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To appear in upcoming issue of Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (Sustainability Issue).

The Nature Inside Our Heads: Exploring Possibilities for Widespread Cultural Paradigm Shifts about Nature

Author: Tema Milstein

Contact information:

Department of Communication and Journalism

MSC03 2240

University of New Mexico

Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001

tema@unm.edu

505-450-1784 (personal cell phone)

Bio: Tema Milstein is an Assistant Professor in the Communication and Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests are in the nature of culture and the culture of nature.

Essay to be accompanied by an image by the author: Memory in a Seattle parking lot, 2006.

The Nature Inside Our Heads: Exploring Possibilities for Widespread Cultural Paradigm Shifts about Nature

‘To protect the nature that is all around us, we must think long and hard about the nature we carry inside our heads.’

– William Cronon (1996)

The nature we perceive and breathe is deeply rooted in the culture we use as our lens and filter. In order to envision and enact nondestructive relations with nature, many scholars of culture and environment argue we must first become aware of our cultural beliefs that inform, direct, and legitimize our material actions toward and within nature. Secondly, we must find ways in the present to both visualize and achieve mutually beneficial human-nature relations. This essay surveys and interconnects scholars’ and thinkers’ work from across academic disciplines and ways of life to investigate possibilities for holistic cultural change in the human relationship with nature.

Dominant Western culture, and its spread through corporate-political globalization, largely proliferates an alienated view of the human in relation to nature. In viewing society as having a position separate from and prevailing over nature, dominant Western discourse isolates human society from an integral relationship with nature, and distances humans from their capacities as part of nature to heal, renew, and evolve. Some scholars warn against this fostering of a particularly Western nihilist self-encapsulation. O’Sullivan and Taylor (2004) speak of the fostering of ‘the minimal self,’ a deeply truncated sense of the self that causes great alienation and fragmentation not only from nature but from one another. Berry (1999) connects this constructed isolation to the realities we create for the more than human world. He argues that cultural selection is an especially decisive force in determining the future of the biosystems of the Earth. As such, the deepest cause of the present environmental devastation is found in a dominant Western ‘mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of rights on the humans’ (p. 4).

Informed by the ontology that humans cannot shift their relations with the Earth without also shifting culture, this essay explores possibilities for widespread cultural paradigm shifts about nature by looking at the following trajectories: fundamental perception change, alterations in communication about and with nature, increased voice to less privileged or silenced integral cultural approaches to nature, and incorporation of transgressive histories and contemporary actions.

A Fundamental Cultural Perception Shift

A fundamental shift in cultural perception is needed for a holistic, reciprocal relationship with nature to evolve. Medicine Eagle (1996), a Sioux and Nez Perce woman on the shaman’s path, addresses the urgency of the need for this shift: Though several traditions speak of four or five different worlds and say ‘the Creator’ made all these worlds dependant on one simple law, that humans shall be in harmony and in balance with all things, time and again people have destroyed that harmony. Medicine Eagle argues unless we bring about that balance again, this final world is our last chance. Ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak (1995) shares a letter from Australian rainforest activist John Seed, who points to a healthy living Earth being dependent on a deep perceptual shift. Seed writes, ‘It is obvious to me that the forests cannot be saved one at a time, nor can the planet be saved one issue at a time: Without profound revolution in human consciousness, all the forests will soon disappear’ (p. 3).

I suggest here that such a profound transformation of perception or consciousness must include shifts in understandings from instrumental to intrinsic value, from hierarchy to interrelatedness/unity, from bounded cocoons to connected beings, and from mental consciousness to multi-consciousness.

From Instrumental to Intrinsic Value

In dominant Western culture, nature is generally seen as having instrumental as opposed to intrinsic value. O’Sullivan and Taylor (2004) write that this very inability to appreciate intrinsic, or inherent, value in nature is, in itself, a way of seeing. While on an individual survival scale, an instrumentalist view of the Earth on the basis of nature’s production for human purposes makes some practical sense, on a mass exploitation scale this worldview is disastrous. In a globalizing cultural discourse, this instrumentalist framing of nature crystallizes in transnational economic, political, and legal structures, leaving both marginalized human communities and other-than-human modes of being with few to no rights. As such, every day, humans cut down ancient forests and empty vital oceans of life because they see these forests and oceans through the lenses of instrumental value. Proctor (1996) writes particularly of forests, arguing that ‘without assigning some intrinsic worth to the remaining ancient forests, without valuing them as the complex living communities they comprise, there appears little hope of sparing them…’ (p. 282).

