Presented at the Virtual Symposium of Pagan Thought and Practice on March 29, 2025. The symposium is an offering of Commons of Modern Pagans and Spiritual Seekers (COMPASS).
Let’s take a deep breath together and let all that settle.
Hi, I’m Debbie, she/her pronouns, and I’m joining from the Adirondack mountains in northeastern New York, land that was once hunting territory of the Mohawk and once roamed by eastern elk and grey wolves. May the spirit of nature be attentive to our intentions for this day.
I’m delighted and humbled to be among you. I‘m not a scientist, not an expert in permaculture or conservation biology, or anything like that. I’m just a wildlife rehabilitator who was called by spirit during a shamanic journey to serve the Earth and was guided to help broken turtles. In responding to that call, I learned how great the need for hands-on care is, because we humans can cause great harm. I believe that we also have an amazing power to heal. And I believe in the power of community, especially when the idea is community is expanded to include the wild beings we share this world with.
It’s lovely to be among Pagans because we may differ in our beliefs, but you’ll probably agree that our common thread is the connection we feel with the Earth and more-than-human life. You may find, like I do, mystery and wonder in wild places, whether that place is deep in the woods or is an unpaved square in a city sidewalk. I’m deeply concerned, though, for our beloved Earth community, because climate change and the extinction crisis are grave threats. I’m going to share ideas from some authors I‘m inspired by, as well as my own experiences in working with wildlife, to explain why I believe protecting biodiversity should be a spiritual imperative for everyone walking a Pagan path. I hope, with a few how-to’s, both mundane and mystical, that you’ll feel inspired to connect with what is my life’s work – to support and protect wild beings and nurture life-affirming ecosystems wherever you find them. And I’m going to tell you why I believe we build strength into our Pagan communities when we do this work together.
While I mostly care for turtles, much of what I’ve learned about the interconnectedness of life, I’ve learned from squirrels. The first animals I had in care after I got my wildlife rehabilitation license were three orphaned gray squirrels. The first time one fell asleep against my chest, I became a staunch defender of squirrels.
Sitting outside and watching squirrels, and whoever else comes by, is my main spiritual practice. When I was in seminary and struggling with the idea of god, goddess, whoever, I spent hours sitting out there. One day I realized that my god was whoever the squirrels’ was. I connected to the animating spirit that keeps life life-ing. Squirrel-watching showed me that conservation work, whether science or activism, mostly happened in the paradigm that humans are here and nature is over there. What countless hours of being right in the middle of all that life energy revealed was that we are not separate from nature and conservation can, and should, happen from the inside out.
It’s not just squirrels out there, of course. There’s this magical variety of life interacting all the time. You know it. It’s the sparkling thing that draws you to the wild. But there aren’t as many sparkly things as there once were. Wild beings make up only 4% of the biomass of mammals on Earth. The rest is livestock and humans. And a fifth of the species that make up that measly 4% is threatened with extinction. If you’re unaware of how rapidly species are disappearing, I suggest Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. There’s a chapter in there about all the bats dying of white nose fungus, which hit me hard because the first places where they were finding all the dead bats were a short drive from my home. I experienced a shocking change of perspective when I realized extinction wasn’t just something that happened to rhinos in Africa, but happens in my own backyard.
I’ve been inspired in my realization that we must shift to a hands-on, caring model of species and ecosystem protection by the writings of Deborah Bird Rose, based on her ethnographic research Australian Aboriginal communities. She wrote “when we highlight the pitiless and destructive qualities of humans, we see the desperate need to find ways to recuperate relational and mutually beneficial sides of the story about who we are and of what we are capable.” In the final years of her life she cared for flying foxes, a large bat species that is going extinct. Just like me with my squirrels, she fed and held flying fox babies, so they felt like they were part of a family. She saw their care as a tender, generous, and compassionate response to human cruelty. She also wrote about the Aboriginal concept of shimmer, which she explained as the visible ancestral power of life, something felt in encounters and relationships with more-than-human beings, and how that shimmer is fading. I feel that, too.
