Transcription of Ted Carter and Ellen Gunter for the show Earth Calling #152
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast Show #152: “Earth Calling,” airing for the first time on Sunday, August 10, 2014.
Summer is in full bloom, and the earth reminds us daily of the bounty that we Mainers enjoy. Today we speak with Ted Carter and Ellen Gunter, authors of Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century; and Roger Doiron, founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International.
Join our conversations, and learn how we can maintain and foster our relationship with the world in which we live. Thank you for joining us.
A topic that I find quite important for all of us, but especially for myself and my family, is the environment and the earth on which we live, and with which we live really. Today we have two individuals who I think feel similarly, and probably even more strongly that I do, which is saying a lot. Today we have Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes; he is a landscape designer and contractor, and also Ellen Gunter who is a journalist and environmental activist. Ted and Ellen co-wrote Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century, which was released on Earth Day this year. Thanks so much for coming in and being with us today.
Ellen: Our pleasure.
Dr. Lisa: I want to read … there’s so much in your book which is wonderful, and I think it’s a great update for people who know. Ted has been a long-time supporter of our radio show and has come on a guest several times. The first time way, way back was to talk about the first iteration of this book.
This book is so different and so wonderful and alive, and reading it is like taking a breath of fresh air. One of the quotes that I read this morning was by Thomas Barry, “Our moments of grace are moments of transformation.” There is something very graceful about this book. It’s a pause. Is that part of your intention in writing this?
Ted: The two of us, Ellen and myself, we are a good team because Ell is a fantastic writer and a journalist … and environmental activity and a spiritual director. I think that she puts a lot of heart and soul into her writing, and it definitely is … it’s a call to action is what this book is. We really want people to get ignited and start to go to town on this because time is of the essence.
I don’t know if I’m answering your question exactly properly, but this is really a call to action. It’s in the Sacred Activism Series of Random House, and it’s really important that we do that.
Ellen: We love that quote because what he’s talking about there are the moments of dawn and dusk, and those are the moments where you see the morning birthing, and you see the day ending. They are so brief, and they are so regular. We can count on them happening every day, buy everything in life is a transformation. Earth is all about cycles.
On many levels this book is about transformation. It’s about what we’re undergoing right now on the earth. It is transforming, and in a lot of terrible ways.
Each of us has a role to fulfill, a job to do. This is going to require a transformation of sorts from all of us.
Dr. Lisa: Reading this book is … it’s not easy. It’s not easy to hear about the things that are going on, going on right now, and have been going on very recently, and have been going on for decades, possibly centuries. It’s not easy to know that this is what we’ve been doing.
Let me read a little passage from the intro. This is something that you wrote, Ellen. “Ted once reminded me of a trip he had made to visit a Yaqui shaman friend of ours named Lench Archuleta with whom he had studied nature and earth spirituality in the Arizona desert. One afternoon we sat on a bluff overlooking what appeared to be a distant dust storm. It wasn’t. The bulldozers, cutting deep swaths, were making space for yet another subdivision.”
“As we watched, Lench told me his tribe had a name for us. They call us termite people” because we are eating the earth’s flesh, and by doing that we are literally eating our future, our world. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a form of madness, of suicide.'”
That hit home for me, that what we’re doing is eating into the core of where we’re living.
Ellen: Rachel Carson talked about this in Silent Spring. She called it biocide, ecocide. That was in 1962. Her big platform was DDT. Silent Spring refers, of course, to the fact that there were no birds singing because the preponderance of DDT After World War 2 was basically not just killing the insects that were bothering plants and troubling home gardeners, but it was killing the birds who were eating the berries and whatnot as part of the earth cycle.
She basically was warning us about a world we live in now, and she was right. We celebrate her now as being the person who really started waking us up, but this is obviously a very long process. That was 50 years ago. It’s time to move to the next level, I think, and it is hard to recognize. It is hard to own this.
Dr. Lisa: She paid for it herself. She ended up dying of cancer, and they thought largely that there was a chemical contribution to that cancer. It’s not easy to be the voice of conscience.
You have a quote from Bill Moyers. “The most important credential of all is a conscience that cannot be purchased or silenced.” To be that voice is tricky and hard, but important … so important.
Ellen: It is. You really find out who your friends are, I guess. There are lots of people that … in my family and friend hierarchy who just can’t walk with us on this. That’s okay. You really have to find a peace with it because, if it’s something that’s really driving your soul, you can’t say no to it.
