Following is a report of events as I experienced them during a gathering in the village of Bereznik in the Barents region of North Russia early March 2020. The gathering was called
Seeds of Action: Post-Apocalyptic Hopelessness and Hope.
Seeds of Action: Post-Apocalyptic Hopelessness and Hope.
Isolated from the outside world in what seemed like a parallel universe suspended in time, participants came together to process critical issues faced by life on this planet. A part of the theme of the gathering was to not only work on the level of language, logic, and symbols, but to try to become grounded in the non-symbolic biological, chemical and physical levels of reality. Thus, we shared both actual seeds and soil as well as symbolic seeds and soil. We shared walks in the woods listening to the sap flow through trees and long evenings looking at the challenges we face through different lenses and languages. Some bathed in the frozen river and recovered in the Banja (sauna) while others focused on the practical side of building a bio-centric model for regenerative eco-villages that can act as keystone species in degrading ecosystems.
An experience I shared with several participants was of time slowing down. Reflecting on this on the train ride back to Moscow it was as if we had lived in the village for a long time. This was juxtaposed to what had happened in the outside world during our time in Bereznik where the Corona virus spread across Europe as we dealt with issues of societal and ecological collapse. The financial markets tumbled while we discussed post-apocalyptic scenarios stretching 6000 years into the future. It became evident that we entered the village from a world to which we would not be returning. Crossing the hang-bridge to Bereznik, was like entering a liminal zone. I had entered a participant and left an initiated villager.
The first day was for landing and getting to know the village. Igor Polskiy gave a beautiful presentation of the brief story of planet Earth with wonderful visualizations that one had to experience to understand. It covered the spread of agriculture in the Middle East as it enslaved or assimilating "wild" peoples. It moved on to civilizations that eventually destroyed their own ecosystem and led to desertification, large-scale expansion and colonialism. The exploitation of natural systems could be exported to the colonies, and the resources could be imported to the metropolis. From there to the point where we are now. Science fiction called us to space, where we could find another America with endless wealth to export the extraction of resources into space. Never realized, this led to mass extinction of species and environmental disaster.
Igor moved on to show a direction where we can pass beyond the current era of ecological crisis. This must link people to other living creatures to an interconnected network of life. The old picture of the world is the one where a human is separated from nature, human is considered master of nature. Born during the Enlightenment period this idea brought us to the edge of extinction and is no longer relevant, but we still tell ourselves and our children a story - a great myth of modern civilization - about how we developed and defeated nature, moving along the path of progress towards enlightenment and happiness. Without a different story in our mind's humanity will fall into confusion and despair. This story must be reformulated so that the causes of the crisis and the ways out of it become clearly visible and understandable, so that fear and guilt is replaced with the desire to support one's own life and the life of other creatures, which will lead people in the coming years.
The second day Dorian Cave of the Deep Adaptation Forum, and dramaturg/philosopher Ilja Lehtinen gave their presentations.
Dorian´s presentation was grounded in Professor Jem Bendell´s A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy and went through the crises that face the biosphere in coming decades. Mass extinctions, changes in soil organic conditions, loss of wilderness areas, sea levels and conditions, civil and military unrest, mass migrations, geoengineering, economic crisis are some of the many topics covered. Responses to these crisis based on the Deep Adaptation Agenda are the 4 R´s: (1) Resilience: how do we keep what we want to keep (2) Relinquishment: what do we need to let go of (3) Restoration: What can we bring back to help us (4) Reconciliation: what can we make peace with. These topics formed a core theme of the immersion in the days that followed, leading to several spinoff workshops and even a film project lead by Maxim Vlasov.
