Healing Ecology, Child Development and Empathy- A conversation

Alternative Child Development Specialist & Naturalist interview eachother on the topic of empathy in child development and in nature, especially with relationship to the autism epidemic.. This is a small selection of our conversation, the transcript of which may be made available upon request.

Aaron – A good place to start talking about this issue, “autism and empathy” is this complaint that I’m trying to articulate about the feeling of growing up in a culture – must we name this specific culture as a place to start a conversation, maybe if we can understand the negative of empathy, you know, we can make suggestions for the positive. I feel like I grew up in a dominantly white suburban culture that was, like, straight, and oppressive in some ways and where there wasn’t much freedom for me. In my own restricted ways, I always tried to rebel against those social circumstances and the cultural norms that have driven post-world war II USA in particular. When I was younger, I was something of a ‘punk rock anarchist kid’, culminating in a highly political stage in high school and for years afterwards in Seattle.

Laura – Would you tell us what that means? Were your parents conservative?

Aaron – My parents are lovely folk who might be described as socially conservative but only by us in the postmodern left niche. Nevertheless, they are always making big strides in the right direction. In most ways I think they would describe themselves as “liberals”, they are progressive on many issues such as health care, environmental rehabilitation and gay rights.

Laura – Would your parents describe themselves as ‘Democrats’?

Aaron -- “Yeah…”

Laura – nodding in acknowledgement “sure”

Aaron – They have a lot of appreciation for Barak Obama on some level.

Laura – Yeah, exactly…

There is mutual laughter

Aaron – And they Love NPR. But it’s in a way, like, I can appreciate the fact that NPR is not a lot of other shit, but it’s as if there are these invisible undertones of middle class alienated existence. Feeling like a pretense of neutrality, it can be translated as arrogance on their part. You follow me?

Laura – “Uh-huh” …

Aaron – And that’s: I think, hidden in NPR. But it’s still better than most things. But what I mean really is like confidence or even ‘competence’ in empathy. “Confidence in Empathy” is a phrase that came to me recently. I feel that people lack a certain “confidence in empathy” as if sympathy is some kind of ideal, even in Unitarian communities, which I grew up in. There was this ideal of compassion, often spoken but sometimes exercised with invisible limitations, or at least not very courageously. I take confidence in empathy to the point where it’s a belief but also a practicality, and instead they were ruled by what they thought of as being economic forces, but what I thought of as being personal forces, or, more specifically, interpersonal.

I believe that one thing that ties our society together is this sense of interpersonal formality of relationship and procedure based on free market capitalism. I think that’s also called alienation. And a lot of fear and individuation comes from alienation – from separation, from these symbols of division. At the zendo the other day I expressed bemusement at people who had never had the experience of living out of a back pack because I wonder how they survive…

Laura – (laughter) “you’re right” ... “

Aaron – I am serious. I am actually wondering how they take care of themselves. And I think they don’t truly. I say they are interdependent. Many people are so busy taking care of these mundane desires which are stoked by the media. But really they exploit the human circumstance of lack and sadness and they try to fill that with myriad anesthetics – this is the basis of consumer culture in a nutshell. Consumerism is of the essence of evasion. Aversion and evasion – really – they really take evasive maneuvers away from this possibility of becoming the fulfillment of their liveliest most creative selves because they’re putting all this energy into fear. I have always felt stifled by that fear overdrive in society. How about you? So right now I’m looking at it. I’m feeling that this lack of confidence with empathy […]

Laura – Well […] you talk about confidence but people are not willing to move confidently into the dark unless they feel safe. Many people who sink to the depths do so out of desperation because of circumstance. If you’re not being forced into the dark, it takes a lot of will to go there on your own. What you receive when you get there is very important… So if you have a negative association with opening up, such as someone not listening to you… That makes it much harder. We have a culture of both not opening up – so people aren’t ready when you need help – and also, people aren’t ready to receive.

