Understanding Nature On Her Terms, And The Fear That Comes With It

 

by Ursula Goodenough

Robert F. Bukaty/AP

  It is not enough to appreciate nature.
It is also crucial that we understand it.

Aldo Leopold has written a passage in his classic A Sand County Almanac that goes to heart of what I want to write about this morning.

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that environmental conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial. ...We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

Leopold wrote this passage in 1949, and it can certainly be said that religion and philosophy have since come to hear about conservation, in good part, because of the environmental movement that Leopold helped to catalyze.
But I hear him saying something more.
I hear him saying that it is not enough to appreciate nature.  It is also crucial that we understand it, deep in our bones.
Several years ago I attended a workshop where the speakers described various ways that environmental topics had been effectively woven into college curricula.  Many interesting programs were outlined. In not one presentation, however, was there any mention of science courses. Indeed, the S-word was never used in the entire two hours of discussion. Sustainability, yes, and stewardship and subsidies and self-restraint. But not science.
Let me take a short detour and bring to your minds another key social movement of the past 50 years, one that we can call cultural studies. We have come to realize that in order to have an appreciation of a culture other than one’s own, it is essential to leave one’s own culture-laden perspectives behind. To take in another culture requires a deep understanding of its language, its history, its dynamics, and its mythos from the perspective of those who inhabit that culture, from those who indwell. We now insist on hearing their voices.
In the same way, I would say, to understand a tree is not just to think of it as beautiful, or as a habitat for birds, or as provisioning shade for the ferns or loam for the forest floor.  A tree is all of these things, to be sure. But it is also carrying out photosynthetic electron transport and cyclic and non-cyclic phosphorylation and NADP reduction and DNA replication and lignin biosynthesis. To say that these vital activities of the tree are not interesting, or too difficult to understand, sounds dismissive to me, or even arrogant, like hearing someone say that he wants to observe a Central American culture through his own lenses, on his own terms, wants to pull up in a cruise ship and buy a few postcards and leave. To my mind, it is our obligation to understand how genes work and evolution happens and galaxies collide and water freezes and brains think and stars burn. This is the language and the history of our entire context. Trees speak in electrons and carbon and chemical bonds and DNA.
How could a curriculum on environmentalism leave these things out?
  Well, let’s begin with the perception that “these things” are not very interesting or too difficult to understand. True, our schools in the main do a terrible job of making science interesting, and an excellent job of making it incomprehensible. And true, the perceived linkage between scientific understanding and the technological use of scientific understanding fuels an anti-science bias in persons who are alarmed by the technological juggernaut (although to my mind, as I’ve developed here, this bias arises from a misunderstanding of how the science-technology linkage works).
But I pick up on something deeper: I encounter a resistance to scientific explanation. Resistance doesn't usually come from cognitive sources.  It comes from the gut. Therefore, I would suggest that much of the resistance to scientific explanation comes from what we can call a fear of reductionism. We fear, however inchoately, that to view the Sun in terms of its language of thermonuclear reactions and gravitational pressures will destroy our experience of the Sun’s majesty and the beauty of sunsets. We fear that to view life as the product of genes interacting with environment is to destroy the meaning of both life and environment. We encounter, that is, the ominous specter of “scientific materialism,” which sounds for all the world like soviet-style “dialectical materialism” that can morph into “diabolical materialism.” We shudder, a long existential shudder, and then we scurry back to thinking about nature on our own aesthetic and political terms.
Poor matter. This magical stuff, undergirding everything that we know to exist, including the minds that hold our understandings of existence, is so often given disparaging qualifiers, like “mere” matter or “just” matter or “only” matter. What else, pray tell, would we want to be made of?
So the resistance, I submit, is embedded in our fear that we will somehow lose what we sometimes call our spirituality by encountering our context in material form. And to lose our spirituality, we fear, is to lose our humanness, our soulfulness, our capacity for transcendent experience. We will become automatons.
Here’s what I say to undergraduates when we arrive at this potentially gloomy juncture. I say to them, OK, a good-looking guy walks by and I feel my pulse quicken and my face flush. Do I say to myself, aah, norepinephrine released from my sympathetic neurons has just stimulated my sinoatrial node to generate increased cardiac output? Of course not. I say to myself, Wow, that’s a really good-looking guy!  It’s not like I can’t go there. I can certainly reflect on how interesting it is that the experience I just had was mediated by action potentials and calcium influx. But, I assure them, this doesn’t wreck the experience. It’s just a second way to think about it. The immediate experience, the subjective experience, is uncompromised. Subjectivity, in the end, is immune to anything but its own inherent experiential manifestations.