{"id":57,"date":"2019-09-22T21:44:27","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T21:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/humansecurity\/chapter\/war-against-nature-ontology\/"},"modified":"2020-09-30T18:42:11","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T18:42:11","slug":"war-against-nature-ontology","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/humansecurity\/chapter\/war-against-nature-ontology\/","title":{"raw":"Our War Against Nature: Ontology, Cognition and a Constricting Paradigm","rendered":"Our War Against Nature: Ontology, Cognition and a Constricting Paradigm"},"content":{"raw":"Ronnie Hawkins<\/span><\/a>\r\n
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Learning Outcomes & Big Ideas<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
NUMBER<\/th>\r\nBIG IDEAS<\/th>\r\nLEARNING OUTCOMES<\/th>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
1.<\/td>\r\nThere is a real world out there, and science is the human endeavor that observes and investigates \u2018how things are\u2019 with that reality.<\/td>\r\nIntegrate what humanity has learned recently, by way of science, into a new way of seeing the world, shifting our worldview, to lead us off our ecocidal track that threatens human security.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
2.<\/td>\r\nLiving organisms have been discovered to be immensely complex autopoietic systems. Ecosystems, the biosphere, and the biogeophysical Earth system as a whole, are successively larger complex systems; understanding their function requires taking into account the nonlinear interactions of many factors.<\/td>\r\nThink holistically using system thinking, not just linear thinking, in order to understand living organisms and those levels of organization.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
3.<\/td>\r\nAll living organisms have much in common, from their bodily composition and vital biochemical processes to their purposive activity, which is always aimed at maintaining and elaborating the lives that their individual genetic endowments make possible.<\/td>\r\nAccept that all living organisms have interests, and respect those.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
4.<\/td>\r\nLife has been flowing into increasingly elaborate forms on the Earth over the last four billion years. In each period of time, life flows over space through patterns of dynamic interaction among innumerable living organisms, joined together by matter and energy exchange within ecosystems.<\/td>\r\nLearn to look at the Earth in evolutionary terms, including the history of life. Understand how human societies evolved into their present state, looking at certain aspects of that development through several different disciplinary lenses.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
5.<\/td>\r\nEcosystems are structured by the ways in which solar energy flows through the system, energy initially trapped by the photosynthetic activities of the \u2018producers\u2019 of living matter, and powering successive trophic layers of \u2018consuming\u2019 organisms, whose biomass diminishes moving upward toward the apex of the biotic pyramid.<\/td>\r\nUnderstand how energy flows through the trophic levels of an ecosystem.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
6.<\/td>\r\nHumans are primates, not carnivores, and did not evolve as apex predators; our closest evolutionary relatives, with whom we share a basic physiology, are primarily vegetarian.<\/td>\r\nPlace yourself, and your species, into the correct trophic level of an ecosystem that supports your existence.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
7.<\/td>\r\nSince all living organisms must sense \u2018how things are\u2019 in their environment and respond appropriately to it if they are to stay alive, all living organisms have some sort of awareness. Many types of nonhuman animals have well-developed brains and manifest intelligent behavior; many have special senses and abilities that we humans don\u2019t have.<\/td>\r\nDevelop an awareness that all life forms have minds, and that some are comparable to human minds in complexity.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
8.<\/td>\r\nHuman beings are a part of nature, and therefore share in what all lifeforms have in common.<\/td>\r\nAccept that there is no empirically identifiable characteristic that makes humans metaphysically unique and superior to nonhuman beings. Accept that a \u2018war on nature\u2019 is a war against ourselves as well as the larger community of life on Earth, and therefore a threat to real human security.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
9.<\/td>\r\nEarly humans must have been highly social primates that developed group identities through shared symbols and ways of communicating meaning through sound and gesture.<\/td>\r\nDescribe the evolutionary advantages of such skills.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
10.<\/td>\r\nLanguage allowed us to divide up the nature around us into separate parts and name them, creating \u2018re-presentations\u2019 of things. The ability to cut from context and name things in a particular way enabled us to \u2018grasp\u2019 parts of nature and use them in a coordinated way, giving us a great deal of power over the world around us. The kind of thinking that divides and separates also promoted group cohesion and conceptualizing \u2018other\u2019 groups as \u2018enemies,\u2019 threats to the security of our \u2018own\u2019 groups.<\/td>\r\nDescribe some examples of those developments that describe how human societies evolved.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
11.<\/td>\r\nMany vertebrates show a functional difference between the right and left hemispheres of their brains, the left focusing on parts and pieces of things to categorize them in terms of their usefulness, the right taking in the whole scene with an eye toward relationships with other beings, for good or for ill. In the majority of humans, our primary language centers are located in our left hemispheres.<\/td>\r\nDescribe examples of how your left and right hemisphere interpret the world in different ways.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
12.<\/td>\r\nThe culture of Western Europe, more so than other human cultures, has emphasized the abstract world of our representations and valued them over and above the real world of nature, and has exalted the superiority of human beings because of their ability to speak and think \u2018rationally\u2019. The mechanistic physics successfully applied by Newton to the solar system was projected onto the universe, envisioning it as a great machine, and all living beings (with the exception of the human being) as merely clockwork mechanisms. This image of an inanimate, \u2018dead\u2019 nature persists today as an implicit metaphor which still serves to justify treating the rest of the living world as nothing but a store of \u2018resources\u2019 and provider of \u2018services\u2019 for human beings.<\/td>\r\nInterpret those developments in terms what might have been gained by \u2018Western\u2019 cultures and what might have been lost \u2013 or benefits vs. harms, if you prefer. In the same way, evaluate Iain McGilchrist\u2019s interpretation of the history of the development of Western thought as evidence for the emergence of an increasingly left-hemisphere dominated, use-oriented approach to the world, an approach that is now manifesting in many parts of the globe with the spread of industrial society.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
13.<\/td>\r\nJohn Searle maintains that we humans construct our \u2018social reality\u2019 by using shared symbols that allow us to organize and coordinate our collective behavior; he claims that our very complex social institutions are created through many iterations of the bestowal of this sort of functional symbolic status. Most people are not aware that our social institutions are human creations, and tend to take them for part of the \u2018ontologically objective\u2019 reality of the physical and biological world, when they are actually \u2018ontologically subjective,\u2019 being ultimately dependent on the beliefs of minded beings for their existence. Our economic and political institutions are ontologically subjective. As social constructions, they are open to conscious revision as warranted.<\/td>\r\nName examples of ontologically objective and subjective objects in your everyday life. Suggest how you would prefer the latter to be revised and describe for what benefits.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
14.<\/td>\r\nSearle\u2019s theory holds that all human social institutions come into being through \u2018a single logico-linguistic operation,\u2019 and as such it is likely that McGilchrist would consider them products of left-hemisphere cognition. Most of us just grow up within a society and absorb a certain set of \u2018background\u2019 capacities that enable us to live within the institutional structure without thinking consciously about it. Zerubavel discusses our \u2018shared mindscapes\u2019 and our tendency toward conformity that may sometimes lead us to \u2018go along with the crowd\u2019 against the testimony of our own senses.<\/td>\r\nFollow Norgaard\u2019s application of Zerubavel\u2019s \u2018cognitive sociology\u2019 in her analysis of collective denial, \u2018conspiracy of silence,\u2019 and selective attention among those who benefit in various ways from the war against nature. Describe examples from your own social life where collective behaviour proceeds unexamined, in spite of individuals\u2019 contradictory sensory information.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
15.<\/td>\r\nAs we begin to get the picture, not only of the intricate workings of the Biosphere and the Earth System, but of our escalating human impact on these systems and its disastrous consequences for all life on Earth, we will realize the necessity for bringing \u2018our war against nature\u2019 to a close. Applying the insights of these several thinkers, some of the ways we can begin to \u2018reverse course\u2019 become clear.<\/td>\r\nDescribe how you interpret the following suggestions for your own life decisions: (a) overcoming our denial of what\u2019s happening and our own role in it, (b) correcting the myths and metaphors in our culture that promote a mistaken view of how things are, (c) righting the \u2018ontological reversal\u2019 in thinking that the economy is what supports our lives, independently of the ecology, (d) reducing the dominance of left hemisphere cognition in our culture and in ourselves, (e) promoting a right-hemisphere approach of openness to others of both human and nonhuman form.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n
16.<\/td>\r\nAnthropocentrism signifies the belief in the centrality of the human, both insofar as human consciousness is taken as the exemplar of all consciousness, and with respect to the overtly normative judgment that humans are superior to all other life and thereby justified in taking nonhuman lives and habitats for their own use. The belief in human centrality and superiority is unwarranted on the basis of what we now know about life on Earth. At the end of this chapter and Chapter 12<\/a>, the questions will be posed: Who are we? What kind of being is the human being going to choose to be? Will we continue to exalt our own species above all others, and \u201cwar\u201d against them, or will we be the kind of being that accepts our place within nature, and calls off this misbegotten \u201cwar\u201d?<\/td>\r\nDescribe your own personal environmental ethic in terms of anthropocentrism or alternatives to it. Engage with those questions on the basis of your personal beliefs and hopes.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Summary<\/h1>\r\nWith respect to human security, the scene at this point in time has us teetering on the brink of further escalating \u2018our war against nature,\u2019 as mega-projects are being planned and carried out all around the globe, while the product of our numbers times our per-person consumption reaches never-before-seen proportions. This \u2018war,\u2019 like many biological processes in nature, took quite a while to build up steam, but ever since the \u2018Great Acceleration\u2019 of the mid-20th<\/sup> century \u2014 which will be discussed in the next chapter (Chapter 12<\/a>) \u2014 we have been engaged in an all-out assault on nonhuman beings and natural systems. This chapter presents a brief outline of what nature<\/em> is like, to the best of our current scientific knowledge, tracing the flow of life<\/em> on Earth over time and space and the emergence of minds within it; after all, if we\u2019re going to continue engaging in a \u2018war,\u2019 we should at least know something about \u2018the enemy.\u2019 One thing that integrating current scientific knowledge into our worldview should give us is a vision of organisms and ecosystems as immensely complex, self-maintaining systems quite unlike anything the outdated myths, images and metaphors we have inherited from past ways of thinking have made them out to be. The simultaneous realization that we humans are equally biological organisms in continuity with and dependent on the larger biosphere and that we are currently destabilizing planetary systems in a major way (the latter point to be illustrated by examples in Chapter 12<\/a>) should shock us into a species-wide bump-up in our collective awareness that might be sufficient to bring about a serious effort to \u2018scale down and pull back.\u2019 The several avenues for turning the tide explored here \u2014 revising misleading myths and metaphors, recognizing the differential ontological status of what actually supports our lives versus what currently channels our collective activities, dialing down the left-hemisphere dominance that has driven the transformation of living nature into that quantifiable abstraction we call \u2018money\u2019 by imposing upon it the image of a lifeless heap of resources to be \u2018used,\u2019 and \u2014 the necessary first step \u2014 getting over the collective denial that locks us into a \u2018conspiracy of silence\u2019 about this unacknowledged war \u2014 all might contribute to creating the kind of human being who finally makes peace with nature.\r\n

Chapter Overview<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n

11.1 Introduction: Defining Terms, Posing Questions<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.2 Reality, Science and Revolutions in Our Thinking<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.3 Seeing the Complexity of Nature<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.3.1 Seeing the Commonality of All Life<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.3.2 Seeing the Purposiveness of All Living Organisms<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.3.3 Seeing Life Flowing over Time<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.3.4 Seeing Life Flowing over Space<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.3.5 Seeing Mind in Life<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.4 Seeing Ourselves in Life\u2019s Larger Context<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.4.1 Seeing Mind in Human Life<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.4.2 Group-Living Social Primates: Cooperation and Conflict in Bioregional Context<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.4.3 We Humans Have Specialized in Utilizing Symbols<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.4.3.1 Coevolution of Symbolic Culture, Language and Intergroup Conflict<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.4.3.2 Separation of the Symbolic Realm from the Realm of Nature<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.4.3.3 Dualistic Thinking, Enmity and War<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.5 The \u2018War Against Nature\u2019<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.5.1 A Certain Kind of Culture Pits Human Against Nature<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.5.2 The Culture of Western Europe and the Emergence of \u2018Modern\u2019 Science<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.5.3 The Death of Nature<\/a><\/p>\r\n11.6 Understanding How and Why We Continue to Wage 'Our War Against Nature' and Reversing Course<\/a>\r\n

11.6.1 Our Ability to Abstract and Symbolize Enables Us to Construct the Linguistic Core of Our \u2018Social Reality\u2019<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.6.2 There Are Other (Social) Reasons Why We Do What We Do (and Don\u2019t Do)<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.6.3 Acting to Reverse Course: Overcoming Denial, Correcting Our Metaphors, Righting the Ontological Reversal, Rebalancing Our Cognition<\/a><\/p>\r\n

11.7 Becoming Reflexive: Rethinking \u2018Who\u2019 We Are, Breaking Free of a Constricting Paradigm, Ending the \u2018War\u2019<\/a><\/p>\r\nResources and References<\/a>\r\n

Key Points<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Extension Activities & Further Research<\/a><\/p>\r\n

List of Terms<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Suggested Videos<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Suggested Websites<\/a><\/p>\r\n

References<\/a><\/p>\r\nIt is becoming clear that the relationship between our species and nature will be of critical importance to human security in the coming years, as we move ever further into this new geological epoch we have named after ourselves, the [pb_glossary id=\"124\"]Anthropocene[\/pb_glossary] so named because there is evidence that our human activities, in the aggregate, have become so enormous that they are altering nature, changing the parameters of the biogeophysical systems of the Earth in measurable ways that bode no good for the continuation of human society. In order to understand how this relationship became so fraught with difficulties \u2014 which will be necessary if we are ever to repair it \u2014 it will be helpful to look into the problematic approach that has been taken up to now, which can be termed \u2018Our War Against Nature.\u2019\r\n

The Anthropocene is a monumental security problem, yet we lack the conceptual resources to effectively deal with it. We cannot see it. We cannot think it. Even if we could, the conditions of the new human age are of such a magnitude that our interventions will never be able to fully meet its challenges. (Harrington & Shearing, 2017, p. 141)<\/blockquote>\r\n

<\/a>11.1 Introduction: Defining Terms, Posing Questions<\/h1>\r\nIn order to understand what is meant by \u2018Our War Against Nature,\u2019 we must start by defining terms. What do we mean by \u2018war\u2019 and \u2018nature\u2019? War usually implies violence of some sort, inflicted with the intent to kill living beings, and it is usually the effort of one human grouping to subdue and possibly exterminate another human grouping; here it will need to be broadened to apply to the extermination of nonhuman beings as well, and the understanding of \u2018intent\u2019 will have to run the gamut from full conscious intent to an \u2018unconscious\u2019 going along with the crowd in a kind of psychological denial over the ultimate consequences of seemingly innocent actions. The word \u2018nature\u2019 will be used here to refer to the Biosphere, the sum total of living beings on the Earth, including ourselves as biological beings, organized as we all are into the interactive ecosystems that support our lives. Another important question that should arise upon reading the chapter title, however, is this: who are \u2018we\u2019 to be waging such a war, who are we that would claim violent acts against nature, so defined, as our own? Figuring out the identity of that \u2018who,\u2019 and realizing the difference between \u2018its\u2019 security and the security of real, live human beings who know they are not separate from, and who do not wish to act warlike toward, the nature on this planet, will mark a major step toward attaining real human security.\r\n

