In memory of Doug Ralph

Doug Ralph passed away suddenly at his home in Castlemaine, central Victoria, yesterday. I had heard about Doug's good work as an environmentalist and mentor for a while but only known him for about a year. What struck me most was his kindness and profound connection with the bush. I was privileged to interview him for the Spring 2014 issue of Earthsong Journal, the interview republished below.

A warrior for the earth and gentle soul is welcomed back. Rest in peace, Doug.

Box-ironbark country, in the foothills north of the Great Dividing Range, stretches in a belt across central Victoria and into the north-east of the state. Doug Ralph was born in this country at Castlemaine and has lived there nearly all of his 66 years. His descendants came to the area in 1851 during the gold rush. He stood for the Greens in the seat of Bendigo in the 1996 federal election and was a founding member of the Friends of the Box Ironbark Forests in 1997. Passionate about the environment and local history, he leads bushwalks and is something of an elder and mentor to young artists and environmentalists. He spoke with Sasha Shtargot.

Doug, there seems to be a flowering of environmental awareness and alternative lifestyles at the moment in the Castlemaine area. How do you explain it?

Well, there’s been a huge change in attitude towards the forests around here, mainly in the last 20 years. People used to be far more interested in the (gold mining) heritage of the area than the natural environment. We started the Friends of Box Ironbark Forests to gain recognition for the forests – we thought they needed a political voice. One of our victories was in the early 2000s when a section of the Calder Freeway was planned through a beautiful forest at Malmsbury. We campaigned against that and the authorities ended up changing the route of the freeway. They put a bend in the freeway away from the forest, put wildlife underpasses for animals, made changes to the designs of the freeway. I’m proud to say that I helped save a forest.

Something special is happening in central Victoria. There are now 2000 people in environment and Landcare groups in the Mount Alexander Shire, which is probably more than any other comparable area anywhere in Australia. There’s a spiritual element to it in that people are feeling a strong connection to place, a sense of belonging, and like-minded people are being attracted here. Really great people are coming all the time and I love being around them.

What do you think is special about the land here?

There’s something about the light here. I don’t know how to describe it – you just have to experience it. Once people learn to see it, the light has a big influence on them. You notice it especially when it’s wet, in the morning until about 10 or 11, and before it gets dark. In winter there’s a kind of horizontal light as the sun is going down and you get amazing light shows – the whole landscape sparkles with light.

I was deeply moved by a book about the Yarra River written by Maya Ward (The Comfort of Water, Transit Lounge 2012). In that she mentioned a story of some monks at a monastery who drew their water from one river all the time. They experienced the river, in a way they became the river. If you are drinking water from a particular area you are that water, you are the food of the area. Aboriginal people understand that – you just become part of the land.

I go for walks in the bush. It’s my way of meditating and sometimes afterwards I don’t know where I’ve been, I just blend with the landscape. One day I was walking in this way in a trance and all of a sudden I stopped – three wallabies were sitting nearby, eating calmly. Normally wallabies run away when a human is near, but these just sat there. I stopped and looked at them and they looked at me. It was a special moment.

Doug, the land in central Victoria was deeply scarred by mining and logging. Then cattle and sheep farms had their impacts. How has the land regenerated after all that?

In the last few decades, farming became unviable around here. Once the farming stopped, the trees started to come back. It’s been like a resurrection – something that was dead coming back to life. Historically, the early white settlers described the land as “park-like” – the forests had big trees with space in between. That’s what (British explorer) Major Mitchell described when he came through this area. But they cut down the big trees and when you do that you get a denser, coppiced, multi-stemmed growth. After all those years the forest is opening out again.

There’s a lot of regeneration going on and you are getting trees coming up in some places that haven’t been seen since the days of the gold rush. Once grazing stops, life comes back from nowhere. Where I live there were cattle for over 100 years, but the land is repairing itself. Even where you’ve had the worst impacts of mining, like where the land has been sluiced, it’s regenerating. You can strip the land bare but a seed will still germinate, a blade of grass will still come up.

People talk about active “revegetation” of the land, for instance planting trees to mitigate climate change, but you’re not really a supporter of that, are you?

The Government has this idea of a “green army” of people planting trees, but they need to get their head around changing the way the land is managed. We don’t have to plant 20 million trees – if we leave the land alone and let it regenerate we’ll get 100 million trees coming back. Bob Brown said that if you want to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, take all the cattle out of central Australia. If you did that, all the regrowth would be a huge carbon sink.

