Ayana Young  Hello, my name is Ayana Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild where we explore radical ideas relating to Earth renewal. It is a perennial debate when exactly humanity broke away from the rest of the animal world and became the exceptional species we claim to be...30,000 years, 2 million years? It depends on your definition of human. Our cerebral advancements came at a heavy cost, however. We learned how to cleverly manipulate the other creatures we share the planet with leading first to the loss of megafauna and that ecocidal behavior has continued to spin our biosphere into a rapid mass extinction event that has been accelerating in direct correlation to technological achievement and population growth. Additionally, we have largely abandoned our faculties of intuition which has allowed us to become desensitized to the destruction we have wrought and write it off as a cost of doing business.

Joining us today is one of the great pioneers of rewilding the human psyche and renewing our intuition. Stephen Harrod Buhner is the Senior Researcher for the foundation for Gaian Studies. Described as both an earth poet and a Bardic naturalist, he is the award winning author of 19 books, including The Lost Language of Plants, The Secret Teachings of Plants, and Sacred Plant Medicine. His most recent book is Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Before retiring from the road in 2013, he taught for more than 30 years throughout North America and Europe. He lives in Silver City, New Mexico. 

Ayana Young  Hello, Stephen, I am so excited to have you on the show.

Stephen Harrod Buhner  Hi Ayana, thanks for having me on. It's great.

Ayana Young  So to jump right into the imaginal realm…You speak of the imaginal realm in terms such as a world where the mythic and the mundane interpenetrate each other and the world's imagination – "the place where the world dreams form into being" as well as "the place that lies underneath the world of form." It's inherently challenging to explain the imaginal realm in terms that the rational linear mind can accept, but you've done so in your book part by way of metaphor with "a fisherman on a dark sea who can only know the water surface." So, with metaphor or otherwise, can you help us understand what's below the surface that we can't see with our eyes? And, how can we begin to open our intuitive faculties to it?

Stephen Harrod Buhner  There is a German writer named Ernst Jünger and he said this great thing. He said, "Materialism contains prodigious depths that materialists can't understand," – I thought was quite a fantastic way of putting it. And the thing is, we've been trained to orient ourselves so much towards surfaces that, after a while, we begin to forget that there's anything beyond that. Nevertheless, every person every day of their life is continually going past the surface of things to touch what is inside and underneath material forms. And really, the key to doing that is our capacity for feeling. 

And, see, it's odd when we get into the whole discussion of the Enlightenment which was actually an absolutely magnificent response to the oppressions of the fundamentalist Christianity, primarily Catholicism. It was a really-needed corrective, but like any big system, over time, it began to get more and more and more conservative. It's like what I refer to as the reality police began to take over the whole enlightenment paradigm and began to orient everybody towards surfaces as if that's the practical thing to do. And people that weren't oriented towards surfaces were considered to be unsophisticated or naive people that were out of touch with reality. 

But, if you look at what's natural for children...When human beings are born and they're growing, everybody knows there's that magical kind of energy that small children have – that little girl's sitting under the trees talking with flowers. They're quite convinced that flowers have lives of their own, that they have the ability to communicate that they care. And there's this tremendous empathic relationship between the human and all of the other life forms that surround the human. Children have to be trained out of that very vigorously for them to give up that experiential relationship with the world. 

The interesting thing is in the enlightenment, none of the people that were major movers in the enlightenment believed that that should be given up it was only much later that the sort of fundamentalists-materialists-reductionists began to, you know, sort of act as reality police and shame everybody out of that kind of response to the world by saying, "Oh, you're anthropomorphizing," you know, that you think these other things are alive. And what's really true is that they're mechanomorphising. They're projecting onto nature a mechanical dynamic which they insist is fundamental, but really think about it. Every day of our life, we go beyond the surface that we're surrounded by when we walk into the house and we expect somebody to be there and there's nobody there. The house has a kind of feeling to it where we can tell it's empty, even if our brain is questioning our feeling sense. Whenever anybody goes to a new restaurant, for instance, everybody does this even diehard fundamentalists, mechano-materialists. They walk in and they sort of stand there inside the door and they sort of feel the room because that feeling-sense gives us a sense of the meanings that we're about to encounter. It's a survival characteristic built into the human species over and it really every species over millions of years have the ability to perceive meaning through feeling. And that's the way that the whole imaginal realm is accessed. 

