Sarah Forth           

        Human bodies, minds and hearts...have been stolen from the Source and used for their own purposes...  There is one truth, there is one Source, there is one God, there is one Whole, and we can't have our separate little purposes, either as individuals or states, without regard to the natural order of the whole.  There is no existence outside the whole.
                                             Lord Exeter  (From Frances Horn -
                                             In: The Heart of the Healer, by D Church & A Sherr)

What treatment is indicated when the problem is outrage over damages caused by a society grown indifferent to the individual member of that society?

  What treatment is indicated when your patient is your own habitat, planet earth?

  What health inducing regimens do you prescribe?  Indeed, to whom do you prescribe - for is not the doctor and the patient in these cases one and the same?

  Our biosphere, left to its own devices, wastes not and wants not.  It is human interaction with creation which has brought us to the edge of environmental collapse.  We humans are the ones who must mend our ways.

  Addressing these and other questions, I recently taught a course titled 'Women, Nature and the Sacred' for a graduate program in Feminist Spirituality at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.  The only program of its kind in the United States, our mission is to expose the patriarchal religious systems that support women's subordination as well as to develop new models of relationship and religion that are egalitarian and life-giving.

  An underlying assumption of the course was that what we need is not more information about environmental degradation but a reconnection with the sacredness of creation.  We need to reconfigure our fundamental understanding of the relationship between the Divine and creation.  New understandings in turn spawn new ethical practices, concrete gestures towards healing ourselves - so the earth can heal as we are healed.

  This is the work of ecofeminism, a cultural critique which looks at ecological destruction through a feminist lens.  There are a wide variety of ecofeminists but the common analysis which has emerged over the past 15 years is that there are parallels and interconnections between the manner in which women and nature are viewed as 'other', ontologically 'less than' and subject to domination.  Ecofeminism calls for significant social, political, economic and spiritual changes and for a biocentric environmental ethic.  The literature in ecofeminism is now vast.  A selected bibliography is attached.

  One premise of feminist pedagogy is that we begin with our real experience of oppressions and develop our theory from critical reflection on our lives and the lives of other women.  Our work is thus circular: from practice to theory and back again.  Most of our students are mature working women with a storehouse of painful experiences to call upon.  In turning over the stones of women's connection with nature I had no idea just how much trauma our explorations would uncover.

  The course began at 'the beginning' with a look at various creation stories, including myths from the Babylonian, Greek and Hebrew traditions.  Cosmology tries to answer some of the 'how' questions about our origins.  It also tells us about a society's world view.  In the case of Christianized western societies, we are heir to a Hebraic world view perceived through the lens of Greek philosophy.  A number of points of tension result, not the least of which is the concept of a soul which can be divided from the body, a profound ambivalence towards nature and some notions about sin that tend to foster lack of responsibility towards creation.  All of these ideas are used to justify the abuse of our habitat.

  We also had to consider the contributions of western science to environmental destruction.  The science that arose in the 16th and 17th centuries furthered the estrangement between humans and creation.  Although the earlier social model had subordinated females to males, it also promoted an organic sense of harmony, with everyone and everything in its place - albeit hierarchically arranged.  Over time, nature and - by extension - women through their association with the material realms, came to be seen as the 'other', to be domesticated, silenced, even, if necessary, tortured into submission.  That the witch burnings occurred simultaneously with the advancement of modern science is no coincidence.

  Recently, a number of scientists such as David Bohm, James Lovelock, Rupert Sheldrake and Fritjof Capra have suggested alternative visions of how the universe operates.  To find out to what extent their vision has percolated through the scientific community, we visited a special exhibit entitled 'Global Warming' at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.  What we found, unfortunately, is that while the exhibit was fun, clever and informational, with lots of hands-on and interactive displays, it was put together from the old perspective of science as a value-neutral investigation.  The exhibit never asked, "Who is responsible?"  Viewers were asked to conserve energy but we were never informed about the greatest environmental vandals: our governments, the military and big businesses.

  About this time, students' own experiences with 'objective' science began surfacing.

  A student named 'Joan' shared in class an experience which left its mark when she was carrying her third child.  When Joan went for her first visit to the obstetrician she was told that state law now required that she either submit to a diagnostic test for a particular birth defect or sign a waiver of responsibility.  She lived adjacent to the San Joaquin Valley, one of America's most prolific agricultural areas.  The birth defect is associated with exposure to agricultural chemicals.  Describing her dilemma, her voice quivered with strong feeling.  "Suddenly the focus was on me.  If I didn't take the test, I wasn't being a good mother.  I would have been blamed if the child were born deformed.  But it wasn't my responsibility.  The responsibility belonged to the chemical companies and the agri-business industry and the state that lets this happen!"  A dedicated mother, Joan was outraged at the unnecessary risk to her children - uncovered by implication but not dealt with in any way by the responsible authorities.  This is clearly potential harm that was preventable.  She was also angered at the helplessness of mothers like herself.  "Thousands of women go and have that test without even thinking about it.  We've normalised disease," she said.  That her child was fortunate enough to be born healthy did not mitigate her outrage even five years after the incident.

  'Sonya', another student, will never have the opportunity to make the decision about testing which so bothered her fellow student.  With Sonya's treatment for cervical cancer at age 26 she lost the capacity to bear children.  What does her cancer have to do with out environmental ethic?  This student had been the daughter of a soldier in the army.  In the late 1960's she moved with her father and family to Dugway Proving Grounds, home of the U.S. military's chemical weapons program.  Located in the western desert lands of Tooele County, Utah, the area around Dugway is not useful for much more than livestock grazing.  Periodically, however, some of those sheep or cattle in the area fall prey to mysterious, mass deaths.  Property settlements were always made out of court.  This student cannot prove connections between her illness and her toxic environmental exposure.  This exacerbates her anguish.

