Twenty-One Acres of Common Ground: A Philosophical Memoir

12 October 2017

Daniel C. Fouke Professor Emeritus Department of Philosophy University of Dayton 300 College Park Dayton, Ohio 45360-1546

Copyright 2017

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Table of Contents

PROLOGUE 1

CHAPTER 1: THE WOODS 6

CHAPTER 2: LEARNING TO SEE 17

CHAPTER 3: THE THOUGHTS OF INSECTS AND SPIDERS 45

CHAPTER 4: THE SEARCH 75

CHAPTER 5: HUMAN LIFE AND THE LIFE OF THE SOIL 93

CHAPTER 6: ENCOUNTERS ON THE LAND 109

CHAPTER 7: THE INNER LIVES OF ANIMALS 130

CHAPTER 8: OUR VEGETAL KIN 182

CHAPTER 9: SEEING AND FEELING 211

CHAPTER 10: THE VIEW FROM WHERE WE ARE 231

BIBLIOGRAPHY 251

NOTES 284

4 Prologue

Having settled ourselves in our new home, wreck that it is, we exit through the front door and make our way across the concrete parking lot. It extends, twenty feet wide, across the southern front of the house and turns into a parking lot on the west side. On our left we pass the driveway—a gravel road with parallel strips of concrete textured with grooves for traction. It swept straight down like a ski slope to the street 350 feet below. On this driveway, a previous owner of the house, put his newly purchased tractor into neutral. It began to roll towards the driveway. Unable to put it into gear, he hit the driveway picking up speed as he found that his breaks were too weak to stop him. Still unable to stop when he hit the street, he crashed into the trees and down a ravine on the other side. As a result of this accident, he lost one of his legs. I am reminded of this accident as we set off up the steep road cut into the hill that takes us 189 yards to the plateau on the top of our property, machetes and tent in hand. Once we reach this spot we pass through a 7-acre field, now growing alfalfa, and reach the 11 acres of wood.

The wood is divided by a wide mowed path that circles around it. On one side, it divides the largest part of the woods from land that borders a series of ravines, some of which have springs. Over time, we will notice a difference between the rich loamy soil in the ravines and the flatter portion of the wood and field. We will learn that some 25 years ago, a previous owner had illegally stripped off and sold the topsoil of every part of our property except the ravines, flattening the hill in preparation for a housing development that he was unable to get approved.

The ravines aside, all the other soil is hard clay which the annual shedding of leaves by the trees that grew back have been unable to coat with a significant layer of leaf-mold.

As we approach the of the wood circled by the path, we see mounds of emerald green.

There is lush growth everywhere, the luxuriant result of an explosion of countless honeysuckle

1 and bittersweet vines. These are not the lovely and non-invasive native honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) and bittersweet (Celastrus scandens), but the invasive Japanese honeysuckle

(Lonicera japonica) and Asian bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). This is our first careful examination of the condition of this part of our land. Looking upward we see how the honeysuckle has encircled the tops of even our tallest trees—tulip trees, oaks, locust trees, and maples—with a web that impedes their growth and cracks their crowns with ever tightening nooses. We see tree trunks that have been squeezed into the shapes of corkscrews in the clutch of

Asian bittersweet vines that wind around them and swell with new growth each season. Our first self-appointed task is to free the trees, cutting away the vines from the trunks to stop the damage above. We each pick a point of entry into this tangled mass. Swinging our machetes, we cut our way through the vines and discover an understory filled with another invasive plant— honeysuckle shrubs (Lonicera maackii). This, along with a number of other invasive shrubs of the same family, was introduced from Asia into North America as an ornamental plant in 1752. It turns out that Southwestern Ohio, where our township of Spring Valley is located, is one of the areas most infested with this shrub. All of these plants, in addition to other introduced invasive species we will find on our property, such as tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), also called garbage tree), the garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolate) that will spring up after we have cleared much of the honeysuckle, autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellate), and muliflora roses all have allelopathic properties. They alter the chemistry of the soil to inhibit germination of the seeds of native plants. Our soil is polluted with these chemicals. This, and their rampant growth, are taking over natural areas and systematically endangering the native shrubs, wildflowers, and trees of our region. Variants of this problem are found across the United States.

2 Having made separate entry points, Barb and I lose track of each other. I call out her name and hear a faint answer. I have no idea from where it is coming. I trace the path I’ve beaten back, find where she started, and follow her track to where she is located. We behold each other, covered with sweat and bloody scratches, breathing hard from our exertions, we begin to realize the enormity of the task we have set ourselves in thinking that we could ecologically restore our property and refashion our house into something livable.

The house was an underground house build in the 1970’s, with walls and ceiling fashioned from 12-inch thick concrete and two glass doors and a window facing south. A later owner dug away the soil that embedded the house in the hill and added a 2nd floor with two narrow glass doors, but no windows that would enable us to see, from our perch on the side of the hill, the valley below us through which winds the Little Miami, a state and national scenic river, and which also includes the scenic and historic town of Spring Valley. Nor can we see the hills that surround the valley which, in the spring, turn pink as the redbud trees bloom. The floor of the upper level is the tar-covered concrete that was the roof of the original underground house.

