“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”
Cicero
I’ve been harvesting asparagus on my allotment. The spears emerge almost magically out of the ground at this time in Spring, thrusting through the crust of the dry soil; vibrantly green growth as new as the first morning. Freshly picked, it’s a lovely delicacy. Before cutting the shoots, I firstly thank the plants. I take only what I need and importantly, only what they can afford to give. Already in late Spring now, I’ve stopped taking shoots, as the asparagus needs to grow and live its life, unfolding its tall feathery fronds.
Some years ago, I would have thought thanking plants was sweet though a bit New Agey, but in recent years I would spontaneously find myself letting the plants know before I pruned or picked them, and thanking them for their gift. Now it seems only right to do so ever since I’ve begun to wake up to a visceral sense of my inseparability from the web of life. If the more-than-human world is not just ours to use and consume because we recognise it to be our kin and to be in varying degrees animate, then when we take from it, as we must do in order to exist, it calls for respect, honour and reciprocity. And perhaps most foundationally, gratitude. Indigenous peoples have known this from time immemorial and the principles that govern the exchange of life for life have been called the Honourable Harvest. Native American writer and biology professor Robin Wall Kimmerer has written about this practice which governs every exchange between human beings and the earth. She calls it a covenant of reciprocity between humans and the earth.
In the Christian tradition, grace, which is a short prayer or thankful phrase said before eating, comes from a similar age-old spirit of gratitude, though nowadays these rituals are fading out for most Westerners.
I’m fortunate to be able to grow at least some of the produce I eat and wherever I can, I buy other foods from small organic producers. But for many modern people, they are far removed from any direct relationship with the growing and harvesting of their own food. And in the current cost of living crisis, my concern can sound like an indulgent luxury, while people are forced to buy low quality produce from discount stores. It’s much harder to have a connection with notions like the honourable harvest and gratitude when one’s food all comes from Tescos or Lidl. Who can you feel grateful to? The van driver delivering your online grocery order? Well yes, we should thank them, but it hardly scratches the surface. Upwards of 50% of our Western diet consists of UPFs, ultra processed foods made with strange chemicals far removed from anything alive and growing in a field. Who could I thank for my Pringles or my Beyond Meat burger or my Red Bull? It’s then hard to appreciate what we receive from the earth or to feel any sense of reciprocity; the only reciprocity tends to be the money in our bank account to pay for it all.
Blackbird bathing in my little pond
We’re clearly a long way from the life conditions of traditional indigenous peoples and though we can and should learn from them, we can never go back to a hunter gatherer or basic agrarian life. Yet I feel we need to become some kind of post-postmodern indigenous beings. After all, we all come from somewhere, and it’s far better for us and the planet if we become rooted in that place and care for it. Some people might understandably feel more comfortable with the idea of becoming naturalised citizens, especially if they are from settler countries. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says,
“For all of us, becoming Indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”
In our complex market economies, we are divorced as never before from the earth and the consequences of our actions and lifestyles. Yet if we have a little life-entangled sensibility, we can go some way towards making up for our lack of direct engagement with the basics of embodied life. It helps if we can grow some things, even if only in a window box, and if not, then to look to farmers markets and other organic producers which still have clear connections to the origins of the produce and are not peddling UPFs. There are simple steps like eating in season to be in touch with the rhythm of the seasons and to cut down on unnecessary air freighting.
Increasingly, I’ve found that this spirit of the honourable harvest and gratitude can radiate out much more widely than only being about food, crucial though that is. After all, this is really about how we live and relate to everything. Through the digital knowledge now available through our globally interconnected world, we can still find some connection to the provenance of what we buy. Fledgling post-postmodern indigenous folk can extend the range of our senses to be in touch with the origins and effects on other people and the living world, of what we purchase. I rely on Ethical Consumer website and magazine in the UK, which does all the hard work of following the origins and supply chains of almost everything, to help me make more conscious and ethical choices. In this way tech and modernity can expand our senses and our moral circle of care.
For example, we can choose foods without palm oil with all its inherent SE Asian forest-destroying harm. We can choose to avoid tomatoes from southern Spain produced by North African workers labouring in exploitative conditions which resemble forced labour according to the UN. If you feel you must eat meat and fish, then don’t buy concentration camp produced animals: it’s a matter of dignity, respect and care for our fellow beings.