We like to say that writing, Earth Calling is our calling. This is what we were called to do. I think there’s a quote somewhere at the beginning that if you’re called on a journey, if you decide to take a spiritual journey, then it’s okay to not do it; but if you do it, there’s no turning back. It’s a one-way street.
Ted and I, I think we are of one mind on this, that there is no direction except forward. We can’t help ourselves. This is what we have to do.
Dr. Lisa: How did you come to meet each other?: I know we talked about this when your wrote the first book, Ted, but give me a little bit of background on how the two of you came to be working on this.
Ted: As usual, things happen altogether at the same time. It was about ten years ago that I was starting to go out to the desert to work with Lench Archuleta, the shaman that you had read about. He was getting me to see nature and the earth differently, and I met Ellen in that same time period.
We had been going to Chicago … I went nine times a year, actually, to set up stage and to work with Carolyn Myss. Ellen was a classmate of mine, and she would do a narrative after we were done. It was just incredibly written, beautifully written, and very descriptive. I just said, “Whoa. If I ever write a book, I’d love to have her work with me on a book.”
Sure enough, when I started reading a lot of the information about what was happening to our planet and the world, and it was making me very sad, a very dear friend of our says, “Do the thing that breaks your heart.” I was very … this broke my heart.
Ell came up for her birthday in 2007 and I said to her, “Would you write a book with me?” and she said, “Sure.” It was going to be a handbook, a little pamphlet.
Ellen: Sixteen pages.
Ted: Little did we know it would be almost 300 pages for the first book.
She is a great … There’s a friend of ours out in California, and he says, “There’s friends that we know that we can climb hills with, and then there’s some friends that we can climb mountains with. Ellen is somebody you climb mountains with.”
Dr. Lisa: Ellen, I really enjoyed the weaving of the work of Carolyn Myss … not just Carolyn Myss, but really ayurvedic medicine, about the chakras, and talking about what different chakras mean. I know this is something that’s become part of our communal lexicon, but at the time you started doing this, if you’re talking about chakras people are looking at you a little funny.
Ellen: This is a multi-thousand-year-old tradition. I think it was begun by the Hindus and picked by other cultures.
The chakras … of course, Carolyn is where I’d heard about these, and I’d had an awareness about it because I studied tai chi for 20 years. You get energy, you get prana, and it’s prana of tai chi and yoga and the chakra system. It’s all the same thing.
I had an awareness of them, but when we started studying with Carolyn she relates it to your spiritual journey. She talks about how, in Anatomy of the Spirit, that you can really track … you have a spiritual anatomy, and that these chakras are basically the foundation of that.
In the first book we wrote about how the first chakra is our tribal connection. If you do yoga, and you sit down in a lotus position, your tailbone is the closest thing to the earth. That’s your first chakra.
When Ted and I first started Reunion, we said, “Our first chakra is broken. We have no connection to the earth anymore.” That’s one of the things that’s wrong. We don’t appreciate it. We don’t see it. We don’t hear it. We don’t get how … We can’t survive. We are the earth.
The Bible, to use one particular kind of mythology, which a lot of us were brought up with, when creation was begun with a handful of dirt … ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all that stuff. We have that built into our culture, that we are the earth.
Just to extend the metaphor a little bit, what Ted and I talk about a lot in here is … We put the chakras in there because there is a very physical spiritual connection here. Your heart is what makes you feel compassion … your fourth chakra, your heart chakra.
Your sixth is your head. It’s your brain. It’s both your cognitive brain and your intuitive brain. You can cognitively get the data, and your heart is going, “Oh, my God. This is really killing me,” but the fifth chakra, your speech, your mouth, this is where you make choice. That’s where the action part is.
That’s how we tie all these things together in the book, by saying … it’s like Goethe said, “Knowing is great, and being willing is great, but you just do.” You have to put your feet on the ground and do something. That’s what we’re trying to do with Earth Calling.
Dr. Lisa: A big chunk of the book is reviewing what has been going on. I think many people are now aware of climate change. I think it’s less controversial. I think it’s more widely accepted that this is an actual thing, but I’m not sure the people understand that some of the things that have been used as examples, they’re things that have repeated themselves.
You talked essentially what are dust bowls in China now because of the irrigation system changes. We were experiencing dust bowl issues in the United States a century ago.
Ellen: The dust bowl was really … I don’t know if you saw Ken Burns … if anybody listening has been … probably saw the dust bowl show. One of the reasons the dust bowl happened was that Oklahoma was not ever meant to be used for the crops that it was used for. It was prairie grass, which has very different root systems.