It is one room with a ceiling 14-feet tall at the center, large enough to allow us to play some version of basketball if we wished to, along with a bathroom. There is something wrong with the electrical system. Upstairs the polarities of the outlets are reversed. Downstairs flipping a switch often elicits an electrical shock. There is no central heating. The back concrete walls of the downstairs are covered with drops of moisture and patches of mildew. One bathroom is so moldy, that we close the door, not to open it again until we are finally able remodel the downstairs. There are two small bedrooms and a bathroom along the back side of the downstairs, as well as a pantry covered in red wall-paper that our niece says looks like a low-class tattoo parlor. The front side of the house is one long room. On one end is the living area partly filled

3 with a huge brick fireplace that is unusable, because it is not connected to a chimney. On the other end is an open kitchen with few cabinets and a stove that, by the time we remodel this area, will be down to one working burner. We will live in this dungeon for around 6 years. The roofers wait some time to install the shingles after laying down the tar-paper. A violent storm will tear off large sheets and water will infiltrate the downstairs where we are living. After this we will move under the moisture stained wall board and loosened strips of joint tape.

Addressing the problems of the house, trying to clear the woods of invasive species, planting native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers to create a biodiverse landscape will occupy us for close to 30 years. But on that first day of clearing vines, we have not yet grasped the enormity of our project. We are in our middle 30s. We are full of vigor and dreams of life among wild things.

That night we put up our tent in a part of the woods less infested with invasive plants that on on the edge of one of our ravines. We start a fire, cook our food, talk, and then lie down wearily on our sleeping bags. An early riser, I awake to the sounds of birds and leave the tent with my binoculars. Entranced by the unspeakable beauty of these songs, which are like nothing I’ve ever heard, I try to track down the birds to view them. Their ethereal song has a flute-like quality and seem they seem to have ventriloquial abilities, since parts of the melody seems to emit from more than one location. Later I will learn that I am hearing wood thrushes and that the unearthly quality of their songs is partly attributable to the males’ ability to sing duets with themselves by singing harmonizing pairs of notes simultaneously, one in each branch of its y-shaped syrinx, or voice box. Many have tried to describe the song, but none can do it justice. It is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. Of it, Thoreau wrote, “Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and

Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.”1 Though their songs fill the woods, I am not able to locate a

4 single one. Even so, this is magic. This earthly magic that we discover among the ordinary life of this place, however damaged it is, will help to carry us through the next 28 years of labor—a labor still unfinished. As we steadily increase the habitat of our property, the magic will increase as more wild things move in. But as we have grown older, we sometimes wonder whether the labor will wear us down and how long we will be able to keep it up. Looking at our neighbors’ properties that are in the same condition as ours was on that first day, we wonder whether our inevitable surrender of the land because of old age or death, will allow the seeds from those invasive plants to take root on our property, and make all our efforts vain.

In what follows I will describe what led up to that first day in the wood and what has followed until the present time. Since I am a professional philosopher who has concentrated on environmental philosophy in the later part of my career, I will both provide a narrative of our journey and attempt to describe the philosophical lessons I’ve drawn from it—lessons about what we are, the nature of this amazing planet, and where we fit in its rare and precious system of life. Much of what I say will, I’m afraid, be tinged with sadness about what we have done, how we have fashioned ourselves, and what we are losing. However sad these things make me, I write this book in the hope that we can find a way to change, understand our place in the natural order, and discover a more constructive and wise path forward.

5

Chapter 1: The Woods

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving,

swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though

to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden

cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while

incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and

groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into

cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

———John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (2004) p. 81.

For many years I have taught courses in environmental philosophy and sustainability. I have also taught these subjects as part of Introduction to Philosophy, a course that all students are required to take at the Catholic university at which I work. In each class, I have asked my students whether there was some special place during their childhood in which they found a deep connection to the natural world. The places they mention range from tree-shaded creeks, the wild shores of a lake, to wooded lots, or even a mere tree or cluster of trees and shrubs in their neighborhood in which they find a kind of magic, mystery, or solace. Too often, their stories end with how that place was taken from them by development, or sometimes even their own parents who cut down their trees or replaced a wooded area with a grass lawn—a green desert devoid of the most interesting living things. My students often express both resentment and grief when describing these things. Those feelings and memories seem to have been suppressed until I ask them my question, as though they felt it was expected of them to simply accept that this is how

6 the world is: people are entitled to do as they please with their property, we must expect to be robbed of precious things, and nature is dispensable. This is what we call progress. And growing up requires accepting it. They are convinced that the belief that those lost places could have been preserved, like their childish belief in Santa Claus, must be abandoned as the price of “growing up.” But the longing for those places is not lost, only buried, until we excavate them together in the class room by asking whether the destruction of beautiful things and intimacy with the natural world can really be called progress.

My memories of my own childhood are fragmented. I marvel when I read memoirs in which the authors recount conversations and events from their early days in great detail. What I have are mere images, feelings, or fleeting memories of scenes that flash before my mind’s eye.

