Experiencing: Nature Based Leadership

June 2, 2022 notes from a webinar by Cheryl Charles on Nature Based Leadership

This class felt right in alignment with all my current explorations and rabbit holes.

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Vision
A world in which humans live, learn, serve and lead in healthy balance with nature.

Goal
Inspire, educate and develop values-based leadership through which people will care for themselves, one another, and all of life.

Principles
Human health and well-being are inextricably linked to the health of the planet’s living systems.
Direct experiences in nature nourish health, hope, creativity and compassion.
Solutions to a healthy future can be found and applied through an integrated ecological approach with mind, heart, body and spirit in balance.
Nature-based leadership, which is inherently collaborative and generative, differs significantly from most current mechanistic and hierarchical leadership models.

– Antioch University Nature Based Leadership Institute

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As collected in this field journal so far, I’m connecting ways that nature, leadership and life have parallels and resonate with one another. What is possible when we embrace and practice leadership from a place rooted in the natural world and living systems? Living, learning, leading and serving from an ecologically-rooted place opens up new opportunities for humans.

Many days of my life I have woken up and felt less like a human and more like a droid in a repetitive pattern, traveling through liminal spaces that feel hollow and disconnected from what truly brings me alive. The more I create dialogue with other humans (and communicate with animals, plants, fungi), the more I have been able to shed light on the disconnection that had been part of periods of depression and despair. During the course of my master’s program, I feel immense gratitude for the mentors and fellow learners that reminded me that we are integral to nature and influence nature itself and this reciprocal relationship is there whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. One of the earliest openings to this worldview is having the incredible experience of doing an in-person gathering as part of the master’s program at Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island in Washington state.  How could I not be inspired and grounded surrounded by the lush Pacific Northwest forests and the mischievous bunnies bouncing through the grass?

When I saw this webinar on the Antioch Continuing ed page, of course I felt called to participate and engage.

Nature Based Leadership is a vehicle for rescuing us from ourselves. We can learn from nature how to improve our lives, enhance our leadership, and, perhaps, save our species from itself.

Cheryl began the talk about why we should we even care? Why nature-based leadership?

“By being directly involved with the natural world in our everyday lives, in every environment and every setting… it tends to contribute to our own personal health and well-being and it contributes to our relationships and whole communities and intimate connection that leads to taking action to care for the world.”

Cheryl Charles

The health of the living planet and health of humans are inextricably linked. One of the guiding principles of nature-based leadership is “solutions to a healthy future can be found and applied through an integrated ecological approach with mind, heart, body and spirit in balance”. It is this integrated approach that means the study of nature-based leadership is interdisciplinary drawing from life sciences including humanities, theology, philosophy and social sciences. As I continue to connect dots, thoughts & ideas, I noticed myself deeply appreciating this emerging field of study and its possibilities. In fact, much of what I’ve been nerding out on these days touches on many of the concepts that are brought together in nature-based leadership. E.g: ecology, systems theory, complexity, biomimicry, conservation psychology, spiritual ecology, indigenous wisdom, ecological leadership.

“Nature-based leadership is inherently collaborative and generative; it differs significantly from current mechanistic and hierarchical leadership models and is a way forward to restore the balance between people and nature. Human health and well-being are inextricably linked to the health of the planet’s living systems.”

Cheryl Charles

Natural Guides to Nature-based Leadership

• Diversity
• Niche
• Cooperation and Competition
• Self-Regulation
• Optimization
• Connectedness
• Community

Diversity

• Nature thrives on diversity. Diversity tends to be an indicator of a healthy ecosystem. Diversity contributes to resilience. Diversity within ecosystems nurtures survival while specialization favors extinction.

Makes me think of how bananas could easily be gone.
Lack of genetic diversity in bananas meant that they’re less resilient and more prone to disease and now the monoculture of Cavendish bananas is under threat from a disease.

Niche

• Every organism in nature has a contribution to make to living ecosystems. Everyone has a role everyone has a contribution to make.

Cooperation and Competition

• Both exist in natural systems. Cooperation may be a stronger natural tendency than competition.

How often in the workplace are we using language and acting in ways that support competition instead of collaboration? There is a place for competitive spirit, yet, science is finding more evidence for cooperation and collaboration being the most effective and dominant type of relationships in the natural world. Immediately my mind thought of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, a book by Suzanne Simard – a world leading forest ecologist and “frontier of plant communication and intelligence”. She’s a  Canadian scientist and professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. Her book talks about networks of communication systems that she called the “Wood Wide Web” that shares resources and informations among trees and fungi in the forest. I’m astounded by what we can learn from trees and forest systems.

Self-Regulation

• The natural world is a self-regulating system. All life forms are inherently self-regulating”

Optimization

• Nature uses only the energy and resources it needs. Nature optimizes and leaves energy and resources in reserve.

