John P. Clark: Dreaming of liberation and a world beyond domination (ep302)
How might we reimagine education and the primary purposes it serves? What is the significance of having a regenerative revolution? And what does liberation mean—beyond the socially constructed ideas on freedom most of us have come to know?
Listen in as we explore these questions in this episode with John Clark, an eco-communitarian anarchist writer, activist, and educator who lives and works in New Orleans—where his family has been for twelve generations. His most recent book, which we unpack in this conversation, is Between Earth and Empire: From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community.
Embodying his politic of dismantling hierarchies of domination, in 2013, John founded La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology with the goals of promoting social and ecological regeneration, creating a cooperative Earth community, and preventing regional and global ecological collapse. Connect with John by joining the La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology Facebook group and the Dialectical Social Ecology Facebook group.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Prove Me Wrong by Luna Bec
“The irony of this concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is that it is not about a tragedy of the commons; it’s a tragedy of the loss of the commons.”
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Transcript
Note: Green Dreamer is a community-powered multimedia journal exploring our paths to collective healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. The values, views, and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Please do your own additional research on the information, resources, and statistics shared. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: Today, you have a strong stance against all forms of domination, and that's embodied in your political ideologies and through praxis in terms of how you live your life and organize La Terre Institute. I wonder if you could start us off by sharing what it was in your life that led you to see our culture of domination as one of the root causes of a lot of our social and ecological crises.
John Clark: What I'd like to focus on is what really brought me to the book and focus those themes in one direction. That story is told in the chapter called “Do You Know What It Means”? And it's about being in India, where I had a study program—that's where I was when Hurricane Katrina hit: with a group of students studying in India. This came out of an organization I work with which works with Tibetan refugees. Our study group was doing volunteer work with refugees and also doing our own studies.
At the time that the program was going on, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. So we were there, those of us from New Orleans watching the destruction of our city, not knowing what we would come back to. We knew that there was very extensive death and destruction. We had a lot of trouble even getting in touch with our families. I remember sitting in a restaurant on the fourth floor at the top of the Tibetan guesthouse where we were staying. That's the only place where there was television so we could watch the BBC and see what was going on. I was thinking: Who will do what is necessary at this moment? Who will come to New Orleans or come back to New Orleans and do exactly what the community needs at this point?
That was really the turning point in my life. I had been thinking about the system of domination, about the state, about capitalism, about patriarchy, about the technological mega-machine, about human domination of nature and what it was doing to the earth. And I had also studied all sorts of experiments—intentional communities, revolutions, evolutions, various attempts to come to terms with what our species and those in charge of making decisions were doing to our planet. And it was all focused at that time because the disaster was so personal. It came literally to my home. And I wondered, who is going to come and do what is necessary?
So, when I came back to New Orleans, I immediately found a small community of people who had gathered together and were living and working 24 hours a day doing nothing other than exactly what the community needed at that moment. We were cooking food to take to those people who were still in the city and needed food. We were doing volunteer work to take people to hospitals, cut down trees that had fallen on their houses—in other words, we were doing what was needed to fulfill the basic needs of human beings. And, of course, we helped animals also.
There were a lot of needs. And I had this feeling that, for the first time in my life, I really understood what anarchism, or sometimes it's called utopianism, was really about, what it meant to come to terms with the fundamental problems of our community, our human community, and our earth community, and to do exactly what was necessary to make that our life's work, our vocation.
That was really a turning point. I'm a philosophy professor, I'm an activist, I've done this from different points of view, from theory and practice. But at certain times, there is a trauma that wakes you up.
Another thing I've spent a lot of time working on is wisdom traditions. I'm very much interested in traditions like Buddhism and Daoism. The fundamental insight of Buddhism is that you have to wake up. You can read a lot of books, you can join a lot of organizations, you can do many hours of volunteer work, you can write articles, and so forth. You can say all the right things and go through all the right motions. But at a certain point, you need to wake up. You need to know what your condition is in this universe, in this world, and also in your own little community, where you can do the most good. And that was the moment where all of that really dawned on me. Ultimately, it led me to decide to leave the university and to work full-time on the problem of the crisis of the Earth and the crisis of humanity.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing your path. You've noted before that our human community has dissolved and narrowed in scope over time from the whole world to the extended family, to the nuclear family, to the individual, and now even that is dissolving. A lot of us have learned of the economic theory called Tragedy of the Commons, which describes a situation when individuals, who have access to a resource unhampered by social structures or rules that govern access and use, will act independently according to their own self-interest, and contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. This is often used as the justification for things like land ownership and private property. But I wonder if the tragedy here is not rooted in the fact that common spaces and shared resources exist, but rather that there is a lack of community and a narrowing definition of the self. What comes to mind for you when these ideas and dominant presumptions are raised?
