Green Spiritual Technologies: Putting the Anthropocene Era to Rest (One Day a Week) by Jonathan Schorsch

The shutdown forced on much of the world by the Coronavirus pandemic has focused attention even more urgently on questions related to work: economic inequities, exploitation of workers, work’s meaningfulness, the quality of the work environment, and of course work’s ecological ramifications. Creative and radical technocratic analysis and solutions are being offered, for instance by researcher Phillip Frey, the Zentrum Emanzipatorische Technikforschung (Center for Emancipatory Technology) and the Autonomy think tank. Noting the link between overly-long working hours, worker burnout, overproduction and environmental harm, Frey and his colleagues have proposed work-free Fridays, Freeday for Future. Though attuned to cultural factors, either they are unaware of or choose not to reference an age-old, similar spiritual technology, the idea and practice of a weekly sabbath.

In the call for environmental solutions, rituals have arisen with increasing frequency. The reasons for this are many. Secular, rationalist, scientistic modernism is often understood to be the cause of today’s planetary environmental collapse. In some ways postmodernism has (re)turned to and reassessed the cognitive and cultural aspects ex(or)cised by modernism. Within the environmental movement itself, taking it in the widest possible sense, a growing number of people want more than mere technocratic problem-solving, yearning as well for procedures, discussion, and approaches that take into account and address the emotional, psychological, and even spiritual/metaphysical layers of ecological work. In 2016 Stephen Cave and Sarah Darwin penned a provocative recognition of ritual’s potency for the ecologically-minded. To mourn species that have gone extinct, some people came up with Lost Species Day. Artist Marcus Coates produced a thought-provoking video about a 2017 Irish project to issue a public apology to the Great Auk, which had just been declared extinct. Others have turned to Indigenous and non-western practices as models.

Whether we like it or not, ‘religion’ remains one of the world’s most powerful forces. Given the urgency of our environmental crises and the fact that a large majority of people in the world continues to live and think cosmologically or spiritually, environmentalists ought to be self-conscious, thoughtful, playful (always an absolutely serious business), careful, and bold when using, (re)interpreting, revising, and (re)creating practices from traditions. This, after all, is how the history of religions works: change masking itself as tradition’s original intent. When it comes to mitigating human harm to our own environment, some religious leaders have proven themselves creative and intrepid in putting their traditions to use. In just one example, Buddhist monks in Thailand, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka ordain trees, wrapping them with colored sashes, to remind people of their sacredness and prevent their being cut down.

Reposted courtesy of Counterpoint. Read the full version of this post on their site.