Learning from the natural world
The lesson of biodiversity: we will only survive at all if we thrive together.
Welcome to the final Sunday of 2021. It’s been… a year. Full of loss and grief, joy and growth, a full turn of the wheel. On balance, I hope for you the year brought more peace than struggle. However it went, know that you are loved, important, and necessary to our collaborative journey.
I mean “necessary” quite literally. In this reflection on themes from the first year of Living Conscience, we explore lessons from the natural world around us (and indeed, within us, and us within it - we are not separate from it at all).
The most profound lesson nature offers up is the absolute necessity of biodiversity for sustaining life. Our Westernized “rational” minds have a tendency to separate, categorize, analyze. But nature shows us that all of life is inextricably intertwined. Change a single element, and the whole reverberates.
This includes you.
Prairies need every plant, insect, bird, mammal, bacterium, molecule. Forests need every type of tree. Farms need not be monoculture - regenerative agriculture includes diverse crops and the use of biomass to restore the soil. Every living thing - and our mineral companions in rock and stone - plays an irreplaceable role in keeping the whole thriving. This winter, I view the blanket of snow covering our valley with new awareness of its critical role as an insulator and irrigator of the fertile land below. Snow, after all, is water; and water, after all, is life.
As species die, evolutionary processes can compensate - if given enough time. As climate shifts, creatures can adapt - if given enough time. We are (typically) talking millennia, not decades. (A few fast-evolving species can adapt much quicker - humans are not among them.)
Our social, political, and economic systems require the same diversity to thrive. Just as we appreciate the beauty and function of a diverse landscape, a diverse community is beautiful and resilient. A diverse economy (smaller businesses, less consumerism, more reciprocity) is more humane and spreads prosperity more equitably. A political system which includes, values, honors all voices is more responsive and able to adjust to human needs more quickly.
We have built too many of our systems out of our analytical mindset, artificially dividing the whole for the short-term benefit of a few, and they are toppling for lack of diversity.
If we accept our place in the systems of nature, we can slow and potentially reverse the damage done. We can turn our efforts to supporting diversity in all aspects of life, understanding that this is an existential challenge: we will only survive at all if we thrive together.
You are necessary in exactly the same way that every other creature, mineral, and drop of water is necessary. Be safe and well, tend to your health, and thank you for being part of our beautiful, diverse planet.