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Restoration of Ecological Community

Kate Rawles

‘There is no more urgent intellectual task facing the human species… than thoroughly to reimagine its relationship with nature.’

Robert Macfarlane

I’m on the Sea Dragon, a 72-ft yacht en route from England to the Azores. We’re about to lower a couple of fish-mouthed trawls into the grey waves. There, they will funnel sea water into glass jars at their base. We haven’t seen land for days. Yet after each brief daily trawl, alongside the writhing plankton, tiny pieces of plastic float in the glass. From above the waves, the vast and ever-shifting mass of the sea often looks just fine. It isn’t. Plastic has pervaded the ocean.

Even from a ship, the ocean can be a powerful provider of that strangely positive feeling that comes with suddenly understanding yourself to be a tiny irrelevant being in the vastness of nature. Individually we are specks on the ocean. But collectively, for the first time in the history of humans on Earth, we have become gargantuan.

Our impacts on nature are staggering, immense, decimating and global. Half the world’s tropical and temperate rainforests are now gone. Deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre per second. Half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are overfished. Wild species are disappearing about 1000 times faster than the normal rate and the latest estimates strongly suggest we’ve underestimated species loss so far, upgrading our current impact on mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles to a staggering 50 percent lost since 1970. The sixth great extinction is being caused, uniquely, by a resident species. We’re altering the composition of the atmosphere, conducting an immense experiment on our climate. Our cumulative impacts on Earth are now so great that geologists are debating whether to rename the current era ‘Anthropocene’. The human era. It’s not a compliment.

Our ways of life are, collectively, utterly unsustainable. If everyone on Earth enjoyed the lifestyle of an average Western European, by 2050 we would need three planets.

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Back on Sea Dragon it’s the 4 a.m. watch. There’s a vast black sky above the dark waves. I’m lying on deck, looking at vivid stars through the rigging. A sudden shout. Dolphins! Everyone, bar Deborah at the helm, scrambles to the foredeck. The dolphins are playing on the bow-wave. Their incredible spurts of speed and evident exuberance make us laugh out loud. We can see them because they are covered in phosphorescence, their bodies like curving, water-borne sparklers, their blowholes streaming sparkles into the night. It’s utterly unexpected and so beautiful it hurts.

Dolphins are especially charismatic representatives of nature, of course. Yet there’s no shortage of occasions in which people respond to nature – trees, views, birds, bees, rivers – with excitement, appreciation of beauty and strangeness, love. So what accounts for this chasm of a mismatch between human/nature relationships of the positive kind, and the beyond-dysfunctional relationship overall? It’s a huge question, but here are three interconnected strands of a possible answer.

The first is disconnection. In industrialised societies many of us are increasingly cut off from other species and living systems by our indoor, fast-paced, screen-mediated, urban lives; scurrying through our days unaware of the life and energy all around us. We are disconnected from the experience of other forms of life; and disconnected intellectually from the myriad ways in which our lives depend on theirs. Other species are not only the occasional source of dolphin-like flashes of joy, but the constant source of things we literally cannot survive without. Fertile soil. Oxygenated air. Clean water. Pollination. Photosynthesis.

I’m hardly encouraged to think of this, though, as I buy plastic-smothered food, drenched in pesticides and grown courtesy of a staggering quantity of fossil fuels. I’m disconnected from my impacts on the life-forms I need and co-exist with, impacts I cause inadvertently, simply by taking my place and being normal in the context of industrialised, high-consumption societies. These disconnections – literal, experiential, emotional, intellectual – are part of what makes it possible for the decimation of nature to continue without provoking the mass outrage and protest it actually warrants.

A second strand is consumerism. Consumption way beyond need; the creation of identity; status and self-esteem via unnecessary stuff; the inevitable conflict between economic systems dependent on indefinite, resource-based, consumption-fuelled growth; and a single planet with ecological limits. All our major environmental problems can be understood as manifestations of this conflict between growth and limits. Some argue that these two strands are interconnected; that excess consumption at an individual level can be an unconscious attempt to alleviate the loneliness of disconnection from the

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Llangrannog beach flock by Emily Laurens to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, 2014. ‘We need to find new ways to expressing that love and commemorating the passing of places, ecosystems and species. So with all that in mind I went to where the civilised, farmed, human dominated land meets the wild untamable ocean. To draw passenger pigeons with my friends in that liminal space. Within those fragments of rock that sea and time has crumbled to near dust I trace their shapes with my garden rake. In the blond brown sands I draw a small flock of pigeons, like shadows passing overhead. And then I watch them disappear.’

