John Revington was a volunteer with the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC) in Lismore, New South Wales, and editor of its quarterly journal, the World Rainforest Report. He lived from 1986 onward at Bodhi Farm, a Buddhist-founded intentional community on the NSW north coast, and completed graduate research through the School of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney (Hawkesbury), including an unpublished Master’s paper, Learning a Sense of Place (1997).

His essays, written mostly in the mid-to-late 1990s and published by RIC, argue for a Deep Ecology that doesn’t stop at values and inner transformation. He writes as someone inside the movement rather than against it: Deep Ecology, in his account, correctly diagnoses a culture’s alienation from the Earth, but on its own gives no account of power, political economy, or who benefits from exploitation – and without that analysis, well-meaning activism can misfire, alienate potential allies, or curdle into a misanthropy he found troubling in some of the movement’s own touchstones (his essay on the subject discusses Edward Abbey directly).

His other essays turn to the personal and experiential side of the same problem: how our relationship with time produces compulsive busyness and a culture-wide disregard for the future, and how intimacy with a particular place – not abstract commitment to “the Earth” or “Gaia” – is what actually sustains ecological care. Several of these draw on his own life at Bodhi Farm, including raising his son Tane there.

Essential Works

All four essays below were originally published by the Rainforest Information Centre and are republished on this site with permission.