Falling Back In Love With Humanity

The Pathway Out of Environmental Grief and Into Wholeness

Jake Melara, Unsplash

The Pathway Out of Environmental Grief and Into Wholeness

Although I grew up in the suburban Los Angeles Basin, my childhood was rooted in the outdoors, whether playing within the weedy licorice in our backyard or searching for tadpoles in the ponds at our local neighborhood park. My parents’ strong connection to nature meant that our weekends and vacations were mostly spent backpacking in the Sierras or walking beaches along the wild Pacific Coast. I could explore tidepools for hours, delighting in starfish, sea urchins and anemones and was equally at home hiking beneath a canopy of pines to summit some Sierra peak.

My love of the nature was so strong that by the time I entered college at nineteen, I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to “saving the earth.” A contentious conservation issue of the time was an outcry over logging of the last of California’s ancient old-growth redwood forests. Vehemently opposed to this logging, I joined a student environmentalist group inspired by the famed desert writer Edward Abbey and the Earth First! movement and protested on the shipping docks in Sacramento where boats were stacked with cut horizontal old-growth redwood trees.

My passion for environmentalism led to my dream job as a conservation scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the largest conservation organization in the world. For twenty years I conducted studies on species like condors, mule deer and sage-grouse and spent my time passionately collaborating with amazing colleagues to protect animals and their habitat from the peril of man’s drills, bulldozers, and plows.

Famed ecologist Aldo Leopold said:

“one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

In my late forties, when my career as a scientist was peaking, despair over the state of our planet from the “world of wounds” had sunk into my bones.

The Old Story of Loss and Separation

The story of environmental conservation is a story of loss — to preserve the last species and systems before they are gone. Scientists collect data and track the losses in the hopes of raising enough alarms that people finally wake up and care. Loss of wildlife, forests, migration routes, balanced climate, clean water, clean air, and dark skies. Everything is measured and tracked in the hopes of changing the narrative of loss and destruction.

Modern philosopher Charles Eisenstein calls this the paradigm of the Old Story. The Old Story being the story of separation, which presents itself in many different ways. In terms of loss and scarcity, it appears as:

“The universe progresses inexorably toward greater entropy. The amount of usable energy is finite and ever-decreasing. Scarcity is built into physics.”

At one crucial moment of despair, I realized that I was caught in an endless loop of “Groundhog Day” cycles waking and working in scarcity. It felt like no matter how hard I worked there would never be enough time, money or resources to fully fix the ailing planet and my broken heart. It felt like I was in a deep well with no bottom.

There was a sense of futility that I could not shake. Knowing right from wrong, and tirelessly working on the side of the “right” was supposed to save us, but that story had played itself out and there was no happy ending in sight. Underneath was a feeling that I didn’t deserve to be happy when so much of the world was suffering. I didn’t know how to let myself be happy.

I could also feel larger existential questions looming: Why am I here? Why are we even doing this?

I started to listen to fresh voices, and especially the wisdom of the ancestors and native cultures that were marginalized, terrorized and denigrated in the capitalist quest for power and money set upon the pretense of modernity and progress.

One of these voices is philosopher and author Bayo Akomolafe who says:

“In order to find your way, you must become lost.”

I was utterly lost. Nothing made sense anymore except to pause. To stop fighting all the battles against humanities evils. I left my job as a scientist and began a deep inner quest for resolution to my anger and sadness. For so long I had focused on mapping and studying the Earth’s landscapes and species, but I needed a new way forward to heal my broken heart and the landscape within.

I gave myself a year to put on my own proverbial oxygen mask and seek answers within — where I had never seriously looked. To find new ways of being in the world. To find my joy again. To find new ways of being alive.

To do this, I needed to let go of everything that I’d ever known. I needed to let go of my colonial material upbringing that created this problem and venture into other ways of knowing the world.

In the words again of Akomolafe,

“This is a radical discontinuity in the intelligence of becoming and we are being invited into that place…We will not come out of this intact. Maybe it’s time to let go. Maybe it’s time to fall. The beauty of a magical entangled universe, is that in falling, we might be flying without the tyranny of coordinates. We find ourselves in a mode of being entirely by adopting decolonial ways of seeing and noticing and sniffing and being in the world. We might find other ways of being alive.”

A New Model for Conservation

And so, I dove deeply into meditation and plant medicine. Like Alice in Wonderland, I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole of consciousness and Self. It was here that I finally saw that the ground of my being — of all beings and all things — is whole and the essence of the Universe is loving, sacred and intelligent. This understanding changed everything.

This is what Albert Einstein meant when he wrote:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

As this understanding settled within me, the question arose:

What if the loss model of conservation itself is the problem?

What if we flipped the conservation story from one of loss and scarcity to one of wholeness?

It seems anathema to everything that conservation stands for. To see wholeness in a world perpetually being destroyed by humanity is exactly counter to the destruction before our eyes and the abundance of data showing the magnitude of ecosystem loss. It seems obvious that we are losing everything.

