Restoring the Earth

Auroville Today: Tell us how you came to the Findhorn community. 

Alan Watson Featherstone: I moved to Findhorn in 1978 drawn by their work of co-creation with nature, and the spirit, intelligence, consciousness and purpose in nature. It resonated in my heart. One of the things that Findhorn and Auroville have in common is that they conceive of us as spiritual beings in physical form. Our mission here on earth is to make higher spiritual consciousness manifest in our daily actions, work and relationships, and to bring into being something that hasn’t existed before. 

Since being in Findhorn I’ve discovered that by following the path of our heart we discover our true potential as human beings. 

I had the standard career trajectory in Findhorn. I worked in various departments, served on the Core Group and as a Trustee, and organized big conferences. All this prepared me for my life work. 

Say more about your life work.

My life work has two aspects. Firstly, to know my spiritual self, my true identity, that’s the personal part. Secondly, to be of service, to help transform the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. I have been helping to heal and transform nature in many forms; by working in the garden, by co-creating with nature and the power of love, setting up recycling programmes, growing sprouts in Findhorn kitchen. I published the Findhorn Nature calendar and Trees for Life calendars for many years. Then I began work on restoring the Caledonian Forest where my prime purpose is healing the relationship between humans and nature by restoring a highly degraded ecosystem to its natural state of diversity, abundance and health as a wild forest. 

Auroville was hugely influential along the way. I first heard of Auroville when I arrived in Findhorn from Eric Franciscus who had lived here for 9 months. It sounded interesting but I didn’t really connect then. However, in 1984, around the time I felt called to do something for the dying Caledonian Forest, I started finding brochures and leaflets about Auroville and they grabbed me. I also had a series of dreams about Auroville. They culminated in one dream where I got into the car belonging to Eric and fell asleep. The car stopped and Eric said ‘We are here’ and I was in Auroville. 

I had no money at the time, but I believe in the laws of manifestation, that if it’s meant to be it will come, it will happen. I was in my room when I got a knock on the door saying I had won £1000 in a Greenpeace raffle, and that was how I able to come to Auroville. 

I arrived here in February 1985 and was hosted by Jan and Johnny in Fertile. Jan had spent 9 months in Findhorn and she wanted to return that hospitality. She took me around, introduced me to people and got me sorted. I worked with Walter and Tine in their tree nursery at Shakti. I became deeply touched by Auroville and what it had achieved by 1985. It was young forests on Auroville lands and all the surrounding village land was red earth, and you could still see canyons with no vegetation in them. It was tremendously inspiring and touching to see the dedication and commitment of those living in the Greenbelt. They drilled their own wells, guarded trees at night to stop villagers cutting them down. When you do that, nature responds. Now it’s all green. I thought that if they can do this in Auroville where there is no top soil and lateritic pan everywhere and ten months of the year is without rain, we can certainly do it in Scotland where it rains all the time and there is topsoil, albeit leached and poor. 

After that time in Auroville I stayed connected. Periodically I would buy books on ecology and send them with people who were going to Auroville. There was more of an ongoing exchange then.

In 1989 Paul Blanchflower got in touch with me. He had been in Fertile and heard that I was regenerating the Caledonian Forest. At the time, he was studying for a forestry degree in Edinburgh University and had to do a field project for his final year. So he did a study on the first 50 hectares of overgrazed seedlings that we were about to fence for regeneration. His research showed that 100,000 Scots Pine seedlings had germinated naturally in the area from mature trees, but were unable to grow because of the pressure of too many deer eating them all. My vision of restoring a big area in Highlands with native trees touched Paul a lot. After he graduated, he came back to Auroville and started championing the growing of native trees here. 

I came back to Auroville in 1998 and went seed collecting with Paul and Joss in Gingee and learnt more about their work, how they were trying to bring back the Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest and replace ‘work’ trees and non-natives. It had parallels with what I was doing on a different continent. We were a wave of humanity with a new consciousness that I would describe as being the ‘givers’ as distinct from the ‘leavers’ or ‘takers’ as defined by Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael. ‘Givers’ is my term for people giving life back to the earth via our ecological restoration work, through our hands and the power of our hearts. 

I was formulating a dream: that the 21st Century would be about restoring the Earth, where people of all cultures and nations would help heal our wounded world and revitalise degraded ecosystems. The work I was engaged in with Trees for Life and the greenwork in Auroville were two of the pioneering projects to prepare the way for that. 