Ilja´s article arguing For Hopelessness had been shared with the participants prior to the immersion. This set the stage for his presentation on the historical roots of hope going back to the one of the oldest Greek myth of Pandora´s Box (Pot). To paraphrase Ilja "Hesiod tells how Zeus, in his desire for vengeance, puts all the imaginable ailments and plagues into a special pot, which he then gives to Pandora who delivers the pot to Prometheus' simple brother, Epimetheus. In his foolishness, he opens it and the contents of the pot pour out into the trouble of mankind. Illness, old age, death… But at the bottom of the pot, a strange creature remained: Elpis, hope. Before it slips out, Pandora closes the lid of the pot.
According to the prevailing interpretation, Elpis was to be understood as the spark of salvation: the promise that would help to overcome the cruelness of destiny. However, according to another, more pessimistic view, Zeus left the worst of the plagues locked in his jar, a cunning monster whose purpose was to continue to torment man already beset by troubles.
Of course, since this is a myth, there is no "right" answer. But what's interesting is that the Greek relationship to hope was far more complex and practical than ours. The Elpis, who was trapped in the Pandora's pot, was neither good or bad in itself: neither the basis of meaningfulness in life nor the seed of apocalyptic horror. It was a possible relationship to the world. And, at least according to Hesiod, a farmer-poet who spent his entire life in the countryside, there was reason for caution. From his agrarian point of view, it was an unreliable, even dangerous, creature."
Ilja´s presentation moved on to St. Paul´s "faith, hope, love", showing how hope as we know it evolved into the Protestant-Evangelical American dream of hope for a techno-optimistic future. For many it was the first time that the idea of hope itself, and its link to the future, was on the chopping block. Ilja argued not that the situation was hopeless, but that the idea that we should have hope in the first place should be deconstructed. He quotes Heiner Müller, anticipating the imminent worsening of the ecological crisis, saying that "I was without hope or despair for the future".
This presentation had a significant impact. It became clear in the discussions that followed that many villagers had taken hope as a given. Now the validity of hope´s centrality in our views was being question on the grounds of being a Judeo-Christian construction. The effect that hope has on psychological drives was an underlying theme. Predictably, there was no consensus that we should abandon hope, but for me it created cracks in my worldview that reached the core.
An experience I shared with several participants was of time slowing down. Reflecting on this on the train ride back to Moscow it was as if we had lived in the village for a long time. This was juxtaposed to what had happened in the outside world during our time in Bereznik where the Corona virus spread across Europe as we dealt with issues of societal and ecological collapse. The financial markets tumbled while we discussed post-apocalyptic scenarios stretching 6000 years into the future. It became evident that we entered the village from a world to which we would not be returning. Crossing the hang-bridge to Bereznik, was like entering a liminal zone. I had entered a participant and left an initiated villager.
The first day was for landing and getting to know the village. Igor Polskiy gave a beautiful presentation of the brief story of planet Earth with wonderful visualizations that one had to experience to understand. It covered the spread of agriculture in the Middle East as it enslaved or assimilating "wild" peoples. It moved on to civilizations that eventually destroyed their own ecosystem and led to desertification, large-scale expansion and colonialism. The exploitation of natural systems could be exported to the colonies, and the resources could be imported to the metropolis. From there to the point where we are now. Science fiction called us to space, where we could find another America with endless wealth to export the extraction of resources into space. Never realized, this led to mass extinction of species and environmental disaster.
Igor moved on to show a direction where we can pass beyond the current era of ecological crisis. This must link people to other living creatures to an interconnected network of life. The old picture of the world is the one where a human is separated from nature, human is considered master of nature. Born during the Enlightenment period this idea brought us to the edge of extinction and is no longer relevant, but we still tell ourselves and our children a story - a great myth of modern civilization - about how we developed and defeated nature, moving along the path of progress towards enlightenment and happiness. Without a different story in our mind's humanity will fall into confusion and despair. This story must be reformulated so that the causes of the crisis and the ways out of it become clearly visible and understandable, so that fear and guilt is replaced with the desire to support one's own life and the life of other creatures, which will lead people in the coming years.
The second day Dorian Cave of the Deep Adaptation Forum, and dramaturg/philosopher Ilja Lehtinen gave their presentations.
