coe034_taylor.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] Welcome everyone back to the Cultures of Energy podcast. We had the pleasure recently of talking with Professor Ron Taylor, and luckily we all are going to have the pleasure of listening to him now. Braun is really a globally renowned scholar of spirituality, religion of the dark green kind leading environmentalist. He's had all kinds of honors and recognition, including most recently at the Rachel Carson Center, which is a preeminent kind of environmental studies institute. Yes, in Germany. And Braun has written lots of cool books and done encyclopedias about religion and nature, and he's written dark green religion, which we'll talk about in the podcast Ecological Resistance Movements and even a book about Eco Avatar.

Speaker2: [00:01:21] Yes, and we're going to talk about all those things. This is, by the way, the Cultures of Energy podcast, right?

Speaker1: [00:01:26] The Cultures of Energy podcast. In case you didn't know that after having clicked on that link,

Speaker2: [00:01:33] You know there could be just newbies, people who just randomly got here. They followed some links somewhere. They don't know where they are. They need orientation.

Speaker1: [00:01:40] They're they're like, I just followed a tiny URL. I don't know where I am.

Speaker2: [00:01:44] They could have followed some clickbait. We could be part of some phishing scam program somewhere. That's how they got to it. Yeah. So anyway, run your MacKeeper. And while you're doing that, listen to this conversation. But this conversation is interesting and exciting and relevant because it tackles eco spirituality. Yep. And I wanted to ask my co-host Simone how here just how eco spiritual she feels. Would you describe yourself as an eco spiritual soul?

Speaker1: [00:02:11] I don't know. It's pretty hard to feel it here in Houston. I have to admit, OK, I don't know. I mean, maybe that sounds pathetic. And maybe it's just because I was just reading an email from our friend in Earth Sciences who said they don't even have nitrate monitors here on Buffalo Bayou, which is just down the street. And so they have, I guess this is one of the most pervasive toxins in water anywhere in the world, and they don't even know exactly how much of that stuff. Just so we don't get the explicit warnings. Yeah, is out there. So it's a little bit harder to feel it here in Houston, although probably this is the place where we need to cultivate that kind of ethos.

Speaker2: [00:02:50] This is a very damaged environment, to be sure. And but interestingly, it also, as we were thinking and talking about this, I think it reveals also this what I would call like the eco spiritual gap between the two co-hosts of this podcast in the sense that you grew up in Northern California. I mean, you've you've frolicked in the redwoods, you've bonded with nature and been a naturalist and done all of these things.

Speaker1: [00:03:13] Yeah, I've been arrested, not arrested, but I've got a major citation ticket from a couple of cops for swimming in the Pacific.

Speaker2: [00:03:20] Ok. I can happen. Oh, not all you're saying.

Speaker1: [00:03:23] I'm just saying it can happen. Same time, swimming is illegal.

Speaker2: [00:03:26] There's something about California. We'll get back to that, about California. That inspires that. But growing up on the south side of Chicago, as I did with a concrete, you know, yard, it sounds like an Oliver Twist story. I don't mean it to sound like that. We were fine, but it was a place that was fairly bereft of what I would call nature and thus has left me, I think, fully stunted in my ability to appreciate nature. So the second question is why am I so afraid of nature? Can you answer that?

Speaker1: [00:03:53] Well, I don't know. I mean, you kind of set it up as a genealogy of a traumatic childhood. I guess that's got to be it. It's because you've never sort of had the encounter with the redwoods. I don't know. I think only you can sort of do that on your psychoanalytic on that one.

Speaker2: [00:04:07] Well, it's psychoanalytic. I mean, I'm OK. The two things. The two biggest natural things I'm afraid of are water. And my mom says that's because of a past life experience. I must have drowned in a past life or guess past death.

Speaker1: [00:04:17] Now there are some eco spirituality for you.

Speaker2: [00:04:19] There you go. My mom listen like when she was super. When you came to talking about Star Hawk in the podcast, I knew who Star Hawk was because I saw Star Hawk books sitting around my mom totally office.

Speaker1: [00:04:30] And again, because I've for your mom, I've purchased for that non eco friendly holiday called Christmas. I've purchased for her the Wee Moon Wee Moon calendar, which goes way back into the eco feminist world. So I didn't mean to interrupt, but what I wanted to say was despite the concrete yard and the Oliver Twist urban history that you've survived, you also, you know, very close in a very close nurturing relationship was this was this female, this mother figure that's true who is kind of a kind of an eco feminist in her own way?

Speaker2: [00:05:08] Oh, definitely. Yeah, I know, without a doubt. And actually did things like trying, you know, to occasionally take the family camping, but with disastrous traumatic results. And that brings me to the second thing about nature I'm the most frightened of which are raccoons. So it's not just, you know, I don't just have an anxiety about marine phenomena. Also there terrestrial phenomenon also frightened to death about so you put those together, you get some raccoons like on a surfboard, you get some small boat, and that's that's my fear factor right there.

Speaker1: [00:05:36] I get it. I mean, they do have sharp teeth and sharp claws and and they can make a gang

Speaker2: [00:05:41] And they just don't care. They can make a game. They don't care. I remember once living in a thick hut, opening a back door and seeing a raccoon dragging a turkey carcass out of the garbage. And it was like three feet from me, and it just looked me in the eye and said, You know, there's no way you're there's nothing you can do to me that frightens me. I'm not afraid of you, and I'm taking this turkey

Speaker1: [00:05:58] Carcass that is that is a raccoon attitude. But what you should have thought is that, thank God, it's dragging away that turkey carcass instead of my hand, right? It could have been much worse. You could have gotten in a in a row with it.

Speaker2: [00:06:11] And anyway, I've lost

Speaker1: [00:06:12] Lost a little.

Speaker2: [00:06:14] So literally have goose bumps right now. I'm triggering myself with this talk about raccoons. I'm getting a little so we have to we have to move on.

Speaker1: [00:06:20] I don't know. But yeah, but I mean, the raccoons are kind of minor, especially, you know, you have to sort of go someplace else to run into them like camping. But is it just a marine phobia? I think there's a kind of lagoon phobia, I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:06:34] The thing is, when I hear about eco spirituality, when we're talking about it, I I totally sign on to all its principles, and I feel that to the extent I'm a spiritual person, I am an eco spiritual person. But I just have this thing with nature. So it's hard. I'm not. It's like, and that sounds nothing against nature. I just I just it makes me deeply uncomfortable and feel I feel deeply vulnerable, which I guess is maybe the point. Maybe that's how we should feel. But I'm not. I guess I couldn't call myself a tree hugger. Exactly.

Speaker1: [00:07:01] Now, for that reason, it's not a pathology. Exactly. It's just some kind of deep wounding. But maybe as a past life thing, I think an eco spiritual way might want to put it that way. All right. Now what I want to what I want to understand and I didn't get to ask this to Braun, is why whenever we talk about nature, spirituality or eco spirituality or any of these kinds of, I don't know, encounters, shall we say, with the metaphysical in terms of nature, how come we always put this proviso of the term spirituality? How come it's so difficult to think about nature, eco anything in terms of religion? Well, now now, Braun says dark green religion. He uses the R word. I just think it's kind of fascinating. It's become part of the corpus about how we talk about these things is that, you know, it's not really religion because there's something very institutional about religion. You know, it has this kind of history and origin stories and et cetera. I mean, I'm just posing the question. I'm not saying there's an answer. I just think it's an interesting phenomenon that we hear all the time. It's eco spirituality, but it's rarely sort of nature religion.

Speaker2: [00:08:11] Yeah, I think it sounds to me like it's kind of a fluid scale. It didn't seem to me as though he really was putting too much weight on whether,

Speaker1: [00:08:19] Yeah, I'm just talking about in general or popular, whatever kind of the popular imaginary. Well, no. His book is called Dark Green Religion. No, no one uses

Speaker2: [00:08:27] That word, but I'm saying if I were to drop the bomb by which I mean Durkheim on this conversation and say, you know, at the essence of religion, all that is is sacred and profane is right. In some way of managing that distinction ritually, then you know, you can make something that's, you know, fairly, you know, kind of, um, formalized and free flowing religious pretty easily. As long as you can stabilize this and as long as nature is or the living world is, or Gaia or whatever is the sacred, then you know it's a religion.

Speaker1: [00:09:00] Right? But did old email actually ever use the word spiritual or spirituality? I mean, spirit? Yeah, but I don't know. It's an interesting he used the word religion quite a lot not to load up our terms too much anyway. It's just it's a kind of question. And one of the questions I did get to ask Braun was What would Jesus do about the Anthropocene?

Speaker2: [00:09:22] Right. That was interesting.

Speaker1: [00:09:24] Well, you thought it was kind of a weird question, but I thought it was very organic and remarkably

Speaker2: [00:09:29] Remarkably, he didn't want to speak on behalf of.

Speaker1: [00:09:32] Yeah, well, go figure.

Speaker2: [00:09:34] And then of course, we get to talking about surfing because somehow when you get to Californians on the podcast, they always want to talk about surfing.

Speaker1: [00:09:40] It's like to. I knew I could sort of I felt the vibe. I just knew it.

Speaker2: [00:09:44] You just knew it. You just knew it. You can feel it, which I guess is some kind of eco spiritual

Speaker1: [00:09:49] Fact that Californians have. Yeah, that's another kind of metaphysical encounter that we have. It's it's like molecular at the level of the ocean somehow because we share the same ocean, too. He was further down south.

Speaker2: [00:10:02] Ok, well, anyway, you're going to no matter where you are or what your relationship to water is, what your relationship to raccoons is, you know how connected you feel to to Mother Earth and to Gaia or whatever else. I think you'll still enjoy this podcast. It's quite an interesting conversation. And with that, can we say,

Speaker1: [00:10:20] Yeah, we can say, Go Brian Taylor, listen up. It's good.

Speaker2: [00:10:44] Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we are so happy to have Brian Taylor with us today, Brian. It's been the case in the past several months. We've been doing this that we've often spoken to. People who either have just experienced a storm are about to experience a storm who are who are experiencing flooding. How are things going in Florida just really quickly? Are you OK?

Speaker3: [00:11:05] Well, we're fine here, I think there's been some trees down and some damage, I think there's been one fatality in a neighboring county. But we're we've been a little bit on the southern fringe of it. So compared to two thousand four, this has been pretty mild for us.

Speaker2: [00:11:22] Well, that's good to hear.

Speaker1: [00:11:23] That's great. Well, we're really glad to have you with us here today, Brian, and how happy that you're surviving all the the wetness and winds down there. But this is actually the weather is actually a pretty nice Segway into some of the work that you've been doing over the last several years, which has to do with the concept that you've innovated, that you're calling dark green religion and dark green spirituality. And so for our listeners who may not be tuned into what that is exactly, we thought we would start out by getting, you know, your sort of synopsis or your view on what this is precisely and what led you to kind of conceive of these ideas of the dark green and vis a vis religion and spirituality?

Speaker3: [00:12:07] Sure. Happy to, and very glad to be with you and your listeners. Well, dark green religion is my way of talking about the affective or emotional, or if one prefers the spiritual or religious connections people have to nature. It's characterized by beliefs and practices in which nature is in some way considered sacred as having intrinsic value, which are generally accompanied by feelings of kinship, humility, mutual dependence and belonging. We could think of it in terms of kind of atypical characteristics. One this perception that nature is sacred. Secondly, this notion that all living things have intrinsic value, which some call a deep ecological or bio centric ethics, and thus all living things deserve respect, if not also reverence. Third, and very important is the notion that all life shares a common ancestor and thus all living things are literally kin and that that leads to certain kinds of moral responsibilities. These spiritualities, these worldviews typically also include ecology based metaphysics of interconnection and mutual dependence. People with this kind of sentiment feel deep feelings of belonging and connection to nature. And generally speaking, there's a deep humility that goes with this a sense that humans are natural beings who really, like all other organisms, are subject to nature's laws. And although exceptional in some ways, they're not exempt. Humans are not exempt from these basic ecological principles, including things like caring capacity, the notion that humans can outstrip their food and water supplies or excrete more waste than their habitats can recycle and so forth. Seven. An experience of awe and wonder at the terror and beauties of the world and universe. And then, maybe most simply simply, a love for nature. So those are characteristics typically that I see having increasing cultural traction around the world. I think that people's understandings of the human place in the biosphere began to change dramatically with the Darwinian revolution. And some of what I'm talking about here is an echo of that in places around the world where people are relatively well-educated and are aware of these things.

