Study of Nature

Exploring our understanding of Nature, as well as the power and limits of modern science, in the light of human experience and rational inquiry

For centuries modern empirical science has provided privileged answers to that question, answers typically given in terms of mechanism, mathematicism, and reductionism. "Mechanism" is explaining nature in terms of the parts of things and motive (efficient) causes. "Mathematicism" means seeing natural regularities in things as epiphenomena of more fundamental “laws of nature,” understood mathematically. "Reductionism" means that wholes are explained without loss in terms of the law-like motions and mechanical interactions of their parts.

But a growing number of thinkers are reconsidering this conception of Nature and the role of modern science in its development. Coming from the scientific side, we are anti-reductionists, “emergentists,” holists, structuralists, self-organization theorists, systems thinkers, and complexity theorists. From the philosophical side, we are non-reductionists, “anti-realists” (a term of art that does not imply pure subjectivity and constructivism), neo-Aristotelians, neo-Thomists, phenomenologists, and more generally all those who take seriously the need to account for the data of everyday human experience. On the historical front, we study especially the early modern period and crucial thinkers such as Bacon and Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, and their world-changing scientific, theological, and philosophical claims.

Words of Nature

What exactly is “Nature”? It is at once one of our most familiar words and concepts; and at the same time, one of the most mysterious. We understand artificial things, what they do and why they do it and how they came to be, because we make them. But what makes a natural thing be what it is, and do what it does? And why does it always (or usually) do one thing in a given circumstance rather than another?

We can't ask questions about Nature without also asking questions about modern empirical science. What exactly does modern science teach us about Nature? The Nature that we experience on an everyday basis is full of beauty and purpose, as well as cruelty and chaos. Is this common experience a naive illusion, and Nature nothing but purposeless particles in motion according to inexplicable laws, the "things" of common experience nothing but arbitrary arrangements of an underlying quantum flux?

Are the natural sciences the only means by which we can answer those kinds of basic, rational questions about Nature? Or are the kinds of answers typically given by science—answers in terms of mathematical laws and mechanical causes—inherently limited, unable to encompass what we otherwise know to be true in other ways?

Realism of Nature

"Once more people are going to go out into the country, and be on the hillsides, and in the grass, and hear the birds, and look at the insects, and watch the sky; and they won't do it really, I'm afraid, with any love for what those things represent, and they won't do it with any deep wisdom for themselves. So far, nature has been used too much to hate people with, and to be against oneself.

The reason is that people are much more troublesome than an elm tree, or an oak tree, or a beach, or mountains, or a squirrel, or a woodchuck, or an opossum, or a gazelle, or a giraffe. And therefore, since people are so troublesome, there is a tendency to use nature on vacations not for the purpose that nature was intended for, to understand people with, but to say, "Well, all my relatives give me a lot of trouble, but if I lie face-down on the grass, I don't have to think about them." That is a dangerous business. And one goes back home more divided than ever....

Nature is not to be used that way. And man is nature. And New York City is nature. Any person who thinks that New York City isn't nature should ask, Where did it come from? Did the mind of man suddenly make a halt?"

Some people have few answer in saving the World

So what are we to do? Some of the writers cited above offer no solutions -- they are merely diagnosticians, they say, it is not their place to tell us what to do. Some writers do proffer answers, that range from the modest to the radical to the resigned. Here are some of them:

The late Freeman Dyson, in his famous Wired interview, suggests we need to rediscover community and focus our attention on it, since that's the political level at which we can have a personal impact. Along with that, he says, we need to quickly advance new technologies that (like solar energy co-ops) increase community self-sufficiency and (like biotech innovations) improve quality of life. Economist Herman Daly, in Developing Ideas, proposes an economic and tax program that would help communities flourish and encourage conservation and the protection of the commons, and proposes a global contract in which developed nations would agree to reduce their levels of consumption while in return the developing nations would agree to reduce their levels of population.

Just in the last year, Jon Schell in The Unconquerable World has proposed a new political system built around non-violence and consensus-building, while Shoshana Zuboff in The Support Economy has proposed a new post-capitalist economic system based on small enterprises collaborating to meet human needs holistically. Thom Hartmann in Unequal Protection, David Korten in When Corporations Rule the World and Joel Bakan in The Corporation present prescriptions for stripping corporations of their power and perhaps returning that power to local communities. Jim Merkel in Radical Simplicity prescribes a way that each of us can strive to reduce our personal footprint to sustainable levels.