Aaron – “yeah”

Laura – If it’s their first experience with nature and they haven’t been given a background in experiencing nature as kind of a holistic thing, the first thing that they have is a pain or a cold or an uncontrollable wet. If people haven’t had that ever and they don’t have any training or any tools to do that, you know. So it takes a lot of integrity to do that anyways…

Aaron – The question is then, who is going to spend the time to mentor children in nature experience unless they are being paid? I think we need a community response, as suggested by The Last Child In The Woods. Maybe there is truth to that, that you need to make money to survive, but still, on a cultural basis it’s almost like there’s this impetus towards fear and to try to move people and isolate them away from this kind of empathic community scenario.

Laura – Well it moves them away from what they’re afraid of and also away from what our society teaches us to be afraid of.

Aaron – Right. It seems like we’re also talking about child development. I’m glad you moved it there because that is something that is my specialty.

Laura – Can you elaborate on that?

Aaron – I’m an alternative development child specialist – and that’s what I do. I am a part of this company startup called Dayaalu. I’m working with Sue Steindorf towards this transformative integral summer camp experiment for ASD kids on Bainbridge Island. We have also introduced an autism awareness pilot program in a Bainbridge Island middle school, which is to be incorporated as curriculum. For the purposes of this I would love to bring out a flyer to read…

Laura – Cool…

Aaron – Okay, so I’m thinking this might bring new stuff up. Unfortunatelty I cannot give this one to you because there is a limited number of copies. I’m hoping this will bring it into my area of specialty – which is, more to the point, an autism reality check. But I’m also equally interested in all the so-called “others” – the Pervasive Developmental Disabilities – Not Otherwise Specified, literally PDD-NOS. Which means a diagnosis of ‘other’. They don’t care to elaborate apparently […]

Interruption by mutual laughter

You know, this is not so dissimilar to “white”, “asian”, “other”. Instead you just have to mark “reality check”. Or do you feel like you can just check one of those and feel satisfied with the simplicity of all that?

Laughter…

Laura – But that’s just because I’m white…

Aaron – No you’re, like, Irish […]

Laura – Yeah, of course. I’m not even sure if I have any Native. I’m not sure that I do… So, umm, so why are you working with kids with developmental disabilities… what does that relate to empathy?

Aaron – This thing that’s called ‘autism’ and a lot of these things that are called ‘PDD-NOS’ are something of an ultimate scenario of the condemnation by society. They’ve been condemned by society I feel as people who lack empathy. So we are turning that around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees by insisting that they are teachers of empathy […] so that’s what I’d call literally a revolution […] it’s a hundred and eighty degree turn in a circle. So, “teaching compassion and empowering lives”, this is language that my friend Sue Steindorf wrote for Dayaalu right before she met me. And then I helped her participate in this novel autism awareness pilot program for the Bainbridge Island school district. It was the first shot and it was very successful. What we want to do is engage with school districts and neurodiversity communities around this ideal… of teaching the so-called special needs children as teachers of compassion… holding them as such.

Laura – What was the conference about? What was so cool about that conference?

Aaron – It was. What I just mentioned was a pilot program of original curriculum for a school district. So my part of it was to go into two middle school classrooms of seventh grade kids and speak to them about my experiences after Sue had run these novel educational programs […] I engaged with them as a speaker, for a full class period for two different seventh grade classrooms and it blew their minds. Later I was told that this moment caused a little ripple in the school district. So these programs may be run in the future as curriculum for the whole school. When I speak to public audiences I use very gentle language, right now I’m being much more uncensored, by the way. Speaking of which I said some pretty uncensored things to the seventh grade kids […] I talked about people living on the streets, I talked about all these different experiences, and relating it to their lives whenever I could. So I’m telling them real stuff up front. Somehow I walk into this school district and receive minor grant money to speak truth to these kids. I believe in hindsight that they are better listeners than most adults.

The point is – autism is interesting to us because it’s an incredible epidemic. I believe that, taking into account the incredible increase in it, in one or two generations those ASD kids will be a huge population. They already are. This creates a problem of proportions because people have no idea how to relate to them. They have been mistreated for centuries because of misunderstanding, and now they seem to be sprouting up everywhere. And I’m also asserting, for the purposes of being uncensored right now, I don’t typically say this out loud, or try not to, but […] basically, their worst behaviors, all of the shittiest things that happen to them are mere reflections of the broader society and where it’s at in its development. Certainly there was a major developmental shift in society happening that gives context to the rise of autism. I have said this for years – if we want to understand autism, we have to take a look in the dark. For years my mantra has been ‘I don’t care what they all think of me: I’m going to see what’s in there’.