While dominant Western discourse continues to reproduce instrumental ways of knowing nature, alternative Western discourses have also long struggled to promote intrinsic valuing of nature. Voices in tension with dominant instrumentalist discourse have included William Wordsworth’s and Henry David Thoreau’s romantic valuing of nature as sacred, Aldo Leopold’s conservationist valuing of nature as communities, Rachel Carson’s ecological valuing of nature as under attack, Edward Abby’s vigilante valuing of nature as in need of protection, and the voices of more contemporary philosophies such as ecofeminism and deep ecology as well as activist groups such as Greenpeace and Earth First! that champion intrinsic valuing of nature. These resistant voices have attempted to disrupt dominant ways of knowing nature and, in so doing, continue to create cultural ambivalence or tension and, therefore, discursive and practical space for other forms of environmental consciousness. The transformations I detail in the following perceptual shifts are informed by such discourses, as well as other ways of knowing and communicating nature, and are aimed at helping to build upon and enrich such spaces of cultural possibility.

From Hierarchy to Interrelatedness

Parks Deloz (2004) writes of nurturing an ecologically interdependent human consciousness. As interdependence is the inherent reality of life, a fact of existence, our job ‘is to learn it again, or really, in a new way, adequate to the particular configuration that it has taken in our time’ (p. 31). Parks Deloz suggests exploratory and non-comprehensive steps that might move us from a hierarchical view of humans as dominant over nature toward interdependent consciousness, including enhancing our systemic awareness, cultivating a sense of place, nourishing the semi-permeable self, practicing dialectical-paradoxical thought, healing ourselves and our relationship with the Earth, and being comfortable with standing on the cusp of mystery. Some of these steps relate to shifts I advocate within this essay. Some I do not have space to visit, however, I view all these steps as important in nourishing an interrelated approach to human relations with nature.

A shift from a hierarchical view to an interrelated view must also include a shift from a view of a dominating human power over nature to a nurturing human power with nature. Eisler (1996) points to archeological evidence that reflects a social organization that appears to have been the norm in Neolithic Goddess-worshiping societies. Instead of power symbolized by the blade – the power to take away or to oppress – the view of power was the power to nurture and was the normative ideal emulated by both women and men. Eisler terms this power ‘actualization power’ as distinguished from ‘domination power.’ Cultures practicing actualization power emphasized linking rather than ranking, and did not equate difference with inferiority or superiority. A similar powerful interdependency replaces hierarchies of domination as the model of social and environmental relations in much ecofeminist thought and work.

From Bounded Human to Connected Beings

Another necessary transformation is a move from bounded human to permeable interconnected human. In many ways, this shift is an embodied shift as much as it is perceptual. Phenomenology provides a path in this direction. A phenomenological approach to knowledge looks at the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy; it responds to objectivist science by rerooting humans to their living dimension, showing that at the heart of our most abstract thoughts is in fact the sensuous and sentient body itself. In this framework, other things and beings are sensible, and constantly beckoning our senses.

In expanding on phenomenological approaches to understanding existence, Heidegger and other Western philosophers challenged notions of the Cartesian bounded human being and the subject-object binary informed by Western nature-culture duality. Instead, Heidegger (1972/2002, 1990) described existence, or ‘being-in-the-world,’ as being neither internalist (mentalist) in the sense that it is an extension of our minds, nor simply externalist, to be found in the natural world. Instead, ‘being-in-the-world’ is co-emergent between the being and all other beings it encounters.

From this phenomenological perspective, Heidegger argues that technologies narrow our understandings of what is possible to think about our relations with nature. One way to consider such technologies is to think of how we often block our most direct sensory connection to the ground – for instance, our sense of touch with the technology of soled shoes. Or how often we either ignore our sense of smell or confuse it with an abundance of manufactured scents and pollutants. Most of us have little daily awareness of our primary partner in one of our most basic interactions, the very air we cyclically and continuously breathe in and out in interdependence with plants and other animals. We spend much of our time in human-fabricated containers, and overlook that we have come to view our bodies as similarly impermeable containers. Consider the myth that reigns in much of the West, that of the expulsion from Eden and how one of the first lessons was the compulsion to clothe ourselves, blocking our sense of touch, of the breeze, the sun, the rain, and the brush of another living being on our skin.

