Transcript: Dr. MARY EVELYN TUCKER on Cosmological Re-inheritance /120
Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young.
Mary Evelyn Tucker These new alliances of NGOs, of UN, of church forces and Indigenous peoples creating new synergies and coalitions, I think, are enormously hopeful.
Ayana Young Today we are speaking with Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker. Dr. Tucker is co-director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale where she teaches in an MA program between the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Divinity School. With John Grim, she organized 10 conferences on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard. Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-author, with Brian Thomas Swimme, of Journey of the Universe and the executive producer of the film with John Grim. She regularly lectures on the significance of this story for the environmental and social challenges of our times. She has published Ecology and Religion, Worldly Wonder, and edited Thomas Berry’s books including Great Work, Evening Thoughts, Sacred Universe, and Selected Writings. Tucker and Grim recently published Thomas Berry: A Biography (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Ayana Young Well, Mary, thank you again for joining us on this podcast. I really believe the intersections at which you work are mandatory for us to be able to really feel into during these extremely troubled times.
Mary Evelyn Tucker I agree, we have so many challenges, and they seem to be growing, but this intersection of ecology and spirituality, I think, is drawing more and more people in and inspiring the work that needs to be done, not necessarily just our work, but a whole range of work in this space of eco-spirituality.
Ayana Young Well, I'd love to begin our conversation On the Journey of the Universe, which is a collaboration between the both of you and Brian Thomas Swimme that explores the universe and scientific discovery through a series of conversations a film and a book and the journey of the universe touches on the anthropic principle that the universe is inherently compatible with life that it sustains at this time. And I recall a moment in the film where the following quote is spoken, and it's quote, "The body of the universe gave birth to our bodies. The self organizing dynamics of the universe gave birth to our minds. We belong here. We've always belonged here," end quote.
And I'm so intrigued by the contradiction we have here that if we do indeed belong here, how do we explain the dysfunction of what is transpiring today, and how can we rationalize our unique human capabilities or the genius of our consciousness when these same qualities have brought about widespread ecological collapse in such a limited amount of time? Rather than, say, focusing on human ingenuity, is it perhaps more fruitful to focus on a less anthropocentric dream?
Mary Evelyn Tucker Well, we've got lots of words here that maybe need some unpacking, but it's an extremely important question that you're probing. It's true that Journey of the Universe has a sensibility and affinity with this idea of an anthropic principle that is expressed in strong forms or weak forms, but that the conditions of the emergence of the universe, the galaxy, stars, planetary systems and the earth itself — that those conditions, in terms of self organizing dynamics, emergent properties and so on, were such that life could eventually emerge over enormous expenses of time. It's 10 billion years of universe emergence, even before the Earth and its dynamics are in sight, and it's 1 billion years before the first cell and 2 billion years before multicellular life. So we're talking about deep time here. We're talking about an unfolding universe of immense proportions that really our grandparents didn't even have a sense of. Of course, Native peoples and many religions have a sense of deep time. There's no question, but this is a sense of a new story that's giving us our birth, our inheritance, our long lineage, and that really does change a great deal. So that's something of the anthropic idea.
But then you mentioned anthropocentric. This isn't an anthropocentric worldview. It's not to say that we are the crowning completion of creation and so on. We are self-reflective creatures. We are symbolic making creatures. But we are inhabiting a profoundly sentient world, which is why your website and your work means so much to many, many people. Deep ecology understood this a long time ago. So the word that we like to use is ,“We are anthropocosmic beings.” We are re-inheriting our cosmic, our cosmological side, that is deeply related to our ecological side. We're talking about the redwoods and their majesty and the projects that you're working on with the redwoods. It would be impossible to understand them fully, except in deep time, these are 2000 year old creatures, some of them — living, sentient life forms. So everything you're doing is pointing us towards the embeddedness of life forms in the unfolding of universe and earth systems. So that changes our sensibilities, and it gives us a new kind of energy to appreciate, have reverence for, conserve, work with, reforest ecosystems and so on. So that's the difference.
