The AllCreation Podcast

About Christina

Christina Conklin is an artist, researcher and writer. As a former religious studies major, she spends a lot of time exploring the intersections of belief systems and natural systems. She shares deep insights, stunning artworks, and terrifying research from her latest book, The Atlas of Disappearing Places.

Show Notes

1. At the very end of this podcast, AllCreation producer Chris Searles jumps in with a final question for Christina. 
2. Click here to see the video of Christina's presentation, including the slides she shares from 12:00-38:00.

References

• Deep Time
• Stephen Jay Gould
• The Life Timeline
• Deep Ecology
• Arne Naess
• Deep Adaptation
• The Atlas of Disappearing Places (book)
• Jeremy Lent
• The Deep Transformation Network 
• Deep Adaptation Network 
• Global Colab
• Transition Towns
• Breakthrough Communities

Program

0:00 Welcome & Intro

TERMS

1:40 What do “Deep Ecology, Deep Adaptation, and Deep Time” mean?

THE OCEAN

5:10 What important roles does the ocean play and how is everyone on Earth connected to it?

8:30 What are some parallels between the Oceans, bodies of water, and our own bodies — also bodies of water

CHRISTINA’S SLIDE PRESENTATION 

12:00 “THE ATLAS OF DISAPPEARING PLACES: OUR COAST AND OCEANS IN THE CLIMATE CRISIS"
To see the video or this presentation go here (link coming later today).

FOLLOW UP 

36:00 If the ocean were a body, how sick would it be?

38:45 How optimistic are you we can make the changes we need to?

CHRISTINA’S ARTWORK

44:00 It’s stunningly beautiful, tell us more 

DEEP TRANSFORMATION

46:00 What are your hopes from participating in the Deep Transformation Network?

48:30 (An interruption from producer Chris) How does the metaphor of “restoring connective tissue” relate to your ecological work and understanding?

52:00 Wrap Up

Quotes

We’re used to thinking in terms of decades and centuries, but really we’re on this much bigger timeline of Life, and I like locating myself on that timeline, it’s more grounding to me. Seeing the continuity between humans and other species, AlLL the way back into the algae, right? Let’s go ALL the way back and see the continuity.

We’re pretty sick and headed toward the hospital.

So much of what needs to happen is a paradigm shift where we re-member, Re-Member, like “belong again to the world,” and stop the idea of extraction, mastery of resources… All of these ideas came from a specific place and time in history. They have not always existed. It is not necessarily capital T, truth, in any sense.

Every religion in the world has pointed to humanity’s role as stewards of nature, as parts OF the natural order.

In much of the Developing World this is real right now.

The planetary systems are remarkably resilient. if you just leave them alone for a little while, they will find their homeostatic place again. We saw that with Covid. So, we really do have the opportunity to write new stories.

I think it’s about everybody waking up and doing everything they can. It’s now. Now is the time.

Thanks for listening.
This podcast is 1 of 4 keynotes from our Summer Solstice
2022 collection, "Restoring Connective Tissue." It was produced 
and edited by Chris Searles. 

In this interview, Jeremy Lent, "one of the greatest thinkers of our age" according to renown journalist George Monbiot, discusses ecological reality, how we understand it, and what we should do next as a society. Jeremy contrasts our modern ways of thinking about existence with the ancient ways from China and the world's Indigenous communities. He shares how connectedness, "which is to say love," is the essence of these ancient worldviews and today's burgeoning complexity science. Jeremy describes the necessity of "deep transformation" into an "ecological civilization," the reality that "the health of the whole system requires the health of each part of the system", and he shares what keeps him going.

About Jeremy

Jeremy Lent is author of two breakthrough books on consciousness and Western Civilization. The Patterning Instinct is a cultural history of humanity’s search for meaning, and The Web of Meaning explores and weaves together wisdom from ancient China, traditional Indigenous communities, Western philosophy, and today's Sciences. Jeremy also recently launched a global network for ecological civilization called The Deep Transformation Network.

References 

• The Patterning Instinct (Jeremy's first book)
• The Web of Meaning (Jeremy's second book)
• The Deep Transformation Network
• Confucianism - a philosophy / ethics
• Taoism - a philosophy / religion
• Buddhism - a philosophy / practice
• Neo-Confucianism - rationality-based fusion of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism 
• Complexity science
• Gewu: to study nature in order to learn how to trive
• António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations
• Coral reefs will collapse
• UN predicts billions of people will be facing severe water stress
• Jevons paradox
• Slavlov Zizek 
• Dualism
• The Selfish Gene is not true
• Re: the belief, "Humans and nature are selfish"
• Systems orientation to the world, how things connect 
• Mutually-beneficial symbiosis
• Consensus trance
• Ecological Civilization

Program

0:00 Welcome & Intro

A REALITY CHECK

4:00 How series is the ecological crisis? 

7:40 How much disruption & suffering do you envision? 

10:30 What’s driving this?

16:15 How have we made “meaning” here in the West?

20:30 Why do we believe Nature is a machine?

A NEW VIEW OF REALITY

24:00 What ancient Asian, Indigenous, and complexity science wisdom are you drawing from now?

28:00 Chi & Li explanation 

29:00 The contrast between neo-Confucian Gei Wu, Materialism’s desire to conquer Nature 

34:15 Separation from Nature, our way of life, is madness, isn’t it?

38:00 And the opposite, re-connecting, brings out love?

CONNECTING to an ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

39:50 So, is the first step to reconnect to our own bodies?

