Page 17 - ECOlogic Book

Sunrise in Seattle
(Winter, 1991)

The crisis we face today demands more than superficial adjustment. Increasingly, it
is realized that any efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be
infused with a vision of the sacred.” Thomas Berry

An Interview with Gail mally mack

Gail mally mack is a local artist who is exploring the relationship of art
to the evolution of consciousness. She works and teaches in the Detroit
area where she has exhibited widely. With an MFA from Bennington
College in Vermont, she has taught at Oakland Community College,
Wayne State University, and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit,
the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center and The Detroit Art Institute.
ECOlogc interviewed her about her recent experience at the Earth and
Spirit Conference in Seattle, Washington, sponsored by the Chinook
Learning Center:

ECOlogic: Gail, what was the overall message of the Earth and Spirit
conference?

Gail: the conference addressed the spiritual dimensions of the ecological
crisis, which many leading religious and environmental thinkers believe is a
spiritual crisis of the greatest magnitude. We’re faced with the destruction of
the natural world, and the fate of that world. This is touching the very spiritual
core of our being which we need to touch in order to heal it. A new philosophy
of earth-connectedness needs to begin, and that’s spiritual. The religions of
all times have dealt with these questions of being, questions of where we come
from and where we’re going. The earth has been negated by the human and
now has to be reconnected. This change in philosophy depends on a shift in
the basic human world view; what we think and how we are in the world.
That’s spirit.

ECOlogic: We’ve been in a dualistic mode of consciousness for a long time –
both East and West. The objective has been to get the spirit out of the body,
or to redeem the soul out of the world. That’s the philosophical basis for a lot
of the destruction of the natural world. Is that the kind of thing you mean?

Gail: That’s what I mean. Looking back through time we were in an earth-
mother goddess mode for many thousands of years. We then went into a
mythic period, and that was followed by a very ego-centric time of the

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