“Enjoy it while you can”: Lovelock

So we’re shifting gears in NW, saving Stewart Brand’s eco-pragmatism for later and turning today instead to James Lovelock’s dire forecast that it’s too late for us to save the planet. We shouldn’t end our course on that note, though we definitely need to consider it. Let’s consider it now.

Gaia and Whole Earth are expressions of the holistic, indigenous POV we’ve been encountering in the course so far with Wildcat, Eagle Man, Cajete and others. But I wonder if they’re not as uncomfortable as Brand and I with his idea that our jig is about up.

Supposedly,  the nonagenerian godfather of “Gaia” has lately moderated his pessimism a bit. But he told Bob Edwards that

it’s already far too late to stop global warming… we should be committing our resources to surviving in the new hotter world to come instead of trying to stop it.

And less than a year ago he was still sounding pretty fatalistic.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia is subtitled “A Final Warning,” but he says that wasn’t his first choice. He wanted it to read: “Enjoy It While You Can.” That’s generally good advice, especially in one’s 10th decade on the planet, but it’s a bit resigned. As a Jamesian I’m sure it would be better for us to believe that we still have a chance to swerve from the worst imaginable collision with consequences, if we’re prepared to act on that belief and Lovelock’s “warning.”

Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” co-founder was Lynn Margulis, once married to Carl Sagan, with whom Lovelock worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Carl would undoubtedly be delighted, and envious, to learn of Lovelock’s plans to travel into space (courtesy of Richard Branson) and see Mother Earth entire. He’s hoping to enjoy a transcendent moment while he can.

What most of us don’t get, he says, is our deeply transient nature as a transitional species on a planet we can never own or manage. We’re full of hubris about this.

Lovelock’s view, he concedes, is unpopular. Most climate scientists dispute his “procedure” but not the facts. What we must proceed to do immediately, he says, is get to higher ground and haul out the lifeboats. Our loving mother will kill us in an instant without batting an eyelash. So, climb on up. Or, if you’re already in one of the relatively few temperate or high-altitude, high-latitude places, close the gate.

Bucky Fuller notwithstanding, Earth is not our spaceship but more the incubator of our successors. Is that hopeful enough for you? For us? Well, it’s apparently more hopeful than the green dream of safe and renewable energy for the 7th generation.

Near the end of this clip he explains how he thinks Richard Dawkins and other critics have misunderstood his Gaia thesis. (“Gaia is a tough bitch,” indeed.) Then he says: “I speak for Gaia much more than I speak for people.” Hmmm.

[“Daisy World and Nuclear Energy: Two Sides of Gaia“]

Lovelock’s “Gaia” before Brand’s “Whole Earth”

A note to NW STUDENTS:

On further consideration, I’ve decided it would make more sense– chronologically, thematically, hopefully– to read and discuss James Lovelock’s Vanishing Face of Gaia next, ahead of Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline. But neither will be on the Wednesday exam. Go ahead and begin reading Lovelock. Tomorrow’s main biz will be to review the earlier March material and get on with our interminable (but always enlightening) midterm presentations.

“We are all kernels on the same corncob”

Wrapping up Native Science today, if we can.

Western science needs Native science to examine its prevailing worldview and culture. Western science has often been caught up in an almost fanatic drive to objectify and fragment all of human experience so that it could somehow be better or more clearly understood  or controlled. But these methodologies often forget to recontextualize data bits, or to recycle that knowledge into a meaningful expression for human life and human situations. Indigenous science is a process of thinking and relating that refuses to decontextualize.

Point taken: the reductive analyses of scientific inquiry are useful tools, but their greatest use lies in reconstruction at the level of life as it is actually lived, in real places, by real people.  Science is an observational discipline whose discoveries must be integrated with the observers’ own lifeworlds, to have their appropriate impact in building relationships between persons and nature.

After all: “we are all kernels on the same corncob.”

POSTSCRIPT: In the spirit of bridge-building between native and mainstream western science, Gregory Cajete was interviewed prior to an appearance at NASA a couple of years ago:

The air that we breathe and that is finite we share with each other right now and eventually we will be breathing those same argon atoms again. The idea is that air is shared by all living, breathing entities and through that physical process we become related to each other. It is using those kinds of ways to describe the fact that physically, socially, even spiritually there is this interconnection and interrelatedness that human beings share with each other and that is referred to by saying we are all related. Mitakuye oyasin is the Lakota way of expressing that idea and that reality. There are words in other Indigenous languages that describe the same thing, that we are all related. We use a term in my language, because corn is kind of our sacramental plant, a staple of our traditional diet, we say we are all kernels on the same corn cob.

