Treating damaged land as kin calls for intensified care, not flight

Evidence

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and artist, said something to me more than a decade ago that I still think of often. She was talking about living in a part of Ontario that has been a site of intense industrial pollution, and the draw of moving to more “pristine” wilderness. But, she said, “when I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relationship, I don’t hate my mother because she’s sick, or because she’s been abused. I don’t stop visiting her because she’s been in an abusive relationship and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship.” You visit her even more. I related to this on many levels, as the daughter of a mother who became severely disabled and as the mother of a child with what is officially classified as a disability (though we prefer to see it as a different way of being human). Simpson’s formulation calls on us to reckon with the sickened and impaired state of our world, but not to use that as an excuse to walk away in search of perfection. On the contrary, when we are surrounded by need, we are called upon to become better caretakers. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1112

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — the familial relationship with a sickened, scarred land is the same reframing that makes caring for damaged infrastructure (grafted, root-bound trees) an act of love rather than repair.
• QUESTION: Does this familial-land ethic map onto Klein’s own positionality — the disabled mother and disabled child she names here — more genuinely than it maps onto politics?