The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Morito, Bruce

The Trumpeter (2001) 
Editorial 
Bruce Morito  
I’m pleased to report that submissions to the Trumpeter are increasing, and a renewed 
commitment to the publication is becoming evident. As the online version develops, we 
are finding a renewed and evolving use of the site.  The number of visits to the site (about 
1300 every week) probably indicates a growing, albeit emerging, readership as a more 
web-savvy, environmentally concerned community grows.  
We are presently examining different technologies for delivery, keeping the view in mind 
that these technologies are to serve the community, rather than dictating the way in which 
the community disseminates its ideas, research, and views.  Sometimes technologies 
emerge, such as e-books and bulletin boards, that promise to increase potential for access 
to information, ideas, and forums.  Often, however, the cost of technology and access to 
the means for the utilization of it (e.g. broad-band transmission) bars access to many who 
desire and would benefit from such technology.  We wrestle with these issues at the 
Trumpeter.  We face the need to compromise with technological demands by offering 
some increased functioning (e.g., easier locating of references), but not incorporating 
others that might require computing capacity that many people don’t have.  Accessibility 
by as wide an audience as possible is of foremost concern.  We encourage the use of 
libraries and other modes of access to enable those without adequate technology to access 
the online version of the Trumpeter. We also invite members of the deep ecology 
community to voice their concerns and ideas about this shift to more technologically 
dependent delivery. 
In this issue, Chet Bowers discusses some of the implications of moving more toward a 
computer-based society and, particularly, the effect of this move on cultural identities and 
autonomy.  The growing tendency of our society to treat knowledge as data, Bowers 
argues, is having an impact not only on cultural identity, but on our ability to be attuned 
to local ecosystems.   
Alan Drengson, founder of the Trumpeter, writes about the possibility of identifying and 
acting upon deeply held and shared values in addressing environmental degradation and 
the social impacts of that degradation.  By tracing the development of the shallow and 
deep ecology movements, Drengson reviews for us the key facets of the deep ecology 
movement, with a focus on Arne Naess’s open-ended approach.  With this background, 
he outlines some implications for business and world trade, were these to become 
ecologically responsible. 
Viktor Postnikov brings a brief survey, international in flavour, of the development of 
eco-poetry.  He provides a way of understanding the nature and aims of such poetry in its 
role in conveying the sacred feeling of unity with nature.  We are happy to continue to 
publish poetry in the Trumpeter and find Postnikov’s contribution a welcome inspiration 
to that end.  
The idea of the Aleph, or as David Wright would have it, “the substance, the divinity that 
the primordial symbol seeks to communicate across time and space,” explores the 
elements of magic and the transcendence in alphabetized languages.  Appealing to the 
likes of David Abram and Jorge Luis Borges, Wright explores the “translation from 
experience to explanation” through the problematic of written language. The article 
follows on the focus of the last issue on ways of knowing through the perceptions of 
Annie Booth and Tim Rogers. 
Holons are the focus of Stan Rowe’s critique of Ken Wilber’s . Brief History of 
Everything. Rowe’s critical review examines the organismic roots of Wilber’s idea and 
concludes that its use is over-extended, and as such, both unwarranted and dangerous 
(including the potential for supporting fascist thought). 
Jason Wallin’s narrative challenges the established pedagogical methods in biological 
sciences and how we come to learn about other species and ecosystems.  At-one-ment is 
seen as an open-ended form of knowing that anticipates surprise in the more immediate 
presence of natural processes.  In many respects the article reads better as a narrative of 
Wallin’s own experience in the teaching process, despite his critique of the Cartesian and 
Baconian approaches to knowing nature.  
Richard Arnold offers us a series of poems, Earthshark, Prophet River, an untitled piece, 
and Second Ascent.  We are grateful for Arnold’s contribution and encourage further 
submissions of poetry.  Arnold’s poems contribute a richness to the Trumpeter—a special 
element that distinguishes the Trumpeter from other scholarly publications. 
John Seed presents us with a detailed report on the “EarthSpirit Rising” conference held 
at Bellarmine University, Louisville, Kentucky in June, 2001. 
Finally, we thank Richard Arnold once again for his review of Under the Tough Old 
Stars.  We are mostly interested in reviews of books for which we request reviews, 
although unsolicited and unpublished reviews of books pertinent to supporters of deep 
ecology will be considered.  
I am deeply grateful for the work of referees, both board members and non-board 
volunteers, for making the online version of the Trumpeter possible.  Without their 
dedication and concern for the deep ecology movement, this journal would not exist. 
Copyright retained by author(s)  
Click here to return to the contents page.


