John Hausdoerffer: From earthlings to placelings (ep341)
“In pursuing happiness through consumption, one is doing violence to one’s own spirit by reducing one’s self and all of our beauty as perceiving and caring beings.”
What does it mean to understand our roles not as Earthlings but as “Placelings”? And as we deepen into the work of collective healing, what underlies the invitation to reframe the preservation of "wildness” into a re-establishment of “kinship”?
In this episode, we welcome John Hausdoerffer, Ph.D., an author and teacher from Crested Butte, Colorado, where he serves as the Dean of the Clark School of Environment & Sustainability at Western Colorado University. John is the editor of What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? and of the book series, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by the Awakening Orchestra
Episode-inspired artwork by Nano Février
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
John Hausdoerffer: I have always wondered, at first in a more egocentric way, how I'll be remembered. My father died at a young age and he was a great father, but not an intellectual, not an author, not a creative in any way. So he didn't leave much behind other than his values through his children, which is a lot. But I always reflected on that. I wish I had something from his heart and mind to wrestle with, contemplate. So I have that consciousness with my children.
I'm an environmental philosopher who specifically thinks about what do social justice movements from diverse cultural communities have to say to the conservation movement and how can the conservation movement be unsettled in a healthy way by diverse social justice perspectives, given that the conservation movements are pretty culturally privileged in a lot of ways? So for me, I had a project about a decade ago and I was looking at the great conservationist-philosopher Aldo Leopold and his classic land ethic. I had this question: “How would the land ethic be complicated and complimented, stretched from the perspective of social justice leaders?”
I did a bit of a tour, I visited with Vandana Shiva in India, I visited with Devon Peña in southern Colorado, I visited with Winona LaDuke in Minnesota to talk about Leopold’s land ethic with them and to see what environmental justice movements have to say in challenging or even praising the land ethic. So I ended up on Winona LaDuke’s White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. She's just incredibly influenced by her community, and she had me go on her back deck and meet with a daily lodge lodge leader from her community, and I had my clever academic question about Leopold and environmental justice, and he looked right through me and he said, “Well, the only question that matters is what kind of ancestor do you want to be?”
Yeah, and that really hit home for me in that moment, I dropped the Leopold project and began wrestling from the spirit with this question and what I've learned in time, and I'm still humbled by it, is that a couple of things have to happen for me to wrestle with this question, “what kind of ancestor do you want to be?” First of all, I have to ask myself, “Who are my ancestors?” For me to answer this question individually, like John Hausdoerffer for thinking about how John Hausdoerffer’s great-grandkids will talk about him when he's a crumbling photograph on the wall…
For me to think of the question in that egocentric way would be to perpetuate the very problem we're trying to take on of individuals.
So I've learned that, first of all, I can't be the one answering the question, I have to be the one asking the question and honoring this gentleman, Michael Dahl, who asked it of me, who had seen it on his sister's Facebook page, just to de-romanticize the scene of it. It's a question that comes from Turtle Island going way back, and so I knew in the project I needed to gather coeditors who represented diverse communities. So Kathryn Kassouf Cummings, Brooke Perry Hecht from the Center for Humans and Nature, they bring together offers all over the world for many cultural backgrounds, and Melissa Nelson, who is an Indigenous scholar and activist who really could enliven the fact that this is an Indigenous question specifically from Turtle Island.
So we brought together about 40 authors from about 20 different self-identified global cultures and we didn't ask them to answer the question, we asked them to wrestle with the question. So that was one [thing], recognizing that I had to surround myself with people who have experienced life from very different bodies, who think about ancestry from very different social positions and power relationships, to decenter myself and become a listener rather than an author, and that's been incredibly humbling. The second thing is that...
I had to start asking not only to whom must this question be posed, but to what extent is the greater-than-human world also an ancestor?
So in addition to unsettling my previous worldview with this question by bringing together diverse authors and editors, I had to bring in authors who had an ecological understanding and ecological rents, either from traditional ecological knowledge from Indigenous communities and/or some or both, like Robin Wall Kimmerer, from modern ecological science to help us hear from tree persons and deer persons and microbial persons and fungal persons ideas on what kind of ancestor we want. So this project just blew up. It started out like hard enough for me, John, to think about how do I want to be remembered by my grandkids? But then when you expand the sphere of the self out across diverse fellow humans and then out into the more-than-human world and say, “These are all my elders, these are all my teachers. These are all my ancestors. What kind of ancestor do I want to be?” It's become a very humbling project.