Earthzine: You write, “We are Earth becoming conscious of itself, and collectively, humans are the Earth’s most highly developed sense organ.” NASA just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Images of Earth from space have transformed the way we view the world. How have images of the Earth, our planetary siblings, our Sun, neighboring nebulae and distant galaxies affected native science?

Cajete: In many ways it helps us to visualize what native science has always been, in one way or another, trying to define, first of all that we are all interrelated, we all breathe the same air, we are made of the same elements of the earth, we are conveyors of the sun’s fire, we are participants in the activities of the biosphere no matter where we are and so this idea of the photographs of Earth, especially the newer technologies that allow us to see the Earth as it is evolving its processes, its weather patterns help us to visualize a living, breathing, active planet processes, the life process of the planet itself. And so those images and ways of understanding ourselves, really do add to the conceptions and perspectives of native science. A metaphor that is sometimes used in native science is “we are all members of Turtle Island”. This is an idea that has been popularized by the Iroquois Confederacy but it is really a notion or an idea that is held by all native tribes. The metaphor describes Earth as a living, breathing, super organism and that we as human beings ride the turtle’s back. The thoughts that we think, the actions that we perform, the understandings and the insights that we gain, the celebrations as well as the sadness that we feel are all registered on the Great Mother of the turtles’ back. And so, we affect the consciousness of the Earth as she affects ours. This idea of the super organism which is the planet Earth has been held by every Indigenous culture that I can remember ever studying and can be said to be the prime philosophy of native peoples. It is the understanding that one comes to naturally; if you are a good observer you can begin to see how life forces interact on the Earth or just in the place in which you live, and you begin to have a sense that there is this greater organism, this greater process that is a part of life.

And so, let’s turn to the founder of Whole Earth and Long Now, the man who wanted to know why we hadn’t yet seen an image of Mother Earth in all her majestic entirety, even deep into the manned space program of the sixties.

Stewart Brand has always had a sense of the “greater organism.” Lately he’s also articulated his own version of “eco-pragmatism.” How well do they mesh? Do we really need dense cities, nuclear power, transgenic crops, and geoengineering? What would Wildcat, Eagle Man, and Greg Cajete say? We’ll try to find out as we commence reading Whole Earth Discipline.

“I could turn and live with animals…”

Chapters 5 & 6 in Native Science are about animals and place, respectively, so that calls for a reiteration of the link to Michael Pollan’s “An Animal’s Place,” mentioned the other day. (Summary)

Pollan’s influential essay was all about how humans can best express and sustain a healthy respect for animals, especially those destined to end up on our plates. He thinks people like Joel Salatin, at Polyface Farm in Virginia, are onto something important. Could be.

Native peoples, we read, have traditionally perceived animals as co-creators of life, in many ways our betters and (as Eagle Man already taught us) our teachers. But of course, indigenous peoples have always eaten animals. Respectfully, gratefully… humanely and ethically too? Or is eating animals wrong, period?

Well, what would Walt Whitman say?

I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

There are non-consumptive, non-exploitative forms of participation in animals’ lives. Telling stories featuring animal heroes is an example, especially those calling us back to the more elemental and instinctual parts of ourselves.  But we’re more comfortable with the Disney version, projecting anthropomorphic stories onto Simba and Mickey and Baloo et al. Great entertainment, but do we ever outgrow the patronizing, sentimentalizing propaganda?

What we’ve really got a case of, apparently, even if biophilia reigns at the deepest instinctual levels, is bio-phobia. We resist the “natural orientation”that would draw all life into our circle of empathy. The Shaman, again, runs interference in “establishing and maintaining a direct relationship between human beings and the animals and plants.” (Remember Ed with his hand in the ground?)

Another of my favorite topics is raised here, the question of how “meaning passes from generation to generation,” crucially distinguished among indigenous peoples by their inherited oral and hunting traditions. Do those of us whose stories are more encrypted, and who do not trap, wrestle, or otherwise subdue our own sustenance directly, have a harder time “coming into being” (i.e., becoming educated about our natural relations)?

“Coyote stealing fire from the shamans” will remind many of us of Prometheus, and the Great Turtle myth of the Iroquois of Gaia. Stay tuned, Stewart Brand and James Lovelock are on deck and in the hole. (Lovelock may actually be in his bunker humming Carole King.)

I’ve mentioned Aldo Leopold‘s “Land Ethic” before, but Cajete reminds us again. It carries a strong indigenous current I hadn’t thought about much: “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.” Is that true?

“Multiverse” is a term William James liked, and lately Brian Greene and other astrophysicists, but for neither of them does the term quite mean “multiple realities of which the reality experienced by our five senses is only one of many possibilities,” and in which direct communion with animals and plants might result in knowledge discoverable in no other way. James would have been sympathetic, though, especially if the nitrous was strong.

