Ecological Intelligence (8 page)

And so, where were you when the foundations of the Earth were being laid? Linked to the molecular and chemical origins of this planet, one way of answering this question is to reply that, in essence, we were all there and we are still there. Every hydrogen atom in our bodies originates from the time of the big bang; every atom of iron in our red blood cells is a leftover of supernova explosions; every atom of oxygen and carbon is a gift from our sun. Psychologically, those foundations are being laid right now. They are the foundations of a new way of thinking about who and what we are in relationship to the Earth and to Nature. And we are the masons of the way we think. We can say yes and no.

Rumi

3

THE WAKE-UP CALLS

F
EW WILL ARGUE THAT THIS PAST MILLENNIUM HAS BEEN WITNESS TO some of the most dramatic changes to the way human beings have come to see themselves in their relationship to the world. The catalyst in this process has been the questioning or reflective nature of human consciousness itself, but more especially the thinking of certain rare and courageous individuals to whom we are greatly indebted. They are responsible for what I believe to be the five major wake-up calls of the past five hundred years (one cosmic minute).

The first wake-up call, triggered by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), promulgated the now accepted theory that the Earth and the planets rotate around the sun—not the other way round. In short, he was announcing the news that the Earth had lost its fancied position as the center of the universe. This must have caused great philosophical discomfort to many, particularly the church, who saw the Earth and humans as central to God’s universe. Years later, in an astonishing act of retribution against anyone challenging its cosmology, the church came down hard on Copernicus’s successor, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), when he excitedly announced the discovery of the moons of Jupiter. At the time, the principals of the Holy Church of Rome, instead of leaping at the opportunity to peep through Galileo’s telescope, refused to do so, threatening to excommunicate the embattled astronomer if he did not refute his claim. Additional death threats forced Galileo to conclude that his cause was not worth dying for, whereupon he disclaimed his newfound discovery.

Let us not judge Galileo too harshly, for we might have done the same. We are old hands at denying the truth of ourselves, of turning our heads, of refusing to turn the telescope inward. We are all wary of the possibility of being shown up, of discovering that our perceptions have been wrong, or that our lives might have been more fulfilled if we had only been a little more daring.

Those early giants of mathematics and astronomy have been more than vindicated, and we are now privy to haunting, yet magnificent, images from deep space, from time and distances that have too many naughts, too many powers of ten for our minds to assimilate. The images remind us of how small we are, how distant and how little we really know. And yet, in spite of the fact that our Earth does circle the sun and beyond that, the deep center of our galaxy, we don’t quite believe it, do we? Ironically, five hundred years on, our speech confirms that Copernicus, at a subtle level, has not been fully acknowledged. We still speak of sunrises and sunsets, unconsciously reinforcing the notion that the sun revolves around us. In the self-centered world of the human animal, we have great difficulty in speaking about the Earth rising into the night—how beautiful—or of our planet dipping sharply into the morning, saluting the sun. This is poetic speech, but it is important. It is part of the language of ecological intelligence, which is at once factual, at once poetic. To see the horizon tilting upward and away from the sun is an entirely different experience to watching the sun going down. Try it.

T
he second wake-up call was a little louder than the first. This was the voice of English physicist Isaac Newton (1642–1727), a mind that gave us the law of gravity as well as the classical laws of motion.Newton not only put the Earth in its place, but the planets, and the sun, too, in theirs, for they are subject to the same laws. Thanks to Newton, the universe was something that we could begin to measure—it had weight, it was gravid…hence the word
gravity
, from the Latin
gravidus
, “to be laden, heavy”…pregnant. For many, it was hardly a surprise that an apple would fall on one’s head if one sat directly beneath it long enough, or that a body, at rest, could be propelled by a force acting upon it. Who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction? On the playful side, who of us in our youth has not accelerated a reluctant playmate into a swimming pool, knowing sooner, rather than later, a more than equal and opposite reaction was in the cards?

Realizing the pregnant significance of Newton’s laws, there were those who saw beyond the banality of playground physics. They knew deep down that to understand them was to have our lives changed forever. History, in this regard, has already spoken. Without Newton’s signature, there might not have been space travel, aircraft, industrial engineering, or technology in the way we know it today. And yet technology, for all its blessings, has come at a price—the industrial revolution and with it the growth of cities and increased urbanization has distanced us from our relationship with the land, the rivers, and the sea. This was not Newton’s fault, and for everything that this man’s intellect unveiled, we need to honor him. His legacy, as well as that of Copernicus, has had an indelible impact on modern thought.

T
he third wake-up call was like a thunderclap. It was the voice of nineteenth-century British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Compared with the largely impersonal discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, Darwin’s ideas hit a lot closer to home. Most people are profoundly indifferent to whether it is the Earth or the sun that revolves around the other, and few of us would lose sleep because we didn’t understand the aerodynamics of a space rocket. But it is impossible to be indifferent to Darwin. He struck a deep subjective chord, and the ongoing resistance to his ideas tells us that the chord is both raw and deep.

Intrinsic to Darwin’s message is the notion that evolution is something tangible, something meaningful, and that we are socially and biologically closer to our animal companions than we would like to think. The tracks along the path of the unfolding mammalian genome are undoubtedly those of Darwin. The lion is more than 90 percent human, and so is the spotted hyena. The African elephant also has well over 90 percent of the human gene sequence. But that is not all. Those pesky fruit flies of the family Drosophila that buzz around our baskets of overripe fruit are 42 percent human, while the chimpanzee, our closest primate cousin, shares more than 98 percent of our blueprint. Without discounting the obvious as well as the sometimes subtle differences in genetic expression, how much of the genome of the hyena and the chimpanzee do we have in us?