<\/a>11.2 Reality, Science and Revolutions in Our Thinking<\/h1>\r\nAlong the way to this goal, however, we must not only figure out who \u2018we\u2019 are, we must try to get a handle on reality in general, and in particular what 'nature,' understood as the larger biological world that includes us, is like and how we come to know what it is like. There are things that really exist, outside of ourselves \u2014 I think all of us must acknowledge this, as a fact of our own existence. There is, \u2018really,\u2019 a real world out there, one that we can see and hear and touch and smell. We know that something exists that is independent of our own private thoughts about it, and we humans share the knowledge of the existence of a common reality \u2018out there\u2019 in such a way that we can talk to one another about it, arrange to meet one another at certain times and places within it, and so on. All other living organisms share with us the ability to have knowledge of the existence of the fundamental reality, to the extent that all of us beings need to understand 'how things are\u2019 with that reality, in order to be able to deal with it so as to stay alive. All organisms have ways of sensing those aspects of reality that are important to them; we humans have our own types of sense organs that allow us to sense what is important to us. We also have brains that enable us to synthesize this information and take appropriate action, as do many other animals.\r\n\r\nLong ago in our history, however, some of us humans started to look more closely at the world around us, to observe how parts of it seemed to behave by watching and listening and touching that reality, sometimes even poking around with it, and even measuring and recording things, and trying to explain how things happened and predict what was likely to happen next. Thus we started practicing \u2018science,\u2019 in many forms in many different cultures around the world \u2014 the wellsprings of science being the curiosity that propels one to seek out how things are, really<\/em>, in the world, combined with the spirit of empiricism, the inner demand to come as close as possible to this knowledge through direct interaction with one\u2019s own senses, with as little as possible need for taking anyone else\u2019s word about how they are.\r\n\r\nBecause we humans are very social beings, however, we began sharing the things we were learning about the nature of our reality, building on what had been recorded by those that came before, and sometimes the common opinion about what\u2019s true of our underlying reality needed to be corrected when new information, empirically gathered, came to light. Shared beliefs are \u2018sticky\u2019 things \u2014 they can enlarge our understanding of the world, but they can also hold back our ability to incorporate new knowledge because of the powerful resonance created by everybody-believing-the-same-thing-together. The trade-off between these two consequences of our social nature has led to several recognized \u2018revolutions\u2019 in the history of science, times when the general outline of what is taken for reality \u2014 our beliefs about \u2018how things are\u2019 \u2014 has needed to shift significantly, first among scientists and eventually among the general public, changing from one pattern of understanding to another. In the Western world, for example, the Copernican Revolution changed the collective understanding of \u2018how things are\u2019 from belief in a geocentric universe to belief in a solar system in which the Earth is the third planet from the sun, and once the \u2018new\u2019 way of looking at the heavens was adopted \u2014 once this paradigm shift was made, in the words of Thomas Kuhn (1962) \u2014 many things that just didn\u2019t fit into the older way of thinking were seen for the first time, including new stars, sunspots and comets. We now seem to be on the verge of another major shift of [pb_glossary id=\"186\"]paradigm[\/pb_glossary] as a result of continuing progress in science, and whether or not it is successfully achieved may well determine whether or not our human species, as well as the many others that evolved with us, will continue to exist into the future. The inertia of our old, shared, but simply habitual ways of thinking and acting has become a major obstacle to our making the necessary shift in our thinking and acting. Fortunately, the way social forces maintain and reinforce that inertia is also something that certain branches of academic endeavor now are grappling with; unfortunately, however, several recently worsening developments are working to undermine our ability to learn from science what we need to know about our reality, ranging from the tendency of certain scientists to allow their research to be influenced by the needs of the industries they serve \u2014 thus contributing to a growing skepticism about the integrity of \u2018science\u2019 in certain other quarters \u2014 all the way to financial and political interests overtly generating and propagating deliberate misinformation to keep us in ignorance or fostering collective denial (Oreskes & Conway, 2010).\r\n\r\nIn this chapter, we will speak a great deal in the language of science, mostly biological science, because the intention here is to provide an overview of how things are with nature \u2014 how it works, what we\u2019re doing to it, and why; and science, if done with integrity, seems to provide the best way we have of figuring all that out. Empirical science is built on the assumption that what I laid out at the start of this chapter is true: that there is a<\/em> reality<\/em> that we can see and touch and measure; and it is hoped that we can use what is concluded on the basis of careful observations of it to change prevailing beliefs if and when change is discovered to be warranted. We will also speak in the language of philosophy upon occasion. However, and will do so now in order to introduce the term [pb_glossary id=\"183\"]ontology[\/pb_glossary], the philosophical study of being, of what exists and in what way; here we will follow John Searle (1995) in distinguishing two fundamentally different ontological categories, that which exists \u2018objectively\u2019 in the physical\/biological world, independently of the ways we may represent things to ourselves within our belief systems \u2014 i.e. the things that are studied by science \u2014 and that which exists subjectivel\u2019 in the form of the shared representations that we humans carry around in our heads, which underlie our \u2018social reality,\u2019 to be discussed later in the chapter. The revolution in our way of understanding \u2018how things are\u2019 \u2014 the shift that needs to happen \u2014 begins with opening our eyes to the complexity of nature, to the astounding complexity of living organisms and the ecosystems in which they are enmeshed, which our science is only just recently coming to appreciate; it will come full circle when we begin to see ourselves acting within this larger context, including the ways in which we are acting to construct our social reality, and how we might begin to change this humanly created reality so as not to have such a destructive effect on nature, including that part of nature that is ourselves.\r\n\r\nIn order to deal with the welter of detail that is emerging rapidly, however, given the sheer number of human beings now engaging in science and contributing to our understanding of all that that complexity, we need to learn how to approach it in terms of \u2018systems thinking\u2019 \u2014 a very different way of thinking about how things happen than the simplistic linear model that goes \u2018A bumps into B and causes C.\u2019 A system has been defined as \u2018a set of things interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time,\u2019 and as such it needs to be considered holistically, not thought of as merely an assemblage of separate \u2018parts,\u2019 with the recognition that the basic operating unit of a system is the feedback loop <\/em>(Meadows, 2008). Since our reality is unimaginably complex, its vast number of parts are interconnected through innumerable ongoing interactions, and these are damped down or speeded up by a multitude of feedbacks such that the relationship between any given change in the system and its ensuing effects will usually be anything but linear. This broad sea-change in our thinking will also serve to usher in two more specific changes in our way of seeing the world. The first comes when we step back from our shallow stereotypes and see other beings as the immensely complex living wholes that they are, and the other occurs when we take another step back and start getting a grasp of the larger whole made up of all these innumerable other living beings in ongoing relationships with one another \u2014 the Biosphere, the dynamic configuration of all life on this planet. We will begin to see many other living beings as highly intelligent and purposive in their own right, that they are not just \u2018things\u2019 or \u2018resources\u2019 to do with as we please, and will recognize that we are not only interconnected with them in many biological ways, we are also enmeshed in moral relationships with them. At the same time that we are beginning to cognize the Biosphere\u2019s complexity and that of the myriad living beings we share it with, however, we are also becoming aware of the extent to which our collective human activities have already impacted many of these other beings and the Earth System as a whole, and of how these systems are likely to fare in the future if we continue on along our present course. It is to be hoped that, as we all absorb the many new findings emerging from science, we will decide to reverse course and call off our \u2018war against nature.\u2019\r\n

<\/a>11.3 Seeing the Complexity of Nature<\/h1>\r\n

<\/a>11.3.1 Seeing the Commonality of All Life<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nLiving organisms exhibit the highest degree of complexity that we know of, far higher than any systems we humans have designed, and it must be admitted that, as extensive as our scientific knowledge is to date, we are still far from understanding the nature of the phenomenon of life<\/em> itself. As Meadows explains systems thinking, all systems have a purpose, and all of their \u2018parts\u2019 function together in order to fulfill that purpose. We humans construct nonliving systems that function to fulfill purposes of our choosing, from simple thermostat-controlled heat sources to computers. Natural living systems \u2014 organisms, and at another level of analysis, ecosystems \u2014 function to fulfill the purposes of staying alive, expressing their genomes, and evolving. They have been termed [pb_glossary id=\"161\"]autopoietic[\/pb_glossary] systems in light of their properties of [pb_glossary id=\"188\"]self-organization[\/pb_glossary] and self-maintenance. When an organism dies, its parts disintegrate into their nonliving components, but while it is alive it maintains its extremely complex, highly organized structure through constantly active biochemical processes, processes that are largely shared throughout the living world.\r\n\r\nAll life as we know it is based on a set of chemical compounds containing the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur, a small, select subset of all the chemical compounds found in nonliving nature. These chemical compounds are joined together into proteins, lipids, complex carbohydrates, and nucleic acids, the building blocks of living matter, but the metaphor is misleading if it leads one to envision static structures; the biochemical constitution of living organisms is in constant motion, the vital processes of photosynthesis (in green plants) and respiration (in all living organisms) are ongoing \u2014 the engines of life \u2014 and continually feeding into more specialized pathways involved in life maintenance and continuation for specific types of organisms. Many of these metabolic processes are said to have been highly conserved, meaning that there has been very little change in them over evolutionary time \u2014 they are processes that we all have in common, all of us beings, as living parts of nature, the larger whole.\r\n

<\/a>11.3.2 Seeing the Purposiveness of All Living Organisms<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nEven as the core biochemical processes of life have remained much the same, the bodily forms taken by living organisms have evolved over time. The discovery that a process of evolution has taken place on this planet, however, has often been said to have \u2018taken teleology,\u2019 or purposiveness, \u2018out of nature,\u2019 but that claim, in itself, is misleading. What can be said is that we have no evidence of natural processes seeking some externally imposed \u2018final goal\u2019 such as we might postulate a detached \u2018designer\u2019 dictating. But our planet, Earth, \u2018is riddled with purpose,\u2019 as the late Mary Midgley observed; it\u2019s \u201cfull of organisms, beings that all steadily pursue their own characteristic ways of life, beings that can be understood only by grasping the distinctive thing that each of them is trying to be and do\u201d (Anthony, 2014). Evolution, \u2018descent with modification by natural selection,\u2019 is conceived in terms of heritable changes occurring within a population of organisms over time as a result of factors within their environment selecting, for survival, those individuals exhibiting particular traits \u2014 bodily manifestations of genetic variability \u2014 that make them best suited to live in that particular place. But individual organisms are certainly \u2018purposive\u2019 in striving to do just that, to survive and, if so fortunate, to reproduce, and along the way to live their lives to the fullest according to what their own nature\u2019s genetic toolkit enables them to do \u2014 as we humans, no more and no less products of evolution, also do.\r\n\r\nWe are finally coming out, thankfully, of an era dominated by reductionism, so it is no longer necessary to \u2018flatten\u2019 all living beings (excepting ourselves \u2014 and we do typically make exceptions of ourselves, inconsistently with an appreciation of evolution) into agency-less, subjectivity-less bits of matter being bumped about, at the mercy of the determinism of their DNA combined with the brutal mechanism of competition and conflict for \u2018resources.\u2019 This view of living organisms is wrong; it is the purposiveness of life, each individual organism pushing itself forward into the available affordances of its habitat, that provides the motive force behind the process of the evolution of life over time, a purposiveness that all of us living beings share<\/em>. The fact that there is something known as \u2018convergent evolution\u2019 \u2014 that certain abilities, such as the ability to see, the ability to fly, the tendency to socialize with conspecifics, even the capacity for engaging in \u2018higher cognition,\u2019have evolved in multiple, distantly related lines \u2014 may indicate that there are a certain limited number of ways of \u2018living out ones genetic toolkit to the fullest\u2019 on this planet, as a result of this \u2018push\u2019 from inside toward self-elaboration; it need not be taken as evidence for a predetermined pattern imposed from without, but the evolution of some of these abilities could legitimately give rise to speculations about mutual recognition among living organisms as a kind of strange attractor.\r\n\r\nWhile we still, to reiterate, do not fully understand the nature of the phenomenon, nor its origins, we are bringing into focus an increasingly detailed picture of the development of life once it appeared, which some scientists are now claiming may date back as far as four billion years, almost to the origin of the Earth itself. Innumerable species have come into being and passed out of it again over this multibillion year span; the phenomenon of life has surged forward to elaborate a Biosphere of great complexity many times, suffering setbacks, and a few great die-offs, but so far always recovering, even if ecosystems have taken millions of years between cataclysms to attain the degree of diversity we enjoy today, or at least did until recently. A species<\/em>, according to Holmes Rolston, \u201cis a living historical form, propagated in individual organisms, that flows dynamically over generations\u201d (1985, p. 721). Stepping back to view it from afar, we can thus see life flowing over time, its myriad specific forms adapting to changing circumstances, and simultaneously flowing over space, as forms differentiate and interact within environments. In its most recently generated wave of forms, moreover, life can be seen elaborating itself in multitudes of individual organisms with increasingly sensitive ways of becoming aware of what\u2019s around them, and of responding to what\u2019s out there, with many possible currents of interaction setting up between the different living forms as \u2018mind\u2019 has blossomed and subjectivity within them deepened.\r\n

<\/a>11.3.3 Seeing Life Flowing over Time<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nThe membrane-bound cell is the basic unit of all life as we know it, and a single cell is in itself an immensely complex system, the functioning of which we are just beginning to understand. All living organisms, single-celled or many celled, are given their bodily structure by proteins, assembled out of a set of twenty left-handed amino acids in a complex process under the direction of a DNA-based genetic code. On the basis of genomic similarities, [pb_glossary id=\"172\"]LUCA[\/pb_glossary] (a Last Universal Common Ancestor<\/a>), has been proposed, believed to have come into existence almost four billion years ago and to have given rise to all species that have emerged since, so that all presently existing species can be seen as deriving from one fundamentally interrelated Tree of Life (Hug et al., 2016). The first lifeforms on this Earth, our science tells us, were prokaryotes \u2014 bacteria and the more recently recognized archaea \u2014 single-celled organisms that lacked organelles and even a membrane-bound nucleus but that went about busily metabolizing anyway, picking up sensory cues, moving around in their environments, interacting in mutualistic, competitive and predatory relationships by themselves for a couple of billion years, give or take a few hundred million, until other forms appeared, other forms that are still going strong today. Prokaryotic cyanobacteria carried out photosynthesis, combining carbon dioxide and water to make sugars and ultimately many other organic compounds, thereby creating food for themselves and others out of the energy of the sun, and giving off oxygen, which gradually built up in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Then somewhere around two billion years ago, the prokaryotes were joined by the eukaryotes, organisms whose DNA is packaged inside a nucleus and who come equipped with mitochondria to carry out oxidative phosphorylation, to keep energy flowing in their bodies, and, if plants, chloroplasts to house the processes of photosynthesis \u2014 these two essential organelles now recognized as quite possibly having arisen from prokaryotic forms becoming symbiotic with and later incorporated into larger cells, as first hypothesized by Lynn Margulis. \u201cWhatever the exact series of events turns out to be,\u201d explains Carl Zimmer (2009), \u201ceukaryotes triggered a biological revolution,\u201d since, while \u201cprokaryotes can generate energy only by pumping charged atoms across their membranes,\u201d eukaryotes \u201ccan pack hundreds of energy-generating mitochondria into a single cell,\u201d and therefore could get much bigger, and develop multicellularity.\r\n\r\nA little over 600 million years ago, multicellular forms known as Ediacarans appeared on the scene, with bodily forms unlike any organism alive today, some growing in strange, fractal patterns, some displaying three-part symmetry. These were replaced when the first ancestors of all the modern forms of animals \u2014 molluscs, echinoderms, arthropods, a group that includes insects and crustaceans, the chordate ancestors of the vertebrates, and so on \u2014 made their appearance in what has been called the Cambrian explosion, beginning around 540 million years ago. While its triggering factors are still scientifically controversial, this event has been summed up as follows: \u201cafter millions of years of quiet progress, animals had finally accrued the developmental recipes to build body parts and improve on basic themes,\u201d an achievement requiring a genetic toolkit that was, in the words of paleontologist Nick Butterfield, \u201cabsolutely, astronomically, inconceivably complex\u201d (Sokol, 2018, p. 884). The Cambrian marked the beginning of the Paleozoic era, which continued until roughly 250 million years ago, during which time vascular plants colonized land and vertebrates appeared \u2014 first the fishes, followed by amphibians, and then, with the evolution of the amniotic egg that permitted embryos to develop in a dry environment, the reptiles. The animal kingdom is generally thought of as divided between the vertebrates, animals with backbones, and the invertebrates, animals lacking backbones, but bodily development in both groups has been found to proceed along similar lines under the control of a small number of homeobox or Hox<\/em> genes that serve to switch gene expression on and off in the growing embryos. The great majority of animal species, vertebrate and invertebrate, are classified as bilaterians, bilaterally structured with a right and left side that are mirror images of each other. The five classes of vertebrate animals \u2014 the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals \u2014 all share the bilateral tetrapod body plan, with four appendages, be they fins, wings or limbs.[footnote]For illustrations of these homologies, see Shubin (2008).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe Paleozoic era ended with the most severe extinction event in Earth\u2019s history, the Permian-Triassic (P-T) extinction event or the 'great dying,' occurring around 250 million years ago, during which reportedly about 70% of terrestrial vertebrates and up to 96% of species of marine life became extinct.[footnote]This figure may be under revision downward, to no more than 81% \u2014 see Stanley (2016).[\/footnote] One likely contributory cause of this event is climate warming. Reconstructed seawater temperatures from the Triassic (the geologic period immediately following the end-Permian extinction), show an inverse relationship with biological diversity, and marine animals have been particularly vulnerable to warming because their need for oxygen increases with rising temperature while its concentration in seawater decreases, with water temperatures over 35\u00b0C being generally lethal (Sun et al., 2012).\r\n\r\nEcosystems collapsed worldwide following the event, and while \u2018disaster taxa\u2019 \u2014 weedy generalist species that can colonize many sorts of disturbed habitats rapidly \u2014 invaded relatively quickly, true ecological diversity was slow to recover, taking about 30 million years, well into the Late Triassic, for full recovery (Sahney & Benton, 2008). The Mesozoic Era, spanning roughly 250 to 66 million years before the present time and comprising the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, has been termed the \u2018Age of Reptiles\u2019; dinosaurs appeared in the Late Triassic and became the dominant terrestrial vertebrates over the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, while the first birds and ancestral mammals emerged in the Jurassic, remaining relatively small and ecologically insignificant through the end of the Cretaceous. The Mesozoic Era came to an end with the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) or Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-P) extinction, occurring around 66 million years ago, most often attributed to an asteroid impact spewing dust and sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, inhibiting photosynthesis, abruptly cooling the Earth (Pope et al., 1998), and bringing about the extinction of an estimated three-quarters of terrestrial plant and animal species. Rebuilding again following the demise of the giant reptiles, the Cenozoic Era or the \u2018Age of Mammals\u2019 began, starting 66 million years ago and extending up through today.\r\n\r\nDuring the Late Cretaceous, some 80-100 million years ago, the placental mammals split into four lines, one giving rise to the hoofed mammals, whales, carnivores,and bats, another leading to primates and rodents, a third to the elephants, among others and a fourth to the anteaters and armadillos (Marshall, 2009); early forms of most of the present mammalian orders emerged during the Eocene epoch, 56 to 34 million years ago. The first were small, but by the end of the Oligocene, 23 million years ago, there were large-bodied herbivores, specialized carnivores, and mammals inhabiting the air and water as well as land. Monkeys evolved during the Oligocene, 34 to 23 million years ago, with the ape lineage splitting from Old World monkeys about 25 million years ago; the apes differentiated over the Miocene, lasting from 23 to 5.3 million years ago, the human line diverging from its common ancestor with the chimpanzee and bonobo around four to six million years ago. By the Pleistocene epoch, the beginning of the Quaternary period, two million years ago, global temperatures having cooled throughout the preceding Pliocene, some very large land mammals and birds had come to inhabit the planet, all of which became extinct as the Pleistocene was winding down.\r\n\r\nThe factors contributing to the Late Quaternary Extinctions (LQE) have been reviewed and evaluated by Paul Koch and Anthony Barnosky (2006). As they discuss, 50,000 years ago the Earth was populated by many large mammals, including proboscideans \u2014 elephant-like mammals including mammoths and mastodons \u2014 giant ground sloths, camels, saber-tooth cats and a giant beaver in North America, woolly mammoths, rhinoceroses and giant deer with three-meter antlers in Eurasia, glyptodonts \u2014 giant armadillos the size of a car and weighing over 1,000 pounds \u2014 and litopterns \u2014 three-toed, camel-like mammals \u2014 in South America, and diprotodons \u2014 vegetarian, rhinoceros-sized wombats weighing up to 2.7 tonnes \u2014 in Australia, by 10,000 years ago, the start of the Holocene epoch, all of these had vanished. Reviewing evidence from archaeology, paleoecology, and climatology, Koch and Barnosky conclude that the worldwide disappearance of the Pleistocene megafauna \u2014 defined as animals weighing 44 kg or larger \u2014 can largely be attributed to human hunting, possibly aggravated by indirect anthropogenic effects like competition and habitat alteration, with changes in climate and other environmental factors also contributing to the patterns of disappearance. The impact was somewhat less severe in Eurasia, since ancestors of modern humans were present there from about 40,000 years ago, hunting with simpler tools, and this probably allowed the evolution of defensive behavior among prey. Africa, moreover, where humans originated, seems to have remained \u2018a fortunate anomaly,\u2019 losing only around half of its megafauna by the end of the Pleistocene, retaining the greatest number of large animals still alive today \u2014 although a modern extinction event, from uncontrolled hunting and habitat destruction, may be bringing about their demise right now, as will be discussed in the following chapter (Chapter 12<\/a>).\r\n\r\nThe best-preserved paleontological record is from North America, where \u2018extinctions were rapid and pronounced,\u2019 and may even be compatible with the \u2018blitzkrieg\u2019 hypothesis \u2014 the notion that human hunters slaughtered the large mammals mercilessly over a short period of time \u2014 something that seems unlikely in most other regions of the globe where extinctions occurred over longer periods. The [pb_glossary id=\"167\"]emergence[\/pb_glossary] of our own species, Homo sapiens<\/em>, somewhere around 200,000 years ago, is thus considered to have been a major force leading to the extinction of many large mammals and significantly altering landscapes on all major continents, leaving us to inherit a planet with a post-Pleistocene fauna shorn of some of its more interesting and perhaps ecologically significant variants, and a planet that is now poised to lose many of its remaining specialized forms in the near future if we humans continue along on our current trajectory. Whether or not this trend will continue \u2014 whether we will go on waging so direct a war against nature \u2014 is currently under contestation; are we re-living out our early role as mega-killers, or will we become reflexive enough to activate our moral [pb_glossary id=\"191\"]agency[\/pb_glossary] and change our behavior?\r\n