John Clark: I wrote a book on the subject called The Tragedy of Common Sense, which is about the tragedy of the commons. What you're saying is the analysis that I follow. Garrett Hardin, a biologist, wrote two rather famous or infamous articles called “Lifeboat Ethics,” which is one of the most widely reprinted essays in introductory philosophy courses, and he wrote the article called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” And this idea of the tragedy of the Commons has been used for very insidious purposes, to support the idea of privatizing everything—and also blaming poor people around the world for the problems of the world, as if population is the only problem and scarcity of resources is the only problem. It's a book that is basically wrong on everything that it says. And what's right is really the commons.
So, the reason why I called the book The Tragedy of Common Sense is that I taught this article in my classes for many years, and what really perplexed me is that my students thought that it made sense, even though everything that Garrett Hardin said about world population, about food, and so forth was exactly the opposite of the truth—that actually when people have more, they make better decisions. When people have more resources, when they have more freedom, particularly, as we know, when women have more control over reproduction, when women have more access to life chances, to jobs, and so forth, this is what actually helps society—while the lifeboat ethics approach, which is not to help people help themselves, is exactly what causes the problem.
So the irony of this concept of the tragedy of the Commons is that it is not about a tragedy of the commons. It's a tragedy of the loss of the commons. And we know that if we look at the history of indigenous societies and many traditional societies, there's been a lot of research done on this subject now that says that the best way to manage so-called “resources”, the best form of organizing ourselves is not to privatize everything, and it's not to establish state control over everything. It's to have democratic communal control of everything.
When the local community is in control of its own destiny, it makes the best decisions.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, that definitely challenges a lot of the dominant narratives that we hear. You speak a lot to what's called dialectical thinking, which refers to the ability to see issues from multiple perspectives rather than an “either-or”. So something that you challenge is this frequently said phrase, “think globally, act locally”. You say that we have to both think globally and locally and act globally and locally. And through your experience collaborating with various Indigenous communities, you also noted that Indigenous peoples tend to be better critical and dialectical thinkers and that working with them has really expanded your worldview. Can you unpack this for us further and also share how our dominant ways of thinking and seeing the world have been limiting as we're trying to find out what we can do to address the social and ecological crises that we've caused.
John Clark: One of the things that I've discovered is that being dominated sometimes makes people smart because they have to learn how to work within a system of domination to survive and to fight against it, so they often become much more subtle thinkers. That's part of the answer. Another part of it is that there's a kind of cliche now that in Western civilization (and not only Western civilization), we've inherited certain reductionist kinds of thinking: technological rationality, instrumental rationality, so-called Cartesian mind. We're encouraged to think that everything can be measured, everything can be quantified, at least in the realm of production, in the realm of power. We still live in a totally insane mythological world in the world of consumption, the world of the image.
But what we find a lot of, if you look at the stories of traditional societies, is that there's often a deeply dialectical, subversive element. I used to do a blog called “It Is What It Isn’t”. I hate this phrase that people use: “It is what it is”.
Dialectical thinking is about realizing that it always is what it isn't. Conventional wisdom always tries to convince us that it is what it is. This is the political reasoning that has been imposed on us: capitalist rationality, patriarchy, heterosexism, all of these things. There's a certain way that the world is, and you just have to internalize it, memorize it, conform to it, or be terrorized by the fact that you haven't conformed.
As we know in tradition, for instance, in Native American societies, there are figures like Coyote, the trickster. The trickster pervades so-called mythology or the traditional stories of Indigenous societies. And the trickster is always undermining everything. Making fun of everything. There's a wonderful book by Lewis Hyde: Trickster Makes This World. He also wrote a book called The Gift, which is also an amazing book.
