Ecological Intelligence

by Ian Mccallum

  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.

  We 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=mc2, 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.

  Time, then, is not what we think it is. According to our conventional view, only the present is real or special, but when viewed from this other, objective dimension, the past, the present, and the future are equally real and present, says theoretical physicist Paul Davis. In other words, time does not flow and not only is our notion of yesterday, today, and tomorrow an illusion, but there is also no such thing as the present moment either. He points out that the arrow of time might indicate the future, but this does not imply that the arrow is moving toward the future any more than a compass needle pointing north indicates that the compass is moving north. Instead, as difficult as it might be for us to grasp, “all of eternity is laid out in a four-dimensional block or field, composed of time and the three spatial dimensions” says Davis. This is a reminder of the block universe that Greek philosopher and mathematician Parmenides had intuited nearly three thousand years earlier. Does this mean we must throw away our clocks? The answer is no. We sense ti
me psychologically. Yes, it is likely, under certain conditions, that time might lose its separate identity from space, but it is important to recognize that this does not mean that time is identical to the three dimensions of space, says Davis. Time and space enter into daily experience and physical theory in distinct and measurable ways. This distinction, he says, is important in the everyday world of the human animal, for it underpins the key notions of cause and effect, preventing them from being hopelessly jumbled.

  At the beginning of the 1920s, writes Paul Johnson in The History of the Modern World, “the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism”—the notion that anything goes. No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God, believing passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong. He also believed that Nature was teleological or purposive. “God does not play dice with the universe,” was his famous response to his friend Neils Bohr when the latter questioned him about the seeming randomness of cosmic events.

  In modern science, randomness versus purpose in Nature is hotly debated. Both sides of the argument have merit. “The manifestations of life, its expressions, its forms, are so diverse that they must contain a large element of the accidental,” wrote distinguished scientist and biologist Jacob Bronowski in his book The Ascent of Man, “… and yet the nature of life is so uniform that it must be constrained by many necessities.” Who can argue the seeming randomness of an asteroid collision with the Earth, and yet who can deny at least a hint of purpose in the ongoing cycles of life and death and the seasons of every living thing? Who knows, Nature might indeed have a purpose, but it is certainly not in accordance with what the human animal would like it to be.

  If Nature does have a purpose then we have to accept that we are a part of it. If not, then it is likely that we will give it one. It is part of the psychological integrity and survival of our peculiar species. For example, why is it that whenever there is a call to assist in the preservation and conservation of an endangered species, men and women rally to this call? If it is the purpose of Nature for animals to go extinct, then why not let the animals go extinct? Why not let the wilderness vanish? Because there is something in the human psyche that says no. It would seem that there is something in us that acknowledges the purpose of a whale, an elephant, or a butterfly. But what purpose? At a lecture at the University of Cape Town in 1982, author Laurens vander Post answered this question pointedly. Referring to the psychological integrity of the human being, he said, “The conservation of animals and plants is more important to human beings than we are to them. These forms of life are vital for our survival.”

  Roderick Frazer Nash, a former professor of history and environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, framed it differently during a lecture on the philosophy of wilderness in 1987. He invited listeners to think about the values of wilderness (which in the same lecture he had previously outlined factually) in terms of an analogy with a woman who asks, “Why do you love me?”

  Try telling her that you worship her, that you cherish the life you have lived together, that she is necessary for your mental welfare, that her presence in your life makes you different, that in her own special way she is beautiful, that she inspires you to be creative, and that she challenges you and offers you an alternative to the way most other women are in the world.

  Pushing the envelope of human consciousness does not come with-out a price and neither did the formula E=mc2. That same equation, filled with mathematical and poetic insight, was pregnant with a mushroom-shaped shadow that was to become the blueprint for the atomic bomb and nuclear war—grave and gravid stuff. It is no wonder that Einstein, at the end of his life, said that there were times when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker. However, in support of a great man, let us look again at that equation.

