Decolonizing Our Relationship with Nature
By Jessica Chang, MHC-LP.
Living in New York City, the “concrete jungle,” can feel nature-depriving. Whether this feels ~natural~ to you or you feel your cravings for greenery and open skies fester the longer you live here, it may bring up questions regarding your relationship with nature. Research shows that one’s connectedness with nature, land, and the environment has a positive impact on one’s overall wellbeing and sense of self (Keaulana et al., 2021). How has colonization impacted our relationship with nature, and how might we decolonize our relationship with nature?
Colonial Mindset
The first European settlers saw the environment as commodity to reach their economic aspirations. They exploited the land to the point of complete exhaustion, void of concern about using the land and natural resources carefully. Gold and silver were mined to depletion, rivers and waterways were poisoned along with the flora and fauna, and forests were destroyed. A colonizer’s view of a map does not include people nor nature, but territory to be claimed.
Eurocentric colonial and neocolonial regard towards the environment harms the environment as well as the people. Colonized mindset impairs the relationship between people with their surroundings and with each other. Colonial thinking is characterized by greed, exploitation, and hoarding lands without consideration for anything else including the inhabitants, the future of the environment, nor any and all forms of life. “Land hoarding” began after colonization in connection with economic growth. Colonial thinking has environmental growth and economic/technological growth at odds. It disrupts, obliterates, and severs people’s relation with the environment, externalizing nature (environmental matter) as a thing to be used, exploited, commercialized, fetishized, and colonized by humans. Human relations are also removed as investors (land hoarders) continue to hoard land while the people of the area are struggling to survive. As seen in today’s capitalist society, relationships amongst people have been deeply deprioritized in the need to work and earn money for survival. In colonial mindset, subject-object power relation is imposed, defined by mastery, appropriation, and domination (forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, etc.). Colonialism is violence.
Preservationist Mindset
After the closing of the frontier in the 1890s, there was a romanticized notion of colonial conquest from the past. As endorsed by Roosevelt who said that untouched wilderness “taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision,” it became quintessential to the spirit of the American frontiersman. This led to the establishment of the first National Park, Yosemite National Park, the first land set aside specifically for conservation in the United States. It is easy to be fooled that the mindset which supports the preservation of land is entirely contrasting to the mindset that involves conquering and civilizing it. However, both are inherently racist, involving violence towards indigenous communities and the assumption that they have no influence on the land they are being cut off from, assuming “nature” as completely removed and separate from their relation and existence as people.
National Parks were once the sacred homelands of indigenous nations who were displaced, tortured and killed in the name of “conservation”. Indigenous care management of their environments were and continue to be completely overlooked, with current events bringing indigenous knowledge of controlled burns to the forefront of anticolonial discourse. In reality, indigenous inhabitants would also use controlled burns to create a space they wanted to observe, apparent in the now overgrown and disappearing vistas of Yosemite National Park upon their forced displacement. Their active land management was not seen as agriculture, their homelands viewed as wasted, unproductive lands which was legitimated by God to dispossess from the indigenous people and given by God to European settlers in order to tame and to cultivate. Additionally through this lens, it is believed that indigenous humans must be removed from nature in order to be saved (i.e., colonization of the United States as well as ongoing Zionist occupation of Palestinian homelands).
The invisibility of indigenous practices, the thought that humans must be removed from nature in order to save it, and the belief that “pristine, virgin wilderness” must be quarantined from an inherently destructive humanity is rooted in white supremacy.
So how do we decolonize our relationship with nature?
There are many ways to decolonize our relationship with nature, and it is helpful to gain an understanding of indigenous thinking and their relationship with nature by listening to indigenous voices. The purpose of gaining understanding is not to romanticize indigenous practices and regard indigenous people as distinct from others, leading to fetishization, dehumanization, and racial hierarchies from “leftist” spaces which stems again from white supremacy. It is important to recognize these distinguishing relationships with nature through a cultural context built on different belief systems. Indigenous communities see that we are connected with nature as inseparable and integral to ourselves. We as people do not develop separate and distinctly from the natural world, but out of the natural world. We are continuous with our local ecosystems, and by taking care of our environments we are taking care of ourselves.
As a non-indigenous human on my own journey decolonizing my relationship with nature, I urge you to keep being curious about your relationships with others, your environments, and yourself, and keep gaining awareness and unlearning the voices of the oppressors. Share the labor. Share the much-needed rest. Share the love.
Some helpful starting points for decolonizing your relationship with nature:
Go outside. Go on a walk and look around you, at nothing in particular, and observe the natural world. Notice the function and the beauty, how it impacts its surroundings and how its surroundings impact it. How have you related to this space?
Be curious and explore. What have you learned about the natural world in the voices of the oppressor? Think about your own judgment on what is clean and what is dirty, and distinguish between those judgments and what is safe and unsafe. Play with dirt, take off your shoes, stretch in open air.
Acknowledge nature is all around us. Nature is us, and we are nature. This shows up as indoor plants and parks, playfulness, seedlings at the base of cement buildings, music, the food we nourish ourselves with, the flow of water, natural rhythms of our bodies, sunlight, babies and children, natural materials, etc. By recognizing nature, you continue to relate and build your relationship with the environment and yourself.
Land acknowledgment. Continue to recognize the violence faced by indigenous people through colonization. Do your research. Look at maps. See how indigenous communities have been and continue to be forced aside for settler purposes. Acknowledge your own contributions to colonization and whose land you are living on. If you reside in what is politically known as New York City, you are existing on Lenapehoking, the ancestral lands of the Lenape peoples.
Resources:
Andrade, B. (2021). Connection with the Environment - two different worldviews into perspective. The Indigenous Foundation.
Cruz, N. D. (2020). “Reimagine the environment implies decolonizing our relationship with nature”. Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Demos, T. J. (2015). Decolonizing Nature: Making the World Matter. SocialText.
Keaulana, S., et al. (2021). A Scoping Review of Nature, Land, and Environmental Connectedness and Relatedness. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(11), 5897. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18115897
Owen, N. (2019). Decolonizing Nature: How “Wilderness” Dispossesses Indigenous People. Harbinger: a Journal of Social Ecology, Issue #2.