Photo: Sunset on the Pontax River, James Bay
What becomes possible when people reconnect to nature in the way I’m articulating in this series of posts? A lot. The small things ripple out into the big things. Here’s what I can imagine happening if our cultures became more nature oriented.
On a personal level, I believe that many people’s mental and physical health could improve significantly. Humans evolved immersed in nature, and it’s the stimulus our bodies and brains thrive on. When I started working outdoors for most of the winter as a forest school educator, I stopped experiencing SAD (seasonal affective disorder). Most land based skills engage your body and mind in a more holistic way. I regularly teach carving classes at Les Affutés, and the number of office workers that come in to work with their hands after looking at a screen all day is revealing. It really seems to ground them back in their bodies and the physical world.
On a community level, I wonder what could happen if our communities were more in tune with the seasons? In nature, everything has a cycle. Summer isn’t more important than fall, and producing fruit isn’t more important than decomposing. What if we worked less in the winter when there’s less energy?
What if we marked the turning of seasons, in the world and in our lives, with a bit more depth than the Easter bunny, birthday parties, and Christmas presents? I’m thinking of the lack of rites of passage for youth, the invisibility of elders. There is wisdom in cultures that really acknowledge and attend to the transitions of life, whether that’s the spring equinox or entering adulthood.
On a societal level, what would happen if our economy reflected the patterns of nature? Ecology and economy both refer to the same thing; our home (Oikos in Greek). Our current model assumes infinite growth. The places in nature where that occurs (eg. cancer, viruses) don’t tend to sustain life very well. This is well beyond the scope of what I teach, but some resources I enjoyed on this topic are linked below.
The global level is where many of us feel the most powerless, but large societies are made of communities, which are made of individual people. As nature connection infuses throughout our own lives and communities, a lot can happen. Reconnection happens in little ways, like picking berries, and in big ways, like restoring a landscape. It’s not everyday that we’re able to personally reintroduce wolves or buffalo to a landscape, though. For most of us, it’s the small acts that maintain our connection. For me, that looks like harvesting blackberries and salmon when I visit family, gathering greens in spring, canoe trips in summer, hunting in the fall, and snowshoeing in winter.
It’s the small acts that create ripples that I am trying to spread with Wise Oak.
In the next blog post in this series, I’ll cover some concrete ways I think you can incorporate more nature into your life and what’s worked for me.
Some links to check out:
-The book “Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein goes in depth into what a life sustaining economic model could look like.
–This episode of the Future Ecologies podcast really stretched my thinking. It artfully makes the case that financial systems can be effectively put in service to the restoration of massive landscapes.
-Some other examples of a nature-centric paradigm playing out on a large scale are landscape rewilding, buffalo reintroductions, cultural fire management, and permaculture.
And of course, if you’re looking to feed your connection to nature in a concrete way, take a peek at our short classes and seasonal courses.
