Walk Lightly upon the Earth: Creation Spirituality for Daily Living
Kevin Treston (2003)
Creation Enterprises, rrp $20.00
Walk Lightly upon the Earth is printed on 100 per cent recycled paper but you wouldn’t know it. What they can do now with used paper is quite something. Kevin Treston is a prolific writer on Catholic education and he has now turned his hand to, as Kevin puts it, ‘Creation Spirituality for Daily Living’. Kevin states in the introduction that he writes this book ‘from my perspective as a Christian living in a developed country’. Hence, Kevin attempts to link the Christian tradition with the issues we are currently facing as an Earth community; a challenging task and one that he takes up well.
In this brief and easily accessable work there are seven chapters. Each of the first six chapters concludes with some questions and some very useful quotations from prominent figures. Chapter seven contains numerous suggestions on how we can walk lightly upon the earth, ranging from rituals to education to herbal gardens. The other six chapters deal with a brief overview of the history of the universe, a sense of wonder, work as an act of co-creation, the Sabbath, wisdom justice, sacred stories of destiny and contemporary understandings of human nature.
This book is a very handy text for a class at senior secondary level and for group discussion. Simply read the brief chapters and reflect on the questions and quotations at the end or make up your own questions. It is a good book to get started on the new cosmology and its connection to Christianity and spirituality. Some lovely photos and beautifully presented text.
Working in the area of environment and the human impact on the planet these days can be a sobering experience. This book does not gloss over the time of crisis we now live in, but, while acknowledging the issues, offers hope and many practical suggestions to involve and empower ourselves. The book concludes with some good resources and websites.
Tom Kingston is a member of the EarthSong Journal Editorial Committee.
The Environment and Christian Faith
Robert Barry Leal
St Paul ’s Publications, 2004, rrp $19.95
This little book is the result of the ‘ecological conversion’ of the author after his distinguished career in other fields of university teaching and administration in Australia. His starting point is the growing concern with environmental problems at the world level, and more specifically in Australia.
What has been, and what should be, the church’s response to these sort of issues? What theological per-spectives will throw light on and inform action today?
Such questions have led Leal, in the first four chapters, to outline the origins and nature of ecological theology, to examine the eco-theological strands in scripture and Christian tra-dition, and to review a selection of recent writings on eco-theology. In the final two chapters he looks specifically at the Australian context of eco-theology, and the contribution of indigenous traditions and insights to an otherwise Christian theological enterprise.
A helpful feature is the provision, at the end of each chapter, of a set of questions for reflection and discussion and a short list of suggested activities to give a sense of the issues addressed and a way of engaging with them. The book is complemented by a well-chosen recent bibliography for further reading.
Chapters 5 and 6 are probably Leal’s major contribution as he addresses the Australian context and specifically the contribution of indigenous thought. These chapters draw on earlier historical and theo-logical work, especially that of Malone, Goosen, Habel, Prewer, and, on indigenous influences, from the Rainbow Spirit Elders, Wally Fejo, Patrick Dodson, and the synthesising work by Frank Fletcher, Tony Kelly and Geoffrey Lilburne.
The book is an informative and challenging analysis, but in the final chapter Leal identifies the fact that European cultural superiority is very much under question today, especially from the new respect being offered Aboriginal and Maori experience and wisdom regarding the land and its spiritual connections. While some in the church have abandoned the environment as too hard, too irrelevant or too controversial, others are beginning to hear a call to ecological conversion, a call which for some has missiological implications.
There seems to be a parallel new valuing of the person and work of the Holy Spirit, both in bringing renewal to Aboriginal Christian communities, but also in helping to name the spiritual connectedness with creation and with our own land in particular.
Leal’s concluding paragraphs are about the contribution of Aboriginal experience to Australian theology and spirituality. In my opinion this theme is more coherently and extensively developed by others, including Stockton, Lilburne, Pattel-Gray, Tacey and the Rainbow Spirit Elders. This final chapter seems to have moved away from a primary emphasis on eco-theology and the Australian environment, to more general issues of culture and theology.