Ecologist and philosopher David Abram is another whose writings I relate to. He explores the way humans have insulated ourselves from the rest of existence and as a result have cut our lives off from the necessary nourishment of contact and interchange with other shapes of life, from, as he wrote, “antlered and loop-tailed and amber-eyed beings whose resplendent weirdness loosens our imaginations.” Reading Abram’s books during my shamanic studies was my first introduction to the concept of animism. I like Graham Harvey’s definition of new animism, “the understanding that the world is a community of persons, most of whom are not human, but all of whom are related.” David Abram calls that shift in perception to experiencing all life as a community of persons, “difficult magic.” He writes about experiencing “the utter weirdness and dark wonder that lives in a deeply place-based relation to the earth,” “the felt sense of being in contact with wakeful forms of sentience that are richly different from own’s own” and “interaction with intelligences that are radically other from one’s own human style of intelligence.” Difficult or not, it’s the magic we must undertake to get on the inside.
The practice of deep ecology is the way I have accessed that magic and the closest I can come to putting a name on my personal spirituality. When I read Animate Earth by the late Stephan Harding, one of the founders of Schumacher College, I understood how deep ecology could be a spiritual practice. Harding learned from Arne Naess, who was the father of deep ecology and proposed each of us develop a personal ecological wisdom. Harding took it further and laid out a path to developing ecological wisdom, by moving from deep experience, to deep questioning, and then to deep commitment. In my work as a wildlife rehabilitator, deep experiences range from the feeling of a baby squirrel resting against my chest to being present at the moment of death for a turtle so badly injured all I could offer was hospice care. Deep experiences are like David Abram described as contact with the resplendent weirdness. I believe deep experiences occur in our rituals, in meditation, in shamanic journeys, and, of course, in everyday moments for Pagans who are spiritually and culturally open to noticing the magic happening around them.
If you’re with me that opportunities for deep experiences are built into our Pagan spirituality and culture, you may understand how my experiences of interconnection led me to question the dominant Western paradigm that humans are separate from nature and why so many humans either fail to notice or don’t care that we’re losing all the beautiful, sparkly weirdness of biodiversity. I made a commitment to try to save at least a small part of it, but not by fencing off a sanctuary and saying keep out. Instead, I invite people in, to have those wonderful, spiritual experiences with other-than-humans that encourage care and shift the story of who we are. Once we’re in, once we’ve performed the difficult magic of expanding our idea of community to include the more-than-human world and feel that we belong in it, we have access to power. I believe the power I draw on is what Starhawk calls “power-from-within” in her book, Dreaming the Dark. In it, Starhawk says how to access power-from-within individually, then how to expand the work into groups, into communities, and how to take action.
I promised I would share some practices and actions you can take to start your questioning or to fulfill your deep commitment to save the Earth’s biodiversity. There are many ways, and many teachers, but these are some that I teach.
First, don’t do anything. I described sitting outside and watching the squirrels. That practice is called a sit spot, and it’s simply going outside and sitting in the same place at close to the same time every day, or every week, depending on your schedule. Just sit there, quietly observing. The more-than-human beings get used to you being there and act like you belong. After a couple of years of sitting every day, the squirrels stopped going around me and just ran across my legs. And then I felt like I belonged. There’s a sense of interconnection, and the possibility of deep experiences, but it is also a practice of what I call disruptive stillness. My realization about the spirit of nature arose in the stillness, when questions can churn, when old mindsets and beliefs are disrupted by observations, and new ones can form.
Next, plant the world you envision. I will admit here to being better with animals than plants, and I hope I never have to survive solely on what I can grow, so I envision the wildlife around me thriving and plant natives for them. There have been numerous studies on how gardening is beneficial to our physical and mental well-being, but gardening with the intention of creating food and habitat for wildlife has a greater impact. One study showed that the benefits increase in spaces with higher biodiversity. Humans thrive when we encounter, as David Abram puts it, “wakeful forms of sentience that are richly different” than our own, enhancing the feeling of belonging in nature and a spiritual sense of interconnection. If we crave the deep experiences afforded by biodiverse spaces, we should do our part to co-create them. My research has focused on doing this work in the typical American suburban backyard, less than an acre, but there are opportunities to engage in cities, too, from a potted plant on a balcony, to community gardens, to volunteering for larger restoration projects, and, of course, in rural areas. I’d guess that most of you are better at growing plants than I am and don’t need advice from me. What I believe is necessary for us, though, is that expanded sense of community, a sensitivity to the needs of more-than-human beings, and acts that disrupt the paradigm that gardens are only for human benefit. We can, I think, shift that paradigm toward ecological wisdom when others witness us creating and interacting with life-affirming ecosystems, large or small. We are well-positioned to lead the way.
