As a civilisation, we seem to be painfully aware of all the shortcomings in our contact with nature. Stories about all we have destroyed, and where we have failed, permeate our culture. Truth is, we don’t even believe anymore that we could do any good. Most of us feel like the best thing we could do for nature, is to leave it alone. But that kind of thinking is wrong. And dangerous.

How can we do good, if we can’t even imagine it?

If I asked you how humans are affecting the nature, I suspect you would tell me about all the bad things we are doing. About the pollution, the deforestation, about the insecticides and herbicides, about microplastics, and mining, and species loss. And you would, of course, be right.

But is that all of it? Is destruction all we are capable of?

Most of us actually do think so. Growing up in our culture, we absorb the image of pristine nature and of the horrible effect we, the humanity, have on it. We talk about nature and wilderness as something pure and good – and completely separate from us. We think the best we can do is to leave it alone.

If we can’t even imagine that our interactions with the rest of the natural world could be beneficial for it, how can we hope to actually do anything positive?

How are we supposed to find a way to live on this planet in peace and harmony with the rest of the life on it, if we assume from the get-go that we are only capable of doing harm? How are we supposed to be looking for solutions, if we don’t actually believe there are any?

I was thinking about all this as I was reading George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. While he had some good points, I found myself strongly disagreeing with his conclusions and solutions. I might write about it more some day, but not today.

I think George Monbiot got it wrong from the premise. For him, the number one problem of agriculture is land use. And so his solution is to use as little land as possible. Everything he suggests is considered from this point of view, arriving at dubious solutions such as using factory-grown bacteria as the chief source of fat and protein for people around the world.

It is clear that George Monbiot can’t imagine that humans could actually be useful to the rest of the natural world. And he definitely can’t see us as a part of it. He takes it even further, and as many of his fellow vegans, he even sees domestic animals as inherently damaging to nature and something that should be removed. It’s as if cows and sheep and other domestic animals have lost their status as part of nature in his eyes. It’s as if they were tainted by their contact with us.

Humans are nature too

We have been thinking of ourselves as separate from nature for a while now. The concept of nature came to be after the Middle Ages, during the period of Enlightenment. It is even more recent to think of ourselves as only being capable of natural destruction. But thankfully, our culture does not represent all the people in existence and definitely not all the people in history. We might have forgotten about it, but the truth is that humans can live in peace with nature. And not only that, we can even help it prosper.

One of the main ideas in the (absolutely wonderful) Ishmael trilogy by Daniel Quinn is the fact that humanity is much, much older than our civilisation. While it’s a fact fairly obvious to most of us, it has some implications that we don’t usually realise.

Our genus, Homo, is almost 3 million years old. Homo sapiens – modern humans, that were anatomically and physiologically identical to us – appeared some 300 000 years ago. Compared to either of these numbers, our agriculturalist, city-building, less than 10 000 years old civilisation, is like a blink of an eye. Humans have been here for a long time, living just like all other creatures do – as part of the ecosystem.

We tend to think about our prehistoric ancestors as not-quite-human; as if they were somehow unfinished. We assume they didn’t have our curiosity, our intellect and our drive, because in our eyes they were not yet living the way humans are supposed to. Yet, they were just like us, and yet they managed to live in peace with the world around them.

They knew they belonged to the world, just as much as rhinos and mites and sequoias do; and they knew that just like any of those other creatures, they had their role to play in it.

How can we know what they might have been thinking? Well, fortunately, there are still people living in this world now, whose lifestyle is closer to that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors than to our “civilised” ways. We still have a chance to learn from them. If we are ready.

Myth of the wilderness

The truth is that Indigenous peoples have been modifying and managing the nature around them for millennia. Many of the areas that we would classify as wilderness were shaped by human activity, including places such as the Amazon rain-forest, or the Australian aridlands. While this is still far from the mainstream perception, scientist are actually starting to point to how the whole concept of “wilderness” is inappropriate and how certain biomes rely on human input for their preservation (great article on this is Indigenous knowledge and the shackles of wilderness).

