Nature Works

Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness. Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread and fear. You think you might because in the 'real' world you have been conditioned to fear nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive. You have been taught, brainwashed, to distrust and ignore your instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgements. You would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then, probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command your attention, you would probably play with your new 'friends', exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all species in nature do. Imagine, too, that there is an unseen force that, for a while, protects you -- pulls you away before you can touch plants that are poisonous, guides you to safe, comfortable places to sleep, eat, drink and play, and repels predators, until you have learned from this force -- let's say you call it ma -- how to survive without its intervention, at which point ma leaves you to your own devices. Your group becomes, in fact, a hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of civilization -- language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being, self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness, awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for nature, and, to the extent needed, creativity -- all the elements of natural systems shown in the diagram above. You will instinctively hunt together and gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert peers. There will be a 'pecking order' of sorts, based on consensus of, and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable -- keen senses, physical strength, creativity -- but the tribe will be egalitarian. There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. Some members of the tribe will be eaten by predators, and others will contract diseases and go off by themselves to die, but these deaths will not cause the members of the tribe to become fearful, paranoid, selfish, greedy or violent. They will simply be accepted as the way life is. Your tribe of amnesiacs will know of no other way to respond. You will respect and flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from them, but you will not fear them.

That is how nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but because life is wonderful. When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in a tree in winter, don't feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who lack them) instinctive survival talents -- they need a lot of food in winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they can't, they simply hibernate, and if they even suspect they won't be able to, they'll migrate. They can fly, and I envy them, I wish I were one of them. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze or starve to death -- famine is a modern human invention, due to our huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird, it almost certainly succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries: Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed.

The people in your amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous. Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we have lost much of our sensory acuity and openness, largely because we live most of our lives in cities and indoors, areas of great sensory homogeneity, poverty and concealment. We no longer have either rich sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses, opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings in nature, so that even in those rare times when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive, closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge.

Our ignorance of nature, combined with our collective arrogance (because of our unquestioned evolutionary success), leads us to believe that we are the only sentient, emotional, intelligent creatures on the planet, and to tell ourselves that all other life couldn't possibly have done so well for so many millions of years because they're smart, sensitive and creative, so it must be because they're automatons just doing what they've been 'programmed' to do. But just as economists and historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man, scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communications has so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary intelligence, great awareness of their own existence, and profound emotion.

Jeff Masson's work on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants Weep, supports this theory. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us to be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentally different. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate. Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do so in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidence that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of deep emotion, long-lasting memory and astute reasoning.

I have since read other works that ascribe similar intelligence and emotional sensitivity to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's book Mind of the Raven is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). At this point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am incredulous -- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of 'all things natural' is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind acceptance of religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position. I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs, but I can only hope that, with people like Masson and Heinrich systematically debunking the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will at least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what other animals have to teach us, and to say to us.

In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it's quite possible that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that they are more 'sensitive' in every sense of the word than we are, that they 'feel' more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then don't they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do -- maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and clumsy human ones that we don't 'hear' them. Or perhaps it's just that they don't have to -- maybe we developed 'sophisticated' abstract language not because we were uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise instructions about man-made processes (like harvesting crops) in our strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How sophisticated a language do you need to say "danger", "food", "yes", "no", and "I love you", and ultimately what else is really important to say? I'm being facetious of course -- humans now need our language and our technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a better way to live, and don't need sophisticated language or technology to do so.