Editorial

Drengson, Alan

Education for Local and Global Ecological Responsibility: Arne Naess's Cross-cultural, Ecophilosophy

Henighan, Tom

The Trumpeter c©
ISSN: 0832 6193
Vol. 16, No. 1 ( 2000)
Book Review: Nancy Ryley ¡I¿The Forsaken Gar-
den: Four Conversations on the Deep Meaning of
Environmental Illness¡/I¿
Tom Henighan
• The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on the Deep Meaning of Envi-
ronmental Illness.
• Nancy Ryley
• Quest Books, 1998, 297 pages, $23.00
I have a confession to make. When the editor asked me if I wanted to review
The Forsaken Garden he described it as a book on environmental illness, which,
up to a point, is quite accurate. Although I wasn’t terribly keen on dealing
with that subject, I agreed, mainly because it’s my experience that if your first
response to a group you want to work with is a refusal, you often don’t hear
from them again. Nonetheless, when the parcel arrived I didn’t open it for a
while, mainly because I was up to my neck in research on the arts and had more
pressing deadlines to meet.
Well, reader, I have opened the book and read it, and its impact on me may be
judged by the fact that, although I was hoping to take a break from teaching
university courses next year, I am now thinking of revamping one of my courses
and offering it this fall, if only to be able to talk with students about The
Forsaken Garden.
The Forsaken Garden has as its subtitle “four conversations on the deep mean-
ing of environmental illness.” The editor, Nancy Ryley, is a documentary film-
maker who had to get out of the Toronto rat race and move west because
she suffered from fatigue, depression and hypersensitivity to foods and chem-
icals, a malaise that some ascribe to our increasing additive-ridden diets and
chemically-poisoned environments. This book, however, doesn’t really go into
that; it simply assumes it as a given. And whatever it is that aﬄicted (or af-
flicts) Nancy Ryley, it has driven her in a most creative direction. The Forsaken
Garden doesn’t spend much time lamenting illness; it presents Ms. Ryley in
creative dialogue with four important thinkers who have unique but related vi-
sions of what a healthy society should be and how we may attain it. This is
a book that stirs one to action, not because it is rhetorically overblown, but
because of the sharpness of the insights of the contributors and their ability to
Book Review: Nancy Ryley ¡I¿The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on
the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness¡/I¿ 2
pinpoint the historical false turnings that are driving us toward what may be
an almost inevitable confrontation with major ecological catastrophe.
Ms. Ryley’s first interview, with the late Sir Laurens van der Post, whose The
Lost World of The Kalahari is one of the important books in my life, struck
me as the least striking of the four, perhaps because I am quite familiar with
van der Post’s point of view, or possibly because his linking of the inner and
outer aspects of the current crisis is stated in such general terms. Sir Laurens
insists that we suffer from “loss of soul” and need to undertake our own personal
journeys to achieve wholeness. Our own narrowness, our inability to deal with
our shadow side, causes us to project our destructive selves outward. Our post-
Renaissance obsession with controlling the outer world, which has made us
unconscious of our inner processes, has also meant losing touch with anything
transcendent. We spend most of our energy, in every sense, in attempts at
domination but we destroy what we seek to dominate and remain hollow at the
centre. The task in front of us is to find a way to turn things around; failing
that, we will be faced with a judgment “that will be something which even the
Book of Revelation may not have properly foretold.”
While this may not be a very specific analysis, it manages to link the inner and
outer sides of the world ecological crisis in a way that discourages superficial
solutions. Sir Laurens doesn’t say that we shouldn’t try to stop exploiting the
third world, or that some of the dehumanizing and socially destructive sides
of the new international economy shouldn’t be dealt with, but he does suggest
that, if we think in terms of outer structures alone, we are falling into a trap
and will accomplish very little.
Nancy Ryley’s interview with Thomas Berry, which is placed last in the book,
picks up from the van der Post theme, sharpens the historical context, brings
hard science into the picture in a much more creative way and, above all, shows
us how the actual experience of the natural environment can itself be transfor-
mative, apart from any supposed Jungian paradigm. Readers of Thomas Berry’s
books, The Dream of the Earth and The Universe Story, will find familiar ma-
terial in this interview, but those coming to this impressive thinker for the first
time will be amazed at the breadth and profundity of the man’s insights and at
the synthesizing power of his vision.
Berry’s view of the universe rests on a profound acceptance of the deepest west-
ern traditions of natural sacrality. He makes clear that, as modern quantum
science insists, we are actually enfolded into this universe of ours; it is literally
our inescapable environment. Recognizing the millennial roots (and their dan-
