Ecological Intelligence (21 page)

And so, what is your name? Where do you stand? Where is your voice?

THE MISINFORMED PUBLIC

A
nother blind spot to ecological intelligence reflects the belief that decisions pertaining to our natural resources have little or nothing to do with the public and that ecological decisions are best left in the hands of the “experts.” I have already outlined the powerful subjective, archetypal responses that are sometimes evoked in a public that does not agree with what it regards as the sometimes high-handed deci-sion and policy making, not only in conservation biology, but in other fields such as politics and medical health. A doctor might be an expert with respect to the diagnosis and management of a particular pathology, but he should be careful never to underestimate the intelligence of his patients. Their skepticism, but more than that, their criticism, is good for us. We need more than their signatures to take them along what we deem to be the appropriate path or course of action—we need their participation.

Scientists appreciate how important it is to present their work to the public and this alone is good reason to listen to their protest. They are not all misinformed or ignorant. Linked to the powerful evolutionary dynamics of fair play, protest does not necessarily reflect or respond to classical reasoning and rational persuasion. But this does not make it wrong. If anything, because it is so often vindicated, it would appear to have its own rationale. We must welcome it. Protest is often the key to the unlocking of hidden agendas, a reminder that every policy is worth a review. It should also be a reminder that the first rule of scientific investigation is to ensure that one’s mind is not clouded by prejudice—a necessary prerequisite for distinguishing non-science from nonsense.

In spite of its intentions and its successes, the hierarchy of advanced science carries an inevitable shadow of which we need to be aware. As Louis Liebenberg says, it comes in the form of authoritarian elitism, an attitude that distances people with less background knowledge from both the advances and the limitations of science. What do they know? is a classical shadow question. We should also be asking What is it that we don’t know? As scientists, we need to be aware that our way of thinking is not the only school of thought and that in certain situations, even when we believe that we are right, it could be no more right than any other value system.

I think we need to become a lot more egalitarian in our attitude to the public. Egalitarianism does not mean that all things and all people are equal either in strength, or knowledge, or in intellect. Instead, it is a belief in the high value of equality and of the desirability of removing inequalities. It is an attitude that is both purposeful and democratic, one that reaches out with the intention not only of bringing out the best in the other but of learning from that other. And that means learning from the layman, the children, the forests, and the animals.

The writings of Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, for instance, are a profound reminder that our psychiatric descriptions of the behavior of people occur in a behavioral field that includes the psychiatrist. “The behavior of the patient,” he writes, “is to some extent a function of the behavior of the psychiatrist.” Laing, in a way, was referring to the observer effect in quantum physics. He was therefore cautioning us to be careful of who or what we label as dumb, stupid, or insane.

T
he dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship is not that different from any relationship, be it human-human, individual-public, or human-animal. In other words, we have to understand the existential position of the other, where they’re coming from, and how they experience us. History has shown that there will always be missing information in our decision making and that they, our psychiatric patients, the uninformed public, or a herd of elephants, can, when we are willing to listen, teach us a lot about themselves and about us—the so-called experts.

For the record, here is a statement from an “authority” on wild animal behavior. It comes from a 1956 report by the then director of the Uganda National Parks, who, in a damning and subjective statement, unwittingly declared his lack of understanding of the African wild dog,
Lycaon pictus
.

Wild dogs hunt in packs, killing wantonly, far more than they need for food and by methods of utmost cruelty. They do not kill quickly as the lion does but often start to devour the antelope which is his victim before its life is extinct. They do more damage than almost any other carnivore, for whenever they enter a particular stretch of country, the disturbance they cause is so great, that for the time being, all buck are driven out. A particularly unpleasant characteristic is that they will, without hesitation, turn upon any member of the pack that falls by the way through wound or sickness and show no reluctance to consume their own kind.

From what we know about wild dogs today, this statement is frighteningly subjective and misleading. They will certainly fight with dogs from another pack, but they do not turn on and devour members of their own. Their manner of hunting is anything but cruel. It is quick and efficient. What is more, their prey is shared and the order of eating is determined by the age of the individual members of the pack—the yearlings go first, followed by the adults, who, if there are cubs at the den, will regurgitate portions of meat for them upon their return. There is nothing unpleasant about wild dogs at all. Unrelated to wolves and domestic dogs in terms of evolutionary bloodlines, they serve as a model for the human animal when it comes to teamwork and care of the young. Sadly, they are highly sensitive to diseases such as canine distemper and therefore, to the encroachment of human populations on their ranges. Is it any wonder that there are only about three thou-sand wild dogs left in Africa?

Public participation and, with it, public protest has to be under-stood as essential, for one reason more than any other—responsibility and vigilance becomes shared. If protest is silenced, as it so often is, it does not mean that it has disappeared. It might take a long time, but it will be heard again. Anyone with a reasonable sense of political history will vouch for that. Any psychologist will tell you that unexpressed dissatisfaction or anger turns inward, often predisposing to depression and demotivation in the one who is silenced. However, with time, as Rilke reminds us, the children will go out in search of the church that the fathers have forgotten. A classic example of this was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was impossible for that wall to remain standing—it had already come down in the minds of the younger generation of East Berliners. The forgotten church was on the other side of that wall.

DREAMS

A
likely objection to the notion of ecological intelligence concerns the significance of dreams. In chapter three, I wrote that it was impossible to understand the admonition of Apollo—know thyself—without an understanding of our dreams. Whether we understand them or not, our dreams are a reality. We have them, or perhaps they have us.

No one who has had the privilege of owning a dog would deny that our canine companions dream. Watching their twitching—often accompanied by plaintive high-pitched calls—as they sleep, one can almost picture them chasing rabbits or squirrels in some ancient field of hide-and-seek. What need would there be for such an animal to dream, we might ask? Perhaps it is this—to reinforce the survival strategies, the vigilance, and the other wild instincts in our otherwise thoroughly domesticated pets. Could this be the reason why human animals dream?

Freud once said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, and if this is so, as many therapists believe it to be, then it is a road well worth exploring. When viewed from an evolutionary perspective, they can be seen as an essential language of Nature—a primal correspondence. To me, our dreams are poems from the unconscious. They say yes and no. They affect us. They color our nights and, when we learn to acknowledge them, our days too. Our dreams are homeostatic and mindful. They modify, motivate, remind, reward, warm, warn, and deflate us. They keep us in touch with our feelings.

In this light, it is likely that we dream because we need to. “If sleeping and dreaming do not perform vital biological functions, then they must represent nature’s most stupid blunder and most colossal waste of time,” say Anthony Stevens and John Price in their thought-provoking book
Evolutionary Psychiatry
. Freud also believed that in addition to their symbolic significance, dreams were “the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.”

Irrespective of how dreams are interpreted, sleep research has shown that our mental health suffers without them. It appears that it is not so much sleep deprivation but dream-phase deprivation that affects us. Dreams are intimately associated with specific chemicals and structures in the mammalian brain as well as with certain phases or periods of sleep. And sleep is not a passive process either, a time in our day when we like to think that the brain switches off. It is precisely the opposite. The brain, through increased nocturnal electrochemical activity in the evolutionarily older brain stem, liter-ally switches on. As a result of this measurable activity, a remarkable physiological phase of sleep, common to all mammals and known as RE M or rapid eye movement sleep, is initiated. Accompanied by f lickering eye movements as well as a deep relaxing of the muscles, particularly those around the head and neck, RE M sleep in humans begins about an hour after sleep onset. Throughout the night it alternates with non-RE M sleep, but the alternating patterns vary from person to person and with age. Newborn infants, for instance, spend about half of their sleeping time in RE M phase, while the average for adults is about 25 percent.