Speaker1: [00:14:32] Yeah, I think one of the really interesting points that you make in the book, for example, is that dark green forms of religion actually cohere more closely and are more closely aligned with, you know, sort of modern understandings of evolution and scientific principles and experimentation. And so that there's a way in which the dark green can actually marry up more closely with the kind of modernist view of science and empiricism in ways that religion in its kind of generally taken sense doesn't, right? You know, questions about divine beings who we can't quite see, but we sense them might be there their reliance on faith rather than empiricism. So I think this is a really interesting element of dark green religion.

Speaker3: [00:15:21] Yeah, you know, part of what I talk about in the book, I talk about two major forms of dark green spirituality. One is a kind of animistic perception, and there are some people who whose who think and feel a deep connection with nonhuman organisms, and that could be understood as conventionally religious in some sense. In other words, the world is in spirited with divine beings or animated by a divine being. But increasingly, I think the types of dark green spiritualities that I am talking about can be and are grand. Founded in entirely naturalistic ways without the belief in immaterial divine beings or beings, the other type that's typical has come increasingly simply to be called guy and spirituality. And now this is actually reflecting an ancient perception that that that all of the entities in the world function together like an organism. So the notion of organism, as it is, was articulated by ancient Greek philosophers. But with the work of James Lovelock and his theory of the Gaia hypothesis, this note taken from the Greek goddess of the Earth. This notion that that everything in the biosphere contributes to the ongoing functioning of the Earth's living systems so that there can be the conditions necessary for life as we know it now. This is really quite common and whatever terminology we give it. I think that that Gaia has the most current traction. And as you know, in the book and in other venues, I've documented the widespread cultural traction that these sorts of notions have around the world. But basically morality and these sorts of animistic spiritualities of belonging and connection to nature of kinship with non-human organisms are on the upswing culturally, especially among those, as I said before, who are in relatively well-educated sectors of the human population.

Speaker1: [00:17:45] Right. And Gaia is being I mean, as you know, it's being mobilized politically too, like among indigenous communities in South America as a kind of a, you know, a question of political importance. So clearly, Gaia is is is on the upswing.

Speaker3: [00:18:02] Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting the ways in which there's I mean, part of what I talk about in thinking about these new forms of Earth related spirituality is the extent to which they are bricolage. So you're mentioning indigenous cultures, well, indigenous cultures who are involved in environmental struggles, as you well know, are increasingly connected with people who are working and striving to be in solidarity with them, trying to help them in their causes. And there is a a natural thing that happens when people are in an authentic encounter with one another, they learn from one another. They they borrow interesting and compelling ideas, one from another. So just as environmentalists around the world have learned a lot from various indigenous cultures around the world, so indigenous cultures around the world are learning from the the environmentalists and the environmental scientists that they are increasingly engaged with in all sorts of ways. So there's just a tremendous creativity going on in these what we might just call green counter cultures as people learn from one another and hybridized ideas. And basically, what I was trying to do with this trope, dark green religion is just try to to pass on some observations that I've been making looking at grassroots environmental movements on the one hand, but also at examples of of people who are promoting and expressing these kinds of ideals that I summarize at the outset of our talk in literature, in poetry and music and film photography, scholarly writing documentaries. We see these kinds of things being expressed under the United Nations umbrella, even in ceremonies that happen there, certainly within environmental organizations and at sites of environmental protests and even at theme parks. So the cultural production is really robust, and a part of what I'm arguing is that despite great diversity and significant contestation about how this is done and what's appropriate and what isn't, there is nevertheless some important convergences that empower people in very concrete efforts to mobilize around environmental and social issues.

Speaker2: [00:20:33] So, Ron, you know one thing I wanted to ask you about dark green religion again, a fascinating, fabulous book and a great diagnosis of our contemporary spiritual condition, I think. You know, there's a very some provocative work you're doing in there talking about Christianity. I mean, not necessarily your arguments, but the interpretation, particularly of the historian Lyn White, that Christianity might be a a religion that's uniquely perhaps anti environmentalist if that's the right way of putting it or that in which it's. Because of the sense of human dominion over nature, it has led to more environmental destruction in Christian countries than perhaps elsewhere. Is that something you'd want to comment on a bit, and I think it's a really interesting thing to think about, maybe particularly in light of, you know, the most recent Francis, Pope Francis's encyclical and so forth.

Speaker3: [00:21:25] Yeah, absolutely. I think this is really important to to ruminate on. In fact, I think it's so important that I've spent most of the last four years with a couple of colleagues doing the most comprehensive review of social scientific research, exploring the role of what we construe as religion, as well as the kind of emotional connections people have to nature and don't have to nature in various ways. And we've now we're just publishing the first of this research in the Journal of Conservation Biology that will be out momentarily and a couple of months later in the Journal for the study of religion, nature and culture, we have a much longer research review that not only looks at Christianity and the so-called Abrahamic religions, but looks globally at all the so-called world religions, as well as indigenous cultures, and as well as as any data that we can get from environmental psychology and tourism studies that deal with the ways in which people increasingly are expressing and promoting and being drawn to the kinds of sentiments and perceptions that I've characterized as dark green religion. So that's a little bit of a long program, but what did we learn by looking at the existing social scientific research? Well, we learned that it's very complicated, that things cut a number of different ways. But it looks as though the Lyn White thesis, with its critique of Christianity and implicitly with the Abrahamic religions, holds up pretty well with it's a theology of domination is pretty strong in the tradition that this is a deeply anthropocentric or human centered tradition that tends to devalue non-human organisms because human beings, after all, are the only organisms that are created in the divine image.

