Active Hope. Joanna Macy
fourlegged beings.”17
The Haudenosaunee’s expressions of thanksgiving are “the words that come before all else” and precede every council meeting. Instead of being reserved for a special day each year, thanksgiving becomes a way of life.
GRATITUDE MOTIVATES US TO ACT FOR OUR WORLD
What is striking about their thanksgiving prayers is that the Haudenosaunee don’t focus on possessions or personal good fortune. Rather, the emphasis is on the blessings we all receive because they are part of our natural world. While the expressions of gratitude are delivered spontaneously in people’s own words, the order and format follow a traditional structure. A version of the thanksgiving address has been published by the Mohawks, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee, and begins like this:
The People
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.
The Earth Mother
We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time.
To our Mother, we send greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one.18
The other verses in turn give thanks to the waters of the world; the fish life in the water; the varied vastness of plant life; the food plants from the garden; the medicine herbs of the world; the animal life; the trees; the birds, “who each day remind us to enjoy and appreciate life”; the four winds; the thunder beings of thunder and lightning, “who bring with them the water that renews life”; our eldest brother, the Sun; our oldest Grandmother, the moon, “who governs the movement of the ocean tides”; the stars “spread across the sky like jewelry”; Enlightened Teachers; the Creator or Great Spirit; and finally to anything forgotten or not yet named. Thanksgivings like this deepen our instinctual knowledge that we belong to a larger web and have an essential role to play in its well-being. As Haudenosaunee Chief Leon Shenandoah said in his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1985, “Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our mother earth from whom all life comes.”19
Different stories give us different purposes. In the Business as Usual model, nearly everything is privatized. The parts of our world remaining outside individual or corporate ownership, such as the air or the oceans, are not seen as our responsibility. Gratitude is viewed as politeness, not necessity. In their “Basic Call to Consciousness,” the Haudenosaunee tell a very different story, one in which our well-being depends on our natural world and gratitude keeps us to our purpose of taking care of life. When we forget this, the larger ecology we depend on gets lost from our sight — and the world unravels.
THE MODERN SCIENCE OF GAIA THEORY
The skill side of gratitude involves recognizing and valuing benefits we might have previously ignored. New information makes a difference; our gratitude to others, and our enthusiasm to help them, can suddenly grow if we discover they have done us a great favor. You might think of examples of this from your own life, perhaps times you’ve felt warmer toward someone after hearing of support provided to you. This same principle holds true in our relationship with our world.
Just as we depend on plants for food, we also rely on them to make air breathable. Our two neighboring planets, Mars and Venus, have atmospheres that would kill us in a few minutes, and we’ve only recently discovered that Earth’s atmosphere used to be similar. Three billion years ago, our planet’s air, like that of Mars and Venus, had much more carbon dioxide and hardly any oxygen.20 Over the next 2 billion years or so, early plant life did us the remarkable service of making our atmosphere breathable by adding an abundance of oxygen and removing much of the carbon dioxide.
Oxygen is a highly reactive gas, which wouldn’t normally be expected to exist at levels as high as the 20 percent we have now. It was the chemically unlikely fact that oxygen has remained at this level for hundreds of millions of years that led British scientist James Lovelock to develop the early ideas of Gaia theory. Here is how he described his moment of insight:
An awesome thought came to me. The Earth’s atmosphere was an extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases, yet I knew that it was constant in composition over quite long periods of time. Could it be that life on Earth not only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it — keeping it at a constant composition, and at a level favourable for organisms?21
The core tenet of Gaia theory is that our planet is a self-regulating system. There’s a parallel here to the way our bodies keep arterial oxygen and temperature levels stable or the way termite colonies maintain their internal temperature and humidity. Living systems have the capacity to keep themselves in balance. Gaia theory shows how life looks after itself, different species acting together to maintain the balance of nature. In addition to maintaining oxygen levels, life plays a role in regulating the salinity of the sea and the dynamics of our climate.
As stars grow older, they tend to burn brighter. Because of this, it is estimated that our sun now puts out at least 25 percent more heat than it did when life began on Earth three and a half billion years ago.22 Yet has our planet also gotten 25 percent hotter? Human life wouldn’t exist if it had. And we have plant life to thank for this. By absorbing carbon dioxide, plants reduce the greenhouse effect of this gas, keeping the planetary temperature within a range suitable for complex life such as ours.
GIVING BACK AND GIVING FORWARD
A timber executive once remarked that when he looked at a tree, all he saw was a pile of money on a stump. Compare this with the Haudenosaunee view that trees should be treated with gratitude and respect. If we saw trees as allies that helped us, we would want to become allies to them. This dynamic pulls us into a cycle of regeneration, in which we take what we need to live and also give back. Because our modern industrialized culture has forgotten this principle of reciprocity, forests continue to shrink and deserts to grow. To counter this unraveling, let’s develop an ecological intelligence that recognizes how our personal well-being depends on the well-being of the natural world. Gratitude plays an important role in this.
TRY THIS: THANKING WHAT SUPPORTS YOU TO LIVE
Next time you see a tree or plant, take a moment to express thanks. With each breath you take in, experience gratitude for the oxygen that would simply not be there save for the magnificent work plants have done in transforming our atmosphere and making it breathable. As you look at all the greenery, bear in mind also that plants, by absorbing carbon dioxide and reducing the greenhouse effect, have saved our world from becoming dangerously overheated. Without plants and all they do for us, we would not be alive today. Consider how you would like to express your thanks.
The carbon dioxide released when we burn fossil fuels puts back into the atmosphere the gas that ancient plants removed hundreds of millions of years ago. By burning fossil fuels we are reversing one of the planet’s cooling mechanisms, and temperatures are rising. Present-day forests make their contribution to planetary cooling not just through absorbing carbon dioxide but also through helping clouds to form. When tropical forests are chopped down, the local climate becomes hotter and drier, making it more difficult for trees to grow again. Tropical forests like the Amazon are under threat not only from deforestation but also from drought related to climate change. They need our help,