Contemporary sensory relations with nature are often experienced through aesthetic rather than holistically embodied appreciation. We are often aware of our visual sensing of nature to the extreme and to the masking of our other senses. This ocularcentrism can serve to distance humans from nature, situating us as observer or spectator instead of as interconnected participator. However, the culturally valued visual sense also continues to connect us with nature in certain ways. For instance, a larger public generally supports protection of those aspects of nature that are visually aesthetically pleasing, such as whales and redwoods, but far fewer come out to protect that which is not visually pleasing (e.g., the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow) or to successfully struggle for that which is impossible to sense with vision alone (e.g., climate crisis or ecosystems). What is key here is though we often consider ourselves separate units bounded from nature, our senses continue to both shape and be shaped by our cultural discourses and practices of nature. Saito (2001) describes how researchers were surprised to find that American Midwestern farmers’ land use decisions were primarily motivated by aesthetic, not economic or pragmatic, considerations, and how major industries like Nike and Interface Carpet find aesthetics to be the primary obstacle to public acceptance of ecologically sustainable design.

Some traditional cultural approaches, such as Zen Buddhism, engage directly with transforming one’s aesthetic sensing from subjective centrist (e.g., egocentric or anthropocentric) positions to ways of sensing that comprehend nature in ways that penetrate the bounds of the self. In so doing, in Zen Buddhism one recognizes the value and beauty of all forms of nature, and avoids limiting appreciation to those ways of being considered visually perfect or elegant within cultural norms. In addition, in freeing one’s self from culturally and subjectively limited ways of sensing, one is able to not only eschew attachment to certain ways of being but also to embrace the fluid transience of life (Saito, 1997).

Abram (1997) argues our senses, in fact, were formed in reciprocity with the shifting textures, sounds, and shapes of the Earth, and it is our senses that tie our humanness to the animate Earth. ‘Our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese’ (p. 22). When we shut ourselves off from these other voices, we not only rob our own senses of integrity and our minds of coherence, we also condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction. However, by acknowledging and remaining constantly aware of our sensory links, we are able to reconnect to the ongoing interchange between our selves and the other selves surrounding us.

Such practice establishes a firm, yet fluid ground for human sensing, connection, and communication with others. Still, even with actual transformation from bounded to unbounded experience, lacking the context of systemic socio-cultural scale change, an individual can often lose one’s sense of found awareness and connection. Abram describes losing his appreciation of other animals’ awareness when he returned to the West after studying with shamans in Bali. He found himself gradually shifting from an unbounded practice of observing animals from inside their worlds to forgetting his own connection to these worlds and observing them from an abstracting and egocentric position. Abram states that ‘indeed the more I spoke about other animals, the less possible it became to speak to them’ (p. 25).

From Mental Consciousness to Multi-consciousness.

The final shift I detail here is from mental consciousness to multi-consciousness in terms of both Gebser’s philosophy of integral consciousness and in terms of the four selves of Okanagan belief.

Chawla (2002) classifies Gebser’s four states of consciousness – mental, mythic, magic, and archaic – as each having both value and possibilities of defective influence for understanding human experience within nature. In dominant Western culture, privilege is given to the mental, a consciousness Gebser characterizes as rational and evaluative in the abstract, ruled by ego and sight. At best, mental consciousness includes a healthy sense of self-efficacy and illuminative powers of focus; at worst, it creates precarious dualities and a defective egoism that reduces both ‘nature and other people to mere mechanisms to manipulate and consume’ (p. 211).

Gebser’s archaic consciousness echoes the aspects of experience emphasized by phenomenology in that experience is elemental in an immediate and immersive physical sense. In archaic consciousness, which can be exemplified by ‘children in play who literally live close to the ground and up against the fully sensory qualities of things – making hiding places under tables and buses, climbing trees, rolling down hills, squatting in mud and water, and peering under rocks, surrounded by smells, textures, and details’ (p. 209), people form their primal connection to nature and to human wisdom regarding their part in nature. This state can be a foundation for both trust or fear.

Like archaic, magic consciousnesses tends to be ignored or dismissed as irrational in dominant Western discourse. Magic consciousness apprehends our connection with the world, a self-aware coming together of self and other, a silent intuition of the world’s power and our own power. This can be exemplified in the supernatural experiences found in many cultures or the sudden spontaneous consciousness of oneness with nature that many people, including those in the West, briefly experience. If this power is seen as a dominating power instead of an actualizing power, the awareness of our own and the world’s power also opens us to the possibility of fear that drives humans to dominate the outside natural world so as not to be dominated by it. In this defective form, Gebser found magic consciousness prevalent in the world’s obsession with machines and technologies and in Western culture’s ‘limitless drive to transform all of the earth’s resources into the objects of human desire’ (p. 210).

Finally, Gebser’s mythic consciousness gives voice to the powers of empathy, sympathy, and associative thinking that archaic, mental, and magic consciousnesses make possible, communicating a collective sense of ours and us. The mythic storytelling of human-nature experience takes place in cyclic time – ‘to the rhythm of the in-breath and out-breath, the heartbeat, day and night, the seasons, and the generations...’ (p. 211). This consciousness recognizes dialectic distinctions rather than dualities within relations through song, ritual, dance, poetry, etc. In defective forms, however, it becomes both propaganda and empty ritual.