Kamea Chayne: The question of what kind of ancestor do you want to be, there is a similar question often posed within the dominant culture, which is “what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?” The earlier question you shared in the beginning of “how do I want to be remembered?” It's sort of like this, “what kind of legacy do I want to leave?” And they, of course, can be interpreted in similar ways, and I acknowledge that everyone approaches that question differently, so there is no right or wrong answer, but I wonder if you've thought about how these questions might orient us towards different values and focuses and who or what relationships are being centered?
John Hausdoerffer: I love that distinction and challenge. So as a dean, I work a lot in development. Part of my job is fundraising to free students from debt, right? So I'm also often talking with donors about legacy, and I've changed. I've stopped using that word because you're absolutely right. That is attached to ego and a desire to imprint one's mind on the world beyond death, which I think is a dangerous impulse.
I recently held a conversation with a group called The Conscious Elders in Palo Alto, California, and a woman who showed up had just come from doing her will with her husband and lawyer to our ancestry conversation. Talk about a moment of wrestling with legacy. What was cool was she said in that meeting, and this is very Silicon Valley, she had talked her husband out of setting money aside to freeze his brain so he can someday become AI. Like, I realized I was no longer in the Colorado Rockies in that moment, and she convinced him to reinvest that into buying land so they can teach their children how to steward a piece of land.
And I think that's the difference between legacy and ancestor, because the children are going to have to learn from the soil and the trees and the wildlife and the flora and fauna and the shifting climate and build a sort of regenerative practice that is not about them, right, but about their relationship with land.
To me, ancestry is about relationships, whereas legacy is about self-expression.
When I was on the White Earth Reservation and really listening to Michael Dahl, who posed this question to me, he was getting at that his most important ancestor was wild rice. What he was saying was that the wild rice teaches them how to live in every way. Wild Rice is part of his cosmology because in their legends, a leader had a dream that told him to move the people west until they arrived at the food that grew on the water. It's part of their cosmology. It’s part of their diet. It's a super food. It's part of their economy, and selling it on the roadside enhances a pretty impoverished community. It's part of their ecological relationship because by going out there in their canoes, he says, they groom the lake and help germinate and re-enliven the rice. So they're almost like a healthy disturbance if you think about resilience theory, suddenly you have humans in the role of a low intensity disturbance that is helping the ecosystem.
So in all of these ways, he looked at me and said, “I am not Anishinaabe without wild rice in my stomach during the wild rice moon in September.” To me, what that is telling me is the kind of ancestor you want to be is measured by the land. It's not measured by whether or not your great-grandkid remembers you. It's not easy, it doesn't even matter if you have great grandkids, that's pretty heteronormative and patriarchal, right? It's measured by whether or not you set in motion a system of values, whether or not you set in motion communities that allow for people of the future to still have wild rice in their stomach during the wild rice moon in September.
So I think that the better way of asking it, a less abstract and more place-based way of asking what kind of ancestor do you want to be is to ask “What is my rice?” What is my version of Michael Dahl's wild rice that allows for the land to be both the barometer of our behavior as ancestors, have we behaved in a way that allows for there to be wild rice in the future? For example, the economic benefits are being challenged because corporations have tried to patent wild rice and found ways to grow it on pines in California and sell it for cheap with wild rice slapped on the box, right? So are they losing their customer base? And how is that adding to poverty, climate change, acid rain, or threatening the window of ecological health necessary to have wild rice? The land, whether or not there's rice is a barometer [of] how you remembered.
Literally, the land itself is a barometer for how you've lived as an ancestor.
Then the land is also an elder and an ancestor teaching you and reminding you of ancestral instructions for how to live on the land. A challenge for me as a privileged white male who's descended from transient people is do I have that kind of connection to read the land in terms of how I am as an ancestor? Is it misappropriation of Michael's Indigenous story for me to even try?
