A radical re-evaluation of how we look at our land

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This article was published 16/03/2024 (910 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks a language that is foreign to most — and frankly, a language that would rarely find itself in the business section of a daily newspaper.

I’m not talking about the traditional Indigenous language of her Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a language hovering on the verge of extinction and kept alive only through the efforts of a devoted few.

As a scientist trained in biology, a teacher, author, and parent, Wall Kimmerer is fully fluent in the words we all use.

It’s how she uses those words and the values embedded in them that makes her so challenging to the status quo in a society focused on fighting over who owns what and measuring everything’s worth in dollars and cents.

As the keynote speaker at the University of Manitoba’s Sustainability of Canadian Agriculture conference this week, Wall Kimmerer’s perspective, rooted as it was in common sense and natural wisdom, was a radical departure from cultural norms.

Right about the same time Farm Credit Canada was reporting that farmland values in Canada surged another 11.5 per cent last year, Wall Kimmerer was suggesting to her audience that we need to embrace a much broader definition of land’s worth.

“The Western worldview conceives of lands as capital, and natural resources as ecosystem services, and mostly importantly, as property,” she said. “The change we need is to a worldview in which land is understood as much more than property.”

Aside from rejecting the notion that humans are smarter and more entitled to natural resources than all other species of animals and plants, Wall Kimmerer offered a surprisingly inclusive view of how traditional values and modern science can intersect, and how humans and the environment can co-exist in mutually beneficial ways.

It starts, however, with embracing a humbler identity.

“I think that we are living in an era of profound error for much of humans’ time on the planet.

Before the great delusion, we lived in cultures that understood ourselves not as masters of the universe, but as the younger brothers of creation,” she said.

“We need traditional ecological knowledge, which is based on the recognition that we humans are not at the top of a pyramid of life but are a member of a democracy of species governed by laws of interdependence.”

That one pivot, which admittedly strikes at the heart of biblical doctrine shaping Western values, sets the stage for a different relationship with the natural world, one less focused on mining all available resources for human gain and more on harvesting in the spirit of reciprocity.

It’s about taking, but also giving back, and learning rather than seeking to control.

What does that look like for modern agriculture?

New concepts creeping into the mainstream vocabulary, such as regenerative agriculture, cover crops and permaculture, respect the need for biodiversity and focus on soil health as the foundation for sustainability.

While they remain far from becoming conventional practices, farmers adopting these approaches are getting closer to the type of relationship with the land that Wall Kimmerer is advocating.

“Human ingenuity can certainly be part of the solution, but we should keep in mind that there already is a system that pulls carbon from the atmosphere and stores it for centuries,” she noted.

“We could do worse than engage the traditional Indigenous philosophy of learning from the plants. The important question becomes, if plants are our oldest teachers, how could we be better students?”

As well, despite the tendency to lean on “science-based” decision-making, there is growing awareness that science alone doesn’t translate into knowledge or wisdom.

Traditional cultures embrace a wider definition of knowledge. “The Medicine Wheel … reminds us that that we humans have four ways of knowing: mind, body, emotion and spirit. And most of our scientific communications are only on one half of that Medicine Wheel,” she said.

Radical ideas have a way of living on the fringe — until the right combination of time and circumstances converge.

If Wall Kimmerer is right and the escalating climate crisis is the tragic result of humankind’s grand experiment in running things, that time is now.

Laura Rance is executive editor, production content lead for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com