Native Instincts
Nipped in the Bud
Some 20 years ago I wrote a short, provocative letter to the editor of the Fredericksburg, Virginia, Free Lance Star. A defense of organic farmers, it was my first letter to an editor, and I had little expectation that it would ever be printed. Five days later, I was caught off guard by a rare early morning phone call; it was the friend who had goaded me into writing the letter now calling to thank me. Yes, indeed, it was published in that Wednesday morning’s paper, and it swiftly ignited a raucous community debate that would set the course for the remainder of my career.
At the time, I was working as an environmental educator in the local office of a large state government agency – my first job out of graduate school – and I had just completed what seemed to be a successful opening year of work and community life. I had rebuilt a disarrayed volunteer educational program, and I had made the many personal adjustments to living in a new town, in a new state. I worked a lot of overtime that year. Two weeks earlier, the agency’s district director had met with me to assess my first-year annual review. Our meeting was the culmination of a lengthy, inclusive process that gathered input from office co-workers, program volunteers, and other local stakeholders. The director wrapped up the review by thanking me for a job well done in representing the agency, building new programs and restoring the trust of a disenfranchised volunteer base – in short, a glowing review, and I left beaming.
Abruptly, then, less than a month later and just two weeks after the letter appeared, I was fired. The formal termination was conducted at a remote district office, taking little more than ten minutes. It was easy to surmise that lawyers had prepared the executors well, as no questions were asked, no defense was permitted, no clear explanation was given. They simply told me I was no longer a good fit for the agency, then they took my office keys. Three days later, my personal belongings arrived without notice in a postal box at my side door. Mission accomplished. I never saw my office co-workers again.
The memory of the long drive home from the state district office still lingers. I was dismayed, dizzied by loss and confusion. Just one year out of graduate school and at the beginning of a new career, I had substantial student loan debt, and I had recently signed a contract to buy a house in the community. How, I wondered, could everything change so completely, so suddenly – and so much for the worse? My certainty and my idyllic vision for a better future, the lures that led me to graduate school, were vaporized to a wisp; a foggy dread, a deep mistrust set in. Certainly, the firing was driven by institutional self-interest, as their decision was explicit and calculated, the implementation well-planned. There was something else, though, something more powerful at work, ominous, lurking behind appearances, but my naïveté clouded any ability to see it. I would not unearth it for many years. It was simply this: The ideas and the inflammatory language of my letter had provoked a primordial native instinct, an innate knee-jerk reaction to protect one’s own. In the eyes of the state-level agency heads, the letter was an insult to their most prominent stakeholders; as such, it threatened the agency’s credibility, its future funding, its long-term well-being.
A month later, as emotions settled and more rational thinking prevailed, I was very grateful to accept a significantly less notable position, at a significantly lower salary, with another local government agency. The agency director who initiated my hiring risked her own credibility for me, but she believed in me, and she considered it a very good hire, as did her boss. Over the months that followed, the director and I talked daily and became good work friends.
Late one afternoon, when we were chatting with several other colleagues at the end of the work day — something to do with war and aggression, and with peace — the director told us that her pacifist nature had fled her after her daughter was born. A new-found ferocity had replaced her characteristically peaceful nature. “I would do anything to protect her,” she said. At the time, I failed to recognize the connection between what she was saying and my dismissal, but now the link is clear. The native instinct that her daughter’s birth had brought forth was the same instinct that initiated and fueled my firing. My letter had spurred some significant locals to make threatening calls to the agency’s leadership. The agency responded by scouring my record for dirt. As there was no dirt, they wove a fabric of misdeeds from the threads of my imperfections, then they purged me for the alleged transgressions. Honesty, truth, facts — elements that most of us would consider essential to higher, more complex human decision-making — all were overridden by a direct, more primitive form of behavior. They acted with immediacy to protect their own — themselves first, and then their biggest supporters, the large commercial farmers who rely heavily on chemicals for their livelihood and the agrochemical companies that funded research in other departments of the agency. I was a risk, a menace. They nipped me in the bud.
