Green Arts: Creation Inspiration

Revised December 20, 2008

"The artist appeals to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition -- and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our sense of mystery, pity, beauty and pain, to our latent feeling of fellowship with all creation, to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity which binds together all humanity: the dead to the living, and the living to the unborn." - Joseph Conrad

At Homeness, by Kenneth Patton
"Gather into yourself all of the world.
Lie on the earth and feast on the sky.
Print upon the films of your eyes' inner theater the
images of all its forms and creatures.
Record upon your inner ear the sounds of water and
wind, leaves and birds, the voices and songs of people.
Gather the stars into your mind, and the knowledge of
huge spaces and the length of time.
Be rich with friends and companions.
Discover the loveliness of your mate and your fortune in
the faces and hands of your children.
Give and be given unto, that within you may be stored
and reborn all of the world about you.
You who are nature, be all of nature;
For nothing can be strange to you, and never in the
heavens and earth can you be homeless."

Ecoshift, though solidly grounded in the knowledge of science and the realities of government and industry, conscientiously embodies the emotional and inspirational aspects of human existence. The creative arts, broadly defined here to include art, crafts, writing, music, theater, and dance, can all incorporate "green" components. Resurgence magazine includes "The Arts" as a regular section. An exhibition in Cincinnati in 2002 titled "Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies" led to a book by Sue Spaid, which documents the involvement of green artists in transforming and restoring natural landscapes and systems. The text is on the web at http://www.greenmuseum.org/c/ecovention/intro_frame.html.

As Ecoshift occurs and people spend less money on things, especially on expensive toys and gadgets, a greater share of income will be available to support education and the arts. Local music and theater will grow, allowing more musicians and actors to earn their living through performance. And homes may once again become places where crafts, poetry, theater, and music provide family entertainment.

The Written Word

ECOSHIFT has relied almost completely on the creative art of writing. Books, magazines, and web sites provide sources of information and inspiration. Many of these are referenced throughout the book and need not be reconsidered here.

Fiction about Ecoshift, on the other hand, remains rather sparse in spite of fiction's usefulness as a readable teaching tool. Two books from 1975 are now seen as classics of an emerging Ecoshift genre: "The Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey and "Ecotopia" by Ernest Callenbach. A more recent classic is Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael", which has introduced thousands to ecocentrism. Each of these authors has followed up their success with other related novels. In the young reader category, "Grandpa's Prayers of the Earth" by Douglas Wood and "The Girl Who Slipped Through Time" by Paula Hendrich include considerable deep ecology. Edward Rutherfurd's "The Forest" develops a real sense of place about the New Forest in England, with a few statements like:

"Whenever you try to impose a static order on nature, it doesn't work. The entire system changes anyway.... An oak tree lives in a four-hundred-year time frame. Human time-frames are always too short. So we get it wrong, and we don't really understand the natural processes half the time."

Although the dominance of murder and mayhem in current fiction disturbs me, nevertheless, such books can gain wide readership. Nevada Barr's series starring a National Park Service ranger named Anna Pigeon has topped best-seller lists. Anna usually has to deal with villains who are poaching wildlife or archeological sites. A similar series by Jessica Speart with U.S. Fish and Game enforcer Rachel Porter has deeper ecological thinking. Other novels that include violence are "Ecowar" by Richard Henrick, "The Ice" by Louis Charbonneau, and "The Family Tree" by Sheri Tepper, all of which feature the good guys versus the bad guys in terms of plundering Earth.

Two other books better illustrate the potential of environmental and ecocentric fiction. "World Made By Hand" by James Howard Kunstler involves the response of a town in New York to the end of fossil fuel; it is not a pretty picture. Artist Jeanne C. Wilkinson has published "The Meetings of WEarth: A Story for Our Times" on the web. Far in the future animals meet in Congress to debate the relation of Domesticates and Wilds and the relation of Who-Mans to themselves and to the Rooted Ones, ending with The Great Dance of the universe. The Ecoshift movement needs much more such fiction.

Poetry about nature is nothing new and can be found everywhere. The nineteenth century brought an outbreak of paeans to the pastoral beauties of nature, though without any real concern about whether such nature would continue to exist. Walt Whitman, in "Leaves of Grass" and other writings, began to question the adverse impact of humanity on nature. Twentieth century technology seems to have reduced the romantic poets and painters to "air head" status, out of touch with the "real" world of industrialization and consumerism.

The rise of concern about "the environment" late in the twentieth century produced new poetry expressing this concern. Mary Oliver and Gary Snyder have become the poet laureates of the movement, urging respect for nature and for Earth. Wendell Berry, in both prose and poetry, has led a transition from earlier "back to the land" movements to the more recent bioregional movement emphasizing a sense of place and growing one's own food. The collection of poetry in "Earth Prayers" edited by Roberts and Amidon, gets used frequently during Earth-based meetings and church services.

