2 RELATING

A History of Enforced Individualism

Research that informs Western education has often been oblivious to its own cultural biases and messaging about independence and disconnection. Research in the social sciences, for example, has tended to start with the premise that the independent, autonomous adult is the standard for healthy humanness. Thus, adults have been encouraged to prepare children for this goal. For example, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow greatly influenced the way generations of parents, educators, caregivers, and policymakers attended to children when he asserted in the 1950s that a child’s most basic and fundamental need is for air, water, food, and shelter. In his famous hierarchy of five needs, “love and social needs” rank in the middle.³ By placing love as a more distant priority than food and shelter and by ignoring the natural world altogether, Maslow prioritized the individual over the social, independence over interdependence, the human world over the relationship between humans and the natural world. By operating from an autonomy assumption, Maslow’s ideas aligned with other North American experts of that era who argued and often continue to argue that children should be trained for independence, often the earlier, the better.

Beyond psychology, other Western authorities promoted individualism from other angles. The philosophers who underscored our education systems, such as Descartes and Rousseau, oriented from a fundamental belief in the isolation of the individual and a separation of mind and body. Meanwhile, in medicine, some doctors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed that parents were the carriers of potential diseases and thus encouraged mothers and fathers to maintain distance from their children and avoid physical affection.⁴ With good intentions, they warned that kissing an infant could lead to death because of the risk of passing along “tuberculosis, diphtheria, and many other grave diseases.”⁵ Sterility and a lack of physical contact in orphanages, children’s hospitals, maternity wards, and family homes were lauded.

Aligned with this thinking, some psychologists also worried that too much motherly love might corrupt a child’s character and health.⁶ “When you are tempted to pet your child remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” John B. Watson, the president of the American Psychology Association (APA), cautioned.⁷ In Watson’s 1928 book, he claims that too much physical affection in childhood leads to “aches and pains” as well as insomnia in adulthood, conditions that interfere with the all-important ability to be a useful worker.⁸ He instructs mothers “not to talk in endearing and coddling terms” and to “[n]ever hug or kiss [children], never let them sit on your lap.”⁹

Like many specialists of the time, Watson misinterpreted children’s despondency and resignation for confidence and autonomy.¹⁰ But these children weren’t actually confident or autonomous at all—their attachment systems were utterly broken. Contemporary psychology suggests that they likely grew into adults who had learned early to compensate for lack of connection by seeking to rely only on themselves and finding reward in work and culturally sanctioned achievement rather than relationships.¹¹ Experiencing empathy and forming emotionally intimate relationships may have been difficult for them. In fact, this aloof parenting style trains the neurological and hormonal system of the child’s body, creating a biological propensity to focus on the self. The ethical psychologist Darcia Narvaez writes, “Within a culture of detachment, adults view humans as selfish and competitive by nature. Because of this, little attention is given to humanity’s and, especially, children’s basic needs.”¹² When the culture provides little support for caregivers, when caregivers in turn are unable to provide tender, loving, consistent, and relationally responsive support for infants, children can develop into adults who feel half-alive, numbed to the world and to others.¹³

At the same time as these shifts in infant and child-rearing were taking place, societal changes were creating ever more distance between children and the natural environments. Today, 82 percent of North Americans live in urban settings.¹⁴ As the delights and temptations of electronics compel them, each generation of children is spending less and less time climbing trees, searching for tadpoles, and throwing snowballs—and more time indoors staring at screens.¹⁵ Increasingly parceled off to after-school classes and no longer considered safe to walk to school on their own, children are now more likely to watch trees, birds, and dandelion puffs pass by automobile windows and glimpse them from classroom windows. Collectively, the electronic boom, urban densification, perceptions of safety, and educational advancement combine to plant young humans in increasingly anthropocentric environments, that is, environments designed by humans for humans and stocked with human-made objects.

How might our more-than-human relations contribute to the development of human biological attachment systems? It’s a question in need of more answers. Narvaez helpfully suggests that we expand notions of attachment development to include “ecological attachment.”¹⁶ She points out that throughout our evolution, human babies were ensconced in natural environments, which they explored through crawling and toddling. In other words, they developed early relationships through experiential and multisensory modes of interaction. Noting that the more-than-human offered additional “partners” in child-rearing—entities that stimulate, support, comfort, and provide for children—Narvaez reminds us that many Indigenous cultures acknowledge these familial partners with kinship terms, such as identifying Juniper as grandfather or Piñon as grandmother.¹⁷ While these relationships may be spiritual in nature, their impacts are also biological. Time spent in natural (as opposed to human-made) environments positively contributes to cognitive, emotional, physical, and social well-being through a host of biological, neurological, and psychological mechanisms.¹⁸

What happens when nations are run largely by the policymakers, CEOs, school principals, and educators who experienced emotionally isolating child-rearing and notable nature separation? The severing of relationality between caregivers and children in settler culture has resulted in generations of increasingly isolated adults. Perhaps it’s a little less surprising then, albeit horrific, that these settlers separated generations of Indigenous North American children from their families, communities, and ecological homelands as they forcibly moved them to residential schools. The psychologist Sue Gerhardt argues that we “are living in an impoverished emotional culture, the end product of decades of individualism and consumerism, which have eroded our social bonds.”¹⁹ The erosion is not only reflected in our inability to bond with other humans. It is also evident in our diminished capacity to bond with the rest of the denizens of the more-than-human. Indeed, the very architecture of our attachment systems has been altered by—what is in evolutionary terms—drastic, sudden, and severe changes in lifestyle. Yet this ubiquitous sense of isolation has been taken as proof that autonomy is the paramount condition of existence. Scientifically, this is akin to starting fires and then pointing to those fires as proof that fires are pervasive. Emotionally isolated and ecologically detached adults are not evidence that the isolated individual is an inherent feature of existence. They are evidence of isolating cultural practices.