  I had my own story to share.  I had been a resident of central Pennsylvania in 1978, living within ten miles of the Third Mile Island nuclear power station at the time of its near meltdown.  Because of the lack of clear information during the crisis, I, like most people, conducted business as usual - including making a visit close to the plant.  During the ensuing months when my menstrual cycle went haywire I chalked up the disorder to emotional stress.  But the problems continued.  Only later did I learn that even a low level of radiation can affect women's reproductive organs.  I have since come to understand that women often are biological markers for environmental distress, registering small ecological changes before they become apparent on a grosser level.

The results of such experiences are that the harmonious relationship between humans and the rest of creation are weakened or even sundered.  Interactions with the natural world become a potential source of harm.  Consequently, a disordered spiritual sense of our place in the universe develops which in turn fuels an ethic of confrontation and domination rather than one of harmonising ourselves with our environment.  Our governments owe us reasonable attempts at clarifications and explanations for what we experience due to their actions or inactions.

  All of us in the class felt profoundly aggrieved by the destruction wreaked on our bodies and our biosphere.  Grief can lead to despair and despair to immobilisation, especially when a person feels alone and without support for her pain and anguish.  Grief can lead to despair and despair to immobilisation.  These are not exactly the recipe for environmental activism or a renewal of a sacred connection!  One way out of this dilemma is the apocalypticism found within strands of evangelical Christianity.  We can sleep more comfortably at night, their teachings suggest, despite living on the edge of the ecological abyss, because our real concern is with eternal life.  If we know ourselves to be saved, we are secure with God in life everlasting - even if we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons or make our air unbreathable and water undrinkable.  An extreme version of this line of reasoning even welcomes catastrophe as a means of ushering in a renewed heaven and earth.  These beliefs emerge from some of the tensions I mentioned earlier which envision a deity as radically other than his (sic) creation.

  Fortunately, there are other ways to prevent immobilising despair.  Our class used one of these.  "The Council of All Beings" is a set of experiential exercises designed to encourage participants to renew their relationship with nature.  For one of the activities, participants assume the role of a created being and give voice to its grievances.  Critical to the curative process is [release of suppressed] grief we feel over the loss and degradation of nature.  We used the Hebrew lament tradition as our model.  Profoundly beautiful and poetic lamentations were voiced by class members.

  This "despair work" was developed by Joanna Macy, an American activist, in her workshops on despair and empowerment in the nuclear age (documented in her book of the same name).  Australian rainforest activist John Seed collaborated with Macy in the creation of the Council exercises which he summarises in a small book entitled Thinking Like a Mountain.

  One consequence of these and other rituals of empowerment is that we nurture our awe at the mystery of the universe.  Creation becomes resacralised, reflecting back to us the Holiness with which it was endowed (which our society has so thoroughly forgotten that such statements are felt by many to be strange, 'mystical' or with some other excuse - dismissable).  Deep ecology, which is what this brand of environmentalism is called, promotes our interconnection with the web of life and insists that we give up our anthropocentrism.  That is, instead of placing ourselves at the centre of creation, we need to be - like all other beings - 'plain citizens' of the planet, as American naturalist Aldo Leopold put it.

  Without ranking ourselves superior, it is also possible, however, to say that humans are the consciousness of our planet.  This self-reflective capacity separates us from nature to some degree but can also be cultivated on behalf of an ethic of mutuality.  Both our intellectual understanding and our ethical awareness can be nourished so that we can approach our patient with understanding.

  And what is the healing regimen I prescribe?  Avoid despair and practice awe.  The path to healing is quite individual.  One woman became a vegetarian as a result of the class.  She did this upon learning of the environmental consequences of 'factory' production of animals for meat.  Broadening her environmental awareness, she got her office to replace the styrofoam coffee cups with paper ones (in order to reduce the threat from CFCs to the atmospheric ozone layer) and encouraged others to recycle glass and aluminium and to compost the family garbage.  Another student bought a cabin in the woods.  I've begun research on women eco-warriors; others were moved to increase their activism against war, the military being the world's number one environmental enemy.

  When practices of domination have been internalised as well as externalised, the recovery is complex and slow.  But every gesture towards healing is valid and valuable.  Wholeness lies in making the effort.

Recommended readings:

Diamond, Irene and Ornstein, Gloria Feman (Eds), Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club 1990.   A major collection of essays surveying the breadth of ecofeminist thoughts

Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1980  A stunning indictment of western science's role in shaping an ethic of domination.

- - - - Radical Ecology: The Search for a Liveable World, New York/London: Routledge 1992.  A Baedeker to the environmental movement(s).  Thoroughly covers the various philosophical and practical approaches.

Reuther, Rosemary Radford, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, New York: HarperSanFrancisco 1992.  A brilliant critique of what's bad and what's good for the environment in the western tradition.

Seager, Joni, Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis, New York/London: Routledge 1993.  The premier feminist critique of how the military, corporations, governments and the environmental establishment foster ecological destruction.

Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas, The Universe Story, New York: HarperSanFrancisco 1992.  A physicist and theologian team up to tell our collective story.  Beautifully written, provocative and awe inspiring.


Sarah S. Forth teaches in the M.A. Program in Feminist Spirituality at Immaculate Heart College Center, 425 Shatto Place, Suite 401, Los Angeles, California 90039
                            

You may quote from or reproduce these editorial clips if you include the following credits and email contact:
Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, M.D. 1994 Reprinted with permission of the author P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099 www.WholisticHealingResearch.com   DB@WholisticHealingResearch.com

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