Painting, Drawing, Photography, and Sculpture

Artists have memorialized the natural world for centuries, but such work has usually externalized nature, treating it as something awesomely powerful to be subdued, or, when transformed by humanity into pastoral scenery, to be worshipped as controlled and even created by people, perhaps in the image of God's Garden of Eden. Only recently have artists begun to think ecocentrically, to see nature as integrated with humanity, or to see humanity as part of the recurring cycles of nature.

"Green" art is becoming a genre, and not just because the extensive list of artists in the Green Art Guide is run by an artist/architect named Cedric Green! Sculptors rearrange natural objects in a natural environment. Architects design structures to be green both in materials/energy and in blending with their environment. Such sculpture and architecture represent worship of the close relationship between nature and humanity. In Resurgence [Nov/Dec 2006 p.37] Jules Cashford states about British sculptor Jacob Lane: "His work embodies the wisdom of a unified vision whose mythic image is the goddess, a vision that holds sacred the body of Earth, and whose story is the Universe." Such statements can be made about a growing number of artists. Thomas Berger, who lives near my former home in the New Hampsire/Maine Seacoast is one example. In a "Resurgence" illustration Matt Kenyon depicts a small human figure admiring a lone large tree that is protected from harm by a log fence; the human seems oblivious to the surrounding stumps of the many trees that were used to create the fence! Greg Patch uses non-toxic media to portray the balance of nature and the unity of life. Martin Hill draws circles with natural materials and makes beautiful photographs of them to emphasize that circularity (recycling), rather than linearity, is how nature works. In the award-winning film "Rivers and Tides", Andy Goldsworthy uses piles of stones, leaves, and twigs that are washed away as the tide comes in, thus amplifying and worshiping the temporary qualities of nature. Other relevant films include "March of the Penguins" and "Winged Migration".

Some artists combine their aesthetics with a stronger social message. The Universe Story Trilogy, by Jennifer Morgan, is wonderfully enhanced by the art of Dana Lynne Andersen. The "Song of Creation" on her web site expresses both the fantasy and awe of the Universe. On a much more "down to Earth" scale, Chris Jordan utilizes his artistic abilities to document the situation humanity has created on Earth in his "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait". His art depicts such fine items as "one hundred million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees cut in the U.S. yearly to make the paper for junk mail", and "one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours". And that's just the beginning! He reproduces Seurat's "La Grande Jatte" using 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds

Crafts

As Ecoshift develops, Western societies will see more and more products made locally and individually and fewer and fewer products of factories in developing countries overseas. The latter half of the twentieth century was marked by continual loss of local knowledge of how to make clothing, utensils, and tools, as well as the better-known loss of locally-grown foods. "Consumers" were and are inundated with advertising urging "buying" rather than "making". Now, with the rise of Ecoshift, people concerned with sustainability and simplicity are re-learning "making". Large numbers of individuals and families remove themselves from the corporate, consumer world and seek to make a satisfying living by the personal creation and sale of "arts and crafts". Pottery, spinning, knitting, crocheting, weaving of art objects, of clothing, and of warmth-giving blankets and rugs seem to be resurging. We are making progress in turning "home-made" into a positive term again. We are resurrecting and preserving old techniques. We are using local and natural materials.

My CSM

Several years ago my always-knitting wife visited the Machine Knitting Museum in Ruddington, England with our English co-grandmother, Jean. Jean mentioned that her father still had a 1926 circular sock machine (CSM) in his attic, and would Suzanne be interested in it. She wasn't, but I was, so Jean had it refurbished and I "inherited" it.

Many thousands of CSMs were marketed to housewives in the 1920s as a way of earning money while working at home. A pair of socks could be knit in an hour or two, faster if you were good, and then sold to the company that made the machine. However, the machines proved trickier to use than the hype implied and many were soon gathering dust in attics while the manufacturers were being sued for mail fraud.

Now these old CSMs sell on Ebay and elsewhere for around $1000 because so many of us are fascinated by the mechanical ingenuity they involve, by the ability to make socks and other tubular items like hats quickly and easily, and for me especially by the fact that they are human-powered - all you do is turn a crank. I have joined my wife as a knitter, though I use a radically different technique, and I make all my own socks and socks for lots of friends. I enjoy the positive feelings I get from working with useful technology that was essentially perfected in the mid-nineteenth century, long before electricity.

Two aspects of the burgeoning green crafts movement bother me somewhat: the greening of gimmicks, and the import of overseas craft products. Many companies produce catalogs or web shopping sites featuring all kinds of "green" products. While many of these products are useful, there are also many that are gimmicks. Each reader needs to define the difference for themselves. Just consider whether an item that is run by solar or wind power, or is made from recycled plastic or hemp, or is produced by a company that uses solar power, provides real usefulness, or whether it just adds to one's collection of consumer "stuff" (see the Voluntary Simplicity chapter).

The second aspect concerns the many efforts to financially assist impoverished peoples on other continents by purchasing their craft products. Development of micro-credit and sales over the world-wide web have enabled organization of many small craft companies, often run by women or by community groups. They produce such diverse things as clothing, fair-trade chocolate, weaving, and pottery for sale internationally. One negative aspect of this is the same as the negative aspect of purchasing any products made overseas - the energy costs of transportation. A second negative aspect involves the development of a reliance for income on the generosity of the Western wealthy, an income source that will dry up when the fossil-fueled house of cards tumbles down. In other words, craft export does not help to develop a local sustainable economy. To a certain extent, the same can be said about exporting Native American crafts outside their source bioregion.