Contemporary Life and Ongoing Isolation

In North America today, parents are facing challenges unlike those of previous generations: the middle class has been hollowed out, the unstable gig economy has overtaken steady lifetime jobs,²⁰ house prices in desirable locations have skyrocketed, and multibillion-dollar porn, drug, and gaming industries compete for their children’s attention. Overworked and exhausted parents, chronically stressed about paying the bills, being evicted, and securing the next short-term contract should not be tasked with revolutionizing culture to better support children’s needs (although, remarkably, many are trying). The term “parenting” is, in fact, a misnomer, a misleading directive. In fact, children are “communitied” into adulthood, but today that “community” consists of a potentially dubious mixture of humans, social media influencers, and international corporations and fewer and fewer more-than-human kin.

Faced with impossible demands on their time and energy, many North American parents may be unable to respond to their infants’ and children’s needs in the ways that our species evolved to expect.²¹ For example, they may maintain markedly less physical contact with their infants and children, as strollers, playpens, and baby monitors take over the roles humans used to have. Yet physical affection between mother and infant, the neurologist Michael Meaney has discovered, beneficially stimulates particular regions of the brain.²² Physical affection also contributes to advantageous sharing of microbiomes, the “trillions of bacteria and fungi” living symbiotically inside us, as Narvaez reminds.²³ In other words, caregivers have historically been a means of mediating and introducing infants to the communities of the microscopic more-than-human that has played essential roles in human survival and evolution. Today’s parents are also likely to maintain less eye contact with infants and children, as cell phones and screens capture our attention. Yet eye contact, along with other forms of responsiveness, is essential in helping a child grow their communication and social skills, according to the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child.²⁴

The point here is not to guilt-trip caregivers and parents for their child-rearing practices but rather to point out how cultural forces pin us all into roles where our child-rearing options are limited. Indeed, we are all limited in how we are the world and how we express ourselves more generally. We may lack the opportunity, support, or time to reflect on our own upbringing or to consider whether we want to align with the driving North American values of hyper-individualism, materialism, and nature separation. We may lack models for a more relational and supportive form of parenting, for a more connected way of being in the world. Due to the demands of our work, we may lack the physical and emotional energy and economic stability to care for children and ourselves in a different (read: more diverse and emotionally nurturing) way.

Parents and caregivers, of course, are just one aspect of the complex web of values, lifestyle choices, and beliefs that comprise culture. Narvaez reminds us that infants “are born into an existing ecology.”²⁵ In other words, everything—from the air the mother breathes to the microbes and pesticides she ingests in her food to the unseen biases of culture—impacts her baby before the baby is even born. Narvaez concludes that babies raised in the typically North American manner have a physiologically underdeveloped relational capacity. As such, the neurological underpinnings of empathy and care have been understimulated. But, in a supportive environment, the brain, we now know, can change.

The biological infrastructure of an individual’s attachment system is not limited to human-to-human relationships. Cultural practices can erode our capacity to bond with our more-than-human relations too. Today, billions of humans reside in dense urban centers, a habitat composed largely of metal, glass, cement, angular lines, and human crowds, not to mention noise, air, and light pollution. For centuries prior, our ancestors largely lived in rural settings. Affected as they were by the vagaries of the natural world, these lifestyles could be difficult and sometimes grueling, but they did provide abundantly more and richer relationships with land and its more-than-human inhabitants than does urbanity. The sounds of farm animals, the sight of birds in flight, and the scent of earthy soil were regular features, offering comfort, stimulation, and relationship to generations upon generations of infants and toddlers.

Some researchers, like the environmental scientist Ming Kuo, suggest that perhaps humans were never designed to live walled, cemented, and fenced off from much of nature in urban settings.²⁶ She notes that “habitat selection theory” is the idea that “we’re wired for whatever habitat we evolved in.” Just like animals at a zoo, she explains, human health and psychology may suffer when we’re situated in artificial environments, separated from greenery, trees, and moving water.²⁷ E. O. Wilson and others have taken these ideas further, suggesting that humans have a proclivity toward—even an innate love for—our diverse relations; that part of being human is to care for—and be cared for by—the more-than-human world; and that we, as humans, are wired in this direction. They call this biophilia.²⁸

One wonders, though: How well can those who have been cleft from their relational instincts by alienation and urbanization provide the ecological care, give attention, and take up the responsibility urgently needed? Urbanization—compounded by isolating child-rearing practices—and limited exposure to the more-than-human are likely to intensify the dual issues of anthropocentrism and individualism over time.

The End Results of Isolated Individualism

Despite their deep concern for the environment, the average American or Canadian is forced into being largely preoccupied with their own survival and material priorities. Operating from the centrality of the self, we prioritize our own needs and those of our families first. Likewise, mining CEOs and corporate lobbyists likely consider their own needs first, followed by the needs of their shareholders, colleagues, and employees. Some questions are rarely asked: Whom else should I care for? How is my existence, my expression of self, made manifest—and at whose expense? How does my action impact everyone, including the myriad and diverse beings of the natural world? Who is caring for me who I am not acknowledging or even noticing? Instead, most North Americans ask the question that rings like a kind of cultural tinnitus: What can you do for me?

