Interview of Alastair McIntosh ― Resistance Radio

July 22nd, 2018

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(Sound of a burbling spring)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Alastair McIntosh. He’s been described by BBC TV as “one of the world’s leading environmental campaigners.” A pioneer of modern land reform in Scotland, he helped bring the Isle of Eigg into community ownership. On the Isle of Harris he negotiated withdrawal of the world’s biggest cement company (Lafarge) from a devastating “superquarry” plan, then agreed to serve (unpaid) on that company’s Sustainability Stakeholders Panel for 10 years.  Alastair guest lectures at military staff colleges, most notably the UK Defence Academy, on nonviolence. His books include Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (Aurum), Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition (Birlinn), Rekindling Community (Green Books) and Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service (Green Books). His most recent major work is Poacher’s Pilgrimage: an Island Journey (Birlinn 2016, cascade, 2018). He is a fellow of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh and a visiting professor at the College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow. His website is www.AlastairMcIntosh.com and Twitter @alastairmci.

So first, thank you for your work in the world, and second, thank you for being on the program.

AM: It’s lovely to be talking with you, Derrick.

DJ: So let’s start with the question of “What is community?” and “What is the relationship between community and the land?”

AM: Well, you’re diving in deep there. I distinguish between community and society. We often take those two words as synonyms, but I think community is something very much deeper. I called my best-known book “Soil and Soul,” because it is about relationship with the land, with land reform, and environmental protection, like protecting the mountain that was threatened with a superquarry, that you mentioned. And when I was discussing that, I’m talking 20-odd years ago now, when I was discussing that with my friend Satish Kumar at Schumacher College, he said “You know, we could add another one to that. Soil, soul and society.” And in fact his most recent book is along the lines of that title. And it’s a wonderful addition, because I think that community involves those three pillars. Soil: our relationship with the land. What it means to be a community of place, as distinct from merely a community of interests. Soul, which leads you into the question of “What does it mean to be a human being?” Are we just egos walking about on legs of meat? Or is there very much more to our being than that? Are we somehow profoundly interconnected, and is consciousness something that is perhaps bigger than just our own individual sense of awareness? Something that might have a cosmic property?

Soil, soul and society. Our connection with one another. Our relationships with one another. So I’m talking, when I’m talking about community, as the interaction between the natural environment and the social environment, but together with an ontology, an understanding of what human being is about, that deepened that vertically through the normal psychological into the depth psychological, and if it is a meaningful concept for a person, into what we might call the spiritual.

DJ: So that all is really beautiful. Can you ground it for me? That’s a really nice overview. Now can we talk more specifically about what it actually means? If you want to put it in context of, like that superquarry, that’s fine, and if you don’t, that’s fine too.

AM: Okay. What does community, in this deep sense, actually mean? It means, first of all, that like the earthworm, we are organisms of the soil. That we are deeply animals of this planet, with all that that entails, including our whole DNA structure, our evolutionary trajectory and what have you. And as such, we are creatures of habitat. Habitat is the environmental and social context of community. And because of the soul element, because of the element of us which is, or which can be, if we choose to develop it, profoundly conscious, that draws us into what the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire refers to as “conscientization.” It sounds much better in the original Portuguese. By conscientization he basically means coming into a full humanity, bringing together conscience and consciousness. Now what that means is that when we find ourselves in a state of disconnect, in a state of desolation, or as the Jesuits would emphasize, that means de-Sol-ation, i.e. you are no longer constellated around the sun, around the heart of your being. When we find ourselves in such states of desolation because of what we might be experiencing in our life, and our world, it invites us to the possibility that there might be deeper reaches and deeper resources of human being with which we can resource our activism, our actions for change.

This is what I and a few others speak of as spiritual activism. In other words, if we are only doing our activism, take for example land reform, or environment protection – take for example the fact that I’m speaking to you here from Govan in Glasgow, which is a hard-pressed area, a former shipbuilding area with all the social problems you normally get. The issues of urban poverty that we have here. We are only coming at that from a conventional level of bringing about social change. We so readily either burn out or fall out. And I’m interested in what happens, recognizing those dangers, recognizing how many activists have come to that. I’m interested in how we can be in it for the long run. In other words, how can we drill down into deeper sources of being energized? Deeper sources of carrying the suffering that is all around us and which we might experience ourselves? Is there something deeper that we can dig down into? And if so, how can that take shape to help resource our activism?