Do animals have “rights,” beyond interests, even if they cannot defend them discursively or juridically? Peter Singer…

The Navajo concept of ho’zho was engagingly discussed by Chris Phillips…

Ancient indigenous paths and roads are everywhere, even where their traces are hard to spot. But I’ve been motoring up and down one of them for many years to visit my in-laws who live down “the Trace.” Sometimes I park, get out, lace up my Nikes, and participate in a locomotive ritual that owes more than most realize to native design genius in the matter of moccassins.

Finally, and not just because we’re just back from gorgeous Fall Creek Falls: springs and waterfalls are wonderful symbols of healing and purification. They’re powerful, beautiful, inspiring, “memorable.” I don’t think “western science” would or could ever remove its spiritual impact on any honest observer.

a true story about “the beginning”

Mitakuye oyasin seems to be our recurring refrain in NW class. We’re all related, but to what? The whole community. That includes not just people and animals but plants, food, and medicine, and genetic information stretching back into pre-history, and humans of the future, and post-humans, and and and…

And even invasive spiritual traditions, evidently. Greg Cajete recalls the “Saint’s house” of his youth where Catholicism was celebrated alongside traditional Pueblo values. That’s pluralism, again, and if you ask me that’s a good thing.

But does it flirt with relativism too, or with something even less committed to the truth, in which competing propositions about the cosmos are not merely “true for you and true for me,” respectively, but in which all differences are submerged in an indiscriminately assimilated melange of “tradition and age-old practices”? Or… is it just a prayerful expression of the hope that we might all one day learn to just get along?

“Children are our future,” I thought, is as close to a universal cliche as there is. But Cajete claims it as a distinctively indigenous attitude, along with a Howard Gardner-esque “multiple intelligences” view of pedagogy… and this on the heels of contending that “tribal man is hardly a personal ‘self’ in our modern sense of the word.” This is an interesting attempt to cut through familiar battles between communitarianism and individualism. He even speaks the Emersonian language of “self-reliance” approvingly  at one point, while still affirming the tribe’s pervasive imprint on every member of the community. Does he pull it off?

Seeking and finding life, “that place that Indian people talk about,” is another core aspiration. Being “at home” in this world was Carl Sagan’s definition of spirituality, too. What a fascinating convergence.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

In other words, we are all connected. Life’s an extraordinarily inclusive symphony. The universe makes a big sound.

What’s sacred to a child? Well, in my experience just about anything can be. Children are more readily at home in the present than most of us, at least ’til we get our educational snares into them. But Cajete has in mind the words that compose stories, which– also in my experience– are so enchanting to children. Parents of small children who don’t treasure a nightly storytime ritual are missing out on one of life’s most incredibly special experiences.

Striking contracts and covenants with plants sounds a little out there, but I guess it’s simply an application of the will to build stronger communities in which we would all coexist in respectful mutuality. But plants? Really? Well yes, suggests a story in the Times. “Plants Like Life Too.”

I’m a little uneasy about the indigenous tendency to chalk illness up to “improper relationship to the natural world, spirit world, community, and/or to one’s own spirit and soul.” But a healer’s gotta start somewhere, and maybe we can agree that pure medical materialism is just too narrow.

“In the creation myth of the Inuit, the first man is born fully formed from a pea pod.” That’s one example of Cajete’s meaning when he says native myths mirror the reality of human biological evolution, though the mirror image seems a little cloudy. Less, perhaps, than in some other creation stories.

I notice that YouTube is teeming with more-or-less-cleverly produced creation myth videos. Very entertaining…

…but I have to wonder why it’s so hard to find good renditions of the actual facts of creation as we’ve come to know them? Speaking of Carl, “let me tell you a story about the beginning”:

So, on Carl’s reading mitakuye oyasin means the differences between species and lifeforms (let alone persons and peoples) on this planet, this place, are insignificant. We are related means we are one. So why can’t we all just get along?

Native science is interdependent

We return from Spring Break today to a new author in our Native Wisdom course, Gregory Cajete. In Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence,

Cajete examines the multiple levels of meaning that inform Native astronomy, cosmology, psychology, agriculture, and the healing arts. Unlike the western scientific method, native thinking does not isolate an object or phenomenon in order to understand it, but perceives it in terms of relationship. An understanding of the relationships that bind together natural forces and all forms of life has been fundamental to the ability of indigenous peoples to live for millennia in spiritual and physical harmony with the land. It is clear that the first peoples offer perspectives that can help us work toward solutions at this time of global environmental crisis.

A quick intro to Dr. Cajete, before we get on with presentations. (Everyone should now be more than ready.)

