Age of Ecology

When I introduced "The Myth of the Secular," the last series I did for Ideas, I mentioned that it was done in a style that I had first used in this series, "The Age of Ecology," broadcast in 1990.  During the 1980's I had grown restive with the conventional documentary in which a group of speakers are deployed as beads on a string created by the programme maker.  A couple of things bothered me.  The first was that the you-go-then-I-go rhythm of the documentary inevitably limited each speaker to a certain short span of time - it was a lot longer in an Ideas programme than in a television documentary, where one point per "clip" or "insert" is the almost unvarying rule, but more than three or four minutes was unusual and likely to make the documentary feel lumpy and unbalanced.  So people with a lot more to say were often limited to what the exigencies of the documentary allowed them.  The second was that the narrative momentum of the documentary often prevented much attention to what was individual about the individual speakers in the programme.  To talk about their curiculum vitae, or the way in which their ideas had formed and developed, or how these ideas might differ from the documentary's artificial consensus was often difficult or impossible.   So I settled on the one person at a time, and sometimes one person per programme, scheme that I worked with on and off for the next twenty years or so. 

 

This method allowed me to present a spectrum of views without having to reconcile or even compare them.  Each person's thought could unfold in its own time and on its own terms.  There was time to explore how each one came to think as he or she did, and how each one defined his or her terms.   My theme, the age of ecology, was well-suited to this treatment.  Practically everyone agrees that we live in such an age, now sometimes called the Anthropocene in recognition of the fact that human impacts on nature now register on geological time scales, but there the agreement ends.  Do we need more management, more science, more regulation, or less?   Can a retooled capitalism pilot "spaceship earth" to salvation, or is a more fundamental change of attitude required?   I first became aware of this question in 1970, when Ivan Illich spoke at a teach-in some friends and I had organized in Toronto.  The environmental crisis, Illich said, presented a fundamental choice:  either we would turn back from the edge that was beginning to become visible, or we would try to manage a precarious life on this edge by means of an ever more comprehensive and intrusive set of calculations and controls.   Illich, typically, was a little ahead of his time, but twenty years later the choice he had offered was rapidly being decided in favour of the management option.  My series was an attempt to draw attention to some of the more searching and more critical approaches to the age of ecology that I had come across; and without, as I've said, having to bring them all into precise alignment.  Included in the series were the following thinkers:

Part One: Wolfgang Sachs and Donald Worster

PartTwo: David Ehrenfeld and John Livingstone

Part Three: Thomas Berry

Part Four: Vandana Shiva and Frederique Appfel-Marglin

Part Five:  John Todd

Part Six:  James Lovelock and William Irwin Thompson

Part Seven: Murray Bookchin and Stuart Hill

Part Eight:  Bill McKibben, David Rothenberg and Erazim Kohak

The year after these shows were broadcast Jim Lorimer published a book called The Age of Ecology - the cover is pictured above - in which transcripts of a number of my programmes, including some episodes from this series, were gathered.  Remarkably the book is still in print.

 

Being Born

"How is the little creature (kryatura) in the belly of its mother?  Let your mind imagine that the kryatura, being inside the belly of its mother, can be likened to a twig doubled in half.  And some say like a walnut which lies inside a watery skin, with its two hands resting on its breasts, the elbows of its arms lying on its two knees, its two heels drawn up under its backside, its head also on its knees, the mouth closed, the umbilical cord open, since through this it eats what its mother eats and drinks what its mother drinks.  And there is no discharge from its body, for otherwise it would kill its mother.  And when it is born, what was closed is opened, and what was opened is closed, for if it were not thus it could not remain living for even one hour.  And it has a burning candle near its head, and it sees from one corner of the world to the other, all the while being in the belly of its mother.  And in all the life of that person it never enjoys better days than those."         
                                                         

(from ME'AM LO'EZ, a Sephardic Jewish commentary on Genesis, published in Istanbul in 1730 and reprinted as an epigraph to Barbara Duden's Disembodying Women, Harvard, 1993)

Sometime in early 1983 I learned that Tom Verny, a Toronto psychiatrist, was organizing the grandly named First International Congress on Pre and Peri-Natal Pyschology.  Verny was the author of a book called The Secret Life of the Unborn Child published in 1981.  It gained considerable attention and signaled the coming of age of a previously fairly marginal branch of psychology.  The Congress was intended to consolidate this success by bringing together many of the scholars who had studied birth and prenatal existence as formative experiences.  It was held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and attended by midwives, obstetricians, childbirth educators, psychologists and psychoanalysts, as well as interested members of the public.  Their perspectives were diverse, but they shared a conviction that how we are born matters.  Many argued that the the upheaval of birth creates the very template within which consciousness and imagination form. 

 The last of my four children had been born at home earlier that year - a birth attended by midwives who were still practicing illegally in Ontario - and I was keenly interested in both the politics and the psychology of childbirth.  Tom Verny liked the idea of having me report on the Congress for Ideas, so I set up a temporary studio in an office adjacent to the scene of most of the action and, in three manic days, managed to get almost all the Congress's main speakers on tape.  The series was broadcast later that year.  Times have changed a little - midwifery is no longer illegal in Ontario - but I think most of what is said here pertains to things that don't change...