The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Smith, Richard

Sustainable learning

Manes, Christopher

A review of Technology and the Contested Meaning of Sustainability by Aidan Davison

Postnikov, Viktor

Eco-poetry

Rowe, Stan

Transcending this Poor Earth: á la Ken Wilber

Wallin, Jason

Atonement: A Meditation on Ecological Presence

Arnold, Richard

Poems

Wright, David

Divining the Aleph

The Trumpeter (2001) 
Book Review:  
Under the Tough Old Stars 
Richard Arnold  
BOOK REVIEW: “Under the Tough Old Stars”: Ecopedagogical Essays. 
By David W. Jardine. Brandon, VT: Foundation for Educational Renewal, 2000. 
Price $24.95 (paper). 
David Jardine, a professor in the Education Faculty at University of Calgary, is widely 
published in the field of ecopedagogy. Although this concept has been practiced for many 
centuries in traditional societies, as a named discipline it is rather a novelty in North 
America. Thank heaven for Jardine, and for other writers and teachers like him who are 
bringing this way of education to a generation of students. Basically, “ecopedagogy” 
means using (as often as possible) non-technological (i.e. natural) methods of instruction. 
It also involves an interconnected or “holistic” approach to knowledge—an approach 
which, as Jardine argues, overturns the standard western pedagogy of “isolating facts.” 
“Under the tough old stars” is a line Jardine borrowed from poet Gary Snyder. It is 
comforting to read an education text which not only pays deep respect to poetry—citing 
Snyder, Wendell Berry, David Ignatow, and other poets—but which is itself poetic. 
This is achieved by using un-prosy language, coined/compound words, and metaphor. 
Some passages in the book have a distinctly lyrical quality, like poetry; a good example is 
the closing chapter, “All Beings Are Your Ancestors,” subtitled “A Bear Sutra on 
Ecology, Buddhism, and Pedagogy.” Here, Jardine brings us immediately into his 
narrative with the opening sentence: 
Just spotted a year-old black bear crossing Hwy.66 @ McLean Creek, 
heading north. (225) 
In this chapter the bear, though actual and ordinary, becomes more than just a bear—as 
does the animal in William Faulkner’s “The Bear” (1940), surely the most powerfully 
poetic hunting story ever written. Jardine’s bear “mak[es] this whole place show its 
fragility and…mak[es] my own fragility and momentariness show” (226). Tinged, 
perhaps, with the quality of sound explored by Modernist writers (Pound, T.S. Eliot, 
Stein, as well as Faulkner), we read phrases like: 
Stopped and watched him amble up the shalysteep creekedge. Wet. 
Greenglistening….Like little bellybreath tingles on downarcing childgiggle 
swingsets….Nearby, the lowest Chakra tingles with an upspine burst to 
whitesparkle brilliance. (225-6) 
This linguistic creativity may appear frivolous to readers expecting standard academic 
A native of Alabama, since 1985 Richard Arnold has lived, 
worked, raised a family, and explored the wilderness on 
Vancouver Island, B.C. His creative and scholarly writings have 
appeared in The Trumpeter, Ecoforestry, ECW Press, 
Organization & Environment, Isle, and Snowy Egret. 
prose, but I think it gives Jardine’s narrative a first-person experiential quality which 
makes it more interesting and memorable. 
Some chapters of this book give us too much “theory” on ecopedagogy, and not enough 
practice; I also find it bothersome to read the same quotes over and over (e.g. “To damage 
the earth is to damage your children,” by Wendell Berry). Perhaps this latter condition 
arises because many of the essays were first published separately in journals. 
There are some factual errors; for example, on page 224 Jardine writes: “I’ll sit here a bit, 
near Solstice, facing Sol’s perennial highpitched summer stasis over the Tropic of 
Capricorn.” This should be Tropic of Cancer, assuming Jardine is located in the northern 
hemisphere. Citations in the text occasionally don’t match the list of references—e.g. for 
Wendell Berry, is it 1986 or 1987? For Gary Snyder, 1977 or 1980? These 
inconsistencies need to be cleared up. Otherwise, I find “Under The Tough Old Stars” to 
be a unique yet practical, musically-written text on the education which really matters: 
teaching students that we humans are a part of nature, not apart from it. 
Copyright retained by author(s)  
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Book Review: Under the Tough Old Stars

Bowers, C. A.

