Ecological Intelligence (4 page)

T
o be sensitive to the cadence of yes and no is to remember that between you and me, between you and an elephant, a heron, a river, or a tree, there is a space that has to be respected and that, at times, we ignore at our peril. Poetry is the only language I know capable of effectively describing that space, and as we shall see, it is part of the necessary task of asking permission to enter that space. Sometimes you are permitted to enter into it and sometimes you are not. Poetry is therefore more than a language. It is an attitude and if we’ve forgotten it, it is our task to remember it again. We urgently need tongues that can speak with care, anger, protest—not the scattered or whinging prose of the fanatic, but the voice of those who can speak of anger and beauty in the same breath. Only poetry can do this. It is a language of protest but it is also a language of hope.

Poetry, then, because it is unafraid of what is raw, because it is rooted, because it reaches out and hooks back at the same time, because it outlives us, and because all other art forms are a form of poetry, is the obvious language for an ecological intelligence. Put another way, it is difficult to find another language that can better describe the way a lion walks or how a fish eagle swoops to scoop its prey. How else can we describe the sound of the wind through the reeds or the changing colors of the clouds in a western sky if not poetically? How can we better communicate the first breath of a child, the dying breath of an elephant, or the sloppy death of thirty or more roan antelope in transit to a foreign country if not through the rawness of poetry?

W
hen we no longer shudder at the ecological warning calls of science, it would seem that the only voice left that can awaken us belongs to the poets. Poetry comes at us from both sides, from inside and from out. It will not let us off the hook, and if we listen to the language carefully, it should not take long to understand that it is the language of soul. We have to be able to shudder.

If you are with me, you will understand that the poetry I am interested in is not necessarily that of verse and rhyme. I am interested in the lines and images that are felt in the bones of the reader that make children ask for a second reading and that stir the exhausted mindsets of civil servants who can’t wait until they retire. I am interested in the poems that unite the scientist and the artist in us—the poems that can hold the tension and the wisdom between the words yes and no. Let’s welcome the poetry that says “No!” to what we are doing to the land and the sea; “Yes!” to those that speak for our healing. Let’s welcome the poetry that reminds us of our creatureliness, as Heaney puts it—the ones that rhyme with our history. Through the guidance of poetry, let’s take that clumsy yet essential first step toward rediscovering ourselves in Nature. The choice is ours, says the poet Rilke:

Read this poem by Antonio Machado aloud. And then, please, read it again. Its title is its first five words:

When Machado asks “what have you done with the garden…?” we know exactly who he is addressing. He is speaking to you and me. When Rilke says “tonight I want you to step out of your house,” we know exactly what he means. Tonight I want you to think and to speak about the world and the wild, differently.

Unlike Shakespeare’s definition of love that alters not as it alteration finds, poetry alters as it alteration finds. Poetry is not unconditional. And yet, like love, it too endures. It has a life of its own, it is elusive. It refuses, like spirit and soul, to be measured. It is random yet ever present. As Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz says, “it slips between yes and no…it is real…And as soon as I say IT IS RE AL, it vanishes. It is not speech. It is an act.”

E
cological intelligence is not speech. It is an act. It is an act of weaving and unweaving our reflections of ourselves on Earth, of scattering eyes upon it, and of scattering the Earth upon our eyes. It comes alive between yes and no, between what is and what is not, between science and nonscience. And as soon as it becomes acquisitive, something egotistic…it vanishes.

Some will say that these are the lamentations of a romantic, and I will answer yes…and no. I am a romantic, as well as an occasional stray idealist, but not in a sentimental sense. I do not believe in utopias. Instead, let me remind you, in the words of South African poet Stephen Watson, what it means to be a romantic in the great traditional sense of the word: “It was and is, rather, one expression of a perennial human tendency to protest against that which would confine and otherwise mutilate what used to be called the human soul.” He tells us that to be a romantic is not only to be someone who expects adventure around every corner, but someone who is capable of “placing oneself in that long Romantic tradition of protest against a mechanized and (sometimes) heartless world.”

Does this mean that the romantic is antimechanization and, in the same vein, antiscience? Far from it. One of the main concerns of this book is to remind the reader of the common ground between the scientist and the poet. It is an attempt to acknowledge, as sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and philosopher Karl Popper affirm, that the poet and the scientist draw from the same unconscious reservoir of myths and images. They share the same boldness of imagination. They both concern themselves with discovering and communicating natural laws in a language marked by elegance—a beautiful word for the right mix of simplicity, clarity, and latent power. Where the two differ, however, as we shall see, is in their methodology. Scientists, says Wilson, aim for a generalizing formula to which special cases are obedient, seeking unifying natural laws, while poets “invent special cases immediately.” To me, the scientist says, “Let’s go out and prove it.” The poet says, “Let’s go out and disprove it.” Where the poet and the scientist stand united, however, is in the essence of their work. Wilson puts it this way: “Their works are lit by a personal flame and above all else, they are committed to the abstract ideal of truth in the midst of clamoring demands of ego and ideology. They pass the acid test of promoting new knowledge even at the expense of losing credit for it. In a sense, science and poetry are not professions—they are vocations.” They are vocations committed to new ways of seeing things and of saying them.

In 1952, French poet Francis Ponge published an essay on poetry called “The Silent World Is Our Only Homeland.” In it, he describes the process and function of poetry:

It is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle. We have only to lower our standard of dominating nature and to raise our standards of participating in it in order to make the reconciliation take place. When man becomes proud to be not just the site where ideas and feelings are produced, but also the crossroad where they divide and mingle, he will be ready to be saved. Hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man, that he becomes almost speechless, and later re-invents a language. Poets are the ambassadors of the silent world. As such, they stammer, they murmur, they sink into the darkness of logos—until at last they reach the level of ROOTS , where things and formulae are one.This is why, whatever one says, poetry is much more important than any other art, any other science. This is also why poetry has nothing in common with the poetry anthologies of today. True poetry is what does not pretend to be poetry. It is in the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking the new encounter.

If we are to begin to rediscover ourselves in Nature, let’s begin to live the ecological intelligence that we seek…little by little. If a poetic encounter with the world and, in this case, with ourselves, is going to be a dogged one and if it is going to be up to a few maniacs like you and me to undertake it, then let’s do it. Let’s look at the root meaning of the word
enthusiasm
and live it, literally. It comes from the Greek
enthousiasmos
, which means “to be filled with the gods.” Let’s remember where we have come from.

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973)

Ye are the salt of the earth.

Saint Matthew

2

EVOLUTION IN PERSPECTIVE

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HERE WERE YOU WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH?” is the famous question asked by the Old Testament God of Job after he had complained to his maker about his miserable fate. Not surprisingly, the response was one of silence. How would you have answered that one? I think your silence would have been as loud as mine.

“Where were you?”
I believe this to be a personal question and a profoundly evolutionary one. It as a question that demands an ecological answer. Perhaps, by reviewing our remarkable history, we might discover that we are a lot closer to those foundations than we previously imagined.

THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSE

T
he known universe, according to recent estimates, is somewhere between 13 and 15 billion years old—15,000 million years! How did it all begin? Well, we don’t really know. General scientific consensus acknowledges a big bang as the starting point, not only of the explosive outward trek of radiation, particles, molecules, gas, and dust—all of these constellating over millions of years into the supernovas, galaxies, stars, and planets that we call the cosmos—but of the beginning of time. It is indeed a conundrum, a situation begging the question:

“What happened before the ‘big’ event?” Once again, we don’t really know. Instead, our imaginations are now being stirred by a host of new hotly debated theories about alternative or parallel universes to ours, including notions of multiple conditions of existence outside our usual, three-dimensional one, some of them having little to do with the timing of the big bang. As they say, watch this space.

While no one knows what happened before the big bang, we think we know what happened directly afterward. In that first trillionth of a second, gravity and the four dimensions of length, breadth, height, and time were born. For the time being, let’s stay with the universe we know, or at least the one that we pretend to know. What does it consist of?

T
he visible matter, from planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae, and so forth…everything that the eye can see, telescopes and all, is believed to be a tiny 1 percent of what we know (it could be even less).Ninety-nine percent of the universe, then, is invisible! About 3 percent of what is invisible is made up of baryonic matter (protons, neutrons, and electrons), intergalactic gas, brown dwarfs, and black holes (a gravitational force so powerful that neither light, protons, neutrons, nor atoms can escape). A further 23 percent is made up of another kind of dark matter in the form of exotic, unknown particles. We don’t know what they are, but we know that they are there. If this sounds absurd then what about the remaining 70 percent of our outwardly accelerating universe? Simply referred to as dark energy, it is believed to be the cosmic force responsible for the acceleration of the galaxies, some of them at speeds faster than the speed of light. Akin to Einstein’s notion of antigravity—what he once called his “biggest blunder”—this force is yet to be positively identified, but we know it is there.

In an interesting parallel, it is estimated that 70 percent of the world’s living species, from bacteria to worms, ants, flowering plants, mammals, and even primates, have yet to be identified. Forget about space, we hardly know what’s on our own doorstep. And if you don’t mind a poetic parallel, we might as well be saying the same thing for how little we know about the human mind, itself a phenomenon in process—exotic, precious, and with its own blind spots and black holes, its own dark energy, and its own peculiar resistance to gravity.

Looking around us, we appear to be alone. We are uncertain. We think we know
where
we are but the answer as to the
why
is not readily forthcoming.
What
we are, as we shall see, is easy. We are human animals—curious, witty, aggressive, reflective, wonderful, and pathetic and, as Anthony Fairall of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Cape Town once quipped, “this is the right time for us to be here.”

COSMIC TIME

S
o, this is our time and this is where we are: Earth. We are biologically in it and of it, children of a 4.5-billion-year-old planet and a 5.5-billion-year-old star called the sun. Rotating around our parental star in a 365-day solar year, we are part of a tiny solar system in an equally tiny corner of a trillion-star cluster known as the Milky Way Galaxy. At the center of our galaxy is a black hole around which our solar system and the rest of the Milky Way spins. This dark and massive force, when viewed from Earth, is somewhere beyond the constellation of Sagittarius, about 40,000 light-years away. That’s how long, in years, it will take us to get there if we were traveling at 186,411 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second—the speed of light. It is indeed, in human dimensions, a long, long way from home.

While these figures might be comprehensible to some, they are meaningless, really, unless we can bring them down to Earth, so to speak. By referring to cosmic years, eminent British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore has given us a way of condensing our notion of time to a more user-friendly scale.

A cosmic year is the equivalent of 225 million solar years—the time it takes for our solar system to rotate once around the center of our galaxy. This tells us that if the Earth is 4.5 billion solar years old, then in cosmic years, dividing 4.5 billion by 225 million, the Earth is twenty cosmic years old. The Earth, then, has circled the black hole center of our galaxy roughly twenty times in its history. To put a human life span onto this time scale, seventy years translates into roughly nine cosmic seconds. And so, using the model of cosmic time, let’s review our evolutionary milestones. See how this compares with conventional time in the diagram on the next page.

T
he first two “years” of the Earth’s existence were ones of molten fury—a fiery hangover from its split from the sun. Unable to generate its own heat, it began to cool, and about eighteen cosmic years ago our hot Precambrian planet—so named after the rocks of Cambria, the former name of present-day Wales—gave rise to the world’s oldest known igneous rocks. These molten elements solidified into the well-known crystal shapes of ancient granite and basalt. With the cooling of the Earth came the ocean-forming rains and the beginning of a geological process called the cycle of stones. The alternating heat and cold of day and night caused the rocks to swell and to retract until, exhausted by the process, the outer geological skin of the basalts and granites began to erode and flake off. Carried away by wind and water, it took another two cosmic years for the first great rock formations to erode their way to the seas. The first stage in the cycle was over.

Under the massive weight of oxygen-free water, the second stage of the cycle began. In a process of geological transformation, layer upon layer of the exfoliated and eroded igneous tissue compressed to become the oldest known sedimentary rocks on Earth. The crystals in these strata, under intense heat and pressure, were transformed in the third stage into the tough, elegantly grained metamorphic form that we find in the present-day mountain ranges such as the Alps and the Himalayas.

A
s a metaphor for the shaping of human life and character, it would appear that our personal fine- and coarse-grained life experiences, our patterns of weathering, trauma, and transformations are not unlike those patterns in the cycle of stones. Meanwhile, it is curious to think, as British geologist and archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes puts it, that

granite and basalt, with water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in combination with the early atmosphere of Earth, have made all the material paraphernalia with which man now surrounds himself, the sky-scraper, the wine glass, the vacuum cleaner, jewels, the mirror into which I look. And the woman who looks? Where did it come from, this being behind the eyes, this thing that asks? How has this been gleaned from a landscape of harsh rock and empty seas?

