So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” from Braiding Sweetgrass
What changes when we see the climate crisis as a failure of relationship?
So much of the discussion of climate change is either transactional, speaking the language of ecosystem services or insurance payments, or it’s technological, about solar panels or carbon capture or electric vehicles.
But climate change is also fundamentally relational. We are all part of a net of relationships that holds us, whether or not we discern the threads. I find that tracing some of these relationships motivates me to work harder to protect the climate and helps me feel more powerful and less lonely as I see where the net is fraying and who is working to repair it.
I am in relationship to people I do not know: the miner who dug the cobalt ore that powers my cellphone; the people suffering asthma downwind of the refinery that fuels my automobile; the Wintun/Patwin people who cared for the land I live on and were nourished by it for millennia—until the scouts and trappers and missionaries brought them sickness and slavery and separated them from their land—and who are once again a major force in the local area, rebuilding the food bank and working to protect the land, among many other efforts.
The global supply chain obfuscates many of the relationships I have. My material life rests on a foundation of denial: denial that my comfort and sense of connection depends on that miner and those people suffering asthma. In economic terms their suffering is an externality. The mine owners don’t pay for it. The phone manufacturers don’t pay for it. The oil companies and automakers don’t pay for it. I don’t pay for it. Those who suffer pay for it.
Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that we are also related to land, nature, the living world. Cobalt mines contaminate soils and water and force people off their land. The damage from oil spills is impossible to overstate. Conservation efforts that devalue human relationships to the living world continue to displace people rather than see them as protectors.
My own relationship to the California landscape has changed. For a long time, being a spectator, hiking through it without engaging, has felt unsatisfying. All the more so now that wildfires have charred miles of beloved and familiar landscape in the Coast Ranges and make me hesitate to go into the mountains after wildfire season is underway. I’d like to be able to heal my place as it is changing; that would heal me too.
With all these failures of relationship, one of the defining feelings I’ve had about climate change, for years, is isolation—in the midst of a phenomenon that is entirely collective. And along with my sense of isolation is a sense of helplessness, and fear, and a constant cognitive dissonance. Anyone who’s been in denial can recognize all of those. I know I should be addressing this suffering, but I don’t know how. And I fear the cost of it, the cost of losing my comfort. But what might I gain from being freed from isolation, helplessness, fear, and the constant sense that the way I live is destructive to all I care about?
If I look at my happiest moments, they were all about relationship to a person or place or group. I have to ask the question, what might I gain if I take seriously climate relationships and my need to relate? How might my life be improved if I mind these connections?
These are questions I am just beginning to live into. But I know part of the answer is in the meaning of relation as story, telling, account. Solving climate change requires new stories, stories that make visible the connections that weave us together. Our interdependency requires us to listen to voices that do not share our perspective in order to understand our own lives.
As I was working on the Mangroves post for Project Regeneration Nexus this came home to me. Mangroves are deep carbon sinks, and they often provide flood protection. They’re also cradles of biodiversity that shelter fish and shellfish; those ocean communities feed human communities that share the mangroves with them.
In the Nigerian delta, in the region of the Ogoni people, oil spills killed off thousands of acres of mangroves and the shellfish that women traditionally harvest for food. With the shellfish gone, the women now depend entirely on men, who do deep-sea fishing. It is the women who are compensating for the damage done by the oil companies by restoring the mangroves.
This story repeats itself around the globe, with variations. Sometimes it’s shrimp aquaculture that destroys the mangroves; sometimes it’s palm oil. Then the surrounding people, who are typically marginalized and usually Indigenous, lose their fisheries and the flood protection the mangroves provided. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel or the shrimp or the palm oil ends up being consumed by people far away and usually wealthier. People like me.
And the people who are left to repair the damage are exactly the people who were harmed in the first place. Not only are they repairing the damage to their own lives, they are returning carbon sinks that the entire world needs. They are doing the work I want to be doing.
So what kind of relationship do I want with them? Well, Martha Agbani, who is leading that mangrove restoration project, has a Twitter account. So I can follow her and get her perspective. I can give to organizations like Mama Cash or Blue Ventures that support similar projects around the world.
This is not so much relationship as acknowledgment, but it feels infinitely better than pretending these things aren’t happening and that I am helpless. Being able to put faces to the damage also shows me that my own choices matter in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. If these women can repair the world, who am I to think I can’t or that it’s too hard?
In my work I am especially interested in the relationships and stories around climate, curious what the net of relationships is, and considering how to change the stories so they point toward care for that net. Meanwhile there are people who have been harmed by the same global forces right down the road from me, where the relationship is closer, my impact potentially greater, and the possibility for working shoulder to shoulder easier to make reality. There’s no end to the relationships to acknowledge and remake; but one relationship at a time, we can mend the net of relationship that holds us all.
Link to Mangroves post coming as soon as it’s up.