This Whispering in our Hearts

The Bushfires and COVID-19 remind us that we aren’t separate from nature and able to dominate it to satisfy our every desire. Vulnerability is part of the human condition and we need to use that knowledge to change the way we live.

Rob Delves, Fremantle-Tangney Greens and GI Co-editor

This richly expressive phrase is the title of Henry Reynolds’ 1998 book, a history of 19^th Century relations between Aboriginal people and colonial settlers on the frontier. 'How is it our minds are not satisfied? What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?'  The Whispering perfectly encapsulates the insistent nagging feeling that Terra Nullius and the rest of the dominant narrative of the settler world was a morally bankrupt attempt to justify the reality of violent dispossession.

The first time I can recall a similar “whispering” was as a16 year old on a Scout hike in the Victorian high country. This was about the third time we’d completed our favourite 20 kilometre circuit around the magnificent Howqua Valley. As I was about to round a bend for a break at a much-loved resting place, the boy at the front let out “look at that” scream of pain. We were looking across the valley to a massive hillside that had been clear-felled. Eucalyptus delegatensis, or Alpine Ash, 40 to 50m trees standing proud and straight, with dark grey-brown bark in their lower half and a pale smooth trunk above, seemed such a perfect fit for this sub-alpine environment. These beautiful tall trees thickly covered the hillside from near the valley floor all the way up to the ridgeline at about 1,200 metres. Now all gone – every single tree.

Our two leaders reassured us that this was all good and necessary – the regrowth would be fine and how else do we get all the timber we rely on for so many uses? They probably mentioned jobs and growth as well, though I can’t recall that slogan from the early 1960s. Most of us mumbled a sort of grudging intellectual agreement, but our hearts were whispering, because this just felt so wrong. The accepted adult wisdom and values behind it felt wrong, yet it was hard to put our feelings into words against the logic of leaders we respected.

For at least 300 years, the over-arching worldview has been that humans are separate from nature and are increasingly able to control the planet, shaping it, dominating it for our benefit. An impressive array of revered Enlightenment thinkers relentlessly debunked the religious explanations that droughts, floods, poor harvests, plagues and other deprivations were the gods’ punishment for human sins, including our mistreatment of their universe, the natural world. Instead, they showed how humans could use science and technology to get on top of nature and harness it to make life richer, healthier and safer. For example, René Descartes celebrated the way science and human knowledge were making humans “the masters and possessors of nature.” The onward march of scientific progress would ensure increasing wealth and the security that comes from our ever-increasing control of nature.

This outlook underpins the view, sadly still held by many today, that the Earth exists to be exploited for human benefit and that the human entrepreneurs who do the most spectacular exploiting should be celebrated and richly rewarded. A more recent “whispering in my heart” occurred about 17 years ago when John Howard responded to criticism of his removal of environmental controls by stating that it is a moral failing to have a resource available and not make use of it. I was gobsmacked at the way he made this seem so self-evidently normal.

It is now painfully obvious that nature isn’t all that impressed by our attempts to dominate ‒ and is not the passive, impotent victim we had long assumed it to be. Human mistreatment of the natural environment has turned out to have distinctly painful boomerang effects. We are therefore heading down a very dangerous path. Green parties all around the world are united in warning about the danger of this “separate from and able to dominate” relationship with nature and demanding a respectful, nurturing relationship. For example, the first two sentences of The Australian Greens’ Environmental Principles are:

1. Human beings are part of the natural world, and all forms of life deserve our respect.
2. Human society depends upon the ecological resources of the planet, therefore we must protect and maintain the integrity of its ecosystems.

There has been a fascinating range of ideas about how our recent experience of the twin “unprecedenteds” – the bushfires followed by the COVID-19 pandemic ‒ might result in a different Australia. The idea I’d like to explore is how these events might activate the “whispering” that I believe has been in millions of Australian hearts for some time. Surely the fires and the Coronavirus have intensified the concern most of us have long felt that our dominating, controlling attempt to isolate ourselves from the natural world is wrong. We are part of nature and the most important lesson of the bushfires and the pandemic is that we have to accept we aren’t in control. We are vulnerable, and that frightening sense of lack of control will dramatically increase if we persist in hammering the natural world harder and harder.

How do we respond to these two timely reminders: that humans are not separate and above nature but very much part of it, and that we need to learn how to live with this understanding of our vulnerability? Here are four responses that I would make, based on my understanding of Greens’ values.

1. Share the vulnerability support more equally

Neoliberal policies of the last 40 years have created grossly unequal societies in which increasing numbers of people have experienced vulnerability and precarious living conditions, even in supposed good times, let alone when bushfires and pandemics are raging. These policies have created much more casual, insecure and precarious employment and also weakened the public services necessary to ensure a decent life when work fails to deliver. The Corona experience has shattered the security-illusion of millions of “good middle class” Australians: they were led to believe that living in a modern city and enjoying good education combined with their hard work meant they were immune from nature’s wild flings and any economic fluctuations. Therefore, those who couldn’t cope had only themselves to blame and should be grateful for whatever government support they got. This standard neoliberal narrative appeared to be enough to quell their heart-whisperings about the growing inequality and unfairness they were observing.

Then came the uncontrollable bushfires and the even more capricious pandemic. Suddenly millions more found out what it’s like to be vulnerable and how humiliating and inadequate was the Centrelink support. It was a perfect example of the beautiful advice given by Atticus to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.”  Newstart was “temporarily” lifted from its punitive miserable level by double the amount that Rachel Siewert had been demanding for so many years. Amazing stuff! However, it’s important that the temporary becomes permanent and expands into humane government universal income support or job guarantee, in recognition that insecurity and vulnerability is the human condition ‒ not just the ‘leaners’ condition.

