Copyright Alan Whitehead & Earthschooling: No Part of this book, post, URL, or book excerpt may be shared with anyone who has not paid for these materials.
Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
“BE WATCHFUL…”
Conservation – Class 12 – Middle Lesson
Rudolf Steiner was not only one of the first, but the most effective conservationist of the 20th Century. His early influences were the mystic mountain-scapes and simple nature-loving herb gatherers of his Austrian childhood. Added to this was the – at that time – atavistic ability of little Rudolf to see the deeds of the Elementals in the four elements – and four kingdoms – of his life-filled home.
Even though achieving distinction in the academic circles of his time as a Doctor of Philosophy, it was in natural science that Steiner performed this most important task in the pre- Anthroposophy years. He was charged with editing the voluminous scientific writings of Germany’s favorite son, Goethe, an early conservationist in his own right. Over the ensuing 14 years, this genius became Dr. Steiner’s cardinal influence in the natural sciences, with such insightful breakthroughs as his metamorphosis of plants, and color theory – and all the time he was supposed to be a poet-playwright! This led subsequently to Steiner’s creation of a vast body of his own nature teaching, which he called Spiritual Science.
In many hundreds of lectures, papers and books, Steiner went beyond even Goethe in penetrating the mystery behind the phenomenal world. One of these secrets was the manifold roles of those same Elementals, or nature spirits, he beheld as a child. His adult perceptions however were no longer atavistic! These teachings, based always on an uncompromising veneration for life, led to many fields of endeavor by his followers, both contemporary and post-mortem. Among these are the many research institutes and practical enterprises in healing and agriculture. Through a century of osmosis, Steiner’s love-filled approach to nature has penetrated almost every chamber of cultural consciousness. The erstwhile cold-hearted hunter now often becomes the wildlife protector.
In fact it was this love of nature which first attracted your author to Anthroposophy. The magic seeds however were planted years before by my father. I was blessed to be born into a family of ‘nature lovers’, as they were quaintly called in the 1940s and ‘50s. My fondest childhood memories are of walks in the bush, or holidays in nature-rich sanctuaries, like Binna Burra in south-east Queensland. This same Great Dividing Range wilderness I can see from my verandah as I write, life’s a circle! My dad would lift me up to peek into a bird’s nest with its treasure of speckled eggs, or let me peer through his make-do camera lens (L. ‘lentil’!) magnifying glass to gasp at the beauty of the golden womb of a tiny pink bush orchid.
During my adolescence I was a keen bushwalker; organizing my own Conservation education it would seem! So it was not loving of the living world which lured me to Steiner’s work – I already had that – it was a new level of understanding of it that only Spiritual Science seemed capable of providing. In this Class 12 Conservation unit, Love and Understanding, the heart and the head, are the two pillars upon which the lesson is built. Of course many other science units taught over the last 12 years deal with a wide range of Conservation issues, but in this lesson we focus on the phenomenon as such; the nature loving and protection whole in this case being greater than the parts.
In this spirit, a brief history of Conservation should be given; beginning in ancient times. Here nature was an intimidating power, the feeling of forests and eradication of wild animals being thought of as not only an imperative, but a moral duty. How times change! Paradise on earth was envisaged as a Happy Valley of peaceful farms and villages. Ironically we now call this the pejorative term, ‘development’.
Even though the relatively small global population simply couldn’t initially ‘subdue the earth’, as the Genesis sanction would have it, early cultures certainly changed it. Australian Aborigines, over thousands of years, helped transform a soft-leafed floral landscape into the near-ubiquitous sclerophyll (‘hard leaf’) one we see today. This was due mainly to their hunting practices of slow burning. The more esoteric reason was the influence of their more sclerotic etheric bodies.
