Darcia Narvaez returns to the podcast, along with co-author G.A. Bradshaw, to discuss their new book, The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities, published by North Atlantic Books.

By drawing on the ancestral legacies of child-rearing and broader nesting practices and contemporary breakthroughs in neurology and developmental psychology, we can better understand how integral intergenerational cultural practices bear on the complex development of human beings. But, what of our animal kin? What are their evolved nests, and what lessons can we learn from them? How does a broken or intact human evolved nest impact and interact with the evolved nests of other animals? 

Over the course of ten chapters of their new book The Evolved Nest, Narvaez and Bradshaw describe “different animal’s parenting model[s], sharing species-specific adaptations that allow each to thrive in their evolved nests.” Some examples include: how wolves build an internal moral compass; how beavers foster a spirit of play in their children; how octopuses develop emotional and social intelligence; and how, when, and whether (or not) brown bears decide to have children. 

For me, this discussion with these two women is a dialogue on non-dual consciousness and how the ecological and the social are the same. The brokenness of modern human societies bleeds into all systems of life, and while it may be difficult to imagine returning to lifeways that regenerate the integral components of the evolved nests of human and more-than-human beings, still, we can look to our animal kin and see ourselves—our pains and joys, our love and traumas, our brokenness and healing. Whatever the path to ecological regeneration may be at this late stage of biospheric collapse, it will involve looking to our more-than-human kin to recognize ourselves in them, to see what has been lost, and what yet can be reclaimed.