They are not more vivid than some recurring dreams that I have or series of dreams set in a common place that comes to seem like a real place where I have lived. My inner life seems shaped nearly as much by dreams as by memories.

In one recurring dream from my childhood I live in a medieval town on a waterfront with a long dock extending high above the ocean. The village is plagued by the predations of a dragon and a meeting is called to decide upon some course of action. It is decided that someone has to be armed, take a defensive position on the dock (since that is where the incursions occur), and fend off the dragon to protect the village. To my surprise, this burden falls to me. As I ask why it has to be me, all but one of the villagers vanishes. He hands me what appears to be a sword in its scabbard, before he himself disappears. I stand alone examining the weapon in my hand, only to discover that the scabbard held not a sword, but a lollipop. Wondering what I am to do, I wander to the edge of the dock, searching for signs of the dragon. I lose my balance and tumble toward the ocean far below. As I reach its surface, all is transformed. I plummet not into the water but

7 through clouds, drifting into a green meadow surrounded by mountains, my landing eased at the last minute by a parachute. This recurring dream seems to prefigure the futility I often feel as I battle against the forces that rob the world of beauty, but there are no such comforting endings as in these dreams.

I have often dreamed, as I suppose all of us have, that I can fly. But my dreams of flight always include the hazard of a sky so strewn with power lines that flight is dangerous. In them, I must resign myself to a terrestrial existence, knowing that if we had made our cities differently I could have soared up high and moved freely over the landscape.

In adulthood, I have dreamed so often of some places that I sometimes find it hard to believe that they do not really exist and that the events that occur within them are not a real part of my history. There is a place with a tall house, which we are remodeling—a place to which we have moved because of the spectacular scenes of nature that surround it—streams of pure water flowing through a wooded valley, a vista of wooded hills and mountains, and prairies filled with flowers and grasses populated by a rich variety of birds and other wild things. There are always two disasters: the view is eroded by the encroachment of mining that gradually eats away at the trees, streams, and prairies, replacing them with a ravaged landscape; and the house begins to collapse on itself due to flooding and defective construction.

As I entered my profession as a professor of philosophy, I had a vivid and disturbing dream of unhappy students crowding into my office to complain that they are simply unable to understand what I am talking about in the classroom. The solution, they believe, is to tear my eyes from their sockets, and pass them among themselves to look through them.

8 In my childhood, I lived in four different houses. I have no memory of the first, where we lived until I was four years old. However, I remember vividly our house on Gramercy Street in

Toledo, Ohio. It sits on the corner of a field and woods that seems immense to me, and dense with things to explore and wonder about: a field where we are always surrounded by bees, wasps, butterflies, dragonflies, and other insects; woods with trees to climb and build platforms upon. We cut the ends of grapevines free so that we can use them to swing from tree to neighboring tree. There is a moist area with a dense colony of canes from which we weave our forts. I lie on a tree fallen over the creek and study the life in the water, entranced by the aquatic insects and their mysterious forms of locomotion. I wonder to what hidden homes or lairs they disappear. One year I collect the eggs of salamanders and placed them in a fishbowl. With fascination, I follow their development from black droplets at the center of firm, but gelatinous eggs, to slender comma-shaped forms with feather-like gills around their necks. Once they emerge, not knowing how to care for them, I return them to the creek.

I spend almost all my free time exploring that woods and studying the things within it.

My parents purchase a microscope for me and I discover the hidden structure of insects, feathers, and other small ornaments of the natural world. I wander alone through the field or the woods, follow the creek, and climb trees to watch what goes on in the canopy. These moments hold me entirely in their grasp and freeze time, the scenes before me becoming a portal to some other dimension of this world. I am especially enchanted with the birds and talk to them, half expecting them to talk back. I feel myself part of the community of living things and that we were all, in some way, kin. Understanding these feelings will preoccupy me throughout much of my adult life.

9 One year, a pair of robins build a nest on the support of the awning over our picture window. The nest incorporates the window itself as part of one side, and by standing on a stool we can see first the improbably blue eggs, and later the hatchlings, naked and ugly at first, each day visibly developing into something new. Pin feathers emerge from waxy coated sheaths supplied with proteins and pigments by their blood, gradually forming into recognizable feathers.

As the nestlings grow the nest becomes so crowded that it seems inevitable that at least one will be nudged over the side to its death. We watch with anxiety as they fledge, wondering whether they will fall prey to cats, careless and curious children, or other predators. The whole process that unfolds before us seems a miracle, one more example of the mystery and magic that surrounds me.

From our home in Toledo, Ohio my parents annually send me to a summer camp for two weeks—Camp Storer, established in 1918 as the summer camp facility of the YMCA of Greater

Toledo. This camp, which still exists, includes a lake surrounded by approximately 1250 acres in the Irish Hills region of southeast Michigan. I spend many happy days there fishing, sailing, swimming, and taking three-day trips by canoe or horseback during which we sleep under the stars. I study the creatures among the reed beds of the lake. One summer I collect a mussel and bring it home in a fishbowl, which we place on a table. After the evening darkens, I take my parents and sisters to examine my find more closely. We switch on the light and find it transmogrified. Its shells are no longer tightly closed. They have opened to allow a smooth white appendage, its “foot” to probe and glide across the glass bottom.

