2
Should I Have Children?
Brown Bears
The chill surprised her. Autumn’s come early. Her nose lifted to catch the drift of wind. Salt—the air was salty—a sea wind. The season had definitely shifted, and winter was on its way. Returning her attention to the Pine, the Bear continued to pluck cones and swallow their fatty nuts. It wasn’t time to muse about the weather. It was time to consider the children she carried within.
The turn to fall in Kamchatka is poignant. By September’s end, the landscape is in retreat. Summer’s flush has faded, replaced by winter’s breath. Some residents have left for temperate climes; others remain, picking at the season’s last fruits. Brown Bears are among those who stay, finding what they can, gleaning nuts and berries. Given enough sustenance, they can grow to five feet tall at the shoulders and weigh in at more than half a ton.1 But gaining this stature takes hard work. Bears are fully aware that summer’s bounty may disappear at any moment, and they do not stop looking for food until they achieve the fullness needed to balance hibernation’s deficit. At this point, as Charlie Russell observed, Bears ease their search and transition to the coming of winter.
Charlie’s observations came from a lifetime spent with Bears. After fifty-some years living cheek by jowl with Grizzlies in his home province of Alberta, Canada, Charlie spent a decade living with their cousins, the Brown Bears of Kamchatka, Russia’s stark peninsular wilderness. It was here that his journey took an unexpected turn: the rescue, rearing, and reintroduction to the wild of Brown Bear cubs.2
All at once, Charlie was thrust into the role of a mother Bear. She is the vital source of care that feeds the healthy growth of infants to the threshold of adulthood. Building on his deep experience with Grizzlies and living in the wild, Charlie was able to successfully function as a surrogate mother. He nurtured ten cubs whose mothers had been hunted down and killed, so they could eventually live and thrive on their own among their wild Kamchatkan kin. Charlie’s experience, however, did not go unaided. He had unexpected help. Through guidance from a mother Brown Bear named Brandy, Charlie grafted into the wisdom of Brown Bear rootstock.
Brandy taught Charlie the nuanced ways of Bear ethics, values, and motherhood. Her trust and confidence in his abilities were so great that she put him in charge of her young while she was away doing other Bear business. That phase of their partnership took form one day when Brandy up and left her children in the care of their new human nanny. As Charlie pointed out, Brandy did not bother to ask if he wanted the job:
She was in charge and never made any bones about it. Brandy was an amazing female bear and the crankiest bear I ever met. What I mean is that she was very intolerant of my stupid human mistakes and had no qualms about telling me so. She was not very tolerant of other bears either. If you heard a bear roaring in the valley, it would be Brandy. She was loudest when chasing a male, and she’d go after him for miles throughout the valley and over the mountain. I’d hear her and laugh, thinking she’s after some poor soul who happened to wander into her area.3
In addition to mothering his own cubs, Charlie was a second mother for three sets of Brandy’s. It was a relationship that lasted more than seven years.
Intimate contact with the Kamchatkan wild provided incredible insights into Brown Bear life. Charlie saw how, when the warm season begins to wind down, Bears do too. “They know exactly how much more food they need to consume before achieving the right amount of fat,” he said. “The cubs were ravenous when they emerged from hibernation. But, at some point in late summer to early fall, they slowed down and became what I called ‘lazy old bears.’ They lost the tension that goes with an urgent need for food. When they know they have fattened up enough, bears can afford to loll around and enjoy the remaining warmth of the year.”4 Similar to their traditional human neighbors, the Itelmens, Kamchatka’s Brown Bears live with Nature’s pace.
Fat or slim, Bears possess powerful arms and unretractable six-inch claws. To view these claws as weapons alone, however, is a mistake. While they can serve Bears in this capacity, claws have many roles and are wielded with delicate care. Charlie describes the finesse with which his cubs used their paws and claws when harvesting Pine nuts:
They’d pick up a pinecone and carefully lay it on the back of their hand where it forms a hollow. Then, one by one, they’d bite and separate the scales and nuts in their mouth. When one side was done, they’d switch over to the other hand and do the same thing. The cone was rotated, back and forth between paws, with a steady stream of its scales pouring out from the cub’s mouth. After four or five bites, the cubs would drop the empty core, reach up and grab another cone to start the process over, just like a conveyor belt.5
A mother Bear uses her clawed hands for all manner of things including digging roots, catching Salmon, and making a winter den where her babies will be born and overwinter. While human children are born throughout the year, baby Bears are birthed during a single season. Brown Bears hibernate for up to seven months until spring breaks, when they can emerge from their winter retreat. At that moment, Bears join everyone else in a common, pressing mission: find food and start packing in calories. Bear hands instantly transform into skilled implements for fishing and harvesting nuts and fruits.
