When the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer asked her ecology students to give her some examples of positive interactions between humans and the Earth, she was stunned by their response. Almost all of them - around 200 in total - said they couldn’t think of any. They were convinced that humans and nature were ‘a bad mix’.1

Kimmerer’s urban, US-based students were used to seeing factory farms, suburban sprawl and other degraded landscapes on a daily basis. With their sights set on careers in environmental protection, they’d been studying climate change, pollution and habitat loss.

In some ways it was laudable that they had such an awareness of environmental crisis. But as so often with Kimmerer, her indigenous heritage - she’s an enrolled member of the Potawatomi tribe - showed her another side to the story. She could see that as the land around her students had become impoverished, so too had the scope of their vision.

When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?

Growing up in England in the 1970s, in the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and with the threat of nuclear war hanging over everything, I entered adulthood with a similar view to Kimmerer’s students. I was burdened with a life-sapping sense of guilt over the state of the environment. The message that we humans were a terrible threat to nature was everywhere in my childhood. It was even in the games my family played.

My mum loved a board game, and even more so if it could be deemed ‘educational’. A favourite was Conservation, released by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in 1972. When Mum went into a residential care home towards the end of her life, I found it neatly shelved in a cupboard with other familiar childhood games like Monopoly and Cluedo.

The aim of Conservation is to collect families of birds and settle them in their correct habitats. But to do that, you have to dodge the Hazard cards, which feature a range of environmental dangers that could completely wipe out your little families.

When I found the game in Mum’s cupboard, I was instantly whooshed back in time. It was like being reunited with a long-lost friend. But also, I was shocked. My adult eyes perceived messages that I couldn’t have deciphered as a child, messages that I now read as harmful, no matter how well-intentioned the RSPB may have been.2

Take the lid, for example. It’s an attractive design, featuring a range of habitats that can be found in the UK. But although a bird can be seen in every little picture, humans are entirely absent, even in the image of a village. This juxtaposition of unpeopled places with the large letters spelling CONSERVATION subtly implies that humans cannot co-exist with healthy habitats.

The message is amplified on the Hazard cards. Here there are humans aplenty: stealing eggs, building factories beside rivers, and dousing the land with pesticides. In a particularly sinister image, a disembodied hand hovers over a rural idyll and unfurls plans for industrial development.

Even when humans are enjoying nature, they are cast as agents of destruction.

To ram the message home, there’s a space on the board called Limbo for cards that fall victim to the hazards and it’s illustrated with birds that have been killed by a trap and an oil slick.

Bear in mind that this is an ‘educational’ game, so presumably targeted at least partly at children.

The solitary osprey on the lid of Conservation reminded me of a book published just a few years before the RSPB released their game. In The Peregrine (1967), JA Baker describes his obsession with the peregrine falcons that lived in the Essex countryside near his home. The book is widely considered a classic of British nature writing, with literary heavyweights such as Robert Macfarlane and Mark Cocker describing it as ‘unrivalled’ and ‘a masterpiece’.

While Baker’s compressed, poetic and highly inventive prose is undeniably extraordinary, I’ve always found the content of the book troubling. It elevates the falcon almost to the status of a deity and portrays humans as vile to the point of irredeemable. Describing his resolve to pursue the bird, Baker writes:

‘I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.’

The Peregrine, like the lid of Conservation, contains very few humans. When they do appear, they’re mostly destroying things. There’s a hare being hunted with dogs and, later on, invisible but noisy men are heard shooting ‘thousands’ of pigeons that ‘go down before the guns, like the cavalry at Balaclava’. Baker writes:

‘We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.’

Few of us in the West need go far from our front doors to find evidence of the human capacity to destroy the more-than-human, whether through greed, malice or just plain incompetence. Only yesterday I read some posts on a local Facebook page about a neighbourhood where a series of newly planted street trees have been killed by someone who is pouring salt around their roots.

But I worry about the blanket assumption that humans are bad for nature. It reinforces the idea that we are separate from it, which is at the root of the current environmental crises. It’s also deeply depressing, and depression is a powerful consumer of energy that might otherwise be channelled into action.

Kimmerer offers a different, liberating message. She describes her book Braiding Sweetgrass as ‘a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world’. She goes on:

It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

Kimmerer’s message that ‘people and land are good medicine for each other’ relieved me of a lifelong burden of shame and guilt. A burden that came from being shown only the harm that humans wreak, and not the way that reciprocity between human and other-than-human can lead to abundance and mutual flourishing. It set me free to recover the kind of joy in my relationship with nature that I hadn’t experienced since I was a small child.

This newsletter is named for Deborah Bird Rose’s work on shimmer. Shimmer is the vibrant, brilliant, pulsing quality of life that arises from encounter and relationship and mutuality. The more encounters and the more mutuality the better. The more healthy interactions between human and other-than-human, the richer and the more joyful the world becomes. (See this post for more on shimmer).

I make no apologies for quoting Rose’s beautiful, life-giving words again. They acknowledge the threat that humans can pose to other species but also remind us that a joyful life of mutual flourishing is still possible. Rose offers us the vision that Kimmerer found lacking in her unhappy students, one that energises and calls to action. Hope instead of guilt.

We are called into recognition: of the shimmer of life’s pulses and the great patterns within which the power of life expresses itself. We are therefore called into gratitude for the fact that in the midst of terrible destruction, life finds ways to flourish, and that the shimmer of life does indeed include us.3

Threads, knots and tangles

The book Wild Service, edited by Nick Hayes and

Listen to Robin Wall Kimmerer talking about the intelligence of plants with the excellent Krista Tippett here.

Robert Macfarlane recently published a glorious Instagram post describing an experience of shimmer in the Cairngorms. Well worth a look.