Ecological Intelligence

by Ian Mccallum

  A word of caution: I think we need to be careful of confusing synchronicity with the notion that every life incident is meant to be. Certain life events do not appear to have any meaning at all and it is up to us to decide whether or not to give them meaning. In other words, I disagree with those who support a deterministic view that everything from life-threatening illnesses to personal and collective tragedies are meant to be. How can we possibly believe that tidal waves, earthquakes, human poverty, starvation, AIDS , and man-made ecological crises are meant to be? We either give these tragedies meaning or not, and, with time, we usually do. Sometimes it is precisely what happens after the second act—the act of giving meaning to an event—that determines one’s openness to the events that are bound to follow. “Nothing has changed,” says the unknown poet, “except my attitude—so everything has changed.” On the other hand, even the skeptics among us, when we are honest, will admit that there have been certain events in our lives when the sense of meaning has been immediate and profound. There was no need for the second act. This is synchronicity.

  To understand the deeper significance of synchronicity, I believe it is important that we remain open to the likelihood that it works both ways. Events not only happen to us—we also happen to them. In other words, I think we need to become more aware of our personal contributions and influence (conscious or unconscious) to events that

  we tend to describe as synchronistic. Gary Zukav, in describing the observer effect in physics, offers a quantum perspective: “since particle-like behavior and wave-like behavior are the only properties that we ascribe to light, and since these properties are now recognized to belong not to light itself, but to our interaction with light, it would appear that light has no properties independent of us!” The observer happens to light and vice versa.

  Ancient wisdom reminds us that this kind of thinking is not new, for, in its essence, it describes the traditional Nguni African notion of Umuntu…Ubuntu, which means “Because of you, I exist.” To me, our humanity is not defined by human fellowship alone but includes a subtle yet essential dependency on animals and landscape as well. The web or the field of life is inclusive not only of our immediate surroundings, our geology, and our biology, but of deep space and time also. Could synchronicity be another name for the language of this field? If it is, then we have little choice but to see what we call “mind” differently. It is to see it as existing not encased by a skull, but in an extended field for which we are in our own way accountable. We are responsible therefore not only for what we take from it, but for what we put into it.

  To take on this responsibility is to take the notion of a mindfield seriously. It is to add another dimension to what it means to think molecular—intention. A bushman hunter describing the feeling of oneness that he has with his prey prior to the hunt is describing not only his intent, but the significance of that intent also—because somehow, his prey knows about it. D. H. Lawrence agrees with this notion when he writes that the fox is dead long before the hunter has pulled the trigger of his gun. It is as if the animal knows when it is being hunted, or, as Barry Lopez describes the imminent death of a moose in an encounter with a wolf, “it is engaged in a conversation of death. The moose, standing quite still, its eyes fixed on the grey hunter, knows what is going to happen next. It is an ancient contract.”

  The Kalahari bushmen understand this contract. To them there is no hunt unless it is filled with intention, continuity, and connection. There is no hunt unless the prey and the prayer of the hunter become the same thing. Prayer can be seen as a poetic chemistry of intent, effective not so much in its calculating, acquisitive sense, but in a way that Saint Paul may have meant it in his letter to the Corinthians when he said we should “pray unceasingly.” To me, to pray unceasingly is to be continually mindful of the patterns of connections between all things, vigilant to one’s participation in a field of life. It is what Rumi meant when he said: “If you are not with us faithfully, then you are causing terrible damage, but if you are, then you are helping people you don’t know and have never seen.” The poet is asking us to hold the patterns of connection; to hold the chemistry. To pray unceasingly is to think molecular. It is to see the small things, including oneself, in the bigger picture. It means being able to look at a green leaf differently, to see the science and the poetry in it, to be aware that you and the leaf are linked. It is an invitation to experience the transformation process of photosynthesis at work—photons of light combining with molecules of carbon dioxide and water to provide not only the energy necessary for the growth and survival of the plant, but producing the life-giving molecules of oxygen that we breath in. It is to have a sense of privilege at being privy to the powerful yet delicate connection and interdependence between the chlorophyll molecules that produce oxygen and the hemoglobin molecules of red-blooded animals that bind it. It is to hold one’s breath and then to give it back again in the realization that the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are almost identical. What makes them different is the presence of a single trace element in each molecule—magnesium in the former, giving plants their green coloring, and iron in the latter, the reason why blood is red.

  Then there is that great and essential element—water. To think molecular is to see it differently and to salute it, for there is no other substance on Earth quite like it. It makes up more than 80 percent of our body mass—a reminder of our aquatic origins. Absurd? Not at all. Salute the salty signature of the sea in the intracellular compartments of our blood and that of the streams and the rivers in the extracellular flow. Feel the electricity of the bonding of those two hydrogen atoms and the one of oxygen that make up the molecules of water, each of them acting like a tiny magnet, and when you have done that, imagine not only the delicacy but the necessity of a molecular bond that lasts a crucial one-billionth of a second before unbonding and then rebonding again—it is what gives water its wetness.

  In his hard-hitting poem “Elemental,” D. H. Lawrence has no problem seeing water and fire differently. Here are some lines:

  I wish men would get back to their balance among the elements and be a bit more fiery, as incapable of telling lies as fire is.

  I wish they would be true to their own variation, as water is, which goes through all the stages of steam and stream and ice without losing its head.

  In summary, to acknowledge a mindfield is to be aware of the dance of atoms around us and within us and to have a sense of being in conversation with these invisible aspects of our existence. It is to give synchronicity a face that is both evolutionary and immediate. It is to wake up to the fact that we are creatures in a universe about which we know so little, that the vast fields of dark matter and dark energy are not out there in deep space, but that we are in it and of it and that each one of us can make a difference to the world in which we find ourselves. It is therefore, more than anything, an attitude: one that is open to choosing the hard path, the one that E. O. Wilson calls the path of “volitional evolution.” This is the difficult path of those who have decided to do something about their heredity and their fate and who are committed to playing their part faithfully.

  Our task is to rediscover ourselves in Nature and the only way to do this, I believe, is to make the mindfield livable. Clearly, this is an individual choice. We either continue to believe that someone or something else will rescue us, show us the easy way, or even take the hard path on our behalf, or we choose the opposite—we take it upon ourselves. We take the hard path, each one of us, in our own way, and we take it gladly. And where or when does that path begin? It begins exactly where we are right now, when we look up to see the world as a mirror; when we discover that our sense of freedom and authenticity is linked to the well-being and authenticity of others—and that includes the animals, the trees, and the land. It begins when we are open to synchronicity without pretending to control it. This is what living in a mindfield is about.

  Finally, does all of this imply that an ecological intelligence and one
’s personal notions of God are mutually exclusive? If anything, surely, it is the opposite. To me, the creative forces of the universe are neither distant nor impersonal. Are we not, every one of us, living expressions of these forces? As Jacquetta Hawkes reminds us, we are hardly more cut off from Nature than is a naked flame from the surrounding exchange of gases and moisture that sustain it. It would appear that every living creature is united both inwardly and outwardly with the beginning of life.

  However, let us not be victims of wishful thinking. Whilst it is impossible to participate in our own fate without a deep sense of awe and gratitude for the forces of creation and evolution, it is important that we accept the great indifference of Nature. It does not exist to punish or to bless us; it is neither cruel nor loving, but we, the human animal, can choose not to be indifferent. We can choose to reach out, to take care, and to love.

  PART TWO

  LOOKING AHEAD

  Tonight

  I want you to feel the blurred edge

  between good and bad,

  to say no to the urge to look away

  or to take sides…

  but to give

  with both eyes

  I make no apology for a fascination with the soft edge of science.

  It is here, it seems, that we get fleeting glimpses of strange shadows just beneath the surface of current understanding.

  Lyall Watson

  7

  THE BLIND SPOTS

  THE NOTION OF AN ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE, OF LIVING IN A MINDFIELD, and of the need for a poetic language—all for the purpose of a deeper awareness of the multifaceted relationship between humans and Nature—may sound appealing and even logical, but it is going to require rhetoric as well as logic, and that is not an easy task. I use the word rhetoric in its classical oratory sense—the art of persuasive language, the art of influencing the one who hears. To some, the notion may be too far-fetched, not in keeping with conventional wisdom and, in all probability, too difficult to apply.

  Don’t be surprised if, in some instances, the resistance to what the poets have been trying to say is as dismissive as it was about Galileo’s moons. Change is always unsettling and often threatening, but we must not shy away from it. We must face up not only to the mounting environmental pressures of our time, but to the nagging internal pressures also—the ones that urge us to come to terms with the significance and responsibilities of what it means to be the human animal. Who knows, we might find unexpected patterns or directions within the very pressures we are trying to avoid. Consider the surprising truth about the short-range subnuclear forces of intergalactic space, for instance. These are not detectable until they are crushed together by huge stellar pressures. And yet, says Karl Popper, these are the very forces that are responsible for holding together all the more complex atoms of the universe. When looked at differently, our external and internal pressures, like those massive stellar forces, could be both appropriate and necessary—a reminder that there would be no evolution of size, shape, or consciousness without them.

  The environmental pressures of our time could be the very pressures behind a new evolutionary leap—not another expansion in brain size, but of a consciousness and an intelligence that can redefine our sense of history, our sense of Nature, and our sense of coexistence.

  I believe the pressure is on and that it has to be taken personally. It is in the heated poetry of Antonio Machado: “what have you done with the garden?” It is in the voice of the ecologically intelligent Rainer Maria Rilke: “tonight, I want you to take a step out of your house.” It is in the challenge of Rumi who asks: “are you faithfully with us?”

