Jeff Carreira: Our issue theme is Spiritual Activism: Faith, Freedom, and Liberation and we want to explore what the term spiritual activism could mean. Is spiritual activism done by people who have spiritual interests? Is it activism on behalf of spirituality itself or spiritual institutions? Or is it, as I see it, activism that is motivated, shaped and fueled by deep spiritual drives. There is something inherently and deeply spiritual that is driving a spiritual activist to work for change. Would you start our conversation by speaking a little about the type of activism that you are engaged with.

Aterah Nusrat: I would agree with your definition in terms of spiritual activism as something that emerges from within. It's not imposed from outside. It's not imposed by institutions. It's something that emerges. I feel as though it's a response to a desire for the expression of more truth and for a deeper alignment and harmony between the inner and the outer. Spiritual activism stems from a desire for greater clarity and greater consciousness. For me, my work has really been about how we can bring the spiritual insight that we're not separate from the universe or from each other, to bear on our relationship to our planet and our environment. I think a lot of people feel that we're damaging our home considerably, and it's not stopping. The natural question is, why does it continue? I think the devastation continues because, at the heart of it, there is a spiritual crisis as we do not relate to ourselves as being one with nature. We are being called to awaken to the fact that we're not separate from the natural world. That's what's driving me. It's something that we as a species need to become more conscious of quickly because we're not the only beings dependent on this planet.

We're part of a whole global ecosystem. We're part of the universe. We're part of life emerging. And we're not cognizant enough of that. We still act as if we exist in isolation and the repercussions of our actions don't matter. Well, if everything is interconnected, they do matter. The only way for us to feel the true interconnectedness of reality is to let go of our sense of being separate from our surroundings, our environment, and all the people we affect. To me, it comes back to that spiritual sense of oneness with everything; unity. That doesn't mean everything is ‘good’. It just means that there is no separation and everything we do affects everything else. I think that's very empowering because it means that an individual also has the potential to affect change through their own evolution and their own spiritual awakening, because that self-knowledge will impact their decisions, their choices, and their actions in the world. I find this non-separate identity of self empowers activism because it provides the fuel to keep giving.

Jeff Carreira: That's great because you've expanded on the definition of spiritual activism. You said that the environmental crisis actually stems from a spiritual crisis, which is our lack of connection to the world around us. This deeper spiritual crisis is manifesting as an environmental crisis. The way that you're talking about it implies that unless we change at a spiritual level, we won't be able to affect change at the global level.

Aterah Nusrat: Without addressing the spiritual crisis underneath we won't go far enough. People are responding to the environmental crisis, but there's a missing dimension to it because we are not addressing the spiritual crisis. Technological solutions exist, better policy exists. People are doing a lot of good things on the ground, but if we don't add this dimension then even the technological solutions and the better policy decisions are still in the framework of being separate from the natural world, from nature, from ourselves. It will never quite meet the need because we're still coming from the same place, even if we are addressing the issues to some degree.

Jeff Carreira: I want to stay with this because I think it's very interesting. I think it's very much at the heart of what I know about the work that you do. Can you explain why it is that if we don't shift that spiritually isolated sense of being, we can't go far enough to solve our global problems. Why is it that we can't meet the crisis, even with our best intentions, if that spiritual division isn't resolved?

Aterah Nusrat: Because the paradigm we're going to be operating in is still going to be one based on separation. In terms of the enlightenment era, and capitalism, and the meta-context that we exist in, there are too many other drivers forcing us to act as consumers. The framework that we live in is fundamentally rooted in the quest to satisfy individual needs based on the idea that we are separate.Whatever solutions we come up with, whatever decisions we make, will still be based in that paradigm. To relate to yourself as not being separate requires a complete paradigm shift and that's a spiritual awakening.

Jeff Carreira: I find this very compelling. Can you share a concrete example of a problem where some ground has been gained and explain why this fundamental division is impeding us from going further.

