TRANQUILITY IN DISTURBANCE 2025

Looking Beyond the Matrix

Happy Neo Year!

From the perspective of the news that really matters, by which I mean news from the survival beat, 2024 went out with a BIG Bang! Two of them, in fact. And both more-or-less under the radar of what passes for news these days - which Kurt Vonnegut said could always be summed up in four words: “Situation, desperate as usual.” I don’t need to tell my readers everything that is wrong in the world today. There is no shortage of desperate news on that global beat.

Instead of more of the same foreboding you’ve probably almost gotten used to by now, and in honor of the big new cosmological era we have now entered (Pluto in Aquarius till 2044), I want to offer you two new developments from the last month of 2024 that are unusual in there responsiveness to the desperate urgency of these ‘two crises that are actually one’: climate and biodiversity. Warming (macro) and Weirding (micro), two aspects of the relational chaos we humans have engendered.

These newly announced developments are also naturally conjoined in that way, having everything to do with relationality, which is the true arena where survival of the species is playing out right now.

NEWS FLASH! U.S. Climate Keystone Species Receives YUGE Support!

According to science from a number of fronts that has developed mostly over the last decade or so, we now know that there are enough depleted grasslands available in the Western U.S. to allow our national mammal, the American Buffalo, to regenerate the very lands we tried to extirpate them from a little over a century ago, and in the process draw down up to TWICE the amount of CO2 from the atmosphere that we are currently emitting - which on its own would help reverse global warming.

This is the new science of ‘trophic upgrading’ that utilizes keystone species like the bison and beavers to trigger a cascade of positive ecological changes at the landscape level (and also at seascape level, e.g. supporting otters and whales). At the same time, Tribes across the country are now rising up to re-assert their sacred, ancient relationship with Buffalo, both on their own reservations and, crucially, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that serves as a reservoir for the wild bison genetic diversity we very nearly lost. How ironic is it that our ecological salvation may come from both the people and the animals we tried, and failed, to eliminate via genocide and ecocide?

Because of the importance of Yellowstone bison to the species’ survival, the Department of Interior, under Laguna Pueblo Tribal member Deb Haaland’s leadership, has instituted an aggressive bison transfer program to use these national treasures as seed-stock for growing Tribal herds all over the country (even Florida!). I have had the distinct honor in the last few years of helping to change the narrative surrounding the “management” (oxymoron alert) of Yellowstone’s ‘wild’ bison, by working closely with Tribal allies and Interior. These efforts were instrumental in bringing 11 key Tribes together in November of 2023 to begin cooperating in the assertion of Tribal sovereignty over buffalo.

Unbeknownst to anyone at that time, a mama cow was carrying a white baby that would take birth in Yellowstone last Spring, thus fulfilling Lakota prophesy of return and regeneration from White Buffalo Calf Woman. This, according to Chief Arvol Looking Horse (the spiritual leader at Standing Rock), who is the holder of the sacred pipe handed down from White Buffalo Calf Woman. This was universally seen by Tribes as a hopeful sign, especially in the wake of the Buffalo Treaty many of the Tribes and First Nations have entered into to propogate bison on Turtle Island, not to mention the Tribal Summit itself, which Chief Looking Horse helped pull off.

Well, now a whopping $100 Million has just been made available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program, funding that will benefit 126 tribes across the nation! This huge injection of cash will:

“supplement bison cultural herds along with the aim to create 20 new herds, which will stabilize and strengthen the efforts of each tribal nation and support cultural renewal while fostering ecological rejuvenation in northern short mixed-grass prairies,”

according to the grant announcement, as reported by Brett French in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

Wild Thing! This makes my heart sing!!

This is the best form of cultural reparations that the U.S. could possibly offer Tribes at this time, and there is an ongoing rejuvenation of Tribal traditions, songs, and lifeways that has been catalyzed by restoring the sacred relationship between the Indigenous people of this land and the species that literally shaped that land. This is exactly how we wayward settlers support our Tribal allies at scale.

This is, in part, how we begin coming into proper relationship with Gaia, bringing healing to all our relations. It’s how we heal climate trauma, which is thoroughly entangled with the generational trauma of genocide and ecocide. As the United Nations acknowledges, Indigenous leadership is critical to our collective survival.

So this is fantastic news!

