A Visionary Road Map
Book review from Karen Elias of 'Eco-Spirituality in the 21st Century: Revisioning Nature, Community, and Connection for a Better Tomorrow' by Dana O’Driscoll and Nate Summers
In the profoundly moving documentary The Eternal Song, released this past fall by SAND (Science and Non Duality), Indigenous spokespeople from across the world describe the trauma they experience, both personally and communally, in being violently torn away from their land and their language by colonial intrusion. The film makes it clear that unless we, as a global population, can remember our ancient connections to the natural world, the Earth and its human and more-than-human inhabitants will continue on its disastrous downward trajectory. We’re left with this message: all of us were, at some time, indigenous to place. Find your ancestors. Do the work.
Eco-Spirituality in the 21st Century by Dana O’Driscoll and Nate Summers, born out of this sense of urgency, offers multiple lessons on ways to do the work. Their insistence that reconnection is not only necessary but wondrously possible informs every page of this beautiful, important book. But first we need to know exactly where we are. The authors begin each of their chapters by bearing clear-eyed witness to the material, psychological, communal and spiritual harms our world is currently undergoing, drawing attention along the way to the many beliefs that contribute to these harms. One of these is the often-unconscious presumption that human beings are a superior species with rights to dominion over the Earth. The concomitant idea that the natural world has lesser intrinsic value makes possible the damaging insistence that Earth is merely an inert resource from which corporate interests can extract, with impunity, whatever they need. This set of ideas has disrupted our planet’s ecological balance. It has also helped foster the loneliness and disconnection from the living natural order that human beings are experiencing today in ever greater numbers.
Each chapter ends, however, on a very different note, with a “story of the future.” Here, for example, “Sulphur Creek,” previously contaminated by acid mine drainage, has been renamed “Clear Creek” after passive remediation, reforestation and land regeneration have worked together to heal the land. Here, Indigenous teachings, previously considered primitive and beaten out of their adherents by force, have been restored, as ritual and ceremony allow medicine practices from all traditions to be woven into the fabric of daily life.
How can we make real these future visions? The authors acknowledge that many of us feel stuck, unable to imagine the positive scenarios that would allow humans and more-than-humans to flourish while respecting our planetary limitations. We need new stories. The authors offer their book as a kind of “visionary road map” designed to help us co-create, with the more-than-human world, a balanced and hopeful future. Combining text with Dana’s inspired artwork, the book offers steps we can take today to reconnect joyfully with a world that is waiting for us to put down our phones and pay attention. Their tools are powerful – practical, ceremonial, visionary – and derived from the authors’ considerable experience, as well as from a variety of disciplines:
‘. . . including druidry, ancestral skills, earth skills, wilderness survival skills, deep nature connection, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, wild-food foraging, rewilding, herbalism, leading and writing ceremonies, and nature spirituality.’
Dana’s experience as an animist druid and permaculture practitioner combines with Nate’s experience as a survival and ancestral skills teacher to create a visionary program grounded in land-based practice.
‘We recognize,’ they explain, ‘that if humanity is to survive and thrive in the future, we need to re-envision our entire approach to human life, and eco-spirituality is at the core of that approach. Thus, we offer a grand vision of seven principles – what we call the 7 R’s – for re-envisioning humans’ relationship with the living earth.’
Their proposed journey includes: Reconnection, Respect, Rewilding, Regeneration, Resilience, Reenchantment, and Revisioning.
Each step of their proposed journey – from finding a meditative Sit Spot to crafting a sacred vision – is designed to be easily accessible and persuasive, part of a web of ritual enactments that have the power to heal the wounds of our disconnection and move us closer to a future in sync with our deepest longings.
I am currently on my third reading of this inspiring book, purposely slowing down this time around to better absorb, and practice, its teachings. We need to start, yesterday, on the path toward personal and planetary healing. This book offers a compelling vision of what such a path might look like, and in what magical, momentous directions our journey could go. Be prepared, in exploring its riches, to fall seriously in love with our precious irreplaceable Earth.
Karen Elias is an artist/activist using writing and visual art to protest injustice and imagine a way forward.
“Thrutopia urges us to call up in our wild imaginations whatever’s needed to cross the great abyss.” ~ Karen Elias