When Beaver creates a dam on a desert creek, it forms an oasis that invites myriad beings for whom the hot and dry is unworkable. Ultimately, that industrious rodent raises the overall level of flourishing for surrounding flora and fauna, for the whole community. In contrast, the American dream primarily aims to raise the overall level of living for oneself and possibly a few additional humans. And, unfortunately, that dream is largely manifesting as an ongoing nightmare for the majority of earth’s inhabitants, both human and more-than-human. Might the whole thing be rewritten in Beaver’s image, where the dream is to raise the whole community?

If the child is disconnected from the earth, their caregivers, and themselves yet still seeks to belong—as we all do—they may find comfort in and settle for reduced forms of connection—the ones sanctioned by the dominant culture: consumption, competition, commodification, supremacy. Alfie Kohn writes, “First we are systematically socialized to compete—and to want to compete—and then the results are cited as evidence of competition’s inevitability.”²⁹ The growing child can ignore and rebel against their mother, compete for position with peers, and take what they want from the earth’s resources—all the while aching to belong. Even though children are pushed toward independence, they are often granted the most superficial kind of individuality, manifesting mostly in their mundane consumer choices, such as the coolest toothpaste or wildest hair color. They have been inundated with messages from industry and even government and schools to put their own needs first, that it is their right and goal to satiate their material desires. Shop till you drop. Don’t settle for less. Dress for success. Have it your way. Because you’re worth it. He who dies with the most toys wins. Even popular modern psychology underscores the doctrine of individualism by urging young people to love themselves first and, only when and if they accomplish that, love others. Their parents, teachers, and peers may likewise be trying to incubate self-love within the isolating bubbles of hyper-independence.

If we turn our attention beyond this sense of individualization and human isolation, we can see the parallels happening between human and the rest of the more-than-human. For if the “I” is most important in the human world—and the human takes that same position among all species—the obvious result is the shunting aside or deeming problematic of relationality toward those whom Winona LaDuke calls “all our relations.”³⁰ Eco-philosophers have long talked of this separation between the human and the rest of the world, with many suggesting that this alienation is an artifact of the move to lessen the value of all our relations,³¹ to instrumentalize them and make their value utilitarian—rather than taking on the responsibilities that would be required if we were to be in genuine relationship, acknowledging that they exist independently from us and have rights, possibilities, and values intrinsic to them.

Despite this orientation toward the self, the individual is not exactly thriving under these ideals either, as increasing mental illness rates, shortening life spans,³² and plummeting social trust attest.³³ Many researchers have documented increases in childhood depression, loneliness, neuroticism, attention disorders, and anxiety,³⁴ and have pointed to disconnectedness as the cause.³⁵ Toddlers are now being treated with psychotropics for depression and bipolar disorders.³⁶ These conditions now common in North America are exceedingly rare in traditional cultures around the globe where connections to others are central.³⁷ Adults evidence these problems as well, but, worryingly, each generation seems to be faring worse than the previous.

In fact, the deterioration of childhood mental health and the degradation of the environment have deeply entwined roots. Environmental degradation decreases human emotional, social, and physical well-being.³⁸ For example, recent epidemiological evidence suggests that urban pollution increases ADHD, anxiety, and aggression,³⁹ and slows cognitive development⁴⁰ and emotional regulation.⁴¹ Similarly, the human-made chemical BPA, common in food and beverage containers, has been found to change and repress the social functioning of mice over multiple generations.⁴² Viewing the world through the lens of individualization prevents acknowledgment of cultural practices that both exacerbate problems and obstruct potential solutions (such as the solution offered by the process of ecologizing education).

Humans damage forests, pollute rivers, and disrupt delicately balanced ecosystems. Reduced environmental health, in turn, reduces human health in complex, far-reaching, and potentially lifelong ways. The root injury to both, however, comes earlier and involves subtle and persistent cultural messaging to children about disconnection. BPA damage and water pollution are mere symptoms of a larger blight within Western culture. Banning BPA helps in the short term, but what will be the next BPA? Environmental destruction will continue until modern Western culture goes to the deeper root of the problem: its flawed and limiting core beliefs about connection to fellow humans and our more-than-human kin.

Systemic Isolation in Standard Schooling

Personal and human supremacy is also messaged through the physical spaces that contain childhood. The anthropologist Felice Wyndham says that in modern Western cultures, we live, work, and go to school in “dead boxes.”⁴³ Our days are filled with dead things: desks, computer screens, walls. Our tables and papers are flattened dead trees. In fact, we humans make these dead things and shape them for our own use—and they, in turn, are shaping us. The message is powerful. Pick any classroom in North America and it will look roughly the same. It is not a place filled with living things, and although many teachers work hard to make classrooms as lively and inviting as possible, there are limits to what can be achieved within these spaces, limits often enforced from unexpected quarters, such as when the teacher is told to remove natural materials by the fire chief for reasons of safety. Yet the classroom window may reveal a small forest, a frigid snowscape, and beings engaged in their own projects. In these homogenized classroom environments, people logically adopt a worldview wherein they are the “subject” and everything else is an “object.” Worryingly, this relationship to human-constructed inanimate objects is then transferred to those that are animate, living, and vital. All-powerful humans act upon an “inferior” environment and its myriad objects, using all for their own benefit. By the time they enter the ecologizing school, most kindergarten children have been exposed to this subject–object dynamic on a daily basis in homes, community centers, indoor preschools, libraries, play gyms, and relatives’ and friends’ houses for five years. Equally important, so has the teacher—and for much longer.

