Ecological Intelligence (26 page)

I
have no doubt that hunters are generally passionate about the environment. There are also those who are genuinely concerned about issues such as biodiversity, long-term conservation, and environmental ethics. I agree with the African president of the Safari Club International—the principal voice of organized hunting—when he calls for dialogue and compromise, and I also believe he is sincere when he says he sees himself to be a coguardian of the world’s natural heritage. However, I do not agree with him when he says that antihunting campaigns are attacks on private ownership and personal freedom. The argument is not about human rights but about the nurturing of an ecological intelligence. It is about trying to show the nonsense of killing for that special feeling or using an elephant’s foot as a wastepaper basket, a stool, or an umbrella stand. It is about dealing with the welling up and spilling over of rage when we hear that a corporate executive who claims to be an ethical hunter has shot and killed a rare bongo,
Tragelaphus eurycerus
, for his trophy collection. It is what this book is about. The animals are in our blood and in our psyches, and they do not exist simply for how useful they can be for human purposes. We can no longer plead ignorance to the genetic evidence found in the unraveling of the human genome. We are dependent on them for more than their meat, their hides, or the claim that they exist in order to satisfy the human predatory urge. In psyche and in substance, we are the keepers of the zoo.

We are now face-to-face with an ethical imperative. Something in us has to say no! Rooted in what philosophers Hume, Smith, and Schopenhauer believed to be an inborn and indestructible instinct for what is fair and what is unfair, to say no is to protest against anything that is damaging or demeaning to a sense of kinship with another—to what we call soul. We can no longer turn our heads, pretending we did not know. I believe there is a code of conduct implicit in our new insights…one that respects the intrinsic dignity and space of all animals. Let D. H. Lawrence, in these lines from the poem “Mountain Lion,” amplify what I mean:

Men!

Two men!

Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

…

What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?

What is he carrying?

Something yellow.

A deer?

…

And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.

…

It is a mountain lion,

A long, slim cat, yellow like a lioness.

Dead.

…

TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL

A
nd so, is there any justification for hunting, or, put more bluntly, for the killing of animals? To me there is. Meat, from the white of fish and fowl to that of mammalian red, has been a significant part of human survival. To stop the killing or use of animals for food is presently not an option. We need them for more than their spiritual value. However, their nutritional and spiritual value go together. This is the reason why we bless our food. I go along with the hunter who kills for the pot. I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t because I eat meat and I eat venison. I can even understand, but I do not condone, the poaching of an animal from a conservancy in order to feed a starving family. I agree with the killing of an animal in self-defense, or if it is sick or injured and if to do so is to put it out of its misery. Out of respect for the animals and for biodiversity, I instinctively align myself to a philosophy of noninterference rather than culling, and yet I cannot argue with absolute conviction against the need to manage sustainable populations of animals confined to fencedin grazing and browsing areas. I have learned enough about culling to know that it is a contentious issue and that it should always remain so. “We cannot wait for the research” should never be an excuse to go ahead with the perceived need to cull. We must learn to wait. Culling should never be based on the notion of “ideal” numbers of animals. Instead, it should be based on an under-standing of the natural history of the animal, its breeding cycles, its peaks and vales, the terrain of the animal, climatic rhythms, natural diseases, species interactions, and biodiversity.

It is important to remember that animals are in a continuous process of adaptation. In many instances they will adjust to changing climatic and geographical conditions without our intervention. Time constraints, deadlines, and ultimatums are human constructs and they seldom work in the wild. It is not always easy to see the potential order in what is often interpreted as chaos and destruction, for example, the impact of the growing populations of elephants on the trees in Africa’s game reserves. Respect the process. Look at fallen trees differently. See in their twisted shapes the potential ecosystems of termites, ants, and other insects, butterflies, reptiles, birds, and the developing food chains in and around the decaying trees. See the space created by the fallen tree as space for the grasses that feed the herbivores. An area of fallen trees may not look aesthetically pleasing, but when seen in an ecological context the dead trees come alive. Yes, elephants will die, as will other animals—they might starve and their reproductive cycles will alter, but this is not new in the wild. We should know by now that when we interfere, we often make the situation worse. The introduction of artificial watering holes as well as the erection of protective fences is bound to have an effect on the migratory and population dynamics of elephants and other animals. Then again, there may be times when we need to cull, in which case, let it be done in the knowledge that the slain animal is not a trophy.