I think everyone listening, depending on their cultural background, has to not only wrestle with what kind of ancestor they want to be and not only wrestle with how do diverse cultures, how does the greater the human community challenge us on that question? We also have to wrestle with what is our race and then wrestle with given our cultural position? Are we even capable of asking that question?
Kamea Chayne: I would love to go deeper into what we measure and what we value. So in terms of recognizing our need to pose a question like what kind of ancestor do we want to be for our future generations, it is, of course, helpful to situate that within the multilayered socio-ecological crises that we are facing today. So we might better understand how to translate our answers to that question into how we show up and what we do. People often talk about systemic injustices, historical warfare or domination between communities and so forth when trying to pinpoint the deeper roots of our crises.
You've named a spiritual violence that has taken place, which is tethered to you and maybe even underlies the other forms of systemic violence. So can you speak more to what you mean by a spiritual violence in how it might have shifted how we conceptualize value and therefore how we define something like societal progress and advancement in the system?
John Hausdoerffer: You bet. And obviously, like anyone listening, I'm deeply concerned about physical violence. I'm deeply concerned about a third of bird species that were around when I was born [that are] now gone. I'm concerned about a billion people living below a dollar a day who emit very little carbon being displaced by and even killed by climate change. I’m deeply concerned with those physical systems of violence emerging from the climate crisis.
For me, my focus is on the spiritual violence that happens to those of us who are asked to define happiness through consumption. I think it reduces the spirit and redefines humans as bodies that consume bodies that not only perpetuates the physical violence because it causes us to forget our spiritual bond and removes us from the opportunity to take moral responsibility for each other. But it also it hurts the spirit. It hurts one's own spirit.
In pursuing happiness through consumption, one is doing violence to one's own spirit by reducing one's self and all of our beauty as perceiving and caring beings.
The ability to perceive complexity and build resilience through caring, what a beautiful opportunity to express ourselves as a species that this climate crisis raises. If we instead choose to reduce ourselves to bodies that consume, bodies that no longer think about or care about the violent impacts, that is a spiritual violence we're doing to ourselves. And so this ancestor question is trying to reawaken a spiritual concern for ourselves, as well as whether or not Michael Dahl’s great grandkids have wild rice in their stomach.
Kamea Chayne: Absolutely. What I've come to learn is that diversity and complexity are what lend themselves to collective resilience. So when we have this sort of spiritual violence where we are incentivized to simplify complexity and simplify everything into commodities that can be bought and sold, that directly leads to the compromising of our collective immunity and our collective wellbeing, and therefore the sixth mass extinction and climate change.
John Hausdoerffer: Well put. I love the way it's an important framework that you share there with the danger of simplifying complexity and as you mentioned, resilience emerges from a diverse system. You look at Vandana Shiva, who I interviewed with the kinship collection, and she has an essay on both wildness and ancestor, and her organization is called Navdanya which means nine seeds and that's a diverse combination of seeds such that no matter what's happening in climate change, whether it's drought or flood, something's growing. I think the resilience from diversity of those nine seeds is a great lesson for us as a human community and the more diverse voices we bring together around how to be a good ancestor. Yeah, it can be unsettling and having to it in that it holds up a mirror to the privilege of someone like myself.
But in that act of being unsettled, disturbance leads to resilience—if one adapts.
So there's a really interesting example I want to share with you from the ancestor book if I may…in an essay by Kaylena Bray, who comes from the northeast and is a Seneca, she talks about corn and corn as an ancestor, if you think about the diversity of kinds of corn that have lent their resilience. And for her in this region, it's incredible what corn and the continued awakening of her cultural community not only teaches her how corn is her ancestor, but in having her in this book, she and the corn of her community are ancestors to me, and I'll share a passage from her.
She says the ancestral lineage carried through seeds has become a tangible reminder for me of what it means to be an ancestor. The grandfather pod corn was given its name for a reason. It acts as an ancestral grandfather. It is a source of strength and resilience that carries its influence and unknown in lasting ways and watches protectively. I'm like, OK, this is John, how is corn protective? What is that? This really cool what she says, I feel a similar source of influence from the corn I grew up eating Oneo-gon, and it strikes me how unknowingly, yet persistently, I've had this connection my entire life. To this day, when I eat white corn and soups or boiled bread, I think of what life must have been like for my ancestors and the strength and resilience needed for this corn to be here. I think of the French expedition of 1687 where they burned half a million bushels of white corn in a raid designated to wipe out the Haudenosaunee people at Gandagora, present day New York. Despite these attempts, we are still here. And the corn is still here. There is a sign displayed prominently in the seat house of this extensive and ancient corn collection. It is a framed photo of corncobs and imprinted seeds that reads:
"They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds."
