Embodying Ecosystem Ethics

Rights, Responsibilities, and Rituals in the Polycrisis

On a subway in Berlin, I witnessed my neighbor stuck deep in a doom scroll, swiping right and left with his thumb on the main screen, opening and closing apps, refreshing his emails. Occasionally, his finger levitated over an icon and quivered, hesitating which way to go - deeper into a rabbit hole or back to the safety of the menu screen? In those split seconds, I felt the full confusion of our civilization. On and on it went, for the full thirteen minute ride.

We’ve all been there at times, of course. Because we’re all vulnerable to the dopamine-tinged possibility our phones offer us at all times. And the doom scroll might just be a perfect metaphor for the state of modern civilization: technology, meant to empower us, overwhelms us.

The biologist E. O. Wilson said that the problem with humanity is that “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” Artificial intelligence and John Deere tractors, quantum computing, novel psychedelics, and gene splicing - the issue with our godlike technology is that without an ethic of responsibility, it leads to abuse and addiction. Carl Jung wrote in 1951 that the great mistake of the modern era was that “We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality.” It’s culturally assumed that we have the right to use the startling array of technologies available to us. How do we build a culture of responsibility to balance this culture of rights? 

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10,000 kilometers. That’s how far I traveled by airplane in the past few weeks. From San Francisco to New York City, then Paris, and now Berlin. Looking out of a plane window at 30,000 feet, I feel the cognitive dissonance that Wilson speaks of, between the machine of the airplane and my body, evolved on the ground. I benefit from technology in so many ways, but how might the power and freedom it confers limit my imagination and capacity for engaged action? 

To grow wiser, we have to grapple with the fact that modernity worships individual freedom and the rights that protect that freedom. And for good reason: individual rights evolved in the West to protect against abuses of power. Today, these rights provide the basis for freedom of religion, sexual orientation, and political orientation; they empower individual agency. At the same time, it’s individual property rights that allow corporates to maximize returns for their shareholders, thereby externalizing damage to the rest of the world, who have to suffer the consequences. A culture of rights without an accompanying set of responsibilities leads to the atomized, short-term, extractive thinking that is rocking the life support systems of the planet. Thus, we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but no Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities. 

Western civilization is unique in placing such strong emphasis on the individual and their rights, and at the heart of this story is liberalism, the political philosophy that individuals have rights and that responsibilities exist only insofar as they protect rights. Tracing the evolution of the Western idea of individual rights can help us understand how deeply embedded this ideology is in our lives today.

A key moment in this evolution is the life and death of Socrates, who was given the ultimatum of death or exile for corrupting the youth of the city. His style of teaching was rooted in the belief that individuals are capable of uncovering truth for themselves instead of blindly receiving it. Teaching people to think for themselves was a crime. 

Socrates chose death, but the rediscovery of his thinking, and that of many other Greek philosophers, helped Renaissance thinkers shift the seat of authority away from church and kingdom and towards the individual. Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Revolution, elevated the solitary believer, armed with only a Bible and a conscience, above all earthly authorities. In 1521, he claimed, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand.” In 1637, Descartes proclaimed his famous “I think, therefore I am,” and not much later, in 1689, John Locke, argued that all individuals have inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and property”. 

But this progressive liberation of the individual from the tyranny of church and state also severed the individual from family, tradition, and nature. The impact of this division can’t be understated. The anthropologist Wade Davis calls it “the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom”. The individual’s freedom from their social and ecological contexts provided the grounds for colonialism, industrialization, and broadly speaking the exploitation of humans and ecosystems. And the increase in personal freedom came at the cost of losing a shared sense of purpose.

Western liberal thinkers also wrote about the responsibilities we owe to the greater whole. In addition to natural rights, Locke argued for informed participation in the political process, protection of the rights of others, and limits on the private appropriation of the commons. However, these ideas have faded in modern times. The dominant economic ideology of modernity, neoliberal economics, believes markets driven by individual actors can more effectively solve systemic crises than collective political engagements. At the same time, consumer culture rids us of the need to actually rely on others. Why ask your neighbor to borrow their vacuum cleaner when Amazon will deliver you one by tomorrow? Why ask for directions when your phone can tell you better? Can you see how our faith in each other and our capacity to listen to the world beyond our own is eroding?