At the age of ten, we move from the house on the edge of the woods to a neighborhood vacant of woods, fields or creeks. Our house sits at the edge of a circular “park,” barren of all but grass. During the two years we lived there, all the enchantment of my previous life vanished,

10 except the sound of a cardinal that would call outside my bedroom window early in the mornings and the nest that a pair built one year in a pine tree next to our screened-in back porch. From one of the corners of the porch, we could just peek.

During my two years at this house, I am largely taken away from the natural world and my energy turns to games on the streets and driveways—kick-the-can, hockey on roller skates, basketball, and baseball. But an older cousin reveals to me elements of nature in the city. She likes to share with me what she is learning in her science classes. One spring we collect twigs with small hard buds. She points out details in the structure of the twigs and buds that I have never noticed, and explains to me their significance for the tree’s future development. We study the anatomy of birds by reassembling the bones of a chicken, boiled clean and dried.

In sixth grade, with my mother’s help, I conduct a science project on feathers and flight.

My mother and I amass a large collection of feathers. A friend of the family who hunts ducks gives me their severed wings that I mount and dry to display. I learn about the different kinds of feathers, their various structures, and what each contributes to maintaining the lives of birds and the modes of flight characteristic of each kind. In spite of this, in the absence of immersive experiences of nature, I am frequently and unexpectedly overwhelmed with the feeling that a chasm separates me from my earlier life, as though I’ve lost a part of myself or that my past life was only a vivid dream.

In 1965 when I am thirteen, as a consequence of my father’s promotion to a managerial position at Champion Spark Plug, we move to Burlington, Iowa. Along the back of our yard is a ravine with a creek, and beyond that a woods and a pond. Again I can wander and observe. The pond, though small, hosts a pair of kingfishers. I spend hours prostrate behind some shrubs watching those birds (with their blue Mohawk crests and long, strong bills) dive for tadpoles and

11 fish. I listen to their odd, chattering calls. A neighbor with training in forestry, takes walks with me and my mother to put names to the trees and shrubs.

My mother and I join the Burlington Bird club. My mother brags to them about my science project and collection of feathers and wings, which now include wings of other birds taken from road kills, including those of a great horned owl. They ask me to do a presentation on feathers and flight. Among the members of the Burlington Bird Club is Fredric Leopold who is in his nineties and has been concerned about the survival of wood ducks, studying their nesting habits, and designing wood duck houses. I learn that he is the youngest brother of Aldo Leopold who had written an important book called Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, the year of his death. Intrigued that Burlington had been the home of this famous man, my mother and I read that book. I find that it articulates, in poetic and philosophical reflections, what previously I had only felt—that I belong to the larger community of life—an interconnected system which includes not only vegetation, insects and animals, but abiotic elements such as air, sun, water, and soil, the base on which life depends. At age 13 my life is transformed. I will return to that book many times, later using one of its essays in nearly all the classes I teach. What were at first vague impressions of my childhood will become increasingly rooted in my understanding as I probe what science tells us about what we, and the world around us, are.

At the same time, I am tutored in how to search out encounters with wild things, and learn that the ability to closely observe, identify, and study the details of their lives imparts rich particularity to that larger community. A much older boy who belongs to the Bird Club is very seriously interested in birds and will go on to become an accomplished ornithologist. One winter,

I am flattered when he invites me to accompany him on a field trip. I marvel at his ability to find and identify birds—a marsh hawk, sleek and long-tailed, with its wings slightly upraised as it

12 glides low over a wetland, a brown creeper near a creek probing the bark of trees for insects with its slender, downward curving bill. Looking closely at the trees around me I can find no signs of anything that could be food for the brown creeper. Nor can I conceive how the hawk can find prey in the vast areas over which it soars. I begin to wonder how these marvelous creatures are able so gracefully and effortlessly to navigate their environments and make a living. I wonder how such delicate creatures as titmice, chickadees, and nuthatches can survive the frigid temperatures. I want to know more. I want to unlock some of these mysteries, so I read.

I learn that many of a bird’s bones are hollow—filled with the very air through which they fly, and given strength by struts that cross back and forth within them. I learn that their powers of vision far exceed our own. The small, dark, lidded beads that appear to view are only the smallest part of their eyes, the orbs of which fill much of their skulls. This all seems quite incredible to me. Although I am rather squeamish, I force myself to dissect dead birds I find on the road to see for myself what I have read about them.

After I move to Iowa City to attend college, I return home one day to find that the woods in back of our house has been scraped free of mature trees and plants. A house, aspiring to be an estate, is in the process of construction. A long, paved, and winding road leads up to it through what is now a grass lawn with a few small exotic species of trees pathetically planted here and there.

And I’m sure that in Toledo Ohio the wood of my childhood on Gramercy is now gone, fallen to development. Like my students, I have found that the places that I loved are gone.