Dorian´s presentation was grounded in Professor Jem Bendell´s A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy and went through the crises that face the biosphere in coming decades. Mass extinctions, changes in soil organic conditions, loss of wilderness areas, sea levels and conditions, civil and military unrest, mass migrations, geoengineering, economic crisis are some of the many topics covered. Responses to these crisis based on the Deep Adaptation Agenda are the 4 R´s: (1) Resilience: how do we keep what we want to keep (2) Relinquishment: what do we need to let go of (3) Restoration: What can we bring back to help us (4) Reconciliation: what can we make peace with. These topics formed a core theme of the immersion in the days that followed, leading to several spinoff workshops and even a film project lead by Maxim Vlasov.
Ilja´s article arguing For Hopelessness had been shared with the participants prior to the immersion. This set the stage for his presentation on the historical roots of hope going back to the one of the oldest Greek myth of Pandora´s Box (Pot). To paraphrase Ilja "Hesiod tells how Zeus, in his desire for vengeance, puts all the imaginable ailments and plagues into a special pot, which he then gives to Pandora who delivers the pot to Prometheus' simple brother, Epimetheus. In his foolishness, he opens it and the contents of the pot pour out into the trouble of mankind. Illness, old age, death… But at the bottom of the pot, a strange creature remained: Elpis, hope. Before it slips out, Pandora closes the lid of the pot.
According to the prevailing interpretation, Elpis was to be understood as the spark of salvation: the promise that would help to overcome the cruelness of destiny. However, according to another, more pessimistic view, Zeus left the worst of the plagues locked in his jar, a cunning monster whose purpose was to continue to torment man already beset by troubles.
Of course, since this is a myth, there is no "right" answer. But what's interesting is that the Greek relationship to hope was far more complex and practical than ours. The Elpis, who was trapped in the Pandora's pot, was neither good or bad in itself: neither the basis of meaningfulness in life nor the seed of apocalyptic horror. It was a possible relationship to the world. And, at least according to Hesiod, a farmer-poet who spent his entire life in the countryside, there was reason for caution. From his agrarian point of view, it was an unreliable, even dangerous, creature."
Ilja´s presentation moved on to St. Paul´s "faith, hope, love", showing how hope as we know it evolved into the Protestant-Evangelical American dream of hope for a techno-optimistic future. For many it was the first time that the idea of hope itself, and its link to the future, was on the chopping block. Ilja argued not that the situation was hopeless, but that the idea that we should have hope in the first place should be deconstructed. He quotes Heiner Müller, anticipating the imminent worsening of the ecological crisis, saying that "I was without hope or despair for the future".
This presentation had a significant impact. It became clear in the discussions that followed that many villagers had taken hope as a given. Now the validity of hope´s centrality in our views was being question on the grounds of being a Judeo-Christian construction. The effect that hope has on psychological drives was an underlying theme. Predictably, there was no consensus that we should abandon hope, but for me it created cracks in my worldview that reached the core.
John Gast American Progress (1872) from Ilja´s presentation.
Seeds of Hope
Day two I gave my presentation Seeds of Hope based on ideas from my thesis in ecological agriculture Web of Ecological Thought: emergent properties, entropy and bio-centric ethics. The hope portion was focused on how seeds can help get us through the high entropy events like climate change on the non-symbolic level. I also shared a new concept of Bio-domes that are designed to act as ecosystems capsules for surviving runaway global warming.
I must admit that my world view had such massive cracks in it after the trauma of Ilja´s presentation that I seriously considered not presenting. I had already let go of hope of saving the world from global warming years back, and even hope of avoiding runaway global warming in recent years which had caused me to spiral into depths of despair and misanthropy.
