Mortal Meddling

When you live close to Nature, you encounter both the sacred side of creation, as well as its disturbing side. The sacred side is the beautiful side—which causes me to pause whatever task I'm into and stand in awe of what I'm experiencing. The disturbing side is the obverse face of nature's beauty—when you encounter something repugnant, such as a predator in the act of ruthlessly killing and devouring its prey or encountering a dead and decaying body in the woods that beetles and maggots are consuming.

Then there are those times when you are not just the observer of Nature's unfolding, but an actor in the scene. I prefer to be a participant in the sacred side, but sometimes I play a role in the distressing side. Both sides are part of the complete experience. I rejoice when I can assist Nature's beautiful aspects—such as when I can assist a modest flowering tree into becoming a gorgeous, audacious, and blossoming exhibitionist or clear the saplings and competition around an oak tree and watch it proudly grow into a noble giant.

But there are those obverse troublesome occasions when I seem to interfere with Nature and transform a sacred event into one that almost becomes profane. I can excuse myself when in the past I was ignorant of Nature's plan, but it is harder to accept in recent times, when I should know better and am simply not mindful enough. I can blunder into a situation where I disturb the natural process. It is a precarious balance—wherein I am often not sure how to proceed; will I help things along or will I harmfully intrude?

Before my wife and I moved out to this corner of Nature's heaven, the local ecosystem had been rolling along naturally on its own—without the interference of humans. Nature had achieved its own balance out here, with various flora and fauna playing out their roles. It's not that our forest homestead had never experienced the meddling of man... it had been partially farmed nearly a century ago, but after the departure of humans, the ecosystem had settled into a new kind of order. It was directing its own enterprise. The wisdom of Nature was once again in charge.

Then we appeared on the scene about four decades ago. We tried to be gentle and fit into the ecosystem as best we could; causing as little disturbance as we could, but our mere presence altered the natural order. We cleared trees, dug some holes for a home, and planted a garden. But disturb Nature we did—although we attempted to keep our intrusions to a minimum. Our objective was to benefit the local ecosystem as much as possible, but that was often unattainable.

Next time: an example of an unfortunate interference...

Romancing Nature—Part 2

Real nature can be scary—rather than cute and cuddly. To our deep ancestors, nature was an awesome place that called for a healthy level of fear—not what is imagined as the “Peaceable Kingdom,” where the lion reposes compliantly with the lamb. Our ancestors understood nature in its “red in tooth and claw” quality. In our attempts to enforce our dominion over the world, we have domesticated it and largely eradicated our fear and awe.

Thus we have people wandering through the wilderness, coming upon a grizzly bear and trying to get close for a photograph. So we read in the news about another person killed by a bear, and wonder if something should be done about it. Many people are unaware of the various kinds of parasites who invade a critter and slowly and painfully kill their host. This is not the kind of nature we want to hear about.

We have done our best to terminate what we perceive to be animal-to-animal cruelty in nature, while at the same time overlooking our cruelty toward it and each other. We have interfered with God’s sacred world and imposed our misplaced values on it.

If, on the other hand, we were to open ourselves to the reality of nature, we could not only see its beauty, but also what’s not cozy out there: the scary predators, the violent deaths, the scavengers who feast on dead bodies, the nasty parasites, etc. We could learn to accept these unpleasant realities, along with the enchanting antics of birds, chipmunks, and other cute critters. When we come to understand that we are a part of the natural world and that it’s a world containing both peace and killing, we can see the wholeness and realize that nature is sacred and beautiful in its own right. We don’t need to romance or idealize it. We don’t need to force it to conform to some fictitious and gentle image that we’ve created.

Our ancestors were in close touch with real nature. They dealt with threatening predators, as they simultaneously felt a sense of peace and awe. It was not a nature stripped of its threats, or of their immediacy and deep connection to it. We can reacquire our ancestors’ awe of nature, as well as thrill to its beauty and serenity. We can learn to appreciate its wholeness—by getting back in touch with it, by dropping our idealized picture and opening to the complete story. It’s both tame and wild.

