Humanities & Cultures

Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.

There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind.

It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.