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O U R P L A C E I N N A T U R E

Anumber of years ago, I was in Manhattan being interviewed by afeminist historian who was writing an article on the women’s movement. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned that my partner and I were uncertain of our summer plans as we might be fac- ing a short stretch in jail for blockading at Clayoquot Sound up in British Columbia, where we had been protesting the logging of old- growth forests.

My interviewer peered forward and said something high on my list of Least Favorite Responses to Political Action: “Are people still doing that sort of thing?” This was, of course, many years before Seattle, when large street actions were just not happening and protests in the forests were not being covered by the New York Times.

When I assured her people were indeed still doing that sort of thing, she leaned back, pen poised in the air, and said, “You know, I think to most New Yorkers the environment is sort of unreal.” While I was digesting that thought, she went on, “I mean, we support it, save the whales and all that, but we don’t really believe in it.”

This conversation made a lasting impact on me. At first, I laughed and felt superior, but as I began to consider her words I realized she had articulated a problem that went far beyond New Yorkers — that was, in fact, a condition shared by lawmakers, corporate executives, decision-makers of all kinds. The environment seems less real than the balance sheet or the latest results of voter polls.

But as I thought longer about the situation, my smugness began to erode. For if I were honest, I would have to admit that to most city dwellers, even most environmentalists, even most Pagans who claim to worship nature, in reality the environment is sort of unreal, something we visit from time to time, or appreciate aesthetically, without deeply

grasping that our lives depend upon it. My family and I had been arrested for trying to protect old-growth forest, but the truth is that until our friends took us hiking, we wouldn’t necessarily have known old growth when we saw it. How could we? There isn’t enough of it left anywhere reasonably accessible for us to have become familiar with it. Like many people, I garden — but the vegetables and fruit I grow are a wonderful addition to the food I buy, not my major source of subsistence. I may worry about the weather, but it rarely determines my income or my daily caloric intake.

We all live in a culture that has more and more made the environ- ment unreal, something exotic we watch on PBS, not the daily fabric of our existence. I began to feel that developing a real relationship with nature was a vital part of both our political and spiritual work.

To do that, we need to be aware of the underlying attitudes that separate us from the natural world. There are, of course, the overrid- ing philosophies that see human beings as above nature and therefore entitled to exploit the natural world for human ends. These philoso- phies arise both from religious sources and secular worship of profit, and the damage they cause is massive and visible.

But there is another more subtly damaging view of the human relationship to nature, and the damage it causes is perhaps more insid- ious because this view is often held by activists and environmentalists themselves. That is the attitude that human beings are somehow worse than nature, a blight on the planet, doomed to despoil what- ever we touch, and that nature would be better off without us. Now, I admit that a case can be made for this view — nevertheless I think that in its own way it is just as damaging as the world view of the active despoilers. For if we believe that we are in essence bad for nature, we are profoundly separated from the natural world. We are also subtly relieved of responsibility for developing a healthy relation- ship with nature, for learning to observe and interact and play an active role in nature’s healing.

The humans-as-blight vision also is self-defeating in organizing around environmental issues. It’s hard to get people enthused about a movement that — even if only unconsciously — envisions its extinc- tion as a good. And people don’t act effectively out of feeling bad, guilty, wrong, and inauthentic. As long as we see humans as separate

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from nature, whether we place ourselves above or below, we will inevitably set up human/nature oppositions in which everyone loses.

There is another view, a view held by most indigenous cultures, by bioregionalists and permaculturalists and many people who live closer to the earth — and that is to see humans as being ourselves as much nature as any old-growth redwood, mosquito, or wildflower. We are, in fact, animals. We are bodies evolved over billions of years to eat, shit, breathe, drink, reproduce, die, and decay like other bodies. In nature, every giant whale and tiny microorganism has a role to play in the balance of the whole. How arrogant to think that we don’t!

What might that role be? One hint might be contained in the words of Mabel McKay, Cache Creek Pomo elder and basketmaker: “When people don’t use the plants, they get scarce. You must use them so they will come up again. All plants are like that. If they’re not gathered from, or talked to and cared about, they’ll die.”

Could it be that we are supposed to be talking to the plants and animals, interacting with them, accepting the gifts they offer, and using them in ways that further their growth? The Pomo basketmak- ers, by collecting sedge roots, pruned and thinned the stands of sedge and improved their habitat. The sedge, flourishing by the riversides and on the banks of creeks, helps hold the soil with its roots, prevent- ing erosion. The First People of California pruned, coppiced, harvested, and burned the grasslands and forests in patterns that cre- ated optimum conditions for wildlife, for both open meadows and the growth of the great trees. Their interaction with the land was so ele- gantly attuned that European invaders missed it entirely, believing they had found a wilderness untouched by human intervention (and open for their exploitation), when what they had actually found was more in the nature of an exquisitely cared-for wild garden.

