A Small Furry Prayer (20 page)

39

Deep ecology
is a term coined in 1972 by Norwegian ecophilosopher Arne Naess to describe an environmental ethos—an “ecosophy,” as he called it—that is both fundamental to the world of dog rescue and a worldview thoroughly departed from the anthropocentric. This ecosophy is built around the central idea that every species has intrinsic value whose worth cannot be measured by its usefulness to mankind. It is a philosophy of
biotic egalitarianism
: “The right of all forms to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified,” says Naess. “No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species.”

Deep ecology is “deep” because it forces us to ask penetrating questions about our species' place in the world. Who are we? Why are we here? How should we live properly? The current view holds humans as separate from our environment—as either stewards of nature or masters of nature—but Naess feels we should see ourselves as we most certainly are: as
part
of the nature, no different than any other part. Tulane philosopher Michael Zimmerman puts it this way: “Instead of identifying with our egos or our immediate families, we would learn to identify with trees and animals and plants, indeed the whole ecosphere. This would involve a pretty radical change of consciousness, but it would make our behavior more consistent with what science tells us is necessary for the well-being of life on Earth. We just wouldn't do certain things that damage the planet, just as you wouldn't cut off your own finger.” Or, as Naess says: “It's a vision of the world in which we protect the environment as part of ourselves.”

In positioning humans as “of the earth” rather than “on the earth,” deep ecology is seen as the purest antidote to Cartesian logic. Humans cannot be a special case because there are no special cases. All life is responsible for the health and well-being of all life because—and this is another idea core to deep ecology—all life is interrelated, interconnected, and ultimately one. For this reason, deep ecologists do not favor short-term environmental fixes—like, say, recycling—rather preferring to completely redesign society based on, as the literature for the Foundation for Deep Ecology states, “values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems.” In his essay “The Viable Human,” cosmologist and cultural historian Thomas Berry explains further: “Rather than be concerned about how to raise automobile production, this ethic would be interested in solving the problem of human mobility in a way that would not require the disruption of highways, roads and parking lots.”

Joy gets more than four hundred e-mails a day from other rescuers. Each is a plea for help, containing a personality description, backstory, medical update, and the worst part: a photo of a dog about to die. For more than a hundred years, ever since the founding of organizations like the ASPCA, humans have been trying to solve problems of animal welfare with short-term fixes like leash laws, dog licenses, and public awareness campaigns. None has been very effective. Millions of dogs are still being euthanized in America each year, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Since most rescuers feel roughly the same for dogs as most humans feel for children, dealing with this “e-mail problem” is one reason why rescuers prefer deep ecology.

Another reason is scientific. Most philosophies of interconnection are spiritual in nature and thus require a leap of faith along the way. Deep ecology, though, is built upon factual insight. So while Naess's thinking appears an updated version of everything from Lao Tzu's
Tao Te Ching
to Aldo Leopold's land ethic, its most critical antecedent was actually the planet Mars.

In 1962, NASA hired British scientist James Lovelock to solve a hard problem. The agency needed an easy way to detect life on the Red Planet. Lovelock took a top-down biochemist's approach. Life requires chemical reactions. We breathe in air and exhale carbon dioxide. Lovelock reasoned that if Mars was lifeless, then the planet's atmosphere would be free of these reactions. It would be stable, in a state of chemical equilibrium, which Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 later confirmed. The earth's atmosphere, on the other hand, should be incredibly unstable because life would have a noticeable impact on its equilibrium. This did not turn out to be the case—and Lovelock wanted to know why.

How is it that life's delicate balance remains so well maintained on earth? The exact chemical combination of our atmosphere is very specific and very unlikely, yet the entire system remains perfectly hospitable and, oddly, self-regulating. Lovelock found examples of this homeostasis everywhere. The earth's temperature has remained virtually constant for more than three billion years, yet during this same time frame the sun's firepower has increased by 30 to 40 percent. Both the chemical content of the earth's atmosphere and the salinity of her oceans have also remained stable, despite entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, saying things should work otherwise.