Postscript. A couple of points we didn’t get to in Monday’s class:

Einstein’s birthday was Monday, celebrated by some as pi-day. “Sixty-four decimal places of Pi gets the observable universe’s circumference down to a sextillionth the size of a proton,” according to Neil Tyson. So is the universe really mathematical? Sure seems like it to me.

Native languages have no words for philosophy, science,  psychology, “or any other foundational way of coming to know and understand the nature of life.” Good, maybe, but I have to raise my hand to insist that on my view the best science and philosophy resist the foundational metaphor altogether. No need to read those values into the words.

If “biophilia” is real, in other words, science and philosophy should find it, explore it, enhance it… not reduce it to arbitrary propositional foundations. Some words describing what we’re trying to do, when we study nature and our place therein in the way of western philosophy and science, can still be sacred.

Carl Jung can’t drive

Harrison’s report on Carl Jung, the collective unconscious, and the power of myth reminds me again of Northern Exposure.  “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” That’s my kind of shrink.

 

The world without us?

We finish Nature’s Way today and get serious about midterm report presentations. All hands, please.

Buffalo and “Gone,” Black Elk’s medicine-bearing great white equine, symbolize the emergency of our time: “we had better conserve what is left and learn new values.” (For the record: Black Elk’s other horses of the apocalypse are “Thin” and “Too Many,” respectively heralding ozone depletion and overpopulation.)

How should we heed the steeds? We could begin by trying to reverse the annihilation of vast numbers of species. We could stop worshiping our “dead-zone” midwestern lawns (“midwestern” not geographically so much as in terms of horticultural sensibility, an “egalitarian conceit” in Michael Pollan’s charitable words) and decimating avian life. We could stop spreading our kudzu-like invasive dominance. And we could stop guzzling millions of years’ worth of fossil fuels annually.

But we’d best not look to shortcut short-term “solutions” like natural gas, which is scarce, dangerous to extract, and toxic. It’s not the clean green alternative it’s been portrayed as being.

In sum, we must get ourselves under control. We’re killing Mother Earth, says Eagle Man, daring her to be done with us. The threat of a world without us is no metaphor. A world without oil might be preferable. Is it time for a major transition?

“Tiger” craves freedom

Eagle Man tells us of fearless, freedom-loving Tiger today, and of the horse called Heat.

NOTE TO STUDENTS: Today’s exam, following another presentation or two, will not include material from the latest Nature’s Way reading assignment (ch.7-8).

Much to his credit, Eagle Man explicates tiger symbolism by promptly drawing our attention to “freedom from want” and then to mental freedom. “Most folks won’t budge an inch from the beliefs instilled in them since childhood.” There’s hope, though, that young people increasingly reject rigidity and crave “other points of view and the freedom to explore them.” That’s precisely the pluralism Wade Davis was pleading for at TED. (It’s what my alma mater’s mascot symbolized to me, too, back when I first started to study philosophy.)

“We need to be allowed Tiger’s freedom as we walk our own trails of proof and error.”

Indigenous people “did not presume to have the only path to truth.”

“Creator has allowed us free will… and a free-thinking mind to insulate us from the dangerous dictates of zealous soothsayers… (spreading the doctrine of original sin and the like)… never give up your freedom to a human being…”

“…the only ‘real truth’ is what we can directly observe… A Nature-based spirituality cannot encompass a conventional religious hierarchy.”

Heat was the first horse of Black Elk’s apocalyptic vision, the symbolic embodiment of desecrating excess. The greenhouse effect is natural and good in delicate equilibrium, but we’ve thrown it catastrophically out of kilter. Eagle Man gathers the now-familiar facts of global warming, and extends them.

Did you know, for instance, that by the end of this century it is forecast that “ongoing warming will have enlarged the zone of potential malaria transmission from an area containing 45% of the world’s population to an area containing about 60%” and that “deaths related to heat waves is projected to double by 2020”?

And that’s only from the first horse’s mouth, there’s more. Kinda puts exam day in perspective.

[2010 set record global temperatures, tied with 2005 as hottest on record… the evidence at climatecrisis.net…floods & droughts in 2010]

heritage

More from an anthropologist impressed by Polynesian tradition, on valuing ancient wisdom and the intelligence of intuition and feeling.

“We live in a world bloated with data, yet starved for wisdom… The link between past and future is fragile…  Throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge… The planet is our canoe, and we are the voyagers.”

This is a beautiful talk by Elizabeth Lindsey, and it’s inspired a spirited comments thread. I do have to admit some sympathy for this guarded reaction: “I’m leery of mysticism and elders who think they know best  due to some ancient tales.”