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John Seed, an ecological activist and founder of the Rainforest Action Network in Australia, shares his journey of getting involved in protecting the rainforest. He believes that humans evolved within the rainforests and that we are interconnected with nature. He emphasizes the importance of re-identifying ourselves with nature and experiencing a sense of belonging and interconnectedness. He discusses the concept of deep ecology and the need for a new psychology to catch up with the new physics. He also highlights the importance of considering the development aspirations of indigenous people in protecting the rainforest. Good evening, welcome to LinkedIn for Transformation, I'm your host John McClane. Tonight we're going to be exploring some of the issues involved in the Rainforest, the Rainforest Action Network, and how you can be involved in helping to restore balance on this planet. Tonight my guest is John Seed, who is an ecological activist, Rainforest Action Network activist and founder of the Rainforest Action Network in Australia. John is visiting the United States and doing some classes and workshops here and bringing a little bit of his practical ecological wisdom with him. John, good evening. Hi John. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved in this work. What was it that happened to you that brought you into this work? Well, I'd left my job as a systems engineer for IBM some years previously and gone back to the land and was growing organic food and vegetables and living in paradise in the mountains and the sound of the chainsaws drifted up from the valley and I couldn't ignore it any longer. One day I found myself involved in what turned out to be the first major confrontation in defence of the Rainforest, not only in Australia but anywhere in the world, as we discovered later. And somehow in that atmosphere, that heightened atmosphere of being in some danger, being in conflict, I felt as though the Rainforest got inside me and I was able to see things that I'd never seen before and my life was really changed by that and I've never really looked back from there. I've been involved in protecting Rainforest in one way or another ever since. What got inside you? Well, that's a good question. I think what got inside me, I mean at the time I didn't know, but what I've realised since is that having studied the subject extensively, that it seems as though we ourselves evolved within these Rainforests for 130 million years or so before very recently, relatively recently emerging, blinking out onto the plains and so my mind and my psyche and my spirit are all Rainforest products you might say. So I suppose what got inside me was just the relationship, the fact that of course I can hear the Rainforest because it's part of me and I'm part of it. And I suppose the surprising thing is that not everybody can hear it and I guess that's a function of the conceptual filters that we've put up in our society where we don't believe in certain things and therefore they don't seem to be possible. Like we don't believe that we're connected to the earth? Well that's right, I mean of course you'd only need to hold your breath for a couple of minutes to realise how difficult that would be to defend but none the less that appears to be the case that in spite of everything that we know it's very difficult for us to experience ourselves as if we were part of the earth, as if we were just one cell in the earth's body which is what I believe we actually are. Say somebody who lives in the city, how do you particularly see that affecting them? Well I mean it doesn't really matter where you live because of course the Rainforest and the wilderness is a particularly easy place to get in touch with these things but everything in the city is just as natural as everything anywhere else. There's nothing that's unnatural, everything is made out of earth and it's made out of the same miraculous molecules that wove themselves into the biology of the world. So we might think that plastic is particularly unnatural but really if we trace it back we realise it came from oil and the oil itself was laid down by the Rainforest in the Carboniferous a hundred and some million years ago and there's nothing we can find that won't lead us back to nature if we trace it back and if we follow it back far enough. So I think that the city is quite a, it's not such a difficult place as many people think to get in touch with these things. How in your particular case do you feel you develop a sense of responsibility towards the earth and is that in fact how you feel? Well it's interesting, a sense of responsibility isn't actually how I feel it. Because a lot of people in the ecological movement, for years the United States has been save the earth, save the whales. Yeah that's right, well I just don't think that we're capable of the kind of responsibility that that would require and that the way I see it is that we want certain things because we experience ourselves in a certain way because of our conditioning, the way we were brought up and in particular the kind of materialism that's all around us and that advertising and the rest of it really provokes in us and promotes in our culture. But so we're digging up the earth and destroying the earth in a thousand ways in order to turn it into microwave ovens and hair dryers and you name it and then we stuff these things into our lives in the hope that somehow this is going to make us feel good. We don't do these things for their own sake, we do it because of some kind of psychological or shall we say spiritual reward that we hope to get from it and this reward isn't forthcoming. We never see anybody that's actually satisfied, that's actually got enough. And I see it as a kind of a displacement activity that the kinds of joy and upliftment and ecstasy that we're looking for are actually available very easily and freely in nature if we go out and experience it, if we go out and look for it. And when we, through the rainforest or through the kind of workshops that I do, when we extend our roots into nature, when we re-identify ourselves with nature and we realise that it was me that's been evolving here for the last four thousand million years, it's not just a story in a book, that every cell in my body is descended in an unbroken chain from those events, that my DNA has evolved continuously all of that time, then certain new forms of nourishment and joy become accessible to us just through that sense of interconnectedness and a sense of belonging here, a sense of feeling that I'm home, you know, satisfaction from that. And when we feel that, then things kind of drop