Brian McLaren connects our love of nature with our grief and anger when it’s treated without respect and care:
Through the years, I’ve been involved in a lot of different areas of activism and so often what sustains us and motivates us in our activism work is anger. That’s legitimate because wherever we see injustice, we ought to be angry. But anger … can toxify our motivations if anger is all that’s driving us. That’s why I think it helps often for us to trace our anger back to grief, as Father Richard often says, and then to trace our grief to love. It’s because we love something that we feel grief when it’s threatened. In fact, one of my favorite definitions of grief is that grief is love persisting when what we love is passing away. What you love, you try to save, and that’s why so many of us see the natural world around us with such tenderness, with such grief, sometimes with such anger, because what we love is passing away. [1]
Author Lydia Wylie-Kellermann describes her approach to helping her children fall in love with a place:
When I think about parenting in this moment, I often think about the words from the Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum, who said, and I paraphrase, “You can’t save a place you don’t love. You can’t love a place you don’t know. And you can’t know a place you haven’t learned.” [2]
I think that is some of the most important and radical work we can do as parents of young kids: help them learn the land that holds them. By doing so we are nurturing them to fall in love with this place—and ultimately that love may lead to imagination and action for climate justice….
So we lie down on our bellies and watch the milkweed disappear as the caterpillar grows fat. We wander the neighborhood in search of snacks in the form of wild grape vines, tiger lilies, and the roots of Queen Anne’s lace. We throw lavish funerals for the fallen sparrow and delight when the opossum comes to visit…. We let mud get between our toes and we climb the apple trees. With each moment, we are learning this place. We are all falling in love….
Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit peace activist now a beloved ancestor, once said “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Standing in one place and not moving is a part of the work. And a beautiful piece that leads to knowledge and intimacy and relationship. Resistance to climate destruction can be slow work of being present to a place in the face of a transient, fast-paced world.
Fall in love.
None of us are going to save this planet alone. But we can shift patterns of destruction in our own ecosystem. If we learn the place and fall madly in love, how could we not interfere in the destruction and make change? [3]
References:
[1] Adapted from Brian McLaren, “Seeing Nature as a Lover (Part Two) with Miriam Smith,” Learning How to See, season 6, ep. 5 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2024), podcast. Available as MP3 audio download and PDF transcript.
[2] Baba Dioum to the IUCN General Assembly, New Delhi, 1968: “In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.”
[3] Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2024), 23, 27.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, love and reeds (detail), 2021, photo, Los Angeles. Click here to enlarge image. We love nature as a friend, holding it gently and developing a relationship through our bodies.
Story from Our Community:
All my life, I have found solace in nature. My altar became the woods and the stars at night. I [had an] … abusive mother and although much of my life has been filled with grace, I still struggle with the physical and mental effects of trauma. But God makes everything beautiful in its own time. I am now beginning to realize that I am grateful for my trauma. It keeps me close to God’s ever-present love, and the acceptance that life is always both/and.
—Beth M.