Aterah Nusrat: Think of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. There are 17 of them and we are supposed to accomplish things like eradicating poverty and global hunger and addressing climate change by 2030. There are so many goals to be met and there are a lot of policy instruments in place, but there's a huge gap. I think it's just the inertia of the system, the political system, the economic system, and what we're grounded in. But there's a growing recognition of that gap at an international level because the Sustainable Development Goals are clearly not being met. It is 2024 and we are very far from reaching the goals set for 2030. So people are becoming aware of the fact that the practical mechanisms that we have in place will not be sufficient to get us there. And part of that recognition is pointing us back to the inner development of capacities that individuals who are decision-makers and policymakers need.

Do these people have the inner capacities they need to be able to make decisions which are not based in a sense of separation? I think that's being recognized. There are developmental tools being produced in relationship mindfulness training, empathy, and relatability to increase people’s ability to see the connection between themselves and another person. That's being recognized as a gap that needs to be filled, and I think people are working on that now. In fact, there’s a paper that’s just come out to help address this gap. This paper (The System Within: Addressing the inner dimensions of sustainability and systems transformation), puts forward approaches to support the inner transformation needed to meet our outer transformation needs.

Jeff Carreira: It sounds like that paper is acknowledging that in order to affect external change, there needs to be internal transformation. Maybe, as you said when we started talking, what is fueling our environmental crisis is that we feel separate from the Earth. If you feel separate from something, you don’t care about it in the same way. You don't care about it as if it's your own body. I think you’re talking about an expansion to include the whole world in our sphere of concern.

Aterah Nusrat: Yes, that makes me think of how human rights can be extended to animals. People have often treated animals as if they have no interiority, but that is changing. And now its beginning to change for land formations as well. We now have rivers that have been given legal rights. This is a very different way of relating to a river. You can only relate to it as more than just material if you feel a sense of connection and no separation. Otherwise, a river is just a resource that's been delivered to human beings for their benefit. If we see a river as an entity with sentience everything changes. This perspective is native to many indigenous land-based peoples whose sense of spirituality is directly connected to the land. That's not the way most of us in the modern world relate to the natural world.

Jeff Carreira: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you've been engaged with in the domain of the environment?

Aterah Nusrat: Basically, I’ve been working for a center for integrative health for a number of years. What I really enjoy about that is the focus on mind-body medicine. There's an acknowledgement of the relationship between the mind and the body in relation to well-being. I lived for 20 years within a spiritual community practicing meditation. It has been interesting for me to combine that experience with my academic background and passion for environmental sustainability. When I was young, I joined Greenpeace as a supporter, and I don't know where that urge came from. I can only say that it came out of a spiritual connection to the land and a recognition that we were not separate from our natural environment. It didn’t make logical sense why I would care so much about it when nobody around me seemed to. It just emerged. Now I find myself professionally in a place where I can bring together my interest in environmental sustainability and my deep work on my inner self.

I am lucky to work in a place where the fuzzy lines can be crossed. We're exploring the relationship between spirituality, health and well-being, and the relationship of those domains with planetary health and well-being. I’ve written a couple of papers with my colleagues about the relationship between integrative healthcare and planetary health. The American healthcare system is really set up to treat disease, and what we explore in our papers is how we can instead focus on actually generating health. One of the ways that we can support that is by promoting preventive medicine. This is the work that I've been involved with on the healthcare side. When you look at preventive medicine, you're also looking at lifestyle changes. Then you can see that by adopting healthier lifestyles, you can simultaneously reduce your carbon footprint. If you can replace car trips with bicycle rides or walking, you improve your own health and well-being, and your local environment benefits from the reduced air pollution. There’s a bi-directional benefit for both people and the planet.

What I'm most interested in is creating a space where the perspective of unity can take root and reframe our relationship to the planet and our definition of health and well-being. Does health stop at our skin? Does it end with human communities? Can we have healthy people without a healthy planet? Can we restore health to the planet through material means alone, or is there a different framing that we need to adopt in our morals, ethics, values, and spiritual orientation?

