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| Boranup Forest, Southern WA |
"We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees." Qwatsinas, Nuxalk Nation
It is becoming increasingly obvious that if we continue to dishonour the ecosystems which nurture and support our very existence, our future is dire. It is now time for us to recognise that the Indigenous sense of belonging to, and oneness within, the place they live and to their environment is not just a sentiment, but a deep truth. Healing the land has become synonymous with healing ourselves, and vice versa, as it dawns on us that we are indivisible from our environment, and what we do to it, we ultimately do to ourselves.
Indigenous Peoples (better known as First Peoples) everywhere have a profound knowing that they belong TO the Earth, not that they can OWN bits of her.
“.... the Aboriginal people of Australia believe they are integrally connected with the land, the animal, insect, and plant and sky kingdoms. There is no distinction between these elements. For them, “coming home” is about reconnecting with the place that bore them and that supported them through life.
As white man heals so too does black man, and as black man heals so too does white man. The land is what connects us all and brings us home to our hearts. Our spirits are thus united. And we can all call Australia home, finally.” liminalsonglines.com/healing/
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| Aboriginal children playing, collecting bush tucker 1 |
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| Aboriginal fire-stick farming in the Kimberley |
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| Kayapo River people in the Amazon. Photo by Cristina Mittermeier |
The sense of belonging to, caring for and deep respect for the land and their environment is synonymous with deep spirituality for Indigenous peoples.
"What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?" -Massasoit
From before the times of the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions, European man has set himself the task of controlling and dominating the forces of Nature. He has analysed Nature into its separate parts- and reduced her to nothing more than a complex machine, an instrument simply to be understood and used, overcome, for his own desires. Reductionist thinking of this sort fails to recognise that the whole is greater than the sum of its component parts. Understanding a single part or even many parts does not necessarily inform how the whole operates. Matter and its parts were seen as female, therefore subservient, and a lower order than spirit.
Francis Bacon stated that:
“ ...man can recover that right over nature that belongs to it by divine bequest. The gaol is to establish the power and dominion of the human race over the entree universe. The new technologies do not, like the old, merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course, they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.”
In contrast, Goethe has said
“Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.”
The more mechanistic view which placed us in control of and superior to Nature as espoused by Bacon, has won out and borne us into an Age of Technology which is so rapacious of Nature that we are destroying many species’ ability to live on our planet and possibly even our own.
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Like the alternate views of nature presented by Bacon and Goethe, a debate has also divided believers into those who see the bible as giving humans dominion over all living things while at the same time requiring stewardship. The book of Genesis 1:28 has been interpreted as providing permission for humans to do whatever they like to the environment.
“God blessed them [Adam and Eve] and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
However, there are many now who see such dominion as a misreading of God’s word and that we were actually required to undertake ethical stewardship. Genesis 2-24 provides insights that humans are only a single species in a large and complex web of life we do not entirely understand and can never really control.
What is needed now is a willingness for us to put aside our sense of separation and reconnect with our environments; to stop chopping down old growth forests for wood chips to make cardboard boxes to put our TVs in. The extraordinary biodiversity found in old growth forests may have a myriad of undiscovered benefits to humans in terms of pharmaceutical compounds. Simply connecting with these natural cathedrals has been found to improve physical, emotional and even spiritual health.
In his book The Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv links the troubling trends in childhood obesity, diabetes, attention-deficit disorders (ADD) and depression, to the increasing disconnect between children and nature- he calls it nature-deficit disorder. It is difficult for children to feel deeply about the disappearing rainforests and the extinction of species if they cannot feel the connection to the birds and trees in their backyard.
Our living environments, our homes, families and communities, need to be turned into places of connection and healing. We have the technology and the knowledge to do so. Ian McHarg, sometimes known as the father of ecological town planning, wrote “Design with Nature” in 1969, a book which promotes an ecological view of designing homes and communities.
McHarg said:
“Surgery on the brain or heart or any other vital organ takes courage. So too does intervention in an urban neighborhood, a degraded wetlands, or any of the other tissues of the living landscape. To heal places, landscape architects and ecological planners must not only have the knowledge and skill to make reasonable diagnoses and to prescribe sound actions, but also the courage to take on difficult challenges. -Prospectus (1998)
George Seddon of Perth has written ‘A Sense of Place’ in 1972, to teach people about appreciating their local environments and the need to protect the fragile Swan Coastal Plain, said:
“Gardeners are key land managers. Our choices therefore lie not in whether but in how we manage the land. We would all agree that we must do it in an ecologically responsible way.”
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By valuing the ecosystems we live within- the trees in our suburbs, the forests in our areas, the wetlands and deserts, and learning to build our homes in such a way as to connect with the beauty around us, we will slowly heal our families and our communities as well.
We cannot separate ourselves from our landscapes, and ignore their destruction as something happening “over there”, without a deep sense of loss of belonging- and then trying to compensate for that loss with more materialism.
By reconnecting with our belonging, we can regain our sense of wholeness, but also a sense of responsibility towards the landscapes around us, and we can heal together.
“The world is a glorious bounty. There is more food than can be eaten if we would limit our numbers to those who can be cherished... more children than we can love, more laughter than can be endured, more wisdom than can be absorbed. Canvas and pigments lie in wait, stone, wood, and metal are ready for sculpture, random noise is latent for symphonies, sites are gravid for cities, institutions lie in the wings ready to solve our most intractable problems, parables of moving power remain unformulated and yet, the world is finally unknowable.”
