Ecological debt
I’ve been interviewing some of the people who are generously giving me ‘resident’ debt stories for the website (i.e. ones which will remain there as examples to stimulate ideas for potential contributors. They will also be the first to be recited at the event in May, which we are planning for. Below is an extract from an email sent to me by Persephone Pearl (Feral Theatre) (following a meeting last month) who I wanted to ask about ecological debt, which I was clear is an important part of the project, and I was definitely influenced by Eisenstein in this; i.e, the idea that we have taken relentlessly and often unconsciously from nature, to great destruction of human and animal life and now it is time to pay back and be called to account for actions which deplete or have depleted nature purely for profit. That this is a tipping point and it is time to start to balance the scales…Feral do a lot of work around creating awareness of this with their pieces on Lost Species and Perse was the obvious person to talk to…
‘I enjoyed our meet-up in the library – it was great to see you in the flow with such an exciting project. And I was honoured you wanted to hear my thoughts on ecological debt. Lately I have been thinking about how our taken-for-granted cultural expectations determine how we perceive the world (e.g. death is bad; e.g. it’s my life & my personal realisation is the highest goal) and when we were talking … I could hear how credit and debt are assumptions like this too – exciting! In a culture where there is reciprocity with earth rather than trying to exploit it/ maximise outputs, the idea of debt is not even relevant.
The journey from the Commons to Enclosure in the 17th – 19th centuries was a big step forward in terms of the exploitation of resources & people – but I am not a historian so I can’t tell you much about that. I’m just thinking about how the concept of land ownership might be a relatively new one, which – though it’s hard to imagine what there was before – totally conditions the lens through which we perceive the world.
I have been learning about how our culture leaves us all “ontogenetically stunted” and is a product of stunted people. I have been reading & re-reading a true classic of Eco psychology, Paul Shepard’s Nature & Madness. He say – and so does Stephen Jenkinson by the way and lots of other great thinkers – that we are deprived of initiation rites and consequently of eldership and this leaves our culture juvenile, infantilised, stuck – made up of big kids. That’s what clear-cutting and over-fishing look like don’t they?
– If I can’t have it, neither can you!
– Mine, mine!
– I won’t share!
– I need it now!
Alinah, I would like to hear what you have been learning/ discovering about the difference between gratitude and indebtedness?
I’m sure you have researched usury, & the historical journey from condemning it as evil to accepting it as normal & predicating societal functions & the hallowed growth paradigm on it? The normalising of debt culture has happened in tandem with the normalising of resource over-exploitation & exploitation of poor by rich.
… I have found a good account of the extinction of the passenger pigeon written by my friend and Feral colleague Camilla Schofield for the Funeral for Lost Species. She made a memorial like a war memorial consisting of hundreds of tiny white crosses arranged in a flock formation.’
When The Book of Debts goes live at the end of March, the life of the passenger pigeon will appear as an ecological debt, owed to the species, by industrialising, expansionist 19th century USA.
Gratitude and indebtedness and the difference between them? This merits a whole post, and will follow on soon from this one.
Off to Birmngham tomorrow to meet Fierce, discuss plans, do a recce and see the extraordinary-sounding Thrift Radiates Happiness, in case you live in the area, it only runs til this Sunday..