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It’s 9 AM on a Saturday in Berlin, and I climb up the three flights of stairs through a converted factory space to the Berlin Zen Center for a day-long retreat. During the first meditation, I cheat a little bit and sneak a peek at the scene: the rectangular hall with its wood paneling, small square windows, a wooden Buddha statue with palm facing outwards in the mudra of reassurance and safety; ten individuals arranged in a square around the room, all striving to be present with what already is. What, on this gorgeous, luminous Saturday when we could all be at the park drinking aperol-spritz, would compel us to intentionally freeze ourselves in the lotus position?

Bill Plotkin is the founder of Animas Valley Institute, which guides multi-day immersions into the wilderness to help individuals undergo personal transformation and develop leadership skills. In his book, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, he notes:

"In contemporary Western society, we have no effective initiation rites for our youth, no ceremonies that help them find their unique place in the world and their unique contribution to the community. As a result, we have a society of people who are physically adult but psychologically and spiritually adolescent." In other words, we haven’t grown up; we haven’t taken responsibility for ourselves.

Indigenous cultures around the world use initiatory practices to connect individuals to broader ecological dimensions: the animals, plants, spirits and beings alive in the present, the ancestors who came before, and those yet to come. Initiations can be intense, even deadly in some cultures, because they are designed for confrontation with the deepest aspects of existence. They test the initiate’s strength, resilience, and commitment to the continuity of life. They aren’t merely symbolic; they are deeply embodied, stripping away selfishness and other perverse traits, allowing the initiate to emerge with a profound understanding of their responsibilities in the larger, interconnected web of life. 

I think of the Sun Dance ceremony practiced by many tribal nations indigenous to the Great Plains of Turtle Island/North America. Around the summer solstice, native communities gather from across the continent to pray for healing, seek spiritual visions, and make personal sacrifices for the wellbeing of the community. Each tribal nation has their own version, but usually at the center of the ceremony are the dancers who fast nonstop for many days, completely exposed to the elements. The dancers pierce themselves and are attached by ropes to a central sacred tree. The intention is to dance until the piercings are torn from the flesh. The flesh becomes a sacred offering, an act of prayer. 

Despite being banned by the U.S. and Canadian governments in the late 19th century, the Sun Dance continued in secret and was revived publicly after the bans were lifted in the mid-20th century. The endurance of the ceremony speaks to its profundity. Think about it: what’s the most precious thing you could give up in prayer? It’s your body. That body that modernity spends so much time obsessing over, that we supplement, augment, and beautify to no end. How might our bodies, our lives, be acts of service? 

In the Emerald podcast, host Joshua Schrei speaks about an aboriginal Australian tribe that teaches its children to never cast shadow on an elder. Growing up, these children have to constantly be mindful of where and how they stand in relation to the sun and other community members. Joshua wonders, “What deeper somatic embedded reminder of the fact that actions have consequences - that what you do matters - could there be than growing up physically aware of where you are throwing shade?” 

At an individual level, cultivating an ethic of responsibility means being willing to earnestly probe at a few basic questions: how do I impact the world? How might my actions be oriented around acquiring status and success for myself? How might my own freedom feed into the epidemic of selfishness at the heart of the great crises of our times?

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The meditation day is over and I leave the center. I ride an e-scooter through stormy clouds and a drizzle. The air is warm on my face, the drops refreshing. Strong gusts of wind cause the sycamore trees to lose leaves, fruits, and whole branches. I feel fully immersed in the dynamism and aliveness of the moment. I reflect on how nourishing these moments are, when the soul is uplifted and the poetry of the universe manifests itself clearly for a moment. I feel free in these moments. But it’s not a freedom I own for myself. Because it’s felt in the company of the animate world I’m embedded in. 

