Why should we take into account our relationships with, not just for, the ‘more-than-human’ world when innovating our ways of governing and working together?
Often geo-politics, wars and security concerns dominate the headlines as the ‘real issues,’, while our relationship with the more-than-human world is seen as less ‘serious’—almost as if it is optional. Yet in my view it would be a mistake to think that.
Through her experiences in Ireland and Northern Ireland, Kerri ni Dochartaigh makes a strong case in Thin Places for why we cannot separate questions of war and security from considerations about our relationship with the natural world. She talks about her experience of growing up in Derry during the Troubles:
"When whole streets are burned down, and the fact of a city changed beyond recognition, very few folks notice their disconnect with the natural world. When you’ve no home to go to because it’s been petrol bombed, seeking the wonder of the wild world is not a priority."
But, she also goes on to articulate precisely why reconnecting with the natural world can be so healing and so powerful, drawing on her own experience of how it helped her get over her thoughts of suicide:
"There is so much life in the places around us and, sometimes, for some of us, somehow, this helps us to value our own life… Battles, governments, laws, leaders - borders - come and go, but the land and its sacred places remain unmoved and unchanged in their core."
A disconnection from the natural world is one part of the myriad reasons why many people feel disconnected from each other, feeling alone and depressed and powerless. These are precisely the emotions that autocrats feed upon, enflaming them to entrench divides and to gain their own strength.
If we want a resilient citizenry that has agency, a sense of belonging and connection, then I think we need to take questions about how to do more to connect with the natural world seriously as well.
Research finds that those who feel more connected to nature also tend to feel more connected to humanity. The UNDP has also argued that there is a critical connection between human rights and the natural world. We have evidence from numerous studies that time spent in nature and practices like ‘forest bathing’ have noticeable impacts on people’s nervous systems, making them calmer and happier. Other research supports the positive impacts on the well-being and behavioural development of children who spend more time in green spaces.
I am reminded of another passage in Abram’s book:
"For at the very moment that human populations on every continent have come to recognize the planet as a unified whole, we discover that so many other species are rapidly dwindling and vanishing, that the rivers are choking from industrial wastes, that the sky itself is wounded. At the very moment that the idea of human equality has finally spread, via the printed word or the electronic media, into every nation, it becomes apparent that it is indeed nothing more than an idea, that in some of the most ‘developed’ of nations humans are nevertheless destroying each other, physically and emotionally, in unprecedented numbers – whether through warfare, through the callousness of corporate greed, or through a rapidly spreading indifference.
Clearly, something is terribly missing, some essential ingredient has been neglected, some necessary aspect of life has been dangerously overlooked, set aside, or simply forgotten in the rush toward a common world. In order to obtain the astonishing and unifying image of the whole earth whirling in the darkness of space, humans it would seem, have had to relinquish something just as valuable – the humility and grace that comes from being fully a part of that whirling world. We have forgotten the poise that comes from living in storied relation and reciprocity with the myriad things, the myriad beings, that perceptually surround us.
Only if we can renew that reciprocity – grounding our newfound capacity for literate abstraction in those older, oral forms of experience – only then will the abstract intellect find its real value. It is surely not a matter of ‘going back,’ but rather of coming full circle, uniting our capacity for cool reason with those more sensorial and mimetic ways of knowing, letting the vision of a common world root itself in our direct, participatory engagement with the local and the particular."
While writing in 1997, Abram’s words resonate more than ever today. We are seemingly more ‘developed’ and ‘advanced’ than ever. Yet humans are still tearing each other apart, new wars are entrenching old divides ever deeper, and we are facing multiple human challenges — rates of loneliness, depression, suicide, and other symptoms of disconnection have been increasing over the past few decades.
It’s clear that many people do not feel like they are living in “storied relation and reciprocity” with the myriad beings that surround us. I think that Abram is right in emphasising that this is not about “going back” to anything. Rather, “coming full circle” is a useful metaphor for thinking about how we could gain another sense of knowing ourselves and the world by reconnecting, in a very physical way, with the natural world around us.
We should also be thinking about how to inspire reconnection with the world in a joyful way. Much of the current narrative is negative and catastrophic, about climate crisis, extinctions, and similar. However, I agree with Michael McCarthy, who writes in The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, that:
“We should offer up what [nature] means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy…. Firstly, because the mortal threat itself is not centuries old, but has arisen merely in the space of my own lifetime; and secondly, because the joy nature gives us cannot be quantified in a generalised way… we have infinitely different longings for solace and understanding and delight… Defence through joy, if you like. For nature, as human society takes its wrecking ball to the planet, has never needed more defending.”
For the sake of the future of humanity and the future of the planet, we need to find new ways of living and governing together. Part of the problem that we face today is people not being truly present, and we need to take action now for the reality we want to be living in today.
As Abram writes:
“A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present. It strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment.”
By ‘ecological’ he is not talking about the political movement that has become associated with these ideas. The term ‘ecology’ was initially coined in the mid-19th century by the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel in his book Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms). He wrote, “by ecology, we mean the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the conditions of existence.” The word derives from the Greek word for ‘house’ or ‘environment’, ekos, and in a footnote Haeckel also referenced the Greek word for ‘dwelling place’, hora. As James Bridle reminds us in Ways of Being, Haeckel was deeply inspired by Darwin’s work, especially in the relationships between species.
Bridle writes:
“Ecology is the study of interrelationships: those unbreakable cords which tie everything to everyone else. Crucially, those relationships extend to things as well as beings: ecology is just as interested in how the availability of nesting materials affects bird populations, or how urban planning shapes the spread of diseases, as it is in how honeybees pollinate marigolds and cleaner wrasses delouse surgeonfish. And that’s just biological ecology. Ecology is fundamentally different to the other sciences in that it describes a scope and an attitude of study, rather than a field. There is an ecology - and ecologists - of mathematics, behaviour, economics, physics, history, art, psychology, warfare, and almost any other discipline that you can think of.”
Taking the ecological approach to democracy, in my view, is about exploring the full depth and complexity of the interrelationships that we have between people, the living world, and technology.
Democracy has evolved in different ways in different parts of the world at different moments of history. Democracy involves a mix of institutions, practices, rules, spaces, and rituals.
How do we want democracy to evolve today, and what perspective do we want underpinning how we think about it?
For me a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things is essential for trying to understand the world, and should be taken into account in how we innovate all aspects of democracy.
