Learning Earthmind in a Time of War
by Deena Metzger, plus Mary Woodbury talks to Mark Ballabon about his YA novel HOME
“To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
I am sitting outside in the patio looking onto the Santa Monica mountains, green fields and hills, peppered with yellow mustard flowers. It is a wildly beautiful summer day, one of the last days of winter. I relish this day as the grass will soon turn brown for lack of rain and fire season will probably begin early.
For several long summers, I sat here in this way, in the shade of Eucalyptus trees, writing, watching for fires, listening to the counsel of an old woman, La Vieja, who had, herself, taken refuge in a Fire Lookout in the Sierras, watching for fires. She is living there to see what we must see in these times, and she demands that I do likewise. That we do likewise.
I have sat here with this focus and intent since October 2017. Today, March 1, 2022, the book, La Vieja, A Journal of Fire, emerges into the world. For the last five years, La Vieja slid between dimensions, slipped into various realms of the human and non-human, made connections across time and space, gathering ways of seeing and knowing that are significantly different from how we are living our lives. She was looking as far as she could across this Earth, back into history, forward to the future, struggling to comprehend how to meet a world continuously, self-righteously set on fire each day through the most commonplace and conventional habits, activities, assumptions and beliefs.
It is bitter that she comes into the world today as another unconscionable war proceeds in Ukraine and the UN IPCC assessment 2022 is released. What does this simultaneity of war and climate dissolution indicate? What is it we are called to see?
“Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC says. “This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction.” The report asserts, “Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature...”
“Human-induced climate change …. Miles of lines of tanks.
“Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today.
Today, March 2, 2022, an even more violent attack on Ukraine cities has begun. A news photo shows a group of Ukrainian people standing across the road blocking access to a nuclear plant in Enehodar.
In 1945, the US dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. The Fukishima nuclear disaster was in 2011.
The American Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, "We have seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs – which are banned under the Geneva Convention.”
“The United States dropped about 1,228 cluster bombs containing 248,056 bomblets between October 2001 and March 2002.” [1] “The United States also used cluster bombs extensively in its cave campaigns near Tora Bora and Shahi-Kot. [2] Forty-six of the reported 232 strikes fell on these regions. [3] Reporters who arrived at an al-Qaeda camp in mid-December described the aftermath of a cluster strike, including denuded trees, shredded clothing, "twisted cooking pots," torn religious books, and dead al-Qaeda fighters.” [4]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that if a third world war were to occur, it would involve nuclear weapons and be destructive, according to Russian media.
Conservative as the IPCC report must be in order to be approved by the 195 government members, it, inevitably, does not mention war as a major contributor to the destruction of the environment. It does not say that every war is a war on the earth. The report says we must change our use of fossil fuels now; it does not say we must end war now.
Perhaps this is the most unlikely time, the most necessary moment to say no to war, to say no to ecocide, to recognize they are intrinsically inter-related and to act now.
“There is increasing evidence of adaptation that has caused unintended consequences, for example destroying nature, putting peoples’ lives at risk or increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This can be avoided by involving everyone in planning, attention to equity and justice, and drawing on Indigenous and local knowledge.”
A forty-mile line of tanks is advancing on the ancient city of Kyiv that traces its history to the year 482 while its first settlements were 25,000 years ago. 25,000 years to come to this? Russian paratroopers deployed in Kharkiv, the city of poets, as key port city of Kherson falls under Russian control.
IPCC Assessment Report, 3/1/2022. SPM.D.5.3 The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.
The first IPPC 1990 assessment said that certain that emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface. They calculated with confidence that CO2 had been responsible for over half the enhanced greenhouse effect. They predicted that under a "business as usual" (BAU) scenario, global mean temperature would increase by about 0.3 °C per decade during the [21st] century.
We didn’t make the necessary internal or external changes to meet the dire circumstances being revealed to us. We didn’t understand. We didn’t want to understand.