GEOLOGICAL TIMESCALE

It would seem that we cannot escape our molecular and geological foundations. They are in our blood.

ORGANIC LIFE

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ith the unraveling of DNA sequences in living forms, most biologists now acknowledge three domains of life. These are the Bacteria—the conventional microbes of the world; the Archaea, ancient single-cell organisms that inhabit environments of extreme temperature and acidity (thermacidophiles), salty environments (halobacteria), and anoxic bogs (methanogenic bacteria). The third domain comprises the Eukarya—organisms that are made up of cells with organelles and a separate, membrane-bound nucleus. The Eukarya comprise the fungi, the plants, and all animals, including us.

The Archaea were the first organic inhabitants of the Earth.Without them, there would be no trees, flowers, or fish…and we wouldn’t be here either. But when and how did they come about? As for the when, we believe it to be about thirteen or fourteen cosmic years ago (3 billion years). The how is speculative but highly likely. With 60 percent of the granites already established, the electrochemical mixture of land, water, and lightning combined to produce molecular compounds of nitrogen, carbon, and other elements that had not existed on Earth before. There was no turning back. A process had been initiated in which the electrically charged molecules combined to form water-borne organisms capable of living in an oxygen-free world. The next step in the process was crucial: the development of a membrane—the first organic boundary, the first fence, the first hint of specialization.

However, if there was ever a defining moment in the evolution of life as we know it, it occurred about ten cosmic years (about 2 billion years) ago. It marks the earliest evidence of one of the great strategies of species survival: symbiosis—so named by German botanist Anton de Bary in 1873 to describe the living together of different organisms for mutual benefit. With it came the emergence of the first differentiated cells. These were the first cells to have organelles and a nucleus with its own membrane. The reason for the nuclear membrane will become clear. But what triggered this first symbiotic relationship? It was the changing conditions of the surroundings.

In an environment that was becoming increasingly oxygenated, new aerobic (oxygen-coping) bacteria began to emerge, putting them at a clear advantage over the anaerobes. With competition for nutrients becoming increasingly serious, including a phase when, in all likelihood, the two strains of bacteria were feeding off each other, the first great alliance took place. Instead of being devoured by the predatory anaerobes, the more recent, threadlike aerobic organisms became part of the intracellular structure of their evolutionary older anaerobic cousins. They literally came on board, where they function to this day in all living cells, as the indispensable organelles responsible for the conversion of oxygen into energy. Essential for cellular metabolism and homeostasis, these little subcompartments of our cells are known as mitochondria, from the Greek
mitos
, meaning “thread,” and
chondrion
, meaning “granule.” Because of the energy they generate, they are also called the powerhouses of the cells. Without them we would not be able to move, think, or dream. Without them, the animal and insect kingdoms as we know them today would not exist.

The symbiotic relationship, however, was a conditional one. The host cells, compelled to protect their own DNA, ensured their long-term survival by developing a membrane around their nuclei. The mitochondria, for the same reason, developed a double membrane. This genetic independence of the cell nuclei and mitochondria brings a fascinating twist to the symbiotic tale. It is well known that the genetic information in the nucleus of mammalian cells comes from both parents. What we didn’t know until very recently is that the genetic information in the mitochondria is passed on, generation after generation, by the female of the species only. In other words, the mitochondria, the powerhouses of our cells, come from our biological mothers. Why there is no contribution from the biological father is unknown, but it would seem that the genetic information, if any, which the sperm may carry regarding the mitochondria is either absent or, if not, lost or destroyed at the moment of conception. Be that as it may, the maternal link to our mitochondria has opened up a fascinating avenue into our understanding of human ancestry. With the discovery of this lineage, we are able to show that modern humans,
Homo sapiens sapiens
, as little as 200,000 years ago shared not only a common bloodline, but as recently as 60,000 years ago, a lineage through six or seven possible biological mothers. As humans, it would seem that we are more closely related to each other than we sometimes like to think. As for our link with animals, the evidence suggests that the mammalian bloodline goes back 100 million years. It would appear that the poetry of the brotherhood and sisterhood of all living things has become science.