Here’s the straight talk. In every way every autism symptom necessarily resembles the aspie’s highly neuroplastic adaptation to the changes in the social and ecological environment. So what’s the context of the times in which we live? I say we live in a changing society, in fact a rapidly changing society. In fact, the rate of change is accelerating rapidly, and we basically cannot keep up with the technological development. There are all sorts of strange possibilities starting to be reported by the technological science sphere. Ever since the advent of the internet and the availability of information technology. There seems to be this sense of self-destruction based on a lack of empathy. And it relates to humans as well as the earth. I believe it’s the result of changes in the neuro-somatic, you know, brain and intelligent processors of neuronal connectivity based on electric chemical signals, living systems. This is a conclusion at which I rest after years of research and experience, including a fair amount of journalism training. That began in Olympia. When I came back from Palestine for the second time… I was looking for a good story, because I got my first regular job at a newspaper in the United States. This was The Sitting Duck, which at the time was edited by an old kermudgin named Terry Knight.

So it wasn’t a big deal to get a job at The Sitting Duck, but I was really excited about just being in the practice of doing actual journalism. All of the sudden then I encountered this really astounding story. I was on a camping trip when a friend’s girlfriend who was working with a severe autistic child in Lacey literally pleaded to me to write about it. At the time I was writing hipster stuff, Roller Derby Girls and DIY shows and stuff. Although the first time I got to go to Burning Man was as a journalist for The Sitting Duck. So I was there with a press pass to hide behind. Funny, huh?

Laura – “Oh yeah, awesome”

Aaron – Later by the way, it was when I went back a second time was when I really deepened and opened and enjoyed myself […] because I went not as a journalist! But just as a person who was a citizen of Black Rock City, so I ended up volunteering at this Gaia Maitreya Temple complex thing, which was really beautiful. It really opened my heart chakra to receiving an abundant spiritual landscape. That kind of notion was new to me in some ways. I always knew it was there, I never didn’t believe, but it was new in terms of the level of synchromystical sense of interdependence and interconnection with other people who could let go of the presumption of neurotypical civilization in a heartbeat…

There is mutual laughter

Aaron – So it was healing for me, the experience opened me up and helped to cure some of my anxiety. You know, it was very wonderful.

Laura – It’s a contained safe environment.

Aaron – For you to be free […] I found a kind of freedom there on the playa desert, out there with tens of thousands of people in this desert sand storm […] I found an empathy there that was absent from my usual life. And I guess my suggestion is some of the value in what we call the west coast festival scene… I think maybe that term could be recycled, but whatever, for the purposes of our discussion… That there is this suggestion that people can run these sustainable civilizations based on empathy. And then somehow there’s the notion of stability, you know stable, sustainable development and growth. Burning Man I believe is our non-neurotypical response to the proto-apocalyptic vision of desperation that is being sold to people through our consumerist society. I remember at Burning Man I had this conversation with someone about the possibility of “peak oil”, “the long-emergency” and all that. We both started laughing because we knew that because of our temporary communitas we already had the PVC pipe and we were just going to pitch tent and start building cool things.

Laura – Yeah. Empowering isn’t it?

Aaron – Yeah: I mean, we can live very much off the grid if we need to, but we need the skills and the experience. That’s what stuff like Burning Man teaches you to do.

Laura – At Rainbow Gathering that’s part of their whole deal, it’s about being self-contained and going in and developing a space for yourself in tribe. You do have to rely on each other. But if you’re going to rely on someone you need to know where they’re at.

(20:17)

Aaron – Independent DIY culture but also kind of a natural economy based on necessity, simple commerce and empathy to some degree – you know.

Laura – Even at Rainbow Gathering we have no … The scene is temporary. We still don’t have an idea of the depths to which a Native Tribe can go. It’s pretty far where we have gone, but our goal which is even more amazing, is to become fully integrated with our families… Our family is our tribe and our tribe is our families.

