Reclaiming our Relations with Nature

Resources:

Webinar - "How to Build Plant Conscious Relations" with Nat Mengist (this was a workshop, and I'm not sure if it was recorded)

Nature and Health Speaks: Reclaiming Relationships with Nature - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5ZIvUuEVug&feature=youtu.be

The other day, I attended a webinar titled “How to Build Plant Conscious Relations” led by Nat Mengist, Research Assistant at UW who is a Farm Coordinator for The Common Acre and manages data for Learning in Places, an NSF-funded study that co-designs equitable science education in outdoor learning environments. I didn’t really know what was going into, but I knew I loved plants, so that was enough to register! (Also several of my friends were excited about it too!) Somewhere at the start of this webinar, I also remembered that Nat was in another panel discussion on Reclaiming Relationships with Nature hosted by UW’s Nature and Health also featuring panelists Jessica Hernandez and my friend Jules Hepp (!!) that I had saved to watch later and never did. Jessica is an Indigenous scientists and scholar whose dissertation Indigenous Lands Before Urban Parks: Indigenizing Restoration in Discovery Park, aims to bring attention to climate and food justice as a means of environmental justice in urban settings-focusing on land. She also is the founder of Piña Soul, SPC, an environmental consulting and artesanias hybrid business that promotes and supports environmental sustainability and conservation among Black & Indigenous communities. Jules is a Queer Nonbianary Environmental Educator and Artist, Certified Forest Therapy Guide, and founder of The Art of Connection. So I finally listened to it, and this blog post is a synthesis of what I learned from both experiences and my reflections.

Lately, I have been examining white supremacy - what it is, how it manifests, and how to dismantle it in my own life. While this is important work, equally important is what is built to replace it. I can get bogged down by thinking about how much there is to dismantle (just within my own life as well as in the communities I am part of), but there is so much joy in inspiration in thinking about and planning for what oppressive systems can be replaced with. I’m taking a turn in this blog post, and looking at what replacing white supremacy in my (and our collective) relationships with nature looks like. Having had re-examined my relationship with nature when I first started teaching environmental education (recognizing the importance of developing my sense of place and learning about the land I live on), I am continuing to re-examine it in a more critical way (learning from the land I live on and realizing how my relationship with land is influenced by settler-colonialism, and starting to recognize how I can decolonize that relationship).

The first thing I’ve become conscious of is that in western culture (settler-colonial culture), humans are seen as separate from nature, that humans are high up on a hierarchy of living things, that we see nature as something to use (and on the flip side we also see it as something we should keep untouched - thinking of national parks). The way this manifests is not having a connection to the land you live on, not being in relation with non-human elements of your environment, and not even knowing what those elements are. This can be seen in plant blindness, described by Nat Mengist as the inability to see/notice plants in one’s environment, the inability to recognize their importance, the inability to appreciate their unique aesthetic and unique biological feature, and the misguided anthropogenic ranking of plants as inferior to animals, and unworthy of consideration. In this video, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, member of the Citizen Potowatomi Nation and State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse (and author of the books Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss which are incredible!) points out that most people in the country can name dozens of companies from looking at their logo but can only name about 10 plants by sight. By contrast, Black and Indigenous cultures view humans as in relation with all parts of nature (there is no separation between humans and nature), seeing the landscape as animated, and stewarding the land as a responsibility (for example, Indigenous people have been burning land to regenerate plant growth long before settlers came to the continent, and western views of leaving environments as “pristine and untouched” often actually throw them out of balance. Ecosystems and humans have adapted together for a long time). By being aware of the culture that is pushed on us - one that separates us from nature - we can start to reclaim the relationships with nature that we innately know but have been indoctrinated out of us.

Nat Mengist talked in particular about our relationship with plants. The gratitude of plants isn’t one-sided. The feeling of liberation when you come down to the level of a plant, when you take care of a plant are vulnerable to a plant benefits us as humans taking care of and tending to plants. But it’s a two way street, and plants benefit from us just as much as we benefit from them. This is something that I am feeling more and more as I take care of plants and harvest seeds to help them continue to grow in the future. One way to break through the settler-colonial indoctrination of being separated from nature is to take care of and talk to your plants :’) (I do this all the time, and I think it does help them grow <3) Plant give us so much, and its our responsibility to give back to them.

The panels also touched on the differences between Western and Indigenous sciences. In one of the panels, I think someone said that Western science has perfected the practice of seeing (ie, objectively observing) while Indigenous science has developed the practice of listening (ie, learning from and immersing oneself in). As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, “It takes humility to learn from other species...What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects?” I also thought the panels did a nice job of presenting these two systems of observation not as binaries, but as two systems that may align, diverge, or contradict, but are complements to each other. Jessica Hernandez also advocated for moving the narrative about inclusion from “having a seat at the table” to “be leading the table.” Non-dominant voices and perspectives should not only be part of the conversation but need the opportunity to lead it.

Another idea that I took away from these talks was that if we trace our roots back far enough, we will find ancestors who knew how to be on and with the land - it’s a part of human nature. As Nat Mengist said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re white identifying, you have this in your roots too.” I feel that I am just starting to see myself in relation with plants, and it’s really opened my eyes to how much I’ve been missing. I’ve been captivated by seeds (the entire past and future of a plant lie in a seed), my role in taking care of plants and collecting seeds, and how my own life and that of the plants I tend are linked together. I’m not sure I can explain it, but I think the best advice I can offer to try to experience this yourself is to grow a plant from a seed, let it grow, harvest its seeds, and plant those seeds again (in other words, help a plant completely through its life cycle) and reflect on your experience. There’s something pretty incredible about it.

Jessica Hernandez pointed out that there are institutional barriers pushing back to prevent our relationships with nature, and that there is no reclaiming our relationship with nature without food justice, climate justice, and racial justice. Jules brought up the point that while Environmental Education (EE) is relatively new as a field in western culture, the idea of humans being in relation with land is not new at all, and many EE programs are grounded in white settler perspectives of land. As educators, we have a responsibility to help our students reclaim their relationship with nature. All of these oppressive systems are tied together and must be unraveled and re-woven together.

To paraphrase Nat Mengist, everyone has a way to contribute to decolonization - take risks, keep learning, stand up for what’s right. And do it in the way that’s best for you - some bees are solitary, some live in hives. I feel like this was all over the place, but some things that I am learning about more are food and seed sovereignty. Some things that were mentioned in these talks that I want to learn more about are Indigenous and Black environmentalists (George Washington Carver in particular was someone Nat brought up several times and now I’ve very curious about), counter-appropriation, how my ancestors and ancestors who lived on the land I currently live on lived in relation with the land, and the idea of re-storying land relations in tandem with land restoration, and how to center Indigenous science in environmental education.