Notes from 'Dark Green Religion' (Bron Taylor, 2009)
Wikipedia article on the book
Read in 2023, these notes compiled in June 2024
p10-11 quotes from Lynn White Jr. (1967):
- "Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions... not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends."
- "By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."
- Christianity was "the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen" and as a result helped precipitate the environmental crisis.
p18-21 about Gary Snyder:
- "...he recalled an experience with a woman named Ella, an Irish mystic he knew during the 1950s, who once accompanied him on a walk in Northern California's (John) Muir Redwoods. Hearing the song of a yellow crown warbler, Ella turned to him and reported that this song was a special gift to her from that bird."
- Snyder quote from interview: "It's not that animals come up and say something in English in your ear. You know, it's that things come into your mind... Most people think that everything that comes into their mind is their own, their own mind, that it comes from within... Well, some of those things that you think are from within are given to you from outside, and part of the trick is knowing which was which - being alert to the one that you know was a gift, and not think, 'I thought that.' Say [instead], 'Ah, that was a gift!' ... I have a poem about magpie giving me a song ['Magpie Song']."
- Another direct quote from Snyder: "Intcrrelatedness is a common-sense observation. We should remind ourselves that ordinary working people, traditional people ... notice that things are connected. What's not common is the mind-body dualism that begins to come in with monotheism. And the alliance of monotheism with the formation of centralized governance and the national state, that's what's unnatural, and statistically in a minority on earth. The [most common] human experience has been an experience of Animism. Only a small proportion of people on earth have been monotheists... Everybody else in the world is a multifaceted polytheist, animist, or Buddhist who sees things in the world [as alive]."
- Snyder "liked Christopher Stone's widely discussed argument that trees should be represented in democratic processes and the courts."
- Snyder prescribes nature rehab - learning local lore, plants, animals. Going back to the land. But also advocates use of poetry and song and devising of new rituals.
p24 - Marc Berkoff and the importance of eyes
- "The American biologist-ethologist Marc Bekoff is a well-known contemporary proponent of Naturalistic Animism. He argues that cognitive ethology and everyday observation of animals prove they have rich affective lives and can communicate with humans in many ways, including by expressing their desires, pleasures, aversions, pain, and grief. He also believes they have traits that resemble morality, if not also spiritual experiences or precursors to them. Bekoff draws on both anecdotal reports from scientists as well as methodologically rigorous research in making such assertions. While acknowledging that interpretation can be difficult, Bekoff claims that the pathway to communication with animals is through their eyes. Here, his animistic perception becomes clear: 'Eyes are magnificently complex organs that provide a window into an individual's emotional world. As in humans, in many species eyes reflect feelings, whether wide open in glee or sunken in despair. Eyes are mysterious, evocative, and immediate communicators... Personal interpretation or intuition plays a role, and yet there is no more direct animal-to-animal communication than staring deeply into another's eyes.'"
- "Bekoff traced his ability to understand the meaning in animal eyes to an occasion when he had to kill a cat as part of a doctoral research project. When he went to pick up the animal, whom he considered intelligent, he faced a piercing, unbreaking stare, which he took to communicate, 'Why me?' These eyes brought Bekoff to tears, for they 'told the whole story of the interminable pain and indignity [the cat] had endured'; afterward, Bekoff 'resolved not to conduct research that involved intentionally inflicting pain or causing the death of another being.' Bekoff buttressed his own anecdotes of communicative experiences with animals by drawing on similar reports by other scientists, which often also had to do with eye contact."
p25 - Jane Goodall and touch / the limitations of words
- Recalling contact with chimpanzees, Goodall describes "touch" as "a language far more ancient than words, a language we shared with our prehistoric ancestor, a language bridging our two worlds."
- ""It is all but impossible to describe the new awareness that comes when words are abandoned... Words are a part of our rational selves, and to abandon
them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves."
p28 - the personhood of trees
- The idea of "tree-speak" and native americans telling a researcher that a tree was talking to them: "He later became convinced when Native American elders who heard the song told him that, indeed, it was the tree's song. Translated from Tree-speak into first-person English, the song is about the tree's fear as loggers draw near as well as its anguish about the destruction of the tree's beloved forest and forest friends."
- Goodall talks about visiting a forest which had never been logged or lived in, and how it felt different (the 'magic woods' are like this?)
p29 - the spirituality of science
- Goodall again: quantum physics supports "the idea that there is intelligence behind the universe. So that paerticular branch of science, which seems so very unspiritual to start with, ends up coming back around" to spirituality.
- Goodall also talks about specific experiences (similar to experiences I've had in forests, mainly during the pandemic, but also more recently) where "I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness [when] ... that self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to me,;qe, to becorne one with the spirit power of life itself. The air was filled with a feathered symphony, the evensong of birds."
p48 - Walt Whitman
- From 'Leaves of Grass' (1855): "This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and animals."
p49 - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- From 'Nature' (1836): "Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."
p62 - John Muir
- Attributed personhood to non-human entities: "precious plant peoples" and "insect peoples".
- Described an earthquake at Yosemite, in a letter to Emerson, as "the first spoken words that I have heard direct from the tender bosom of mother earth".
- "One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as fellow mountaineers".
- Mountaineers sometimes experience a loss of self, in moments of extreme danger: time slows down, an extraordinary force flows through them, removing their own agency.