Aaron – The phrase “hold space” has come into popular use. I believe that one of the most powerful acts that I could possibly do is to create space. The thing is that this basically shows all (showing Laura the Dayaalu flyer made by Sue). Here there are autistic kids doing yoga. They have healthy skin and they are in good health. And who communicate and who can speak to people about what’s going […]

Laura – Yeah. That’s cool. So… I’d like to talk about both the chemical as well as the kind of mindmap origins of autism and asbergers in particular.

Aaron – Good. Okay.

Laura – I want the chemical, genetic and social basis of autism […] Mycelial social fabric […] So let’s talk about the chemical causes first, that sounds a little easier. Are they often nutritional, like the kinds of foods you eat or are they like toxins?

Aaron – Yeah. Both. Yes – they are both.

Laura – What about what happens? What happens to someone when they become autistic? Is there a process that happens to make people autistic in their brain?

Aaron – That’s a really interesting question. Because I’ve actually almost […] I’ve received documentation of that as a living process before. That was one early thing that cued me in as evidence that the story is wrong […] the whole story is just wrong. Then I had a series of amazing epiphanies. My introduction to real alternative child development as an observation about society was these kids in this neighborhood in Lacey who had received [taking a deep breath] this toxic plume. The copper smelter south of Tacoma that exploded… intentionally… because of bankruptcy. I wont go into the ASARCO company but there’s a whole story about corruption and a superfund site available to the public. That’s American Smelter and Refinery Corporation – an early industrial era corporation. But this neighborhood had also been dosed with toxicity from this watershed where existed an old chemical plant farm. They were growing plants. They used to put stuff like roundup and dumped toxins in there. For years. In the watershed. It’s accumulative and the watershed is poisoned.

A parent of this particular group of autism moms… they call themselves “mercury moms” actually figured out that if you look through back pages of The Olympian newspaper, the corporate press in this town, that all of these people near this watershed write in and complain of getting cancer from contamination from this particular watershed. So it happens to be this watershed overlaying with the toxic plume from ASARCO south of Tacoma. On the Washington State Dept. of Ecology it’s registered as Toxic. There’s a map of it in fact. This neighborhood in Lacey looks like any white middle class neighborhood. It’s very green. In one generation, the same kids who go to the same two doctor clinics but also including illegal experiments that were conducted on children from pharmaceutical corporations in the city of Olympia, including the Merck corporation, by the approval of an illegal beauracratic entity that exists in Olympia, making millions of dollars.

It’s right up in Tumwater I believe. I don’t remember the name of it but I have it in my research. It’s a whole scandalous story, again we find corruption, collaboration with the pharmaceutical companies to approve any kind of human subject research. It’s a private corporation that gets paid by the pharmaceutical companies to approve research on their human subjects. The Olympia Merck vaccine experiments in Olympia were an example of that. So here in our town we find wonderful, or horrible, examples of pharmaceutical funded research in this country – and I say that it lacks empathy. Beyond that, it’s often sociopathic, not feeling for its victims. Because they performed grotesque experiments on children. These parents had an interesting situation because they were fairily educated some of them… you know… and they all happen to have children with autism within one generation in an area where before it didn’t exist. Many of these families have stories, they have testified to me on record that experiments or not […] vaccines were involved in their child’s autism. These were apparent medical anomalies… kids who had come down with autism. In the case of Ryan Boe, he had come down with it right within the doctor’s office immediately after vaccination. He had an intense reaction which I shall not recount – after which he was changed, apparently forever. Admittedly, a nurse in Olympia has admitted to parent sources that they were not following the government recommendations for spacing out the time between vaccination to kids. Now, as I mentioned, illegally-approved experiments were performed in Olympia on some of these children. It is demonstratably clear that the combination of vaccine poisoning and environmental toxicity, perhaps with genetic and social factors… is causal of this specific group of mostly severe, so-called severe, autistic people, coming out in one generation. I met many of these children personally and saw before-and-after vaccine-reaction photographs for some cases. When I first heard of the whole story the whole thing was so overwhelming… the autism families were sounding outwardly paranoid at times. I remember hearing that Dan Olmstead had been here, who now has an amazing book out called Age of Autism, named after his UPI column. It just rips the vaccination issue, it’s amazing. He came to Olympia and wrote about it. He couldn’t get the Olympian to publish it. And he’s the boss of the people who cover the white house for the United Press International. Who could get the Olympian to cover the autism outbreak, insert perhaps any mere mention of the correspondence of regional toxicity to the outbreak, or the reportage of vaccine injury? No one. So then I couldn’t even get The Sitting Duck to publish it. So I want to report for the record, I testify that I’ve had a hard time getting this information out there. These mercury moms have never had their rightful access to the regular media. So they are marginal in that way. But they formed this community. I went in and interviewed many of them.