DJ: So there are a few directions that I’m thinking, and I’m going to say a couple of things and you can take this in any direction you want.

AM: Yeah. Sure.

DJ: One of them is: I was speaking with someone a year ago about how community is continuing to evolve in the computer age, so that at one point we were place-based, and he now says that we’re moving – and he’s not promoting this. This is like, a weatherman.

AM: He’s just observing what’s happening.

DJ: Yes. And he said that we’re moving toward what he called “aspiration-based,” where it’s not even interest-based, but you can have an avatar on – you can be online and pretend that you are a hobbit from The Lord of the Rings, and you will get together with other hobbits. And that’s an extreme example, but when he first told me that I almost started crying because it is so horrifying to me, and so ungrounded.

AM: I would completely agree. I was reading something the other day about the idea of cyborgs, the idea of combining humans with machines. I mean, on a certain level you’re talking to one here. I’m only able to talk to you just now because I have very powerful hearing aids. I’m very deaf otherwise. So partly I am a combination of a human and a machine. But not in any sense that goes into the soul. It’s purely to augment sensory deficiency. But what troubled me in reading up about this – is the term you use “cyborg?”

DJ: Yes. It horrifies me as well.

AM: They’re basically talking about how we’re on a trajectory to become post-human. We’re on a trajectory to transcend what it means to be human. And I’m kind of thinking “Hang on a minute. How about trying just being human?” How about having a human experience first? It’s a bit like some of the Buddhist teachers say, you know, when the students go on saying “I’m trying to get into a space of no self.” Some of the wiser Buddhists teachers will say “Well, actually, first of all you have to develop your self before you can move on to no-self.” So when I hear the kind of thing you’ve just been talking about, I think “Wait a minute. This sounds to me like yet another escape from the reality of being here now, of being grounded in our communities of place.” And yes, okay, we all have communities of interest. I’m connecting with you and your people because we’re a community of interests, that are activists. But that only makes sense if we’re doing our activism in an embodied place, in amongst what they – I was raised on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, one of our ports. Iain Crichton Smith wrote a major essay. He called it “Real People in a Real Place.” And Iain’s concern was that we were losing touch with what it means to be real people in a real place.

So before heading off into these Internet realities, and losing ourselves in fantasy existences, literally losing ourselves, becoming detached, deranged in these Internet fantasies, I would say let’s just ground ourselves here. Let’s learn what it means to be real. And one way we can do that is by activism to make things more real in our place.

I was talking to one of my colleagues here, Luke Devlin, the other day, and we were discussing what is it that those of us who are older, like I’m 62 now, I think I’m about five years or so older than you are. And what can the likes of us most helpfully do for the younger generation? And do you know what he said? He said “anything that can’t be done with a computer.” In other words, having real contact with real people in real places doing real things.

DJ: And another – I’m sorry if I’m throwing things from many directions –

AM: That’s fine. Am I making sense to you? Is this having traction with you?

DJ: No, you’re making perfect sense. This is profoundly moving to me, and I’m presuming it will be for the listeners as well.

AM: Well, I think the kind of people you’re reaching out to, if I can just infer it from bits and pieces I’ve picked up over the years from the Internet and stuff that you’ve been writing, and particularly those of my students whom you’ve been an important influence on. The kind of thing that they’re most deeply searching for is how to have meaning. How to have authentic meaning, not a fabricated simulated sense of meaning, but to be real. They just want to be real, and they want relationships that are real, embodied in the heart and embodied in practical actions like sharing food and digging ground, and even, you know; I’ll take young men out in my inflatable canoe and take them fishing for mackerel in the summer, that kind of stuff to connect them with where food comes from. All of that stuff.

DJ: Yeah. I have a good friend who is an activist, who says that central to his activism is having lunch with people.

AM: Ha! Beautiful.

DJ: That before we can go to a protest, and protests are incredibly important, but he said “I don’t want to go to the protest with you if I haven’t,” to use the cliche, “broken bread with you.” If I haven’t eaten with you and I don’t know who you are.