Every year, migrating Salmon populate the inland waters of Kamchatka. Salmon have a double life: they are anadromous, living part of their lives in the ocean and the other part in fresh water. On average, ocean waters are three times as concentrated with ions (salts) as a Salmon’s interior. In fresh water, the opposite is true. To accommodate this radical change in chemistry, the Fish have evolved an ingenious method that pumps salts in and out of their bodies to maintain internal chemical balance, a process called osmoregulation.6
Salmon life begins in fresh water. A few months after they are born, young Salmon called alevin travel downstream to the open ocean, where they do three things: drink a lot of water, decrease urine production, and start osmoregulating pumps in their gill cells. After a few years, the process reverses when Salmon return to spawn in natal waters. Their exteriors also change, morphing from an ocean-blue complexion to crimson as internal carotenoids move into their skin.7
The journey home is challenging. After navigating a network of ever-smaller waterways—sometimes as long as a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers)—Salmon bodies are spent by the time they reach their spawning grounds. When a female Salmon arrives and finds the right spot, she uses her tail to build one or several nests, called redds (the word’s origin is credited to the Gaelic, meaning “to clean and clear an area”). When construction is completed, she lays her eggs in the nest, and a waiting male fertilizes them. The mother then covers the eggs with gravel. Her task accomplished, she remains, vigilantly guarding her precious brood until she dies, which can be less than a scant ten days later, two months short of the birthing of her young.
Meanwhile, on land, Bears wait impatiently for the annual event. They line lakes and streams, pacing up and down riverbanks and shorelines in hungry anticipation. After months without food or water, Bears are depleted. Their bodies crave the rich protein, fat, and nutrients that Salmon bodies provide. As Salmon die, Bears revive, and so the cycle goes.
Often, Fish and berries aren’t enough. Brown Bears also need Kamchatka’s white pearls, Pine nuts, to create a blanket of honeycombed fat encircling their midriff. This layer of adipose tissue provides crucial insulation and slow-burning calories that sustain a Bear through hibernation.8 Mother Bears need even more. Not only do they have to maintain good health and strength to survive until and into spring; they also have to have enough stores to provide nutritious milk for their cubs.
Infant Animals require resources appropriate to their species-specific needs as they approach and complete sensitive periods of development. Altricial species—those that depend on intensive postnatal care, such as Bears and humans—must have sufficient internal and external resources for both mother and children. An infant’s health directly relates to their mother’s health. If a Bear mother receives proper nutrition, experiences low to negligible psychological and physiological stress, and has not experienced trauma, such as the violent orphaning that Charlie Russell’s rescued cubs endured, a mother can usually provide well for her child before and after birth. Primates are no different.
While Brown Bear mothers are designed to care for their cubs on their own, humans evolved to be cooperative child-raisers.9 The core structure of humanity’s ancestral evolved nest is a family and community who give a mother physical and emotional support to create a space of nurturance—a biology of love.10 Unlike other Primates, however, who travel using long arms in conjunction with legs, humans are bipedal. Evolutionary shifts in posture and motion have led to other changes in our species.11
As a result of walking on two limbs instead of four, humans evolved smaller pelvises, and at the same time, they evolved bigger heads with larger brains.12 Among hominids, human baby brains and bodies are the most developmentally plastic and have the greatest and longest-term needs.13 Human brains are three times larger than would be expected in another primate of the same size. In anticipation of extensive postnatal growth in brain volume, the human cranium does not seal completely for about eighteen months. Because a human mother’s narrow pelvis forces a baby to exit her womb when the fetus is highly immature compared to other Mammals,14 the human brain is the least developed Primate brain at birth, and it needs long-term nested care.
Neural tissue requires a lot of energy to grow and maintain itself, so having a large head and brain is an expensive adaptation. Almost 60 percent of a human infant’s energy intake goes to growing the brain.15 Seventy-five percent of our brain size develops after birth, co-constructed through baby-carer partnerships. If most of our brain growth is influenced by what we experience, then it matters what that experience is. Basic brain and body systems and their circuitry are established by the care and environment in which a baby grows. From the brain stem to the limbic system to the neocortex, the infant’s brain organizes around social experience.16 These features are reflected in the design of the human evolved nest.
