Flora and Fauna on El Camino

Oak leaf the morning after Christmas.

First, a caveat—it’s winter here in Europe, of course. So it’s not the best time to observe flora and fauna. Regardless, and even while trying to cultivate a philosophy that nature can be found everywhere—even in the tiniest crack of a sidewalk or under our fingernails, I have been underwhelmed with the natural world I’ve been observing along the camino. The time has come for me to explore my observations and speculations about humanity’s relationship with other species, one of my deepest concerns in life. But here, as usual, my primary angle will be on the spiritual aspects of this relationship, or lack thereof.

The Rio Lima on Christmas morning.

One of the best days we’ve had walking so far was Christmas day. We woke up in the picturesque Portuguese village of Ponte de Lima to find a clear and crisp morning awaiting us. It was a relatively short day of hiking—11 miles—so we took our time having coffee at a café before setting off. (Yes, there were plenty of cafes opens on Christmas morning. The one we chose happened to have lots of single old men smoking cigarettes. A Christmas tradition?) Then we took our time walking out of town to begin our climb up cobblestoned country lanes and dirt paths through vineyards, past red-roofed stone houses and churches, to the highest mountain pass on our route. 

The Rio Lima and another medieval bridge
leading to a chapel--Capela de San Antonio
dos Capuchos and our pilgrim hostel for the night

Gradually the houses dropped away and we entered solid forest. At least the European version of forest. Nothing but some sort of pine. Lots of it, of different-aged stands. Our trail criss-crossed over eroded gravel tracks. This was clearly a forest plantation on a regular harvest cycle. The view from the pass back over the river valley we had just climbed out of was vast and lovely, if one ignored the regular harvest patterns and lack of diversity in the forests, and the broken glass littering the exposed rock at the viewpoint. We were in our comfort zone—walking through the woods and mountains—and yet I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug about these Portuguese forests. These are the kinds of pine plantations that made our eyes glaze over when we had to walk through them on the Continental Divide Trail in the Rocky Mountains of Montana to get to the “real” wilderness areas where diverse forest ecosystems are allowed to flourish on their own. Generally speaking, there’s just not that kind of wilderness in Europe. You don’t visit Europe to get close to nature. It’s easy to write off Europe as having devastated its natural environment centuries ago.

Traditional Portuguese village.

View from the high mountain pass at
Alto da Portela Grande (410 m)

So this may seem like an odd place to speculate on humanity’s spiritual relationship with other species. I came on the camino because I was curious about whether such a pilgrimage might allow me to explore some of my spiritual beliefs. I’ve referred to Quakerism, Catholicism, Hinduism, and Taoism in my various blogs. But I have quickly run into one of my most profound problems with all of these isms—a lack of an in-depth theology of interspecies relationships. Of course, I don’t know as much about Eastern philosophies as I do about Christian theology, so there could be much there to explore. But my frame of reference continues to be the Euro-American world, try as I might to break out of it. Speaking of the same world, Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme write,

“Many Americans do not relate to the environmental tragedy

personally because we have been living within a modern political and

economic story which values personal freedom and individual

competition, and a religious story that values personal salvation and

relationship to a Creator outside of the world. The larger community

of life is left behind in these worldviews where particular human

interests dominate, especially economic growth and progress. The well

being of land, air, water, and species are not seen as fundamental to

many Americans – politically, economically, or religiously. Thus they

are in denial or oblivious to the fact that we are causing a mass

extinction of species, toxifying the water and land, radically altering the

climate, and contributing to the causes of poverty around the world.

...Many environmentalists are trying to address this issue by

following Aldo Leopold’s directive to extend our sense of value and

moral responsibility to the biotic community. How do we do this?

...A traditional Biblical cosmology, then, is no longer adequate for

our times and the recognition of this is what is causing Jewish,

Christian, and Muslim theologians to reexamine the Genesis story.

Many of them are involved in redefining the role of the human in

relation to the growing environmental crisis. The reconstruction of

the meaning of stewardship versus dominion is at the heart of these

discussions.”

(Tucker and Swimme, 2009, “The Universe Story as a Basis for Multicultural Planetary Civilization, from The Coming Transformation: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities, eds. Kellert and Speth)

One of the many stone crosses along the Camino de Santiago,
piled with "offerings" of rocks from pilgrims.

Who is guiding whom?

The world religions seem to me to focus on giving us guidance on how to live well with our selves and each other in order to become closer to the divine. While we can all use such guidance, what about how to live well with other species? I’m talking spiritual theology here, not the rational approach  of ethics or ecology. Where are the spiritual guides who can tell us how to walk well among our non-human neighbors on the Earth? There are more and more scholars trying to answer questions like these, but I want to see someone developing theology for this purpose that includes specific rituals, such as pilgrimages, to help us develop our spiritual understandings of our place on the planet. There are models, of course, such as traditional and indigenous knowledge systems and pedagogies, or even self-proclaimed pagan “religions” like Wicca. (Those wacky Wiccans. Who takes them seriously? No one I know.) Tucker and Swimme are leaders in this arena of Christian theology, developing Thomas Berry’s idea of a “Universe story” that unites scientific and religious understandings of human life on the planet.

Hiking through hard frost on the morning after Christmas,
our last day in Portugal.

As with all my blog posts on this camino, I’m just barely scratching the surface of everything that could be and needs to be said here. I’m just trying to use the journey and the writing as a way to probe what it is I want to explore more deeply. This post has returned to my guiding environmental interests in life, somewhat in reaction to the frustration I frequently feel with too much “navel-gazing” and to the guilt that I feel that I generally don’t pay enough attention to my spiritual health, at least through traditional religious practices. I’m giving it an honest attempt!

Crossing the Rio Mino from Portugal to Spain, with
the beautiful town and cathedral of Tui on the Spanish side.

In the meantime, we’ve left Portugal behind and crossed into Spain, and the small patches of forests have actually changed a bit, gotten more diverse. I believe this has more to do with change in the land and climate (we’re actually closer to the coast now) than in the political boundary, but there are noticeable differences in the human-built environments as well, so who knows? In any case, I have stopped trying to dampen my habitual process of trying to make sense of the environment around me in case it’s actually counterproductive to bringing me closer to enlightenment. I don’t really have any intention of changing my belief that we all need to know as much about the natural world as possible in order to behave better as members of the global environment. So, if that means I won’t ever experience enlightenment because I can’t let go of my attachments to wanting to see a healthy environment around me, so be it.