Nature’s Voice and the “InBetween”

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The world was not made for human beings; human beings were made within a world already in motion. Mountains were rising, waters circulating, winds sculpting landscapes, and beings living, dying, and evolving long before anyone called them “resources” or “ecosystems.”

To remember this is to remember that humans are participants, not protagonists, in a larger, unfolding story. The “inbetween” names the field of forces, relationships, and intelligences that hold everything together and quietly teach us how to live.

The Missing Presence

In climate conversations, nearly all focus remains on human experience: our heat waves, our floods, our economies. Even when we speak of “nature,” it is often treated as an abstraction, absent, silent, reduced to numbers and reports.

Picture two people discussing ocean warming, the changing salinity, acidity, and oxygen levels. Their concerns may be sincere, their facts accurate, yet the ocean itself is nowhere to be found. No seawater in sight, no salt in the air, no tangible presence of what they are trying to defend.

What’s missing is not just an object but a relationship. Without water, they speak for the ocean rather than with it. That gap between human words and living reality is the “inbetween”: the space of copresence and reciprocity where genuine listening begins.

The InBetween as Relational Reality

The “inbetween” is the connective tissue of life, the space between beings that is never empty. It is where energy and responsibility circulate, where lessons about balance, limits, and renewal emerge. It is both a classroom and an ethical space: the testing ground for whether humans dominate the conversation or make room for morethanhuman voices.

When discussions ignore the inbetween, they collapse the world into a single human perspective. Nature becomes a backdrop, a passive object in need of representation. Yet the Earth is constantly communicating through tides, wind, migrations, decay, and regeneration. The problem is not silence; it is our failure to listen.

Water as Intelligent Presence

Consider water. Often labelled a “resource” or a line on a climate chart, water is in fact one of the planet’s most sophisticated presences. It shapes coastlines, redistributes heat, carries memory, and enlivens every ecosystem it touches.

Water:

  • Holds memory in glaciers, aquifers, clouds, and rivers.
  • Organizes life in complex webs that adapt to shifts in chemistry and temperature.
  • Nourishes land and species with exquisite timing where its cycles remain intact.

To call water intelligent is not metaphorical flattery. It acknowledges a living system that responds, adapts, and cocreates the conditions for life — something no technology can replicate.

Talking With, Not For

Honouring the inbetween means refusing to speak for nature in its absence and learning instead to talk to it. This begins with presence, bringing the element into the space of dialogue, physically and symbolically, and engaging it with respect.

Imagine climate discussions where:

  • A vessel of seawater rests at the center of the room, grounding the conversation in the reality it concerns.
  • Participants take a moment of silence, touch the waterl, and consider where that water has travelled and what it has witnessed.
  • Decisions are framed as questions to the water: What do you need from us? How are you already responding? How must we change to restore the right relationship?

The water does not answer in words, but through currents, chemistry, and movement. Listening becomes a relational practice of dialogue instead of a monologue.

Beyond HumanCentred Narratives

Recentring the inbetween overturns familiar climate narratives. It shifts concern from what climate change is doing to us to what Earth is asking of all beings, human and morethanhuman. It challenges the idea that the world is a stage built for human achievement and replaces it with humility, the awareness that our knowledge, while powerful, is partial.

Environmental destruction is not only a technical crisis but a relational one. When we discuss oceans, forests, and skies as abstractions, we reproduce the same separation and control that caused the damage.

Reweaving the Web of Relationship

Listening to nature’s voice through the inbetween calls for new practices of connection:

  • Bringing elements such as water, soil, plants, and stones into meetings and ceremonies as honoured participants.
  • Holding gatherings outdoors, where the morethanhuman world is not excluded but present.
  • Practising protocols of greeting, gratitude, and consent before making decisions that affect the land.
  • Learning from Indigenous teachings that treat land, waters, and elements as relatives with agency and law, not as mute resources.

In this way, the “impact of climate change” becomes a lived conversation among all beings. Human speech joins a chorus rather than dominating the soundscape.

Honouring the InBetween

Life will continue in some form with or without us, but human survival depends on restoring right relationships with the living world. The inbetween is where those relationships form, deepen, and become sacred again.

When climate dialogue makes space for the presence and voice of water, land, and other beings, it shifts from crisis management to relationship repair. We remember that we are not speaking on behalf of a silent planet, we are speaking within a living one.

In that shift from speaking for to speaking with, another kind of future becomes possible: one where humans take their rightful place inside a wider intelligence, listening to the teachers that have been here far longer than we have, and shaping choices that honour the lifegiving spaces in between.