Thirty-two years later:
SPM.D.5 It is unequivocal that climate change has already disrupted human and natural systems. Past and current development trends (past emissions, development and climate change) have not advanced global climate resilient development (very high confidence). Societal choices and actions implemented in the next decade determine the extent to which medium- and long-term pathways will deliver higher or lower climate resilient development (high confidence). Importantly climate resilient development prospects are increasingly limited if current greenhouse gas emissions do not rapidly decline, especially if 1.5°C global warming is exceeded in the near term (high confidence).
Circumstances are changing so rapidly that even this essay is being rewritten five minutes before posting because circumstances have changed extremely in twenty-four hours. The war advances, the dead and suffering soldiers and citizens increase. The injuries to people, structures, land intensify.
Let’s pause and take a breath.
This is an extreme moment.
Whether we are in Ukraine or seemingly safe gazing across a line of eucalyptus trees to a green field radiant with yellow mustard flowers (mustard gas, developed into chemotherapy, with serious and unacknowledged effects on the environment) we are in war. One war seems to demand our immediate reaction and the other to allow for gradual change. A misunderstanding of the realities of time and space leads us to these assumptions.
We have had so many alerts to what could be coming and so much sooner than we have expected.
Two years ago, Covid 19 or Queen Corona could be seen as a warning to change our lives. Disregard for the environment and the animals, the disruption of natural system led to the virus mutating and jumping to humans and the ensuing pandemic, still not globally contained. It is only hours since those in the US learned we could probably take off our masks and, statistically, be safe.
The global Covid death toll is almost 6 million.
In the last months, many of us, in the US and Canada and globally, have been struggling with unfathomable explosions of random violence, hate crimes, and extreme polarization in response to Covid, masking and vaccine. Divisions we had never imagined were emerging everywhere and we were not able to avoid them even in our own lives, even here (wherever here is for you who are reading this.) We were alarmed by the vitriol and violence even in the most intimate relationships. Now we see that these seemingly milder but alarming conflicts were harbingers of what is occurring. A difference, perhaps, in degree, but not in intent or consequences.
IPCC Assessment Report, 3/1/2022. SPM.D.5.3 The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.
Whether we live by signs or can connect the dots, this moment of extremity calls. What are we to do?
We are to know that each of us, that we are at war. That we live in terms of conflict, domination and winning, That our language is bellicose and we make war on everything and so war is pervasive.
We do not think in terms of interconnection, interrelationship, and interdependence. We do not think ecologically.
The wars against the Earth and all living beings and the wars against nations and peoples are the same wars. Each one affects the others.
The medicine for ending war and the medicine for ceasing ecocide, the methods, the strategies, the actions, are the same – interrelationship, interconnection, interdependence.
Insisting on relationship is a radical act that is only effective if it is universal, occurring in every realm and on every level, between all beings – without exceptions. Further, it will only be possible if our activities of inter-relationship are pre-emptive.
To step out of ecocide we must learn to think like an eco-system. We must learn to think ‘we,’ to step out of making enemies. Even today, as we watch the attacks increase, peacemaking is not a choice; it is an absolute necessity.
Even today, we are called to soul search and find ways not to be at war.
Today we step out of war mind.
Tomorrow we truly change our lives.
We know very well that airplanes, guns and bombs cannot remove wrong perceptions. Only loving speech and compassionate listening can help people correct wrong perceptions. But our leaders are not trained in that discipline, and they only rely on the armed forces to remove terrorism.
Thich Nhat Hanh
On behalf a future for all beings,
Deena Metzger
This essay was originally posted in Deena’s substack here. Find out more about La Vieja: A Journal of Fire.