Saving civilization was hopeless, but I had not abandoned all hope. Hope remained in seeds, in the non-symbolic world of ecology. Delving deep into the function of reproduction one could see the kernel of what had brought life through five extinctions and this was the hope I clung to. I needed to feel I could play some part in the grand narrative of life. I did not believe that I would see a stable world return. I had given up hope that things would get better in my lifetime. I had faced the fact that hundreds of generations would suffer for thousands of years before we could return to some semblance of stable ecology. But I had not been able to let go of hope itself. There was still a feeling that I could play a part in opening the bottlenecks created by the anthropocentric paradigms into which I was born and in accordance to whose rules I was currently bound.
Ilja managed to deconstruct that hope on a deep level. He showed that despite all attempts to face reality I was still stuck in the paradigm of hope I had been raised in. An American Protestant hopefulness was so deeply engrained in my mind that I could not manage to pry it loose. There remains a sense in me that my vision for the future, in Seeds of Hope is somehow flawed in that it is founded on hope that people can place the biosphere first and cooperate in protecting it.
I feel responsible to the people and ecology that I am linked to in working on the bio-dome concept and feel it should not focus on hope, but rather on right bio-centric livelihood. We don't need to look to the future in hope and try to save it. It is sufficient to look to the here and now. We live in a world that is far removed from a bio-centric ethic. To bring back that ethic and to re-establish the connection to the biosphere that we had before we started to dream of hope of a better world is really the core message of the bio-dome concept. Ground yourself in your ecosystemic senses and align yourself with your ecology. Take yourself and your species out of the centre and place the entire biosphere in the heart.
I must admit that my world view had such massive cracks in it after the trauma of Ilja´s presentation that I seriously considered not presenting. I had already let go of hope of saving the world from global warming years back, and even hope of avoiding runaway global warming in recent years which had caused me to spiral into depths of despair and misanthropy.
Saving civilization was hopeless, but I had not abandoned all hope. Hope remained in seeds, in the non-symbolic world of ecology. Delving deep into the function of reproduction one could see the kernel of what had brought life through five extinctions and this was the hope I clung to. I needed to feel I could play some part in the grand narrative of life. I did not believe that I would see a stable world return. I had given up hope that things would get better in my lifetime. I had faced the fact that hundreds of generations would suffer for thousands of years before we could return to some semblance of stable ecology. But I had not been able to let go of hope itself. There was still a feeling that I could play a part in opening the bottlenecks created by the anthropocentric paradigms into which I was born and in accordance to whose rules I was currently bound.
Ilja managed to deconstruct that hope on a deep level. He showed that despite all attempts to face reality I was still stuck in the paradigm of hope I had been raised in. An American Protestant hopefulness was so deeply engrained in my mind that I could not manage to pry it loose. There remains a sense in me that my vision for the future, in Seeds of Hope is somehow flawed in that it is founded on hope that people can place the biosphere first and cooperate in protecting it.
I feel responsible to the people and ecology that I am linked to in working on the bio-dome concept and feel it should not focus on hope, but rather on right bio-centric livelihood. We don't need to look to the future in hope and try to save it. It is sufficient to look to the here and now. We live in a world that is far removed from a bio-centric ethic. To bring back that ethic and to re-establish the connection to the biosphere that we had before we started to dream of hope of a better world is really the core message of the bio-dome concept. Ground yourself in your ecosystemic senses and align yourself with your ecology. Take yourself and your species out of the centre and place the entire biosphere in the heart.
Forests in the Focus of Climate Troubles
The other presentation of the day was Forests in the Focus of Climate Troubles by Ph.D. Anna Nemchinova and Ph.D. Antonina Kulyasova which also dealt with entropy in ecosystems where biota creates order out of the chaos and decay of complexity. It showed how Russian forests are the largest net carbon sink which deposit far more than they emit. It put Russian forests in the context of global warming as one of the most critical ecosystems to maintain and protect. It delved into the destruction of current deforestation practices of clearcutting in massive chequered patterns causing soil erosion, river pollution, changes in the age structure of forests, degradation of vulnerable plant species, biodiversity reduction, crisis for forest cultures and much more.