While an opportunity seems to have been lost to suggest specific lines of future enquiry and consoli-dation of ecotheology in Australia, the book provides a brief, readable summary of wider theological issues, their contextualisation in the Australian environment, and an invi-tation to keep the conversation going. For this, we are most grateful.
Robin Pryor reviewed this book for the EarthSong Journal.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Black Swan Books, 2003, rrp $27.95
Why is that we love Bill Bryson so much? Is it because he seems to love us so much? He visits Australia every year, has writ-ten a book about us (Down Under) and has often said that if he were a younger man he would have moved here. Perhaps it is his infectious curiosity. Or maybe his endlessly entertaining, well-researched and wonderfully gossipy way with words.
For me, Bryson does for science, physics and geology (among other things) what Robert Winston did for the human body. This is pretty complex subject matter, covering an unfathomably long period of time, but it is accessible, interesting and exciting.
Bryson has obviously asked an awful lot of questions in the writing of this book, and although, as he freely admits, he may not have got everything exactly right, the scale of the work is impressive and he has a wonderful ability to engage his readers in the stories of the brilliant and seriously eccentric characters he encounters in his research.
We learn that Isaac Newton once stuck a needle in his own eye ‘just to see what would happen’. We read about a lighthouse keeper’s cat that was single-handedly responsible for the extinction of a rare bird species.
In an age where we are particularly concerned about the possible effects of global warming, it was somewhat sobering to read that an Indonesian volcanic eruption in 1815 lowered the temperature globally by just one degree Celsius, and yet caused crops everywhere to fail. Summer never came that year and in London the artist J. M. W. Turner painted those famous ‘blearily colour-ful sunsets’ – a result of the dust and ash trapped in the atmosphere.
For all the humour and wonderful stories of scientific discovery and human foible, I finished A Short History feeling slightly sad. It’s the same feeling I had while reading Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters, and it comes from the huge weight of responsibility for all the irresponsible destruction wreaked by us on the earth and our utter failure, even now, to halt this destruction. In his closing chapter, ominously titled ‘Goodbye’, Bryson reminds us that out of all species that have yet passed through this earth, we alone have had the abil-ity to appreciate our environment, and to have some understanding of what we might do to make it better.
The other thing Bryson makes clear is that we are only here through a series of incredibly lucky flukes and that ultimately, whatever we do, it is the earth that will have the last laugh. Our earth naturally moves to restore equilibrium, and ultimately we will be powerless against such a massive force.
Naomi Turner is a regular contributor to the EarthSong Journal.
Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth
Mathis Wackernagel & William Rees. Illustrated by Phil Testemale.
New Society Publishers, British Columbia, Canada, 1996, pb, 160 pp., rrp $28.95
My personal connection with this study commenced during the 2001 Asia Pacific Earth Charter Conference in Brisbane, just prior to The Earth Charter being presented to the World Summit on Sustainability for endorsement by the United Nations General Assembly. It was at this conference that I first heard of the term Ecological Footprint described as ‘the area of land and sea needed to produce the natural resources a human population consumes and to assimilate the waste that the population produces’. Academic staff from Griffith University presented research material, that, when assessed conservatively, demonstrated that within the existing patterns of human natural capital usage, humans were over exploiting the Earth by 30 per cent!
This work by Wackernagel and Rees on the Ecological Footprint showed me a much broader and deeper statistical study of this concept and the environmental imperative that it raises. It was interesting to note this Canadian research both acknowledged and used the research of Griffith University. The starting point for the Wackernagel and Rees study is the acknowledgement of the finite capacity of the Earth; a surface area of 51 billion hectares of which 14.5 billion are land; however, only 8.9 billion are ecologically productive. The remaining 5.6 billion hectares are marginal or unproductive for human use, while I.5 billion are covered by ice. For these researchers, the Ecological Footprint is based on the idea that for every item of material or energy consumption, a certain amount of land in one or more ecosystem categories is required to provide the consumption-related resource flows and waste sinks. The research data classification from official statistics was divided into five major categories: food, housing, transportation, consumer goods and services.
