Activism: What’s contemplation got to do with it?
An extract from the diary of jessica Townsend about the first day of Extinction Rebellion.
1st November 2018
Yesterday in Parliament Square, Extinction Rebellion declared we are in rebellion against the government until it faces the reality of the climate and ecological crisis, begins to act on the emergency, and to consult with citizens about what to do in the face of this threat to our very existence.
Early yesterday morning, I emerged from the St James Park tube, looking for the nearest Starbucks which had been selected as the press meeting point, I thought: right now, the police don’t know who I am. But maybe after today they will. What has happened to my life that this could be even a small possibility?
The night before Gail Bradbrook and Simon Bramwell, two of the core founders of Extinction Rebellion, stayed with me in my modest house in Walthamstow in the second double bedroom on the ground floor where a dining room might usually be. They slept on an unstable Ikea bed in danger of it collapsing on them.
They make an interesting couple. Gail is in her forties, slim, nerdy and humorous with a gentle Northern accent. Her compassion and intelligence make her easy to love. She talks about sex quite a lot and is also so strongly committed to the spiritual side of the movement which puts her in alignment with the Stroud hippies and shamans, but slightly at odds with the metropolitan arty and branding end of the movement.
Simon Bramwell is a big almost Shakespearean character, with a booming voice and an almost courtly way of talking. A self-educated Gloucestershire man, with a big red beard, thick glasses usually wearing rough tweeds. He has a slightly strong smell of tobacco with the tang of ‘man’ with perhaps a bit of badger thrown in.
Simon wrote the text for the declaration of rebellion that we’ve put out as posters and distributed on the action:
We hereby declare the bonds of the social contract to be null and void, which the government has rendered invalid by its continuing failure to act appropriately. We call upon every principled and peaceful citizen to rise with us.
We demand to be heard, to apply informed solutions to these ecological crises and to create a national assembly by which to initiate those solutions needed to change our present cataclysmic course.
We refuse to bequeath a dying planet to future generations by failing to act now.
We act in peace, with ferocious love of these lands in our hearts. We act on behalf of life. (1)
As I made us morning tea, Gail said she feared the police would cordon off Parliament Square and the whole day would be some kind of farce with us crowded onto the pavements. But in the event, those fears weren’t realised and the square was so empty it made us look like a pretty small assembly of people rather than a mass movement.
Many of the buildings, including Big Ben, were canvassed off for repairs and not particularly iconic looking.
Eventually a motley selection of invited journalists began to gather. We hadn’t given the media the specific location of the protest as we were worried about the police getting the information. The press coordinator was Ronan, a softly-spoken Irish man who has worked with Occupy. He ran things from a back office and Tamzin, a young Cambridge educated climate veteran, was the main link on the ground.
My own job was looking after XR’s own photographers and filmmakers and filling in gaps left by Tamzin. As we sat outside with the sparse number of media who showed up, Gail and Simon tensely walked past with a couple of uniformed police officers walking close behind them. The groups didn’t make eye contact or acknowledge each other in any way.
An hour later in the square, there were about 200 people. And I thought we are tiny. Are we really going to make any difference? As the day progressed, we grew to around a thousand people.
The Swedish schoolgirl activist Greta Thunberg arrived. She is a teenager who looks younger than she is. Perhaps that’s down to the long plaits she wears. Her face was in two parts: the eyes were neutral and her mouth mostly in a fixed lopsided smile. Above the eyes, was a permanent frown. It felt very tough to me; this girl standing alone, doing the adult job of a media spokesman. At this point her father was not around. I tried to chat to her, to put her at her ease, but it was awkward. [It was only later I realised she is on the autism spectrum.] I had been so looking forward to meeting with her because her story is so resonant in our times but the reality looked like an abandoned but fiercely determined young person in a strange city.
Later, I saw her sitting between the drumming band and the stepladder where George Monbiot was speaking. As the drummers did their high-volume routine, she put her hands over her ears.