I mean, the imaginal realm is when you're going very, very deep into the meanings that are within the material world, but this is the beginning of it. It's like always everyday reclaiming the feeling-sense. How does this table feel? How does this restaurant feel? How does this person feel? How does this communication that I'm receiving feel? How does this hospital feel? How does this medicine feel? So that you literally recurrently claim the response of the heart to what's presented to the sense. Writers do that. Musicians do that all the time. Art is fundamentally involved with that feeling sense. And when writers write, for instance, and they feel what they're talking about. They feel what the words…There's not just the mental communication or the mental meaning, there's a feeling meaning and the words and as they do that, they begin to go into this sort of a dream state. Every writer, that's any good talks about it. Some...Stephen King calls it "the zone." They call it all different kinds of things. You go into there deeper and deeper and deeper and all of a sudden, myths, meanings that you never expected – all of these things began flowing from somewhere else into the words you're writing or into the music that you're making. And that's the imaginal world beginning to enter, penetrate more deeply the art that you're doing, but our capacity for that is only existent because it's a capacity present in this place that we call Earth, in this scenario in which we're embedded. Everything here that's a living organism has access in some way to that and utilizes that were just a specific instance of a general condition.

Ayana Young  Hearing about this level of consciousness where the metaphysical background becomes the foreground and you no longer see isolated objects, but you see matrices connecting everything. You know, it's my first reaction to think, "Wow, I want to be there, now." And you've told how, as a kid, you yearned to be a wise man. So I'm wondering, do you agree with many Buddhist teachers that desiring enlightenment as an outcome is actually counterproductive and the desire becomes an obstacle to attaining that state?

Stephen Harrod Buhner  No, not at all. It's like you have to understand. I think Buddhism is probably of all what's called the world's great religions although they continually leave animism out of that, which irritates me to no end. But this whole kind of...the Buddhists are probably the more accurate of the great religious forms because – and many Buddhists say that they're not really a religion, they're more a kind of a science that they're exploring the world – but then when you get into the certain arenas of Buddhism where they start talking about the world as an illusion and all of that stuff and our whole job is to get out of here, so we can get off of the cycle of rebirth and they start going into place, that is a way to "Let's go to heaven so we don't have to feel bad" kind of thing anymore. And, for me, embodiment here – manifestation in the body – being a human life form, an Earth life form is a wonderful, dynamic. So that, you know, I think that those kinds of comments from the Buddhist frame, there's quite often taken out of context and popularized in this sort of strange way and if you get very deep into it, you start to find there's a lot more subtleties to that. So that…It's not quite so possible to reduce it like that. That it's the desire. And they also are quite aware of that – it's the desire that provides the motive force for you to get where you're going. And, you know, even though a lot of people they kind of translate nonattachment into kind of a passivity, but that's a real misunderstanding of what's happening in that frame of reference. 

I mean, Gandhi was accused of engaging in passive resistance and it was quite clear that he never recommended passive anything. It's an active movement that just when they talk about nonattachment, they're talking about, in a way, not holding on to the form of the thing that you find or that you seek. So when, in the Taoist dynamics when they talk about the Tao, they say the Tao that can be spoken isn't the true Tao. And in a sense, they're trying to get you to this experiential place that can't be easily captured in language. It's...Poetry is pretty much the only thing that can really capture that experiential state. 

So for me, that desire to understand, to penetrate more deeply into the metaphysical background of the world, to no longer be dissociated from it, to be immersed, to be engaged in communication with all of the other life forms here, to work with the Earth itself as a living organism, to fulfill the function that we've been given the work that's in us to do, desire is a fundamental part of that. And there's, you might say, there's healthy desire and there's the shadow side of desire. And I suspect the Buddhists are more talking about the shadow side, but the popularization of that kind of phrasing hides that distinction, I think.

Ayana Young  You recently gave a lecture series and there's videos of that series on your website, which I highly recommend to the audience. But you're explaining the non-physical reality as it is understood by the Bushmen of the Kalahari. You say, quote, "You get second eyes, second ears, and you can then begin to perceive the lines, ropes, and grids of connection between living things. Sometimes you can hear them as songs and those songs become lines or ropes that can take you somewhere." How did you first come to know the imaginal realm? And do you ever doubt its existence?