The work can be read for the Earth perspectives, projections and conclusions independently of the need to assimilate all the numerical analysis. The statistics are essential though in authenticating the validity of the Ecological Footprint as ‘a revolutionary concept and an important ecological tool’. The concept motivates social response at both the individual and communal levels for present and future generations. It is a study well suited for teachers, students and policy makers. The graphical presentation of the concepts are a special teaching feature of the work, particularly when we reflect on the concept with the famous Apollo 8 photograph of the Earth in front of us, taken on the first manned flight to our Moon in 1968.
New human consciousness and awareness generates new language. The awareness of the finiteness of the Earth has developed a receptivity towards the concept of the Ecological Footprint. This term, though initially generating fear and concern when applied to the present human situation, has the capacity for humans to respond in altruistic hope. The term is gradually becoming mainstream, for example, in ‘Eco Footprint Week’ (15–17 October, 2004) and finding a foundational place in National Environmental Education documents for Australian schools.
If the concept of the Ecological Footprint is an unfamiliar term for you, then this book is well worth the read. The study acknowledges its solely human perspective on resource use simply because they are not able to fully recognise and quantify the resource needs of the other billions of plant and animal species that share the planet with us. The researched estimate of the over use of natural capital by humans, as expressed in the Ecological Footprint, is underestimated! The term Ecological Footprint is a concept with an evolving understanding.
Kevin Atton, a Christian Brother, is a strong supporter of the EarthSong Project.
South Of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright
Veronica Brady
Harper Collins Publishers, 1998. rrp $29.95.
Poet and activist Judith Wright lived a life of “monumental significance”, at least according to her biographer Veronica Brady. South Of My Days , an authorized biography, explores Wright’s achievements as a poet of international acclaim and as an activist for a range of causes – the environment, Aboriginal land rights, peace and nuclear disarmament being chief among them. While Brady expounds the epic nature of Wright’s life, conducted as it was in passionate commitment to the good of the Earth and its peoples, she also illuminates the deeper threads of meaning around which this life coheres.
Firstly, there is the land, the New England tableland which Wright knew as her ‘blood’s country’. Brady shows how this connection, almost “umbilical” in its intensity, impacted on Wright’s poetry, and later on her passionate defense of the environment. This land also schooled Wright in the realities of Indigenous dispossession. As a girl she discovered the remains of a bora ring on the family property and later, was taken by her father to the site of a local massacre. These “two threads of her life, the love of the land itself and the deep unease over the fate of its original people” twined together and became not only a central focus but a “sacred responsibility” that Wright bore with remarkable fidelity to the end.
Brady also shows us how the atrocities and mindlessness of war injected an ethical edge to Wright’s poetry and activism and caused her to question and critique the philosophies and values underpinning western culture. Born in shadow of the First World War she grew to adulthood in the second, cognisant of the brutalities of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. Her thinking and her work were also shaped and haunted by the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki .
Against this background it is understandable that Wright took an “oppositional” stance to many of the intellectual, social, political and cultural trends of her time. With her philosopher husband, Jack McKinney, the “great love of her life”, she believed that ‘what needed to be changed was the way we see the world’, to grasp that ‘we are part of a unity with “nature” and that human thought is the development of that relationship.’ And it is in this context that Brady offers perhaps her deepest insight into the most enduring of Wright’s legacies. Underlying the precision and power of Wright’s poetry, and the passionate advocacy of her activism, lies a commitment, utter and complete, to enter fully her mortality, and to speak honestly, unflinchingly, from within its pain, its loss, its love. Wright’s course, reveals Brady, was to resist the havens of abstraction and materialism and to steer for the intuitive, contemplative face of reality. Her poetry, particularly, was a way of inviting others on this journey into humanity. As Wright said towards the end of her life,’ poetry has to show a way down into, back and beyond or it’s not poetry’.