Lovelock decided there might be a good reason for all this self-regulation, which he explained first in journal articles and later in his 1979 book
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
: “The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.” In Lovelock's view the earth was a “super-organism,” a cybernetic feedback system that “seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.” At the suggestion of his neighbor, author and screenwriter William Goldman, he called the system Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess.

There has been a long and nasty battle surrounding Gaia, with quasi-religious overtones and lots of belligerent name-calling. Heavyweights like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould led the charge against it. Nature lovers everywhere rushed to support it. Most animal rescuers seem to treasure it, as these days do a troupe of top scientists. Thirty years later, after a ton of computer modeling, much corroborating research, and some error correction on Lovelock's part, what was once derided as a “New Age cult” has become almost legitimate theory.

For error correction purposes, Lovelock removed all taint of teleological language—anything that said all of this happened for a reason and that life is directed by this reason—and replaced it with language in which life's delicate balance is an emergent property, an apparently much more acceptable idea. Emergence comes from complexity theory, which used to be chaos theory, which was once catastrophe theory, and all are built around the observation that as systems become more complex they begin to create coherent patterns. Sometimes these patterns are greater than the sum of their parts. Sometimes much greater. The collaborative behavior of millions of individual ants in a colony being one example, the evolution of human consciousness from the cooperative firing patterns of a billion neurons being another. A third would be the seemingly impossible idea that on planet Earth, all life maintains all life.

Naess and his supporters view deep ecology not as a theory but as an accurate description of reality and a call to action: we protect the planet as we protect ourselves. The philosophy now underlies a significant portion of the environmental movement and much of the cause of dog rescue. Naess has said this means “not thinking of the dog as an instrument for your pleasure” instead as an intrinsic part of the earth's web of life, as important as any other. And this is an importance rescuers cling to, because they often find themselves confronting others who feel otherwise.

Around our second autumn in Chimayo, a close friend, whom I'll call Karen, got extremely upset when she saw the conditions of the Santa Fe animal shelter. Karen had a brother I'll call Aaron who'd spent twenty years as a junkie on the streets of Portland. When Aaron's need for medical care outweighed his need for heroin, he finally agreed to move in with his sister. When Karen went to pick him up, the incredibly inadequate facilities the state of Oregon uses to house their homeless became apparent.

About five days after Aaron arrived in New Mexico, Karen decided that adopting a dog would speed his recovery. Since we didn't have one who fit their needs, Joy drove them to the Santa Fe shelter to help make Sophie's choice. The Santa Fe shelter is one of the better ones in America. This doesn't just mean the dogs get toys to play with and space to roam, it also means music is piped into the kennels to keep the animals calm. This infuriated Karen. “Why do street dogs get such great treatment when my brother spent twenty years homeless and never had a place to sleep so nice?” In her mind, the fact that money was being spent to help dogs when there were humans in need was a criminal injustice, a kind of systemic sociological failure that was beyond any acceptable explanation. Unfortunately, it was Joy she asked for an explanation. Like most dog rescuers, Joy favored biotic egalitarianism. She doesn't privilege human life above animal life, nor does she hide her opinion. Which is not the first time that dog rescue has cost her a friendship.

It probably won't be the last.

40

If we're ever going to stop having this argument then we need to make up our mind about the value of animals. If biotic egalitarianism is to win, if we're ever going to afford animals the same rights as humans, if people are ever going to stop begrudging dogs their standards of care and instead fight for their survival as we fight for our own, then we need to find a way to completely obliterate our Cartesian hangover. Some see this as an ethics question, but mostly—at least going by legal precedent—the answer will come down to biology: if animals are like us, then they can have their rights; if they're unlike us, then they're not our problem.

Richard Granger, head of the Brain Engineering Laboratory at Dartmouth University, has spent much of his career investigating this problem—specifically looking for areas in the human brain that might actually distinguish us from other animals. “The first thing you need to know is you can count the neurological differences between humans and animals on the fingers of both hands. Mostly they're tiny, inconsequential blips. None of them account for things like language, for any skill we would put under the Cartesian heading of ‘human specialness.' ”

What accounts for those skills, according to Granger, is brain size. If brains are computers, then both humans and animals have the same hardware and the same software; ours just comes in a bigger box. Because of that bigger box, our neurons have more space to make more connections with other neurons. In the wiring diagram of the brain, we have more wires. And this bigger box and these few more wires are the source of our superpowers.

