Mother Nature and Mothering Nature

Nature seems to be a series of self-regulating systems with a bent toward life, and specifically, a diversity of life. But what’s our role in nature?

For quite some time, our common cultural narrative has come from a line in Genesis: “God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion/rule over [it].” Replenish the earth? Ok. But subdue and have dominion over it? :/ Without serious study and a deeper understanding of the Bible, it’s easy to take those words with our own harsh definitions and run with a license to dominate in violent and even brutal ways. However, if we look a lot closer, we can understand those original Hebrew words to mean something more like cultivating and tending like a gardener or farmer; and the dominion and ruling meaning someone who protects and strengthens the weak, heals the sick and injured, finds the lost, restores life for those who are victims of violence, oppression, and poverty and sees them as precious (Psalms 72:12-14 and Ezekiel 34:4), and to rule “by going down and walking among as an equal” (source).

From a developmental perspective, overall, we appear to be quite young in our role. While Nature will always be our Mother and can provide us with everything we need, we don’t always have to be in the role of a young child. 

It’s like there’s this progression we can/need to make beyond being perpetual extractors and consumers to a place where we can care for others.

Dependent on others  —>  Self-reliant  —>  Surplus-producing & caring for others

It seems like we’ve been in a stage of adolescence, asserting our independence from nature which is causing all kinds of crisis. Right now, it feels like we have pushed Mother Nature too far and we’ve gotten The Great Grounding. Hopefully, like every hero’s journey, we will/are returning to embrace that we are a part of nature, not a part from nature and will/are becoming ready to, as Neri Oxman has said as a verb, “Mother Nature” back. Still receiving, but as a mature species, able to contribute, protect, and nurture, as well.

(We Can Be) Better Together

When we look around at the mess we’ve made around the planet, it’s easy for us to believe that Nature would be better off if we’d just leave her be. But we are finding (and remembering) that we can actually help Nature out significantly when we know what we’re doing and consider the needs of the whole.

There is this pervading Pristine Myth that Nature was mostly uninhabited, untouched, and totally “wilderness” before the Europeans arrived. “There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created… Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous… Full of people, like a hive of bees, so that it seems as though God had placed all, or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.” (source)

“Nature really misses us,” laments M. Kat Anderson in the book and documentary above, Tending The Wild. “We no longer have a relationship with plants and animals, and that’s the reason why they’re going away.” She says, “Contemporary Native Americans often use the word wilderness as a negative label for land that has not been taken care of by humans for a long time.” As one contributor in the film explains, “A moderate level of disturbance gives the highest levels of diversity and richness in an environment.”

And as Tim Vredenburg explains about the Coquille Indian Tribe in North Bend, Oregon, “There’s a tendency in today’s culture to fixate on a particular set of values within a forest, or an ecosystem: jobs, or timber receipts, or old growth, or fish habitat—you name it, there’s a position. The tribe’s position is to value all of it. The idea of reserves, of drawing a line around a forest to keep people out, doesn’t make sense to the Coquilles. But neither does the idea of taking everything away and leaving nothing for future generations.”

The Mess We’ve Made

We are living in volatile times. And smart people are telling us it’s only getting worse: the extreme weather, the pandemics, the destruction. Destruction often happens as an ecosystem seeks balance. We don’t have to like it or want it.

But what if we could curb the parts of the destruction we don’t like by paying closer attention to what is out of balance and joining the work to re-establish balance and sustainability in ways we do like? We can look at it a lot like depth psychology. When issues (like a pandemic, for example) come up, we can ask: What is this trying to tell us? Why has this come? What is it asking of us?

The earth will rebalance herself. The question is: Will we work with her to rebalance? And how much of the things we love—our older parents/grandparents, our polar bears, our coral reefs, our coastal cities, our children and grandchildren will make it into the newly balanced world? Can we discover the specific parts nature seems inflamed about and work with her to destroy that with more precision to limit the collateral damage in the mass destruction that we seem to be headed for?

One of the biggest challenge scientists (Nobel Prize-winning scientists, etc) are waving red flags about is that we have to drastically change and reverse our carbon emissions in the next 12-25 years (SOON!) or we’ll reach a major threshold in global warming that will kill all the remaining coral (which support over a million species of plants and animals) and melt the ice caps, raising sea level around 3-30 feet. A fifth of the world’s population live along the coasts—about 2 billion people by 2100. If we continue current life as usual, an estimated 13 million people will be displaced in the US alone.

It’s not a far stretch to imagine global warming as Mother Nature having a fever that we can reduce. 

We are still, as individuals and communities, extremely, fragilely, dependent on others. We’re going to need to make some big changes to be able to become self-reliant let alone nurturing. 

What if we asked:

How can my home/community/watershed produce enough clean water, healthy food, healthy shelters, & clean energy with as little transportation as possible to meet & exceed our needs to survive?

How many newly unemployed people could that put to work? And we could go on to ask:

What is nature trying to do in this specific place? How can we help her do it?

Sustainability: measured in centuries

Particularly in placemaking, we must think about the generations to come. Our current culture has a hard enough time considering making decisions in light of the next 10 years let alone the Native American mindset “to make sure every decision we make relates to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come,” Oren Lyons, Chief of the Onondaga Nation.

If the next thousand years feels impossible to wrap your head around, try setting the goal a little closer: How can we make this place so it is better in 300 years? That doesn’t mean every thing you build has to still be standing in several centuries, but it will reframe the way you think about the project.

Part of the challenge of designing with seven generations in mind is imagining all the crazy things that could happen between now and then—and that’s the point. What if we have flying cars? What if we have no cars and the internet collapses? How would we eat if something apocalyptic happens?

Closed loop systems

One of the surest ways to create a sustainable system is to design closed loop systems. Not that each place must be an impermeable island, but if it can function independently, it can operate sustainably. This includes designing better solutions for all the “not in my backyard” elements like landfills, manufacturing, etc. There is no such place as away but fortunately, there’s also no such thing as waste. We need to be able to design solutions that leave residents saying, “Absolutely! I’d be ok with that in my backyard.” So, for example, instead of making a landfill, we send our food scraps to the local farmer who turns it into compost, who turns it back into food.

Earth building

Yes, you can build tall structures that can last from natural materials. Above is Shibam, called “Manhattan of the Desert”, in Yemen whose buildings were mostly built in the 16th century from mud bricks. And below are contemporary examples of sustainable buildings being made of natural materials.

Summary

We are a part of nature that, like an adolescent, has tried hard to differentiate ourselves. We have made some wonderful, helpful technological advancements during this period of exploration. But also inflicted some serious damage to our home and time-honored ways of living. We need to sift out the helpful things we’ve learned and apply them as we re-integrate as a part of nature with an immense capacity to heal the ecosystem. Long-sighted, closed-loop designs made with local, minimally processed materials, with more people working closer to the land will bring us back into a more healthy balance and could prevent massive loss and destruction.