The ERI Blog

The three days in ‘short-term guest’ involvement at Findhorn (July14 – 16), on the Firth of Moray, in far north-eastern Scotland, gave me a good insight into Findhorn as a major eco-centre, with a strong base in eco-spirituality. In fact, along with my week in Schumacher College (Devon, UK) in late 2008, it seemed that such a place acts as a base for a sort of modern monastic movement.

The daily rhythms are monastic, with bells pealing to mark the passing time, contemplation (meditation) and group ritual (prayer, singing, chanting, dance, music) are built into the day, meals are in common, domestic tasks are undertaken by all members and guests, arts and crafts thrive, and decisions are made largely through consensus.

Findhorn has also become a hub for several entrepreneurial activities, residential projects, as well as community and social activism, all within eco-friendly ethical frameworks and policies. You pass the handsome stone ruins of the old abbey as you approach Findhorn, as if to point to the continuity. And the talk at the (magnificent vegetarian) meals is of spiritual journeys, personal conversions and great dreams (or what we used to call personal vocations).

Most guests are passing through, but there is no problem recruiting staff, who stay for varying lengths of time to serve the needs of guests, and of the place itself. Crops are grown, ideas are nourished, and the local wildlife flourishes. I guess such eco-monasteries arise, because the world needs them, now.

Sometimes an email will arrive on my screen like a breath of fresh air. Daniel Devincenzi, from the City of Beautiful Breezes (Buenos Aires), sent me one with the refreshing title you see above. Isn’t that an idea to move the Edmund Rice Network to work?

Colegio Cardenal Newman (yes, he who is moving towards beatification as you read this) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has adopted a five-point action plan to turn this title into a project for their school. Of course, they are beginning with an audit, and the staff and students are planning to set goals for the college in the following areas:
• Energy
• Water
• Purchasing and Waste
• Transport
• Building and Environment

You can see immediately how every area of the school curriculum can be involved in this. What subject does not touch on our environment? Let Colegio Cardenal Newman be the first to aim for sustainability so clearly, but let’s all be inspired to move in the same direction!

Whilst the audit is taking place enthusiastic students are already collecting waste paper from each classroom to be recycled . The sale of this paper will contribute towards the running costs of one of our major public children’s hospital – Hospital Garrahan – www.vaporlospibes.com.ar

On a flying visit to Auckland, in late May 2009, I had six energising encounters – Hayden Kingdon (religious studies, St Peter’s), Damaris Kingdon (Edmund Rice Network), Sam Drumm (social justice), all at St Peter’s, and the two dynamic communities in Queen Mary Road, the Brothers and the young lay community. The St Peter’s visit said to me that an Edmund Rice school can ‘embed’ many other vital components of the Edmund Rice movement – to their mutual benefit. Many of our Indian schools do this superbly well too.

The sixth encounter? I was not in a camera-clicking mode that day, and the only photo I took was of Sam under this magnificent pohutukawa tree, that clings to the rocky substrate on which St Peter’s College is perched. While Sam is a striking enough subject in his own right, it was the tree that caught my attention. How old is it? Was it there before they built the school?

Pohutukawas hang on to the rocky cliffs around New Zealand’s coasts. Their deep red blossoms (at Christmas time, in full summer), their shaggy trunks, their contorted limbs, give the coastline a unique character. St Peter’s is gifted with this old grandfather tree, speaking Maori, speaking of the local ecosystem, speaking of a future we can fashion together.

In 2006, when I first visited the site of the present novitiate in Bhopal, it was an empty soggy field, with one huge mango tree and a line of magnificent mohu’a trees across it, like shaggy green elephants. Whatever plans I heard, preserving those trees were part of them. It was as if they were already seen as nurturing future Brothers, already entrusted with new life.

In 2008, one low building lay in their shade, housing nearly twenty Brothers. The grandfather mango tree provided a shady vestibule. The mohu’a trees provided birds and fruit bats, nests and roosts, and watched as the young Brothers planted new trees around the boundaries.

In 2009, a two-storey building, in pink and deep red, stands in the shade of the old trees. Other religious groups send their novices to stay there, for periods of study, and a new Brothers’ community is forming in the ‘old’ novitiate building, south of the trees. The blue jays have nested there; the fruit bats still rest there during the heat of the day; and a new generation of novices is learning what the trees have to offer them.

Tiwari, a friend of the Bow Bazar community of Brothers, spent some time one Saturday morning sharing his spirituality with them. He told this story of Lord Vishnu, who was wondering who, of all his millions of devotees, was the most devout.

Vishnu sent his assistant around the world to find the most devout disciple. After strenuous searching, the assistant returned, having narrowed it down to two men. Each had spent all his adult life meditating, without deviation, under a shady tree. And each had asked one question of the assistant: “How long will it be before I see Lord Vishnu? When will he show himself to me?”

Vishnu said: “When a thousand years have passed, for each leaf on the tree above you, then I will come.” One man, when he heard the answer, stood up, rolled up his mat, and returned to his business; he said, “I will never see God.” The other, when he heard the answer, sprang up and began to dance, he was so happy.