So, in the face of this, how is it possible to flip the story from a place of loss to a place of wholeness?

What I came to understand is that first I must know wholeness within. I must know that I am not a separate being walking around in a separate body. When we live in separateness, we feel alone. Reality appears random and chaotic with things that need to be fixed everywhere.

From this view, the world looks understandably dim and as though everything is falling apart — socially, environmentally, and politically — and that there is little hope for the planet. Whether a specific one of these challenges affects us directly or indirectly, we yearn for a sense of order and for the world to be made whole again. We yearn to love the world.

As paradoxical as it seems, the way out of our broken heartedness is not to change someone’s mind or work harder thinking that if we just adopt the next new technology or create a new law, we will fix the ailing planet. Loss arises from scarcity and separateness — from the sense that we have to get enough of X…(e.g. resources, money, love…whatever) to be okay.

As the famous quote by Anais Nin, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.”

My version is:

If you see loss and scarcity within yourself, then you will see loss and scarcity in the world.

The Way Forward

When I embarked long ago to live my dream as a conservation scientist, this unforgettable line in Walden by Thoreau became like a companion and mantra: “I went to the wood because I wished to live deliberately and seek out the marrow of life, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” And for a long time, it served me well to pour my heart into the outer world.

I brought my scientist mind to every program, trying to label, organize, and understand everything that I saw. I wrote papers and told people what and how to “save the world” that I so desperately wanted to be okay. I thought that somehow by making everyone understand how special Earth is, they would want to save it. And God bless them, some wonderful philanthropists did amazing things. But, the stark truth is that it would never be enough. Not this way, anyway, and I’d burned myself out doing it.

I found the real solution in knowing the peace, well-being and okayness within that exists amidst the madness —the knowing that deeply, truly everything will be okay. This message of radical hope cuts through the appearance of chaos. As expressed by Charles Eisenstein, we are invited back to “the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible.”

As spiritual teacher Rupert Spira writes: “There are essentially two models for civilization. The first one is one in which the ideas and attitudes of individuals are informed by an understanding of their relationship to the whole, and their activities and relationships are the means by which this understanding is expressed in society.

The second model is one in which individuals overlook their relationship to the whole and, as a result, believe and feel themselves to be discrete, independently existing entities. This is the paradigm of separation that inevitably leads to unhappiness on the inside, conflict on the outside between individuals, communities, and nations, and the exploitation and degradation of the earth.

History has repeatedly shown that a civilization in which individuals neglect their relationship to the whole will collapse.”

This is where we find ourselves now. Our modern history is the collective history of separation. Our scientists explored the material world with painstaking exactitude — from the smallest subatomic particles to the furthest reaches of the universe. And they couldn’t find a beginning or an end. And they never will — not by these means, anyway.

Again in the words of Spira: “Thus self-knowledge is not only the direct path to peace and happiness; is also a pre-requisite for understanding the nature of the universe. The reason why scientists have yet to discover the nature of the universe, in spite of searching for it for over two thousand years, is that they have yet to recognize the nature of their own minds.”

The path then begins at home. Begin in the only place you can begin — with yourself. Journey inwards to discover the nature of your own being and radically accept yourself as you are — with all your apparent imperfections and limitations.

Dare to shift your perception and discover the purity of the screen behind the wild chaotic movie of objective reality veiling the truth that the essence of your being is sacred, perfect and whole already.

We are the sacred mystery in form. And if you are that then the stuff of the universe isn’t dead nothingness as we have been taught to believe.

The universe is alive, intelligent, and sacred.

Eisenstein says exquisitely in this must-watch performance:

“Life is sacred.
 Matter is sacred.
 The world is sacred.
 You are sacred.”

When I journeyed within for answers, I awakened to wholeness as my new orientation. I discovered that to know the world as whole now doesn’t stop me from caring or wanting to act. This isn’t some kind of Pollyanna glossing over of the world’s evils. Rather, from wholeness, I have an infinite reservoir of energy to share with the world.

Thich Nhat Hanh says:

“Many people are aware of the world’s suffering, and their hearts are filled with compassion. They know what needs to be done, and they engage in political, social, and environmental work to try to change things. But after a period of intense involvement, they become discouraged, because they lack the strength needed to sustain a life of action. Real strength is not in power, money, or weapons, but in deep, inner peace. The best way to take care of the environment is to take care of the environmentalist.”

To fall in love with yourself opens the possibility to fall in love with humanity and the world as it is — clearcuts, mines, malls, cement…all of it.

Individual wholeness becomes global wholeness.

Wholeness opens a space for the infinite possibilities of what wants to become.

When we finally accept this one truth, that we are sacred and therefore all life is sacred, this is how we will fall back in love with ourselves. This is how we will fall back in love with humanity and the world waiting so patiently for our return.