gers) in his own conception of the Ecozoic Age — the here and now in which
we must bring human activity into balance with the spontaneous functioning of
nature — he argues convincingly for a future that is both rationally limned and
mythically resonant. This part of Nancy Ryley’s book alone would make it well
worth buying.
The Trumpeter
Book Review: Nancy Ryley ¡I¿The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on
the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness¡/I¿ 3
The other two contributors, Marion and Ross Woodman, are a well-known
Toronto wife and husband couple, she a Jungian analyst, he a professor of liter-
ature. Marion Woodman has written much on addiction and the creative reader
can put together her cultural analysis of this phenomenon with what Thomas
Berry sees as our obsession with “Wonderworld.” We choose the wrong kind of
food to fill us up, and deny ourselves spiritual sustenance, just as we choose con-
sumer goods to “make us happy” with the result that we are deeply miserable.
Is this just rhetoric? I don’t think so.
Only last week I made a public presentation opposing a new Loblaws big box in
my neighborhood of Ottawa. To the consternation of our mayor, I condemned
the bad city planning that is dumping a suburban monster into a unique and
village-like section of this city. I was not surprised that no one seemed to
understand the fundamental principles of city planning, least of all the planners,
but what really shocked me was the parade of citizens (they seemed like zombies
to me) who stood up to speak for Loblaws in awestruck tones, rhapsodizing over
the company’s merchandise and even apologizing to the almighty corporation
for blasphemers like myself who value a sanely developed neighborhood over
one more monster stuffed with overmarketed and mostly unnecessary consumer
goods.
Everything that Marion Woodman says about addiction spoke to me then and I
realized more clearly than ever that I am surrounded by devotees of the fatuous
dream of Wonderworld exposed by Thomas Berry.
The Marion Woodman conversations touch on issues of the feeling-relation to
the environment, on the limitations of patriarchal thinking and of the need to
return to those vital forces within us that we project culturally as gods and
goddesses but too often ignore. Here, more than anywhere else in the book,
there is specific discussion of environmental illness, but also a marvelous working
through of some key imagery to suggest solutions to the loss of soul described
by van der Post. We must return to the garden, Marion Woodman suggests,
not to a presumed innocence but to a being-in-the-body that is fully aware of
that “quantum non-separability” described by Thomas Berry.
Ross Woodman for his part zeroes in on the Romantic writers and shows how
fundamentally their insights underlie modern deep ecological thinking, as well
as how a book like Frankenstein presents us with a terrifying vision of the de-
structive potential of our own creative powers. I’ve never met Woodman, nor
heard his ideas before, but I was delighted to find great areas of overlap be-
tween his approach to these writers and mine (I’ve taught Romantic literature
for some three decades). Woodman understands very well the dynamic link
the Romantics perceived between psyche and nature, a link that has been over-
shadowed in much recent criticism by obsessive attention to gender and politics.
Woodman argues that what some decry as “mysticism” in Romantic writing is
really the grounding of value in experiential process, something Alfred North
Whitehead identified in Romantic poetry in his classic book on Science and the
The Trumpeter
Book Review: Nancy Ryley ¡I¿The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on
the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness¡/I¿ 4
Modern World. Romantic poetry, as Woodman pithily outlines it, links with
the ecological movement, with the revival of myth as a way of knowing, and
with the turn to inwardness through meditation that characterizes the twenti-
eth century interest in eastern thought. The Romantics form the true, original
counter-culture, one that seeks to make contact with — and in a deeper sense
knows itself to be a part of — a polytheistic world of natural energy.
Nancy Ryley has created a wonderful book, literally so, since it gives us a path
back to wonder, in the sense that Carlyle and others have defined it. The
thoughts and imagery of the various contributors make a coherent counterpoint
that is full of energy and the spirit of play, yet not one of them underrates the
dangers of the current situation, or stands in the way of specific social and polit-
ical action. Ms. Ryley herself with her many valuable questions and probings,
has managed to keep the subject in focus and to bring out the considerable best
in most of her contributors. As an introduction to the creative ways in which
the broadest and deepest ecological thinking is challenging the complacencies
of consumerism, “development,” and scientism, The Forsaken Garden is truly
outstanding.
Citation Format
Henighan, Tom (2000) Book Review: Nancy Ryley ¡I¿The Forsaken Garden: Four
Conversations on the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness¡/I¿. The Trumpeter: 16, 1.
http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.16.1.2
The Trumpeter