In America where they have stopped farming, they’ve seen the land go back to forest, and in Europe people are talking about “re-wilding”. Regeneration is happening in a big way all over Australia, especially in the southern states. After all the rain that we had (in 2010-2011) there’s been massive growth and that has been huge for storing carbon. Changing the way you manage the land is about changing your attitude to it. It comes down to respecting the land – the earth is capable of repairing itself.

The Meaning of Nothing

I eavesdropped on a fascinating conversation the other day. Four people – an older couple and a younger one – sat down not far from my table while I was having lunch at a cafe and began discussing the meaning of non-being. It went like this:

“It’s amazing to think where you were before you were born,” the older man said. “Where was I? I was nothing.

“All these things were happening – all these events, world events – and where was I?”

“I find that really disturbing,” the older woman said. “I don’t know why. It just makes me shiver that I was nothing and that there’s nothing out there – that we go back to nothing.”

“I don’t think we go to nothing when we die,” the younger man chimed in. “I think there’s something there.”

“What do you mean?” the younger woman asked. “Are you saying that we go somewhere, to heaven?”

“I’m not religious. I just think that when we die we go to a place of love, of deep love and light.”

I enjoyed their discussion, a parley on subjects so immediate yet so deep. It gladdened me to hear people talk about such things and my own mind was stimulated to contemplate that “nothing” about which they spoke and the existence, or otherwise, of life after death.

There’s a classic Zen koan, or instructive riddle, that asks: “What was your original face before you were born?” The student of Zen meditates on the koan until its essence seeps into their soul. Its aim is to guide a person past the material layers of existence, past the rational everyday mind, and into a whole experience where being and non-being (my face when I was born, my face before I was born) are one. That experience of “just is”, beyond human delineations and conceptions, is said to be the heart of reality.

Accepting that, I wonder if non-being deserves more credit than it gets. As the cafe discussion progressed I began thinking that nothingness was more than some great cosmic pit out of which we emerged and into which we vanished at death. Paradoxically, it is an active presence or principle. Non-being and being are inseparable – to be, something has to come into existence, and if it does it must eventually die. These are the very basic rules of temporal reality. So in essence non-being is highly productive and deeply interwoven with being. It is the rich compost that gives birth to form and that receives form back to be remade, continuously to the end of time.

The idea that death is necessary for life has been understood since the early millennia of human thought. Hunter-gatherers and later crop and animal farmers lived close to nature, the cycles of life and death experienced intimately and everywhere to be seen. Various communities around the world made ritual sacrifices of crops, animals, and even sometimes people to ensure the proper cycles continued. Death was to be propitiated, non-being given appropriate reverence so that the fertile compost would keep producing new forms. Only recently in history, with the advent of modern Western culture, has a disconnection appeared in the human mind between being and non-being. Urbanised, industrialised humanity has lost the balance of the two, focusing almost exclusively on material existence, and denying the vital, essential role of non-being.

More than an empty abyss that bookends our life, non-being is a fundamental and constant part of everyday living. If we look closely, we can see its three variants or phases. Firstly, it is potential; it is the darkness that holds the ground from which everything is born and in which all is latent. When forms appear, potential is with them as they grow and change, continuously carrying possibilities for what they may be. Secondly, it is the decay that works upon all forms and their eventual death. And finally it is regeneration, the transformation of all in the great turning of the cycles of life. Here’s one simple example of the working of the three phases of non-being: A single fly emerges from potential into life. It lives and breeds, carrying its potential forward in its offspring and decaying as it nears the end of its life. One day it is caught in the web of a spider. Choking in the web, it is eaten by the spider. The fly in death is transformed into food and regeneration for the spider, into energy that becomes a part of the spider itself which in turn propels its life and eventual death.

The interplay of being and non-being is the basis of temporal reality and its product is change, constant change. When we meditate on this process, it can be immensely healing and comforting. There is a wild beauty in the processes of life and no part is out of place, nothing that is isolated or alone but everything has a reason and purpose. Seen in this way we cease to be angst-ridden by existence, but are active participants in a dynamic and creative Whole. The only danger is in thinking and acting as if somehow disconnected from this, as if the reality of life, its intimacy and integrity, doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, there is much of that presently in our world.

I think the young man in the cafe was right – we do go to a place of love and light when we die. But then we are in this place when we are alive too, even under the heaviest weight of suffering. We just have to open our eyes and look.