Whereas Gebser recommends a non-hierarchical integration of these four consciousnesses as a goal for human development, Chawla speaks of the importance of such integral consciousness to avoid partial perspectives of our experiences of nature. I find several parallels between Gebser’s four consciousnesses and the traditional and often still practiced philosophy among the Okanagan Nation of the four selves. In this Okanagan way of knowing, the whole person is identified as having four main capacities that operate together: the physical self, the emotional self, the thinking self, and the spiritual self. The four selves appear to encompass greater and more ecological capacities than Gebser’s four consciousnesses.

Of the four selves, Okanagan scholar Jeannette Armstrong (1995) explains that the body-self is dependent on everything that sustains the body in an interface with the parts of humans that continue outside the skin. Humans, as such, survive within our skins inside the rest of our vast selves. The body here is the Earth itself – flesh, blood, and bones are Earth-body; cycles of the Earth move within and outside our skins. ‘We are everything that surrounds us, including the vast forces we only glimpse. If we cannot maintain and stay in balance with the outer self, then we cannot continue as an individual life-form, and we dissipate back into the larger self’ (pp. 320-321).

The heart-self, which does not have an apparent parallel in Gebser’s framework but can find echoes in ecofeminism, is the self with which we link or bond to other parts of our larger selves around us. In this way, emotion is the capacity whereby community and land intersect in our beings and become part of us. Further, this bond or link is a priority for individual wholeness and well-being. In stark contrast to Western devotion to mental consciousness, instead of asking, ‘what do you think?,’ Armstrong explains Okanagans tend to ask, ‘what is your heart on this matter?’

Somewhat similar to Gebser’s mental consciousness, the thinking self is considered a spark that ignites, a beginning point from which other things occur. Traditional Okanagan methods of education teach that this self must be disciplined to work in concert with the other selves in order to engage its abilities far beyond its automatic-response capacity. To avoid being a destructive force, the thinking self must always join the heart-self. If the thinking self is controlled, it is like an out of control fire that can destroy.

Finally, the spirit-self is known as that ‘without substance while moving continuously outward.’ This self requires great quietness for other parts to become conscious of it. The other capacities fuse together and subside in order to activate this capacity. Okanagan teachers describe this capacity as the place where all things are. Much like Zen Buddhist approaches or perhaps a more spiritual approach to phenomenology, the spirit-self is considered an ‘old part of us that can ‘“hear/interpret” all knowledge being spoken by all things that surround us, including our own bodies, in order to bring new knowledge into existence’ (p. 322). This self is considered the true self and has great power.

In both Gebser’s integral consciousness and in the Okanagan four selves we begin to see ways of consciousness that are not prescribed, binary, nor linear to think, be, and act with nature.

A Shift in Communication

The ways we communicate not only reflect but also help construct the ways we perceive and relate to the environment. The use of the word ‘the environment,’ in itself, both reflects and reproduces a particular orientation of humans as subject and nature as a surrounding and somewhat sterile backdrop. The natural world is, in fact, highly connected to, and in many ways increasingly dependent upon, how we communicate its reality.

Language as Reifying the Nature-Human Duality

Many scholars argue the crisis in human relations with nature originated and is reproduced in culture and language. Though the separation of nature from culture is a fiction, Griffin (1997) argues it is one that culture and language have authored. Others argue that switches from oral to written language especially serve to restrict nature’s role in the co-construction of reality. Armstrong (1995), whose mother tongue is the purely oral Okanagan language, suggests oral languages are able to avoid creating the concrete abstractions of written languages. Similarly, Abram (1997) argues the effect of written language is to cast a sort of spell upon our human senses, separating us from our integral relationship with nature with representations. While early written languages borrowed shapes from nature to create meaningful symbols, letters of the contemporary English alphabet, for example, instead refer to a particular sound-gesture of the human mouth, functioning as a mirror reflecting back on ourselves instead of the interrelated world these sounds generally symbolize. In this way, Abrams claims the alphabet establishes a new reflexivity between the human organism and its own signs, short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that organism and the land.

