24. A Duty of Care

24. A Duty of Care

Nature :: Spirit Podcast (22m 14s)

May 28 2021

“A duty of care.” I ran across the phrase this week in a book I was reading, To Speak for the Trees, by the botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger. In the book Diana talks about growing up in Britain and Ireland—how she was orphaned at the age of twelve and then how her mother’s people, who were Irish farmers in County Cork, adopted her in the traditional way, all of them together taking her under their wing, teaching her one by one what they knew of the old Celtic ways. One elderly auntie might teach her how to treat an illness with plant medicine, another how to cover eggs with a layer of butter to keep them from oxidizing so they would not spoil even without refrigeration.

Diana writes, “Everything in the natural world possessed innate value. This belief, that one should love others and nature as much as they loved themselves, was at the very heart of Celtic philosophy. It [was] drilled into me with every lesson.” She was to love trees as people—something she said was not hard for her, as she went on to become a tree scientist.

But, she says, it’s harder to instill in people the sense of responsibility for nature. We humans are susceptible to greed, taking more from nature than we need, and so a central part of each of her lessons was to “always leave enough for the seventh generation.” We have “a duty of care,” she writes. Everything in the world is “owed the same duty of care” that we grant to ourselves and our loved ones.

As it happens, I read three other Indigenous writers this week, and every one of them offered a parallel message, each with its own flavor, its own history. I want to highlight all their words as a way of honoring this idea that is so crucial to living peaceably on Earth—the idea of care. An ethic of care. Caring for the land, caring for one another. And how some societies build it into the very foundations of their culture so that caring isn’t just something people do in the privacy of their homes within their own families; it’s the guiding principle of public life. It has social value. Caring for land and caring for others shapes the culture’s very laws and economics. So today we’re honoring as well the Indigenous societies that preserve and practice this public duty of care to this very day.

First up, a voice from Australia. Dr. Mary Graham is an Aboriginal woman from the Kombumerri clan of the Gold Coast of Queensland. She’s also a Western-trained philosopher and professor. Mary Graham writes that for Aboriginal people, the land is “not property or real estate; it is the great mother of all humanity. . . . The land, and how we treat it,” she writes, “is what determines our human-ness. . . . The relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations.” Aboriginal people see that if a person’s or a society’s relationships with others are out of balance, it is because their relationship with Earth suffered first.

In relating to land, the first ingredient is an obligation of care. Mary Graham writes, “As the land created us, so we are always going to be obligated to it. All the flora and fauna, every living thing, all the landforms and features of the land, they are all our ancestors, because they all came before us. . . . . Literally, the grass we walk on, the soil we walk on, the plants and animals we eat—these all made us human and gave us meaning and identity.” And because “we are always obliged to the land,” she goes on, “we are in turn obliged to look after it.”

Mary Graham calls this law of care a “custodial ethic.” She writes, “Ethics only come from having empathy and from looking after something outside ourselves.” She says, “The land looks after us, we look after it, it looks after us, we look after it.”

Her words reminded me of the native Hawaiian culture, of the land where I now live. I’ve talked about this before in the podcast, the guiding idea of aloha ʻāina, or giving love, aloha, to the land, the ʻāina. For Hawaiians the ʻāina is our mother or grandmother; ʻāina literally means “that which feeds.” We love the land, aloha ʻāina, because the land loves us and provides for us, ʻāina aloha.

For digging deeper

Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s story of receiving the Celtic oral tradition appears in her memoir, To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2019). Jane Fonda interviewed Diana for her Fire Drill Fridays series. For in-depth stories about Diana, see the series of five articles in the British Colombia news magazine The Tyee in 2020 by Andrew Nikiforuk.

Aboriginal philosopher Mary Graham teaches in the School of Political Science & International Studies at the University of Queensland. Her words come from her paper “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews,” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): 181–94. Available for free download at the Australian National University Press, the final entry on this page. More detail in a chapter by Mary Graham and Michelle Maloney, “Caring for Country and Rights of Nature in Australia: A Conversation between Earth Jurisprudence and Aboriginal Law and Ethics,” In Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice, ed. Cameron La Follette and Chris Maser (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Group, Taylor & Francis, 2019), 385–400.

The thesis of Claire Hiwahiwa Steele is “He Ali’i Ka ‘Āina; He Kauwā ke Kanaka (The Land Is Chief; Man Is Its Servant): Traditional Hawaiian Resource Stewardship and the Transformation of the Konohiki,” MA Thesis (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2015), available for download at Scholar Space of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Numbers of casualties from the German Peasants’ War of 1525–26 come from Encyclopedia Britannica. Germany’s population in 1500 was 12 million, with 1.5 million of those people living in towns and cities and the remaining 10.5 million people in the countryside. If 100,000 German peasants and farmers were killed or executed, that would be .09 percent, or nearly 1 in 100 of the rural people.

Oren Lyons’s words about the Great Law of Peace come from the Basic Call to Consciousness, a statement published first in 1977 when delegates from Indigenous groups from both North and South America delivered position papers to a United Nations conference in Geneva. It was the first UN gathering that looked at discrimination against Indigenous people of the Americas, and it led over the next few decades to the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Watch a talk by Oren Lyons here on “The Indigenous View of the World.”

The English observer who reported on the Iroquois Confederacy in the 1720s was Cadwallader Colden, a member of the New York provincial council who attended as a colonial representative of New York. His words are quoted in a paper by Renée Jacobs, “The Iroquois Great Law of Peace and the United States Constitution: How the Founding Fathers Ignored the Clan Mothers,” American Indian Law Review 16, no. 2 (1991): 497–531, available from the digital commons at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.

On Benjamin Franklin’s contacts with the Iroquois, see “Franklin and the Iroquois Foundations of the Constitution,” by Cynthia Feathers and Susan Feathers, University of Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan.–Feb. 2007. More info from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University at their website the National History Education Clearinghouse, “Iroquois and the Founding Fathers.” Donald Grinde Jr. and Bruce Johansen make a case, following original historical documents, for Iroquois influence on the American Founders. Their book, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center of UCLA, 1990), is available online here.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson talks a lot about the differences between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration held up a vision that “all men are created equal” while the Constitution set limits on that equality in order to protect property, and the tension between those two different purposes continues to this day. “When people have rights, they focus on the Constitution,” she says; “when they don’t have rights, they focus on the Declaration.” This came from her Facebook Live chat on April 29, 2021. All her Thursday Live chats are fascinating, and her daily newsletter summarizing political developments is a must-read.