The next few days are a sacred time – Halloween, All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, Dia de los Muertos, Samhain. The veil between worlds is thin, and that lack of border brings ancestors closer to us. It’s a time to honor those who have passed over, remember lost loved ones. What we don’t often do, though, is acknowledge entire species who have disappeared from our world. Nor do we mourn the massive loss of biodiversity in our lifetime in the same way we grieve for other humans. What if we extended our spiritual work during these holy days to include the non-human species we share this world with?
What is Samhain?
While Halloween is all about costumes and candy now, it was originally All Hallows Eve, the night before All Saints Day, when Christians honored all their saints, martyrs, and departed loved ones. Whether All Hallows Eve was based on an ancient Celtic harvest festival, the Gaelic Samhain, or if pagans borrowed from the Christians when they made Samhain part of the modern Wheel of the Year, is disputed and it doesn’t really matter. But wherever it came from, Samhain, as I know it from my Wiccan and Druidic practices, provides a context in which we can all look at our relationship with the natural world today.
Samhain means “summer’s end,” and marks the start of what the Celts considered the dark half of the year. It was the end of the grazing season when all but the best breeding stock were slaughtered before winter. It was also the time when the last of the crops were brought in. Irish legend says that crops left in the field after Samhain belonged to the faeries, so better harvest what you need before then. Offerings and sacrifices were made to the fae, the ancestors, and those who passed through the veil. And then came the time of rest and renewal in the darkness.
A fallow field is one that is allowed to lie idle, resting, to restore fertility. We also use fallow to describe times of dormancy and idleness, such as when a writer is taking a break from writing. The void of the fallow times is often associated with darkness.
In his book, An Immense World, Ed Yong writes about our problematic relationship with the dark. Humans, he points out, have crappy vision at night compared to most mammals. We’ve become culturally diurnal, too. Light for us symbolizes what is good and safe. Light is hope, progress, and knowledge. We even call our spiritual healers “lightworkers.”
Darkness, on the other hand, is associated with danger, stagnation, ignorance, despair, and evil. We have to shine light everywhere to overcome the darkness, both figuratively and literally. We light up the night! And the more we do, the more we not only isolate ourselves from the rest of the natural world, but the more we harm those who rely on the dark.
Migrating Birds
The daily and seasonal rhythms of light and dark have existed throughout four billion years of evolutionary history and we wrecked it in the nineteenth century with light at night. During the last few weeks, I’ve been sadly watching the Twitter feed of Wild Bird Fund, the main bird rehabilitator in New York City. Fall migration time brings on the height of bird deaths due to window strikes. Some survive the impact, and Wild Bird Fund’s social media is desperately trying to convince people to look for stunned birds on the sidewalk and bring them in for care.
You see, many of these birds are on the move at night to cover the hundreds of miles to their winter territories. As they pass through the city – through, not over, because skyscrapers are higher than they fly – as they pass through, they are confused by office buildings which are empty of people but lit up anyway. And all that reflective glass that is so pleasing to the human eye? Death trap for birds.
It’s heartbreaking to see pictures of dead birds littering the sidewalks around those buildings, but that’s the reality many fall mornings. And many of the birds that make it to Wild Bird Fund representant increasingly rare species. Posts I looked at showed scarlet tanagers, northern flickers, brown creepers, ruby crowned kinglets, sharp-shinned hawks, woodcocks, and eastern whippoorwills. It happens in cities everywhere. I just happen to know the Wild Bird Fund folks through my wildlife rehab connections in the state. Even up here, where light pollution is so much less of a problem, bird rehabbers see victims from window strikes. Many, like a downy woodpecker who came to me after hitting a neighbor’s window last spring, don’t survive the head trauma.
Fallow times and species recovery
So the dark half of the year begins with humans actively fighting to stay in the light and as a result harming other beings. We’ve lost our spiritual connection with the darkness and no longer understand the importance of the fallow times. As a frequently overwhelmed and burnt out feeling human, I can attest to the downside of not allowing space for rest and renewal, but we keep going anyway. And just like we want to keep our own lives in a constant state of productivity, we do the same with the land. If it isn’t serving us, it has no value. But what wildlife needs is land that is fallow for decades, untouched by humans or non-native grazers. It’s what biologist E.O. Wilson advocated for in his Half Earth project, setting aside half of the earth for everyone but us humans.