Nature doesn’t use energy unnecessarily. Yet we humans (myself included) can be frivolous with energy. The name of the game in so much of modern business is MAXIMIZE everything. Cheryl shared that when we maximize, we don’t leave anything in reserve. This began opening my eyes to framing leadership through optimization, not maximization. What is possible when energy is left in the reserve? What are ways of approaching life and leadership so we don’t use up everything and deplete all energy and resources? Again, in taking the metaview, it is easy to see how the approaches of extraction and exploitation are finite and will inevitably reach a point of nothing being left.

Connectedness

• All organisms, species and habitats are interconnected in nature. Every part is connected to every other.

Community

• Nature creates communities of life, all of which demonstrate diversity, niche, cooperation and competition, self-regulation, optimization and connectedness.

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Cheryl spoke of ways that this nature-based leadership model is a collaborative one and is based in how systems in nature work. This is in contrast to the traditional leadership models that are typically seen in most facets of our daily lives such as government, education or business.

In the metaview of the human story, much of the history positioned homo sapiens in direct experience with the natural world. Only within the last few hundred years with colonization, the modern industrial world, technology and innovation bursts have we operated predominantly with the mechanical worldview. The thing is nature is COMPLEX and, gosh, we sure have a hard time dealing with the complexity of humans and the living world. It’s an entirely different muscle to think organically and not attempt to dissect our way into understanding the whole or not accepting that life does not happen in a vacuum. Absolutely all worldviews are useful and *ding*ding* INTEGRAL to the health of a system. However, at a time in history where mechanical approaches are dominant, it’s exciting to see the antithesis to the extractive shadow of mechanical worldview in the form of natural systems approaches that consider the collective in a balanced ecosystem.

During the class I was introduced to the term Ecozoic era ​

While not intending to change the course of evolution or change the chemistry or large scale cycles of the planet, we have indeed done so. We have been, as a civilization, simply paying attention to our own human needs, acting out of what Dr. Brian Swimme calls “local mind”.

While many individuals of the last centuries have been aware of the effects our way of life have had on the Earth community, as a society, and now a global civilization we have been unable to see those effects. We have not historically been paying attention to how our activities have impacted the larger community of life and those structures and systems that support life.

​-​Ecozoic Times
​https://ecozoictimes.com/what-is-the-ecozoic/what-does-ecozoic-mean/

And… the SO WHAT?

A TON OF BENEFITS. Simple as that.

Why nature-based living, learning, leading and serving?

• Personal health and well-being
• Humility, hope and healing
• Healthy positive relationships
• Thriving children, teens and people of all ages
• Healthy communities
• Peace and prosperity
• Healthy planet

I reflect on how much nature has been a part of my leadership journey, especially over the last few years. My goals and intentions for the year are rooted in a meaningful connection with nature, whether it’s obsessing over the growing garden or my sketch-a-day visual journal that encourages me to be mindful of the beauty in nature surrounding me all the time. Funnily enough, as I’m typing this, I stopped for a few minutes to observe a hummingbird that was visiting our balcony just now. These small yet powerful things have an exponential effect together whether it’s optimization and energy management, benefiting from cooperation, feeling the positive effects of self-regulation or witnessing the fruitfulness of diversity. Intentionally or not I find myself bringing many of these metaphors, correlations or inspirations and weaving them into my education and coaching practices. The metaphors or intuition I harness from nature resonates with many people, and in that way, ways of being in the world are inspired by nature and have a ripple effect. This is what K and I speak about all the time with business… Integral leadership is regenerative and infinite. It is inherently so because it draws from the natural world.

The times I have been disconnected from nature are also the times when I’ve been the most disconnected from myself, loved ones and the environment around me. These simple habits I’ve incorporated into my daily practice helps me remember my own connection with everything in a beautiful and humbling way. The seed of connection to the natural world plants the roots of empathy in ourselves.

It’s like a new pair of glasses when I experience the world through nature, and I love to share the excitement for these perspectives with others who are also jazzed about introducing, educating and practicing using natural systems as guiding principles.

My key takeaway, is to continue to take time to do something positive. A huge number of people making a little effort will be more significant than a tiny number of people making a huge effort. Let’s continue to take both tiny and larger steps together. Let’s learn, grow, stumble, help each other up. Soon enough we’ll collectively have power to co-create a better future. Domino Chain Reaction (geometric growth in action) is one of my favourite videos that simply shows the power of growth in action.

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For reference – about Nature Based Leadership Institute from their website

The vision of the Institute is a world in which all humans live, learn, lead and serve in healthy balance with nature. AUNE’s Nature Based Leadership Institute applies nature’s lessons to achieve economic, environmental and social justice. The purpose of nature-based leadership is to create and sustain healthy environments of all kinds—within ourselves, with others, and with the Earth itself.  To learn more about the Nature Based Leadership Institute, contact Cheryl Charles, PhD, research scholar and founding executive director of the Nature Based Leadership Institute at [email protected].