Now your other question, I would say we have to put an Anthropocosmic worldview in relationship to the Anthropocene, right? — this age of human imprint that you've pointed to, but it's very clear. And again, unless we understand history, we can't fully appreciate the present. And so if, in 100 years time, last century, we went from 2 billion to 6 billion people, that's the beginning of the Anthropocene, the human presence. If we have technologies and chainsaws and bulldozers that are going to take down ancient growth for us in the flat we have a new moment in time. So our technologies have changed everything. Our population has changed everything. Capitalist systems, of course, have radically changed things. So you put all these ‘A’s together, and the Anthropocene and Anthropocosmic worldview have got to be in a deep conversation for the transition moment that we're now inhabiting. So it was a long answer to your very, very important set of questions. So thank you for that.
Ayana Young I'm grateful that you are calling it this transition period because I do feel that type of movement in what we're going through. It's in some ways, it feels stagnant because I don't feel like we're moving quickly enough through this very destructive moment. But I also appreciate you bringing up deep time because it puts things in perspective in a way that our human scale lifetimes just can't even touch. And I'm thinking about the ways in which scientific thought and stories about the creation of the universe are potentially in conflict or at odds with religious teachings and, you know, origin stories. Yet at the same time, I think religion and science are more compatible than many might think. You know, for example, the father of the Big Bang Theory, I think George Lemaitre was actually a Catholic priest. So could you say more and potentially give an example about how your work reconciles these seemingly oppositional forces, and how is the combination of scientific discovery and faith essential for weaving a new story of the universe and our place on Earth?
Mary Evelyn Tucker Wonderful, wonderful set of questions. And, you know, with the rise of science in the 17th century, it was clear that many scientists were in awe at the complexity of the universe that they were discovering and so on. And many scientists still are inspired by awe and wonder and curiosity, you know, from the cell to the galaxies. These are just astonishing systems of which we still only have a glimpse. So I think that compatibility is fundamental from the very beginning, that one of the greatest origins of religion is what's called the numinous, the sense of that which is awesome and fearful and attractive and somewhat frightening and so on. But that notion we are drawn forward into spaces of great mystery, and religious traditions help us to rest in the mystery. Scientific traditions are pushing towards discovery, discovery, but as I say, that origin in awe is very compatible. And George Lemaitre, yes, was a priest. And another example of someone putting this together is Teilhard de Chardin, who's a great inspiration for our work. He's a Jesuit paleontologist, was involved in the discovery of Peking Man. He lived from 1881 to 1955. When we did the 50th anniversary of his death at conferences in New York, including one at the UN. 1000 people came to the UN to celebrate him. Why? Because he had this extraordinary vision of an understanding, one of the first to put together the story of the universe, but telling it in a scientific way, but also spiritual way. That the self organizing dynamics that matter has its own interiority, its own sense of the functioning and directing, if you will, principles of "Why does an acorn become an oak?" and so on. So he had spirit and matter evolving over time to greater complexity and greater consciousness.
This was an inspiration for Thomas Berry, who said, "Well, we have to tell this as a story." And you've pointed to all peoples, all cultures have had stories. Why are we here? Where do we come from? Where are we going? So this particular story that's dawning in human consciousness, it'll be told in many, many ways, but it's something that has the possibility. It's one offering into many stories and different cultural expressions, but hopefully that is in dialogue with those other cultural and religious expressions. But it's a story that gives us the potential to say deep time, deep lineage, connectivity, relationality, kinship, all the words that are used, certainly by Indigenous peoples, but also ecologists, relationality. And so, that even more profound inhabiting of that space of connectivity will help ground our ecological and social work going forward.
People are going to burn out. It's already happening, the sense of despair, disempowerment, disease, is absolutely enormous. But, we just showed this film, Journey of the Universe, at Vassar College two days ago. The head of the Environmental Studies Department said he came out of a depression feeling such despair about the state of our world when he saw this film and several students had that same sensibility. And students have been in my office here at Yale weeping by saying we have felt disempowered in despair and Journey brought us back into conversation with what we can do, what we can contribute. So that's our hope. It's an offering into extremely complex times.
