Don’t be turned away by the name Starhawk, or the many labels this woman identifies herself with: Pagan, Witch, activist, permaculturist, eco-feminist, teacher, and author. Starhawk has written multiple books on earth-based spirituality, and activism for peace, environmental, and global justice. So far I have read Webs of Power and The Earth Path, which she wrote in her cabin on a computer powered by solar panels.

In Webs of Power, Starhawk warns against the environmentalist and activist trend to see humanity as a blight on the planet, doomed to despoil whatever we touch. I know many environmentalists and activists who are falling into this, and I admit I sometimes do too. “We’re parasites,” people declare. Starhawk sees this worldview as damaging, as she explains, “It’s hard to get people enthused about a movement that– even if only unconsciously– envisions its extinction as good. And people don’t act effectively out of feeling bad, guilty, wrong, and inauthentic. As long as we see humans as separate from nature, whether we place ourselves above or below, we will inevitably set up human/nature oppositions in which everyone loses.”

A different view of humanity, which avoids this humanity/nature dichotomy, is held by most indigenous cultures, bioregionalists, and permaculturists, and others close to the earth: We are animals; we are as much a part of the earth as other animal, plant, or microorganism. “We are bodies evolved over billions of years to eat, shit, breathe, drink, reproduce, die, and decay like other bodies,” Starhawk writes. She urges that the “virgin” wilderness is a European fantasy; rather humans have cohabitated with nature for millennia and native peoples have used fire, prayer, tools, and ceremonies to influence their environment. So she urges us to go ahead and get ourselves dirty.

She urges us and guides her readers how to observe and connect daily with the natural world, whether in a green spot inside a city or far out in the wilderness, whether gardening, walking, or sitting. Her book The Earth Path goes through the elements, air, fire, earth, and water, including how we can meditate on these elements and give them the respect and attention they deserve.

Starhawk believes that in order to create a new political/economic/social system that cares for the environment, and all animals including ourselves, we may need to become indigenous. She defines indigenous as: “deeply rooted in one place, living in a culture in which sustenance, spirit, and culture arises from the plants, animals, climate, and resources of that particular land.”

She blames the European witch trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for nearly wiping out the culture of earth-based spirituality, and earth-based medicine and plant knowledge, replacing these with patriarchal religion and ‘expert’-based medicine and. The understanding of the world as alive, animate, and speaking, was replaced by a mechanistic model of the universe, which sees the world as separate objects, with no inherent life, and therefore the freedom to exploit these objects without constraint.

Starhawk believes science and spirit can be reconciled. Instead of breaking subjects into component parts, using a very limited cause-and-effect model, the universe can be viewed as a complex web of relationships and patterns that makes up the whole. Though modern science has already begun to describe the world in these terms of networks, interlocking processes and relationships, Starhawk believes that our culture is still behind this sophistication, still stuck on that limited compartmental model. For example, school subjects are separated into Literature, Math, Science, Psychology, Religion, etc.

Starhawk also presents a different view of evolution, which goes beyond Darwinism: the Gaian evolution based on the Gaia theory developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This view is a shift in focus from the individual to the ecosystem, the whole. The idea is that the earth functions like a living being, so that creatures co-evolve, adapt interdependently as oppose to Darwin’s theory of adapting more individually. “The redwood tree does not evolve as a separate species;” Starhawk explains the theory, “rather, the forest as a whole evolves, the interwoven lives of redwood and tanoak, huckleberry and salal, the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil below and the lichens in the canopy where the marbled murrelets nest.”

Starhawk co-founded and co-teaches Earth Activist Trainings, two-week courses which combine basic permaculture with activist trainings and nature observation, all grounded in earth-based spirituality. So at least pick up one of her books, she has written them with wisdom, dirty hands, and a compassionate heart.

Check out Starhawk’s website at www.Starhawk.org