Last week, metaphorically speaking, I wrote a post about Using Martin Buber’s I and Thou to better understand how we engage with both the environment and other people. There, I described the “I-it” relationship, where the I’s primary relation to the it is in terms of outcomes and experiences, taking from the it what it can without necessarily giving anything back. It is the very objectification of nature itself. The I-it relation, I argued, is unable to push the average person to giving up things that give their lives meaning and comfort for a more sustainable world.
What, then, is the I-Thou relationship? In it’s most extreme, impossible. The I-Thou is non-describable at it’s very heart, the relation in which I and Thou engage with each other, ignoring any contexts and knowledge from the outside and ignoring categorization of the Thou. In it’s very essence, it is a transcendental experience. The best way to sort of get close to the picture of what Buber is describing here is the flow state, in which thought itself erodes away in moments of great focus.
So, how does any of this make sense for us in the context of sustainability? It seems as though I’m grasping at straws. This is correct, but also, If Martin Luther King can invoke Buber in regards to segregation, I might as well try for sustainability.
The piece we read on Watershed as Common-place by Caroline Druschke is the one I think that highlights what I’m thinking of here. There, she describes the ambiguity of the watershed as a thing that can hold many symbolic meanings. This quote displays it excellently:
As I suggest here, the watershed’s slipperiness (its ability to slip between
abstract community and particular place) marks it with the capacity to change rhetorics, selves, and, ultimately, landscapes
She spends the paper describing how the identification of farmers with the watershed improved the sense of community and interest in sustainable practices. The watershed, a nebulous concept that defines itself differently within each persons relation to it, becomes our Thou. The farmers are engaged with their environment at a direct level, unable to easily categorize their relation to it.
I think this is the approach needed more in our outreach. Last post, I complained about the outcome-based approach most mainstream sustainabilty projects aim to meet: Look, they say, and see what the future looks like. We objectify nature as a tool for human proliferation, categorizing it as a thing that must be protected only in relation to it’s ability to keep our society afloat. Boiled down to this admittedly over-simplified terms, there’s no difference between sustainability campaigns and oil company propaganda about human innovation.
How should we speak about nature then? I’ve already admitted that the I-Thou relation is functionally indescribable, broken with even the slightest hint of classification or experience. I really think that we need to break away from an outcomes based approach and enter an approach of co-relationship. To get the masses to see that nature is a thing worth changing their lives for, we need to get them engaged with nature on a more even level. There is a feeling when being in the woods for long enough that one gets whence their brain becomes tired of thoughts, when the knowledge of what the woods are is overshadowed by the feeling of what they are. I think that is the state of mind that will make people choose sustainability over comfort.
How do we do it?
I have no good answers here. The best idea I can come up with is to copy what the government agencies Druschke wrote about did; create a communal relation between one’s local surroundings and oneself. This most likely requires grass-root advocacy and engagement, rather than top-down approaches. It can’t be done on twitter or at the Whitehouse; the engagement requires personally reaching each and every person willing to engage. Creating community around local parks or gardens might be a great way to accomplish this. Unlikely, but perhaps restructuring political boundaries to reflect the natural world might get people thinking in that sort of way. The fundamental idea remains roughly the same, either way: People care about things they are engaged with on a deep and personal level. They must connect with nature as the thou, a partner who stands in relation, rather than the it which is only to be experienced and used.