The Earth, viewed from space. Photo: By Vimal S on Unsplash.
Down to Earth: Paul Hodgkin says it’s time for a new kind of engagement
‘This is a moment of Copernican significance.’
One of the joys and responsibilities of Quakerism is that each generation has to renew its understanding of the sacred for its own changing times. Right now, I am finding my traditional Quaker responses to Trump/Ukraine/rearmament/climate/AI both true and underwhelming. My own comfortable life exists on one side of a pane of glass, the world’s great troubles on the other.
Then, busy as I was on my hamster wheel of worry, the thought came that perhaps I was looking for the truth in the wrong place. When we ask ‘How should we react to Trump?’, or, ‘Do we need to rearm?’, the question is entirely about us humans, when what the world needs now, what our generation’s renewal is perhaps about, is to ask instead: ‘What does the Earth need?’
Quakerism has never taken the Earth’s needs as its primary point of spiritual reference. Like the whole of the global north, we took the natural world for granted. In the words of Advices & queries 42, we thought our job was to ‘show a loving consideration for all creatures’ and to ‘work to ensure that our increasing power over nature was used responsibly’. But it is not we who have power over nature; it is a warming, depleted Earth that holds the power over us.
Our traditional Quaker responses were formed in a world that assumed that progress (as defined by humans), together with the fossil energy that fuelled it, were unstoppable. As a result, Quaker spirituality is locked into the human dimension and does not yet encompass the full reality of the Earth crises that are upon us. We have spent 350 years asking ‘What does our personal sense of God/the Light lead us to do in relation to humanity?’, when now we must ask ‘What does the Earth (including humanity but obviously vastly more than humanity) need of us?’
What would happen if we took the Earth’s needs as the primary reference point for our Quakerism? What if the call is for us to move from answering that of God in every one, to answering that of God in every thing?
If I start with the Earth’s needs as my primary spiritual reference then I suddenly find myself on solid ground; of course the people, animals, and ecosystems of Ukraine do not want war. Of course the Earth does not want us to increase spending on defence – it wants every last dollar, pound, euro and rouble spent on helping us humans transition away from our disastrous lifestyles. Perhaps what we need now is a peace testimony that encompasses the whole of creation. A pacifist witness, not just against violence between us humans, but also dedicated to the curlew crying on the estuary, and the smell of witch hazel on the spring air. Perhaps something like this: ‘All principles and practices of exploitation towards others and the Earth we do utterly deny. All outward wars and violent strife against others and against the Earth itself, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever, we do deny. And this is our testimony to the whole Earth and all creatures who dwell here.’
This ‘down to Earth’ Quakerism could also transform our other testimonies. Simplicity sits at the heart of what the Earth needs us humans to do. The extravagance of our lives in the global north is farcical and offensive. Simplicity is not just a moral and ecological imperative, it is also a deeply political act against the market itself.
And what about equality? Well surely, since we are all – ferns, children, viruses, oceans, people, spiders, otters – needed to maintain a healthy Earth, then this co-dependence may be the planet’s version of equality. This interdependence is the root of climate justice and ecological right livelihood. The Earth is not a resource to be plundered. Our cheap wood was once someone else’s rainforest.
This is a moment of Copernican significance. Like it or not, we are not the centre of the universe, or of life. In this new world, when the Earth’s needs are co-equal to our own, we are called to an extended equality that owes as much to animism as ethics.
‘Climate breakdown will always trump Trump.’
What truth is the Earth asking us to heed? Well, truth is not a piece of real estate to plant our flag on and defend, but rather a journey through new meanings unfolding in our lives – and because of the enormity of the Earth changes that we have triggered, our journeys are now defined by the Earth’s journey. Climate breakdown will always trump Trump. The Earth’s deep truth is that there is no ‘them’, and there is no ‘master’ species. There is, and has only ever been, us – our friends that we know and love, and our friends that we have never known but on whom we nevertheless are completely dependent. And these friends include whales, icecaps, millipedes and clown fish. Our tragedy and the Earth’s tragedy, is that we humans do not yet live lives that are consistent with this deep truth.
Asking what the Earth needs transforms each of our testimonies. Simplicity becomes a witness against the market. Peace becomes the peace of all things. Equality is the decentering of humans from dominion over everything else. And all this is held within the truth that we are but one part of a living Earth that we newly understand as a co-evolving Gaian entity. Desecrate the Earth and we desecrate God.
There is a Christ-like resonance in living on a crucified Earth which, beyond all reason, still loves us. The reef, the handful of humus, the wetland, the stream, the microbiome that keeps us healthy, the mycelia that lie deep and complex as a brain beneath the forest floor, all this is Gaia, all this is to be loved. All this is to be felt holding us, loving us, despite all that we have done. The birds in the estuary carry our children’s future as they sleep. The life of a child in Dafur, or one born 3,000 years hence, cannot be discounted as being worth less than ours. There can be no othering because there is no other Earth. This, and us, and we, and them, are all one. This is what the Earth, and science, and mysticism, are all telling us.
‘Listen, be still’, I hear the Earth saying. The thousands of generations behind us are urging us forward, wishing us well, holding us dear in this labour, in this birth of the new. Look with clear eyes at the climate as it churns ahead of us for the next ten thousand years. And watch our children out there, three thousand generations hence, still coping with a climate that never stops changing – one that will never again be as benign as the one we have known. This is our time to reconcile ourselves to what we have done, and to what is about to happen.
Then, like grace, an idea might appear to us. Perhaps our wonder and awe at Gaia’s beauty is reciprocated. Perhaps if the Earth became the touchstone of our spirituality, we would find – despite everything we have done – that the Earth is still as madly in love with humans. Just as She is with all creation. And my heart lifts.