Speaker3: [00:23:31] And so they have special moral status. We can certainly see. Pope Francis, the first wrestling with that anthropocentric Adam and the echo of Lyn White in the back of his mind, I think is quite clear, and he's trying to argue that while Christianity is indeed anthropocentric, that comes with very special obligations to the natural world. And he, in a rather innovative way, makes the argument that the tradition really should have a reverence for all life. That said, let's flip the coin over and look at. At the religious traditions originating in Asia. There has been a stereotype that religions originating in Asia are more ecologically friendly than the ones originating in the West, and the social scientific data suggests that that's really not the case, at least the way ordinary folks live on the ground. And one of the things that was most striking in doing this research was that. Just as in the Hebrew Bible and the Abrahamic traditions, God used nature to reward or punish people based on their behaviors. People all around the world who believe that there are divinities or a god of some sort that's responsible for the environmental conditions.

Speaker3: [00:25:05] Have trouble understanding the extent to which they are themselves transforming environmental systems in ways that harm them and lead to the erosion of biodiversity. So one of the things that seems quite clear is that and again, speaking generally, this belief in divine beings controlling nature in some way seems to hinder understanding of environmental systems, which in turn hinders our ability to figure out what we're doing wrong and how to adapt to them. The data also suggests that some indigenous cultures have to put it kind of in a cavalier way, perhaps have lived in place for a long time and have learned their ecological manners in ways that allow them to live sustainably in certain regions. You can't generalize across all the thousands of indigenous cultures. But it looks like at least in no small number of cases there, spiritualities there, religious practices, practices, their forms of virtualizing quite often helped to promote environmentally friendly behavior. Uh, finally, then there's the the data that suggests that people who spend extended time in relatively intact biological systems often develop an affinity for them and affection for them and a desire to protect. Now this is very interesting to theorize about because we have folks like the great entomologist and ecologist E.O.

Speaker3: [00:26:44] Wilson, who advanced the biophilia hypothesis decades ago, and he and his progeny have argued that our aesthetic sensibilities that we have a weak aesthetic appreciation for nature because deep down in our genes, deep down in our genome through eons of evolution, we know intuitively that healthy ecosystems are those in which we flourish. Now that theory is not proven, but there's some tantalizing scientific evidence that suggests that there might just be something to it. So the overarching question of my research career has been why have human beings been so slow to understand and react to the environmental predicaments that they're making for themselves? And what accounts for? Cases where people. A rise in assertive ways to protect environmental systems and the social systems that are embedded in them so that everyone. Human and non-human can flourish. And that's what I've been driving toward in my own research, my research collaborations with others, and I've concluded at least so far, that these dark green forms is problematic as some of them are and contested as some of them are. Are in the main salutary. They do tend to correlate with aggressive environmental action to defend planet considered sacred. And they have cultural traction. They provide some kind of hopeful signals that a significant part of the human community is figuring out what's going on and effective ways to respond to it.

Speaker1: [00:28:39] Mm hmm. All right. Yeah, great. I wanted to ask Brian, you know, just in thinking about what you've been saying, kind of the question about the preservation of life and these questions around vitality. It brings me back to this kind of juxtaposition that we see a lot and that, you know, in many works that have to do with environment and ecology. And that is the distinction between the bio centric point of view or the anthropocentric point of view in ecology. So of course, in the bio centric, the idea briefly, is that nature is inherently precious in and of itself, whereas in the anthropocentric view, nature is sort of a utilitarian basis for human thriving and flourishing. So one of the things that stands out to me in both of those definitions is that there is an emphasis on the living. So whether it's, you know, plants and creatures and the bio form or whether it's human beings and the anthro form, there's a real emphasis on life as life. So, so then that takes me to your area of expertise in religion and many world religions, as we know, have as a priority the idea of everlasting life or eternal life or re-iterate of life if we think about reincarnation. And so, you know, there's this kind of ultimate teleological of of life forever. And so I'm wondering how those meld and how you know how you see this attention to to vitality or living ness or infinite life as important to ideas about eco religiosity or more generally, what are your what are your thoughts about that?

Speaker3: [00:30:17] Well, certainly if we're looking at world views in general, including ones we might describe as religious to attend to people's attitudes toward living things and non-living things and things like what happens to a human life when it apparently ends are very important questions. Generally speaking, the world religions offer some kind of divine rescue from death at the end of a natural human life. The Abrahamic religions offer at least a more conservative forms of them offer a place where human souls can go later that if one is properly aligned spiritually, they will go to in an afterlife. The religions originating in Asia, generally speaking, have, of course, a view of reincarnation where depending on your past lives, you end up in one or another state. And of course, the superior state to end up in is the human state or even a place of nirvana later. So it certainly makes sense to pay attention to these things. Many indigenous cultures, of course, don't have these sorts of notions ancient Judaism scholars think didn't have these afterlife notions the way later Judaism and the the other Abrahamic traditions came to have. So it makes sense to look at these issues of life and death in some complexity. One of the things that I find in dark green religion and here's a general tendency because it's still quite plural is a very naturalistic view of death, one that embraces death as wild, perhaps sad in very profound ways for human beings. It's also it also tends to be seen as the wellspring of new life.

Speaker3: [00:32:12] And there's a recognition that all of the things that go into a human body, all the elements that go into a human body get recycled through natural cycles and then are picked up by other living things sooner or later and become parts of new living things. So while there might be some sadness to such a naturalistic understanding of the world, that and no belief that an individual human soul goes to a better place somewhere else or has a chance for a better life next time around, there's also a way in which this cycle of life and death and death and life and death is consecrated is made sacred, as is understood as sacred by people who have this kind of new, newer, naturalistic worldview. And so I spent quite a bit of time in the dark green religion book looking at the ways in which people view death. That's really quite different from most longstanding religious traditions. Now, in this sense. With this kind of perspective there, there's a kind of a blurry line between a biotic existence and biotic existence. And I'm not very much up on the science, but there's some interesting philosophy of science that is unpacking the the blurry line between living and non-living things. So I won't get into a thicket that I'm not really qualified to talk about, except to mention that you're really pointing toward really important questions.