Stephen Harrod Buhner  Well, for me growing up, I never really fit in very well and I became relatively dissociated over time, but there were certain feeling experiences that were quite moving to me. I suppose the easiest way to describe it is, my birth family was incredibly dysfunctional. My mother was what appeared normal, but she was really a borderline personality and when she said "I love you" what she actually meant was I hate you. But when I was with my father's mother, who with whom I was really close, my grandmother, and she said, "I love you," what she meant was, I love you. So from a very early age, I began to be aware of the distinction between form and essence between the surface of the thing and what's inside of it and that if I hadn't been born that way in that framework, I might have just passed over that sort of crucial dynamic. But it was sort of an entree into the deeper aspects of the world, and it's really based on the feeling sense. I mean, everybody knows that. Everybody knows it! It doesn't matter if it's Richard Dawkins or it doesn't matter who it is. If you walk into the house and you go up to your beloved and you say, "How are you?” And then they go, "FINE." You know they're not fine. You get the experience right then that the form of the thing and what's inside the form has no relationship to each other, see. 

And so, for me, being immersed in that dysfunctional family and not really being able to absorb kind of a functional way of being a human being, that sent me on this quest and I wanted to live a life that was is congruent and filled with warmth as what I experienced with my grandmother and my great grandfather, and I didn't want to have that dissociated experience that I had with my mother, and that sort of moved it in. But you know, I found for everybody there is these little moments that we tend to pass over. I mean, William Stafford, the poet said this great thing. He said, you know, "My poetry did not come from exceptional experiences, they came from experiences everybody has every day, but that most people overlook. They don't take the time to see. Only children and poets really seem to look at these things," you know. And so I began to follow that thread of feeling and that began to take me deeper and deeper. 

So when you get to the Bushmen of the Kalahari, you know, there's a statement that came before the one that you mentioned, where they say...This one woman is talking to this guy, Bradford Keeney, who's studying with them, and she says, you know, "You must tell your people, they have to wake up twice in the morning. They must wake up their body and get out of bed and then they have to wake up their hearts." I love that and they say, you know, and he says, well Bradford Keeney responds to the woman and says, "Well, but you know, it's extremely difficult to explain this to people. You know, they don't really believe in the reality of feelings." And she goes, "Do they keep bumping into feelings that they don't know what to do with? Do they tell their hearts to go back to sleep again, every day?" What a great way of putting it because that's what we're all trained to do. Our feelings start to awaken and we tell them to go back asleep. We tell our hearts to go to sleep so we can move through the world carelessly. We've been taught not to care in the guise of being responsible, reasonable, rational, grown up. 

And as.....My brain tends to go blank from time to time. I don't know why that is, but there's this particularly great statement by somebody who I truly love, Gregory Bateson – the name comes back – where he said, you know, "This loss of the sense of aesthetic unity of the ability to feel is an epistemological mistake and it is a much greater mistake than any of the older systems made that we have tried to supplant with science." And so, for me, following that, waking up the heart, and you begin going deeper and deeper into the world. And then there's what you sort of reclaim the response is the heart to what's presented to the senses. And you develop the feeling sense as a reliable tool. 

The Kalahari would say, you know that you're creating a library of feelings because everything you encounter has a different feeling tone to it just like everything we see visually has a different range of colors to it. You know, they might be very similar, but there's subtle differences. So you build this library of feelings based on your experience and you begin going deeper and deeper and deeper and then all of a sudden, you begin to be aware that things that seem unrelated to the reductive mind are in fact connected. 

And, you know, many people have remarked on this. John Muir long ago said, "If you pull on anything you find it hitched to everything else in the universe." So that sense of connection, the ability to see threads, golden threads of connection, that take you from this thing to that thing to that thing. They arise out of the deepening of the feeling sense and out of creating a library of feelings and reclaiming the response of the heart to what's presented to the senses. And then, as you begin going deeper and deeper into that journey, you start having, you know, particularly poignant experiences where you come upon things that you could never have found any other way. That feeling sense leads you to remarkable moments that then tend to expand your perceptual sense far beyond where it was when you began.

Ayana Young  I have this question. And it's kind of, you know, ping ponging in my mind so I'm going to try to say clearly, but...So we have the feeling sense or we're trying to reawaken that feeling sense and then we have emotions and we also have these stories that we've created over time...So how do we know when the genuine feeling senses and how to trust that over the tricks played by the mind of old stories that come up?