Thomas King in The Truth About Stories and Thomas Berry in Dream of the Earth both say we need to write a new story about a new human culture, that the rest of us can embrace, and which will show us the way forward. Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point teaches us how change occurs and can be brought about quickly, and Peter Singer in Ten Ways to Make a Difference and the late Dana Meadows in Places to Intervene in a System offer pragmatic advice about how to bring change about. Stuart Koffman in At Home in the Universe explains how we can exploit the attributes of self-managing systems to help humans evolve at the community level.

While Margaret Mead tells us that most of the major changes in human society and culture have been wrought by a few, caring people, James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds persuades us of the importance and value of tapping into the collective wisdom of large numbers of people who, together, probably have the answer to every problem, even one as intractable as the crisis that faces us today. And Bill McDonough in Cradle to Cradle and Avery Lovins in Natural Capitalism show proven ways that could be used to redesign the world by learning from nature.

Bucky Fuller reminds us that it is much easier to create a new system that renders the old one obsolete than to try to reform an existing system. There is even a school of thought that proposes a human cultural metamorphosis, explained by Elisabet Sahtouris in EarthDance and Gary Alexander in eGaia, by which transformation to a new human culture might be achieved quickly. Glenn Parton in Humans in the Wilderness suggests a grand experiment of spaced-out Intentional Communities, to reintroduce humans to community and wilderness, and provide a model for building a new natural culture.

So there are many suggested solutions, none of which has achieved any great groundswell of support. They are of four main types:

• innovative (brought about through invention of new technologies),
  
• social/educational (brought about by virally changing a lot of people's minds),
  
• commercial/entrepreneurial (brought about by changing the rules by which the economy operates) and
  
• political (brought about by changing laws and regulations).

Learn and Understand

If there is any consensus of these writers, it is that innovation is the easiest way to bring about change ( because it requires no widespread public agreement to occur) and political reform is the hardest (because the political system was set up to institute the changes needed to make civilization 'work' and its very purpose is to defend the status quo).

My answer continues to evolve the more I read, and I'm much less convinced that it's the right answer than I am of the Truth about Nature and the Truth about Civilization. But for those that are interested, here is my answer, as of today:

1. There are a lot of things that everyone can do, and should do, to make the world better. Here's my latest list of 15 things: Trust your instincts; Listen, learn and teach others; Learn and practice critical thinking; Re-learn how to imagine; Use less stuff; Stop at one child; Become less dependent; Become an activist; Volunteer; Be a role model; Be a pioneer; Find or create a meaningful job; Share your expertise; Be good to yourself; and Infect others with your courage and spirit and passion. It's the least we can do. It's necessary that we do these things to be clearer about what else we need to do, because these things by themselves won't be enough.
2. There is a second group of things that we need to work on that will require specialized expertise and talent:
• Innovators and scientists need to work on simpler, cheaper, more reliable birth control, abortion and assisted-suicide technologies, breakthroughs in clean energy technology, and technologies that: reduce pollution and waste; prevent rather than just treat diseases; reduce the need for transportation; enable community self-sufficiency (e.g. solar/wind energy co-ops, indoor gardening); do more with less; replace molecules with bits; conserve energy and resources; create nutritious and delicious animal-product-free food; reduce the need for agricultural chemicals; enhance the ability of activists and problem-solvers to organize, collaborate virtually and share information; help identify socially and environmentally irresponsible people and corporations; prevent and treat mental illness; and enable us to better communicate with and learn from other animals.
• Social activists and teachers need to develop a new non-corporatist, autonomous community-based education system that teaches responsible citizenship, how to learn, how to think creatively and critically, how to get along with others, and how to start and run your own responsible business; they need to persuade people to stop at one child, adopt a vegan diet, buy local and live simpler lives; and they need to teach appreciation of and skills in: community-building, achieving consensus, using citizen-power, effective listening, peaceful conflict resolution; and they need to teach us all how to cope with terrible knowledge, responsibility and change.
• Entrepreneurs need to demonstrate and teach community-based Natural Enterprise, and pledge to buy local.
• Politicians and lawyers (I'm not holding my breath on this) need to revamp corporate charters to refocus corporations on responsibility to community, end business subsidies, reform election and campaign finance laws, shift taxes from goods (employment) to bads (pollution, waste, non-renewable resource use), replace GDP with a genuine progress indicator, restrict property ownership, protect and expand the commons and wilderness, make health and education universal rights, shift spending from defense to humanitarian activities, forgive third-world debts, reduce extraterritoriality (power of companies and nations over the affairs of other sovereign nations), reinstate usury laws, introduce currency reform and LETS systems, and extend anti-cruelty laws.