Fast-forward a few millennia: Wherever the Roman Empire spread, large wild animals virtually disappeared, mostly never to return. This was due not only to the Romans’ love of hunting, mostly unconscionably for its own sake rather than food, but to supply the many entertainment arenas with objects of spectacle – lions fighting lions, lions fighting men, lions fighting bears …! In Consequence, lions, previously reasonably abundant, died out over the length and breadth of the Empire.
With the advent of steel, the forests were easier to ‘subdue’; this reached critical mass in Britain under Henry VIII, who virtually destroyed the whole oak and other canopy which covered most of the country. This was to build his fleet of ships, both civil and military.
Of course the Industrial Revolution put paid to most wilderness in Western countries, even Australia. Virtually the entire infinitely sublime lowland rainforests of our eastern coast were clear-felled in just a few decades in the late 19th Century. This scorched earth policy exists even today in places like Brazil and Queensland…Queensland? As much destruction occurs in inland Queensland, not to mention other states, as in that globally-acknowledged crime against the earth, the clearing of the irreplaceable jungles of South America – for yet more grazing land!
This wanton violation of the natural world has always been abhorred by Steiner people; even in the days when the attitude of the wider community was that the ‘conquest’ of nature was a virtue. So it was easy for me to initiate a Conservation program at the first Steiner school in which I taught; though difficult to impossible in most other schools in the late 1960s. This was at Glenaeon in Sydney. Here in the high school we set ourselves both short- and long-term goals. The first was a large tree-planting program, executed as a social-cultural exercise.
At the annual School Barbeque, we requested that every child (kindly, primary and high) be supplied by their parents with a native tree. This was to replenish a part of the bush playground which had become badly degraded. “Replenish the earth” is the complementary injunction of Genesis to “Subdue the earth”! I only hope that the hundreds of seedlings we diligently planted are forest giants today, over three decades later! The -Long-term Conservation project was to create, in the beautiful Sydney Sandstone bush that sloped down to Middle Harbor, a Nature Walk. Many hours of loving toil were invested in cutting, weed clearing, landscaping the paths, and naming the trees and pons of interest.
I was not alone in this huge supervisory task; I was lucky to have the invaluable help of the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society, Bob Williams, who was also an eminent botanist He also lived nearby, so he knew the flora community intimately. I not only had an expert botanist to assist with the ‘head’ stuff, like plant identification and description, but a Spiritual Scientist of the first order to assure the metaphysical integrity of the project. This all leads to the fact that the teacher and students of this unit anywhere should likewise plan a hands-on enterprise with which to immortalize this lesson. Tell the local media about it – they love the odd feel-good story! Failing this, or as well as, the students might design a Conservation proposal for their school or area; such as how to safely eradicate an invasive waterweed from the local creek system.
Class 12 is an ideal year in which to introduce this Conservation middle lesson, as the students are, in the great soul recapitulation, truly now citizens of the 20th-21st Century. Conservation awareness really only came into focus in the last hundred years; even national parks were virtually unknown earlier. This timing tunes the 18-year-olds into the demands of the age in order to help halt the carnage of nature.
Class 12 is also the Venus year (beginning the 7-planet 14-to-21 path with Saturn in Class 8). This love deity is ever-present when we open the hearts of our young charges to the wonders of the living world. The color of Venus is, aptly, green! For all the crimes which have been committed which have placed our wild plants and animals under siege, there have been many love-filled positive initiatives to counterbalance them.
The following is a personal observation of how things, in some respects anyway, are getting better on the environmental front: On driving along the Pacific Highway in the far-north coast of NSW in the early 1960s, my wife and I would pause on a hill to admire the view of a pretty valley beside the sea. This was actually a large dairy farm, containing almost no bio-diversity. Some years later “Happy Valley” (as we presciently called it) was developed as a housing estate called Ocean Shores. The change was so dreadful, the local Greens called it ‘open sores’! Today my wife and I happily reside in the very same valley – but open sores it isn’t!