But a little later, when it was Greta’s turn to address the crowd, the sound system wasn’t quite loud enough. So the crowd went into ‘mic check’ mode, repeating everything she said so people at the back could hear. It was a very striking moment: a crowd of adults amplifying the words of the diminutive schoolgirl.
When I was about eight years old, I first heard about something called climate change, or global warming. Apparently, that was something humans had created by our way of living. I was told to turn off the lights to save energy and to recycle paper to save resources.
I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans who are an animal species among others could be capable of changing the Earth’s climate. Because if we were, and it was really changing the climate, we wouldn’t be talking about anything else. As soon as you turned on the TV everything would be about that. Headlines, radio, newspapers. You would never read or hear about anything else. As if there was a World War going on. But no one ever talked about it. If burning fossil fuels were so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue as before? (2)
*
On that first day of Extinction Rebellion, for which I will be forever grateful to have been present, I had a sense of history unfolding. And since I am a writer, there was an extra frisson. I had always envied writers who were at the right place, at the right time. It didn’t occur to me that I might be one of them because I lived in a steady, boring country called Britain. History happened in more glamorous places: Eastern Europe, South America and Africa.
Until then I’d never been an activist. My first sally into the territory was in the early noughties, supporting the Stop The War campaign against invading Iraq. That had been such a dispiriting failure that I promised myself not to invest so heavily again.
In any case, I like being a writer. I like the quiet alchemy of working alone in a room with an empty screen. I love words moving out of my body, through my fingers and onto my computer screen.
So what had happened to make me change my mind?
Only three months before declaration day, I first really heard about the intersecting emergencies of our times. It was in a yurt at a festival called Buddhafield. It was my first time there too. I sat in a circle of strangers while a non-binary person in yoga leggings spelled out the bad news of climate science. At the end, they asked us whether we might consider being arrested as a protest. Two tentative hands went up; neither of them was mine.
The news was dizzying but in a strange way familiar. Is that why dystopian novels are so compelling, I wondered? Is it because deep down our secret selves know we are living in one? On the other hand, it was hard to process that after approximately seven and a half thousand generations of humanity that I should have been born into one facing the end times.
It took me a long time to process the wild grief for my children, the rage for everything I love ‘in the natural world’, to move through long periods of numbness and slippage back into denial. Eventually I had to take on this truth: the world we live in, and the society of which we are a part, is in desperate trouble. And most of the people we live among do not acknowledge this fact.
After this, it felt that my former writing life was no longer viable. And I had a strong instinct that I had to act. That instinct was visceral. From my gut. It didn’t come from an urge to ‘save the world’. It was about energy. I knew that my way to process and endure the horrible facts of our times would be to work to mitigate them. Whether I was successful or not. At the end of the film Don’t Look Up, Jennifer Lawrence expresses gratitude that she had tried her hardest to get the message through. She does this moments before the meteor strike. (3)
And I was lucky enough to be in a position to do this. For once in my life, I had no partner to strike compromises with, no children in need of shoes or holidays or help with homework. Nor, as precarious creative trying to get by in the big city, did I have a heavy-weight career to untether from.
So, for the past three years that has been my life. I have mostly worked steadily for Extinction Rebellion while juggling a writing project that also addresses the crisis. There have been periods of escalation and overwhelming intensity and periods of relative quietness.
And ironically, given the hideous scientific conditions from which that instinct came, the organism that flowered under the XR banner was, initially at least, a great pleasure to work within. I count those days as among the the best fun of my life. Better than anything I’ve achieved with work: better than having a play on in London, better than having a TV show broadcast or getting a film commission. It is up there with my more intimate high points: falling in love, having children.
In the early days, Extinction Rebellion expanded exponentially, and every day more wonderful, creative, experienced focussed people joined. Some were short-term visitors, making their sometimes very large contributions and then disappearing. Others more measured, committing for the long haul.