away, extraneous things, material things become less and less relevant. One of the things that I've studied a lot in the last few years is called deep ecology, which is I guess almost like the science of this way of thinking, and the person who coined that term, Professor Arne Næss, the philosophy professor from Oslo University in Norway, he says a sense of responsibility or duty is a treacherous basis for conservation, that it's just very few of us have sufficient sense of responsibility, we, in the end, will come out of our self-interest. The problem is that the self whose interests we serve, we may not have correctly identified it, that if for instance we don't include the air as our self because someone has told us that the air isn't me, it's really part of the environment as though it's something out there, some object far away from us, then we might think that we need a sense of responsibility to be involved in stopping the air pollution. Once we realize that the air is part of my body, that it's part of my whole system, that I'm part of it, then it's merely a matter of self-interest to be involved in these things and that's a much more surefire way of finding motivation and a sense of responsibility. I know that in the new physics they've discovered that all electrons, that of course all matter is composed from, actually move from the board to the chair, into our body, into the air, back into the plant and into the floor, and it's all circulating around, so we're all completely interconnected, even though it looks like they're solid, separate, different components, we're all totally, we all live in a completely unified field of being and energy. That's right, and what we need is a new psychology to catch up with the new physics where we actually learn how to experience ourselves the way that we truly are, because the sense of separation that we feel from nature has to be an illusion, we are, it doesn't matter what we believe, we are inextricably embedded in nature, whatever spiritual things we believe in, they themselves are rooted in a complex biology and if we destroy that biology we destroy everything else that grows out of it. How is your work right now a reflection of your consciousness and what you're feeling? Well my work is divided between political, activist, direct action kind of work in the rainforest and workshop form that I call the Council of All Beings, which uses ritual and ceremony to reintegrate human beings with nature. Okay, let's talk about the rainforest action and the activist side of you, and we'll hear a little bit about that. Well, as an activist I started out, as I think I mentioned, just in direct action, standing in front of bulldozers and then lobbying parliaments and so on, but as my work took me further and further afield, beyond Australia to New Guinea and then to Ecuador and to other countries, it became clear that in these countries no conservation of rainforests was possible that didn't include an interest in the legitimate development aspirations of the indigenous inhabitants of these forests, that unless we are prepared to take a concern about the people who have lived in harmony with these forests for thousands of years, the forests can't be protected. So, although at the beginning we were interested in the trees and the plants and the animals much more than the people, it's become clear that the people are as much a part of the forest as all of the rest of it. And so in New Guinea at the moment, for example, I'm part of a group that initiated a project and that I'm now funding, you know, a project here in the United States where we're trying to stop the destruction of the rainforests by logging, which is the main cause of the destruction in that country. And the reason that the people invite the loggers in is because no other developments are accessible to them. They feel underdeveloped. No other economic developments. No other economic developments. Thank you. That's a good point because, of course, these people are highly developed in their ancient ways, but they've seen the transistor radios, they've seen the chainsaws, they've seen the fishing lines. They've seen TV. And they've seen their babies die from diseases that could have been cured if they had a bit of money. And they've seen that you need an education in this world and in order to get an education you need a light at night and therefore you have to buy fuel for the lamp. Do you know? I mean, they've seen that they need money and at the moment no other options are being offered to them other than the multinational loggers coming in and offering them huge fistfuls of dollars to clear sell their forests. So we went in there and looked at what possible alternative developments we could provide them with in exchange for them remaining the caretakers of the forests as they've always been. The difficulty there is that these people don't have an education nor the kind of infrastructure that you would need. You can't build a factory for them to make computer chips over there or anything like that. And so what we found in the end was that we found a few kinds of developments that would work and one of them, strangely enough, was logging, that the people themselves were capable of managing these forests far more carefully than the logging companies if we would just give them the technology and the education. And so that's what we did. We made a contract about two years ago with the Zia tribe in Moriby province in New Guinea where a large company had been negotiating with them for some time and the company was so confident of getting access to their whole 250,000 acres of pristine rainforest that the company had already built the wharf and the log dump and was preparing to go in and log as soon as the contract was signed. We got in there ahead of them and signed a contract with the people where we provided them with three small portable sawmills, a management plan for the use of those mills and a guaranteed market outside, an export market for the ecological timber that they produced such that they would get 200 times as much for each log sawn up into sawn timber as the multinational was offering them for that raw log. That's remarkable and at the same time create a sustainable growth pattern, in other words not wipe out the whole forest. Exactly. The sawmills themselves don't belong to those people, they belong to a non-government organization nearby and the condition that the people retain both the sawmills and the market is that they stick to the management plan which allows them to cut about 15 acres a year per sawmill. From a 50 year rotation, this leaves 99% of the forest completely untouched and the other 1% very carefully