The following essay, "Epicenters of Justice," has been submitted to the faculty of the University of Minnesota as partial fulfillment for the Master of Liberal Studies degree.

Drew Hempel completed high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After a year at Hampshire College in the five college valley of Amherst, Massachusetts, Hempel transferred to Madison, WI where he achieved a B.A. in International Relations with an emphasis on environmental studies. Drew has a certificate in conservation biology and sustainable development from the School for Field Studies in Costa Rica, as well as work and travel experience in Alaska, Morocco, Venezuela and other countries.

With a childhood focused on music studies, for the past ten years Hempel has worked on applied social research and theory in ecological justice. Work areas have included Citizens for a Better Environment, Lothlorien Housing Cooperative, Natural Harvest Farm, University of Wisconsin-Madison Greens, the Minnesota Free Burma Coalition, Clean Water Action Alliance, AFSCME local 3896, and the Resource Center of Americas. Hempel recently completely a stint as a columnist for the University of Minnesota Daily, chalked up eight arrests for civil disobedience and helped lead several successful sustainability projects for monitoring sweatshops, divesting from corporations collaborating in slave-labor projects and passing a selective purchasing resolution at the Minneapolis City Council.

What is this book about? I want to first start with an informal, accessible transcription of a talk that is from someone who studied with an Indian teacher of Advaita Vedanta or nondualism. I ask that readers not dismiss this passage as simple new ageism but to proceed to the following scholarly excerpt from Yale University Press's publication of Nonduality: A comparative philosophy authored by David Loy.

The interesting thing is, this is reality. This is just simple reality. It is not some exalted state of enlightenment. It is just recognizing what is obviously, irrefutably true. There is just Awareness experiencing form. If you really check and see, it is just Awareness meeting Awareness. There is only really one of us here in the whole game. The interesting thing is, you see, since this is reality, since this is just what is real, how might life be if it was lived like this? If there was not the referencing of something that anyway does not exist, how could life be? How would world economics be if there was no sense of "you" and "me"? Competition would disappear. Starvation would disappear. Environmental degradation would disappear.

You know, I came from quite an educated family and I had a good education, so everybody was interested in solutions, political solutions, environmental solutions, but it became really obvious to me from quite early on, when I was about fourteen, that the only solution is to awaken from this dream. As long as action is taken based in separation, you can "Greenpeace" as much as you like and Greenpeace is a great organization, but it is still coming from separation, you see. It is still "us" against "them" - bad guys and good guys. You can come up with all kinds of new political systems. You know, Marx was really idealistic. I mean, if you read "Das Kapital," he had fantastic ideas, but you can't implement a different system without first changing Consciousness. It has been the same with everybody who has tried to shift the external.

Nothing is really going to fundamentally shift because the underlying blueprint has been left untouched. It seems like it is only through this shift from separation to wakefulness that life on this planet can be lived as it is intuitively meant to be lived. You know what I mean? You look around and you see so much funny stuff going on. There's the weirdest stuff goes on on this planet, you know. I mean, stuff that when you look at it, it looks just crazy.

I used to live in Bali in Indonesia and they are cutting down the rainforest very fast there. I found out that there are teak trees there which are really beautiful and very valuable hardwood which they cut down, put them on boats and take them 200 miles offshore and dump them into the ocean. This is because Japanese businessmen are amassing hardwood in warehouses in Japan and they want to keep its value high. So other companies cut trees but these Japanese companies pay for them and just dump them in the water; abandon them just to keep investment high. Now, somebody doing that has to have billions of dollars already. What kind of thought process is at work with billions of dollars that is willing to risk the environment just to keep value? It has to be a thought process that is thinking in terms of limitation, that is thinking in terms of "me" and "you." So, what kind of world could it be, what kind of manifestation could it be where this imaginary separation is just no longer referenced?1

In both these dualisms [personal and species (collective)], the self is understood to be the source of awareness and therefore of all meaning and value, which is to devalue the world/nature into merely that field of activity wherein the self labors to fulfill itself. Then the problem is the same for both: the alienated subject feels no responsibility for the objectified other and attempts to find satisfaction through projects that usually merely increase the sense of alienation. The meaning and purpose sought can be attained only in a relationship whereby nonduality with the objectified other is re-established.... The nondualist systems that we have studied do not provide us with ready-made models to cope with this new ecological problem, which is the product of a very different worldview.... So perhaps new forms of spiritual practice need to be developed which temper the yin of spiritual practice with the yang of grass-roots social activism. The last two centuries have shown us that it is naive to expect the necessary changes through political or social revolutions alone. Both the personal and the species dualisms are due to delusions that cannot be behavioristically 'conditioned' out of existence but that require the desire and effort to develop an awareness that transforms one's life. Perhaps the future of our biosphere depends to some extent on the quiet, unnoticed influence of those working to overcome their own sense of subject-object duality.2

Here is another example from a recent scholarly essay by David W. Kidner that also describes the foundation for Epicenters of Justice:

In a healthy culture, the wildness/otherness within us resonates with parallel aspects of the rest of the natural world. While we might say that such resonance takes place outside of consciousness, we should also note that the unconscious is partly formed in the denial of such resonances... The destruction of the natural world is thus underpinned and paralleled by a covert, psycho-cultural destruction in which the multiple metaphors of symbolic process are replaced by the reified categories of the language of rationality...4

If rationality is to have any function for long-term survival, it must, as ecologists have been telling us, find a form which encourages sensitivity to the conditions under which we exist on the earth, one which recognises and accommodates the denied relationships of dependency and enables us to acknowledge our debt to the sustaining others of the earth. This implies creating a democratic culture beyond dualism, ending colonising relationships and finding a mutual, ethical basis for enriching coexistence with earth others. We can realign reason not with the master formations of elite control and the rational egoism which fails to acknowledge the other as a limiting principle, but with social formations built on radical democracy, co-operation and mutuality.4a