While I tend to default to getting my hands dirty, I also use ritual in my inside-out conservation work. In 2022, I felt distressed that twenty of the wolves from Yellowstone, an amazing conservation success story, were killed by hunters in the months since protections were lifted, just outside of the park’s borders. We have no wolves here in New York anymore, they’ve been gone since the late 1800s, but I’ve always been drawn to the mystery and power of wolf packs. While I couldn’t put myself between a wolf and a hunter then, I could put up an energetic shield, so I created a ritual of protection and sent energy into that shield every day for weeks. If we believe in the power of ritual, there is always something we can do. Dana O’Driscoll has a wonderful book of land healing rituals for more ideas. Shamanic journeying is a practice you can use to connect with the land and with the wildlife around you to find out what’s needed and to gather the strength and power to do what is asked of you. I always begin with the practical and make it a point to learn the natural history of more-than-human animals that appear as helping spirits, and what challenges they face in survival. I approach interpreting messages by first asking, “what help do they need?” before I look at how what they shared might help me. It’s one way I stay in a state of reciprocity.
Something that I think needs more attention is the loss we feel when species disappear, when the sparkle of biodiversity fades. We have funerals, wakes, and memorials for our fellow humans, all quite socially acceptable, to allow grief to be witnessed and shared. My questioning has led me to consider who society says we can mourn and what that says about who’s valued. Unfortunately, for most of society, the more-than-human world is not. We’re getting better, I think, about recognizing and empathizing with those mourning pets, but wildlife rehabilitators are usually left being the only ones mourning the losses of their patients, and there are many. I bury half the turtles who are crushed by cars, with a private ritual for each, just me and the Earth. I hope someone will conduct a study, but anecdotally I can share that wildlife rehabilitators have high rates of burnout, emotional breakdown, and suicide. Working with turtles has been particularly emotionally challenging for me, because the positive impact of wildlife rehabilitation on species conservation has only really been documented in turtles. Because of their reproductive strategy, losing a mature turtle can reduce her population for a generation or more. Imagine digging a hole in your backyard for a turtle, knowing that, because you couldn’t save her after someone carelessly ran her over, her ecosystem might not have any turtles in a few years. It’s a grief that needs to be witnessed and held.
I believe public actions of grief for more-than-human beings can shift the social discourse around who is mournable. They also say something about our own vulnerability as a species and how we, like so many other species, may ultimately fail to adapt to a climate changed world. We can publicly acknowledge, through grief rituals, the risk of extinction we share with the more-than-humans. One thing about holding Pagan beliefs is we are already somewhat outside societal norms, so we are well situated to start or continue creating art and memorials to lost biodiversity, and to mourn in public, so that witnessing and holding these losses becomes a shared practice in our communities.
Because of my experience, even with the tough emotions that come with it, I will always promote permitted wildlife rescue and care as a meaningful way to protect and support wild beings. Plus, there aren’t enough of us doing this kind of healing work. Rescue and care offer particularly intimate deep experiences with wildlife because these activities often require physical contact with injured or orphaned animals. I have argued that the deep commitment of dedicated wildlife rehabilitators is its own kind of emerging ecospirituality. I’m not surprised that I encounter many Pagans in wildlife rehabilitation. Not only does it give us access to our felt connection with the Earth, but it is one of the places we find common ground with others with different beliefs, where human diversity and biodiversity can be made safer.
I want to conclude with some thoughts on being part of what is, at this point in time, in this country, a marginalized group, and why I believe that being here, on the edge, is a place of power. David Abram, in an essay entitled The Ecology of Magic, recalls his experience with the shamans of Bali. He notes that they don’t live in the middle of the villages, but rather on the outskirts, where they mediate between humans and the larger community of beings. That’s where we walk, in the liminal space between the dominionists and the wild, and from where we can extend healing hands into both. The practices I shared, plus the many others you may already be engaged with, can and should create opportunities to come together. What I found, when I expanded my sense of community to include the wild beings, was that my human community expanded as well. We find each other when we do the work. And when every wild body matters enough to mourn their loss, we feel how the other humans on the margins with us also matter, and that there is magic in all forms of diversity. We gather in strength on the edges where things still sparkle, affirming life.