Did you know that domestic livestock like cattle and sheep are one of the main drivers of habitat loss? Add onto that the impacts of lethal predator control, and we have native species disappearing. Cattle ranchers in the American Southwest are responsible for the near-extinction of the jaguar and the Mexican grey wolf there, and they are the most vocal opponents of reintroduction. If you’re a meat-eater, please keep in mind that the true cost of your steak includes the loss of these and other species.
There is little hope for the renewal of species that have been lost. No fallow times in which they can be restored. Most often the response to dwindling numbers is to consider them gone and use the land for something else. No renewal. Just gone.
Extinctions
In the U.S., protections provided by the Endangered Species Act have helped save some of our native wildlife before they disappeared forever, but for others, protections came too late. Just this year, U.S. Fish and Wildlife removed 23 species from the endangered species list because they are just gone. There was one plant and 22 animal species, including one you may have heard of, the ivory-billed woodpecker. Another bird, the Bachman’s warbler, was also declared extinct, along with eight freshwater mussels and two fish species from the U.S. mainland. The final ten were from Hawai’i and Guam, part of more than 650 endangered species of plants and animals found on those Pacific Islands and nowhere else. Beautiful Hawai’i is sadly known as the extinction capital of the world.
I had just planned on talking about how we might mourn those 23 species, but a couple of weeks ago World Wildlife Fund released their Living Planet Report for 2022. The news was not good. Monitored wildlife populations around the world decreased an average of 69% since 1970. The speed and scale of biodiversity loss is staggering.
There’s very little in my religious and spiritual background, even as an Earth-honoring pagan, to help me wrap my head and my heart around these kinds of losses. I’m grateful for an emerging spiritual ecology movement that is creating a path to both healing our fractured relationship with nature and expanding our sense of what is possible when it comes to living in harmony with the Earth. But even there, I find little discussion of how we might grieve global biodiversity loss and how we can recognize all beings as ancestors to be honored. One of my seminary deans and now friend, Reverend Sarah Bowen, recently released a wonderful book called Sacred Sendoffs which explores our relationships with and loss of everyone from our beloved pets to the wild creatures. Still, though, she focuses on individual animals, not whole species. My generation and those younger have never seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. We don’t know what we’ve lost. How can we mourn them?
I was contemplating all of this when I began to consider the Samhain ritual I will be offering online tonight. Even the ancient ways I and my fellow pagans aspire to reconnect with don’t meet my needs. How could they? Two thousand years ago, when the Celts were still around and the Earth’s human population was only around 300 million, E.O. Wilson’s half earth idea was probably reality. Recreating ancient festivals like Samhain ties us to the past and, for those of us with European roots, our ancestors. But they don’t meet our needs in this era of cascading ecological crises nor do they provide a framework for grappling with the spiritual dilemmas that come with them. So I took a look at Samhain while present with my own desire for interconnection and the grief I felt over the biodiversity we’re losing.
In her contribution to the book Order of the Sacred Earth, Kristal Parks, a long-time animal activist, wrote, “Let us do eco-justice from the point of view, and in collaboration with, Mother Earth and Her critters. They have knowledge and abilities we can’t even begin to imagine and are worthy to be our mentors and elders.” Our mentors and elders. Now I’m thinking about the Earth’s beings as not only elders but ancestors. If we are all interconnected, aren’t all beings my ancestors? With that simple shift of perspective, I can easily include an honoring of species lost in my Samhain ritual.
Challenges to recovery
But is that enough?
I say no. I don’t think holding people in their grief over species loss, or even, for some, letting them know there was a loss that they might need to grieve in the first place, goes nearly far enough. Because we really need to look to the future.
I saw a great tweet that I assumed was written by some indigenous spiritual leader, but it turned out the author, Adam Grant, is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of Business. He tweeted that too many people spend their lives being dutiful descendants instead of good ancestors.
