14 Singing in the Cobweb of Existence: Sustainability Learning in Early Childhood Education

Sarah Powell

School of Education, Macquarie University, Australia

Abstract

The singing body is a tangible evocation of the resonant energetic connection between human and Earth. The singing body, derived from Grosz (2008), acts as a theoretical starting point for thinking about the significance of singing as a real and embodied act of children’s becoming-with the Earth. A young child’s song-video offers insight into the deep and multifaceted expression of being that characterises young children’s knowledge and being in a form of existential practice and materialisation, which has the potential to change the way sustainability learning is perceived and enacted. The fundamental significance of singing is exemplified by the practices of Indigenous Aboriginal peoples of Australia and Wachiperi people of Peru, who sing to connect, create and heal. This profound relationship between human and Earth offers an ineluctable challenge to rethink current Western early childhood sustainability learning practices and beliefs.

Keywords

singing, sustainability, embodiment, creativity, Indigenous culture, early childhood education

The singing body is a tangible evocation of the resonant energetic connection between human and Earth. Singing cultivates deep, lasting, and meaningful relationships of being and becoming, which disrupts capitalism’s utilitarian association with the Earth. Sparking, cultivating and fostering children’s constitutive relationship with the Earth challenges the Capitalocene’s perceived right of ownership, its preoccupation with nature as an economic “thing”, and its total disregard for the Earth’s present and future. The notion of the singing body, derived from Grosz’s (2008) sense of the body ‘literally singing the territory into existence’ (p. 50), acts as a theoretical starting point for thinking about the significance of singing as a real and embodied act of children’s becoming-with the Earth; a simultaneous act of disruption and creation in a spatio-temporal assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is a frightening illustration of the way the Capitalocene has impacted the environment. According to Nobre et al. (2016), there are many issues that threaten this region, which are “potentially irreversible” (Nobre et al., 2016, p. 10759), such as the destruction of forests, which causes changes to the environment that cannot be reversed. Such destruction has ramifications related to biodiversity and rainfall, which will impact the world’s climate, biodiversity, atmosphere and water sources. According to Wissler (2015), “mining, logging, evangelism, and cattle farming” (p. 30) have devastated the Amazonian environment and have nearly destroyed Indigenous cultures. In his review, Swift (2010) describes the way Davis (2009) “delivers an indictment of a predatory industrialism that destroys cultures and habitats either through shortsighted arrogance or in order to plunder the Earth’s dwindling stock of fish, timber, minerals and hydrocarbons” (p. 34).

In Australia, it is a similar story. The regular incursion of oil and gas companies fracking in Aboriginal lands has caused great destruction. Despite worldwide moves towards the reduction of fossil fuel usage, as a way of responding to climate change, the Australian Government has persisted in its pursuit of money-making practices that exploit both the land and its people, justifying its decision as a way of “stimulating economic growth following the pandemic” (Knaus, 2021). Aboriginal people depend on this land, its water and its fish for survival. Fracking has, and will continue to, devastate the land, poison the water and poison the animals and fish. There are countless natural spaces that remain critically endangered and threatened across Australia, indeed, the world, and, without significant action, these places and cultures will be lost. The health of the land is directly linked to the concept of Country for Aboriginal peoples of Australia and is integral to their identity and well-being (Bawaka Country, 2022). Being on Country and caring for Country is vital in maintaining cultural connection and a sense of belonging because “Country is everything” (Bawaka Country, 2022; 2023) and, importantly, according to Coff (2021):

Learning on Country is about changing the way you see the world, merging our Indigenous Relational worldview with Western approaches to pedagogy in order for Country to be included in every part of how we teach and what is taught (p. 192).

Creating consequential change requires a shift in thinking. Meaningful efforts towards creating a more sustainable and respectful relationship with the Earth must go beyond current practices. In the context of early childhood education (ECE), teaching children to reduce, reuse and recycle, while important, does not generate the depth of understanding and relationship required for children to recognise their symbiotic existence with the Earth, and to live respectfully in it. According to Chapman and O’Gorman (2022), the arts are a powerful learning tool, and integrating arts experiences into ECE curriculum has “transformative” potential. They argue that addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals requires creative thinking, and that arts education in ECE offers children “opportunities for seeing the world in new ways and for imagining different futures” (2022, p. 35). Children have substantial capacity for creativity, moving between spaces and places and thoughts, representing and (re)representing, connecting seemingly disparate elements to form something new, where “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities… Each multiplicity is symbiotic…” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 249).

