Some weeks ago I was browsing an occult Facebook group, (which was my first mistake) and came across something interesting, and exasperating. People were posting pictures of basic spells they had done, frequently drawing sigils on their wrists, “to make it rain in Australia”. My suggestion to consider donating to relief funds and write to representatives urging action on green policies was greeted with hostility.
Now clearly this is one example and it’s quite egregious, but it highlights a tendency I have seen elsewhere in the pagan, polytheist, and occult communities, of what I might call performative environmentalism.
This is when you go to a pagan gathering and prayers or rituals are held to “heal the earth”, but food is brought wrapped in store-bought packaging, eaten on paper plates with plastic cutlery, and no further action is taken. When witches and pagans who claim to follow an “earth-based path” or to “worship the earth” buy crystals that are the product of devastating strip-mining, and burn plants that are endangered.
I say this not to shit on anyone’s practice, because I have done and participated in all of these things myself. I say this because I believe we urgently need to start taking steps to put our actions where our words and our rituals and our intent is.
Imagine the good pagan and polytheist groups could do by taking a collection at our gatherings to donate to environmental charities when we do an earth-based ritual. If we organised to clean local natural spaces. If when we met we made an effort to avoid waste and creating pollution, damaging the land we live on and our relationship with it even as we try to build those relationships.
We need to realise that praying for and to the natural world isn’t enough. Buying crystals that have been mined with unethical labour practices to say the least, polluting as they go, is not sustainable. Nor is buying “sacred” herbs that are overharvested and shipped around the world. Get a little dirt under your fingernails. Go outside, and pick up a stone. Grow a sage plant in a pot on your windowsill. These will serve you better because you have a connection to them, and their production is not unethical and destructive to our habitat.
No one person can solve our environmental crisis – that’s why we also need to pressure political representatives.
But as an animist I know, the land around us is alive. We cannot build a positive relationship with it while abusing it, no matter our intentions.
wandering blackbird 