The start of an art-icle…
Here are some parts of a thought piece I am working on. It’s still very much a work in progress so please forgive the reminders to myself and unfinished parts. One day I will expand this into a research project with actual participants but for now its just theory and my own personal experiences.
I hope you enjoy and please leave me a comment, I’d love to hear what you think!
Motherhood as Leadership for Sustainable Futures
Introduction
Many people, cultures and religions believe that the planet Earth we live upon, Pachamama, Gaia, is our Great Mother, she who gives life and nurtures us all.
Archeological evidence, history and genetic science suggest that Hominids and later Homo-Sapien, or human, mothers have been birthing, nurturing and raising the next generation of our species for several million years. It can be said that mothers are right there at the edges of evolution. The shared ‘collective concept’ and practice of being a mother has changed drastically over the last hundred years or so, with the rate of change accelerating as the forces of globalisation, technology, environmental and cultural change affect how mothers perceive their purpose and engage in the practice of bringing life to future generations. Motherhood presents a minefield of challenges – physical/ environmental, social, and spiritual – as well as an abundance of love and joy felt by these women who are doing arguably one of the most important jobs on the planet.
This paper explores the forces and challenges of motherhood in current times, and using CLA (Causal Layered Analysis), develops four common narratives of post-normal mums that mirror the evolutionary experience from mothering in a closed futures context to the transformation available when mothers are aware, and have access to, the openness in a futures field of possibilities. The conclusions drawn suggest that combining foresight and motherhood can be understood as a method of leadership for sustainable futures.
The Call and Intention of the Mother
Mother Earth is calling for help. With a multitude of global problems such as climate change; air, ocean and soil pollution; socio-political instability; threatened ecosystem collapse and mass extinctions occurring all over the planet (IPCC, 2014) it is clear that things need to change. Many, many actions must be taken, and the roots of these actions exist in the values and beliefs that reinforce human agency.
As Gus Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defence Council and past US advisor on climate change told a British radio presenter in 2013,
“I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.”
In a dominant capitalist culture that conditions towards individual accumulation of wealth at the expense of nature and other people, it is no wonder that mother Earth is suffering, along with a large percentage of mothers who feel stuck, and unsure of how to move forward for themselves and their families. This article poses the theory that mothers can be leaders at the edges of transformative evolution. They can guide children to grow with the values of care, respect, generosity and love, to replace the environmental problems of selfishness, greed and apathy that Gus Speth speaks of above. Mothers can engage change with the co-creation of the next generation, and through the raising of children who will become conscious ‘global-citizens’, the leaders of the future.
For the purpose of this paper, it is assumed that all mothers, if given the conscious choice, would have the intention to care for themselves and their children in loving, healthful ways, while creating their own preferred futures that are in alignment with planetary sustainability. It is also recognised that there are many barriers to overcome.
It is acknowledged that as a mother, I bring my own experiences and bias. My standpoints encompass both an individual identity, as well as a shared community identity with other mothers. I also acknowledge that all mothers have particular experiences, challenges and strengths that shape how they mother. So while some things expressed here may resonate, some may not.
Epistemologies … ontology… Diverse multi-discipline background in Social Science, Futures Studies and Sustainability.
Using the lens of the nexus between people and planet to view the plight of mothers in modern times and how, from this position, mothering can become a powerful means of enacting change and leading towards sustainable futures.
Forces of Change
Change is a constant of the universe (Ref…), yet change on planet Earth has been accelerating most notably since the industrial revolution, with the rate of change increasing exponentially as technology is headed for the singularity (Ref… Inayatullah…)
The important forces of change affecting mothers in the twenty-first century can be summarised in four categories: globalisation, technology, environmental and cultural. These categories are explored in the following sections.
Globalisation
In the past, mothers were taught by their communities how to perform the task of raising the next generation. Each culture had different ways and practices, but the role of the mother was clearly understood and was contained by a limited geographical area. Globalisation changed all of this. By ‘making the world smaller’…
Technology
Some technologies have made the tasks of caring for a family easier, allowing women to combine both work and motherhood, a human right fought for by our feminist foremothers (Ref…). However, some mothers reject this story of ‘having it all’ because …
The rise of technology should have created more time for mums to engage in the important things, like forming good relationships and nurturing their children, yet it seems mothers are busier than ever before.
Simplicity.