<\/a>11.3.4 Seeing Life Flowing over Space<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nWhile the bodily forms of the Earth\u2019s organisms can be seen as changing over time, the ecological relationships established among organisms can be visualized as large-scale patterns of interaction that show a kind of dynamic stability over space. Ecosystems are not simply collections of plants and animals, randomly or haphazardly thrown together; they are highly organized systems that are fundamentally structured by physics, the large-scale configuration of the system produced by the pathways through which energy flows. The basic conceptual framework for understanding ecosystem structure is often presented as a pyramid; the solar energy powering the whole system is first captured by photosynthesizing green plants, the \u2018producers,\u2019 at the base, and it flows upward through successive layers of \u2018consumers,\u2019 animals that can\u2019t make their own food and so must eat other organisms power their own bodies . The collective biomass of these animals diminishes in a stepwise fashion, passing up the pyramid layer by layer, because the available energy diminishes at each step, since converting the body of one kind of organism into the body of another is energetically expensive. Aldo Leopold\u2019s description of a terrestrial [pb_glossary id=\"162\"]biotic pyramid[\/pb_glossary] is one of the best around:\r\n
Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.\r\n\r\nThe species of a layer are not alike in where they came from, or in what they look like, but rather in what they eat. Each successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above. Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of their prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. (Leopold, 1949, p. 252)<\/blockquote>\r\nThat\u2019s why \u2018big, fierce animals are rare\u2019 (Colinvaux, 1979): they need huge territories to support all the other animals that go into making up the lower layers of the pyramid, the prey animals and their prey animals and the plants that they eat, all together contributing enough transformed solar energy to maintain the large, fierce, active bodies of apex predators like lions and leopards.\r\n\r\nThe layers Leopold speaks of are called trophic levels, first the green plants (supported by microrganisms and nutrients in the soil) that form their own bodies out of air, water and sun, then on a level above them the animals that eat the plants\u2019 bodies, the herbivores,a step above them the animals that eat some other animals as well as plants, the omnivores, and above them possibly several levels of animals that only eat other animals, the smaller, \u2018meso\u2019carnivores, below and at the top the apex predator, an animal able to feast on all the others and who usually doesn\u2019t get eaten herself. A rule of thumb holds that the embodied energy goes down by about 90% in each step up a trophic level, such that the level above can contain only about 10% of the biomass of the one underneath \u2014 that\u2019s why numbers of organisms generally get smaller, even as body size often gets larger (all the better to capture prey) \u2014 as they dine higher and higher up the pyramid. That\u2019s also why humans draw an increasing amount of energy from the Earth the higher up the food chain they eat \u2014 much more energy, embodied in biomass, is required to grow the bodies of the animals on which they feast than would be required if people just met their needs primarily by eating plants directly \u2014 as our closest primate relatives still do today. Humans are not<\/em> ecologically constituted to be apex predators. Aldo Leopold assigned humans to \u2018an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons and squirrels, which eat both meat and vegetables\u2019 (1949), pointing out an ecological relationship that led environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott to add, \u201cas omnivores, the population of human beings should, perhaps, be roughly twice that of bears, allowing for differences of size\u201d (Callicott, 1980, p. 326).\r\n\r\nReal-world ecosystems are usually far more complex than this pyramid with its discrete trophic levels would indicate, of course, so the movement of energy and materials is better described as making up food webs, interconnected chains linking different kinds of organisms, and including the microbial and fungal organisms that break down the bodies of plants and animals, releasing nutrients for reuptake by plants or processing it into organic matter again consumable by other organisms. The fundamental role of plant life, whose photosynthetic trapping of the sun\u2019s energy generates the \u2018net primary productivity\u2019 \u2014 given the acronym of [pb_glossary id=\"182\"]NPP[\/pb_glossary] \u2014 that powers the activities of virtually all of the Earth\u2019s other living creatures, must be retained firmly in mind. Now we are aware, however, that quite a bit of \u2018ecosystem engineering\u2019 is a result of animal life. The prevailing view in ecological science once held that the large-scale structure of plant-dominated terrestrial ecosystems was primarily due to the climate and soil conditions facilitating plant growth, but more recent studies are showing the great extent to which top-down control of herbivores by their predators can affect the vegetative community.\r\n\r\nOne famous example of the way the presence or absence of a carnivore at the highest trophic level can \u2018cascade\u2019 down the system is the way aspen forests have been recovering following the reintroduction of grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park, their territories reducing elk grazing pressure on young aspen stands, ultimately changing the landscape.[footnote]See Ripple & Beschta (2011) and How Wolves Change Rivers<\/a> video.[\/footnote] Another is the ongoing introduced instability of kelp forests in oceans around the world, as commercial exploitation led first to the extirpation of apex predators like sea otters and cod fishes, unleashing a rebound in their prey, populations of herbivorous sea urchins that subsequently overgrazed and diminished many kelp forests. Continued \u2018fishing down\u2019 of coastal marine food webs next led to extirpation of sea urchins in many places around the world, allowing kelp beds to regrow but this time \u2018devoid of vertebrate apex predators,\u2019 with large predatory crabs moving into the top spot in some places (Steneck et al., 2002); it remains to be seen where these systems will eventually restabilize, but one finding of this study is that the more biodiverse the system, the greater the likelihood it will be [pb_glossary id=\"149\"]resilient[\/pb_glossary] to systemic kelp deforestation. Moreover, the diversity of species is proving to have important effects on ecosystem structure more generally, with the different kinds of diversity \u2014 genetic diversity, diversity in the functional roles played by different organisms in the ecosystem, and diversity of their interactions in biotic networks \u2014 having their own kinds of effects; so far, research is showing \u201ccompelling scientific support for the idea that maintaining a high proportion of biological diversity leads to efficient and stable levels of ecosystem functioning\u201d (Naeem et al., 2012, p. 1405).\r\n\r\nLarger-scale, landscape-level patterns of interaction among animals of different trophic levels are also discernable over time and space, such as \u2018migratory coupling,\u2019 where the migrations of prey induce the corresponding migrations of their predators (Furey et al., 2018), while at smaller scales the regular patterns of banding or clustering of organisms that can be seen in aerial surveys across many different types of terrain are being explained in terms of self-organization resulting from short-range positive feedback \u2014 more vegetation grows around pre-existing plants because they pull more moisture up through their roots \u2014 coupled with long-range negative feedback \u2014 roots from different plants compete with one another in the drier soil between vegetated patches \u2014 a principle that seems to hold across many different ecosystems (Rietkerk & van de Koppel, 2008; Pringle & Tarnita, 2017). Of course, as we humans increasingly take over space with growing urbanization and the installation of ever-larger agroindustrial systems for feeding our growing population, less and less room is available to support these patterns of interaction among lifeforms. Just how far this mega-scale alteration in the flowing of life over space will reach is going to be increasingly contested in the years ahead.\r\n\r\nIn addition to the patterns we can see in the world around us, moreover, our appreciation of the \u201clittle things that run the world\u201d has been growing as well. The phrase is taken from the title of a talk by Edward O. Wilson, referring to invertebrate animals, but it could be extended now to include the single-celled organisms, which we are learning contribute a significant part of our own body mass and biochemistry. Wilson pointed out that invertebrate species outnumber species of vertebrates by a factor of more than twenty, and can make up over 90% of the animal biomass on a hectare of land; their importance in food webs and pollination and other ecosystemic interactions is so great that Wilson expressed doubt that we humans could last more than a few months without them. Should all the invertebrates disappear, he maintained:\r\n
Most of the fishes, amphibians, birds and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of the majority of the forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. The earth would rot. As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, narrowing and closing the channels of the nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them the last remnants of the vertebrates. The remaining fungi, after enjoying a population explosion of stupendous proportions, would also perish. Within a few decades the world would return to the state of a billion years ago, composed primarily of bacteria, algae, and a few other very simple multicellular plants. (Wilson, 1987, p. 345)<\/blockquote>\r\nWilson made these remarks at the opening of the invertebrate exhibit at the Zoological Park in Washington, DC, in 1987, and while the invertebrate-less world he presented seemed dismal, it also seemed far-fetched, since invertebrate populations appeared to be thriving in most places, and the occasion recognizing the importance of their conservation seemed to herald a new awareness of our need to treat them with care. More than 30 years afterwards, however, with populations of many kinds of invertebrates essential to ecosystem functioning on the decline now, his words sound a little more sinister. Meanwhile, a recent examination of the invertebrates \u2018right under our noses\u2019 has shown that, typically, more than a hundred species of insects and other arthropods live in and around people\u2019s homes worldwide, and efforts to \u2018go to war\u2019 with chemicals against pests like cockroaches simply increase the evolution of their resistance. Moreover, the importance of even smaller \u2018little things\u2019 is coming to our attention as well, including the microbes that colonize our bodies, our houses, and other human-occupied spaces. A study of dust collected from forty homes in one American city documented an average of around eighty thousand species of bacteria and archaea, the vast majority of which are benign or beneficial to us humans, and despite people\u2019s tendency to want to \u2018kill them all,\u2019 it\u2019s being discovered that it is actually healthier to be surrounded by more microbial diversity rather than less (Dunn, 2018); the declining biodiversity in urban homes appears to be associated with an increase in the incidence of allergies and other chronic inflammatory diseases (Hanski et al., 2012). Trillions of microbes also inhabit the human gut, and enter into complex relationships with our diets, giving rise to metabolic products that have important effects on human physiology which are currently under investigation (Gentile & Weir, 2018).\r\n