The Oklahoma land rush in … whenever that was, the lateral 1800s or something. It was the last part of the country that needed to be settled, and then brought everybody in. Of course, they started farming and cattle ranching. They changed the ecosystem of the state so that when … They had several years where it was very bountiful, but then all of that nutrition in the soil ran out, and it could no longer sustain that.
When you don’t listen and pay attention to what the earth system requires, then you have something like a dust bowl.
You’re right. There are cycles. The dust bowls and the incredible amount of pollution in China is due to the desertification of a lot of their plains areas, a lot of their breadbaskets disappearing because of overuse, because their water supplies are dwindling, because they have such a monstrous population they’re trying to support with food.
Yeah, these things have happened historically. One of the things that’s different now is that it’s all happening at once, and it is a repeatable cycle that we cannot get out of. We have the heat. We have the drought. We have the floods. We have the wildfires. They are now part of our lives because we haven’t maintained a balance with the earth.
Dr. Lisa: Ted, I know you have something to say about this.
Ted: It’s all about balance, really, and Carolyn has told me that … Last year I went out, I go out to work on her gardens every year, and I said to her, “Boy, nature has always taught me about great abundance,” but she said, “Ted, first you have to have balance; then you can have abundance.”
We see that in our health. We see that in our way of life. When we’re out of balance, we’re out of sync. What’s happening, what’s so absolutely tragic what’s happening right now, is that at the perfect moment when the worms should be available for the birds to eat for their offspring and everything like that, the seasons are all screwed up, so you can’t get to those … It’s off sync, so that they can’t be nourished in time to feed their young.
We’re having die-offs in animal populations and bird populations that are part of an imbalance that we have set forth in nature. What we’re doing to nature Is not natural. This is not natural. It’s very unnatural.
What we’re doing as human beings, as earthlings, is also equally as unnatural. It’s not natural to be this way. I think greed and a lot of self-interest drives this, and we have to keep that in check, and we have to call ourselves home and say, “What are we doing here? Are we all going to let this beautiful ecosystem fall into this great abyss, or are we going to do something about it?”
I can’t sit back and not do anything anymore. I can’t do it.
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Dr. Lisa: We’re definitely going to talk about what you can do, because that’s a very big part of this book, so I want to go into that. Also, I know that as somebody who has really wanted to do good things in life, it has been overwhelming for me at times, and I know for people around me, to see that you’ve no sooner dealt with Hurricane Katrina than you have another natural disaster over here.
I read the Barbara Kingsolver book about the Monarch butterflies, and then it actually comes to be. You feel as much as you’re composting and trying to walk instead of drive and doing your thing, not eating as much meat and not using as much water, it still feels so overwhelming.
How do you reconnect with what keeps you moving forward in a purposeful and mindful way?
Ted: Lisa, you are a spark. Think of yourself as a spark to ignite the passion in other people. Your actions, they may seem very inconsequential, but you influence other people, and you’re in a place to influence people through your radio station, through everything that you do.
Remember that. You throw the pebble in the water and it ripples. You’re touching a million other people, especially people …
The poor and disenfranchised aren’t going to be able to do anything; they’re too busy surviving. It’s the people like us that are really connected and that are running in this economy that can really do something. We have the resource, we have the influence, and we should be taking this and stewarding this great opportunity that we have, and this great blessing we have, in a way that really sparks something in others.
Ellen: What you’re talking about is network. This radio station, this broadcast, reaching out is networking, as Ted said. You influence one person, and you don’t know where that goes. It doesn’t just happen now. It doesn’t just influence somebody now. That happens into perpetuity. This broadcast will be affecting people for a thousand years if we’re still around, just because of the nature of influence and because how memory works with our species, and the collective unconscious and a whole bunch of other things.
To get the first part of your question, yes, everybody … it’s frustrating. “What can I do? How can I act?” That’s really what the action piece is about. Everybody is different. However many people are listening to this, every one of you has a different calling. Yes, we designed the book so that you could figure that out.
First you reconnect. You resensitize yourself to nature … but then join a network. Get involved with other people. That’s where that alchemy of action comes in. That’s where it generates and it is completely out of control. I’ve seen this time and again.
I’m a big activist with the Keystone XL Pipeline, and that started out with 1253 people getting arrested over a period of two weeks. Now it reignited the environmental movement. There is no way … It’s bled over into the fracking movement. It’s all over the world now. You never know what your one action is going to do in the long term.
Get into a network, join out of these organizations. The infrastructures are all set up already. That’s that alchemy that begins.