Reflecting on my childhood experiences of nature, I find it difficult to articulate why they were, and remain, so important and meaningful to me. What did they do to and for me? The philosopher Arnold Berleant has tried to characterize aesthetic experiences of natural

13 environments—experiences that engage the whole person and transfigure a place. Perception and concentration become so immediate and intense that the experience is endowed with a vividly singular quality, evoking the “sense that the occasion has a distinct and special significance that makes it unique.”2 A sense of the sublime arises from a perceptual encounter with something of

“overwhelming magnitude or power.” These experiences almost magically vivify the perceptual world and transform the self, binding it to a place.3

Berleant’s grand language brings to mind experiences I had later in life, such as the magnificence of redwoods, sequoia trees, and towering mountains that made me feel dwarfed and insignificant in their presence. But it applies as well to my childhood wanderings in the woods. Climbing a tree to what seemed a great height, surrounded by its canopy, I would marvel that this tree had begun many years before as a small nut or seed that sent forth the slender beginnings of its first small root. I would run my hands over its trunk and branches and feel their strength. I would wonder at the thousands of leaves around me that were produced anew each spring after the barrenness of its winter life. I felt enclosed by the tree and held, as it were, in its sheltering hand. Lying on a log over the creek, a world of insects, tadpoles, and turtles would unfold before my eyes. The more closely I looked, the more this world enlarged as I noticed creatures tinier and tinier, some as small as a particle of sand. I sometimes felt that if I had the eyes to see, I would discover that the creek contained worlds within worlds unendingly. In these moments the larger world around me was lost as I was absorbed by the particular mysteries immediately before or around me.

When my students express grief at the loss of the special natural places of their childhood it is important to consider of how much they have been deprived. A vast literature documents the effects of natural environments on the development and wellbeing of children. I will discuss the

14 positive effects of natural environments in Chapter 7. Lack of prolonged exposure to nature and green spaces has been shown to have serious long-term consequences for the physical and psychological health of children, including increased levels of depression, cognitive disabilities, obesity, and diabetes.4 In addition, to be deprived of experiences of the natural world’s beauty is to be deprived of the opportunity, and quite possibly the capacity, to discover what kind of being we are and to perceive the world as the gift it is—to experience grace.

As ecosystems are degraded, we also lose aesthetic and spiritual values that cannot be measured in standard currency. I have mentioned my love of birds. Who can measure the loss of beauty as the populations of song birds steadily decline? Their graceful flight, their often delightful colors, their forms and shapes so perfectly adapted to their environment, their songs, which have been shown to creatively vary among individuals of the same species and which many think not only declare their territory and attract mates, but express and communicate pure musical joy.5

In March of 2009, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, released a comprehensive assessment of the state of bird populations in America, which reported that nearly a third of the nation’s eight hundred bird species are endangered, threatened or in serious decline because of conversion of habitat to development, loss of wetlands, and pollution. This raises the heart- rending prospect of a landscape emptied of the beauty, cheerful activity, and song of birds. An editorial in the New York Times, published on April 1, 2009, observed,

[T]here is no glossing over these staggering losses, and there is no dismissing

what they mean. There is nothing accidental or inevitable about the vanishing of

these birds. However unintentional, it is the direct result of human activity — of

development, of global warming, of air and water pollution and of our failure to

15 set aside the habitat these birds need to flourish.… Every threatened species

reveals some aspect of our lives that could be adjusted.

We need to make a place for beauty in our world and our ways of measuring progress ought to take account of the loveliness of the world that we save.

My childhood experiences shaped me in immeasurable ways. They have made me hunger for the companionship of living things. They have also made me grieve over the poverty of the world that is emerging around me—tamed and degraded landscapes, artificial environments, an increasingly sterile world. As I face each year’s new class of first year students, I can’t help but wonder how much they have been harmed and stunted by the heritage we have passed on to them. I feel that we cannot content ourselves by only preserving the natural areas that remain.

They are too distant from where we live our daily lives and where our children play. In many regions they are little more than scattered patches. And as I entered adulthood and moved from city to city, I often found it difficult to discover a way to live that could reintroduce the magic I found in my childhood. To do that, and to create a world worthy of inheritance by new generations of children, I increasingly feel that we must not only preserve the few places that harbor a diversity of life, but that we must engage in a great restoration and healing of our surroundings. We must reimagine cities, suburbs, and built environments. We must reimagine prosperity and rethink what it means to flourish. Our flourishing cannot be divorced from the flourishing of our diverse and distant kin, our companions in the dramatic arc of the history of life.

16 Chapter 2: Learning to See

Thus, what Paul says about all human beings, namely that God ‘has made of one

blood all nations of men’ [Acts 17:26 ], can be taken to apply to all creatures. . . .

And we can see why God did this. He made all ‘nations’ of human beings to be

‘of one blood’ so that they would love one another, would be united by the same

sympathy, and would help one another. In implanting a certain universal

sympathy and mutual love into his creatures, God made them all members of one

body and all (so to speak) brothers who all have the same Father….

———Anne Conway, The Principles of the most

Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1692) 6.4

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species.

We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations:

that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of

evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of

kinship with fellow- creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over

the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

———Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, p. 109.