The human evolved nest comprising family and community creates a web of nurturance. Parents and other carers serve as external regulators—sources of comfort and care—who assist infants in developing their internal capacities, including such crucial neurobiological systems as the immune, neuroendocrine, and stress response systems. With this external scaffolding of nested care, body and brain systems are immersed in a bath of supportive biochemistry, ensuring that neurobiological systems form optimally. Biological anthropologist Ashley Montagu describes this essential external womb, an exterogestation, as a postnatal “womb with a view.”17
Every child is a self-organizing, dynamic system who increasingly interacts with and depends on an expanding, supportive environment.18 These interactions shape the extent of an infant’s mental and emotional complexity and body-mind integration. Bodies are implicit memory banks, imprinting perceptions of the world—whether those experiences feel loving and sensitive or frightening and insensitive—that seed the mind-self foundation. Companionship care—loving envelopment in the evolved nest of human and nonhuman relations—builds a child’s self-confidence, resilience, and ability to regain internal balance after experiencing change or stress. The appropriately nurtured child-turned-adult learns how to maintain healthful balance and respond effectively to their experiences.
In the case of humans and other Mammals, because mothers have evolved to carry the embryo to term and provide nurturance through breast milk, they generally form the fulcrum of the community’s nested organization of care. Human maternal health and a mother’s ability to provide committed care for her young are strongly influenced by the communal support they receive.19 Our species has evolved to need a great deal of community support to raise a child, each of whom requires upward of thirteen million calories to reach maturity.
A mother communicates to her baby behaviorally, verbally, and nonverbally. Her states of mental, emotional, and physical health transmit to her infant through her actions, which are informed by culturally imbued values shaped during her early life experience. Genes, however, are inert without experience. What the baby experiences in the environment influences which genes are strongly or weakly expressed.20 Experience turns genes on or off during sensitive periods, a process referred to as epigenetics. Interactions between genes and timed experience play a significant role in child development.
Care quality, which includes a carer’s attitudes, feelings, and psychological states, is more than skin deep. It directly translates to a baby’s body and brain and sets them on a given postnatal path. Mammalian breastfeeding, for example, is a formative regulatory mechanism that shapes budding minds and brains.21 When a newborn is allowed to crawl up their mother’s belly to massage and suck a nipple to start the flow of milk, they start on a path of positive self-confidence and trust. Suckling comfort, colostrum, and breast milk are fundamental elements of interpersonal development. In cases of adoption or other circumstances when breast milk is not available, an infant can experience the essential physical and emotional connection that breastfeeding embodies when provision of formula is combined with skin-to-skin contact.
As soon as a human or Bear baby is born, mother and child form a synchronized dyad whose interactions of feeding and nuzzling seamlessly shift from synchrony (attunement) and dyssynchrony (brief out-of-attunement). By experiencing dyssynchrony—as when, for example, a mother moves and milk flow stops—followed by rapid restoration of synchronic attunement—as when the baby finds the nipple again and milk flow resumes—an infant learns that when environmental change takes place, they have the power to restore connection. Over time, babies learn how to resynchronize diverse social interactions after synchrony is lost, thereby expanding their response “vocabulary.” These minute experiences set the stage for establishing the foundation for social self-efficacy, the belief in oneself and the understanding that one can function in the social world securely and successfully.22
In this relational dance, babies follow the lead of their carers through the “communicative musicality” of body-to-body signaling.23 As their physical skills grow, infants acquire new methods of interaction. They learn subtle nonverbal signaling and how to recognize the diverse workings of social relations—things like starting and stopping conversations, reading and understanding facial expressions, and expressing affection.24
Early relational processes also affect how an individual develops a sense of self-with-others, the sense of who-I-am that is defined by the more-than-one. We may perceive ourselves as individuals, but every individual is formed through relationships. I am because we are.25 Social experiences begin in the womb and carry through birth and beyond.26 An infant’s myriad internal psychosomatic networks, which range from cellular biochemical reactions to scheduled neuronal network formation, anticipate external networks of communal care and develop in coordination with the multiplicity of their surroundings. Through living with others, an infant’s core self begins to gel with the awareness of self as a feeling body, first in relationship with the mother and gradually with the ever-expanding world of family, community, and Nature.
