Underwater Sculpture by Jason de Caires Taylor submerged off the coast of Cancun, Mexico Photo: Jason de Caires Taylor
The recent rise in the exploration of the concept of entering a different geologic age, the Anthropocene, is provoking interesting dialogue across the web—a dialogue that explores the multivalent conceptions that we have of our relationship with the natural world. This conversation is exciting, long overdue, and hopefully it’s just the beginning of a realignment of some of our deepest beliefs and assumptions about our entitlement as the dominant species on Earth.
Anthropocene (2011) Underwater sculpture by Jason de Caires Taylor submerged off the coast of Cancun, Mexico
Here is a link to an article in GDC Interiors Journal with a contribution by Synergetic Press author Christian Schwägerl that provides an accessible, yet in-depth analysis of the major concepts involved and their philosophical underpinnings.
Woe is Earth. Drilled silly, dumped on, farmed out, fished out, and cloaked in a burka of carbon—who does the planet have to thank for this dire state of affairs? Only its most highly evolved species, of course. Enter Christian Schwägerl’s The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet, in which he justifies use of the term “Anthropocene” to designate a new human geological era based on the changes we’ve caused and our vital role as planetary stewards. Schwägerl and others (Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, for instance) are championing the relationship between humans and nature as a revolutionary science-driven force.
Our dear friend Ornette Coleman passed away on June 11. Our condolences go out to his son, Denardo, and extended family in this time of loss. We will always remember the delight and inspiration that he and his music brought us over the years.
The video below is a clip from the award-winning documentary Ornette… Made in America, featuring the opening celebration for the Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center in the city of Coleman’s birth, Fort Worth, Texas. The city of Fort Worth welcomed back their native son with a mayoral proclamation of September 29, 1983 as “Ornette Coleman Day,” and Coleman was presented with a key to the city. On that night, Caravan of Dreams opened with Ornette and Prime Time on stage, while dancers twirled around the cameras in this film directed by Shirley Clarke. (Courtesy of Global Ecotechnics)
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And we leave you with a poem by his friend, Johnny Dolphin.
Ornette Coleman’s Manhattan
Ship searching out cross-currents,
Myself stalking this big city
Ornette and me circling higher in simple talk
Until words turn prayer flags
Whipped into tatters on passes between peaks
While music shatters into microtones
Leading captured melodies into ancient slavery.
My poems are your saxophone
Your sax reads my reading;
Words and music make mad lucinations
Navigating existence into pulse.
You threw away keys,
I threw away logics,
We honed our intuition
Rapping in an old warehouse pad.
Our Apollonian attractors dive,
Nitroxed in gaudy Dionysian reefs.
Trip of trips
Stately fandango
Cold sober in every drunken gene,
While sweet potato pie
Concentrates our eye.
From: Off the Road: Poetry 1989-2000
Here’s their update from the BBC:
Geologists search for Anthropocene ‘golden spike’
“The majority of us think it is real; that there is clearly something happening; that there are clearly signals in the environment that are recognisable and make the Anthropocene a distinct unit; and the majority of us think it would be justified to formally recognise it.
“That doesn’t mean it will be formalised, but we’re going to go through the procedure of putting in a submission.”
They estimate 2 to 3 years for the application process to be completed.
Here are two excellent talks on the topic. Author, journalist and Anthropocene expert, Christian Schwagerl with champion for the environment, Tony Juniper, President of the Wildlife Trusts in UK.
Christian Schwägerl and Tony Juniper
“The conditions that will come with the Anthropocene are not simply a technical and scientific subject, they’re also highly political, philosophical and about the relationship that we wish to foster with the earth into the future.” -Tony Juniper at the Royal Society of Arts. Here’s a podcast of their joint talk.
Christian Schwägerl, author of The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet and co-founder of The Anthropocene Project, visited the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) in London to have a conversation with Tony Juniper, sustainability adviser and author of What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? How Money Really Does Grow on Trees, about how we can approach the Anthropocene optimistically. While in London, Christian also visited the Royal Institution to share some of his innovative ideas about how we can take responsibility in our role as the dominant force on the planet with Robin McKie, science and technology editor for The Observer, and Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester.