42: 50 What are the moral implications of our modern way of life? What is an Ecological Civilization? 

47:15 Please identify some “ecological principles”

51:10 What is The Deep Transformation Network?

53:50 What keeps you going as a “possibilitarian”? What is your spiritual source, what is helping you do this?

WRAP UP

58:00 “How are your connections?”

Quotes

 Even though in the West we’re just beginning to uncover the importance of making these connections, Traditional ways of making sense of things always focused on these connections. So in early China, for example, about 1,000 years ago, they integrated three of the great Chinese traditions from the past: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism…

You don’t have the universe without all the stuff and all the relationships…

Every one of (the big shifts) happened because of symbiosis with other species, where they take their specialist skills … and that is what we get from today, where if we walk in a forest we get … and transfer their seeds … and the fungal network underground… the whole thing is a symbiotic ecosystems. And if we can start to look at our human relationship, not at how can we conquer it, then we have a chance at shifting our trajectory.

We can really understand “love” as being really, like, the realization and embrace of (our) connectedness. When we open our eyes, to that connectedness, embrace it with our being, that is love. . . It’s all about this recognition of connectedness.

“I think therefore I am” … is saying that thinking capacity is the only thing that actually is fundamentally my identity… but again, this is where modern science shows how fundamentally wrong that is… It’s actually not the only part of our intelligence… What we really are as human beings is a combined, conceptual consciousness that allows us to think in those symbolic ways, and, what we can think of as our animate consciousness, our embodied wisdom, which actually is that vast bulk of what we are as human organisms and is also a gateway to connect us with the rest of life, because some of the deepest elements of what we have within our bodies are what we share with all life. And again, modern science validates that.

Half of the genes we see in a banana are shared with us.

… And that’s not just a gee whiz fact, what that basically points to is that the way in which our bodies organize themselves, the way in which they actually are coherent and allow us to have awareness and consciousness are deeply similar. . . In Biology this is called “homology,” the deep history of our evolution is shared with all these other creatures around us…

Once we realize that other animals, far from being machines, are actually sentient, feeling beings. and...

Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame and a research pioneer integrating work on child flourishing, human moral development, healthy psyche, and Indigenous Peoples' worldview. Professor Narvaez talks here about her breakthrough works, the meaning of "The Evolved Nest," and her new book, "Restoring the Kinship Worldview." She also shares principles and strategies for restoring feelings of connectedness, calm and security to your own life and to couples, families, and communities.

About Darcia

In addition to being Professor Emerita of Psychology Emerita at Notre Dame, Darcia is a fellow at the American Psychological Association, and at the American Educational Research Association. She has written, co-authored and edited more than 20 books. Her book, Neurobiology and The Development of Human Morality won the William James Book Award. Her newest book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview, is co-authored with Indigenous worldview scholar, Four Arrows.

References

• The Evolved Nest
• Neurobiology and The Development of Human Morality
• Restoring the Kinship Worldview
• Four Arrows (co-author / co-editor, “The Kinship Worldview”)
• 9 components of the Evolved Nest
• Alloparents 
• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Honorable Harvest (from Braiding Sweetgrass)
• Linda Hogan (Chickasaw Nation)
• Genevieve Vaughan,  Maternal Gift Economy
• Nature’s Gift Economy
• David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous 
• Human microbiome 
• Symbiosis
• Melvin Konnor
• James Prescott 
• Allan Schore, neurobiological attachment
• Jon Young, Coyote games
• Tamarack Song, games to develop intuition
• David Bohm, physicist, “The real intelligence is insight intelligence and it comes in from the outside.”

Program

0.00 Welcome & Intro

I. THE KINSHIP WORLDVIEW 

2:50 What is a “worldview”? 
4:30 What is a “Kinship” worldview?
6:58 Contrast the Indigenous worldview of connection with the Western worldview of disconnectedness 

II. THE EVOLVED NEST

9:35 What are the characteristics of an “evolved nest”? 

11:35 Components of the Evolved Nest:

>>  11:45 Soothing perinatal experiences

>>   13:00 Breast feeding

>>   14:25 Lots of affectionate touch, no negative touch

>>   15:20 A welcoming social climate

>>   16:25 Alloparents who are responsive 

>>   16:55 Self-directed play with multiple-age playmates

>>   17:55 Nature connection 

>>   19:14 Routine healing experiences 

22:20 On being an animal 

III. RESTORING THE KINSHIP WORLDVIEW

24:55 Talking about the book -- What are you trying to convey with the precepts? 

30:18 Darcia: To understand our Nature as a Human species is to understand what Thriving looks like

>>   happy, calm, quiet minds, gleeful, childlike

>>   sense of humor that’s not hostile

>>   holding hands, sitting together, enjoying being together… 

>>   try to make the other person laugh and feel safe

>>   there’s no big ego, it’s “us”.
32:00 The Honorable Harvest, Darcia shares favorite quotes, including: “Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will live forever.”

34:50 What healing medicine feels like; Tom shares a quote

37:05 Darcia: We have a lot of unhealed grief and trauma we pass on, instead of taking time to heal

37:30 What is the relationship between the Sacred Feminine and The Maternal Gift Economy? 

40:25 Communion, holy union, co-creation, and our interconnectedness 

41:10 Darcia on Nature connection and her “Ecological Attachment”, experiment

42:30 Rooted and connected: “Our roots extend out from our skin and our other body cavities.” 

43:20 The microbiome; "We are communities"

44:00 Where does your passion for restoring kinship come from? How are you teaching this? 