managed and we believe that it may be sustainable in the long term although if we're wrong it's still only 1% of the forest that's been damaged. And two would be double what they would have had and they're still way ahead. Exactly. So how does that impact someone here in California and the United States in general? Well I think that it's more that what can we in California and the United States do to strengthen the hand of people like myself who are doing this and I think one of the things is that we have here in California some of the most active Rainforest Action groups in the world, particularly here in San Francisco, the Rainforest Action Network and I think the single most important thing anyone can do is to hook into that network and become part of the large and growing body of people who are adding their weight to this whole project. So for example, if we stop consuming the timbers that are destroying the rainforest, the mahogany and the teak and the other timbers and begin insisting on rainforest timber from sustainably produced sources such as the one that I've described, then this will change the nature of the market in this country. If we do as the Rainforest Action Network did a few years ago and start applying consumer boycotts to the companies that are engaged in the troublemaking then we can have a tremendous impact as for instance the Rainforest Action Network had a few years ago when they forced Burger King out of the rainforest of Costa Rica by having Whopper stop a month and Burger King sales dropped 11% during Whopper stop a month, the following month they agreed to stop cutting down rainforests for cattle pasture that dropped a few cents off the price of their Whoppers. So by joining together with like-minded people in our communities we can really make a difference. And even though California and the United States has their own set of environmental problems, which we do absolutely, it's important to keep in mind that the environmental problems in the rest of the world impact us, the water in the ocean moves around, that if the rainforest collapses that is going to substantially alter climate in the whole world. Isn't that true? Yes, that's so. But we really do need to be concerned about what's going on in other places. I think that's fine, it goes beyond climate in that what scientists are realizing more and more is the truth of what has been called the Gaia Hypothesis, which is the idea proposed by British scientist Jim Lovelock that the earth is like a living organism and that all of the different wild ecosystems are like the vital organs of this organism, so that as we destroy the liver we may live in the brain but it doesn't really make much difference. The earth needs all of these things to survive and it doesn't know that the astronauts looking back on the earth, they didn't see some bits coloured red and some bits coloured blue, they didn't see any national borders, the air, the water as you point out doesn't know any national borders nor does the climate, so that the rainforests are a kind of thermostat, you know, that they maintain not only the stability of the climate and the cycling of fresh water around the earth but they are also responsible for the composition of gases in the atmosphere, the fact that there's exactly the right amount of oxygen and exactly the right amount of nitrogen in balance isn't just something that happens to be so, it's something that's continually being created by the respiratory system of the earth you might say, the lungs of the earth is what the rainforest is sometimes called. How do you see the consciousness that each individual person carries having the doorway to grow and expand and to feel more connected to the earth in general and the particular issues that you're addressing? Well I think that... Is suffering a part of that? Well I think we have to feel that something's wrong, if we don't feel that there's something wrong then we're going to just stay where we are, but I think that everybody now knows that there is something wrong, I don't think that there's anybody any longer who feels that everything's okay, we may not know the extent of the damage that's already been caused or the extent of the threat but we know that there's something wrong and then because we think that we can avoid suffering that way we sort of try and deny it, we change the channel or we turn the page, we don't want to look at it because we're afraid that it's going to bring us down, but I've found that the opposite is the case, that especially if we're in a community, if we're in a circle of people who are all concerned about the same thing then there can be a tremendous empowerment from really letting the information in and a tremendous joy can also arise from knowing that we're really addressing the important issues of our time. So you encourage people to get involved in various groups, ecological groups of which there are a lot in the Bay Area and in the United States a growing number, do you think that's a good way of joining with other people? I think so, I think that that's, you know that... Because you've been involved in this work for a long time, what have you seen people doing, what's working? Well, I'd have to say that there doesn't seem to be a lot that's working in the sense that the problems aren't getting any better, do you know, that a lot of people are working on it but it's not nearly enough, so I think that what's needed now is a vast change far beyond anything that we've seen and I think that's going to need everybody, you know, and at the moment the growing points are these environmental groups but in themselves they're not really strong enough that perhaps if we all joined them they would be strong enough. How are we going to do this? How are we going to create the conditions for a change, the size that we need, you know? The magnitude that we need? Yeah. How are we? What are some ideas? Well, I think that for me we really have to develop a kind of, a sense of urgency about the situation and I think that that sense of urgency comes from actually experiencing, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said that the most important thing we can do is to hear within ourselves the sounds of the earth crying, that we really have to open ourselves, our empathy and we really have to feel what's going on as well as know what's going on. We have to stop denying the things that we know and really invite those feelings. This can be something that's very much too painful to do by oneself but in the company once again of like-minded people and that's very much the early stages of the workshops that I facilitate, I think one of the most important things we can do