“We’re here to discuss and to listen about the point in time in which homo sapiens. . . are now influencing the geology of our world and the societal impact of that.” -Robin McKie at the Royal Institution
CLICK HERE FOR Royal Institution Talk
To read more on this radical investigation of our global situation, pick up your own copy of The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet in our bookstore.
Christian Schwägerl, author of The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet and co-founder of The Anthropocene Project, visited the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) in London to have a conversation with Tony Juniper, sustainability adviser and author of What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? How Money Really Does Grow on Trees, about how we can approach the Anthropocene optimistically. While in London, Christian also visited the Royal Institution to share some of his innovative ideas about how we can take responsibility in our role as the dominant force on the planet with Robin McKie, science and technology editor for The Observer, and Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester.
The Anthropocene idea originated with Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who realized the impact that human activities were having on the atmosphere. The research that Crutzen conducted revealed how certain chemicals were depleting the Ozone layer. This information incited activists to fight for bans in the 1980s on chemicals that were being used in refrigerants and aerosol cans. It’s been encouraging to see that in the years since these changes were made, Ozone levels have been steadily increasing.
The significance of this finding led Crutzen to wonder about other ways that humans might be impacting the environment. As the list of his findings kept growing longer, Crutzen was led to the revolutionary idea that the influence of humanity on earth has reached a point that warrants its own geologic epoch: the “Anthropocene.”
Christian provides twelve key ideas as we move toward a more responsible and conscious Anthropocene:
To get a sense of our place in the Anthropocene, we need to redefine our sense of time.
We find ourselves caught in an instantaneous flow of information, keeping us thinking in the short-term. Compared with the doomsdayism so typically associated with thinking of the environmental movement which doesn’t encourage much consideration for what the distant future will look like. By expanding our sense of time to include the long now, we can give our actions a deeper context.
When you get into a car today, you’re touching the deep past. The gasoline powering the vehicles we drive so casually was formed three hundred million years ago. At the same time, we’re also touching the deep future; fifty thousand years from now, carbon molecules released from your roadtrip will still be influencing the atmosphere.
We have to include human civilization in our understanding of nature. Cities must learn to function as planetary ecosystems. That means more sustainable transportation systems, renewable energy sources, and locally grown sources of food.
Humans are involved in the cyclical system of the biosphere where everything comes back around. There’s nowhere that resources can be extracted from without an impact; there’s nowhere to dump waste materials where they’ll disappear.
The business of growing food and raising animals for human consumption now takes place on an area of land larger than the size of South America. We have to take measures to counteract the destruction of soils caused by pesticides and chemical fertilizers, reverse deforestation, and consider the influence that our personal dietary choices have on global.
Technology that is compostable must become the new standard. The iPhone has elements from forty different mountains. When we consider the resources that we’re pulling as a society from the earth for our technology, we can start to respect the process. The biosphere has a recycling process built in, and the technosphere has to become integrated within it.
When we consider the material level that people strive for around the world, and then multiply that by that number of humans currently on the planet it shows us that instead of fighting for resources, we need to be sharing them.
We need to be using the energy we have more wisely. We need to be encouraging meaningful strides in innovation by investing in energy research.
Humanity has been breeding animals and cultivating plants for over ten thousand years. More recently, innovations in biological technology provide humans with even greater level of power over evolutionary outcomes. Will the use of this power reflect an attitude of stewardship or of short-term capitalist interests?
Though the name ‘Anthropocene’ reflects on our species, it can serve to open us up to a greater sense of all of the other life forms we share this planet with. By putting human history into a context of natural history, it can increase our sense of connection with the planetary story.
The Anthropocene combines the spheres of economy and ecology. By putting economics into an ecological framework, we can adjust our perspective so that natural resources are not viewed as externalities, but as our true source of wealth.
In the Anthropocene we can connect our daily choices with their global impact and reflect on the influence that those choices have. We can ask ourselves what we offer back to the earth every day. In this way we can consider what we give as a daily offering to the planet—is it the contents of our garbage can?
