Why Emotional Connections to the Earth Matter in Restoration: Teachings from Karen Kinslow
“How does my connection to my mother relate to my connection to Mother Earth? Perhaps in some ways the attachment that we do or don’t have with our primary caregivers, our families, ourselves, our neighbors, is very much the root of the climate crisis. It’s in part that we aren’t related, deeply or fully, with where we are with Mother Earth.”
—Karen Kinslow
Picture taken by Karen Kinslow at the fieldsite of her Cane Run Restoration Project in Kentucky.
Our connection to Earth goes deeper than one might think. It is life itself. We are dependent on the Earth for our basic needs like food and water. As humans, our cultures are also rooted in personal and emotional interactions with Nature. The natural environments, whether built or untouched, that we live in add value to our lives instrumentally and intrinsically. How can the way we treat landscapes be a reflection of how we treat ourselves, or others? And vice versa, how is it that the way we go about community and social action manifests in how we view Nature?
On November 5th, 2022, scholar-activist Karen Kinslow, a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of Kentucky, shared with the Youth Visionary Collective (YVC) about her studies and current research on environmental justice through emotional connections with the Earth. Blending social theory and geography, her work is based on collaborative, place-based stewardship. Karen’s research centers on how people engage meaningfully with the natural world. Through a deeper understanding and the nurturing of relations with oneself, with other humans, and with the Earth and the living world around us, Karen sees these relationships to be vital to restoring natural landscapes.
Drawing on the building of personal relationships, Karen’s talk with the YVC introduced the terms emotional geography, critical restoration geography, and community geography—all of which are ideas and practices that address the question of how emotional connections to the environment shape how we go about climate change. Saying, “It's important to think about relations with each other as well as the land,” Karen instills the idea that humans and Nature are interconnected. As much as we are affected by our environment, we are equally and simultaneously influencing it.
Karen began by discussing how we view degraded landscapes and how we can change these landscapes into mutually beneficial and holistic spaces. Together we found that it should be a community-based effort, that changing degraded landscapes requires a re-storying of the past and future, incorporating missing voices and ensuring participation of those who reside in and steward the area that is being restored. Karen explains we need to not only restore Nature and our relations to it but also our relations to each other:
Karen explained: “We can repair that stream but if people are not engaged and it creates no new work or it does not change the cultures, feelings, or power dynamics for people who live near that, is it really restored?” Restoration becomes a strong ask when opposing hegemonic voices make their claims as to why their action is assumed right. It requires more than just acknowledging other sides and instead asking how, for who, and by who is the work being put into practice?.
With this idea in mind and her studies of geography, Karen’s research is based on the concept of community geography. As explained by Karen, it goes beyond applied social science research, as it engages a community of research scholars, activists, and participants, as well as local community members, in a joint and collaborative analysis of a particular space to move forward:
This embodiment of the present and future is reflected in Karen’s work. One collaborative project Karen shared with the YVC, is the work of Critical Restoration—a way of thinking, doing, and being that values working with others within a landscape:
“Critical restoration geographies take into account race, gender and sexuality, and disability, in the study of ecological restoration and restoration futures. It is really about combining cultural and social aspects of life with environmental sciences.”
Through a deeper understanding and the nurturing of relations with oneself, with other humans, and with the Earth, Karen sees these relationships to be the change that will help in restoring natural landscapes. With her studies in geography, Karen notes how Critical Restoration can be understood differently from geography. She breaks it down for us and says that geography “thinks about things in terms of space,” and “restoration brings us to a conversation about time.” Bringing the two concepts together we critically think about the influences of the past, present, and future, on how humans treat the environment
Another concept explained by Karen is Earth-care intimacies. The term was born out of Karen’s own experience of losing her mother. She describes: “If I really think about the deepest of connections, the umbilical ones, it’s to my own mother.” At the time of her mother’s passing, Karen notes the transformative nature that she experienced and began to make connections to Mother Earth. In the video below Karen expresses her thoughts on the absence and/or presence of these intimate connections:
Deeply connected to the idea of Earth-care intimacies is Karen’s way of viewing love as an action. In quoting bell hooks, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling,” Karen explained that during her research she found that many did work beyond what was expected because of the connections they felt to the Earth. This capacity for love—the idea of moving the theoretical into action—is based on collective hope and shared visions. Listen to Karen explaining this in the video below:
Karen sees this embodiment as vital to not just her own study, but also collectively redefining work. “It’s not just this vague theory, but there's this concrete material basis to it.” In critical restoration, the theory talks about emotions and movement in the body. Karen explains:
Juli with Indigenous Chachi youth in the Chocó Rainforest.
In the face of the many environmental crises today, Karen’s research aims to reimagine the Western framework of work as solely a hierarchical means to achieve merit, money, and order. This definition is problematic as it shapes how people view non-valuable work, places a monetary value on people and nature, and creates overall difficulty and distress seen in many working environments today.
Emotional geography first asks how collective environmental engagement can come about, whether from oneself or from the connection to others and then how and where these ideas and feelings can meet. Even though it may seem vague, climate action is not meant to be discouraging, instead, Karen advocates for motivation and diversity in participation. Reminding the YVC of what work can mean, Karen expressed how revolution can come from rethinking the capacity of work. She explained this point further, saying “Each of us has our own capacity and place in the interconnected world in which we live, and part of a more beautiful future or a more realized conscientious connection is to see how each of us can be ourselves and use our capacities.” This valuing of diverse work and capacity is brought about through different types of thinking and different ways of doing.
In the end, when asking how we can restore the environment, cultural and emotional shifts are needed. Karen's message to the YVC was that change is rooted in place-based learning, it “can start small and can start to grow, and be generative. Starting from where we are, in ourselves, and moving outwards.” What we learned from Karen was the importance of collectively (re)building our connections to Mother Earth, as this affects how we treat the environment around us. Collective action, based on love as action, can help rebuild our connections to Nature and fight the climate crisis. Our lack of acknowledging our deep connections to each other and Mother Earth leads to alienation, intergenerational trauma, and fuels how we treat the world around us. What is your connection to Mother Earth, and how does this impact how YOU treat the world around you?