Learning Methods

1. We need to quickly reduce human population on Earth to a sustainable level of no more than one billion. Attempting to make any solution work in a world so horrendously overpopulated is futile and insane. If technology improvements, education and peer pressure can achieve this quickly and voluntarily, that would be the best answer. Political pressure to do so has repeatedly failed, and won't work. If the voluntary methods won't work quickly, we need to find another way, painless and non-discriminatory and non-political.
2. The next culture, everyone seems to agree, needs to be built around communities. We need to create some Model Intentional Communities, a lot of them, to re-learn how communities work, and how to create them, and to show our young people a better way to live (preaching to them won't work). Quinn's idea of just 'walking away' from our civilization culture is a good one, but we need something to walk away to, and MICs might be the answer, the building block of the next, sustainable culture.
3. Saving the world is going to require some self-sacrifice and some risk-taking. We need to bring together a lot of bright minds in a lot of different ways to start focusing on this one big problem, instead of the immediate little problems civilization keeps throwing in front of us. We need to diagnose and cure the disease, and that means some of us need to stop being preoccupied with treating the symptoms. I believe that process needs to be voluntary, and the problem-solving groups need to be self-selecting and self-managed. And we need to solve the problem holistically -- a vicious cycle can't be changed merely by tinkering with its isolated parts. That means we need a combination of big-picture thinkers and innovators, and specialists who can expose the big-thinkers' ideas to real-world reality tests. Think-tanks, conferences, ad hoc organizations -- we need them all, and lots of them. If we're going to fix this, many people will have to decide to make this their calling, their purpose for living, at considerable personal sacrifice, and they'll have to find, and work with, like minds.
   
4. My sense is that the answers, if there are any, are innovations and technologies that can change our culture as broadly and abruptly as the invention of the arrowheads, agriculture, science and automation did. They won't be the result of linear thinking, and will probably be far more revolutionary than any of the technologies I call for in point 2 above. As Einstein said, We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
   
5. We don't have much time. We are already starting to see the early signs of total ecological and social collapse, and although this collapse is unlikely to reach a head in our lifetimes (it could take as long as another century), we may already be too late to begin to prevent it. I believe the signal for the beginning of the end will be more conventional than natural disasters caused by global warming -- it is more likely to be a nuclear or biological holocaust caused by two warring, suffering, nothing-left-to-lose nations, or by a stateless group of desperate malcontents who have the motive, and probably the method, and are only now waiting for the opportunity to say fuck you all. There is no time to lose, or to debate whether anything needs to be done. Something needs to be done, now.
6. We can't go back. Returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is neither possible nor desirable. We need to go forward to build a new culture that understands and learns from the truth about nature, and is sustainable, but which also uses the best innovations and technologies that human ingenuity has and will come up with, so that a billion of us can live lightly on the Earth, comfortably, easily, connected, in balance with and as part of nature. Innovation can allow us to do more with less, to eat well without farming animals or catastrophic agriculture, to specialize in what we do best and love doing most, with people we love to live and work with. But that innovation and those technologies must also respect the truth about nature, which means we'll need to reinvent them to work without non-renewable resources, and so that they can be produced with no pollution and no waste. Just because many current technologies use non-sustainable processes and non-renewable materials, exploit slave labour, are produced by a demeaning hierarchical and irresponsible corporatist economy and produce mountains of toxic garbage doesn't mean all technologies must do so. Just as civilization isn't the only viable human culture, today's wasteful and destructive economy isn't the only viable economy. They're the only life we know, but not the only life possible. We need only imagine something better, and strive to make it so.

Healing Place of Nature

Nature’s Healing Forces
Nature has strong regenerative capabilities to heal damage caused by fire, lightening, flood, earthquakes or blights. Looking closely amidst the ruins of fire or flood affected areas one can find signs of new growth and new life. Nature demonstrates the ability to survive despite strong forces that challenge her.In May 1980 Mount St. Helen’s erupted destroying an area 24 square miles. Scientists predicted the region would remain a dead zone for decades to come. Yet, only five years later after this natural devastation, a lupine bloomed at the base of the mountain, as a testimony to the tenacity and the regenerative forces of nature.

If you watch how nature deals with adversity,
continually renewing itself,
you can’t help but learn.

Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad,
Whatever is done and suffered by her creatures.
All scars she heals,
whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.

The giant sequoia trees have adapted to withstand fires by becoming fire-resistant. Black scars on the tree trunks serve as reminders those that have survived fire and lightening strikes. Fire is also a part of the sequoia’s life-cycle. Natural fires are needed to open up the forest, thin out the competing species and make way for the new seedlings.
Nature’s healing forces can serve as powerful recuperative images for those who have experienced a death or other significant loss. Images of the rebirth in nature can be useful as symbols for the strong internal forces, bringing hope of surviving the loss. From monumental newsworthy events to ordinary insignificant occurrences, one can witness the incredible destructive power and the amazing healing capabilities of nature and be reminded that: