History on deep ecology

The Development of the Deep Ecology Process

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our Philosophy page describes Arne Naess’s call for “therapies which heal our relations with the widest community, that of all living beings”, and notes that the processes answering that call were developed largely by his coauthors on Thinking Like a Mountain. What follows traces that development more closely: how a workshop first conceived in response to the nuclear threat became, over four decades and in two hemispheres, the body of practice now generally offered as the Work That Reconnects.

Despair and Empowerment: Joanna Macy's Foundational Work

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Everything ported into the “Honouring Our Pain for the World” section of this site — the Truth Mandala, the Mourning — has one direct ancestor: Joanna Macy’s Despair and Empowerment workshops, developed in the early 1980s in response to the psychological toll of living under nuclear threat. This is the historical foundation, with sources.

The book

Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (New Society Publishers, 1983) — free to read at the Internet Archive. Forty-seven exercises for working through despair, isolation and powerlessness in the face of nuclear war, environmental destruction, and social injustice, developed from Macy’s own workshops of the same name.
A later, freely available essay covering similar ground: Joanna Macy, “Working Through Environmental Despair”.

The psychological grounding

Macy’s central insight drew on psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s research on “psychic numbing” — the emotional shutdown Lifton documented in survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Macy recognised the same numbing in people living under the threat of nuclear war: a widespread, anticipatory retreat from unbearable knowledge. Rather than responding with more facts and statistics, she built group exercises that gave fear, grief and anger a structured, safe space to be spoken aloud — the direct template for what later became the Truth Mandala and the Mourning.

The Council of All Beings

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

By Joanna Macy, Ph.D. Written for The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Full source page: rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Joanna Macy.htm.

The Council of All Beings is a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form. A simple structure for spontaneous expression, it aims to heighten awareness of our interdependence in the living body of Earth, and to strengthen our commitment to defend it. The ritual serves to help us acknowledge and give voice to the suffering of our world. It also serves, in equal measure, to help us experience the beauty and power of our interconnectedness with all life.

Video: Give Trees a Chance – The Story of Terania Creek

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This 1980 documentary tells the story of the first eco-blockade in the world – the Terania Creek forest protest in Australia in 1979. A historic event, it brought rainforest preservation into public consciousness and led to the formation of the Nightcap National Park. Narrated by Jack Thompson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CE-LVZTuCY