The ecological is so void in Westernish life. Even when it has been declared a SCIENCE.
Why?
Perhaps, because it has not been declared an ART.
— 🍂 Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 25, 2020
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Eco ~ Greek Oikos from PIE root *weik- (1) ~ clan.
Proto Indo European Root ~ *ar(ə)-ti ~ to fit together.
(ia – plural suffix of nouns).
Ecolartia.
Enjoy. #Neologisms
— 🍂 Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 25, 2020
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Fluminism brings together my thoughts over a number of years. I offer an alternative to Biocentrism (Taylor), Ecocentrism (Naess) and, importantly, Anthropocentrism (Passmore, et al).
To be a Fluminist is to recognise oneself viscerally as part of the interconnectedness between all beings ~ Symnexia (Sanguimund), and in this realisation, to act with love, respect and responsibility in protecting these interconnections, minimising the breaking of their flows, to find fluministic ways to proliferate and send new flows ~ Praximund.
The following is an extract from my dissertation, including narrative scholarship.
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5.4 Praximund: Responsibility and the Sacred.
There are problems with the theory of Rights taking precedence over Responsibilities. Many indigenous people understand this. Rights are merely human constructs, legislatively fixed (when processes are not), but politically vulnerable and impressionable by further human culture/population dominion.
Natural processes and fluministic interconnections have evolved, are evolving. There exists intrinsic, self-willed, complex patterns across space and time. Free-willed, save for our excess. We participate, as part of nature, yes. But because of this excess of destructive behaviours, rivers, forests, mycelium and migration need more than ‘Rights’ afforded only by humans, and a minority of humans at that… for this too is dominion.
So I have a name for the responsibilities and an adherence expected. A unity of opposites ~ a natural law, but not a law. I call it Praximund (latin; process/Earth) the deepest possible respect for natural processes, and a fundamental requisite of fluministic action. Infringe only with negative consequences to oneself and all life, the biosphere, as we are all interconnected. There is honour and pride in celebration and ritual of it.
There’s credence in declaring ecological interconnections sacred as a route to the protection of life, a full sanctity of life (Kumar). Nurtured this way, perhaps, the sacred become inviolable. Constituent lives are liberated to evolve with a free-will, a flourish of nature’s effervescent, green fuse. More, by cultivating a collective reverence for the presence of a community of living beings ~ through narratives, ritual and rules ~ we may look and ‘see’ life in new ways, a wave of sanguimund spreading though each one of us, the wonder of interconnected life. There have been many before us using sacred words with similar meanings now lost, and I hope many after, with words yet to be created. All I ask that we think about creating our own sacred in and with the natural world (Milton, Bateson), building narratives and exercising rituals in what is of utmost meaning to ourselves and together. Then, defend from the profane. And that defense, in sanctity and in love, will need to be strong.
Narrative Scholarship.
Guarding the sacred is not limited to protection from human intrusion. Sometimes, the opposite is vital. Sometimes, the sacred is one’s presence or consciousness and the tending of ecosystem in a loving, fluministic way. Fenced-off zones around Chernobyl have led to non-human life returning in abundance. There is a sanctity in the absolute devotion of ecological networks of that place. But the absence of humans is not a pre-requisite of the sacred.
Churches may seem at their most holy when the bells toll loudly, when the stalls are heaving with parishioners singing hymns at the top of their voices. The sacred seems to exist somewhere in the union of the people in the nave, all facing east, a sense of reverence helped along by those clever architects placing windows in the clerestory to remind of God’s presence in beams of moted dust light.
The land can hold us with a similar sense of direction, commitment and devotion. And God need not be involved, unless he is simply love. A private moment, no less, can be the touch of grace, with such strength that it can change one’s perspective forever.
I lean over my Grandmother’s grave and remember her strength. Fused into my memory cells, she’d garden with such force as to create her own weather system. This memory seems sacred, but not her grave. I feel the difference in remembering I am her kin.