All over this continent, native peoples used fire, prayer, tools, and ceremonies to influence their natural environment. The ecosystems we revere in forest and prairie co-evolved with human cultures. Outside of the highest mountain peaks and the glaciers, no “untouched” wilderness existed here. European preconceptions and racist dismissal of other cultures created the fantasy of the “virgin” wilderness. The very “nature” we see ourselves as blighting was formed by millenia of cohabitation.

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Indigenous cultures around the world, including those we draw from in our present-day Pagan traditions, have seen themselves as part of nature. Not all have been successful in keeping the balance: indige- nous cultures have hunted animals to extinction, have destroyed forests and desertified cropland. We must not romanticize other cultures, but neither should we close our eyes to what we can learn from them.

The first lesson is that we as human beings do have the capacity to meet both our needs and those of the nonhuman beings around us, in ways that actually increase diversity, habitat, balance, and beauty. If we fail to do so, it is because of a flaw in our attitudes, our observations, our goals, or our actions, not our inherent being.

The second lesson we can learn is that nature wants to talk to us. Far from being better off without us, nature would be incomplete without human eyes admiring her and human voices singing praise, human hands tending, pruning, and gathering, and human bellies filled with her bounty. The plants will die if they are not cared about. And especially right now, when so much of nature suffers from human- inflicted wounds, we need human creativity, ingenuity, and sweat to renew the balance our out-of-tune culture has damaged.

DEVELOPING BONDS TO PLACE All of our ancestors were indigenous to somewhere; that is, they were deeply rooted in one place, living in a culture in which sustenance, spirit, and culture arose from the plants, animals, climate, and resources of that particular land. If we are going to create a new polit- ical/economic/social system, one that truly cares for the environment and for human beings, we may need to become indigenous again, to find at least one spot on the earth we can know intimately.

Come and walk with me in the Cazadero Hills, and I can tell you the names of all the trees. I know where the rare California nutmeg grows, where to find berries in the summer and matsutake mushrooms in the winter, where the gray squirrel crosses the stream running down the big-leaf maple branch and leaping into the redwood, where the ravens court each other with aerobatics after the winter storms. My neighbors, who have lived here longer, know even more.

Because I know these things about my land, I can walk into any for- est where the trees are strange and understand something about the

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relationships going on. I know what health, stress, and recovery look and feel like, and I can be more intelligent in my interventions.

I didn’t learn these things in a day, or a week. It takes time to get to know a place. Permaculture, the system of ecological design I attempt to put into practice on my land, has a guiding principle: “Use thoughtful and protracted observation instead of thoughtless inter- vention.” Learning a place takes time because what we need to observe are patterns that only become apparent through time. Not just, “What are the birds in my backyard today?” but “What birds come and go throughout the different seasons? How do their popu- lations change? Are there more this year than last year? How do I know? Is this a one-time fluctuation or part of a larger trend?” And those questions are just the beginning. Indigenous myths and cere- monies reflect thousands of years of careful observation, codified into songs and tales and rituals that tell us what is supposed to be going on, and when.

Observation itself, for most of us, requires a shift in awareness. Most of us don’t actually know how to see and hear what is going on around us in the physical world. When we do go out into the forest or the mountains, nature becomes a scenic background to our own thoughts and dramas. If we grew up watching television or riding on the freeway instead of watching birds and animals and walking through the woods, our brains may literally need to be repatterned.

Jon Young, director of the Wilderness Awareness School8, which teaches these observational skills, tells of a psychology experiment in which two groups of cats were raised in two different rooms. The first room was painted in vertical stripes, the second in horizontal stripes. After a few months, they were both brought into a room full of chairs, with both vertical and horizontal parts. The cats raised in the vertical room avoided the chair legs but bumped into the crossbars. Those raised in the horizontal room steered clear of the crossbars but ran into the legs. They literally couldn’t see what their brains had not grown accustomed to seeing. After many collisions, however, they learned.

If we want to repattern our awareness, we need to arrange some regular collisions with nature. The Wilderness Awareness School stresses finding one spot, whether it’s in the country or your backyard in the city or a vacant lot beside your house, and spending some time

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there each day observing what is going on, consciously opening all five of your senses.

When we begin this practice, we can begin to understand some- thing of what it means to be bonded to a place. The dominant culture has no word for or true understanding of this bond. It stresses attach- ment to people, to family, lovers, and mates as well as attachment to things, to property and commodities and the money that allows us to buy them. Connection to place is seen as unimportant, a sort of aes- thetic thing, but really, one place is as good as another.