IV. RESTORING OUR WORLD
48:10 What should we be doing to restore The Nest?

>>   Make sure you yourself are centered; Nature connection is one of the best ways to heal. 

>>   Learn to get back to social joy. 

>>   Learn to guide the conscious mind into connection; build the communal imagination. 

52:12 What is sustaining your spirit right now?

>>   I sing to the 6 directions

>>   I sing on my land

>>   Lying on the Earth, leaning against a tree, huggling with spouse

>>   Try to make my husband laugh, sing and dance together.

>>   Keep aware: "I am and always will be part of the Earth."

V. CONCLUSION

54:30 Final thoughts

>>   The first precept: the recognition of spiritual energy in Nature; find that guardian spirit... 

57:00 Tom reads a final quote, on Community Welfare (Dona Enriqueta Contreras)

57:56 End

Quotes

Everything the baby experiences engraves the brain for life. So you want to make sure you don’t distress the baby because then you’re shifting the trajectory away from wellness towards illness or ill-being or adversity.

(In a) welcoming social climate, the mother feels supported, the baby is wanted, the community is delighted with having the baby around, and the baby feels like they belong, that they can make a difference, make other people smile and laugh as they are made to smile an...

From AllCreation's Spring 2022 edition, "Dominionism: Exploring religious relationships with other life." Guest editor, Rev. Dr. Dan De Leon, interviews Rev. Erin Walter on the Unitarian Universalist understanding of the Genesis 1:26 concepts of "dominion" and "dominionism." 

"And God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.'" (Genesis 1:26)

About Erin

Rev. Erin J. Walter (she/her/hers) is Minister and Executive Director for the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry (TXUUJM), coach for Beloved Conversations, and a community minister at Wildflower Church in Austin, TX. Erin is a winner of the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation Sermon Award, a former journalist, and singer/songwriter/bassist for the band Parker Woodland. She is a lifelong Unitarian Universalist (UU), an adviser to the SIMS Foundation, currently serving on the board of Texas Impact. 

Program

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:39 About Erin’s band, Parker Woodland
• 02:30 About Erin’s UU ministry and the Texas UU Justice Ministry
• 03:15 Why is environmental stewardship a priority for you and the TX UU
• 05:10 Do UUs believe they have “dominion” over the Web of LIfe?
• 06:20 Dominionism comes from Genesis I. Many people believe that’s an open and shut case for taking without replenishing and having domination. But that changes with the “web of life” connotation, it changes the relationship with the word. What is the identity of humankind in the web of life for a UU? 
• 11:20 The here and now… Seeing the Earth as divine increases our sense of urgency to take care of the here and now… Tell us more about a UU take on the present in contrast with a Christian.
• 14:00 “When Jesus instructs us how to pray, he gives us two prayers: the Lord’s prayer and in Revelation, which ends with saying that "God comes to live with them" — us! God comes to be with us. Why wouldn’t we want to take really good care of the Creation in order to make way for the Creator?”
• 19:00 The Christian Climate lament: "Do I work for companies that are going to perpetuate doing with Creation whatever they want? Or, do I help the Earth and go broke? ...That’s the world we’re living in?!" This is difficult to counsel on. 
• 23:00 What are you working on politically right now? 
• 26:30 Is the Creation Coalition limited to UUs only? 
• 27:30 Metanoia. Some of what I’m learning from editing this issue is there’s a common thread, “Nothing’s going to change unless we change our perspective. How we look at the environment has to change. Nothing can be more encouraging than the recognition that I’m not alone. If we can unite across our differences, that will foster more of that change of perspective.
• 30:53 Where do you get your hope from? 

References

• Rev. Darrick Jackson
• Meadville Lombard Theological Seminary
• Rev. Fred Small  
• The Creation Coalition
• UU Ministry for Earth (UUMFE)
• Build Back Fossil Free
• Beloved Conversations
• Woyaya

Quotes

We’re a non-creedal faith, so the folks in the pew sitting next to you might not believe the same thing about the Divine.

Our faith connections are around principles and values, not so much around creed or dogma. So for us, one of those principles is the interconnectedness of the web of life that we consider us all to be a part of.

Many of us fall into that category where our spirits are concerned about how we care for each other and how we steward our relationships, our lives, and our actions in the here and now.

I was raised UU, and “dominionism” is really not a word I heard at church.

We meet in a place of community, sustenance, and sustainability for this home.

If all of this is God’s Kingdom, can we treat it as holy? And, what do we have to lose?

Yes, I often just feel incredible awe and gratitude to just be in this world, it’s, it’s amazing.

I hadn’t thought about humankind as being at the top of any living creature hierarchy.

There’s a lot of economic and justice layers to how we make our work choices to reflect our values.

We have this balance to strike, of facing the hard work that we have to do and making sure we have support to do the work.

If not us, who?

Spiritual tools are really important. One of the things I’m constantly talking about is that we do not fall into despair. We need our joy practices, our spiritual practices, our sustenance practices, to keep us uplifted enough to be doing the work.

If there’s one thing that I would hope people across all kinds of political and religious differences could unite around, it would be stewardship of the Earth.

I always want to encourage people to find one thing that they can do WITH the interconnected web of our lives; we're not going to each be doing it alone.

I mean, the coalition work feels like "The Way" to me, you know. Again, it's this inherent worth and dignity of every person, like, yes, I want to be affirmed for who I am as an individual, but the liberation for the Earth and for Each other is going to be achieved Together.