Ayana Young Thank you for that offering and around the scientific discovery and the power of science these days, especially, I feel really torn. I feel a little frustrated with the vast amounts of data collection that I feel like every scientist I speak to just wants more and more data. And I'm wondering, well, for what you know, how much more do we have to collect in order to see that what we're doing is destructive and, honestly, ecocidal? You know, I see scientific discovery and it privileges technology in certain forms of knowledge, production and logic while religion and faith seem to center alternative modes of knowing and believing through cosmology, storytelling, song and ritual. So I'm wondering, how are both of these important tools in the context of the environmental crisis. And then a deeper question is “how can we account for the complex, lasting historical legacy of Western supremacy and domination rooted in so called scientific reasoning over other cultural faith based, eco and indigenous narratives of belonging?”
Mary Evelyn Tucker Yeah, wow. So again, an offering into the space of complexity and challenge would be science is, as you suggest, one way of knowing. It's not the only way of. Knowing, and our universities have embraced it, along with technology and engineering as "the" way of knowing, and then that's been exported around the world. The Chinese are all about science, technology, engineering and so on. And our colleague, who's a Confucian scholar, is asked to come back to Beijing University to start an Institute for the Humanities as a counterpoint to this type of massive, hypermodern educational system. So that is absolutely the case. Here in all of our colleges and universities that is a very dominant sense of a way of knowing. But some of that is breaking down and I think it's because in part, the science of climate change has not communicated, as we know, and it's not only because of fake news, and not only because of the Koch brothers and think tanks that have been deniers for so long. It's also because science has tried to communicate as the priesthood of knowledge, and that has not gone over well with a wide population. So there are many reasons, and certainly the deniers and these think tanks and Koch brothers and so on, and the oil companies are way out front in terms of the problems we're facing.
But, let me just emphasize we must recognize there are multiple ways of knowing, Indigenous ways of knowing. We understand traditional environmental knowledge is something that needs to be honored, reintegrated, re-understood, rebirthed, encouraged, and so on. And that is it's going to take time, but one of the things that I think is a counterpoint to the singular way of knowing in science is what is happening with Robin Kimmerer's work, for example, Braiding Sweetgrass and many others in the space of both in academia, environmental knowledge from traditional peoples is beginning to be re-appreciated, and scholars, Indigenous scholars, are coming forward. We just had Kyle Whyte here yesterday at Yale from Michigan State University, a Potawatomi scholar and historian — absolutely excellent, especially along the lines of what you were pointing to.
So the singular way of knowing along with colonization, along with capitalism that broke forth from the European continent and created a presence around the world in colonial societies for 500 years and is still a major presence — all of a sudden we are getting voices to oppose that. Certainly in the anti-globalization movements we had it and voices like Vandana Shiva and so on about food and agriculture. So we have many, many voices, many of whom are on your podcast. But what's particularly striking, I think I'll give you two examples of Indigenous peoples. If we take Standing Rock and Water is Life, all of that sensibility in rituals that were much of that was driven by young people and ritual and prayer and so on at the very heart of this. That electrified people all across the North American continent, the largest gathering of indigenous peoples in modern history and so on, and the opposition that they are still getting is unbelievable. So there's a lot of heroic activity there and around the world with Indigenous peoples protecting forests and so on.
So the two examples I wanted to give that are counterintuitive...I was just at a conference at Georgetown University sponsored by the Vatican, by the Jesuits, by NGOs and so on. The theme was, the Vatican is going to have a conference in October on the Amazon. The Pope has twice apologized publicly for the treatment and forced conversion and cultural and human genocide of Indigenous peoples. That was in Bolivia and Peru and, now, in Latin America, there's a new formation of an alliance of the Catholic Church and other Christian churches with Indigenous peoples on protection of the rainforest, and that's what's going to be brought to the Vatican in October. It's an unprecedented alliance. There are twelve Cardinals there from the Global South and so on, who are in full support of this. There were Indigenous peoples there and so on. So was high level, intense and a, I think, historic breakthrough. The other breakthrough along these lines is the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, which began with the United Nations Development Program, the Norwegian government, Norwegian Rainforest Foundation and NGO and groups like The Forum on Religion and Ecology, which again, had the same purpose. This is in the summer of 2017 saying Indigenous peoples need to be in the foreground of protection of rainforests and the Norwegian government, for 12 years, gave $4 billion to rainforest protection. They said, "We can't do this without Indigenous peoples."
