Ideas of peace with nature

The idea of peace with nature is rooted in indigenous American concepts of harmony between human communities and the Great Mother, Mother Earth or Pachamama. These found their way into ecology (through Alexander von Humboldt) and social movements (through Simón Bolívar). Bubbling away for 200 years (1820s-2020s). They eventually shaped the Rights of Mother Earth and Buen Vivir movements among Andean and Amazonian peoples, and the Peace with Nature and Pura Vida policies of Costa Rica, which have been very influential since they came from a long process of being creative with debt, biodiversity, bioprospecting, ecotourism, decentralisation, taxes on fossil fuels, and universal environmental education. They also inspired calls for peace with nature by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Approaches to peace with nature

There are four main strands of peace with nature thinking, the common theme of which is that paying attention to nature and obeying her rules are needed for people to live well in viable societies, provided that their members cooperate and that their children are raised to these tasks. This end-point can be reached from one or other (or a blend) of the following four approaches.

• Scientific peace with nature, to guide regulations and businesses in building a clean, green, high-tech, democratic, egalitarian and prosperous society.
• Religious peace with nature, communities where care for nature and wild creatures is inherent to a specific practice within one of the faith traditions.
• Indigenous peace with nature, societies in which nature is seen as the Great Mother, sacred and all-powerful, with human communities needing a deeply lawful, respectful and reciprocal relationship with nature if they are to ‘live well’.
• Red/green peace with nature, reform movements to promote community control of ecosystems through environmental education and local benefit capture, seeing that these things can make societies everywhere happier, safer, fairer, and more prosperous.

Inevitable change

Restoring peace with nature is what we’ve always done when we run out of frontier, and we have to learn how to live more sustainably in a newly-occupied territory. It’s just as natural a strand of human nature as the acquisitive mobility that brought us there in the first place and the overkill prictised by the new arrivals. Traditionally it involves learning about nature in the new locality, agreeing rules for living there, and then raising children accordingly. This is all done automatically as part of the settling-down process. But now we have the challenge that this has to happen quickly and all over the world, in response to global signals.  We’ve never before done a transition like this at a global scale, but then we’ve never had ideas of global justice and Earth systems, or the technologies of global knowledge-sharing. These can make the transition just, smooth and inclusive, while keeping much of our knowledge and technology

Inclusive strength

Our great strengths are that we are all to some extent in communion with one another, and that we all sense more-or-less what has to be done. Thus peace with nature is being restored through every community initiative to promote sustainability, environmental education or ecosystem restoration, through every nature club, climate demo or ecologically-informed vote, and through every work of art, writing or performance that validates it. As well as transforming individual lives and community outcomes, they all contribute to the accelerating Zeitgeist shift that is making it easier and easier for others to get involved.

Julian Caldecott