Romancing Nature—Part 1

Many people in modern society have developed a quixotic view of nature—a perspective that is both idealistic and unrealistic, because it views nature primarily as a nurturing, gentle, and innocent realm. While that can certainly be true, it’s a very limited understanding. It’s also a kind of quasi-religious or new-agey belief that can allow people to interpret nature from a secure distance, as a cuddly place of sanctuary and safety.

This perspective interestingly seems to bubble up most often in those people who regret our modern disconnect from the natural world and who lament the preponderance of society’s soulless, mechanical perspective. Yet these same individuals continue to hang onto a belief in a type of outdated spirituality that has placed us apart from and superior to all other creatures—a belief that has significantly contributed to that disconnect. It’s a viewpoint that can create a false understanding of the natural world and our place in it.

We in America have a long tradition of enjoying fine nature writers such as Thoreau, Emerson, John Muir, and Wordsworth, who compellingly described the sacredness of the wild. Their words have drawn many of us closer to nature than our urban-technological society would otherwise allow. We feel the tug of their depictions of the natural world—exacerbated by the separation that many of us have from nature and our minimal ability to experience it directly.

But this romantic perception of nature, while comforting, can blind us to seeing the reality of the world that is outside the influence of humans: a wild and raw nature. We have distanced ourselves from this true nature, so we have come to romanticizing it. We lack a tangible connection to nature and have, in the vacuum, created an imaginary connection. It is a fanciful perception that is exemplified in Disney’s cute, animated movies.

The unfortunate truth is that the only nature most of us can experience today is a human-altered nature, in which we have eliminated most of the large, predatory mammals from the wild. In so doing, we have created a subdued nature. The British Isles, for example, were once home to numerous large predators and were covered by primeval forests. One can walk the length of Britain today and never fear an attack from a threatening critter, while enjoying the fabulous gardens carefully cultivated by their accomplished horticulturists.  

We have removed the majority of those large predators—the denizens of the top of the food chain—without understanding their evolutionary role in the ecological balance. We have impoverished nature, while simultaneously remaining blind to our role in the depleted natural scene. We put attention to isolated problems in the natural world—how to deal with the plethora of deer in suburban neighborhoods, for example—ignorant of what has really been lost or unbalanced in nature by our actions. We have tamed nature and subsequently have transformed it into a place of comfort. What we see is not real nature.

More romance next time…

Why Do They Do That?

I have written before about what happens after I learn something new: it makes me aware of just how little I really do know and it always seems to raise three more questions for every one that it explains. It’s sort of like the Pandora’s Box of knowledge—once you open it, just hold on for the ride.

For many of my questions, I realize that continued observation will likely bring me an answer. I may watch a bird do something that puzzles me and understand that if I just keep watching some more, I’ll come to know why it behaves as it does. This is the essence of scientific research: if you doggedly stay with it, keeping your mind open and all senses alert, the answer will most likely come to you.

For other questions, however, I feel confident that someone has already discovered answers and has even recorded them somewhere. This is the promise of human knowledge: we document our revelations and pass them on to countless others. My challenge in this case is finding out where the findings may be recorded. That’s the prime reason why I so highly value the Internet—it contains a stunning amount of knowledge.

But for a few of my questions, I doubt that either searching the records or additional observations on my part will bring me answers. These are questions for which there may be no answer, or questions that I’ve framed so poorly that I need to understand more so I can even ask the right question, or maybe questions that are so silly, I’d be ashamed of having anyone know I even asked them. You may have heard someone say (attempting to reassure another person), “There are no dumb questions.” On the contrary, I’ve formulated more than a few obtuse questions. I’m not sure but that some of the following examples may fall into this latter category.

First, here’s an example of one for which I later did find an answer: How is it that a woodpecker can bang his beak so hard against a tree and not suffer brain damage? (Sort of like a washed-up boxer being unable to assemble an intelligible sentence.) Years later I read that a woodpecker’s brain is surrounded by a cushioning fluid that protects it’s brain. Aha!

