The Plant Spirit Podcast with Sara Artemisia

Deep Ecology & Healing the Illusion of Separation with John Seed

• Sara Artemisia / John Seed • Episode 70

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#70 - Join us for an amazing conversation with environmental activist and Rainforest Information Centre founder John Seed. In this illuminating episode, John shares his journey of awakening to the sentience of the natural world and how addressing inner disconnection from Nature is essential for true ecological healing.

In this episode you'll discover: 

• How spirituality and ecology are fundamentally interconnected
• A beautiful guided practice that helps us experience our ancient reciprocal relationship with plants
• The remarkable success of his experience in rainforest protection campaigns and understanding the ecological self
• How community-based ecological therapies can help heal our relationship with the living Earth and dispel the illusion of separation

John also shares profound wisdom on the value of connecting with the story of the emerging universe and practical tools to experience our interdependence with the plant world.

John Seed is an environmental activist and founder of the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC). He is an accomplished bard, songwriter, filmmaker, and co-author of "Thinking Like a Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings." In 1995 he received the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in 1995, for services to conservation. He has spearheaded RIC's endangered species, climate change, Asian elephants, Ecuador and Cambodia campaigns. John has written and lectured extensively on deep ecology, and he’s conducted Deep Ecology workshops around the world for 35 years to help people strengthen the felt sense of our connection with the living Earth.

You can find John at: https://www.rainforestinformationcentre.org/
Breathing with Trees meditation: https://rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/breathing.htm
IG: https://www.instagram.com/johnseed_deepecology/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnseed.deepecology/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/rainforestinfo
Books & Articles: https://www.rainforestinformationcentre.org/john_seed_articles_essays

For more info visit Sara's website at: https://www.multidimensionalnature.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/multidimensional.nature/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saraartemisia.ms/
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/plantspiritherbalism
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@saraartemisia
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@multidimensional.nature
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/multidimensionalnature/

Learn how to communicate with plant consciousness in the free workshop on How to Learn Plant Language: https://www.learnplantlanguage.com/

Sara Artemisia:

Welcome to the Plant Spirit Podcast with Sara Artemisia on connecting with plant consciousness and the healing wisdom of Nature. To learn how to communicate directly with plant consciousness, you can check out the free workshop at www.learnplantlanguage.com. And for Financial Coaching, Business Development Coaching, Flower Essence Therapy, or One-to-one Mentorship Sessions, visit www.multidimensionalnature.com. I'm your host, Sara Artemisia, and I am deeply honored to welcome our next guest to the show today. John Seed is an environmental activist and founder of the Rainforest Information Centre. He's an accomplished bard, songwriter, film-maker and co-author of"Thinking Like a Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings". He has written and lectured extensively on deep ecology, and he's conducted Deep Ecology workshops around the world for 35 years to help people strengthen the felt sense of our connection with the living Earth. So John, thank you so much for being here. Such an honor to have you here with us today.

John Seed:

Thanks so much, Sara.

Sara Artemisia:

I love how your approach is rooted in such a deep sense of connection and relationship with the Earth, and I'd love to hear to start today. How do you really feel that spirituality and ecology are one and the same?

John Seed:

Well, it seems, it seems to me, that everything grew out of the Earth. I mean, the Earth grew out of the universe, of course, but for the moment, let's just start with the Earth. And one of the people I admire, whose work I admire is the cosmologist Brian Swimme and he once said the Earth used to be nothing but lava, and now it sings opera. And so it's just this sense that I have, that everything grew out of that lava, that nothing has been added since then, nothing came from the outside in order to turn the lava into all of all of this and that that includes, of course, spirituality. So to deep ecology, human beings are not the crown of creation or or the top of any pyramid, but we're just one tiny leaf on the tree of life, and everything about us comes from that tree that there is nothing about us that doesn't come from the Earth. And so that, of course, includes spirituality.

Sara Artemisia:

Amazing and so succinct. I love that. And I also, just before we move forward, want to just say to everyone listening that a little bit later, John will be sharing a practice of connection with a plant. And so if you have a moment right now to either pause and go sit with a plant or just find one in your space, that would be really helpful. And if not, of course, you can always come back to the exercise later. So I just wanted to share that here. And so I know that you've been working for decades with protecting rainforests, and I was curious if you could share some stories that you've had about that.