  E=mc2 was in fact a multiple pregnancy, incubating the exciting field of quantum theory, a system of mechanics based on the wave-particle duality of matter and radiation. The duality phenomenon is also known as the observer effect. In other words, light can be seen to travel in waves or particles, depending on the intention of the observer. The theory introduces us to the concept of an invisible field to explain the astonishing, nonclassical behavior of subatomic particles. As if connected or supported in a field of interaction, the behavior of these particles is such that there seems to be no usual cause-and-effect relationship between them. In other words, their influence, one upon the other, is instantaneous. Absurd? Read on…

  Another characteristic of the behavior of subatomic particles is that they manifest in quantum leaps. This is another way of saying that there is no apparent movement of the particle from point A to point B.In what could be a hint of what the poets refer to as a web of life, a particle therefore manifests or unveils itself at point B as if it had always been there. Then there is the observer effect, a phenomenon reminding us that the very act of observing particles causes them to manifest. The act of observation creates the spacetime event, telling us that every subatomic particle exists firstly in a virtual state, the actual state manifesting itself in accordance with the intention of the observer.

  Standing on the shoulders of Einstein, German physicist Werner Heisenberg proposed his uncertainty principle, a theory informing us that we can know the motion or velocity of an electron and we can know its position, but we cannot know both at the same time. This principle predicts that the harder one tries to scrutinize the movements of a subatomic particle, the more elusive it becomes. The mere act of focusing on the particle is enough to disturb it. This conclusion was based on the understanding that waves of light could not be emitted at an arbitrary rate but only in “packets” called quanta, and that each quantum had a certain amount of energy that was greater the higher the frequency of the waves. Stephen Hawking provides one of the most accessible explanations of the uncertainty principle in his classic, A Brief History of Time.

  In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately. The obvious way to do this is to shine light on the particle. Some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle and this will indicate its position. However, one will not be able to determine the position of the particle more accurately than the distances between the wave crests of light, so one needs to use light of a short wavelength in order to measure the position of the particle precisely…[but] one cannot use an arbitrarily small amount of light; one has to use a quantum. This quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. Moreover, the more accurately one measures the position, the shorter the wavelength of light that one needs and hence the higher the energy of a single quantum. So the velocity of the particle will be disturbed by a larger amount. In other words, the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa…Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world.

  Ultimately it is impossible to know exactly how the constituents of matter are behaving. “As soon as I say: IT IS RE AL, it vanishes,” said Octavio Paz when asked to define the essence of poetry. And then there is Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who raised a glass of wine to toast his wife: “I know you so well,” he said, “that I haven’t a clue who you are.” The physicist and the poet…I wonder which is which…who spins around whom? Such is the language of poetry and of physics.

  The “hidden invariables” of relativity and quantum theory preceded the “hidden order” of what is known in physics today as chaos theory, a fascinating discovery of the nature of turbulence, irregularity, and randomness in our lives. Invariably defined as an absence of order, we do not sit easily with t
he notion of chaos. However, it now appears that chaos, when looked at differently, can be seen to have its own dynamic, its own order, and that there are special patterns of regularity in what we perceive as being irregular or random. It would appear that strange laws of chaos exist behind most of the things we consider remarkable about our world—the human heartbeat, human thought, storms, the structures of galaxies, the creation of a poem, cloud build-up, traffic congestion, the impact of elephants on woodlands, the rise and fall of wild-dog populations, the spread of a forest fire, a winding coastline, and even the origins and evolution of life itself.

  Depending on the intensity of one’s focus, what might appear as an orderly situation at one level of magnification is turbulent, irregular, or chaotic at another. Psychologically, any prolonged focus on any one thing, be it a person, a fantasy or a situation, is a good definition of a neurosis, a reminder that we have to learn how to vary the focus if we are to see the bigger picture in our situations. “Do no thing in excess,” says Apollo. Vary your focus every now and then. Do some scanning for a change.

  Chaos theory says yes and no. It reminds us that whatever interpretation we make about our perceptions of the world we can be sure that there is information missing. It tells us that the truths we seek can never be fully grasped. It reminds us also of the transformational significance of the missing information, of the dormant treasures within it—when we are open to it. It is clear to me that pre-Christianera Greek writer Xenophanes, in this two thousand-year-old untitled poem translated by Karl Popper, understood the significance of missing information and of uncertainty…