(Illustration Credit: LisaAlisa_ill/ iStockPhotos.com)
Recently in my learning from York University and at Royal Roads University, I’ve had to confront myself with an old narrative that I’ve held onto far too long from my parent’s generations’ stories. My parent’s being first-wave environmentalists of the Western/ Global North environmental movement in the 1970’s and whom their stories are almost coded into my DNA since birth. It is a story that sets the ultimate course of humans and the more-than-human world off the edge to obliteration, within the span of a few more generations to come, and a story in which humans are the ‘evil-doers’ to Earth.
This entrenched narrative is something that Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) spoke about in her chapter Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teaching of Grass (2013, pg. 156 – 201). For that worldview was like a stuffy old scientist who believed that human activity is ultimately always at odds with the natural world and our interactions could never possible be “good” for the natural world. Yet the book describes another worldview. For the author’s Graduate student, Laurie, proved otherwise as her research in harvested sweetgrass had actually flourished with human activities compared to the control crops that were unharvested. Of course, the lesson in Kimmerer’s chapter was that this was due to Indigenous traditional wisdom of the ‘Honorable Harvest,’ which included many ingrained lessons within it, such as you don’t take more than you need and that you give back in reciprocity to the more-than-human world.
Stories like these are starting to unravel my normative worldview, by examining my entrenched inner narrative that is best described as an apocalyptic story and that only breeds a sense of nihilism, apathy and to be honest, depression. Beginning to decode that narrative is like breathing new life into my soul on a crisp autumn day. For it begins a renewed sense of possibilities and re-imagination I used to have in my 20’s where I truly believed we humans – the so called ‘evil-doers’ of the planet – would not only learn the errors of our ways and begin to radically transform ourselves, but also heal our relationship with the world. Nothing short of a global revolution. Yet as the years passed and I got older, but not necessarily wiser, I lost that story of hope and possibility, replacing it with the ecological apocalypse narrative.
But this alternative story, and the teachings from this week at Royal Roads University in the Diploma program for Climate Action Leadership (CALS501), shifts our relationship with the world. It shows that humans and the more-than-human-world can act in reciprocity and may actually be “good” for one another. It shifts our relationship from the human-nature divide, in which humans only dominate and exploit the world, into an interconnected being that has a loving and transformative relationship with itself. It mesomorphs our hyper independent conditioning of what it means to be human into an interconnected being, like flock behavior of migrating birds, especially when we think of complex systems, open education, transdisplinary research and user-centred design.
Hence, rather than treating ourselves as separate individual beings all scrambling to address the climate crisis, we are weaved (or braided) into the same cloth where we need each other to solve this crisis, just as we need an interconnected relationship with the earth if we are survive the 21st century. For these are alternative worldview where the earth needs us to heal our wrongdoings (our toxic tailing ponds, our mining sites, our waste sites, and so much more), and where we need the earth in order to not only live (earth, air, food, and water to name a few) but also learn her lessons in order to adapt to the warming world ahead. One such lesson is that of shifting our own human relationships with each away from competition and into cooperation with one another, which is fundamental in climate adaptation.
To think that we actually need each other now more than ever – humans and the-more-than-human world – and to think that we can actually do good by each other is a profoundly radical idea. One that I had only dreamed of as a young girl. But it is a story that deserves re-examining in our current place and time. For it might just radically de-code that tired old narratives that no longer serve us, creating space for new stories to be told and constructed into our reality.
References
Corman, I. & Cox, R. 2020. Transdisplinary: A Primer. Masters’ in Climate Action Leadership, Royal Roads University: Retrieved from: https://commons.royalroads.ca/macal/wp-content/uploads/sites/88/2021/04/MACAL_Transdisciplinary_Thinking03-31-21-3.pdf
Davis, J. (2014). Towards a Further Understanding of What Indigenous People have Always Known: Storytelling as a Basis of Good Pedagogy. In First Nations Perspectives, 6 (1), pp. 83-96.
DeVries, I. (2020). Open Learning Primer. Masters’ in Climate Action Leadership, Royal Roads University: Retrieved from: https://media.royalroads.ca/owl/media/macal/documents/open-education-primer.pdf
Homer-Dixon, T. (2011, January). Complexity Science. In Oxford Leadership Journal, 2 (1), pp. 1-15. Retrieved from: http://homerdixon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Homer-Dixon-Oxford-Leadership-Journal-Manion-lecture.pdf
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Phillips, L. (2013). Storytelling as Pedagogy. In Practical Stragies, Literacy Learning: The Middle Years, 21 (2), pp. ii – iii.