Community UR Here
Our Cloudy Kin There is no bad weather, just bad neighbors. BY THOMAS DEAN
B
rother Snow. Sister Rain. Auntie Sunshine. Uncle Cloudy. Grandfather Cold. Grandmother Warmth. Cousin Storm. Mother Earth. Welcome to the family of weather—our kin. Ecological understanding is about wholeness, knowing that the earth—as a whole system, organism or being (what many call Gaia)— comprises diverse, interdependent beings (or organisms, if you prefer) that live together and support each other in a web of reciprocal relationships. Much of science has come to understand this pretty well for at least 50 to 100 years; Indigenous peoples have known this for thousands. Weather is an integral part of the genius that is the living earth. In recent years, “kinship” has been used more and more to describe the entangled relationships of our world, especially to help us humans understand that we are as much part of this ecological web—as both givers and takers—as any other form of life, that indeed all of life is our kin, that we are kin to all of life. In fact, in the past year, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, under the auspices of the Center for Humans and Nature, have edited a five-volume book series with the overarching title Kinship. But, again, this is nothing new: For centuries, many Indigenous peoples have said some version of “all my relations” or “we are all related” in their greetings, prayers and thanks, acknowledging that the ultimate expression of humanity is our oneness with all of creation. Our animal creature kin range from the unseen microbe up to the charismatic megafauna (such as bison and elephants). But our relations include every manner of life, including plants and basic elements. They also include systems, such as waterways, forests and prairies. And so to my point—weather is also our kin. Weather consists of three simple but fundamental things—air, water and sunlight (or energy, if you prefer). Without those essentials, life simply wouldn’t exist. In its simplest systematic terms (forgive me, meteorologists), weather is just the behavior of air and water moving around, powered by sunlight. But from an ecological perspective, we are enmeshed in weather simply by virtue of our existence. And therefore from a 24 March 2022 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV304
Jordan Sellergren / Little Village
community to all that lives—is needed for us to be in right relationship with the rest of the living world. A sense of kinship with all that lives—and genuine acts of “kinning,” as Kimmerer, Van Horn, Hausdoerffer and others would say—can lead to that care for the world we need to practice. MOST OF THE TIME, AT LEAST IN A This kind of kinship certainly calls STABLE ENVIRONMENT, THE WEATHER for a major attitudinal shift among IS DOING WHAT IT NEEDS TO DO: BEING much of humanity today. We often see our lack of kinship in everyday attiPROVIDENTIAL. THAT IS, PROVIDING tudes toward weather. We’re coming FOR LIFE ON EARTH, INCLUDING OURS. out of winter, which bears the brunt of most anti-kinship attitudes here in the superior to, the rest of the earth. This attitude has Midwest, though there will be plenty of sourled to the mindset that the earth is for our use pussing in the coming seasons as well, as many and exploitation, that nature is a “resource” for start to complain about heat and humidity. Many treat “bad” weather as a personal afour comfort and consumption. And that attitude is the root cause of today’s ecological problems: front, an inconvenience or a comfort feature pollution, climate instability and catastrophe, of a living space that has been denied to them. Weather is not akin to a swimming pool in an mass extinction, desertification, you name it. An ethic of care—which Aldo Leopold in apartment complex or a nice view out of a the 1940s called a “land ethic,” extending the west-facing window. And it certainly isn’t trying kinship perspective, weather is our relative. The ecological consequences of a kinship perspective can be significant. For a long time, many humans, especially in the Western world, have considered themselves separate from, even