Griffin (1997) argues that problems of human language reifying or creating separate abstractions cannot simply be fixed by erasing certain words from our vocabulary. For example, ‘to erase the word nature from our vocabulary may be to eliminate the only way of knowing the limitations of language in language’ (p. 218). It is in deconstructing the use of these words that we are able to reveal our cultural perceptions of nature and to contextualize our perceptions within the larger cultural and socio-economic systems that shape them. For instance, Irigaray (1993) argues that language itself has been formed and filtered through dominant male experience and the accompaniment of all-determining and abstracting logos, or rationality. Only in first becoming aware of such foundational constructions can we then move to create new ways of producing meaning, ways of communicating that relate more closely to life, that reflect and remind us of the reciprocal concrete fluidity of nature and experience.

Creating New Ways and Looking to Other Ways of Speaking

Berry (1999) argues that one of the essential roles of the ecologist is to create the language in which a true eco-social sense of reality, of value, and of progress can be communicated to Western society. I argue that the role Berry characterizes as that of the ecologist also must be the role of anyone who wants to shift meaning and action in human relations with nature. In order to convey such reality, value, and progress in human-nature relations, Abram (1997) suggests we must take written language up and evoke earth with it and have earth evoke language again in return. Our challenge, Abram writes, is to release ‘the budded, earthly intelligence of words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches’ (p. 273). In this vein, far from characterizing nature as a static and separate ‘environment,’ Gebser defines and names nature as the Greek physis: ‘an upwelling of self-organizing energy that pours itself forth in all the forms of the universe – an ever-present origin, physically and spiritually’ (Chawla, 2002).

Essential is that such new ways of speaking must evoke definitions of nature that are multiple, multiplying, and fluid. Phenomenology here offers a step forward: Heidegger (1990) asserts it is through language that we disclose an understanding of our co-emergent ‘being-in-the-world.’ One evocative term for such a ‘being-in-the-world’ might be Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual term ‘flesh,’ which signifies human flesh as well as the flesh of the world and has some parallels with the interface of the Okanagan body-self. ‘Flesh’ denotes interdependent and integral oneness with nature, as well as a sensory level understanding of human-nature relations. Referring to the nature-human relationship as ‘flesh’ also carries material implications. Abram argues that perceiving nature and one’s self as part of one flesh, leads one to experience one’s surroundings as sensate, attentive, and watchful. As such, one must then take care that one’s actions are mindful and respectful, even when far from other humans, lest one offend the sensate land itself.

Similarly, we can look for guidance to long existing cultural paradigms of speaking. For instance, in Okanagan, the word for ‘our place on the land’ and ‘our language’ is the same. In fact, Okanagans consider their language the ‘language of the land,’ meaning the land taught the people language and the way people survived was to speak the language the land offered as its teachings. In Okanagan, land and body also share the same root syllable. Armstrong (1995) explains, ‘This means that the flesh which is our body is pieces of the land come to us through the things which the land is. The soil, the water, the air, and all other life-forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be dis-placed’ (p. 323). If part of developing an interdependent awareness is to develop a sense of and connection to place, the Okanagan language can serve as one localized model of speaking that arose out of this sense of connection and reproduces this reciprocal connection.

Create Collective Myths

Tinker (1996) argues that in the United States myths of social and environmental conquest are complemented and legitimated by stories of utilitarian rationalization. To combat these myths that undergird a destructive culture, we need alternative communal stories that can generate functional mythologies. Such mythologies would undergird the lives of reciprocal human-human and human-nature communities in new and vibrant ways.

In recommending such a partnership ethic with nature, Merchant (1996) argues for a feminist reversal of the reclaiming of Eden through destruction myth. Examples of such new myths would not accept the idea of subduing the earth, or even dressing and keeping the garden, since both entail total domestication and control by human beings. Instead, such new myths would constitute each earthly place as a home, or community, to be shared with other living and nonliving things. In these myths, the needs of humans and nonhumans would be dynamically balanced. Merchant argues that such stories have to be the product of both many new voices and many new actions that make the myths part of lived reality.

From Communicating Solely with Each Other to Communicating with Nonhuman Nature

In dominant Western culture, listening for the voices of nature, as if the nonhuman world felt, heard, or spoke, would seem the essence of madness to most people. Roszak (1995) questions whether it is possible that, by asserting this very conception of madness, we defend the deepest of our repressions, the form of psychic mutilation most crucial to the advance of industrial civilization – the assumption that the Earth is a dead and servile thing that has no feeling, memory, nor intention of its own. In contrast, in embracing the highly communicative more-than-human world, by relearning how to listen, I argue we can begin to shift to more vital flourishing relations.

Behnke (1999) cautions that, in order to do this, we must avoid a frontal relation with nature, in which nature is posited as an object dominated by a theorizing spectator in such a way that its being known by humans becomes the measure of its being. Instead, a way must be found to speak from ‘within’ nature. Abram (1997) is eloquent on this matter and advocates a shift from humans communicating solely with one another and with human-made products and representations to engaging in a sensing, intercorporeal communication with nature. This sensorial or intercorporeal communication is what I term eco-communication.

