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Notes from 'Dark Green Religion' (Bron Taylor, 2009)

Wikipedia article on the book

Read in 2023, these notes compiled June - September 2024

• Nature is sacred
• Nature can teach us
• All life forms, wherther animate or not, have intrinsic value

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: "Interrelatedness 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 particular 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 merge, to become 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.

p80 - John Seed

• Gaian spirituality: "Seed wrote that activism can promote a spiritual consciousness, beyond anthropocentrism such that the notion, "I am protecting the rainforest," could develop into an understanding, "I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest emerged into thinking.""

p81 - Edward Abbey - Desert solitaire (1968)

• Description of a desert: "Is this at last locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. . Each time I look up at one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring - the leafy god, the desert's liquid eye - but also a rainbow-coloured corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence, about to speak my name."
• "I know nothing about underlying reality, having never encountered any... Appearance is reality, I say, and more than most of us deserve... Come home for God's sake, and enjoy this gracious Earth of ours while you can... Throw metaphysics to the dogs. I never heard a mountain lion bawling over the fate of his soul."

p88 - David Abram - on "perception"

• "Perception is communication. It is the constant, ongoing communication between this organism that I am and the vast organic entity of which I am a part... the experience of communication between the individual microcosm and the planetary macrocosm..."
• "...the surrounding phyisical world as an active participant in our perceptual experience."
• Words for "spirit" and "psyche" are related to words for wind or breath eg spirit / respiration from spiritus (Latin; a breath or gust of wind).
• The development of alphabetic language as a factor in our disconnection from nature.

p91 - Jeanette Armstrong (traditional Okanagan Indian)

• "Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between Western and indigenous philosophies... Even the most progressive Western philosophers still generally believe that listening to land is a metaphor. [But] it's not a metaphor. It's how the world is." This notion that it's not a metaphor is something that crops up again and again. From Blake talking about the imagination as something real, to Harner describing the otherworld as an actual place, not internal thoughts. It's important to have that faith, similar to the belief which exists in conventional religion.
• "...the surrounding physical world as an active participant in our perceptual experience."

p92 - Derrick Jensen - Endgame (2006)

• "If you want to know what to do, go to the nearest mountain, the nearest native tree, the nearest native soil, and ask what it needs. Ask it to teach you. It knows how to live there... it will teach you."
• "Declensionist cosmogony" - ecological degradation is linked to agriculture as it engenders social hierarchy, technological fetishism, sky gods and the repression of paganism / animism.

p97 - Goat and Fly - eco-activists

• "They believed that if they could somehow get their adversaries into the forest, they would be changed forever. As Fly put it, "Nobody can go in there and not be transformed.""
• Fly: Spirituality is "when I know what the trees are saying, when I know what my friends are thinking, [it's when] I and the people I'm with open ourselves to other energies or to a higher vibrational level. People call them all sorts of things, Ghosts, Fairies. Telepathy. It has [convinced me we are not] separate from each other, and from the rocks, and everything else."
• "Like all good mystics, Fly cautioned, "The more words I put on this the farther we can go from the reality I refer to." He then offered his spiritual prescription: what we need to do is "just sit down, shut up, breathe, have eye contact. touch..." and falling silent, he put his hands on the earth" = basically Coming to your senses".

p128 - Val Plumwood - Being Prey (1996)

• Plumwood survived a crocodile attack and felt she was taught a lesson: "Large predators like lions and crocodiles present an important test for us. An ecosystem's ability to support large predators is a mark of its ecological integrity. Crocodiles and other creatures that can take human life also present a test of our acceptance of our ecological identity. When they're allowed to live freely, these creatures indicate our preparedness to coexist with the otherness of the earth, and to recognise ourselves in mutual, ecological terms, as part of the food chain, eaten as well as eater." Helped to promote a feeling in her of increased care and compassion towards crocodiles, similar to surfers who suffer shark attacks.

p129 -130 - Chris van der Merwe - Deep Ecology Elephant Programme (DEEP)

• Advises stepping outside the protective enclosure in order to view game animals like leopards.
• Elephants are good teachers and have human-like behaviour. Jeanette Selier (instructor): "Elephants are like humans."
• Advise walking/biking rather than viewing from safari vehicle.
• "Van der Merwe wanted us to imagine and feel what it was like to be a member of the species Homo sapiens, living off the land and part of the wider community of life in Africa..." But balancing that way of being with normal life could lead to a contradictory life?

p149 - David Suzuki

• "...a sense of awe, wonder, and humility can flow from the close observation of nature, and this comes easily to those who live in direct, daily contact with nature, especially indigenous people, those who procure food themselves, and scientists."

p234 - excerpts from Thoreau

• "...how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light."
• "I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter's shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realised that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathise, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still."
• Talking about phosphorescent wood - "It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day, not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house, - and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them." - that same feeling I had in Grimescar during the pandemic, looking up and seeing the trees move, and believing them to be alive in a new way.