I don't want to give you too much of a reading list, but there's a wonderful book by a young person named Dylan Fitzwater named “Autonomy is in Our Hearts”. That's the title of the book. And it's about the Tzotzil language, which is one of the languages that's spoken in the Zapatista communities in Chiapas. And it's just a wonderful book. It's a study of the Zapatista revolutionary movement, but it's about how Indigenous values are so central to the transformation of these revolutionaries. A lot of the revolutionaries went to Chiapas as Marxist Leninist militants, and they were going to teach the peasants about politics. And what happened to them is they didn't convert the peasants to their basically Western ideology; they were converted to much of the traditional view, the traditional outlook, of the Indigenous people.
Dylan was a student at Hampshire College and a friend of mine and I had access to his undergraduate thesis that he wrote after spending time in the Zapatista schools and studying the Tzotzil language. We concluded that his young guy knows more than most of the scholars, academic people, and so forth, that tell us about what's going on there, because he went down there and listened to the Indigenous people and is telling us what they told him.
So often the traditional language is much more subtle. We have all these vague ideas about the soul, which hardly has any meaning anymore in our society. But in Chiapas, the soul is a collective thing. It has many different aspects and subtleties that would be rather baffling to us. They have difficulty using our reductionist concepts of power and politics because the concepts they use--such as the Tzotzil term which means “bringing ourselves to greatness”, communally bringing ourselves together to greatness--they basically have a communal language that allows them to think and organize themselves in different ways that our atomistic, individualist, reductionist language just doesn't allow us to do. One reason why I wrote this preface about Reflections of a Slow Learner was that it took me so long to learn some of these things.
Back in the 90s, I worked for 10 years with the Papuan people. It so happened that a large corporation called Freeport-McMoRan that had a headquarters in New Orleans was not only wreaking havoc ecologically with the Mississippi River and Barton Springs, in Austin—they were doing great damage here. But it turned out they were really involved in genocide and ecocide in West Papua, which is the western half of the island of so-called New Guinea. So I spent 10 years working in support of them, working against this corporation. And it was really a turning point in my life to listen to the Indigenous people who had two five-billion-dollar suits in New Orleans and federal and state courts against this corporation. So I learned that there are many people still walking the earth who have much more of a connection to traditional ecological views of reality and whom we can learn a lot from. And then after ten years of working with the Papuans, I started working with the Tibetans, which is why I was in India in 2005 with our India program. And I think I would be very impoverished spiritually and mentally if I had not had the opportunity to work with people like the Papuans and the Tibetans for the last 30 years.
Kamea Chayne: Certainly sounds like experiences that have been very humbling for you. And this is a perfect segue for us to discuss your chapter three, titled “Education for the Earth or Education for Empire?” You contextualize this broader question by asking, “Given that we are conditioned to become egocentric, anthropocentric, ethnocentric, acquisitive, competitive, defensive, distracted, hierarchical, patriarchal, status and power-seeking beings, how can we come to see ourselves and to recreate ourselves as communal, compassionate, caring, creative, spontaneous, awakened, loving, empathetic, mutualistic, cooperative, solidaristic, geological, and cosmological beings?” You had worked for decades inside of our dominant educational institutions. So I wonder, do you see them, broadly-speaking, being able to train and equip generations of people that will have the knowledge and critical thinking skills to help bring about the large-scale transformations that we need to address our varied crises? Or do you think they've largely been set up in ways that are meant to condition the masses to just normalize the ideology behind Empire and to keep empowering its extractive ways of functioning?
John Clark: I would say it's something very much like what you just described, although there's a little more complexity to it, and I think there's a little more hope. But in some ways, let's not be too hopeful.
I think the dominant educational system has its function of reproducing the dominant system. And I don't think we can really expect anything else of it.
On the other hand, there are openings within it to do good and creative things. And I would certainly never recommend that people not take advantage of those openings.
So I spent decades working in the traditional educational system. I spent a lot of time working with student groups, trying to do what I can in my teaching to develop more of a critical and dialectical way of thinking and analyzing. But I saw certain limits. That's why I decided six or seven years ago that I would try to primarily do education outside of that system. That's what I'm trying to do now.
I have a certain analysis of the way the world works that's presented briefly in that book, and I'm not going to spend too much time explaining it. But if I could just briefly summarize, it’s that we have certain spheres of social determination, which I call the social institutional sphere, the social ideological sphere, the sphere of the social imaginary, and the sphere of the social ethos. It's not just about how we think, which is the ideology part, but it's also the way we imagine the world, ourselves, and nature. And it's also the way we live. If I had to pick one that's most important, it's the way we live.