Deena Metzger is a writer, healer, and teacher whose work spans multiple genres including the novel, poetry, non-fiction, and plays. She is the author of many books, including the novels: A Rain of Night Birds, concerning two climatologists, La Negra y Blanca (2012 PEN Oakland Pen Award for Literature), Feral, and The Other Hand. Her other books include The Burden of Light, Ruin and Beauty and Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing. Metzger co-edited Intimate Nature, The Bond Between Women and Animals, which pioneered the radical understanding that animals are highly intelligent and exhibit intent. Her experiences with Elephants in the wild over twenty years is based on their spiritual agency and complex narrative communication. Some of that experience is chronicled in her latest novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire. She has developed The Literature of Restoration to, among other goals, advance Earth based writing, restore climate and counter extinction.
Solutions Showcase
In a new section for the newsletter, we will be showcasing books from our members which highlight pro-active climate solutions being put into action. Kicking things off league founder Lauren James shares an extract from Green Rising, about using magic to collect ocean plastic waste:
Out in the deepest waters, where rubbish floated on the ocean surface in a foul mass of plastic, they grew leathery seaweed, using the ribbons to build a net. It guided the waste along the sea currents until it was bundled together.
Theo was jolted out of his focus by distant shouting coming from the guards behind the barricade.
“Ignore them,” he said to the trainees. “Keep going!”
Their seaweed-tangle of plastics was being covered by an enormous mass of plants, compressing down the layers to seal away the rubbish.
In real life, ocean plastics have been successfully collected using a floating device by The Ocean Cleanup.
Climate Anxiety is a Daily Reality
Mary Woodbury (pen, Clara Hume and social media manager for the League’s Twitter account) talks to Mark Ballabon about his YA novel Home: My Life in the Universe (released on Earth Day, April 22, 2022).
Mary: What is your background, and what led you to writing Home?
Mark: I’ve always had a great love of philosophy and the big questions about life on earth. It began when I was 8 years old and it led me to my first big question, Why is the human on Earth? Many years later, I had a book published entirely about that question. 14-year-old protagonist Leah has her own big question, which no one can answer.
I also have a love of nature and wildness, and a passion for discovering the natural patterns, geometry and systems in living things – from a flower to a human cell. This has led me to being a strong environmentalist, involved in projects and supporting groups who defend the integrity of the planet’s natural ecosystems and habitats. Leah, who grew up near the great lakes in Killarney, south west Ireland, develops a similar passion for nature.
In the last decade I’ve been involved in a growing number of international projects with youth, and co-founded a youth group (12-17yr olds) who love to explore the big questions about living as well as contemporary issues of our modern culture, relating to body image, bullying, people pleasing and so forth. Through all of these projects, the climate crisis features all the time.
So all of these themes form the foundation for HOME. Yet it was a particular experience in leading an international group of 80 teenagers on a trip to Greenwich, which inspired me to not only write the book, but to develop the main characters. After a meditation and movement session, which I took them through on the hill, right by the observatory, they began asking questions about their lives, their issues, and their hopes for the future, which to me were profoundly moving. I felt I had something to offer them, which became Leah’s story in HOME.
Mary: We recently chatted on Zoom, and you mentioned that some of your earlier reviewers were children and teens. What did you learn from them?
Mark: Humility, I hope! I realised that as much as I tried to empathise with their world, I didn’t really understand it, and I wanted to. So I listened, a lot, took many notes and encouraged them to freely edit my draft manuscripts with a red pen or a finely sharpened pencil! It was actually very liberating when I received feedback such as “I don’t think like that”, or “I don’t speak like that”. After a few years of this, I finally got a piece of feedback from one of the teenage editors, which told me that I was on the right track. It simply said, “Great. It’s working. You’ve written yourself out of the story!”
Mary: What's happening in Home, and what would you like us to know about it?
Mark: A lot! 14-year-old Leah’s story was inspired by true events and real teenagers.
Beneath the daily noise of social media, clips, memes, and role models, Leah is trying to discover who she is and where she fits in, not only in the world, but in the universe which she sees herself to be part of. While she is affected by the super-competitive culture at school, it doesn’t define her. Initially she becomes a loner, but she doesn’t feel alone. She has a big question, and although no one can answer it, she knows that there is an answer.