We need to be willing to meticulously make small steps, build relationships one conversation at a time, one meeting at a time, one experience at a time, while also holding this radical, amazing vision of the beloved community we can be building together. We need to see the big, glorious picture while also being willing to do what you and I are doing right now, just have one on one conversations.

What’s your theme song?

###############

Thanks for listening.
This podcast is part of our Spring 2022 series, Dominionism.
Visit the AllCreation podcast site or AllCreation.org for more.
Produced and edited by Chris Searles.
See the whole "Dominionism" collection here.

From AllCreation's Spring 2022 edition, "Dominionism: Exploring religious relationships with other life." Guest editor, Rev. Dr. Dan De Leon, interviews Rabbi Matt Rosenberg on the Jewish, religious meaning of "dominion" and "dominionism," which appear in the Jewish and Christian Bibles. 

"And God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.'" (Genesis 1:26)

About Matt
Rabbi Matt Rosenberg began his tenure as the executive director of the Albert Einstein Residence Center, Sacramento’s senior Jewish housing community, in January 2021. A California native, Matt earned his undergraduate degree in geography from UC Davis, earned his masters degree in rabbinic studies from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, and a masters degree in geography from CSU Northridge. He spent 18 years operating the ThoughtCo.com website, is  author of two books on geography, and currently lectures in geography at Sacramento State University.

Program

• 00:00 Welcome
• 01:25 Self intro
• 02:45 Is there an environmental ethic in Judaism & what does that look like?
• 05:15 Expansions on: "Helping the Earth be all that God dreams of it to be.” Anthropocentrism means humans can take whatever we want. Is there an anti-Anthropocentricism? Is there an interpretation of Dominionism that is not so narcissistic as today’s?
• 08:00 Are you a vegetarian? To what extent is that rooted in your faith?
• 08:45 Did you grow up looking at the environment through the lease of the Creation stories, as “God made this?”, or as something that could be compartmentalized?
• 10:22 Being reminded of our “creaturely identity” comes from being in Nature. 
• 14:40 In Deuteronomy 20:19. I can hear, “Trees are better than you”, how does this ethic expand? 
• 16:30 Would an understanding of Tu-B’shivat now look at the Earth and feel that we’re doing enough? 
• 19:00 In the last 5% of human history, fundamentally, what changed? Why did we go from such a long history of belonging and relationship with the Creation to this? 
• 22:00 “Metanoia” means a change of heart, a change or direction based on a change of perspective. How we see the world is directly going to effect how we treat it. Has your environmental view always been a part of your Judaism or more of a metanoia over time where you’ve been able to incorporate it as a piece of your Judaism? 
• 25:00 What gives you hope? 

Quotes

God created the universe and therefore has complete ownership over all creation, and humans are God’s partners in bettering Creation.

Religious traditions are human-focused—they’re not for the whales and the dolphins, but it’s our job, according to my understanding, to maintain the basic balance to this order of Creation.

Yes, the mitzvah (the commandment) to not destroy, comes from Deuteronomy 20, which says you can eat of the fruit trees but you cannot cut them down. Trees are people, too, and we should prevent all unnecessary destruction.

We have this concept of “All the more so” … If you cannot cut down trees in wartime, all the more so should you not cut down trees when it’s not war.

We can absolutely do better. There’s no greater crisis right now, and we should be observing Tu BiShvat everyday; we’re on this path of destruction of humanity. The Earth will survive for billions more years and I think God has put us on this Earth to find this balance, to find a role where we can use the Earth’s resources and not abuse the Earth’s resources. There’ve been humans on Earth for 200,000 years. We’ve only recently disrupted the balance.

We have but a few years to figure out where we’re going to go from here and how we’re going to protect our planet for our children and our children’s children, truly.

My hope comes from that fact that humans are creative and we can come up with solutions, and there are answers to climate change and the problems we see on our planet, and I have faith that my children’s generation and their children’s generation will do better. I see this long arc towards the betterment of the world.

###############

Thanks for listening.
This podcast is part of our Spring 2022 series, Dominionism.
Visit the AllCreation podcast site or AllCreation.org for more.
Produced and edited by Chris Searles.
See the whole "Dominionism" collection here.

From AllCreation's Spring 2022 edition, "Dominionism: Exploring religious relationships with other life," guest edited by Rev. Dr. Dan De Leon. Dan speaks here with Imam Islam Mossaad about Dominionism from an Islamic scriptural perspective. 

About Imam Mossaad
Imam Islam Mossaad has served as imam for the North Austin Muslim Community Center (NAMCC) from May 2008 – January 2015 and returned to NAMCC January 2018 to the present time. He has also served as Imam for the Islamic Center of Little Rock from September 2003 until May 2006 and Imam for the Islamic Community of Bryan-College Station January 2017 – January 2018.  Imam Islam is a Hafidh of Quran (he has committed the entire Quran to memory) and has received life-long Islamic education from scholars of Islam here in the United States and through his formal studies with Mishkhâh University.  He has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Imam Mossaad has diverse professional experience.  He has worked as an engineer, engineering consultant, Islamic school principal, teacher, and Imam.  He strives to unite Muslims along the Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet Mohammed (Peace be upon him).  He also seeks to educate people on the beauty of Islam while promoting tolerance and mutual understanding. Imam Islam Mossaad is a long-time Austinite, is American born and raised with Egyptian parentage.  He is married and has two children. This interview is one of the features from our Spring 2022 collection, Dominionism. Thank you, Imam Mossaad!