So these new alliances of NGOs, of UN, of church forces and Indigenous peoples creating new synergies and coalitions, I think, are enormously hopeful in this space of multiple ways of knowing. We need good ecological science, there's no question. We need traditional environmental knowledge and we need the voices in synergy of spiritually grounded and scientifically literate folks for the preservation of these great ecosystems.
Ayana Young I will just be completely transparent and say, I've noticed a lot of pessimism that I have felt even when I partially get excited to hear about these examples. And then that other side of me questions, you know, how much is this just presentation? Who is the money going to? Where? You know, $4 billion. Is it international contractors that are getting the money? How is the money getting to the people on the ground? What's actually being protected? How are carbon offsets being... You know, my mind goes into this rat wheel of questioning. There's also this other part of me that says, "Ayana, nothing's going to be perfect." There will be these pushes towards growth in a non capitalistic growth, but growth in terms of what the Vatican is doing with indigenous peoples. There will be things to work out. It's so complex. It's not an easy thing to just come together around a round table in a closed door room and somehow come up with a perfect solution.
Another thing that I wanted to mention from your response, that I feel really... I resonate with a lot, is this feeling that science and honestly, the judicial system is so separate from the common people or from the everyday people. The language of science, the language of law. You have to go to a lawyer. You have to go to a scientist just like you had to go to a priest when the sermons were in Latin, and the common folk couldn't even understand what the Bible was even saying. So it's interesting to see history repeat in this way of it's not meant for the everyday person to fully understandstand and how disconnecting that is. And then to see how Robin Wall Kimmerer is bringing these points of connection to light so that people can feel like they belong. And it goes back to this belonging. They belong in this world. They deserve to understand how things work. And so those were just a few of my my thoughts as you were talking.
You mentioned the Forum on Religion and Ecology, and I know that 20 years ago, both you and John founded the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale as an initiative to quote, "explore the relationship between the world's religious and spiritual traditions and the environmental challenges we face," end quote. And with approximately 85% of the world's population affiliating with some sort of religion, it's undeniable that the church and other religious organizations are instrumental and powerful forces. And I'm curious what led you to focus on the world's body of religious traditions in relationship to environmental challenge? And do you see the greatness of religious presence as an opportunity for a strategic change? And if so, what are the limitations of integrating faith voices into dialogue around environmental crises at the governmental or national level when it comes to those nation states that have complex or even violent relationships with religious groups?
Mary Evelyn Tucker Yeah, well, again, you've got a series of questions, each of one more important than the next. And so let me say from the very beginning, it's our understanding and shared by many people, including yourself, that there are problems with religion that we recognize historically and at present, and there's no question that this is not a simple answer, a golden solution, or something like that. But there are also promises, and I think we've got to navigate this space that you've just said — the inadequacies of institutions, the corruption of humans everywhere. And so we expect more often from religions, but they're just as human as any other institution with the sense of recognizing those problems and promise this work began when, in certain ways, because I'm a student of the Asian traditions. I went to Japan in '73-74 when Nixon was elected the second time, and we knew that invasion of Cambodia had happened. Watergate was happening, and I was working for McGovern, and when he was elected, under very tenuous circumstances, I said, "I'm leaving the country until he's out of office." And I went to Japan, taught at a terrific women's university. I did Zen meditation, studied the traditions of Asia, and came back and did my PhD at Columbia, but first I met Thomas Berry and did my masters with him.