The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness

Sheppard, Aryne

The Trumpeter c©
ISSN: 0832 6193
Vol. 16, No. 1 ( 2000)
Book Review: Joanna Macy ¡I¿Widening Circles -
A Memoir¡/I¿
Aryne Sheppard
• Widening Circles - A Memoir
• Joanna Macy
• New Society Publishers Gabriola Island, BC
Joanna Macy is one of today’s most engaging environmental and spiritual lead-
ers. In Widening Circles, she shares the story of her life. Born in southern
California in 1929, Joanna Macy’s life spans a time of incredible change in
the world, most notably the advent of nuclear technology and the global envi-
ronmental crisis. From the clothing drive she organized as a teenager to her
participation in the 1999 Seattle protests, Joanna’s love for the world has al-
ways been expressed through activism; it is a powerful theme running through
Widening Circles. She divides her story into seven stages in which she traces
the events and people that have shaped her life and her life’s work.
Joanna Macy begins Widening Circles with memories of childhood summers
spent at her grandparents’ farm. During these summers she enjoyed her grand-
father’s church, the silence of an old maple tree and her love of nature. As a
child, the farm felt like the “steadiest part” of her troubled life.
Joanna’s father was a Presbyterian preacher’s son who chose a vocation outside
the church, that of a stockbroker. In 1934, the Rogers moved to New York
State where Joanna, her mother, and two brothers lived apart from their father.
Eventually the entire family moved in together, living in a series of apartments in
New York City and later, a house Joanna and her mother named “Bleak House.”
Family life was filled with unspoken tension — her father isolated himself from
his family and was often abusive. Joanna, her mother’s confidante, lived with
the fear that she would be destroyed by her father’s control.
Joanna was educated at the Lycee Francais de New York and took solace in
study. As she moved through her teenage years, Christianity became a central
part of her life. God was a presence that felt to her “like a warm, enveloping
mind.” At seventeen, Joanna joined a Presbyterian youth program and found
herself in the pulpit, teaching others what pain could reveal about their connec-
tion with God and others. She decided that missionary service was to be her
life’s vocation.
Book Review: Joanna Macy ¡I¿Widening Circles - A Memoir¡/I¿ 2
Despite her father’s refusal to fund her education, Joanna was able to attend
Wellesley College where she majored in Biblical History. After four years of
study, Joanna had a crisis of faith. Christianity, for her, had been reduced to
abstract theories and dichotomies — God was no longer a comforting presence
to be found in the natural world. After a challenge from a favourite professor,
Joanna left her Christian faith behind.
Fittingly, she terms the next stage of her life “The Hole in the Center.” The
Church was a strong part of her heritage and had become the core of her identity.
After graduation, Joanna traveled to France on a Fulbright scholarship where
she studied the tactics of the French communist party and enjoyed a new freedom
as an independent young woman.
On her return to America, she took a position with the CIA for two and a half
years. It was during this time that she met her husband, Francis Macy. Despite
their close bond, Joanna was not prepared for the depression and isolation she
would experience as a young wife and mother in the mid-1950s. She studied
Algebra and Greek between housework and childcare to give some structure to
her days and to exercise her brain. By 1956, Joanna and her family were living
in Germany where she received help caring for their two children and was able
to become involved in her husband’s work.
After returning from Germany, the Macys spent four years in Washington, DC
where they welcomed a new daughter. Joanna’s commitment to social action
led her to work on behalf of Africans who came to America to set up embassies.
Eventually she was given a salaried position in the State Department in which
to continue her work.
In the five years between 1964 and 1969, Joanna and her family lived in Asia
and Africa. It was during this tumultuous period that she was introduced to
the Buddha Dharma that would become an integral part of her life. The first
two years were spent in India where Fran Macy had taken a position heading
up the Peace Corps Program. Joanna was equally involved in Peace Corps
work supporting American volunteers and working with a group of refugees
from Tibet. The meditative practice that she had begun in India not only gave
her strength, it awakened an intellectual appetite and a new vision for her life.
Although unsure of what her role would be, Joanna wanted to help build a
bridge between Buddhist insight and Western thought.