Stephen Harrod Buhner  Well, this is a very good question because...and it also happens to be one of the things that reductionists use to try to confuse people that are following the feelings, right? You have to understand when we're born, we have eyes we're seeing, but we haven't calibrated our seeing, okay. We hear but we haven't calibrated our hearing. We're experiencing sounds, but we don't know how to attribute meaning to them, right? We're experiencing things that we're seeing, but we don't know how to attribute meaning to them. Okay. We feel touches on our body, but we don't know how to attribute meaning to them. So we're immersed in a sensory dynamic that over time we learn to attribute meaning, right? And to separate out and to make distinctions. So the thing is with our feeling sense, if it were used as a primary method of sensory perception as it is in every nonindustrial culture in the world, right...Especially not in the West. If you use it like that and the children grow up in it, it begins to develop in sophistication just like our ability to see, our ability to hear, our ability to think. But for most of us in the Western world, about the time we go to school, five or six, we begin to be trained out of using that so it remains an atrophied experience or capacity of the human being. And then we get very confused. 

You know, really, most of the people...When I worked as a psychotherapist for many years, really a lot of the people came – were coming in – and they're going, "Help, I'm a human being, but I don't know what that means." You know, it's like, “Who am I? What does all this stuff mean? What do I do?” And that confusion comes a lot out of that kind of weird training that we get. So we don't understand that emotions are very different than feelings, okay? We sort of blend those together a lot, but emotions really are...they're information about the things that are going on around you. Anger is energy to solve a problem. That's why organisms get angry. All organisms get angry, okay? It's an evolutionarily created dynamic to enhance survivability. So something happens, you get scared. So fear is information that the status quo has changed, and you need to pay attention to it to figure out what's altered. Okay, now, it could be a very fast thing like a lion jumping out of the bushes or it can be a very subtle thing that you just, you know, you start to feel afraid for some reason and you don't really understand why. And then it turns out that maybe you're starting to get sick. Or maybe it turns out that your spouse is very upset with you and has something that they want to talk about and so you're sensing that. So, but quite often anger comes after fear so you get something that scares you, you don't know what to do, and then you get angry and it's made up of all of this energy, this motive force to encounter whatever that thing is, and try to come up with a solution. It's energy to solve a problem. Sadness is just letting go of something, something that was woven into that you have to release. Joy is just simply the healthy functioning of the organism. So those are like emotions, they're information that's like on the dashboard of our car to let us know about what's going on. 

A feeling – we have both kinesthetic and non kinesthetic feeling: the feeling of somebody touching your leg, that's a feeling. But we also have that straight kinesthetic feeling. We also have the ability to feel 'How does this room feel?' Or "How does this music feel when I listen to it? What feeling does it create in me?" Those are really different. Those are perceptions – feelings or perceptions about what's happening either in your interior world or the exterior world. So if your body is beginning to get unhealthy in a certain way, whether it's psychologically or physically, you'll start to feel differently and that gives you clues about what's going on there that you can sort of track back to find the root of it. 

Then, of course, there's the third thing you brought up where we have old history about things. So one of the ones for me is my father who was actually a very nice man in many ways and very kind. He was just raised funny and so he had a lot of repressed rage and he held his mouth a certain way, okay. And I was little, as most children are, and I was afraid of his rage because nothing seemed bigger to me in the whole world then him and his anger, right? So I left home, but whenever I encountered anybody that held their mouth similarly to him, it would bring back that fear about his rage, right. And so I'd be locked into that old framework and that can lead to a lot of confusions and projections and all kinds of things. The thing that's true is, when somebody holds their mouth that way, most of the time, they do have some repressed rage. But so what? My response after that is where the problem lies because I have lack of resolution with my own past experience. So that's the difference between perception and projection. 

And Goethe, you know, the great German poet who used this kind of perception as a fundamental part of his work with plants. He was just absolutely a magnificent scientist, which most people don't know. He said, "Perception never deceives, interpretation deceives." So what happens after time, as you learn through this long calibration process that your perception is accurate, but almost instantaneously after the perception, there is an interpretation. And that's the thing that people have to learn to be extremely rigorous in examining so that they can sort out their past psychological dynamics that they aren't clear about. Whether those things come from culture or family or school, it doesn't really matter. And it's just a process of learning like anything else, like riding a bicycle, you fall a lot of times, but you know, after a while, you learn that balance point and you'll learn how to make it work.

