Step One: Reframing Nature
We must take care of Nature!
“Be stewards of the Environment!” “TOP TEN WAYS TO TAKE CARE OF OUR PLANET”
What a nice idea, taking care of “Nature” (whatever that is)! It makes us think of cleaning streams, throwing litter into the proper receptacles, recycling at home, buying organic. All good, to be sure, but are they really “taking care of Nature?” These sentiments are so ingrained in environmentalist circles that it’s likely not many of us have really considered what they say about the worldview that produced them.
Essentially, saying “We must take care of Nature” implies that humanity has dominion over it.
“Take care of Nature” means “humans are responsible for keeping Nature healthy.” In reality, the opposite is true: “Nature” is responsible for keeping US healthy, because humans and “Nature” are part of the same System. Nature isn’t something you “Go To.”
Clearly, Step One in Participatory Ecology is reframing how we understand “Nature.” This is going to take some work.
“TEN REASONS TO ESCAPE TO NATURE” “GET BACK TO NATURE THIS WEEKEND!” “25 INSPIRING NATURE QUOTES TO MAKE YOU WANT TO GO OUTSIDE AND EXPLORE NATURE” “It’s time to get out in nature and explore the places you are helping protect.”
The implication, of course, is that Nature is something Other, something we don’t participate in unless we GO to it. This isn’t, however, the case. We absolutely NEED to see NATURE as something in which we already participate.
Nature isn’t just a collection of biosystems outside of your house; it’s a process in which entities participate. Nature is an “exchange of goods and services” via a network of nodes and connections.
Saying “Escape to Nature” is meaningless. It’s like telling an octopus to “Escape to the Sea,” or a bear to “Escape to the Forest.” It’s like telling a variable to “Escape to an Algorithm.”
You don’t need a tent or hiking boots or a long drive to the “middle of nowhere” to experience Nature; the fact is, you can’t NOT experience Nature.
What does this mean, exactly? It means there is no “Wild” versus “Urban.” It means that the value of entities isn’t in the entities themselves, but in the connections and exchanges between them. The better the connections and exchanges of mutually beneficial services in a system, the more value that system has. Valuable Systems — be they forests, cities, workplaces, rivers, the ‘soil food web’ — consist of entities working together to benefit all of the individual parts of the system.
Taking Nature out of the equation by separating it, framing it as something to “visit,” collapses the value function of the System called “Life on Earth.”
Understanding “Nature” as something in which we participate, not as an “Other,” is a kind of “gnosis” — a revelatory event that changes the way you see and interact with the world.
Really, when you look at all of the ways in which it is suggested that we “take care of nature,” they’re actually things like “fix the mess YOU ALREADY MADE.” Being a good “steward of the environment” means “Stop POISONING YOUR OWN FOOD.” “Taking care of the planet” means “DON’T THROW YOUR PLASTIC IN YOUR DRINKING WATER.” Saying “Take Care of the Planet” is like saying “Take your indentured servant to the doctor after you’ve overworked and beaten him.”
It’s really an Imperialist concept with roots in Christian Dominianism. Environmentalists who advise us to be “stewards of the planet,” however well-meaning, come from the same place as those awful evangelical Christians who think pollution is fine since “God” gave us power over the whole Earth and the Second Coming is happening any day now so?
So, here’s an idea: instead of saying “Take Care of Nature,” how about we start saying “Treat Nature as an Equal?”
Rivers, trees, rocks, plants, animals, insects — these are all people, with the same intrinsic value as humans. Yes, we interact with them in ways that often change them, just as they interact with us in ways that change us. It’s because our relationship to Nature isn’t one of power or control; it’s a series of transactions among equals.
(Yes, sometimes those transactions entail one equal eating another.)
It’s a subtle distinction, a slight change in conceptualization, but I know from personal experience that making this change has profound impacts on the way we interact with the world around us. The more people who see other people as people, the better chances we’ll have to make it through the coming climate changes, together.
Most animist cultures have always known this. Maybe it’s time for the rest of us to catch on.
EXAMPLE ONE: For instance, what if there’s no such thing as “Wild”?
Wait, let me back up.
What if the big problem in the algorithm called “A Healthy Environment” is an error in the code? What if someone, at some point, accidentally inserted a line of code that gave this:
…a different value than this:
Or that this:
…is fundamentally different than this:
Is human agriculture (when done right) actually different — not as a process, but as a value — than what trees do when they grow leaves, or what ants do when they harvest honeydew from aphids? Are humans who plant corn seeds really carrying out the “long-term plan” of the wild teosinte ancestor of corn? Are we really so clear on how Social Networking “works” in the Cyber-Ecosystem?
Maybe you’re wondering what the hell this is all about. Well, me too…
Take “ReWilding” as a case study. What the heck is it?
Those of us into “eco” are likely familiar with the term. There are two different manifestations of ReWilding. The first is the concept as used in conservation biology (emphasis mine):
…[L]arge-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and keystone species.
What, however, is a “core wilderness area,” and, more interestingly, what is NOT a “core wilderness area”?
What if we decided that EVERYTHING is a “core wilderness area,” even our cities, towns, and communities?
Another question concerns the concept of “keystone species” and native plants. As the climate changes, how will we be able to decide the difference between “natives” and “invasives?” If we’re going to “rewild,” do we eliminate so-called “invasives,” or would it be better to find new ways to work with them?
In a warmer world, how many resources do we want to spend trying to “return” an area to “Wild” State 1.0 when the climate has already been updated to Version 2.6?