A young man I met filming us on the street eventually agreed to do the social media for XR. Iggy Fox never told us his age – it was twenty-two – and he was still training. His Facebook tutor told him she had never seen a social media growth like the organic expansion of Extinction Rebellion in those days.
The April rebellion was a beautiful flowering. Massive Attack played for rebels in Marble Arch. A Banksy design appeared near where out-of-town rebels were camping. Waterloo Bridge was covered in trees and flowers. There was a pink boat in Oxford Circus named after a murdered environmental defender. The police were pretty zen.
Just Sitting
When I began to work with Extinction Rebellion, I already had a meditation practice and an interest in Buddhism. So from the beginning, I was trying to integrate the energy and purpose of activism with the impulse to reach inside myself, and to find what’s there. To keep grounded. I suspect meditation means a lot of different things to different people. To some that means reaching for the transcendental, to others being embodied and grounded. To yet more people sitting quietly in the face of our difficulties while noticing our physical and mental reactions.
At first, I was surprised and then vexed by how few of my fellow meditators didn’t respond to the urgency of the times. Some of them expressed the idea that in transforming themselves, the world could also be transformed. They would do their work by sitting on their cushions. Their argument was that there had always been suffering in the world and there always would be. This existential threat was part of that dhukka too. My intuition was so strongly in the other direction that it was easy for me to arrogantly dismiss them as in-activists.
Rebel Values
Two things that strongly appealed to me about Extinction Rebellion (which was by now become “XR”) were its commitment to non-violence, and its aim from the beginning to establish a regenerative culture for activists.
Non-violence has always been a core concept. Sometimes cofounder Roger Hallam has claimed the approach is pragmatic and that we use it because it’s been shown to be more effective than violence. In this he follows the research done by Erica Chenoweth (4).
But to others in the movement, it is a more profound choice. Non-harm or ahimsa is an ancient Indian ethical idea practised by Gandhi and also part of the Buddhist eightfold path. Ahimsa is a more stringent idea than non-violence.
It seems to this faction, myself included, that violence will not undo the present exploitative, global, political and economic system which is underpinned by violence towards the earth, other living beings and even other humans.
Amitav Ghosh in his new book The Nutmeg’s Curse (5) shows that from the beginning colonial powers such as the Dutch and the British East India Companies used genocide in order to gain control of rare commodities like nutmeg and mace. There was a deliberate attempt to kill off the indigenous inhabitants of the Banda archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and those practices also spread to the ‘conquest’ of the lands that would become America.
It is fascinating then that many people looking at the violent extractive way our society functions: by factory farming methods that deploy the routine use of mechanical rape of cows, the taking and killing of the young produced, battery hens, and industrial trawling of fish that leads to the deaths of 2.3 billion living beings per annum; a system of resource distribution that relies on poverty in the Global South to keep the Global North in its ascendancy; see these aspects as a by product of our industrial processes. Actually the hideous violence explicit and implicit in them is the working model. It’s just that it’s hidden from us beneficiaries.
And we are living in the age of the dominance of the fossil fuel companies. Not only do our cars, homes and industries rely on them, but their chemical byproducts are the plastics that clog our water systems, and the pesticides and fertilisers that threaten the webs of biodiversity that have taken 3.5 billion years to evolve.
How did we allow this degraded system to take over? One interesting answer comes from the indigenous Algonquin tribe who first thought the white invaders had a kind of pathology that they put down to an illness which they called Wetiko. In another chapter of this book Liam Kavanagh has characterised this as the Western Grasping Disease.
Because the changes needed are so urgent, we need to construct a parallel system even within the present crumbling circumstances. To be worth fighting for, the new system needs to be characterised by non grasping, by kindness, by emotional positivity, kinship and connection. Using violent methods such as those suggested by Andreas Malm (6) threaten to destabilise our society and bring forward collapse because as Audre Lorde (7) said in a different context: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
I think the emphasis on regen, or regeneration, also sits well with contemplative concerns. For too long, it's been claimed, activists have been chewed up and spat out once they burn out. XR is in it for the long haul. So, the organisation needs to develop and build-in practices to replenish rebels when they become low.