In the handwritten prologue from her journal, Leah says, “I’m writing this for anyone whose ever had an experience that no one could explain or asked a big question that no one could answer…” I hope people will relate to Leah’s quest to find herself, to find true friendship and to feel that very special feeling that you are really worth something.
Mary: Your main character, Leah, writes in a journal, so we get to see her perspective of the world, her friends, and her family. This allows the reader to better understand the mind of a younger person and see the world through their eyes. How did you step into that mind?
Mark: I’ve been trying to develop the art of listening for many years. And in the book, Leah’s mentor, Maia shows her the anagram of the word ‘LISTEN’ which is ‘SILENT’. So with the many young people I’ve met, I’ve tried to maintain an internal silence so I can fully listen to what they’re saying, unconditionally. That’s when their deeper thoughts, fears, hopes and aspirations reveal themselves. And it’s those feelings, which imbue each character in their own unique way.
Mary: Climate change, pollution, and other ecological horrors are a part of this story. Can you talk about why it was important for you to bring these issues into the story?
Mark: The climate crisis and climate anxiety are a daily reality for millions of people around the planet and for myself too. But for young people, this is the biggest threat to their future, the biggest threat to their hopes and the biggest threat to their enjoying the beauty of nature, the planet, flora, fauna and natural ecosystems. The conversation about this needs to go deeper as well as more practical, and the clash between climate activist Kayleigh and Leah hopefully offers some original and practical ways of approach.
Anything else you would like to tell audiences who read Home?
My main hope in writing HOME is that it would promote meaningful conversations in schools and homes, between friends and families… not only about the climate, social media, bullying and other contemporary issues, but about finding one’s place in the world, and in the universe.
Are you working on anything else right now?
I’m working on book two in the Trilogy, called DRAGONFLY which is about what it really means to change. Leah’s first love, Sean, will have a big part to play in that!
Find out more about HOME.
Mary Woodbury (pen, Clara Hume) has written the Wild Mountain Series: Back to the Garden (Moon Willow Press, 2018) and, upcoming, The Stolen Child (Dragonfly Publishing, 2022) as well as The Adventures of Finn Wilder's children's series, Finn's Tree Alphabet (Dragonfly Publishing, 2021), with more to come, and Bird Song: A Novella (Dragonfly Publishing, 2020). Mary contributed to the book Tales from the River (Stormbird Press, 2018) and edited the anthology Winds of Change: Short Stories About the Climate, which received kudos from Bill McKibben. She is a graduate of Purdue University and lives in Nova Scotia with her husband and two cats. They maintain a 2-acre property with beehives, over 50 newly planted trees, and much more. You can read more about her at her blog. She runs the site Dragonfly.eco, a place to find meaningful stories about our natural world and humanity's connection with it.
Mark Ballabon is a philosopher, environmentalist and author who has been teaching and writing about personal and spiritual development for over two decades. He is the author of several non-fiction books, including the acclaimed, ‘Why is The Human on Earth?’ and ‘Courting the Future: Preparing for a Different World’. The latter features a collection of essays that explore the future in a visionary and practical way, including a section of writings on the climate crisis and climate change in the human. ‘Home: My life in the Universe’ will be published on 22nd April 2022.
Mark is an honours graduate from the University of Greenwich and lives in England with his wife. He continues to be actively involved in a variety of international projects with youth groups.
Climate News
Interview with the founder of the Climate League Lauren James [CIWEM]
1,000+ Scientists Worldwide Engaged in Civil Disobedience for Climate Action [Truthout]
Inside Just Stop Oil, the youth climate group blocking UK refineries [Guardian]
Writing Climate: Pitchfest for TV and Film - enter a round robin style event where 20 writers will have 8 ten-minute, one-on-one pitch meetings with Hollywood stakeholders