“I am nature and everything around me is nature”
A chat with Kalpana Arias on finding roots, connecting with nature, and the ups, but mostly downs, of COP28.
Kalpana Arias has made her life’s work connecting people to nature in a digital age. I first came across her last year when she hosted a workshop called Radical Roots with the company I was working with at the time. She gave the low-down on urban greening and taught them to make seed bombs to scatter around their neighbourhoods.
Sadly, I only witnessed the workshop from afar because I was in London and the event was in Copenhagen, but we managed to meet in person a few months later at a book club she was running as part of her social enterprise, Nowadays On Earth. The book in question was, very appropriately, Guerilla Gardening and after she interviewed its author, the equally inspiring Ellen Miles, we all dreamt up our own plans for planting out the empty plots and sad little street beds in our respective local areas.
Her big bright smile and passion for connecting people to the world around them are infectious, and her relentless efforts to fight the environmental hurdles we’re facing with playfulness and originality are inspiring.
At the time of our chat, she was with her mother in Colombia and I was with mine in France, and the time absolutely flew by as we discussed her work, in both theoretical and practical terms, and the importance of finding your roots.
We also talk through the disappointments and realisations she had at COP28 late last year, and, ending with a bit of hope and positivity, the projects she’s most looking forward to launching in 2024.
To dig a little deeper into Kalpana’s work, you can sign up to her gardening workshops, book club, and newsletter. You can also download her app right here.
As always, this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The best place to start, and where I start with everyone, is to introduce yourself. I’d love for you to say a little bit about where you’re from, who you are, and what you do.
I’m Kalpana, I’m a multi-hyphenate human being — I’m a gardener, technologist, and urban greening activist. I’m currently based in London working with a community of gardeners to make our cities green again and have really been enjoying exploring what urbanity means as a vehicle for transformation in the ways we as humans relate to our environment, to each other, and the natural world.
And what does that work look like in terms of different projects that you work on?
The day-to-day really fluctuates and also depends on the season. At the very beginning of Nowadays on Earth, I was really interested in looking at what our relationship to nature looks like in today’s world, and what I kept noticing was this interesting pull and push between nature and technology. Between this romanticization of our past relationship with the natural world and an excitement at the incredible tools and creativity that have transformed the way that we see and experience the world. Both of these ideas held a similar meaning for me which was that nature is technology and that we can create technology that is for people and for nature if we allow ourselves to live with nature-led practices.
That got me interested in creating urban green spaces that were supported through technology, so we have started working with different emerging technologies like AI, VR, and gamified nature apps to create a space where we can explore how tech can create this vision of nature that we can all feel but is sometimes hard to imagine. This oppression of our imagination so that we can’t really see a world beyond what is already there is part of a wider system of oppression. So we are using the master's tools to destroy the master’s house, essentially using technology in a way that is aligned with nature, bringing it to the centre of these tools, and giving it a voice.
I know that’s very vague, so I can go into specifics of what we actually do — things like creating our app, hosting different workshops on nature rights, and bringing nature into decision-making spaces and board rooms. We also think about how we use these processes when we’re innovating or creating. How do we make sure we are working from an ecosystemic point of view, as opposed to from a very human-centric one?
The first time that I heard about you and your work was because you were doing a workshop with SPACE10, and I can remember writing the copy for the calendar page and thinking, wow, seed bombs! This is so cool! And, because I was in London and the workshop was in Denmark, I didn’t get to take part in it, but it sounded so radical to me. It was a kind of workshop that I had never heard of before and I guess it was a breath of fresh air to know that somebody was out there trying to get people more engaged with their surroundings again and connect with nature by planting and guerilla gardening, so I’d love for you to talk about that approach.
There are a lot of different groups and communities out there taking part in guerilla gardening and one of the workshops that we lead is called Radical Roots, which is the one we presented at SPACE10. Sometimes nature and gardening can feel inaccessible in terms of what you do and the tools you need, but nature creates its own seed bombs, just through the very biological design of plants, so it’s about getting people to think about how they can give nature a helping hand — especially in environments where we really have to carve out these spaces.
We normally see weeds growing out of pavement cracks and that’s one of the most resilient forms of urban nature that we find, but when we think about our surroundings and our environment in cities, everything was a choice, but not a choice that has necessarily been made by you or your community. We wanted to create a way to give people back that agency and that power, not by asking for it, but by doing and by being part of this very natural process.
The workshop also came about from wanting to add a sense of play and fun into things — when we talk about the power of imagination, I don’t think there is a better archetype than a seed. So, I think doing workshops with seeds is a great way to create that sense of what our surroundings could become, and just playing and doing it in community, which I think is a very important part of that transformation. Knowing that it’s not about individual change and it might feel like it’s a very singular act, but when it’s done in numbers, it really can shift the dial to give that power back to communities.
Definitely, and how empowering to be given a seed or to go and buy a seed after going to one of these workshops and plant it in a street garden bed around your house and then see that grow. I think the focus on the collective is such an important part of it because we live in a very individualistic kind of world and for people to realise that if we get together, we can make ourselves at home together, and that’s really beautiful.
It’s about also planting yourself back in your own ecosystem. I mean, Radical Roots kind of asks, how do we build roots back into our community? How do we go into our hyper-human selves? We’ve got more non-human cells than human cells, so how can we tap into that to let our mycelial tendrils ooze out of our pores and grow roots into the earth to really plant ourselves back in our space? A lot of us live so out of our bodies and out of our environments, so it’s about planting ourselves back into your own ecosystem with the act of planting.