References

• Names of God: 
  • Ar-Rahman, The Most Merciful
  • Ar-Rahman / Ar-Rahmeen, "entirely merciful, most kind"
  • Al-Jabbar, The Compeller
• Arabic Words
  • Al-Aalameen, encompassing everything except Allah
  • Amana, trust, honesty, faithfulness 
  • Rabb, God (Allah)
  • Jinn, spirit creatures preceding humans 
• Dr. Sayyed Hossein Nasr
  • 2009 lecture discussed here
• Bible verses
  • Genesis 1:26
  • Leviticus 18:22

Program

• 00:01 Welcome & intro
• 00:30 Self introduction 
• 03:55 Cultural Ambassador. How much of your time is spent introducing Islam to people in the West? 
• 05:20 Islam & the Environment. What is a traditionally Islamic view of the environment, and how do Muslims understand their relationship with the environment in terms of having "dominion" over the Earth?
• 10:30 Accountability & Relationship. For Muslims, “dominion” cannot be separated from accountability?
• 13:30 Disconnect. In 1956, Dr. Sayyed Nasr predicted the environmental crisis (paraphrased), “There’s nothing as important in the world. Most Muslims do not realize there’s a disconnect, the environmental crisis is driven by a blindness to [our sacred] teachings about Nature."
• 21:55 "The All Encompassing." On Nasr's statement, “God is the environment into which we are born, in which we live, in which function, and in which we die.” 
• 26:10 Names of God. Christians see Christ himself, “as surely as you do it to what you see you do it to me." I hear similar themes. 
• 32:40 Self-love. "Love one another as we love ourselves."
• 37:15 Anthropocentrism. What is the Islamic view on Anthropcentrism, the idea that humans are the most important creatues in the world.
• 42:00 Sharia Law. Do Muslims actually abide by the environmental commandments of Islamic holy law?
•  49:20 Right relationship. What will happen to the tree if I don’t do right by it? How can I live in right relationship with the whole of creation? 
• 53:30 Metanoia. How do we need to change how we see? What is the Islamic view of "dominionism" and does that view need to change? 
• 56:25 Spiritual Growth. Has the way you see the environment changed over time for you or your family?

Quotes

“Allah” is the name in Arabic for “the one God.”

Islam means submission and peace through submission. So we submit along with the trees, the birds, the animals, the galaxy, they are Muslim, meaning they are in submission to God.

“The Prophet Muhammad’s divine inspiration came through being in Nature… We see nature as a sacred sign from God.”

This idea of having dominion, or “to subdue, and to dominate,” those are anathema actually in the Islamic context, but there is definitely an idea of what some modern day authors are [calling] stewardship; so, “halifa.”

You are answerable to God for what you do with the animals and the plants and the streams, and so there’s a lot of this feeling of accountability before God for the Nature that we are entrusted with.

One of the names of God is The Most Beautiful, and so when we see beauty it should draw us closer to the wonder for the beauty of God himself, the beauty in Nature and the patterns and the colors, and as you mentioned, just the wind blowing thru the leaves, and so on. It can take a person to another mystical plain.

How we treat animals really says a lot about our inner spirituality or our inner world and our inner self.

A very powerful feeling to have, is to feel communion not just with your fellow human being but even with the blades of grass, with the molecules in the air, and this oneness with everything. Go out into Nature -- into a stream, into a lake -- and just watch the ripples, and just enjoy that whole feeling that you’re getting of closeness to God. 

Nature connects us to God and we don’t want to lose that.

###############

Thanks for listening.
This podcast is part of our Spring 2022 series, Dominionism.
Visit the AllCreation podcast site or AllCreation.org for more.
Produced and edited by Chris Searles.
See the whole "Dominionism" collection here.

This is the keynote interview for AllCreation's Spring 2022 edition, "Dominionism: Exploring religious relationships with other life," guest edited by Rev. Dr. Dan De Leon. Dan speaks here with Dr. Norman Wirzba about Genesis 1:26, the context it was written in, and how knowing all that changes the modern Christian perspective. 

"And God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.'" (Genesis 1:26)

About Dr. Wirzba
Dr. Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke Divinity School. Dr. Wirzba’s research and teaching interests are at the intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and agrarian and environmental studies. He lectures frequently in Canada, the United States, and Europe. His research is centered on a recovery of the doctrine of creation and a restatement of humanity in terms of its creaturely life. He is currently the director of a multi-year, projected entitled “Facing the Anthropocene” where he works with an international team of scholars to rethink several academic disciplines in light of challenges like climate change, food insecurity, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, species extinction, and the built environment. Visit NormanWirzba.com for more.

Written Works

• Dr. Wirzba has published and edited numerous books, the latest of which is This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World. 

Program

• 00:02 Dan's Intro
•  01:57 Welcome Dr. Wirzba
• 02:37 Dr. Wirzba self-introduction, "It doesn't seem there could be a more important conversation than how to live together..."
• 08:50 Scripture conversation begins -- Genesis I: "I give you Dominion"
• 16:45 Understanding the context of the language is very helpful; some biblical metaphors can now be made literal 
• 20:20 "God created us for Intimacy with the Land”
• 28:00 Distinction between idolatry and iconic perception
• 34:55 Repositioning of our perspective; What is “Nature” and what is “Creation”
• 42:40 “The Gospel being for all creatures”
• 44:40 “Jesus as creator” 
• 51:25 "How to pray", re: The Lord’s Prayer and “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven”. You write that in order to make that real we must restore relationships with the actual land on which people live… To make this sacred prayer realized, what are some practical ways we can restore relationships with the actual land on which we live?
• 56:00 re: Awakening & Connecting to other Life, Metanoia: a change of heart and direction, and Purification: giving one another the ability to see God’s creatures -- I hear that in you saying we need to have time for Metanoia. "What was your metanoia?"