Dr. Lisa: You quoted, as you’re talking about stepping into your soul’s journey, Teilhard de Chardin, “It would seem that our time is calling us to awaken from our benumbed and bewitched to a wonder at and reverence for the astonishing, miraculous, and mysterious creation of which we are a part.”
I think this is important. I think that first we have to start with that wonderment. We have to start with that reconnection, to get out there and really feel this in some way, so that it’s not just something that we’re dealing with on an intellectual level.
Ellen: Exactly. It’s that heart connection. We get it cognitively. We can get it intuitively. That compassionate heart is what is awakened when you’re in nature.
I like to tell people, “Go out and sit outside.” Nobody goes to Times Square to relax. They go out into nature. Your state is emblematic of that. You are the one. You are a magnet for this.
People are drawn here because it’s so beautiful. It’s so peaceful. It regenerates people. It heals them. It’s an amazing place to be.
Go sit outside and take some deep breaths. When you sigh, that’s when your cognitive side is giving way to your intuitive side, that genius that is innate in us.
Matthew Fox says … he’s a modern-day mystic, and he says, “We are starved for awe.” We are starved for it. We want to be blown away by something besides video games and FX on movies. We want to see what’s really there. That’s part of our connection. That’s what nature gives us. Nature is built in awe.
Dr. Lisa: You also quote two individuals, or two stories of individuals who listened to themselves and went on and did things that, I think, have become quite amazing. You spoke about Rudolf Steiner and the biodynamics movement, and also about Findhorn. Anybody who has … these are names that come over and over and over again, and yet these two groups of individuals, the Caddys at Findhorn and Rudolf Steiner, they were considered a little bit …
Ellen: Loony.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah. Why was it important to share these stories in Earth Calling?
Ted: I have a Steiner garden, I have a Rudolf Steiner gardener, a biodynamic garden, at my home. I work with … Ben Steele has been in here at the studio, and we’ve talked about the Rudolf Steiner journey. Of course, Steiner was a savant, an incredible human being that comes around once every hundred years, these people. I think that we have to be the Caddys and the Steiners. All of us, we are a little bit different.
One thing that really hit home to me was a friend of mine said, “Ted, you’re an eccentric man. Do you know what that means?” I said, “That means I’m different.” He said, “No. That means you live outside the circle.” I said, “Do you know what … that people outside the circle do?” I said, “No.” He said, “They change the world. How can you live inside the circle and change the world?”
Then he was giving me a lesson that I needed to hear, because I was trying to conform again; but I didn’t want to conform again. That’s not who I am. I’ve always operated outside the circle.
It takes a lot of courage to do that, but it’s the place, if you really want to do things in your life that really make a difference, you have to go out there and make it happen.
Ellen: That’s just who you are. You can’t help yourself. I’ve known you for 10-12 years now, and that’s who you are.
When we were doing the first book, we went out to Northern California because Ted had met somebody doing … You were working with the Pfeifer Institute or … I forget which one … which is where you learned about biodynamics and why you would want to do it.
He hooked up with this guy who was part of a French wine family, and he had left this … I don’t know which one it was. It doesn’t matter. He had left his family’s estate and cashed out, and he said, “I just want to find out how I can grow wine grapes without using pesticides and fertilizer. That’s so unnatural.”
Long story short, he ended up taking biodynamics and became a practitioner, a master practitioner.
We met him in Northern California in the wine country, and he took us on a tour of one of the vineyards that he takes care of, which was winning awards. You eat these grapes and you just … buzz. They’re so fantastic.
We’re up on a hill overlooking his biodynamic vineyard and all the preps and all the stuff that are part of that discipline. I’m looking around and I said, “All of these are …” because you have to have biodynamic certification. You have to maintain that to be able to call yourself a bio-D practitioner … product.
I’m looking around at all these beautiful vineyards around him, and I said, “So they are all biodynamic.” I’m not going to imitate his French accent, but he said, “No. That’s conventional,” which means pesticides and fertilizers, “That one’s conventional. That’s conventional.” I said, “You’re surrounded by conventional agriculture? How do you maintain your certification? All that stuff blows over here.” He grinned at us and he shrugged and he said, “Because it’s up to the earth.”
Ted and I went, “What?” That was out big lightning moment. What he was saying was we have the capacity to work with the earth, to make agreements with the earth. The agreement you make with biodynamics is you never use pesticides and fertilizer. You use the preps that are part of the discipline of doing bio-
D, and Ted could talk a lot more intelligently about that. You can find out more about it just by Googling biodynamics.
