A Search for the Meaning of Human Ecology
Do you feel like you live inside societal and cultural systems you don’t fully understand, systems that are powerful and technologically advanced, yet not suited to help people feel connected or keep our lands and waters healthy? Too often, attempts to explain why so many people feel this way are incomplete, abstract, or distant, leaving us with the sense that it’s all beyond our influence.
What follows is a practical attempt to make the bigger picture more visible, by exploring a basic ecological reality that helps us understand human life, and why the practice of seeing the whole can be so orienting and empowering.
This also carries much of the spirit of what we’re developing at Awakening Lands through the Returning Home community practice.
Starting With a View Outside Ourselves
Most people today live from an individualized view of the world. We may be surrounded by other people, but do we feel our interdependence?
We grow up with stories of heroes and strong leaders, of personal struggle and overcoming. We grow up wanting to be like the characters in these stories, to become something ourselves. The modern world reinforces this. It enables us to make choices on our own. It pays us to solve problems on our own. It encourages us to carry responsibility on our own.
It’s no wonder that most of us come to see the world from the inside of a single life.
But this way of seeing makes it harder to understand the larger systems we are part of. It also clouds our understanding of human ecology - how we connect to each other and to the rest of life.
In a world shaped to see from the individual first, attempts to perceive whole human relational systems can feel vague, messy, complicated, and unfamiliar.
So let’s begin in an ecological system that is intact, one where we can enter as an observer to feel a whole ecology more clearly.
Let’s begin with a forest.
Walk With Your Imagination Into a Forest
Take a moment to arrive. Feel your feet on the soil. Listen to all of the sounds.
Once you are there, you may notice that it has layers. Tall trees form the canopy. Beneath them are smaller trees in the understory. There are bushes, grasses, mosses, insects, mammals, reptiles, and a living soil below it all. Everything has a role and function that connects it into a relationship with the whole.
Once you really settle in and observe thoughtfully, the cliché that “everything is connected” becomes something you can feel.
Sunlight offers energy that is transformed through photosynthesis, then distributed. Water is slowed, spread, and stored in various ways. Nutrients pass from plant to soil and from soil back to plant again in a continual cycle of life, death, and decay.
There is no isolation in a healthy forest, it is all about relationships.
Thriving…
It is interconnection that makes a forest so capable.
That’s why it can recover after storms. When a grandmother tree falls, the next generation is already growing into the light.
A forest can support an extraordinary diversity of life at once. In fact its strength comes from its diversity of life being held together in many ways. This is why forests can last far longer than we can comprehend. The Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, Australia is estimated to be 180 million years old. Sit with that for a moment.
Such longevity comes from many parts adapting together over time, within shared conditions that support life.
This is what a thriving living system is like.
But When Relationships Break…
…the system weakens.
When too many trees are removed at once, the soil, which forms slowly over generations, washes away. When too many species are removed, others that depended on the same web of interdependence can no longer survive. For what remains, survival takes a lot more effort.
Life does not fail because it gives up. It fails because the conditions and relationships that support it are no longer present.
The Individual Lens
Now think back to how the modern world trains us into individuality.
This way of seeing and being has its benefits and comforts. It allows freedom and initiative. But without being clearly a part of something greater, we are incomplete, like trees standing on their own.
When we see and act first from the individual level, the social systems we are part of fade into the background. We are of course never truly on our own, but our interdependencies are less felt, less valued, and the quality of our relationships weakens.
The whole becomes something we can’t think about clearly, and don’t really experience. Without that experience, ecological thinking can begin to feel unfamiliar or abstract, because it asks us to perceive in a way we rarely practice.
Can We Now Think about Human Ecology More Clearly?
So how do we think about human ecology while most of us experience life in isolation?
Seeing an intact forest ecology and the foundational role of interdependence gives us grounding from which to ask: “What would it require for humans to be more whole?”
The interdependence that allows a forest to thrive makes the ill-health in our relational webs more clear. It helps us see both what is missing and where to begin imagining a healthier human ecology.
If we step back and consider what such an ecology would require, some foundational patterns come into view. At a minimum, a healthy human ecology seems to require:
Belonging, so people feel connected to a specific whole and can feel it
Collective sense-making, so the whole can adapt and learn together
Shared purpose and meaning, so action aligns in a common direction
Continuity, so the whole renews and persists across time and generations
Connection to a place, so human systems are part of larger living systems
Why This May Still Feel Abstract
Even with a clearer conceptual picture, our fragmented experience in the modern world can leave this feeling theoretical.
How could it be otherwise?
How could we think deeply about the human forms of interconnection like belonging, meaning, shared purpose, and collective sense-making without ever having been inside a “social field” where those things are truly alive? Most of us lack the necessary shared experience and reference.
Could this partly be why conversations about culture, systems, or society so often feel academic or removed from daily life?
The Missing Prerequisite, Practicing Reconnecting the Whole
Until we experience shared attention, belonging, and lived interrelatedness, our ideas about human ecology will remain incomplete.
In our modern world, normal circumstances rarely lead us there. What is required are the spaces and practices that intentionally bring people into shared attention and open us to greater depths of connection.
When we do, listening deepens, we begin to notice things that are missing, we notice behavior patterns that weaken and strengthen the whole, and we feel healthier possibilities ahead. It can quickly become clear how orienting and empowering relationships truly are. Both individual and collective actions instinctively become supportive to the whole.
This way of seeing was normal for much of human history. The question before us now is how to relearn it under very different conditions, and for it to become common once again.
We Then Sense Better Questions
As we practice reconnecting and become familiar with what that experience is like, new questions around the meaning of human ecology naturally come into view.
This is because the practice of reconnecting makes our place within larger living systems like watersheds, ecosystems, and the biosphere more clearly felt. Long-term care begins to feel practical rather than abstract.
We then naturally sense better and more specific questions about how to grow into ecologically attuned ways of organizing societies, of organizing as people in places.
From our experience in working with small community groups to practice restoring shared attention and lived interrelatedness, we can say this much with confidence: it is meaningful, enriching, demanding, and inspiring.
It opens a shared exploration into how we might live more coherently with one another and with the living systems we depend on, an exploration that unfolds over time, and one we can only go on together.
So let’s go.
This exploration is part of the ongoing work at Awakening Lands, finding ways communities restore shared meaning, belonging, and long-term care for the places they call home. We continue to draw many lessons through the ongoing Returning Home community practice.
A brief note on lineage:
Through our work developing the Returning Home practice, specifically through place-based participatory storytelling and cultivating spaces for collective reflection and action, we arrived at a sequence of experience and learning that we later recognized maps closely to the framework of Theory U as articulated by Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute. We’ve found their language to be a clear articulation of the patterns and sequence we encountered through practice. You may have noticed the similar language used above. We’re grateful to draw on it to improve our own communication, and hope that doing so also builds shared understanding and evermore common language.
Please share this with someone you feel would somehow benefit from reading it.
Interesting read! I’m taking a course on Human Ecology right now and this has intrigued me. Amazing work!