Hayden on Earth : Education: The liberal assemblyman is sorting out his thoughts on man, God and the environment in teaching a course at Santa Monica City College.

“What do people work for?” Assemblyman Tom Hayden challenged a classroom of 90 Santa Monica City College students.

“Meaning,” someone offered.

“Consumption,” said another.

“Vacation!” Hayden answered. “And where do they like to go? Nature! For some reason they have a need for blue skies, for going fishing, for exposing their kids to this cycle. They’re drawn to it as powerfully as anything in their lives. People have a subconscious sense that it’s their home, and they have to get to it. This runs across class lines and gender lines. It’s difficult to explain.”

Hayden, who at 51 remains one of the nation’s most intellectually restless politicians, believes he is just the man to explain it.

He is spending his Thursday nights in a classroom, preaching and sorting out his views on the relationship among man, God and the environment.

The liberal former anti-war activist’s decision to create and teach a 16-week course on “Environment and Spirituality,” and to begin writing a book on the same theme, is the story of a midlife search for meaningfulness. It is also an attempt to confer additional legitimacy on “New Age” ecology and theology, loosely organized philosophical niches that seek to radically change the way people view their existence.

Hayden, a man regarded by his admirers as a brilliant seer and dismissed by his critics as an arrogant oddball, has entered academia for reasons that are clearly political and yet also deeply personal.

The Democratic assemblyman from Santa Monica, who wrote part of Proposition 128, the sweeping “Big Green” environmental initiative that was soundly defeated by California voters last year, says he has concluded that the political process is not reacting quickly enough to the planet’s environmental woes. As a result, he says, he has decided to use religion to change the way people vote on environmental issues. He believes he must change the way people think, not merely about the spotted owl or plastic trash bags, but about God and Earth, so that environmental preservation becomes a matter of spiritual urgency.

He wants people to think about the world as a living organism, not a storehouse of physical resources. He wants them to think about creation as a continuous process, not just seven days in antiquity. He wants to convince people that Judeo-Christian ethics, which teach that man has the God-given right to “subdue” the Earth, are the root of many of today’s environmental problems.

“Our religious assumptions motivate our behavior,” said Hayden, a Catholic of Irish ancestry. “But the stark fact is that organized religion has either ignored or rationalized the exploitation of the natural environment for 2,000 years. This requires an immediate and profound change if we’re to heal the environment we depend on. There are limits to what you can achieve until you change people’s thinking. Political and economic reform are important, but compared to the magnitude of the (environmental) problem, they amount to tinkering.

“The major assumption that needs to be challenged is that the Earth is a storehouse of physical things put here for our pleasure. . . . Participatory democracy stops at the outskirts of the human. What I’m trying to say is that nature has rights, and that those rights don’t come from us.”

Hayden said these ideas began to appeal to him before the “Big Green” initiative went down to defeat in a campaign in which chemical, oil and agricultural interests raised more than $11 million to oppose it. The measure would have placed unprecedented controls on pesticides, air pollution emissions, harvesting of old-growth redwood forests and development affecting marine and coastal resources.

“I had to grapple every day with the depths of the environmental crisis versus the shallowness of our political and business institutions,” he said. “I realized there’s a deeper level from which our political opinions come, and that campaign was a metaphor for something deeper. . . . What I’m doing now is not retreating from politics, it’s trying to deepen where I was coming from in politics.”

The strategy of appealing for spiritual votes parallels that used by 19th-Century opponents of slavery, he said.

“When slaves were considered things, without spirits, there was a compelling need in the abolitionist movement to appeal to religion, to make an argument against slavery in more than secular terms.”

And if all this results in Tom Hayden becoming America’s first avowed “environmental politician,” well, so be it.

“I don’t know of any politician who is primarily an environmentalist and sees politics as a way to accomplish environmental reform,” said Hayden, whose political standing in Sacramento is so shaky that leaders of his own party last month drafted a reapportionment plan eliminating his district. (That gesture became moot when the state Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction over reapportionment.)

New Age adherents are filled with concepts and jargon that have yet to play well in mainstream America. When it comes to the environment, they tend to use the more sweeping term cosmology in place of ecology. They dispute God’s place as an overseer of Earth, often substituting the theory of “Gaia,” in which “Mother Earth” is viewed as a single unit that regulates the environment. They contend that conservation decisions should be made with the brain’s right cerebral hemisphere, which neurology loosely regards as the “holistic” side of the brain.

Hayden, whose class is a wide-ranging survey of New Age philosophies and Eastern spirituality, is undaunted by the selling job he may have to do to the general public.

“People are ready for a new way of thinking,” he said in an interview. “It’s the transition that’s the intellectual struggle.”

Despite their quirkiness, some New Age concepts have considerable if indirect influence within the environmental movement. Integrating spirituality gives them even more power.

Richard Moore, president of Santa Monica City College and longtime friend of Hayden, said he was delighted to give Hayden a forum.

“I think Tom is one of the great leaders on the planet in terms of where ecology is heading,” Moore said. “He’s right on. He’s got a hot topic. America is driven by moral idealism, not by politics.”

In the aftermath of the Proposition 128 campaign, Hayden said, he decided not only to change his political focus but his lifestyle. He said he replaced his home’s lawn with drought-resistant plants, vowed to ride a bicycle on trips in his Santa Monica neighborhood and invested in a new environmentally conscious store of home products that will open later this month in Santa Monica.

Teaching a class and writing a book were the next steps.

Hayden runs an informal class, allowing opinions to fly between students, who are a mixture of college-age and older.

In two recent classes, topics included Thomas Berry, a Catholic monk who advocates a “new” story of Creation to make preservation of natural resources more purposeful; James Lovelock, a highly respected British scientist who coined the “Gaia” theory of Earth as a living organism; a presentation of a film about campers in Yosemite, interwoven with readings from journals of the first white explorers of the region, and an appearance by a reform rabbi, Dan Swartz, who emphasized the spiritual awe that some Jewish philosophers have expressed for nature in describing the kibbutzes of Israel.

Many of the students entered the class sympathetic to such voices. At one point during a recent class, however, one frustrated student told Hayden that she was having trouble understanding the spiritual underpinnings of environmentalism because she spent so much time isolated from it, working indoors or stuck in traffic.

“That,” Hayden said a few days later, “is the person I’m interested in.”

Swartz was in the midst of his presentation when 9:30 p.m. came and the three-hour class ended.

“Can we go to 9:45?” Hayden asked the students. “Nine-thirty or 9:45? Make a decision.”

“Nine forty-five” most of them called out.

Swartz closed with a meditation written by a Hassidic rabbi who urged praying once a day in fields or forests. He chose this one, Swartz explained, to try to send the students into the outside world with a sense of mysticism about nature.

Close your eyes, he told them. Imagine you’re barefoot, standing beside a mountain stream. In your hands you have a robe covered with dirt. You put the robe in a stream and with two stones, scrub and scrub and you see the stains wash away, and the robe becomes clean, and you walk to the bank and put the robe on and lift your face to the sun and feel the breeze slowly drying the robe, and you feel the sunlight on your cheeks.

Swartz was finished. There was silence for a moment.

“Thank you,” Hayden said to the class. “See you next week.”