This is what they were using in Findhorn, and nobody really knew what that was. The point is that when you work in concert, when you are in partnership, when you are connected to nature and you make this promise, then this is what happens.
Ted’s garden is crazy. I send bio-D preps to friends and they go, “I have a lemon tree that I’ve had for 18 years, and now it’s putting out …” They’ve never even had lemons on it before. I said, “You can never use … This is your agreement. You make this agreement.”
People think it sounds crazy. I will promise you, it is incredible. It’s just incredible it doesn’t matter if you believe it. Just do it.
Dr. Lisa: In Findhorn you gave the example of enormous broccolis that were …
Ellen: There were 50-pound broccolis they had to haul out with a truck.
Dr. Lisa: This was in Scotland, I believe, on very rocky coast with not very much soil, but it was just the way that it was cared for.
Ellen: [Gorson Brew 0:29:34] is what they call it. It was sand. It looked like there was no nutritional value in it. They grew this insane garden, and people came from all over the place … I forget … from horticultural societies. They did analysis of the soil, and it was completely rich in everything that was needed, because they worked in concert with nature.
Dr. Lisa: This gets me to, I think, a really important question, and that is: how do people … this is Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century. This is a call to action. You want people to work in concert with nature, with themselves, their lives, their earth. Where do people start?
Ellen: It’s spring. Thank God. Finally. I live in Chicago. We’re having a very late spring right now. One of first things I would say is: what’s available to you right now? What’s available is gardens. Begin to garden. We recommend that you get heirloom seeds. We have a whole thing in there, as you know, on GMOs. We’re very much opposed to those. They’re not natural, no matter what they say.
We were asked that question the other day, and yes, just go out and start putting your hands in the earth. Start there. Start there, and do some potted plants. If you don’t have a garden, then go work in a garden. Go to the farmers’ markets. Find the seed purveyors there.
Once you start investigating, a whole world opens up to you. This is not weird and it’s not specialized. It is becoming the norm. Everybody is getting this. Eat local. Buy local. Find out where your meat comes from. As Ted said, if it says it’s grass fed, does that mean it’s being grown in Brazil on what used to be rainforest? You don’t want to support that, and you don’t know what they’re doing to the grass before the cattle are eating it.
I think our book is a really good prep. We spent a year before we wrote Reunion. We spent a year doing nothing but reading and researching, and we finally got to the point where we kept reading the same thing. No matter what the source, we were finding the same sorts of opinions and ideas and data and statistics and long-term tests. We said, “Okay, it’s time to start writing. We have maxed the information for now.”
We read dozens of books, thousands of articles, hundreds of blogs. We’d research and research, and we never took any resource as first [blush 0:32:04]. We’d always investigate it.
There is so much to do, and you can start as simple as sticking your hands in the earth, getting an organic tomato plant and growing some tomatoes for yourself.
Ted: Also I’m going to interject about children. If you’re a young mother, you’re a young father, get your children involved. This is stewardship. My mom and dad, from when we had our little suburban home in Chicago, they were out landscaping on the weekends. I was mowing the neighbor’s lawn. We were outside all the time.
Put the computers away. Put the cell phones away. Put all that technology away, and go out and play in nature, and participate in what this beautiful earth is all about.
Ellen: Well said.
Dr. Lisa: Ellen, we’re fortunate that you flew in to be with us here in Maine. I know that you are flying out again, back, very soon. You’re going back to Chicago.
Ellen: I am, back to Oak Park.
Dr. Lisa: Ted, I know you’re extremely busy as well. It’s a very busy time of year for you. The fact that you both took the time to be with us in the studio and have taken the time to write this book, Earth Calling, it says a lot to me. How do people find out about Earth Calling, and how do people …
Ellen: It’s distributed by Random House, so the easiest thing to do is to go to Amazon or go to Barnes and Noble. I know there are a few bookstores around Portland that are starting to carry it. You can request it, and they will order it for you. It’s widely available. It’s also a Kindle, so you can go onto Amazon, and in three minutes it’ll be on your Kindle or your iPad or whatever.
Ted: I’m going to give Longfellow Books a plug because they have been very supportive of this book and I’m going to be doing a reading for them. I love Longfellow Books, so … that’s what I want to say.
Dr. Lisa: We love Longfellow Books here in Portland, too. People who live in the Greater Portland area, Longfellow Books is a great place to go for Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 20th Century, and to read more about the work that Ellen Gunter and Ted Carter have been doing.
Thank you again for everything that you’re doing and for all that you will continue to do.
Ted: Thank you very much.
Ellen: Thank you, Lisa.