Performing Arts

Although "green" may not yet have penetrated very far into the big-scale performing arts of Broadway and Carnegie Hall, there are good beginnings here and there in music, theater, drumming, and dance.

Environmental music surged in the late 60s and around Earth Day 1970. In 1969 Joni Mitchell wrote "Woodstock" including the famous chorus "We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden", a concise statement of humanity's place in the Universe and our status on Earth. Beginning at the same time, Pete Seeger sang of cleaning the Hudson River while cruising in the sloop "Clearwater". Many more songs followed, with the classic song-book of 1992, "Rise Up Singing", listing 25 songs under the heading "Ecology". The more ecocentric of these include "The Earth is My Mother" by Carol Johnson, "Honor the Earth" by Molly Scott, "Let It Be (When you walk in the forest, let it be)" by Malvina Reynolds, and especially "This Old Earth" by Bob Zentz.

Green song-writing continues. "Seize the Day", a British acoustic band that also joins in protests, has been called "the musical wing of the ecology movement" [Resurgence 237:40]. They have protested the WTO in Seattle, but now they pledge never to fly again, so they won't repeat their 2000 tour of the U.S. All their music can be heard on the web site; songs I particularly like are "G 'n' T" (Green and Tory), and "Child of the Universe". Then there is "Dancing in Fifty-year Forests (playing in stumps, all that's left of the giants)" on Laura Lind's album "Wild Birds".

In theater arts, puppetry and street theater have always been a part of the environmental movement, though documentation of these activities is sketchy. Drumming also has played a role in the environmental and peace movements for decades. The World Drum has traveled around Earth drumming in churches and meetings to call attention to the planet's "critical situation". Another form of ecocentric participatory theater finds its expression in the Council of All Beings described in the Deep Ecology chapter.

Mother Earth vs. World's People

I am playing the role of bailiff to an audience of 70 during a Sunday service at my Unitarian-Universalist church in Tamworth NH. I call the "jury" to order and introduce His Honor. I announce the charge being brought by the prosecutor, Mother Earth. "Mother Earth is charging World's People with acting in ways that cause her grievous personal harm and limit her inherent civil rights to a fruitful existence." Mother Earth calls Ms. Melting Glacier (covered by a white sheet), Mr. Rising Oceans (with swim fins and draped in seaweed), Miss Gulf Stream (running, but slowing down during testimony), and others, and interrogates them about what is happening to them. Another witness, Mr. Hummer Dinger , argues contrarily "Production, that's what it's all about, ma'am, unfettered production. That's what has given us the world's best life-style. All the things we own and enjoy. Like my Hummer." After closing arguments by both sides, the "jury" of the audience discusses and votes on the verdict, which this time was "guilty" of course. The judge closes the case with an exhortation about what individuals can do to help Mother Earth.

The play, "The Case of Mother Earth vs. World's People - Perhaps the Most Important Trial in the History of Civilization", by Doug Stewart, was written for churches and other groups. It provides a fun way to get across a variety of important facts about what we are doing to Earth's systems, including the really scary prospects of rising sea level and stopping the Gulf Stream. The play can be purchased from the Ministry for Earth as part of its Global Warming Action Kit Volume 1.

Finally, dance also plays a role in spreading the Ecoshift message. In particular, Joanna Macy brought the Elm Dance from Latvia in 1992. The dance developed in response to Chernobyl, in the most heavily impacted areas, as an effort to maintain spirit and action. Macy says: "When swaying in place, imagine that you can feel the energy from the heart of the Earth spiraling up through the floor into your body. When the energy reaches the heart chakra, send it out for the healing of the elms and all beings." The dance is now used world-wide as a deep ecology ritual (see the Deep Ecology chapter).

The Spiral or Grapevine dance, originated by Starhawk, plays a similar participatory role in Earth-based spirituality groups. The dance begins in a circle, then breaks into a line that spirals into the center, reverses direction and leads out again into a circle. As those spiraling outward pass those still going inward, each participant "greets" every other participant. This dance is often used by Wiccans and other pagans as a Samhain or New Years dance. At the Unitarian-Universalist conference my family attends every year at Ferry Beach in Saco, Maine, we use the Spiral Dance as a closing ritual along with the chant "Go Now in Peace", because it enables each person to acknowledge and say goodbye to each other, even though there are 200 of us.

Singing, chanting, drumming, writing, painting, pottery, knitting, crafting, dancing, acting, sculpting - all creative arts can be means of expressing the joys and concerns of the human relation with Earth. All can be meditative and spiritual. Whether done individually or in groups, arts can stir the soul and create energy for personal and societal change.

To the next chapter - Ecospirituality: Caring for Creation

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ECOSHIFT: Creation Inspiration - by Tony Federer