The animals, in science, as we are discovering, and in poetry as it always has been, are in our blood. The landscape is in our skin. We, too, gnash and gnaw; we sound our alarm calls and our cries of territory, sexuality, and discovery. We, too, are known for our aggression, for gangrelated violence, for organized warfare and, like the
Polygerus
ants in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, for slavery. We, too, are defined by our territorial tiffs, known for our experience of fear, frustration, and rage and by the way we are warmed by that powerful yet indescribable phenomenon called belonging—what the human animal sometimes calls soul. The sense of belonging affects creatures from antelopes to dogs, birds, elephants, and primates, and we are not the only creatures who die from a loss of it.

Who spins around whom in this dance? In these selected lines from his astounding poem “Wilderness,” written in 1918, the poet Carl Sandburg celebrates his animal nature—long before the unraveling of the human genome.

There is a wolf in me…fangs pointed for tearing gashes…a red tongue for raw meat…and the hot lapping of
blood—I keep the wolf because the wilderness gave it
to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me…a silvery-gray…fox…I sniff and guess …I pick things out of the wind and air…
I circle and loop and double cross.

There is a hog in me…a snout and a belly…a machinery for eating and grunting…a machinery for sleeping satisfied
in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me…I know I come from salt-blue-water-gates…

I scurried with shoals of herrings…I blew water
spouts with porpoises…before land was…before the
water went down…before Noah…before the first chapter
of Genesis

There is a baboon in me…hairy under the arm pits
…ready to sing and give milk…waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird
…and I got them from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony
head, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—

And I got something else : it is a manchild heart, a woman-
child heart: it is a father and mother

And lover: it comes from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-
Knows-Where—for I am the

Keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and I kill and I work:

I am a pal of the world: I come from the wilderness.

From what depths did this poem come, I wonder, if not from a deep sensing of the biopsychological history of the human animal? At the level of the gene, then, more particularly in the sequencing of the amino acids that bind the chromosomes within the gene, every living thing speaks the same language. From flies and foxes to humans, all the creatures of the Earth and the sea say
one
thing—we are relatives. This, to me, is poetry. Darwin was right.

W
e have all had the experience of sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night, the result of a sudden yet delayed realization of the significance of what someone has said, written, or done. It is as if, prior to the sudden realization, we were either resistant to or unable to grasp what that person was trying to convey. Such was and remains the significance of the voice and the written work of Albert Einstein (1879–1955), a man whose double-barreled theories of relativity represent the fourth great wake-up call of the past half millennium.

In 1905, with the publication of his special theory and eleven years later, of his general theory of relativity, Einstein turned Newton’s laws of a three-dimensional universe inside out. With his famous special theory equation E=mc
²
, he established that mass and energy are equivalent and that they can be transformed into each other. He also predicted that under certain circumstances time will slow down, for example as one approximates the speed of light. In this theory, he concluded that there are “hidden invariables” in the ordering of the universe. It was an admission that certain occurrences in physics could not be predicted with the solid certainty of traditional cause-and-effect thinking.Every measurement, he said, depends on one’s frame of reference—an observation not without profound personal as well as sociocultural significance. To a three-dimensional intelligence, this is absurd. What did this mean? In short, our commonsense Newtonian view of time as an ordered sequence of moments following one upon the other, the same for everyone, had been turned on its head. Newton believed that time
anywhere
,
anyhow
, was a phenomenon well defined. In his own words, time was “absolute, true and mathematical, of itself and from its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains similar and immovable…” Newton said the same about our understanding of space: “Absolute, in its own nature…similar, and immovable…”

Nearly two hundred years after Newton, following a total eclipse of the sun on May 29, 1919, there was an excited yet humble refutation of Newton’s absolutes. In one of the most famous scientific observations of this past century, astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington was able, as predicted by Einstein, to show that light, as it travels close to the sun on its way from a star to the Earth, is deflected by the gravitational pull of the sun. Normally, because of the sun’s brilliance, we cannot see the stars in daytime, but if we could, the deflection of their light rays, according to Einstein, would make them appear in different positions from those we would expect them to occupy. At that time, the only way to prove his theory was to measure the position of stars close to the sun during a total eclipse and to compare it with where they were predicted to be. Einstein was right—these stars, their light deviated by the sun, were not where they were supposed to be.

Unlike Newton, who had shown the equations that explained gravity, Einstein, when he pointed out that huge masses or forces like the sun actually warp the space and light near them, was able to show how gravity worked. But there was more. He showed that time would be warped also. Contrary to our experience of time as a phenomenon or dimension in its own right, independent of space and the laws of motion, Einstein linked the three dimensions of space (height, width, and depth) to the dimension of time, describing it as a fourth dimension—spacetime. In a four-dimensional world, he said, space, time, and mass are interdependent. He put it another way:

If you will not take the answer too seriously, and consider it only as a kind of joke, then I will explain it as follows. It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left. According to the relativity theory, however, time and space disappear together with the things.

It is practically impossible to wrap our minds around such a notion, but Einstein had the courage to think the impossible. By predicting observable effects that, as far as we are aware, no one had ever dreamt of before, he bravely put his reputation on the line. It is crucial that we do not underestimate the boldness of his imagination, for it was truly poetic.