In reality, that aim has only ever been partially achieved in XR. But in an improvised movement, trying to sustain a flat power system, and working with little or no money, it’s a big ask. While it is true that when people say they need regen, it is accepted that they need to step back for a bit, but since the aim to have two or three people who can fill a role has never been achieved such gaps often might prove difficult for the organisation.
Another helpful and related practice associated with regen, is that at the beginning of a meeting, there is a check in when people can say how they are. It can feel tiresome when there is a lot to cover on an agenda but it is still very useful to know people’s personal and mental states so that when someone is curt or tetchy the rest of the team remembers that their mother is in intensive care or their baby teething. And that helps to see a person under stress instead of someone acting out.
Yet in spite of these measures, every rebellion, I see the light in my fellow rebels’ eyes go dim. And now that some of my friends are beginning to spend time in prison, how can we claim any kind of regenerative culture?
But what, aside from prison, is getting in the way of Extinction Rebellion having a regenerative culture? Many of the issues in the way of achieving that are not an intrinsic part of XR but more to do with the society in which we find ourselves. For instance:
Whatsaptivism
The beeping heart of activism in 2021 is a smartphone, providing a sense of intimacy with other activists across the country and even the world but also mirroring the twenty-four-hour news cycle in its relentless churning of stories, information, and news. Smartphones are the portals into the activist matrix.
And that portal lies on the side table next to my bed, among the books I am reading. If I can’t sleep, and check the time it’s easy to get sucked into debates or watch news clips and read twitter threads. Sometimes I realize I have done an hour of work on my phone before I even raise my head from my pillow. I have a continuous ache in my wrist from holding my phone in this position.
Social media, it’s been claimed, marks the democratisation of the media. It is the activist’s ally against the wall of the established press and news organisations. But because social media are designed to be addictive, at best it’s an insidious friend, taking peace of mind and replacing it with a craving to being in the flow of things and intense FOMO if you turn away. And after two or three years in that electronic flow who the hell are you outside it anyhow?
What does regeneration mean in a collapsing world?
But the gritty detail of activism in 2021 is not the only challenge. Many of us working in the climate sector believe that the beginning of societal collapse is already around us. It’s in our poor community relationships, the dead bees on the pavement killed by pesticides to keep down weeds in cities, our lack of compassion for refugees, the trees sawn down so only concrete remains. It’s in the increasing phenomenon of offshoring and the decreasing tax revenues from the super-rich and corporations, it’s in the failures in the care system, the silencing of the bird chorus and the depletion of the soil.
It is in our failing international bodies and our national democratic structures. It’s in the increasingly glib and superficial rhetoric that can’t possibly address theour deep and complex mess that we’re in. It’s in the clauses being added as I write to the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act. Our country – post COVID- is taking a lurch towards authoritarianism. I am sure each of us has our personal sad catalogue of failures here.
Thinkers such as Jem Bendell, (8) once a professor of sustainability, are convinced we are in the middle of collapse and that we now need to gear ourselves towards adaptation rather than halting the crisis. Seeing this clearly, he gave up his comfortable but meaningless job and published a paper Deep Adaptation which had over a million downloads. Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth from the Dark Mountain Project produced a manifesto (9) eschewing the fight against collapse and concentrating instead on making art in a failing world. This great work continues with Charlotte DuCann.
And philosophy Professor Rupert Read (10) UEA tells his students straight to adapt to the new climate reality: ’I think there is a very real change that the later part of the lives of most of the people in this room is going to be grim…. I actually think that you in the room should be very angry against the generation that’s older than you because there’s been what I would call a festival of recklessness, a carnival of short-termism that has characterised the last two generations that potentially leaves you in a very parlous situation… we have to try to imagine how different a future will be if we get to a point which we may well get to, well within your lives, where it becomes clear that for the foreseeable future each generation is going to have a worse life than the generation that came before.’
