Something is missing. Our unceasing worrying about the environmental crisis has a monotonous tone. Day after day we hear more and more news of this or that extreme weather event accompanied by dire predictions of the future, and then some forlorn voice will pipe up with ‘But it is not too late, if only we act now…’And we all know that we will not act now. Our politicians are almost incapable of acting now, hamstrung as they are by the individualist presumptions that pervade Western-style societies around the world.
The bottom line is that many of us are worried that working together to address the environmental crisis will erode many of our hard-won liberties and equalities. The Covid pandemic has, in many ways, been a sort of trial run for the big event. And it has proved how far reaching these concerns are. We are fearful that a crisis will give rise to an autocratic government that will dictate how we must live. We are all too aware of the political extremists, who turn out on the streets and shout their demands. We fear the rise of the hard right who so readily scapegoat others in order to maintain social order. We may also be concerned about the hard left whose idealistic egalitarianism has proven, as in China and Russia, to create oppressive regimes so easily. So, we are caught in the status quo and prefer to bumble along, stumbling our way towards the greatest crisis ever known to humanity.
Is there an alternative that we have not yet considered? I believe there is, but to appreciate it we need to cast our minds back to the very origins of human society. The great skill of pioneering anthropologists such as Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas and Mircea Eliade was to side-step questions about the ‘truth’ of particular belief systems and enquire about how traditional religions functioned to form and maintain their societies. They all agreed that the belief in a higher power and the whole system of festivals, rituals and sacred observances that accompanied such a belief was of vital importance in creating such traditional societies. The religions functioned to create a shared imagination between the people that gave them cohesion, identity and a sense of belonging.
In our modern age we may think we have moved beyond all that. We no longer need religion, or anything to do with it, in our public life. We can build our societies on reason and evidence. And we have made great progress in formalising human society around democratic rights and responsibilities, the balancing of power and the role of evidence in public life. Yet there may still be something missing, something that is becoming all too apparent now that the environmental crisis is bearing down on us all. We no longer have the resources to work together as we need to. We know about protecting individual freedoms but lack the necessary cohesion to respond to the grave danger we are facing. And there is one way to achieve this that has not been properly considered. It is the art of creating shared imagination.
The obvious focus of the environmental crisis is our relationship with the earth. Science teaches us that the earth is a higher power that we are absolutely dependent upon. Some of our communities are discovering this the hard way as they experience extreme weather in the form of droughts, floods and wildfires. Yet most of us, especially in more benign climes, do not feel this truth. And that is the problem. We must come to feel the power of the earth, deep in our minds and emotions, if we are to respond adequately to the crisis that is breaking in on the world. And this, I would suggest, is a quasi-religious issue. Not that we suddenly have to become all religious about the Earth. Rather, we need to learn how to create shared imagination of the Earth in a way that is in keeping with our modern understandings of the world.
Durkheim, Douglas and Eliade agreed that the origins of shared imagination lay in making distinctions between sacred and profane. This was the most basic means by which traditional people framed the world around them. The sacred and profane was a primary distinction of the mind, before all others, and around which all other distinctions would be built. And it was a shared perception reinforced by a whole set of social and spatial provisions, like the creation of festivals and rituals and the demarcation of sacred spaces, which implicitly bound the people together as one, giving them a sense of home and belonging.
So, what might this mean for us today, with our need to imagine our relationship to the earth? I believe we are already seeing a new set of concepts arise that help us to relate to the earth, offering a modern equivalent of the traditional sacred and profane distinction. Words like ‘wilding’ and ‘organic’ have proved to be immensely powerful in redefining our relationship with the earth. They implicitly convey respect for the earth as one great and powerful system on which we depend. Wilding connects us with the regenerative power of the earth and the ability of damaged ecosystems to repair themselves, while organic defines a method of farming that respects natural processes over against abusive and arrogant methods of chemical farming. Both of these words embody modern forms of the sacred and profane. They are polarising words that settle on us a new perception of the world. At the same time, we are seeing the reuse of old words like ‘sanctuary’ and ‘pollution’ that have their origins in the traditional world, but which are now being applied, not to churches and temples, but to our relationship with the earth. We have ‘sanctuaries’ for wildlife on land and ocean and we recoil in disgust at plastic ‘pollution’ of our seas. These are all powerful words, freighted with emotion, and conveying a new approach to the sacred and profane. They are concepts that create earthquakes in our culture. They are the sign of a new imagination breaking in upon human society.
