When we drill down for the root causes of the environmental crisis that is unfolding, I think one of the biggest problems is a deeply ingrained tendency to think of ourselves as separate from the natural world. There are many cultures around the globe, indigenous and otherwise that don’t think this way, but among many of us, this idea that we are separate from the rest of the web of life is an unconscious assumption. Part of this can be attributed to religion, part to our blind faith in technological advances, part to sheer ignorance of objective (evidence-based) realities.
Everything that makes up our bodies comes from the natural world. For example, we are composed of roughly sixty percent water . If that water is contaminated by mercury, or BPA’s or other toxic chemicals our health is affected. The plants and animals we eat are metabolized to become our flesh and blood. The basic molecules that make us up come from the soil. We didn’t come down to the earth, we came out of it.
Because our brains struggle to embrace complex systems most of us default to dualistic thinking—black and white separations of man versus animal (even though we are mammals ourselves), wild versus civilized, or productive versus unproductive. Even the concept of “vacant land” is something that only exists if you exclude everything but the human.
Biology, ecology, and chemistry all support the viewpoint of complex webs of interdependence—there is no organism that isn’t affected by other conditions and other organisms. If we can widen the lens of our and self-obsessed viewpoint we can see that our bodies includes the lakes, the fish, the soil, and the oxygen generated by trees, grasses and plankton.
In his book The Heart of Understanding, the buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn explains this simply:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. ‘Interbeing’ is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix ‘inter’ with the verb ‘to be,’ we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.1
My personal feeling is that the natural world is part of me, and I am part of it. If we extinguish the fish from Lake Simcoe (and all the other living beings that depend on the fish, like the herons and the gulls) my “body,” my life, is diminished. No amount of consumer stuff can replace the beauty of a great blue heron, or the magic of a silvery fish leaping out of the water to chomp on insects at dusk. To me, the natural world is sacred. To treat it as a storehouse to be extracted and sold so that we can have more so-called wealth is insanity. We do need to take in order to live, but we’ve far exceeded a sustainable balance. We seem oblivious to the consequences of our actions and lack the imagination to envision a future that includes biodiversity and greater equity.
As much as we love to blame other people for the mess we’re in, until we shift our viewpoint and recognize that we are not “above” all the other species and processes that allow us to live, our ability to address this crisis will continue to be hobbled by powerful forces like big oil, big tech, and “vested interests” who care about nothing more than their dividends and stock performance. At the same time, we have to see where our own desires for excess (stuff, trips, experiences) are driving the problems too.
Connecting to nature, our embodiment, and having some humility about our place in the world will need to happen urgently if we’re ever going to turn this crisis around.
1. Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of Understanding, (Berkeley California: Parallax Press, 1988), 3.
Weekly News Digest: “The Blowhole”
The National Healing Forests Initiative is accepting grant applications from individuals and communities interested in building forests until July 17th, 2023. According to the David Suzuki Foundation, “Healing Forests are green spaces honouring residential school victims, survivors and their families. They also promote community rewilding and spending time outdoors.” More information and application info is available here.
If you want to read a fascinating account about how New Age Spirituality and Wellness got mixed up with far-right conspiracy theorists and the politics of paranoia during the pandemic, check out Conspirituality (Random House, Canada). Although not specific to environmental issues this book has some insightful perspectives about how disinformation spreads and why it appeals.
And on a similar theme here’s a great article from The Narwhal about wildfire misinformation.
Also, check out Building Smarter Housing for Ontario Communities. from our friends at Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition.
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Love it. Interbeing - a new word to add to my lexicon. Thanks for this.