The Ecological Citizen: Selected papers from the peer-reviewed, ecocentric journal, 2018 - 2019

By Ecological Citizen

A selection of papers published in the Ecological Citizen journal; an independent, peer-reviewed, free-to-access journal that provides a forum for inspiring and mobilizing discussion with an Earth-centred perspective. Each paper offers a perspective on ecocentric approaches to life. What does it mean to be ecocentric? Deep green, or ecocentric,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ecological Citizen
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648403630

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The Ecological Citizen: Selected papers from the peer-reviewed, ecocentric journal, 2018 - 2019

The Ecological Citizen Press

Copyright © 2020 The Ecological Citizen and the authors

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The copyright of each original article content belongs to the authors unless otherwise stated. There is no limit on printing or distribution the original version of each article in the original form downloaded from the website https://ecologicalcitizen.net.

National Library of Australia

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ISBN-13: 9780648403630 (eBook)

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The Ecological Citizen: Selected papers from the peer-reviewed, ecocentric journal, 2018 - 2019

Confronting human supremacy in defence of the Earth

Selected Papers 2018 - 2019

Contents

Introduction

by Patrick Curry (Editor-in-Chief)

An introduction to ecocentrism

from The Ecological Citizen journal

Transforming human life on our home planet, perennially

by Wes Jackson, Aubrey Streit Krug, Bill Vitek and Robert Jensen

Dandelions are divine

by Bill Vitek

Future rivers, dams and ecocentrism

by John J Piccolo, Richard D Durtsche, Johan Watz, Martin Österling and Olle Calles

Rights of rivers enter the mainstream

by Grant Wilson and Darlene May Lee

Christianity and nature – an interview with Nigel Cooper

by Patrick Curry

Animism and ecology: Participating in the world community

by Graham Harvey

Against enlightened inaction: Edification from Thoreau

by Luke Philip Plotica

The silence of the humpback whale

by Kathleen Dean Moore

Restoring the living ocean: The time is now

by Eileen Crist

Thinking and walking with The Sonoran Desert: A literary field guide

by Louise Boscacci

Sensory pollution and the biodiversity crisis

by Kirsten M Parris

Take Action - Sign the ‘Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism’

Introduction

Patrick Curry (Editor-in-Chief)

The Ecological Citizen is now in its third year of publication. It continues to encourage and articulate perspectives which address (in the words our Mission Statement) ‘the central issue of our time: how to halt and reverse our current ecocidal course and create an ecological civilization.’ Those perspectives are integrally ecocentric. In contrast to the dominant anthropocentrism – even, often, of environmentalism – they take as the starting-point of value and meaning the Earth itself, as a complex and living whole. In this context, human beings are not privileged rulers but only one kind among many, many others, each member of which has its own intrinsic value: ‘plain citizens’, in the term from Aldo Leopold which supplied our name.

That commitment is the basis of our integrity, without which we are nothing. At the same time, however, we want to avoid dogmatic purity. So there is also an important place in our pages for non-anthropocentric perspectives which, although not necessarily fully ecocentric, critically address destructive human-centredness.

We don’t take sides in irrelevant and distracting arguments about which is more important, the so-called outer world of the physical environment and so-called inner or psychological worlds, nor in equally unhelpful disputes between advocates of science and proponents of cultural, social and overtly political considerations. Slowing, then stopping and finally reversing ecocide will need all of these approaches.

The breadth and depth of such an approach is clearly evident, I think, in this selection. In it you will find whales and oceans, biodiversity and deserts, rivers and dams, animists and Christians, writers and dandelions. No apportioning of such richness and variety along sectarian lines is possible, and there is a mixture of warning, elegy and celebration which is entirely appropriate for such a wondrous but alarmingly imperilled world. May it inspire both appreciation and action!

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An introduction to ecocentrism

About The Ecological Citizen journal

The Ecological Citizen is an independent, peer-reviewed, free-to-access journal that provides a forum for inspiring and mobilizing discussion with an Earth-centred perspective. Standards issues are published twice a year, and special supplements are also published from time to time.

The publication has no financial affiliations, no publication charges and no article access fees. It is published online, with print-ready files made available for anyone wishing to print copies. The Journal is committed to ensuring ongoing availability of all published pieces as part of good archiving practice.

Opinions expressed in the Journal do not necessarily reflect those of each member of the Editorial Board.

The Journal is run with minimal costs by a staff of volunteers. The small costs that do exist are covered by small, unrestricted, private donations.

The copyright of the content belongs to the authors, artists and photographers, unless otherwise stated.

The Journal reserves the right for all content to appear on its website in readable and printable format indefinitely, and the right for all published writing to be translated into other languages for further distribution. There is no limit on printing or distribution of PDFs downloaded from the website.

Information on contributing to the journal can be found at:

https://ecologicalcitizen.net/submissions.html

A plain-language definition of ‘ecocentric’

You are deep green (or, in more technical terms, ‘ecocentric’) if you feel that it is wrong for humans to have an unreasonably large, negative impact on the biological and geological natural world (e.g. causing other species to go extinct) AND you believe that it is a deeper wrong than just affecting the quality of life of other humans in some way. That is, it also does wrong to the Earth and to the rest of life.

