Might Michael's Duck Help Us With Climate Change?

Might we kneel before a duck to find a better way to treat the Earth?

With the UN IPCC’s latest Report telling us just how badly we’ve messed with the planet’s life-sustaining processes, I wonder if our path forward might better involve a journey within. Might a duck help us to find our way?

From all my work supporting company and NGO leaders to find a path away from environmental destruction and human rights abuses, it was only when people really connected to who they were that we managed progress.

Australian philosopher and cartoonist Michael Leunig uses a simple drawing of a man praying to a duck to symbolise and demonstrate his ideas about the power of finding that connection within.

As Michael writes in the beautiful introduction to his 1990 publication, A Common Prayer, “The duck in the picture symbolises one thing and many things: nature, instinct, feeling, beauty, innocence, the primal, the non-rational and the mysterious unsayable.” These are qualities, he notes that, “we can easily attribute to the inner life of the kneeling man, to his spirit or his soul.”

The duck in the picture is a symbol of the human spirit, “and in wanting connection with his spirit it is a symbolic picture of a man searching for his soul.”

Michael notes that the more the man does these things, the more his life takes on a sense of meaning, “The search for the spirit leads to love and a better world, for him and those around him. This personal act is also a social and political act because it affects so many people who may be connected to the searcher.”

If we can act from our own inner wisdom, we rarely do things that harm. The Earth and all the beings upon it need us to find that connection asap.

Slowing down in Nature and observing the movements around us can help us find our way in. We might think we need vast, city-filling protests to bring change. I don’t. I think we need to watch ducks and find that connection to ourselves. If we do that, and act from that place, we can indeed find a new, different way.