Return to the earth

THE great US protest movements of the 1960s civil rights, Vietnam, all that did widely succeed in installing a liberal idealism as a respectable American way. When, after thirty years, we look to see where the marchers have got to, a good many seem to have kept the faith. Today's ecological concerns, in particular, can sustain a whole lifestyle, personal, political - even spiritual.

Tom Hayden was one of the Chicago Seven, arraigned alongside Jerry Rub in and Abbie Hoffman after the riots of 1968. His marriage to Jane Fonda endured for IS years until 1989. Today, at 56, he is a California State senator, lecturing on "ecotheology" and chairing the State's Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee.

He has also attracted a share of the backlash aimed from the Christian Right at environmentalists with spiritual pretensions; nature mysticists who, like Hayden, challenge the traditional, Bible-backed assumption of man's God-given dominance over nature. Creationists and other ultra-conservative Christian groups make common cause with loggers, miners and jeep manufacturers in denouncing "the new paganism" that threatens to subvert the smooth deployment of capital along with the authority of organised religion.

Hayden's lost gospel is one of kinship with nature, taken rather beyond mere willingness to sort out the household rubbish for recycling. We, too, can "return to the sea as our remains become runoff. We can return to the sky as the sea evaporates. We can return to the earth as rain".

Such elevated moments are actually quite rare in the book the work of a teacher rather than a prophet (and not very obviously that of a politician). It rehearses familiar green themes and sources, from Thoreau to Chief Seattle, from Leopold to Schumacher, and links them into the thinking of current friends of the Earth such as Al Gore, Thomas Berry and Vaclav Ravel.

Hayden's own gospel, while radical enough to upset the Christian fudamentalists, is mild enough by the standards of activists such as Earth First! or the "deep ecologists" who would reduce the human population to a more seemly balance. His original, San Francisco publishers, Sierra Club Books, are moderates who don't go in for the really wild stuff.

Prospecting the neglected roots of kinship with nature, Hayden retraces his own tribal origins to County Monaghan. "My Irish ancestors could be called the Indians of Europe, a people who lived in clans and tribes, were warriors with a heroic view of life, and who communicated with spirits in the land and sea."

HIS reading of Ireland's "native" history, mythical and otherwise, can be somewhat economical. The early Irish, we are told, "developed a language sometimes known as Ogham, popularised today as a kind of Irish I Ching known as runes". Later, the run dale farming system "involved collective use of alternating furrows on the same field". Well. . . yes.

But there are real resonances. Dr Kevin Whelan's graphic description of life in the pre-Famine clachans of the west, with so much singing, dancing and storytelling going on among the swirling turfsmoke, "is remarkably similar,"

writes Hayden, "to descriptions of Indian villages in America". We can expect this theme to be developed in essays on the Famine, edited by Hayden in a forthcoming book from Wolfhound Press.

"A sense of the harmony and mystery of man's place in nature" was what Estyn Evans, Whelan's great precursor in historical geography, found in the old Irish literature, "a pagan sense of communion with all living things". The insight recurs in Hayden's quote from Fintan O'Toole: "Early Irish Christian spirituality," is marked by both the intimacy of a tribal society and by a use of nature imagery bordering on pantheism.

But the Famine was a sort of betrayal by nature and the land, and emigration brought a conscious severing from this ambivalent, peasant spirituality. The emigrants sought consolation in the Church of the city and its emphasis on the eternal aftermath to life. The price of their assimilation was, says Hayden, "a displacement from the village on earth to a heaven in the sky".

He went looking for his roots after the upheavals of the 1960s, moved by the echoes of "We Shall Overcome" on the streets of Derry, only to find himself turned back from Shannon expelled, he says, as a potentially subversive revolutionary. His book arrives in Ireland at something of a crisis in modes of spirituality. Many might want to draw on the powerful idea which sets clachan and hermitage in the same valley as Chief Seattle's tepee.