This idea can help focus us and motivate us by contextualizing the role each person has as an individual in this epoch.
We already have an internet that connects us with so many things in the world, from highly discounted products shipped right to our doorstep to an endless stream of cat pictures, but by creating an internet of all things we can brings in the interests of all life forms on earth. Perhaps such an internet could help us calculate the best actions to take now according to the interests of future generations.
We generally think of ourselves as a materialistic culture, but are we really if we buy things to throw them away after one use? Companies build products with planned obsolescence, so that they stop working in just a few years and we buy new things. We have to provide incentives to make lasting, quality products rather than focusing on maximizing profits.
An artistic representation of a future plastic-laden fossil. From Craft in the Anthropocene, by Yesenia Thibault-Picazo
Every choice, every action has an influence on the rest of life on earth. The globalization of our society has such a far reach that the contents of our refrigerators span continents, oftentimes without our even realizing their exotic origins. The Anthropocene reflects a change in our consciousness as we realize our role as the dominant force on the planet. As we come to appreciate this power, we must consider how to be democratic in considering the interests of future generations as well as those who are most vulnerable to climate change but may not have as strong of a voice in the plutocratic political structures that are currently in place.
As we face the possibilities of this new epoch, we should remain optimistic. The Anthropocene is an open idea. It’s an idea that presents us with a wide range of challenges at the same time that it imbues us with the agency to shift the course of life on earth. As we begin to acknowledge the reality of our role as planetary stewards, we can start by bringing mindfulness to the choices that shape our lives and intention to the actions that will shape our world.
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To read more on this radical investigation of our global situation, pick up your own copy of The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet in our bookstore.
Allan Badiner, Alex & Allyson Grey and Rick Strassman celebrating the launch of Zig Zag Zen to a packed house at the Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 19th. Photo by Lisa Law.
Last Tuesday night, Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico was full of curious congregants who had gathered to hear a discussion on Buddhism, psychedelics and visionary art. Every seat was filled, and even the window ledges were occupied with eager attendants. Seated around a table at the front of the space the panel of speakers for the evening faced the crowd.
Publisher Deborah Parrish Snyder introducing the speakers for the evening. Photo by Lisa Law.
Allan Badiner, the editor of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics is also a contributing editor for Tricycle magazine and has edited two other books dealing with Buddhism and the environment. Alex Grey, the art editor of Zig Zag Zen is one of the most prominent visionary artists in the world today who co-founded the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Allyson Grey, a contributing artist to Zig Zag Zen focuses her work around geometric and esoteric principles of order, chaos and secret writing and cofounded the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Dr. Rick Strassman, a contributing author is clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and has conducted federally funded research on the DMT experience.
Allan began the conversation by recounting an experience he had while studying with Thich Naht Hanh at Plum Village. While sharing stories in a Dharma discussion group each of the participants revealed that they had experience with psychedelics and that those experiences paved the way to their later Buddhist practice. When many of the practitioners moved to Buddhism, they let go of their psychedelic use.
Allan then shared how he got the inspiration for creating a book around this issue. While on retreat at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, as he was reading through the guest book he found an entry with a drawing of a pack of Zig Zag rolling papers that read “Wow, I thought I’d miss these a lot more than I did.” Upon seeing the pack of Zig Zag papers at the Zen center, Zig Zag Zen was born.
While many American Buddhist practitioners share a psychedelic background, the intention for the book was to create a well-balanced examination of the subject. Not a book that would draw any conclusions for you. And some of the contributors who were included do not believe Buddhism and psychedelics should even be thought of together.
So, why create a new edition of this book? Because we find ourselves in a fairly unique situation in the history of humanity. We have the power to manipulate nature and affect the mechanisms of climate. And as we’ve gained this power, we find ourselves in the midst of another mass extinction. In much the same way that as people grow older they reach back to the religion of their youth to search for meaning, now we can see society reaching out to religions as a way to make sense of its growing fear. By shifting our consciousness through spiritual development, we can make the kinds of radical changes required for us to survive.