Schools, as a whole, have worked hard to turn attention toward social and ecological wounds, but their very structure tends to send anthropocentric and individualistic messages, albeit unintentionally. The physical space of standard schools reinforces this subject–object dynamic and the separation of humans. Furthermore, because educators may be offered little time for deep and sustained reflection or the opportunity to step outside the box of culturally based schooling expectations, many pedagogical practices have limited room for change. Understandably, the internalization of these subject–object and hierarchical paradigms results in some students—or perhaps all students some of the time—feeling objectified, inconsequential, lesser than, or used by others. They may treat others in this manner too. Perhaps this internalized worldview is why standard school systems tend to fall short on emotional flourishing.

Many adults readily confirm this fact with their own anecdotal memories. Surface complaints include meaningless, tedious, and disconnected curriculum. Deeper retrospection often recalls lonely and isolating social cliques, laced with the anxiety of incessant competition and even trauma. Furthermore, since the standard school is primarily a place of a quite singular form of rational learning, successful children must find ways to sideline emotion, relationships, and yearning for sensory experience. Brief trips outdoors, mindfulness moments, and more “emotion” talk in classrooms cannot resolve these issues because the foundations of the system and, by extension, the pedagogical approach itself are built on problematic notions.

Despite countless thoughtful teachers working to oppose these conditions, most students feel on some level that their larger nature—as whole and interdependent, emotional, sensual beings—has been quashed. Belonging to the system seems to come at a cost. To truly succeed in the eyes of the teacher, the cooperative child must become competitive. The relational child must promote the self. The emotionally gifted child must concentrate on the rational. The diverse knower must narrow the allowable fields of meaning-making. Myriad possibilities, ways of knowing, and some spark of life—of the core self—must be relinquished in order to adapt to the demands of the classroom, the curriculum, and the culture.

Prior to school, many young children start asking questions about how trees feel when they’re cut down or what it means for whales to swim with so much plastic or where garbage goes. Many adults are as uncomfortable with these questions as with ones about Santa Claus: we don’t want our children (or ourselves, for that matter) to know the truth. We don’t want them to know about the daily destruction of the planet, and so we separate the child and ourselves from that relational instinct by repeating the lies that were told to us. Trees don’t care if they’re cut down. The ocean is huge. The garbage just goes “away” in a truck.

Children who spend abundant time in more complex natural spaces are pushed to crush their desire for environmental engagement, that part of themselves that cares for the natural world. After all, the “voice” of culture inside them insists that such a disposition is crazy, overly sentimental, and even wrong. The child who felt truly loved when sitting in a favorite maple tree now remembers the experience as “childish,” private, and embarrassing. The child who attentively watched and cared for spiders now stomps on them in the schoolyard to make the other children laugh. When we no longer feel encouraged to be relationally aware and responsive selves, we move toward superficialities and find ways to protect ourselves from pain. Eventually, we may succumb to shallow forms of relating to ourselves, others, and the diversity of beings that make up the more-than-human.

Concerned educators labor in vain to counteract these tendencies because the system is rigged in one direction. Despite their often extraordinary efforts toward collaboration and community-building in the standard classroom, the direct and indirect messaging systems embedded in centralized learning outcomes, architectural designs, and competitive grading models tend to reinforce autonomy, thus obscuring relational impairments in students. Where the forest imparts a complex ecological philosophy—an enlivening and humbling paradox that everyone and everything matters and is simultaneously insignificant, that everyone and everything is in relation and yet distinct—the standard classroom typically presents, with limited complexity, a world of detachment, separation, objectification, and individualism.

This messaging is evidenced in the materiality of the space itself, in social expectation, and in curriculum design. Children’s freedoms are restricted by classrooms, bells, desks, and other actions imposed by a system, a teacher, and a physical space where efficiency, commonly a buzzword for control, is a primary goal. Industrial lighting, worksheets, standardized exams, rows of desks or rows of tables—all promote a code of conformity, even when a particular assignment or instructor aims for creativity. Lessons are broken into chunkable parts and further fragmented into test questions. The educator John Holt explains that contemporary education compels children to work for “petty and contemptible rewards” and “the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.”⁴⁴ Importantly, children are trained to look outside themselves, often toward human “experts,” for instruction, discipline, and reward at the expense of their own internal knowing, in what often amounts to forced learning at an inappropriate pace. They are told what they should experience and what they should learn. As the environmental leader Vandana Shiva articulates, “We’ve moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we’re moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial—that we’re creating incomplete human beings.”⁴⁵

In 1986, Alfie Kohn reported that 65 percent of sixth-graders prefer a cooperative style of learning over a competitive one.⁴⁶ However, standard North American education prizes students for obedience and encourages the kind of competition that fosters it. Kohn explained, “Children who are set against each other are easier to discipline.”⁴⁷ The result is reduced cooperation and connection between peers and a more limited relationship between teachers and students. Today, even though many teachers focus on relationships and earn trust, inspire, or become confidants, those roles are optional and hard to accomplish for an entire class of twenty-five to thirty diverse students. The combination of class size, centralized mandates, the downloading of larger systemic responsibilities (for example, mental health care, responding to needs of complex families and learners, etc.), and increasing demands on the teacher’s role makes the obedience-authority paradigm, so critiqued thirty-five years ago, a continuing presence in many schools.

The standard North American educational design places humans at the center of existence—with Brown Bear, Peat Moss, River Stone, and Chestnut Pollen positioned as extraneous, sidelined objects. This implicit curriculum teaches children that the more-than-human world can be ignored and is of minor educational and cultural importance. The typical classroom makes it difficult to foster relational feeling between students and, for example, the schoolyard tree. Self-identifying male children often feel particularly embarrassed by their instinct and need to care for others and the desire to remain connected to others. In fact, the student who cries for the tree that has broken in a storm will likely be laughed at by peers. What is a tree for? The culture, and often by extension the curriculum, says a tree is for making paper. The curriculum imparts false truths: that the world is known, that knowledge can be broken into bits, that learners are consumers of knowledge and are lesser-thans in the educational process, and that everything is served to them only by human experts—teacher, parents, Google, or book authors.