In 2002 I helped to organise the ‘Restore The Earth’ conference in Findhorn. Joss, Anita and Paul came and give presentations of their work here as part of that conference. It feels like a lot of cross pollination and fertilisation has happened between Auroville’s greenwork and Findhorn and Trees for Life. 

Tell us more about ecological restoration and ‘rewilding’.

Humans have destructively affected ecosystems; exploiting them to death or near extinction. This was summarised by Chateaubriand as ‘forests precede civilisations, deserts follow them’. 

We operate under the illusion that we are not connected to nature. That’s at the heart of many of the problems of our culture in the world. If one positive thing comes from this coronavirus pandemic, it is that we are all connected. What happens in one part of world spreads rapidly and what we do to nature comes back to bite us. The theory is this virus started in markets selling wild animals...

Ecological restoration or ‘rewilding’ is a conscious attempt to turn the tide of destruction: to reconnect the strands in the web of life and to restore diversity and abundance. To step back from what the American writer David Ehrenfeld called the ‘the arrogance of humanism’, the idea that we humans are the pinnacle of nature and know better. Ecological restoration on a significant scale has never been attempted before. Nature has taken millions of years to evolve to its present level of complexity, abundance and interdependence and we need to create space for that to continue on the planet and allow all other beings to continue their evolutionary journey, instead of harnessing them all for human greed. 

Rewilding is about allowing space for nature. For example, we need to ensure there is enough natural habitat, large spaces, for species such as tigers to flourish at the top of food webs. By implication humans have to shrink their demands on the planet. It’s not just about planting trees or bringing back species but making conscious choices to minimise our effects on world. For rewilding and restoration to be successful we have to rein in humanity and find a way to live simply, to put into practice Gandhi’s saying that “the earth has enough for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed”. It’s why I became vegan 40 years ago, why I live in an eco-village and buy few things, and they are often second-hand. 

What about the impact of climate change? 

The mainstream modern day capitalist society is racing to the cliff edge of self-destruction. Its days are numbered; the question is, how is it going to change? It could be a gentle graceful change or a catastrophic one. However, the choices made collectively over the past decades point to a catastrophic one. Since 9/11 I am asking, are we ready? Are Findhorn and Auroville ready? We know what needs to be done on the physical level with wind power, permaculture, recycling etc. But are there strong enough spiritual practices? Are we ready to shift from a culture of fear, control and ‘power over’ – power over others, and over Nature – to a new culture seeking to incarnate the supramental based on love and values of the heart, which liberates the power within each one of us. Are we strong enough to stand solid and true amongst the approaching chaos? I don’t know the answer to that. 

We need to take steps to be as prepared as we can be for whatever comes along. After 9/11 we had a chance, it could have been a pivot point if we built on the love, care and community cohesion that was present for a short while, but other forces quickly took over, the war on terror etc. We were not strong enough in love and spirit to hold that space. Now we have another opportunity with the coronavirus. It is time to break through or break down. At present, the forces of fear are running the show. We have to make personal choices to live by the heart and not give way to fear. 

What’s it like being back in Auroville?

It’s quite sobering and shocking to me that somehow I’ve let twenty two years go by since my last visit to Auroville! In some ways the community is physically almost unrecognisable. There is green everywhere and it’s not just on Auroville lands but it has spilled over to surrounding lands, so the huge contrasts of the past are not so obvious now. 

The community has grown in diversity and sophistication, and technology has advanced. In 1985 pushbikes were the main transport, now it’s mostly motorbikes. The spirit of the place is still here, though, the commitment to fulfilling the vision of Mother, to experiment with different new ways, to strive for unity through all the challenges on the way. The challenge now is similar to that which Findhorn faces: not to rest on your laurels, on what you have already achieved, but to remember what your real work is: to be the city of dawn, an experiment in human unity, a laboratory for the supramental. 

You have a life here now that is quite comfortable. The risk is people get into a rut and don’t apply as much commitment and dedication to a higher purpose, to manifesting a higher vision. In Findhorn and Auroville we have laid the groundwork for massive changes ahead. Peter Caddy, one of the Findhorn founders, saw Findhorn as a training centre for world servers and I see Auroville doing the same thing, even if it is not articulated.  Mother described Auroville as the City of Dawn and Eileen Caddy, another of the Founders of Findhorn, described Findhorn as a City of Light, so we are both engaged in the same work.

The work of places like Auroville and Findhorn is to be centres of sanity in times of madness, islands of hope and beacons of positivity that work for all.