Speaker1: [00:33:45] Right? Those kind of interrelationships. I think it's a really interesting area of study now in the social sciences and in the humanities. And so, yeah, I don't know that any of us really have the, you know, the answer if there is one, but it's a kind of fascinating conjunction between the two. Shall I ask another question? Yeah, OK. So I've got I've got another one for you, Brian. Ok, so I want to talk about a I'm going to call it a Gaia experience. And yes, it was Mendocino County based. So this was an event that when I was just a young whippersnapper used to go to every year and it's called the Northern California Women's Herbal Symposium. And I just looked online this morning. And lo and behold, there's still around and they're still doing their thing. And they have a really cool logo now online, which is kind of a a wooden ring. And then it's kind of bursting over with flowers and leaves and everything. And then in the middle of it, there's a kind of Rosie the Riveter arm, you know, a very strong woman's arm with a bicep and then on the bicep as the tattoo that says, Mom. Uh-huh. Right? So it's, you know, Mother Earth, but women's power and all this, you know, vital life. So anyway, so at the Northern California Women's Herbal Symposium, this was a naturist space. Although I have to say that after looking at the website, it appears to no longer be naturist. But it was definitely about nature with a capital n nature with a lowercase, and it was only women who are permitted to be there.

Speaker1: [00:35:18] And it was kind of this super guy, a place where there was herb gathering, looking at medicinal uses of herbs. I call it a space that was women with a y. You remember that there were like rites of passage where you would have all the women there kind of holding their hands up overhead to create this tunnel for, you know, rites of passage and you would sort of walk through it. They had a menstrual hut where you could go in order to get out of the, you know, out of the sun and out of the chaos drum circles dancing around the fire or blah blah blah. You know, super beautiful setting and an interesting place. So the reason I brought this up is that the proposition in this space and I believe in many others, is and the discourse for sure was that women were more inherently and essentially in a very essentialist way, connected to the Earth through flora and fauna and all these other mechanisms, in part because of their key role in reproduction, I would say the reproductive life of the species that there was some inherently more cut connectivity between women and mother nature. Right. So, you know, this is a kind of an old school form of eco feminism, right? This is not new, but this kind of women centered ecology. How does that articulate with with dark green religion or darker green ecologies? Is there a is there a connection there or are they different? Is this something that you see in your research?

Speaker3: [00:36:47] Do you remember the old kung fu movies?

Speaker1: [00:36:50] Sure. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:36:51] Were that that slogan sticks in my mind? There are many paths, grasshopper?

Speaker1: [00:36:56] Yeah. All right.

Speaker3: [00:36:57] David Carey and I think I would say that about dark green spirituality. There are many paths to these sorts of perceptions. I first became acquainted with these sorts of things in the radical environmental subculture, which and one of the tributaries to that subculture was what we might call feminist and guy and eco feminist spirituality. Much like you're describing, some of the people involved were from Mendocino County went to witch camps that were originally inspired by the work of Star Hawk, the Oh Yeah, feminist witch and writer and activist. And and certainly the kinds of that particular tradition certainly has a deep reverence for nature. They have, as you indicated, they have a certain kind of assumption about women being by nature closer to nature. And thus, if you're going to liberate nature, you also have to simultaneously liberate women if you're because they're so closely connected. Now, of course, people have debated whether the connection to the purported connection between women and nature is in fact born out. By social science. But if we just set aside that question for a minute, clearly this sort of thing is a part of the creative construction of a of a nature related spirituality. And it may be contested and indeed it is, including by feminist environmentalists who some of whom view this kind of essentialism as regressive. But nevertheless, many of the traits and characteristics that I articulated at the beginning of our talk that are common in dark green spirituality you will find in feminist spirituality. Now, one of the things that I would just add to this is that I really first began studying this stuff when I was drawn to the radical environmental movement because this was a place where people were really dramatically mobilizing and even risking freedom to defend environmental systems that they considered sacred.

Speaker3: [00:39:19] And after a while and I began to study more broadly the environmental movement, I began to realize that the ideas that I was first encountering there and that we could trace back to Western counterculture in general. Had begun to really escape their countercultural breeding grounds, they were going mainstream, and let me give you just one example that I haven't written about because this exploded since the publication of my book. Ok, great. Neil deGrasse Tyson, of course, is a famous astrophysicist who was a protege of Carl Sagan, who heads the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and he was the charismatic spokesman for the new PBS Cosmos series that was kind of modeled on the one with Carl. Sagan had the same main author and Drinan, who, if memory serves, was Carl Sagan's wife. Now he's a very charismatic figure. Probably all of your listeners have seen Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he's become even more popular after this Cosmos series. And like Carl Sagan, who was on Johnny Carson repeatedly. Tyson is nearly everywhere. And if you go to hear him, you'll have to get your tickets early because he plays to large sold out crowds now. And he is obviously a hardcore scientist who is not theistic in any way, but his his performances are religion resembling in many ways. And interestingly, he typically ends his talks by reading the last few sentences from Carl Sagan's pale blue dot, which he refers to as Christians, refer to their sacred texts.

Speaker3: [00:41:14] He calls it the book of Carl. And and then he reads this very evocative text written by Carl Sagan about why we should consider this precious, tiny place in space, essentially as a sacred place that deserves respect and reverence. I'm paraphrasing here, of course, but the language is, I don't think, quite as evocative as you'll find. But it's reminiscent of what you'll find at the end of Darwin's on the origin of species, where he offers his readers in some sense consolation that if you go down this path of embracing an evolutionary and ecological worldview, there might be some things that you leave behind. I think implicit he was suggesting theistic belief, but then he said, but there is grandeur in this view of life about how this wondrous diversity emerges. So I give this illustration of a little Darwin, a little Tyson to suggest that we have we have forms of this kind of dark green spirituality that are still emerging from and incubating in western, largely western cultures. But also these are increasingly influential around the world. If you travel widely, you know there's a lot of this kind of spirituality out and about, but also in very mainstream venues. I would say that public television and Radio and Public Radio International are some of the great promoters of dark green spirituality and not just the Cosmos series, but the National Park series with Ken Burns and and I could go on and on and on.

Speaker2: [00:42:57] Yeah, and we want to do we want to talk about your book on Avatar in a in a little bit too. But yeah, a good finish up. Sorry.

