Our Need for the Earth, Our Need for Each Other
By Molly Jenkins,
The winter horizon glowered at me with reddish hues, doubly reflected in the passing glare of car headlights. I shuddered and clasped my bare feet on the brick steps.
My insufficient heart lay open, judged, and damned by the cold yawning dusk. My baby needed me.
I didn’t want him to need me.
My son, who is a toddler now, is intimately dependent on me. He was even more dependent on me last winter, when he was a baby with colic. Before motherhood, I liked being needed, being necessary. I liked the idea of motherhood, of being able to fix problems and comfort little ones. I was not prepared to be wanted or needed in circumstances where I could do nothing, fix nothing. I was not prepared to be unwaveringly present. I was not prepared for that kind of radical and exhausting dependence on me.
I am in turn, dependent on my husband, and dependent on my own mother in ways that would shock and horrify my independence-craving high school self. My mother graciously retired and moved in to help take care of my son, so that my husband and I could continue to work. My son is deeply known and loved by his grandmother. My mother is deeply gratified by being so present in his life.
Even before she came to live with us, friends graciously brought us food and spent time with us, even if it meant sitting with us while the baby cried for hours. I am now tremendously aware of how dependent we all are on each other. That first year, I needed solidarity as much as that little baby desperately needed me––even when it failed to bring immediate results, even when it failed to solve the problem.
So why do we hold autonomy as a fundamental and supreme trait in contemporary discourse, to the detriment of acknowledging interdependence or the welfare of others? Autonomy is often touted as both a desirable and inherent trait of human beings. In his book In Defense of Anarchy, Robert Paul Wolff defined the autonomous man as being “not subject to the will of another”; before him Immanuel Kant defined autonomy similarly. In The Theory and Practice of Autonomy, Gerald Dworkin asserts that a view of autonomy as paramount to other traits is problematic, and that such a view will tend toward “intellectually imperialistic” ends. We seek to assert our own wills, independent of the wills of another, and achieve “real” independence, “real” autonomy, “real” liberty.
But the nature of physical realities and their constraints prevent us within reason from accomplishing autonomy perfectly. Modern man has placed undue emphasis on the supremacy of autonomy. This fixation on the supremacy of autonomy prevents us from a natural and normal relational dependence on each other and on nature. Only when natural disasters occur are we reminded of and subject to the will of natural, physical laws and their metaphysical implications.
The idea of dependence of the individual on the will of others is not a new one, but it finds new life in Leah Libresco Sargeant’s recent essay on dependence (rather than autonomy) as the default nature of living things. She does not argue for paternalism, for violent coercion, but for a mutual and self-giving interdependence. I would argue that this interdependence naturally extends to our relationship with the environment as much as it does to other people.
Perhaps, it comes as no surprise that we undervalue our dependence on the Earth for critical resources: food, water, shelter, even beauty. Aldo Leopold, the father of ecological conservation, wrote in his Sand County Almanac, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” Intermediates allow us to be removed from the direct sourcing of our food, water, and shelter. It is easier, then, to hide from physical and spiritual realities, like the tenuousness of our quality of life and our dependence on the Earth, let alone other people.
As Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, pointed out in an essay for Plough Quarterly magazine, “Physical reality actually turns out to matter; it can’t be forced to compromise.” We are dependent on physical realities. When something ceases to be a reality in the physical realm, its absence is felt. What happens when a tree is abruptly removed? Do you know?
When a tree is removed, an entire community of microbes, fungi, insects, birds, and other creatures is displaced and destroyed. This community is intimately dependent on a single tree for food, shelter, even water. When a tree is removed, a child’s favorite hideaway is removed. A tree can be a thread, keeping a person together when other threads are unraveling. When a tree is removed, life is unraveled. The unraveling matters, and it matters above and beyond the approximate market value of the CO2 that won’t be sequestered by the absent tree.
Like Aldo Leopold, I believe that our manner of treating physical reality has additional spiritual consequences. If we abuse and abase the good green earth, we abuse and abase our mothers, our children, ourselves. When we treat resources as disposable and replaceable, we treat relationships as disposable and replaceable. Our habits of being matter and carry over across relationships. Consider how a friend may speak inquiringly of how a suitor treats his family members, his previous girlfriends––these relationships bear on how he will conduct himself in future relationships. His habits will carry over. Similarly, our habits in our prayer lives carry over into how we conduct ourselves in our day-to-day. The idea that our habits inform how we relate to ourselves and others is a fundamentally Aristotelian idea, and it springs up in every discipline from theology to neuroscience. Javier Bernacer and Jose Ignacio Murillo illustrated this idea concisely for their 2014 paper in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience:
The cornerstone that underlies the Aristotelian theory of action is the following: when an agent does or makes something, there is an effect not only on the receiver of the action or the product made, but also—and more importantly—on the agent...Since human actions are driven and controlled by cognition, each new action leaves a footprint in the agent as a kind of learning: a disposition to face further similar situations in a certain way, which includes the interpretation of that situation and the possible ways of dealing with it.
When we assert our independence from the natural world, we assert that we are not dependent, although the natural world may dictate our very life or death. We are dependent on nature yielding in our favor and no amount of cutting-edge technology can help us get around that––it is, fundamentally, a relational problem.
We need to accept dependence as our default state in order to surmount the spiritual and ecological crisis at hand. We are tremendously dependent on the wellbeing of the Earth and on each other. We are not unfathomably free from physical reality. We are not perfectly free––we cannot pretend that our independence is perfect, or paramount, or even virtuous. Our imperfect freedom is not something to be mourned either. Radical interdependence opens us up to radical gratitude: “happiness doubled by wonder,” as G.K. Chesterton defined it in A Short History of England.
Independence will not help us achieve sainthood, and it certainly won’t help us get through the day when resources are strapped. In allowing ourselves to be dependent beings, we may begin to foster a culture where we are not alienated from the earth, from others, from ourselves––the relationships that matter. Then, we may begin to value the common good, and so value our common home.
That winter night, and countless other nights, I breathed. I asked Mary to be with me so that I could be with my son. I clung to her like a life raft. I clung to the love of my friends, my mother, my spouse like a life raft. I turned around, took another breath, and went back inside and held my son as he screamed, as holding and rocking him seemingly did nothing for what felt like hours and eons. I relinquished my independence and rocked my son, holding the hands of my mother and husband, praying in hushed tones. A peaceful silence eventually washed over us, we three together praying. Resilience was born in our home that night, and I was all the more grateful for the home we forged. What crises could we weather if we clung to the rock of the earth with the same gratitude? How willingly would we yield in our smaller conflicts, our smaller moments of selfishness with the earth and its resources? Cultivating a habit of sacrificial gratitude, in lieu of a habit of disposability, may be critical to restoring our relationship with the land.
The memory has a happy ending: colic has an end, and bears no impact on the later happiness, resilience, and tenacity of a child. It was the love that was there for me, that I could be there for my son, that had meaning. I have since navigated a million conflicts that felt minor by comparison and found abundant patience I hardly thought possible before. In the moment, though, I merely existed––clenched and clinging, grasped and clung-to––dependent.
