‍Fires, floods, storms, draughts - the destruction of mother nature is accelerating unprecedentedly. Despite this, the insane industrialised narratives of modernity keep perpetuating the normalization of the War on Nature. Solutions are sold for the problems the same companies have created. Today’s economy runs on business models that create artificial scarcity and externalize responsibility. Keeping you sick sells. How can we shift the narratives on nature towards embracing our wild potential as healers and stewards within the web of life?

Yet another record was broken with temperatures unseen for 120 000 years. We have now crossed 7 out of 9 planetary boundaries on which human life depends. The industrialization of our planet has produced a technosphere that now outweights the biosphere in total mass. In the EU, 80% of habitats are in poor condition. The sixth mass extinction is ongoing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the outer destruction of nature and the communities that depend on it is reflected by a pandemic of civilizational diseases, distrust, stress, and depression. After all, we are highly interdependent with the health of our natural environment.

"The War on Nature will not be won with weapons. It will be won by radically listening to the wisdom nature has to share with us."

Looking at the face of nature

The modern attention economy is however keeping narratives alive that normalize the domination and exploitation of nature. Last century, the Nazis - and their equivalents in so many countries -have dehumanized humans to justify violence. The equivalent today is the denial of the aliveness of nature, reduced to being a dead commodity. This is justifying the most abominable violences towards living beings: let’s call it “denaturisation”. Emmanuel Levina’s lesson from the Holocaust was that all morale derives from recognizing the humanity in the other by looking at the face of the other. Today, we may need to learn to look at, listen to, and sense nature as a part of ourselves.

You feel guilty doing less bad

The success and pervasiveness of today’s mechanistic narratives about nature leaves little space for healing our break-away from nature. Incremental change – “green growth” through “clean tech” – is praised as “solution”, without questioning the roots of the problems. Diverse nature-rooted approaches have very little visibility in an increasingly monocultural discourse spaces in (social) media, politics and society. It may be no coincidence that the ones pushing this exploitative and technology-obsessed “action fetish” furthest on behalf of “saving the planet” they helped destroy, like Elon Musk’s brands or others calling themselves “futurists”, have a certain (aesthetical and moral) resemblance to the Italian futurists that pioneered the fascist movement.

The disconnection from the presence of nature

The leitmotiv of the futurists was precisely the industrial acceleration, objectivation of life and abolishment of wisdom that has become mainstream today in technological redemption narratives. They have become dominant narratives on overcoming the climate and nature crises. Within such a context of accelerating and automated destruction, much of sustainability communications (CSR, ESG, green marketing…) limit themselves towards “doing less harm” while sustaining the destructive underlying logic of how we live, work and consume. Superficial behaviour changes are incentivized by making people feel guilty, driving even more compensation-justified consumption. Saving nature, that’s restlessly buying, building, moving, talking, convincing, influencing, strategizing, targeting, reporting, accounting and public bullshitting. Action fetish everywhere we look.

Europe's war on nature

Zooming into the EU, the EU Green Deal had been envisioned as the “new growth strategy for Europe” to become “a global climate leader”. Although European men have invented industrialization and colonized the whole planet, there is a systematic exclusion of history and divergent perspectives. The Global South, indigenous people, women and youth remain marginalized from conversations on climate or biodiversity. It is important to remember that European ideologies were at the start of the War on Nature. It is only coherent that the main “solutions” to the climate and biodiversity crises presented are in the logic of a perpetrator, justifying even more violence: more blind technologies (“the green and digital ‘twin transitions’”), more international rules made by Europe, outsourcing of own dirty industries, superficially cleaner balance sheets for “net-zero”, more rejection of the effects of the own behaviour (refugees), more of the same.

Selling the solutions to the problems you create

While some important steps were taken in the framework of the EU Green Deal, dirty lobbies are stepping up to artificially keep fragile and destructive business models alive with taxpayer money – at the benefit of a small percentage of shareholders. This is unsurprising given that our economic system incentivizes business models that are built on making profits from creating scarcity: unsatisfiable desires, restlessness, disease etc. The opportunists today are the fossil-fuel based pharmaceutical, technological, chemical, arms and security industries. They have not succeeded in halting the Nature Restoration Law, but they have spinned the policy narrative to sell the problem they create as the solution. Recent and likely successes are the approval of GMOs without labeling requirements, a new chemical fertilisers strategy and the continued legalization of thousands of provenly highly toxic chemicals.

Beyond blaming and shaming

Now it would be easy to identify the villains in these industries and their political arms in governments and parliaments. After all, it was found that only 100 companies were responsible for 71% of global Greenhouse Gas Emissions. While responsibility matters, it is precisely the strategy of naming, blaming and shaming that has been used by the lobbying departments of these industries. By using the same strategy of attack, the destructive logic that pervades our lives will only be perpetuated further. To restore and regenerate nature, and live in peace, we need to learn to create framework conditions in which we can shift our attention towards healing the divisions of the past, and towards living in abundance by embracing our wildness as part of nature.

Shifting our perspectives in communications

Regenerative communications are research into life-affirming narratives, aesthetics that enable immersion and resonance, a language that includes and diversifies, as well as conversations that enable healing and transcendence. Communications require cultivating consciousness for being able to weave thriving communication webs that nourish the regeneration of diverse and unique communities and places. Inspired by nature and marginalized perspectives, this approach invites us to ask deeper questions, to listen to other voices, to imagine life at its fullest. The War on Nature will not be won with weapons. It will be won by radically listening to the wisdom nature has to share with us. All else will flow.

Questions to ask ourselves

• Which stance do we take on the War On Nature?

• How does my brand story include nature?

• Which role does my organization play as part of nature?

• Which marginalized perspectives can help us in understanding that role?

• What future of living in harmony with nature do we imagine?

• How do we contribute to the political, mediatic and public narratives about nature?

• How can we use nature as an inspiration for our branding, channels, messages etc.?

Discover more!

Read Perspectivist's War Chronicles series!

Date
13 July 2023
By Jean-Philippe
Category
#WARCHRONICLES
Reading time
5 mins

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