Refugia are the small sheltered places, a valley, a pool, the lee of a rock, where life survives a catastrophe and from which it spreads out again once conditions change. The American philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore turned the ecological idea into a way of living through the ecological crisis: when we cannot stop the destruction ourselves, we can make our lives, homes, groups and practices into places where what matters is kept alive. In Therapeutic Shamanism that fits a path of service: facing the state of the world without withdrawing from it, and keeping alive, in small and practical ways, the right relationship with the living world that our culture has forgotten.
What are refugia in ecology? #
Places where life holds on. The word is the plural of the Latin refugium, a place of refuge. Ecologists use it for habitats that living things retreat to, persist in, and can later spread out from when the surrounding conditions change.1 The best-known are the glacial refugia of the Ice Ages, sheltered pockets where plants and animals survived whilst ice and cold covered the land around them, and from which they recolonised it as the ice retreated. Conservationists now look for climate change refugia, places likely to stay relatively stable as the climate warms, because protecting them may give many species their best chance.
Put simply, a refugium is a sanctuary where life can cling on through hard times. In an ice age, or in a time of extreme heat, it might be a little sheltered valley where life holds on until times change, and from which it can start to emerge again.
Who is Kathleen Dean Moore? #
An American environmental philosopher and nature writer. She joined the philosophy faculty at Oregon State University in 1977, after a doctorate at the University of Colorado, chaired its philosophy department from 1992 to 2000, and was named a Distinguished Professor in 2009. She co-founded, and for many years directed, the university’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word. Her essay collections include Riverwalking, Holdfast, which won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, The Pine Island Paradox and Wild Comfort.2
Her growing alarm at the climate and extinction crises led her to leave the university to write and speak full-time about the moral urgency of action. With the philosopher Michael P. Nelson she edited Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (2010), with a foreword by Desmond Tutu, and she went on to write Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016), the book in which she writes about refugia. She lives and writes in Corvallis, Oregon, and at a cabin in Alaska.2
How does Moore use the idea of refugia? #
Through the story of Mount St Helens. When the volcano in Washington State erupted in 1980, the scientists who first flew in found every tree stripped and every stream choked with ash, and thought nothing would grow there again in their lifetimes; any new life, they assumed, would have to drift in slowly from the edges. Thirty-five years later the same scientists were on their knees among moss and lupines. The blast had passed over small places in the lee of rocks and logs, a bed of moss under a rotting log, a vole’s nest under a boulder, algae and dragonfly larvae between stones in a buried stream, and from these “places of safety where life endures” the forests and meadows had come back.3
Moore tells this story to distraught students who cannot see what they could do against so much destruction. Her answer is that our work is to create refugia: “refugia of the imagination”, places where ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow, and small pockets of flourishing, by making ourselves into overhanging rock ledges that protect life. New ways of living, she writes, will spread not from the edges over centuries, but from small pockets of good work shaped by an understanding that all life is interdependent.3
The idea has travelled. The grief teacher Francis Weller took it from Moore’s book and made it part of what he calls the medicine for the Long Dark, the hard times we are living through: friendship and community as places of refuge, and the conviction, in his words, that “We can become a refugia.”4 See Who is Francis Weller, and what does he teach about grief?
How can someone become a refugium? #
In ordinary, practical ways. Moore’s own suggestions run in three directions. We can create new pockets of flourishing: a bicycle cooperative, a seed-sharing community, a wildlife sanctuary on spare ground, raising butterflies with children, teaching someone to sew. We can restore what has been damaged: plant a riverbank, breach a dam, introduce the neighbours to one another’s children. And, maybe most effective of all, we can protect the refugia that already exist, the marshy ditch behind the shopping centre, the hedges in the neighbourhood, and refuse to take part in what is wrong.5
There are many ways of being an activist, and not all of them are obviously spiritual; they include everything from lifestyle choices to campaigning and volunteering, and all of them matter.6 One suggestion for how to live, whatever else a life involves, is to find the true stories of your Soul, let your Adult Soul shape your life, and from that place find ways to be of service; another is to find the things in the natural world that you love, and fight for them.7 See How does animism respond to eco-despair, and why is activism part of the path?
How does the idea fit with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
The books do not use the word, but the idea sits closely with the published teaching in three ways.
First, it begins with facing things. Turning despair around means first standing and facing things as they really are and feeling our feelings about them, being “the shamans, the people in the tribe who are prepared to see the things that most other people prefer to avoid.” Then the energy of despair can be turned into empowerment and a determination to act, not by withdrawing from the world but by taking our place in it and being of service.8 A refugium is a very concrete form that service can take.
Second, it is not the whole answer, and does not pretend to be. Campaigning, legislating, lifestyle changes and protecting habitats are vital emergency measures, like antibiotics for an infection; the underlying cause is a culture that has forgotten how to live in right relationship, and the remedy for that has to be learnt from societies that were healthy, which means hunter-gatherer peoples and their shamans.9 A refugium is a place where that older knowledge can be kept, lived and passed on.
Third, it has happened before. Through all the dark centuries since the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer there were always people who still felt and showed compassion and love, and countless acts of kindness; they were “candles in that darkness”.10 Shamanism itself survived this way. For a long time it was systematically and actively persecuted by Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer, and the people who held its knowledge and teachings through thousands of years of dark times, and passed the torch on, acted as refugia. Those teachings picked up a good deal of Fallen, hierarchical thinking along the way, and the debt of gratitude owed to the people who kept them alive is immense. Now times have changed, and, as refugia do when conditions change, shamanism is starting to emerge again. See Why have shamans been persecuted, and what happened to shamanism under states and world religions? See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
