Belonging to the community of the land

Earlier this month I gave a welcome talk for a conference in Texas. The topic: “the community of the land,” a phrase I’ve begun using in preference to “nature,” a word that has somehow come to connote a separate world -whether alien or utopian - to which humanity no longer belongs.

The phrase “community of the land” was inspired by Aldo Leopold, author of Sand County Almanac. Leopold, a wildlife biologist, spent a lifetime outdoors observing the relationships between plants, animals (including humans), and the land.

He came to realize that what was important in nature wasn’t individual lives or even individual species. It was the whole messy package, the steaming stew of interactions between plant and animal and landscape, between soil-dwelling microbe and root, root and tunneling rodent, rodent and soaring hawk, and hawk and the soil it decays into that created this living, breathing Earth. Leopold summed up his credo: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to encompass soils, waters, plants, animals or collectively: the land.

The phrase “the community of the land” reflects the fact that landscape is not just a scenic backdrop; it is a vibrant, interrelated community to which people belong.

The piñon pine - juniper woodlands above town, for instance, are not static. They are constantly changing, shaped by the relationships between all the lives that inhabit them.
The legions of microscopic and macroscopic lives like fungi and springtails and worms that live, eat, reproduce, and die underfoot, and in the doing, cleanse the air and water that pass through the soil and keep it fertile. These tiny lives enter into partnerships with the piñons and junipers, the oaks, blue grama grass and the wildflowers that briefly splash the hillsides with color.

The plants in turn feed hosts of insects, from seed-gathering ants trailing in lines across the soil to native bees and butterflies sipping flower nectar. And birds too, like the piñon jays on whom the trees depend to carry their fat-rich seeds to distant jay-caches where uneaten seeds sprout new groves of piñons. The warblers and flycatchers that pluck insects off the branches or out of the air, the circling hawks that catch the rodents and snakes, the deer that munch on succulent plants and the mountain lions that munch on deer.

And the people that cut the trees for firewood, clear patches for houses and roads, and whizz between the trees on mountain bikes. This whole web of relationships is what animates the landscape and gives it the characteristic colors, smells, shapes and sounds that we recognize as piñon-juniper woodland, the dwarf “forest” the cloaks our hills.

Why care about the community of the land? Because it is our oldest home, the place where our species was born and shaped. Because it is the earth we depend on, the planet that provides us with the air we breathe, the water that floods our cells, the food we eat and the raw materials from which we make the stuff of our lives. And because it is the home of our hearts and spirits. Reconnecting with the community of the land, that living web of interrelationships between species large and small, obvious and obscure can restore our sanity, our balance and our hope for the future.

Some believe our power has liberated or alienated us from nature, the great network of life that still shapes this unique blue planet. Not so.

There is a place for us in nature, if we’ll take it. It’s risky, but it allows us to exercise our species’ greatest talent: love. Love is the gift we bring to the community of the land. And it’s what allows us to truly belong to the only home our species has ever known.

How I recognize myself - and all my relations

"Creating dance is the thing I know best," says dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp in her book The Creative Habit. "It is how I recognize myself." Tharp says a lot of other wise things in her book, a gift of my writer friend Eduardo Rey Brummel about how to develop and nurture your creativity, things I'll think about and digest and use and go back to over the years. But it's this idea of art being what you know best and how you recognize yourself that strikes me tonight.

I know what she means in a way that goes beyond words, a way of knowing that rises from my cells. Writing is how I recognize myself - and how I know myself as human. It's how I see myself in the context of others. It's how I recognize my relationship with the rest of the living world, what my Crow Indian friends Rose Plenty Good and Alice Bulltail used to call "all our relations." Meaning not just all the other human beings, but all the other species, those lives we share this planet with. Even the ones we fear or hate or don't know. Perhaps especially those.

Rose and Alice and the other women who gathered in my neighbor Terry's living room to drink coffee and bead and tell stories weren't a judgmental lot, but they didn't mince words when someone was selfish or greedy or mean or cruel or in some way violating the community. "He acts like he has no relatives," they'd say. It was their worst insult: to act as if you alone were the most important, as if the whole world was about you.

Watching how we have been behaving lately - whether we're killing each other in Iraq and Lebanon and Darfur, or killing other species as we rush to consume more than our share of the worlds' resources first, that's the phrase that comes to mind: we're acting as if we have no relatives. As if it really was all about us.

It's not. It seems to me that the "little" wars flaring around the world and global climate change are all saying the same thing: our actions, big and small, subtle and obvious, day in and day out, all have lasting consequences. Who we love, who we hate, who we trust. It's whether we are careful with the resources we use in our everyday lives: Do we buy more than we need? Do we leave the water faucet running? Do we turn lights off? Is our approach to the world kind and tolerant, or suspicious, greedy and fearful?

Let's start behaving like relatives again. Let's treat each other - and all those other swimming, crawling, flying, and rooted lives - as if we were kin. Let's make space for each other and be courteous and don't hog the last cookies - or oil - just because we can. Let's use our art and our lives to recognize ourselves as the people we can be, not the people who behave as if we have no relations. That's not us. We can do better, and the sooner we start, the more likely we'll still have a world to share - and share alike.