Granger is currently trying to isolate the moment those superpowers develop, which is essentially the point we stopped being “them” and started being “us,” but openly admits that finding it may be years away. Until then the similarity camp holds more of the cards, perhaps because they've come from at the question from the opposite direction.

In 1982, a professor of human ecology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, the late Paul Shepard, extended deep ecology's ideas of interconnection into the realm of the psychological. In his book
Nature and Madness
, he makes the case that if there are profound and innate links between the planet Earth and the human species—the kind of links Lovelock tried to establish with his Gaia theory—then those links should extend to the human mind. And we should be able to find them.

Shepard starts with the idea that evolution shaped the brain to shrink complexity by categorization. To this end, our brains slot everything into small boxes. Part of this is our primate ancestry where divisions between “us” and “them” were critical to survival, and part came about during the development of language, when the act of giving names to things required us to first put them in categories. Since those categories were based on what we saw around us, early language acted as our bridge to the natural world. We still
bat
our lashes, are
dog
tired, and clutter our homes like
pack rats
, but in older times, the comparisons went farther. Our letter
A
is derived from the Hebrew letter
aleph
, which in turn comes from a word that means “ox.” Which is why, when you turn an
A
upside down, you get a pictograph of an ox head.

In
The Others
, Shepard explains it this way:

Category making based on animals, linked to speech, was at the center of the evolution of the human mind and the beginning of language itself. Subsistence peoples today continue to extend and enlarge their repertoire of taxonomic groups avidly—indeed, we might speak of them as hobbyists or naturalists. Tribal peoples around the world know hundreds of plants and animals by name and natural history. The Nuba of Africa identify more than forty species of locusts (biologists recognize only ten) and twenty-seven varieties of sorghum which are botanically but three. “In the two preliterate societies in which I have carried out field research,” says one anthropologist, “knowledge of the biological world constitutes—I would claim—a greater chunk than all of types of knowledge combined.” He calculates that primitive tribes have an average of 1,000 to 1,200 kinds of plants and animals in their vocabulary, and he goes on to point out that familiarity with this great diversity of organisms is not primarily because of their economic usefulness.

Shepard was interested in the psychology of categorization and how it affected the development of human intelligence. He realized it wasn't just language that was built upon the natural world, it was everything else as well. Humans spent 99 percent of their history as hunter-gatherers, which means the entire architecture of the brain has been built atop the scaffolding of the natural world. Because of this, Shepard worried about the effects of ecological destruction on our psychic stability; specifically, he's worried about what happens when the very things that taught us how to think disappear.

This is not a new fear. A hundred and fifty years ago, Chief Seattle worried about the exact same thing. “What is a man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For what happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.” Nor, as it turns out, is this an irrational fear.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, according to research conducted by the Hurricane Katrina Advisory Group, the rates of mental illness doubled among those who lived in the area. On the opposite side of that coin, scientists at the University of Illinois recently discovered that a twenty-minute walk in the woods out-performed all the drugs currently on the market for the treatment of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder in children. It was psychologist Erich Fromm who first coined the term
biophilia
, but Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson borrowed it to describe “the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.” And after ten years researching the topic, Richard Louv, in his 2005
Last Child in the Woods
, agrees. He coined the phrase “nature-deficit disorder” to describe why children lacking contact with the outdoors—that is, kids whose biophilic instinct remains unnourished—have been found significantly more prone to anxiety, depression, and attention disorder. But if you really want to find direct links between the natural world and the human mind, as psychologist Stanley Coren pointed out in a 2009 blog entry on the
Psychology Today
website, the best place to look is dogs.