Inanimate/Object
When it’s fully manifested, the instinct to protect a creature’s own can release fierce energy that will take down whatever threatens itself or its kin. It can fuel political movements, protest movements, even peace movements. We’ve seen it electrify wings of the environmental movement. Within the native plant movement, on the other hand, this powerful defensive reaction rarely seems to awaken. For the most part, the native plant movement kindles within us the urge to do good, to make the planet a better, more welcoming place for everyone, every being. Some proponents may be in-your-face about native plants, but they don’t forcibly intimidate others, and they don’t threaten your livelihood. This suggests, perhaps, that we members of the native plant movement do not believe that “our own” are at risk when the plants we love are threatened. What, though, if someone or another being were to directly endanger our children? As child guardians, would it not be natural for us take down or at least disrupt the actions of the assailant? Surely, we all consider parents’ rising in defense of their young to be an appropriate adult response, an innate expression of parents’ relationship with their offspring.
If this is true, does it make you wonder about our relationship with the many other beings that inhabit our planet? Does it make you wonder about what is normal, what is appropriate? How about the threat that the extinction of so many native species poses to our children? Is it normal, really, for responsible adults to sit idly by and watch the destruction of the natural world, to watch trees and wildlife bulldozed and then burned into oblivion? How do we watch it all happen without perceiving it as a threat, without a knee-jerk auto-response, the native instinct to protect our own? Are we now completely disconnected, entirely removed from our natural world, from native plants and other living beings — the very ground of our survival? Is not this Earth the only place we have to sustain us? Does what imperils this Earth not also imperil us and our children?
Throughout stages of my career, I have worked in both landscaping and construction. Early on, when I lived in a more northern climate, I did landscape work in the spring, summer and fall, and construction work during the cold winter months. Though both jobs involved working with my hands, it always took me some time to make the seasonal adjustment from one job to the other. Even after landscaping for many years, and thinking that my love and respect for plants was unwavering, when I would begin doing construction work in the winter months, I sometimes fell into treating plants like things, mere objects getting in the way of construction, of progress. This always caught me by surprise, but when I finally grasped what was happening to me, I was no longer bewildered by how difficult, often onerous, it could be to convince other construction workers, those in my cohort, that our daily grind can have destructive consequences for the animate world, that plants are living things, that the very soil is alive! At the core, construction workers are little different from me, the landscaper, or from you, but they do work almost universally with non-living things, and we are all conceivably prone to transfer the thoughts and feelings we associate with the non-living to the living, with the inanimate to the animate, to plants, to soil, to other beings that we don’t see as our own. How else, I wonder, could we destroy so many living beings in our wake without concern or any sense of remorse? What else might explain my lack of feeling for plants when I took up construction work during those by-gone winter months?
Pronouns matter
It’s perplexing, but through reading and reflection, I’ve dug up multiple explanations for how this might come to be. In The Spell of the Sensuous, for instance, David Abram argues that our severance from nature began with the development of the written language in the form of the alphabet. Use of the phonetic alphabet, he writes, changes the locus of our attention, abstracting us from the natural world, cleaving us from the animate universe. Rather than reading animal footprints in the soil, rather than interpreting the irregular, ever-changing surfaces of plant leaves, we now read uniform black print on flat pages of paper. It’s a major shift in the focus of our natural awareness. Whereas reading plant parts and animal tracks draws us into the depths of the natural world, reading books leads us, at best, into a conceptual version of that world. (And the iNaturalist app? Who does the reading there? To what place does that lead us?) Abram further develops this idea in his second book, Becoming Animal, pointing out that we live in the animate earth, not on it, not separate from it.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer traces our divorce from the animate universe back to the cultural stories that define us, especially those asserting that we are here to dominate the earth, to use it unrelentingly, as we freely choose — all of it — for our own purposes. She contends that shortcomings in the English language perpetuate the rupture. That is, our native tongue lacks pronouns that ascribe life to living beings other than ourselves. They are “Its.” If a tree is an “it,” she points out, it’s untroubling to cut it down, but if the tree is a “she” or “he,” both fully alive and with person-hood, maybe we think twice before getting out the chainsaw.