It may not be a surprise the reader that I feel the sacred most in perceiving those bristling interconnections in the living world, the living, quietly seen or unseen. A humble field maple will do it, with birds in the gnarly branches and fungi at the roots. Their Autumnal yellow glow takes my breath way and I am minded to sit for hours and just be present. It is a profound love, intense and moving.
A mother fox licking her young, a tender petal opening to a bee, these are all things bright and beautiful. Light is important to me, I have been to the darkest of dark. That the direct or diffused sunlight gives succour to life seems profound. I love the light around waterfalls. So do the mosses and the liverworts.
There are also the green rays at sunset, or during eclipses, the last and first moments of light bent and scattered through our thin atmosphere like moments of magic.
Hokianga
The sacred can also be a memory, an event marked at a place only by the truth-myths passed down through generations. From the eastern sunrise, I once arrived at the spectacular Hokianga Harbour, North Island, New Zealand, an area brimming with sacred Māori sites. Yellow dunes on the far side of the bay shone brightly sucked back into a baby-blue vacuum. An incoming tide from the Tasman sea swept the bay clean with crested wave upon wave, and variable oystercatchers flew low at blistering speed (I could just make out their uncanny calls).
I followed a sign to a look-out point high above the harbour entrance and sat on a low wooden bench. I felt an immediate essence of something profound here. I was positioned somewhere on the edge of it all, and it felt like sanctuary.
Later, I walked along nearby Omapere wharf and talked to a Māori man from the village who was fishing with a simple line and hook. I was just a tourist, yet he was so generous in conversation.
He told me his Māori oral tradition, that legendary Polynesian explorer, Kupe, of the Matahourua canoe, made first Aotearoa landfall and lived here. The story goes that he named it Te Puna i te ao marama ~ the spring of the world of light ~ until in his old age he decided to return to his island birthplace, Hawai- ki. The words he spoke as he left were, Hei konei ra i te puna i te ao marama, ka hoki nei ahau, e kore ano e hokianga-nui mai ~ this the spring of the world of light, I shall not come back here again ~ and so, granted Hokianga its name.
The vessel of the sacred contains a good measure of vulnerability. Maybe this is an essential tension that drives us to protect.
Great sacrilege occurred at Hokianga, long after Kupe’s departure, against the endemic and the Māori. The mighty kauri trees, like the blue whales of the world’s forests, were wrenched from inland Waipoua and floated down the river for milling and global export, mainly by the hands of Pakeha (non-natives). Unlike the Māori, who would take chosen trees with a reverence, for canoe- building, the Pakeha took nearly all.
And without the kauri, large parts of the forest died and many endemic species lost forever. What was left was turned over to dairy, and again those products exported globally from the Harbour. To destroy the interconnections between living things is to destroy the most sacred ~ life.
Another Pakeha, William Roy McGregor, professor of Zoology, successfully campaigned to end logging of the Waipoua Forest in 1952 and created the Waipoua Forest Sanctuary. The sanctuary is still weak from attack, with Kauri Die-back disease laying claim to regenerating forest, and climate change will be having its effect. Let’s hope this small part of a once vast, ancient forest recovers to it’s truest dynamic state of being, given full protection and time.
Unlike the great Kupe, perhaps, I’ll return to Hokianga again one day. Modern technology makes it easier for me, though I’ll have to watch those emissions (always some kind of price to make such returns). The harbour and surrounds are a wealth of flora and fauna and, until then, it will be the distant sounds of the oystercatchers, torea-pango, that will remain in my memory as symbol of the sacredness of that place. If I am quiet enough, I can still hear the sacred, right now in my head.
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The story also told here Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, First peoples in Māori tradition – Kupe, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.
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For more on Māori reverence, customs, ritual and stories, including the mauri of the forest (the life-force) invested in objects and buried under important ecological places or tane trees, as acts of protection.
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End note: Waipoua Forest was bought by the settler-colonialist Government from the local Te Roroa Māori in the 1870s for around £2000, no doubt putting them under immense pressure beforehand. Locals were disenfranchised from the receipts of logging, except to be employed in some of the most dangerous work. McGregor’s protected area was a legal entity under the Laws of the New Zealand Government, yet was suspended in the 1970’s for further logging. After yet another campaign, it was stopped. I wonder, if the practices of mauri “life-force” had been continued by all, and regularly, would this infringement have ever occurred?
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Unless you believe that we are members of some kind of intergalactic cult, we humans are not alien to this world. We are intrinsic to it; a manifestation of the diversity of all the life that ever existed.
Despite our geologically recent farming cultures, the schism between humans and the rest of nature is false. In fact, growing and harvesting food, generating our water and energy supplies, and getting rid of waste is where we are submerged deepest into the flows of life, and where we are perhaps closest to our teresapien kin. The problem is that the connections are now largely negative in the flow of ecological and climatic entropy, and in our moralities.
You can tell how Capitalism deconstructs the interconnections that sustain life. Just look at waste costed into price. It’s something we try not to think about, until it more obviously surfaces in the flood waters, or flaps from a road verge, or a school yard. The recycling industry, as it stands, is a Capitalist perpetuation of the problem.
More often than not, the invisible dangers are the deepest concern, the ones our sensory organs cannot easily discern. And these are delicate and complex dangers because life systems are both delicate and complex. We either need access to the tools to be able to trace these dangers, or see them manifest in ourselves, our loved ones, and in other life forms, in the shape of disease and death. Even more resources are required to then treat and save, though teresapien lives are not granted anywhere near the same attention as humans, and some humans are not granted anywhere near the same attention as ‘other’ humans.
We are always playing catch up with the negative forces of competitive Capitalism.
It’s beyond time to apply the Precautionary Principle to extreme Capitalism itself. Capitalism puts public (human and teresapien) health at risk. We (the biosphere) can no longer afford to let these harms be driven by competition for a fat bank account or a gilded mansion. I am not speaking of local trade and creativity, and I am not speaking of basic comforts. Some say it would be paralysing, to restrict a natural drive to accumulate resources in cash and property for further innovation. But there’s no paralysis more permanent than death. So what are the alternatives? Because these too are intrinsic to the Precautionary Principle. Let’s create them collaboratively, with no waste, and for the good of all life.
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Climate scientists and activists are still tending to think and communicate to the masses in human socio-political terms, even going so far as to reject the worth of saving NGO-promo animals (trees, whales, pandas, polar bears), or other teresapiens in general as an un-emotive or meaningless exercise, and continuing to place the human species as central to all like a gravitational force.
To bring people into the Nawoken, may require the initial motivation of something much closer to themselves. What immediately touches us drives us. But tragically, that too is a legacy of white, ‘Enlightenment’ colonialist separation, reductionism, or bifurcation. Many of the indigenous communities, before the violence of European colonisation erupted, were already living vast eco-logical interconnected lives, honouring and respecting living beings and places, to include the inorganic, where humans were culturally not centre-placed in isolation in all decision making.
This is NOT to take away the human imperative. It is, instead, to add the imperative of all interconnected life, upon which we are all a part, dependent, and having intrinsic value in and of itself. One shared biosphere.
Often, teresapiens were ‘personified’ (Wall-Kimmerer) to be included in all the most weighty decisions. Ancestors, descendents and “Country” (the floloca) similarly played essential roles in the hearts and minds of communities, no better described here, in short, in the proportionality of indigenous peoples of Australia (Graham, Brigg). In doing so, these peoples thrived whilst maintaining complex ecological flows within relative climatic stability across varying bioregions and languages, with equitable consumption patterns and little to no waste. Sometimes that meant leaving things alone as sacred, at least for a period of time, if not forever. In my own eco-political framework I call Cherishism, the Cherishers would make sure all had a ‘say’ too (teresapien lives evaluated with sincerity and reverence in all decisions).