2. Embrace the scientific search to understand the natural world, but not to dominate it.

The Greens respect the scientific way of knowing and we champion policies based on evidence. We reject the view that the aim of science and technology should be to actively dominate the natural world, but we are enthusiastic supporters of using science to understand it. In fact, much better resourcing of this scientific quest is essential, and we’ve been arguing this is relation to climate change for decades now.

This realisation that we are so much part of nature and must respect and protect it, means we must use science to understand our natural environment much better, especially our uniquely fragile and complex Australian environment. A recent book illustrates this very clearly with respect to farming. In Call of the Reed Warbler, Charles Massy argues all farmers need to become much better at ecological literacy, or “reading our country.” This learning process should combine the best of agricultural science with spending time on country, working on the land, observing and getting the feel of the land, especially with the help of local First Nations people. He calls their custodianship “one of the greatest ever sustainable partnerships between humankind and the ecosystems they occupied”.

The early 1980s drought was a defining moment for Massy. First, he tried to fight the drought – and failed. Then came the realisation that “the land, soils, micro-organisms and other creatures and vegetation are adapted to this.” Instead of trying to defeat and control the ravages of drought, he needed to understand how natural complex systems will self-organise themselves back to health. This understanding led him to experiment with different ways of working with the grain of nature, using such techniques as biodiverse plantings, returning key parts of the farm to forest, longer resting times in grazing paddocks, ensuring as much rainfall as possible is retained in the soil and avoiding belting the soil with chemical sprays. In many ways, this book reminds me of the famous Silent Spring, the radical questioning of chemical agriculture by Rachel Carson. Like Massy, she argued that we need to understand how nature maintains plant health and the importance of biodiversity rather than chemical-drenched monocultures. And of course, the celebration of birdsong as a sign of ecosystem health is central to both book titles.

3. A lot more “good globalisation” would help

There’s a lively debate going the rounds about whether we’ll emerge on the other side of this pandemic with an even more globalised economic system or much more localised production and trade. There are compelling arguments for both. What I think shouldn’t be up for debate is the need for a lot more Good Globalisation. “We’re all in this together” has been a rallying call around blood, flag, the Anzac spirit and the other patriotic stuff to persuade us all to cooperate and do the right isolating and hand washing thing for Australia. However, we must also realise that it’s useless trying to win the Covid and Climate wars without the same sort of “we’re all in this together” international cooperation. Large servings of Good Globalisation are needed to deal with the current pandemic and whatever Covid-Ebola-SARS-MERS type of health threat might come next.

The WHO has been criticised by some, but Trump’s decision to remove US funding is rightly condemned, because international coordination is vital in many ways: ensuring transparency and sharing of information, supporting poor countries that have limited resources to deal with pandemics, cooperating to find a vaccine, and delivering essential medical resources, such as protective clothing, test kits, ventilators, and drugs. Some countries may wish to rely on more local production of these resources, but it’s also essential that the world as a whole has more than enough of these resources and that international supply chains are secure. The Neoliberal Efficiency policies of absolute minimal stockpiles and “just in time” delivery must be replaced by government’s combining to provide abundant supplies of essential medical resources to give all countries their best chance in this increasingly insecure world.

Paying for it? Here’s a thought: we might just possibly be failing to understand where the real threats to national and global safety and security are coming from. I’ve heard that the world spends about 100 times more on military defence equipment than on health crisis equipment. An international agreement to transfer even just 10% of that military spending would go a long way to ensuring the world was well prepared to combat what many experts believe are much greater threats than wars – the pandemic threats and climate threats.

4. So would a big serving of Maturity

In his latest book called Falter: Has the human game begun to play itself out? Bill McKibben presents ideas that are relevant to this issue of how we should live in our world made dangerously insecure by climate change and mass extinctions of species. He suggests an extended analogy with an individual achieving maturity – or a change of mindset towards growing up rather than just keeping on growing. He sees maturity as a person reaching the stage where they decide to make important choices and commitments such as to career, marriage, children, local community and thereby place limits on their behaviour in the interests of contributing to a better community. There’s a loss of freedom, choosing to give up some things to gain something deeper and more appropriate.

There’s an urgent need for societies to adopt this same principle by choosing to continue to build some things in a nurturing way (such as farming to maintain soil and land health) but leave some things alone (leave fossil fuels in the ground, reafforestation, return some lands to nature). It’s an urgent need, because as the title of his book suggests we may have already breached the planet’s climate and biodiversity boundaries beyond their ability to repair. I was particularly taken by his point that solar panels and nonviolence point the way forward, as they are perfect examples of maturity rather than growth. So, Bill McKibben should have the last word:

“Solar power is an interesting advance in that it’s less powerful than the fuel it replaces, and in certain ways harder to use. Renewable energy is omnipresent but also diffuse, nothing like the concentrated package of chemical energy in a lump of coal or a liter of oil. But these limitations also come with real and offsetting advantages. People won’t make money on an Exxon scale because you can’t charge for the sun. In that sense, solar power could be a technology of repair, social as well as environmental. So, the fact that it doesn’t represent a quantum leap forward in human power is a feature as well as a bug – it fits better with the human game…. Solar energy and nonviolence are technologies less of growth than of consolidation and repair. They posit that we’ve grown powerful enough as a species and the job now is to make sure that that power is shared and controlled. They are the technologies of maturity.”

Header photo: Logging Victoria’s mountain ash forests. Credit: The Wilderness Society (wilderness.org.au)

_{[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]}