<\/a>11.3.5. Seeing Mind in Life<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nIn the words of philosopher Evan Thompson, \u201ca living being is not sheer exteriority \u2026 but instead embodies a kind of interiority, that of its own immanent purposiveness\u201d (2007, p. 225), and it is recently being realized that this may apply to plants as well as animals and to the unicellular as well as the multicellular. The more we learn about life, its amazing complexity and its fundamental commonality as it extends over time and space, the more it becomes clear that there must be some kind of \u2018mind,\u2019 some purposive inwardness that pushes ahead, pursuing its own life in its own way, within each living organism, \u2018all the way down.\u2019\r\n\r\nMicrobial life, being life<\/em>, by definition is of such organized complexity that we should not be surprised to find perception, motility, and evidence of subtle responsiveness to environmental conditions even in the single-celled. The green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii<\/em>, for example, has an eyespot<\/em> composed of rhodopsin photoreceptors that, when stimulated, release a current of calcium ions that modify its flagellar motion, orienting it toward or away from light (Kateriya et al., 2004); the slime mold Physarum polycephalum<\/em>, moreover, has been described as showing \u2018primitive intelligence\u2019 by solving a maze, finding the minimum length solution joining two nutrient locations at different ends of an agar labyrinth (Nakagaki et al., 2000). Plants, too, are exquisitely sensitive to factors such as light, moisture and nutrients, as well as predators and pollinators in their environment, and they respond to them in ways that further their growth and propagation; they also communicate with fellow plants, of the same and other species, within their ecological communities. Since plants are sessile (rooted to one place), their behavioral repertoire is necessarily more limited in terms of movement, but they exhibit many sophisticated responses that can rewardingly be studied along the lines of animal behavior, including anticipation of future events, memory, and communication with other organisms (Karban, 2008). They respond individually to the heterogeneity of light and moisture in their environment throughout their growth, not only by placing root and leaf development in the most favorable circumstances, but in ways that have been described as showing \u2018choice\u2019; the parasitic dodder plant, for example, actively rejects potential host plants of inferior nutrition by turning its shoot growth at right angles from such stems and elongating directly away from them (Kelly, 1992).\r\n\r\nIt has long been noted that plants respond to leaf-devouring insect attacks by releasing volatile chemicals, a response that not only leads other plants to beef up their own leaf level of insect-repellents but that sometimes draws in specific insect predators and parasitizing wasps (Pare & Tumlinson, 1999). The timing and intensity of release can vary in accordance with a multiplicity of environmental factors, and blends of different odor-producing volatiles can be produced in response to different leaf-eaters, possibly summoning particular carnivorous insects specialized to feast on each kind of herbivore, making it a highly sophisticated response that has been considered, according to a \u2018behavioural ecological approach\u2019 that speaks in terms of plant \u2018decisions,\u2019 and a \u2018crying for help\u2019 within the larger ecological community (Dicke, 2009). It has also been known for several decades now that many forest trees are linked together in underground networks by the mycorrhizal fungi associated with their roots, and they have been shown to send each other nutrients, communicate warning signals, and recognize kin through these networks. According to Suzanne Simard, another scientist who does not hesitate to draw a parallel with the behavior of animals, \u201cthe topology of mycorrhizal networks is similar to neural networks, with scale-free patterns and small-world properties that are correlated with local and global efficiencies important in intelligence\u201d (Simard, 2018, p. 191).[footnote]See also Simard\u2019s TEDx talk<\/a>.[\/footnote] The communicative properties of trees have also been conveyed to the public by Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate<\/em> (2016); he speaks of the \u2018wood-wide-web\u2019 that connects the trees in a forest, noting that the \u2018mother trees,\u2019 the big, old trees that serve as hubs, \u2018suckle their young,\u2019 pumping sugars through the network into the roots of young saplings too shaded to survive on their own (Grant, 2018).\r\n\r\nThe similarities between plant and animal behavior and, in some respects, their physiology prompted a group of scientists to announce in 2006 the founding of a new subspecialty, \u2018plant neurobiology,\u2019 maintaining that \u2018the behavior plants exhibit is coordinated across the whole organism by some form of integrated signaling, communication, and response system,\u2019 one that \u2018includes long-distance electrical signals, vesicle-mediated transport of auxin in specialized vascular tissues, and production of chemicals known to be neuronal in animals\u2019 (Brenner et al., 2006). The announcement was met with outrage from a certain quarter of the plant science community, more than thirty luminaries signing onto a letter noting that \u201cthere is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses or a brain in plants\u201d (although the \u2018plant neurobiologists\u2019 had made no such claims) and challenging the proponents of the new field \u201cto reevaluate critically the concept and to develop an intellectually rigorous foundation for it\u201d (Alpi et al., 2007, p. 136). One of the signatories, Lincoln Taiz, interviewed by Michael Pollan, speaks dismissively of \u2018a strain of teleology in plant biology\u2019 and strenuously rejects the notion of \u2018choice\u2019 or \u2018decision-making\u2019 in plants, explaining that \u201cthe plant response is based entirely on the net flow of auxin and other chemical signals,\u201d and maintaining that the verb \u2018decide\u2019 is a term that \u201cimplies free will.\u201d He amends his stance, however, with the caveat \u201cof course, one could argue that humans lack free will too, but that is a separate issue\u201d (Pollan, 2013). This last statement is rather telling \u2014 when one is coming from a reductionist position that flattens down the purposiveness of all life into the bumping about of chemical compounds- one must be sure to keep that belief system \u2018separate\u2019 from our understanding of how we actually live our own lives. Whereas, accepting the evolutionary continuity that exists among lifeforms seen as whole organisms lets us recognize the purposiveness, intentional behavior and intelligence that exists throughout living nature \u2014 in us and in everything else that\u2019s alive- with no need to make a special exception for ourselves. Pollan observes that \u201cour big brains, and perhaps our experience of inwardness, allow us to feel that we must be fundamentally different \u2014 suspended above nature and other species as if by some metaphysical \u2018skyhook,\u2019 to borrow a phrase from philosopher Daniel Dennett.\u201d But he notes that \u201cplant neurobiologists are intent on taking away our skyhook, completing the revolution that Darwin started but which remains \u2014 psychologically at least \u2014 incomplete\u201d (Pollan, 2013, n.p.). Monica Gagliano is another scientist who has already made the paradigm shift; unapologetic about speaking of learning, memory, and intelligence in plants (Gagliano et al., 2016). She is at the same time, critical of \u201cthose who make the big claims and write grand opinion pieces,\u201d saying \u201cwe don\u2019t need another opinion piece\u201d \u2014 \u201cwe need to do the science.\u201d Having started as an animal ecologist, she prefers to call her field \u2018plant cognitive ethology,\u2019 maintaining that, \u201cfor me, a plant isn\u2019t an object, it\u2019s always a subject that is interacting with other subjects in the environment\u201d (Morris, 2018, n.p.).[footnote]See also Hall (2011) and Chamovitz (2012) for more popularized thinking about plants.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nUnlike plants, however, animals typically move rapidly around in their environments and so must have a way of coordinating their movements rapidly \u2014 hence the emergence of the nervous system. Simple animals like sponges rely on cell-to-cell signaling, and radially symmetric animals like jellyfish make do with diffuse nerve nets, but the bilaterians generally coordinate their movements via well-developed nervous systems that are believed to have originated in a last common ancestor arising over 500 million years ago. The basic structure is a linear nerve cord with \u2018ganglion\u2019 enlargements supplying each body segment, and a larger \u2018brain\u2019 at the front end; in invertebrates, including many worms, crustaceans, and insects, the nerve cord is divided in two and placed ventrally, below the major organs of the body, while in vertebrates it is dorsally located and encased in a bony vertebral column. The insect brain is made up of three regions, the protocerebrum, deuterocerebrum, and tritocerebrum. The largest region is the protocerebrum that houses the mushroom bodies, paired neuron clusters making up the \u2018higher\u2019 brain centers, thought to be important in learning, memory, and behavioral complexity, especially in bees, wasps and ants; it is estimated that the mushroom bodies contain about 340,000 neurons in the honeybee. An example of complex cognitive behavior in insects is the \u2018waggle dance\u2019 of honeybees, which communicates information to hive mates about the direction and distance to sources of nectar and pollen.[footnote]Watch the honeybee waggle dance video<\/a>.[\/footnote] Faced with the striking degree of organizational similarity among living animal forms, one scientist recently summarized, \u201cas our knowledge of neural development increases, so does the list of conserved features, pointing to the existence of a highly sophisticated, single species as the origin of most extant nervous systems\u201d (Ghysen, 2003, p. 555).\r\n\r\nThe vast majority of animal forms utilize the sensory information they take in from their environment in order to move in appropriate, survival-related ways. Hence they will have a great variety of perceptual abilities, forms of cognitive processing, and behavioral responses shaped by the different ecological niches they inhabit, something that we tend to take for granted but should recognize as a distinctive feature of animal life that extends far beyond the boundaries of our own species. Development of the human brain follows the same basic trajectory as that of all mammalian brains, the neural tube expanding into hindbrain, midbrain and forebrain regions, with the latter giving rise to an expanded cerebral cortex. Some other mammals also manifest a high degree of cortical development, including the other great apes, elephants, and cetaceans such as the bottle-nosed dolphin. To put our own brain power in perspective, we will look at what we now know about the brains of some other animals, bearing in mind that we are learning more all the time as careful investigations are carried out utilizing new technologies and with an open-minded attitude to what we may find.\r\n\r\nThe brain of the false killer whale, at almost 4,000 g, is more than twice the size of the human brain, at roughly 1,500 g, while the brain of the African elephant is almost three times larger, at four to 5,000 g, and the brain of the sperm whale, the largest of the mammals, is almost six times larger, at around 8,000 g. The cortical surfaces of the brains of the two cetaceans are also more highly convoluted, cetaceans showing the greatest degree of convolution among the mammals. Earlier comparisons have focused on the ratio of brain to body size, the \u2018encephalization quotient,\u2019 but this appears a rather crude measurement in light of a newly developed technology allowing for a quantitative assessment of the number of neurons and non-neuronal cells in different regions of the brain and in total, opening up insights into a greater degree of diversity in brain architecture than heretofore appreciated (Herculano-Houzel, 2009). Using this technology, it has been discovered that the different orders of mammals have different \u2018cellular scaling rules\u2019 determining the density of neurons present per gram of brain tissue. Larger brains in rodents, for example, will contain larger total numbers of neurons than will smaller rodent brains, but the brains of primates \u2018scale in a much more space-saving, economical manner,\u2019 such that neuron density is greater, and so increasing brain size in primates results in an even greater number of neurons, gram for gram, than would be found in rodents. By this measure, humans, with the largest brains among the primates, do have the greatest number of brain cells \u2014 in a 1.5 kg brain, 86 billion neurons and 85 billion non-neuronal cells have been found \u2014 but only when compared with the other, smaller-brained primates.[footnote]See List of animals by number of neurons<\/a> for comparison diagrams.[\/footnote] According to the author of these studies, \u201cwe need to rethink our notions about the place that the human brain holds in nature and evolution, and rewrite some of the basic concepts that are taught in textbooks\u201d (Herculano-Houzel, 2009, pp. 9-10). Ours is not qualitatively different from other primate brains, but simply has the number of neurons expected for its size; it is basically just \u2018a linearly scaled-up primate brain.\u2019 Moreover, our cerebral cortex, which makes up 82% of our brain mass at an average of 1,233 g (out of an average 1,500 g brain), holds only 16 billion neurons (19% of the total in the brain), a fraction similar to that seen in other primates and some other mammals. While the cerebellum \u2014 a part of the brain until recently considered solely devoted to movement coordination, but now becoming the focus of increasing interest as its complex interconnections with the cerebral cortex are explored \u2014 weighs only 154 g but contains 69 billion neurons (Herculano-Houzel, 2009).\r\n\r\nThe new research not only gives us a new perspective on our own brains, and thereby our \u2018cognitive\u2019 place in nature, it is beginning to change our views of other animals, what they are really like and what they might be capable of, cognitively. The brain of the African elephant is not only roughly three times larger than our own, it contains roughly three times as many neurons \u2014 257 billion of them as calculated in the pioneering study (Herculano-Houzel, 2014). The vast majority of them, however \u2014 251 billion, or 97.5% \u2014 are found in the cerebellum, with only 5.6 billion in the cerebral cortex \u2014 and the neurons that are found there are thought to be an average of 10 to 40 times larger than those found in other mammals, with what this might mean for cognition being currently unknown. The size of the elephant cerebellum, which makes up more than 25% of the total brain mass, the largest proportionally of all mammals, has been speculated to be related to infrasound communication or possibly to processing the complex sensory and motor requirements involved in the sensitive, manipulatory use of the trunk \u2014 but much remains to be discovered about this fascinating animal.\r\n\r\nThe numbers and distributions of neurons in the brains of cetaceans are yet to be determined \u2014 one estimate was 11 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex of the false killer whale, but this could be off by a factor of ten, giving an estimate of between 21 billion and 212 billion for the whole brain, depending on the scaling rules for the order, as yet undetermined (Herculano-Houzel, 2009). One thing that is known is that the architecture of cetacean brains is even more divergent from the typical mammalian plan than that of elephants. While their brains are the most highly convoluted among the mammals, their cerebral cortex is comparatively thin and appears to lack one of the usual six layers of cells. Moreover, instead of an expansion of the frontal lobes, as observed in primates, there has been an expansion toward the sides, in the temporal and parietal regions, and there is a completely new lobe, the paralimbic lobe, not found in any other mammal, the function of which is so far unknown (Marino, 2002) but possibly may be related to echolocation or coordination of synchronous movements in groups of animals. The pattern of projection of visual and auditory information onto the cerebral cortex is also highly unusual among mammals, as is the marked degree of independence between the two cerebral hemispheres, which reportedly sleep independently of one another, and seem to be altogether lacking in REM sleep.\r\n\r\nThe brains of birds, too, have recently been found to be more remarkable than once believed. Birds have a pallium instead of the neocortex found in mammals; the surface of their brains is smooth rather than convoluted, and the cells in their cerebrum are arranged in nuclear clusters instead of layers. It has recently been discovered, however, that their neurons are even more tightly packed than in the brains of primates, with parrots and songbirds having about twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass, and their brains are truly \u2018miniaturized,\u2019 since the short distance between neurons necessitated by their high densities likely results in a higher speed of information processing (Olkowicz et al., 2016). Parrots, like primates, show an increased connectivity between the telencephalon and the cerebellum, possibly indicative of an interplay between fine motor skills and complex cognition in birds (Gutierrez-Ibanez et al., 2018), along the lines of what is being investigated in mammals. What is being learned about the brains of birds, moreover, is spurring a new look at the brains of reptiles and even fish. The mobulid rays, a group of cartilaginous fishes comprising the manta and devil rays, have high encephalization quotients, a relatively large telencephalon making up over 60% of the brain mass, and a high degree of cerebellar foliation thought to be due to their active, maneuverable lifestyles and highly developed social and migratory behavior (Ari, 2011). A study of selected genes from mammalian neocortex and homologous genes from avian and turtle brains found, once again, a \u2018highly conserved\u2019 pattern of gene expression, supporting the conclusion that many of the cell types, neurotransmitters, and circuitry are widely shared among the vertebrates, preserving the major connections and performing very similar functions despite major differences in brain structure and tissue architecture, attesting to fundamental continuity since the last common ancestor, over 500 million years ago.\r\n\r\nAmong the \u2018brainier\u2019 members of the mammalian and avian classes \u2014 particularly the primates, elephants, whales and dolphins, parrots, corvids and some other songbirds, and even the mobulid rays (Ari & D\u2019Agostino, 2016) \u2014 we are finding many, many examples of \u2018higher cognition.\u2019 Over the last five to 10 years or so, there has been a veritable explosion of research reports, popular articles and books detailing what\u2019s being discovered about their abilities, and it is now widely accepted that some of these animals engage in tool use, mirror self-recognition, imitation, vocal learning, and complex social cognition likely including \u2018theory of mind,\u2019 to name a few indicators. Frans deWaal discusses the cognitive abilities of some of these other animals, from apes and monkeys to crows and parrots, elephants and octopuses, and even ants, wasps and bees, raising deep questions about our common assumption: that humans are the only living beings capable of intelligent thought (and that only the human<\/em> kind of thought should be considered \u2018intelligent\u2019), an attitude that, because it is exclusively \u2018centered upon the human,\u2019 is termed anthropocentrism<\/em>.[footnote]Frans de Waal\u2019s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?<\/em> (2016) provides some detailed examples. Over the last five to 10 years or so, there has been a veritable explosion of research reports, popular articles and books detailing the cognitive capacities of other animals. For example, see Baboon Metaphysics (Cheney & Seyfarth 2007), The Genius of Birds (Ackerman 2016), \u2018Thinking Chickens\u2019 (Marino 2017) and What a Fish Knows (Balcombe 2016).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nOne way to see how our thinking has changed can be illustrated by consideration of what we have been learning about birds, both in terms of behavior and in brain structure. As discussed by Ackerman (2016), birds have now been extensively documented to have complex cognitive abilities, including memory and spatial mapping (Clark\u2019s nutcrackers can bury and retrieve pine seeds from up to 5,000 caches spread over hundreds of square miles), tool use (New Caledonian crows fashion elaborate tools from branches and bend wires into hooks for obtaining food), vocal learning (mockingbirds can imitate, with near perfection, as many as two hundred different songs of other birds), social learning (a few great tits learned to open milk bottles in a single town in the 1920s and the behavior spread widely over Britain over subsequent decades; crows can recognize individual humans and spread information about the \u2018dangerous\u2019 scientists who capture them across large social networks), mirror self-recognition (Eurasian magpies will scratch away a mark put on their throat when seen in a mirror), and complex social interaction, manipulation, and possibly \u2018theory of mind\u2019 (western scrub jays keep track of other birds that might be watching them when they cache their food, and will recache it later if necessary; male Eurasian jays seem to understand their mates\u2019 specific desires for certain foods). But until recently, little effort was put into making such observations, since until very recently we had little respect for \u2018bird brains.\u2019\r\n\r\nThe lines giving rise to the primates, elephants, and cetaceans probably diverged over 95 million years ago, with independent evolution occurring in these lines ever since, so it is not surprising that differences are to be found in the overall structure of their brains. The split between what became mammals and birds came even earlier, sometime around 300 million years ago. Nevertheless, parrots and primates \u201cshow impressive convergence of complex cognitive abilities, and this is accompanied by convergent changes in the brain,\u201d including relatively large brain size, telencephalon size, size of associative areas of the telencephalon, and increased connectivity between the telencephalon and cerebellum- though this increased connectivity has evolved over different neural pathways (Gutierrez-Ibanez et al., 2018, p. 5). \u201cIt has been suggested that intelligence in these taxa can only have arisen by convergent evolution,\u201d observes cognitive biologist Nathan Emery:\r\n
driven by the need to solve comparable social and ecological problems; simple examination of six ecological variables across corvids, parrots, other birds, monkeys, apes, elephants and cetaceans reveals that certain preconditions correlate with the development of complex cognition: omnivorous generalist diet, highly social, large relative brain size, innovative, long developmental period, extended longevity, and variable habitat, [and] this exercise suggests that the evolution of intelligence was highly correlated with the ability to think and act flexibly within an ever-changing environment. (Emery, 2005, p. 37)<\/blockquote>\r\nThe same can be said about the conditions under which our own species evolved, of course, placing us within the spectrum of cognitively complex animals, one with a very high degree of behavioral flexibility indeed.\r\n

<\/a>11.4. Seeing Ourselves in Life\u2019s Larger Context<\/h1>\r\nWe need to back up a bit now in order to place ourselves within the larger context of life on Earth, so as not to make the mistake of imagining that human beings are uniquely distinguished from other animals by their exclusive possession of 'mind.' We humans are a kind of animal, a large-bodied primate to be precise, very closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos \u2014 our line having branched with theirs five to six million years ago \u2014 and also closely related, although somewhat less so, with the other great apes, the gorillas and orangutans. The mammalian order of living primates is divided into the prosimians, consisting of the lemurs, lorises and tarsiers, and the anthropoid primates, including the new world monkeys, old world monkeys, and the members of the superfamily Hominoidea, which itself is divided into the Hylobatidae, the family of the smaller or lesser apes, the gibbons and siamangs, and the Hominidae family of the great apes, made up of three subfamilies, the orangutans, the gorillas, and one (depending on the method of grouping) which includes chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans. The primates are thought to have evolved from a group of insectivorous early mammals living late in the Cretaceous, emerging as squirrel-like mammals in the Paleocene that began to develop the classic primate features of grasping hands and feet, stereoscopic vision and relatively large brains in the Eocene. First, the prosimians evolved and radiated across several major continents, flourishing until they were displaced by the later-evolving monkeys and apes, except in Madagascar, where they can still be found \u2014 if hanging on precariously \u2014 today. Monkeys evolved over the Oligocene and apes in the Miocene, with the early ancestors of humans probably making their appearance early in the Pliocene. By the late Pleistocene, Homo sapiens<\/em> had appeared and was already beginning to make an impact on its environment.\r\n\r\nIf we\u2019re going to think about our species\u2019 relationship with nature, however, we need to consider the kind of ecological role that is played by the closest relatives of ours, the apes and the primates in general. Except for the insectivorous tarsiers, our primate relatives are far and away predominantly vegetarians, and our human digestive tracts are much more like those of the other great apes than like the mammalian carnivores. Most of the apes and monkeys are classified as either folivores (animals primarily subsisting on leaves), or frugivores (animals for whom fruit makes up a considerable portion of the diet). Folivores have the advantage of greater abundance and accessibility of food, but frugivores obtain a higher concentration of calories by eating ripe fruit, and it is thought that the greater energy provided, in combination with the cognitive demands of obtaining a high-quality but patchily distributed and sometimes only seasonally available food, have led to a larger brain size in otherwise similar species (Milton, 2006). Among the great apes, gorillas are primarily folivores, while orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos are primarily frugivores, although all have been observed to opportunistically consume invertebrates and the occasional small vertebrate. Chimpanzees will sometimes engage in cooperative hunting of medium-sized mammals \u2014 often monkeys \u2014 with social sharing of the meat. In places where they coexist with colobus monkeys, they can sometimes have a significant effect on monkey populations (Lambert, 2012). However, great apes and other primates do not seem to play a role in the \u2018top down\u2019 control of other animals. Meat actually makes up no more than about five to six percent of the chimpanzee diet, most of that being in the form of insects (Goodall, 1986, p. 232; Milton, 1987, p. 105) while the amount of animal flesh consumed by the other great apes is usually quite a bit less. According to Katharine Milton, although early humans began adding meat to their diets as the climate got colder in the Pliocene, \u201cthis behavior does not mean that people today are biologically suited to the virtually fiber-free diet many of us now consume,\u201d since \u201cin its general form, our digestive tract does not seem to be greatly modified from that of the common ancestor of apes and humans, which was undoubtedly a strongly herbivorous animal\u201d (Milton, 2006, n.p.). Primates in nature thus do not have the ecological role of apex predator; the key role they play in ecosystem function is that of seed dispersers, moving the seeds of their favored fruit trees considerable distances and thereby helping to maintain tropical forests; they have also been considered vegetative ecosystem engineers through herbivory, shaping forest structure as they dine selectively on flowers, leaves and bark of certain trees (Beaune, 2015; Chapman et al., 2013).\r\n\r\nThe great apes notably have a very slow rate of reproduction; chimpanzee mothers suppress ovulation by suckling their young for four to six years, creating a long interbirth interval between what are usually single offspring, resulting in no more than four to fi ve young over a lifetime (Tutin, 1994). Their average density on the lands they occupy is also quite sparse, depending on habitat type and social organization, but is usually on the order of less than one to two to fi ve individuals per square kilometre, with home ranges that can (if not limited by human encroachment) extend to over 500 square kilometers for chimpanzee communities of 20 to 100 individuals (Nishida & Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, 1987). It has been suggested that it is the cognitive capacity of different species that places an upper limit on group size, since an individual can only maintain awareness of a certain number of relationships at the same time (Dunbar, 1992). The difference between the average densities of chimpanzee societies and our own when concentrated in urban centers is really quite striking, and bears consideration in light of Robin Dunbar\u2019s pronouncement that 150 is around the limit on the number of individuals any of us is capable of knowing well (Hill & Dunbar, 2003).\r\n\r\nMost of the primates are highly social, often with more or less well-defined hierarchies keeping individuals \u2018in their place\u2019 as a function of social standing, but a wide range of types of social organization is found within the primate order. Among the great apes, orangutans tend to live a fairly solitary existence within tropical forests, while gorillas usually live in troops of several females with offspring dominated by an older, male silverback. The two chimpanzee species typically live in multimale, multifemale groups, the common chimp groupings usually dominated by one or several alpha males. In contrast, the bonobos seemingly accord females the upper hand \u2014 and, it should be noted, we humans are equally related to both. In chimpanzee societies, intergroup male-male competition, with several powerful males, vying for the position of alpha-male, is often the most noticeable preoccupation. [footnote] Frans de Waal\u2019s (1982) Chimpanzee Politics provides a classic description of this kind of behavior, something that is often on display in our human realm as well. You can watch de Waal\u2019s TEDx talk on moral behavior in animals<\/a>. An excerpt from this video, highlighting the capuchin 'sense of justice,' can be seen in the video Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally<\/a>.[\/footnote] On the other hand, some primates also seem to have, if not a desire for \u2018equality,\u2019 at least an innate sense of \u2018justice\u2019 \u2014 or at least an acute sense of how their rewards compare with those of competing conspecifics \u2014 that is thought to contribute to cooperation on the basis of equal sharing within the group. de Waal and his student, Sarah Brosnan, taught captive capuchin monkeys to exchange plastic tokens for food, but when a monkey discovers that her reward is only a bit of cucumber while her neighbor is getting grapes, she shows her displeasure and throws the cucumber out of the cage (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003). The primate order encompasses animals with a wide range of behavioral repertoires, and primates, generally, are perhaps the most behaviorally flexible among the mammals, with humans the most flexible of all, biologically speaking. We humans, thus, innately possess a great many degrees of freedom, allowing for a great many alternative behaviors, many different ways of asserting our moral agency, possible within the realm of human choice.\r\n