Children’s diverse and embodied encounters with the world have been explored by many researchers demonstrating multiple examples of their entanglement and their “becoming-with” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), weather (Quinones & Duhn, 2025; Rooney & Blaise, 2022), bushfire and rainforest (Somerville & Powell, 2022), play and movement (Fasting et al., 2025), mud (Somerville & Powell, 2019), music and sound (Powell & Somerville, 2020) and snow (Myrstad et al., 2020). Such research highlights the potential for positive change through a newly imagined approach to understanding planetary well-being where children are engaged in meaningful, creative, immersive and embodied experiences that reflect the cobweb of existence that brings “sustainability to life as a relational value, or an approach to living” (Fasting et al., 2025).

The data presented below is one such example – an example of this cobweb – of how the song, the video, the singing child, the inside life and the natural Earth, exist together, merged in juxtaposition, with reimagined knowledge and experience of being in the world. It is “data that glows” (MacLure, 2013); something that proposes and produces something else, undefined, but poignant, profound and resonating with hope.

The Singing Child in the Data that Glows

The Bush is Really Good

 

The bush is really good

The bush is really good

The bush is really good

Yeah, the bush is rea-ea-ea-ea-eally good.

 

And I just wish that you can be my friend fore-ver

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah ye-ye-yeah

Yeah yeah yeah the bush is good

The bush is good because

The bush is good because the trees help us breathe, yeah baby…

Baby, we should look after the trees the most

Because trees make us breathe

Trees make us breathe.

 

The end, but not the end yet

Nearly the end, yeah baby

Yeah baby don’t forget about the trees

So be kind to them.

 

^{Powell, S. (2014). The bush is really good [Unpublished song; video recording]. Used with permission of the author.}

She sings alone in her bedroom. The iPad captures her view. Voices in the background, brothers, cousins, the sound of a post-school, afternoon unwind.

Still frame: pink, patterned bedspread, bedroom door, pink owl, knitted dolls, doll’s house, white wardrobe. Pink fairy wings next to Cabbage Patch Kid; Olaf pillow; cushion emblazoned with a princess-crown. School uniform, headphones, purple dress. A single pink pen.

Start the recording: iPad moves; black power cord. She sings a simple melody. Repeats with small variations of pitch; the angelic voice of a young child. The iPad moves constantly to reveal a bent leg, a knee, and a finger that partially obfuscates the view. The iPad moves left to right, each oscillation in time with the beat. Sometimes it moves to the rhythm of the words, faster, disorientating. A finger now obfuscates the microphone, muffling the sound but not completely blocking.

The hint of an American accent in pronunciation; melismatic words, syllables strung out across multiple moments (bars); the repetition of “yeah” and “baby”, showing familiarity with popular music and other widely accessible genres. Musical phrases reflect Western tonality, resolving satisfyingly (for some) on the tonic (home note).

End: The iPad is still, focusing ahead as it did at the start. A “play” arrow awaits.

This is Not Just a Song

This is not just a song, and it is not just a visual recording. It is not even just a song-video. It is an intricate and intimate expression of many, many moments of being, the tying together of silky threads in the cobweb of existence.

She is singing about trees. She lives in a place surrounded by trees, engulfed by the Australian bush. She is singing about how trees help humans breathe. In the song-video, there is not a single tree to be seen. The house is surrounded by the bush, but all that can be seen is her messy, pink bedroom, with toys, clothes, furniture, and every now and then, a glimpse of her.

She is only just 6 years old, and yet she has crafted this song. The lyrics have been formed from conversations with her brothers on the walk home from school. One brother has enthusiastically described what he learned that day: that trees actually breathe in carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen so that humans can breathe. The song switches then to being friends, and a Western popular music style is heard: a slightly American accent, the repetition of “yeah” and the use of “baby”.

On top of this is the technology that captures this song. It is not simply recording the sound of her voice and the view through its lens. It is integral to the creation. It moves from side to side, on the beat, to the rhythm of the words. It explores the view from different angles, all the while reminding the viewer that there are no trees to be seen. There is a beauty encapsulated in the song-video, reflecting an innocence and depth of connection.

There is so much going on at once. There are so many layers of meaning, knowledge, being and understanding. It is this creative potential of children and their capacity to create meaning simultaneously from disparate elements of experience that “allows” them to embrace different ways of being in the world, seeing the world, and producing deep connections with the Earth. This relationship offers the potential to reimagine new and effective ways to care for and heal the Earth, reminding us all of our innate connection with it.

Singing in the Cobweb of Existence

Singing is an age-old, elemental practice that unites the inhabitants of the natural world; it heals, creates and re-creates, bringing life into being over and over. Grosz (2008) recognises this interdependence, saying:

Every people sings the earth and their own bodies into existence only by identifying those earthly elements that tie into or counterpoint their bodies and bodily needs: the earth, however rarefied and abstracted, still marks every body and is the condition for every body’s artistic capacities. It is because the earth frames and engulfs the body that the body can sing the earth and the stories of its origin (p. 51).

Grosz highlights the relationship between Earth, body, and singing. The singing body is inseparable from the Earth. It sings it into being. At the same time, the Earth consumes the body, and because the body is a vital part of the Earth, it can tell the Earth’s story of creation through song. Lenz Taguchi (2011) writes that “we cannot consider ourselves as a separate entity in the world, but… in a state of mutual inter-dependence with everything else” (p. 40). She contends that “we are nothing until we connect to something else” (p. 40), all matter and organisms require connection “in order to live” (p. 40).

The relationship between cultural and creative practice and the health of the land is a significant characteristic of Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Davis (2009) articulates the importance of listening to the ancient wisdom of Indigenous peoples across the world. The Warlpiri concept of jukurrpa is another manifestation of this deep connection. Jukurrpa is an Aboriginal term from Central Australia that translates to the more familiar “Dreaming” or “Dreamtime” (Barwick, 2023; Bracknell, 2023; Ross & Baarda, 2017; Turk, 2022). It has also been likened to cosmology since it incorporates all aspects related to understanding life, nature and being in the world (Baarda, 2021; Reader, 2016). Baarda (2021) talks about the “timelessness of the dreamtime, Jukurrpa” (p. 13), and how it incorporates everything, including past, present and future. It refers to the ancient beings that created the Earth’s contours and features, its mountains and rivers; it encapsulates the way humans relate to the natural world, their “relationship to place, to each other, to plants and to animals” (Ross & Baarda, 2017, p. 249); it tells the Earth’s ancient stories of creation that are still alive in the present; and it represents an “eternal process” of maintaining the “life forces” (Bracknell, 2023, p. 78) of nature’s beings. As Barwick (2023) states, “the scope of jukurrpa is space, time, and creative action” (p. 93), where songs enact complex “responses to the world” (p. 93); where the “landscape tells… a story” (p. 94) through the entanglement of Earth and human in an inseparable and simultaneous experience of being in “deep past” and “deep present” (p. 94), and where songs are a manifestation of “world-creating power” (p. 113).

Songlines are the Aboriginal depictions of how the planet and everything in it was created and continues to be created, through song. Songlines are the “dreaming tracks” (Neale & Kelly, 2020, n. p) that ancient beings and people have travelled “to learn from Country” and “connect sites of knowledge embodied in the features of the land” (n. p). Grosz (2008) describes songlines as “resonating lines of force” (p. 50), which, in the Dreamtime, would “literally [sing] the territory into existence” (p. 50). The land is defined by song, and a song has “the power to affect the land” (p. 50). The land and the body are intrinsically and inseparably linked by song (Grosz, 2008). Neale and Kelly (2020) say “Country is Dreaming” with no “separation of animate and inanimate” (n. p). All things are connected and rely on each other for existence in the past, present and future. Songlines, also referred to as songspirals, “bring Country into existence” and express the connections that “make and remake” life (Bawaka Country et al., 2022, p. 436). Singing is an act of creation, of remembering, of becoming with Country, of recreating and healing, and the iteration of relations between all things, human and non-human; a “oneness of all things” (Neale & Kelly, 2020, n. p.). Aboriginal peoples have traditionally sung the land into being and for healing, since songlines are fundamental to Indigenous knowledge and being (Neale & Kelly, 2020).

