The Water Is Wide

an appreciation by David Gershan

Dan McKanan’s 2018 study of environmentalism, Eco-Alchemy, explores the wide water of the ecology and environmental movements with its many streams with great coherence. It is possible to lose the way in these crowded waters, but McKanan keeps the boat afloat and admirably steers us to a wide shore. One great theme of the book is, to quote him: “Students of Steiner’s spiritual science, also known as anthroposophy…are active in every corner of the environmental movement...” McKanan explores, more thoroughly than this reviewer has ever encountered, how anthroposophy connects to and has created paths of influence and inspiration in amazingly disparate ways. He is remarkably successful.

University of California Press, 2017; 306 pages

How was Rachel Carson touched by anthroposophy? Gardens at the San Francisco Zen Center? Bhutan’s “Gross National Happiness” project? Israeli kibbutzim? Intentional communities in Ireland and Norway? The Water Research Institute in Maine? And there are more connections, many more!

Anthroposophy’s centrality is not a surprise to McKanan because environmentalism, as he states, “is a movement that seeks to restore harmony between humanity and nature by helping humans model our behavior on the rhythms of natural systems.”

The reverence and deeply spiritual orientation gained from anthroposophy reflects this description of environmentalism, and it is shared by biodynamic farmers and Native American and many other rural agricultural communities that preserve ritual and acknowledgement of Mother Earth. He states: “Steiner taught that our planet is a single organism with a spiritual personality….is a holistic worldview that seeks to achieve harmony through creative work with the polarities of human and nature, matter and spirit, macrocosm and microcosm…..” We come to see how McKanan understands environmentalism in its widest contexts through explorations of agriculture, education, social reform and renewal, and the natural world. It is at the end of the book however that McKanan reaches another shore—and that is explored in the section: “Anthroposophy’s Gifts.” We will discuss this at the end of the review.

McKanan’s own path to anthroposophy and its founder Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), begins in 1995 with his membership as a contributing share-holder in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiative of the famous Angelica Organics farm in Caledonia, Illinois. Anyone who has not seen the 2005 documentary film The Real Dirt on Farmer John will want to get acquainted with the great operator of Angelica, John Peterson. From Illinois, McKanan spent parts of summers in Minnesota at a Camphill Village—one of many anthroposophically-inspired villages dedicated to the care and enhancement of adults and children gifted and also challenged with a variety of developmental conditions. His first book, Touching The World: Christian Communities Transforming Society, included research done there. He is a professor and Emerson Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. He states that his orientation to anthroposophy is pragmatic. His research methods, therefore, “are a hybrid of textual, historical, and ethnographic approaches.”

He remains, he says, “neutral” to the “spiritual practices and worldview” that are found in anthroposophy. I would comment that McKanan is ultimately not entirely neutral because of the enormity of its effect on his book’s conclusions and the depth of immersion of his studies of anthroposophy. The informed and deepened orientation is there—living with anthroposophy has altered McKanan and probably fructified his life in Unitarian Universalism—and vice-versa. Interestingly, it was Rudolf Steiner who repeatedly emphasized that the duality—of pragmatic and “being in the world” alongside the study and meditative growth within the spiritual behind it—is fundamental to anthroposophy.

I have been observing an interesting and challenging phenomenon: the emergence of “camps” of involvement in anthroposophical initiatives. There seems to be a separation between the pragmatic life and spiritual life. It has developed gradually. We are also witnessing a transformational theme in both camps, and this is explored by McKanan. This is of great importance for McKanan and for me.

What about this transformation? I think, as does McKanan, that it goes to the heart of the life of anthroposophy today. The experiences of illumination gained from the study of anthroposophy and the working initiatives that are born from them have not always maintained that thread. “I don’t really know what he (Rudolf Steiner) is saying…but…I am a dedicated biodynamic farmer. I employ the techniques and rituals. They work.” I have heard this countless times at biodynamic conferences.

McKanan quotes Thea Carlson, executive director of the Biodynamic Association of America: “In the past, the reluctance to talk openly about spiritual matters made the movement more of an ‘insiders’ club,’ since outsiders couldn’t figure out what it was all about.” It seems that meeting the challenge of how to communicate biodynamics, social and economic reforms, medicine, and education so that they do not alienate is also transforming. What is dissolved and broken down in human digestion is now undergoing a similar process in anthroposophic initiatives. McKanan sees this as a new way forward for the anthroposophical movement. The movement is also experiencing a new build up. Older expectations held within the movement are giving way to a new pragmatism, but not at all a new materialism.