References

• Dr. Seyyed Nasr lecture, 2009
• From Nature to Creation - Norman Wirzba book
• This Sacred Life - Norman Wizba book
• The Gerasene demoniac

Quotes

It doesn’t seem that there could be a more important question than to figure out how to live well, in our places, with each other.

How can we do this to our world? How can we be damaging it so badly?

Scripture assumes a God who loves the world… And the question for me is: how can we say we worship a God who loves the world but not give our love to the world at the same time?

These are Agrarian people.

As a farm kid, the first thing you know is that… you don’t ever presume to do with your land or your animals whatever you want… You know that as a farmer you are only successful in so far as your animals are healthy and your land, your soil, is fertile. Which means that good farmers are always very attentive to the needs of the land, to the needs of plants, to the needs of their animals… It’s the realization that you can’t possibly succeed if the world that feeds you does not do well at the same time.

Subduing means learning to come alongside fellow creatures so that in taking care of their needs you also take care of your own.

We are all together sharers in this divine breath that animates Ground into the diversity of Creatures that we see.

God understands that apart from soil, plant, and animal life, we can’t possibly survive, we can’t possibly thrive, and we can’t possibly be happy.

The first creatures that are presented to “the Adám,” as someone to help them in their loneliness, are animals.

Let’s go to the second creation story. We forget about the Garden. The image you get there is the first human being, Adam, being animated out of soil. God is the first gardener.

We are made to feel connection with soil, plants, animals, and people, because those are all the places where God is active.

Scripture affirms a position in which God is present to creatures all of the time, desiring for them to live into the fullness of their lives.

It doesn’t make sense to talk about human flourishing if everything (humans) need, in the form of water, and air, and food, if it doesn’t flourish at the same time.

All things came into being through His word.

When you’re living the life God wants you to, animated by this loving power, there is no better life.

I think the first thing to do is for people just to get outside, and: Notice. Look. Pay Attention. Smell. Feel. Touch. Grieve.

The thing to start is just to try to calm down and center yourself in your neighborhood.

Children can be our teachers, too. 

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Thanks for listening.
This podcast is part of our Spring 2022 series, Dominionism.
Visit the AllCreation podcast site or AllCreation.org for more.
Produced and edited by Chris Searles.
See the whole "Dominionism" collection here.

"We are commanded to sustain the world."
- Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin & Rabbi Avram Resiner

“They shall forever inhabit this earth, the result of My planting, the work of My hands in which I glory.” (Isaiah 60:21)

Shmita is a set of commandments in the Jewish and Christian Bibles (The Torah) to practice and celebrate the cyclical "release" of agricultural lands, financial debts, slaves, and ancestral lands. "Shmita Live" was a conversation on Zoom, March 1, 2022 exploring the ancient shmita commandments' many meanings today. The event brought together a number of the amazing people who contributed to AllCreation.org's "Shmita Now" collection, created by guest editor Yaira Robinson. Our fun and incisive hour celebrates these fine folks, welcomes some outstanding guests, and gives everyone a chance to share some truly breakthrough ideas on how to integrate the ancient shmita commandments into our lives now. We hope you enjoy listening. Co-hosted by: AllCreation.org, National Wildlife Federation, Shmita Project Northwest, and Hazon. Presented by BioIntegrity Partnerships. Original event page: Shmita Live.

Background info: 

• The shmita verses: Exodus 23: 10-11, Leviticus 25:2–7, Leviticus 25:20–22, and Deuteronomy 15:1–3
• "Shmita Live" PDF with panelists' names & links (for download)
• Shmita explanation on Wikipedia

PANELISTS

• Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin of St. Mary's Seminary, and MDEHR 
• Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb of Adat Shalom, Interfaith Power & Light, and COEJL
• Dr. Mirele Goldsmith of Jewish Earth Alliance
• Simcha Scwhartz of Wilderness Torah
• Rabbi Laura Bellows of Dayenu
• Nati Passow of Dayenu, and Jewish Farm School
• Shmita Project Northwest's Deirdre Gabbay
• Hazon's Sarah Zell Young
• National Wildlife Federation's Naomi Edelson
• AllCreation.org's Chris Searles (moderator)

PROGRAM
I. WELCOME 

• 0:00 Preroll
• 0:08 Welcome & Introductions -- by Chris Searles (moderator), AllCreation.org 
• 3:35 "Shmita 101" by Deirdre Gabbay (co-host), Shmita Project Northwest