Whatever we do in our seemingly irreversible technological imprint on Earth, these foundational ways of eco-logical living must now return, with ecological growth in both abundance and diversity of all that is now dying.
It is right to fight for human equality and equity between ourselves, for a basic human exchange of empathy, compassion and altruism, but also because those divides themselves continue to drive biospheric destruction and depauperation; air, land and oceans (Grey, et al).
But to survive in our one shared biosphere, more, to thrive as an honourable part of it, those of us in the Westernish, where our Long Covid-like Enlightenment period is still fueling division, bifurcation, hierachies, racism, and consumption-driven destruction in a globalised market, must truly analyse and synthesise our place within life systems, biologically/ecologically, and re-evaluate where we stand.
We are Symlings among symlings, in vast and complex flows. I now call the study of this way of life Symbioethics.
True wisdom would mean listening to our species elders, educating our loved ones, observing and attuning with living ‘flows’ (loves), along their lines/planes/three dimensional places ~ four dimensions, to count the ‘spiritual.’ We are part of nature, not alien to it, and our children and grandchildren deserve to reclaim that billion year old identity.
This superego-juddering shift, despite all the mechanistic political approaches, National/UN targets and agreements possible, is essential.
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Look, my work on Fluminism proves, I contend, that climate justice is about saving all lives with equal devotion. There is NO divide between climate justice and ecological abundance.
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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We are all nature – we are one and the same. Concentrate on the processes that hinder flow & create suffering. #Fluminism is as much about resisting racism and poverty as it is about ecological growth.
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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Humans are not ecological producers. We don’t even photosynthesise! We ALSO don’t decompose organic material into elements for renewal. We need to look after the ones who do. We are part of system far bigger than us. The biosphere! But what is happening IS an extinction event.
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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You might have a gateway into these (shockingly disturbing) facts about life on Earth. It could be that social injustice brings you in.
But it doesn’t stop at this point. Lifetimes of study, ancient cultures, new science on symbiosis… see the interconnectedness of all life!
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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If you don’t, then Homo hubris (the legacy of WhiteMAnthropocentrism), will continue to dominate – we are not central to all life. We are ecological consumers, dependent upon others, including bacteria within. We need those ‘producers’, and the beings who sustain them.
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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They help regulate climate, they keep life forces flowing on land, in the air and at sea. They have been punched and pulverised, bit by bit, continent by continent. It has to stop. And fairly, for humans and teresapiens alike. Which means capitalism is no answer. It’s unfair!
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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Climate justice and anti-racism MUST also be about ecological ‘freedoms.’ Because the denial of ecological freedoms means… death. Fight for both.
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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I understand that being victims of white oppression over centuries would mean easy rejection of Deep Ecology (ecocentrism), where the whole is put above the needs of the few (a form of utiltarianism). But Fluminism is alternative to holism. It looks to processes instead.
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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Processes that sustain life. ALL life (you, me, wherever, and every single living organism). Equally, equity, by the very nature of their dynamic, interconnected flows. #Symbioethics
Yes people matter. All people. As Fluminists.
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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Might you gather these wonderful tweets about ‘fluminism’ into a single-thread so we can refer to (& retweet) all these together? As @jimj220 used to say “equity equals survival.”
— Aubrey Meyer (@aubreygci) October 12, 2020
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That’s kind, Aubrey. The short of it is, of course, love (love being a doing word) for all living beings – plant, animal (inc humammals (equally) ), insect, fungi, bacteria… even viruses to a hidden extent. #Fluminism
Meanwhile, I’ll blog the tweets. Thank you. x
— 🕸Ginny Battson (@seasonalight) October 12, 2020
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I just want to note this moment in terms of my own mental health. As an ecophilosopher, I do not separate myself from my thoughts. It would be like ripping me apart, limb from limb. I write about life-love as a devotion, and I am similarly devoted to my cause. These are exceptional and difficult times, and it is important to recognise despair and kindle hope. If someone attacks my core devotion, and any attempt to recognise despair and kindle hope, they are attacking me.