Speaker3: [00:43:03] Well, this is just an illustration of how, you know, a lot of people say that to have religion, you have to have organized structures. And part of what I'm arguing is, although we might not recognize them at first glance, there are many institutions academic museums, aquariums, television documentaries, cable networks and so forth. Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, theme parks and so forth. There's lots of people involved in expressing and promoting these newer forms of naturalistic nature spirituality.

Speaker2: [00:43:42] So, so we wanted to talk to you a little bit about the dark and dark green religion, too. I mean, you make this point that there's a difference between dark green religion or spirituality and just green religion and green spirituality. And you know, I imagine maybe this is a character or green religion is a little bit, you know, faith plus recycling, you know, be kind to your environment, tread gently, take good care of God's gifts. But there seems to be a dark green religion if I'm understanding it correctly, a more inherent kind of radicalism. And you were just talking about the radical environmental movement since we're, you know, in an era in which violence and faith or violence and spirituality are often connected together. I wanted to get you to maybe comment a little bit on that. Whether you think that dark green spirituality does have an affinity of any kind to both the radical and the violent. But on the other hand, I would say, you know, we were talking before the episode that it seems as though some of the more violent kinds of environmental activism seem to have faded into the background. So maybe conversely, one could argue that that dark green spirituality is actually, you know, caused a radicalism that isn't violent?

Speaker3: [00:44:49] Well, thank you for raising this. I gave the book the title and have used this trope dark green religion not only to reference a kind of deep, dark green eco or bio centric ethical system, but also to signal that like any kind of spirituality or religion, there can be a shadow side. There can be a violent side. So I wanted to look very carefully at whether and to what extent these dark green spiritualities might redound in and promote social conflict or or even violence. And of course, critics of these movements quite commonly critics coming from more conventional religious orientations and conservative ones that tend to view these sorts of spirituality as spiritually dangerous as misleading people into spiritual death and also politically dangerous as having a kind of authoritarian nature or a misanthropic, anti-human agenda. Ok, so what of these charges having studied these movements and including the most radical ones? It is certainly the case that one hears on occasion from some individuals within them misanthropic sentiments, views such as that. Humans are something of a cancer on the planet that they can't seem to behave themselves and views that the planet would be much better off if there were far fewer of them. We have examples where people who have at least some of these perceptions that I've described as dark green religion have engaged in illegal activities, from sabotaging logging equipment to burning down forest service facilities or ski resort buildings that are being punched into areas that they consider sacred. As, for example, happened in Vail, Colorado, as a ski resort was planning to expand into an area considered to be critical habitat for an endangered lynx.

Speaker3: [00:47:05] We also have the case where Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, expressed affinity with these radical environmental movements, although I think that it's fair to say that he was not expressing most of the traits and characteristics that I was mentioning. Now all that said, if we're looking at whether a movement might be inclined toward revolutionary violence or terrorist violence, we really have to look as one of my colleagues put it and ask the question Where are the bodies? And compared to most revolutionary movements or terrorist movements? It's you can't really find the bodies unless you were to say that someone like Ted Kaczynski is a great representative of what we're talking about here. And I don't think he is actually and I write about why in some detail and some of my scholarly articles in, for example, the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence. So religions always a potential danger because when whenever you consider you have folks who consider this or that sacred, those who are desecrating agents need to be stopped and there and from that can come a logic that they should be stopped by any means necessary. And we certainly hear that kind of logic from that kind of rhetoric from some in the radical environmental movement. I've heard people say that lethal violence is justifiable in defense of a sacred Mother Earth, but at least so far, we haven't seen that breakout in significant actual actual violence.

Speaker1: [00:48:50] Right? Yeah. Well, Brian, I can't resist asking you this question. So I guess so. I guess I will. It's part facetious and I think part genuine in a way. And that is a character, a very well-known religious figure who a lot of people at the time and presently think was a radical and that is Jesus Christ himself. And so I was wondering, I know you've seen the bumper stickers and the T-shirts that ask, What would Jesus do? I think we've all seen these right? And so what would Jesus do about the Anthropocene or climate change?

Speaker3: [00:49:26] Boy, it strikes me as rather hazardous to speak on Jesus's behalf. Yeah, with regard to the tradition as a whole. Let me just say that when it comes to the Abrahamic traditions, that these are agriculture's and they convey and express the kinds of spirituality and values that you would expect from agricultural people, the Hebrew Bible has some very beautiful and poetic language that that could be described as kind of referencing all all of life, especially perhaps the song of songs. And yet there's a tendency to view wild animals as kind of threats to the good human community. And indeed, God is God might punish people with wild animals. So it's hard from these traditions. If you read the if you read the texts early on to arrive to to to conclude that there's a strong kind of ethic that references all living things as opposed to the domesticated organisms that we know best are often fond of or just fond of to eat.

Speaker1: [00:50:48] All right. Well, well put.

Speaker3: [00:50:50] This is just one of the areas in which there's real challenges. It's not, you know, it's like it's like Kermit the Frog said. It's not easy being green. Yeah, right. It's actually part of what I've discovered is that or in arguing that it's especially hard being green if you have a conventional religious worldview where there are divine beings or a divine being who's in charge of natural systems who ultimately controls it, how do you get your brain around an Anthropocene in which you're eroding biophysical complexity in a very, very dramatic way? It's just hard to get your brain around that, and we can see lots of examples where religious people say, Hey, it's hubristic to think that we could dramatically change the environment because God's in charge.

Speaker2: [00:51:39] Right, right. I love I love the moment, and you really taught me something in the book when you when you mentioned that that the root of religion is religare to reconnect. So in a sense, religion maybe offers a sense, a manifesto or, you know, it tells us reconnect exclamation point. And and I kind of see dark green spirituality what you're describing. This phenomenon is being part of that process of reconnection difficult as it as it is. But maybe we could. Absolutely. Yeah, maybe maybe we can also turn now to something you mentioned before when you're talking about Tyson's work and the fact that a lot of this dark green spirituality may be coming in a form that's not directly obviously religious. And so you have this book project that you've just brought out about the film Avatar. And I was wondering if you could help connect the dots for us as to how this connects to your your your broader interest in dark green religion?