F
inally, the code of conduct I am referring to applies equally to non-hunting activities, especially to the cameramen and crews responsible for the increasing number of dubious wildlife documentaries making their appearance on our television screens. While their trophies remain alive, wrestling crocodiles and pythons and doing handstands in front of elephants sends a clear message—the activity is about human dominance over animals. This may not be the conscious intention of the human players in these documentaries, but it is how it comes across and I believe deep down they know it. Thank heavens for those, like the Save the Rhino Foundation, who will not submit to the demands of these cameramen. On one particular film shoot in Namibia, the on-site members of the foundation refused to provoke a desert-adapted black rhinoceros,
Diceros bicornis bicornis
, into charging the photographer. Of course, it would have made a great shot. After all, it is the shot that sells the footage. In instances like this, the crew would argue that they mean no harm and that the footage is educational. However, whenever wildlife situations are manipulated to suit the photographer, the harm is already done—animals’ fear and suspicion of humans is reinforced and at the same time the viewers, many of whom are well informed about animal behavior, find the obvious commercialism repellant.

As for its educational significance, the manipulated human-animal interaction is seldom the way things really are in the wild. One of the problems with this misperception is that uninformed visitors to wildlife areas, many of them paying high prices to be there, expect the same kind of interaction and feel cheated when they don’t get it.These same visitors often incite guides and game rangers, many of whom are young and eager to please, to break the rules by getting too close or even provoking animals into charging. It has happened to me. Most don’t succumb to the pressure. However, there is another group of guides and rangers who need no incitement. Perhaps out of boredom, familiarity, or sheer machismo they wittingly break the professional code of conduct and with it their pact with the wild.

A
nd so, when last did you have a sense of the “No” feeling—the feeling that what we are doing at the human-animal interface is inappropriate, that it is unfair, or that it is simply unethical? Does that feeling have a voice when it comes to trophy hunting, to manipulated wildlife photography and documentaries, to the sale of ivory, the logging of the rain forests, and the unbridled harvesting of the seas? And will your voice be heard?

Will the mind-set change? Will it come from within, or, when the evidence against the hunting of any animal for trophy purposes is properly understood, will it need to be legislated against? Remember that colossal gesture on July 18, 1989, when the then president of Kenya set to flames $3 million worth (at that time) of ivory. None of us can escape that message…some things are simply not for sale.

Teilhard de Chardin

Breathe one last time
your wild breath into me
that I may not forget you,
that I may remember who I am…

Barbara Fairhead

10

HEADING OUT—COMING HOME

T
HE TWENTIETH CENTURY WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR MANY REASONS—the radio, advances in automobiles and aircraft, space travel, the harnessing and unleashing of nuclear power, sound cinematography, television, computers, the Internet. It will be remembered for its weapons, its wars, for antibiotics, psychoanalysis, organ transplants, and the unraveling of the human genome. Sadly, it will also be remembered as the century in which the ways of the wild, the natural migrations, their habitat, and the capacity of the animals to find their own balance with the land changed forever. The reason for this is inescapable—the human factor—our insecurity, our arrogance, our ignorance. With few exceptions we have become the victims of our intellectual success, and it shows. By continuing to distance ourselves from Nature and from our fellow soul makers, we, too, have lost our sense of balance. We suffer from a loss of soul.

It is true, we’ve come a long way since that mythological day when Apollo announced that first great ecological admonition—know thyself. And yet we hardly know ourselves at all. This is ironic, given that our search for who and what we are has been almost obsessive. We have technology that can take us into what we believe to be the very heart of matter—machines that can measure one billionth of one billionth of a yard (10-19). As if this is not enough, we are presently assembling in Geneva, Switzerland, a 16.77-mile-long accelerator, or particle smasher, that will add an extra power of ten to our microscopic search for meaning. Known as the Large Hadron Collider, the temperatures created in the particle collisions will be around 1 billion times that of the center of the sun. Why are we doing this? By attempting to emulate the conditions that are believed to have existed less than one billionth of a second after the big bang, we hope to find among the scattered parti-cles the graviton or Higgs boson—the so-called God particle. According to the standard model of particle physics, the graviton, in the same way that DNA is the carrier of genes, is the generator and carrier of mass and gravity. Finding this particle, we believe, will go a long way toward a better understanding of dark matter, including the antigravity properties of dark energy.