There was a period of my life that extended from 1975, my last year in college, to 1983, that I have since not shared with even my closest friends. One reason for this is that I simply do not know what to make of some of what happened to me then. Yet there were several experiences that profoundly affected me and shaped my life in formative ways. I will mention only three, but

17 first I should provide some context. Up until the middle of high school I was a regular church- goer. The Vietnam war was raging, with nightly images of the violent conflict and of young men not much older than myself, returned home in flag-draped coffins, after losing their lives in combat. It was a time of extreme violence. The civil rights movement was at its peak. The nightly news displayed incidence police violence against black people non-violently protesting for recognition of their civil rights. On 15 September 1963, the year of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s speech in which he so famously proclaimed “I have a dream,” four young girls were killed and many injured in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in

Birmingham Alabama. In 1968 Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. In that same year, my mother and I watched the Democratic convention in horror and disbelief at police violence against protestors in the streets of Chicago.

During this same period there were a number of environmental disasters. For example, in

1969, over a ten-day period an oil well off the coast of Santa Barbara spilled an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels, contaminating a long stretch of coastline and killing dolphins, elephant seals, and sea lions, and an estimated 3,500 sea birds. That same year, because of toxic contamination, the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland, Ohio. Although the river had actually caught on fire several times before, this fire caught the attention of the news media and was widely publicized. In one class during my senior year of high school, we read Rachel Carson’s Silent

Spring. I was startled into the realization that the living things I loved were under threat by the poisons unleashed upon them by our culture.

I was awakened, as from a dream, to a world of violence and threats to the natural environment all around me, and became deeply troubled by what, in philosophy and theology, is called the problem of evil. How is it possible that an all-powerful, all-good, and all-wise god

18 could have created a world that contains so much evil? Overwhelmed by the chaos, hatred, violence, and pollution so unrelentingly displayed on the news, I eventually concluded that there could be no god. I remained an atheist from my last two years in high school through my years in college.

In college I found myself without inner resources to cope with my despair over what humanity was bringing forth on the planet or to find meaning in life. I began to explore religions of various kinds and to experiment with meditative practices. One day, meditating in the tiny back yard of our trailer that overlooked a hill, I was focusing on the single tree growing there and a busily active squirrel. In that inauspicious setting, I suddenly saw in a way that I cannot describe how everything was connected as parts of whole. In some ways, this only increased my despair, as human destructiveness in an interconnected world was bound to ripple through it all. I began to look for some transcendent source of hope—some reason to believe that, in spite of daily evidence to the contrary, things would turn out well and that the good would prevail. As I was finishing my final year in college and working second shift as a custodian at the University of Iowa hospitals, I became friends with a fascinating and brilliant co-worker, Ed Smith, who was a Christian. He was affiliated with an obscure denomination which was one of a number that had broken off from the Nazarene Church because of what they saw as its compromises to the early teachings and practices of Methodism. After dropping out of Harvard, he had been a poet, a political radical, a translator in Vietnam, and eventually a Christian convert. He had moved to

Iowa City from California in order to start a church and conducted services for a very small congregation in his small apartment. We had many long conversations in which I shared with him my despair and my longing for some deep source of hope. It was a long time before I could

19 bring myself to join his little congregation, but I did begin to pray and to open myself up to the possibility of some larger meaning than the unsettling reality of the visible world.

At that time, Barbara and I were living in a small loft apartment. One night I was bathing in the large old tub with claw feet when I suddenly felt that I was being examined by some all- seeing eye, and that all my failings and sins were exposed. Deeply unsettled and frightened, I became serious about renouncing all evil in myself and searching for God. I am entirely aware that this experience, as the two others I will recount, could have been a psychological delusion, but I was deeply affected.

I began to read the Gospels with Ed. I was profoundly moved by the teachings of Jesus, which I still seek to follow to this day. I found the Sermon on the Mount and his parables to be astonishing. The words of Jesus struck me as something almost supernatural in themselves. Ed assured me that in contrast to the what I had been taught by the more tepid religious denominations of my childhood and youth, that one could have evidence of God’s existence through direct experience—a direct encounter with divinity. If such a thing were possible, I felt it my duty to pursue it.

When we left Iowa City for Ann Arbor Michigan, where Barbara had been recruited to the graduate program in Russian, we attended the services of a small church with similar doctrines in the nearby town of Ypsilanti. While I could not help but be appalled by some of what I heard from the pulpit, one of the fundamental tenants of these denominations is that a total renunciation of the self will result in a work of grace that will radically transform the orientation of the self. I attempted night and day to abandon myself to God. One evening, after three weeks of fasting and prayer, I had one of the most transcendent and indescribable experiences of my life. I felt that I was in the presence of holiness, I was filled with joy, and lost consciousness of

20 everything around me. I do not know how long this episode lasted, but its effects were enduring.

I felt myself a different person—a new self.

Another evening I spent all night praying and reading the Bible, which was open to

Matthew 9 in the King James Version. Suddenly a burning light fell upon two lines of the text,

Matthew 9:16-17: “No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.” For years I have puzzled over what to make of this. I took a meaning from it that does not exactly conform to what I have learned through my study of its historical context. And how I understand these words has changed over the years. I now think of them as calling for a complete transformation of the self and society— that neither can be fixed by merely mending this or that aspect of the status quo.

