An Interview with Michael Lynn Wellman by Molly Brown

Editor’s note recorded by Molly Brown

Editor’s note:  Michael Wellman recently wrote a PhD. dissertation titled “Rewilding Activism: Weaving Resistance, Reskilling and Re-membering” for the California Institute of Integral Studies.  After seeing how thoroughly the Work That Reconnects is woven throughout his dissertation, I wanted to interview Michael to bring his insights and perspectives to Deep Times readers.

This is Part One of that interview, focusing on Honoring Our Pain for the World. Part Two, which will appear in the September 2023 issue, focuses on Going Forth in the Great Turning.  Michael’s article “Reconnecting with Identity: Locating Commonality in Intersections” appears in this March 2023 issue as well.

Recording of interview, Part One

Molly Brown:  Welcome, Michael. I am so delighted to be talking with you today. I am just blown away by your dissertation. It covers such a broad range of approaches and responses to the mess we’re in. It’s both challenging and inspiring. I’d like to talk to you about how you came to write this dissertation. And what your thinking is, especially now that you’ve done it and can reflect back on it.

Michael Wellman: Well, thank you so much, Molly, I appreciate the opportunity to chat about it. And it was dear to my heart that Joanna [Macy] was able to join for the oral defense. It was meaningful to be rooted in that lineage of her work.

When I was thinking about what to talk about today, I kept returning to when I started this dissertation eight years ago. At the beginning, I was really floundering around, lost a bit, wandering, going through a big career transition from mechanical engineering. During undergrad, I had been turned on to the climate crisis watching An Inconvenient Truth and after undergrad I pursued a career in cleantech and  green building design. After a few years, I returned to school to pursue an MBA in social entrepreneurship and became the co-director of one of Obama’s clean energy grants from the big economic stimulus at the time. It was during that time that  I was exposed to a few different industry insights that really showed me that, “Oh, this isn’t just a technological or economic problem to solve, and actually, there’s something much deeper at play here.” 

That realization really sent me into despair.  I found myself with new questions, “well, there’s something deeper here: is it apathy? greed? education?” The student in me was driven back to school to pursue this doctorate to seek answers to these questions. 

During that same time, a couple of life events happened that really sent me into what Joanna identifies as  “ecological grief.” I was back home for an autumn during that time and visited my childhood home. I grew up on a river and woods out in farm country. 

Molly: Where’s that? 

Michael: I was born in Flint, Michigan, on occupied Anishinaabek lands. I grew up in rural farmland outside of Flint.   

At the time, no one lived in my childhood home. My parents divorced during the Great Recession. My father worked for General Motors, and with the collapse of industrialism with outsourcing and globalization, his plant closed and he left for work in Texas. So my childhood home sat empty. And these woods that were so meaningful for me as a child that I played in, that have all that magic and wonder and awe— they were cut down. And I bore witness to that. I experienced what Glenn Albrecht calls “solastalgia,” a sense of being homesick while I was still at home, my place of safety and connection.

Shortly thereafter, I returned to graduate school, and learned the intricacies of how our social and ecological crises are one and the same. In my dissertation, I used that word “socioecological crisis” to help people understand that. I was so focused on climate change when I was an engineer, I didn’t really understand the connection to social justice and liberation issues.

And it was during that first semester when the Black Lives Matter protests really sprung up. There was the Ferguson Uprising and young black men like Eric Garner and Michael Brown were shot down, so I participated in those protests in Oakland. And it was really my first time being part of a social movement, being part of a mass of people who came in together around an important issue, and I began to link those social and ecological issues. 

And also to see the reality of the police state, of keeping people down and not having us galvanize around these important issues. So I was really in a lot of doom and despair around all this.

For so long the outdoors had been so important to me. I was living out West and climbing, skiing, and rafting. And so then moving to the big city, and being overwhelmed by all the stimulation, the noise, the concrete–I was really dysregulated.