The common understanding of freedom in the West focuses on the power to act as one wants. But spiritual traditions worldwide caution against this view: unrestricted individual freedom gives us few incentives to engage ethically with others. This is where rituals rooted in the patterns of nature prove invaluable.

Joshua Schrei speaks of the unburdening that ritual containers enable: “How do you convey that the lightest and most cloud-like you will ever feel is in a highly structured ritual designed to remind you of your responsibility, even as it dissolves you into the sparkling numinous web of life? How do you convey that Law is eternal and binding, as inescapable as birth and death? And yet, translucent as moon beams, as light as when you at least take that backpack off.”

The liberal legacy in the West offers a very different narrative, one in which the absence of constraints creates true freedom. At an extreme, this leads to the post-humanist trend, prominent in Silicon Valley, of biohacking our bodies in order to live forever. Across the globe, diverse indigenous cultures and ancient wisdom traditions have consensus that individual freedom emerges within the laws of nature - birth, death, and reciprocity - and in relationship with natural entities such as the sun, the moon, animals and plants. The Sun Dance, for example, honors the sun for its life-giving properties, and does this on or near the summer solstice, when the sun is at its annual apex. Rituals and initiations integrate us into a cosmic structure in both physical and symbolic ways. They force us, often uncomfortably so, to embody the interdependence inherent to ecosystems and the universe itself. 

Perhaps rights and responsibilities can be understood in a similar ecological manner: rights are what we receive, and responsibilities are how we use them for the greater good. Our individual agency, freedom, and self-expression thrive within communities and ecosystems, not in isolation. The hyperfocus on the self, ironically, limits the individual’s agency and capacity for self-expression - because it’s through relationships that we find meaning and solve problems. From an evolutionary perspective, our species' success is largely due to our ability to form cohesive, cooperative groups that can address complex problems and adapt to diverse environments.

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Now it’s Sunday morning, and I’m running in Tempelhof, Berlin’s former airport converted into a giant park. Even though it’s early, the sun is intense and I’m covered in sweat. I’m running in my barefoot sandals, a thin foot-shaped piece of rubber with straps that give my body intimate contact with the ground. I’m covering a personal record in distance and I can feel the strain in my shins as I struggle to keep good running form. My mind wants out. I feel the strain in my body and try to push on. 

In the book, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic, Martin Prechtel describes the running tradition of the Pueblo Indians. The Pueblos, he says, run in order to contribute to the movement of the cosmos. The passage is worth quoting at length:

“Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt… Because human life has been given the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can.”

The word that best captures the responsibility I yearn for is devotion. Not a blind devotion to an abstract collective. But rather, a devotion that understands our selves as ephemeral links in the great story of life on this planet. Like the Pueblo runners, I wonder how to keep this story flowing. 

I dream of layered, symbiotic relationships that build the resilience we need to engage climate volatility, rapid technological advances, and ongoing industrial growth over the course of many generations. To me, that looks like radically leaner lifestyles that ritualize the interdependence between ourselves and other selves: other people, plants, animals, celestial bodies, and the endless array of beings that paint this planet and world into being. In this vision, human diversity - the different ways we walk, talk, think, and dance - merges with interspecies diversity - the ways we crawl, fly, slither, flutter, sprout, crystalize, and flow - to weave, thread by thread, the tapestry of life.

In addition to developing a culture of responsibility, we’ll need to recognize that these other beings also have rights, and we will have to share power and govern with them. This isn’t science fiction. These processes are already under way, and we need them badly, because at the end of the day, embodied ethics is about response-ability: our practical capacity to navigate a planet in freefall; the freedom to step out of the doom scroll.

I think back to my neighbor on the subway, to the fragmentation and disconnection of our time. Perhaps I could have struck up a conversation with him? Would that have been weird and awkward, and perhaps unwelcome? Or perhaps, all the opposite, it would have been a necessary pattern interrupt, a re-membering that there is a world beyond the narrow confines of the screen and the self, calling us back into being, over and over again.

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I offer my thanks to Rachel Howard, Jay Standish, and Evan Steiner for providing their feedback on initial drafts, and gratitude to the Embodied Ethics course and community for their contagious commitment to these themes.