Who Needs the Healing?

UNTAMED is a year-long, living exhibition at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, Cape Town that combines art, plants, poetry, sustainable architecture and a solar panel.  It's a poignant, pressing statement designed provoke individual consciousness about our relationships to Nature.

The spiraling, solar-powered, naturally-lit pavilion has been designed by Enrico Daffonchio.  The living wall comprised of re-fashioned plastic cold-drink bottles filled with indigenous ground covers was planted by the Kirstenbosch horticulturalists.

The sculptures are by Dylan Lewis, renowned for his animal works in bronze.  Here he explores humanity's balance with Nature in a way that evokes a lost wildness, and a lost serenity.  The words are by Ian McCallum, poet and psychiatrist, wilderness guide and psychological analyist probably best known for his book, Ecological Intelligence.  


I rushed through UNTAMED - after an appropriately wild toddler who loved running the spiral and would not be tamed by the conventions of viewing an exhibition.  But despite this, words by Ian McCallum jumped out at me: "We need to stop speaking about the Earth being in need of healing.  The Earth does not need healing.  We do."

Because I feel so urgent about giving Nature the chance for the restoration and renewal of wildness, I often think, speak and write in terms of us 'healing the Earth'.  So I really enjoyed the challenge of this statement.  It's not a new idea but it is certainly has value in being revived.  Mr McCallum's view is that we are pathological in our relationship to Nature.  He echoes American monk, 'Earth scholar' and Deep Ecology advocate Thomas Berry who described humanity in relation to Nature as being autistic for centuries.

What they, and many other sustainable living activists, are saying is that we won't get sustainability right without addressing the fundamental problems in the way we see and relate to Nature.  While we exist in a paradigm that disregards and attempts to dominate Nature; while we find the most value in Nature in terms of what we can extract from it, instead of learn about it; we will remain in opposition to the force that gives us life - eco-illiterate, pathological, unresponsive - doomed.  The challenge of awakening to respect,  love, appreciation, even reverence for Life - ours and all others, is an individual one.

Gardening for Resilience

We have such a deeply ingrained urge to cultivate. Maybe one day they'll find a genome for it! The second last chapter of Stewart Brand's book, Whole Earth Discipline, is called: "It's All Gardening". He writes: "Ecosystem engineering is an ancient art, practiced and malpracticed by every human society since the mastery of fire. We would be fools to repeat their mistakes and just as foolish to ignore some of the brilliant practices that worked for them."

How should we be gardening today?

We are facing unprecedented challenges. The ways we choose to garden will have an impact on our resilience in the face of climate change. We should be gardening for biodiversity, for local and sustainable food, for sustainable water and for zero waste. Here's an example of a folly in my home city, Cape Town:

- a rose garden in the showpiece Company Gardens - Why? It even gets a mention on the city's "green map". Why? The Cape Town city and environs is blessed to be home to one of the unique floral kingdoms of the world. The smallest floral kingdom in the world in terms of space but the second most diverse in terms of species - and that's second only to the Amazonian floral kingdom that spans multiple countries and continents. Why aren't we proudly growing our native flora in our showpiece urban garden? Why are we growing roses?

It's time - let's grow for food and biodiversity. Let us plant native plants and restore our biodiversity. Let us plant for food and create an urban foodshed. Let us get off the train at the new revamped Cape Town station and pick a banana or an orange on the way to work. Let us plant an Erica or Buchu on our balcony and feed a butterfly and a bee.

Let the landscapers give up on the hungry lawns and sterile exotic palms. Let us create food-rich, nature-rich local environments that make us strong.

Nature Play

Today's parents are beset by anxieties about providing our children with the 'right' development opportunities that will prepare them for "success". The current children of the developed world are the most over-regulated, over-organised, busiest children in human history - and some would argue, also the most limited. The greatest of these limitations is not being able to roam freely in Nature. Fear for children's safety and dwindling Nature are just two of the reasons why children of today spend far less unsupervised time outdoors than their parents did. The commercialisation of childhood is another major factor. Indoor play areas have become big business in the same way that video and TV products evermore replace a child's primary experience of the world.

In his influential book, 'Last Child in the Woods', Richard Loev proposes that in fact enabling our children to play freely in Nature every day, come rain or shine, is one of the greatest things we can do to prepare them for fulfilling adult lives. He presents a vast array of studies that indicate that unstructured Nature play impacts positively on physical, cognitive and emotional development. For instance, a comparative study of pre-schoolers in Norway and Sweden showed that children in a 'green' playschool who spent most of their school time rambling outside in a natural setting had significantly better physical prowess than their counterparts who were engaged in some organised physical activity on a level playground. The Nature children, who ran and tumbled over uneven ground, climbed trees, waded in water and built forts in long grass had better muscle tone and strength, greater balance and co-ordination skills.