When you need to change your mobile phone, why not get a phone which is designed to last, rather than one designed for quick obsolescence? One which doesn’t exploit workers and endeavours to use recycled and responsibly sourced rare metals from Africa. These phones are available and It’s very easy to switch.
You can change your bank to one not involved in funding fossil fuel destruction of life on earth. If you have a pension, why not change to an ethical fund which now can track all the ecological effects involved with those investments? There are funds which only invest for positive impact and are concerned with the environment, social responsibility, the working conditions of employees and every factor in the supply chains, including animal welfare. Yes, we are embedded in a neoliberal market economy, and we can’t avoid that fact, yet within these limits, there’s a tremendous amount we individually can do to align with a spirit of gratitude and the honourable harvest. Isn’t it just common sense and decency that we shouldn’t continue to be frequent flyers or drive tank-like SUVs in cities or have multiple homes?
I mean, why wouldn’t we want to consider the effects of our consumer choices on other beings and on collective life on our shared earth?
Too much trouble? It doesn’t take me long using the expertise of resources like Ethical Consumer. This could easily look like some kind of list of things we are supposed to cut down on out of a sense of guilt; and people don’t like being told that they’ve got to stop doing this or that, or to have to restrain themselves. But I’m talking about a perspective which is far removed from some mechanical reckoning of our carbon footprint and being forced to have less stuff, do less, and have less fun. It’s very different when your perspective is one of gratitude for what we receive in abundance and which includes wanting to share with your family and wider kin and not taking more than your fair share; and the kin I’m referring to is expansive and inclusive of all beings.
We naturally wouldn’t want to steal from our children or our grandparents, nor to trash our house or foul our beds. Similarly we have a much bigger family which we are intrinsically part of, and all beings want to live and deserve to have a life in our shared home. So we don’t want to take more than our share. Yes, we can and should lower our carbon footprint, but that’s not the main reason. It’s our interwovenness with all life which implies our not needlessly harming or taking too much, so that other life may coexist.
I don’t find this to be in the slightest way austere, abstemious, self denying or giving up anything at all. It’s rather a greater alignment with Life, lived with increasing reverence, joy and gratitude. I also want to clarify that although sharing much overlap, what I’m pointing to is a distinct perspective from other valuable perspectives which are more centred on climate chaos, natural history or environmentalism.
Guerilla street gardening – cornflowers
Just to illustrate with a simple example: returning to my original allotment growing. A number of my neighbouring growers endlessly rotovate their soil to destroy every vestige of weeds and spray everything with poison to keep it that way. My ethos is of food for all. And I mean food for all beings, not just for myself, family and friends. My plot is a mixture of vegetables and fruit with patches of wildflowers, bushes and so called ‘weeds’ for pollinating insects; the soil is never dug to preserve the immensely complex soil ecosystem with its mycelial networks. A prominent pond with native plants provides popular drinking and bathing for birds, homes for frogs and newts and insects; there is deliberate untidiness and rotting wood to offer more varied habitats rather than imposing human strictures of clinical sterility and neatness. To me, this is just a natural reciprocity, a giving back in thanks for what I receive. I don’t want to rip off other beings and the earth. I take an honourable harvest and I give back to nature.
And you don’t need to live in a lovely part of the countryside to do this. I live in grimy urban East London, in a borough which is nationally right at the very bottom of the league table for all metrics of quality of life and green space. In such places there is an even greater need to give back, and to express love for the area. I live here and am embedded in my locale, and am intimately familiar with the little oases of green space and trees and the ways the more-than-human world manages to coexist. I engage in guerilla gardening, planting patches of wildflowers under street trees and growing saplings to plant out in parks.
The phrase “Beneath the pavement, the beach”, from the 1968 Paris uprisings sometimes comes to mind in this concrete dominated landscape. Wherever we live on the face of the earth, we all can be grateful to Brother Sun and Sister Moon as St Francis said in his famous Canticle. After all, we can’t photosynthesise: we utterly depend on plants and the sun to provide our essential sustenance.
“How can we reciprocate the gifts of the Earth? In gratitude, in ceremony, through acts of practical reverence and land stewardship, in fierce defence of the places we love, in art, in science, in song, in gardens, in children, in ballots, in stories of renewal, in creative resistance, in how we spend our money and our precious lives, by refusing to be complicit with the forces of ecological destruction. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and dance for the renewal of the world.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
