It is said we are made of stardust. Perhaps that’s where accomplished meditators return. The rest of us may more easily return to what we’re made of by contemplating the first lifeform that emerged: the Archetype, which literally means “the first form.” Continue reading Don’t lose heart
On Friday 22nd April, an unusual ceremony took place in Winnipeg, Canada. Represented by its governor, the Hudson’s Bay Company gave its massive retail store in the heart of downtown Winnipeg, dating from 1881, to the Manitoba First Nations. Continue reading What change? Whose reconciliation?
Our call: Love all, no more war on nature, nonhuman and human. Embracing peaceful coexistence heralds humanity’s return to our Earthling nature, our authentic identity. Continue reading Demonic war
Let me recount this short tale—a thin slice from my recent life—exactly as it happened. On a warm afternoon earlier this month, outside an old inn that overlooks an east-coast estuary and that was once owned by a prolific persecutor of witches, I met a recent immigrant to the British Isles. It was immediately obvious that she was nervous in the presence of a new … Continue reading A knowledge for thirst: Water, empathy, and kinship
Despite strong public opposition in France, hunting’s ever-thinning guise of heritage still remains robust enough to satisfy many politicians. Emmanuel Macron, the President, claims to be serious about biodiversity but is an advocate of the suite of barbaric practices that make up this tradition. Continue reading A liberté without freedom, an égalité devoid of fairness, and a fraternité blind to kinship: Life as a bird in France
It is obvious that humanity’s treatment of whale people constitutes an atrocity. This includes the deliberate murder of a so-called hunt, the quasi-deliberate murder of negligence, the effective murder of habitat destruction, or the oblivious murder of the unthinking. Continue reading Ecocentric thoughts on whaling
How did we as a humanity lose touch with what is the most precious thing of all—our home planet and our relationship with it? How could we (let) unwind the breathtaking beauty of this Earth, the onetime gift of a living planet, and our love for our Earthling kin? Continue reading The discourse of COVID vaccination and the sovereign technological fix
Once you cut yourself off from media and start living as a recluse interesting things happen. Continue reading Four weeks of solitude
This is the first post in a category titled ‘Beneath the birch and pine’. The uniting theme for this series—beyond the writer’s nature-centred standpoint—will be the inspiration that each piece finds in some aspect of life in the Scottish Highlands. Continue reading Beneath the birch and pine: Prelude to a series
The real way forward, away from suffering and toward hope, lies in denouncing the root cause of our predicament, the human-supremacy story, the destructive platitude of human specialness. Continue reading Broken mirror
To massacre animals in this way is not what indigenous humans would do. On the contrary, the Grind is more akin to what Western vivisectionists did when they cut into living animals in the name of science. Faroe islanders do the same, under more turbulent, uncontrolled circumstances, in the name of tradition. Continue reading Open letter to Faroe Islanders: Please stop the slaughter of whales and dolphins
We must make food in harmony and collaboration with nature: healing for the planet, replenishing soils, with kindness to animals and reverence to plants, wholesome and available to all people. That is the way of Agroecology. Continue reading Four frameworks for Agroecology
As someone with serious misgivings about many technological ‘advances’, I do find there to be something oddly amusing in the resilience of the QWERTY keyboard. Continue reading Technoscepticism and the machine-proof Muir
Near the southern end of the modern border between Wales and England – on the side of the latter – the sea-seeking River Wye and the Severn Estuary provide the aquatic outline for a curious wedge of land. Continue reading Smiles and scowles: Puzzles in the Forest
Earth keepers call out to one and all to opt out of the sociocultural identity game, to choose freedom from anthropocentric herd costumes that furnish simulacra of reality for a sleepwalking, and now moribund, existence. Continue reading Earthling (we/us)
Slowly, over the years, intimate knowledge has allowed me to realize all wild lives are significant, and while sometimes enormously different from mine, they are not inferior. Continue reading Hunting: A personal ecocentric view
At first glance, it may strike us as odd that human food is made from the suffering and torture of animals. But it’s the fact that it is not odd that should command our attention. Continue reading Shutter the factory farms
Four years ago, I made an alarming observation that completely changed my game plan as a young organizer. I decided to use the power of story, word, and intention to confront a dominant narrative that defies the natural laws that govern life on Earth. Continue reading Changing the world by re-discovering your story
Earth is a place of exquisite vitality pervaded by the mystery of awareness. It is being catastrophically impoverished. Artificial intelligence will not bring back what is vanishing, nor replace it. If you wish to know transcendence, forget the machine. Look for an octopus teacher. Continue reading Grace versus dystopia
The term environmental racism refers to the way in which the neighborhoods of disadvantaged socioeconomic groups are disproportionately burdened with the negative effects of environmental exploitation. Continue reading Reversing environmental racism
The term ecofascism is often defined as “a totalitarian government that requires individuals to sacrifice their interests to the well-being of environment.” In the alternative conception, ecofascism applies to murdering environmental activists, and ignoring the slaughter and suffering of billions of nonhuman living beings. Continue reading Reversing ecofascism
Considered ecocentrically, identity politics and exclusive social justice activism have serious flaws. They include encouraging destructive human narcissism, a stunted range of ethical sympathy, and a disregard for a healthy natural world as the precondition for any politics at all. Continue reading The poverty of identity politics
Sated with nature’s wonders, I find an unwelcome thought returning, and I reluctantly begin to turn the focus-wheel clockwise as I lift my binoculars to the opposite shore. There it is: the ghastly sight of a recent hillside clear-cut. The devastation is obvious without the aid of magnification. Continue reading Bare-faced forestry
Do people actually believe that humanity can cause a mass extinction and there will be no consequences? I am not talking only about consequences for human physical well-being, which will be numerous. I am talking about an everlasting legacy of sorrow to human posterity. Continue reading On rational and sacred ground
One night years ago, in a park in Florida, I met a wonderful couple, Carol Wolf and her husband, Herb. They introduced me to the joys of mothing, the practice of attracting moths to suspended sheets with ultraviolet lights at night, and photographing them. This can get quite exciting, especially when a new, or unusually beautiful, species turns up. Continue reading The ethics of mothing
It seems obvious to me that my first principle should be to try to consider the effect of my every decision on all other life forms at both the individual and species levels. Continue reading Making my decisions – do least harm
In a grand revival of natural history lies a significant proportion of the work that needs to be done if humanity is to awaken to the appalling crisis of life’s erasure. Continue reading The zebras of Kidderminster
Even as the existential threats of mass extinction and climate upheaval are gathering intensity and becoming increasingly inescapable, the world’s superpowers and many other nation-states, in alignment with the corporate-industrial sector, are busy adding insult to injury. Continue reading Before midnight
… on some of our walks, a sombreness falls cloak-like. These are the ones on which we pass the signs of a recent murder or evidence of a slaughter in progress. Continue reading Life and death in the suburbs
If we refuse to heed the systemic underpinnings of COVID-19, the current epidemiological debacle will surely be dwarfed by other catastrophes in the not too distant future. Continue reading The COVID-19 mirror
What am I doing? Am I doing enough? Why am I, and are we, not doing more? Continue reading What are you doing about the ecological crisis?
The blog is named after the small fungi that emerge, tongue-like, from forest floors and grasslands. It is not too much of a leap of imagination to see the tongues as representing the Earth’s efforts to protest against the manifold tragedies being inflicted on her life forms and systems by the rapacious, and sometimes cruel, behaviour of modern human societies. Continue reading Welcome to Earth Tongues
Earth Tongues 