Here are a couple that continue to puzzle me: How does a firefly keep from temporarily blinding itself when it flashes? If I were to switch on a bright light in the dark, my slowly-acquired night vision would immediately be destroyed, and I’d blindly stumble around for a few minutes until I recovered. That temporary blinding could be fatal for the firefly. In a similar manner, how does a cicada not deafen itself? From 50 feet away he hurts my ears; I’d hate to think of the pain I’d feel if I held him in my hand. How does he tolerate his own noise?

How does a whippoorwill ever tell if he has another competitor singing nearby, when he never shuts up long enough to listen? How does a plant decide when to continue growing upright and when to send out a lateral twig? Does a grasshopper or a flea ever get leg cramps and have to limp along, rather than jump? Or when they make one of their spectacular leaps, do they ever sprain an ankle as they land? Do they even have an ankle?

So many questions, so little time to answer them all.

Is Beauty Truth?—Part 2

I believe that the previous posting describes Stewart’s restrictive use of the word beauty. And how about his use of truth? The meaning of truth is where philosophers can really wax endlessly. But let’s narrow the field (according to Stewart) by considering truth to mean physical reality. The main aim of the physicist is to discover nature’s story, to seek nature’s truth. While the mathematician plays with abstract (not necessarily real) concepts, a physicist plays with nature’s rules and behavior—looking to discover the reality of how the world works. Nature holds the truth and the physicist is attempting to uncover her secrets.

When beauty and truth are described this way, I think I see the crux of Stewart’s argument, because as it turns out, the mathematician’s beauty has often been the same as nature’s truth. Time and again physicists, struggling to grasp a given physical reality, have come upon a rule or law (not their law, but nature’s) that previously was neatly expressed by a mathematician who was completely unconcerned with the physical world. The mathematician may have thought the rule was her theoretical and beautiful insight, but nature was already operating that way. Beauty becomes truth.

Another way to view this situation is to note that nature consistently prefers elegance. Time and again physicists have discovered that Mother Nature takes the simple path. When physicists are bumbling about and, say, are positing two different theories of how things might work, they’ve often gotten closer to reality by choosing the simpler one. I’ve written before of how Kepler’s three elegant laws of planetary motion (expressed by three simple—and beautiful—mathematical equations) came to be seen as having far more truth than Ptolemy’s contorted and confusing model of how the planets were supposed to move.

Ian Stewart’s main point is that symmetry can demonstrate to us the equivalence of mathematical beauty and physical truth. I won’t try to describe his definition of symmetry—it’s a little too esoteric for me to try and tackle here. In a general way, however, when something possesses symmetry, we find it has a pleasing quality—for it helps our mind to more easily and fluently grasp it. Symmetry literally helps to smooth our mental processing. Symmetrical things, it turns out, not only appear to us as true, but it’s also pretty much the way that nature works: being both symmetrical and true.

So nature—by definition “The Truth”—is at root beautiful. A giant of pure mathematics and physics, Paul Dirac, once put it, “A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.” Ian Stewart wraps up his book Why Beauty is Truth with, “In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps. In mathematics, beauty must be true—because anything false is ugly.”

Over the last 2-3 decades I’ve been privileged to become increasingly absorbed in local nature, as I’ve watched the flora and fauna surrounding me. In the process I have come to consider nature as something to be revered. The local creatures and plants have been teaching me their truths as they have been showing me their beauty. The more I learn, the more I can comprehend that the story of nature, at root, is elegant. The totality of it, however, is beyond mere human comprehension. I am in awe of it; I’m overwhelmed by its beauty. Is that not something divine?

Three Mentors

We often find that our passions were once stimulated by a teacher, whose message touched a resonant chord in us—either because it came along at just the right time or that it awakened a latent inquisitiveness in us. Maybe either the career we chose or the interests that we eagerly pursue were suggested by this person. Maybe we found ourselves wandering about with little direction and the path became clear once we met the teacher.

Three literary naturalist writers have become my mentors in recent years—individuals who wrote about the natural world and who have inspired me. They’ve given me ideas and a direction in which to point myself, as I try to respond to the example they have set for me.