Kamea Chayne: I have chills listening to that, I remember that quote, I didn't know where it came from, but that has stuck with me as well, and I really appreciate you reading this passage and definitely encourage our listeners to check out the full volume as well, as well as the many other volumes that you have co-edited, which we will talk more about here and link to within our show notes. And earlier, you raised this question of inviting us to think about what is our rice?
Something that really stuck with me from what you've shared before is that "We are not earthlings, we are placelings. I don't think we evolved a conscience for a global scale problems. I think we can participate in global solutions to how we evolve, which is probably on the watershed scale, the bioregional scale," and this has really resonated with me because I've been drawn to this idea of realigning our cultures and economies with ecology, which necessarily has to be place-based because the trade cycles and laws of the land, if you will, is different in every bioregion.
And I almost wonder if the creation of this binary of culture and ecology is akin to the binary of man and nature in that men is a part of Earth. So the constructed binary created this psychological separation just as much as every ecosystem has. Its unique cultures that are dominant cultures have just become misaligned with what comes to mind for you here. What else can you share about this idea of seeing ourselves as place placings?
John Hausdoerffer: Well, I think you're getting back to the spiritual violence, and in this case, it's not so much the spiritual violence of consumption, but the spiritual violence of being detached from the ecological sustenance of our identity.
So for example, when I think about my rice or in the case of Bray, who I just read from, my corn. It's my version of that. In what way is the land an ancestor of mine, both teaching me how to live as a placeling and showing me whether or not I'm doing a good job. For me, it's snowpack, I'm talking to you right now from an apartment at 9000 feet above sea level in the mountains of Mount Crested Butte, Colorado.
I'm surrounded by a fresh snow storm, but we're in a very dangerous drought and snowpack is the basis of our recreational tourist economy, the basis of our ranching economy, whether or not students come to our destination college, the basis of our ecological health, as we face forest fires and beetle kill and things of that nature, and the snow of the Rockies is the source of water necessary for everything from riparian ecosystems all through the West to the water access of the Hopi in the Southwest, the Zuni and whether or not the Colorado River reaches the people of Mexico, whether or not poor folks in Phoenix and Las Vegas and L.A. have access to water and economic opportunity through the agricultural industry in the West. All of that starts with the snowpack.
And by the way, I love to dance down that snow on my skis every day, and I learned that from my grandpa. So for me, just snow connects me to my ancestors, my grandfather, my daughters, who I will ski with this evening, as well as a measurement for how I'm addressing climate change, whether or not my life is responsible and in solidarity with Hopi, Mexican, riparian species, etcetera. Snowpack is my rice. So that is that's what defines me as a placeling. It's really important that I make the distinction of placing versus, as some might say... Becoming "native" to place—as white folks, we have to not use that term. Becoming "Indigenous" to a place, too—I think that's problematic. But becoming a placeling. It comes from the joy of finding your place.
Michael Dahl loves watching his kid roll around the rice on the garage floor while he's cooking it and how it brings his family together. I love teach my kids how to ski. Also, that snow also calls me out on how I'm addressing climate change. And once you discover that your snow, your corn, your rice, now you have a sense of cultural identity. It's no longer just United Nations climate data and data, giving you a guilt trip that's driving your activism. By the way, guilt is an unsustainable fuel for activism. It's something joyful that makes you who you are as a place that pushes you to act every day.
That's what the environmental movement is missing: a joy-based, identity-centered reason to act, rooted in place. That's what I mean by placeling.
Kamea Chayne: I've really come to see our climate crisis and also our sixth mass extinction as being rooted in this severance of place-based community and place-based relationships. Because when a lot of our food systems, fiber systems or any other production systems have no relation with place, they become extremely resource and labor-intensive just to upkeep. And so for me personally, it's baffling when the elite discourses on climate action continue to view Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and biocultural knowledge as a separate cause and even prop up solutions that may perpetuate the same sort of new frontier ideology that caused a lot of the problems to begin with.