But my sensibility was, as many Asian scholars would say as well, when China and India began to modernize, we could see that as a billion plus people in East Asia and a billion plus people in South Asia would industrialize, modernize, want the fruits of modernity, we were going to have some serious environmental and social problems, to say nothing of the massive pollution in those parts of the world and many other parts of the world. So it was our sense. John Grim, my husband, is a specialist in Indigenous peoples, Native Americans, particular. We're adopted into a Crow family in Montana, and so involved with the Crow Peoples and some of their rituals. So between the sense of we needed to bring the values, the worldviews, understandings of nature, ritual practices and environmental ethics from the world's cultures and religions, we couldn't leave them off the table, so that it was our notion science was necessary, but not sufficient, and that was true of policy, of law, of economics, even technological solutions and so on. All of these are necessary. So we don't want to take technology out of the mix. We need alternative technologies. We need biomimicry, as Janine Benyus and your own work is saying. But we need especially the ethical and moral force of the world's religions. If 85% of the world's people still affiliate in some way. And it was my feeling as a person of the 60s who went to college in Washington, DC, and when I saw the religious communities getting on board for civil rights, for the anti Vietnam War movement and so on, I could see things changed. Because I grew up in a society that said segregation, separate, but equal. That's okay, but when it was said with moral force, that's not okay, then things change. And I feel we're at a similar moment. We have this separation from nature, mentality. The gift and the problem of modernity is individualism, human rights and so on, but also a lack of a sense of community, of where we belong. That's what inspired our work, these conferences that we did at Harvard, and the 10 volumes that came out of it. And then Gus, I'll just conclude here. Gus Beth, who is one of the great environmentalists, founder of NRDC and World Resources Institute, headed up the UN Development Program. He said, we have done the work that we can do in the legal and science fields. We need the voices of the religions, and that's why he brought us to Yale from where we're working on these issues at Harvard, and it's been a very good place for the Forum on Religion and Ecology.
Ayana Young I do want to step a little bit deeper into the academic institutions, and I'd like to recognize the function of higher education as a gatekeeper. That these institutions were built for certain groups, and those features still remain in place today. So how do you ensure that a multiplicity of voices are included in the production of knowledge around these subjects?
Mary Evelyn Tucker Great question. Well, first of all, in Journey of the Universe, as you've noted, it's a film, 55 minutes, was on PBS for three years. It's accessible on Amazon streaming in many different ways. So people can get it. They can be inspired. They can read the book and see this mingling of ecology and poetry, of metaphor and meaning. It's a new genre, really, in the line of Lauren Isley, who wrote absolutely magnificent work, one of them called the Immense Journey of this Deep Time, and what it does to light up our minds, our memories, and inspire our action. But the other part of Journey is these conversations where I interviewed ten scientists telling their part of the unfolding universe from galaxies to the emergence of cells and human life. But in the other ten, I'm interviewing a range of environmentalists, many of them in the Bay Area, a number of them quite well known — ecocities, Richard Register; eco economics, Richard Norgard. But I'm also interviewing people like Carl Anthony, one of the great African American leaders of issues of race, of history, of ecology and our way forward. And he said this story is one that gave him a sense of belonging. The Journey film has been shown by the former governor of New Jersey in prisons in New Jersey. And I asked him what was the response and he said, in one of the women's prisons there was total silence at the end of the showing. And one woman said, "Now I know where I belong." Just to your point.
And I also interviewed two Indigenous peoples in these journey interviews who are also saying, "This is compatible with our knowledge, our knowledge of the stars, our knowledge of how we walk on the land." And so they're seeing this as compatible. Brian Swimme, our narrator, of course, and my co writer in Journey, he himself comes from Indigenous peoples. His father is Salish from British Columbia and he doesn't make a major thing about this, but you can see his understanding of traditional environmental knowledge, along with scientific training that he has. He has a PhD in the Emergence of the Early Universe, but he took 10 years studying the science to tell that story, first with Thomas Berry universe story, and then with the film and book. So the other project that we have, The World's Religions and Ecology. Of course, we're trying to be inclusive, listening to many voices. All the conferences at Harvard had the various sects of the tradition like Judaism, Orthodox Reform, Conservative Christianity and Catholic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Evangelical. So inclusivity of voices was absolutely at the heart of those conferences and more and more, that's what we're reaching out to.