In sum, typical North American pedagogy does little to encourage an ecological instinct in children. While teachers may tell children to care for one another and the environment, the day-to-day contexts continue to prioritize the individual and the human. Thus, while high school students may acquire knowledge, for example, of the complex chemical interactions that turn sunlight, air, and water into food for plants, they may have no experiential reference for the process. When they look at a leaf in the sunlight, they may never consider the processes occurring between them. They have learned the theory of photosynthesis from textbooks without learning the reality of leaves in sunlight. They have spent little time encountering trees or leaves and, consequently, feel little relationship with or connection to them. They may see themselves as utterly disconnected from the leaf’s processes, even though they may have just breathed in oxygen the tree has released, cut a living branch to create a paltry fire, or ripped off a leafy bundle to fiddle with.

Standard pedagogy has remained essentially unchanged in this way for more than a century. Thus, the centrality of the individual and the importance of the human are replicated from one generation to the next—or perhaps, as Narvaez warns, the centrality of the individual is not just replicated but intensified. With the relational instinct significantly impaired, individuals who believe themselves to be kind, aware, and respectful have been and continue to be proxy to and even privileged by the pouring of toxic chemicals in rivers, the plowing up of forests, the paving over of unique habitats, and the exploding of whole islands without a thought to the loss of lives. Those rarer individuals who grow to adulthood with a relatively intact relational and ecological capacity struggle with the complexities, feel the pain of ongoing violence, and have generally spent enormous amounts of time outdoors in nature—despite the indoor school system.

The Relational Instinct

The Harvard neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, one of the world’s leading experts on prosocial development, states simply: “Maslow had it wrong.” The infant’s “most primary and urgent need,” he claims, “is bonding.”⁴⁸ The newborn infant knows what many scientists have been culturally trained to overlook: connection and ongoing connection come first. Their very life was conceived through the physical and, hopefully, loving connection of their key caregivers, who are themselves defined by their social and more-than-human environments and by their ancestors and the ancestral environments before them. Human life is made possible by the fertile interactions between microbial, atmospheric, and other connections. And further, it is enriched, depleted, or altered by psychological and biological impacts, such as the expectant mother’s peaceful and abundant garden or the father’s exposure to harsh chemical agents. Who among us would choose a life with plenty of food and shelter but no love or connections to anyone, human or more-than-human? It’s not just that survival depends on relationships: indeed, life has little meaning without them.

Indeed, evidence of interdependence is so omnipresent in the natural environment, one wonders why Western scientists imagined humans to be exempt. Ivy climbs because of Maple and Sunlight. Maple spins seeds into the breeze. Thimbleberry awaits Bear. Even our bodies are not our own, as Narvaez reminds us: “The human body cannot function without the trillions of other organisms that conduct a host of symbiotic functions that keep it alive.”⁴⁹ The cause of the individualism fallacy is one thing, but the result is quite another. How different might the last half-century of parenting advice, pedagogical practice, and environmental policy have been if love and bonding were recognized as the world’s most urgent need? And if relationship and cooperation were understood as fundamental?

Researchers have only fairly recently studied the extent to which humans are physiologically cocreated by other humans. However, research remains distinctly lacking on the subject of the involvement of more-than-human beings in human physiological development. For example, what important neurological, microbial, or sensory processes occur when an infant feels the breeze on their face throughout the day? What processes or physiological development may be reduced when an infant is kept almost entirely indoors with static air? How is an infant’s neurological development altered by shifting patterns of outdoor light, as opposed to relatively constant and artificial indoor light? And more directly, how does one come to understand the color green when immersed in the nuance and subtlety of a temperate rainforest versus in the uniformity of the lime-green walls of a classroom? Anthropologists who study traditional peoples around the world consistently remark on the precociousness and social skills of those children.⁵⁰ To what extent is that maturity attributable to the influence of more-than-human beings? More pointedly, how might a lack of exposure to all these relations reduce a child’s well-being, their range of experiential encounter, their imagined possibilities (for example, one child, when asked about what they wanted to be when they grew up, responded “Salmon”), and their ability to empathize with and care for others, including care for the natural world?

In the 1970s, the developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan pointed out that “the relational bias” in women’s thinking was viewed as a deviation or deficiency rather than as “a different social and moral understanding.”⁵¹ She explained that women at that time frequently expressed values of compassion, inclusion, social harmony, and empathy and used those values as the basis of moral decision-making. Although Gilligan wrote of women’s values, evidence suggests that a “relational bias” is the norm for all children of any gender. Contemporary North American culture fractures the psyche, creating a kind of eco-double consciousness:⁵² one part feels innate compassion and connection to all living beings, while the other part criticizes that impulse, believing it to be a sign of weakness and inappropriate dependency. Children who manage to maintain a strong relational self often feel quite alien from their peers, experiencing a kind of double life—outwardly displaying the culturally accepted self and inwardly maintaining the hidden, relational self, which, if not addressed, works to seed doubt and complacency regarding the oppression of the natural world. It can lead to a sense of insecurity and a fear to express especially if one of the selves continues to be denigrated. Our contention is that this tension is widespread; there are many of us who are caught between what we understand to be the cultural norm and our own relational and experiential connection to the natural world.