Kimmerer suggests that we resolve this linguistic shortcoming by instituting the use of a new pronoun, one that refers to living beings other than ourselves, those not our own. The singular form of the new pronoun would be “ki” and the plural “kin.” As odd as that may sound, please consider the idea for a minute. If you met someone you considered very beautiful, you would never say “It’s very beautiful.” Rather, you would say “She, or he, is very beautiful.” On the other hand, if you came across a very beautiful tree, it would be common to say “Wow, it’s very beautiful.” While “it” may be the tree that is in the way of construction, “ki” is the living being that resides there.
I like this proposed use of the pronoun “ki,” and I herewith pledge to promote its use. The meaning may be deeper than we can immediately fathom, but the practice might begin saving lives, the lives of other beings.
The Animate Matrix
All told, these explanations suggest that we have come to perceive ourselves and experience ourselves as separate from the natural world, not a part of the animate matrix of other living beings, not in the earth, but on it, as David Abram says. Nature, perceived as Other, is not our own, and if it is not our own, we seem entirely capable of witnessing its destruction without triggering the primal instinct that irrupts when our family, our fellow believers, our own are under threat, literally in peril.
Natural landscapes are a diverse medley of living beings, all reproducing, all longing after themselves to complete themselves. If we want to do good, perhaps the most important thing we can do is to allow that unfolding of life to take place, to let nature happen. What could be simpler? Those robust native plants are in-your-face, they are in your neighbor’s face, a living example of nature in action. Not a word need be said, it’s not an abstraction, not a concept, it’s fully present, right here in the everyday matrix of our experience.
Gratitude, Reciprocity, Fierceness
All good — or mostly good. What might it take, though, for us to begin fiercely defending these “Other” beings? It seems that may only happen when we begin to recognize the Other as part of our own, and ourselves as part of the Other. The atmosphere, the air that surrounds us, as David Abram makes clear, is alive too; it’s not Other. The air is a shared, mutual, medium that suffuses all beings. It’s mostly invisible, yet filled and filling with minute, fleeting molecules of maple and oak, of crow and cardinal, of beetle and fly, of you and me. Yes, we do indeed breathe each other!
This broader understanding may lead us to see that it makes no difference whether we are descendants of this continent or another. We are right here, right now, in the earth, immersed in the place we all call home. These native species are part of that home, they are not Other, they are our kin. Each is “ki.” If we breathe that in, and let that sit for a while, may it prod our native instincts, may it impel us to protect this land as if it were our own, as if our children’s lives depend on it. Then, perhaps, we can dream of a time or even see a time, when, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “The land gives thanks to the people.”
Fierceness is instinctual, it’s primordial – and it is exhausting. We humans are not hard-wired to be continuously on alert, always incited to protect. Mostly, it seems, we are here to do good. Thankfully, we have other instincts that move us toward that end — most importantly, our instincts for reciprocity and gratitude. It’s natural to be grateful for what has been given to us. It stirs us to reciprocate, to share from the bounty that we have received. The great beauty of it is that reciprocity in turn fuels more gratitude.
Gratitude, reciprocity, and fierceness — they’re all natural to us, they’re instinctual. When enlivened, they inspirit us to protect and restore the native landscape. It seems inconceivable, though, that we will ever be moved to heal this land until we claim it as our own. This Eastern deciduous forest, this native woodland of oak and hickory and maple, this land is our homeland. Let’s make that claim.
PS
This seems an appropriate time to thank all of you who welcomed and supported me when I moved to Chattanooga, some 17 years ago. Yes, I had largely recovered from the firing by then; I had money in the bank, a good education to rely on, and a good work ethic, but otherwise I was starting from scratch . Now, I am grateful to be part of your own. That gratitude fuels reciprocity; it enlivens me, it moves me to continue protecting and restoring the land we all call home.
I take full responsibility for the content of this post, but if it is good at all, it would not be nearly so good without the editing skills of Emily Campbell. Thank you, Emily!