Some proponents of restoration ecology have addressed this by essentially claiming that this isn’t the actual intention, that restoring individual entities isn’t part of the plan, but a growing number of individuals are increasingly interested in bringing extinct species back to life. I mean, does anybody else have “PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE” flashing in their head in big red letters at the moment?
The other, more prevalent version of “ReWilding” concerns how people can “rewild” themselves. ReWild.com defines it as:
…[R]estoring ancestral ways of living that create greater health and well-being for humans and the ecosystems that we belong to…. Rewilding learns from the examples of indigenous people past and present provided by anthropology, archaeology, and ethnobiology.
The problems with this characterization are pronounced.
The characterization of “ancestral” and “indigenous ways of living” as “wild” is SUPER problematic and is solidly colonialist.
Calling indigenous cultures “Wild” reduces them to a stereotype and eliminates the complexity of native cultures from every geography.
Are these the “WILD” ancestors you’re talking about?
Proponents of this kind of ReWilding take you all over the place, from faddish conceits like the Paleo Diet and Barefoot Walking to questionably useful (but inarguably more fun) skills like Archery. This movement is also dominated by the affluent and privileged who can afford to take the time to get out of town and buy organic and walk around barefoot. However, they all have one thing in common: they all advise us that everybody needs to “get out into nature more,” to “get out of the cities,” to go out into, and somehow become, “the Wild.”
This reveals the biggest problem with this kind of ReWilding:
The biggest problem with this kind of ReWilding is that it is an excuse to ignore whatever we don’t want to consider “Wild.”
Listen: if you are in an office building at a desk, reading this on a computer, you are just as much “in the wild” as you would be if you were in the woods in Alaska. You’re still in an ecosystem. You’re still participating in an ecology.
And, the very idea that someone walking down the street in a city is less in “the wild” than someone on a trail is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Think about it: if we programmed our activities as parts of a living system with the same value as the whole, we’d inherently recognize the value in keeping the water clean, keeping trees alive, keeping toxins out of the soil and the air. If we didn’t see “Wild” and “Urban” as different, but understood our technology the way plants understand the technology of the forest or microorganisms understand the technology of the microbiome, we’d have a lot less to explain to our grandkids right now.
One stupid line of code in our societal algorithm, and now we’re looking at wildfires and missing sea ice.
The fact is, “Wild” is a terrible signifier, and “ReWilding” is a broken idea. “Wild and Urban/Civilized are Different” is a bad line of code, and “ReWilding” as a concept and as a movement underlines this point. This reconsideration of what have become standard talking points and default positions of “eco” people is one way to start reframing the way we perceive our relationship with whatever “Nature” is.
EXAMPLE TWO: Addressing the Living
If we’re going to withstand the difficult times ahead, we’re going to have to realize that all of the entities who share in our ecosystems are people. There’s no two ways about it: if we don’t start valuing the beings who live near us as people, no matter their actual genus or species, how will we ever respect them enough to survive together as the planet warms and the oceans rise?
The best way to change the way you think about something is to get into the habit of changing the way you speak. Instead of speaking of plants, animals, stones, soil, water, the sky as things, if we change the way we address them, we can begin to understand them as self-existing entities with their own methods of expression, their own needs, and own contributions to the whole system.
This is, of course, a much bigger problem for so-called modern “Western” society than for more traditional cultures, but since the “Western” view — that animals and plants and rocks are “things” — dominates, it’s the view that must be confronted.
Take a look at the photo below. Do you see a picture of a lovely mountain scene? Instead, try to think of it as a group photo, a collection of individual persons who live together and share the same ecosystem. The mountain is a great-great-grandfather, and the rocks below are his grandchildren. Each tree is a person in the act of “tree-ing.” The flowers are our sisters, the stream our cousin.
Places are people. Here’s a grandmother in the act of “hill-ing,” while someone streams by below. Cousins and other relatives stand on the banks:
Here are some cool little guys hanging out in the woods. They’re very cute, and they’re kind of humming. Are they all the same person, or different people?
And a representative from the Tribe of Anthuor, a person spending the afternoon Deer-ing:
THIS guy!
Yes, I’m going to eat them, but since they’re persons, I’m going to do so respectfully and gratefully. I raised them in my ecosystem, feeding them and giving them water, and they spent the year gathering sunlight from the Sky People and nutrients from the Soil People, and grew fat. Now they’re sharing this energy with me, and my family, and that’s amazing:
A friend, Arbutus, sacred to the god Hermes.
And, of course, THIS guy:
If this all sounds “silly” to you, or if you think it’s “anthropomorphism,” that’s because your worldview hasn’t changed yet. It may have to, though. If we can’t get back to this way of thinking, it could very well be the end of us.
People have rights. People are their own self-expressions. People are not “invasive species,” or “natural resources,” or meant to be stuffed into boxes. Our relationships with other people are different, more valuable, deeper than our relationships with mere “things” that can be “harvested” or exploited or owned.
This attitude could have saved Flint’s water supply. It could have saved the oceans. It is, in a very real way, contributing to the struggle for water rights around the world. But this doesn’t have to be a “religious” or a “spiritual” thing, even though some, like myself, understand it that way. It can be an attitude, a change in perception, and a healthier way to participate in our ecology.
The world is filled with living beings, and they’re everywhere, all around us. Only by respecting them as fellow persons within our shared biosystems will help us — ALL of us — withstand the coming crises.
Do I have more to say on this? YOU BET I DO. Stay tuned….