The well-connected life
Xavier works in a cigarette paper factory in the heart of the beautiful French region of Ariège, near the charming Soueix-Rogalle. But every day he isn’t working, he gets up at four am and heads for the majestic Pyrenees mountains. An amateur wildlife photographer, he packs his camera, telescope and tripod in his backpack along with half a loaf of hearty bread, a hunk of sheep cheese and a gourd of coffee.
Twenty minutes of hairpin roads after leaving his house, he parks on the side of the road and sets off by flashlight. He treks along the narrow footpaths until he finds a spot with a good view of the valley, and settles in to wait. This is the best time for spotting isards, wild boars, bears and birds.
When I first met him last fall, Xavier was thinking about setting up a guide service that would let him spend more time in the mountains, reducing his hours at the factory. I offered to be a guinea pig for this project and when we returned to Ariège in February, he took our family on a short but wonderful hike in this extraordinarily beautiful nature. But he told me that he had abandoned his plans for guided tours. “I realized that what I really love is being alone in nature,” he explained. “It’s simple – I feel good up there. I’m becoming a better photographer, I’m learning more and more each day about animals and plants. »
“Few people are ready for the rigours of observing nature,” he added. “Many are reluctant to leave so early in the morning, or they see time spent in the hills as a marathon, or as just another action to check off their list of accomplishments.” I must admit that our own start time was 7 am, not 4….
A few years ago, I did a four-day “nature solo” in the stunning mountains near Crestone, Colorado. I realized with surprise that I had almost never spent any time alone in nature. Despite many experiences camping, hiking, cross-country skiing and canoeing, I had rarely been alone, and certainly never for days on end. It was humbling, cleansing, memorable.
Of course, we don’t have to be hermits in the woods to live a connection to nature. But living and working in urban apartments and offices, whether in cramped basements or luxury towers, with Netflix and Youtube as principal leisure activities, can put some hefty barriers to that connection. Nonetheless it is possible to tear them down. Extensive research shows that connection and experiences in nature, including urban parks and treed streets, have important mental and physical health benefits for humans. The Milwaukee Urban Ecology Centre is an inspiring example of fostering nature while growing community well-being. Their amazing team includes my dear friends Beth Heller and Ken Leinbach; Ken recently published an excellent and accessible book about it.
At the brilliant Se relier dans la nature conference (Chaire UNESCO, Alimentations du mondes) in Montpellier last February, I discovered several thinkers who enlightened me on this issue: videos of all the presentations are available here.
According to Alessandro Pignocchi, a cognition and philosophy researcher turned comic book author, escaping the current ecological crisis will require radically revisiting our relationship with nature. This, he believes, will require confrontation of governments and their structures along with the creation of new entities such as the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD experiment in non-commercial living, established by opponents of an airport construction project.
The notion of Nature-object, which is another way of describing the Nature:Nurture divide, describes the relationship with plants, animals, ecosystems and non-humans which is generally privileged in the Western societies: the subject-to-object relationship. The only subjects are humans, and all nonhumans are objects that acquire their value by virtue of the services they render to humans. The notion of ecological service, so important even in supposedly ecological discourses, is symptomatic of this mode of relationship.
The opposite of the subject-to-object relationship is the subject-to-subject one, in which one attributes to the other a status of subject and thus a form of interiority that takes into account the others’ interests, situation, point of view, and existence as a living creature. This is the kind of relationship people generally maintain with their pets, and which many small-scale breeders have with their animals.
My translation, from Zad, nature, culture et recomposition des mondes
It’s a powerful idea – although I’m not sure it’s so black and white. It seems to me that we can use tools like ecosystem services and carbon pricing while at the same time cultivating a certain subject-to-subject relationship with nature.
It reminds me of surveys on public attitudes and perceptions of food, in which the authors lamented the results demonstrating that many people felt local food was better for the environment and used the concepts of ‘local’ and ‘sustainable’ interchangeably. It is entirely true that when we define ‘the environment’ primarily through carbon emissions, the ecological footprints of local products is not necessarily smaller than products coming from afar: production methods (like fertilizers and pesticides), type of transport, economies of scale, and the degree of mechanization and processing all come into play. But from the point of view of building a ‘subject-to-subject’ relationship with nature and other humans, direct exchanges at farmers’ markets or with a Community Supported Agriculture Project (AMAP, in France) stimulate a social bond and an understanding of nature, provide a perspective on food sources and a richness of social exchange which buying products in supermarkets and fast-food outlets mostly doesn’t.
In her book Les combats pour la nature, Valérie Chansigaud (another speaker at the Se relier dans la nature seminar) traces the history of these struggles and their relationship to social ‘progress’. She insists on the fact that protecting nature is highly political and cannot (or at least should not) be dissociated from social, economic and cultural issues. She refers not only to influential writers through history (Rousseau, Reclus, Malthus, Veblen), but also to cases of environmental struggles like the Japanese drama of Minamata, when a factory contaminated the village’s water with organic mercury and poisoned its fisherman. The case of Minamata is example of the essential role that media, artists, doctors and large non-profits play in “transforming struggles that are divided, localized and poorly audible into much more global and effective movements”.
In the same impressive way that we have become an international community in search of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the current climate emergency is challenging us to completely reorganize the way we live and work, redefining our relationships with each other and with nature. Here in France, President Macron’s first speech in response to the Corona crisis revolved around the idea that ‘we are at war’, presumably against the virus. Fortunately, his subsequent speeches have focused on expressing humility in the face of uncertainty and the need to take care of the most vulnerable. For, as lawyer and librarian Lionel Maurel explains, “our enemy is not the virus but systems of production that require that nonhumans be reduced to objects and resources in order to function.”
So how do we face the future? The road ahead is hazy, but it is clear to me that the compass for how we act must be the triple links that Abdenour Bidar evokes : the link to oneself, the link to the other, the link to nature — what he calls “the well-connected life”:
What will this new paradigm be? What can be its basic, simple idea, whose meaning, whose interest will be immediately understandable to all? Whoever we are, wherever we live on the planet, the same evidence and the same suffering are obvious: we have broken our nurturing bonds, our bond of closeness and respect to Mother Nature, our bond of solidarity and compassion to others through too much individualism, and even our bond to ourselves in absurd or superficial lives. This is the common denominator of all our crises: the suffering or breaking of our essential bonds, especially this triple vital bond that makes us breathe, open wide our lungs and our hearts, grow in humanity: the bond to ourselves, the bond to others, the bond to nature. With this triple bond the meaning and joy of life comes easily. No more, no less. For the meaning of life, whether relativists and nihilists like it or not, is to be in harmony with oneself, to live in humanity with others and in harmony with nature. This is the formula for great human health.
My translation, from Before the coronavirus, we were imprisoned, but we did not know it