Our modern age gave us confidence to manage and order the world according to our desires. We learnt to appreciate signs of our management, valuing the ordered fields of the countryside and the close-cropped, monoculture grassland of the park. These things reassured us of the order of the world as it bowed to our will. Yet all this is now called into question. We now know that the ultra-managed environments of farm and park can all too easily become cages for wildlife. A tidy lawn is no longer a sign of cleanness, but of barrenness. The massive field betrays the destruction of hedgerows and the consequent removal of habitat for so many creatures. It is no longer good enough to say that farming is for food. Farming has other responsibilities, to the soils, to wildlife, to the rivers, to the climate and much more. And it all means that our perception of the world is changing. The Earth is truly, and scientifically, a higher power. And these new concepts like wilding are just the first stirrings of the art of creating shared imagination that is breaking in on the world, an art that implicitly gives ultimate value to the diverse ecosystems of the world and works against all that would diminish them.
This art also has social aspects, ways of engaging and building community life. Emile Durkheim was particularly aware of the power of festival and ritual to shape traditional societies. He wrote of the ‘collective effervescence’ that so often accompanied festivals, with their music and dancing, and recognised how this did something to the society that participated, binding the people together as one. Today, we need to learn again that festivals are not just for young people, they are for whole communities. And they are not just about music, powerful as that is in stirring the emotions. Imagine if every neighbourhood on earth established its own festival specifically to celebrate its relationship with the earth. Local people could combine together to highlight everything and everyone in their area who was making a positive response to the earth, from bird watchers to allotmenteers, growers and musicians, movers and shakers. And they would celebrate. There might be parades, tours of local nature sites, poetry, photography and play. The centrepiece of the day might be a promise to the Earth, which every member of the community was invited to make together in a public act.
Imagine the power that might flow from such festivals? Such festivals are doable. They are within the reach of ordinary citizens all around the world. They don’t need to be massively expensive. Any and every community could put on a festival as suited them, but with one common factor, namely that it would be focused on our relationship with the earth. The festivals might be timed to coincide with the solstices and equinoxes and so join every culture on earth together as one, subverting our political differences, bridging our social divisions and creating one shared imagination of the earth. Through festival we could discover that our truest and deepest identity, that unites all peoples on earth, is found in the simple idea that the earth is our home.
Coupled to such festivals could be the recognition of sacred spaces. Mircea Eliade believed that sacred spaces, like springs and shrines, churches and temples, were a means by which traditional societies orientated their whole lives. They built their sense of space from the places they considered sacred. Eliade talks of such spaces as ‘cosmogenic’, or world-creating, and suggests they were so powerful they actually formed traditional people’s sense of what was real. A modern equivalent of this process might begin with recognition of natural spaces around us that we love and respect. Every neighbourhood could identify those places in their area that need to be accorded special respect because they are important places for wildlife in all its diversity. The communities could survey the wildlife in those places and monitor its health. They could ensure wildlife corridors existed throughout their area and nurture new wild places. The community would get to treasure the non-human life among them and sense their relationship to it.
These things are just the first stirrings of the art of creating shared imagination of the earth and our relationship to it. It has three elements, the conceptual, the social and the spatial and each can be elaborated in many ways.
This art offers a new way of building trust among us. There can be no doubt that trust is fragile in our modern Western democracies and contributes to our fear about the rise of oppressive regimes. The pandemic has unearthed serious numbers of people willing to believe in conspiracy theories or embrace denial. These are a proxy for the general level of trust in our culture. Rediscovering the art of creating shared imagination will ground our lives in a new way, helping us to face our human situation and to feel our place on the earth. And this will build trust. It could also motivate us to work together far more powerfully and more creatively than any autocratic government. The focus on the earth will bind us together. All our differences will be transcended by acknowledgement of our common relationship with the earth.
I also expect this art to turn the tables on our system of values. Consider who we honour today? What a mish mash of the good, the bad and the ugly! We have rich boys who like to go into space, influencers who present idealised versions of themselves in order to sell things. We have celebrities, who are famous for being famous. Yet, on the other hand, we do honour many, who serve the public good and whose achievements are substantial. In the future I expect these values will shift. In some communities, people who work the land are the lowest of the low. In the future, I envisage that the person who sensitively works the land might rise to a place of the highest esteem among us. And the one who studies the ecology of a place will be listened to almost like a priest, as they reveal the wildlife around us.
The art of creating shared imagination offers us a new way forward. And we can set out now. These things are within our grasp. We need not wait for the politicians. They do not really lead us anyway. They follow. They need us, the ordinary citizens, to learn the art of creating shared imagination in relation to the Earth. Then the policies that we so desperately need will follow.
This is the second of three short essays by Chris Sunderland designed to introduce his new book
Imagination is the key – to unlock the environmental crisis
which is available here