Key to being part of this world outside the womb is the development of three basic systems. The first system focuses on the state of the body, through proprioception and interoception. Proprioception gives us an internal sense of our body in the world—how our movements and our bodies are in relationship with the environment. Interoception gives us the sense of what is going on inside our body. Similar to our senses—smell, touch, taste, sight, hearing, balance—proprioception and interoception are forms of communication. Proprioception helps keep us in contact and harmony with our environment, and interoception helps keep us in contact and harmony inside our body. Together, they monitor and coordinate with a shifting environment the overall state of the body, physiological processes, and felt emotions of well-being.27
The second system is exteroception or pragmatic intelligence. This faculty integrates awareness and information about specific situations, objects, and future events and our aesthetic response to them. The third system, alteroception, is concerned with coordinating body-to-body connection and emotional sympathy with others. It is integral to capacities for empathy.
Alteroceptive exchanges between a mother and baby finely tune interoceptive integration. Through touch, movement, and breastfeeding, the infant’s immature nervous system and rapidly growing body are sated, and they settle. Body-to-body contact fosters healthy sleep cycles, arousal, and exploration levels.28 Even precocial Animals, such as Chickens, Geese, and Turkeys, who are able to forage on their own almost immediately after hatching, still need the nurturance, protection, and love of their mother and siblings. Chicks will sleep under their mother’s wings and bodies at night for heat and protection; at the same time, they are receiving essential social and emotional “nutrients” that touch and cuddling provide. Indeed, the terms “precocial” and “altricial” are now appreciated as opposite ends of a continuum, the “precocial-altricial spectrum,” along which various species may share traits of both developmental classification extrema.29
Touch and caresses increase levels of oxytocin—the “love” hormone that typically makes us feel “cuddly”—and establish baselines of this neuromodulator for lifelong production in a child.30 While oxytocin helps facilitate a sense of connection and empathy with others, it also counteracts stress effects by decreasing blood pressure and reducing activity of the autonomic nervous system’s sympathetic branch (flight/fight).31
To healthfully coordinate and integrate proprioception, interoception, exteroception, and alteroception, infant brains need nurturing care to self-organize. Companionship care provided by the evolved nest within a complex natural world ensures that these capacities form harmoniously from birth. As nested children expand their capacities and relationships, they increase social skills and empathy because they have been treated with empathy.32 When a baby receives affection and responsiveness early on, their social brain is primed to care for others in return. A baby reflects back what they have experienced. Brown Bears are no different; their infants also need and flourish with somatic love and nurturance.
During their journey from loins to independent life, young Bears rely on their mother for everything. In utero, the female Bear’s blood and body provide nourishment for her growing babies. As soon as the one to four Bear babies are born, weighing less than a kilogram, they crawl to their mother’s nipples and begin to nurse. Den time is spent touching, nursing, nestling, and playing together. In spring, when the family leaves the den, nested care continues under the watchful eye of mother Bear. After two or even three years of constant companionship, including seven-month spells in the hibernation den together, the cubs wean and strike off on their own to eventually start the next generation of Brown Bears and repeat what they learned from their mother.33
Mother Bear wears many hats. She is protector, resource, and teacher. Although Bears are born with a genetic library of inborn knowledge, there is a lot that a mother’s children must learn and experience if they are to thrive in the wild. Living in the wilderness takes more than inheritance. It demands careful observation, vast social and ecological knowledge, and experience. As Charlie Russell discovered, skill levels vary across individuals and families, and using them well takes practice. Not all Brown Bears, for example, are born expert fishermen.34 Interspersed between play and forays of exploration, young Bears watch what their mother does and how she does it, be it fishing, snuffling for roots, artfully collecting Pine nuts, or, critically, exercising the ethics of Brown Bear society.
While female Bears may parent on their own, they are partnered at every step with mother Nature. Every aspect of a Bear is shaped in relationship with Nature’s grain. This refined union of self with surroundings has been passed through innumerable generations over millions of years. To optimize their children’s security and wellness, mothers-to-be must be aware of external states as well as their own internal states. In parallel to Salmon who use osmoregulation to retain inner balance amid changing environments, Bears maintain coherence between their bodies and the environment by using accurate knowledge of self and Nature reality.
Nature reality is the unspoken web of ethics and principles by which all Animals and Plants live.35 It is a sense of self born from and in relationship, resonant with what was referred to by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh as “interbeing”36 and by German philosopher Martin Buber as the nexus of “I-Thou” encounters.37 This interdependence and vibrant betweenness of wild existence is part of Nature’s coherence and beauty. Nature reality is reflected in Justo Oxa Díaz’s description of Quechuan relational living: “The community, the ayllu, is not only a territory where a group of people live; it is more than that. It is a dynamic space where the whole community of beings that exist in the world lives; this includes humans, plants, animals, the mountains, the rivers, the rain, etc. All are related like a family. It is important to remember that this place [the community] is not where we are from, it is who we are. For example, I am not from Huantura, I am Huantura.”38 Wholeness is the essence of our ancestral evolved nest and those of other Animals. We are placed in, and our ethics emerge from, that space.39 This exquisite sensitivity to perceiving oneself as fully part of Nature is woven into every aspect of life, including the time leading up to pregnancy and birth.
