“The horizon might be brighter if we could only see the interconnectedness of our world and, in beginning to understand it, we might be less likely to destroy it.”

~~ Nora Bateson ~~

There’s a big, gorgeous field close to my house that’s brimming with Spring daisies and buttercups. It’s a photographer’s dream. Seeing it makes me smile to remember making daisy chains when I was a child, and holding buttercups under my friends’ chins to see if they liked butter! Sweet bits of Nature lore make their way into human association.

This field has a lengthy association with (settler) humans. 160 years ago, it was one of several blocks purchased from the crown by wealthy colonist land speculators, sold at a loss, then purchased and sold many times for various farming purposes and logged of all its virgin trees. It’s been included in a local park for the past 50 years. It’s a familiar propensity, this stamping human value on things.

I’m reminded of the decades long battle that ensued over a proposed year-round ski resort in the Jumbo Valley, at the heart of the Purcell Mountains in British Columbia. On one side of the battle stood the European land developer who envisioned his personal legacy in the form of a ‘world-class’ tourist destination in a spectacular wilderness setting. On the other side, stood environmental advocates and the Ktunaxa First Nation, determined to protect the natural landscape; one of the last remaining wildlife corridors between Canada and the United States, and sacred home to grizzly bears whose dreams, say the Ktunaxa, travel to Jumbo mountain during their winter sleep. To this day, that valley remains undeveloped.

Paradigms collide, issues pit neighbour against neighbour and create deep, lasting rifts within households and communities. Yet covid, climate change, biodiversity loss and war in Europe have made it perfectly clear how interconnected our world really is; and the importance of cooperation.

Can we look at ourselves in the mirror and dissolve this false sense of separation between humans and the more-than-human-world? That would be a true paradigm shift!

The work of Dr. Richard A. Watson, Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, furthers my thinking in this regard. Dr. Watson draws on multiple diverse disciplines that highlight schisms in the evolution theory of ‘survival of the fittest’, and natural selection; theory that leads self-interest and competition to become social norms. His work builds a wider lens for what is missing from contemporary scientific understanding and offers a new worldview that shows how the relationship between things is actually the primary catalyst that energizes evolution.

“Our work shows that when these relationships are formed slowly over many experiences, as they are in nature, the organisation of these relationships has a wisdom greater than the parts. The new options they present cause self-interested individuals to act in better alignment with collective interest. A word people use for relationships that cause us to serve something other than ourselves is love. Not the sentimental or brain-chemistry kind; the kind that does real work – the kind that makes us part of something greater than we are as individuals.

This offers a scientific framework that naturalises an incentive to ask ‘What do we know of each other?’ rather than ‘What’s in it for me?’. And perhaps alleviates an eagerness to exploit one another and the planet.”

~~ Richard Watson ~~

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Dr. Watson hits the nail on the head by questioning how things would be different if we re-conceptualized our approach to the human and more-than-human-world in terms of inter-relationships.

That is to say, the vitality of living systems is dependent upon the relationships within and between each system. Nora Bateson dives further into this critical element of understanding living systems.

In her book Small Arcs of Larger Circles, Nora Bateson points out that we can never be separated from the ecologies that we live within, including those ecologies of family, jobs, landscapes, etc.; all are processes taking place on multiple levels within and between all the parts and wholes that intersect with one another. It’s messy, to be sure. In short, she is saying that life is operating on vastly different premises than humans have yet learned to recognize. New approaches, rather than more of the old, are called for.

“The problems that are arising are the result(s) of the fragmented way that we assess the world. The underlying metaphors of our culture hold true to the logic of industrial causation and mechanized interaction. Life is not like that. From ecological overshoot, to economic volatility, to human trafficking and rampant racism, there is a recurring theme of exploitation. Could our habit of separating the world into parts, which we imagine gear together to function as wholes, be contributing to the segregation of ideas, people, ecologies, and more?”

~~ Nora Bateson ~~

A worldview sourced in relationship sees this field of daisies and buttercups *interbeing with grasses, bees, trees, soil, sunlight, mice, hawks, childhood lore, an unusually wet Spring and even with colonial settlement. It serves as a pattern of plant and animal life in alignment with the way life really is. Borrowing a word coined by Nora Bateson – this daisy field is a study of mutual relations learning together over time, i.e. a proper *symmathesy.

* Symmathesy: Proposed by Nora Bateson, symmathesy is a new word to replace “system” – it refers specifically to living systems and to their capacity for interacting with, and learning from, one another. 

*Interbeing: The term coined by Master Thich Nhat Hanh referring to all things being intrinsically related to one another.

Paradigm: An example serving as a pattern. e.g. survival of the fittest and natural selection are a dominant pattern (paradigm) on which to build theories about how the world really is and our human place within that world. The changing organisation of the relationships between things (by induction, not selection), posed by Dr. Watson, offers a different pattern (paradigm) for how the world really is and our human place within that world.

Worldview: The fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual’s or society’s knowledge and point of view.