from yazine - Young Adult magazine,

Young Adult Ministry,
Brisbane Catholic Education,
Volume 4 Number 1, 2003.

To hear within ourselves the sound of the earth crying

John Seed - an amazingly appropriate name! - was a pioneer of the world's first direct action to preserve rainforests, and has worked for over twenty years in Australia and around the world to save forests and ecosystems and to raise consciousness of the interconnectedness of all life. He founded the Rainforest Information Centre. www.rainforestinfo.org.au Madonna Botting spoke to John at a workshop on deep ecology.

John Seed appears like a lively leprechaun, sitting with his legs folded under him, his eyes alight with enthusiasm and passion. The twinkle is engaging, but the talk is even more so, revealing twenty years of following a star. His 'conversion' was both instantaneous and ongoing. He first got an inkling of a totally new way of regarding the world one day in 1979, but like many a reluctant convert before him, struggled against the total rethink of life and values that it would precipitate. Since then he has spent his life with the vision - working it out and working in it.

Can you tell me about how you first got involved with protecting the rainforests, and how this led to your concern for ecology generally?
I was living on a back-to-the-land Buddhist meditators community formed in1974 at Nimbin in northern New South Wales. We had built a meditation centre, and I thought I'd spend the rest of my life living like that. But in August 1979, some neighbours spoke at our monthly market to ask for help to save a piece of bush around Terrania Creek. Logging was due to start there the following Monday, just four miles from where we were living. Though it was so close, I had never been to this little bit of bush before.

Perhaps because of the tension - there were the police and the loggers - there was some kind of heightened awareness in my experience of the rainforest. Something happened that day which turned my life around. I felt in touch with the incredible beauty and intelligence of that forest and felt that I was being called to defend it. I didn't have any conceptual framework to make sense of this, so I struggled against it for quite a while but eventually surrendered to it, and it has been guiding my life ever since.

Intelligence of the forest? Could you say some more about that?
I hadn't considered the possibility that a human being might be 'called' by the forest, but in the years after that, as I studied, I discovered that these rainforests are the womb of life. They are home to more than half the species of plants and animals in the world, and we humans also originated in these forests. Over the last 150 million years, more than 95% of our time was spent in the rainforest. When I consider that, it should come as no surprise that the forest would have a way of connecting with me.

We are accustomed to thinking only of human beings as intelligent,
but if human beings are intelligent, how much more intelligent is the complex system which gave rise to human beings and 10 million other species besides! I don't know if there is an intelligence outside ourselves, but somehow I was totally 'woken up' by that experience of being in the forest

Awakening is an interesting choice of word, given your background in Buddhism.
I felt like lapsed Buddhist after that experience in the forest! Like I was straying from Buddhism…

Into activism?
Yes, and especially away from meditation. But in the years since then, a certain strain of Buddhism called 'engaged Buddhism' has become prominent. From within that community, journals like 'The Enquiring Mind' will ring me up and say; 'Are you still a Buddhist?' 'Ah, I don't know'. 'Are you still meditating?' 'No, not really'. 'Ah, you're still a Buddhist!' Y'know, they like to claim me as one of their own! Obviously all those years of meditation prepared the way for me.

What gives you strength and maintains the passion? Or is it rage?
No, not much rage. The kind of work we've been doing at this workshop keeps me going. Something about the 'circle ritual' and 'ceremony' is not just a surface thing, but rather a true rejuvenation, a fountain of renewal that maintains the energy for the struggle. I agreed to do this six months ago, and then two weeks ago I went 'Ah I'm so busy!' But there is something about sitting in a circle that is so ancient and so authentic. I was feeling a bit tired - so tired that I'd forgotten how important this work is - but now I have all this energy to get back into the fray!

Direct action is also a ceremony; a part of the prayer for awakening. For me, you can't save the forests! All you can do is temporarily stop some destruction happening. If humanity keeps going the way it is now, nothing we save is going to stay saved. So those actions of blockades, and people on tripods, and chaining themselves to machines are all a ritual, a kind of a ceremony, a part of an ongoing prayer for an awakening of humanity.