<\/a>11.4.1 Seeing Mind in Human Life<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nBut, if we are in fact so similar to other organisms as a result of evolutionary continuity, what about our much-vaunted human uniqueness? Presumably it has to do with our superior intelligence, but if our cerebral cortex is seen as a little less special in light of what we\u2019re learning about brain structure and organization in other animals, we were also taken down a peg or two as [pb_glossary id=\"181\"]neural network[\/pb_glossary] research began to investigate intelligence in the workings of both biological and artificial systems. It seems that, when the artificial intelligence (AI) folks first started trying to engineer computerized robots that could actually move around and deal with physical objects, they were embarrassingly unsuccessful \u2014 because they had been assuming that real intelligence was based on the kind of rule-governed manipulation of abstract symbols, the kind of linear, if-A-and-B-then-C-must-follow logic of which philosophers are generally so proud. It turns out that things don\u2019t work that way for animals trying to get around in the real world, however: they appear to identify objects through a process of pattern recognition involving some complex neural circuitry, and their interactions are guided by yet more neuronal connections organized into networks that become activated when particular skill sets are required \u2014 and, as we are discovering, the same is true of us (Preston, 1991; Davion, 2002). Even much of what we consider our \u2018highest\u2019 mental activity \u2014 our moral reasoning, for example \u2014 seems to be carried out by neural networks that we share in basic organization with many other animals. Much of the research disclosing this information is quite recent, utilizing functional neuroimaging (fMRI) in human beings responding to morally relevant scenarios. What was discovered, according to one team of researchers, is that \u201dthe psychological processes underlying moral choices recruit socio-emotional and cognitive processes that are domain-general\u201d (FeldmanHall et al., 2014, p. 297), meaning that there is no set of \u2018moral\u2019 circuitry peculiar to humans that enables us to think and behave in a moral sphere uniquely our own. Rather, moral reasoning activates patterns of circuitry involving emotional and social cognition such as [pb_glossary id=\"168\"]empathy[\/pb_glossary] and [pb_glossary id=\"332\"]theory of mind[\/pb_glossary], the ability to understand another\u2019s point of view \u2014 circuitry enabling similar sorts of cognition in at least the brainier types of nonhuman animals as well. In humans, the brain regions involved in what we consider moral reasoning include the ventromedial prefrontal cortex \u2014 attuned to emotional response \u2014 and the right temporoparietal junction\u2013 involved in \u2018theory of mind\u2019 processing in nonmoral contexts as well as moral ones. As another pair of researchers conclude, \u201cso far, the uniquely moral brain has appeared nowhere \u2014 perhaps because it does not exist\u201d (Young & Dungan, 2012, p. 7). This conclusion is becoming increasingly clear as further research is carried out. All in all, morality is supported not by a single brain circuitry or structure, but by a multiplicity of circuits that overlap with other general complex processes, according to Pascual et al. (2013, p. 5) \u201cThe \u2018moral brain\u2019 does not exist per se: rather, moral processes require the engagement of specific structures of both the \u2018emotional\u2019 and the \u2018cognitive\u2019 brains\u201d (Pascual et al., 2013, p. 6).\r\n\r\nOn the other hand, a recent development that supporting continuity between us and some other animals with respect to how morality \u2018works\u2019 \u2014 how social animals maintain harmony and cooperation within the group \u2014 has been the discovery of [pb_glossary id=\"180\"]mirror neurons[\/pb_glossary]. Mirror neurons<\/a> are cells within the brains of certain animals that become active both when an animal performs certain motor movements and when that animal sees or hears another animal perform the action. They were first discovered by accident, the legend goes, when a rhesus monkey, with electrodes implanted in the brain for other purposes, showed a pattern of activity corresponding to arm, hand and mouth movements \u2014 which the monkey was not carrying out \u2014 while watching one of the researchers eat his lunch. In the human brain, mirror neurons are concentrated in the posterior part of the inferior frontal gyrus and in the rostral part of the posterior parietal cortex; working together, they seem to transmit information about the goal or intention of another\u2019s movements.\r\n\r\nThese mirror neurons are believed to be connected with the insula and the limbic system to form a large-scale network supporting our ability to feel empathy (Iacoboni, 2009). If perceiving the way others feel through sensory cues sets these \u2018mirror\u2019 neurons to resonating with those of the other being, we, in essence, are able to \u201cfeel each other\u2019s feelings.\u201d It is \u201csomething we accomplish . . . naturally, effortlessly, and quickly\u201d that seems well explained by the incorporation into this neural network of \u201ca prereflective, automatic mechanism of mirroring what is going on in the brain of other people,\u201d according to Marco Iacoboni (2009, p. 666). Recognizing their existence has been said to \u2018dissolve\u2019 what has been called \u2018the problem of other minds\u2019, the question of how we can come to know that others have minds and, roughly, what they are thinking. Moreover, since \u201ca proximate mechanism that evolved to serve the ultimate goal of cooperation . . . will yield benefits for all contributors\u201d (de Waal, 2008, p. 281), it has been claimed that \u201cthe evolutionary process made us wired for empathy\u201d (Iacoboni, 2009, p. 666). Such mirroring neurons have also been found in some of the \u2018brainier\u2019 social animals, including other primates, dolphins and birds, he notes, evidence of the kind of \u2018interiority\u2019 that we humans also possess. Giacomo Rizzolatti, the original discoverer of mirror neurons, suggests that the mirror neuron system allows understanding of the actions of others \u2018from the inside\u2019, providing \u201ca profound natural link between individuals that is crucial for establishing inter-individual interactions\u201d (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2010, p. 273). However, caution has been raised against \u2018an overly enthusiastic tendency\u2019 to overinterpret possible connections between the mirror neuron system and empathy, since there are likely to be a number of different neural pathways involved in this complex phenomenon, and the empirical evidence for a direct connection with mirror neurons is limited (Lamm & Majdandzic, 2015).\r\n\r\nThese neurons may also be implicated in processes that have the opposite effect in human beings, in a way that is intimately connected with our major claim to \u2018uniqueness,\u2019 our remarkable facility with language and symbols (Corballis, 2010). The inferior frontal area in the macaque brain where mirror neurons were first discovered, area F5, roughly corresponds with Broca\u2019s area in the human brain, one of our important language areas, and in subsequent studies of human \u2018mirroring,\u2019 neurons in the language areas of the left hemisphere have been found to be activated (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998). Whereas in the monkey\u2019s brain the mirroring area is considered to be primarily involved in hand movements, this striking correspondence has led these and other researchers to propose that human speech, and later language more generally, may have originated with hand gestures, socially shared, which came to be adapted for intentional communication. However it came about, for the majority of us humans at least, our primary language areas are situated within the left hemisphere of our brains, and the left hemisphere\u2019s contribution to our human uniqueness may possibly be a key as to why we have increasingly been waging a war against nature, as well as wars against each other from time to time.\r\n\r\nA functional differentiation between the two cerebral hemispheres extends far back in vertebrate evolution; birds, for example, have been shown to be more effective in pecking at grains of food using their right eyes, controlled by their left hemispheres (since major nerve tracts cross over inside the brain), while scanning for predators overhead with the left eyes, controlled by their right hemispheres (Vallortigara, 2000; Rogers, 2012). Many subtle and not-so-subtle differences in function between the two hemispheres are still being discovered in humans, but in the view of Iain McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist and philosopher who has devoted many years to studying the neuropsychological specializations of the hemispheres, \u201cthe most fundamental difference\u201d between them \u2014 and something that would seem to pertain to hemispherically-lateralized animals across the board \u2014 is that there is a basic difference in the type of attention<\/em> they direct toward the world (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 4).\r\n\r\nThe right hemisphere tends to apprehend \u2018what\u2019s out there\u2019 broadly, holistically and in context, recognizing other beings as already embedded in social relationships with the self. The left hemisphere, in contrast, directs a narrow, focused attention toward parts and pieces of things, tends to favor thinking in abstract terms and following a linear sequence of \u2018logical\u2019 reasoning, and generally comes at things with a use-orientation<\/em>, categorizing them in terms of how the individual animal, in competition with others, might benefit from exploiting them. The role of the right temporoparietal junction in theory-of-mind processing, important in social cognition and moral reasoning, should be kept in mind. Ideally, the two hemispheres work reciprocally and in coordination with one another. The proper sequence of neural processing of incoming information, McGilchrist maintains, is that the right hemisphere initially takes in the immediate, real-time presencing of what\u2019s in the organism\u2019s total environmental surround; then, passing across the corpus callosum to the left hemisphere, the most salient aspects of it are abstracted, categorized and evaluated for use or threat; and finally this information is re-presented to the right hemisphere for reintegration into a more thorough and once again holistic understanding of the overall situation \u2014 a sequence that can be represented RH > LH > RH \u2014 presumably enabling the organism to take appropriate action within its lived context (McGilchrist, 2009, pp. 189\u2013208).\r\n\r\nOur left hemispheres have enabled us to examine the world around us in great detail, and, through the use of linear logic, to formulate and test scientific hypotheses. Without these specialized skills, we would not have been able to discover all the intricacies of living organisms of which we have recently become aware. But its propensity for abstraction in combination with its general use-orientation, when not counterbalanced by the right hemisphere\u2019s ability to connect with others and put things in larger perspective, has most likely contributed to the way our society dismisses nonhuman others and nature in general as merely \u2018resources\u2019 for us to use, and it may also be a significant factor in perpetuating the continuing intergroup conflicts within our human realm.\r\n\r\nLeft hemisphere dominance may also be responsible for a certain linearity of thought \u2014 unfortunately emphasized throughout our educational systems today \u2014 that may serve to block our ability to engage in [pb_glossary id=\"190\"]systems thinking[\/pb_glossary], something desperately needed in order to understand the impacts of all the processes our \u2018war against nature\u2019 is unleashing now. This preference for linearity may underlie some of the \u2018short-termism\u2019 with which we have approached just about everything, from human population growth to the social spread of unsustainable habits to the accumulation of plastic trash on our beaches. Populations and positive-feedback processes without external controls don\u2019t grow linearly over time but rather exponentially. However, just as a tangent drawn between two points on a curved surface can provide a reasonable approximation of the path from A to B if they\u2019re close enough together, growth in components of these systems may seem linear if the time interval of evaluation is short enough. Therefore, projections of consequences may lead to overestimation of the time until thresholds are crossed, as well as serious underestimation of all the repercussions as trend lines intersect over time. Should the manufacturers of disposable plastics have been looking ahead to the dissemination of their products worldwide and their eventual fragmentation into indigestible particles contaminating worldwide food webs? It is a serious question to ask: Why not?\r\n\r\nIt is the degree to which many of us modern humans seem to be \u2018stuck\u2019 in the left hemisphere mode, failing to reintegrate its insights into the holistic picture supplied by the right, that McGilchrist believes may lie at the heart of many of today\u2019s pressing problems, as will be discussed a little later on.\r\n

<\/a>11.4.2 Group-Living Social Primates: Cooperation and Conflict in Bioregional Context<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nTo zoom back out of our examination of brain organization and cognition for now and focus more closely on \u2018who we are\u2019 and how we got to be that way, evolutionary biology paints a picture of our early primate ancestors living in relatively small social groupings that had to cooperate in order to survive, just as our closest relatives, the great apes, do today. Our progenitors fanned out from the tropical forests into other habitats, coordinating hunting practices to supplement their mostly vegetarian diets and later domesticating plants and animals to ensure a more consistent food supply. People worked together, sharing tasks within the group and often competing with other groups of humans for needed resources, sometimes engaging in violent intergroup conflict along the lines of what primatologists call [pb_glossary id=\"171\"]lethal raiding[\/pb_glossary], observed among chimpanzees in the wild today (Wrangham, 1996). We should remind ourselves, however, that humans are equally close genetically to the other chimpanzee species, the bonobos, whose social organization is somewhat different and who have been seen to engage in peaceful intergroup interaction, which thus must also be seen as an available option within our larger \u2018genetic toolkit.\u2019 As discussed earlier, the need for cooperation within the group, to maintain its integrity and to defend against threats coming from outside the group, is what many think gave rise to the development of our ethical sensibilities, with the help of our neural wiring that enables us to feel empathy (de Waal, 2009). Too much individual selfishness and too little altruism toward other group members would produce uncooperative bands with a survival disadvantage when pitted against more cohesive tribes of people that worked well together. Human security, then, emerged from small, face-to-face communities that worked together to make their living from the local bioregion and successfully fend off predators and competing human tribes. Individual lives might be more or less difficult, depending on the vagaries of the total environment, and wars might be fought with other bands of humans, but nature itself was the provider, if not always a benign one, during this long period of our evolution. Humans were an integral part of the natural world as we, like all other species, did what came naturally in order to survive, and our early belief systems generally included a core of respect, if not reverence, for Nature, in recognition of its fundamental role in sustaining life.\r\n

<\/a>11.4.3 We Humans Have Specialized in Utilizing Symbols<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n

<\/a>11.4.3.1 Coevolution of Symbolic Culture, Language and Intergroup Conflict<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nOne definition of culture<\/em> is \u2018shared symbolic meaning,\u2019 which primatologist Carel van Schaik traces back to the socially learned labeling of edible foods or dangerous predators, seen in a variety of animal species, developing into the emergence of special skills and\/or special communicative signals unique to particular populations of nonhuman primates, and finally to the conveyance of meaning by arbitrary signs (symbols), an ability that seems to be possessed rudimentarily by certain groupings of both chimpanzees and orangutans living in the wild (van Schaik, 2004, pp. 156-157). In the primate lineage that includes both chimps and humans, where social groupings came to be dominated by male coalitions engaging in lethal raiding and later in more sophisticated forms of warfare, it seems a crucial threshold was crossed once group membership could be signified by means of behavioral or linguistic conventions. In a move that seems to directly counter Iacoboni\u2019s feel-good role for mirror neurons, Van Schaik theorizes that \u201cbetween-group hostility, by favoring symbolic cultures, helped to lay the foundation for human language\u201d (van Schaik, 2004, p. 158). Our ancestors' ability to cooperate was greatly enhanced by the ability to communicate using sound, sign and gesture, but this applied primarily to those within the social group. Once a simple manifestation of our biology as social primates, held together by bonds of kinship and reciprocity, now the group<\/em> could mark and conceptualize itself, draw a line between the collective self and other human groups sharing and displaying different symbols, pulling disparate members together into tight cohesion. Once we became able to represent a qualitative difference between \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019 by the arbitrary symbol, we learned somehow to \u2018cut\u2019 the empathic connection that might otherwise, should we relate face-to-face, set mirror neurons in the emotional circuitry of our brains to resonating empathically; it seems that words and images can get in the way of empathy, as can numbers.\r\n

<\/a>11.4.3.2 Separation of the Symbolic Realm from the Realm of Nature<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nLanguage not only facilitated our immediate, group-maintaining actions, however, it gave people the ability to tell stories, maintain collective memories of past events and imagine possibilities that might or might not ever come to pass, inserting some distance between a human cultural realm and the temporal flux. Moreover, since the ability to communicate meaning through the use of specifically constructed words and signs did make humans stand out from all the other animals not showing such a talent, the move into the realm of symbol can be seen as cutting the first cleavage demarcating the human world from the world of the purely natural. Our growing use of symbols \u2014 vocal, gestural, or graphic \u2014 pried us away from the concreteness of the world of nature, with all its chaotic diversity, toward the relative stability and uniformity of the general concept. To transmit shared meaning, symbols that could cover minor differences by making things \u2018the same\u2019 were required.[footnote]See Nietzsche, F. 1974. The Gay Science. New York: Random House, Inc. pp. 169\u2013172, pp. 297\u2013300.[\/footnote] In developing our ability to communicate by means of this process of abstraction, the ability to quantify assemblages of relatively similar things began to take precedence over recognition of fine qualitative differences among particulars. Unruly nature could be \u2018ordered,\u2019 named and made to seem more uniform, and increasingly brought under the control of human beings, both physically and conceptually.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s been known for more than a century that most of our neural wiring for language is located within the left hemisphere, and Iain McGilchrist suggests \u201cthe metaphor of grasp<\/em>\u201d (2009, p. 112) as a way to link together language, the possible role of \u2018mirrored\u2019 hand gestures, and the left hemisphere\u2019s use-orientation. It \u2018is not an accident that we talk about \u2018grasping\u2019 what someone is saying,\u2019 he maintains; rather:\r\n
The idea of \u2018grasping\u2019 implies seizing a thing for ourselves, for use, wresting it away from its context, holding it fast \u2026 it is the expression of our will, and it is the means to power. It is what enables us to \u2018manipulate\u2019 \u2014 literally to take a handful of whatever we need \u2014 and thereby to dominate the world around us. (McGilchrist, 2009, pp. 112\u2013113)<\/blockquote>\r\n\u2018Grasping\u2019 certain parts and pieces of nature, naming and \u2018ordering\u2019 them and putting them to use, certainly gave our ancestors an edge over their many evolutionary cohorts; on the other hand, when only certain aspects of reality are plucked out of a very complex total field and made into \u2018re-presentations,\u2019 they become abstract concepts that can be quite misleading, particularly so if we fail to complete the circuit and place them back within the larger context from whence they came. Thus, \u201cwhat is moving and seamless, a process, becomes static and separate \u2014 things<\/em>\u201d (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 137) \u2014 a transformation in our perception of the world around us of which Nietzsche, for one, complains at length. Moreover, as McGilchrist continues, \u201cmanipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division\u201d \u2014 so, he maintains, if he had to pick \u201cone governing principle\u201d to characterize the left hemisphere, \u201cit would be that of division.\u201d In other words, McGilchrist (2009, p. 137) tells us, \u201cit is the hemisphere of either\/or\u201d \u2014 the generator of what is referred to as dualistic thinking.\r\n

<\/a>11.4.3.3 Dualistic Thinking, Enmity and War<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nPsychologists and philosophers who study the processes underlying our current propensity for waging war among our human groupings often point to an extreme form of dividing up the world, called dualistic thinking, as providing its necessary conceptual framework. In Faces of the Enemy<\/em>, psychologist Sam Keen (1986, p. 18) explains:\r\n
Around the basic antagonism between insiders and strangers the tribal mind forms an entire myth of conflict. The mythic mind, which still governs modern politics, is obsessively dualistic. It splits everything into polar opposites. The basic distinction between insiders and outsiders is parlayed into a paranoid ethic and metaphysic in which reality is seen as a morality play, a conflict between\r\n

The tribes \u00a0 versus \u00a0 The enemy<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Good \u00a0 versus \u00a0 Evil<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