To indigenous cultures, the bond with place is more akin to the bonds we expect with our mothers or our closest family. Jeannette Armstrong writes from the Okanagan perspective: “The Okanagan word for ‘our place on the land’ and ‘our language’ is the same. This means that the land has taught us our language. The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us as its teachings ... We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that the flesh which is our body is pieces of the land come to us through the things which the land is … We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be dis-placed. The Okanagan teaches that anything displaced from all that it requires to survive in health will eventually perish ... As Okanagans our most essential responsibility is to learn to bond our whole individual selves and our communal selves to the land.”9

The whole system we call “globalization” is predicated on the destruction of this bond. The global corporate economic system has displaced millions of people. A capitalist economic system needs a workforce of mobile and expendable people, who can be brought to work when the need for production is high, laid off or transferred when its low. And indigenous peoples have an annoying habit of valu- ing the integrity of their land and culture over the profits that can be extracted from the resources it may command. The whole ideology of “efficiency” and “integration” is aimed at shoring up an economic sys- tem in which no region is self-sufficient, in which the resources of the entire globe are available without restraint to corporations that wish to exploit them, and in which the entire world is one huge market open to all. Corporations and enterprises are displaced as well — they are no longer tied or responsible to any local community. They are free to

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pick up and leave if local regulations become too onerous, or local labor too demanding.

The world we want to create, the revolution we foster, would reroot us back in place. At one of the early meetings of our local land use group, the Cazadero Hills Land Use Council (or CHLUC, pro- nounced “Cluck”), my neighbor Bob Madrone defined our work as “becoming indigenous.” At the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, an indigenous speaker defined what it means to be indigenous. “It’s not the color of your skin,” he said. “It’s not even about being raised in a traditional way. It’s about being a guardian of the common treasure of the land.”

BRAZIL’S MOVIMIENTO SIM TERRE One of the best examples of a balanced human/nature relationship comes from the MST of Brazil. The Movimiento Sim Terre, or Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, is the largest direct action move- ment in the world.10 Since 1984, they’ve enabled hundreds of thousands of very poor people to reclaim unused land and start settle- ments that the government, in time, is forced to legalize.

An MST encampment is the embodiment of reinhabitation. Although the members of the settlement are generally from the poor- est strata of Brazilian society, without any formal education, the MST teaches a high degree of ecological literacy.

I visited two encampments in February of 2001. When my com- panions and I arrived at the first legalized camp with a cargo of bright balls, we were greeted by a pack of delighted children and Tane Rosa, the schoolteacher. Tane Rosa was surprised and happy to learn that I also lived in a rural area. She immediately asked me four questions: “What kinds of trees do you have? What kinds of birds do you have? Do you have any wild animals? What can you grow?”

We walked up to her garden, picked okra for lunch, and she pointed out to me the medicinal herbs and edible wild plants growing alongside the path, just as I would do for her if she came to visit my land.

When we toured the encampment, she pointed with pride at the new coffee planting that would be an example of agroforestry: shade- grown coffee planted under trees that provide fruit and habitat for birds and animals. There are three separate areas of indigenous forest

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left, and the settlement is planting forest corridors to link them and to provide more wildlife habitat.

In the room we stayed in is a poster that outlines the Ten Agreements of the MST. It reads:

OUR AGREEMENTS WITH EARTH AND WITH LIFE Human beings are precious because their intelligence, work, and organization can protect and preserve all forms of life.

1. To love and preserve the earth and all natural things. 2. To always improve our knowledge about nature and agriculture. 3. To produce food to eliminate hunger in humanity. To avoid

monoculture and the use of agricultural pesticides. 4. To preserve the already existing forest and to reforest new areas. 5. To take care of the springs, rivers, wetlands, and lakes. To fight

against the privatization of water. 6. To make the camp and community beautiful by planting flowers,

medicinal herbs, and trees. 7. To adequately treat the trash and to fight any threats of contam-

ination and aggression of the environment. 8. To practice solidarity and to revolt against any kind of injustice,

aggression, and exploitation against a person, a community, and nature.

9. To fight against the large estates so that everyone can have land, bread, education, and freedom.

10. Never sell the land. The land is the supreme gift for the future generations. Agrarian Reform — for a Brazil without large estates!

“To love the earth, you first must know it, and by the time you do, we’ll be able to build a better world,” Tane Rosa tells us.

LEARNING TO LOVE THE EARTH How do we learn to know and love the earth? To begin with, we can each commit ourselves to developing a personal relationship with the natural world, to making that relationship the heart of our spiritual practice and the inspiration of our actions in the world.

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Perhaps the best way to begin is simply to step outside and observe. Find some spot that is still at least partly wild. If you live in the city, that might mean a less-tended corner of a park or a vacant lot filled with weeds or an unkempt garden — not a mono-culture lawn under a few clipped trees or a manicured flowerbed, but any place that seems slightly out of control. Spend a few moments each day there, if you can, just looking at the physical reality around you. Not, if you can help it, speculating on how the trees feel or using them as a back- ground for your own meditations or personal work, but actually looking at them, at what insects and birds and animals appear, at how they grow and change over time. Just look, feel, listen, smell, taste. If you get bored, either you’ve picked a place that’s too sterile and con- trolled to have much going on, or you’re not really looking. Notice how your mind gets in there and what your internal dialogue is, but instead of focusing on yourself, focus on what’s around you.

Over time, you’ll be amazed at how much there is to see, once we open our eyes. And as we relearn our capacity to observe, we’ll begin to understand that what we see is real.

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