Reconnecting with land
By Kim Deans
In 2019 Angus & I travelled to Montana to attend a Land Listening event. It was here, immersed in this vast landscape where I came to realise how disconnected I had become from the land at our home The Oasis. We had been impacted by a bushfire six months previously and at the time of our trip the land was brown, parched and apocalyptic in the grips of what became the worst drought in recorded history here.
Landscapes recovering from the impact of natural disaster are traumatised, as are the humans that inhabit them. My trauma response after the fire had been one of disconnect, isolation and avoidance with regards to my relationship with the land. We had no livestock or poultry so there was no daily routine drawing me outside. We had very little water, so I avoided going outside where what remained of our garden was scorched, withered and dead.
At times of trauma the best way we can help is to lean into our relationships with those impacted and become present and available to them. Our land was in trauma and I had shut it out of my life, not wanting to bear witness to its pain. I felt helpless and could not see anything positive that I could do to nurture the land. It was on a hillside on a beautiful ranch in Montana sitting in circle, surrounded by teepees and an electric fence to keep the bears out that I realised that I didn’t have to DO anything, I just had to BE present.
When we returned home I showed up and reengaged with the land. I spent more time outside, it could be as simple as walking the land, camera in hand looking for tiny miracles of life amidst the dryness. I noticed beauty in a different form to what was there before. I appreciated the small things and stopped isolating myself from the desertification. I sat in the spaces in the garden where favourite plants used to be and felt their presence still there. I experienced how nothing in nature ever stays the same, it is always evolving, never static. I noticed our tendency to expect farms and gardens “should” look a certain way (tidy, orderly etc) and how we work hard, fighting against nature to keep it that way rather than accepting and working with nature’s rhythms of creation and destruction.
When we started our land restoration journey 18 years ago we made it our mission to grow soil. Seeing ourselves as “growers” we took on a responsibility to improve the land and put in a lot of work to make a difference. As we have regenerated our relationship with land this relationship has evolved to become reciprocal, with the land nurturing us in return. When we look after the land it looks after us. We are evolving into stewards, creating the conditions for life to thrive through stewarding a complex web of relationships, both seen and unseen. We no longer “grow” anything, growth is inherent in nature, it is our stewardship that creates the conditions for growth to happen. We have come to see our land, the microbes, the plants, the animals and the unseen aspects as part of our community that we relate with.
Stewardship is a relational approach, based on connection and interrelationships with the resources flowing through agricultural ecosystems rather than taking a transactional approach. Growing our regenerative capacity requires that we orient relationally and move away from operating transactionally.
Transactional relationships have a short term focus on getting something and are motivated by self interest. They are full of expectations, giving to receive something in return, results oriented and fuelled by a scarcity mindset that promotes competition. Transactional relationships can be hidden behind good intentions, such as believing I had to do something to be of help to the land, rather than realising simply being there is enough, that I am already enough.
When we orient relationally, we take a longer term view where people and nature are prioritised before monetary profit. We look for the impact of our actions 7 generations from now. We build a relationship with land based on connection, observing, listening, noticing, mutual interests, mutual benefits, giving, generosity and acceptance. Resources flow through relationships and an abundance mindset of co-operation and collaboration emerges where there is enough for all.
Stewardship expands our capacity to create the conditions for all the valuable resources that flow through agricultural ecosystems to thrive without limiting ourselves to financial capital. We start to notice the many resources we have available to us, some having been hidden in plain sight and taken for granted until now. How we value resources is a reflection of our personal values, state of being, our relationship to the resource and whether our survival needs are being taken care of (when we are in survival mode we don’t have the capacity to expand our view to take a new perspective). Stewardship is how we bring ourselves, our businesses, our communities and our landscapes back to life.
Shifting our perspective towards valuing resources provided by natures ecosystems instead of converting them into forms of capital leads us towards a path of stewardship. When we take a transactional view, we see resources as capital. A perspective focused on resources in terms of capital leads us down a path of commodifying resources, effectively reducing their value by applying monetary values to resources that underpin life itself and are inherently way more valuable than money. We live in a world where people and nature are seen as commodities. Valuing non-financial resources without attaching a monetary value empowers us to realise the inherent value that we ourselves and the whole ecosystem of life we inhabit contain without needing to reduce our value or nature’s value to money.
Regeneration relies on stewarding our human capacity to move beyond good intentions hidden behind a transactional mindset, to have the courage to value people and nature more than money. Restoring our relationship with nature and ourselves to re-establish the flow of resources through nature’s ecosystems, from a place of reverence and trust in natures inherent abundance is the way forward. Taking a transactional, business as usual approach to monetising nature is essentially trying to solve the problems with the same transactional thinking that created them, doing the same things and expecting different results (the definition of insanity).
“Restoring land without restoring a relationship is an empty exercise. It is a relationship that will endure and one that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is essential… it is the medicine for the earth.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer