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Turtle Planet: Compassion, Conservation, and the Fate of the Natural World
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: pending
ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-271-8, (ebook) 978-1-64250-272-5
BISAC category code FIC025000FICTION / Psychological
Printed in the United States of America
For Professor Richard Malenky—researcher, environmentalist, and, perhaps most importantly, teacher extraordinaire. Thank you, old friend, for pointing me straight at what matters, all those many years ago.
And for Janelle, queen of all spirit realms, especially my own.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged
by the way its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless
a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man
from the cruelty of humankind.”
—Mahatma Gandhi
“Great Dao inhales and exhales. Monitor and guard sexual essence, breath, physical energy, emotion, money, and spiritual capital.
Be sure there is more inhaling than exhaling, lest you flag, tire, sadden, go broke, forget who you are, and die.”
—Immortal YIN, chelonian consort to the Great Sage, Laozi
“Behold the turtle, who makes progress only
when he sticks his neck out.”
—Bryant Conant
Table of Contents
Why I Chose Turtles to Teach Me
Daoism, Meditation, and How a Monk Talks to Turtles
We Choose the Gods that Suit Us Best
We Have to Be Taught to Hate, Waste, and Destroy
Investing in Loss
We’re All in This Together
Dao Is Big; We Are Small
Shamanism, Science, Dreamtime, and Dao
Nature Teaches the Lessons We Need
What We Want Most Is Freedom from Suffering
They So Want Us Gone
The Medium Is Not the Message; The Message Is the Message
Balance Cowardly Acts of Evil with Fearless Acts of Beauty
Perspective Is a Tool for Us to Use as We Choose
Seize the Day in Your Own Special Way
Qi Is Vibration and Vibration Is Everything
Spontaneous, Redemptive Evolution Is Still Possible
Meet the Turtles
My Life List
A Note on Sources, Transliterations, and Numbers
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Decades before I became a Daoist monk, I was born a seeker, always feeling as if I was staring at the surface of the pond, never willing to commit to a conventional life path for fear of missing out on what is really important. I’ve always sensed that we are creatures of time more than of space, and when it comes to time, we waste far too much of it. I believe we should question authority and doubt whether what we are told is true. I am wary of narratives that serve states or corporations and suspect the agendas that create those narratives.
One of those narratives that I find most disturbing tells us that animals are dumb and insensate, don’t feel pleasure or pain, and that they, and the rest of Planet Earth, are here to serve us, sacrifice for us, and do our bidding. Decades of direct experience—floating eyeball to eyeball with a one-hundred-foot blue whale, dancing with the exquisitely deadly western Australian taipan snake, cuddling a hairless dog, teaching an African Grey parrot to talk, feeding a piranha, motorcycling with a California condor flying not far off the top of my helmet—tells me that this is a pernicious lie. In fact, I very much believe, as aboriginal people have for millennia, that there is a whole universe of animal experience and consciousness that stands separate and apart from human experience and consciousness. Western science is waking up to this reality, too. Even as we continue to torture them, butcher them, and drive them to extinction, more studies show that even animals with brains quite different from our own demonstrate consciousness, feel emotions, and possess intelligence.
Included in the standard narrative that denies this fact is a hierarchy of life, from low to high, bad to good, with human beings at the top. Given how much better other animals behave than we do—we corner the market on torture, trafficking, genocide, and other equally charming behaviors—this hierarchy is as ironically twisted as a molecule of DNA. It is also a relatively recent conceit. Rock paintings, oral traditions, and archeological evidence tell us that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic pastoralists respected other living creatures more than modern humans do, giving them their ceremonial and religious due even when eating them or harnessing them as organic machines.