(33:25)

Aaron – I also believe that a major cause is the proliferation of endocrine disrupter chemicals throughout our daily lives… I suggest that in the decades nineteen fifty and ninetine ninety there was a shortage of empathic behavior, a scarcity of thinking about it.

Laura – The nineties more than the eighties?

Aaron – The nineties more than the fifties… The nineties was a horror story that we cannot imagine. Because we changed the food supply that sustains our lives. Nothing like that was even heard of in the fifties. They were making science fiction flicks about that. It was the fulfillment of the dream of the fifties.

Laura – Uh-huh. Oh Yeah.

Aaron – In this inversion of empathy of the nineties… that was sort of this anaesthetic bubble of the nineties, right under people’s noses… out of the blue, within our lifetimes, the food system changed forever, the proliferation of endocrine disrupters to the point of criminal negligence […]

Laura – What are endocrine disrupters?

Aaron – Endocrine disrupter chemicals are found in a lot of stuff. They are found in daily products: in women’s cosmetics for the large part, they’re found in almost all plastics. They’re found in most cans of food, in the lining. They are subtle bioaccumulative agents (it’s hard or impossible for most people to get rid of them) [...] especially with the Standard American Diet, they don’t ever get rid of them, they accumulate them.

Laura – Can things like seaweed get rid of them?

Aaron – There are ways, yeah. But I think it takes a long time.

Laura – Is this the same as Persistent Organic Pollutants? Like vinyl is a persistent organic pollutant. I think PCBs, they accumulate in orcas and so on, in salmon I think. Have you heard of these things going into the ocean?

Aaron -- Yeah… That’s not the same classification necessarily. Endocrine Disrupter Chemicals specifically gets its meaning from ‘endocrine’ which means hormone glands… Take this reality check… young girls going into puberty earlier and earlier in each generation, reaching the beginnings of sexual maturity. Endocrine disrupter chemicals are affecting their sexual development. But you can bet it doesn’t stop there. But that’s the big bad thing about it, the symptoms get worse with passing generations, that’s what accumulation of endocrine disrupters like BPA is doing to us.

People didn’t know – in the Levittown culture, that was the beginning of white suburban America. A post-world-war two white community… especially for soldiers returning home, they wanted to start families, and what do you know, the desire for nice neighborhoods being constructed on the fly translated into a growth market. Levittown spread across the country. William Levitt was a business genius, but his communitas reflected the makings of a Disneyland-esque Pleasantville. The nineties inherited this Pleasantville mentality, “the soccer mom” politically represented the white burbs. They were teaching us at the time that there was possibility of limitless growth in the economy. There was no limit to spending.

Recently I had this experience at the bank. I have been trying to get over my fear of bankers. So I go to WSECU credit union… and in twenty minutes time I explained my reality with reference to autism and the social context of where it comes from – as you say, the chemical, genetic and social reality of it […] For this one awestruck bank teller I crunched into as simple possible terms the information that I had to offer. Impressively, she remained focused the entire time and listened. By the end of my rap the teller seemed genuinely concerned and looked like she wanted to hear more, but her boss left her a note that we were taking up too much time. She was just like – her jaw jut dropped, you know? I have to say this – this is crazy material. But at some point, it just needs to be said, the truth just needs to be spoken. I feel like I have to say the truth in a way that is sanitized and I wish that I could apologize for all of the people who are left out because they are now suffering so much that I can’t even talk about them.