Ayana Young  One of my favorite quotes of yours goes, "The more you become Earth speaking on behalf of herself, the less human-oriented you become. Over time, every belief is stripped away, including much of what we think of as our self identity. This work if you follow it all the way to the end will cost you everything that you are. You become, as Emerson said 'A transparent eyeball." The truth passes through you living and intact," unquote. Oh, I have to say, I was just so encouraged to hear this. You know, it seems like a universal rite of passage to shake off one's conditioning and walk straight into the battlefield of clashing paradigms. So I'm wondering, what is this work you refer to? And how do you know if you followed it to the end?

Stephen Harrod Buhner  Goethe also said this great thing. He said, "This work has..." How did he put it? He's talking about the way he approached the world in this perceptual sense. He goes,  "This has worked my poor ego in ways I hardly thought possible." And I just love that. And it's, you know, in Ram Dass had another thing that's kind of irrelevant here. He said, "You know, when I first did inner work? It was a mobscene in there." 

So it's like, there's this thing we...When we began, we think that our cultural framework, our family framework, whatever it is that we've absorbed as sort of our primary view of the world, we think it's foundational. We think it's fundamental. You know, and it doesn't matter what the beliefs are, there's always a series of functional beliefs, like behave this way, talk this way, dress this way, do this, do this, do this, right? All of these things. And we absorb a lot of it just by mimicry and watching. A lot of it, we're told we're taught, you know, and then we go to school, and we learn all kinds of ridiculous things like the dinosaurs died out because their brains were the size of a walnut and it took like a week for the nerve impulses to get from their tail to their head. Or we learned things like nothing else is intelligent on the earth except for human beings. Other things are like lesser intelligences, and on and on, and all this stuff. And we buildup sort of a software program of ourselves in the world. And for most people, one way or another, sooner or later, that software program, which is very inaccurate, begins to rub out against reality. Okay, now most people take antidepressants or they become drunkards or they watch a lot of TV or they just learn to shut it off. And they just sort of go on, you know, as if nothing happened. 

But there's a certain number of people that began to go, "Wait a second, the picture I was given doesn’t match, my software program doesn't match what I'm encountering in the real world," and a few people go, "Wait a second, I want to find out what's real." Now, people all through history have talked about how few are the people that make that decision, but there are consistently somewhere between 10 and 15% of the population will, in some way, make that decision. And they act as what this guy Edward de Bono called depatterning factor for the culture. And it's really important that they do that because it keeps the culture more vibrant. Of course, the culture doesn't really like it and there's a lot of conflict about their framework being upset. But nevertheless, you begin to encounter…Yyou get some piece of something real that you can't ignore and you start following it, and that leads to something else and something else and something else. And in the beginning, a lot of us think it's a rather romantic journey and it is, but in a different way than we thought. We think that's really romantic, "Oooh,  I'm going to follow this thing." And there's many people that have passed before and we'll see the records, the passages, the writings of some of them, and we'll get all inspired. And we'll start saying, "Oh, I want to do that," and you start following along. 

And then we begin to find out that there's a price. And it costs us this little piece of ourselves, this little piece of our illusion about the nature of the world. So we go and we pay that and then we go further and it costs us a little more and a little more and a little more. And slowly what begins to happen...It's kind of this interesting trick of the universe...Slowly, what begins to happen is we begin giving up our sort of narcissistic orientation. We began to be subsumed into this larger framework. The earth begins to flow through us more and more. And with a lot of people, it starts with the plants. I don't know why. For most of the people that have really moved me in my life – Masanobu Fukuoka, Luther Burbank, Barbara McClintock – it was the plants that pull them deeper into the world and begin to reveal to them what's really going on here, which is very different than what we've been taught. We get pulled a little deeper. We get pulled a little deeper. We get pulled a little deeper, and then we begin to be aware that there's a certain work in us that we're meant to do. 

Wallace Stegner put it this great way. It goes, "People in America do not understand that we have been subsumed by what we conquered." And I just love that and so we begin to go deeper and deeper and we give up a little more and a little more and finally, this process begins to happen, where we began to become old-growth ourselves, where we begin to become the earth speaking on behalf of itself. And that narcissistic sort of anthropocentrism that we began with, you know, that was the majority of who we are, is stripped away more and more and more. The psychological frame is stripped down to the foundation over and over again until it fundamentally is remade and matches more accurately the reality of the world. And we find we've gotten to the place we always wanted to get to, but we're no longer who we were and it's just a fundamental dynamic. In some ways, we're more ourselves. We've truly become ourselves, but in other ways, we're not anything like that young boy or girl who began the journey a long time ago. And many people, musicians who have followed their path to become music speaking on behalf of itself, or writers who have done that or poets, they all understand that, you know, you'd become something else in the process. It costs everything that you are to become that thing.