Her family’s life in India was followed by two years in Tunisia, and one year in
Nigeria. These transitions became increasingly difficult. She openly describes
the anguish and resulting depression she experienced as she was “yanked from
one country to another without the connecting thread of professional engage-
ment” labeling it “cultural miscarriage.”
The Macys returned briefly to their home in Washington before moving to New
York State in 1972. Joanna began as a graduate student studying Buddhism and
The Trumpeter
Book Review: Joanna Macy ¡I¿Widening Circles - A Memoir¡/I¿ 3
Systems Theory in the Religion Department at Syracuse University. During the
five years of her Ph.D. research, Joanna Macy truly came into her own. Through
counseling, the questioning of cultural norms, and her family’s decision to live
communally, Joanna gained the freedom to make value choices that were truer
to her own experience. After the completion of her dissertation, she was even
able to spend a year in Buddhist Sri Lanka, studying a self-help movement
committed to social change.
Joanna’s environmental education began in the late 1970s and quickly led to
anti-nuclear activism. She became involved in a lawsuit against the Virginia
Electric Power Company to prevent unsafe storage of irradiated fuel rods. The
knowledge she gained through this work led to a public meeting for workers at
a Virginia nuclear plant and, later, to workshops involving government officials
in Washington, DC and those affected by the Chernobyl disaster.
Joanna’s career was not the result of a conscious decision she made, but was
rather the culmination of a natural evolution. Following the publication of her
article entitled “How to Deal with Despair,” she began receiving invitations to
conduct workshops on the theme. She discovered that when people opened up
to the pain they felt for the world, they began to sense a deeper connection with
life. As she recounts stories of people who have attended her workshops, one is
struck by the similarity and depth of emotion expressed by humans around the
world. It is difficult not share in Joanna’s sense of kinship with those who share
a common concern for the world.
Joanna Macy ends her memoir with a recent trip she and her husband took to
Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. It is a quiet ending as she
gives thanks to her family and remembers those who have graced her life.
The most striking aspects of Joanna Macy are her desire for meaningful work
in the world and her complete openness to life. Whether the world brought her
despair or joy, she experienced (and presumably continues to experience) her
life fully. Widening Circles is beautifully written. Her poetic descriptions of
faces and landscapes give evidence of her love of the sensual world. Joanna’s
memories are vivid and so she is able to share with us a rich and complete
picture of her own history.
For the deep ecology community, Joanna Macy’s work is pivotal as it highlights
the connection between personal suffering and love for the world. Her spiritual
and intellectual life has always been linked to social action. Joanna’s work is
guided by her belief that “we have to find a way to live in this planet-time
without closing our eyes to what we’re doing.” As both a body of thought
and a philosophical movement, deep ecology becomes “deep” when there is
congruency between theory and personal experience. It is easy, however, to
have an intellectual belief in our connection with the earth, yet still fail to
experience it in a meaningful way. What many activists fail to realize is that
intellect is a poor motivator. A deep valuing of, and connection to, the Earth
The Trumpeter
Book Review: Joanna Macy ¡I¿Widening Circles - A Memoir¡/I¿ 4
is essential if we are to escape apathy, burnout, and misanthropy. Joanna aptly
titles her work, “The Work that Reconnects,” as it offers the practical tools and
inner resources needed to deal with the overwhelming environmental crisis we
are facing by helping us feel our connectedness.
Joanna Macy’s story is not offered as a lesson, yet I found myself inspired by
her courage and integrity. Widening Circles is full of exotic locations, adventure
and even mystical experience, but somehow her life never seemed distant from
my own. Joanna’s honesty and groundedness have allowed her to become an
effective and compassionate leader. These same qualities come through in her
writing allowing us to relate to her personally. Joanna Macy’s life story offers
us the wisdom of a woman who has found her own unique path and who is fully
engaged in living.
Citation Format
Sheppard, Aryne (2000) Book Review: Joanna Macy ¡I¿Widening Circles - A Memoir¡/I¿.
The Trumpeter: 16, 1. http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.16.1.9
The Trumpeter