Reduced relational capacity need not be a life sentence, but it can impede a child’s ability to care about others, including the diversity of the more-than-human. It may be altogether unreasonable to expect a child to embrace their relationships with Gall Midge, Hemlock, and River if they are carrying the psychological wounds of enforced independence deep in their psyche. They may respond with resentment, feign boredom, react with hostility, or be excessively interactive, evidencing their anxiety rather than mutual engagement. At ecologizing schools, all the teachers, human and otherwise, gently and patiently encourage emotional connections while valuing interdependence. Evidence from these BC schools suggests that students have often begun to heal from emotional and relational wounds. Sometimes, they find their own therapeutic interventions, which are often under-recognized by their teachers and unnoticed by their peers, such as seeking out comforting nature sounds or bonding with a particular tree. And for those who come from situations where the dangers are clearly human, finding and building safe relations with natural kin and places can be an important salve, antidote, or just respite.

Returning to the Relational in Ecologizing Education

Outdoor environmental schools are born into an existing cultural ecology. Ecologizing educators may find themselves reflecting on the patterns and messaging of isolation in their own childhood as well as those of their students and their caregivers. Some of the work of radical cultural change is about acknowledging and psychologically untangling from wounding aspects of the current culture and bringing subconscious damage to light. But another aspect of cultural change involves opening doors to new opportunities for connection and belonging. This process is a returning to the relational because, we argue, the relational orientation is inherent in the human species despite its having been suppressed and diverted.

In most cases, children arriving at the ecologizing schools have just exited standard schooling and its embedded and enforced messages of isolation. Understandably, therefore, these students may be unlikely to notice, for example, that dialogue within the forest changes when humans step into it. Human voices may drown out River’s story and scatter Sandflies. Song Sparrow’s trilling goes unnoticed. Flying Squirrel scampers high up the tree. Shyer creatures go into hiding completely. And what of the more subtle conversations? The ones between sunlight and leaves, worms and soil, water and roots?

Most North Americans are unaccustomed to noticing these languages, this multisensory dialogue that brings flora, fauna, water, and weather into communication. Nonetheless, many children readily sense the vitality of the forest. By discussing ecological dialogue and by making space to listen, the ecologizing educator creates an experiential and possibly conceptual bridge for the student in the hope that they may cross over and discover—or rediscover—genuine relationships with the other members of the more-than-human. During this process, students are reunited with a hidden, sometimes self-repressed part of themselves. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber explained that all children are born with the relational instinct and that teachers carry the responsibility for recognizing and supporting opportunities to relate.⁵³ In Buber’s view, all of earth’s beings—horses, the element mica, children—contain a divine spark, and he believed in the importance of connecting these sparks through multisensory, experiential, and spiritual “dialogue.”⁵⁴ Doing so creates a coming together of self and Other as well as an expansion of self, since the self is incomplete in isolation.

The Language of Relationality

To the Western mind, “talking with the trees” might sound metaphoric, a bit of poetic whimsy and personification. This is one of many subtle cultural biases that is often carried into the outdoors. This assumption primes children for shallow or dismissive relations with the natural world. In fact, what we think of as “language” is itself a metaphor. The words, grammar, and syntax that we utter from vocal cords, tongues, and mouths are representations of things. Conversely, the gestures, communions, and communications in the forest are most often not representations at all. They are first-line communications. The word-languages that humans employ—though rich with possibilities and potentials for interaction, translation, and connection—are only one form of dialogue. They are also limiting in ways that reflect cultural values.

In terms of its ecological ethos, the English language is particularly problematic. One of the key issues is that English lacks the vocabulary needed to conceptualize relationships with the natural world. A number of other languages do have vocabulary for the kinds of deep engagements humans regularly experience within those cultures. The Welsh saying dod yn ôl at fy nghoed has been literally translated to mean “come back to my trees” but is understood to suggest one’s return to well-being or a balanced state of mind. The Japanese language maintains the concept of shinrin-yoku. The term, which literally translates as “forest bathing,” means to walk through the forest for personal healing and restoration. In Norwegian, one can participate in friluftsliv (literally “free-air-life”), which means to go out into the great outdoors with a spirit of exploration and appreciation for the natural world. Thus, these concepts of well-being enable an emotional, spiritual, and long-lasting engagement with nature that is unmatched by, say, the concepts of “camping” or “outdoor adventure.”

A second key deficit for the English language is its focus on nouns, that is, on things, rather than on actions, relationships, or experiences. This focus not only prioritizes objects but also positions them as static, which makes conveying ideas about relating, process, movement, or incompleteness more difficult. Where the English language categorizes stars, plants, and rivers as “things”—that is, mere objects—hundreds of North American Indigenous languages refer to star spirits, plant spirits, and river spirits.⁵⁵ In other words, rather than simply assigning labels for stars, plants, and rivers, Indigenous languages use names filled with vitality for these more-than-human entities, implicitly recognizing their agency.

While nouns are predominant in the English language, other languages rely more on verbs. Robin Wall Kimmerer reports, for example, that verbs comprise 70 percent of the Potawatomi vocabulary, while verbs account for only 30 percent of English.⁵⁶ Kimmerer explains that by using verbs instead of nouns, Potawatomi acknowledges the animacy of Water, Beach, and Mushroom. The words “Watering,” “Beaching,” and “Mushrooming” pulse with an aliveness of being and becoming, unlike the flat, inanimate objects implied by the English language. This question of the stasis of the noun can be influenced and altered in various ways. For example, in this book we have tried using gerunds in particular places to recognize and emphasize movement and process.