 

Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

Image Credit: Hector John Periquin, Unsplash

 

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Climate Resilience as an Act of Self-Determination

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Across these lands, First Nations are not simply responding to climate change; they are expressing a profound act of self-determination. Investing in resilience is not just about reducing risk or protecting infrastructure; it is about renewing relationships with land, water, plants, animals, and elements as the primary teachers of how to live, adapt, and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

For Indigenous communities, resilience is inseparable from identity, language, law, and governance. It is a way of saying: We will define our own adaptation, guided by the natural laws that have sustained life here for millennia.

Learning from Nature’s Long History of Change

Climate change is often described as novel or purely human-made. While industrial activity has unquestionably accelerated, the Earth’s climate has always been in motion. Over millennia, warming, cooling, flooding, and fire have continuously reshaped life. In these cycles, nature teaches a hard truth: some species perish, others adapt. Those that survive don’t just endure; they reorganize, forge new relationships, and sometimes emerge more resilient and diverse than before.

Indigenous Peoples have observed and lived within these adaptive processes for thousands of years. By watching how plants root deeper, how animals shift migration patterns, and how waters carve new paths, communities learn what authentic adaptation means. Adaptation is not an optional add-on; it is a law of life.

More-than-Human Teachers of Autonomy

Indigenous law and lifeways are rooted in the more-than-human world. Languages carry the verbs and metaphors of specific territories, while hunting, fishing, harvesting, and ceremony express ecological kinship.

From this perspective:

  • Plants teach patience, rootedness, and collective defence.
  • Animals show mobility, alertness, and cooperation.
  • Waters’ model persistence and the quiet strength of flow.
  • Fire and wind remind us of transformation and the limits of control.

These beings are not “resources.” They are teachers. They show that autonomy is not isolation but the capacity to respond to change while remaining in right relationship with the web of life. For many First Nations, this is where self-determination begins in the school of the land, long before it is written into policy.

Climate Change as a Crucible for Renewal

When communities design resilient housing, energy systems, food networks, or water infrastructure, they do more than install technology; they realign human systems with the teachings of their territories. This can mean:

  • Designing community layouts that follow local contours, winds, and wildlife corridors.
  • Adjusting hunting and fishing practices to track shifting species while maintaining reciprocity.
  • Reclaiming fire stewardship to protect habitats and renew ecosystems.
  • Localizing food and energy to reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-heavy supply chains.

Each of these is a form of climate self-determination. The more space, resources, and authority First Nations must shape such models, the more deeply adaptation can take root in long-term relationships with land and water. These shifts are not only technical but also cultural, linguistic, and spiritual. They create the conditions for communities to renew their institutions, habits, and values at the pace the Earth now demands.

Knowledge That Evolves with the Climate

As First Nations engage closely with their territories, monitoring ice, tracking plant cycles, observing wildlife, and watching shorelines, a living record of change emerges. Each project produces two transformations:

  • Infrastructure evolves through new buildings, systems, and practices.
  • Knowledge evolves, deepening understanding of place, risk, and interdependence.

This co-evolution is crucial. Static plans soon fail in a world of accelerating climate disruptions. True resilience relies on the capacity to read the land, interpret signals, and adjust course. When governance is grounded in the agency of the land itself, Indigenous Nations are uniquely positioned to lead this kind of adaptive practice.

From Self-Determination to Shared Sovereignty

When First Nations lead adaptation, they are not only strengthening their own communities, but they are also modelling shared sovereignty rooted in place. Shared sovereignty does not erase difference; it anchors relationships in mutual responsibility.

It rests on three recognitions:

  • Natural laws, those governing water, soil, species, and climate, are the highest laws.
  • Human governance must fit within them, not above them.
  • Nation-to-nation relationships are strongest when grounded in shared duties to land and water.

As First Nations are supported to listen to and act from the authority of land, new possibilities for collaboration and climate justice open. Non-Indigenous societies have much to learn from these approaches, not just techniques, but humility: accepting that humans must adapt to the Earth, not the other way around.

A Path Forward for Climate Justice

Climate change is revealing the brittleness of systems built on extraction and the denial of limits. In contrast, Indigenous climate leadership offers another path, one grounded in relationship with morethanhuman relatives and exercised through responsibility rather than domination.

For readers of the Indigenous Climate Hub, this is an invitation to see resilience not as a technical challenge but as a renewal of connection:

  • Supporting First Nations’ leadership strengthens teachers’ adaptation to lands, waters, and living beings.
  • Investing in Indigenous self-determination invests in knowledge systems that can guide all communities through uncertainty.
  • Embracing shared sovereignty honours natural law and the hope that, by learning from the Earth, humanity can move beyond survival into a state of balance.

In this light, climate change becomes more than a threat; it becomes the crucible through which deeper self-determination, wiser stewardship, and more just relationships among nations are forged.

 

Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

Image Credit : Kenzie Broad, Unsplash

 

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