Taken from: Gray J, Whyte I and Curry P (2018) Ecocentrism: What it means and what it implies. The Ecological Citizen v1.

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Transforming human life on our home planet, perennially

Wes Jackson, Aubrey Streit Krug, Bill Vitek and Robert Jensen

Jackson W, Streit Krug A, Vitek B and Jensen R (2018) Transforming human life on our home planet, perennially. The Ecological Citizen 2: 43–6

For those who are willing to face the multiple, cascading crises that humans have created, one task is analysis – how did we get here? In the 200,000 years of Homo sapiens, what have been key thresholds of systemic change?

A good case can be made for agriculture, which the polymath scientist Jared Diamond (1987) called the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Three decades later, historian Yuval Noah Harari (2015: 77) called the Agricultural Revolution history’s biggest fraud. When we started taking control of other animals’ lives and breaking the soil to produce energy-rich grain, we intervened in ecosystems in ways we could not predict or control, to the detriment of many organisms – including humans.

With more than 7 billion people on the planet, we are not going to return to hunting and gathering. But around the world, often under the banner of ‘agroecology’, people are using modern science and traditional knowledge to develop ways of farming that are less ecologically and socially destructive.

Over the past four decades, The Land Institute (https://landinstitute.org/) has developed what we hold to be one of the most promising projects in sustainable agriculture: Natural Systems Agriculture, which is based around perennial grains grown in mixtures, rather than annuals grown in monocultures. A new Ecosphere Studies programme nurtures and explores this perennial thinking through research and education – all based in an ecocentric worldview that challenges the dominant industrial model that currently defines ways of feeding both bodies and minds. This article outlines our approach, including a diagnosis of the human agricultural past and present in a broader ecospheric context which resonates with other ecocentric projects, while building on the lessons learned on the Kansas prairies that are home to The Land Institute.

The history: The 10,000-year problem of agriculture

When humans began to generate surpluses by domesticating plants and animals about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, a conceptual split between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ emerged, with human culture assumed to be separate from, and privileged over, non-human nature. This domination–subordination relationship, with humans claiming dominion over the world, also came to define relationships within the human family and human society. Social hierarchies, organized around such statuses as sex or gender, class, race or ethnicity, and national citizenship, structure most societies today and influence the control of surpluses; deep disparities in wealth and power are the norm within and between contemporary human societies.

The depletion of soil and other resources by humans intensified with industrialization. Ongoing imperial and settler–colonial structures, ideologically justified as advancing ‘civilization’, have been particularly dependent upon material scaffolding from the five relatively non-renewable sources of carbon: soil, trees, coal, oil and natural gas. Highly dense fossil-carbon energy, and the advanced technology used to extract and process resources, have destroyed local wisdom by treating whole ecosystems as if they were mere collections of inanimate parts, leading to crises that affect essentially all ecosystems.

The conceptual shift: Earth alive!

Moving from a human-centric to an ecocentric perspective begins with a critique of the living–dead dualism. Stan Rowe (2003) suggested we imagine the perspective from inside a cell: from such a viewpoint it might appear that there are some moving or living parts and other non-moving or non-living parts. But from an outside view, the whole cell is seen as living, with that life being the result of the participation of all its components.

Viewing life only as a property of organisms has led some humans to treat the planet as a mine from which to extract resources and a dump into which to discard wastes, rather than as a home to care for. Viewing humans as supreme among creatures has led to the instrumental treatment of fellow organisms. What is considered ‘dead’, ‘inanimate’ or ‘not-human’ is deemed relevant only to the extent it can be exploited for human use.

Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere are not separate from the biosphere but essential parts of a living whole – the ecosphere, our foundational unit of analysis. Because of the priority of the ecosphere over humans (in time, inclusiveness, complexity, evolutionary creativity and diversity), the ecosphere is a proper ‘boundary of causation’ (naming the forces that create our world) within the cosmos. At the next level down in the hierarchy of structure, ecosystems become the primary focus for human investigations, as the ‘boundaries of consideration’ (the scope of what humans reasonably can, and should, pay attention to).

What knowledge and practices are needed to create and maintain stable and just communities that can remain in a sustainable relationship with our ecosphere? The Land Institute’s mission statement emphasizes, When people, land, and community are as one, all three members prosper (https://is.gd/TLImission). We hold this to be a truth that must become self-evident: Our shared human responsibility is to live on, not dominate, our home planet.

To address the social–ecological trauma of agriculture and the industrial world, we must voluntarily live within biophysical limits to make possible a post-growth, sunshine-powered future. We must evaluate human systems and projects not by their short-term productivity for humans alone, but rather by the long-term flourishing of ecosystems, including humans.

The process: Driving knowledge out of its categories

This requires that we integrate insights from all academic disciplines – core sciences, applied sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, the arts – and recognize the value of disparate ways of knowing, from modern to indigenous or traditional perspectives.

We do not reject