One of the things I'm very much interested in that's reflected in that book is traditions like Zen. One of the things you learn in Zen is that every moment of your life is practice. Therefore, every moment of your life is either good practice or not-so-good practice. That's what ethos is about. And practice is not only about ideas—it's about feelings, affects, it's about habits, habits of thought, habits of mind and body, emotions, feelings, all of those things. This is also what institutions are about. Educational institutions are part, in many ways, of the dominant ethos now, but as I said, there's a lot of complexity. There are alternative institutions.
I used to go to something called the Institute for Social Ecology, which was not part of the dominant system, but it met at Goddard College, which was an alternative college. We have to consider the possibilities that we can create alternatives that in some ways are on the borders between the dominant system and the periphery. But ultimately we have to create our own world. If we're lucky enough to live in a traditional community that still has remnants of a more ecological and more communal world you have a lot more to work with. If we don't have that, we have to work on it. So in that book and in other work that I've engaged in, I've looked at this problem and how we have to do this at various levels. And one level is what we sometimes talk about as affinity groups or maybe extended families or base communities.
Part of your description of the Green Dreamer Podcast is that it's about regeneration. You say ecological regeneration. And ecological includes the social ecology. We live in a world that has become atomized, fragmented, alienated, and so forth. I'm looking at your podcast description, which I really like very much because in a way, it summarizes what the book is about. We live in this period of the Necrocene. We came out of a period which was the Cenozoic: the new era of life on Earth. And now we're moving into the new era of death on earth, of mass extinction, of destruction of ecosystems, and so forth. So regeneration is the word to substitute for revolution.
We could say it's an ecological revolution, but if it isn't a regenerative revolution, it's going to be a revolution that goes right back where we started, which is what has happened to so many revolutions.
Elisee Reclus, who was a great educational reformer, had this idea of evolution and revolution. We have to be evolving at the same time that we're working for a revolutionary change — which ultimately is a revolution for survival at this point in geohistory. So that's exactly right.
And collective healing is also the problem. We can call it “socialization”. We could call it “formation”. We could call it a lot of things. But it takes place in the primary communities, which are living communities and also learning communities. There's a great thinker named Martin Buber who wrote about the cooperative way of life, and he said we could have different types of cooperatives. We can have a producer cooperative, a consumer cooperative, a living cooperative, and we can also have a full cooperative in which we produce, consume, and live together cooperatively or communally. And education is part of that process. If the primary community is in charge of all of those things--just like we were talking about the concept of the commons, that's what it's about--if our production and our consumption and our living are all common, then then we're getting somewhere in the direction of solving these problems.
So one of the things I've also been interested in is therapeutic communities. I visited the largest and most widely studied therapeutic community in the UK and I've learned a lot from therapeutic communities.
I found out that what really works is unconditional love. We need a politics of love. We need a politics of care and we need a politics of love.
And we need to do it a little more in a more sophisticated way than peace and love in the 60s did it. But I agree entirely that collective healing is what we need, and that ultimately, all of this is pointing in the direction of a world of abundance and wellness. This is what I would call a politics of care and a politics of flourishing, to aim at exactly that. So I guess the question of education, or formation, or growing up is the question of how we can be part of that process. What is education for? Right now, I guess the answer is it is for Empire.
The primary function of education is to train people to become part of a system, and that system is Empire right now. What we need is for education to be part of the process of the flourishing of life on Earth.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I mean, it seems like a lot of what you just said points to our need for deeper perspective shifts and relational shifts. I do feel like a lot of solutions coming out of the “green movement” right now are still stuck working within the framework of what this dominant culture has taught us.
Something else that I think our dominant Western culture instills in people is this idea that humans are separate from the rest of life on Earth, and even separate from Earth herself. This leads to the common narrative that human impact is inherently negative, and therefore, if we want to safeguard our planet, maybe we should draw more borders around “wild spaces” absent of humanity and set aside more land for other animals. But as you noted, based on Charbonneau's work, “A sharp division between an idealized ecological realm of wild nature and a supposedly denatured and fallow human realm can legitimate ecological destruction.” So how would these “green” solutions that are still rooted in separation, rather than integration, actually lead to greater destruction?