Physical development may be the most obvious benefit. However, Nature play is also increasingly being used with promising results as either an alternative or supplementary therapy for children diagnosed with ADHD. Parents involved in these studies report both the immediate calming affect of Nature on their children and an increased capacity to focus after Nature experiences. In a world with an increasing demand for innovation, it may also trigger the ambitions of some parents to know that studies show that children who play often in Nature show markedly greater capacities for quality creativity.

Scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson uses his "biophilia" hypothesis to argue that humans have a biological need to "affiliate with other forms of life" - that is, a physical connection to the natural world is fundamental to our individual development.

Leap for Sustainability

Bright Green thinker and writer, Alex Steffen of http://www.worldchanging.com has long maintained that we cannot achieve sustainability by taking little steps. He also warns that focusing on small, simple changes can dangerously distract us from taking the necessary big leaps that the complexity of our world demands. Instead Mr Steffen urges us constantly towards consciousness of the whole system in which we are embedded, as well as high level actions on political and personal levels.

In this article, How to Really Green Your Home, Deep Down

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/011094.html you can watch Catherine Mohr's entertaining and smart TED talk of how she grappled with her ecological impact when she was building a new home. Its provides great insights into embodied energy and water, and shows how to take them into account.

For many of us, our homes represent the largest systems that we have control over, and they are therefore the most significant places where we can make an impact on sustainability. It is important to fully understand our homes in terms of processes, networks and relationships. Bits and pieces of green technologies and some 'simple' actions won't make the difference that is possible with a whole-systems understanding and approach.

Changes

I love books that change me. Reading Stewart Brand's 'Whole Earth Discipline' did that last week, and I feel invigorated. I love the way this man thinks, and how brilliantly he writes about his intelligent ideas. Once founder and editor of the famed 'Whole Earth Catalogues', Stewart Brand is also largely credited with planting the seeds of the USA environmental movement of the 70's through his button campaign demanding to see NASA's pictures of the Earth after the 1969 moon mission. For me, he has always been a person to watch. He has a knack of being on the button.

Many serious environmentalists and Earth-Lovers felt a range of negative emotions, from disappointment to fury, when about five years ago, Stewart Brand wrote articles and gave interviews that seemed to champion the very 'Evils' that 'green' activists have long rallied against. Very controversially, he started to say that urbanisation is good, cities are green and world population is mostly likely to decline, not explode. Even worse, he started to say nuclear power is green and that genetic engineering offers valuable technologies for a greener world. Brand transformed himself unapologetically, from Saviour to Judas. I admire his bravery in much the same way as I relished Bob Dylan going electric.

Still, I wasn't sure I wanted to read 'Whole Earth Discipline' when I first saw the reviews, but I am delighted that I did. It is not that I have been fully convinced by Stewart Brand's new arguments about what's 'green'. It is that he reminded me to think for myself and to freely change my mind when appropriate, when times change, when there's new information and new ways.

There's a crucial aim at stake: to sustain human civilisation on Earth. For a long future, for our children and their future generations; that means sustaining the ecosystems and species that sustain us as well. We go hand in hand, and we all need substantial change, right now.

We're stuck in old ways. We don't understand today's science. We're romantic when we need to be pragmatic. We're not visionary enough. We're anti-intellectual. We fight before we listen and understand. We're pessimistic, and we don't trust. We hold onto the old; scared to change our minds and be different in case we lose some kind of credibility. Sometimes, because of this, we may stand in the way of what might help us. That has to change fast. We have to change. Fast. Climate change is already here.

Happy Earth Day!

The Song

The song of the small bird was a dream of a world inside me.
Sweet, clear notes drew attention to the vastness of possibilities
I could inhabit.
Each possibility had its own skin and they could all fit me perfectly.
I was free to choose, to try on, to go out,
to come back and to change…

The song of the small bird could be heard through
the branches and leaves of very big, very old trees.
It had a purity that could be heard best by the heart.
It told of a place of peace and quiet,
a home of blessed, wordless stillness,
a temple of knowing and being full of Oneself,
without any limitations at all…

From the song came bones from the sky and hair on the water.
There was blood in the veins of the leaves of grass
and under the bark of the living forest.
Mushrooms loved the song.
Flowers mimicked its sweetness and offered it up in nectar
to the brown velvet butterflies that came to sip.
I could breathe in the song; smooth and fine.
Soon, all of us in the garden came to be the song
in different and wonderful ways.
All the same, our molecules could now dance and sing
a new way of being that was abundant and hopeful,
and very satisfying.


I love this message from Earth Charter International:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnGcf0mRZ98

It starts with One... Transform yourself...

The Old Oak and The Kingdom of Mushroom