That next semester, the second semester in school, was really a turning point for me. I was in a graduate course called “Ecology in a Time of Planetary Crisis,” and each week we read books on different aspects of the Great Unraveling, like the sixth great extinction, the freshwater crisis, and peak oil.

Molly: Right, this is really overwhelming.

 Michael: One of the books we read was Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. And the conclusion of that book is that our last great hope is “resistance”–mass uprisings, mass social movements, direct action. After having been part of the Ferguson Uprising and seeing all the potential, the power and the unity, and then being on the backside of that where naturally uprisings burn out, I was grasping for a social movement to be part of.  

It happened to be at that same time that I was in this class called “The Great Turning” with Sean Kelly and Joanna Macy. At the time, I had so much despair and doom and gloom and did not have an outlet for it. What I learned with Joanna Macy, that was so subtle in some ways, and also one of the most profound moments for me, was when she used the term “ecological grief” and normalized that. Not only could one have grief for what’s happening to the ecological systems—you know, all these things we talked about with the Great Unraveling—but that it was also important to feel that grief. 

Molly: Yep. 

Michael: And for me, that really shifted something internally because for so long I thought I should feel worse about all the social issues, while what really touched my heart the deepest was what was happening to the earth. So working with Joanna in that capacity really started me on this path. 

 When I was looking back through my notes, and reflecting on my time with Joanna, a couple teachings that she shared at that time stuck with me. One was around apathy–the inability to suffer. And really thinking about that as it related to both myself and what I see in our culture. The second is that when we do start feeling into the immensity of all the emotions around what’s happening to the world, it’s easy to fall into panic or paralysis, denial or despair. In my dissertation, I look at what happens when we open our awareness to the Great Unraveling.  If we don’t have practices for regulating our nervous system, or aren’t careful about titrating those experiences in doses, how quickly it can overwhelm our systems and lead to the ‘pill of doomism.’

Molly: Yes, I saw that term in your table of contents.

Michael: Yeah. It is a play on The Matrix, which is an important popular mythology of our time. There’s the idea of taking this red pill that’s an awakening to the reality of the situation. But when we do that, there could be this reaction: “Wow, I don’t even want to be part of this anymore”—the immensity of the predicament we are in. I explore this doomism in my dissertation, building on ecological grief and looking at these phenomena of solastalgia, environmental melancholy, and climate anxiety. 

Molly: Yes.

Michael: Looking at this doomism through a trauma-informed lens and recognizing that all these symptoms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) but it’s actually pre-traumatic in a way because so much is unfolding, and also so much still looms. And recognizing that it’s disordering, because we’re inside of it. It’s an ongoing process. Therefore, I feel it’s a form of “Pre-Traumatic Stress Disordering.”

And so the dissertation for me is really trying to offer young people an alternative to doomism through action. And I see Joanna’s Great Turning being a model for this action. Specifically, just seeing some of these recent surveys—one  showed that 50% of the world’s youth believe humanity is doomed, (Yoder, 2021) and another survey done during the pandemic showed that 20 per cent of US youth have contemplated suicide. 

Molly: 20 per cent? 

Michael: Yeah. 20 per cent of US teenagers! 

Molly: Wow! Whoa!

Michael: Yeah, these statistics show the depth to which—we think so much about all that is happening with the physical world—but also [so much is happening] at the psychological and emotional and spiritual levels. For me, that’s really the importance of Joanna’s work and the Work That Reconnects, starting to help us develop practices, so that we can work with these emotions, process these emotions, be witnessed and held in community doing this work, so that we can get to a place where we’re able to be in our bodies, not from some sort of trauma response, but from a more grounded and centered place where we can take action and make change in the world. I just don’t believe that we can make this Great Turning towards a life-affirming, life-sustaining society, when we’re in a place where our youth are believing we’re doomed and/or seeing suicide as the way out.

Molly: How do you see the relationship between the ecological issues and the social justice issues? 