II. PANELIST SELF-INTRODUCTIONS 

• 6:30 Naomi Edelson, senior dir., National Wildlife Federation. references: Deuteronomy 30:19 (the life verse), and -> Sacred Grounds <- "Sacred Grounds" is National Wildlife Federation's native plant program for congregations. 
• 9:39 Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin, conservative rabbi, St. Mary's Seminary; exec. dir., Maryland Campaign for Environmental Human Rights (MDEHR). references: The Kotzker Rebbi ("We are here to hold up the heavens."), Shabbas candles / Luminous light of Creation. 
• 13:22 Rabbi Laura Bellows, dir. of spiritual activism, Dayenu. references: The Talmud, The Boat story, With All of Our Might (Dayenu program). 
• 17:00 Sarah Zell Young, dir. of strategic partnerships, Hazon. references: Hazon's Shmita Project, Shmita Prizes, Shmita Sourcebook. 
• 19:45 Simcha Schwarz, dir. of development and communications, Wilderness Torah. references: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Center for Earth-based Judaism
• 22:10 Deirdre Gabbay, co-fndr, dir., Shmita Project Northwest. references: Washington Interfaith Power & Light.
• 23:58 Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, rabbi, Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, chair, Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), board member, Interfaith Power & Light. references: Sacred Grounds, Mussar (enlightenment ethics), Anavah (humility), "Taking up the right amount of space," Chesed (loving kindness), Kavod (honor).
• 26:29 Dr. Mirele Goldsmith, co-fndr, co-chair, Jewish Earth Alliance. references: "messes that we're in": filthy air, mountaintop removal, fracking watewater.
• 40:57 Nati Passow (arriving later), opr. mngr., Dayenu. references: Jewish Farmer Network, Nati's pdf "Shmita year by year" (coming soon).  

III. PANELISTS' CONVERSATION & END

• 29:00 Deepening connections
• 43:12 Shmita...

In this podcast guest editor Yaira Robinson explores different ways shmita values are being put into action today. Naomi Edelson, senior director of Wildlife Partnerships at The National Wildlife Federation and Dr. Mirele Goldsmith, environmental psychologist and co-chair of Jewish Earth Alliance, tell us about their projects to restore wildlife on congregational grounds and advocate for a greener, more equal, local community.

About Our Guests
Naomi Edelson is the Senior Director of Wildlife Partnerships for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). In this role, she leads partnerships with state wildlife agencies and other state based partners to secure greater funding to prevent wildlife from becoming endangered, including legislative, communications, grassroots, and coalition building elements of the campaign. On the federal side this includes the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act campaign. Naomi has also developed a toolkit for wildlife leaders on “Strengthening State Wildlife Agencies” that includes securing state-level funding for wildlife with numerous tips, tools, and case studies. She also works with Gardening for Wildlife program to restore wildlife habitat where people live, work, learn, play, and worship, including creation of the Native Plant Finder and Sacred Grounds, a program for faith communities. Naomi is a wildlife biologist with a M.S. from the University of Florida where she studied wading birds and wetlands, and a B.S. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Dr. Mirele B. Goldsmith is an environmental psychologist, educator, and activist. She is an expert in how to change human behavior to solve environmental problems. As director of Hazon’s Jewish Greening Fellowship, she guided 55 community-based organizations to save energy, invest in renewables, implement sustainable operations and educate youths and adults. She co-founded Jewish Earth Alliance, a national network mobilizing Jews to raise a moral voice for action on climate change to the US Congress.

Naomi References 

• Dr. Doug Tallamy
• Dr. Tallamy’s native plant research (“super plants”)
• Dr. Doug Tallamy, “Bringing Nature Home”
• Plantings on sacred grounds 
• NWF.org/sacredgrounds
• NWF.org/gardenforwildlife
• NWF.org/nativeplantfinder
• NWF.org/nativeplants

Mirele References

• Jewish Community Relations Council 
• Jewish Earth Alliance
• Speak Truth to Power: A Guide for Congregations Taking Public Policy Positions 
• Thrive Plan 2050 (“Thrive 2050”)

Naomi Quotes

“Sacred Grounds” helps congregations green the outside of their grounds. Our effort is focused on what is outside your door and how can we make that more hospitable for both wildlife and people. 

We’re encouraging the replacement of lawns with native plants. The idea is to replace lawns with the plants that have co-evolved with wildlife, and when you plant them they provide food and cover and homes for wildlife. But at the same time, they help people because they’re actually changing how the water is on the land. 

The basic program is to green some of your grounds, and it can be a very small area. Engage your congregation members. Then also reaching beyond your congregation and being leaders within the community, and getting neighbors and other congregations and other institutions in your community to do this. We’re really working to create a movement with congregations being at the center of it. 

We want to create, even in urban and suburban areas, biologically-important areas. 

We don’t have to just do it on our public lands. We have to help by doing it where we live, work, play, and worship. And we can make a huge difference by, all of us together, putting in these native plants. 

Saving wildlife saves us. 

It’s a simple food web story that most of learned going to school. And we, in our own yards and at our congregation grounds, can help support that and really make sure our landscapes are Life-sustaining. 

It’s very exciting and it’s very fun. 

It gave people a way to plant with purpose. Not just to plant something that’s beautiful, but to plant something that really matters for people and wildlife. 

The most essential ingredient is getting a green team going.

You could do something for even a few hundred dollars to start, and you’ll have to take out some lawn. But luckily, what’s beginning to happen is, some local governments are offering incentives for this. My county offers congregations up to $20,000 to put in features that will slow the flow. They also offer up to $7,000 for homes to put in native plant gardens. 

There’s a huge problem with storm run off and it’s getting worse, and so I do think is something that is going to happen more. 

(Some) towns have very updated ordinances around what a yard should look like. And so National Wildlife Foundation have actually created a tool kit to advocate for changing ordinances at the local level so you can change that. 

All religions have a concept of “caring for creation.” They may or may not use that exact language. But it is that idea that we’re part of this beautiful world, and we have responsibilities to help it continue, and that we’re totally interconnected and that saving wildlife saves us, and we really need that in this time, and it’s a fun way, positive, very significant way to make a difference in the world a Jew would call, “Tikkun Olam,” repairing the world. 