What should activists do? Should activists today spend their time fighting in arm to arm combat about every clause of the government bills to take our rights, or take a bigger picture view? Many of us working in the sector have a gut instinct that in the face of these challenges what we need is greater human interconnection.
Work that reconnects
Joanna Macy is a veteran of ecological thought and many decades ago put together a methodology to help people to process where we are in the climate and ecological emergency and also put together a programme to a process our feelings around it in The Work That Reconnects. (11)
In his new massive book in two parts The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist (12) says that the sacredness in life is relational: that it exists between things and that this is true both in sub atomic theory as well as at the macro level.
In another area altogether, Merlin Sheldrake, speculates in his new book The Entangled World (13) that plants, fungi and bacteria have complicated, mutually-dependent lives that help every element to thrive. It seems the dominant paradigm, the operating system for the Earth in general and human culture in particular for competition and the survival of the fittest doesn’t work anymore.
As the world breaks around us, we are waking up to the importance of connection in many aspects of our world. But what does this mean in an experiential personal way? How can we live this instead of just theorising?
Our experiment with sangha was our idea of how to build connection and kin. It is just one approach among many parallel approaches to reknit humanity together and to find a different kind of life.
What is a sangha and how could it help?
In fact, sangha can simply be seen as a group of people with a commitment to each other. It could be seen as a fuller commitment to the ‘checking in’ and regenerative practices used by Extinction Rebellion before meetings. And a more engaged way to make connection.
In Buddhism, sangha is of central importance and is as emphasised as the teachings and the Buddha himself. The Buddha may have reached enlightenment without a sangha but the rest of us need the help of a community.
When you are part of a sangha you are not alone, and, if you have a partner, the burden of having all your needs met does not fall on that one person. That said, sometimes the challenges you are facing at a given moment might come from a difficult relationship with someone in that sangha but that is seen as part of the work.
On the sangha zoom calls we held during the COVID period, and in the residency in Bergerac that followed it, we encouraged each other to stay with the trouble which can often just meant referring to the climate and ecological crises as realities. Too often in regular society the danger is underplayed or ignored and, effectively, we act as if it isn’t true. By living in that truth with others trying to do the same, I felt myself acclimatise to the reality of our precarious situation.
But it can also mean not shying away from conflict and being conscious of one’s own reactivity. Listening to what others say and sometimes learning difficult and unexpected things about oneself, exploring what Jung called the shadow.
But the zoom calls during COVID were mostly polite and pleasurable. Trouble was talked about but we used examples from our own lives which didn’t involve others in the sangha. Often the discussion touched difficult and unresolved parts of people’s lives. People sometimes disagreed but they did it without any acrimony. If A said x then B might come in with: ‘that’s interesting but how about this…’ and then describe a different approach.
So it was only on the residency, when most of the sangha were living in community, that a more radical honesty was achieved. There, the discussions were sometimes personal and painful, touching issues that hurt those drawn into conflict. People learned unpleasant truths about how others saw some of their behaviours and explored their shadow. One of the sangha Carmen Zurl calls this process another fabulous growth opportunity for growth.
For me, the process felt very well held. Although some of those involved felt distress there was a general kindness and space to be able to see all side of the conflicts. One deep and very personal battle about the fate of a local wild cat, was explored from every angle as if it were a complex three-dimensional shape and we found both sides had principled and ethical reasons for their views so the argument was finely balanced. In the discussion afterwards, the voice of everyone in the residency was heard.
It was, I think, the most peaceful exploration of conflict I’ve ever been involved in, and yet it hurt some of those involved who took time to recover. From this I think I came up against a truth I had encountered many times before and yet forgotten: that there is no way to engage with conflict (and growth) and avoid pain.
That deepening of bonds and trust felt very valuable. But tentative. How to take such an approach into the hurly burly of life outside the residency? Would that ever be effective? With people you didn’t like and hadn’t had the chance to spend some time living with? Possibly not but knowing it is possible feels useful. It expands my understanding, giving a glint of how humans might live at some time in the future.
In my own case I have chosen to live in a Triratna Buddhist community in London and I am exploring how that feels.
What has activism ever had to do with contemplation?
During the many calls that the contemplative activism sangha had during the COVID period we sometimes talked about contemplation and activism as two very different, perhaps contradictory concepts without connection: what did it mean to be trying to practice both?
But Liubov Czytac Kryminaly, a young Russian woman I met on the residency in Bergerac, pointed me towards a strange word in Russian: podvizhnitschestvo. (14) This appears on the Russian Wikipedia () but doesn’t not have an English translation. She considers it a parallel word to the Russian word for acetic and she literally translates it as being a kind of holy activist. So, it seems such a concept does exist at least in some Slavic languages including Russian.
This brings us to a question at the heart of activism throughout the ages. What can individuals do who strongly don’t agree with the orthodoxy of the times in which they live, but who have no access to the assets of that society or the levers with which to change the system?
One way they can most powerfully act is they can use their bodies as a kind of theatre to communicate to the rest of their community the strength of their feelings.
In this way, Jesus was an early radical activist, hanging out with thieves, tax collectors and prostitutes and acting non-violently towards people but throwing over the tables of those trying to make temples into market places. His behaviour ultimately led to a painful, punitive and infamous death. Martin Luther King’s life follows a similar model. A life of courageous activism, arrests and then a violent assassination.
Going back to the early Roman Church, saints such as Simeon Stylites followed a similar radical model. Simeon lived for thirty-seven years on a platform above a pillar near Aleppo in modern-day Syria. He was fed by followers hoisting food up to him. He gained a strong reputation as a mystic and critic of the church. In fact, his power grew to such an extent that the bishops feared his bad judgement. This enabled him to use his idiosyncratic lifestyle as a literal platform from which to interfere with the religious controversies of the time. He can be seen as a contemplative entrepreneur, using his spiritual capital to challenge the powerful hegemony of the Catholic Church.
In the Buddhist tradition, after the Vietnam War, Thich Quang Duc set fire to himself, burning to death while he quietly meditated. This dramatic action was to draw attention to unjust treatment of Buddhists following the regime set up after the war. And the courage and ability to pull off such a strong action relied on the self-discipline acquired by their contemplative practices.
Hunger strikes are another potent form of bodily protest and have been deployed by a varied range of protestors including Gandhi, the suffragettes and the IRA. A handful of people from Extinction Rebellion have used hunger strike and as I write Emma Smart, a scientist from Weymouth, sentencedsentence for blocking roads with Insulate Britain is on hunger strike in prison.
Many of these contemplative activists come from religious traditions. In the early days of Extinction Rebellion, it was striking how willing people from religious traditions were to break the law. Perhaps believing in ‘higher’ powers gave them courage. There were many Christians, particularly Quakers, including vicars and priests even from the very beginning at our protests. Indeed, there was even a former archbishop of Canterbury. (14) XR Jews XR, Buddhists and XR Muslims have also been part of powerful actions and initiatives.
But religious routes are not for everyone. And contemplative practices are not just found in the formal religions. In our sangha, Charlotte DuCann and her partner Mark Watson don’t meditate but have evolved their own practice which involves sitting in nature and focusing closely on plants.
And many people are finding quicker routes into the contemplative zone through the use of hallucinogenics. Many people report a feeling of peeling back one’s own thinking in which the illusion of separation disappears, a sudden insight that everything and everyone is connected.
Let me end this personal exploration near where I began, with XR founder Gail Bradbrook who was wondering how to make an impact on the climate and ecological crisis while taking ayahuasca on a retreat. At that time, while under the influence she had an image of the social codes of societal change. A while later when she met Roger Hallam they discussed what might be effective. He held up his theory of change saying: ‘what we have here is nothing less than are the social codes of societal change.’ [check wording for the whole lot]
End Notes
As philosopher Timothy Morton has said the climate and ecological crisis is a hyper object too big to be seen (15). Our own scale as individuals is too small to have an effect on this.
