Plant Spirit Shamanism: What?s Up With the Weather?
Plant spirit shamans – natural healers who work with herbs, ritual, and the elements – have long known that the world is not made up of discrete and separate parts, but that we are all one: that the ‘butterfly effect’ of a single extra drop of water released from a cloud into a Gloucestershire river could eventually lead to flooding in the distant streets of London.
Through Gaia Theory and a more informed understanding in recent years of how the natural world, the environment, and the climate really works, some scientists are also coming round to the shaman’s age-old view of the connections between all things.
How might these scientists and the shamans counter some of the current scepticism about ‘carbon footprints’ and climate change, and what might they say about the ‘freak weather conditions’ many of us have been experiencing lately? What are the objections of the sceptics, what are the facts, and what are scientists and modern-day shamans saying?
DOES CARBON DIOXIDE (CO2) CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING?
The sceptics say there is no “proof” of this. But proof is not the job of science, which deals, in fact, with the art of probabilities. Scientists, that is, make hypotheses (‘best guesses’) which are there not to be proved, but to be disproved – if possible.
The current best guess – that CO2 does create a Greenhouse Effect by trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere and causing temperatures rises on Earth – has been around since 1829, when Joseph Fourier first put forward this hypothesis – and no-one’s proved him wrong yet.
Indeed, a recent survey of almost 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles