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Tag: deep ecology

Update to Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism

This post is an update to the Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism that I made on April 28, 2020.

Although I have signed this statement, I want to point out that it neglects to acknowledge the roles of Indigenous peoples around the world in promoting values closely related to ecocentrism. (I do not mean to oversimplify the diverse Indigenous cultures of the world, but most would find resonance with the idea of the “intrinsic (inherent) value in all of nature and the ecosphere.”) The First Nations peoples of Turtle Island and have been especially vocal in this regard. One significant example that comes to mind is “A Basic Call to Consciousness: The Hau De No Sau Nee Address to the Western World,” which was written primarily by John Mohawk (Sotsisowah), a historian, writer, and activist of the Seneca Nation, and was presented in Geneva, Switzerland in 1977, as part of the International Non-Governmental Organization Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas. More recently, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass has reached thousands and thousands of readers. Also, in the past decade, Indigenous water protectors using the Lakota words Mní Wičóni, “water is life,” have stood up against the petroleum industry. Adrián Villaseñor Galarza has also written of the “ancestral deep ecology” of the Indigenous peoples of Central and South America. The establishment of systems of human supremacy over the past several centuries–systems that are now global in scale–has gone hand in hand with colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples and the destruction of their lifeways. Proponents of ecocentrism today have an obligation to learn from and ally with Indigenous peoples, many of whom are front-line defenders of the ecosphere.

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Guided Meditation for Awakening the Ecological Self

This meditation is inspired by the concept of the ecological self as described by Arne Naess, Joanna Macy, John Seed, and other participants in the Deep Ecology movement, which began in the early 1970s, and also by a guided meditation by Sharon Salzburg on gratitude and our interconnectedness with other people.

The ecological self honored here is the expansive, interconnected self, that lives in relationship with everything else that exists.

I am sharing this meditation freely through a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

If you prefer to download the audio file, you can access it here.

The script for the meditation is available here, in case you’d like to read the meditation yourself or make modifications.

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