Speaker3: [00:52:37] Sure. Well, it turns out that Cameron's book came out the very month that my book was was printed. And when I saw it, I thought, This is a very good example of what I've been talking about when I talk about dark green spirituality or dark green religion. And then as I watched even in the first month, what a blockbuster it was. I thought to myself, Well, it will be very interesting to see the ways, the extent to which this film has cultural traction and influences. And then reading interviews and so forth. With Cameron, it became clear that he wanted to use, as he put it, the magic of cinema to transform human consciousness to. And even though he considers himself an atheist, he used religious terminology to, you know, to find a kind of reverent place for for all of nature. So I also knew, just as you would, hanging out in academic subcultures that there would be many criticisms of the film. And I knew that some people would find the depiction of indigenous people to be offensive, right? And I thought that whatever, whatever people, different people thought about the film, it was certainly worth wrestling with the questions that it poses and its potential spiritual and political impacts in a sophisticated way. So that's why I pulled that book together. And, you know, it's called, as, you know, avatar and nature spirituality, but it's also very, very political. It tries to assess what the political stakes might be and what the political implications of such a film might be. And indeed, there are many, many surprises there. My colleagues and I discovered in the course of working up that book.

Speaker2: [00:54:27] Yeah, yeah, it's a fascinating project. Yeah, I mean, I wanted to ask you one thing and this again, this is maybe a slightly oddball approach to it. But when I saw the film Avatar. I which I did enjoy. And we were going to watch it again before talking to you, then we decided not to. We just go with our our stored memories of it. So I'm working. I'm going to work from like a slightly lo fi, you know, mnemonics source here. But you know, when I first saw the movie, one of the things that struck me about it was was not just the the sense of the the interconnectivity of of of human beings or other beings with one another, but also the way in which, you know, this idea of like kind of the avatar itself, this kind of virtual reality dimension to it as well. And I couldn't help thinking as I was watching some of the imagery in it, especially if that kind of interconnectedness of everything through light and the trees and roots, and that there was something that kind of very was very much reminiscent of the internet here.

Speaker2: [00:55:25] You know that there was a kind of kind of an internet sublime in that somehow and then that got me thinking as well about the people, you know, again from California. But a different part, you know, who are preaching a certain sense of of technological sublime, you know, the singularity stuff we're going to kind of endure as a species by, you know, uploading ourselves into the web somehow. And I don't know, it was in a weird way. Even though I think Cameron's intentions were different, I did feel like there was a veneer or there was a kind of a substrate of this story. That was that was also about a kind of a digital mediation or electronic mediation. And, you know, but religion and media go really well together. So I guess this is a kind of a religion and media question to you, whether you see any of that kind of internet era thinking. As part of that, that interconnectivity is somehow connected to the dark green interconnectivity. Or you're talking about,

Speaker3: [00:56:20] You know, when I first, the first thing I wrote about the film was, I think, called Avatar Avatar as Rorschach. And I think that's a very apt metaphor for the reception that it received. People, of course, view this art in general and this work of art in particular through their own lenses, whatever they are and the the reception of the film was exceptionally diverse. I think probably most people saw that first and foremost, it was a film about it was an environment themed film that also expressed solidarity in a metaphorical way with the Earth's indigenous people that had been run over by a mechanized, industrial, voracious industrial machine like society right here on Earth. And certainly, there was this kind of guy in like neural network theme that all the parts need to be working together for the flourishing of the whole. So there was the guy in theme. There was the kinship theme, the animistic theme in which, you know, eye to eye communication with between the Navy and the humans that fell for them. They fell in love with them and also with the other organisms there. That connection and kinship, the trans species connection and kinship, even with species that normally prey one on another, was very deep there. One of the things I didn't see a lot of in reading pretty widely about the reaction, to be honest, was people who were saying, Hey, here's an example of the kind of techno the internet cyber techno utopia.

Speaker3: [00:58:07] Right? And so maybe that's a sign that Cameron was in the main successful in getting over his his main themes. The controversies seem to go more over whether Jake Sully was a white messiah figure, and that was that was denigrating to the struggle of of the indigenous Na'vi, or whether the film was sexist in certain ways, or whether the film promoted a kind of imperial capitalist ideology, or rather whether it made marines look bad. So there's lots of different, different controversies that the film set off. But I think one of the most interesting things about it is the diverse way in which it was understood. And also, perhaps the most interesting thing is the emotional reaction that many people had. And we go into that at some length in the book, looking at fandom forums and so forth, where people some people entered into pretty deep states of depression because they sort of recognized that there was something in their urbanized techno cyber world that had been lost, that they didn't have access to beautiful, biologically diverse environmental habitats. So I think the jury is still out what the what, if any, long term impact of this film might have. But interestingly, there are several more planned animal kingdom at Disney in Orlando is going to have an Avatar theme park a. Wow. So the and Cameron is quite clear that he is trying to use the magic of cinema to, as he puts it, to inspire environmental action.

Speaker2: [00:59:51] Yeah, he clearly had some kind of a, you know, I guess we could call it a conversion event, whether it happened before or after the making of the film. But we know we happen to know anthropologists that he consulted with quite closely who works within an Amazonian people, the Kayapo. And we, you know, his daughter went on then to work for Cameron as a producer on some of his projects. So, you know, a little bit about about what's going on. And yes, I think there are more movies coming, although maybe not as soon as we hope. I guess there's been a lot there over over. Well, not budget necessarily, but they're just being delayed because of Cameron's a bit of a perfectionist, I guess.

Speaker1: [01:00:26] And also what this anthropologist Terry Turner was working on with James Cameron and with Arnold Schwarzenegger was the prevention of the Belmont Dam. That's right. And that, you know, that whole damming of the Shingo, which of course, the Brazilian government went ahead with. But yeah, anyway, so there there's there's a lot tied up into, you know, the kind of media, religion and politics.

Speaker3: [01:00:48] I'm interested just to quickly ask you. My impression was that Terry Turner hadn't been involved before the first film came out. Is that your

Speaker1: [01:00:56] That's that's what I think. But we, you and I disagree about that. I think that Cameron did not visit the Kayapo until after the movie came out, but I don't know.

