By Nic Caddell
My EcoFaith internship took place during a period of massive destabilization, change, confusion, wounding, and transformation at the personal, interpersonal, communal, and public levels. I became part of the core EcoFaith team just after moving to a new place—a transition in which virtually everything about my vocational, social, and structural circumstances changed in ways that were disorienting and left me grieving. At the same time, the national and global crisis of Trump’s re-election was rapidly playing out. The timeliness and poignancy of receiving an internship that supported my civic engagement, creative resistance, and the ability to support alternative (and underground) systems of care and resilience, could not have been more obvious.
EcoFaith’s Seven Practices for Awakening Leadership were a structure that supported me and gave me direction in my efforts. Their invitations—to spiritually ground, build relationships, share stories, engage in mutual mentorship, act together, make space for reflection and power analysis, and restore balance—guided the programs I co-created. They also helped me learn the social ecology of the community I’d landed in, and the broader ecology of the ecoregion.
The leaders and land I collaborated with during my internship helped me explore varied ways to embody the practices. Their teachings have instructed me in what it can look like to organize our communities around the purpose of collective healing, and what it can look like to collaborate in creating and restoring (and restor(y)ing) mutually sustaining lifeways.
My exploration of what it means to embody leadership for eco-social-spiritual transformation and healing, also coincided with my exploration of a severely burned area near my home. Eleven years out from the burn, the site—which is about the size of Hong Kong—is thick with waxy ceanothus bushes, fields of fireweed, and hillsides of bunchgrass, cheatgrass, and lupine. Woodpeckers make a regular racket against the charred and bleached snags that stand sentinel over the now un-canopied landscape. Towhees and bears scope out the flowering thimbleberries, anticipating the sumptuous fruits they’ll soon eat and replant across the region in handy piles of fecal fertilizer.
Wandering through this recovering landscape1, I’ve been tempted to try and draw some neat analogy between the methods of collaborative repair I’ve been witness to, and what we humans ought to emulate in our efforts of cultural healing. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an organism I could point to and say “Look, that’s what it looks like to be a leader,” or an ecosystem about which I could say “that’s successful collaboration and healing looks like, let us emulate that.”
The truth of this place, as it turns out, is somewhat messier than that. There is no singular organism that epitomizes leadership—leadership comes in gloriously myriad forms, as particularized gifts put into collaboration with one another. And as for recovery, this ecosystem—however resilient, however full of beautiful, brilliant examples of how to open in the ruins—is still hurting. It is deeply marked by ongoing legacies of fire suppression, commodification, climate disruption, and indigenous displacement.
What I found ambling through the landscape was not a tidy analogy, but a remembrace. The remembrace was this: that however far I may be from fully knowing my integrated function here, I am also a creature of this place. My lifeways impact the collective functioning of this community regardless of whether they support it’s/our wellbeing or not. The history alive here is also mine to participate in re-shaping—but with such care.
I see now why my attempts to make an analogy work sort of missed the point. I could try to make a model out of the workings of that community over there, and apply to this community over here, but that risks being extractive and perpetuating separatism more than nurturing intimacy with our more-than-human kin. It’s not that I don’t want to embody the wisdom of other beings—I do. I want, for example, to embody lupine’s taproot level of groundedness and nitrogen-fixing-like commitment to nourishing other beings. I want to embody woodpecker’s resourcefulness, and mycelium’s impulse to redistribute resources in ways that mirrors need. But I don’t want my whole relationship with these beings to be mediated through metaphor.
Being an ecologically attuned leader isn’t just about bringing ecological metaphors to human-centered spaces; it’s about organizing our communities to shift towards collectively sustaining lifeways. You can’t do that by just knowing about other beings. You have to spend time with them. We cannot be a part of the places we live virtually, or in theory. In today’s world, this means that we must figure out how to organize towards lifeways that do not make a commodity of our attention, and instead give our attentiveness to other beings. How else are we to thoughtfully collaborate with them?
There is a reason we have seven practices, and not just practice five. EcoFaith recognizes that in order to act together in ways that are effective, honorable, sustainable, and representative of diverse perspectives and needs, we must also hold the perspective of our place within a larger context, know one another deeply and dynamically, strengthen our collective by cross-pollinating our gifts, continually critique and reassess our processes, and caretake ourselves and one another. So it is with the places of which we are a part. To know how to be humans whose lifeways support collective flourishing, we must hold ourselves within the larger vision of the collective (de-center ourselves), build intimate relationships with other beings, learn to read the ever-unfolding story of the land in it’s/our diverse sensory languages, be students of one another, caretake one another, and be ever reflective of our actions. Only in the midst of that can we truly act together.
- It’s worth noting that just because an area is burned doesn’t mean that it’s damaged or injured—fire is native to these lands and a crucial element of how the ecosystem functions. However, the suppression of both wildfire and the cultural burning practices of the indigenous mətxʷú (Methow) people, have contributed to the emergence of “megafires” that destroy rather than aid the native functions of the ecosystem. This particular burn was classified as a megafire, and is thus considered a landscape in recovery rather than a landscape experiencing normal cycles of regeneration. ↩︎