Rev. Billy Talen for BuzzFlash: Inventing a New Activism to Defend the Earth
Rev. Billy Talen (Brennan Cavanaugh)
May 31, 2022
By Rev. Billy Talen
Did anyone come away from the COP26 in Glasgow trusting the Environmental Movement to slow down Big Oil and their bankers? The conference’s corporate press release that promised “net zero CO2 by 2050” was widely derided. Then again, it also cast a chill, that the bigwigs were so confident that they believed they could get away with such suicidal gradualism.
The good thing about such a depressing scene was that a critical mass was reached. Enough people were sure that something new in the resistance to the big polluters would need to be invented. The failure of the IPCC-plus-corporate-pledges was over. Glasgow was final push that we needed. This time the indigenous mothers who led the walk-out on the final day might actually grow and grow in power. Now, a new kind of way to defend the Earth is the only possibility.
The walk out at the end was the fourth such walk out, after Poland, Madrid, and _____ . In each case there was this same hope, which died like a rainforest tree. Will it be different this time?
“Evidence points to the need for a quasi-religious transformation of cultural values.”
“The Earth will rise up to balance, to change… and there will be an invitation to humans to join. And if we do join, we can help, but it we don’t come in time, we will disappear.
The first quote is from the authors of The Population Bomb, Anne Ehrlich and Paul Ehrlich. The second quote is from Debra White Plume, spoken at Occupy Wall Street by Eagle Woman. The first quote cracks the door open, we need to be mind-expanded zealots, and that feels like XR, with Gail Bradbrooks’ call for a ‘mass psychedelic event’.
Once that door is open, though, what do we see? We see the Earth. Or say that we see the Earth in the form of a tree. And say that the tree is talking to us and we are being given instructions on how evolve as living beings on the Earth.
Score of studies are now breaking like a wave against us, that trees talk and listen, take care of their elders and children. Scientists are discovering a consciousness that cannot be framed. They can’t say what limit this awareness that trees might have, though some of the reports try to place the tree with the ‘smart’ life of honeybees, dolphins, chimps, wolves and the birds in the family of craws. (Let’s be sure that the revealing of the hidden life of trees doesn’t cast them as fundraising mascots for Big Green, like so many previous cute smart stars of mass mailing appeals.)
Natural scientists who hybrid with quantum physics find the instantaneous transfers of information-carrying energy through the plant quite different than being intelligent in a human style. When energy goes from branch of a tree to the root with such speed, that shows no evidence of friction, that the travel seems simultaneous and both directions, then trees are no longer as different from humans than chimps - no, trees are from a different world.
But they are of the same Earth. And the killing of so many trees is key to the CO2 imbalance that threatens us all. We have the scary prediction that the Amazon rainforest may at some point soon become a CO2 emitter; trees are living shorter lives or are felled by logging…
Trees are now thought to have equivalents of taste and smell, too. But the most famous discovery is the communication through roots, mycelium and ally fungi that are messengers taking word-like pulses to surrounding trees. We are now one Philip K Dick page from an entire landscape interlacing with intelligent back-and-forths. In fact, some of these cutting edge natural scientists are offering us the possibility that the Earth is wired, a white and blue brain spinning round the sun.
I’m writing my way back, by the western man route, to the wisdom of Debra While Plume (and earth culture’s generally), which is that the Earth has conscious intent. The Earth maintains life through a brutal necessary extinction, which is a decision made by the Earth. And the Earth remembers who we are and gives us a chance.
The Earth is a living force, and will we join in the current transformation? It’s possible that we can be informed on the question ’Is it too late?’ - posing the question by a psychedelic experience, as suggested by the XR co-founder. My intuition has it that we should take the example of earth cultures, who frame mind expansion in certain experiences, scheduled by the cycles of nature, or the instruction of a teacher.
Gail Bradbrook is right that something like a mass psychedelic experience is needed, just as the Ehrlichs says something like a religious vision is needed. The point is the something beyond the Environmental Movement is needed now, beyond education, connections, guilt, marketing, litigation, heroism, career, fear, anger…. These traditional motives for environmentalist that have kept us so conservative.
If the Earth speaks, that’s enough. Have you tried whispering straight into the bark? Lately I’ve been talking to trees in East River Park on the edge of the East Village in downtown Manhattan. I talk to the trees and I don’t get an answer that I understand. Well I adjusted my approached, turned the dial up to singing. Lately, I sing with friends to the trees and ask for instructions. These trees are slated for the lumber-mill by real estate and so we hug the trees when the chainsaw guys approach and we try to sing through that too.
When we are hand-cuffed and led off, we try to keep singing our messages to the trees. We sing in jail, and sing as we are released, but we can’t sing in the court, the judges prohibit that. We feel closest to hearing the trees when we are singing, and we don’t know why, precisely. We believe that we are on our way to our new activism, but we acknowledge it feels clumsy (and certainly not respected) at this point. Then again, the trees come into our dreams, and interrupt our Instagram posting. Well, we haven’t spoken this language since King James commissioned the Bible.
They have cut down 700 trees so far, and we believe the roots are talking up a storm. The 300 trees that remain must be traumatized. But maybe this is anthropomorphizing. Perhaps the Earth’s larger intelligent has made another decision about New York. We get arrested a lot, and keep singing. And return to the islands of trees in New York, surrounded by miles of pavement and brutal police. If the Earth is a single conscious being are its thoughts penetrating such a city?
New York needs large crowds of people that the scandal sheets will give a name, say, “Earthers,” and the New York Times will be terrified. Earthers fly up Broadway in feathers and fly up the fire escapes to the rooftops. We might be performance arts, or very troubled. But all that would changed if there were 50,000 Earthers walking to New Jersey and choking a refinery’s pipeline like plant-animals from Creature from the Black Lagoon.
We know that we are made of the Earth, it’s just that we torture it into screens, guns, and GMO corn. We’re made of the Earth but we will become the Earth and we will be Earthers, in a quasi-religious trance, singing, fully participating in the Earth’s uprising. We know we are made of the Earth but now we become the Earth.
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