The connections we’ve lost
Growing up in the relatively urban setting of Long Beach, California, I was never raised to know the world around me. I deeply appreciated the beauty of nature, but had no connection beyond that. Thinking back, I don’t know if anyone around me really had a connection with our environment beyond enjoying its aesthetics — beyond watching Planet Earth, or hanging nature paintings in their home, or maybe, maybe, occasionally hiking or camping.
How many of us, or our family and friends, can look around and name the different plants and animals, or know which plants are edible or medicinal? How many of us know how to read the clouds and winds to predict future weather? How many of us really know about all of the ecosystem services the nature around us provides?
Connection to land — loss and necessity
Modern education doesn’t place value on learning about the natural world around us unless that’s specifically the career path you’ve chosen. Capitalism has shaped our education system by dictating that it’s much more important for children to be raised learning skills that can help industries gain further profit, deeming all other knowledge and skills as extraneous. We force children to learn whitewashed history and math that most of them will never use after school, often under the guise of helping them ‘learn how to learn’ — so why don’t we actually teach them about the world around them — the natural world, that is?
Colonization and capitalism in many ways necessitate a disconnection from place. If there’s no sense of intimacy or connection with the land, then Indigenous groups’ claim to place becomes illegitimate in the public’s eye, allowing for further displacement and seizure of land. It’s also much easier to (over-)exploit an area and its resources if the people have no connection to the land. With disconnection from the environment, each generation builds a new conception of how the land ‘should look’ (such as the conversion of forests to cityscape or pastures, the extensive loss of wetlands and mangroves until they’re all but absent from coastlines, and installation of finely manicured sets of non-native trees and bushes lining neighborhoods), oblivious to the extent of damage and degradation after decades of exploitation.
Without reconnecting to our environment, society’s doomed to abuse it far passed the point of recovery.
Even if our environments are now largely man-made, or ‘built environments’, riddled with introduced and invasive flora and fauna, they are still environments worth learning about and protecting. Although the land has been corrupted in many ways by these non-native plants and animals, that doesn’t mean that these complex communities aren’t beautiful and worthy of respect.
Should we work to quite literally decolonize our landscapes? I say yes. But when we do so should we also do our best to learn about and respect our landscape? Hell yes.
There’s so much beauty and wisdom in the natural world around us. It’s a heinous disservice to allow our current education system to deprive and exclude so many children, especially in low-income and majority-POC* communities, to grow up disconnected from the land they’re on and the environment around them.
Where to go from here
Of course there’s no silver-bullet solution to creating a cultural shift, but there are many smaller changes we can make to encourage this! One thing anyone with some time can do is commit to reading at least several books about the environment, how people and the environment influence each other, and what we can learn from it. Two of my personal favorites, which are approachable for people of all educational backgrounds, are The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney and Cod by Mark Kurlansky, and your local libraries should have plenty of similar books (side note: support your local libraries).
For people with yards or space for gardens, consider switching landscaping plants to native ones, especially edible plants. Not only do these plants require less fertilizer, water, and maintenance, but they thrive better since they’re in their native environment, and they help local pollinators (e.g. bees, hummingbirds, etc) whose traditional food sources may be scarce in an urbanized landscape. If your garden/lawn is accessible to others, planting edible plants also encourages people to interact with the land and the beautiful bounty it can provide if we care for it properly.
That said, the most important thing we can do, as a society, is ensure that future generations don’t repeat our mistakes and actually have a connection with the land that we’ve mostly lost.
By teaching children through place-based education we can develop their understanding of their surrounding environment, the native plants and animals, and the traditional uses of the area’s resources. Additionally, by establishing community gardens that prioritize native plants and are cared for by both local schools and community members, children can build personal connection to the land and the community is encouraged to come together to help care for the land. Similarly, by having more school-sponsored trips to gets students outside, such as beach cleanups and weeding at local parks/farms, we can encourage children to have a greater sense of responsibility and stewardship for their land.
So far, we’ve failed as a society to care for our land, especially in the U.S. where we continually displace Native tribes and nations then ignore their voices when we desecrate their land, where we repeatedly poison low-income and majority-POC* communities, and where we condemn other countries’ environmental practices yet rely on their resources and outsource our emissions to them. Unless we act swiftly and strongly, our planet will soon degrade past the point of salvaging. One of the most critical things we can do is reconnect with our environment, rekindling an understanding of and respect for it — if we truly do this, all of the actions and legislative changes needed to save our lands will fall into place, since it’ll then be a moral imperative we can’t ignore.
*POC: Person/People of Color