is really acknowledge our feelings as part of our intelligence and really invite our feelings along with the knowledge of what's going on because it's those feelings that move us. Our ideas aren't going to move us, you know, it's our emotion, you know, motion, emotion. It's what moves us, our feelings move us and that once we acknowledge the intense feelings of sorrow and despair and horror and what's happening in the world, then we find the antidote to despair which is the actions that we need to take. And the love that we can bring. Yes, very much so, that the love that we can bring in concert with each other in really addressing these problems seriously. And spontaneous action. Spontaneous action certainly, you know, but I think also just the ongoing and deliberate actions that, you know, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network and these groups are involved in that we have to strengthen their hand in any way we can. But you're also saying that each person needs to begin to acknowledge their real feelings about the environment. For instance, I don't know if you've been reading the papers but California just executed somebody. And that one man got a lot of coverage throughout the United States. I think this single event really impacted people in a very deep way emotionally. It brought up a lot of feelings. They may have been overwhelming feelings and you may not have known how to deal with them but they brought those feelings up. And I think you're saying that each person needs to also recognize and honor their own feelings about the earth and the environment and what's happening and coming to terms with that. That that will generate some motivation, some plans, some action and it really is important. Exactly. Yes. You're going to be back here in the fall, in September, doing a class? I'll be teaching classes at JFK, at California Institute of Integral Studies and at the new college in the fall. And I'll be doing weekend workshops at that time as well. And I think we have a phone number that we can put out on the screen so people can get in touch with you. Yes. And what are you hoping to promote here when you come back in the fall? Well, one of the interesting things that's happened in the last year or so has been the interest of some of the major corporations in this country in my work where I think that the penny's beginning to drop as we say at home. I think I might turn this into a bumper sticker, no planets, no business. It's not enough now to hire an environmental vice president to greenwash yourself, to camouflage yourself green in order, you know, so that people will continue buying your product. All of us now, I think, are beginning to look for ways in our own lives where we can make a difference, especially if it can be done at no expense to ourselves. So many of these large corporations are feeling that the kind of workshops that I do don't really threaten them because I'm not talking about how damaging these corporations are or anything. All I'm doing is acquainting people with techniques whereby they can experience their ecological identity, move from having ecological ideas to having ecological self, and that when people do this it's as though their metronome starts ticking correctly, you know, and they start being able to make the right kind of decisions in their day-to-day lives and in their corporate lives as well. So I'm very excited about this work and starting to work with some of these corporations to bring about change from within. The price that, you know, they may be saving, the money they may be saving by dumping toxic wastes or whatever that's been going on for a long time is actually something we can't afford. Well, we certainly can't afford it, but what they're realizing is that they can't really afford it either because we're all, you know, we're all on the Titanic, you know, it's in nobody's interest to scuttle this thing, you know. And people aren't going to want to support their particular businesses if they find out that they have an anti-ecological or, you know. That's true, and if we can, for instance, get a drug company, let's say, to start paying royalties to indigenous people in the country where they have taken the plants from which they've derived these medicines in exchange for these people protecting the forest so that they're medicines for the future, they should be able to get a market edge because so many people would applaud a company for doing this kind of thing. So it's not just the stick, it's the carrot as well, that I think that we, there are enough people now for whom environment is a major, if not the major concern, that we can really make it in the interest of these companies financially to behave in visionary ways and in ways that serve the earth. Would you like to take a moment to just help people connect with that part of themselves or in their minds feel a deeper connection with the earth? Well, let's see. Well, first of all, as we breathe, we could start realising that this breath is something that's shared not only by all of the humans on the earth, but it's also something that's shared by all of the animals that breathe on the earth and start to experience the air as something that's alive rather than something that's dead. With every breath we take in so much information, so much communication from around the earth and consider the way that not only the animals are involved, but the plants as well, that everything that's green on the earth is also breathing and it is exhaling exactly what we need to inhale and that there is this ancient cycle of partnership between the human beings and the plants and that we try and experience that interconnectedness via our breath. We can do the same thing with the water, the water that cycles around the earth, what Aldo Leopold called the round river, as the water is evaporated and transpired up into the atmosphere and falls again, lubricating everything along its way, it also lubricates us and it connects us with the cycle. So we can become, in this way, we can start to visualise ourselves as being part of these ancient cycles. Thank you very much, John. For those of you who are just tuning in, this is LinkUp for Transformation. I'm your host, John McLean, and with me tonight is John Seed, an environmental activist from Australia who's visiting the Bay Area currently, he'll be back in the fall, and there's a phone number we'll put up at the end of the show if you'd like to reach him or are interested in any of the work that he might be doing, we appreciate your interest. Join us next week when we will be back with John and Ralph Messner. Good night, folks.
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