It is my fervent hope that this timely boost will inspire the Tribes to continue asserting even greater sovereignty over their aboriginal food source by, for example, taking over management of wild bison on public lands, in accordance with what they were promised when entering into treaties before our government, in bad faith, attempted to exterminate the buffalo that were at the heart of those treaties. Thanks to pronouncements from the current Supreme Court, the law is definitely in the Tribes’ favor, and they are much better positioned to accomplish necessary conservation objectives in this critical window we are in than the Trump-hobbled Big Green groups are.

From my perspective as a life-long eco-activist and wildlife advocate, this is what quantum social change looks like at scale, at the catalyst-stage. While I know better than take credit for any of this, at the same time I know that my efforts and the efforts of many others working behind the scenes mattered.

Which brings me to our second fantastic news development of 2024 - this one hot off the press, courtesy of my smartest friend in all the world, Karen O’Brien from the University of Oslo:

NEWS FLASH! TRANSFORMATIVE ‘QUANTUM’ SOCIAL CHANGE FRAMEWORK ADOPTED!

This is like reporting on the ultimate catalyst for quantum social change, which for the uninitiated is a description of how new and higher orders can suddenly emerge all at once from utter chaos. As Karen O’Brien just announced on her own substack, “the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment was officially approved by governments on December 15, 2024 at the IPBES-11 plenary in Windhoek, Namibia.” The IPBES is an independent, intergovernmental science-policy platform that serves to bridge the efforts of the United Nations’ IPCC and its Convention on Biodiversity. Most people still see these as two crises instead of one.

This new assessment takes the long view, intended as a catalyst towards achieving a global state of ecological thriving by 2050. It is not a matter of whether this is actually possible, because it is absolutely necessary if we and countless other species are to survive. That’s what makes it so visionary. Someday, I think, Dr. Karen O’Brien will win a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts - she was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel for her climate work with the IPCC. The work she is doing now is even more crucial.

As a refugee of the failed environmental movement and, more recently, as a panpsychologist who has researched the science and psychology of our meta-crisis for over a decade, I will confess that I have begun to sound like a broken record:

• The climate crisis is a crisis of relationship, not a scientific problem or political issue.

• The scope of this problem is reflected in the biodiversity crisis, e.g., with cows largely displacing wildlife the world over in just my lifetime (wildlife’s 80% decline mirrored by cows now representing 80% of all animal life on planet Earth).

• We must therefor come into proper relationship with Gaia and with the land and sea holistically (e.g., our diets), bio-regionally (e.g., wildlife and food sourcing), and at the level of our own ecosystem - even including our, and our community’s, lawns and gardens.

• Nature is the Answer to all of our problems!

And so I take heart from the very first sentences this new report directs at policy makers:

Transformative change for a just and sustainable world is urgent, necessary and challenging but possible, to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and safeguard life on Earth. It is required to respond to global environmental challenges and crises, including biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution.

One of the “Key Messages” or takeaways from the Transformative Change report (KM8) is illustrated by the bison example above:

Conservation that involves sustainable stewardship, notably by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, contributes to transformative change when it is inclusive, well-resourced, focused on places of high value to nature and people, and when the rights of Indigenous Peoples are recognized...

Indigenous and local knowledges often support ‘biocultural’ approaches (integrating biodiversity conservation with cultural values) that have demonstrated long-term sustainability in place-based conservation measures []. Supporting and strengthening conservation led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities may involve adjusting [laws and governance systems].

Another Key Message (KM12) lends support to my own attempts to get the Mental Health Profession generally, and the Psychology profession in particular, to step up to the plate and offer some constructive solutions to the toxic forms of socio-pathology that are prevalent, making people feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of an existential threat:

Shifting dominant societal views and values to recognize and prioritize human-nature interconnectedness is a powerful strategy for transformative change. These shifts can be facilitated through cultural narratives and by changing dominant social norms, facilitating transformative learning processes, co-creating new knowledge and weaving different knowledge systems, worldviews and values that recognize human-nature interdependencies and ethics of care.

Transformative change involves questioning the individual and collective paradigms and cultural narratives that perpetuate the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and nature’s decline []. This can be done by recognizing and promoting worldviews and values that emphasize care, reciprocity and harmony with nature, including Mother Earth. These worldviews and values include those associated with Indigenous and local knowledge systems.