So I wonder how you would explain to someone who has largely been influenced by the dominant, maybe colonial-minded narratives that push for a one size fits all solutions or center these reductive ecological impact assessments of water use, land use and so forth that treat Earth's diverse systems as if they're all homogenous. So in other words, what I'm trying to get at is when the solutions proposed to heal our Earth either maintain this new frontier ideology or neglect the place-based relational aspect.
John Hausdoerffer: Well, I'm going to recommend a book. Michael Mendez has written a book called Climate Change from the Streets, in which he analyzes exactly this. It’s is such an important book from Yale University Press in 2020. I'll say a couple of quick things. One is I'm really glad you brought up the new frontier because the alternative to the frontier mind is being a placeling.
The frontier ideology is one that suggests: a) land is available and free for the taking, instead of someone's homeland. And b) one does not need to live carefully in place because if one overuses one's place, there's always another place to go to.
So whether we're talking about 17th-century tobacco farming in Virginia, in which the average field was aged out every three years and colonists had to move west and cause Indian wars, or if we're talking about the Iraq War of 2003, in which our level of consumption and not caring for our place required a war in the Middle East, the frontier idea continues. We're seeing that now with the Moon being called the eighth continent because folks are seeing it as a natural resource to be exploited. Or even mining asteroids. It's very troubling seeing the colonization of space. Not so much because I care about space. I do, but more about it because it's perpetuating a very spiritually violent idea within us, the frontier notion that we ultimately don't need to care for our place because there's another frontier.
In Michael Mendez's book, what he looks at is how these climate solutions you're referring to. It's about scale for him. If you locate the climate problem and climate solutions at the global scale, Mendez argues, then what ends up happening is you target a few greenhouse gases through things like carbon offsets, which in many ways perpetuate the removal of Indigenous people from their land and close to slave labor in planting trees that are used and dead and 20 years. Or cap and trade, which allows corporations, while addressing CO2, allows them to still pollute locally with other chemicals affecting communities of color living around power plants.
And so those global scales, according to Michael Mendez, those global-scale climate solutions are actually perpetuating localized environmental injustice.
So, he said, if we just shrink the scale down to the neighborhood, you mentioned that you quoted me on the watershed. Mendez is bringing it down to the neighborhood around the power plant. Now suddenly, you're democratizing and bringing more voices from those neighborhoods to the table, not just corporate and nation-state voices on CO2 reductions, but you're bringing local communities to the table, democratically demanding a change in, say, 30 chemicals rather than just CO2. And so you're not only to get a revolution in the scale of how we address climate change and interior revolution in protecting bodies and communities of color, you're also getting a revolution in local democracy. It's a great opportunity if we just change the scale, back to placeling, right?
Kamea Chayne: I really love that reframing, because it really helps us to reawaken to the power that we have and the agency that we need to reclaim in this work of collective healing, rather than pointing to a few things that are very far away that we're sort of just screaming at. We can realize that we have very tangible roles that we can play, especially starting with rebuilding relationships right where we are.
And another thing is the idea of the wild is another that you have explored. And I think it helps us to deepen our understanding of relationships with place through another lens. So in the preface of your book Wildness, it reads: "Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will to be, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing as truly wild."
"WILDNESS, the book, charts a different path, exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work and play." In my past conversations with Mark David Spence of dispossessing the wilderness or with Farmer Rishi of Sarvodaya Institute, the points that they raised led me to question if the idea of wild is in of itself a colonial construct, much like the word nature, which in its very definition is essentially every being other than human a word which, as I've learned, doesn't even exist in a lot of Indigenous languages. So I wonder if you see even framing the goal as learning to live with the wild as perpetuating this disassociation or if you're conceptualizing the wild in entirely different ways altogether.