A significant aspect of RE M sleep is that 75 percent of our dreaming occurs in this phase, and until fairly recently, many sleep researchers believed that RE M sleep and dreams were synonymous. Based on this belief and on the fact that RE M activity is generated in the lowly brain stem, these same scientists saw dreams as mindless or, to put it more politely, as having no intrinsic value. As we shall see, support for this theory is diminishing, for there are those, like neuropsychologist Mark Solms, who regard dreams as anything but mindless. “What about non-RE M dreams?” he asks, knowing that at least another 25 percent of our dreams occur before and after the onset of RE M sleep, with some of our most vivid dreams occurring in the non-RE M phase before we awaken. His research shows that non-RE M dreams are generated not in the brain stem but in the forebrain, giving them a home in the more evolved parts of our brains as well. What is more, the neurochemicals secreted are significantly different from those involved in RE M dreams. In RE M dreams, the main chemicals are acetylcholine, nore-pinephrine, and serotonin with acetylcholine in the dominant role. In non-RE M dreams, the dominant neurotransmitter is dopamine.

So what, you may ask? What is special about dopamine? Dopamine is the prime biochemical ingredient for seeking, striving, exploratory, predatory, and anticipatory behavior in humans and other animals, and as such, do our dreams have anything to do with seeking behavior? I believe they do. But for what, in our dreams, are we seeking? Surely, in an evolutionary light and with the defensive waking ego out of the way it is for what we anticipate or what we might need to examine, pursue, or prioritize in our lives. Could our dreams be part of a persistent, predatorlike search for cohesion and meaning? Often the same theme comes up time and again. It is as if the unconscious, that great wilderness of the psyche, wants us to know something, and until we pay attention to them, it will not let us go. Pay attention to your dreams. Honor the gods, said Apollo. Like poetry, they redress the imbalances in our lives. Our psychological integrity and, who knows, even our survival could depend on them. Freud may have been right when he said that many of our dreams are wish fulfillments—being rewarded with what we cannot have, or for what we are not prepared (for social and for other reasons) in our waking reality. Sometimes, for the sake of what is expedient, our dream world is precisely where the dream should remain. Nevertheless, ignoring them, said Jung, is like refusing to open a letter that has been addressed to you. What follows is an example of how important a dream can be. It was brought to me by one of my patients at a time when he had to make a choice about a change of career.

Thoroughly bored with his life and with his work, he dreamt that he was relaxing in a dry riverbed, somewhere in the African bush. Suddenly an antelope, chased by a predator, leapt into the sand not far from him. Then came the predator. It was a lion, a huge and powerful specimen, kicking up columns of gravel as it chased the antelope toward the opposite bank. “I knew that if the lion saw me, then it was all over,” he said. That is exactly what happened. “Turning its attention to me, it advanced in a low, crouching gait. In a state of fear, I raised my right arm to protect myself but it was soon upon me.” Instead of mauling him, the lion gently closed its jaws around his arm and the dreamer knew that if he resisted, it would kill him. It then pulled him out of the riverbed and let him go. Leaving him unharmed, he watched the great animal saunter away until it had disappeared into the surrounding forest. The man awakened, his heart racing. The dream image stayed with him for days. What was it trying to tell him? This is what we concluded: the dream was an accurate reflection of what had become of him in his work. It was as if he was in a dry riverbed; there was no flow to his work and to his creativity. He needed to get out of his situation. He needed to change.

But what role did the lion play in his dream? What wild, archetypal image of Nature was this? In other words, what did the lion represent in him? And why did it let him go? Reading up on lion behavior, my patient came to understand the lion as an aspect of himself—a representation of what is wild, strong, instinctive, and territorial in him—something that he had neglected. The lion was there to help him to get back on track with his vocation and, for the sake of his psychological health, he dare not resist. Animated by the dream image, he made the change. Accepting a post as a university lecturer brought for him a newfound sense of creativity and fulfillment. My patient did not choose the dream. Primed by his psychic situation, it is as if the dream, as a guiding image, chose him.