The sacred \u00a0 versus \u00a0 The profane<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\nSuch dualistic thinking is socially reinforced, producing a [pb_glossary id=\"164\"]consensual paranoia[\/pb_glossary] whereby, according to Keen, the group creates a \u2018good\u2019 self, with which it consciously identifies, by splitting off \u2018the unacceptable parts of the self \u2014 its greed, cruelty, sadism, hostility, and what Jung called 'the shadow' (Keen, 1986, p. 19) \u2014 and unconsciously projecting these traits onto \u2018the enemy\u2019\u2014 whoever or whatever lies on the other side of that barrier its members' abstracting and dichotomizing minds have constructed for themselves. As Keen vividly illustrates with examples of propaganda posters created by the different sides of various military conflicts, \u2018the enemy\u2019 is often depicted in nonhuman form, as a fearsome animal or some kind of disgusting vermin, all the better to put some distance between us<\/em> and them<\/em> and make the killing of them<\/em> that much easier to do. This polarizing tendency of thought, taken to an extreme, can also impose a projected \u2018deadness\u2019 on the living other, providing a convenient justification not only for killing individual beings but for abstracting all vital qualities out of them, conceptually transforming human as well as nonhuman nature into uniform bits of lifeless matter and eventually into completely abstract monetary units \u2014 often then to be put to use, via our economic institutions, in escalating the ongoing war of us against them<\/em>, in a self-reinforcing, feed-forward process.\r\n

<\/a>11.5 The \u2018War Against Nature\u2019<\/h1>\r\n

<\/a>11.5.1 A Certain Kind of Culture Pits Humans Against Nature<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nAt some time in their histories, all human societies must have taken that fateful step into shared cultural symbolism and language; however, not all proceeded along a path that led them into a \u2018war against nature,\u2019 certainly nothing so extreme as what\u2019s going on now in a near-global assault. Recurrent themes in the stories told by Native Americans and many other land-based peoples told of the interrelatedness among lifeforms and the need for mutual respect and harmony; moral responsibilities extended to nonhuman life, and when life was taken, grateful acknowledgment was required.[footnote]See, for example, Suzuki & Knudtson (1992) and Perkins (1994).[\/footnote] Humans were distinct, everywhere; but a further move along the trajectory, a separation<\/em> of the human from the natural, seems to have been a cultural peculiarity that not all human societies enacted. In what became known as the \u2018Western\u2019 world, however \u2014 the culture which has given rise to the industrialism that has taken hold in most parts of the globe today \u2014 that further move was, and largely still is, much celebrated. It is the culture that originated in Western Europe that Iain McGilchrist sees as having first given expression to the increasing domination of left-hemisphere cognition, with its theme of division, separation, abstraction from context, and us-vs-them thinking, and some of the central myths and metaphors of that culture are still actively structuring the way many of us think today, even if they receive little conscious attention \u2014 issues that will be considered at some length later on in this chapter.\r\n

<\/a>11.5.2 The Culture of Western Europe and the Emergence of \u2018Modern\u2019 Science<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nWriting some of the seminal texts to emerge from the culture of the ancient Greeks, Plato accorded more reality to an immaterial world of Ideas, perfect and eternal, than to the messy and changeable actuality of our embodied lives here on Earth. Aristotle, more appreciative of biology than Plato, nevertheless exalted humanity above the rest and pointed to our rationality, our recently evolved ability to abstract and separate in thought, as the feature that not only singled us out from the other animals but gave us moral priority. Nature was still alive, however, in the Greek society of more than two thousand years ago; Aristotle understood all living things to be animated with a soul that initiated movement, humans, animals and plants alike. But he conceived of our human minds or souls as divided into parts, of which our reason, or rationality, was supposed to govern and rein in the parts given to feelings and baser appetites, in parallel with our efforts to control an unruly world of nature that couldn't always be counted on to deliver the harvest, initiating an internal as well as an external division that might well be conceived in terms of struggle if not an all-out war. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle became intertwined with Christian thought in medieval Europe, and, as historian Lynn White details in a famous essay (White, 1967), the latter, growing in influence at the same time that technology was developing, served to justify an increasingly violent relationship between human society and the natural systems of the land. According to White, the major thrust of the Christian religion, claiming both God and humanity to be transcendent of the created world \u2014 deepening the [pb_glossary id=\"165\"]dualistic[\/pb_glossary] divide in western thought \u2014 urged the \u2018chopping down of sacred groves\u2019 as part of its assault on paganism, and thus explicitly endorsed our war against nature.\r\n\r\nIt took around 2,000 years from the time of Plato and Aristotle for a victory to be declared in this war. In the wake of the great scientific revolution that began with Nicolaus Copernicus's shifting our worldview from a geocentric universe to a heliocentric solar system and culminated in Isaac Newton's inscribing the laws of both celestial and terrestrial motion in precisely formulated mathematical terms, all traces of animism<\/em> were finally swept out of our accepted metaphysical scheme. Living things were no longer to be seen as agents generating their own motion and directing their own lives; the apparently purposive actions of animals and plants came to be \u2018reduced\u2019 to the mindless movements of machinery. From the time of this scientific \u2018enlightenment\u2019 forward until, for many, the present day, we were instructed that what was \u2018really real\u2019 was only \u2018atoms in the void,\u2019 a pronouncement that led people to imagine the universe as being nothing but a collection of tiny, separate, solid, billiard-ball-like particles colliding with one another in the empty vastness of space- particles that could be further \u2018reduced\u2019 in our minds to pure mathematical description in terms of mass, velocity and direction. Mathematician Pierre-Simon LaPlace summed up the enormous change in worldview that resulted from this new [pb_glossary id=\"173\"]metaphysical metaphor[\/pb_glossary] \u2014 the universe as a machine \u2014 in his depiction of a fantasy figure that came to be known as \u2018LaPlace's demon,\u2019 an intellect that, given the positions of all the particles and the magnitude of all the forces acting on them at any one instant of time, could calculate all past and future configurations of the universe, thus removing even human agency from what was now a completely deterministic piece of clockwork.\r\n\r\nExactly how our human lives and our sense of free will could be reconciled with this imaginative cosmology was never quite resolved, but mechanistic science worked beautifully for allowing us to describe, predict, and thus control the movements of macroscopic physical objects, and if the complexities of living organisms lay beyond its grasp, it was not from lack of trying to put them \u2018on the rack,\u2019 as Francis Bacon is said to have urged, to lay bare the \u2018mechanisms\u2019 undergirding life itself. The desire for control over the other<\/em> while alive and agentive has now turned into pretending that the other has been killed, is dead, has become machinelike and therefore is completely in the power of whatever intellect has access to nature's laws. Rene Descartes made the separation between one part of us, our 'rational\u2019 minds, and the rest of nature complete, inscribing in what are still considered the foundational texts of modern philosophy a dualistic metaphysics that remains deeply embedded in our psyches today: all of nature is a vast, mindless machine, including our own bodies, while we are of a different sort altogether, detachable minds or souls that are eternal<\/em>, suitable to inhabit Plato's abstract realm of perfection and immutability, and free to manipulate<\/em> the mechanistic sphere without repercussion, since we do so from our existential positioning safely outside the realm of this \u2018nature.\u2019\r\n\r\nIain McGilchrist has interpreted the major milestones in the evolution of Western European culture, from Plato\u2019s exaltation of a realm of abstraction to Descartes\u2019 severing of our minds from our bodies, through the Industrial Revolution\u2019s assault on nature and finally to our forlorn detachment in Postmodernity, as evidence for an increasing left-hemisphere dominance in the approach to the world being taken by all who have come under its influence, which in this dawn of the Anthropocene epoch seems to extend to almost everybody \u2014 a growing species-wide hemispheric imbalance that may be leading us all toward a literal, not simply metaphorical, \u2018death of nature.\u2019\r\n

<\/a>11.5.3 The Death of Nature<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nThe disappearance of all notion of souls, spirits or vital forces in the natural world, or indeed of there being any difference at all between the living and the nonliving, was the apparent result of this great revolution in western thought that spanned the 16th<\/sup>, 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> centuries, a consequence that Carolyn Merchant has called \u2018The Death of Nature\u2019 (Merchant, 1980). Westerners were thereby freed from any moral reservations they might have had about seizing hold of other living creatures, and eventually entire ecosystems, and twisting them to serve particular exploitative human purposes; if there was nothing with will or agency there in the first place, nothing but mindless clockwork, to what could we possibly owe any measure of ethical respect? The Cartesian fantasy of \u2018our\u2019 splendid isolation \u2014 or perhaps, rather, that of a certain part of us, our rational minds or souls, as conceived by our increasingly dominant left hemispheres, increasingly detached from right-hemisphere input \u2014 coupled with a manipulative approach to the natural world justifying itself on the basis of what is now a very out-of-date physics, appears to be the foundation of what is given the appellation \u2018our war against nature\u2019 today, an orientation that serves to sanction an increasingly violent assault on nonhuman life, and on an important but generally unacknowledged part of our own human lives as well. If nature were really dead, of course, it would make no sense to speak of waging such a war \u2014 the \u2018enemy\u2019 would already have been killed and conquered; but then again, with nature dead, there wouldn't be any of \u2018us\u2019 alive to wage such a war in the first place. There is a deep flaw in the logic underlying this anti-nature, anti-self stance, one that will return us to the question with which this chapter started: who are \u2018we,\u2019 such that \u2018we\u2019 can be proud to embrace as its own and carry out a \u2018war against nature,\u2019 and is this \u2018who\u2019 we choose to be?\r\n

<\/a>11.6 Understanding How and Why We Continue to Wage \u2018Our War Against Nature\u2019 and Reversing Course<\/h1>\r\nIf we are to have any hope of calling off our war against nature, it will be helpful to examine, through several different academic lenses, the ways in which we create and perpetuate our present \u2018social reality,\u2019 which, broadly understood, is what generates and structures all of our human activities on the planet, and the current configuration of which must be at the root of why we are continuing to wage this war.\r\n

<\/a>11.6.1 Our Ability to Abstract and Symbolize Enables Us to Construct the Linguistic Core of Our \u2018Social Reality\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nBecoming increasingly aware of how our minds operate allows us to become reflexive, to \u2018catch ourselves in the act\u2019 of shaping the way we think, and this move opens us up to yet another step, actively changing not only how we think but what we do. Most of what we do in the world, however, we do working together as social animals, and analytic philosopher John Searle focuses attention on our social nature in his account of how we humans \u2018construct culture out of nature,\u2019 in a sense taking up where van Schaik's account leaves off. Searle\u2019s account deals largely with current practices specific to western, industrial cultures, but presumably the basic moves he describes would be species-wide. His analysis is also almost entirely focused on the linguistic and therefore predominantly left-hemisphere process whereby we build up our symbol-world. Although he doesn\u2019t speak of this,the fact that he attempts to describe the process itself and situate it within the larger context of our biological propensities attests to his own ability to employ some right-hemisphere skills as well.\r\n\r\nIn The Construction of Social Reality<\/em>, Searle (1995) tells us that he was struck early on by what he calls \u2018the metaphysical burden\u2019 of the world we live in, the fact that, in addition to those parts of our reality that exist independently of us, the things that are studied by the natural sciences, there are also a large number of things that do not exist other than by virtue of the fact that we, as human subjects, believe in them \u2014 things like money, governments, property, marriages and the like. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that investigates existence, so Searle terms the former, independently existing things, [pb_glossary id=\"184\"]ontologically objective[\/pb_glossary], and the latter, those things that exist only by human agreement, [pb_glossary id=\"185\"]ontologically subjective[\/pb_glossary]. As he explains, these latter \u2018things\u2019 come into existence just as the words of our language come into existence, by our doing something we humans are very, very good at: collectively agreeing to give certain sounds, marks and objects symbolic meanings so that we can use them to convey information and coordinate our human activities. Searle defends a correspondence theory of truth, the notion that a \u2018true\u2019 statement describes fairly accurately how things are in the world, i.e. the way it re-presents the world corresponds <\/em>to the way the world actually is. He is quite clear about the difference between what is ontologically subjective \u2014 our human belief systems, from our re-presentations of concrete things to increasingly abstracted concepts that have no referent in the actual world \u2014 and that which is ontologically objective \u2014 the things that actually do exist in the world, independently of whether we \u2018believe in them\u2019 or not.\r\n\r\nTo explain how the process of symbolization works to allow us to construct our \u2018social reality,\u2019 Searle asks us to imagine a stone wall built by an early band of humans to keep others out of their territory. At first, the wall is a physical barrier; over time, it crumbles into a line of stones that one could easily step across, but it continues to exclude members of other groupings because it has attained symbolic significance as a boundary marker in the minds of all the people of the region, reminding outsiders to the original grouping that the area has been cordoned off, excluding them\u2013it could perhaps be said to signify early \u2018ownership\u2019 and to demarcate an aspect of group identity as well. When entire groupings of humans agree, explicitly or implicitly, to behave as if <\/em>particular things are invested with a certain symbolic meaning or status, then those things can function<\/em> as if they actually had certain physical properties, even if there's nothing correspondingly physical about them. Since it is not just any one individual's thought or desire that brings those symbolic properties into being, but rather the whole human community's shared belief \u2014 what Searle calls their [pb_glossary id=\"163\"]collective intentionality[\/pb_glossary] \u2014 the \u2018barrier\u2019 presented by the symbolic line of stones will be experienced as something substantial insofar as it is outside of any one person's ability to alter. Nevertheless, its existence is utterly dependent upon the continued belief of the larger group, and it would cease to exist when the group died out, or in the moment they decided to change their minds and drop it \u2014 it remains something entirely ontologically subjective. Searle provides a formula to represent the way this process of [pb_glossary id=\"189\"]social construction[\/pb_glossary] works in general terms. He claims our social institutions are created through many iterations of \u2018constitutive rules\u2019 that take the linguistic form of \u2018X counts as Y in context C\u2019. A group invests an object, X \u2014 the line of stones in the example above \u2014 with a symbolic meaning, Y \u2014 being a boundary marker \u2014 in a particular context, C \u2014 demarcating the limits of the homeland. As long as most everyone in the larger community behaves in a way that follows the \u2018rule,\u2019 recognizing the attachment of symbolic status Y to object X, even if they don't think consciously about it, X \u2018is\u2019 that Y for them.\r\n\r\nOur notion of value<\/em> has become abstracted from natural contexts through the action of such a process, becoming increasingly expressed in numerical units with less and less connection to things in the real world. Money, as Searle explains, has evolved from ontologically objective commodity money<\/em> like gold or silver, which most people found desirable in itself, for ornamentation if not for utility, subjected to repeated agreements of the declaration \u2018X counts as Y in context C\u2019 to become contract money<\/em> in the form of promissory notes exchangeable for specified amounts of bullion, and finally fiat money<\/em>, paper currency or electronic traces in computer banks, that governments have declared \u2018by fiat\u2019 to \u2018count as\u2019 a certain amount of value \u2014 a purely linguistic\/symbolic entity. Our conceptions of wealth<\/em>, as positive value, or of debt,<\/em> as negative value, are similarly socially constructed. Nevertheless, their hold on us is remarkably strong; anthropologist David Graeber traces it back to our sense of moral obligation, as beings who necessarily depend upon social cooperation, which includes keeping our agreements and fulfilling our responsibilities, in order to sustain our societies (Graeber, 2011).\r\n\r\nSearle\u2019s theory is developed largely in terms of a very sophisticated linguistic philosophy that focuses on the logical structure of our social institutions, emphasizing abstraction and rule-following. He is forced to develop a concept of \u2018the background\u2019 in order to account for the fact that no conscious (or, he claims, even \u2018unconscious\u2019) rule-following or other abstract thinking seems to be involved in the day-to-day participation of most people in economic or other social institutions. This background includes a set of dispositions that we \u2018evolve\u2019 as we grow up within society and receive positive or negative social feedback for our actions \u2014 dispositions toward ways of thinking and acting that will presumably thereby be \u2018sensitive to the rule structure\u2019 underlying established institutions even if it is never brought to our conscious attention (Searle, 1995, pp. 144\u2013145). In a more recent work, however, Searle reaffirms his theory\u2019s dependence on abstract logic with the claim that \u201call human social institutions are brought into existence and continue in their existence by a single logico-linguistic operation that can be applied over and over again.\u201d Searle (2010, p. 62), outlining the legal process of creating a corporation through a succession of verbal declarations or \u2018speech acts.\u2019 Later, however, he asks \u2014 since there is nothing \u2018there\u2019 to an institution before its linguistic creation, \u201cand since its creation is really just words, words, words\u201d \u2014 given that this is how all \u2018facts\u2019 regarding the existence of our social institutions come about \u2014 \u201chow do we get away with it?\u201d His short answer \u2014 which must be rooted in the processes he lumps together under the background \u2014 is that \u2018we\u2019 get away with constructing and maintaining our institutions, even some that perpetuate highly unjust social arrangements, \u201cto the extent that we can get other people to accept it.\u201d A deeper question, of course, is why people do accept the current structure of our social reality, and in answering this question Searle points to a prominent feature of most cases, \u201dpeople do not typically understand what is going on.\u201d Most people do not understand that things like money, or private property, or corporations, are human creations; rather, \u201cthey tend to think of them as part of the natural order of things, to be taken for granted in the same way that they take for granted the weather or the force of gravity\u201d (Searle, 2010, pp. 106-107). Most people simply grow up within a culture and absorb the ability to live in accord with all of its various symbolic meanings, acquiring a set of \u2018background\u2019 capacities without ever thinking about how they originated. In other words, they fail to see that a large part of the \u2018world\u2019 that they take for granted is socially constructed, maintained in its particular form simply by collective human agreement \u2014 and therefore open to re-construction if only enough of us could come to realize its true ontological status, and our own capacity to make alterations when and where we determine that they are necessary \u2014 this, however, is not something discussed to any extent by Searle.\r\n

