Ecological Intelligence (15 page)

In what way have the themes or topics of modern-day conversation differed from those of our hominid ancestors? The answer, it would seem, is very little. It was Jung who remarked that the origins of directive thinking coincided with the origins of spoken language. He saw our earliest speech as the first stirrings of a cry to our companions that water has been found, or that a bear has killed or been killed, or that a storm is approaching, or that wolves are prowling around the camp. It would appear that the daily information we exchange with our companions today is, in many respects, simple and sophisticated variations of these themes. “We have found water” is a statement charged with excitement, relief, joy, security, triumph, and homecoming. It tells us that we have found what we were looking for. The corporate goal has been reached. For the time being we have struck gold, oil, meat, or material wealth. We can rest a while, we can gossip, and we can reflect. To find water is to have succeeded, to have struck form. Psychologically, it is to find oneself in the flow of things, perhaps to have discovered a wellspring, a place of potential depth or meaning in one’s life, or a space where one can lick one’s psychological wounds.

“The bear has been killed” is a message of multiple meanings. It could be telling us that danger has been averted, that the struggle is over, that a cycle has completed itself, and that we can begin anew. It might come with undertones of excitement, relief, and surprise, but a kill is also a killing. Who did it? What’s in it for us? Will it be shared? Will there be more killings? These are familiar corporate boardroom questions, aren’t they? The bear, then, could be a hero or a villain, the central character in a scandal, or even a scapegoat.

“There is a storm approaching.” Be careful. Be aware. Be vigilant. Make the proper preparations. This might not be a good time to hunt or to take a holiday. Make sure the pantry is stocked. Change is coming. The storms are also the sociopolitical storms on our horizons. Perhaps it is a good time to move to higher ground, or to leave the country. For some, the storm is overdue and it is a good time to stay. Like modern day stockbrokers, our ancestors were interpreting the signs of the times.

Then there are the prowling wolves, the troubles close to home, the brewing storms that were once on the horizons and that we thought would go away but are suddenly upon us. These are the storms of the psyche, the ones which we know we have to face, that must not be avoided, says D. H. Lawrence in these lines from the poem “The Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through”:

What is the knocking at the door in the night?

It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.

Admit them, admit them.

T
he capacity for reflective thinking, for analysis, and symbol formation is largely the domain of the human animal, but it is not limited to humans. It is well known that chimpanzees and bonobos have mastered symbolic thought, albeit on a limited level. For example, they have learned to use long, thin sticks as tools to fish termites out of their mounds. Such use of tools is not confined to our primate cousins either, for elephants are tool users as well. I have personally witnessed a Namibian desert elephant picking up a long stick and using it not only to scratch its abdomen but, in the same grooming session, to scratch behind its ear as well, before discarding it.

Our inner world of words appears to be an ongoing silent and some-times not-so-silent dialogue of questions and answers. Do this, don’t do that. What if this, what if that? Ought I, or ought I not? Our speech, a cohesion of syntax, semantics, and symbols, has been crucial for our survival as a species of perennial problem solvers. Our thoughts in the form of silent and not-so-silent words take wings, for we talk to God, whatever our notions of God may be, we talk to absent loved ones, to the landscape, and to animals, and sometimes we could swear that they talk to us too. Even when we are asleep, the dialogue continues, this time in the form of dreams, what Freud and Jung recognized as the language of the unconscious. In our ongoing inner dialogue, who or what are we addressing? To whom are we saying yes and no and no, again, and yes? And who answers us? Could it be one of the three strange angels that D. H. Lawrence has asked us to admit—the reptile in us, that first mammal, or that 2.5-million-year-old hominid survivor in the human psyche? Operating as a trio, the neurological equivalent of the strange angels can be seen as the combined functional aspects of the brain stem, the paleomammalian cortex, and the modern human forebrain.