Is there a need for grounding in a community in order to continue in this work?
I think you do need some kind of a community. We derive strength when we get our authentication from being in a community. We can continue to act alone for a certain time. But this activist work flies in the face of the bad news of the dominant paradigm to such an extent that it would be difficult to maintain the sense of certainty of its rightness without a shared vision.

Arne Naess*, the Professor of Philosophy who coined the term 'deep ecology' says that what we need are 'community therapies' to heal the illusion of separation from the rest of creation. The separation is an illusion, but it is such a pervasive one it is written large across every social structure we see. It would be difficult for an individual to buck that system without the strength that comes from fellowship. Jesus said - 'when two or three are gathered in my name…' One person can't 'gather'!

Pull quote
'Deep Ecology is a movement where you not only do good for the planet for the sake of the humans but also for the sake of the planet' ~ Arne Naess - Norwegian Eco-Philosopher.

What would a 'healed' community look like - one that had healed that separation?
I don't know. But having said that, if we look at the things we do which cause the destruction, and then imagine what it would be like without those things… The emphasis on consumption, and on owning things in order to have status and sense of self-worth would be absent. It's not really that we want all this 'stuff' that advertising tells us we want; a huge four-wheel-drive even though we live in the suburbs, every house with its own lawnmower... Really we want a sense of satisfaction and well being, and the approval of our peers, so in the healed community we would have those things in a way that didn't tie them to the consumption of material goods.

We're digging the earth up and cutting the earth down because we think we have to turn it into something else before it has any value - as if it doesn't have any value of itself. We think we are the ones whose toil and sweat creates the goodness. But in my experience it's much better before we touch it.

If we could get the satisfaction we're looking for merely from being - such values would transform us from: 'Success comes from how much you own'. Success would come from how happy you could be while owning nothing whatsoever. Last year I spent two weeks at the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton was. I didn't see anyone pining away because they didn't own anything!

Is there a sense of being able contemplate the world and see it for its own value?
So much of what we want is deliberately pushed by advertising. Maybe we wouldn't value jobs so highly if we could ask, 'What is the impact of these jobs?' Rather than unemployment being a tragedy that befell people willy-nilly, we would deliberately destroy those jobs that aren't serving us. Ask 'what's the benefit? What's the cost?' We would start with what we need: food, shelter, medicine. After that it's just culture. So 'How good a culture is it? Who is it serving?'

What about the solutions to this crisis? Will they be low-tech?
For myself, I'm entirely driven by my inspiration and my calling. I like community building and low-tech things. It is not that I want to see what I do multiplied a thousand times, I would rather see thousands of people all being called to do their thing and between us finding many different things that would work.

Do you need to have an intellectual framework?
The framework for me followed the experience - the experience came first. When I discovered Arne Naess and read 'Deep Ecology', there was this tremendous sense of coming home to something I already knew. The fact that I already 'knew' it didn't make it any less important. The experience couldn't be articulated, couldn't be shared without the framework of understanding. Up until then there had been this deep emotional and passionate expression, but there was no way to communicate it except by doing.

Could you say more about the idea of the spiritual awakening you spoke of?
This 'awakening to grace' is something that is recognised across the faith traditions; it seems to me one of the flowers of being human. When you've experienced the kind of deep joy that awakening brings, well, who's going to sell you a four-wheel-drive after that? So it's a socially important phenomenon as well as a personally important one.

When we became human we evolved certain characteristics, and all of them came from the earth - there's nowhere else. We're just made of earth; we eat the earth, we drink the earth. This flowers in us in certain ways. So, the Buddha was part of the earth; Jesus, all the prophets, were part of the earth.

Spirituality isn't separate from the earth; it is one of the gifts the earth gives us. The earth to me is primary, and spirit comes out of that. If anything is sacred, then the earth is. I mean, if God spent five days putting all of this together before he even got around to human beings, then it's got to be sacred! There's no way round it. To find our sacredness elsewhere seems to be misreading the situation.