Widening Circles - A Memoir

Caley, Michael

Sawada, Daiyo

Mindscapes, Creativity and Ecosophy

Orton, David

Is Left Biocentrism Relevant to Green Parties?

Booth, Annie

Ways of Knowing: Acceptable Understandings Within Bioregionalism, Deep Ecology, Ecofeminism, and Native American Cultures

Chamberlain, Paul G.

The Trumpeter c©
ISSN: 0832 6193
Vol. 16, No. 1 ( 2000)
Myth of Icarus
Paul Chamberlain
Human experience of flight provides a unique vantage point from which to
deepen our understanding of the Earth. That such ideas have had a profound
influence on those who fly is not in doubt. Poetry and prose attest to the
richness of the human experience of flying, and more recently astronauts have
acknowledged powerful, in some cases traumatic, emotional experiences after
their return from space. This essay explores the interaction of the self and the
natural world through flight from three perspectives. The first is an exploration
of the human yearning to fly expressed in dreams, myth and literature; the sec-
ond is a discussion of my own experience of flying as an aviator by exploring
the experiential significance of some of my most vivid recollections of natural
scenery; and the third is an attempt to articulate the way in which airplanes
have, on rare occasions, acted as a mediator between my own inner space and
the world outside, culminating in a feeling of higher consciousness. I do not
speak for all pilots; indeed my views are highly subjective, but in presenting
these ideas I am endorsing J.K. Wright’s plea for students of geography to ex-
plore the Earth from all points of view by acknowledging that the experience of
every specialist is worthy of reflection.
One of my most vivid recollections of flying was in a dream. Soaring above the
ground, I was conscious of the wind in my face and I was struck by the greenness
of everything beneath me. I was unable to explain what was holding me up, but
the feeling of fear at not knowing quickly dissolved into exhilaration as I ceased
to rationalize the experience and simply began to enjoy it. It dawned on me
after I awoke that REM sleep was probably one of the first ways early hominids
experienced flying and that my experience was not unique. Does the human
experience of flying have atavistic roots? Jungian psychology certainly speaks to
us of a collective unconscious, suggesting that a deep well of subconscious ideas
occasionally swells up within us, and sometimes crystallises into memorable
dreams. Early hominids must have experienced such dreams, but those dreams
may well have been triggered by watching birds, and the occasional ascent of
mountains, the dream, perhaps, being a subconscious desire to self-actualize
these experiences.
There is powerful evidence of the human yearning to capture this experience in
mythology. On their stone pyramids, the Maya embellished serpents with feath-
ers, making Quetzalcoatl a god; North American native Indians venerated the
Thunderbird, the beating of whose wings represented thunder; and, in ancient
Egypt, the Pharaohs believed that after death their souls rose from their bodies
and migrated into the afterlife in the form of ba. Flying has always been asso-
ciated with myth and the supernatural, but it is also found in more traditional
Myth of Icarus 2
religions. There is a reference to a fiery chariot descending to Earth in Ezekiel,
for example; in the Gospels, Jesus ascends to Heaven after his resurrection; and
in the Koran, Muhammad is said to have risen from the site of the Temple of
the Mount on a winged horse. In Greek mythology the winged horse is Pegasus.
Legend also tells us how Daedalus made wings of feathers united by wax; and
this brings me back to my dream. Of all these ancient allusions to flying, it is
Icarus who best exemplifies the freedom I felt while asleep.
One summer afternoon I found myself piloting an aircraft over Northern On-
tario. The Canadian Shield is a region of ancient rock, bristling with trees and
festooned with innumerable lakes of all shapes and sizes. The weather had been
unstable for several days, but the air was unusually calm that afternoon, almost
serene. As I flew north towards my destination under a pregnant layer of stra-
tocumulus, I became conscious of shafts of sunlight bursting through the holes
in the cloud above; I was suddenly surrounded by vertical flutes of light, like
ancient stone columns capped with a vaulted ceiling of clouds, which gave me
the impression I was flying down the nave of a gothic cathedral. This experience
persisted for the better part of an hour that afternoon. The verisimilitude of the
wilderness and sacred space is a popular metaphor today, but that afternoon,
nature had created a scene that had, for me, become a place of worship without
the need for metaphors. I never saw this apparition again, but years later, when
I visited Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, the illusion reversed itself. When I
walked down the centre of the nave and looked upwards to the vaulted ceiling I
felt as if I were flying again.
Nowhere is nature’s grandeur more visible than along the giant tectonic plate
that begins in Alaska and snakes its way down the spine of two great continents
to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. As I crossed the
Rocky Mountains on my way to the Yukon one Spring morning, I studied them
carefully in the brilliant sunshine. Wending my way between the tallest peaks
in the smooth, rarefied air nearly two miles above the valley floor, I could see
that they were blanketed in deep snow, and soon I was immersed among them
as if I were surfing a sea of waves, flying effortlessly from one crest to the next.
These rocks seemed to have burst upwards angrily from the earth’s crust like
huge claws; in places the snow had fallen away to expose a grey limb, whose
twisted features revealed the immense pressures that had created it. Older than
the last dinosaurs, these peaks would outlive everything; beautiful, powerful and
majestic, I was surrounded by an infinity of time in a limitless space, and I was
painfully conscious of my own mortality. Perhaps that was what George Leigh
Mallory was reacting to when he said that he wanted to climb Everest “because