Speaker2: [01:01:05] Well, that's true. I mean, I think I think he consulted with Terry about coming up with the the Na'vi, you know, that sort of character that he was trying to draw upon some actual indigenous peoples to help model that in terms of worldview questions. But it may be the case. He didn't go to Brazil before the movie came out. It may have been. He just got interested in it and then followed up, and I know he was. He was very, you know, strongly involved with the anti hydroelectric activism, right?

Speaker1: [01:01:30] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker3: [01:01:31] You know, clearly he's felt kind of in solidarity on these causes. You know, a long time ago and he I think he traces some of his environmental radicalism really way back to the Santa Barbara oil spill oil spill, right? But many of us who've watched the film who have some anthropological background wish that he had had more anthropologists involved in the production of the first one, and I personally feel like he might have. He might have avoided some controversies by having done so. So but maybe it's a good thing that he's more connected now with indigenous folks themselves, as well as some of the scholars that that know these cultures quite intimately?

Speaker1: [01:02:12] Right? Well, yeah, the anthropology list serves were all a swirl. They were a commentary after Avatar. I mean, a couple of months of

Speaker2: [01:02:21] Commentary I wouldn't say was warmly received, but you know, no Hollywood film would be

Speaker1: [01:02:25] Met. People got excited about it and we're talking about it.

Speaker3: [01:02:28] It's a part of it. You know, in my own sometimes contrarian way, I mean, I knew that I knew it before it happened and I observed it. But I wanted to push back against some of that. And I wanted because I, you know, I spent quite a bit of time in Indian country here and there. And a lot of times the voices of particularly elders in Indian country are a lot more nuanced than the voices of scholars who can be quite binary in their thinking about these kinds of things. So I think what I'm kind of proud about the book. I think it I think a careful reader of this book is going to come away with a much, much more nuanced understanding of the film, the film maker, the other artists, and the kind of eco spiritual politics giving rise to it.

Speaker1: [01:03:16] Yeah, yeah. Well, we're looking forward to the the second iteration of the film, too, and reading your book alongside of it, and it should start, you know, a new conversation. Not quite a new generation, but it's been quite a while since the first avatar came. So it should sort of spark new questions. I mean, what I would love to see from James Cameron is is something set in a place that he's been visiting lately, and that is the Mariana Trench. I think that would be a kind of fascinating space to to to, you know, to set a film and these ideas. But you brought up Santa Barbara, Braun and the oil spill. And as you may or may not know, I am the official designated question poser when it has to do with questions about surfing. So I know, I know you talk about this in dark green religion. So surfing, what does dark green religion have to do with it?

Speaker3: [01:04:13] Well, you know, I'm a Southern California guy, and I made my way through college and grad school as an ocean lifeguard and on the side, I surfed. And so I know that subculture intimately. And I know that for some people in it, the practice that kind of meditative practice of getting up at. Donner, before Dawn, to be paddling out before the sunrise and to be getting in the flow of those waves that come ultimately from the very origins of the universe and hanging out with and becoming reasonably well acquainted, at least to the extent that humans can be with a variety of marine life and birdlife that populate the coastal environment leads some people to a kind of an almost mystical sense of belonging and connection to that system. A sense, a deep sense of place, feelings of affection and kinship for the non-human organisms with whom they share their daily lives. And I could see this in people I knew I could see it in certain surf documentaries and films. I could see it in some surf magazine surf music. Certainly, there was hybridity between surfing subcultures and some of the countercultural things that emerged in the sixties, including psychotropic drugs, what we might call and theologians. And also, there were people involved in surfing subcultures that wanted to self-consciously steer them in more spiritual and activist directions. And we're doing that really quite self-consciously, including looking at the history of surfing as a kind of mythic narrative where indigenous people used to live in harmony with the oceans in erotically charged sensual relationship, one with another and with the wider community of life, a kind of aloha spirit, eco spiritual surfing subculture emerged.

Speaker3: [01:06:28] Now, of course, that's not the only one. There's there's the there's the Banel Gidget type surfing subculture. There's the thuggish territorial surfing subculture. But for some, it's it's not about competition. It's not about besting someone else. It's about a practice that helps you to feel that you belong to it. And in that sense, it is a wellspring for that sort of dark green spirituality, in my judgment. One of the most interesting things about writing about surfing is that when I first published an article in a scholarly journal about surfing as a form of nature spirituality, the argument went viral very quickly. It was picked up first by a surfing magazine in the UK that excerpted it and interviewed me, and it was picked up by Surfing Magazine, the most widely distributed surfing magazine in the world. It was translated and into Portuguese and Spanish. They did a festival in Brazil titled Surfing as Religion. And interestingly, when these publications would publish this kind of odd argument that surfing is a kind of nature spirituality, the editors would feel a need to explain why they're doing this kind of outlandish thing. And they all in their own way confessed that surfing is their religion. And that didn't surprise me at all, because I've heard a lot of people talk that way. So it was kind of fun to see how an obscure scholarly article. Gained widespread attention because it resonated with with people around the world who felt the way that the people I was describing feel.

Speaker1: [01:08:18] Yeah, that's great. So you don't even have to make a multimillion dollar movie like James Cameron to get people talking, right?

Speaker2: [01:08:25] Not even.

Speaker1: [01:08:27] And it brings us back into the waters, which sort of, you know, brings us back to the the question that we were talking about earlier in terms of, you know, the bios and the abiotic right. So here you see everything kind of combining together in some meditative way in the practice of surfing.

Speaker2: [01:08:42] We're trying to tie it all up and we're trying to

Speaker1: [01:08:43] Get it all. Yeah. So Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and share your thoughts. I think there's been a lot of information and we've learned a lot about bio spirituality and dark green religion, and it's been really stimulating and provocative. And so thanks for all the work that you've been doing. And we look forward to seeing the book out soon

Speaker2: [01:09:03] And keep your head above water. I mean, stay dry.

Speaker1: [01:09:05] Yeah, get get out your good.

Speaker3: [01:09:08] It's been a pleasure talking with you both.

Speaker1: [01:09:09] Yeah. Get out your longboard.

Speaker3: [01:09:12] I wish you're the yard cleanup chores first, but hopefully I'll get over there before long. Yeah, OK, cool.

Speaker1: [01:09:19] Cheers.