And then there is literacy, that great gift of the freethinker. The ability to read and write and to have a confidence that takes literacy for granted must never be underestimated. It represents a huge leap in the evolution of culture and consciousness. It allows us to read in private, to make up our own minds about what we are reading, to cross-reference our findings, to discover new words and new worlds. It takes us into the borders of other countries and into the skin of those who live there. Literacy stirs the imagination. It puts clothes on our thoughts. It extends our vocabulary and our horizons, and, because it is economically and politically empowering, it is easy to see why it is the cornerstone of what we broadly refer to as a modern education.

Finally, there is ecological literacy—the ability to read the ecological issues of our time, to interpret the connections in the web of life, and to recognize our evolutionary signatures within it. It is a literacy that is able to read and write with both eyes—an empirical eye that delights in science and classical reasoning, and a poetic eye, the one that interprets the uncharted waters of nonscience, that can read the future in the wind, the rain, and the land. How can we tell the future from that, you might ask? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s the same way that the great sculptors, by staring at it, come to know the future of the block of marble in front of them. Ecological literacy is a literacy that is impossible to those who are blind to our animal nature.

When Jung proposed his notion of a collective unconscious, more especially the notion of a more than 2-million-year-old hominid in all of us, I believe he was honoring the wild man, the wild woman, and the wild animal in us also—our primal nature, our wild archetype. “Every individual life is at the same time the external life of the species,” he once said, implying that evolution includes the evolution of consciousness also and that the wild man and the wild woman are not very far from the surface of our domesticated social masks. If this is so, as I believe it is, I think we need to look behind us from time to time, to read the tracks of our evolutionary history, and to remember where we have come from.

Norman Maclean

Even now, I imagine that I can feel all the particles of
the universe nourishing my consciousness just as my consciousness
informs all the particles of the universe.

Jacquetta Hawkes

6

LIVING IN A MINDFIELD

I
N THIS CHAPTER I WANT TO PUSH THE ECOLOGICAL ENVELOPE. I WANT YOU to become aware of the constant interplay between our brains, our thoughts, our emotions, our intentions, and the environment. I wish to reinforce what the poets have known for a long time—that we are connected to the lives of plants, planets, stars, and animals in ways that are not as mysterious as we sometimes think, or as we would sometimes like to believe.

Could it be that we are born not only into ancient fields of gravity, electricity, and magnetism, but also into a
mindfield
—a field of information in which conscious and unconscious mental activities, signals, and directions interact and influence each other. Absurd? I don’t think so. When we review the evolution of life on our planet, “is it that unreason-able to imagine the emergence out of our molecular origins, a continuity of geogenesis followed by biogenesis and out of that, like a Chinese puzzle, an emerging psychogenesis?” asks Jacquetta Hawkes. And if we acknowledge the biological continuum of anatomy and physiology (the structure and functioning of the body) then why not a continuum of the brain, the psyche, and the world around us? If this sounds plausible, then say yes quickly.

Because it concerns the subject of ecological intelligence, I want you to be mindful of two important questions: to what degree are we receptive to events and processes within this field of information? Secondly, to what degree are we aware of our personal contributions into it? The answers to these questions may not be readily forthcoming but the search for them is what this chapter addresses.

O
n December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake northwest of the island of Sumatra resulted in the formation of a tidal wave that would bring havoc to the coastlines of countries and islands in the Bay of Bengal. Within hours of the sudden shift of the subterranean plates, tens of thousands of people lost their lives. Millions lost their homes. It will stand as one of the greatest Human-Nature tragedies ever known.The Japanese word
tsunami
is now part of a universal language.

With reports of destruction and the rising toll of death flooding our television screens, I began to fear for the fate of the Andaman islanders, people with a Stone Age culture who live under the protection of the government of India. Andaman is part of an archipelago situated very close to where the 9.3 (Richter scale) earthquake occurred. I then began to worry about the fate of the animals, not so much for the marine creatures, but for those that lived close to the coastlines. Would they have known what was about to happen? What I subsequently learned filled me with a deep sense of relief, gratitude, and respect for our wild relatives.