John Seed:

Well, perhaps I'll start with the story that I was telling you a little bit off before we hit record, and that was how I got into this in the first place, where, in August of 1979 I went down to the local hippie market where, you know, people had their crafts and food for sale, and one of the neighbors got up on the stage and asked for help, because he said the Forestry Commission was coming in the next day to log the rainforest at the end of Terania Creek Road. And I'd never been to the end of Terania Creek Road. I didn't know what a rainforest was. I didn't know if there were rainforests in Australia, but I was into helping the neighbors, and so innocently enough, I showed up the next day and was stunned to discover this magnificence that I had never imagined, and it appeared to be sentient, and it appeared to know me, and it it this time, it was not my neighbor, but the forest itself that was asking for my help. And I was deeply disturbed because my at that time, I was living in a community of Buddhists, organizing meditation retreats and growing our own food, delivering our own babies, etc, and there was nothing about my sort of cognitive framework that had prepared me for this. I didn't really believe in things like this sounded too woo, woo, but it was undeniable, and it was so warm and so authentic that soon enough, I just surrendered and ran away with that circus and have been, you know, hanging on, you know, wherever it wherever it led me, I've been following ever since.

Sara Artemisia:

And how did you specifically find your way into deep ecology? Was that just a natural evolution from that first experience with the rainforest?

John Seed:

In some ways it was, but the way it actually happened was that those first actions in Australia were incredibly successful. It's hard to even imagine today that such a thing was possible, but our passion was easily able to communicate itself, because at that time, this turned out to have been the first such direct action in defense of forests in the world, as far as we know, and that meant that the society had yet to develop any antibodies against the kind of theatrical expressions of people climbing into the trees and chaining themselves to the machinery so that it was easy to be the first item on the news night after night, and clearly the time was right. Because at the beginning, nobody knew that there was rainforest in Australia, really. But less than two years later, an opinion poll found that more than 70% of the people of our state of New South Wales wanted an end to rainforest logging, and the government of the day legislated with a string of national parks that stretched more than 500 miles from North to South. And the following year, we went from our subtropical rainforests down to the Island State of Tasmania and the South of Australia, and had similar successes in protecting the temperate rainforests there. And two years later, we were up in far North Queensland, and once again, for the tropical rainforests, national parks and eventual World Heritage listing rewarded our efforts. But by now it was 1986 and we couldn't help but get a bit of an education, and had learned that these rainforests are the very Womb of Life, their home to more than half of the species of plants and animals in the world, and the satellite photographs were showing them disappearing at a horrendous rate. Less than a single human lifetime remained at those rates of destruction. So clearly, we were witnessing a mass extinction such as the world had not known for at least 65 million years. And for every forest that had been saved in the first half of the 1980s, a thousand forests had been lost, and clearly, there was no way to save the planet, one forest at a time, that unless we could address the underlying spiritual or psychological disease that allows modern humans to imagine that we can somehow profit from the destruction of our own life support systems. Clearly, these actions weren't going to be sufficient, and so my attention turned to trying to understand this, this aspect of our dilemma, and that's what led me to deep ecology.

Sara Artemisia:

Yeah, so important and it is wild how the system is is set up like that. And you were sharing earlier this quote about the need to return to an ecological identity and ecological self, and that seems so pivotal for the time that we're in. I'm curious, because you have witnessed so much over the decades, and you were talking about how the time was really right at that time for the work you were doing at that time. What do you feel that the time is right for right now? Because there's so much happening globally, it really feels to me like we're in this pivotal time of change, this pivotal time of shifting planetarily. I'm curious. What do you see happening in that?

John Seed:

Oh, well, I guess I'm as confused as everybody else at recent events and but from where I'm standing, what I've noticed is that the interest in the experiential deep ecology workshops, which I've been facilitating since I met Joanna Macy, a couple of years after discovering the philosophy of deep ecology. The man who coined the term deep ecology, the late Arne Næss, professor of philosophy at Oslo University, who said that ecological ideas won't save us. We need ecological identity, ecological self. He proposed that in order to nourish our ecological identity, what was needed were community therapies to heal our relations with the living Earth. And it was through meeting Joanna Macy that we began to develop such community therapies, and so you'll have to get me back on track.

Sara Artemisia:

I mean, to me, that sounds like it answers the question really directly, like, what is the time right for the time is right for community therapies to heal our relationship with the living Earth, that this really is very key. And one of the things that we were talking about earlier as well is that very experiential connection with the Earth, how that is so important. And so I was curious if you could share with us some practices, or I know you had shared about this practice, the breathing with trees, is that something you'd be open to sharing about now?