Male and female Brown Bears begin courting in early summer, after enough food and warmth have revived their bodies and minds. Generally, they do not mate until they are around five years old. By this time, Brown Bears are grown and sufficiently seasoned in the wisdom of the wild to take on the responsibility of a family. Unless a female is without children or her cubs are ready to wean, she will not mate. If she is solo, without children in tow, a female Brown Bear tends to wait to find a suitable male. If the pair “clicks,” they partner, and encased in the safety and warmth of the winter den crafted by their mother, a handful of hairless, blind baby Bears are born—but not always. While they may be fertilized, Bear eggs do not implant with conception.40 In fact, in humans, up to half of all embryos never implant after conception.41
Animals have evolved innumerable ways to adapt to changing and challenging environmental conditions. Birds like Canada Geese migrate when cool weather begins and food becomes scarce. Others stay put. Some, such as Black-Tailed Deer, can eke out a living despite the cold. Others yet, like Brown Bears, enter a period of dormancy, a sleepy state of lowered metabolism, heart, and breath rates.42
Biologists generally group dormancy methods into four main categories: hibernation, estivation, brumation, and diapause.43 Bears and many other endothermic (or internally heat-generating) Animals hibernate in winter. Estivation is a kind of hibernation that does not occur in cold weather but rather when conditions become too dry and hot. Ground Squirrels do this in the summer. Brumation is Reptile hibernation designed for the needs and physiology of ectothermic (cold-blooded) Animals. All three strategies are ways to stay in alignment with the environment by adjusting habits or physiology to shelter and conserve energy. A fourth physiological technique, embryonic diapause, is specifically aimed to optimize successful reproduction.44 Mother Bears accomplish this by delaying implantation, pausing before fertilized eggs implant into their uteri.
While denning, mother Bears stop eating, drinking, urinating, and defecating. They rely on stored fat to provide the necessary energy to survive and, if pregnant, nourish their cubs. This is another example illustrating why the relationship between a mother’s condition and her circumstances and environment is so important. It determines whether she gives birth and if her children will live through hibernation and beyond. Bears in peak condition, for example, seem to den early on, when winter begins to descend. They can afford to leave off finding food and start the process of making a family because they have enough inner resources to sustain their cubs through hibernation and in the first days after emerging in spring. This gives their children an edge because, relative to cubs born to less fit and less fat mothers, they have had more food and time to develop faster and more fully.45 Young Bear growth and fat storage characteristics are cross-generational, influenced both by their mother’s body condition before birth as well as their own postnatal nutrition.46
Processes such as delayed implantation are usually regarded as automatic, not involving active participation.47 Deeper reflection, however, suggests that while implantation mechanisms may be hardwired, the decision to implant is mindful of present and future conditions. Evolution created the pause between fertilization and implantation for a reason. All Animals express mindfulness and psychobiological self-regulation, the awareness of and ability to respond appropriately to environmental cues.48 Mindfulness—awareness of self and environment—is vital and integral to being one with Nature. Consciously or unconsciously, at the cusp of implantation, female Bears seem to hold the mirror of self-scrutiny close and ask: Am I ready to care for my babies?
This is not a strange concept for human cultures that, similar to Bears and other Animals, live as part of Nature’s skin. The now is connected to the following seven generations.49 Charlie Russell noticed this invisible connection and profound understanding with his Bears in Kamchatka. He was continually amazed to discover how they were able to see and anticipate things in ways so much more subtle than what modern humans consider possible.50 The decision to be a mother is one such example.
Mothering is a matter of more than just what the female does; it also matters who and where she is—her state of mind and body, and her past, present, and future circumstances. A potential mother-to-be must feel confident that she can build a solid, safe space to den her children. A Bear must also assess whether her body has accumulated sufficient resources to supply her cubs with milk through hibernation, all while maintaining her own fitness and readiness to provide optimal care needed after hibernation. Outside the den, a mother’s energies will be doubly taxed. It isn’t easy to secure food while at the same time keeping a wary eye out for danger and tending to her children’s education.
