Let me begin with the end. (Although, if we weren't addicted to the comfort of illusory linear-industrialized time—another manifestation of måyå/illusion, we would realize there is no beginning or end.)
Death spawns birth.
Industrialized humans—specifically from the U.S. and Canada—are the only form of life that intentionally inhibits the transformation of (re)birth from death through the use of highly toxic formaldehyde embalment.[1] Under the guise of "public health," the hyper-commercialized post-mortem practice of embalming represents the epitomy of eco-dysphoria:[2] our culture's refusal to embrace nature's intelligence while reinforcing the trickster måyå —the fallacy that death is final and the illusion that we are separate from one another and from our natural world. The myth of how to protect public health is perpetuated. Paul Virilio warned: “..the development of ‘health and hygiene’...over and above the context of simple bodily precautions...now represents a veritable sanitary ideology.” Health is distilled to fit a predetermined system of dependency and ignorance. In the service of capitalizing on genericized bodies, the solipsistic concept of health has been systematically reduced to something that needs to be fixed by consumerism. Ironically, our corporatized, privatized, individualized “health” generates complicity-induced illnesses: “at once what produces the disease, and the source of health.”[3]
Transitioning from Winter to Spring to Summer, I am reminded of the burial alternative:[4] water cremation or alkaline hydrolysis (AH).[5] Reducing the deceased body to water and bone over the course of three to twelve hours, the alchemical process of this "green cremation," the body is chemically dissolved and nutrient-rich liquid remain. Similarly, the practice of "natural reduction" ("body composting"),[6] occurs over several months as the body is transformed into living soil by symbiotic microbes—offering a kind of "mycelium running."[7] The practices of body composting and alkaline hydrolysis represent the fertility of alchemy.
Just as our nervous system is a bridge between our brains and bodies, mycelium are the nerve cells, the neurons, of the earth's body. Like the intricacies of a forest/sylvan, bioregional watershed consciousness,[8] and fibershed consciousness,[9] electrical signals course through our bodies. These billions of branches are made of tiny threadlike extensions—nerve fibers that carry messages throughout the body in the form of electrical signals, nerve signals, electromagnetic frequencies. (I will return to my Mother Pelican investigation of EMFs and digital-technology addiction in the proceeding months). There are one billion nerve cells (body-building blocks) in the brain; the one billion neurons in spinal cord are distributed through billions of branches. 10-10,000 connections spark in each and every cell. The vast, interconnecting network of our earth's mycelium reflects our bodies' dendrites, axons, myelin sheaths, and synaptic bulbs.
Billions of years old, fungus can spread underground for millions of square feet. The largest fungus in the world is the honey mushroom in Oregon—97 million square feet. This mass of wispy threads animating worlds below the earth's surface resonates with the 93,000 miles of nerves that extend throughout our human bodies. Like the metabolism of the human body and the earth’s tendency towards homeostasis, the metabolism of our culture must be scrutinized as a relational organism. Following the lead of this corporeal "mycotopia,"[10] a collaborative neuro-interspecies intelligence, I conclude with a scene from my cross-cultural, climate justice book: Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, a realization from the humpback whale. She explained,
Click the image to enlarge.
Click the image to enlarge.
I heard rumors that the United States was soon going to be buried in poop—poop of all kinds: human, animal, insect. Some old whale friends told me they saw swarms of dung beetles fleeing the North American continent because they could no longer bear to eat the poop from the United States. The dung beetles cried that the poop was contaminated with GMOs, pesticides, glyphosate, vaccine adjuvants, hospital hazardous waste, flame retardants, endless chemicals and pollutants—the dung beetles, who have survived for thirty million years, knew better than to eat what had become an industrial toxic soup. Not only is North Americans’ poop chemically toxic, but when people living in the US die, their bodies are now toxic—so they can’t decompose, because nobody wants to eat them—no dung beetles, no vultures, no horn flies, not even the bacteria—they are fleeing too.
Then our mammal cetaceous friend began to cry:
Now I understand—many of our beached whale and dolphin friends’ dead bodies are also filled with chemicals. If nothing eats our bodies, we will no longer be a part of the cycle of life; we will all be separate, forever isolated from one another. The shores and lands are getting covered in unwanted dead bodies and poop.[11]
Western science is finally recognizing some of indigenous wisdoms that have been telling us for thousands of years that all life is sentient—ranging from bacteria to rocks to moss. Fungus is nature's cleaner (like the dung beetle and sea slug), devouring all dead bodies and rotting "waste," leaving a sticky mush until nothing is left.
How will fungi intelligence determine our collective future? What if fungus "decided" human bodies are too toxic to consume?
We are pushing the limits of our planet's body to absorb the waste we produce to the extent that our own bodies are truly becoming waste. As Zazu Dreams' humpback whale bemoans: we are drowning in our own waste—including our contaminated bodies, embalming ourselves in chemicals both in life and death. Rather than experiencing death as another form of life, we transform death into waste. Simultaneoulsy, homo sapiens are the only species that produces actual "waste" (objects that cannot be redistributed back into the earth's natural cycles).[12] These patterns produce a lethal combination leading to climate chaos.
Let us end with the beginning.