John Hausdoerffer: Yes and no. Your concern is exactly why Gavin Van Horn was my coauthor and coeditor there. Gavin and I are now working with Robin Cameron. We've put out this collection called Kinship. Kinship is almost like the sequel to Wildness, where we saw some of what you just said. That said, when we did Wildness, we were well aware of these concerns. Wildness has been a tool of colonialism from the beginning. What would it be like to have one's homeland intelligently and intricately shaped and cultivated over millennia back to the dawn of time? What would be like to have that homeland called wilderness? The second one's homeland is called wilderness, it's free for the taking because it's not seen as home.
“Wilderness" justifies theft as not theft, it justifies displacement as not displacement, because it doesn't see Indigenous peoples as having a right to that land.
So it is absolutely a tool of colonialism. We included Enrique Salmón's essay in this book, he's a Tarahumaran author and thinker from Copper Canyon in Mexico. He opens by saying there is no word for wild in my language. For him, he talks about how in fact, his people are a keystone species on the land. Through the perpetuation of their livelihood, they're generating biodiversity. The preservation of wilderness is an insult to the innovative invention of the human place in the world emerging from the Tarahumaran people.
So yes, yes, yes, wildness is an incredibly troubling concept. That said, this wilderness debate goes back to the eighties, environmental justice movements and geographers and sociologists have been critiquing wilderness ideology for the reasons I just mentioned now for 30 years, almost 40 years. I agree with those concerns that said, I was finding on the left a division, whether it could be solidarity.
What would a movement look like that brought together a common set of values between those who are in the working lands movement, those in the environmental justice movement, and those in the wilderness movement?
That's a pretty unstoppable force in an age in which a realm is burning and the left is sometimes divided. So we wanted to reclaim, with a lot of Indigenous voices in this book, reclaim and offer the opportunity for Black authors, Latinx authors, international authors from India, Indigenous authors from across Turtle Island to reclaim and redefine that term wildness. What it came down to was I asked Enrique Salmón in a documentary interview, “What would it mean to reclaim the W word, if you will?” He said, “Well, that would mean wildness being the moment of becoming a keystone species.” Right. It gets back to the spiritual violence. You know, our mind is made less wild when we're asked to just consume and buy wild, I mean our creativity.
You look at one of the authors in here is from the south side of Chicago, Michael Howard. He cleaned up a lead-contaminated piece of land, a dump, and transformed it into Eden Place. People should Google Eden Place. A place that restored the prairie that brought redtailed hawks and coyotes into an African-American community of Fuller Park so children could experience wildness. But when you hear Michael talk, he says the most important part of Eden Place is for those members of his community who say we left the south because of what happened to our ancestors in the wild. He says it gives them a safe space to reconnect with the power of a world not completely controlled by humans.
For him, he calls that a cultural healing that goes with the healing of the land, an opportunity to heal from cultural trauma that goes with healing the land. He’s a great Black leader in the Fuller Park community who really sees that wildness, that opportunity to make it about the wild imagination of the Fuller Park community, and reinvent the health of their land in that neighborhood. Right. And so it's that agency, that freedom to design your community from the ground up as you see fit rather than just trying to catch up in a consumer society is violent to everyone.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. So I guess whether people use the word wildness or not, I think there is this deeper shared value of wanting to be able to express our intrinsic desires to be fully ourselves with agency, with our creativity, and to really show up as who we are and who we yearn to be. I realized that I ask a lot of questions with no right answers. I just enjoy talking and thinking through them with brilliant people I look up to such as yourself.
Given that wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will to be a unique expression of life, I wonder and I say this delicately, but I can see some saying that colonization is the wildness of the colonizer fully expressed, unleashed, and unrestrained where they're acting without rules, while neglecting the laws of the land and acting with a disregard of the treaties and trust established between communities. I just want to sort of toss this out there and see where you might take this.
John Hausdoerffer: Absolutely, and that that is brilliant, such a brilliant challenge to the term, because that's the balance of privilege— who gets to express themselves and who is the victim of that person's self-expression. You could absolutely map out the violent history of colonialism as the unjust and violent expression of the autonomy of a very limited group of humans who don't have to think about their moral responsibility to the other because the other has been othered and called wild, by the way.
That's why our Wildness book invited a majority of minority authors. Settler-colonial thinkers are in the minority in the book and we evolved. We decided we don't want to reclaim the word and we've replaced it with the term kinship. That's why we've worked with Robin Wall Kimmerer to put out the new collection called Kinship. And so if you look at that quote from our intro to wildness and think about it, replace wild with kinship each time. I mean, this shows that the maturing of the conversation, I hope, and we can talk about kinship and how that maturing emerges from the critique of wildness.
