For those of you who haven’t been tuned into the news of east Africa, you might have missed the fact that the region is gripped by catastrophic rains resulting in flooding, flash flooding, landslides, breached dams, collapsed buildings and roadways, thousands injured, hundreds of lives lost, hundreds more missing, and tens of thousands – or more – people displaced and livelihoods cratered.
Our family is physically fine. Like most natural disasters, these floods have impacted those living the farthest on the margins in the poorest places in impoverished countries on the poorest continent on the planet.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi literally built in an old rock quarry, the stones and riches from which the neighboring wealthy Muthaiga neighborhood was built. Water – and shit – flow downhill, so if you live in a hole at the bottom of a hill, it doesn’t take much rain for everything to go sideways. And there has been way more than “not much” rain. The situation is impossibly devastating and any words I use to describe it will be inadequate.
Click here to donate to flood relief.
Kenyan President William Ruto visited Mathare on Monday to provide assurances of food and housing for people affected by the floods.
No Kenyan will sleep hungry. No child will sleep hungry. We will bring enough food to feed the country until every citizen is able to get back on their feet.
Ruto declared.
But many people of Mathare were already all too familiar with going to sleep hungry. I wonder if this proclamation and support means they will have more food than before? Or perhaps it’s a darker proclamation; they won’t sleep hungry because they won’t sleep at all.
I have been feeling uncertain and uneasy about everything – about this devastation that, depending on where you’re sitting while reading this, may be literally half a world away – or, in my case, is maybe 10 kilometers as the crow flies but might as well be half a world away too. This is not dissimilar from how I feel about devastation here and there and everywhere, now and then and next – conflicts and violence and genocide and natural disasters – and human suffering of unimaginable but real dimensions. And deforestation and habitat destruction and industrial pollution and coral bleaching and mass extinction and ocean acidification and more-than-human suffering of unfathomable but actual depths.
Kenya’s Floodemic
For now, though, it’s these floods here in Kenya that are making it hard for me to breathe. Or to be. Or to be-reathe.
And within the floods, nothing is eating away at me more than this: Kenyan schools – fresh off a scheduled one-month vacation – have been closed for an additional week and a half, with a proclamation issued last Friday that school reopening would be postponed “indefinitely.” It’s like a Kenyan COVID lockdown. A national floodemic.
It’s true that dozens of schools in Mathare – and maybe hundreds more throughout the country and region – have been damaged by floods. Still others are being used as emergency shelters for those who’ve lost their homes. And it’s also true that hundreds – maybe thousands – of schools are totally unaffected by flooding. But shuttered still.
I am gripped by the learning and safety and nutritional losses the children of Kenya are suffering in addition to what they’ve already lost.
Germane to you, my faithful reader, I am also feeling sheepish about offering nature-based learning in schools as a solution when the problems are so big.
And this: What happens when nature causes your school to close?
Yeah, I write here about how beautiful nature-based learning is. About how do-able it is for teachers to foster positive nature connections in schools and access a multitude of benefits for their students and themselves. And how these connections are also beneficial for the planet too. But when schools are shuttered due to flooding, this message feels a little tone deaf.
Not all disasters are the same. In fall of 2020, I was part of a team of people in Leadville, Colorado who decided to make outdoor learning “Plan A”1 as a path to reopen schools for in-person learning. As a result of these efforts, our Kindergarten-6th grade students went back to school in person full time starting in August of 2020 while many other schools did only virtual instruction or a hybrid. I’ve written this before (and here) and it bears repeating:
In November 2022, after that school received a Bright Spot award from Governor Polis for academic growth through the pandemic, I received an email from the principal. Her take? “Outdoor school was a causal part of their success.”
That’s all great (and I wish everyone would take note!). But what now with these school closures? What happens when Mother Nature is the reason for shutting schools rather than the solution? This isn’t an imaginary scenario – it is playing out now in Kenya. It has played out all across the U.S. with hurricanes and wildfires and tornadoes. It has played out across the globe secondary to a whole slurry of natural disasters. Outdoor learning can’t be plan A or B or C when it is the outdoors that is the problem. And this will increasingly be the case.
What then is the place for nature-based learning?
Love covers over a multitude of sins
What happens when Mother Nature shutters classrooms and the students don’t have any positive associations or experiences with more-than-human nature, but rather are living in a flesh-and-blood, on-the-ground, dystopian reality of the doomsday scenarios that are already seeding ecoanxiety amongst children and young people worldwide?
This is not a hypothetical musing. I would imagine most students in Mathare have a pretty unidimensional – and tragic – view of more-than-human nature right now.
How could it be otherwise?
I come back to Grandmother Mugumo, my hundreds-year old, wise neighborhood tree sister who left this world just two weeks ago, falling as gracefully as a several ton being can, breaking down walls, uniting people.
My connection to our tree-sister endured even as I contemplated my own mortality and the very real threat she posed for those around her.
I wonder, though, if Grandmother Mugumo had fallen a different direction – taking human lives in her path – would I have carried out the same rituals? Would I have brought my daughter to lay flowers on her body? Would Clara have hugged her remains? Would I have felt saddened by her loss or just the horror of the human casualties?
I honestly believe I would have held the human suffering and the love for more-than-human nature together, pain and beauty inextricably linked in this messy, beautiful world. I think I could do that because my relationship with more-than-human nature is long and multi-dimensional.
If the children whose schools are now closed, who have lost loved ones and livelihoods and homes to catastrophic flooding, also had a lifetime of positive experiences of nature prior to these devastating floods, would that change the magnitude of the loss?
Maybe not the magnitude, but I believe that cultivating an emotional connection – dare I say love – for more-than-human nature is an existential pursuit for our species and all species.
On a strictly pragmatic note, if we act with greater care and compassion for more-than-human nature and live in a place of reciprocity and balance to the best of our abilities, we might have fewer and less catastrophic natural disasters. This alone seems reason enough to foster love for more-than-human nature.
But natural disasters will still happen, as they have since time immemorial.
So I think love for more-than-human nature is more important than just reducing the frequency or severity of storms or wildfires or droughts or floods. Or lowering the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Or staving off economic losses. Or even human losses.
I believe love for more-than-human nature can yield richer stories from which to understand these disasters, to bring some sense to the senselessness.
Talking about this today with my wise friend David, a pastor in an Evangelical church here in Nairobi, he said,
That makes sense. We have a verse about this in the bible,
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” (Peter 4:8)
Love, cultivated in small and big ways, in tiny drops of positive experiences of more-than-human nature sewn in our neighborhood with the woman who lives down the street or in our village with a grandparent or elder or at home with our mom or at school with a trusted teacher, will give us better stories to share when Mother Nature shows up in such devastating ways.
It is our enduring, centuries-old, nuanced relationship of love and respect and healthy fear and awareness and responsibility and reciprocity with more-than-human nature that empowers us to write the story we desperately need when it floods.
❤️,
Becca
I believe it was Sharon Danks of Green Schoolyards America who framed outdoor learning as “Plan A” during the COVID pandemic. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-10-05-what-if-schools-viewed-outdoor-learning-as-plan-a