This biography is, of course, only one telling of this extraordinary life. Brady herself has acknowledged the limitations of its authorized nature. In an address at the National Library, Canberra, for example, she freely admitted that she came to see “the task [she] was engaged in as telling Judith Wright’s story as she would have told it”, believing that Wright’s contribution to this country has been of such significance that she “deserves to have said about her what she wants said”. Even given such limitations, however, South Of My Days stands as an important record of the life and work of one of the seminal artists and activists of our time. One cannot help but agree with Brady when she says in the same address, “I admired that woman immensely, prickly and all as she was”.
Noelene Kelly is a teacher who is currently engaged in doctoral studies concerning the relationship between literature and the Australian landscape.
PaGaian Cosmology
Glenys Livingstone
Universe, Inc, 2005 rrp $23.95 US
This is a book which many people, and not only women, have been looking for. For one thing, many of us are troubled by the environmental disaster confronting us, and realising that we are after all guests of this fragile planet, wonder not just what to do but how to reimagine our place in the scheme of things. For another many, women especially, feel out of sorts with a culture which exalts abstractions, like money, for instance, or ‘national unity, at the expense of people and the living world, and are looking for a worldview which will attune us to our bodies and the world we live in.
This book helps us to do this. Quoting an impressive array of contemporary scientists, thinkers and wise people from other cultures, Livingstone reminds us of the largely forgotten wisdom, that no one is an island but part of the ongoing life of the universe. The earth is not just a ‘big dead ball of dirt’ for us to exploit but demands our reverence for the part it plays in the unfolding life of the cosmos. This may seem theoretical. But in fact this is a practical book which arises from Livingstone’s sense of alienation as a woman in search of a faith. In effect she develops what Thomas Berry calls a ‘functional cosmology’, a way of learning to live with and celebrate the life of the cosmos reflected in the seasons of the year but also in the seasons of a woman’s body, virgin, mother, crone, acknowledging also that, dwelling in the southern hemisphere but living in a culture brought from the other side of the world, we need to adapt to where we live—though, mercifully in my view, she resists the temptation to appropriate Aboriginal culture in the process.
So far so good. Few people will have problems with this. Some, however, may be troubled by her sub-title, Reinventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, sensing an attack on divine transcendance. What is at issue here, I think however, is the fact that for many, women especially, institutional religion no longer seems to offer abundance of life but its restriction, not a call to reverence but to power over others. Livingstone’s own story illustrates this and in her response she has drawn on a range of religious cultures and those Christians who believe in the holiness of creation and the importance of celebrating it sacramentally will probably be grateful for the challenge she offers It matters to be reminded of the sacredness of creation and the ways in which, as the Psalms tell us, it speaks to us of the glory of God and in that way to recall the vision of mystics like Julian of Norwich, for example, who saw her vision of all things ‘as it were a little hazel nut in the divine hand’. Christian theology after all has long presented a God who transcends the world but is at the same time present to and involved in it.
A final point. Like many others Livingstone has much to say about the misogyny. of many Christian churches. But the way in which her book offers an insight into the deep significance the ‘feminine’, participatory, dimension of existence points to the theological resource it may represent in a world increasingly dominated by patriarchal violence.
Veronica Brady
Veronica Brady is a Loreto Sister who has taught for many years in the English Department of the University of Western Australia where she is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow.
Email address: vbrady@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
The Universe Series
Jennifer Morgan, Illustrated by Dana Lynne Andersen
Dawn Publications, $9.95 US, for children of all ages
Jennifer Morgan is a storyteller, author, educator and an environmental activist. She is a staff member at Genesis Farm which allows her to share her love of the natural world and cosmology with many others.
Her trilogy of books known as
The UNIVERSE SERIES is further testament to her passion for the comos.
- Born with a bang : the universe tells our cosmic story.
- From lava to life : the universe tells our earth story
- Mammals who morph: the universe tells our evolution story.
Jennifer knows the importance of story and is a firm believer “that our cosmology stories fundamentally shape our relationships, our work, our play, our culture, our institutions, our everything.”
The books are further enhanced by the beautifull illustrations of Dana Lynne Andersen. Through her vibrant swirls of color she quickly creates a sense of depth and energy, of mystery and wonder that is our Universe.
I will leave further comments to the experts……
From lava to life: the universe tells our earth story.
Jennifer Morgan Illustrated by Dana Lynne Andersen
Nevada City, CA : Dawn Publications.
“That the Universe can now tell its story through Jennifer’s voice and Dana’s art, is the culmination of centuries of scientific inquiry.” Dr. Thomas Berry
“This spellbinding book traces our way back to the origin and mystery of the Universe and the awesome purpose of our existence.” Sr. Miriam MacGillis
“Wonderfully well done, this book provides a much needed entry into a deeper understanding of the larger patterns of evolution. The sooner children hear these words, the better off they will be.” Dr. Thomas Berry
“In the magic of this story . . . suddenly, we have the feeling that we BELONG. “ Dr. Brian Swimme
“By learning where we come from we can agree on where we are going, and thus share a common ethics. The important story of our origins needs to be told to all people today but especially the young people. Jennifer Morgan and Dana Andersen do a splendid and memorable job of telling that story to young people of all ages.” Matthew Fox
Dawn Publications http://www.dawnpub.com
Produce products to help future generations to cherish the Earth and to live appreciatively on it.
Flight to a Floating Horizon
Chris Guest
The thing about Chris Guest’s debut book is that it’s not really a book at all. It’s a fold-out wall frieze that concertinas out to a spectacular ten metres. Well it will be. Chris is in the process of securing a publishing deal – a tricky thing as you can imagine for such a non-conventional proposition. In the meantime you can view it on Chris’s website: www.chrisguest.net
You have to look closely at Guest’s work, which is where the website really doesn’t do it justice. You can enlarge some of the detail by double-clicking on each of the panels – and here you find wonderful little treats like the skinny-dipper in the dam, the family reading the papers under leafy trees while children play and weirdly wonderful whale-esque hot air balloons. The artwork is exquisite and insanely detailed.
Other people have likened it to ‘ Where’s Wally’ , except, as Chris points out, you’re not looking for the same thing on every page. Indeed it would be impossible to, as each panel reveals a completely different story to explore.
The one thing that does hold the whole piece together is the ‘narrative device’ of a river. Floating Horizon takes a birds eye tour of this river from city through to sea, through night and day, all kinds of weather and all kinds of landscapes. The landscapes are not fixed in space (hence the title) or necessarily time, so that you have the disorienting feeling of not being quite sure which way is up or down, how far into the future you are, or even what planet you’re on.
It was a combination of hiking, dissatisfaction with his work as an architect, a passion for drawing, and a growing sense of disconnection from the natural world that led Chris to create Floating Horizon.
At a crisis point, he quit his job and spent almost everything he had saved on a computer that would help him create a children’s book that had been germinating in his head for many months.
This book would help to open children’s eyes to the natural world, teach them about the way the land is used to feed our modern lifestyles, and fire their imaginations to think about other ways of living.
It’s only when Chris begins to explain the process of creating Floating Horizon that you get a full appreciation for how much work he has put into it. Each panel has been hand-drawn, scanned into the computer, and electronically coloured. Working almost every day, the finished product has taken Chris around 18 months to complete.
One of the lovelier features of the artwork is a computer generated wood grain that sometimes gives the image a look of being underwater. The inspiration for this came from a childhood diet of Japanese manga cartoons such as Astro Boy and Kimba. Later he discovered Japanese wood-block printing – a traditional form of Japanese story-telling using blocks of timber selected especially for the beauty of the grain.
Floating Horizon is likewise a work of exceptional aesthetic beauty that tells a different kind of story to the disconnected child in all of us.