McKanan states: “In its early years, anthroposophy was an intensely self-reinforcing spirituality that encouraged participants to devote their personal energies and material resources to the building up of a tight-knit community. Since 1970, the pendulum has swung toward self-dispersal, as people with little personal connection to anthroposophy have come to dominate many anthroposophical initiatives.” A shift and transformation is undoubtedly happening in many areas of human life and work.

Robert McDermott, president emeritus of the California Institute of Integral Studies, has shared that this transformation is also occurring in Auroville, the community of Aurobindo and The Mother. It seems that ideas of restorative justice, the emerging realities of gender expression, an understanding of the importance of “the conversation” and not only “the lecture,” are all now part of new forms of sharing and communicating anthroposophy with the world.

McKanan’s pragmatic position is both admirable and informative. What is most admirable is his honest boundary between the recounting of anthroposophic ideas and the effort to interpret uncharted areas for him. He lets us know where the water can be murky for him. These areas are the often-diffcult insights that arise from deep immersion in Steiner’s cosmology. This however has not prevented Professor McKanan from including many thoughtful and inspired discussions of the cosmology.

The book is the source of many stories and histories of the initiatives that produced the first ideas about biodynamic agriculture in the world, the founding of the Camphill movement, the new ideas in finance, the Waldorf school movement—and on and on.

From Steiner’s seminal lectures on agriculture (1924) that embed the farm in cosmos and earth, to the farms that inaugurated the principles and practices—and there are many—the story is brought up to the present. This is a great and important history. As McKanan has developed it, environmentalism is the broadest possible awareness of interrelationships among spiritual, social, economic, educational, medical, and artistic interconnections. The new understanding of a healthy social renewal is based upon a “three-folding” between cultural, economic, and “rights” spheres; the development of the Camphill movement, based upon a physician’s initiative, works in family settings within a village or farm. It was Rudolf Steiner who said that the developmentally delayed person cannot be peripheralized, but should be placed in the center of the community, because the heart force must be there, and these individuals bear the heart force in a pure human way. There is the story of new ways to envision finances: Rudolf Steiner Finance, based in San Francisco, a new exploration of esotericism and alchemical studies that places them directly into the practical life, as discussed above. (This last is explored in a stunningly illuminating and often funny way by Dennis Klocek in his Sacred Agriculture, Lindisfarne Books, 2013.) Anthroposophy is the context of these interrelationships. These make up the environmentalism that McKanan describes and it is made accessible through an exhaustively referenced Notes section.

In the section “Rudolf Steiner’s Holistic Vision,” McKanan explores Rudolf Steiner’s own life and teachings: three great streams of hermetics, evolutionary thought, and social reform. Steiner’s “evolutionism” for McKanan “was shaped decisively by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe…” McKanan observes: “the great poet was also an idiosyncratic scientist, who counseled disciplined but subjective observation of holistic phenomena rather than atomizing experimentation.”

I submit that this Goethean phenomenology is fundamental to anthroposophy—and its teaching, not the least of which is the medical application. The development and expansion of the current scientific nihilism and the detached “gaze,” critiqued by Steiner, was also critiqued by Foucault in his time in "The Birth of The Clinic", 1963. The distillation and removal of the physician and scientist into realms of materialism by separating any subjective “observation” out of scientific inquiry actually inhibits the development of a deeper and renewed “gaze.” “Spirit in Matter”—a profound mantra for anthroposophists, cannot emerge as a reality without a rigorously self-educated subjectivism. Why? Because it is through this portal that a profound reality is reached: the knowledge that the “subjective” soul content is, when educated, a great diagnoser and bringer of insight. Objectivity must be humanized by an astute subjectivity, and vice-versa. This is one of Goethe’s gifts, and McKanan appreciates it.

We follow McKanan’s continuous exploration of the role of the human being in environmentalism. Can the Earth get along well, or even better, without the disasters created by humans? How immense is our role in the care of the Earth?

McKanan states: “Some biodynamic practitioners make a pragmatic case for a human-centered worldview: like it or not, humans are currently the most important force shaping ecosystems on Earth.” Rachel Schneider of Hawthorne Valley Farm in upstate New York is quoted: “To base your entire agricultural practice on a mimicking of nature is not sufficient.” From McKanan: “But from a practical standpoint, the salient feature of Steiner’s cosmology is that the whole earth is inseparably caught up in human evolution.”

David Gershan is a physician practicing family medicine in San Francisco, California. He combines his allopathic training and experience with the practice and study of Anthroposophic Medicine.