Reclaiming Our Kinship With Nature

Human beings are naturally connected with the Spirit in all things. This was our collective way of life for thousands of years. We felt and knew the kinship that existed between ourselves and everything in our world. We have defined this in our modern view as Animism, which in its most basic definition is the recognition of the Spirit in all things. Reclaiming our animistic foundation is key to creating a healthy life for ourselves and the planet. 

Our modern society begins to indoctrinate us into a version of Newtonian materialism at an early age. As soon as we begin school we start getting taught there is a separation of living beings and non living things. If it grows like a plant or breathes like an animal or reproduces on a cellular level we are taught that it is alive. If it does not fit that criteria then we are told that it is not alive and only an object. 

Then we are also given hierarchies influenced by materialism and dogma that bases itself in science and religion. Those structures have put forth various opinions over centuries that separate us from nature. Like trees are alive, but they are not sentient. Animals are alive but don’t have souls. There is life all over a mountain but the mountain is not itself alive. 

This is the thinking that has destroyed much of the forests, waters and land of our planet, and decimated an important facet of humans' innate connection to the Divine and Spirit realms.

It’s easier to cut down a forest if we don’t think trees are beings. It’s easier to dam a river if we don’t recognize it is alive. Changing the way we teach our children about this will be the way we save our lives on earth.

Some of these human-centric and extractive ways of thinking are changing as there has been a shift from materialism to a quantum way of looking at the world. Science in the quantum realm recognizes that particles are connected and affect each other even when separated by huge distances. It has shown that the observer and what is observed are connected.  And it has re-discovered that trees are sentient and talk to one another. But it is still a long way to go from those quantum forays by a few into a sea change of how billions of humans and the collective structures of societies relate to nature and nature spirits.

But we can look to the indigenous peoples around the world to show us the way. They still know how the spirit of everything is connected. Thanks to them and fellow conservation and social justice legal advocates who work tirelessly to protect nature from exploitation, some interesting and crucial pivotable events have happened.

In 2017 the Whanganui river in the Māori ancestral lands of New Zealand was granted the rights of personhood, and in 2019 the Klamath River in my home state of Oregon was also granted legal personhood by the Yurok tribal government. In 2022 the Magpie River, sacred to the Innu First Nation, who call it Mutushekau Shipu, was the first river in Canada to be granted legal personhood. In each of these cases, it means that they have rights and legal standing in a court of law, the same as a person or a corporation does. And in these cases, indigenous and conservationist caretakers of the rivers  have been designated to represent them. This has stopped the further building of dams on these rivers, and in the case of Klamath River, has even started the process of removing them.

Other places around the world have made forays into this same way of thinking, albeit with mixed results. In 2008 an article was added to Ecuador’s constitution that Nature “has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes”. Bolivia then did something similar, however both countries are still dependent on extractive economies that continue to expand into indigenous lands leaving destruction and violence in their wake. It remains to be seen if the courts and laws can shift power from the corporations back to the people as representatives for Nature.

Earth needs good lawyers. But she also needs us. We can shift the collective view if there are enough of us that relate to her, and all that is her,  as our kin and alive. We can do this by thinking of rivers, trees and stones as alive and referring to them as she/he/they instead of it, and by acknowledging the Spirit within them that makes them unique beings. Speaking to nature  as a being and to the Spirits that reside within them instead of about nature as an object is also a key shift.

We can also continue to deepen our own relationships with the spaces we inhabit and visit. We can strive to be conscious of how our thoughts and actions connect with those whose spaces we share whether they be forests, rivers, dandelions, drainage ditches or garbage dumps. We can make a stand as activists and support the people, indigenous tribes and organizations who are leading us back to our original way of relating to and with Nature and Nature Beings. 

And we can create and offer ceremonies that honor the Spirit in all things, and that expand our viewpoints and our hearts to see that as we are part of Spirit, we are all related.

"Klamath Wild and Scenic River, Oregon" by mypubliclands is licensed under CC BY 2.0.