All in Darcia Narvaez

The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way Of Raising Children / Darcia Narvaez + G.A. Bradshaw

The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way Of Raising Children / Darcia Narvaez + G.A. Bradshaw

Patrick Farnsworth
Darcia Narvaez, G.A. Bradshaw, 351

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.

Kinship Worldview: Precepts For Rebalancing Life On Earth / Darcia Narvaez + Four Arrows

Kinship Worldview: Precepts For Rebalancing Life On Earth / Darcia Narvaez + Four Arrows

Patrick Farnsworth
Darcia Narvaez, Four Arrows, 323

Darcia Narvaez and Four Arrows join me to discuss their recently published book Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth, a work that contains "selected speeches from Indigenous leaders around the world—necessary wisdom for our times, nourishment for our collective, and a path away from extinction toward a sustainable, interconnected future."

As I comment in the beginning of this discussion, reading this book has been a necessary balm to the various subjects I've explored on the podcast of late. This work has reminded me that our civilization's capacity for mass violence, systemic oppression, exploitation, and the destruction of life-systems of the earth is not representative of human nature, nor the human condition, as a whole. The dominant worldview that pervades all facets of modern, industrial human life is the outcome of centuries, if not millennia, of bad habits and intergenerational trauma. The kinship worldview, highlighted in this book and in this interview, has been a defining feature of indigenous cultures the world over, for "ninety-nine percent of human history," as Professor Narvaez states in her work. The question of how to return to this way of knowing and being, and how to apply it in light of the most pressing crises dominating our time, is of utmost importance.

The Bow That Is Stable: Wise + Knowledgeable Child Rearing / Darcia Narvaez

The Bow That Is Stable: Wise + Knowledgeable Child Rearing / Darcia Narvaez

Patrick Farnsworth
Darcia Narvaez, 69

Darcia Narvaez is a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where she studies flourishing and compassionate moral development and ecological attachment in children and adults. She is the author or editor of dozens of books, chapters and articles. Her recent book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, won the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association and from the American Education Research Association’s Moral Development and Education SIG. She writes a popular blog for Psychology Today, Moral Landscapes.