Kamea Chayne: I just want to say I really appreciated diving into your work because I found that they stirred up a lot of questions within me that I don't even know how to properly articulate, it just sparked deeper curiosities within me, so I'll do my best to try to have this make sense.
But I think when a lot of people think of wild, it's understood as untamed, not under oppressive control that might subvert their agency and again, with the freedom to express and be however they want to be. But in my observation of what people might think of as wild nature, it's not completely ruthless. It's almost as if there's a constant balance of competition and cooperation, a constant dynamic where every being and element is taming one another so that ultimately they fit in better as part of the greater community. And perhaps this speaks to the intricate balance between understanding ourselves as individuals while being in relation with our broader collectives, but I'm curious to hear you deconstruct or add to this train of thoughts on the idea of wildness, kinship, and the forces that still shape and tame what that ends up looking like.
John Hausdoerffer: I want to add one thing, I want to add one thing that you're helping me remember, I have moved on from wanting to call that regenerative process wildness. We now call it kinship. And in fact, in my 2008 book, Catlin's Lament, in the last chapter, I call it The Trouble with Nature because, automatically, nature is a colonialist concept of a place without humans, which justifies removal and separates us. So then I moved from nature and wilderness to wildness as the self-renewal process, and I've now moved with Gavin and Robin from wildness to the kinship.
Once we can see that kinship, once we can see that the city of Toledo, Ohio, recognizes the personhood of Lake Erie and Lake Erie Canal can sue a polluter, once recognized the personhood of the more than human world. By the way, a person is anything that pursues its own good in its own way, so we can have maple persons and lake persons and microbial persons and human persons.
Once we have this shared vision of the equal personhood of all cultures, beings, and systems, then we can build kinship across cultures and species, and through that kinship, then legally and ethically demand that the personhood of all beings and systems is respected.
That's quite a counterpoint to capitalism and it demands that all beings are respected as ancestors. So we've brought kinship in to grow the wildness project and just take out the problematic term.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, well, we are all continually deepening our awareness, so we really appreciate you sharing your reflections on the learnings that you've been through and drawing upon the work of Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, I've come to see the climate crisis as our Earth-self, giving this message that they have their own agency and that the laws of the land cannot be outsmarted and demands that we humble our egos and listen more deeply. So for you, from coediting Kinship, which includes the contributions from so many authors, I really look up to you as teachers. How have you shifted the ways that you understand or look at climate change and where we might turn to for the answers?
John Hausdoerffer: I want to be cautious as a white dude not to go back to the 70s and Mother Earth. You know what I mean? It's problematic seeing the land as gendered because that's tied into histories of domination of land and women at the same time. I will, however, say that the kinship project has helped me see land as family. So in my essay in the kinship collection, for example, and this has to do with climate change...
I have I've sort of long ago, my family and I bought up an old mining claim that we've been restoring and put a year or two on it. It was one solstice eve and I was skiing around the land. The solstice has the longest sunset. It's the shortest day, but the longest sunset as the sun is at the lowest angle. And your pupils expand slowly but surely for the longest time out of any other night of the year. So as your pupils are expanding as slowly as possible and the sun's angle is as low as possible, that twilight is the longest twilight, even though it's the shortest day. I was just out there and everything turned purple off the snow and the trees, and I came along this grove of Douglas fir trees.
And Richard Powers, one of the authors in Kinship, points out that Douglas fir trees share twenty-five percent of DNA with humans. OK. There's definitely a kinship there genetically, but there's more to it than that because when you learn how Doug fir trees function in their community, they're all connected by fungal networks underneath the soil. And when an elder Doug fir Tree dies, it sends all of its nutrients into the system to help all the other Doug fir trees, to help the soil for other species. And that makes the Douglas fir tree a great ancestor. It’s teaching me how to become an elder as I push 50, it’s teaching me about generosity within a system, it's teaching me how to be a good ancestor, and that only comes from kinship.