If as I am suggesting, environmental cosmology is the sublimation of a set of aesthetic dispositions, is cosmological intervention not always 'preaching to the converted' ( less an intervention in the symbolic order than an ideological consolidation of an ethos, a form of life, assembled by other forces?5

Members of Qigong societies all over China invited him to give public speeches, and he frequently lectured to as many as 30,000 people in packed sports arenas. As he did so, he emitted his healing qi to the audience, and this was the principal reason people came to see him. Because of lingering problems with incompatible regional dialects in China, many people in those audiences couldn't understand a word Dr. Yan said, but this did not seem to matter.6 (my emphasis)

The hopefully "resonating" language of Epicenters of Justice is geared toward those who are well-aware of cutting-edge trends in humanity, who are critically open-minded and yet who look for scholarly analysis, well-substantiated in solid research. I myself have "officially left" the academy even though an earlier version of Epicenters of Justice was approved as my graduate thesis by my master of liberal studies advisor and final project instructor at the University of Minnesota. My findings show that the University of Minnesota is only a university by name and it meets the criterion of a coercive institution that punishes researchers who begin successfully applying knowledge that also challenges the corporate-state elite. Just in my applied research in sustainability at the U of MN I directly experienced the blatant corruption of the administration while, at the same time, whole other departments were forced to reorganize at the direct behest of the corporate-state elite and their legally mandated maximizing of destructive profit-extraction.7

So, ironically, this work, with its unusually long footnotes and extensive reliance on excepts, may seem to simply be some awkward attempt to retreat into academia, as some of my activist friends mistakenly judged. This dense, laconic book is actually meant as pragmatic concise solution to our submersion in indoctrination of inaccurate perception. Nondualism is nothing new, in fact, it appears, as I will show, to be the norm for the relatively stable societies compared to the origins of the institutions of the corporate-state elite. What makes Epicenters of Justice unique from other sources on nondualism, is, as Loy points out in his comparative study, a matter of emphasis not experience. After ten years of intensive work in environmental justice activism it is exactly the pervasive lack of a nondual approach in the West that I have found to be the real limit for environmental and social justice.8

Fortunately, as we confront the corporate-state, more and more, revelation of nondualism is becoming a foundation for progressive sustainability. I myself have had the privilege of being involved at a deep level in the transformations taking place, led by the thousands of non-governmental civil society organizations worldwide. I think that the emphasis of Epicenters of Justice could significantly help promote the universal nondualist foundation for ecological justice that a growing number of scholars are discovering, as I will show.

For their intellectual contributions, thanks in particular to my family, my main music teachers Susan Genaw and Lee Humphries and, James Hong, John E. Peck, and Chet B. Kite.

1 "Delicious Beingness," Satsang with Arjuna Nick Ardagh, see http://www.livingessence.com or Arjuna Nick Ardagh, How About Now? (Grass Valley, CA: Living Essence Foundation, 1999)

2 David Loy, Nonduality: A study in comparative philosophy (London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 304; republished 1997 and 1998 by Humanities Press.

3 As so well told by Arjuna, the corporate-state elite are the most powerful manifestations of this world-view. I will give further examples see also Professor G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America?: Power and politics in the year 2000 (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Pub. Co., 1998); and Harland Prechel, Big Business and the State (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).

4 David W. Kidner, "Culture and the Unconscious in Environmental Theory," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 61-73. "Rationality" is a loaded term but as the editor Richard Buxton of From Myth to Reason? Studies in the development of Greek thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) quotes Robin Horton: "If the West has done nothing else of indisputable worth, it has succeeded in creating an institutional framework that has generated forms of explanation, prediction and control of a power hitherto unrivalled in any time or place." Buxton is citing Robin Horton and Ruth Finnegan, eds., Modes of Thought: Essays on thinking in Western and non-Western societies (London: Faber, 1973), p. 294.

4a Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature [London: Routledge, 1993], pp. 195-6

5 Allan Greenbaum, "Environmental thought as cosmological intervention," Environmental Values 8 (1999): 485-497.

6 Charles T. McGee, M.D. with Qigong Master Effie Poy Yew Chow, Ph.D., R.N., C.A., Qi Gong: Miracle healing from China (Coeur d'Alene, ID: Medi Press, 1994), p. 192. The Boston Globe columnist, Chet Raymo, in his lively stomp on threats to the modern paradigm, Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection between Science and Religion (NY: Walker and Co., 1998), is quick to ignore and/or dismiss the legitimate investigations that question the foundation of the West. Although there are several works on ancient philosophy, only a few explore options beyond the assumption that rationalism was a natural evolution that had to beat back the savages along the way. Raymo, for instance, cites E.R. Dodd's classic The Greeks and the Irrational wherein, with the typical confidence, an upturned nose is turned to "mislead" Greek shamans that once had the audacity to be accepted healers among a dominant culture of nondualist practitioners, as I will show.

7 See Lawrence C. Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower: The corporate takeover of academia (Boston, MA : South End Press, 1995). U.S. universities originated as an expression of colonizing and "civilizing."

8 This includes but is not limited to field canvassing for Greenpeace and Citizens for a Better Environment; being vice-president of a labor union local; getting arrested eight times for civil disobedience; being co-owner of a consensus run housing co-op of 35 people that is part of a ten-house collective; co-founding the MN Free Burma coalition; and helping lead many successful campaigns in alliance with many groups.