Until Nature releases summer’s riches, the few islands of green peeking out from melting snow service the entire neighborhood. Everyone is depleted from winter’s deprivation and eager to pull from Nature’s flesh. Poor berry crops and scarce Salmon runs intensify competition, and while the force and determination of a mother Brown Bear are not to be taken lightly, she is at a disadvantage with vulnerable young in her charge. A mother may be physically and mentally fit, but the environment may not be adequate. Climate change, scarcity of food, conflict, and overpopulation may tilt the scale against pregnancy. On top of all this are the dangers and pressures of human disturbances and hunting, which can prematurely drive a female Bear out of her den and cause the loss of her fetuses.51
In keeping with Nature’s gift economy and ethic of mutualism,52 Bears and Nature-based humans keep close track of what is happening in their homelands to determine when it is necessary to refrain from any given action, whether it is sexual activity, egg implantation, exiting from hibernation, or other decisions. By refraining from pregnancy and birth until conditions are sufficient to meet the huge investment that having babies requires, Wildlife stay in tune with the rest of Nature. Maintaining communication and alignment with the environment is central to evolution’s plan.
While some assert that Bears are the only Mammals who can and do delay egg implantation, gestation, and birth, similar strategies have been identified in many more Mammalian species.53 Adaptive mechanisms that evolved to match a mother’s and child’s needs to resource conditions, such as nonimplantation or spontaneous abortion, are also found in humans and other Primates. Baboons, for example, who are able to conceive year-round, show a marked peak in births at the “ecologically most optimal time.”54 By being sensitive to environmental changes such as harsh weather, food shortages, and demanding social dynamics and conditions, a mother increases the chances of her and her offspring’s survival. All these factors deeply influence her babies’ health and how well they will be able to integrate with their community and the world at large. They are yet another way Nature guides and partners with the various members of her ecohome.55
Deciding whether to have a child is a time for naked self-honesty and a stark assessment of reality. The correct answer to the question Am I ready to care for my babies? may not be what a potential mother or other parent/carer anticipates or desires. The biological momentum to pull ancestral heritage into the future is potent, and the yearning for the love, joy, and intimacy of family is strong. Yet her babies’ very lives depend on the mother’s ability to care well for them and maneuver outer social and ecological worlds successfully.
If the results of the mother’s evaluations of self and environment do not align, she risks her life and that of her offspring, and hence her lineage. If she has misjudged her capacity or that of the environment, the babies will fail to thrive. As witnessed today writ large, society spirals into poor mental and physical health if care and concern for one another are not reciprocated and ecological well-being is disregarded.56
Unnested care—the absence of an evolved nest—often leaves a baby fearful, uncertain, and vulnerable in a threatening world. Baby learns to feel that she is bad and may never feel truly secure. She does not see her environment, others, and Nature as welcoming and joyful, but rather as potential agents of harm and hurt, undeserving of her care and concern. Charlie Russell saw these consequences play out in Bears. Orphaned baby Bears, abused and traumatized, their nests shattered by their mother’s death with the blast of a hunter’s gun, similarly suffer. Bear and human brains, minds, and psyches did not evolve in anticipation of the violence and trauma intrinsic to the dominant human culture.57
All organisms have evolved to align with the environments in which they are born and live. Animals and our Nature-based ancestors enjoyed the bounty of a nested world for millions of years because the nested world is a relational world of reciprocity, fullness, and respect. It takes years of intimate, caring companionship in community and Nature to build well-functioning physical and emotional support that nourishes a baby’s body and spirit. It is only recently in human history that our species has created environments that are antithetical to those in which our species evolved. Instead of the ancestral nest, the majority of humans today follow a specific human-constructed world that is out of step with Nature. The difference between living in our natural ancestral environments and the largely human-constructed world of the present has generated widespread physical and psychological ill health affecting our species and the planet as a whole. Without the resources that our ancestral continuum and evolved nest provide, a child’s ability to thrive is challenged.
Self, inner and outer circumstances, and other unanticipated factors affect how babies will grow and whether they will be able to flourish in the world into which they are born. Taken together, these factors underscore the weighty responsibility that starting a family entails. In the words of Rae Maté, “We all need to realize that entering a pregnancy should be like entering a shrine, a sacred place and time: a baby is being built. . . . Society needs to protect pregnant women because everybody is creating this child. It takes a world to make a baby.”58 It is this realization that may give a female Bear pause. Without the foundations to provide resources of an evolved nest and a social and ecological world that can support the health of mind and body, a child’s future is precarious.