As the snowpack is being threatened, my opportunity to connect in that way on a winter night is threatened. As temperatures warm, the pine and the spruce in that community are threatened by pine beetles and spruce beetle, threatening the health of the forest around the Doug fir. So it's like this kinship is sort of like the what is your rice question being snowpack for me. Then the kinship with the tree that the snowpack brought me to is not only showing me a new elder to learn from, it's given me yet another personal and playful reason to keep fighting. Because it's about family.
It's about another person who's in my family, that Doug fir. The seller, colonists, loggers, and miners who cut the original generation of this Doug fir trees left behind stumps, some of which are shaped like thrones. My daughters, when they were four and five, called them fairy thrones and would sit in them. They love that forest because of that. These are family members, these trees, and it makes it more joyful to fight for them.
Kamea Chayne: I sort of challenged the binary between selfishness and selflessness because for me, it's about how one defines the self. And I think this is really an invitation to broaden our sense of self and community and who we understand to be our relatives and family. So even if one were to be self-centered, if we took on a more holistic sense of the self, then in essence, we are acting selfishly and selflessly at the same time.
John Hausdoerffer: I love it, I love it, and you know what I mean..
Isn't that the ultimate aspiration of kinship—that everything is part of an ever-expanding humble self?
Not consumed by its territorial self. Right, because settler-colonial cultures have written the self onto the land, but I know what you mean, and there was a Scandinavian philosopher, Arne Næss, who called that deep ecology and he called it self-realization. That we not only intellectually realize what you just said, we realize that the self is everything once we understand ecology, but we also realize in terms of “real-ize.” We make real through our activism that larger self.
At the age of 80, he went to jail for chaining himself to a dam because he thought the river was an extension of himself. He wasn't protesting for a river. He was protesting the larger self. He made real that self. He didn't just “realize” it was part of his self. He made real that larger self through activism. So is like double meaning to real to self-realization is for the expansion of the self into all things being part of the self and also the fight to make that self more real every day.
Kamea Chayne: Really beautiful example and something that I will continue to meditate on. And the last thing is, as a teacher, one of your hard to stick to rules you set for yourself is to not pose questions to which you know the answer. And you note:
"When students sense that the teacher knows the answer, they freeze up or unnecessarily compete against each other in a game of 'guess what the teacher is thinking.' But when no one, including the teacher in the room, knows the answer to the question, then authentic conversation emerges."
I often like to close out in ways that open some loops for our listeners so that these conversations can stay with them and as a reminder for us to maintain our senses of humility and curiosity. So with that, what has been one of those questions you've raised that you may still be pondering today and what has stuck with you from the conversations that emerged from leading into the inquiry with your students?
John Hausdoerffer: I think it's what is your rice? Because every student I listen to has a very different kind of answer. For some students, it's something physical. For me, it was snowpack, right? But for other students, you'll hear them say something like democracy or feminism is a process for them. Their rice is a process. Yet for others, it's a memory. My rice is the day my grandmother taught me how to throw a spiral with a football, and it keeps me outside and active with my kids when I remember that. And so there's these different kinds of answers, and they keep stretching me that there's more to that question than I originally thought.
And secondly, every time I pose that I have to look in the mirror and ask, as a white settler-colonial-descendant, can I even be asking this question, given I don't have Michael's Indigenous connection to his rice? Am I demeaning or diminishing the Indigenous struggle that goes with him fighting for his rights when I make it about skiing? So it's that every time I pose that question, I both learn from the answers and I continue to wrestle with my privilege.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
John Hausdoerffer: Bewilderment by Richard Powers.
Kamea Chayne: What are some personal mottos, mantras or practices you engage with that keep you grounded?
John Hausdoerffer: All ethical paths lead through hypocrisy.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your biggest sources of inspiration right now?
John Hausdoerffer: Snow, and therefore, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Inuit activist who fights for ice in the Arctic.
Kamea Chayne: Dr. John, it's been an honor to have you here. Thank you so much for sharing your time and wealth of wisdom with us. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
John Hausdoerffer: Just let yourself be challenged and stretched and unsettled in the way that I hope I let Kamea do for me today. Incredibly important not to settle in on one sense of one's own answers. And one of my heroes, Socrates' definition of wisdom, was knowing when you don't know.