And on a more personal level, where do you feel rooted? I feel like you’re quite an international…
International superstar. Oh gosh, well I was born in a city, I was born in Bogota, and I’ve lived in cities most of my life — I moved to Houston later on and then to London, so I’ve always had this very push and pull relationship with the city. I think about 10 years ago, I felt like I wanted to leave the city and be in the countryside and be in that immediate nature environment because that’s where my body felt healthy, that’s where I felt my best, that’s where I felt happier and clearer. But then in the pandemic that started to shift for me because I was in London and Brighton at the time and my relationship with the city started to change because, I guess my longing for nature made my brain activate both the nature that was around me and the nature that wasn’t there.
I found a sense of rootedness in the nature that is all around us and the future nature that is also there. It was like being able to see through the different dimensions of what is there and what could be there. And I think that’s where I’m finding my rootedness, very similarly to the weeds that are growing between the pavements, I’m finding rootedness in the very desolate and empty parts of the world because that’s where things need to grow and I think that’s where I find a lot of hope and a lot of possibilities.
With that in mind, do you have any daily practices or things that you like to do to remind yourself of those roots? Or is it just embedded in your everyday existence?
I like to feel it as an everyday existence. I do have my own mindfulness practices which have really helped me to cultivate a sense of awareness and love and compassion and togetherness over the years. I think if you’re disconnected from yourself, it’s very difficult to connect with the world around you, so there’s definitely an inner and an outer relationship that needs to be cultivated. But the beautiful thing about nature, or just the world outside of us, because I try not to differentiate between what is nature and what isn’t nature, is that it is all a metabolic process of Gaia. Everything is a part of nature and I think approaching things with that understanding creates a better sense of connection and understanding of who we are as a species, and our potential on this planet.
For me, cultivating that everyday experience of, “I am nature and everything around me is nature,” allows me to pull on those threads. It’s about trying to bring yourself back into the living-ness of things because a lot of the time we just don’t exist in that space, it’s a very mental existence. So I try to bring that into a daily practice and the best way I have found to do that is through gardening and interacting with nature and just being in a place where I can sit and observe nature more directly.
Speaking of relating to the world around us, I know that you’ve just been to COP28 and I wonder if you maybe have any comments about that. I feel like certain outcomes weren’t as good as we wanted, so I’d be interested to know how you felt about it as an individual but also as a person who is so embedded in this world of connecting people to nature and environmental activism.
Yeah, I still have a COP28 hangover.
I’m still a little bit burnt out from it and I’ve tried to just restore and rest a lot, but there were a lot of pros and a lot of cons. There’s a fine balance between completely negating something as bad because I think we need to lead with hope, not out of delusion, but because it would be a dishonour to a lot of the communities who have been showing up doing the work. The thing is, the work continues outside of those two weeks.
In some ways it was disappointing, but also I think similarly, with everything else going on in Gaza and all of the different humanitarian crises — in Congo, Sudan — I do feel like there is a veil being lifted and the forces at play are starting to reveal themselves. We can name them, see them, and direct action towards them.
Compared to previous COPs and conversations, I can see that there’s a deeper understanding and awareness of what we’re really dealing with. We’ve got the Bad Guys, we know who they are, and we know what we need to do to deal with them, but the thing that is actually taking a lot of the energy that we need to fight the big issues is, unfortunately, the divisions within the movement itself and that was really hard to see at COP. The disorganisation that happens because certain systemic issues within the movement are not being addressed by the people who hold power and influence. For anyone who is Black, Brown, or Indigenous, it is exhausting to continue to fight in those spaces because there is just so much internal resistance to the transformation that we are calling for. I really hope that changes in the coming years. What I’m seeing more of is communities and people who continue to be oppressed in these forums rising up and doing their own thing.
I think we’re just noticing that some systems aren’t going to change and I came out of COP just disappointed. We know the fossil fuel lobbyists and the industry itself are the bad guys, it’s just more hurtful when we look at the movement itself and see how broken and fragmented it is and I think that is where we need to, in the next couple of years, actually start to build more bridges and more cohesion. There needs to be more humility from everyone because we do need everyone in this fight. It’s definitely not about placing blame or creating more of these same cycles of pain and oppression. It’s about saying we need everyone in this fight, and asking if everyone is here for the same reasons because unfortunately there is just so much greenwashing. At least with fossil fuel lobbyists, we know who they are, but it’s harder on the other end.
Let’s make things a little bit more hopeful, shall we? How are you feeling about 2024? What are you going to be working on? Are you excited about anything in particular?
Yes, there are lots of things I am looking forward to. We are hoping to launch the beta version of We Grow which is the visual gardens app in 2024. We piloted the nature rights workshop at COP28 and got really great feedback — it’s all about bringing nature into your boardroom without tokenizing it and looking at how we can use biodata to give nature a voice. So I’m really looking forward to working with organisations who really want to actually do the work and not just say that they’re bringing nature into the board room but actually doing it.
I’m excited to work with people who are part of the solution and continue to inspire that change and transformation in organisations that want to take the leap but who maybe don’t know how to. It will be really exciting to pave that way forward because there are only so many human solutions to these issues. We need to lean on the more-than-human to help us expand our knowledge and our imaginations. The solutions are definitely there, we just need to find them and resource them and give them the power to actualise.
See you in the next one,
Annabel