I felt myself called to a life of devotion and, after attending a seminary, entered the ministry. Eventually we found ourselves in Urbana, Illinois near the campus of the university there where I tried to do as Ed had done by starting a home mission. Over the several years of doing this. I found myself increasingly troubled by the doctrines and practices of the denomination with which I was affiliated. Some seemed obviously sexist and oppressive and I could not reconcile them which the religious reality I thought myself to have experienced. I began to wonder what doctrinal content I could directly infer from those experiences. I withdrew from the church and pursued graduate study in philosophy thinking that it might provide me tools to sort it out. Regretfully, it did not. Philosophical reflection on religious questions has only deepened my puzzlement.

21 As I have mentioned, I am acutely aware of the mind’s power to deceive itself and to manufacture delusory experiences. I have even researched and published an article on the subject. So I do not entirely trust the experiences I have described, yet I also feel that I cannot entirely renounce them. While I do not know what to make of them, they did form who I am and change my orientation towards the world. Most fundamentally, they made me aware of the holiness behind or permeating the visible order of things, but I have found it increasingly difficult to locate that holiness in the being of a personal god, primarily because I cannot begin to conceive of any person-like being who created a universe as vast and complex as this one. I cannot see that a guiding hand is moving this world in the direction of the good. And I have become profoundly disenchanted with organized religions in which those who call themselves

Christians seem to have no interest in following the teachings of Jesus which have never lost their power for me, even though I find myself unable to believe the doctrines of the trinity and incarnation. But my memory of the holy reality that I thought myself to experience and my increasing immersion in the living world has left me convinced that it is a sacred and that among the worst sins of humanity are ingratitude and the defilement of this gift.

Having lived most of my life in tamed landscapes of Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois, it was while living in Urbana that I was first exposed to the grandeur of unspoiled wilderness. A fellow pastor invited me on a fishing trip in a place in northern Minnesota surrounded by the Chippewa

National Forest. Since 1980 my wife and I have vacationed every year but one in an isolated cabin on a lake there— at a resort near the tiny town of Marcel which is about 30 miles north of

Grand Rapids, the birthplace of Judy Garland. Our annual journeys there have extended over a longer period of time than either of us have lived in any particular place. Our experiences there

22 have woven a dominant thread into the fabric of our lives. For the first twenty-two years we stayed in the “honeymoon cabin,” built in the 1940s. We treasured its isolation from the rest of the resort and signs of human habitation. Although we loved the old place, it was not because of the aesthetic qualities of the cabin itself, which, over the many years, had leaned so far to one side that the top and bottom of the front door had to be trimmed at angles to match its crooked frame. Most of the windows could not be opened because they were so tightly jammed by the twists of the building, and the cabin was home to some mice with whom we became intimately acquainted. Eventually the resort was purchased by a couple in the business of building custom log “cabins,” which are really gorgeously handcrafted mansions, and one now sits upon the site of the old “honeymoon cabin. Both the cabin and the site are stunningly beautiful.

Over the years we have seen many wonderful things in that spot in the North Woods, filled with forests of flowering shrubs, red pines, white birches, oaks, balsam, and aspens, among other trees, an astonishing variety of ferns, fungi, and wildflowers, and bogs vegetated with tamaracks, bog rosemary, sphagnum moss, orchids, cotton grass, and pitcher plants with their strange red blooms and tubular leaves, flared slightly at the top, for luring and trapping insects.

Our cabin is on a lake so clear that we can see the boulders on its bottom through 40 feet of water. We are told that one evening in the past some fishermen took their boat to a bay of the lake, searching for water shallow enough to fish in waders. As they pulled into the cove, slowing their boat, one leaped out and disappeared into deep water before bobbing back to the surface.

The others reached desperately out, with a great struggle pulled him into the boat, and took him to shore where they helped him empty his waders of water. When asked why he had jumped overboard, his explanation was that in his home state of Indiana, if you can see the bottom of the lake, you know that you are in shallow water.

23 ★

The sun is setting. The lake calms to a stretch of blue glass. Between us and the lake, a line of pines is transformed into complexly shaped silhouettes pierced here and there with the pale last light of day held by the western sky. When the sun finally sets, a full moon makes the birch trees and boulders scattered about the shores luminous. Finally, the swarms of mosquitos force us to shelter in the. We talk through the night into the early hours of morning. Between stretches of silence we hear, for the first time, the excited, eerie, and lunatic calls of the common loon filling the night. Around 2:00 a.m., we step onto the deck and look up. Stars smear the black sky like clotting milk. The universe above and the surrounding night never seemed so vast.

★

One afternoon, fishing from our kayak, we see an eagle swoop out of nowhere to a high perch on a pine not far from us. We paddle quietly to just below its perch. The wind rustles the white feathers of its neck and head. We do not seem to exist in its world—we are insignificant and it deigns not to look our way, until we catch a fish and draw it splashing into the net. After a while it departs, first upwards, the strokes of its wings slow but mighty, then stretched motionless as it glides lower and lower over the water finally disappearing from our view into the distance.