In three decades the area has completely greened over, with nature reserves established and many thousands of trees planted; it is particularly renowned for its gardens. There are even lakes in the estate which support abundant bird colonies. The nub is that, although Ocean Shores has not been restored to its pristine pre-settlement rainforest origins, it is a rich bio-system by any standards, with wildlife flourishing as it never could on the erstwhile cow paddock. The issue here is that ‘development’ is not necessarily bad; the goal is to make the environment better than it was before.
As well as involving the students in their own Conservation project, they might be asked, as a home assignment perhaps, to report on someone else’s. This could be investigative journalism, a photo essay, or a video documentary even. One example is the north-west NSW town of Barraba.
Due to economic pressures beyond their control, this semi-arid inland mining and agriculture center was slowly sliding into bankruptcy. The enterprising citizens came to the conclusion that only a new injection of interest could save the town. Barraba is normally thought an uninteresting place; but it is a geographic transitional zone between eastern mountain and western plains.
This creates an interesting flora and faunal overlap. The result is that many more birds can be seen in boring old Barraba, and its environs, that either east or west of it. On a good day a birdwatcher can spot up to 175 species!
So they promoted the town as the Birdwatching Capital of New South Wales (why not the world?). Hyperbole maybe, but the town’s fame has grown to the point where visitors stream in from both Australia and overseas. Here they not only observe and photograph birds, but spend their money in such places as the Regent Honeyeater Restaurant.
This beautiful but endangered avian is now the emblem of the town; and the feathered core of its ornithological appeal. It can be reasonably easily seen only around Barabba, as habitat destruction has expunged it from its former wide brown land range. Even the most recalcitrant bushies can now see the benefits of planting trees on their properties, and even in the town. This of course sustains even larger and more diverse flocks.
With the new knowledge available to the Barrabaites, they even planted, or preserved, wildlife corridors, wetlands, nesting trees, reserves and the like. This is a concept with which they would have been either ignorant or contemptuous of even a few short years ago.
In the spirit of the middle lesson, a vocational element should be included. The obvious areas of employment in Conservation is with one of the many private organizations dedicated to stemming the tide of species extinction and habitat destruction: World Wildlife Fund for Animals; Greenpeace (the new-age Vikings!); Australian Conservation Foundation; Wilderness Society. As well there are local bodies, though less likely to be paid employment, like dune care groups and wildlife rescue Then there are private companies, the media and publishing. The big employers are governments, like National Parks and Wildlife; CSIRO; Department of Fisheries; Forestry; Aboriginal Affairs – even local councils.
The last is often involved with another aspect of Conservation, that of the human environment, or Heritage. It is just as valid to engage the students in issues of indigenous heritage, the protection of old buildings, bridges, wharfs – whatever.
Just as in politics, with its right-wing ‘conservatives’, the word conservation means to conserve that which exists – to resist change. This is too narrow an interpretation; for instance, conservation often results in restoring something that once existed – a rainforest replanting. On the other hand it can make something better, and new, out of a degraded situation; see Ocean Shores earlier – ‘reformation’ perhaps? Paradoxically for conservation conservatives, nature’s First Law is change, or adaptability. In protecting a wilderness area, we are simply preserving it form man-made changes, the path of transformation in any and every environment being relentless. This is often glacially slow, as in the eons-long stability of a rainforest, with its built-in climate-control.
With human intervention into an environment, especially of a technologically-advanced kind, the rate of change is steeply accelerated. The task of Conservation is, with knowledge and wisdom, to manage this metamorphosis, in whatever form it takes. This is preferable to trying to halt it; which usually result in failure anyway.
For example: intensive grazing on the New England Tableland has resulted in the serious dieback of native trees. This has resulted in legion evils, including soil erosion. Yet imported trees, especially conifers and deciduous, thrive both in the climate, and in concert with livestock.
This non-native recovery of the green tree mantle – albeit alien – may not be to every conservationist’s ideal, but a tree cover it still is, with all its attendant benefits of water-retention, erosion control, shade and desalination. Many animal species actually like the new trees.
