The Blue Notebook

Nature and Madness is the provocative title of a 1982 book by Paul Shepard, referred to by some as the “godfather of ecopsychology.” The introduction begins like this:

My question is: why do men persist in destroying their habitat? I have, at times, believed the answer was a lack of information, faulty technique, or insensibility….At mid twentieth century there was a widely shared feeling that we only needed to bring businessmen, cab drivers, housewives, and politicians together with the right mix of oceanographers, soils experts, or foresters in order to set things right.

In time, even with the attention of the media and a windfall of synthesizers, popularizers, gurus of ecophilosophy, and other champions of ecology, in spite of some new laws and indications that environmentalism is taking its place as a new turtle on the political log, nothing much has changed. (Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, p. 1)

I just love the part about “the new turtle on the political log.” I wonder if, 25 years down the line,  Shepard would still have the same conclusion, with climate change on the front page and governments voted out over global warming (as recently happened in Australia). My sense is that he probably would still be saying “nothing much has changed.”

The book is tough sledding, even for someone with a decent education and a certain tolerance for ambiguity. As near as I can tell, though, Shepard’s main thesis applies even more today than it did in 1982. He traces the development of (Western, European) civilzation by looking at four major evolutionary changes:

• Hunter-gather societies transition to villages and farms
• The Judaeo-Christian world view emerges in the dry landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean
• Puritans search for victory over the messy physicalities of procreation and decay during the Protestant Reformation
• Crowded cities become the norm, and industrial economies emerge

The thoughtful person, looking at this list, can sort of guess where he’s going with it. Each stage along the way further distanced us from early exposure to the Otherness of animals, plants, and the natural world. From the psychological point of view, Shepard says, a person thus emerges into adolescence without the grounding, the perspective, the intuitive sense of connection provided by growing up in close contact with the wonder and brutality of nature. So it should be no surprise, he says, that we seek to destroy the very thing we have been so cruelly denied.

There’s so much more to say here, but I need to take this book back to the library or they’re going to come and put a lien on my house. Basically what I’m getting from Shepard at this point is: modern society’s behavior can all be boiled down to a case of arrested development. Those somber men in suits, our supposed leaders, who take without giving and then act like they’ve done us a big favor? Totally stuck at a pre-adolescent stage of development.

Well, that certainly explains a lot, doesn’t it? More on this soon.

This fall I’ve been continuing with a little project I started last year: putting plants and parts of plants in the scanner and seeing what comes out. Leaves changing color are particularly satisfying; when I cut out the background they take on a 3D effect, to the point where someone visitng once went up to touch the picture, thinking I’d just pasted the leaf on there. (Here’s the view from my window with the witch hazel tree in the middle distance just starting to turn.) It’s a simple image, but one I haven’t gotten tired of studying yet.

Someone who’s been doing environmental work in the non-profit sector recently suggested I look at George Lakoff’s book Thinking Points–A Progressive’s Handbook–Communicating Our American Values and Vision. What a gift that recommendation was.

Lakoff is a professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Berkeley (see his not-too-bad Wikipedia write-up), and back in the late 70s when I was getting an MA in linguistics, he and former spouse Robin Lakoff were heroes to us for bringing meaning and social context into the dominant linguistic paradigm at the time, Chomsky’s transformational grammar. This makes it all the more meaningful, encountering his ideas again in such a different and far-removed context.

The non-profit think tank he founded has a website, Rockridge Nation, where I found this wonderful post: Ask Rockridge: How Can We Make ‘Green’ an Identity?.  Lakoff’s ideas, and the discussion about how they could be applied to conservation topics, has forced me to re-think my entire approach to conservation writing — in what I think will be a very positive way. For more details, see my post at the end of the comments section for the above-referenced article. And I plan to post some examples written using his approach as well.

Thought I’d post another teaser for my eventual full report on this summer’s weekend at the beach with microscope and plankton net.

This little beastie is at least clearly identifiable. An amphipod like this is actually visible to the naked eye, and fills the entire field of view at 40x magnification. Although I don’t think this is one, the most familiar amphipod is the so-called sand flea or sand hopper.

I’ve been reading a lot of books on conservation lately, and even though I agree for the most part with their stated aims, I’m having a hard time getting excited about the various reasons people give for putting up with the cost, inconvenience, and in some cases rude awakening that a true commitment to conservation might require. Here are some of the reasons I’ve come across lately:

Preserve our natural heritage for our children and future generations.

The sad fact is that we are programmed almost down to the cellular level for short-term gain. The history of our country is based on the “use it up, move on” ethos. And we haven’t even started talking about money yet. The profit motive is what has powered most of the devastatingly efficient large scale environmental degradation efforts of the last 100 years.

There are economic advantages to going green.

John Lombard, in his book Saving Puget Sound, makes the point that reducing conservation efforts to just laws or just money won’t work. “Something that affects our lives in so many ways has to make sense in non-economic terms as well.”

If we put things back the way they were 100 years ago (or before the Europeans came) everything will be great again.

Sounds too much like empty nostalgia, wishful thinking. Doesn’t take into account one very big change that isn’t going away any time soon: three million people in the Puget Sound area, projected to double in the next 50 to 100 years.

When nature becomes degraded, something of what it means to be human is lost as well.

This is the main idea behind ecopsychology. I like this point of view, as it gets down to the fundamentals. I like it so much I’m taking it as the organizing principle for my own work. But it’s not effective as an argument for convincing other people about the importance of conservation. We don’t want to hear that we’re addicted to rampant materialism, and that everything we do supports the reduction of the natural world to an eventual theme park. We especially don’t want to be told that the only way we’ll be truly happy is to “get back to the garden.”

We’re losing valuable ecosystems.

This line of reasoning can be dramatic and somewhat effective. But that’s because I know what an ecosystem is. I have been told so many times by conservationists that this or that habitat is slowly disappearing. We haven’t done a good job, however, explaining why this is such a tragedy. We talk in hushed tones, nod gravely, try not to let despair overtake us–but who cares about eel grass beds anyway, and why should I lose sleep over the loss of a few sub-alpine meadows? It’s not enough just to say these things are disappearing, and then expect the people we are trying to convince to immediately get the whole picture and feel the same sense of impending doom we do. (By we, in case it isn’t obvious, I mean people working in conservation). Which brings me to my last point:

Everything’s connected.

Now, maybe it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of E. O. Wilson lately, but I think that with this approach we are finally getting somewhere. Certainly, as an organizing strategy for a concerted campaign to inform people and change their behavior, it has just as many problems as some of the other reasons to care that I have so cavalierly dismissed. But I like it because I think that of all the possible ways to approach conservation, this might be the explanation that is the easiest for people to understand. They won’t get it right off, for the same reason that “we’re losing valuable ecosystems” doesn’t connect.

But I’m just wondering: if we took “everything’s connected” as a theme, and just stayed on that message, piling up example after example of how the web of life works (or doesn’t work as the case may be)–without even saying anything about conservation or “you’ve made a mess now clean it up” or anything like that–I’m just wondering if that wouldn’t eventually give people a generated-from-within reason to care.

In a box of prepared slides from La Bonita’s second-grade classroom, I found this stained cross-section of a woody plant stem. I’ve got an 8×12 of it taped to the wall above my computer, and like to contemplate the complexities whenever Ergonomix kicks me off the keyboard.