Healing the earth: the Starhawk interview.

Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern earth-based spirituality. She is also well known as a global justice activist and organizer, whose work and writings have inspired many to action. She is the author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, long considered the essential text for the Neo-Pagan movement, and the now-classic ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. Starhawk travels internationally teaching about women's and earth spirituality and the tools of activism. New Life Journal recently had the opportunity to speak with Starhawk in preparation for her September appearance at the Southeastern Women's Herbal Conference near Asheville NC.

CW: Starhawk, you are very well known as a leader in the earth spirituality movement: can you tell me about your underlying passion for that?

Starhawk: I have always had a strong sense of connection to the earth. My very early experiences of spirituality and this deep sacred connectedness has always been changing so for a long part of my life I have been exploring different kinds of beliefs like earth-based spirituality and have been privileged to actually honor the ground beneath our feet, praying to its sacredness. So I think right now, especially in a time where the basic life support systems in the earth are seriously threatened and the whole balance of life and nature is deteriorating really fast all around us, we really desperately need some kind of different and healing connection to the earth.

CW: Can you tell us about how you see women's role in healing the earth in these times?

Starhawk: Women have always been the ones who actually carried the real everyday responsibilities for life: building and sustaining, and for protecting life. It is so vital to the life of the community, and I think in some sense now, almost more than ever, that responsibility is necessary for somebody to take and carry. If not us, it is hard to think of exactly who will take that responsibility. Because certainly people, whether they are men or women, who currently seem to be holding this power, have not been taking much responsibility.

CW: Can you tell me about the work you have been doing in New Orleans? I know you have been there a lot.

Starhawk: I have been there a number of times this year, working with a group called Common Ground Relief, which has been doing a whole variety of different programs and projects and have basically been helping to bring back New Orleans. They have been helping support people's own self-organizing efforts there. And one of the things we have been doing is the whole project on bioremediation, using plants, microorganisms, fungi, and other natural means of cleaning out the toxins that are there in the soil, some from the hurricane, but a lot are actually there from before the hurricane. They are there because like any Urban area, there has been manufacturing, there have been pesticides, and there are some real toxic residues. So we have been doing training, some sort of on the ground project to give people some of the skills, so that they can actually start healing their own soil and healing their own water, so that when people come back, they can come back to a safe environment.

CW: Can you describe more about what it is like being there these days? What kinds of situations do you encounter?

Starhawk: It is kind of surreal there these days, because if you stay in the French Quarter or the Garden District, the downtown business district, you can believe there never was a hurricane. Things are "kind of back to normal. But then you get out and go into the areas that were flooded, and most of those areas are poor black areas, they are still, six or seven months after the hurricane, just ghost towns. Huge, huge stretches of housing developments that are empty and covered in muck still, the whole lower neck woods are just houses that have been shattered and houses off their foundations. There are some houses that are structurally sound, but nobody has moved back yet--no services, no electricity, no water. There are stretches of public housing that are also structurally sound, standing there, that were flooded but not destroyed. They have not been reopened and have been boarded up. It is shocking how little has actually been done in all these months since the hurricane to bring people back, to make a concerted effort to bring back the community that was there before It is really quite tragic that this is a place where everybody has history, everybody has roots. People often live in the homes that their grandparents lived in, they have neighbors that they feel attached to, there is a very, deep culture there. It is hard to think how that will survive this whole process.

CW: What are some of the most effective and helpful things that you are seeing happening there? Is there a way to connect our readers with any of the things you see as being really constructive at this time?

Starhawk: I think the work that Common Ground has been doing has been tremendously constructive and helpful. It has really bypassed the inactivity that has been weighing people down, people who have been thinking they can only do something that the government has issued permission to do. It has organized people, saying hey, if they won't clean up the garbage, we'll help clean up the garbage. If there is no medical care, we'll set up a clinic. If people want a group to help support, they can go to commongroundrelief.org on the web and find ways to get involved or to donate. People can go down there. They have had a lot of students come down over the Spring Break and volunteer, and help get houses, help create a difference for this population. They have made it possible for people to come back.

CW: Is there a story from your experience that sounds out in your mind of your experiences of New Orleans?