These beautiful new non-native trees often enhance the landscape, both aesthetically and spiritually, replacing, as they usually do, a fairly lifeless eucalypt and acacia scrub. So why do the imports thrive?
Nature always attempts to balance her life dynamics; native trees didn’t even do well in this region prior to white settlement, being hard and stunted. The new soft-leaf trees act as a mollifying agent, softening the whole environment, improving soil aeration, and, with their lush canopies, even attracting rain. ‘Native’ is not always the best thing for an environment – which brings us to the spiritual implications.
There are about the same number of plant and animal species on earth as there are individuals of the single species, homo sapiens (meaning ‘wise man’!). As every human being has an eternal karma, so does every other species. The Conservation slogan “extinction is forever” is right as far as it goes; but spiritual research reveals that every species – each equivalent to a single human individual – has its own path of destiny; one based on repeated earth lives, as our own!
So a species of, say frog, is certainly ‘gone forever’ when the last one perishes, but that particular amphibian group soul lives on. Honestly, Rudolf Steiner gave comforting and compelling answers to virtually all life’s vexing, perplexing problems! In higher worlds this group soul continued to evolve, to reappear as a new species. Whether in the same genus, or as a new form altogether. The first law of the natural world is, after all, metamorphosis, as Goethe tells us. In this light it can be seen that, just as many species vanish, as they always have (like the dinosaurs), new ones are created – or mutated to be more correct.
The extinction of a single species (the odds are that it’s a lowly one, like an invertebrate) is equivalent to the death of a single human being. This does not suggest that we abandon the Conservation canon and give our pestilential civilization open slather. It means rather that we let nature decide which species live, and which departs. For a species to die at the hands of man, either deliberately like the Dodo, or by default, as in habitat destruction, like impending demise of the Bilby, is akin to murder – faunacide or floricide indeed!
Even the Conservation movement’s detractors have to admit that, especially in the last third of the 20thCentury, it has added immensely to not only our own odds of survival, but to quality of life in the form of clean water, and air, soil restoration, and the saving of spirit-replenishing wilderness. With humanity’s relentless incursion into the sanctuary of nature, many species have been either eliminated or seriously disadvantaged. On the other hand, many have flourished in the new conditions, where once they languished in the old. Magpies love suburban gardens even more than the sunny bush!
Crested pigeons love lawns; their numbers multiplying exponentially from a bird with only a marginal population in earlier years. Eastern Rozellas feed on cultivated fruit in favor of their precious harsher diet – and nest in readily-available roof cavities rather than in increasingly rare hollow trees. These are just two examples of nature’s capacity to adapt to change – some species diminish, others prosper. Thus it has always been. Ask your students to sleuth out examples of their own.
It is not some classical ideal of a pre-civilization Garden of Eden native ecosystem we are trying to conserve – an impossibility at any rate – but to enhance the miracle of life on earth, all life. Rudolf Steiner directed our attention to Chapter 3 in the Book of Revelation to see this principle enshrined. In the letter to the angel (as in guardian Angel) of the Church of Sardis, we read the ominous invocation – “Be watchful and strengthen the things that remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found they works perfect before God.” I’ll bet!
Sardis is the 5th ‘church’, that which corresponds with, and refers to, our own time, the 5th post-Atlantean civilization, the 2160-year Anglo-Nippon (or Teutonic), that the Consciousness Soul. Sardis is akin to ‘sardine’ a fish. The 5the Age, since 1413, is under the vernal equinoctial (Northern Hemisphere) regency of Pisces, The Fish. This “Spiritual Soul” is semi-transformed physical body or put simply, informed or wise will. It is with this powerful duet of wisdom and will, made moral by the power of love, that we will indeed be worthy of the tasks to “strengthen the things that remain”. A 3-week Conservation odyssey with Class 12 is a bold step on this holy path.
Leave a Reply