<\/a>11.6.2 There Are Other (Social) Reasons Why We Do What We Do (and Don\u2019t Do)<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nSearle\u2019s analysis of the logical structure of our social institutions can be helpful if we are to make an effort to bring about some deliberate, fundamental changes in their structure, but it is obviously not the whole picture of how our \u2018social reality\u2019 comes about, as he admits. His explanation of how the \u2018ontologically subjective\u2019 comes into being is what is most relevant to our war against nature, since it provides necessary insight into how we might eventually end it \u2014 if our creations foster this war, we can re-create or un-create them. To fill out our understanding of \u2018why we do what we do\u2019 \u2014 and what we don\u2019t do, including get to the root of major problems \u2014 we must look beyond the \u2018single logico-linguistic operation\u2019 postulated by Searle, and draw insights from the fields of social psychology and what Eviatar Zerubavel terms \u2018cognitive sociology.\u2019 Cognitive sociology recognizes \u2018an intersubjective social world\u2019 that lies in between the personal, inner \u2018subjective\u2019 world and the manifest, \u2018objective\u2019 natural world, a world of \u2018shared mindscapes\u2019 that are neither naturally nor logically inevitable but are rather often \u2018utterly conventional\u2019 (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 9), meaning that they\u2019re largely arbitrary, established simply because groups of people come to adopt, for whatever reason, certain shared ways of thinking and acting.\r\n\r\nZerubavel recognizes, as does Searle, the role played by social feedback \u2014 often in the form of \u201ctacit pressure which we rarely even notice unless we try to resist it.\u201d In what he calls \u201cthe process of cognitive socialization,\u201d<\/em> whereby we \u201clearn to see the world through the mental lenses of particular thought communities,\u201d subtle social signals teach us things like what to pay attention to and what to ignore, what sorts of behavior to expect, and how to \u201creason in a socially appropriate manner\u201d (Zerubavel, 1997, pp. 13\u201315). He points to the Solomon Asch experiment in the social psychology of conformity \u2014 in a test of comparative line lengths, many subjects are so strongly influenced by the expressed beliefs of others that they deny the evidence of their own eyes \u2014 as a small-scale example of what he terms \u2018social optics.\u2019[footnote]Watch a video introduction to the Solomon Asch experiment by Philip Zimbardo<\/a> online.[\/footnote] It can also be seen as an illustration of the result of following \u2018the coherence theory of truth,\u2019 holding that what makes a statement \u2018true\u2019 is merely the fact that it coheres with the beliefs and statements of most of the other members of the group, not whether it corresponds with reality (a person adhering to this theory of truth can dispense with the notion of \u2018reality\u2019 altogether). He notes, in agreement with Searle\u2019s defense of the existence of a real world independent of our representations of it, that, while people from different human cultures can have different pictures of how the world is configured, this kind of \u2018optical\u2019 pluralism or \u2018perspectivism\u2019 does not preclude the existence of an \u2018objective reality\u2019. What it does is \u201ctie the validity of the different \u2018views\u2019 of that reality to particular standpoints\u201d (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 30), particular ways that groups may be situated within the larger reality, in order to \u2018see\u2019 it that way.\r\n\r\nOur ways of \u2018dividing up\u2019 the world are largely shared within our thought communities and are therefore social- this includes the tendency to draw sharp, dualistic divides between certain kinds of things (see Section 11.4.3.3<\/a>), which is especially pronounced in some cultures. That this tendency toward dualism is a cultural construction rather than a reflection of an ontological chasm within nature can be illustrated by \u201cthe fact that many young children are totally oblivious to the conventional distinction between humans and all other living creatures,\u201d an observation which \u201cmakes it quite clear that such a distinction is neither natural nor logical\u201d (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 47). Like Searle, Zerubavel draws attention to the \u201ctendency to mistake intersubjectivity for objectivity,\u201d forgetting the conventional nature of our symbols and thereby falling victim to what we will call, later on in this chapter, the [pb_glossary id=\"170\"]fallacy of misplaced concreteness[\/pb_glossary], and he emphasizes the importance of the \u2018cognitive flexibility\u2019 that results from maintaining awareness of our ability to consciously alter the meaning of our symbols, contrasting with the rigidity thought that results from \u2018reifying\u2019 our shared symbols, confusing them with objectively real things in the world (Zerubavel, 1997, pp. 78-80). People\u2019s willingness to die \u2018in order to protect their national flag\u2019 is an example of such reification, he explains, since \u201cwe sometimes confuse totemic representations of collectivities with those collectivities themselves.\u201d\r\n\r\nKari Marie Norgaard draws on Zerubavel\u2019s work in analyzing the way the residents of a small rural community in Norway \u2018don\u2019t do\u2019 something \u2014 they don\u2019t generally acknowledge the very obvious effects of climate change on their local landscape, or its implications, and thus they don\u2019t take any actions to address it. Bringing in issues of emotion, ideology, and power that are omnipresent contributors to the \u2018background\u2019 of which Searle speaks, Norgaard describes what she terms the social organization of denial<\/em>:\r\n
Everyday reality is structured through social, political, and economic institutions and produced through ordinary actions and practices, in particular following (and thereby reproducing) the interconnected cultural norms of what to pay attention to<\/em>, feel<\/em>, and talk about<\/em>. Just as social norms of attention, conversation, and emotion create the sense of what is real<\/em>, they also work to produce the sense of what is not<\/em> real, what is excluded from the immediate experience of normal reality. (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 132)<\/blockquote>\r\nZerubavel uses the story of The Emperor\u2019s New Clothes<\/em> to illustrate the social nature of the way a distortion in our collective perception of reality can be propagated: surrounding the emperor\u2019s nakedness was a \u2018conspiracy of silence\u2019, \u201cwhereby a group of people tacitly agree to outwardly ignore something of which they are all personally aware.\u201d This kind of collective denial is not just a failure to notice something but rather \u201centails a deliberate effort to refrain from\u201d noticing things \u201cthat actually beg for attention\u201d (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 9) \u2014 things so big and conspicuous that they often become referred to as the metaphorical \u2018elephant in the room.\u2019 In studying examples of collective denial as it occurs in a variety of contexts, he has observed that \u201cthe pressure toward silence gains momentum\u201d in proportion to the number of people involved in maintaining it, and increases the longer the denial is maintained (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 15). The wider the circle of conspirators, the more powerful the group pressure not to violate \u201ca collectively sacred social taboo\u201d \u2014 \"thereby evoking a heightened sense of fear\u201d should one dare to break the silence (Zerubavel, 2006, pp. 56-57). Zerubavel quotes Paul Simon in noting that such silence \u2018like a cancer grows\u2019 \u2014 \"which is indeed how an entire society may come to collectively deny its leaders\u2019 incompetence, glaring atrocities, and impending environmental disasters\u201d (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 58).\r\n\r\nOur war against nature is starting to boomerang back upon us by unleashing a variety of \u2018impending environmental disasters,\u2019 one of which is climate change. Norgaard\u2019s analysis will be valuable in helping us to understand what we\u2019re dealing with here \u2014 not only why we continue doing what we\u2019re doing when we know it worsens the problem but why we seem to be so powerless to even address it. Norgaard lived in Norway growing up and speaks fluent Norwegian. She returned there in 2000 \u201cwith a concern about global warming and an intention to conduct research on how the environmentally progressive Norwegians made sense of it\u201d (Norgaard ,2011a, p. xviii). What she found, in the community she visited \u2014 where she knew people were quite knowledgeable, abstractly, about global warming \u2014 was that, despite one of the warmest winters on record, resulting in an \u201cunprecedented\u201d need for artificial snow and loss of the ice fishing season because the lake failed to freeze, everyday life \u201cwent on as though it didn\u2019t exist\u201d; people listened to news coverage of unusual weather, and of climate talks going on internationally, but then they \u201cjust tuned in to American sitcoms.\u201d As far as she could tell, they did not spend much time thinking about how global warming was impacting their own community, and rarely brought it up in conversation; \u201cthey did not integrate this knowledge into everyday life\u201d (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 4).\r\n\r\nTo her outsider\u2019s eyes, Norgaard could detect a well-coordinated if not consciously arranged dance around an \u2018elephant in the room,\u2019 and she brought the thinking of a number of other academics focusing on such phenomena to bear on what she saw. Socially enforced \u2018norms of attention\u2019 can rope off large realms of reality from people\u2019s perception, thus constituting \u2018a particularly insidious form of social control.\u2019 This sort of attentional norm-setting is an example of Steven Lukes\u2019 \u2018third dimension of power,\u2019 she maintains, less visible than the first and second dimensions \u2014 \u2019outright coercion and the ability to set the public agenda\u2019 \u2014 but perhaps even more dangerous because of its ability to, as Lukesputs it, shape people\u2019s \u201cperceptions, cognitions, and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable\u201d \u2014 an analysis that agrees with and further fills out the answer to Searle\u2019s query, \u2018How do we get away with it\u2019?\r\n\r\nLooking more deeply into the community\u2019s failure to take or even envision any climate-change-countering actions, Norgaard found that a desire to avoid unpleasant emotions, including the unpleasant sensation of cognitive dissonance, was likely to be operative not only on the level of individual psychology but also at the social level. Cognitive dissonance is \u2018a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions\u2019 \u2014 beliefs, attitudes, worldviews \u2014 \u2018that are psychologically inconsistent\u2019 (Tavris & Aronson, 2007, p. 13), and it can cause a great deal of discomfort, so people generally do whatever they can to reduce it, usually by trying to deny one or the other of the conflicting cognitions. For example, thinking about all the bad effects on one\u2019s health while continuing to smoke cigarettes creates dissonance, so minimizing the health risk by emphasizing smoking\u2019s prevention of weight gain might be one way of reducing it. Belying their image as \u201ca simple, nature-loving people who are concerned with equality and human rights,\u201d Norwegians are now among the larger per capita contributors to global warming, the country having tripled its oil and gas production over the decade preceding her study to become the second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 88), permitting them to enjoy quite a high standard of living, and yet, by the time of Norgaard\u2019s study, they had done \u201cnot so much\u201d to meet their emissions reduction goals despite their awareness of the consequences of climate change for less fortunate nations \u2014 a thought that must be suppressed because of its threat to personal and cultural values. According to Norgaard, members of the community were able to maintain their distance from the issue of global warming \u201cvia a cultural toolkit of emotion management techniques\u201d and the employment of \u201csocial narratives\u201d of national identity (Norgaard, 2011a, pp. 213-214); they tended to hold fast to old traditions, maintaining a sense of the past within the present, while refraining from thinking too much about the future, telling and retelling stories of \u2018Mythic Norway,\u2019 displaying images of an unspoiled land and emphasizing the small size of the country in relation to other greenhouse gas emitters \u2014 all serving to minimize their responsibility in contributing to the global problem and keeping the dissonance at bay.\r\n\r\nThough not the focus of her study, Norgaard also uncovered efforts to avoid \u201cguilt, fear and helplessness\u201d through similar maneuvers in the United States, where she found the thought of climate change to be just so much \u201cbackground noise.\u201d One of her young American interviewees even posed the crux of her angst as follows: \u201cHow many of us can really imagine that the war against nature will really be over<\/em> and we will come out alive in a world where continuing ecological destruction is not the order of the day?\u201d (Norgaard ,2011a, p. 197, emphasis added). Moreover, Norgaard worries that, \u201cwith the dynamics of global capitalism in which gaps between rich and poor increase,\u201d the tendency toward denial of mounting ecological and social problems will likely increase for those with the economic ability \u201cto build physical, mental, and cultural walls around our daily lives,\u201d and she muses as to whether this kind of denial may be \u201ca new psychological predicament for privileged people\u201d (Norgaard, 2011b, p. 410).\r\n\r\nKeeping unpleasant emotions at a distance by enabling collective denial of a problem does not contribute to its solution, however \u2014 it prevents it. As Zerubavel observes, \u201cconspiracies of silence prevent us from confronting, and consequently solving, our problems.\u201d He explains:\r\n
it is precisely the effort to collectively deny their ubiquitous presence that makes \u2018elephants\u2019 so big. As soon as we acknowledge it they almost magically begin to shrink. And only then, when we no longer collude to ignore it, can we get the proverbial elephant out of the room. (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 87)<\/blockquote>\r\nThe most effective way of dealing with cognitive dissonance is to confront the problem head-on and start taking the steps that are needed to solve it \u2014 which are often well known, but for some reason or other need to be avoided, often in order to maintain a position of privilege, to keep up with others\u2019 expectations, or out of fear of what significant change to our human status quo might bring. The status of nature is deteriorating all the time now as a result of our collective human actions, however, so this elephant is getting harder and harder to ignore \u2014 and besides, won\u2019t we all feel a great relief when we can stop expending so much energy pretending it isn\u2019t there?\r\n