Ayana Young  So I want to ask you, can we know what the plants are communicating to us? Or do people just not have the intelligence anymore to understand?

Stephen Harrod Buhner  [laughter] Haha, that we don't have the intelligence to understand! That's hilarious. It's like, my partner, Julie McIntyre once said, this thing she said, "You have to understand, it's their journey too." And I love that. always remember that it's their journey, too, because in the old days, you know, in the early days of beginning, this journey being narcissistically-oriented around myself, I didn't realize that they might be getting something out of the relationship as well. You know, it's like that thing about, you know, all of us know we're supposed to save the Earth but how many of us have experienced the earth saving us? Plants reach out. The plants are fundamental and there's old stories in some of the Native American cultures, for instance, and many of the Indian non industrial cultures around the world, where they talk about, essentially, that the plants look at us as their children. And it's true that the green plants changed that kind of photosynthesis and dynamic and change the atmosphere of the Earth in such a way that allowed the emergence of our species, right? They are our ancestors and they have a deep caring about us. 

So that's one dynamic that everybody that begins this kind of work runs into, right away. That there's this whole thing about "Oh, Nature's red in tooth and claw," and that's really a misunderstanding of things. What's true is death is irremovable from the system. Okay, there's a reason why death exists. It can never be removed. It's foundational, so once you get over that, then what you find is the system itself has caring and cooperation built into it at this absolutely foundational level. And yeah, sooner or later, all of us are going to die and, at that point, I suppose you could call it red in tooth and claw, but really it is, it's just payment's come-to-due. 

 Or you know, another way of putting it as we all are infected with the most deadly sexually transmitted disease ever created – life, right? So…And our culture is terrified of death more than probably any other culture that has come before us in the history of human habitation of this place. Terrified of it. But if you begin to work through that terror, you find a lot of other cooperation dynamics there. And as you go on this path, you begin to understand that bacteria and plants are foundational to the Earth system the way it is. Human beings are as Buckminster Fuller once said, "We're just throwaway," you know. We're like an add-on, that will be here for a while like the dinosaurs and, eventually, we'll be gone too. But the plants will remain, the bacteria will remain, the viruses will remain because they're all foundational in this place, we're not. But nevertheless, we have an important place here. And there's great caring for us here. Plants extend themselves. Their function and a lot of ways is to maintain the homeodynamics of the planet and they do a lot. They give a lot of themselves to make sure that that happens.

Ayana Young  This all makes me wonder what our ecological function is as a species, especially since we're inundated with information on how ecologically damaging we are. You mentioned how many people, especially so-called environmentalists, believe we're the cancer. And I've definitely gone through that. You know, once upon a time, we were wild animals, carrying seeds through landscapes and leaving our fertilizer. You know, well, a lot has changed and these days, we create GM-Terminator seeds and flush our precious organic matter into strange undergone time capsules. So, Stephen Harrod Buehner, tell us about this alternative theory you have been proposing that human intellect and creativity have arisen for specific ecological purposes. And indeed, we have a role to play in this Earth saga. Can you lay this out for us how humanity fits into it all? And why evolution has taken this bizarre turn?

Stephen Harrod Buhner  No, I don't think it's really a bizarre turn. I think that when we start off, for a lot of us, we're relatively ignorant. I mean, we remain ignorant all of our lives, really, but our ignorance just becomes minutely less over time. But we think that the whole world centers around us and our family, our culture, let's say, our neighborhood, and then, you know, we begin to notice something is awry. You know, it doesn't quite feel right. The forest being cut down doesn't feel right. We begin to notice problems and we begin to notice that the problems once we sort of follow them for a while, they sort of all come back to the human species. And really, if you want to really get into it, they really come back to two things, overpopulation and this sort of software, that we have this model of the world that's completely inaccurate to what's going on here. That sort of reductive, you know, physics, chemistry view of Earth and all of the people here. It's not accurate. It's never been accurate, but we're taught that it is. We began to notice there's problems there. So, then we start to look around, and we're horrified by the problems. If we have any empathic sense, any feeling-sense at all that's alive, we start to be very dismayed. And then a very common next step is outrage. It's like, why is the government doing this? You know, and we, in the West, we believe, you know, that we've got this sort of democratic society and everything, and the governors are there to do a good job, which they're not really. But in any event, that's what we think. And we become really outraged, and maybe they become really politically active. I went through this, it's a sort of period that we all have to go through. And then we start becoming more and more and more aware of the problems and then we start believing that the human species is a cancer or a virus, a plague, because we're destroying everything. And that's a common belief amongst the left. It's a common belief amongst many environmentalists. 

