From talking about nature, to talking with nature 

If we only talk about nature, we do not enter into a relationship with it. That happens when we approach bees and birds as brothers, streams and snakes as sisters, meadows as mothers, forests as father, or vice versa. The point is that the more-than-human creatures are not objects out there. They are more like relatives, like kin. When we address them as such then we enter into relationship with our relatives. From an I - it, to an I - Thou relation, to use Martin Buber’s powerful phrase.  

This is not new, of course. Indigenous peoples, as well as artists and almost all children at some point in their life, have spoken to what mainstream culture has silenced as “physical objects”, as “resources” or the abstract, universalistic phrase of “animals.” Such words only serve to reproduce the distance between “us humans” and “them non-humans”, as objects without soul, that are separate from us, and do not have intelligence nor autonomy. Hence “we” are freed to control “them”.  

Speaking as if Mother Earth was listening … because she is   

So, what if…  

something is there; 

we feel it between us, as a presence. 

A good way to start thinking about nature . . . talk to it, 

talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds 

as to our relatives. (— TȞÁȞČA HUŠTÉ, John Fire Lame Deer, in GoodFeather) 

I was brought up in a standard Western, Norwegian school system, a middle-class family, and by science itself to distrust and dismiss so much of my “smaller” or subtle feelings and experiences. Sometimes I heard that “It doesn’t matter” if there are plastics thrown on the street, that deep ocean trawlers coming into harbor is none of your business, or I got the feeling that “I shouldn’t feel that way” about all the unnecessary wastefulness. We’ve also been taught to believe in our sense of lack, of being too little to matter. On top of such cultural norms that are absorbed and socialised from direct relations in the dominant culture, now increasingly come the distractions of social media; we’re notified maybe 30 times a day, and relate to the world through small, flat screens rather than direct embodied sensuous immersion in it. With that, the capacity to experience deeply and directly the aliveness of the Other is undermined. We have in our bone marrow a long-standing cultural training in separation. Of the isolated human individual, apart from the underground world of fungi, or of raspberries, from seagulls or mountains. 

But whether we find ourselves in the city or in the countryside, the same type of non-separated, connected, entangled way-of-being is still inescapable. If such words and phrases sound strange to you, it is for a reason. For it requires - not just complaining in general terms about how the modern world is “caught in the story of separation”, and then going on with language-as-usual. Rather it requires doing something much more difficult: Struggling with speaking differently, so that this living-with is precisely expressed in our everyday, working, business and political lives. From a relational participatory perspective all being takes place in some continuum between ‘being for oneself’ and ‘being as reciprocal expression of the whole’. And we are both at once. As Thích Nhất Hạnh invited us to understand by introducing the word interbeing to the West:

“To be is to interbe. You cannot be by yourself alone.”  

Business and management-speech however, the way it's taught at Business Schools and universities, are currently very far from this.  

The simplest way I’ve found to express the difference is this: We come from a western tradition that speaks about nature. Now we need to speak with, not just the all-encompassing “nature”, but stay open for dialogue with each creature and critter, thing and tech, mosses and mountains, at particular places. They are longing to be included in our exclusively-human conversations. They are waiting for us to start listening. How can we otherwise start regenerating theirs and our lives, our inter-being? This is the rock-bottom (ontological) requirement of a regenerative approach, as distinct from conventional sustainability: start listening to the myriad beings that make up our broader life-world. Our elder brothers can become inspiration and guides, if this seems like an outlandish and impossible task at first.  

Impossible, unless you insist, of course, to be that thinking wandering and individual subject in search for control over objects. To indigenous people this western, modern and separate way-of-being has always seemed threatening and incomprehensible (often called WEIRD). So it’s now up to us “moderns”: In order to understand “nature”, or the beyond-the-human-worlds, we have to dive in heart-first into deeper relations with fungi, soil and streams, trees, bees and birds. That requires as much attention and earnest work as any other meaningful human relationship in our lives. The big challenge in the coming decades is how to implement that in organisations too, in strategy, leadership and accounting.