Eco-communication is practiced today in some cultures, and many of these cultures are daily challenging the globalized dominant Western discourse, at times merely in their persistence to exist.[1] Gray (1995), a First Nations psychologist who practices shamanic counseling, incorporates a traditional method of eco-communication in work with her clients. For example, using ‘rock-seeing’ with one client, she instructed him to go into nature and to let a rock find him, being sure to remember exactly where the rock was located so he could return it to that spot and thank it for its help. The rock’s language is its ability to show the seeker images. Gray explains, ‘Rocks don’t use ordinary human language, but if we can pay attention to their language, they can actually help us solve problems by giving us gifts of information…’ (p. 178).

Eco-communication is further exemplified by the communication practices of Peruvian Andean indigenous campesinos. Scholars Valladolid and Apffel-Marglin (2001), both of the campesino community, explain that the process of humans making chacra, or growing plants, animals, soils, waters, and climates, is considered in itself a reciprocal conversation with nature. Since all are considered persons, all speak – the potatoes, the llamas, the human community, the mountains, the rain, etc. Here, language is not viewed in the modernist sense of abstract representations that encapsulate the named persons. Instead, ‘One converses with the mouth, the hands, the sense of smell, vision, hearing, gestures, flowerings, the colors of the skin, the taste of the rain, the color of the wind...’ (p. 648).

Another living example of eco-communication is provided by Narby (1998), who explains how Amazonian shamans experience nature communicating in words and images, using abstract symbols that most scientific theories of communication deny anyone but humans use significantly. Narby argues that certain ingested plants serve not merely as triggers of hallucinations that are already stored in human brains, but that they actually supply the hallucinations – and that these hallucinations are a form of the plants’ communication with humans. In addition, shamans communicate back to the plants. For instance, Yaminahua shamans use metaphors called tsai yoshtoyoshto, or ‘language-twisting-twisting,’ through which they communicate with the plant spirits in their hallucinations.

Increased Voice to Silenced or Less Privileged Integral Cultural Approaches to Nature

While it is imperative to always take care to avoid misrepresenting via oversimplified, unresearched romanticizations of indigenous views or misusing via appropriation of indigenous approaches to human relations with nature (Roszak, 1995; Starhawk, 2002; Tinker, 1996; Weaver, 1996), a reality is that whereas there are many models of sustainable indigenous societies, there are no models of sustainable industrial societies. Gray (1995) argues it would be tragic to waste such accumulated knowledge, and redundant for contemporary scholarship and practice to generate models of a sustainable future without learning from the traditional and, in some cases, contemporary ways of life of the more than 300 million indigenous people living in the world today.[2] Other First Nations scholars and writers argue that indigenous peoples have something corrective to offer the Western dominant world system (Tinker, 1996). Tinker specifically points to the cultural values of reciprocity and spatiality as clarifying the place of humans in ongoing processes of balance and renewal with nature and as two important values that can be ‘radically transformative for the Euro-American system’ (p. 160).

These cultural values, along with other views and practices, such as the Seventh Generation framework of the Onondaga Nation (Grim, 1994), the lived regeneration and sustainability of enriched biodiversity of millenarian cultures such as the indigenous Andean campesinos (Valladolid & Apffel-Marglin, 2001), and the interrelatedness that is emphasized in many indigenous creation stories (Tinker, 1996), all must receive greater voice and be heard at a societal level to help inform and diversify approaches to contemporary human relations with nature. In addition, living cultures like the Andean campesinos offer a contemporary, localized, and hybridized cultural approach to human relations with nature that is valuable in both providing possible models and in engendering appreciation that these worldviews not only persist and are viable, but are also, in most cases, endangered.

Further, these alternative ways of perceiving and being offer a critical mirror for the dominant Western mastery-over-nature approach. For example, Armstrong (1995) describes traditional Okanagans viewing Western relations with natural places as ‘wild’ and ‘insane.’ In Okanagan, ‘insane’ translates as ‘in a state of talking talking inside the head’ and ‘wild’ as a displaced being that cannot survive without special protective measures and that requires other life forms to change behavior in its vicinity. This reflection provides new meanings for ‘insane’ that reflect the isolation and ‘minimal self’ of human-nature binary Western culture, and that turn the term ‘wild’ on its head, applying new, contradictory meanings to the Westerner whose ever-expanding developments are seen here not as domesticating but as negatively ‘wilding’ the dependent human via one’s impositions on the more than human world.

