Anthropogenic climate change threatens all of Earth’s species and systems, both human and more-than-human. Further, climate change exposes the limitations inherent to the colonial system of land-as-property. To reduce land to a commodity with a tradeable value, and thus enable it to be bought and sold, capitalist systems must first divide it into discrete, self-contained properties. Each of these properties must further be assigned a function — agricultural, residential, industrial — through which the system can grant it an identity and a monetary value.
Yet land is not monofunctional, nor can any part of it be cleanly separated from another. The Earth, and the biotic and abiotic systems which comprise it, are dynamic, interconnected, and adaptive. Anthropogenic climate change exacerbates this reality, as once-imperceptibly slow climactic shifts become more sudden and severe. Throughout the past decade in the Fraser Valley, I have watched seasonal weather become more extreme and less predictable than I would’ve thought possible as a child, and seen both native and introduced species suffer catastrophic losses as a result. Our summers are hotter than the summers of my childhood, routinely surpassing thirty degrees. Our winters are colder, our springs and autumns shorter, and the once-constant temperate rainforest drizzle now comes only occasionally.
Colonial capitalism is unable to conceptualize a holistic solution to the threat climate change poses, because capitalism understands land as a rigid and divisible entity, whose health is measurable only through its sustained economic productivity. Thus, the preferred capitalist solution to the harms of over-exploitation is to shift to new modes of exploitation, thus reimagining the ways in which we use the land but not our relationship to it. Listening to the Land offers an alternative response. This response will not halt anthropogenic climate change, nor reverse the damages it has caused, but it can help human beings to better adapt to a changing world and develop reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human systems around us.
Listening to the Land is about developing reciprocal relationships with the land, its systems, and the beings that share it with it. To listen properly, we must shift the way that we think about land, moving from exploitation to observation, and then to reciprocity. Observation involves deep and careful attentiveness, not only to the qualities of the land itself, but to the relationships that are present upon it – including our own – and to the ways in which they are shifting. The land is a composite entity, made up of more than what we choose to cultivate. The ecological landscape of a farm is not simply the crops we plant and harvest. Equally important are the soil, the weather, the weeds and wild plants, the animals, and their relationships to one another.
Reciprocity means being aware of how our own actions sustain, influence, or disrupt, and choosing to take actions which nourish the land, support its resiliency, and attend to its needs. These needs are local and evolving, as is the land itself; thus, there is no single model for ethical stewardship. On a farm, reciprocal stewardship could mean rotating nitrogen-fixing crops, maintaining soil microbiomes, and monitoring the health of wild plant species. In a city, it might mean planting flowers for pollinating insects, building community gardens to support local food systems, and creating shade spaces to protect humans and animals during heat waves.
Our climate is less static than it has been in millennia, and its patterns will grow ever less predictable in the coming years. If we are to survive it, our own lifestyles and relationships to the world around us must grow more fluid as well. Learning how to observe the Earth’s signals and respond to them is a lifelong task, but each step works to create resiliency through interdependency. As the Earth systems we once took for granted grow less stable and reliable, the ongoing lessons of Listening to the Land become ever more critical.