Most of us on this journey go through that process – a period of time where we believe that. And that was true for me for a very long time, but something kept sort of poking at me which was that if you accept Gaia Theory, the Gaia Hypothesis, which I do...that the Earth is a living organism that's highly intelligent, that's existed for 4 billion years or so. And you start really seeing the world more from that point of view, you begin to understand nothing is generated out of the ecological matrix of this planet except to fulfill a specific ecological function. That's the way it works and it's directly in conflict with the belief that we're taught that everything's thrown up suit through kind of blind chance, ‘The Selfish Gene,’ you know, the whole of this ridiculous Richard Dawkins-kind-of-thing about ‘it's just blind chance.’ ‘Everybody's competing.’ ‘It's red in tooth and claw.’ 

And so what happens is, you know, there's really no meaning to anything. And that's one of the reasons Jim Lovelock's stuff about Gaia got bitterly attacked because it's so confronted that fundamentalist belief that many reductive scientists have. But if you understand that the Earth is a living organism, that you finally get to the place of knowing the Earth does not make mistakes. It especially will not ever make a mistake of this magnitude, ever. So then you have to begin to ask yourself, "What's the function of the...What's the ecological function of the human species?" Buckminster Fuller got to it in his own way, said...He asked himself a question – which I thought was great. He said, "Why did I invent the atomic bomb?" not "Why did they invent it?" "Why did I invent it?" He took responsibility for the species. So what's the ecological function of the human species? 

So, you know, I got to that over, you know, many, many years of work – 20 years or so – but there were a number of seminal pieces to that. One was Jim Lovelock's work with Gaia Theory. Lynn Margulis’ work with Symbiogenesis. You know, pollinator-pollination dynamics that many people have done. And also this great question that Richard or this great statement, Richard Dawkins made. He said that, "The earth is not alive because the Earth doesn't reproduce." Now, that's an amazing statement for anybody to make. How would a guy that's going to have an average lifespan of 80 years know? If the Earth only reproduces every million years, how would any of us know? Right? 

So it's just, it's weird. It's like...And you know, there's other questions like 'What does the Bristlecone pine do during 5000 years of life?' We have no clue. If there's something it does every thousand years, we would never know. So our hubris is phenomenal. And that's why I continually say, you know, it's important to understand the degree of our ignorance and no matter who we are, our ignorance level will always be massive because that forces us to approach the world from a more humble perspective, a more humble orientation – to let it teach us about itself rather than us, you know, projecting onto it or taking the knowledge or whatever. You know, however you want to describe that. 

But you know, in Buckminster Fuller also said this great thing. He goes, "We're like bees, you see – bees who go out looking for honey without realizing that we're also for performing cross-pollination." Okay. Now, when Margulis did this great work before she died, she was truly remarkable. And she said, "All life on Earth comes from four bacterial forms. Those four bacteria blended together through this process of what she called symbiogenesis, to create every life form on Earth." That we human beings are fundamentally just complex sophistications of those four bacterial forms that have blended together – the mitochondria that power our cells are former free-living bacteria that were incorporated into cells as the power factories to make this kind of mammalian life form.

So Gaia is fundamentally bacteria more than anything else, it's bacterial. Gaia itself is this massive bacterial organism that has created massive complexities on that form – innovations on those bacterial underpinnings to more successfully maintain its homeodynamic balance point, its exquisite sensitivity to the touches of the universe on it, so that it can stay alive, stay a self-organized organism. 