And most religions also talk about caring for neighbors and this is a way we can do that. . . by putting in these native plants. 

Mirele Quotes

Congregations are tax exempt organizations, but yes congregations can lobby on legislative issues and policy matters… according go the IRS they’re allowed to engage in lobbying as long as they’re an insubstantial part of their activities. The only thing they’re not allowed to do is engage in political campaigns. 

Lobbying is to be encouraged. . . We like to say that people of faith walk in a different door than other advocates and may get a little more of an attentive hearing because of that. . . We can really make a difference. 

In our congregation and particularly our climate action team we were thinking about, “what would be an appropriate project for us to get inv...

Sharing Shmita: The Shmita Project Northwest
Deirdre Gabbay, director of The Shmita Project Northwest, takes us on a journey of possibilities, exploring how shmita could inspire change in our communities. Does the world need a Shmita year? Deirdre Gabbay shares not only an explanation of what her group is doing, but her inspirations and thinking on the many  ways  a Shmita year is a good template for how we address modern social crises. Shmita isn’t just about letting the land rest, it’s about the release of debt, slaves, and property, including ancestral homelands. Deidre has a lot of amazing insights, challenging us to think about why need a Shmita and what a Shmita practice might look like today.

About Deirdre
Deirdre Gabbay is director of The Shmita Project Northwest, an organization dedicated to bringing attention to the Hebrew calendar's seven-year Shmita cycle which centers the relationship between the earth and the wellbeing of the human and more-than-human world, through education, inspiration, community-building, and programmatic support. She founded Ahavat v'Avodat HaAdamah, "Love and Service of the Earth," in 2015 to establish an environmental presence for the Pacific Northwest rooted in Jewish text, tradition, and practice, specifically to support a response to climate change. Deirdre is a member of Congregation Beth Shalom, Seattle, and a member of the board of directors of Earth Ministry/Washington Interfaith Power & Light. She blogs at shmitainseattle.com, where all of her divrei Torah (sermons) can be found.

References

• Parshat Behar-Bechukotai
• Torah

Quotes

The texts spoke to me and sort of gave me this vision. I was also really taken with the much more scary depiction that if we don't manage to get things right we're going to experience waves of increasing severity of really bad things, brought about by human pride, which actually creates the hostility of the landscape to the human being. . . "So what are you going to do? Are you going to continue along this course or are you going to reverse course?" Until in the end comes exile and the only way to set the land right, in that part of the text, is, you guessed it, through Shmita.

The global pandemic and overlapping climate and weather-related catastrophes that we all have been going through I think has taught us some really, really important lessons that I think are related to Shmita. And one of them is: really large calamities, like we read about in the Bible, these plagues, they can happen. They can happen in our time.

But then on the positive side, they really taught us that discontinuity of human behavior is possible... As scary as it was it was (the Covid years) it also encouraging. And now all of us, across the planet, have this muscle memory — that things can actually jump out of their ruts, and honestly we're gonna need to be able to jump out of our ruts if we want to try to live sustainably going forward.

So this pattern breaking, from Covid, in some ways gives us a hints of what a Shmita year could be. We sort of have a choice between, it could either be like the one we just had... and the Torah teaches that it gets worse not better if we don't learn the lessons that we're being offered. Or, we could learn to really welcome a Shmita year -- to actually accept voluntarily and lovingly that a year of rest can be a really positive thing. 

What if we were to embrace this, what would a Shmita year look like? 

One of the strengths of a Faith-based point of view is that there’s a vocabulary for a sense of commanded-ness... So how do we summon this sense of commanded-ness? One way is to appeal to these commandments. 

The maximalist vision I have is that someday the whole world will recognize the need for the land to rest for a whole year and that they will rest alongside of it in some meaningful way.  

The cool thing about Shmita, is that it's not even a human commandment at this level. It’s the earth, it’s the land that’s commanded to rest and to observe a Sabbath of complete rest for the Lord. It’s about a relationship that we’re not really even a part of. This is part of the way the world works. It’s part of an operating manual between God and the land. That's a perspective I like to keep.

What if ordinary people were to take a year off from their lives… The Shmita would open this up for ordinary people to think about how to bring this into our culture… I think the Shmita raises the possibility of thinking about this outside of a global pandemic. 

Shmita is deeply concerned about social justice. Shmita isn’t just about letting the land rest, it’s about the release of debts, and it's also about jubilee. . . If you can't repay a debt, then you're supposed to be allowed to walk upright. . .We're having a conversation about how much debt is good for a society. 

Even more intriguing, it has something to say about the need to prevent intergenerational poverty, the passing down of poor circumstances from one generation to the next. 

What could this correspond to today? How might it look? 

Inequality that's left to continue and roll-over from one generation to the next, particularly if it causes some people to be squeezed-out of full participation in society; this is addressed in Torah and a solution is put forward in Torah. We too should put forward a solution. 

For me, it's really important that we learn to take care of the actual place where we live. . . We need to be rooted in place. 

I really hope people feel they have been invited to make aspects of this real...

And just know that this is a very appealing idea that many people are interested in and it can help connect. The belief that we're all in this together is, I think, the most comforting and also the most powerful message we have. 

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Thanks for listening.
This podcast is part of our Winter 2021 series, Shmita Now.
Visit the AllCreation podcast site or AllCreation.org for more. 
Produced and edited by Chris Searles.
Audio processing and improving by Jeff Haley.