The possibility that dogs can produce major psychological and health benefits for their human companions has been a subject of much recent serious psychological research. …

A recent study published in the
Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
not only confirmed these effects, but showed changes in blood chemistry demonstrating a lower amount of stress-related hormones such as cortisol. These effects seem to be automatic, they do not require any conscious efforts or training on the part of the stressed individual. Perhaps most amazingly, these positive psychological effects are achieved faster—after only five to 24 minutes of interacting with a dog—than the result from taking most stress-relieving drugs. Compare this to some of the Prozac or Xanax-type drugs used to deal with stress and depression. Such drugs alter the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the body and can take weeks to show any positive effects. Furthermore, the benefits that build up over this long course of medication can be lost with only [a] few missed doses of the drug. Petting a dog has a virtually immediate effect and can be done at any time. Recently, researchers extended this research by looking at a group of people aged 60 and older, living alone, except for a pet. Non-pet owners were four times more likely to be diagnosed as clinically depressed than pet owners of the same age. The evidence also showed that pet owners required fewer medical services and were more satisfied with their lives.

Not only does Paul Shepard appear to be correct about the existence of profound and innate links between the human mind and the natural world, but as the only species to coevolve with humans, dogs might be our strongest connection to that world: a superhighway to our archaic past courtesy of the one animal who was along for the whole ride.

But the longer I lived with dogs the more I became certain the real question is what else we might discover if we follow that path back further. Almost all archaic cultures speak of an age when humans and animals spoke the same language. Some still do. The Dreamtime of the Aborigines is the most well-known example, but the Zuni still begin all their ancestral tales with the phrase “A long time ago, when the animals could speak …” In his seminal
Shamanism,
University of Chicago professor of the history of religion Mircea Eliade addresses it this way:

Finally, we must take into account the mystical solidarity between man and animal, which is a dominant characteristic of the religion of the paleo-hunters. By virtue of this, certain human beings are able to change into animals, or to understand their language, or to share in their prescience and occult powers. Each time a shaman succeeds in sharing the animal mode of being, he in a manner re-establishes the situation that existed
in illo tempore
, in mystical times, when the divorce between man and the animal world had not yet occurred.

Shape-shifting, as the process of changing into animals is known, language sharing, occult powers—this is pretty much the point where most rational inquiries into such matters conclude. Perhaps that's where things should have ended for me, but I had spent the past two years having experiences with animals that most scientists dismissed as impossible. Empathy, altruism, homosexuality, imitative behavior, moral behavior, intelligence, abstract intelligence, language skills, laughter—this list goes on. So while shape-shifting sounded ridiculous, less than thirty years ago the vast majority of scientists thought that the idea of personality in dogs was ridiculous. At least, I thought, I should keep an open mind.

Along those lines, I had also been doing a little more research and found a passage from Carlos Castaneda's
Journey to Ixtlan
that details an encounter the anthropologist had with a coyote while studying the shamanic practice known as “stopping the world,” under the ever peculiar tutelage of Don Juan:

I sat down on the rocks and the coyote stood almost touching me. I was dumbfounded. I had never seen a wild coyote that close, and the only thing that occurred to me at that moment was to talk to it. I began as one would talk to a friendly dog. And then I thought that the coyote “talked” back to me. I had the absolute certainty that it had said something. I felt confused but I did not have time to ponder upon my feelings, because the coyote “talked” again. It was not that the animal was voicing words the way I am accustomed to hearing words being voiced by human beings, it was rather a “feeling” that it was talking. But it was not like a feeling that one has when a pet seems to communicate with its master either. The coyote actually said something; it relayed a thought and that communication came out in something quite similar to a sentence. I had said, “How are you, little coyote?” and I thought I had heard the animal respond, “I'm all right, and are you?” Then the coyote repeated the sentence and I jumped to my feet. The animal did not make a single movement. It was not even startled by my sudden jump. Its eyes were still friendly and clear. It lay down on its stomach and tilted its head and asked, “Why are you afraid?” I sat down facing it and I carried on the weirdest conversation I had ever had. Finally it asked me what I was doing there and I said I had come there to “stop the world.” The coyote said, “Que bueno!” and then I realized it was a bilingual coyote.

Up until that moment I had assumed “speaking with animals” was a more metaphorical idea than a physical reality. But what Castaneda was describing was the full Doolittle. I have to say, after spending the past two years talking mostly to dogs, the possibility that they might start talking back was just a little too intriguing to pass up.