W
ith technology that can detect galaxies as far away as 10,000 million light years from us, we are searching in the other direction too. In the 1970s, in a poignant statement of how alone we are in the known universe, two separate Pioneer-project spacecraft took off into deep space carrying with them an engraved likeness of
Homo sapiens
sapiens
, together with a fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach and a hello message from Earth. As I write, those spaceships are already far beyond our solar system. Their journey, so far, has been profoundly silent.

As exciting and as metaphysically balanced as these two directions have been, they are essentially journeys that detract, in this crucial time of human history, from perhaps the most exciting and the most essential journey of them all—the inner one. Like the inward-hooking thorn of the ziziphus, this is the complementary journey, the one that will bring us face-to-face with the world and with ourselves.

The images of macro- and microspace are within us. It is time to give them a life that is immediate and specific. To do this, we need to develop an intelligence that is ecological.

I have attempted to describe ecological intelligence as a way of understanding and articulating our evolutionary links with all living things, the debt that we owe to the Earth, and the contribution of wild things to the evolution of human consciousness. It is an intelligence that can grasp the significance of the threefold instruction of Apollo. To me, these admonitions should be on the wall of every corporate and conservation boardroom. They should be part of the vision statements of developers and entrepreneurs, a mental map for lawyers, engineers, doctors, and teachers, as well as the silent mantra for every environmentalist. As we continue to live the questions surrounding our concerns for the Earth, I believe this intelligence will continue to define itself.

We are the human animal and there are profound ecological responsibilities that come with this privilege. We are the only creatures who can say yes and no to traditions, religions, and conventional wisdom. But what is the point of this if we can’t say yes and no to the timing and the intensity of our own threat displays, our compulsions, conformity, and our territorial acquisitiveness? We are not the masters of our fate, and we are not going to be rescued from the ecological predicament of our time, either. We can, however, without detaching our-selves from it, rise above it. We can change ourselves by changing our behavior, says philosopher and naturalist Richard Rorty—especially our linguistic behavior. Freedom of speech is not simply a freedom to think and to say what you wish, but to speak for yourself, to speak from the heart, and to be accountable for your words.

I
have introduced poetry as the language that can best convey the essence of an ecological intelligence, for it is the only language I know that can adequately redress the Human-Nature split. Disobedient to the force of gravity, as poet Simone Weil puts it, it is not only a language but an attitude. It is a language and an attitude that takes us to the edge of our imagination, bridging the gap between science and nonscience, between the actual and the imagined. It speaks from the heart. I hope there was at least one poem quoted in this book that spoke to you in the way that all of them have spoken to me.

Poets may or may not be the “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley claimed them to be, but their work continues to have a profound influence on our thoughts. “And it is because of the cataclysms and transformations of the past century,” wrote literary critic Lord Gorell, that poetry, “the undying, is more, and not less, necessary.” Poetry above all, because it looks beyond the surface of things, is a language that takes us deep into the world and because of this, in the words of Mark Freeman, a literary scholar, “the world is always capable of being thought anew.” And then there is Wordsworth’s admonition: “On all poets is laid the duty of hope.” If this is so, as I believe it is, then poetry is the language that, for now at least, can best define an intelligence that is ecological.

We have looked at the wake-up calls of the past millennium, identifying their areas of impact—physics, cosmology, evolution, and depth psychology. Copernicus redefined the center of our solar system and with it the relegation of the Earth to one of a handful of planets. Galileo discovered that we are not the only planet with a moon, and then came Newton’s laws of an absolute universe. “I am standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Newton in acknowledgment of those who had helped him formulate his laws. Newton’s laws went unchallenged for two hundred years until Einstein came along with his dual theories of relativity. “I am standing on the shoulders of Newton,” said Einstein. Suddenly, there were no absolutes of space, mass, or time. Light traveled in waves or particles—it all depended, at the subatomic level, on the intention of the observer. What kind of a psychological truth was this? And now we know that the speed of light is no longer a universal limit.

Einstein’s genius opened the way for quantum theory and with it the stunning realization that the influence of atomic particles, one upon the other, irrespective of distance, is instantaneous. What is more, they do not move from one point to another—they manifest at their new locality as if they had always been there. This gave credence to the probability of quantum fields, to field thinking, and to the socio-biological notion of a web of life.

Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species gave us something to ponder. I believe it was something to celebrate. The decoding of the human genome tells us that we are indeed related to the animals, the insects, and the plants, and that, like it or not, Earth is where we belong. Once again, the old poets were right. Edward Abbey, in his book
Desert Solitaire
, puts it this way:

All men are brothers, we like to say. Half wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged therefore to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear…that all living things are kindred.

Yes…there’s a menagerie inside our ribs, beneath our bony skulls, says Carl Sandburg, and we are the keepers of the zoo. Is this not a good enough reason to be alive? Could we ask for a privilege more meaningful than this?

And then came those great pioneers of psychology, Freud and Jung. Between them they gave us the first meaningful maps for the journey into the human psyche. They both understood the importance of the unconscious part of our psyche in our daily lives, as well as its nocturnal language—our dreams. It was Jung, however, who understood its evolutionary significance. Seeing it as more than a personal unconscious, he called it the collective unconscious. Within it, he said, are the archetypes—the guiding, psychological motifs and images that have steered us through our 2.5-million-year tenure as a social species. Not only did he understand the evolutionary roots of human nature, he understood what comes with it—our dark side. He called this psycho-logical blind spot our shadow.

It is hard to accept that the intellect, which has made the human animal appear so clever, so ingenious, invariably fails to recognize what comes with it—the early steps of its undoing. It is difficult to acknowledge that a blind spot comes along with the all-seeing human retina. And yet if we know this, then it is not difficult to see within the blind spot of kinship recognition and the evolutionary fear of strangers, the early dynamics of in-groups and out-groups, of racism and xenophobia. Addressing our shadow has been an important part of this book.

T
o rediscover ourselves in Nature, a sense of our evolutionary history is going to be important, but it is not sufficient. It is sobering enough to remember from where and how far we have come, but it is even more sobering to consider where we might be headed. Viewed from a perspective of cosmic time, our history of adaptation and advancement as a species has been a relatively short one. But has it been successful? In terms of technological advancement, it would appear so, but is this really the case? Adapt we have, but does it not make sense that successful adaptation should be a win-win situation, or are we still stuck in the Old Testament notion of having to have dominion over every living thing? We have yet to get our language right. Successful adaptation does not mean dominance and neither does it mean forever.

Natural selection is often misunderstood as being a polite analpgy for the outdated but deeply ingrained notion of the survival of the fittest, and with it, the idea that the different species on Earth exist in hierarchies of dominance. It is not about that at all. Instead, it is a process of give and take, governed by the coexistence of species. It accounts for the way organisms successfully fit into and with the environment. The very essence of natural selection is that organisms come to match their habitats by being the fittest available or the fittest yet: they are not the best imaginable. Technological progress, therefore, is a misleading gauge of successful adaptation. In spite of its apparent benefits, we have failed to acknowledge the shadow that comes with technology and as a result are in danger of becoming less fit in terms of the definition above. We need to answer Antonio Machado’s question: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?” Honor the gods, said Apollo. Be aware of the intelligence in every living thing. And after you have done that, ask permission to enter the space of the other.

In evolutionary terms, it is too early to speak about the successful adaptation of the human animal to this little planet. Compared with the long, imperial reign of the dinosaurs, let alone that of our scaly cousins the crocodiles, the snakes, and the birds, we are pip-squeaks in the evolutionary hall of fame. And yet few would argue the astonishing impact on Earth of the creature that suddenly stood up, freeing not only his hands to grasp the Earth’s elements, but a mind that could mould the elements, shape them, and make symbols of them.

We are an Earthbound species. We are born out of it and we return to it. What we do to it, we do to ourselves. It is in this light that I have difficulty believing that an ecological intelligence is something that is being reclaimed—an implication that our failed ecological strategies reflect some kind of historical fall from grace. I doubt that there has ever been a golden age of ecology in the world, a time when men and women lived in perfect harmony with the Earth. Instead, out of dire necessity, I believe it to be an intelligence that is evolving. The word
perfection
is foreign to evolution and so is the word
harmony
, which implies a world devoid of dissonance and tension. In other words, paradise has probably never existed outside of the human imagination. Of course we miss the good ol’ days when the rains came, when firewood was on one’s doorstep, and people were generally happier than they are today. I don’t think I am being cynical when I say that human memories tend to be selective, but we forget that our modern environmental and political predicaments are rooted in those socalled good old days. In other words, our forefathers are also in the dock. Like Oedipus, they should have known. What will our children say of us? Are we able to look beyond our own lifetime?