AM: There you go. My first job when I graduated in 1977 was I went and did the equivalent of your American Peace Corps. We call it “Volunteer Service Overseas.” I got sent to Papua, New Guinea. And I read a book by the then-Prime Minister of Papua, New Guinea, Michael Somare, and he told this wonderful story. He said “In our part of the world we have tribal fighting.” Well, we all have that, but in different ways. And he said “But we’ve got this rule. Before you have a fight, each tribe has to put together as much food as they can bring, and they all come down to the beach and have a big feast together. Now if you still feel like fighting after you’ve had the feast, okay, get on and fight.” (laughing merrily) You see, the point is when you break bread together – I think of Gerrard Winstanley, the English activist of the 17th century, the Digger, you’ve heard of the Diggers. He said “Break laws like you break the bread,” or that is attributed to him.

When you break bread together, then community happens. Why is it that the most frequently cited miracle of Jesus, in the four gospels, is the Feeding of the Multitudes, variously three to five thousand? It’s because by breaking bread together they subverted the rule of empire, which was to put on bread and circuses. And they subverted the rule of empire with that authenticity. So I think this kind of groundedness is what we’re talking about. And when people say to me “How can I be an activist? I don’t have the skills that you’ve got,” or something like that. I say to them “Well, can you cook? Can you work a photocopier?” That kind of thing. Learn a very simple skill and apply it. And then the magic of community, the magic of love, starts to happen.

DJ: So I love what you’re saying, and I want to tell a little bit of a story that leads to a, I think, very difficult question for myself, and maybe it will be easy for you. I have a friend, Jeannette Armstrong, who is an Okanagan Indian, a writer and activist. She once said to me “We Indians have the same problem that white people do, in that we still fight, we still don’t like each other, and the big difference is that we’re going to be living on this same land for 500 years. So I recognize my great-grandchildren might marry your great-grandchildren, and so we have to find a way to get along.”

AM: Exactly.

DJ: That’s part one. Part two is: one of their ways to get along in their own community is their version of this feast before the fight, which is they have a process they call “analkan.” And the process is, what “analkan” means is “I challenge you to give me your most opposite perspective to mine, so I can increase my understanding.”

AM: Beautiful.

DJ: And so what’ll happen is, if you and I disagree, then we go to the community and a trained facilitator will say: “Each of you give me your most opposite perspective,” and you work it out. That’s all great. That’s the wonderful part. But here’s the difficult part. She also said that the key to this is it only works if you’re working with people in community, and it doesn’t work when you try it with someone who wants what you’ve got.

AM: Ho ho ho ho ho. Interesting.

DJ: You see what I’m getting at?

AM: That’s so interesting.

DJ: So, for example, they couldn’t do the analkan process with the companies that are right now trying to put in dams on their land. So I’m going to just throw all that at you and see where you take it.

AM: Well, I would slightly disagree with that, in that I think the name of the game when we are in conflict, which activism often entails, is that you have to reach through to the humanity of your adversary. Now how do you do that? For me, a starting point, and I am a Quaker by conviction so that influences what I am saying here, is that you seek what in Quakerism we call “That of God and everybody.” You assume that at some deep level, perhaps very buried, there is the divine spark in the other.

Now when you do that it brings a peculiar power that is really the essence of spiritual activism, because if you respond to your adversary from a point where, yes, you are causing confrontation, even obstruction, but nevertheless you are trying to seek out that which is most honorable in the potential of your adversary; in my experience it can very often help to shift things. I had that with the, you mentioned the superquarry where a company was going to put what was going to be the biggest roadstone quarry in the world on a mountain on our island, in a national scenic area in the Outer Hebrides. And as that campaign developed and I came into relationship with the corporate executives, I was able to get through to them at a level of their values. I’d literally say to them “Look, folks. You’ve all gotten to these positions of being Vice Presidents of the biggest cement company in the world by virtue of who you are and the skills you’ve got. And you’ve probably made as much money as you’re ever going to need. But what’s going to happen when you sit your grandchildren on your knee and they ask you ‘What did you do, Granddad, to make the world a better place?’”