Y
ala National Park in Sri Lanka is home to at least two hundred elephants as well as a host of other large and small mammals. Its coastal boundary as well as several miles of inland reserve were devastated by the impact of the tsunami and yet, according to a senior official of the park, there was hardly a dead animal to be found. The elephants and other animals had moved to higher ground hours before the tsunami struck. Even if this report was not 100 percent accurate, clearly these animals knew of the imminent danger. How did they know? I will suggest that the elephants could feel it coming. It is known that these great pachyderms can pick up vibrations through their feet from sources over 124 miles away. They probably heard it coming as well, for they can pick up sounds way below and above the human limits. For the elephants, the alarm had been sounded and it would not surprise me that the other animals, if they hadn’t picked up the alarm themselves, simply joined the elephants on their trek to safety. From suricates to squirrels, baboons, leopards, and francolins, animals know the alarm calls of their neighbors.

But what about the Andaman islanders? Once again, to my great relief, I learned that there were no immediate casualties. Prior to the event that would have brought certain death to those living close to the shore, they, too, had moved to higher ground. How did they know? Did they also hear it coming or perhaps feel it through the soles of their feet? I doubt it. While it needs confirmation, I would suggest that one reason for their escape was that they watched the behavior of the birds and the land animals, both wild and domestic. As has been documented in the earthquake city of Santiago, Chile, the agitated behavior of the animals probably alerted the islanders to what was about to happen. Another reason is that these people belong to an oral culture. The stories and legends of their people are told again and again. Although the last serious tsunami in the region was in 1889, thanks to folklore they knew that as the ocean suddenly began to recede, a more than equal and opposite reaction was imminent. As for the animals, they either preempted the knowledge or confirmed what was about to transpire. Either way, these primal people paid attention to what was happening around them.

While it is sad, it should not be surprising to learn of the significant death toll on the islands of Nicobar, immediately south of the Andamans. These islands are tourist oriented. The shoreline animals and the traditional stories have been replaced by modern buildings, modern technology, and the news of the world. This is not the fault of technology, for modern technology is a significant part of the field of information. The December 26 tsunami was picked up by seismological instruments off the coast of Hawaii fifteen seconds after the earth-quake occurred. As far as we are aware, this is faster than the known capabilities of any animal. The problem was, no one knew quite what to do about it, who to warn, or how to relay the message. Human technology has to be seen and understood in an evolutionary light—how is it being used, where is it taking us and at what cost to our relationship with our wild nature? The great Nature poet, William Wordsworth answers this question in his poem “The world is too much with us”:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

W
hat can we learn from these events at Yala and from the Andaman islands? Perhaps it is this: the animals are an extension of our eyes and ears and noses when we allow them to be. Weavers and herons know how high the rivers are going to rise when the rains come—the height of their nests above the impending water level will tell us. Hornbills regularly begin their nest building about ninety days before the first rains. The African titbabblers, mousebirds, and crombecks, on the other hand, complete theirs about a month before the season of rain. Ants are ancient weathermen too. I have often seen them carrying their eggs to higher ground when the barometer begins to fall.

To be attuned to the natural world is not only to deepen one’s awareness of the seasons and the rhythms of Nature, but to interpret and act upon the irregularities of Nature as well. It is to know that a midday howl of a hyena is never meaningless.

T
o rediscover ourselves in Nature, the idea of a mindfield is going to be an important one. And it is not new. To me, it is implicit in the bushman belief that all the animals say
one
thing. It is to see the Earth as does British chemist James Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis (1972), as a living, self-regulating superorganism—a planet in touch with itself. From nitrogen fixing to photosynthesis and the organic interplay of countless micro- and macroorganisms, the idea of a superorganism is no mere metaphor. Far from being scientifically discredited, the idea has been a catalyst in bringing together the independent disciplines of microbiology, geography, geochemistry, evolutionary theory, and astrophysics. To make the notion livable, I want you to put on your poet’s cap. I want you to think molecular or, to be more precise, to think in particles. I want you to be mindful of the continual exchange of atoms, particles, and molecules around us. Everything in Nature is made up of atoms and particles, including the human mind, for it, too, is a part of Nature.