Photo by Keely Clarke

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‘vividness, vibrancy, and aliveness’ of life. And that the economic system we are born into plays on this – amongst other things – to keep us consuming to the insane degree that it needs.

The third strand is the dominant story across industrialised cultures that humans are separate from, and greatly superior to, the rest of the natural world; and that ‘nature’ is merely a set of resources which humans can and should manage/exploit, entirely for their own purposes. This anthropocentric narrative detaches us from our earthbound realities, feeding the consumerist illusion of a glittering, above-and-beyond-nature existence. And it reduces the entire living world, from blue tits to blue whales, from starfish to sycamore, to a set of entities whose value is defined solely in relation to their usefulness.This finds expression in the language of ‘ecosystem services’, and the attempt to put a monetary value on them. Motivated by a genuine desire to strengthen advocacy for nature by rewriting it in the language of power, this is nonetheless a classic example of trying to solve a problem with the mind-set that caused it.

Aldo Leopold saw this decades ago when he wrote:We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity, belonging to us. When we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. The land ethic…changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.

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Leopold has been called the father of environmental ethics, the academic discipline that analyses and evaluates different models of human/nature relations. But his insights didn’t come from thinking in isolation from experience. Leopold spent a lifetime engaged with other beings and natural systems, first as a hunter and later a conservationist. For many peoples, the notion that their community includes multiple forms of life, not just human ones, is evident. But for industrialised societies, it’s hard to overstate the significance and immensity of the transition Leopold invokes. From conqueror/managers of nature-as-resource, to fellow citizens of our ecological communities. It’s a transition that needs to be rooted in experience as well as thought; a re-imagining, re-feeling, re-experiencing of human/nature relations, as well as a rethinking.

At one level, it’s straightforward. As individuals, personal reconnection can often come with ‘big’ experiences, with dolphins or mountaintops or other wow connections – often thanks to sea kayaking in my case – that act as a shortcut to the re-imagining we need. These encounters offer revitalisation, the invigorating effects of sheer intrigue and wonder, a sort of rewilding of the self which in turn

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can invoke compassion for our ecological communities and their citizens. Their potential for tackling disconnection as well as anthropocentrism is clear. And they can strengthen immunity to the lure of consumption, filling in some of the details about what a less materialistic model of life might involve.

On another level, reconnection with nature-as-community is not so simple; not so much instant magic as a life-practice. It calls for persistent and dedicated acts of imagination, creative thought and action. To strengthen empathy across multiple species-barriers. To really feel and think, not just of big-eyed seals, say, but plankton, or the millions of microorganisms performing critical functions right beneath our feet, as fellow citizens – and then to figure out what this means in practice, across all aspects of our lives. And reconnection can also bring necessary acute discomfort. In my case this happens when I’m compelled to acknowledge the negative impacts of driving my kayak home on a fossil-fuel-filled van, via an outdoor shop where I might buy a fleece I don’t really need, and the lives of the terns, seaweeds and seals whose lives have just been revitalising my own.

This, in the end, is the point. Not to dwell in guilt or blame but to energise work that aims to reshape our systems – economic, social, intellectual – so that our ordinary, normal lives become single-planet lives. And this is where we need imagination to the nth degree; social as well as individual change; community lead transitions across the industrialised world. There are already many inspiring examples. The upsurge of interest in ‘rewilding’ is one – restoring and protecting natural processes; letting these processes take the lead in shaping landscapes; reconnecting fragmented habitats and wilder spaces; reintroducing top predators and keystone species; re-conceptualising the role of humans as a single species within these bigger spaces and systems. These range from the huge Y2Y – Yellowstone to Yukon – project in North America to rewilding Ennerdale in the English Lake District. The Findhorn Community in Scotland, figuring out how to deal with waste, food production, and energy on the basis of co-operation with nature-as-community. Trees for Life, restoring areas of ancient Caledonian forest, underpinned by a strong commitment to the intrinsic value of nature. But this is still work in process and work against the tide.

It’s a tide that needs to turn. Rethinking our relationships to other living beings and recrafting the dominant, intensely human-centred, social narratives is an urgent task. To stay on Earth, we need an extraordinarily creative leap towards profoundly different ways of living on Earth, underpinned by very different stories of who we all are. There is still time to choose and shape this transition, rather than have the laws of ecology force it on us. There is everything to play for.