Incorporation of Transgressive Histories and Contemporary Actions

Because perceptions of history are neither shared nor complete, dominant ideologies are fueled by the unique privilege of documentation. Those ethical considerations or movements that aim to turn the tide of dominant worldviews are often not recorded and, therefore, are rarely passed down through the ages. Thus, highly limited renditions of our shared story inform a collective amnesia, leading us to forget that not only are there alternatives to the way we live, but that these alternatives often have been argued, defended, and practiced far before our time. Such is the case with histories of human relations with nature.

The circulation of transgressive histories disrupts the record and verifies that resistance today is neither a passing fad nor radical fringe murmurings. For instance, in her biography of her time as a tree sitter, Hill (2000) points to efforts to preserve coastal redwoods that date back to the early 1900s, when four California society women birthed the movement by forming the Save-the-Redwoods League. They wrote letters to politicians as well as to a number of renowned and moneyed naturalists. ‘Then they took their cause to the road, just as today’s protestors have taken their cause to the trees, in order to promote public awareness’ (p. 24). Hill argues that without such activists of the past, more of California’s ancient forests would have fallen long ago. As alternative Western and non-Western cultural approaches are important to inform and bolster healthy approaches to relations with nature, so too are alternative histories that both legitimize and support different worldviews.

Ground-level contemporary transgressive actions typically receive little press but can do a tremendous amount in informing a transformed worldview that supports a flourishing future on planet Earth. Examples are international and numerous and provide diverse models for resistance and creation. For instance, in northern India, we can look to the Chipko movement, which draws on political-action principles of Gandhi and foundational ideas of Hindu philosophy to organize villagers to resist environmentally destructive industrial forestry and other top-down development at the expense of local age-old patterns of sustainable subsistence (Callicott, 1994). The first Chipko activism took place in 1973, when villagers stopped developers’ axes by literally hugging the trees. Poignantly, this act was inspired by a transgressive historical precedent in the 18th century, when members of the Bishnoi sect embraced their sacred Kherji trees to prevent the Maharaja of Jodhpur’s axe men from chopping them down. At that time, 363 people were axe murdered. Transgressive action models exist today in places ranging from Mexico City slums to gentrified Portland, Oregon, intersections (Starhawk, 2004), from farm animal sanctuaries in the United States to forest monks in Thailand (Callicott, 1994).

This Shifting Present

In weaving together the above ideas from diverse scholars and practitioners, my intent is to provide a sense of a holistic vision for shifts I feel are necessary to support flourishing human-nature relations. Space constrictions, as well as my own knowledge constrictions, leave this illustrated exploration necessarily wanting. However, my hope is I have provided a decent heuristic framework upon which to grow, elaborate, and define at least one vision of a shifting present. My focus has been on cultural shifts and the largely communicative aspects that might help support this hoped for change. I advocate for a conscious, polyvocal, and systemic worldview shift that comprises multiple elements, each multi-faceted and interrelated with the other.

In exploring avenues toward a fundamental perception change, I traced possible shifts from instrumental to intrinsic value, from hierarchy to interrelatedness/unity, from boundaried human cocoons to connected beings, and from mental consciousness to multi-consciousness. In searching for potential alterations in communication, I looked at language as reifying nature-human duality, creating new ways and looking to other ways of speaking, creating collective myths, and moving from communicating solely with each other to communicating with nonhuman nature. In examining increasing the voice of less privileged or silenced cultural approaches to nature, I looked at attempts by indigenous scholars to do such work. Finally, in investigating the incorporation of transgressive histories and contemporary actions, I investigated how movements that aim to turn the tide of dominant worldviews are often unrecorded or unincorporated and explored the need to selectively incorporate transgressive action.

In examining this multifaceted and interdisciplinary cultural change approach to human relations with nature, I also want to tackle possible accusations that such an attempt at change is a backward move or a return to the past. To do so, I must point to the limits of such a largely monochronic cultural worldview, a view I tend to at times share with many in the West both concerned or unconcerned about the environment. This monochronic view is decidedly limiting in that it can potentially keep us linearly oriented toward an unreachable utopian future instead of rooting us in a constantly changeable present.[3] In addition, many eco-thinkers find themselves defending their ideas against accusations that they advocate a backward move (Naess, 1989) or a return to the past (Shiva, 1994), a criticism that Shiva views as temporal colonization.[4] Abram further problematizes the monochronic and teleological critique, arguing that it ‘is surely not a matter of “going back,” but rather of coming full circle, uniting our capacity for cool reason with those more sensorial and mimetic ways of knowing, letting the vision of a common world root itself in our direct, participatory engagement with the local and the particular’ (p. 271).