And so I think sometimes you can get through in unexpected quarters like that. I’ll give you another example. Last week I was teaching a course in spiritual activism here in Scotland, a week-long course. There was a guy there who had mentioned in his introduction that he had been a soldier but he said he didn’t want to talk about it. And I said “Special Forces?” and he said “Yeah” and I said “Okay, fair enough, we won’t go there unless you want to.” And later in the week he came to me and he started telling me about it. And he told me this story that resonated with another story that I’ve been telling, that basically what he was doing, and he told me I could use this story, obviously not naming him. Basically what he had been doing, back in the apartheid era, is that he had been in the Special Forces, whose task it was to around rural areas in South Africa, go into village communities, search the houses for any liberation material, or any sign that they were part of anti-apartheid movement, and if they were, to destroy the whole village. They had to raze the whole village.

So there they were, on this particular occasion, and there were various operations taking place. There were helicopters flying around in the sky. There was smoke coming up from other villages that were being razed, and he and his group of men came to this village, which had a high stockade around it, and they made their way in. Apparently whenever they went into these places they would be deserted, because the inhabitants would have fled to avoid capture.

And they started searching the house, and they found in one of the houses liberation material. And he was about to give the order to set fire to the village, when out of kind of nowhere, must have been hiding in one of the houses, a woman emerged. And the woman just walked slowly towards him with the most enormous dignity of presence, and just stared gently into his eyes. And he turned to his men and said “Okay. Out of here.”

Now that’s a kind of way in which sometimes you can reach unexpectedly. That said, because let’s just go back to the point you were making, is that the difficulty with sharing honestly, with being able to see the other person’s point of view if the other person is using asymmetric power and is not on side with you, the difficulty then is that it might not work.

That said, I would have to acknowledge that sometimes that is the case. For example; a key part of spiritual activism revolves around discernment. Now, again, in the Quaker tradition that I’m coming from; discernment, properly understood, is not about the “me.” It’s not even about the “we.” It is about discerning the movement, the leading, the promptings of the deep spirit of life from a Christian perspective, the deep spirit of life that moves through us all, assuming that we are spiritually interconnected.

And a Quaker discernment process, particularly a process we call “Meetings for Clearness” where you try to seek clearness, helped by the discernment of the community. The idea is that you gather initially in silence, and wait for leading, wait for insights from that deep level that might speak to the situation. Now what I have noticed, because I’ve often used that as a decision-making process, like we use it in Quakerism. I’ve often used it with groups that are not of a spiritual nature, and I found it very difficult because they don’t trust to that deep spirit. And so the ego kicks in, and in no time, you know, one person’s ego comes in, another person interacts with that, and it breaks down into a normal conversation rather than a spiritual discernment.

So I would partly agree with your Native American friends and what they’ve said, and I would partly disagree with it. As usual, Derrick, with so many of these things, the opposite of one great truth is another great truth, and I can see that one both ways.

DJ: Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I’m thinking a couple of things. One of them is that I’m thinking about how this, did you call it spiritual discernment?

AM: Yes. Spiritual discernment.

DJ: I’m thinking about the relationship between that and time.

AM: Ho! Beautiful. You’re tripping me out. I love it.

DJ: I don’t know how it is when you write, but when I write, oftentimes I can try to – the only thing I can tell about my writing is whether – I can usually tell if I’m writing stuff that’s crap. And if I’m writing stuff that’s crap, I can’t force it to be good, but what I can do is stop writing and take a walk. And it may take three minutes of walking, or it may take three weeks, or three months, and then it will come. So the spiritual discernment feels very similar to me to the relationship with the Muse. It seems like those are parts of the same story.

AM: You betcha, yeah.

DJ: And for me – another thing I’ve noticed, and I don’t know whether this is your experience as well, but I can sit here inside, and the Muse may or may not speak to me. But walking through a forest, interacting with the land, or sitting on the land, sitting with the land, for me – there can be times I’m stuck for hours not knowing what to say, and I can literally walk through a forest for five minutes and something comes. So is there, do you want to just mention the relationship between spiritual discernment, time, and the land?