<\/a>11.6.3 Acting to Reverse Course: Overcoming Denial, Correcting Our Metaphors, Righting the Ontological Reversal, Rebalancing Our Cognition<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nAlong with many others, Norgaard claims that \u201cclimate change is arguably the single most significant environmental issue of our time\u201d (Norgaard, 2011b, p. 399. I would argue the point, insofar as the cumulative impacts of our \u2018war against nature\u2019 include but far exceed climate change, which is just the most dramatic and rapidly progressing result of this misguided \u2018war.\u2019 Our direct assault on nonhuman life and the natural landscape has not let up even in the face of an accelerating extinction event that may be precipitating ecological collapse around the globe, and changes in planetary chemistry have already gone well beyond their consequences simply for the planet\u2019s climate. In examining the way the residents of a Norwegian community were 'paralyzed\u2019 (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 208) in the face of obvious, locally significant climate change, however, Norgaard has uncovered some of the psychological and social processes that are currently operative to \u2018keep everything the same\u2019 pretty much everywhere, maintaining our life-threatening trajectory even as scientists document its disastrous effects in minute detail. The purpose of doing such a study, presumably, was, at the very least, to help us figure out how to release the \u2018paralysis\u2019 and get some large-scale movement going in a different direction, just as the aim of this chapter is not only to make its readers more aware of some of the whys and hows of our \u2018war against nature\u2019 but also to raise the possibility of ending the war, by seeking alternatives to the things that stoke its furnaces now, of which one is denial itself.\r\n\r\nJust as there are national and other group narratives that play and replay to distract from visible contradictions in Norgaard\u2019s Norwegian community, there are images, narratives and metaphors that explain and justify this war deeply embedded within our globalizing culture, blocking our ability to see nonhuman nature in any other way than as rightfully the spoils of the conquering species, the supposed \u2018winners\u2019 of this war. Many of these depictions have been found to be quite misleading in light of contemporary science, but since much of their effect occurs below the level of consciousness, and their implications are continually reinforced socially, it can be quite difficult to correct them in people\u2019s minds. As it becomes more and more necessary to speak about what\u2019s happening, however, discussing the errors and confusions that these images, narratives and metaphors contribute to our \u2018social optics\u2019 should also become easier to do, and once we are made fully conscious of them, they are likely to lose much of their power.\r\n\r\nBy considering the extent to which our metaphors structure our thinking, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson lay some groundwork for a radical revisioning of western thought in their impressive tome Philosophy in the Flesh. On the basis of recent discoveries in cognitive science, they maintain that our minds are not separate from but are rather a result of our embodiment, highly structured by the organization of our perceptual and motor systems, and that our concepts are largely metaphorical, based on relationships we discover in the real world as we explore it with our bodies and then imaginatively project into logical entailments among our thoughts. The common notion of causality, for example, usually envisioned as the application of an outside force to effect a change in the properties of an object, is the likely result of projecting our human experience of forcibly imparting momentum to a billiard ball, made general and presumably universal through our capacity for abstraction. They claim that the vast majority of our thinking processes are below the level of our conscious awareness, making up what they call the \u2018cognitive unconscious,\u2019 but they maintain that through empirical study we can become more aware of the way these processes structure our thinking, and as we do so we can learn, to some extent, how to alter, update, or reprioritize the metaphors we import into our thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 537).\r\n\r\nAnd there is a powerful metaphor at the heart of Descartes\u2019 metaphysics that we desperately need to correct, because it still seems to be operative within the culture that is enveloping the globe: it conveys the notion of a disembodied reason \u2014 pure \u2018mind,\u2019 supposedly inherent only in us human beings \u2014 confronting something of a completely different order, a mindless mechanism, lacking any purposiveness within \u2014 pure \u2018matter\u2019 \u2014 that may be endlessly manipulated, by us humans, from without. Physics and biology have both come a long way since the ideas of Bacon, Descartes and Newton; physicists have discovered that atoms aren\u2019t like billiard balls at all, for example, and biologists know that organisms must be conceived as living systems, quite different from mindless machines. [footnote] For an accessible explanation of the shift in scientific thinking, see Capra (1996).[\/footnote] A growing number of scientists and philosophers, therefore, have turned their attention to correcting this mistaken conception. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has demonstrated that \u2018reason\u2019 cannot be separated from body and emotion, at least not without seriously impairing the judgment of patients who have damage to the emotional circuitry in their brains. In Descartes\u2019 Error<\/em>, Damasio points out, not only that it was a mistake to take \u201cclockwork mechanics as a model for life processes,\u201d but that Descartes had his metaphysics exactly backwards in presuming that the mind was a \u201cthinking thing\u201d separate from the body \u2013 instead of \u201cI think, therefore I am,\u201d conscious thought arose somewhere during the process of biological evolution \u2014 \u201din the beginning it was being, and only later was it thinking\u201d (Damasio, 1994, p. 248). What exactly we mean by \u2018consciousness\u2019 may be endlessly debated; however, in the words of Evan Thompson, \u201ca purely external or outside view of structure and function is inadequate for life,\u201d since \u201ca living being is not sheer exteriority.\u201d Instead, as noted earlier, embodying an inwardness, an \u201cimmanent purposiveness\u201d (Thompson, 2007, p. 225) within itself. A better image for the living organism, human or nonhuman, then \u2014 as replacement for the Cartesian wind-up toy or the heap of colliding billiard-ball atoms \u2014 would be a dynamic system that is both autopoietic <\/em>\u2014 self-organizing \u2014 and cognitive <\/em>\u2014 intelligently related to its environment; in other words, a being for which a \u2018self\u2019 and a \u2018world\u2019 emerge simultaneously, as it interacts with its environment in the process of staying alive (Thompson, 2007, p.158). Seizing hold of our metaphors, myths, and \u2018imaginative visions\u2019 and correcting some of them in light of contemporary science was also a central concern of the late philosopher Mary Midgley. In The Myths We Live By <\/em>she adds her voice in criticism of the Cartesian vision, asserting just how much \u201cwe profoundly need to get rid of something\u201d\u2013the notion of the valuelessness, if not the complete lifelessness, of the natural world that was ushered in by the mechanistic, reductionistic science of three to four centuries ago (Midgley, 2004, p. 250). The time has come to purge these dangerously misleading metaphors from our minds.\r\n\r\nIf a new image is needed to capture our more sophisticated understanding of the individual living being, however, there is also a pressing need for us to update the way we picture the larger system that keeps us alive. It seems there is a powerful image, taken from neoclassical \u2014 which now dominates \u2018mainstream\u2019\u2014 economics, that is responsible for structuring much of our contemporary thought. It is an image of a circular flow of money and commodities, regulated by a perfectly competitive market, and operating as a kind of perpetual-motion machine propelled by the maximization of utility and profit \u2014 whatever does not have a place in the incessant cycling is considered an inconsequential \u2018externality\u2019 and disregarded. While the mechanistic mindset of the left hemisphere is implicit in this conceptualization, it is the wholly abstract realm of our words and symbols \u2014 including that most powerful of all our symbols, money \u2014 that is the left hemisphere\u2019s proudest achievement, and it is the possibility of conceptually taking flight into that abstract economic realm that reinforces the Cartesian illusion that we can escape the constraints of the real world altogether.\r\n\r\nSearle\u2019s analysis offers a helpful vocabulary for describing what is happening here: we have effected an ontological reversal in our minds. Many people do not grasp the crucial distinction between the ontologically subjective and the ontologically objective \u2014 they don\u2019t get the difference, nor the difference it makes.<\/em> In essence, they are falling victim to what Alfred North Whitehead identified as \u2018the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,\u2019 mistaking the abstract for the concrete, taking the concept itself for the underlying reality from which it is derived. Previous generations of humans must have grasped the fundamental ontological order of things \u2014 aware of the reality of the natural world, and our dependency upon it, even if they conceived of themselves as engaged in a \u2018battle\u2019 to wrest grain from the soil or fish from the sea. But a large number of people now to seem to share in a mindset that takes such ontologically subjective \u2018objects\u2019 as \u2018the economy,\u2019 or the corporation, or the nation-state, or just \u2018money\u2019 itself, to be somehow more existentially substantial than the living organisms making up the biosphere. Unless they contribute to the circulation of money in some way, they are assumed to be simply \u2018externalities\u2019 that we can get by without. To the vast majority of people living in industrialized societies, therefore, \u2018the economy\u2019 is of far more concern than the ecology\u2013in contrast to land-based peoples, of course, for whom the two are necessarily inseparable. Most Westerners\u2013and now a growing number of people on the planet as a result of economic and cultural globalization\u2013having accepted the Cartesian metaphysics \u2018unconsciously\u2019 at the level of metaphor, seem to conceive of themselves as separate from nature and able to live independently of it, in the Platonic realm of our symbols. <\/em>They are taking the sphere of our collectively accepted and mutually reinforced beliefs and expectations\u2013the world of our social construction, centered on an image of money and goods revolving in an endlessly turning circle, detached from any larger context\u2013as being more \u2018real\u2019 than our actual planetary reality. We need to learn to \u2018see through\u2019 the money game to what\u2019s really happening on the ground, and do the right thing there.\r\n\r\nLakoff and Johnson pick up where the analyses of Searle and McGilchrist leave off, pointing out what\u2019s wrong with the kind of thinking inculcated by mainstream economics, which they term \u2018the theory of rational action\u2019. \u2018Rationality\u2019 itself is construed in terms of translating whatever is deemed desirable or valuable into numbers\u2013performing the ultimate abstraction by converting all quality into sheer quantity, in other words\u2013and then reasoning on the basis of the metaphor \u2018well-being is wealth\u2019 so as to \u2018maximize\u2019 these empty placeholders. The utilitarian ethicists of the 19th<\/sup> century, while similarly fascinated with mathematics, at least construed well-being in units of pleasure or happiness, but we 21st<\/sup> century humans of industrial culture now think almost solely in units of currency. Moreover, what are taken to be the rational actors in the current scheme of things are often themselves ontologically subjective, socially constructed superorganismic entities like corporations and nation-states, which are conceived as being in competition with one another in a race to garner the largest sum of such symbolic wealth. From a perspective that willingly accepts all the layers of projected symbolic status required to divide our social reality up in this way, such an approach may seem rational. \u201cFrom an ecological and cultural perspective,\u201d however, Lakoff and Johnson observe, \u201cit is profoundly irrational, that is, destructive of other vital forms of well-being\u2013the long-term well-being of the natural world, of indigenous forms of cultural life, and of values crucial to the human spirit\u201d (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 532).\r\n\r\nA contrasting type of rationality is what ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood has described as\u00a0[pb_glossary id=\"166\"]ecological rationality[\/pb_glossary].<\/em> It \u201cincludes that higher-order form of critical, prudential, self-critical reason which scrutinizes the match or fit between an agent\u2019s choices, actions and effects and that agent\u2019s overall desires, interests and objectives as they require certain ecological conditions for their fulfillment<\/em>\u201d (Plumwood, 2002: 68, emphasis added). And in the interests of promoting such an ecological rationality, I propose substituting, at the center of our thought, instead of the contextless, self-enclosed circular flow of abstractions, the following image invoked by Aldo Leopold. \u201cLand,\u201d he tells us, \u201cis not merely soil.\u201d Rather:\r\n
it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life. (Leopold, 1949, p. 252)<\/blockquote>\r\nThis \u2018fountain of energy\u2019 powering all life, surging upward to circulate throughout the \u2018biotic pyramid,\u2019 rising within trophic levels from soil to plant to grazer to predator (see Section 11.3.4<\/a>), is not something tangible that can be \u2018seen\u2019 directly in any landscape, of course. To that extent, the image is like the circular \u2018engine\u2019 of economics, a representation, an abstract conceptualization \u2014 but it is a conceptualization of something real.<\/em> The relationships that are described scientifically, though represented abstractly in terms of producers and consumers, trophic levels and food webs, are not arbitrary social constructions; they can be discovered in the structure of ecosystems as different as rainforests and deserts and coral reefs, ecosystems that are themselves, in Searle\u2019s terminology, ontologically objective. We should learn to respect both the systems and the structure, since how well we can mesh our lives with these will ultimately determine how we will sustain our lives in the years ahead.\r\n\r\nThe fixation of our collective attention upon the abstract symbols of economics serves to conceal from conscious awareness the destruction we are wreaking on the natural world, just as metaphysically \u2018reducing\u2019 nonhuman organisms to machines or collections of billiard-ball atoms conceals their aliveness and intrinsic value as centers of self-organizing agency. The very language that we use when speaking of the natural world \u2014 so often cast in terms of resources or as the provider of \u2018ecosystem services\u2019 just for us\u2013further blocks our ability to see living beings and their ecosystemic patterns of interaction as they are in and of themselves. It is a maneuver that reduces the dissonance we feel if we admit to ourselves the degree of nonhuman distress and suffering our actions are creating, a way to achieve and maintain denial. Eileen Crist focuses attention on our use of the term resources<\/em>, calling it \u201ca corrupt concept which continues to masquerade as merely a descriptive word,\u201d a concept that \u201creconfigures the natural world in terms of how it is usable, thereby entirely bypassing \u2026 nature\u2019s intrinsic standing, both as being and as value\u201d (Crist, 2014, p. 7). Continual linguistic employment of this term could be considered another example of the \u201csocial organization of denial,\u201d insofar as the awareness and agency of nonhuman organisms are obscured or erased by collective collusion, and its influence is pervasive. As Crist observes, \u201cthe transfiguration of the natural world into resources has come to shape human thought and action at such an encompassing level that people largely perceive the natural world through this single framework: of how it is usable and\/or profitable<\/em>\u201d (Crist, 2014, p.7; emphasis added).\r\n\r\nCrist\u2019s observation serves to reconnect us with McGilchrist\u2019s detection of the role of the left hemisphere in our escalating collective environmental destructiveness, since in his view its fundamental attitude is a use-orientation toward whatever is in front of us. As our technologies of brain imaging become increasingly refined, it is likely that a much more nuanced picture of the relationship between our two cerebral hemispheres will emerge\u2013 a possibility that McGilchrist seems to acknowledge at the end of his heavily annotated book. He maintains, however, that what he has presented offers, at the very least, a model or metaphor for two \u201cconsistent ways of being\u201d that can be tracked over the development of western culture, two ways of being that \u201care fundamentally opposed\u201d (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 461). They are at least two identifiably quite different clusters of propensities that appear relevant to our dealings with nature, so we might want to take to heart his descriptions of the characteristic \u201cways of being\u201d of each of our two hemispheres, and strive to rebalance the contributions of each, such that they come into play appropriately within their different realms. There are occasions when what he describes as the workings of the left hemisphere are precisely what we need \u2014 when we\u2019re doing scientific work, or analyzing an argument, for example \u2014 but we must not allow the talents of our right hemisphere to atrophy, or be overshadowed by their opposites. McGilchrist claims that the right hemisphere has \u201cprimacy\u201d over the left, since, being open to the initial presencing of what\u2019s around us, it \u201cstarts the process of bringing the world into being,\u201d and is thus \u201cmore in touch with reality.\u201d The left hemisphere, on the other hand, \u201cis a useful department to send things to for processing, but the things only have meaning once again when returned to the right hemisphere\u201d \u2014 where \u201cthe parts, once seen, are subsumed again in the whole\u201d (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 195). If the proper sequence of mental processing is thus RH > LH > RH, as McGilchrist suggests, then it means that the outcomes of the \u2018single logico-linguistic process\u2019 of which Searle speaks \u2014 if this is indeed what generates the institutional structure of our social reality \u2014 must be reintegrated back into our understanding of the larger context, in all its concrete ecological reality, such that those outcomes which are further disruptive of the natural world will be rejected.\r\n\r\nMoreover, as McGilchrist explains, one way \u2014 the way of the right hemisphere \u2014 is:\r\n
to allow things to be present<\/em> to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their changeability and impermanence, and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole which is forever in flux. In this world, we, too, feel connected to what we experience, part of that whole, not confined in subjective isolation from a world that is viewed as objective. The other [\u2014 the way of the left hemisphere \u2014 is] to step outside the flow of experience and \u2018experience\u2019 our experience in a special way: to re-present<\/em> the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world and one another. This world is explicit, abstracted, compartmentalized, fragmented, static (though its bits can be re-set in motion, like a machine), essentially lifeless. From this world we feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful.\r\n\r\n\u2026 the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself. (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 93)<\/blockquote>\r\nAs the above passages suggest, an additional benefit of taking the right hemisphere approach is that it will enable us to become the humans who experience<\/em> ourselves in relation to nature in a wholly different manner than one of coldly utilizing its resources. If McGilchrist is right, this will relieve the loneliness of \u2018detachment\u2019 that presently seems to haunt our global enterprise, and may even lead to experiencing the \u2018awe\u2019 with which some become infused in the presence of nature.\r\n

<\/a>11.7 Becoming Reflexive: Rethinking \u2018Who\u2019 We Are, Breaking Free of a Constricting Paradigm, Ending the \u2018War\u2019<\/h1>\r\nCongratulations \u2014 if you\u2019ve read this far into the chapter, you already have insight into how we might begin to live more intelligently on our planet, and thus make all of our lives much more secure. You have achieved a degree of [pb_glossary id=\"187\"]reflexivity[\/pb_glossary], the ability to see yourself, together with all of us in our global human society, engaged in the active process of constructing <\/em>our social reality. You now realize we\u2019ve got a lot more choices than we\u2019re currently allowing ourselves to imagine! We are biological organisms, one result of a long process of life unfolding on this planet. We know we are NOT mechanistically determined to continue to behave in predictable patterns like the billiard balls in simplistic physics experiments, nor dissociated rational minds that are \u2018locked into\u2019 following chains of linear logic regardless of where they lead. We see that, as behaviorally flexible primates, we have many more degrees of freedom through which we may exercise moral agency over what we choose to do. Moreover, we realize that we can also choose <\/em>who we are \u2014 we can become the humans who choose NOT to wage this war against nature <\/em>any longer. Since it is largely our socially reinforced set of beliefs, expectations, mental imagery, and attitudinal orientation that keeps us on our current path, undercutting our own security in a \u2018war\u2019 that makes no sense, once we get past our denial we can strive consciously to undo some of the mental straightjacketing we have been inflicting on ourselves, along the lines discussed in the previous section. Even if we don\u2019t succeed in stopping all the destruction that\u2019s already been set in motion, if we can start being honest with ourselves about what went wrong, and why, and take a shot at fixing things \u2014 well, at least we will have tried.\r\n\r\nIn this chapter, we have examined, in a quick overview, some salient aspects of what is currently known about living nature, conceived as life flowing over space and time, and traced the likely path of how we humans came to be doing the kinds of things we are doing to nature now, many of which can be conceptualized as waging a \u2018war\u2019 against it. As close relatives of the chimpanzees (let\u2019s not forget our equally close relationship with bonobos, however), it is likely that we all inherited a dualizing tendency arising out of the need of a social animal to defend its \u2018own\u2019 group by sharply differentiating it from all \u2018others.\u2019 Moreover, we do possess characteristics that make us different from other animals, one being our exceptional facility with symbolization, a difference that has probably always been recognized in human cultures around the world. An orientation that seems to have developed especially strongly within cultures affected by Western thought, however, is one that conceives of us humans being not only distinctive but metaphysically separate from and superior to the rest of the living world, a dualistic opposite to what is often conceived as a dead, lifeless backdrop of \u2018resources\u2019 expressly for our use or a biological machine having no other purpose beyond supplying us with \u2018services.\u2019 This overall orientation \u2014 the engagement of attention in exploitation of a backgrounded \u2018other\u2019 \u2014 can be discovered at work within the intraspecific human relationships of colonization, racism and other group-on-group oppression, but it has been flourishing with little or no widely recognized critique as yet when turned against nonhuman beings and nature more generally.[footnote]See, e.g. Plumwood (1993; 2002); also see Caviola et al. (2019).[\/footnote] The roots of this orientation apparently trace to which cognitive connections happen to be dominant in our brains, within neural networks that may have considerable potential for flexibility. Whatever its neuropsychological underpinnings, however, this way of framing the world has found resonance with quite explicit philosophical positions and is constantly reinforced by ubiquitous misleading metaphors that need to be updated. Our backgrounding of the \u2018other\u2019 in order to enjoy the privileged position of dominance is often a maneuver about which we prefer to remain in denial, so perhaps, it\u2019s time to name this attitude explicitly; it\u2019s known as anthropocentrism<\/em>, a constricting paradigm asserting, of just about everything, \u2018it\u2019s all about us,\u2019 a narrowness of vision that has become a shackle on our thinking.\r\n\r\nIn an essay featured in the journal Science<\/em> during the closing weeks of 2018, a time during which many of us were still absorbing the shocking news concerning the planet\u2019s plummeting biodiversity, Eileen Crist targeted \u2018a pervasive worldview\u2019 that legitimizes and sustains \u2018the trends of more\u2019 \u2014 more people, more consumption, more concrete \u2014 that are driving our assault on nature. Human supremacy\u2013\u2019the belief system of superiority and entitlement\u2019\u2013is manifested in such assumptions as \u2018the human is invested with powers of life and death over all other beings and with the prerogative to control and manage all geographical space\u2019; it is \u201cthe underlying big story that normalizes the trends of more, and the consequent displacements and exterminations of nonhumans \u2014 as well as of humans who oppose that worldview\u201d (Crist, 2018, p. 1242). Who is it that is fighting our war against nature? Whatever its combination of contributory factors, the war is fought under the banner of this sort of anthropocentric [pb_glossary id=\"160\"]anthropocentric[\/pb_glossary] self-glorification, or from within its shadow, the part of us that would prefer to stay in denial about what we\u2019re doing and why it might matter. Crist calls on us to \u2018reimagine the human,\u2019 in such a way that we no longer identify 'human greatness\u2019 with the domination of nonhumans, individually or within ecosystems. We have it within us to make the 'rational response' to this \u2018present-day ecological emergency\u2019 (Crist, 2018) \u2014 it\u2019s clearly a matter of \u201cscaling down and pulling back\u201d (Crist, 2018, p. 1243) \u2014 and it is also the ethical response, evoked as we begin to more fully apprehend life on Earth.\r\n\r\nAs Ben Mylius has pointed out, the anthropocentric paradigm seriously constrains our ability to take in what is out there in the world before us; even a purely descriptive form of anthropocentrism, one that stops short of making claims about moral superiority but that, for example, restricts the definition of terms like \u2018consciousness\u2019 to conditions applicable only to the human case, constitutes a \u201cfailure of conceptual imagination,\u201d \u201ca failure to work hard enough for a truly capacious frame of reference\u201d (Mylius, 2018, p. 187), thereby curtailing what we are prepared to discover in the world around us. The message from science, moreover, as researchers have begun looking into it, is that there is tremendous continuity as well as diversity in the world of life, and no evidence at all for a sharp discontinuity that could justify humans proclaiming some sort of metaphysical superiority over everything else. It becomes a failure of moral imagination as well, of course, when we try to justify harms to nonhuman nature by mentally erasing or psychologically denying the inner lives of other living beings. As Crist observes, this worldview \u2018blocks the human mind from recognizing the intrinsic existence and value of nonhumans and their habitats\u2019; it also, as she recognizes, deprives us of the ability \u2018to experience awe for this living planet\u2019 \u2014 something that we all might undergo if we opened ourselves to the immensity and magnificence of life as it has manifested over the last four billion years \u2014 and an experience that, she claims, should it be rediscovered, \u201cwould galvanize the world into action\u201d in opposing the mounting mass extinction currently in progress (Crist, 2018, p. 1242). Anthropocentrism, in the widest sense, means we humans are always the center of every focus, that there is nothing greater than our burgeoning human enterprise. But there is something greater\u2013the Biosphere, of which we are but a part. And thus the larger question before us, as we head farther and farther into the Anthropocene, is not whether we are endangering \u2018human civilization\u2019 \u2014 of course we are \u2014 but rather just how far down the anthropogenic extinction spasm now in progress is going to knock life on Earth.\r\n\r\nPerhaps most seriously in terms of its consequences for us, however, is the effect of our presumed human supremacy in blinding us to \u2018the wisdom of limitations,\u2019 as Crist puts it. If every binary choice between human and nonhuman interests must always be made in favor of the human, and if every human life is always seen as much, much more valuable than any nonhuman life, then it should not be surprising that we have ended up with the astoundingly skewed ratio of almost 50 times as much biomass tied up in our single species plus our livestock as is found in all the remaining wild terrestrial mammals on this Earth (Bar-On et al., 2018). But how can there be \u2018too much of a good thing,\u2019 when it\u2019s supposed to be the best kind of thing of all? One gigantic \u2018elephant in the living room\u2019 when it comes to our war on nature, a topic that the forces of denial have for all too long made taboo in polite conversation, is the unsustainable trajectory of our human population growth, which is now in itself crowding out nonhuman nature in many parts of the world (Crist et al., 2017), and which, when multiplied by the growing per capita consumption of \u2018resources\u2019 made possible by increasing affluence, is going to be a focus of increasing concern as we approach 2050; the situation does not bode well for any of the planet\u2019s lifeforms, human or nonhuman alike. But our concern in this chapter has been with addressing the processes that gave rise to and perpetuate the war against nature, for the purpose of ending it; its current scope and predictable future consequences are topics for Chapter 12<\/a>.\r\n

<\/a>Resources and References<\/h1>\r\n

Review<\/a><\/strong><\/h2>\r\n
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Key Points<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

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