I can take legitimate critiques of the results of my philosophical work, particularly critiques of my literary inadequacies, but not the fact that I work at all. I can take legitimate criticism of neologisms I craft, but not that I craft them at all nor the approach I take. I can take criticism of the contributions I make on social media, but not that I am a woman doing these things. Being overlooked is, I think, one of the biggest struggles of women at work. Neither do I appreciate ideas stolen from beneath me. They are gifts, of course, but I expect some reciprocal credit, especially from revered and financially successful writers.
Being a woman on social media is harder than being a man. That’s not what frustrates me most, drives my anger, self-doubt and depression. It is that my daughter faces all of this, and more. It’s tough enough facing a life with a tsunami of complex problems swallowing our beautiful Earth. That women (including trans women, especially black women), are not treated with equal respect into the future is desperately wrong.
I have written before about my experiences of 2008, so I don’t want to rake it all over. In short, I had as severe an episode of trauma as one can have without ending it all. After finding my mother’s body after her suicide, I nearly followed her into those depths of eternal nothingness. The shock and the guilt. If it were not for the light of my beautiful young daughter, the unbroken affection for and from Ben-dog, and the right help found by my husband at the time, I would not be here at all. I remember the searing feeling of a tear in my frontal cortex *, that moment of choice.
Moving home from Cardiff, Wales, to Hereford, England, straight after an appendectomy, has meant this last few weeks have been hard. Anxieties about my type 3 cancer returning bubble away. And I work hard to recognise them as such. The good news is that I returned to the woods behind the house where I grew up, where I found Mum, and I felt good about being there. I was not terrified, nor miserable. I still know these woods intimately, after all these years. I noticed where the new owners have taken out single trees for their wood burner. But there, in the young wood (see photo above), in the company of my now 16 year old beautiful daughter, I recorded my thoughts for Melissa Harrison’s brilliant podcast, The Stubborn Light of Things, episode 25 on Healing, and you are welcome to listen to it here.
Despite progress, I am still vulnerable to shocks. I struggle with keeping my anxieties on a leash. The deep sadness of a failed marriage, and a frustrated love. There is no perfect life after trauma, but there is perfection in the imperfection. I am still dependent upon medications that also drive appetite as a side effect. Covid and weight have a co-morbidity. I have put on too much weight, so I am reducing my dose, reducing my weight. I am unsettled, whilst also beginning PhD studies. But these studies are important to me. I am holding them very close, in the spirit of Frankl’s love and meaning, my own welldoing.
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My first language is English. It matters not what my ethnic heritage is or is not. I did not choose for it to be. I was born into an English speaking family. I’m fairly certain all my great grandparents spoke Welsh. Both my grandmothers could understand Welsh and spoke it intermittantly.
English, according to linguistics scholars, is a Western Germanic language on the family tree of all languages. It also uses core words originating in Latin, French, Norse, and others through acts of (brutal) Colonialism. It has been forced upon others, driving extinction of language and living beings, and even its own evolution has been battered down by hierarchies (religious and political) with strict dictionary definitions and power-value agendas. English is also contended as the “lingua franca”, the first globalized linguistic strategy of humans, the language of “business”. I would argue against that as a good thing, as I would argue against the validity of globalization itself. Diversity IS life.
Many of my neologisms originate in root Indo-European languages, Proto Indo-European (PIE) being a reconstructed version (by scholars) of the most ancient. Proto can be seen as a mother language. Languages that have evolved from PIE are Latin, French, German, Norse, also Celtic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Hindi, Sanskrit (where revived), and many more.