AM: I think – the reason I said you’re tripping me out is that I think that any deep discernment, any deep writing or other art form, probably any deep science and any deep activism is about starting to understand this moment of time in the context of eternal time. And this is something that I very much wrote about in my most recent book Poacher’s Pilgrimage: an Island Journey. Because I’m walking into my own island. I go back for 12 days to the island of Lewis and Harris. I walk for 12 days through the island, for four days meeting nobody at all, out in the mountains and so on. And I’m walking into what I call an ecology of the imagination. And what starts happening to one’s psyche in that context – I think I can generalize. It’s not just me. Many people have noticed this in wilderness contexts. It’s that your sense of time starts deepening out of the – it’s not so much that you deepen out of the present moment. You actually deepen into the present moment. But you realize that the present moment is an opening into eternity, and that, as Plato put it, time is a moving image of eternity, but it’s like you widen the aperture with which you’re looking through. So instead of just seeing a little bit, you widen into a sense of something much bigger and much deeper; that which is holy, that which is sacred, to the point where I find myself asking: is it that we just have imaginations that are generated in our individual brains, and that we have consciousness that is generated in our individual brains, or is it more like particularly Hindu theology would say, that we move in the deep imaginal realm? That we move in consciousness and our brain kind of tunes into a particular wavelength that we are able to cope with at this time.

And for me that is germane to the writing process. I use the metaphor “fairy” a lot, because I’m coming out of a cultural tradition in which the old belief system was about the Sía, the fairies. The word “sí” in Gaelic means both fairy and peace. And don’t laugh, because there is an extensive body of Scottish scholarship now from some of our leading ethnographers, people like John MacInnes, Margaret Bennett, Ronald Black; mainly at the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, who have documented this belief system, a belief system that still carries on into the present day. There are still parts of it alive in the present day and it’s basically about stepping into timelessness. You fall down the fairy hill or you get taken away by the fairies in a vision, and you are into a realm of timelessness, from where, as John MacInnes, the greatest living Gaelic scholar, said: “It is from this realm that the creative power of humankind derives.” In other words, from the realm where you have stepped back from being locked into a rigid formulation of space and time. And you realize that most of the time we don’t know what we’re inside of. That we are moving in something much bigger.

As Nora Bateson, one of the daughters of Gregory Bateson, who wrote Steps to an Ecology of Mind, put it to me when I said to her “What was your dad really trying to get at?” in that famous 1972 book. And she said “I think he was trying to show us that we don’t know what it is that we’re inside of.” And so to me the creative process, and the activist context, the activist process; is tied in with that. Because activism is a very creative process. It comes from that being able to see the bigger picture and being able to see that this bigger picture is cosmological. As I said, I was raised in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and whenever I’m back there on a clean and clear night with no moon, I’ll just go out and I’ll stand under the stars and I’ll look up and I’ll say “Whatever is happening on earth, this is a cosmological context. This is the environment of which we are an integral part. We are stardust. We are golden.” And we’ve got to make it back to the garden, as the Woodstock song had it.

DJ: So as you’re talking, I keep thinking about – one of my books, Dreams, is really about – when I talk about a muse – what you say about the fairies, I would never laugh at that. My own belief is that the Muse is an actual being.

AM: Interesting.

DJ: So the Muse is not accessing some part of myself. The Muse is listening. And I love the line by Albrecht Dürer: “Art is inherent in nature, and whoever can extract it has it.” I don’t really like the word “extract” –

AM: I was going to say, I’d quibble with that.

DJ: Yeah, me too.

AM: It’s basically whoever would be –

DJ: Whoever can –

AM: Receive it. What you’re touching on here leads us straight into grief. That these are gifts of grief.

DJ: I’m going to change the Albrecht Dürer quote. See if you like this better. I like this better. Art is inherent in nature, we both like that, right?

AM: Yeah.

DJ: Whoever can accept that gift, has it.

AM: Beautiful. I think what you’re touching on with the gift, there, is of massive importance to activism. In his book The Gift, Lewis Hyde has this wonderful expression, that the gift must always move. And that when we’re engaged with creative endeavor, it’s not about me and my creativity. It’s about a gift that is given to us. And the more open-hearted we are in how we share that, and how we cultivate the gift in others, both in our creativity and in our activism, the more it will move, and the bigger it will become.

If we want to change the world, we have to learn how to work with the dynamics of grief, which is to say, gift. And then, as we change from within, so the politics outwith start to shift also. That’s the only way I make sense of it.

DJ: I heard what you said but I didn’t understand the last phrase. Can you help me understand the part about the politics outwith?