These seemingly insignificant details about the English language are, in fact, critical because, as Lev Vygotsky notes, “speech plays an essential role in the organization of higher psychological functions” and a child perceives the world “not only through his eyes but through his speech.”⁵⁷ Vygotsky describes language as a cultural tool designed to help us understand the world. However, in using the tool, we are also shaped by it, and as a result, we come to make sense of the world the way our culture does. With its word limitations and object-orientation, the English language influences our conception of ourselves, our relationships with all-our-relations, and our receptivity to a wider diversity of communications.

In the case of ecologizing education, if the teacher employs the English language in standard ways, without acknowledging or accommodating for its ecological gaps, the child’s ability to relate can be hampered. Expanding relational capacity while attending to linguistic limitations with twenty-five rain-soaked forest students can seem like a tall order. On the other hand, the setting itself can inspire invention and intuition for receptive students and teachers. For example, some teachers have begun to play a game called “ecologizing the troublesome cliché,” where “killing two birds with one stone” becomes “feeding two birds with one hand.” Other teachers encourage students to play with capitalizations across beings and to notice and name situations of nouning rather than verbing or of hierarchizing humans and marginalizing more-thans.

Despite its many limitations, the English language also has a particular strength in that it is a remarkably adaptable and flexible language that allows for playfulness, spontaneity, expansions, and cross-linguistic collaborations. That is why we can say things like “Octopus dreamed me” and “sometimes humaning is hard” and, despite never having heard these words used in this way, listeners and readers are likely to easily grasp their meaning.⁵⁸

Listening to the Voices of Place

First-grader Lana’s story illustrates the relational, cultural, and linguistic complexity involved in ecological mentoring. Lana often notices what other students, in their rush, do not notice: a feather, a piece of wasp nest, a slug. She approaches more-than-human beings with devotion and reckless enthusiasm. Left to her own instincts, she will literally love a creature to death. In her exuberance, she squeezes and injures Worm, stuffs Butterfly in her backpack for safekeeping, and manhandles Slug all the way home, slime oozing all over her arms.⁵⁹ She removes insects from trails and tree hollows to bring them home, believing she can “protect them best.”⁶⁰ Lana’s intense attachment supports her development as an ecologically minded human, but she relates to more-than-human entities only on her own terms. This orientation leaves her relationships one-sided. She may not feel pain when Butterfly is crushed, but Butterfly does. Here, the ecologizing educator has an opportunity to facilitate dialogue between Lana and the forest beings, to help her develop awareness of the paradox of being connected yet separate.

One way to facilitate dialogue and engage with this problem of language is by leading students on a sound walk or listening walk. The listening walk is a way of approaching the natural world with attentive receptivity.⁶¹ Modern Western culture encourages assertive, dominant, and active control over the environment, and even when those qualities combine with appreciation and enjoyment, they generally exclude receptivity. Attentive receptivity, on the other hand, is a way of being in the world that emphasizes being over doing, since much of what Western humans do in the more-than-human realm results in destruction. Attentive receptivity relies on “long-term experience of living in conjunction with place and the conceptualization of such an experience.”⁶² In other words, attentive receptivity encourages cumulative experiences with specific more-than-human entities (for example, not just experiencing the presence of hemlocks, but experiencing a relationship with the same Hemlock over time). Attentive receptivity encourages child and Hemlock to develop a long-term relationship narrative. It also assumes that either child or Hemlock can initiate the relationship and that both have agency.

Like learning a foreign language in a different cultural setting, tuning into the dialogue of the forest requires effort. The teacher creates an opening for dialogue between students and the various elements of nature by talking about nonword language, by encouraging attentiveness, by critically examining particular notions of communication, and by providing opportunities to connect. But relationships cannot be built on coercion. More-than-humans and children must reach toward each other. To participate in the forest conversation, the talkative child must temporarily suspend chatter. The self-absorbed child must turn attention away from the self. The already visually observant and emotionally doting child might be encouraged toward an outward receptivity. In so doing, they potentially discover other more ecologically robust modes of relating.

The book Wild Pedagogies has described this process of relationship-building as a practice, similar to the way in which meditation or tai chi might be understood.⁶³ These are disciplines that take care and commitment and that are developed, ever deepening, over time. These practices take energy and effort as skills are discovered and developed. But like all relationships, these can expand one’s sense of self, one’s sense of community, and one’s place in the world.

Parents report that children at Maple Ridge are showing increased confidence and better social skills. As the relational self is more fully accommodated, the world seems less dangerous. The students have greater capacity for learning and engagement now that energy is not wasted obscuring and denying the ecologically connected part of themselves.

Raven, a fourth-grade student who has been at the Maple Ridge Environmental School for three years, says “you hear” a plant “through your heart.” She explains: “It’s not ‘speaking’ it’s more like energy or signals. You don’t hear it out loud … you speak your way, they speak different ways, like thousands of different ways. Billions. It’s like the birds with those signals, like when you see a bird flapping up in the sky and a flock of birds, how they all move at the same time, it’s because they tell each other like through mental speaking.”⁶⁴ The more our relational selves grow, the more capacity we have to connect with others, human and more-than-human. The Simon Fraser University eco-research team writes, “The world literally speaks to us, not in our language but in its own; we become, as it were, bilingual. No longer separated from the more-than-human world, we have become a part of it; an ontological shift has occurred.”⁶⁵