In a similar way, the Wachiperi or Q’eros people have a “cosmological worldview” (Wissler, 2009, p. vi) reflected by the word “yanantin”. All things are connected in a reciprocal and dependent community relationship of give and take, a fundamental concept known as “ayni”, and everything is connected by a spiritual essence, “animu”, that drives and maintains life. Wachiperi people of Peru live traditionally and in symbiosis with the Amazon environment, but the twentieth century has seen industry and disease force the Wachiperi out of their land and way of life. It has been estimated that fewer than one hundred Wachiperi people exist today, and only a few speak their traditional language. This has made it increasingly difficult for the Wachiperi to pass on their traditional songs to the younger generation. Having lost their original homeland means they have lost the original context of their existence and the environment to which their songs are directly connected (Wissler, 2015).

The Wachiperi offer an abundance of lessons in coexisting respectfully with nature and live by the principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity refers to the “give and take” of all relationships, being careful to balance this appropriately. This is especially important in their relationship with the land, which constantly gives them what they need. The people “must treat the diverse elements of nature with respect”, otherwise they are in danger of experiencing “spiritual sanctions from natural sources” (Wissler, 2015, p. 31). Perhaps most striking is the way they use music to revitalise their native language and identity, with songs for storytelling and healing; however, these songs are also on the edge of extinction (Wissler, 2015). Their singing is a powerful, complex and multifaceted musical act of communicating with spirit powers to “regenerate, re-create, and reproduce social and cosmic relationships and cosmological perceptions” (Wissler, 2009, p. vi), a life-giving act of integrating plants, animals, humans and spirits.

Like many Indigenous cultures, the Wachiperi have a range of songs for different purposes. Many are about their environment and significant animals or birds. Some are for personal expression and strengthening identity and social relationships. Other songs are used for healing and expressing the interconnectedness of all things. Many songs were sung together to celebrate social gatherings in times when there were many Wachiperi people still living; however, healing songs, or “esüwa”, were sung privately by the healer to the patient and taught to each new generation. Healing songs appealed to the animal or plant spirits to help. The songs were used at night, ‘when the forest spirits are more active’ (Wissler, 2015, p. 34). These forest spirits play a significant role in the healing songs. They are never seen because they live deep in the Amazon Forest, and this is just one reason why preserving the forest is vital to the Wachiperi (Wissler, 2015).

Be Kind to Trees

Author Note

Sarah Powell https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4963-4966

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sarah Powell. Email: sarah.powell@mq.edu.au.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the work I have had the privilege of doing in collaboration with Professor Margaret Somerville at Western Sydney University.

SDG Alignment

Goal 14: Life below water

Goal 15: Life on land

Cite This Chapter

Powell, S. (2026). Singing in the cobweb of existence: Sustainability learning in early childhood education. In L. Naidoo, S. Gannon, C. Woodrow, C. H. Díaz, V. Lopez, & J. F. Salazar (Eds.), Sur-Sur Southern knowledges: Education, sustainability and social transformation. Western Open Books. https://doi.org/10.61588/HGMT4758

Attribution

Except where otherwise noted, this work by Sarah Powell is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Research Integrity Statement

The child described in this chapter is known personally to the author and was observed incidentally in the course of shared daily life rather than through a designed research study. No institutional ethics approval was required or sought. To protect privacy, identifying information has been altered and anonymised. The child was made aware of and granted permission for their experiences and their song to be included in this work prior to submission.

The author declares no known competing financial or non-financial interests that could have influenced the content of this publication.

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