John Clark: Both directions have an element of truth. One part of it is that the wild is important. The Earth has to be allowed to have regenerative processes that we depend on—that have created us and sustain us.
One of the educational projects I'm working on is a group called the Dialectical Social Ecology Group, which just met last night. This issue came up, and we didn't come up with an answer, but we came up with some ideas about it. One of the people in the group mentioned this “half earth” proposal, which is that half of the earth should be devoted to what we might call wild nature. One caveat is, I would say, that often what we consider wild nature does not mean that human beings shouldn't be there. Because the Earth did very well in its self-regulating processes over millennia in which human beings were living in what we might call wild ecosystems. So that's one thing we have to think about. But there's another side to this which can be very dangerous, which is to really overlook human beings.
There's a famous book called The Mountain People by Turnbull about this society in East Africa. He wrote a beautiful book about the Mbuti people in Central Africa, the Forest People, which had this wonderful, beautiful, peaceful, benevolent ecological way of life. And then he wrote this other book about the mountain people who were very individualistic, sadistic, hostile to one another, and so forth. But what he didn't really mention in the book was that these people were driven off their traditional lands which sustained them, and they had been pushed into a situation that put unbearable stresses on them, and they reacted accordingly. He didn't really get into those political issues.
Turnbull did mention that what's striking is that many of the qualities that the Ik exhibited in this very unforgiving environment are found in the most advanced industrial-technological societies on our planet, in which people become very cynical, competitive, harsh, alienated and so forth, and that's a very interesting comparison that he made.
In some cases, it is forced on people. The myth is that it’s nature which pushes people into a position in which their lives are difficult, but when you look at the situations, it's usually by human action. On the other hand, many of the same characteristics are produced in the midst of affluence and overconsumption. So that's the other side of the story. This is what a dialectical approach is about—to see that it isn't just one way and it isn't just the other way. It's a very complex problem. We need wild nature, but we also need to find a way in which human beings find a place in the natural world and in which we work together cooperatively with that natural world.
And often the ideology of wild nature is used to oppress human beings and to create more problems.
Kamea Chayne: Well, I think this whole conversation was a beautiful example of dialectical thinking, so thank you so much for all of this. In thinking about our future and possibilities, you often point to the goal of liberation. Perhaps it's helpful to explore how our dominant culture has shaped and even limited a lot of our views on what freedom even means and looks like so that we can see beyond any social constructs of freedom that many are currently bound by. So on this note, what does collective liberation as a goal mean to you, and what exactly are we liberating ourselves from?
John Clark: In very general terms, we're liberating ourselves from domination, and that means social domination, which takes many forms: capitalism, the state patriarchy, and so forth. But it's not only on that level. This is why I really think it's important for people to study Indigenous traditions, to study wisdom traditions. Buddhism, I think, is very helpful in many ways. In many ways, Zen is the practice of dialectic. And Daoism, which is a very deeply nature-oriented philosophy, also tells us about how domination pervades the most minute details of our life and that we have to work on everything on the individual level, because it's not only that human beings are oppressed by vast systems—they're also oppressed by what's inside them. And ultimately, there is no division.
The great Zen philosopher Suzuki writes about the inward way.
But what you find when you take the inward way is that there is no division between the inward and the outward. So domination is not only something at the social level. Feminism, for decades, has been saying the personal is the political. And we have to take that very seriously—maybe more seriously than we ever have.
In another one of my books called The Impossible Community, I develop a theory of freedom and a theory of domination. And I call the theory of freedom “the third concept of liberty”, which is about not only negative freedom, which Americans tend to focus a lot on (“don't tell me what to do, don't coerce me,” that sort of thing), but also freedom as self-determination—not only on some abstract national level but self-determination on the level of the community. Then the third is the positive dimension of freedom, which is the unfolding of all the best possibilities of all beings, and that's really the dimension of freedom that I would focus on most and what the book focuses on most. It's really this idea of universal flourishing. And Daoism is very good at this.