it is there!” There is a reality in such a scene that transforms the person
who contemplates it. Yet the technology that enabled me to contemplate the
mountains that morning has in a way conquered them. If you look carefully you
can see it at work deep down in these valleys. Roads thread through narrow
canyons where once only rivers ran; railways burrow through hillsides; bridges
span raging torrents; villages nestle against the sides of mountains; and, as you
The Trumpeter
Myth of Icarus 3
fly across the border into British Columbia, a patchwork quilt of logging activity
can be seen from the valley floor to the timberline, stigmata that betray the
all-too-human impact of technology on nature.
In the sky above Greenland one afternoon I saw the Earth as a virgin. “Nothing
comes from nothing,” retorts Lear’s fool, yet in that vast emptiness I saw beauty;
and beauty is its own excuse for being. Buried under a sheet of ice that is almost
two miles deep, the centre of Greenland is actually below sea level. On top of
this smooth white sheet, resembling the paint on top of an artist’s pallet, are
wisps of cloud draped like gossamer thread from a delicate brush. In summer,
the Arctic sun warms the surface twenty-four hours a day, and as the ice melts
it gathers in shallow pools of frigid water, turning the frosty white surface
turquoise. Near the edge of this vast sheet the ice spills over the steep rocks,
cascading into the sea, or plummeting into the valleys in long white serpentine
fingers, like a woman’s hand reaching for the open spaces beyond her grasp. But
behind this beauty, Greenland has a dark secret. In the Middle Ages, Vikings
once colonized these distant shores; then they mysteriously vanished forever.
It was only later that scientists learned that climate change had disrupted the
colony’s delicate balance with nature. This is an ominous warning for a planet
now trapped in its own waste gases. Perhaps Greenland is a metaphor for the
Earth; a wise virgin whose emptiness is filled with voices, but only for those
who listen.
During much of the time I’ve spent in airplanes I have been a detached observer
of the world around me, but there are moments when the aircraft has been
an intermediary between my inner self and the outer world, culminating in a
profound feeling of contentment. Are such experiences mystic? Devotees have
long used quiet contemplation to unite their soul with the divine. The Roman
Catholic mystic Thomas Merton even went as far as to assert that the spiritual
anguish of human beings could only be overcome with mysticism, an idea echoed
by Buddhists, who believe that mysticism alone achieves the serenity of essence
necessary to realise Nirvana. But Ramakrishna, the Hindu mystic, was said to
have once been transported into spiritual ecstasy simply at the sight of cranes
flying across the skyline at dusk. What all of this seems to suggest is that
mysticism is not spatially remote, but rather a different level of consciousness;
contentment, bliss and spiritual ecstasy appear to be a continuum of experiences
within this different order of reality.
Flying over the Atlantic Ocean one summer evening en route from Scotland to
Iceland, I experienced a heightened level of consciousness. Two miles above the
ocean, I noticed a layer of cloud had been silently drawn across the still waters
far below me. Ahead was the setting sun, dying in a brilliant blaze of light,
as it scattered its rich colours across the sky, like a dying man giving away his
fortune before it slipped from his hands. Looking back toward Europe, I saw
a full moon framed in the darkness; and far above, in the infinite canyons of
space, the stars had come out, as if to feast on the beauty of the night. I felt as
The Trumpeter
Myth of Icarus 4
though I was a participant in a symphony, suspended between the sea and the
sky, and the sun and the moon. Yet a drama was unfolding all about me that
evening. Darkness seemed to be warring against the Light, as in Zoroastrian
tradition in which Ormazd (the Good Lord) quarrels with Ahriman (the Lie).
But gradually that evening, it dawned on me that the darkness was losing this
titanic struggle. At this latitude I was crossing each meridian of longitude at
the same speed as the sun. As long as I followed it around the curvature of the
Earth, it would never set. I was surrounded by an infinitude of space, frozen in
time; the eternal now had become a release from the temporal order, and I felt
a oneness with nature, with people and with all things.
I began this essay by suggesting that flying has deep atavistic roots; dream, myth
and literature tend to support this view. In practice, however, the realization of
these ancient yearnings is inextricably linked to technology. For me, technology
has been a way to explore the experiential significance of scenery in a manner
that would otherwise be impossible; occasionally, aircraft have even served as
a mediator between my own inner self and the world beyond, eliciting a deep
feeling of contentment brought about by a higher state of consciousness. All
technology, however, is an extension of ourselves and ultimately each of us is
responsible for its use. Icarus’ refusal to take the middle road, melting the
wax on his wings by flying too close to the sun, reminds us only too well of the
disastrous consequences of our own inept use of technology. We ignore Daedalus
advice at our peril. Like the myths of ancient Greece, ecosophy speaks to us
about the need for greater sensitivity in our relationship with the Earth. In
the short term, it is crucial that we improve our understanding of this concept
if we are to avoid ecocatastrophe. In the long term, however, the sun will
eventually suffer a heat death, and the survival of humankind will require a
future generation to leave this planet in search of a new home. By then, the
first tentative steps into space this century will seem like the movement of the
first reptiles onto the seashore long ago; but by that time we may well have
evolved to the point where flying is as effortless as in our dreams.
Citation Format
Chamberlain, Paul (2000) Myth of Icarus. The Trumpeter: 16, 1.
http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.16.1.6
The Trumpeter