It focused critically on the biotic regulation of climate through the symbiotic relationship between forests and the ocean. It showed how moist air is drawn inland by healthy forest which then pump dry air back out to sea. Biotic regulation was placed into the larger global climate context of warmer winters and destructive wind patterns showing that this is a factor that is just as critical to a stable biosphere as the carbon cycle. Deforestation is thus causing high entropy on multiple emergent properties in the biosphere which all need attention from the global community. Global warming from this perspective is just a symptom of the disease. Taking Milankovich cycles, precipitation dynamics and other factors into the equation we observe overall winter warming, cool and damp summers, shortening of winter frosts duration, winter temperature peak reduction, prolonged spring, late beginning of winter and rapid ice drifts on rivers. A shift from conifers to deciduous trees as a result of clear cutting is playing a role in the observed changes. Conifers preform the functions of the biotic pump from the start of spring and contribute to temperature stability, whereas deciduous trees need to put on leaf mass first which is a delay of 3-4 weeks. Summing up, biotic regulation is ignored by climate change studies in general. We need more biotic controls and less techno-fixes. We need more healthy forests so that we can have healthy atmospheric air and water vapor circulation.
Future Scenarios
In the evening workshop we began mapping out the future based on pivotal events that could trigger changes based on contributions of the villagers attending the immersion. We built future scenarios and highlighted them using the following titles: 1) Apocalypse 2) Business as usual 3) Slow wave 4) Magic kick 5) Wisdom based society 6) Spiritual singularity 7) Techno-singularity.
This workshop was too future oriented for several participants. I struggled too, as I felt we were startling two worlds, one where we instinctively wanted to find a way through the bottlenecks, and the other where hope and the future had been deconstructed. In that world such scenarios seemed pointless and misaligned with the ethos of the immersion. After this event it seemed to me that the village was split in two for a while. But we still held the centre somehow.
Another perspective that came to the surface during this workshop that was significant to me was Nonty´s invitation to come sit under the tree of the ancestors. It seemed somehow to be both symbolic while at the same time deeply rooted in the non-symbolic web of life. I felt saddened by it, as if we had somehow forgotten to include half of the planet in our scenarios. There was no intention to do so, but it seemed too masculine, too Western or Northern.
The positive results from mapping future scenarios was that the need for a biocentric paradigm shift, a shift to non-rivalrous games and cooperation to making it through the bottlenecks that are coming became clear. With or without hope, the current games we play of competing for exponential growth creation has to end. We must make changes if we are not going to self-terminate as a species and degrade the biosphere in the process.
Another perspective that came to the surface during this workshop that was significant to me was Nonty´s invitation to come sit under the tree of the ancestors. It seemed somehow to be both symbolic while at the same time deeply rooted in the non-symbolic web of life. I felt saddened by it, as if we had somehow forgotten to include half of the planet in our scenarios. There was no intention to do so, but it seemed too masculine, too Western or Northern.
The positive results from mapping future scenarios was that the need for a biocentric paradigm shift, a shift to non-rivalrous games and cooperation to making it through the bottlenecks that are coming became clear. With or without hope, the current games we play of competing for exponential growth creation has to end. We must make changes if we are not going to self-terminate as a species and degrade the biosphere in the process.
New Communities
Day three Dorian gave a second lecture on new communities. There was a lot of resonance between my lecture and Dorians second lecture since both dealt with emergent properties and order forming from disorder. He showed how nature is full of self-organising systems which form spontaneously, have global coherent patterns, with local interactions. Learning from the natural world and applying this to social organisation we see that there are feedback loops between emergence, distributed control, continuous adaptation, resilience and back to emergence again. Each of these was covered in depth. The conclusion was that we are facing challenging times and we need to look to nature and mimic the successful emergent properties so that we can collectively deal with the challenges that are coming.
