In this time of more or less total crisis the people must act, yet the vast majority don’t. As a grassroots organizer I see that what people need are motivation and direction. While there are countless campaigns that direct particular actions, large scale progressive motivation eludes us. What is the problem, and how do we fix it? I recently found a decades-old work that moved me to read Braiding Sweetgrass and proceed to discover an answer in the two books together.
Healing the Unaffirmed: Recognizing Deprivation Neurosis by psychiatrists Conrad W. Baars and Anna A. Terruwe defines “unaffirmed” people as those who have essentially failed to receive full acknowledgement and attention as living human beings. This condition, they contend, originates mostly with mothers failing to fully “affirm” the lives of their newborns with affection and care. Deprived of this vital experience, unaffirmed people become deficient in empathy and sociability, unable to form normal human bonds. Many unaffirmed people sink into loneliness, while others, in the absence of external affirmation, become forcefully self-affirming. In 1976 the authors saw this last attitude rapidly growing, and today it is the very formula for personal success.
The book omits a discussion of partial affirmation, which is how we really all live. People are recognized, and hopefully valued, in certain, usually very narrow capacities – as worker, mother, member of an organization and so on – but not as full living human beings. For the most part our relationships are instrumental ones in which we are eminently fungible.
Diametrically opposed to our modern condition is the romanticized picture Robin Wall Kimmerer paints of Native American life in which the people and their environment all form an organic unity. Although for all of us to revert to this in the foreseeable future is out of the question, she does offer a practical way forward. She relates how as she picked beans in her garden, feeling, as a mother, an affinity with the mythical Skywoman, “It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud, startling the chickadees who were picking at the sunflowers, raining black and white hulls on the ground. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back.”1
What, then, is this awareness that the land loves us back? I have explained in Being Alive: A Guide for Human Action that love is the immediate awareness of life, specifically of the conjoined lives of the lover and beloved. As life, moreover, is action, love is the primal awareness of joint action between the parties and their functional unity. Loving the earth, Kimmerer says, “changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate,” giving rise to the feeling that the earth loves you in return and transforming “the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”2 So the action that generates the special feeling is precisely service to nature.
Baars and Terruwe assert that as the mother affirms the child, the child affirms the mother, displaying the reciprocity that Kimmerer finds existing everywhere. She describes several of her own and native actions of a bilateral reciprocal nature, also acknowledging the infinitely multilateral reciprocity in nature. For ultimately each thing affects everything else and is in turn affected by it. Therefore as love of the earth is love of the infinitely manifold whole of nature, so its love for us is love, that is, affirmation, of our whole selves. Kimmerer’s students in a writing workshop realized this, saying, “that nature was the place where they experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well-being.”3
Our awareness of unity with nature, while infinitely manifold, is often somewhat limited to particular places such as gardens that are the sites of our direct reciprocal interaction. Beyond these however we sense further spheres of progressively less direct interaction among all things.
Kimmerer highlights native expressions of gratitude to the natural world for its gifts, however we must not think of these in terms of simple transfers of objects such as fruits, vegetables and resources. There are in fact no distinct gifts but rather ceaseless ongoing giving as the natural world in infinitely manifold ways continuously and fully supports our lives that are intimately conjoined with it. Accordingly, as indivisible parts of the totality, we have specific functions to perform in order to sustain it and therefore ourselves.
Loving, caring and serving are all of a piece, and there is no end to specific opportunities for us to engage in these. Yet as we grow our gardens, restore natural communities and the like, we feel the pain of their stress and our own due to larger forces of environmental degradation. In our time to care is to face a titanic challenge, so it is vital for us to feel the love and know that we literally have nature’s back: it supports us as an allied agency in all we do to serve it.
There are countless particular problems, but one has now become paramount. This is climate change, which is an extremely urgent matter for public concern and for which government policy is crucial.
People fail to affirm each other either partially or totally. While we sort ourselves into so many one-dimensional identity groups, nature is a whole of which ultimately all things are indivisible parts that, except within current human society, wholly affirm each other. We gain the greatest affirmation by serving nature on the largest scale and affirm each other to the greatest extent when we share this endeavor. Our primary duty to the world at this moment is to act as citizens in directing public policy for maximum impact to mitigate climate change.
We function in many different capacities – as individuals, parts of so many collectivities including families, communities, nations, nature – and as we act as citizens we ideally serve all of our interests, affirming the interests of all other citizens plus the world and are in turn affirmed by them. This isn’t lip service but concrete action which is the full engagement of people in democratic processes.
In Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold draws attention to how in nature there are no laggards: living things always act whole-heartedly in, as Kimmerer reminds us, manifold reciprocity. So mobilizing for climate action necessarily entails making real the promise of democracy – citizens fully exercising their rights to participate in their government.
Our time of polycrisis gives new meaning to Baars and Terruwe’s title Healing the Unaffirmed, for, after centuries of failing to affirm nature, we are now rushing to try to heal her. Overall we have failed to affirm each other, also allowing the primary institutional means for this, our democracy, to fall into dire disrepair and now face destruction. The present crisis is forcibly telling us that healing the earth is inseparable from healing all the people with a revival of robust democracy.
Just as loving particular people or all people moves us to act for their benefit, Kimmerer verifies that loving the earth impels us to act in service to it. Our source of motivation is in and all around us, and our direction is now clear: vigorously support and vote for democracy and climate action.
1 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2013), 122.
2 Ibid., 125.
3 Ibid., 124.