Now, I think your point about academia is — especially places like Yale, are very elitist, but they too, are changing, not necessarily fast enough. So I think we have to acknowledge the elitism, the breaking down of that, the opening up of new spaces and voices. It's going to take time because we have not told our history. Howard Zinn's story, of the people's story, that's a telling of our true history. But we haven't told the genocide nearly of native peoples, the African American slavery and so on and so forth, and all these issues of immigration and multiple voices are because we haven't told our full story. So that's part of what we're trying to do within academia and outside of academia.
Ayana Young I could not agree more around not telling the history. And it's very interesting to see how we create industry and we create solutions based off false histories and erasures, and then we wonder why things don't work so well. Things don't work because we're not starting from a foundation of truth. And then we try to stack all this stuff up on falsehoods, and it always falls apart. So I really appreciate you saying that — something I feel very passionate about.
Mary Evelyn Tucker You might be going to another question, but I just wanted to respond to that. And I'm so glad to hear your passion around it, and it's why I come back to the importance of history. It's not just something fossilized and back there. It gives us, you've just said, the grounding for going forward. So let me give you this example of what I would take to be hopeful, despite the fact that we're still very, very partial in our historical understanding and telling. So my grandfather, Carlton Hayes taught history at Columbia in the early 20th century. He was trying to open up the history department at a great American University from American history to European history this post First World War. He said, we've got to understand Europe. How did this happen? And he found the field of nationalism, understanding what that meant for identity and belonging, right? So he opened up and wrote many, many textbooks on European history that were widely read. His student, Ted DeBerry, was involved in the Second World War, Army and Navy language school, studying mostly Japanese and others of his colleagues Chinese and Japanese students, and they came back to Columbia and said, "We've got to understand Asian history." Okay? Because most universities had nothing virtually on Asia. And even as I went through college, almost nothing. So Ted DeBerry helped set up at Columbia the most remarkable Asian Studies programs where you read texts in translation, you did history, you did culture, you did literature and the arts and so on. So these classes have become singular, and that these programs and these texts and translations have gone all across North America and Europe and other parts of the world.
So I was the recipient of this broadening of our historical framework, right, Europe and then Asia. When I came out of Columbia as a student of Ted Deberis and a student of my grandfather in as well, I entered a department to teach World History. And world history was saying, we've got to do this, not just the rise of the West, the West is best, or the West and the other, but all these historians from Africa, from Asia, from Latin America and Indigenous traditions were reshaping "what is World History?" Was very, very exciting, and on secondary and college level, we are working together and extremely good stuff.
Now what we have is what's being called Big History of which Journey of the Universe is a part. But the big historians are saying, well, it's not only human history. We've got to know history of the cosmos, of the earth, and human history within that larger context. So you know, a lifetime, if you will, or two generations, we've gone from American history, European history, Asian history, world history, to Big history. That's an incredible improvement. We have a long way to go — our national history, you see — but we have moved
Ayana Young So good to hear, and I love hearing the personal stories of your grandfather and your personal history within the larger history is really, really wonderful to hear. I wanted to bring up this chapter entitled “The Emerging Alliance of World Religions and Ecology” from the Fall 2001 issue of Datalyst Journal and you and John write, quote, "The study of religion and ecology explores the many ways in which religious communities ritually articulate relationships with their local landscapes and bioregions. Religious ecology gives insight into how people and cultures create both symbolic systems of human Earth relations and practical means of sustaining and implementing these relations," end quote. And I was hoping that you might share some examples of how religion has historically engaged with ecology in ways that many of us might overlook.
Mary Evelyn Tucker Yeah. So thank you. And we developed this even more in our 2014 book, Ecology and Religion that Island Press published. So the way we like to look at it is to break open these religions from their institutional affiliations and their problematic sides. And so the first thing I would say is, what we're trying to say is, if we take religion in its biggest forms, religion is a way of orienting to the cosmos, grounding in earth processes, of nurturing through food, water, wine, etc, and transforming through ethical praxis and engagement. So this orienting the cosmos, grounding to Earth and Earth Systems, nurturing through food and ritual and transforming ourselves in a larger sense of community and belonging. So within that we also say religions... There's a religious cosmology which helps us orient to planetary systems, stars and again, Indigenous peoples knew this profoundly, but so did the Chinese learn systems of astronomy, and the Islamic tradition had very sophisticated understandings of astronomy, etc, as did medieval science in the Christian traditions. So those have been woven — the sense of how we're part of a cosmos in traditions throughout time. And we like to say, in addition to religious cosmology, there's religious ecology. So this would be, how do we weave ourselves into Earth Systems? Which we're trying to do now, again and again. What I think your work and the website is illustrating is this connectivity of this wonderful project that I love reading about, the biodiversity enhancement and test plots and so on with the redwoods and so on.
So the examples would be in a Christian tradition, how do we do our orienting and grounding and so on — all of the rituals within a Christian tradition at the seasonal level would be oriented to cosmos and earth, like the winter solstice, Christmas time, Hanukkah time, this December moment of the shortest day in the year and then light coming back, that return of light. So the symbolic quality of nature and these moments, the summer equinox and Easter and Passover and so on so it's coordinated with the systems of universe and earth, right? And that's talk about grounding. You see how for pre modern peoples, this was hugely grounding. And all the celebrations and the Christmas tree and lights and whatnot that come at the very darkest time of year, and the candles for Seder and whatnot and Passover at the Easter time. So I should have said Hanukkah and Christmas earlier. But the other thing is, many of these systems were agriculturally based, and so all of the world's religions have agricultural rights in the time of planting and of harvest and so on. Shinto, the example from Japan — the Emperor of Japan, symbolically plants the first rice paddies right in the Imperial grounds and harvests them too. The whole country is absorbed in this agricultural rite with Shinto based sensibilities of the beauty and reverence for nature and rice as the food giving sustenance for people. So, you know, all the food rituals of religions have to be connected to agricultural systems and so on. So that's the rituals and agriculture and the cosmos Earth connections are profoundly interwoven with these traditions. And that's what, in some ways, we're recovering and rediscovering, but recreating these ways of weaving ourselves into Earth and the cosmos.
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Ayana Young Welcome back to For The Wild podcast. My guest today is Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker, author, filmmaker and co director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University.
Now this is a question that is a personal question, but I'm sure many people in the audience are feeling this similar tug, and it seems that our generation and the following must balance both short term change and long term change. And I'd love to open this up to you regarding how our vision for long term change might differentiate from short term visions. And perhaps I'm also thinking about deep time again, geologic time versus the temporality of capitalism or even democracy. So can you speak of the hope and the renewal of energies that is carried in Earth time, in cosmic time? And how might it be a part of our long term visions?
Mary Evelyn Tucker Beautiful question, and it's my own too, so I share it. So this question of short term change and long term depth grounding is also my question, and I think it's many people's question, right, because the urgency can be so overwhelming.
But I think unless we find the balance between these two, we can be drawn, you know, too far into well it will all be done in the end and so on. But let me just give you an example. When I meditate in the morning, I try and be there as the sun rises and draw that tremendous sensibility of the energy of the sun into my day, into my life, into the gift of the sun. Brian calls it the roaring energy of the sun. And roaring generosity of the sun, actually is the term. So I think we can do this also on a daily cycle, is what I wanted to get to. So we have the seasonal cycles, the cosmic cycles, but our daily sensibilities — and believe me, I'm learning all the time, and trying to do this — as a sense of grounding. I pray with water in the four directions, which a native Salish elder suggested many, many years ago with this deep sense of "water is life." I try and consciously bring in everything that's around me and offering it the work for all sentient life, all sentient beings and so on. I think every day of women who are in refugee camps and their children and what they're trying to deal with and women around the world who are carrying so many burdens for their family, for survival and so on.