  To be ecologically intelligent will demand nothing less than the courage of Oedipus. It is to discover that Sophocles’ timeless myth is far less a story of incest than of our ultimate responsibility as human beings—to be accountable and conscious of our citizenship. Looking deeper into the myth is to discover that Oedipus, in addition to his self-imposed banishment from his kingdom for having unwittingly murdered his father and then having married his own mother, decreed that his own eyes be put out. A much-loved king, the people under his rule were horrified. “How were you to know?” they wept. His reply was, to the average mind, absurd. “I should have known,” he said. “I have no excuse.” Psychologically speaking, to blind oneself is to look inward. It is to develop what we most lack in our dealings with the outer world—insight. And so, as we face the environmental crises of our day, do we have it in us to say “We have no excuse?” Or will we turn our heads, pretending we just did not see?

  To be ecologically intelligent is to be unafraid of stretching the measured horizons of rational thought. “Only those who risk going too far know how far they can go,” said poet T. S. Eliot, but that does not mean divorcing ourselves from the core of reason. It takes a certain willingness to go to that horizon and to look straight into the things that at first we don’t understand. But that is the demand of science, is it not? It is certainly the demand of the poets. True science is like true poetry. It suppresses nothing. It acknowledges that reason is a precious human asset, but it knows that our Cartesian reasoning cannot adequately explain the real experiences in our lives, the real human-animal stories, the synchronicities, or reasons why we come to the rescue of endangered species and of those who suffer.

  Ecological intelligence is heretical, and yes, it is critical of what might be called the cult of rationality, but it does not reject it. It is an intelligence that recognizes that every creature exists within and beyond itself, that an animal is never just that—an animal. A human being is never just that, either. Every species in its own way is poetic, every individual a unique, interacting component in a complex field of life. And if there is anything absurd about this way of thinking, then it is time to risk that absurdity. It is time to take our souls to the horizon.

  So far, I hope that the poetry in this book has taken us a little closer to that edge, or, as Seamus Heaney puts it, to a sensing of “something coming right, of something moving for us, a little ahead of us.” I hope that we have come a little further than we had expected.

  And so, if promoting an ecological intelligence demands that we take a peep through an alternative telescope, then let’s do it. I hope you will discover that it has little to do with the existence of far-off moons and extraterrestrial life. Rather, it focuses on the here and now. It is about becoming more aware of the miracle of biology, of knowing that within and beneath the skin of our hands is a universe of unconscious life, and that every cell that makes up the you and the me has its own individual life. It is also about coming to know ourselves, warts and all, as 2-million-year-old creatures of soul, spirit, and Earth and of being prepared to be changed by that awareness.

  SCIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY

  The first blind spot or resistance to the notion of an ecological intelligence is that it is subjective, anthropomorphic, and therefore unscientific. My response to such a perception is to quote from Robert Pirsig’s 1974 classic on science and subjectivity, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant… then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.”

  Anthropomorphic thinking—the tendency to ascribe human attributes to beings or things that are not human—is irresistible. As Jung noted, we need no elaborate proof to show that children think in this way…they animate their dolls and their toys, and with imaginative children it is easy to see that they inhabit a world of marvel and magic. To put oneself in the skin of the other is therefore not a passive phenomenon. It is an act that takes us beyond ourselves, toward the experience of a sense of relatedness and relationship with the other.

  A stick, for example, is never just a stick. It is also a detachable extension of an arm, which can reach, probe, scratch, and protect. It can become a weapon. It can be thrown, taking the energy of the human deltoids, the biceps, and the fist with it. It is something to lean on, in which case it becomes an additional leg imbued with “
muscles” and “ligaments” to support the human weight. It is as if the trajectory of the stick, the spear, and the arrow not only reflects the trajectory of human thought, but stimulates it. From sticks to space rockets, the anthropomorphic principle has been a major catalyst for the creative imagination of science.

  Another sensitive but nevertheless classic example of anthropomorphic thinking is in the Genesis image of a Creator and the idea that human beings are made in the likeness of that image. Whether this image is right or wrong is beside the point. What matters is that we create these images, and we do it, it would seem, because our sense of meaning as a social and psychological species depends on it. Consciously or unconsciously, the tendency to connect, to make symbols, to invent analogies, and to see the world as an extension of our-selves has been of enormous significance for the development of the human mind. It is central to our notions of continuity and belonging.

  Empirical science insists on objectivity—detaching one’s personal feelings and prejudices from the subject under observation. And yet quantum physics reminds us that the very act of observing the other, because it involves an exchange of influence, is intrinsically subjective. Any observation will arouse feelings. Subjectivity, the act of putting oneself in the skin of the other, is unavoidable. It is essential, not only to the methodology of tracking wild animals by the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, but also to the tracking of atomic particles.

  In his book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, Louis Liebenberg suggests that anthropomorphic thinking may be the result of the creative scientific imagination. In other words, an imagination that observes, analyzes, interprets, and synthesizes preempts the capacity to understand and predict the thoughts and feelings of others. He adds that this kind of thinking arises from the need of the tracker to identify with the animal in order to predict its movements. The tracker must there-fore be able to visualize or internalize what it would be like to be that animal in its particular environment, suggesting a sense of observer-animal-environment continuity. Prediction of an animal’s movements would appear to be impossible unless one had learned how to ask the question: How would I respond if I was that animal in this environment and in these circumstances? In short, you would have to think like an eland, an elephant, or a fish. You have to put yourself into their skin.