And if you start really getting into which I go to in my book, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, this whole process. You know, the interesting thing is that when you see plants grow, you know, they're very vital and everything, when they begin to set seed, they use up all of the stored resources that they've gotten over the winter in the spring, and they set seed and at the end, they start to look a little bit draggled, because they've used all of that up as they set their seed. The thing is, we've been driven to go out into the universe and all of our space probes, our spaceships, our shuttles, the Mars landers – all of those things we've sent out. They are, in fact, filled with bacteria, viruses, and other organisms. And we've literally, it's like the innovation of pollinator-pollination. At first, there was wind pollination. So when volcanoes exploded or meteorites hit the Earth, they would throw up all of this matter into the universe filled with bacteria that would be caught on the cosmic winds and float until they were pulled into the gravitational sphere of another planet and then they would then go down. And you have to understand it took about a billion years for life to form here, life takes its time. But it was so much more sophisticated pollinator-pollination, where the pollinator actually takes what's needed right to the place that needs to go so life can continue. And we've been sending all of these ships pulling resources out of the ecological background of the planet to send things all through the universe, through our solar system, through our galaxy and on that are filled with bacteria and every time they touch one of those planets, they deliver the bacterial underpinnings of life, right to where it needs to go. And perhaps 500 million or a billion years from now, life will bloom there like it has here. Gaia is reproducing. It's important to understand we are not a mistake. We have a function and it's an important function, but it's not 'the most' essential function. Those belong to bacteria and plants.

Ayana Young  Wow, you've gotten me teary-eyed. I've heard a lot of, quote, big picture outlooks but this is definitely on another level. It's an enormously intriguing thought that our beloved Earth may one day have babies. But, you know, one red flag did pop up, though. It's one that I usually reserved for heaven-oriented people who accept the mistreatment of Earth, seeing heaven as a blank slate. It almost makes Earth less special or less unique. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I know, I know exactly where you're going because in a way, then you could go, "Oh, what does it matter?" Right, you don't need to do anything. It's all handled, you know. And, but the thing is, things are a lot more complicated that – you know, the understanding that this only serves one function: to counteract self-hatred. You see, we are of the Earth. We are the earth in a particular kind of form and in a way, nobody trusts the Earth less than environmentalists. You know, because they have the hubris to say, "We need to save the Earth." Well, the Earth doesn't need saving. We need saving. And actually, we don't even need saving, it's our civilization that needs saving. It's the thing that is in danger. The human species is going to go on for quite a long time. The Earth is gonna...It's dealt with problems a great deal more severe than this, but there's been this sort of self-hatred that's been built up – that we've begun to hate our own nature because of the damage and everything that we see around us. That needed to be counteractive because it's a real problem and leads people to act out of the drama triangle to find a persecutor to look at the Earth as a victim, "Oh, this poor...And it was just going along fine until we raped and destroyed it," you know. That's not a useful orientation. And that will only lead to further problems if we try to make decisions based on that kind of thinking. If you get away from that and you understand, it's a lot more complex than that. And we begin to work with a deeper understanding of things, then you begin to understand those of us who are driven with these feelings that we want to rekindle the response of the heart to what's presented to the senses. That we speak for the livingness, and intelligence of the earth and everything else that's here. That there's complex processes involved and that thing in us driving us to do that is also part of our ecological function in this time. And we have to see the journey through to its end without the despair. Without deciding that it doesn't really matter that we do anything. We have to follow the work that's in us to do. And we can focus on that thing that we're meant to do. The big picture is something Gaia has to solve. Because there's not one of us that's intelligent enough, knowledgeable enough to make full Earth decisions. None of us are wise enough. We have to trust. And a friend of mine once mentioned to me, she said she was really struck...We'd never really spent a lot of time together, but we knew of each other and met a few times but when we did, she said, "The thing that strikes me most about you, is your degree of faith." And I never thought about it that way. But Goethe said this great saying once he said, "I believe in nature and she may do as she will with me." And the thing is, we are in the service to that. We become that as best we can – to speak for the Earth, to become old-growth in our own way. But, the big picture is really up to Gaia to solve. We just have to do our part. And I have incredible faith in that – in the genius of individual human beings doing their part just as you are doing your part by creating this program, that you interview people, that you have that beautiful website, and the people that hear this, that have somehow been touched by the things you're doing. They have their place too, their work too. I believe in the genius of that, of each one of us.

Ayana Young  Thank you for joining us on Unlearn and Rewild. The music you heard was from the Cave Dwellers, a song called "Meditation." Then, Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate with "Warbe" and finally a track called "Silver Flowers" by Talvin Singh. Our theme music is "Like a River" by Kate Wolf. Our production is by March Young.