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Those concerned with the degradation of planetary ecologies have been sounding the alarm ever since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. For decades, environmental activists have been advocating changes in priorities, policies and practices. Many activists and awakened people have been trying to restore our communion with the ways of the Earth. This usually focuses on promoting adult education, consciousness and mindfulness.
Too often, however, even among environmentalists, the orientation towards non-human Nature has been as an onlooker, seeing Nature as separate from humans and consisting of a set of objects that reasoning humans can appreciate, but manipulate for their own ends. The wholeness of being, a holistic socioecology, is missing. Disconnection remains.
In presenting the worldview chart contrasting dominant and Indigenous worldview manifestations, my colleague Four Arrows finds that people nod in agreement with many of the Indigenous precepts; their intellect agrees that these are better. But then he asks them which list better represents their daily lived experience: what they focus on, what practices their family, neighbourhood and workplaces engage in. Then they realise that everyday life is wedged in the dominant list. Intellect can only get us so far. And it often is a veneer or sticker on a host of opposing patterns and practices.
Like all Earth creatures, we are gifted with the treasures from Earth and the sun, including our own lives, as part of an entangled, relational world. What right do we have to divorce ourselves from the web of life? Our ignorance of our entanglement means we have lost our way. Our inability to get along cooperatively with the rest of Nature means we have fallen away from life. ‘We’ means a portion of humanity. ‘We’ in the dominant culture have become disconnected from life-enhancing ways.
My belief is that humanity can shift its course away from the destructive fevers and anxieties ravaging many of its members. We can regroup to transform the world to one that is liveable for all. A peaceful world.
Addressing adult beliefs and behaviour is import-ant but is not enough. We must attend to the roots of the dis-ease: the species-atypical child raising and the falsehoods that support it. We must restore what is species-typical to the young, which brings about relational consciousness and relational knowhow.
Across generations, our ancestors, like us, became disconnected from Nature’s lifeways. They moved into species-atypical ways of being. Unhealed deep wounds occurred centuries ago to make a Nature-defeating pathway seem intelligent. As we can see from the ecological damage all around us and in us, it is not intelligent.
The Western European Enlightenment project that began in the 17th century justified the move away from ancestral wisdom. Instead of viewing the cosmos as unified, sacred and moral, western science, philosophy and education of the elites promoted the view, as anthropologist Robert Redfield notes in The Primitive World and its Transformation, that the cosmos is “fragmented, disenchanted, and amoral”. The English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon promoted the link between science and power: power to manipulate Nature according to human interests. Nature, along with femaleness, was considered – if not outright evil and deserving of domination – inferior to the rational ‘male’ mind.
These adult beliefs trickled down to views on babies and child-raising practices in ways that fulfilled the cultural beliefs of humanity’s sinful nature. Punishment and other forms of coercion were believed necessary to keep the worst evils at bay. And so authoritarianism towards children was normalised and human brain development shifted away from a species-typical pathway, resulting in the dysregulated, disconnected selves common today.
All along the way, many westernised children (at least in the US) experience opposition to their built-in needs and the shaming of their spontaneous interests, missing formative experiences that foster a deep connection to the universe and their unique place in it. Instead of growing their giftedness in cooperation and partnership with the rest of the natural world, they necessarily succumb to adult vigilance about the world and strive for ‘success’.
Thus these children reach adulthood with a common emptiness, a restless anxiety that drives them to try to control their corner of the world. The deflated self they bring along is easily controlled by threat, by authority, by professionals. They lose their way and blunder destructively all over life, unaware of their impact.
In The Perception of the Environment, anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us: “The growth and development of the person … is to be understood relationally as a movement along a way of life, conceived not as the enactment of a corpus of rules and principles (or a ‘culture’) received from predecessors, but as the negotiation of a path through the world.”
A transdisciplinary view of human development and flourishing gives us the insights needed to shift back to our wellness-promoting pathway, a pathway attentive to what members of our species require for healthy development and healthy living. But our species’ basic needs are much broader than what the 20th-century psychologist Abraham Maslow identified. He individualised self-actualisation and made it the endpoint. But the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation place self-actualisation at the bottom of a pathway to community actualisation and community perpetuity.
The wellness-promoting pathway fosters self-actualisation from the bottom up, by meeting the many basic needs we have: animal needs for nourishment, warmth, protection/safety, competence; mammalian needs for affection, play, inclusion; social mammalian needs for extensive bonding, social enjoyment, community support, apprenticeship in adult activities; human needs for togetherness (not isolation), interbeing with others, meaning making through stories that guide behaviour, and regular healing. Maslow missed a lot.
My lab calls the meeting of these needs ‘the evolved nest’. It is provisioned by the community.
The communal evolved nest is a set of experiences that helps the child reach their full potential. Through soothing perinatal experience, extensive positive touch and breastfeeding, welcoming responsive and playful relationships, along with Nature partnership and regular restorative rebalancing healing, we become fully human. The original pathway to raise a human being is that of nested matrices, rooted first in maternal love and layered up in multiple attachments to other persons, human and non-human, to Earth and cosmos.
When communities provide the evolved nest fully, trauma is largely avoided. The evolved nest involves constant accompaniment throughout life. There is no isolation or loneliness. It develops but also maintains a compassionate human nature, which we can observe in nested communities. These communities grow kinship consciousness – which includes being emotionally and relationally present in the here and now – as well as the consciousness of an extended self that is inclusive of living beings across time and space. Kinship consciousness is accompanied by relational knowhow, the ability to get along peacefully with other living beings, human and non-human.
We are the products of how we were treated and how our parents and their parents were treated. They carried trauma and transmitted it across generations to us. We have a choice now to heal ourselves and transmit wellness instead of trauma to future generations.
The evolved nest provides just what is needed to move forward in a life-enhancing manner. We can abandon the trauma-inducing pathway we are on and recreate nested communities. We can rehydrate our spirits, leave the death circles we’ve entered, and feel our way together towards a community of connected companionship.
To help re-nest the world, you can join or support the Nesting Ambassador Program. The next cohort of training starts in January 2027. www.nestedworld.org/nesting-ambassadors
For self-nesting tools and monthly newsletters, go to www.evolvednest.org and www.kindredmedia.org
You can download the worldview chart contrasting the dominant worldview manifestations with those of the kinship worldview at www.worldviewliteracy.org
