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Nature Accountability Leadership
What does it mean for a leader to be accountable to nature?
The Nature Accountability Leadership (NAL) program seeks to explore this question from a research and action context by examining how we commonly interact with our surrounding natural environment, and what this interaction contributes to our sense of personal, community, and organizational wellbeing. Clearly, we are all surrounded and influenced by nature, whether we consciously think of these interactions or not.
As the following diagram illustrates, human interaction with nature has evolved over time, and people still travel through various parts of this cycle in their current lives:
The most negative and destructive part of human interactions with nature come from our viewing nature as something to be feared and conquered, or simply as something to be used for our own gain and limitless exploitation. While there is now much more emphasis on experiencing nature and learning from it, this also has the risk of continuing our pattern of over-use unless we achieve a viewpoint of informed appreciation that results in our practicing a new form of accountable stewardship.