John Seed:

I would, but I'll just get that in terms of what the time is right for now, the reason that I brought up the experiential workshops is that I'm doing the same workshops that I developed with Joanna more than 30 years ago, but suddenly there's a huge surge of interest in the in this work that gives me a feeling that more and more people are ready to be listening to this and and so I just feel like that this is really hopeful. So the practice that I'd like to do, I'm going to do a longish introduction, and during that time, I'd like listeners to see whether they can either place themselves before a living plant, anything that's got anything green about it, a blade of grass is enough, or open a window so that there's line of sight to something green, which will become clear in a few minutes. So one of the processes that I did in the workshop that I did in Melbourne last weekend, and that is part of every workshop I do. At the moment, on Saturday night, we do a process called The Cosmic Walk, and this is a process that owes its existence to the late Thomas Berry. He was a famous theologian at the end of the last century, and late in his life, he discovered that he had become a "geologian", that his attention turned from the conception of God that he'd had all of his life, from the Old Testament and the New Testament, to the Earth itself as the source of every story, including the stories that Christians tell, and that the Christian creation myth was one of 10,000 such myths that humans seem to require. It's ubiquitous asking these questions about who are we and where did we come from? And all of the answers Thomas said, are gorgeous, beautiful flowers of humanity on the Earth, but they tend to be at war with each other. It's not just that the Christian story is at war with the Islam story or but that the Catholic story is at war with the Protestant and the Sunni story is at war with the Shia and that it's too late for that now, and we need to find a story that will unite us rather than separate us. And he proposed that the story, revealed by empiricism, revealed by observation, revealed by our telescopes and microscopes, correctly told, was the creation myth of the future was the creation myth that would unite all of us. And so the cosmic walk was a process created by one of his students, sister Miriam Therese MacGillis, is a Catholic nun from Genesis-Farm in New Jersey. And the cosmic walk we have a ball of hemp, 50 meters long, representing the 13.7 billion year epic story of the universe. And there are 23 beads appropriately placed on this 50 meters, each of which represents an important story in the emerging universe and in the center there's a bead representing the amazing fact that anything exists at all, that had the fundamental forces of physics been one millionth of a percent different than what they are, nothing would exist. But here we are, and so we place a tea light candle next to each of these beads. The hemp is laid out in a spiral, and while singing a chant called Child of the Universe, I am as old as the Universe. I've been here before, and I'll be here again. I am a child of the Universe, part of all women, part of all men, the youngest person in the group lights the candle in the center. We tell the story of existence, and then she or he lights a taper, and while we chant, walks around, lighting candle after candle as the story of the emerging universe is told. And we get about two thirds of the way around, and we light a candle to represent the supernova explosion and the debris of which created our sun and all of the planets of our solar system and so on. So the the process that I'm going to introduce in a moment starts about between two and 3 billion years ago, when our ancestors were single celled bacteria floating in the oceans, and we had become incredibly successful and proliferated to the extent that we'd used up all of the freely available nutrients in the Ocean, and there was a crisis of starvation, and that crisis was solved by the emergence of a new molecule, chlorophyll, which allowed these bacteria to capture photons of light from the sun and use the energy of that to be able to extract carbon from CO2 to continue to build our bodies. And this was a tremendous innovation that solved the problem of how to how to continue at that point, but it had the side effect of every time one of these transactions took place, a molecule of oxygen was released, and oxygen was a toxic poison to the anaerobic life of that time, for nearly a billion years that oxygen couldn't accumulate, because there was so much iron dissolved in the ocean coming up from lava, that the moment some oxygen was released, it oxidized some iron, and a molecule of rust fell to the ocean floor, and all of the iron that we mine today to build our cities and our motor cars and our airplanes, it's now understood that that's how it accumulated. That's how all of that, those great, you know, blocks of iron that we that we mine, were accumulated one molecule at a time by these ancestors, breaking CO2 up and releasing oxygen. But eventually, about 2 billion years ago, all of the iron had been swept out of the oceans, and oxygen began to accumulate, threatening all of life. And this problem was solved by another of the bacteria of that time which created the new molecule, which was the heme molecule, the ancestor of the hemoglobin protein that transport oxygen through all animal bodies, including our own. And this ancient cycle of partnership between the producers of chlorophyll and the producers of heme has continued since that time, and we reenact that in every breath we take. So the particular, the particular process that I'm going to, you know, invite people to share with us at the moment is I'm going to be looking out my window at some green trees outside the window, and I invite people to look at a plant and see what happens when we add consciousness to this ancient cycle of partnership, because I believe that this is one of the processes that helps us to understand and embody our ecological identity. Usually, we're trapped in our social identity, our nationality or our religion or these social constructs, but this is something that takes us back billions and billions of years into our history, and when we add consciousness to it, let's see what happens. So looking out at this green thing, the blade of grass or a tree with we're just going to do this for a few minutes with each in breath. Remember the gift that's being received, the oxygen that we need in order to be alive, is being produced by these green things, and so we allow ourselves to feel gratitude for this gift. And with each out breath, remembering that those green things mutually depend upon our exhalations as well. And so we can feel, instead of just being ashamed of the CO2 that we're producing, we can feel a sense of abundance and generosity, because in the correct quantities, the CO2 is just as essential for the life of these plants as the oxygen is for our life. And so each inhalation and exhalation becomes an exchange of gifts, and we connect with the world in this way. So it's like a breath meditation, but it's actually about the exchange of gasses itself. So, just exchanging gasses with the green world for a couple of minutes and I'll shut up. Thank you. Of course, I invite you to continue this for a bit longer after the podcast.

