Perspectives
Of That Irreducible Terrain (Part III)
Terrain of Hope and Consciousness
Our conservation heritage suggests that saving land is not enough to meet the moment. Land trusts and conservationists will need to create and lift-up approaches that respect and share land in new and diverse ways that go beyond conventional approaches. Share, not in the sense of divvying one’s possession, but in the sense that singular proprietorship of land is not true to life and slowly devolving into an antiquated institution. Despite what property law suggests, land is the place of many. It is ours, theirs, and its; past, present, and future; across species and generations. Land also holds a certain sovereignty and agency in its myriad systems that are capable of perpetually self-regulating over time. It is its own entity, its own organism that is ancient and vital, of which humans and our endeavors are a novel and underdetermined consequence. Respecting and sharing land in this way calls for a shift in the dominant consciousness. Humans and our endeavors must re-evolve, or come around once again, to being conceived as within-and-of nature instead of apart-from or superior-to it. C.G. Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, described the dissociation of modern western life as, “a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots;” in contrast he recalls an encounter with a woman who was the steward of a shamba (East African agroforestry system), “She is identical with her estate and has the dignity of the whole earth. She is the earth…and so she makes sense. She is not up in the air, a sort of social appendix.”[I]
Land, from such a consciousness, is much more than property to be saved and owned. It is a living entity to be intentionally stewarded with reverence for life and its capacity to “generate something-more-from-nothing-but, over and over again,” as the biologist and scholar, Ursula Goodnough, so beautifully phrases in her The Sacred Depths of Nature. Mindful stewardship and kinship are engendered and paramount in this consciousness, and land is transformed into a dynamic relationship instead of an object. Again, this alternative mindset, rooted in humble relationship, is a part of the gift that social justice and Indigenous traditions are extending to the land conservation movement. In their piece entitled, Regeneration, Leah Penniman and Blain Snipstal speak to the depth and radical difference of alternative sensibilities,
“So much of the traditions of the folk whom are indigenous to the Americas or Africa are grounded with deep, profound, and animated spirituality surrounding the relations between land, people, and the cosmos. These Cosmo visions are systems of reality that carry images and values for ways of relating to people and land in radically different ways than those suggested by the dominant society.”
Yaku Viteri Gualinga of the Kichwas People of the Ecuadorian Amazon expresses this difference in, A Well Braided (Knowledge) Braid, describing the worldview of his People that are of the living forest:
“The state, or rather the common assumption, tells us that we, the People, are the guardians. However, it makes me feel like I’m just a person standing there, watching over others. It’s not like that, we do guard, but at the same time, we are also living from-with-in the Kawsak Sacha [Living Forest], so we are not only its guardians, but we are also part of it.”
An alternative, rooted consciousness has seemingly flickered in the conservation movement from the very beginning. Glimmers can be found in many of the writings of the 19th century conservation icons referenced above—Thoreau, Muir, Marsh, Burroughs. But it has not leapt, danced, and spread with the power of epistemic revolution as it is confined within the dissociated, dominant culture of their time—of my time. Being born and raised squarely within the same confines, my writing is a weak expression of the fundamental difference between a consciousness lit by the flicker of abstract knowledge compared to that which arises from the bonfire of the senses.
Aldo Leopold wrote the seminal conservation book, A Sand County Almanac, in 1949. In it, Leopold articulates a Land Ethic and Ecological Conscience, which would change the role of humans from, “conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.” He writes,
“We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that [humans] are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. … These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.”
Leopold’s fear seems to hold true seventy-five years later. My fear is that it will hold true for another 1,000 years if we continue to expect new knowledge to be the provider of “a sense of kinship” and “a sense of wonder.” It seems that new or more knowledge may never produce the land ethic and ecological conscience described in A Sand County Almanac. Perhaps it is simply an older kind of common sense, humility, and a re-evolved way of being that is needed? The scientific theory of evolution is still as shiny and new as it was in 1859 when considered within the grand scope of the “biotic enterprise.” But a sense of kinship with fellow creatures is ancient, born of relational living over the course of three thousand centuries. Black Elk begins his narrative in Black Elk Speaks with,
“My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters … It is the story of all life that is Holy and good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things, for these are children of one mother and their father is one Spirit.”
If we assume these words carry at least an echo of ancestral lineages outside of the dominant western heritage, then it seems the path to kinship lies not in distinguishing ourselves from the caravan of generations but humbly assenting to join the procession. Imagine a life that was literally indistinguishable from the other living beings that inhabited a shared place and time? Then again, such a life seems impossible to imagine, learn, or understand. It can only be lived—felt, seen, tasted, heard, and intuited, bursting like flame from a life of kinship with land and other beings. Of course, this does not mean going back to some idealized primitive condition. As Jung notes, “the wheel of history cannot be put back” and “reduction to a natural condition is neither an ideal state nor a panacea.” But rather by “remembering a potentiality of life that has been overgrown,” to continue to use Jung’s words, we will come to the insight that, “life is a kind of unit…all one tissue in which things live through or by means of each other…all the parts function together, as the cells in our bodies function together, because they are of the same living continuum.”
Land has been saved for over a century in the United States. The consciousness and skill required to maintain the health of land while nourishing people and economy from it have not. From original Indigenous agroecology to the agrarian peasant farming that vitalized many small towns and rural communities into the 20th century, cultures and practices rooted in place and the earth’s bounty have been steadily eroded, undermined, and marginalized. These practices and ways of being are faint and tenuous. Restoring, re-creating, and perhaps amalgamating such cultures and consciousness will require intentional work done with humility and humanity as we collectively adapt and cope with climate change and all its consequences. In the sage words of Robin Wall Kimmerer from her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, “here is where our most challenging and most rewarding work lies, in restoring a relationship of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. And love.”
Thankfully, land-centric work focused on people, culture, and regenerative stewardship have been ongoing for decades—with philosophical roots extending into many historic eras and struggles—and continues to grow and blossom in both place and form across the country. This work is often closely tied to land justice, food sovereignty, and Indigenous lifeways. Relational humanity is centered in this form of conservation, or land-centric work. Beyond allowing people to view, enjoy, and recreate in nature, such efforts create and sustain opportunities for people to live, work, and co-create with nature across time and generations. The effects of such regenerative land stewardship and kinship relations include—art and ecology are restored to farming, people are fed directly from the land, nature and culture are merged, sense of place and harmony are created, and community and land-based economies are fostered. Perhaps most importantly, land is freed from the narrow and concentrated confines of the marketplace and proprietorship. As Hawken surmises at the end of Blessed Unrest, “the goal is to create a more resilient social and economic understory…that restores a measure of autonomy and power to citizens.” Speculative land schemes and the relentless fragmentation and degradation of subdivision development and natural resource extraction will require that land trusts, conservation groups, and communities continue to rally to protect land. The most impactful organizations, however, will go beyond protection alone. Those that embrace the confluence and coalescing of movements, humbly finding and centering relational humanity, will play a vital role in our collective navigation of a warmer more volatile world.
[I] All quotes from C.G. Jung from, The Nature Writings of C.G. Young: The Earth has a Soul, edited by Meredith Sabini, published by North Atlantic Books, 2002.
