[Heads up: this issue has a longer-than-usual intro because I wanted to share several quotes of an essay I enjoyed. I also included the essay in the Food for Thought section further below if you want to skip my opening remarks.]

Ever since coming to terms with the fact that our beliefs are a product of our environment, it all seemed a bit too arbitrary to me to really care much about spirituality. In recent years, though – in part because of my increased anxiety about ecological breakdown – I’ve been trying to learn more about Indigenous perspectives, and in particular the idea of humans as ‘temporary caretakers’ whose role it is to strengthen the bonds and balance between all things.

In the essay Returning the Gift, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes this relationship beautifully. Sharing stories from her Native American Potawatomi ancestors, Klimmerer begins by pointing out the many gifts provided to us by the Earth, but also how we’ve come to accept those gifts without any sense of reciprocity:

“Though we live in a world made of gifts, we find ourselves harnessed to institutions and an economy that relentlessly asks, ‘What more can we take from the Earth?’ This worldview of unbridled exploitation is to my mind the greatest threat to the life that surrounds us. Even our definitions of sustainability revolve around trying to find the formula to ensure that we can keep on taking, far into the future. Isn’t the question we need, ‘What does the Earth ask of us?’”

The answer to this question is fairly simple: gratitude. But showing gratitude requires us to pay attention.

“Paying attention is an ongoing act of reciprocity, the gift that keeps on giving, in which attention generates wonder, which generates more attention – and more joy. Paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgment of pain. Open and attentive, we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds, the old growth and the clear-cut, the mountain and the mine. Paying attention to suffering sharpens our ability to respond. To be responsible. This, too, is a gift, for when we fall in love with the living world, we cannot be bystanders to its destruction. Attention becomes intention, which coalesces itself to action.”

This simple act of paying attention, of listening, is impossible, though, if we don’t even know who we’re meant to listen to.

“Ethnobiologists tell us that our great-grandparents spoke fluent natural history. They knew the names and personalities of dozens of birds and hundreds of plants. Today the average American school child can recognize more than a hundred corporate logos. They can give a name to about ten plants, and these include such categories as ‘Christmas Tree’ and ‘Grass’. We have lost an entire vocabulary, of speech, of experience, and of relationship. Our fundamental currency of relationship, our highly evolved capacity for paying attention to those species who sustain us, has been subverted in a kind of intellectual hijacking. How can we care for them, monitor their well-being, and fight for their existence if we don’t even know their names?

We have enabled a state of nameless anonymity, bringing human people to a condition of isolation and disconnection, that philosophers have called ‘species loneliness’. Species loneliness – this deep, unnamed sadness – is the cost of estrangement from the rest of creation, from the loss of relationship.”

Reversing this loss of relationship – and preventing our own demise – requires fundamental change not (just) of the systems we created, but within ourselves.

“While we race around asking how we might change technology or tax structures, the change that might save us goes unspoken: what we need to change is ourselves. The danger is that we have been captured by a worldview that no longer serves our world, if it ever did – a worldview whose manifestation is destroying our beloved homelands, our fellow species, and ourselves. But all we can talk about is changing light bulbs.

I don’t think that it is more technology we need, or more money, or more data. We need a change in heart, a change in ethics, away from an anthropocentric worldview that considers the Earth our exploitable property to a biocentric, life-centered worldview in which an ethic of respect and reciprocity can grow.”

I’ll stop here for brevity’s sake, but I hope I’ve made Kimmlerer’s essay compelling enough for you to give it a full read.

In trying to understand why I’m drawn to Indigenous perspectives*, I have to acknowledge that for a typical ‘non-believer’ like myself, the sway of science has its limits. Indigenous cultures, some of them tens of thousands of years old, have understood the intricacies of the web of life long before we termed phrases like ‘nature’ or ‘biodiversity’. This profound awareness of the interdependence of everything – of Homo Sapiens not as some sort of supreme species at the top of an imagine pyramid, but as just a tiny part of a fragile system reliant on reciprocity – is immensely humbling. – Kai

(*My understanding of Indigenous practices and beliefs is limited to what I learned from essays, short stories and some experiences exploring Australia. Indigenous spirituality is extremely diverse around the world. In Australia alone, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are made up of over 500 distinct groups and clans, each with their own culture, customs, language and laws.)

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