When the noisy swirl of day students has emptied the playground of St Joseph’s Bow Bazar, in downtown Kolkata, a quieter little procession of rather ragged kids enters the roomy classrooms. These are the Ashivad students and their clothes, though clean, comes from the crushed pile of belongings that their families keep beside them on the street, where they live and sleep. I had the privilege of trying to teach them a few hours of art, thought I spoke no Hindi, and they very little English.

I’d set up a bowl of fruit and was encouraging them to try sketching it. I spent some time demonstrating shading to suggest volume, and urged them (with mime and drama) to ‘fill the whole space’ with their lines, as I’d been taught, many decades ago. As I wandered around the room, I noticed ‘the quiet Mohammad’ (there were three other Mohammads in the class) was in fact using only a tiny fraction of his page; he’d drawn a small crescent for the bowl, and was filling it with neat little circles and fruit shapes.

He listened solemnly to my urgings to sweep his pencil around the whole page, then went back to his precision work. It was only later, when we were collecting and displaying their sketches, that the full force of what I’d nearly wrecked struck me. The quiet Mohammad had produced a classic ‘miniature’, such as I’d been admiring in exhibitions of Moghul Empire art in the museums of Delhi and Kolkata, with just their sense of perspective and spacing, and exquisite detail. The streets of Kolkata continue to produce wonderful “things both new and old”.

Dum Dum Road is one of the most choked arteries in Kolkata’s network, struggling with the traffic running between Dum Dum Station (north end of the Metro) and the airport, plus the usual vendors and commercial centres that line its narrow strip of bitumen. Yet immediately to the west of Dum Dum Road, behind a shielding wall, St Mary’s offers its visitors an eco-park – local and introduced trees, green grass, wetlands, a fish farm, poultry run and local birds. A succession of keen staff and students have ensured the grounds are loved and cherished.

The most recent cyclone flattened ten of the large trees, some of them already rotten with age and termites. But Kolkata is a monsoonal city, built on the largest delta in the world, so it is well and truly used to such violent happenings. Buildings intact, they found the next generation of trees, already planted, were flourishing in the rainy season. As in a natural forest, the extra light created by the fall of giants gave a boost to the younger ones waiting in the shadows.

It’s a compliment to any eco-park that it can cope with the challenges of the seasons. In fact, it’s a test of its success. It’s not a matter of being able to predict the future perfectly, it’s the art (even the spirituality) that recognises and honours nature’s way of ensuring a future, for us all.

Tucked away in the south-east corner of Jarkhand, Bongera is a collection of villages where some of the poorest children we teach walk, in sandals or bare feet, upwards of an hour each day to school. Apart from the rice their families may grow in the shallower valleys, they rely on the forests around them for most of their other needs, including whatever income they can make from harvesting resin (from lakh insects) or wild fruit.

Yet the forest is in a weakened state, with grazing animals making larger and larger clearings, more fields being cleared, and serious fighting between government forces and rebels (Naxalites) destroying further stretches of it. Most of these children have not been to a city, and are learning both Hindi and English (slowly) as new languages at school. They depend on the forest, and the forest is shrinking.

Some will break away to the city, as they grow older, for jobs and income. There they will find the country is desperate for green spaces, surviving ecosystems, jungle. What will it take for the value of their forests to be recognised by the whole country, and their role as its guardians and caretakers amply rewarded, so that the people of Bongera are honoured as those who maintain carbon sinks, oxygen supplies and wilderness for their fellow citizens?

Two big schools, St Patrick’s and St Vincent’s, and a trades-training centre, are now embedded in two eco-parks, thanks to the work of Brother Frank Gale, many young men training to be Brothers, and the local staff and students. Ponds, trees, a vigorous undergrowth, and wildlife give a glimpse of the local ecosystem that almost disappeared when Asansol emerged as one of the most industrialised cities of West Bengal. Given some big-hearted allies, the jungle can always come back!

To see kingfishers pouncing on their prey, or jackals and hawks hunting through these forests, might be reward enough. But these schools are giving the whole city lungs, and restoring to it some soul. The locals love to walk here, and most take pride in such a green space. But not all!

There are some who dump their domestic garbage over the walls, into these eco-parks. So the work is never done – the challenge is to speak up for the forest, and demand some justice for these local species. Dialogue, confrontation, persuasion, outrage – Frank brings all these to bear on the offenders; every green space needs such an advocate!

Kurseong, at the far north end of West Bengal, clings to the steep slopes where the Himalayas rise from the plains of the Ganga. In the rainy season, one falls to sleep here to the sounds of pouring water, as the white streams rush down their narrow gullies. Goethals Memorial High School, a boys boarding school, and the new Open School, for local students, are wedged into the side of these hills.

Loss of trees here spells landslides. A week after I climbed these slopes, five local people were killed in a landslide, following the heavy rain. What can a school do for its local ecosystem? The answer is obvious.

Brother James Joseph, in his years at Kurseong, together with students, has planted 130,000 trees on these slopes. There is now a forest, harbouring monkeys, rare birds and spectacular wildflowers, all around the school, weaving the handsome stone buildings into the local fabric – and saving the precious soil. Here the whole school teaches – if you would seek its achievement, look around you.