We all know by now that climate change is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Yet there is another, less obvious reason we face a climate crisis. Our society has lost sight of our connectedness with the natural world.
For many Americans, the outdoors, the natural world, is a mere passageway between home and work or school. Rain is a nuisance instead of a gift. Nature is an afterthought, a place to go for a walk, not a place to be part of. When food comes from a store instead of a farm or garden, a critical link to the land is broken — we forget that nature provides our sustenance.
Brad Lopes is the education and outreach coordinator for the Aquinnah Cultural Center. He is Wampanoag, and when he speaks of living things other than people, he calls them “our nonhuman relations.” Most of us call them plants and animals, separate words for separate things, but we are not separate. We humans are as much a part of the natural world as a tree and a squirrel, and like them, we depend on the land, water, air, and sun for survival.
The big shift came with the Industrial Revolution which, of course, was charged by fossil fuels. We moved from farms to factories, from days guided by sunlight and the weather to loud, dusty, and dirty indoor spaces. Cities sprang up and covered the soil. Tall buildings blocked the sun. The air and water became polluted. Global warming was born.
We tend to think we are smarter and more important than all the other species, yet we are the ones dangerously upending the environment.
In her book “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,” Elizabeth Kolbert tells of man’s redirection of the Chicago River. In the 19th century, the river was a filthy mix of human and animal waste that flowed into Lake Michigan, Chicago’s only source of drinking water. A canal was built, and the polluted water was redirected downstream to pollute another city, St. Louis. It also, wrote Kolbert, “upended the hydrology of roughly two-thirds of the U.S.”
As statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke observed, “Never, no never, did nature say one thing and wisdom another.”
Chief Seattle, a leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish people, put it this way: “Man does not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever man does to the web, he does to himself.”
Think of the planet as the one huge ecosystem that it is. We consider mosquitos, for example, to be annoying pests, when in fact they are pollinators. They are a food source for fish, birds, bats, dragonflies, and turtles. They help control the populations of other insects.
To get rid of species that bother us, we use cancer-causing, land- and water-contaminating pesticides. In her groundbreaking 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson warned of the deadly effects of synthetic chemicals, and asked, “How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?”
E B. White, author of the beloved children’s book “Charlotte’s Web,” observed, “Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”
Lopes recently held a workshop for local educators on integrating indigenous knowledge and values in the classroom. He noted that indigenous education isn’t separated into different subjects, because they are all interconnected. Nature is the best teacher.
Ponce Chief Standing Bear had this to say about connectedness: “The elders were wise. They knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; they knew that lack of respect for growing things, living things, soon led to a lack of respect for humans, too.”
Our lack of respect for one another is evident in the current culture war, an attempt by some to impose their beliefs on others. We could learn a lot from nature. Consider this passage from the book “The Hidden Life of Trees,” by Pater Wohlleben:
Why do “trees share their food with their own species and sometimes even go as far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: There are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees can create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity … [a] protected environment.”
Carson, considered the mother of the environmental movement, noted “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we should have for destruction.”
What can you do? Be mindful of your place in the natural world. Cut back on chemical use. Ask your merchants to offer natural alternatives.
Degradation of the environment, from pesticides to fossil fuels, is the result of greed. If we don’t buy the products, the perpetrators won’t make money. We as consumers have the power to force change.
Toward the end of the workshop, Lopes slipped in an insightful comment: “The future, I think, will be indigenous-led in many ways.”
Let’s hope so.