Computers, Culture, and the Digital Phase of the Industrial Revolution: Expanding the Debate on the Educational Uses of Computers

Seed, John

The Trumpeter (2001) 
Report On The "EarthSpirit Rising" 
Conference 
John Seed  
  
A wonderful conference on “Ecology, Spirituality & the Great Work” titled “EarthSpirit 
Rising” took place at Bellarmine University, Louisville, Kentucky in June, 2001. 
In honor of Thomas Berry, (the 84-year-old theologian who went on to become a 
“geologian”), the “great work” referred to in the conference title is also the title of 
Berry’s latest book. 
The Great Work of our time, writes Berry, is to establish mutually enhancing human-
Earth relations in all our endeavors and institutions. Keynote speakers were Brian 
Swimme, Miriam Therese McGillis, Matthew Fox, Paul Winter, Connie Barlow, Ruth 
Rosenhek and myself. A similar conference in Cincinatti 2 years ago had attracted 500 
participants. This time more than twice that number showed up and there was a 
tremendous feeling that we were participating in a burgeoning movement which bridged 
communities of scientists, artists, eco-activists and spiritual leaders all sharing a common 
passion for the numinous story of Earth, of Cosmos, and an intuition that this story, 
correctly told, has the power to heal our world. 
A spirit of activism was very present and at our Rainforest Benefit concert on the 
Saturday night, Ruth and I were able to raise more than $5,000 to help us try and stop the 
oil industry from laying the Ecuadorian Amazon to waste with a new pipeline over the 
Andes that would DOUBLE the number of oil wells there laying that mighty jungle to 
waste (If you want to help, please visit forests.org/ric/wrr2001/wrr_apr/ocp.asp) 
All the conference speakers held our rapt attention, but it is a contribution by Dominican 
Sister Miriam MacGillis, which I would like to share with you now. Here is her story in 
the words of Lauren de Boer who edits the EarthLight Journal, the leading forum for 
those ushering this Great Work into historical focus 
Sister Miriam spoke of her ancestry from Ireland, Scotland, and England and her great 
longing in later years to discover who those ancestors were. Her ancestors communicated 
both cosmology and faith to her, and she realized that she would need to under stand the 
landscape out of which her ancestors emerged in order to truly know the origins of the 
faith given to her. She was able to go to Ireland several times over the past decade to 
share the new universe story. “That very process,” she related, “was gifting me with an 
invitation to trace my indigenous and feminist mind.” 
She was surprised to learn that there had been a deep, highly-evolved Irish mind with its 
own mythos and logos long before the invading Celts arrived. She realized that the 
indigenous mind of her ancestors was shaped by the landscape of that island. In the oldest 
cosmological stories, the island itself was believed to be the body of the Sun Goddess. 
Through an act of love and giving, the Sun Goddess became the land. This cosmology 
held this relationship of land and sun as the most primal of relationships. It was the basic 
shaping of the early imagination of the Irish people. The oldest place names, Miriam 
related, were of the anatomy of the body of the Goddess. 
“I learned that the early Goddess was benevolent. She was about abundance and fertility, 
and Her gift was fire and the renewing cycle of the seasons. There were two times when 
She shape-shifted into other forms and became the warrior Goddess: That was if anything 
threatened the land or the children. Then, watch out!” 
“This deep, instinctual knowing of the significance of protecting what was essential 
shaped the Irish psyche,” she concluded. 
Then, on a visit to the Emerald Isle this year, Miriam witnessed, as if for the first time, 
the rapid escalation of the commercial, industrial model into Ireland’s reality. “The 
seduction of the western, technological worldview was rapidly changing thousands and 
thousands of years of an unbelievably coherent culture that had endured such suffering 
and oppression over so many invasions,” she lamented. 
Miriam was invited to take respite, on her last evening there, in a small cottage way up in 
the mountains of County Mayo in western Ireland. Aware of a grief and a sadness inside 
of her, she walked alone, marveling at the beauty of the place. She followed a path which 
would take her to the ruins of a small cluster of huts which were lived in at a time when 