Like, whoa.
That was the missing piece for me. Interconnected, I am an ancestor to all future life on Earth. I thought about what kind of ancestor I would be if I watched the collapse of life on this planet and didn’t at least try to do something. And, in my model of interconnection, that means supporting all life, all species, the environment, whatever and whoever, so all life is flourishing. That’s the world I want to leave to my descendants, human and non-human alike.
That Living Planet Report put it bluntly. We know that the health of our planet is declining, and we know why. We also know that we have the knowledge and means to address biodiversity loss.
They’re not wrong. We just need to do it.
I’ve been fascinated by jaguars since 2015 when I was learning about the Maya and their reverence of jaguars in my shamanic studies. At the same time, video was released of a jaguar, who they call El Jefe, wandering in Arizona. Jaguars are nocturnal and elusive, so just getting that video was a big deal, but in Arizona it was amazing.
Jaguars once ranged from Argentina all the way to the Grand Canyon, but now our border with Mexico is also our border with the jaguars. They were a top predator in the Southwest, but those predator control programs I mentioned earlier, along with trophy hunting, wiped out their populations. The last female jaguar in the U.S. was killed in Arizona in 1949.
El Jefe, and a couple other males who ventured across the border since him, sparked hope that jaguars might return to this country. But those males have to be able to reach the females south of the border to increase that population in northern Mexico before there are enough of them to spread out. A male’s home range can be up to 400 square miles, and it is essential it all stays connected.
In 2021, the border wall constructed across Guadalupe Canyon cut off one of only two corridors those jaguars were known to travel between the U.S. and Mexico. Natural northward expansion can happen, but there needs to be a big, protected area for them and all the other beings who are part of their ecosystem. But we humans would have to get past our need for security from each other along artificial boundaries and just open it all up.
If we could leave a huge swath of land alone , fallow, the jaguars will do their thing and a mythological, philosophical, and cultural icon of power and connection to spirit will be restored.
If.
Another icon is the wolf, and the Mexican gray wolf is another sad story from the U.S. Southwest. Mexican wolves are the rarest subspecies of gray wolves in North America. They’ve been around since the last ice age, but European settlers pretty much killed them off just decades after arriving in the Southwest, to protect their livestock. The last wild Mexican wolves, just seven of them, where taken into captivity in the late 1970s in a last-ditch effort to keep the species from disappearing completely. The Mexican wolves alive today are all descendants of those seven.
Talk about knowing who your ancestors are.
They say if you want to know how extreme an extinction crisis is, look at how extreme the recovery efforts are. It’s like that for Mexican wolves. They reintroduced the wolves in Arizona in 1998 but were forced to limit their territory to satisfy complaining ranchers who think the recovery program is a tool to remove people from the landscape. Remember how I said humans don’t want land around they can’t use?
Anyway, the wolves are hanging in there, but their limited numbers also limit genetic diversity in the packs. So the extremes to which they are going to help them recover got even more extreme. Wolf pups bred in captivity are being snuck into wild wolf dens to be fostered by the pack and introduce new genes. The pups travel by plane, car, and backpack to get to their new homes. Last year, one pup came from the Wolf Conservation Center downstate.
Jaguars and Mexican gray wolves are just two examples of the myriad conservation efforts happening now. But there is never enough money, never enough space, and too much human indifference if not, like for the jaguars and wolves, downright hate.
Lacking significant wealth or, to be real, any wealth at all, I can’t do much about the resource shortage faced by conservationists. But I work locally, for the turtles, whose conservation challenges I’ll save for another time. And I consider how a ritual reminiscent of ancient times might shift some of that indifference towards love. Because I truly believe, if enough of us love enough, we might find it in our hearts to step aside and give other species the land that has always, really, been theirs.
Lying fallow
Maybe it starts with including 23 lost-forever species with our loved ones in our Samhain remembering. From there, maybe we find something in our spirituality that helps us appreciate the dark half of the year we are heading into and its significance in the broader ecological sense. And maybe, hopefully before it’s too late, we’ll let half the Earth lie fallow, to rest, renewing, until life is restored and those nearly lost will again see the light.