During these listening walks and related activities, the voices of the more-than-humans are not only heard; they are also, at least to some degree, freer to vocalize. Despite the whooshing of many pantlegs and scuffing of a couple dozen shoes, birds trill from the trees again. The Flying Squirrel comes out of hiding, peering down from a high branch with curiosity. A gust of wind picks up, sweeping the children’s attention up into the many waving branches of the Douglas Fir. The environmental activist Steve Van Matre’s description of this connection is remarkably similar to that of nine-year-old Raven: “Yes, the earth speaks, but only to those who can hear with their hearts. It speaks in a thousand, thousand small ways, but like our lovers and families and friends, it often sends its messages without words. For you see, the earth speaks in the language of love.”⁶⁶

Realities of the Relational Worldview

Over time and with mindful mediation from the teacher, activities like the listening walk begin dismantling ideologies about human centrality and superiority. Slowly, philosophies emerge that better support personal and planetary well-being. In the ecological worldview—where everything and everyone can dialogue—all beings have intrinsic value. Moss capsules feed mice, and moss greenery houses numerous insects. Wind expands the forest by sailing birch seeds and the tiny hemlock cones away from parent trees. Wasps pollinate plants and flowers and prey on fly and caterpillar populations. The exhalations of children are absorbed by local flora. Their fingerprints impart and absorb new microbes in beneficial exchanges. Children develop deep bonds with the river, the birds, and the surrounding families of trees.

The ecosystem offers a worldview wherein every being belongs. Every being has inherent value and is therefore deserving of respect. An ecologizing educator can help children begin to look at themselves and one another in a new way that aligns with these ecological principles. In a standard classroom, the child’s unarticulated question might be How can I belong? In the ecologizing school, belonging is a more accessible worldview. The forest is a deeply connected ecosystem. As such, the internal query might shift to How are we connected? And how can we explore these connections? Each educational environment allows for certain questions and ways of questioning and at the same time is closed off to others. The child in an ecologizing education may begin to ask questions about their relationship and responsibility to others. They may understand themselves in a more expansive way than the child in an indoor setting can even imagine.

Of course, suggesting that entities within the ecosystem are deeply interconnected is not the same as suggesting that all connections are benevolent. The road out of modern Western culture’s dominant and violent ideology toward the Earth can detour through other troubled domains. For example, some ideological refugees of imperialism maintain that people need only arrive in the forest and wait for nature to bestow blessings. These individuals expect more-than-human entities to live up to highly romanticized notions of interspecies bonding. Interspecies bonding can occur, but human expectation for bonding is problematic and perpetuates the centrality and privilege of the human.

A related problem lies in automatic and unthinking references to “Mother Earth.” To be clear, many individuals, especially Indigenous peoples, all over the world have a profound feeling of mother–child relationship with the earth that confers a sense of responsibility, reciprocity, and mutual love. However, many non-Indigenous North Americans use the term “Mother Earth” as a kind of evidence to themselves or other humans that they care about the earth. In reality, the dominant culture tends to treat human mothers with the same dismissive, taken-for-granted disregard as it treats the earth. Without thoughtfully unpacking the term, some individuals treat “Mother Earth” as a helpful servant or self-sacrificing parent who performs all the relational work and is ever available to and interested in her human children. Such a person expects generosity but extends only need in return.

This view does not account for the position of humans within a complex web of interconnection. It is fundamentally dangerous to assume that grizzly bears and cougars appearing before us are seeking only spiritual bonding. (The documentary movies Grizzly Man and Blackfish bear tragic witness to this premise.) People too are part of the food chain. Moreover, while we hope to avoid becoming bear meals, we regularly engage with more-than-humans in distinctly unromantic ways, such as hosting, for better or for worse, mosquitoes, ticks, and viruses.

Children in ecologizing schools negotiate a multitude of relationships, each containing unique complexities. At the beach school, Seagull may be friendly one moment and snatching a sandwich the next. River is beloved by students at the forest site, but they respect the stinging cold of its winter waters and the fast-churning currents in spring. When we move out of the ideal, we make room for the real, ultimately deepening, relationships. During a wet walk in March, a teacher noticed a tree raked over by bear claws. In the spontaneous ensuing lesson, the educator recounted a Salish legend, discussed Bear’s biological habits, and reminded students how to communicate respect and nonconfrontation to Bear through body language, staying calm, and giving Bear space.

Ultimately, ecologizing education seeks a profound cultural shift in the conception of humans’ place within the world. The simplicity of classroom hierarchies and human supremacy is dismantled to reveal complex entanglements and fecund networks of interconnectedness. The relationships are dynamic, multilayered, meaningful, and sometimes surprising and challenging. Gall Midge becomes a mentor. The child hears from River and becomes an ally and interpreter. Wind is a clown one day and a precarious hazard the next. The obedience-authority system gives way to priorities of acceptance, respect, and interdependence. In ecologizing education, learning often appears to be more emergent, with lessons initiated by a child, a teacher, a falling pine cone, or a slow-moving banana slug. In this way, curriculum shifts from emotionally vacuous and sensually dry curriculum packages to sensory stimuli that support the presence of the whole child: heart, mind, and senses.

Many children will have suffered severed relational needs in infancy and in classrooms; nonetheless, in the forest and with an ecologizing human educator, they can begin to heal. And as their physiological capacity for relating improves, so too does their sense of belonging and the urge to care for the well-being of all-their-relations—and also the comfort, willingness, and ability to learn. The caring, cared-for, and embodied child can engage in dynamic dialogues occurring at multiple levels of awareness. This process is slow and arduous for children whose relational wounds run deep. Children who may have successfully outcompeted others in standard classrooms might relinquish control, centrality, and entitlement with ambivalence. Whatever their unique pathway, each child learns through deep engagement to increasingly comprehend, respect, learn from, love and be loved by, and work to safeguard all beings of the more-than-human.