the Irish had been displaced from their land and barely eked a living because the land had 
been taken from them. She noticed that the other cottages there had become vacation 
homes for the newly wealthy, that the farms were no longer farms, but “only a nostalgic 
decoration for the vacationing community.” 
Weeping, Miriam came to an immense waterfall cascading down into a beautiful 
mountain lake. She looked into that waterfall, with its “absolute, unconditional giving of 
itself,” giving, even though it would eventually flow down “into the industrialized farms, 
with nitrates running off, hedgerows being taken away, industrial tractors coming in, and 
trout streams with cautionary signs not to eat the fish.” 
She found herself, through opening up to the pain, “sounding,” in what she would later 
come to understand was “keening.” Keening, a groaning sound that carried the sorrow, 
mourning, and grief, was something women would do, Miriam explained, at the death of 
the members of families and communities. She realized, “that it is at this level that 
goddess, feminist wisdom must come forth. The energy must come forth from the deep 
grief of saying, no, we cannot do this!” Then she began to imagine what would happen if 
the women of Ireland, and the farmers with their deep, feminine, intuitive knowing, 
began to put on black shrouds, and showed up when the earth movers came in or 
incinerators were being built which would devastate the lakes. 
We were all very moved by her story and I told Sister Miriam that as it happened I would 
be in Ireland the following weekend and, together with two Irish women, Dolores Whelan 
and Anne Kenny, facilitating a workshop in the Wicklow Mountains called “Deep 
Ecology in 21st Century Ireland.
That workshop turned into something very powerful and we all felt the presence of 
Brigid, an Irish saint and before that the Sun Goddess that Miriam had spoken of. Our 
altar contained water brought from three of Brigid’s sacred wells scattered around the 
country and a flame we had lit the day before from the Brigid flame kept alive by 
Brigidine nuns in Dublin. 
On the Saturday afternoon, it seemed appropriate to share the story Miriam had told at 
Earthspirit Rising just a week before. It made a deep impression and Ann Kenny then 
invited any of the women to explore this “keening” with her. Although they were afraid, 
some of them got together during the dinner break that evening before we convened for 
our solstice bonfire. Apparently it was very strong and the next day Ann and the other 7 
women who had participated sat in an inner circle around the altar in the middle of our 
work room Ann played a recording of an old lady keening which had been collected by 
the Irish folklore society in 1950 and everyone called out what they wanted to keen about 
or for. Then the women in the centre started keening and the rest of us joined in. It was a 
revelatory experience for me and I had new insights and openings and understandings as 
did many of the others. 
Later, in our final circle (which was about networking and action and taking our insights 
out into the world), one of the women who shared was an activist named after the 
goddess Onya, who in our “truth mandala” on Saturday morning had cried and raged 
about a proposed motorway through Kildare, the land of her birth. Now she spoke about 
how inspired she had been both by our keening and by the story of Miriam’s vision of 
people dressed in black keening in witness or protest. She resolved to take this vision 
back to her people, those opposing the motorway, and promised to invite us all to dress in 
black and join such protests which she would organize. 
The whole weekend was suffused with the presence of Brigid, the Saint and Brigid the 
Goddess, and the Irish soul shone forth through the thinnest of veils. 
For more information on EarthSpirit Rising, see their website at imagoearth.com or check 
out the latest EarthLight Journal with lots about the conference(www.earthlight.org for 
details). Also recommended: www.metanexus.net - Online Forum on Religion and 
Science - and the Cosmogenesis listserve which they host. See also the Rainforest 
Information Centre’s “Epic of Evolution” page (under “deep ecology” on forests.org/ric) 
For information about Deep Ecology workshops in Ireland or her tours through Sacred 
Ireland, contact Dolores Whelan, journeys.irl@esatclear.ie 
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Report on the "EarthSpirit Rising" Conference

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