I think to facilitate health both on the inside and the outside the main work is trying to establish a space for more people to engage with and discuss the reframing necessary. People who are in positions to affect change need to be in those conversations.

Jeff Carreira: You said that the US health system we have in place is about treating disease rather than optimizing health. Would you say that there is a correlation in environmentalism where, similarly, environmentalism is about disease management rather than health management?

Aterah Nusrat: The general orientation of environmentalism has been towards conservation and that orientation is aimed at protecting a space so that nothing ‘bad’ happens to it. That's still coming from a place of fear, fundamentally, not wanting bad things to happen. The idea is to put a ring around a piece of land and protect it from harm. That is not enough. If we go back to the indigenous perspective, land doesn't stay healthy on its own. Humans interact with it, and there's a partnership that actually allows ecosystems to flourish. It's not just by leaving things alone that things stay healthy. There can be an anti-human perspective in some forms of environmentalism that say, if only humans weren't here everything would be fine. In a certain way, that could be correlated with disease management. We could be seen as the disease, the virus that's ruining everything. But I don't think that's the case. We've emerged as part and parcel of this whole phenomenon. We're integral to the environment. We're not a virus. We need to be part of a healthy ecosystem, and we will be if we're not out of alignment with it. We've fallen out of alignment not just with the environment, but with our own role as a species within it. That comes back again to how we perceive ourselves. Do we perceive ourselves as separate? Do we perceive ourselves as superior to the rest of the ecosystem and the planet? Or do we see ourselves as relational, as part of a healthy ecosystem? And as a ‘keystone species’, which is a term I've come across recently, we have an important role to play, but not at the expense of other ecosystem partners.

Jeff Carreira: That's beautifully said. And it really does get back to the original point, which is that there's a shift in how we need to relate to ourselves and the world that's essential. If you think of human beings as the disease, the solution is to extract human activity from the planet, but maybe we need to be part of the solution.

Aterah Nusrat: In a similar example, a great deal of wildfire management is concerned with the suppression of fires, when in fact controlled fires are an essential part of preventing wildfires from happening in the first place. By over-focusing on stopping fires, we've created conditions for more fires. That's not good forest management. I'm not an expert in this area, but to me it seems to have everything to do with our relationship to the land. The more conscious we are of our bi-directional relationship with the land, the more awake we will be to the potentially beneficial and detrimental impacts of our actions on our shared home.

Jeff Carreira: I think we all have some of that sense that human beings are the problem. We're driving too many cars, we're doing this, we're doing that. If we just stop, everything would be right. What you’re talking about is a different orientation. It’s not just about stopping, it's also about discovering what our natural relationship to the environment is. What is the role we are supposed to play.

Aterah Nusrat: Yes, it may result in people reducing car usage, and flying less. It may change our habits of consumerism. We may do many of the things that we know we need to, but it will be driven by a change in values from our core. It won't be because we're being forced not to drive because it's bad for the environment. Suppression alone isn't going to work because we have to change our outlook.

Jeff Carreira: We all receive a lot of information about how bleak our environmental outlook is. In the midst of all that, what gives you hope? What inspires you that something different is possible?

Aterah Nusrat: I think one thing is knowing you're not alone. There are a lot of people and movements and pockets of exploration that are working at this deeper level and there is an emergence that's happening in different ways. I went to a conference two years ago and people were saying, ‘we are nature’. That would have been unheard of not so long ago. This inclusive identity is surfacing in different spheres of activity. Seeing that emerge gives me hope. I think continuing to feed into that and allowing these conversations to help inform our own internal change, is what gives me hope. I think there's evolution happening at deep levels and I think a lot of people are yearning for it.

Even that yearning is an expression of what is trying to emerge. The more that people find others who have that yearning and are willing even to just talk about it brings it into being. I come across different podcasts, conferences, papers, social movements and projects where that view is continuing to emerge and continuing to become more mainstream. The language is becoming more and more accessible as well. I think that's what gives me hope. I see it emerging, and I want to keep contributing to it.