Respecting and falling in love with Mother Earth, ft. Bruce Pascoe

How do we lead with love?

Loving greetings ~

A few months ago, I shared a conversation with a friend that frustrated me. They said they would always vote against injustice and vote for socially and environmentally progressive policies, but they thought the call to dismantle and overhaul existing systems was too radical.

After about an hour of discussing a variety of issues — including historic patterns and vicious cycles of the abuse of power, how different forms of injustices are being compounded, and how the systems that drive many of these crises are rooted in particular worldviews, values, and relationalities — they said to me, “Okay, all these things feel very philosophical, but I just want to know, what does this mean in terms of what we do and what policies we support?”

I felt like I was being asked to reduce everything I had unlearned and then learned across nearly a decade into a neat little summary. So I felt stumped.

If they do not have the heart to ask deeper questions about the why, the how-things-came-to-be, and the alternative ways of seeing and relating to the world, then how will they come to understand the subversive composition of my dreams?

Here, I recall the multiple times when I had asked Indigenous authors and leaders about their thoughts on policy change. I don’t think it is a coincidence that most of them reacted with an emotional sigh or even a bit of a chuckle — as if to say, “Where do I even begin to address how much more there is to this?”

Dr. Christine Winter (Ngati Kahungunu ki Wairoa, Ngati Pākeha), for example, told me: “To try and resolve the environmental problems that we’re facing from within the same… frameworks that have created the problem just can’t work. The Western world needs to be rethinking the way it approaches what it is to be a human being on this planet, and what relationships are important.”

Graphic via A Growing Culture

So amidst COP29 happening right now in Baku, Azerbaijan, where global energy policymakers and executives are convening to discuss our future climate agendas based on reductive questions of emissions vs. sequestration, techno-solutionism, and the expansion of green capitalism, today, I invite us to take a breather here from that noise… and return, first, to what it might mean to fall in love and be in love with Mother Earth.

warmly, green dreamer kaméa

P.S., If you’re curious what I think about these climate conferences, you can check out my past 3-part series from COP26, as the same takeaways mostly remain:

1. Smokes and Mirrors

2. A crisis in form

3. Earth needs therapy

Episode artwork by Em Nguyen; episode song feature Blue Lake by Forest Veil

“We need policies and plans, but the first step is to fall in love with the ground, the world, the water, the air, and the clouds.”

This is a quote from my most recent Green Dreamer podcast interview with Bruce Pascoe, a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man best known for his book Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture.

But the success of his book was not all rainbows and butterflies. It came with backlash from people who felt challenged by his findings that his Aboriginal Australian ancestors were not simple “hunter-gatherers who lived on empty, uncultivated land” — but were peoples who actively engaged in managing land for agriculture.

If you’re interested, we go a lot deeper into questions of credibility, evidence, and how knowledge is shaped in our full conversation. But I wanted to leave you here with his reminders of the grounding we might receive from tuning into the land.

“The pain was really difficult to deal with because I'm a very private person, I'm a very quiet person. I'm not a talker, I live alone mostly. I live remotely. So I don't have a lot of ‘society’. I like it that way. I've always lived in the bush.

And so the thing about all that difficult time was, I was living in the Country. I was living beside the river, swimming in the river, eating food from the land, I had birds laying on my shoulder and my head talking to me. So even though there was this sort of modern-world pain, I had this old-world solace going on around me. 

And a lot of Aboriginal peoples say, ‘how did you survive all that bullshit, that attack?’ I said, ‘Country.’

When I lay down at night, Country wants to talk to me. A bird came through the window, fondled my hair and talked to me. How could I last in pain when I had that love? I survived because I was in the Country. Country teaches us everything. This is what we have to do.” – Bruce Pascoe via Green Dreamer EP438.

Tap in to our full conversation to learn more about Aboriginal Australian agriculture, land practices of working with fire, maintaining respect for and falling in love with Mother Earth, and more ~

(You can listen to this conversation here or via Spotify or any podcast app, and view our transcript and episode resources here.)

Invitations into reflection:

1. Allow yourself for a moment to slow down and tune in to the terrain around you — noticing the colors, textures, season, weather, scents, soundscape, and diversity of life from the microbial to the collective levels. In what ways, shapes, or forms do you sense love percolating across your community?

2. What are some ways that you experience love and care from your community and Mother Earth, that you would like to acknowledge?

3. How would you like to express your love and care more intentionally to the land and more-than-human world where you are?

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With my loving gratitudes ~