Happy Earth Day! Today is the 54th anniversary of this global celebration of our planet’s environment. Here I look back at the history of the event, and offer reflections on my own past, and one of the key models for nature coaching – Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind.
An ecology of mind
Bateson was born in England 120 years ago this year. Later naturalised as American, he was a polymath whose work included cybernetics – originally a subject applied to mechanical and electrical engineering – anthropology, linguistics, psychotherapy and ecology. His father William Bateson pioneered genetics (and arguably coined the term).
Bateson created a theory of the world – or ‘Mind’ – which involved a series of systems, including systems of individuals, societies and ecosystems. In his book ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind’, Bateson described how systems maintain a steady state (‘homeostatis’), through feedback loops of competition, dependency and other variables. The basic unit of evolution, he thought, was not the Darwinian individual in a species, but the individual and its environment.
This doesn’t seem controversial now, but then it was still relatively fresh and new to be considering a) our survival as a species and b) that everything was connected and c) that our survival depended on the environment. We needed to think in systems and patterns, not Cartesian rules of linear cause and effect.
“The major problems of the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972
Family systems
Bateson’s work contributed to the establishment of family systems therapy, where relationship, form and pattern are so important. In his ecological thinking he liked to ask difficult questions about patterns, such as “What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose, and all four of them to me? And me to you?” (Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: a necessary Unity, 1979). He often played out questions like this with his daughter Nora, and I strongly recommend watching her film for other examples of these playful lines of enquiry.
Earth day
It wasn’t a coinicidence that Bateson’s work arose in the early 1970s. On the first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970, 20 million people took to the streets across the United States to protest about the state of the planet and the impact on human health. In the years preceding, Erlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ had been published, and humans had walked on the moon and taken the first photo of an ‘earthrise’. 1970 was a kind of ‘year zero’ for environmentalism and ecological thought.
In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was founded in the United States, along with the Clean Air Act, to tackle the smog that was enveloping US cities. The Department of the Environment was founded in the UK, and European Conservation Year announced on the continent. A range of influential NGOs were founded that year, including The Conservation Volunteers (in the UK), who I later went to work for, the National Resources Defence Council, and Africare (both in the US).
In 1972, the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, swung the global approach towards conservation and protection. India launched its National Council for Environmental Policy and Planning. China set out its ‘first leap’ – adopting the following principle at the first National Conference on Environmental Protection in August 1973: “overall planning, rational layout, comprehensive utilization, turning harm into good, relying on the people, extensive participation, protecting the environment, and benefitting the people”.
Australia was the first to turn this environmental movement into a political force, when a global outcry over the Lake Pedder damming project in 1972 led to the birth of the United Tasmania Group, precursor to the Tasmanian Greens, the world’s first green party.
Also in 1972, controversial chemist and NASA scientist James Lovelock, toegther with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, published their controversial ‘Gaia’ hypothesis. A natural extension of Bateson’s thinking, perhaps, the Gaia theory posits that the Earth is a self-maintaining system of feedback loops whose balance is essential to life on earth. The theory was initially ignored or ridiculed by scientists including Richard Dawkins. However, it later led to work which helped identify issues with the ozone layer, and contributed to the identification of the ‘greenhouse effect’ and ‘global warming’.
54 years of change
I was born in Australia in 1970 and grew up in the UK. My personal timeline matches up with this ‘year zero’, and almost every statistic on global and local biodiversity change that gets quoted in the press and scientific literature. The ‘Living Planet Index’ is particularly important, and uses 1970 as its baseline. The 2022 report stated a staggering 69% average decline in monitored wildlife populations globally between 1970 and 2018. Global CO2 levels were at around 325 parts per million (ppm) in 1970. Today, we are at 421ppm. Global average air temperatures began exceeding 1.5C of warming on an almost daily basis in 2023, and this has continued into 2024.
Think for a minute how much has been lost during this period. By how much we have separated ourselves from nature in the process. My childhood was urban, and not particularly nature-rich, but has been richer in local wildlife than anything my children are able to experience. The murmuration we enjoy in my home town of Brighton is a wonderful spectacle, for example, but starling popluations in the UK have declined by 66% since the mid-1970s. Imagine great flocks of starlings two-thirds larger, swooping and morphing across the skies.
Nevertheless it is fundamentally important that systemic ecological thought has emerged in the last half century. This new paradigm challenges the Cartesian view of humans and nature as a duality – and instead positions human beings as an inseparable part of earth’s ecosystems and planetary health. This is the central concept in nature connection too – that we feel a ‘oneness’ with the natural world, and as a result are more compassionate and active on nature’s behalf. I am optimistic that the science and policy is – on the whole – putting us on a better path.
It seems apt to quote from ‘Nature: A New Paradigm for Well-being and Ergonomics’ (Richardson et al, 2016) in which the authors draw a path from Bateson to a modern theory of nature connectedness and a closer relationship with nature. This movement, they say ‘…may facilitate a move away from a purely egocentric and goal-directed interpretation of the world and, allow us to develop a more holistic relationship with our environment in the broadest sense.’
The term ‘ecology’ was coined in 1869 as the ‘study of nature’s household‘, but it wasn’t until 1953 that the first textbook was published by Odum & Odum. As a discipline, ecology gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. I went on to specialise in animal ecology at University, and certainly benefited from the expansive mind training I received. My undergraduate dissertation was an exercise in patterns and systems; I studied the population dynamics of the lice that live on the wings of house martins, and how they develop during their host’s breeding summer in the UK. Although I knew nothing of Bateson at the time, this work was, in a way, an exploration of the crab/lobster/orchid problem!
I feel grateful for this path into coaching – a path that started with ecology. I believe it makes my work as a coach richer, more evidence-led and more grounded in the living planet. I offer something different from the many fabulous colleagues engaged in nature and climate coaching around the world – which makes the total offer that much richer and more diverse.
As I celebrate Earth Day today I feel grateful for everything I receive from our natural environment – and continue to feel driven to connect more people to our wonderful planet and – wherever I can – take action that reduces my impact and benefits nature. I hope that whatever you’re up to today, you will reflect on your own part in this shared ecology of mind.