I don’t feel I can move too far away, chiefly for reasons of appropriation. But PIE, I believe, allows some scale of unity across many modern languages, while still respecting there are magnificent branches, such as the great Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Egyptian, Berber), Sino-Tibetan, Quechuan, Pama-Nyugan languages, et al, which have evolved freely.
PIE reflects, to some extent, the waves of migrations integral to Europe that brought me to the English language. More have come, and will continue to come, and this IS a good thing. Diversity is beautiful.
Meanwhile, my words are simply offerings, and in the spirit of Spring Theory.
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It’s striking to realise a personal sense of pure elation from the effect of sunlight in its many forms. Even more so, when light and water mix, and with sounds. I find it healing.
In our rivers, shallow oceans, even at the bottom of swimming pools and upon cave roofs, we are familiar with light refracting back and forth through gentle and chaotic laps of surface waves. A lace-like dance of photons hits our retinas, processes in our brains and triggers emotions.
These hypnotic and beautiful patterns of light are officially known as caustic networks. Most of us would assume caustic is a type of chemical capable of burning, and definitely something to avoid. But caustic, in terms of physics, means patterns formed by the intersection of reflected or refracted parallel rays from a curved surface. Keith Beven, Professor Emeritus of Hydrology at Lancaster University, describes beautifully the physics of caustics and water here at On Landscape.
Ecologically, caustic networks are instrumental to wild beings with varying sensing abilities, who photosynthesize, hide and hunt among them each day, and in ways we are only just beginning to understand.
Earlier this week, Twitter friend Tim Sykes @RiversAndPeople, asked me to create a more relational word for caustics. I jumped at the chance, and spent a few days thinking about it.
I agree. I think a new common word might be useful in garnering interest in something so characteristically Earth-y (rock/water/sun), ecologically effecting, and mesmerizing in its affect upon us.
On studying the patterns at my local river, The Wye, I saw dynamic nets, webs, lace and lattice-work. PIE root *(h)uebh- “to weave;” also “to move quickly” source also of Sanskrit ubhnati “he laces together (Etymonline.com), which is probably where old French Latiz originated.
Lumen, latin for source of light, combined with lattice spelled phonetically for ease of pronunciation across different languages ~ lattiss.
Lumilattiss.
I invited Tim to blog, and so here he writes. My gratitude.
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I enjoyed a sense of fun as I rolled-up my trouser legs and waded into the chalk stream, a winterbourne, watched by seven circling red kites and a herd of curious black bullocks. It’s not unusual for me to dip my feet in this winterbourne for its soothing effects on my racing mind and two things struck me as notable this day: the chill of the flow was toe-numbingly energising; and the crystal-clear water amplified the bright sunshine illuminating my pale feet so they seemed to glow ice-white. The sunrays were reflected and refracted by the water, casting a shimmering, shifting net onto the flinty stream bed and my feet. Lost in the moment I was transfixed by this dancing water-crazed light-lattice of star-like nodes and chaotic wavy light threads.
Afterwards I felt joyful, glee, but I struggled to describe exactly what I had sensed at the time: I think my self was suspended in a trance-like state of fascination. That evening, contemplating this further, a friend enlightened me to the technical name for this familiar phenomenon: a ‘caustic network’. To be awestruck by ethereal light is not unusual, a recent night on a beach watching shooting stars mesmerised by the dancing flames of our campfire was similarly spellbinding in a primitive and sublime way. It struck me that such a wonderful natural fluvial phenomenon deserves a non-technical, more soulful name and I asked Ginny, my twitter-friend what she would call it. As you are reading this blog you already know of Ginny’s passionate gift for forging new language and better ways of thinking to express how we celebrate and conserve the natural world and our relationship in and of it: and hence the word lumilattiss was born…
Tim Sykes is a mature, part-time post graduate research student at the University of Southampton. An ecologist by training, he is exploring our deep relationships with chalk stream winterbournes in their flowing, pooling and drying phases, particularly intrinsic and relational values. He tweets @RiversandPeople, so please do follow!
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