So by bringing this in, I think, in the origin of the day, we can offer this work, we can offer our sensibilities to the powers of the universe, powers of the earth that have sustained life. And by trying to sink into that we can't do it all, the burden isn't just on our shoulders, but that all these powers of the universe and Earth are working with us, working through us. Brian Swimme has a beautiful series The Powers of the Universe, which talk about this specifically. So deep time grounds us and a sense of the daily tasks can inspire us. You know, in a balance, a creative tension, but it also a very generative sense of creative activity going forward.
Ayana Young I think we all need these practices right now to be able to balance the urgency of the short term thinking, but not give way to the apathy that long term thinking can create in people, and I've personally been in this place right now of a lot of deep grief around where we're at and feeling frustrated that change isn't happening quickly enough. The destruction is happening super fast. I mean, the destruction is just so quick but the implementation of solutions and the re-connectivity of our humanity. It's so much more challenging and so much more slow moving than resource extraction, than development, then...you know. And that tug of war in my heart is really challenging, and so I, I've, I really have had to come to a different outlook at this point, which I can't really articulate at the moment but it's not an acceptance necessarily. It's not me saying, "Oh well, I'm just going to accept where we're at, and that's just where we're at."
But it's this way of not giving out to burnout which is what, you know, you had mentioned earlier in the conversation, because I do feel the burnout. You look at Occupy Wall Street, and there was this buzz, and there, you know, we look at the client, the first couple climate marches, and there was a buzz. And now a lot of my activist allies and friends and just people around me, I feel people are like, "Oh my gosh. Like, how many more petitions am I going to have to sign? How many more marches am I going to have to go to? How much more, you know, headline culture do I have to give into and learn about all these things?" And it's interesting. I feel like almost… the more knowledge...Maybe, I don't want to call it knowledge, maybe the more information we have access to, I'm wondering is that even supporting us in this time in terms of articles through social media and such. So I I feel this push and pull of coming to terms with where We're at and fighting back against the destruction, and also being able to conserve the energy that is within me and within all of us, so that we can keep being in relationship with the earth with integrity, but but not just falling apart at each moment. And I think there's something about the daily practices that you were mentioning, and also re engaging with the practices of our ancestors that grounds us in a way that we're not going to find through an article, that we're not going to find through our computers, we're not going to find through these other means that are being shoved in our faces. But to be able to find that for ourselves is so important. So I thank you for that, and it's always a good reminder to hear.
Mary Evelyn Tucker Thank you so much. Let me just say, you know, the 60s was a similar period, and when we saw Martin Luther King and what he was struggling with, Robert Kennedy, and certainly Don Kennedy, so we were dealing with very, very, very tough times, and you think of what Martin Luther King went through just to make a breakthrough to justice, which is still being realized in minimal ways, we have a long, long way to go. So all of these social, political, ecological movements will be well beyond our lifetime, as we know, but I think what we can draw on is also the sense of creativity and chaos go hand in hand. That's what the universe story is telling us — that tremendous chaos and upheaval and violence has led to creativity and new forces. That's what we have to trust. We know this in our own creativity. So as we align ourselves, as your work is doing with these creative towers of Earth and ecosystems, biomimicry, the hidden life of trees, how forests think — all of this work that you are doing with your community and others is crucial to new forms of creativity emerging. So I congratulate you, and I urge you forward in that.
Ayana Young I'm going to take that and remember it in my low moments. So thank you. And this has been a beautiful conversation, and I hope to have more in the future.
Mary Evelyn Tucker Well, I love that. And Ayana, I've really enjoyed this and keep up your depth thinking and your beautiful spirit. May it flourish.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. The music you heard today was from Laurence Cole and Evelyn Francis. Theme music is Like a River from Kate Wolf. I'd like to thank our podcast production team — our podcast audio producer, Andrew Storrs, our media researcher and writer, Francesca Glaspell, Eryn Wise, our social media coordinator, Hannah Wilton, guest coordinator, and Carter Lou McElroy, our music coordinator.