Similarly here, I have attempted, by uniting possibilities for cultural transformation in ways of knowing from communication, psychology, philosophy, phenomenology, indigenous scholarship, history, and experiential epistemologies, to find a way around such teleological criticism, or what Shiva terms the ‘chrono-colonization’ of living processes. I also align myself with Shiva, as well as Abram and others, in suggesting via this essay that we strive to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present, that we walk out of our heads and into the cycling life of the earth around us, respecting both the nature within and without and being responsible, nurturing members of the Earth’s ecosystem. How this can be brought about at a large-scale cultural level is precisely what I have been struggling with in these pages.

References

Abram, D. (1997). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books.

Armstrong, J. (1995). Keepers of the Earth. In T. Roszak, M. E. Gomes & A. D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (pp. 316-324). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Behnke, E. A. (1999). From Merleau-Ponty's concept of nature to an interspecies practice of peace. In H. P. Steeves (Ed.), Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (pp. 93-116). Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Berry, T. (1999). The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower.

Callicott, J. B. (1994). Earth's Insights: A Survey of Ecological Ethics from Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chawla, L. (2002). Spots of time: Manifold ways of being in nature in childhood. In P. H. Kahn, Jr. & S. Kellert (Eds.), Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations (pp. 199-226). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Cronon, W. (Ed.). (1996). Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Eagle, B. M. (1996). The rainbow bridge. In R. S. Gottlieb (Ed.), This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (pp. 386-389). New York & London: Routledge.

Eisler, R. (1996). Messages from the past: The world of the Goddess. In R. S. Gottlieb (Ed.), This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (pp. 369-381). New York & London: Routledge.

Gray, L. (1995). Shamanic counseling and ecopsychology. In T. Roszak, M. E. Gomes & A. D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (pp. 172-182). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Griffin, S. (1997). Ecofeminism and meaning. In K. J. Warren (Ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (pp. 213-226). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Grim, J. A. (1994). Native North American Worldviews and Ecology. In M. E. Tucker & J. A. Grim (Eds.), Worldviews and Ecology: Religion, Philosophy, and the Environment (pp. 41-54). Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, c.

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Heidegger, M. (1990). Being and Time. In G. L. Ormiston & A. D. Schrift (Eds.), (pp. 115-144). Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (1998). Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. Gabriola, Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Merchant, C. (1996). Reinventing Eden: Western culture as a recovery narrative. In W. Cronon (Ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (pp. 132-170). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Naess, A. (1989). Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (t. a. r. b. D. Rothenberg, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Parks Deloz, L. A. (2004). Transformative learning for bioregional citizenship. In E. V. O'Sullivan & M. M. Taylor (Eds.), Learning Toward an Ecological Consciousness: Selected Transformative Practices (pp. 29-46). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Shiva, V. (1994). The seed and the Earth: Biotechnology and the colonization of regeneration. In V. Shiva (Ed.), Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide (pp. 128-143). Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers.

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[1] Abram points to eco-communicating cultures as the forbearers of Western communication: ‘The belief that meaningful speech is a purely human property was entirely alien to those oral communities that first evolved our various ways of speaking, and by holding to such a belief today we may well be inhibiting the spontaneous activity of language. By denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of speech, by insisting that the river has no real voice and that the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience. We cut ourselves off from the deep meanings in many of our words, severing our language from that which supports and sustains it. We then wonder why we are often unable to communicate even among ourselves’ (p. 263).

[2] Gray refers specifically to ecopsychology learning from more than 40,000 years of shamanic experimentation about how to live in a healthy relationship with the Earth.

[3] Many thinkers provide visions of a healthy future. Berry (1999) argues that we must enter an Ecozoic era, wherein humans shift from a human-centered view of the world to an Earth-centered world. This vision of the future is akin to the ecocentric paradigm shift and platform championed by deep ecologists (Naess, 1989; Sessions, 1993). Macy and Brown (1998) advocate a great turning from our current Industrial Growth Society, with its economy dependent on ever-increasing consumption of resources, to a Life-sustaining Society, which meets needs without destroying the life support system of the Earth’s ecosystem.

[4] Shiva (1994) argues that such teleological criticism of reconnecting with nature ‘arises from externalizing nature in space and time; connections then imply a “return” to another time, another place. … The moment we accept conditions for life as obsolete aspects of a primitive past, we invite death and destruction. In fact, it is this chrono-colonization, or temporal colonization, of living processes based on false and artificial constructions of “traditional,” “modern,” “post-modern,” as if they are in a linear temporal hierarchy of the past, the present and the future, which underlie the subjugation of nature and women’ (p. 8).

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