Myth of Icarus

This paper presents an argument for the importance of considering lived,
direct and dialogical experience in nature as an important component of
our conceptualizations of the natural world. I begin by noting how certain
kinds of knowledge, mostly the intuitive and the local, tend to be muted
or excluded from our nature talk. I then suggest that conversations between
people can serve as a fruitful metaphor for exploring dialogues with
nature, noting how certain kinds of knowledge  --  again the intuitive and
local -- are pushed into the background in conversations as well. The
thinking of Henri Lefebvre is then introduced to elaborate this position,
indicating how his notion of thirdspace, conceived of as lived, situated,
and embodied dialogues with nature, provides a rich and generative domain
for conceptualizing our interchanges with the natural world. Some
preliminary implications of this line of thought are drawn out

Rogers, Tim B.

In Search of a Space Where Nature and Culture Dissolve Into a Unified Whole and Deep Ecology

The Trumpeter c©
ISSN: 0832 6193
Vol. 16, No. 1 ( 2000)
Editorial
Bruce Morito
Editorial
Greetings and welcome to our second on-line issue. As you may notice, we are
still in an experimental mode as we test various models of presentation. This
situation will continue as our functionality grows with developments in new for-
mats. While still very much swimming in the obscure waters of computer jargon
(e.g., HTML, XML, SGML, E-Book), I am, nevertheless, slowly beginning to
understand and appreciate the increased functionality of this technology. Al-
though I entered this technological world with considerable scepticism and with
a view that I would do so only to ensure that the voice of the Trumpeter was not
completely lost, I am beginning to see that the deep ecology community might
benefit considerably from it. Some of these functions include: 1) increased refer-
encing capacity, 2) cross-referencing to other articles, 3) indexing and 4) linking
to other sources.
With John Ollerenshaw now joining us as managing editor, we hope to provide
ongoing service to the community. His efforts to bring awareness of the on-
line version and to encourage submissions from the deep ecology supporters are
greatly appreciated.
We are experiencing an enormous number of visits to the site (approximately
1300 per month), far beyond our expectations. This phenomenon suggests that
the Trumpeter remains a viable and perhaps important voice for the deep ecol-
ogy community, if not a wider community. The idea of an on-line version has
met with some resistance, but more people seem to be giving it a chance. With
the kind of exposure we are getting we believe that the new publishing approach
is both viable and particularly valuable to the environmental movement.
This issue of the Trumpeter focuses on ways of knowing and how it affects our
relationship to the land. Supporters of deep ecology have concerned themselves
with ways of knowing from the inception of the movement, but there remain
many insights to gain, both from examining historical and marginalized per-
spectives (e.g., aboriginal) and by examining more contemporary analyses of
various psychological dimensions of knowing. Our first three articles penetrate
different dimensions of knowing from three different perspectives. Annie Booth
explores the idea of ways of knowing and the meaning of information from biore-
gional, ecofeminist, deep ecological and aboriginal perspectives. Knowing, as an
embodied, rational, individual and community quest, is a mode of knowing that
Editorial 2
many ecosophies seek to develop; yet it is already present in Native American
traditions.
Tim Rogers asks us to consider an idea of third space as a way to appreciate
and understand a more comprehensive mode of knowing: a way that is con-
versational in nature. His exploratory psychological examination begins with
a characterization of this mode of knowing as “hunch” to one more structured
and detailed as the notion of third space is unravelled.
Michael Caley and Daiyo Sawada present “a way of understanding current
philosophies in relation to how we bring forth the world.” They “look for a
way of understanding creativity as a source of transformation within and across
philosophies.” Offering a typology of Mindscapes, Caley and Sawada propose
a way to characterize and classify different ways of knowing and the sorts of
creativity associated with those ways. These typologies can aid in the resolu-
tion of environmental problems as they promote deeper thinking about why we
actually hold the views that we do and, moreover, how we hold them.
Ralph Martin’s proposal that Cuba can serve as exemplary of deep ecological
principles, or at least an approximation of its principles from which other coun-
tries stand to learn, shifts focus more to the political perspective. It helps the
deep ecology community, in turn, to demonstrate that the movement offers real
possibilities for implementing the tenets of deep ecology.
Paul Chamberlain contributes the narrative in this issue. He addresses human
hubris, by speaking to the question of why and how we formulate our aspira-
tional ideals. David Orton’s piece on Green politics strains the seam between
the ecologically motivated green movement and green politics. It offers a per-
spective on this tension from a wealth of experience from the battleground, so
to speak. We round out this issue with two book reviews, one on Nancy Ry-
ley’s The Forsaken Garden (Tom Henighan) and the other on Joanna Macy’s
autobiography Widening Circles: A Memoir (Aryne Sheppard).
While we have been fortunate to have these fine articles, some from our backlog
and some new, the Trumpeter is still in need of articles. We encourage the
community to submit articles (especially research-based articles) that have a
deep ecology connection, whether supportive or critical. Since we are now a
university sponsored publication, our emphasis has shifted toward more research
oriented articles, although we retain the presence of narrative, opinion pieces,
poetry and reviews.
Citation Format
Morito, Bruce (2000) Editorial. The Trumpeter: 16, 1.
http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.16.1.10
The Trumpeter


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Editorial

Education for Local and Global Ecological Responsibility: Arne Naess's Cross-cultural, Ecophilosophy

The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness

Widening Circles - A Memoir

Mindscapes, Creativity and Ecosophy

Is Left Biocentrism Relevant to Green Parties?

Ways of Knowing: Acceptable Understandings Within Bioregionalism, Deep Ecology, Ecofeminism, and Native American Cultures

Myth of Icarus

In Search of a Space Where Nature and Culture Dissolve Into a Unified Whole and Deep Ecology

Editorial

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