This blog post below was posted in 2022 after moving to Virginia to be closer to my family. It is a short essay but contains the key sources on my own exploration of this question: How much is enough? Inspired by the great ethicists of my formative adult years, these writers were each examining what Albert Schweitzer called an ethical basis for life. I encourage you to read the post for its links to sources and collective direction these great thinkers still offer Americans and people everywhere on how to live together in peace and prosperity.
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” ― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (from goodreads)
“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.” (Thomas Berry, “The Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth, 42). https://thomasberry.org/quotes/
Photo by Susan Feathers at Virginia Beach Botanical Garden Hydrangea Park
M. Scott Momaday, reading his poetry, A Man Made of Words.
To read or listen to powerful voices of people who have devoted their lives to celebrating the Earth is to heal and to find our way home. Each offers us solace and a direction for our lives as we anticipate times of destruction in America and around the world. Earth teaches us to live in community, to know each other and to be in reciprocal relationship with each other and all of life around us. I highly recommend these great teachers, each of whom has helped me understand a way forward in uncertain times. They offer hope and a longer point of view than ephemeral politics. They are an antidote to avarice. We need this deep resonance now to stabalize our spirits and our collective wish for unity, equality and peace.
Listening
Here is a brilliant conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer and Emanuel Vaughn Lee of Emergence Magazine. Robin describes the wonderful serviceberry tree and what she has learned from its generosity. I also recommend Emergence Magazine for its films from artists and thought leaders across our great planet. I go there frequently to keep the balance.
In the 1970s Frances Moore Lappe asked, “How much is enough?” Still actively writing, speaking and advocating for food justice, she remains one of my guides to living a sane life in The Land of Plenty for Some.
Other early and ever present guides to my adult life and what would preoccupy my work and art, Thomas Berry, Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Carson and E.F. Schumacher all addressed the same issue from different points of view: living in right relationship with all life and a sustaining Earth ecosystem.
In 2008 I published the first of my writing, Paean to the Earth, which included a little essay titled: Get A Grip Ecology. It included 5 principles by which stable ecosystems operate:
Utilizes a renewable energy source/ Does not overgraze food capacity/ Recycles essential elements/Preserves biodiversity/Moderates population size.
Lappe showed us we strayed from these principles when she demonstrated that there has always been enough food to feed every person in the world a nutritious diet, i.e. food scarcity is a myth. By harnessing the major grain crops for growing beef, pork and chicken, Americans were eating there own seed corn and that of other nations. Lappe first introduced Americans to eating low on the food chain by adopting a mostly plant diet. She systematically demonstrated that hunger exists only from misuse of the world’s resources that could easily feed everyone well.
E.F. Schumacher in his landmark book, Small Is Beautiful, examined the physics and economics of business systems and showed that maximum efficiency and employee satisfaction occurs in companies of 500 employees or less. He first wrote about “technology with a human face.” Today, so many decades down the road of human ingenuity run amuck, industrialized societies are looking around and asking how we recover our humanity while making a living.
Again, we must ask ourselves Lappe’s question: “How much is enough?”
Thomas Berry and Albert Schweitzer focused on the spiritual and moral dimensions of how we relate to each other and the Earth community. Berry took us on a rich journey to learn the traditions of cultures based on eco-principles and proposed that our hope resides in adopting similar values and practices. Schweitzer arrived at an “ethical basis for living” through thought: My will to live exists equally in every living thing and thus the path to a moral life is to live in concert with all other beings whether human or tree or four-legged.
These are the principles of the planet and our greatest thinkers came to them from varying paths but these principles have proven true from all perspectives.
This is just a reminder that the answers to the climate crisis and our social ills are embedded in the very same laws that govern the planet and every living creature on it.
My daughter on a recent hike with me along the Eastern Shore. We are best when we are in nature together. It restores our humanity and our hope.
The author mentions Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy, two of the most profound writers and thinkers of a sustaining future. See links below to their words.
Susan Feathers 