Seed Priestesses
We moved on to smaller working groups of which I held one on the bio-dome and one on seeds. The biodome working group moved online after the immersion and an outline of it can be found here. The seed course was a four-hour workshop where I went through the 20 some varieties of seeds I brought with me and donated to the village. In the end we had an initiation ceremony for two new Seed Priestesses who each got a Mandan Squash. Thus continues the link from the last Mandan Corn Priestess, Scattered Corn, daughter of Moves Slowly to the first Russian keepers of the Mandan Seed. You can read more about Scattered Corn here. This was a highlight for me as I feel the work done on the non-symbolic level of seeds and ecology is really the most important work that can have a truly regenerative effect in the long run. Long past our own lives the cycles we partake in through sharing, sowing and saving seeds will continue to cycle.
Spring Dances
The evening of the third day was spent dancing traditional dances which were a pure joy to participate in. It was almost trancelike and was kind of like sowing the village together in a collective dance. Beautiful!
The fourth day ended with a remembrance of ancestors, mothers, fathers and grandparents past. The morning of the last day was a day of celebration and of calling back the birds of spring. We had a lovely time outdoors in the snow with spring competitions, dancing and singing songs together.
The fourth day ended with a remembrance of ancestors, mothers, fathers and grandparents past. The morning of the last day was a day of celebration and of calling back the birds of spring. We had a lovely time outdoors in the snow with spring competitions, dancing and singing songs together.
Ubuntu
The evening of the 4th day Nonty Sabic gave her Ubuntu ceremony which was a truly powerful presentation. She delved deep into her experiences of being a person of colour in a world dominated by Northern and Western cultures with deep hegemonic roots. She shared her experiences of being marginalised even in eco-village communities when she shared her experiences of being raised to believe that being white is what one should aspire to be. Even in eco-villages, where she expected to find people who understood and sympathised, she still found she was on the outside. Again, I was quite emotionally impacted. I come from a family that was a part of the Westward expansion of the European races. Paris Texas, where some of my ancestors are from was Comanche before they arrived. I recall seeing maps of my ancestral town with tepees' and buffalo on it from the 1840s, and in the 1850s-60´s my ancestors owned slaves on land stolen from native Americans.
My reaction was that we need to deal with the rivalrous cultural roots in which our current misalignment with nature is founded if we are to properly move towards a truly bio-centric ethic. We must not exclude anyone from consideration when we form the new ethic. All structures of oppression that hold the current domination in place need to be confronted if we are to form a new paradigm upon which we can build a biocentric community.
My reaction was that we need to deal with the rivalrous cultural roots in which our current misalignment with nature is founded if we are to properly move towards a truly bio-centric ethic. We must not exclude anyone from consideration when we form the new ethic. All structures of oppression that hold the current domination in place need to be confronted if we are to form a new paradigm upon which we can build a biocentric community.
Sharing seeds
On the final day we all shared seeds and anything else we had not shared yet with each other. I was lucky to be able to bring some fava beans and squash seeds from Bereznik back with me, along with some hardy Kazakhstani apricot seeds which I truly hope will extend the range by a few thousand kilometres. This was an especially symbolic link for me as my wife is from Pakistan and I hope one day to visit Hunza valley in the Himalayas where they also have hardy apricots. As I don't fly I plan on taking a train across Russia, Kazakhstan and on to Pakistain through Hunza
Final thoughts
So much more could be written and said. There were many workshops I did not attend, and many people whom I would have loved to get to know better. But the feeling of being a part of a village is now something I will take with me always. I love Bereznik and all my fellow villagers. I can imagine a world of many small villages where people work together to find regenerative ways to live in harmony with each other and the biosphere. Where the ethic is not how can we become richer or create more human centred value, but how can we resonate with each other and our ecosystem. I believe in this sort of a world and want to continue to work with such beautiful people on emergent levels of environmental creativity in order to create new cycles of life out of the seed we hold in our hands, minds and hearts.