Michael: I use the term “socioecological” in my dissertation. This perceived separation from the rest of the natural world is what I’ve come to see as one of the roots, possibly one of the deepest roots of our crisis.  And in some ways this separation or disassociation is what allows us to then dominate over the “Other.” Because we wouldn’t be dominating over ourselves if we saw the rest of the world as ourselves. Even all these words we use today, like environment, like the environment’s out there to save.

Molly: It’s something around us rather than what we’re part of, yeah.

Michael: Even words like “nature” I find to be rather problematic in that same way. And why I like it when you see a banner at a march saying, “We are the earth defending herself” because it’s a recognition that if we’re going to get back to a place of being in community with … the more-than-human world, that we need to re-member ourselves within that. So all the social issues to me are actually ecological issues and vice versa. 

Molly: Yep. And our sense of separation from ”nature” or “the environment” is also our separation from one another, that somehow people with different color skin or different cultures or different religions—that we can separate ourselves from them, that they’re “Other.”

Michael: Yeah, all this “Othering” we do. What I’ve actually found in my own healing work is the role of land-based ceremony, ritual, expanded states, rites of passage— is that “Othering” also happens inside of ourselves. Those parts of ourselves that fragment, that are lost or forgotten, that are disowned or disavowed, that maybe we’re not the most proud of. 

Molly: Because those parts of ourselves are, in fact, the same. I am of nature and so if I disassociate from “outside” nature, I’m also disassociating from my own inner nature

Michael: And that’s a really important contribution of the fields of ecopsychology and eco-somatics. Our outer and inner worlds mirror each other. I am a body on the body of the earth. And so if we’re doing outward Othering, we’re naturally going to be doing inner Othering as well.

Molly: Wow, of course, of course. it’s something we don’t even think about a good deal of the time. Our intuition, for example; we dissociate from our intuition, and I firmly believe our intuition is, in fact, our connection to everything—that’s where intuition comes from. It is the unconscious messages that we’re always receiving and don’t even know that we’re receiving.

Michael:  What I explore in the dissertation is how as we do that healing, especially when we’re doing it through ritual or ceremony, where we can let go of the cognitive mind and get into those other, less known parts of ourselves: sensory perception, felt sense, intuition, dreams, imagination, and magic. We can stop being a head on a stick, which is really a defense mechanism against feeling, the suffering that Joanna Macy talks about, and we get back into our body. Getting back into our body is an important part of this journey of the Great Turning. 

There’s a natural level of dissociation that is healthy or important just to get through an experience sometimes. But if we’re not coming back into the body and re-regulating our nervous system, we get stuck in that dysregulation. By coming back into the body, we have to start feeling again. And it’s hard because there’s so much to feel right there. When you go out into the natural world, you go into a place that you love and there’s the awe and the wonder, and all the beauty and the joy from those experiences. 

But then also, there’s all this pain and needing to honor our pain–for my woods getting cut down, or the situation with Black lives in this country, or what’s happening now with the pandemic and all the fracturing of society. And as we’re re-inhabiting our bodies, we also have to make space to feel all that.

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References:

Balingit, Moriah. “‘A Cry for Help’: CDC Warns of a Steep Decline in Teen Mental Health.” Washington Post, March 31, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/31/student-mental-health-decline-cdc/

Yoder, Kate. “Study: More Than Half of Young People Think ‘Humanity Is Doomed’.” Grist, September 14, 2021. https://grist.org/article/climate-anxiety-study-young-people-think-humanity-is-doomed/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=weekly

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Recorded by Molly Brown

Michael Lynn Wellman is a recent doctoral graduate from the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Michael’s dissertation, “Rewilding Actiism: Weaving Resistance, Reskilling, and Re-Membering,” is inspired by his time working with Joanna Macy and the Work That Reconnects. Michael is a father, husband, activist, and guide who lives on the shores of Gichigami (Lake Superior) on occupied Anishinaabek lands.