Sara Artemisia:

Well, thanks so much, John, so so wonderful. And I mean really, in what you shared there about how the inhalation and the exhalation, it becomes this exchange of gifts. How, you know, so often there can be this experience, in my perception of the human experience, in connecting with plants, where it's more of like through the eyes, you know, as if it's like, oh, they're over there and I'm over here, my human experience and how the breath transcends that directly. It's just right into the body of like we are in relationship through the very active breathing. And how simple and profound that is. So yeah, thank you for sharing that so great and and also on that note, just recognizing the pivotal times that we're in. Why is it important for deep ecology to move more into the mainstream?

John Seed:

Well, deep ecology, the experience of deep ecology, which Joanna Macy calls the work that reconnects, reconnects us both to the living Earth, to the natural world, to the rest of Nature. It dispels the illusion of separation, and that means that we feel ever more motivation to engage with protecting wild Nature, but it also reconnects us only nest calls for community therapies. This isn't something that's done individually. It's done in a circle with other people. And what we find is that when we get together with the circle of people, and we have the shared intention to heal our relations with the more than human world, a tremendous bonding develops between the people who do that together. And I heard of a really interesting study a couple of weeks ago, which I loved, that someone posed a difficult problem to a large number of people as individuals, and about 10% of the people were able to solve that problem, but the same problem given to a small group of individuals, 80% of the groups solved the problem because we're social mammals, and we evolved to work together to solve the problems that we face, that no matter how fit an Individual is, unless they live in a community that's fit. No no amount of personal fitness will allow us to survive and to and to move forward, and so finding a circle of people with whom we share that intention to, heal our relations with the Earth and to protect the Earth, it's just a tremendously powerful force that I think is going to move us forward.

Sara Artemisia:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I'm curious, for folks who may be listening right now who feel a bit isolated, maybe they're living in a community where they feel like they don't have that kind of resonance. Do you have any suggestions for how folks could connect with others to really deepen in this way?

John Seed:

Well, I mean, the first thing is just to look up the work that reconnects and deep ecology, a Nature connection, rewilding, words like this, and see, you know with your address. And see you know, like, who, what's around? Because there are thousands of groups around the world that are already offering this. But the other thing is that what we've found is that, because in these workshops, it's the intention that does all of the heavy lifting, that once a group of people share that intention together. You don't need like a highly skilled facilitator or anything like that. And when Joanna Macy and I joined Professor Arne Næss and Pat Fleming and we wrote our book thinking like a mountain towards the Council of all beings in 1988 and a PDF of that. There'll be a link in the show notes so that people can can can find that book. We wrote it like a recipe book, where, just like a recipe, you don't have to go to cooking school or anything like that. You can just look at the recipe and follow the recipe and and that's it. So many, many people have just, you know, so basically, all that you need to do, if there's nothing else in your neighborhood, is to put out a call for like minded people and get together with three or four people and then follow the recipe, because it works and and that becomes the focal point that will attract more people, and it's these, it's these small circles growing in number that I think, is where the hope lies.

Sara Artemisia:

Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that and tell us, how can people find out more about you and your work?

John Seed:

Oh, well, if you put you know, John Seed Deep Ecology into a search engine, all my social media and other you know, websites and things like that will be there.

Sara Artemisia:

Well, thanks so much, John and yeah, so wonderful to connect today, and just thank you so much for your life's work and for honoring that call and for being so deeply engaged in in relationship with the Earth. Thank you.

John Seed:

Oh, well, thank you, Sara.

Sara Artemisia:

And thanks so much for listening and joining us today on the Plant Spirit Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it, and please follow to subscribe, leave a review and look forward to seeing you on the next episode.