Social media…
Environmental
Environmental changes are occurring at a startling speed; rising sea levels and increasing droughts, floods and storm activity (IPCC, 2014); mass extinctions, reducing species diversity and increasing risks of abrupt and irreversible ecosystem collapse (Macdougall et al, 2013); Influencing everything from the economy to the way families raise their children. Current times have been called the ‘anthropocene’ … (Reff). Global capitalism has seen humans commit the ecocidal insanity of using up non-renewable resources at an alarming rate and polluting the ecosystems that provide precious services for all of life on the planet (Reff… Shiva…). Mothers are affected by these environmental changes in an intimate way. As they are raising the next generation, many mums fear for the future that society as a whole is leaving for their children and grandchildren.
Meanwhile, a growing alliance of ‘eco-mums’ are positively affecting environmental change with their actions.
Cultural
All of these forces of change – globalisation, technology and environmental – combine to create cultural change.
A major cultural change currently affecting mothers is the shift from more community-based ways of living to the individualistic, separatist structure of the nuclear family.
Challenges of 21st Century Motherhood
These barriers must be overcome to realise the preferred future of planetary sustainability…
Physical/Environmental
Many mothers are stretched to capacity and experience physical, emotional and spiritual exhaustion…
Social Stresses
Present-day motherhood can be imbued with social stresses from every side of society. This begins with the individual and her daily life, and increases by a factor of everyone a mother comes into contact with, both on and offline, including those whom she thinks she may come into contact with or be judged by. There are the beliefs and opinions of family, friends and the wider community; the government; the health department; education department; ……
Add to this the growing concerns of youth suicide, with an average of 8 young people taking their lives each week and suicide ranking as the leading cause of death for Australians age 14-44 (ABS, 2016; Headspace, 2016). Clearly there is some severe unsustainability in the system of society.
The way a mother responds to these stresses influences her own wellbeing and that of her children. The common ‘fight-flight-freeze’ response, which originally evolved to protect people in the face of physical danger (Karr-Morse & Wiley, 2012), translates in the present as ‘argue-abandon-stay but do nothing’. However, none of these primitive responses is consistently effective in enacting change and creating the preferred futures one desires.
From a neurobiological standpoint, humans have not yet adapted to the challenges of life in the twenty-first century (Streeter, 2018). This is referred to by Sardar and Sweeny as a, “post normal lag”, the refusal to redefine one’s perspectives and paradigms despite compelling evidence to the contrary (2016). Karr-Morse and Wiley (2012) suggest,
“Having evolved as hunter-gatherers in small mobile communities close to the land, we now find ourselves living mostly in densely populated areas in constant proximity to strangers, often with little connection to the natural environment . . . The realities of modern living—including staggering advances in technology, increasing population density and drastic changes in our roles and relationships with other humans—have outpaced the adaptations of our internal physical systems . . . To top it all off, we are the only species, as far as we know, that worries, projecting concerns into the future and ruminating on our fears. (p. 19)
Despite considerable evidence of interconnectedness and impermanence, from both history and science, on quantum to cosmological scales, many people are unwilling to relinquish these worries, and their attempts of controlling reality through separatist ways of being (Streeter, 2018: 37). It is this type of control and perceived separation that weighs heavy on the hearts of mothers, who are biologically wired, though often unconsciously, to be raising families in the bosom of community and tribe, not in the current isolation experienced by the common nuclear family.
However, another response is available and offers alternative futures. The feminine “tend-and-befriend” (Taylor et al. 2000) response promotes nurturance, reduces distress, and activates oxytocin-rich neural pathways (Campbell, 2008) which, as in the process of natural birth, are associated with the promotion of love, trust, empathy, generosity and other pro-social behaviours (Kirsch et al., 2005).
Spiritual
As Gus Speth suggested at the beginning, we need a spiritual and cultural revolution. To solve this myriad of problems we must “raise our level of thinking above the level where problems were created…..” (Einstein… )
The future is a principle for present action and holds the ethical force needed to “awaken” people to the realities of these new levels of thinking and awareness (Slaughter in Bussey, 2014).
The future acts as an attractor in this process of growing self-consciousness, and demands attention in a way that it did not in pre-modernity (Bussey, 2014: 2).
…
Next I look at motherhood through the lens of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), with a resulting four narratives.
CLA is like an iceberg, as we move below the surface of the problem or situation to explore underlying causes and roots, with change occurring from the transformation of deeply held narratives, myths and metaphors (Inayatullah).
Change the story = Change the reality.
To be continued…