Allan shared the following quote from Dr. Albert Hofmann, which emphasizes the importance of consciousness change to enact the kinds of changes necessary to heal the planet.
“Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change.
Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward other deeper areas of our human existence, so that we again become aware of our spiritual essence. Psychedelic experiences in a safe setting can help our consciousness open up to this sensation of connection and of being one with nature.
LSD and related substances are not drugs in the usual sense, but are part of the sacred substances, which have been used for thousand of years in ritual settings. The classic psychedelics like LSD, Psilocybin and Mescaline are characterized by the fact that they are neither toxic nor addictive. It is my great concern to separate psychedelics from the ongoing debates about drugs, and to highlight the tremendous potential inherent to these substances for self-awareness, as an adjunct in therapy, and for fundamental research into the human mind.
It is my wish that a modern Eleusis will emerge, in which seeking humans can learn to have transcendent experiences with sacred substances in a safe setting. I am convinced that these soul-opening, mind-revealing substances will find their appropriate place in our society and our culture.”
—Dr. Albert Hofmann
Thursday, April 19, 2007 (at age 101)
Alex cited Albert Hofmann’s influence in bringing him to the psychedelic dimension, and he shared the transformative power of his first LSD trip on Allyson’s couch 40 years ago while they were in art school together. He discussed the power that psychedelics provide artists to portray sacred dimensions. Visionary artists translate their ineffable mystical experiences by incorporating the archetypal elements of these visionary mystical experiences, such as the kinds of beings present, the temples and realms visited, the kinds of lights seen, and the sacred messages received.
He described the cover of Zig Zag Zen, which features the Tibetan Guru Padmasambhava displaying the rainbow-body. This wavy light-body is one of the first things we start to see on psychedelics. We start to notice the light-body in people as our higher perception takes over, whether that be through spiritual practice or the use of entheogens; and as our materialism reverses we see the light underlying all beings. This allows the revolution to happen quickly so that we can stop the self-destructive suicidal tendencies in ourselves and in society. As we see ourselves careening towards a self-destructive end, this medicine is our last best possibility to change ourselves and our planet.
Allyson described the similarity between psychedelics and religions. She said that religions are here to teach and to heal, which is what psychedelics do as well, they teach us. She told about her early, casual psychedelic use as a teenager, leading to a time when she took a heavy dose intending to see the White Light, and she understood God, and the sacredness of symbols. This trip led her to pursue meditation practices and follow a spiritual direction.
Rick shared his scientific perspective on the biological basis of spiritual experiences. After practicing for decades with a western Zen Buddhist order, he became interested in exploring the overlap he noticed between the states produced by psychedelic drugs with the states attained by eastern meditation techniques and the underlying biology they may have in common.
After each member of the panel had shared their inquiries and inspirations around these topics, Allan opened the discussion for questions and answers by stating that “now the audience can pretend to have questions, while the panel can pretend to have answers.” After a knowing chuckle from the audience, a few questions emerged from the captivated crowd, and the panel reassembled to greet the members of the audience and autograph their copies of Zig Zag Zen.
Even if you weren’t able to attend this exciting event with us, you can still keep up with the world of Zig Zag Zen by checking out what else we’ve been up to:
Alex Grey sharing the inspiration for his painting “St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution.”
Lightlab and Synergetic Press joined forces to host Alex Grey and Allyson Grey in the geodesic dome at Synergia Ranch, home of Synergetic Press. Inside of the spherical space, they told the psychedelic story of the influence of sacraments in ancient cave paintings, the role of sacraments in modern indigenous cultures and their future in transcendental visionary art.
Allan Badiner and Dr. Rick Strassman were interviewed on Santa Fe Radio Café by host Mary-Charlotte on May 21st.
Here is a link to that interview:
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Allan Badiner, Alex Grey and Allyson Grey were interviewed on the Camp Lovewave show by Terran and Bari on May 23rd. You can listen to that interview here:
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You can also purchase your own copy of the new edition of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics! Zig Zag Zen is full of more interviews, round table discussions, public dialogues, academic inquiries, personal stories, and visionary art to open your heart, expand your mind and squeegee your third eye.