It is impossible to speak about the mind without speaking about the brain, for it raises some testing neurological as well as philosophical questions, for example, are brains and minds the same thing? If the brain is confined to the skull, does that mean that the mind is confined there too? If it is, then human consciousness has to be understood as a purely intracranial affair, purely genetic and therefore capable of developing independently of our external and internal environments. If not, then our minds need to be understood as being both a product and a function of what is internal and external to us. But where do we draw the line between our inner and outer environments? Perhaps there is no line at all.

B
eginning with a brief review of what some biologists believe are the evolutionary origins of the brain, let’s examine some of the theories, evidence, and implications for the brain-mind-environment continuum. In chapter two we acknowledged the evolutionary significance of symbiosis—the living together of two or more organisms for mutual benefit. One of the examples involved the symbiotic intrusion a little over a billion years ago of the highly mobile, corkscrewlike spirochetes into their new single-cell hosts. Today there are several evolutionary biologists who, like Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts in Boston, regard these spirochetes as the precursors of the interconnecting pathways in our brain. How did this come about? It is believed that a number of these so-called wrigglers, once inside the host cell, joined up end to end—an act of keeping in touch with each other. John Briggs and F. David Peat write:

Sacrificing their mobility, the spirochetes were trans-muted into brain cells where, eventually, they became packed together, essentially immobile in our skulls. However, it would appear that their formal identity has been retained. These transmuted bacteria are today the instruments of the most rapid transit feedback network in the history of our planet. In what would seem a flicker of electrical motion, they no longer spin through primeval mud but through the furthest reaches of space and time—as the lightning fast mobility of human thought.

Genetically specified and regulated by the action of specific chemicals known as neurotransmitters, the hard-wired pathways in the central nervous systems of reptiles, birds, and mammals are the ones that account for our basic emotional responses to the environment, our primary instincts or drives, our senses (sight, sound, and so forth), and our motor functioning. Called the pathway or channel systems, it is well known that when an individual suffers a stroke in which such a path-way is involved, the result is a loss of function of the target muscles or organs involved.

On the other hand, our inner state—the way we feel, interpret, experience, reflect upon, and modify our responses to the environment—appears not to be wired at all. Our inner state cannot be pinned down to any one or other pathway. Instead, in association with different neurotransmitters to those in the pathway or channel systems, the neurons responsible for our inner state act globally. In other words, the connections of these neurons interact and overlap with each other in what is aptly referred to as a field of influence. This brings us back to the brain-mind conundrum.

V
ery basically, there are those who say that the brain and the mind are the same thing and those who say they are not. Both theories, as we shall see, are flawed by the same problem, namely, we know that our neurons are active while we are thinking, but neither theory is able to explain exactly how our thoughts cause our neurons to start firing and vice versa. Either way, we cannot escape the fact that our minds are a reality upon which our brains and our bodies depend and that we are a mindful species, for as Solms and Turnbull remind us, our minds are “the part of nature that we ourselves occupy. It is us.”

The dualists, with whom the philosopher Descartes (1596–1650) is associated, believe in the dichotomy of mind and matter, body and soul, and, in this case, brain and mind. To them, the brain and the mind are not the same thing. They believe that mental and neural processes may interact or even co-occur (Descartes thought that the pineal gland was the point of interaction) but they are ultimately irreducible to one another. In other words, the mind has no substance or physical properties. It exists as a kind of ghost in the machine.

A classic example of dualist thinking is intrinsic to the notion that psychiatric conditions such as irritable bowels and bladders, phobias, obsessions, compulsions, panic episodes, anxiety neuroses, and depression, are, because they cannot be measured, “all in the mind.” In other words, the physical condition does not exist. Acknowledging that mental processes have an influence on bodily processes, they nevertheless maintain that the mind is an autonomous entity and that in certain conditions, all that is needed is that the patient get his or her mind “right.”