AM: Okay. I’m using a Scottish word there. “Outwith” meaning “outside of.” What I’m getting at there is that with so much conventional activism, so much conventional politics, it seems like all we need do is change the political system to have a revolution or whatever. That that’s what we need to do. And then the New Order, the new millennium can begin. And in my belief and experience, it doesn’t quite work like that. It partly works like that. The political engagement is a very important part of it. But you’re only going to get the politics that people are inwardly ready for, within themselves. And therefore if we really want to do deep activism, we have to do the outer politics, like the politics of land reform that I’ve been involved with in Scotland, where we’ve now got three percent of Scotland’s land, half a million acres, back into community land trust ownership. Or the superquarry, or the urban poverty issues here in Glasgow, with the GalGael Trust, which I’m involved with. You can only do that effectively if you’ve got, if you’re working with people in a way that is changing them inwardly as well, so that they understand from within the new world, the different world we’re moving to. And they’re motivated from these sources within. So when we’re talking about the big picture, what we’re going to do about the corporations or the governments, and so on, we’ve got to face up to these things and see that in part we are seeing our own reflections back in their mirrors.

And the more that we can work with both the inner dynamics of psychology and spirituality, of that in ourselves and with others around us, the better equipped and the more convincingly we will be able to change the outer political realities.

DJ: This reminds me of two things. One of them is; so many indigenous people have said to me that the first and most important thing we have to do is decolonize our hearts and minds.

AM: Yes. I call it decolonization of the soul, part and parcel of decolonizing the land.

DJ: Yes. And part of what I say when people ask me what we need to do is; one of the things I say is we need to transfer our loyalty away from the capitalist system, away from civilization, from the industrial system, from whatever you want to call it; and toward the land. And I think that we’re using different terms to discuss things that are very similar.

And I want to say one more thing, which is that I’m writing a book right now, with a couple of people, and the title of the book is “Bright Green Lies.” And it’s how solar and wind are not the answers to the problems that the world is facing. And one of the things that we speak to is that at the very end of the book we say that one of the problems is that these are technical solutions to a problem primarily of values, and what really needs to change is – there’s a great line by a climate activist saying “You know, polar bears don’t actually do it for me.” And for me, that’s the problem. The idea that frogs don’t do it for us, or that trees don’t do it for us, polar bears, black bears, doesn’t matter who. Give me a wonderful Scottish creature to throw in there.

AM: A unicorn.

DJ: (laughing) Or to go along with the discussion we had earlier. Fairies don’t do it for us.

For me, a lot of my work is about helping us to remember that, for me, at least, rough skinned-newts and black bears do it for me. Is that what you’re talking about too? Part of it?

AM: If you were here in Glasgow, I’d take you down to the GalGael Trust. “Gal” means “the stranger” and “Gael” means “the heartland people.” There’s something of the stranger and something of the indigenous in all of us these days. And if I took you around our workshop you would see wood carvings, huge life sized wood carvings of many of our indigenous species. The salmon, the otter. That kind of thing. But also ones that have gone extinct locally, like the lynx and the wild boar and what have you. And we see that as honoring the animal spirits of our place. And we build boats and we go out in the River Clyde, and we reconnect people with their full community of place. We reconnect coastal communities.

But what I would say is that the technology, I believe, is also important. It’s the technology that’s allowing us to speak across the Atlantic tonight. In the case of our own house here, I’ve got solar panels and an air to air source heat pump, and we have cut the carbon footprint of our house, measured over five years now, from 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year to just over 1.9 tons, a reduction of 63%. And that’s because of solar and heat pump technology. Our house is warmer and more comfortable than it’s ever been before. That’s thanks to the technology. And I think you’re being fully human, means fully connecting in our consciousness what nature’s about, what our environment is about. That’s your soil element of community. It means fully connecting with the depths of our humanity, which is the soul dynamic, and connecting thereby fully with one another, in community with each other, interconnection with each other, which is the society dynamic. Soil, soul and society.

If you ask me where my hope comes from, as distinct from my optimism – I don’t have much optimism but I have a lot of hope. My hope is that whatever is happening in the world just now, it is an opportunity to deepen consciousness. An opportunity to deepen consciousness of one another, of the whole planetary and cosmological context, an opportunity to deepen consciousness perhaps into the love that drives the sun and other stars around.

DJ: Well thank you so much, and thank you for that beautiful ending. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Alastair McIntosh. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

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