One of the books that I always recommend, and you can read it in an hour, is the Dao De Jing. You can read it every week. The Dao De Jing is the Classic of the Way and its Power. In many ways, it's about the way of the earth and our way and finding a way that our way and the ways of other beings can be in accord with the ways of the earth. That's 2500 years ago, and I don't think anybody's ever said it any better than Laozi, whoever he was—a mythological figure, a great sage, old sage. Old child is another translation of his name, which I like: the idea that the child is, in so many ways, our model.
So that's what freedom and domination are about in a very abbreviated way.
Kamea Chayne: The last thing is I want to read this beautiful passage from your book. In defining the present and in dreaming of our future, you write, “A burning question recently has been what we should call our current geological era. It has been argued here that although ‘Anthropocene’ has been winning, we might want to be a little less self-centered and much more planet-centered. The most precisely accurate term is “Necrocene,” the “new era of death” that follows the Cenozoic, which was a “new era of life.” The current era is the era of the reversal of the creative activity, the poesis, of the Earth. But what should we call the next era, if there is one, in which we put an end to this period of Death on Earth? We should perhaps call it the Poeticene, since it would be the era in which the creative powers of both the Earth and the creatures of the Earth would be allowed to reassert themselves. It would be an era in which all would be allowed to be artists, or poets, in the sense of radically creative beings. In such a poetic democracy, poets would become the acknowledged legislators of the world. And the Earth would be acknowledged again as the Great Poet, the Artist of all artists.”
It's so beautiful how you frame the Cenozoic, which was the era that really enriched biodiversity and life on Earth as creative activity of the earth. And I guess I would like to close our conversation by asking: How can we, as individuals, support this large transformation? I know we could probably spend a whole episode on how we get from point A to point B, but maybe just share the few most topical thoughts that come to mind for you.
John Clark: I appreciate that you read that passage and reminded me of it. I think poesis is so important. In a sense it relates to your question about education, because if I were to look for a model of education, poesis--to be creative--should be the center of education: to release all the creative powers in the being. And I think that's really the answer in some ways to your last question.
I think we have to begin by working in our own lives. I've done a lot of work on a French writer, geographer, philosopher, named Elisee Reclus. One of the things that he said was that the beginning is to gather around ourselves small loving associations--we could call it an affinity group or base community--but people who embody those values and those hopes and those aspirations and start living a life together that is in accord with that vision. And Reclus was interesting to me because he also was active in the First International, which was the first great organization of workers of the world. Right now, we're about to celebrate the hundred and fifty year anniversary of the Paris Commune, which was an attempt to create a directly democratic grassroots regime in Paris. And I think that's a good idea for the next step.
We work on the personal level with small groups, creating cooperatives and other forms of association, but then also try to do something at the level of our neighborhood and our town or our city in which we embody these ideals, in transformation at that level and then also at the larger global level. At the time of the Paris Commune and Elisee Reclus, they had the concept of the “universal republic” so that all of these small loving groups of individuals and also the communes at the local level would have an awareness that we are united as a species and also as part of the earth.
The Earth is so important and we have to be thinking about the fact that we are the Earth. This French philosopher had this phrase in French, which means “humanity is nature becoming conscious”, but in French, it's taking consciousness, it is nature through us, becoming conscious of. And in French, humanity is masculine, but it's herself when you get to the Earth. So ultimately, the feminine appears when we become conscious of ourselves. It's a kind of interesting linguistic dialectic. But this is the question in a sense: Can we, in our own personal lives, in our local life, in our regional life, and in our global life, somehow realize this destiny, this real identity of ourselves as the earth, being conscious of herself?
Kamea Chayne: Beautiful. Thank you so much. I just have three fire round closing questions for you before you wrap up. What is an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
John Clark: I had no choice on this one. I knew what your question was going to be, and in one of our groups, actually it's the APE group, which stands for anarchist political ecology, there's a big movement to read Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I think I'm going to be rereading soon. And that is a work that I think expresses the vision that we've been talking about more than any other fictional work that I know.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
John Clark: I think in a way, it's what we've been talking about, it's about poesis, it's to stay in touch with the creative forces in my own life and in the lives of people around me and in nature.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and for the world at the moment?
John Clark: What makes me most hopeful is when I'm around joyful, creative, caring, hopeful people.
Kamea Chayne: John, thank you so much for joining me today on the show. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
John Clark: I'd like to thank you so much for what you're doing. “Green” and “Dream” are two of my favorite words. And I think if people keep those in mind, they’ll be going in the right direction.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