As we have repeatedly seen, by providing cover for industry to harm us for profit, greenwashing sustains our "industrial toxic soup" and is sustained through reductionist (single-use mentality), colonized, fast fashion, nation-state thinking.[13] In contrast, like a watershed consciousness and fibershed consciousness, "sylvan thinking" (Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human), echoing Ralph Nader's urgent call for "convergences" (Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismanlte the Corporate State), requires that we rethink our assumptions, that we dispell måyå/illusion by unlearning what we think we know.[14]
The roots of sustainability can be found in the interrelationality of DeathLife. This non-linear cycle is reflected in the Jewish tenet of bal taschit, do not destroy or waste, originally referred to trees. In order to "engage intimately with the beings of the forest...to enter this vast ecology of selves...requires being attuned to the unexpected affinities we share with other selves while at the same time recognizing the differences that distingish the many kinds of selves that people the forest" (Kohn, 95). Similarly, the interspecies intimacies that both Rachel Carson and Isidore the Farm Laborer taught us generate new life through unexpected alliances—a polytopia of creative collaborations. For example, healthy bacteria are an antidote to the future-present ecological nightmare about which the humpback in Zazu Dreams warns. As alternatives to embalming and denial of death, natural funeral practices such as Alkaline Hydrolysis and Natural Reduction embody mycotopia—a polytopic reciprocal gift-giving between our bodies and the earth.
Next month, through the lens of trees, we will leave our nested intervals to revisit how "creative extremists" like Martin Luther King Jr. embody the personal-poltical potency of collaborative animism.
[2] “Here is what Americans put in the ground each year through traditional burials: 20 million feet of wood, 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluids, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete, 17,000 tons of copper and bronze, and 64,500 tons of steel,” "Thinking About Having a Green Funeral?" The New York Times, Mar. 22, 2018.
[3] Hegel cited in Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University, 1982, 128.
[5] Alkaline hydrolysis (AH) is also known as resomation, bio cremation, aquamation, and water resolution. See Resomation Ltd. (www.resomation.com), BioCremation (biocremationinfo.com), and Aquamation International (www.aquamationindustries.com). “AH uses little energy, releases no toxic fumes, and is marketed as a green alternative to fire cremation.” Ibid., 16.
[7] See American mycologist, author, and advocate of bioremediation, and medicinal mushrooms, Paul Stamens' Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005. “Stamens calls deforestation (that includes genetically modified single crops) an ‘ecological Armageddon.’” (Zazu Dreams, EndNote 80, p. 103). See the intimate 2019 documentary by Louie Schwartzberg, "Fantastic Fungi."
[8] See Todd Wynward's blessing of the watershed way that focuses on bioregional water-based ceremonies—what it means to be a person of place commited to the social and spiritual convenant of the practice of living in place.
[9] In contrast to fast fashion, industrial agriculture, and the international clothing industry, Fibershed Affiliates are grounded in place-based community organizing that connect fiber farmers (yak, llama, sheep, food forest), processors, artisans, and consumers. A fibershed is another commitment to practicing embodied energy. It is the quintessential technology—techne, meaning "to fabricate," "to weave." Fibersheds literally weave together our global economy. Rooted in community sovereignty and land-use ethics, they connect all of the parts of fiber and dye systems into one collective and cohesive unit — creating communities, markets, and pathways for natural fibers produced within a specific biosphere. A fibershed consciousness educates local communities on how to establish a collective voice that advocates for bioregional systems—bridging the gap between raw materials produced locally and global consumer implications. Many fibersheds start by identifying and mapping their local fiber system — natural fiber producers, mills, dyers, artisans/ designers — to better understand the landscape in which they are working and living. This includes public education, awareness, and skill-building (wool processing, natural dye, hide tanning, flax, milkweed, sorghum processing, garment design, etc.). See Rebecca Burgess' intersectional Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy in which she designates the difference between the clothing industry and a socio-political movement. Burgess defines a fibershed as intersectional system that “includes all the people, plants, animals, and cultural practices that compose and define a specific geography...focused on the source of the raw material, the transparency with which it is converted into clothing, and the connectivity among all parts, from soil to skin and back to soil” (7).
[10] Stamets coined the term mycotopia “to describe an environment in which fungi are actively used to enhance or preserve ecological equilibrium” (Ibid., 303).
[11] Page 77. For detailed explanation of these phenomena, see footnotes 300-305. David Orr tells us: “Similarly toxic are the bodies of whales and dolphins washed up on the banks of the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic shore.”
[12] Western science is learning to compensate by applying bioremediation techniques in landfills, abandoned refineries, and oil spills. “Today’s sewage treatment plants depend on both oxygen-loving and oxygen-hating bacteria…an oxygen-free environment is where the oxygen-hating bacteria thrive” (41, 49). We must learn from our natural environments (including sea slugs who clean the ocean and dung beetles who clean the earth). We must learn from those ho consumewaste matter. Carbon-bacteria-human co-existence offers a model within our own bodies in which gazillions of microbes in our gut (in addition to the gazillion of microbes in our skin and mouths) work symbiotically (Eric Ruston, The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. New York: Walker and Company, 2009). Some parasites and worms strengthen our immune system from our insides, protecting us from multiple auto-immune diseases. Asthma and allergies have increased as our surroundings have become less dirty. “If we all moved into a completely sterile (germ-free) environment, we would die” (Dr. Joel Weinstock, Tufts University). All above references come from Zazu Dreams, Endnote 303).
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy, performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’ journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director of Jews of the Earth, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com or via her websites, Cara Judea and Zazu Dreams. See also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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