I identified the psychological component of this cross-disciplinary problem in my most recent paper Gaia Psychology: “[w]hat is sorely needed now is a new model of self that incorporates a set of ideals and values that are congruent with Indigenous wisdom (i.e., human nature) and have the inherent potential to act as a catalyst of quantum social change towards an ecological civilization where humans are a keystone species for trophic upgrading, not a voracious species spreading trophic downgrading.”

What I’ve proposed as a starting point for this initiative is a positive, “Gaian Psychology” of holistic indigeneity, integrating a model of the ecological self (pp. 20-22) that embraces a number of core values which can be, and in many cases are already being, adopted by individuals and communities in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and cultures around the world. This is congruent with Key Message 13 from the IPBES assessment for “enabling transformative change”:

Shared positive visions and their development is especially important to recognize socio-ecological interdependencies, the agency of non-human life forms and an ethics of care, and thereby to inspire transformative change.

Such a positive psychological reset would have the effect, over time, of bringing us into proper relationship with the survivors of colonialist genocide, who still carry those deep scars, and who are living repositories of the wisdom, ecological knowledge and lifeways necessary for all of us to come into a more wholesome, sustainable relationship with the natural world.

By adopting a post-modern model of holistic indigeneity as an umbrella for promoting wholesome mental health, we can foster the kind of solidarity amongst ourselves, with Indigenous peoples, and in alliance with Gaia, that humans will need, quite frankly, to survive the accelerating collapse of climate systems. It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight. It’s true that we’ve already passed some important ecological tipping points. But Gaia is innately resilient, and in the same short amount of human time it has taken us to reduce wildlife populations by >80%, big marine fish by >90%, and insects by >70%, we can reverse global warming —simply by soliciting Gaia as our ally, and not seeing her as our foe or slave, and by working with Indigenous allies and keystone species to increase biodiversity on land and at sea at scale.

That is the Answer. That’s the Plan. And the two developments touted here are key stepping stones on that regenerative path of quantum socio-ecological change.

As a cogent illustration of what I mean by holistic indigeneity, I’ve talked about how the “Overview Effect” has brought us into a new relationship of higher awareness - as experienced by astronauts of all people - with this larger living organism, Gaia, in which we are integral cells and organelles.

Well, when viewed from that same perspective, astronauts have observed a big green wave of life transforming the land that follows Yellowstone’s bison on their Spring migrations through the Park. That’s the kind of potential we are talking about with Gaia as ally - literally transforming the landscape up and down the front range of the Rocky Mountains, all the way into the plains states, and down into Texas every year, once their populations have been recovered in sacred relationship with the Buffalo People, or Native American Tribes.

Is this not a radically different way of viewing the climate crisis? Instead of a hockey-stick graph of exponential emissions, a pulsating green wave moving across the land every year! Did you know that every bison cow gets pregnant every year, and the herd will grow exponentially by 10% every year - if we LET them? And the Yellowstone Bison, or American Buffalo, is just one of 20 climate keystone species that can have this kind of transformative effect on our shared climate.

I am here to tell you now: it is not an unrealistic vision any more. But don’t take it from me. Take it from an Indigenous scholar, musician and young leader who knows even better, and presents it ever more beautifully - Dr. Lila June - in this 6-minute video on how WE are the ultimate climate keystone species.

Takeaways for 2025

“The universe rests on relationship.”

~ Brian Swimme, Cosmogenisis (2022)

Joanna Macy teaches us that the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning are simultaneous processes. It’s seems like the unravelling is happening above us, however, grabbing all the headlines - because we’re hardwired to focus on threats - while the Great Turning is happening largely unseen, beneath our feet, quite literally at the grass roots level. And she’d say we have a choice here of focusing on one, the other, or both.

That quote at the top, “everything is in destruction... everything is in construction...” was an observation made by a master who’d just fully awoken. Tranquility in disturbance is what he saw as the appropriate attitude in response to our situation in the world. I think Joanna, also a Buddhist scholar, sees things that way, too. It’s why the lights in her eyes burn so bright.

And so I’m wishing all of you tranquility in disturbance as we head into some difficult, unravelling times. Just try to remember that when you’re feeling challenged, a new order always emerges from chaotic miasma, and there is a great turning happening in the compost of all this sociocultural upheaval. Real, lasting and transformative changes happen slowly, slowly, at first, and then all at once.

So take the long view home.