Picking sweetgrass

In her beautiful, gentle book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer – a Native American botanist – reveals a lot about how her culture approached the natural world. She talks about the sense of belonging and feelings of community with all the life around them. She talks about the Honorable Harvest, which is a set of rules to make sure that people don’t take more than their fair share, and that enough is left to keep the cycles of nature going. (Rules like: Never take more than a half. Never take the first, nor the last. Take only what you need. Always give back in return.)

From her stories it becomes clear that the bounty of the land that the European colonisers encountered when they first arrived to the Americas was not an accident. It was not wilderness. It was the result of many millennia of careful cultivation at the hands of the Indigenous peoples.

One of the moving examples she gives, is that of sweetgrass. This plant was, and still is, used for ceremonial purposes among her people and is very important to them. Unfortunately, the sweetgrass populations are steadily declining. Various tribes have different ways of harvesting sweetgrass, and everyone, understandably, thinks their way is the better one. Robin Wall Kimmerer enlisted one of her botany master students to do a thesis about the sweetgrass harvest, trying to determine which harvesting technique was better for the plants – either pulling it out with its roots, or cutting it off, leaving the root in the soil.

She had trouble convincing the faculty to approve the study. They thought it rather useless, saying the result was known from the beginning, as it was obvious that harvesting would lead to decline regardless of the method. But nobody expected what actually happened.

The student spent two years harvesting from three different sweetgrass patches (following the rules of the Honorable Harvest) and documenting the results. She would pinch some of the grass from one of them, pull it out from the other, and the third one was left as a control. At the end of the study period, only one of those patches was not doing well, its population declining. It was the control patch.

As it turns out, sweetgrass needs to be picked. If it isn’t, if space isn’t made for new plants, they get smothered under the tall growth. The decline of sweetgrass goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the peoples who value and harvest it. And the patches that still thrive are, not surprisingly, located in the areas where the people still live and interact with them.

The ciiiircle of liiife

We often feel like it’s somehow morally wrong to be eating other living beings. We are sceptical to the beneficial effects that predators have on their ecosystems, and completely blind to the benefits they provide to their prey (not on the individual, but on the community level).

Lions picking out a sick zebra can save the herd from a disease spreading. Chasing the zebras around ensures they don’t spend too much time in one place, which protects the land from overgrazing, and the zebras from getting parasitic infections from infected manure of their buddies.

Big herds of grazing animals are what prevents grasslands from turning into deserts or forests. The shrubs and trees get eaten before they get a chance to grow big, and the grass gets thinned to make space for new growth, fuelled by the fertiliser left behind by the animals. Some ruminants, like the buffalo, even have an enzyme in their saliva that stimulates grass growth.

While there is nothing wrong with forests, grasslands are a different ecosystem, supporting an equally diverse network of plants and animals that can not thrive in a forest. Despite people who call for “rewilding”, and believe that the only valid landscape is a forest, grasslands have always been here. There is now even evidence that about half of Europe was covered by grasslands and meadows before the arrival of modern humans. But just like in the case of sweetgrass, the European grasslands now rely on us to help them thrive.

In the end, everyone eats and is eaten. Microbes, fungi and plants feed on death just as much as herbivores and carnivores do. Being lower on the food chain does not make one more virtuous. And being higher up on it does not prevent one from contributing to the community of life. Every ecosystem is a network where everything is attached to everything and each creature is needed, however cute or yucky or weird.

You find what you are ready to look for

I have been reading (and thinking) a lot about agriculture lately. It is our closest and most important point of contact with the cycles of life and of nature. It definitely seems like we got a lot of it wrong, and we need to make some changes.

I think it is important that we look for solutions with the right mindset. It is difficult to notice things that you aren’t looking for, let alone ones you can’t even fathom. I think it’s time we started looking at ourselves as creatures that do belong in this world, and that can work with it, care for it, and protect it, while receiving what we need to live. We have to believe it is possible first, before we can even start finding out how to do it. Thankfully, we humans are fast learners, and we still have someone to learn from. And while there is no going back to the Stone Age (not that I want to), we can surely find a way to practice some Honorable Harvest in our world.

The change, if it happens, will come from the bottom. From people with a new vision. From people like you and me.