The operating system of late neoliberal capitalism is harsh, divisive and puts us all in our lonely box or in a position of abject powerlessness. So to be effective, activism needs to be done as a collective. Or better still in a series of overlapping collectives all pushing in the same direction.
We need to reinstate and e-mesh ourselves in communities, kinship groups and collectives. These can be seen as chains of relationship like ice crystals in freezing water. If we can build a critical number of interconnecting communities, then we can maybe build a solid and powerful human network based on positive values. Perhaps it will rise as one piece like a glacier to replace the real-life ones which I expect will disappear from the Earth in my lifetime.
Sangha is another name for a collective. It is one that has deep regard for each member and the well-being of the whole group. It does not shy away from honesty even when that is painful. In fact, it needs honesty to keep rooted. In these times in which we desperately need a new operating system for humanity, constructing sangha may be one of the ways forward.
But is human connection enough? Wasn’t it our overly human-focus that made us neglect the Earth? Don’t we also need also to rediscover the wild in the world and inside us? Don’t we need to find again the deep love and respect for the Earth which humans show when they live among trees and animals? To somehow to find ways of listening to and working with nature? We don’t seem to have made much headway here.
But perhaps there is hope. In a blog on the Writers Rebel website, journalist Beth Pitts interviews indigenous Sarayaku people in Ecuador and reminds us that:
In 2012, the Sarayaku won a historic victory at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which found that the Ecuadorian State had violated their rights by allowing an oil company to prospect in their territory without consultation. A turning point in the case was when José’s father, Don Sabino Gualinga, the spiritual leader of Sarayaku and their most eminent yachak (shaman), then aged 92, took the witness stand. He was asked about the impact of the 1,433 kilograms of explosives that had been planted in Sarayaku territory by the oil company, accompanied by armed military personnel. Referring to the invisible beings that had been disturbed by the explosions, Don Sabino said that “half of the masters of the jungle are no longer there”. (16)
This testimony about the actions of the invisible beings in the forest meant the case swung in the Sarayaku’s favour. Amitav Ghosh quotes this in The Nutmeg’s Curse. He finds it a heartening example of the resurgence of what he calls vitalism – a sense of sacredness and interconnection between everything that is alive – which was cast aside by colonialism. (17)
This is profoundly hopeful development, because it indicates that even courtrooms, which are amongst the most redoubtable citadels of official modernity, are increasingly susceptible to the influence of that subterranean river of vitalism which after having been driven underground for centuries, is now once again rising powerfully to the surface around the world.
(1) Declaration of Rebellion, Extinction Rebellion 2018 found here: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/declaration/
(2) P Greta Thunberg in Parliament Square 31st October 2018 link: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2511079175887177
(3) Don’t Look Up directed by Adam McKay https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11286314/
(4) Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan: Why Civil Resistance Works, 2010.
(5) Amitav Ghosh The Nutmeg’s Curse 2021, chapter 1.
(6) Andreas Malm How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
(7) Audre Lorde in her book of the same name: The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House 1984
(8) Jem Bendell, Deep Adaptation: A map for Navigating Climate Tragedy
(9) Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine.
(10) Rupert Read
(11) Joanna Macy The Work That Reconnects
https://workthatreconnects.org
(12) Iain McGilchrist The Matter With Things 2021
(13) Merlin Sheldrake The Entangled World 2020
(14) Wikipedial page here: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B6%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE
(15) Rowan Williams
(16) Timothy Morton BBC Radio The End of the World Has Already Happened.
(17) Beth Pitts https://writersrebel.com/tag/beth-pitts/
(18) Amitav Ghosh The Nutmeg’s Curse 2021, p 238