Starhawk: There are so many to share. One of the days that we spent when I was there in October, Common Ground had organized a garbage cleanup in this neighborhood that Was in the ninth ward, and part of the ninth ward was very nearly destroyed. At that time, people weren't being allowed in. But we were sort of on the border, in a part that had been flooded, but not shattered. People had been gutting their houses and emptying things out onto the street. They hadn't gotten around to cleaning this up. There was stinking rotting garbage in the street. So they (Common Ground) organized people to get together and clean all of this garbage off of the streets. At one point when one of the neighbors came out, it was this guy who had an American flag on his house, a sign that said "Looters will be shot!" and he started telling us his story. It turned out that he had been in the military, in the Marines, and he had been training the contras in Nicaragua and Honduras, right around the time I had actually been there volunteering with Citizens for Peace, to hold off the contra attack. It was very powerful for me to realize that here was this guy who trained the contras and someone he trained shot a child, and then he shot the guy and left. I don't know how much this is true but he was so taken with what we were doing and he kept saying, "This is so great, that there people are doing this, lots of beautiful people." It really struck me as one of those moments where you could cross that line that keeps us divided--politics, class. It was a time to say you're people and we're people, and we are doing this because it needs to be done.

CW: That is so powerful. I really appreciate your bridge between activism and earth-spirituality. Can you talk more about that?

Starhawk: For me, earth-based spirituality at its very essence is about being here in earth, and it is not about playing out spirituality in some other realm, it is saying the sacred is right here. It is the world we live in, the world we make and create for ourselves and for others to live in. It is very much a real life present thing. That is why again so many of us have been drawn to activism, because we really believe the earth is sacred, that we need to do something to try and protect her.

CW: I like that bridge, that spirituality is right here. It is so easy to get up in the ethers like so much of the new age movement. Can you talk some about the main areas where you focus your activism these days? New Orleans has been a big one for you.

Starhawk: New Orleans has definitely been a big one this year and part of that is because I felt like New Orleans, in a sense, has been a preview of things to come. A huge natural disaster, but the naturalness of it is partially man made. The strength and frequency of hurricanes is increasing because of global warming. We are having more and more natural disasters.

It is a real chance for me to answer the call put out by Common Ground, to be part of this movement that talks about social change and has all of these great visions of how the world could be. This is a chance for us to see if we have the real skills to make that happen, if the skills that we do have are actually useful. Especially for this kind of situation. Common Ground has been providing a medicine clinic which has been a model for the community in a time when government is not succeeding and providing much of anything in the way of medicine. There are hippies from the Rainbow Kitchen that are well known all over the South as feeding people and having the best food. You have rednecks and hippies working together and feeding people. It makes it feel very hopeful.

CW: I understand that you travel in other parts of the world too, is that right?

Starhawk: Yeah, I travel a lot to various countries teaching magic and ritual, helping to organize political demonstrations, and teaching people about permaculture design.

CW: Can you tell us more about permaculture and how you weave that with earth-based spirituality and bring those together?

Starhawk: For me, permaculture is the practical application of it all. Permaculture is a system of ecological design that says you are nature working and if you begin by observing nature and try and work in the same way nature works, then you can create systems that meet human needs and also help create healing and biodiversity.

CW: Can you speak some how permaculture manifests in your daily life? I know that is such a broad question because permaculture is such a broad topic.

Starhawk: Well I have a garden, I teach permaculture design, and I have land on which I tried to work the design along those lines. Permaculture also is just not a garden; it is often a whole set of principles for designing anything from a political project to a city to a house to a farm. I really try to apply those principles because I know that they work well.

CW: It is inspiring to see the connection between earth spirituality and women's spirituality with permaculture because, although there is so much overlap in those philosophies, we don't often really see them presented together. I would like to know more of your thoughts about this.

Starhawk: I think earth-based spirituality is not theoretical; it is more about how we actually live our lives and about how we really grow our food and meet our needs. We do it in a way that is respectful of the earth and that is respectful of future generations. Permaculture and the whole broader area of environmental and ecological design has a lot to offer. Again for me it is so much a part of my spiritual practice, to be saying things like, "What do I do with my garbage?"

CW: How would you suggest we deepen our connection to the earth?

Starhawk: In my recent book, The Earth Path, I have a lot of suggestions for deepening our connection to the earth. In some ways, it really comes down to very simple things like taking some time every day to go out and sit and listen to the world that is going on around us. Make our meditation process about actually opening up our eyes and seeing the world around us; closing your eyes and going in, you're kind of limited. And when you open up, every time, you actually develop a real relationship with the earth. And it starts to talk to you, and it is, oh yeah, it is alive.

Corinna Wood for New Life Journal

Corinna Wood, owner of Red Moon Herbs and director of the SE Women's Herbal Conference, teaches on the faculty of the NC School of Holistic Herbalism, including the Wise Woman Ways of Herbalism programs. She is a frequent contributor to New Life Journal. She can be reached at www.redmoonherbs.com or 828-669-1310. Please go to www.commongroundrelief. org to find out what you can do to help those devastated by the hurricane.