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Terravita Books, 2025

ISBN: 979-8992611809

Reviewed by Marian McCain

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When I moved, for family reasons, from a remote property in rural Australia to a 4th floor apartment in downtown San Francisco, one of the  losses I felt most keenly was the total loss of the rich, deep, three-dimensional magnificence of the night sky and its replacement with at most, one or two pale stars. Which is why this author’s use of this huge contrast as a metaphor for our species’ tragic loss of connectivity with the wild world resonated so deeply with me. What he says is so true. Our modern, Western, capitalist/industrial culture has taken us so far away from our native sense of belongingness to this beautiful planet that we can no longer see it for what it really is and are treating it purely as a source of material wealth rather than as our own, greater Self, thereby sowing the seeds of our own destruction. If we continue along this path, the Earth will survive, albeit with a massive loss of life and diversity, but our species will have perished by its own, foolish hand.

Our Judeo-Christian and Islamist religions are part of the problem, depicting as they do a heaven which is above and beyond the Earth – and preferable to it.

If we are to avert this crisis, we need to wake up. And it is good so see one of the signs of this desperately needed awakening, which is a growing number of books like this one that aim to reconnect us, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, to our true heritage as ‘Earthlings’.

Lauren De Boer does this by way of autobiography, chronicling  his family’s break with fundamentalist religion and his own, growing awareness of his belongingness to Nature, seeded at first by his ‘feral’ childhood in rural Iowa and aided hugely in adulthood by his discovery of Creation-Centred Spiritualty, his studies with Matthew Fox and his meetings with luminaries such as Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, all of which led to his taking on the editorship of ‘Earthlight’ magazine from 1996 to 2005.

As he says: “The more I am ‘out in nature’, the more I realize that I am not just in nature. I AM nature. I am the biosphere evolving through me and within me. To spend any time ‘out there’ is to awaken to the reality that we are nature evolving. My inner life is every bit ‘the natural world’ as the wilderness I trek. This is a deeply healing realization.”

It is one thing to come to the intellectual realization that our species is as much intrinsic part of nature as the trees and flowers and fungus, but it is another thing entirely to live our everyday lives out of that knowing. In other words, to use spiritual ecology as a guiding principle underlying all our everyday decisions and actions. And this mode of living is what the author describes in the last section of the book.

I found it an interesting, thought-provoking and useful book.