John Burroughs wrote in the mid to late 1800s, Hal Borland wrote columns for the New York Times in the middle of the 20th century, and Bernd Heinrich is a biologist who writes today. All were keen observers of the natural world that surrounded them. All lived in remote regions of the woodlands of New England and all wrote in an engaging personal manner, describing their special encounters with the natural world.

All three of them stayed home—choosing to become deeply and intimately familiar with their personal neck of the woods—rather than travel and describe the wonders of far-flung locations. Although I find it fascinating to read the marvelous experiences of a vagabond like John Muir, his stories are more like travelogues than the deeper encounters told by my mentors. While Muir’s descriptions are wide and not very deep, my mentors’ explorations are deep and detailed.

These three wordsmiths were attentive watchers; they kept a “sharp lookout,” in Burroughs’s words. They logged many hours observing the flora and fauna immediately about them—becoming increasingly familiar with their locale. They noted details and asked themselves questions and sought underlying reasons. When the unexpected happened they increased their scrutiny, realizing that a deeper understanding was waiting them, if they could figure out the anomaly.

These men were humble before nature. They knew they were surrounded by the sacred and they treated their world reverentially. They became so absorbed and awed by nature that they literally became a part of it. Animals sensed their respect and sensibility, allowing them access to their world and often treating them as members of their community.

Inspired by my literary mentors, I try to practice the disciplines they have taught me. They’ve shown me the wisdom of reading prodigiously—soaking up the knowledge that others have gained and thus not waste time rediscovering simple truths. But they’ve especially taught me to keep a sharp lookout, so that I begin to pick up on the details of the fascinating lives of the many critters around me. Give me three lifetimes and I’d make some real headway.

Just Another Animal

In my nearly three decades of residence here in the woods I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to come to understand nature far better than I once did. It’s been a treasured gift to be able to be an ongoing student of my natural world. A significant result of this increased grasp of my world has been coming to see that I’ve just scratched the surface—my level is ignorance is daunting.

Another result of my study of nature has been to help me appreciate the findings of numerous scientific analyses in recent years—research that shows humans are much closer to our fellow animals than we previously thought. Our outmoded (and biased) viewpoint told us that humans were fundamentally different from other animals. We created a wide, barren gap between us and them—a gap that placed us superior to all other animals.

Some examples of the qualities that we deemed uniquely human were: symbolic cognition, the design and use of tools, possession of so-called “higher” emotions (such as love, pleasure, excitement, depression), memory, imagining outcomes, language, and of course, the belief that we were forged in the image of the creator. We saw ourselves as the perfected end product of an intentional design process. We believed that the universe has unfolded with the sole purpose of bringing humans into existence. In fact, we once were deluded enough even to believe that the universe literally revolved around us.

But we’re growing up. We now understand that many of the capabilities we once saw as exclusively ours are shared by many fellow critters. Maybe they have them to a lesser degree, but it’s only a matter of degree. The barren gap is gone. We’re more of an animal than many of us would like to believe. We got all puffed up on ourselves and now some of the air in our sails has escaped.

I revel in this awakening—this maturing of the human perspective that’s being abetted by science. It gives credence to the response that springs up when I watch a wild critter here on the homestead: I am both fascinated by its beauty and I feel a close connection to it. I don’t see myself as superior to the spider, squirrel, or sparrow. Sure, I feel lucky to be born a human (with all those enhanced cognitive abilities), but we’re all Earthlings who are much more alike than different.

In fact, I am often struck by the magnificent capabilities that I see in these animals. They are often better than I at smelling, seeing, in their incredibly sensitive perceptions, and in intelligently interacting with their environment. I marvel at their harmony with their world, how in balance they are, and at the positive role they play in their world. I am humbled and even embarrassed when I contrast their effect on the world with our human impact—which finds us fouling our nest and causing so much widespread havoc. I guess, in fact, that’s why I live the life of a hermit: it’s more inspiring to be surrounded by nature than humans.