Moments later we see it climbing back up into the sky with a large and wiggling northern pike grasped in its talons, one in front of the other, orienting the fish to the direction of its flight. It circles widely until the fish is motionless. We hear a scream, and see another eagle head towards the first. They fly together beyond our vision’s reach.

★

We travel to a small remote lake for a day of fishing and a night of camping. Immediately beyond where we launch our kayak is an island bog anchored to the bottom at the center with

24 floating vegetation forming its edge. On it we see wild orchids, called grass pinks, along with ferns, sundews, bog rosemary, cranberries, and a rich variety of other plants. We paddle beyond the bog, circling the lake to a promontory where we pitch our tent beneath a stand of tall and fragrant red pines, then we are back on the lake in search of fish for dinner. We return to our camp site and fix a supper of bass, potatoes, and vegetables grilled over an open fire. After dinner we sit in enjoyment of the evening’s peace, listening to the loons and watching the birds flying among the surrounding trees and bushes, and finally enter our tent for the night. Around midnight, Barb jostles me awake to hear the sounds of a coyotes calling back and forth around us, then a pack of wolves joins. It is a spine-tingling performance. While not believing we are in danger, it is strangely thrilling to know that distant animals, exactly how distant we do not know, are powerful enough to kill us. Then comes silence and sleep until we are awakened again, this time by the hooting of a great horned owl in the pines above our tent.

We arise at 4:00 a.m. and paddle out to discover what transpires between darkness and first light. Coming around a bend of the lake, we see three large heads breaking the water— beavers whose powerful swim home from their nightly chores leaves ripples behind them. One spots us, making a loud warning slap on the water before diving. The slaps of the others follow and they are gone from our sight.

★

This year as we arrive, the owners of the resort greet us, followed by some orphans they have adopted—a male fawn and two young otters. Through the course of the week, the young buck is usually friendly, but at other times he tests his skills for future battles with brief charges towards us, his head, with buds of emerging antlers, lowered. Whenever we approach the dock, the otters follow with lopes that seem strangely off kilter. They talk back and forth in rapid little grunts and

25 squeaks. As we enter our boat and row away from the dock, they follow behind for some distance and then abandon us in search of something more interesting. Next year we will learn that as they matured they learned how to dexterously remove fish from lures as they being pulled towards the waiting nets of disappointed fishers. Unhappy fishers are not likely to return to the resort, so the owners remove the otters to a remote lake where they have fewer opportunities for such mischief.

★

One year merlins are nesting near our cabin. We are sure that we have correctly identified them, in spite of the contradiction between what we observe and what we read in our guides, which describe them as elusive and quiet birds. These falcons are only about twelve inches long, but more sturdily build than most falcons. The male has a breast streaked with orange, reddish- brown, and white, and has a blue-grey back. His tail-feathers are striped with blues and blacks and fringed with white at their ends. Looking upwards at the undersides of their wings, they seem to be spotted with browns and whites. The female is brown above with a buff-colored breast spotted with brown. Every day they provide us a spectacle of some kind, diving about, circling our cabin on the way from one high perch to another, and serenating us with loud and indescribable screeches.

★

We arrive in June. We find the tracks of a wolf near our cabin. One day, as Barb carries our garbage down the path that leads to the dumpster near the office, she notices a black bear following through the woods in a parallel course. She stomps her feet and bangs the lid of the garbage can on its side, but the bear continues until she reaches the clearing. On a remote, lake which can be reached only by hiking, we find a structure of mud and sticks and a slick muddy

26 slope into the lake which looks as though it were a slide. From the shells of mussels scattered all around, we think it may be home to a family of otters. On another day, we hike a primitive dirt road where we discovered the first signs of a beaver’s activity the summer before. We are amazed to see a bog where there was previously none, and floating in the water and cleaning itself as flies buzz around its head is a remarkably large beaver. Year by year this bog becomes larger, flooding the trail, and is eventually filled with pitcher plants.

★

By now it has become a tradition. On at least one day of our vacation we take a 4:00 a.m. pilgrimage to one of the wilder lakes to observe what happens as dawn arrives. As the sun rises, we see deer wading in the shallows eating lilly pads. We surprise a mink as it bounds along a spine of land. We fish and paddle along the shore to study the plants. We admire the waxy white blooms of the callas blooming in wide stands and on floating logs. We think of these logs as floating gardens, although no gardener could create such perfect assemblages of miniature plants blended together in unexpected ways—ferns and moss combined with other plants that vary from log to log. Among them we often find sundews, a tiny carnivorous plant with stems no thicker than threads. At their tops are miniature paddle-like structures covered with outspread hairs holding droplets of a sticky substance on their tips that shine like jewels in the morning light.

We paddle along as quietly as we can, not wanting to hear anything other than the natural sounds around us. Birds sing everywhere, including a catbird who is putting on a remarkable performance. Barb points to the shore of a narrow peninsula snaking out towards the middle of the bay. There, through the shadows of birch trees and alders, we see a long dark head, which we suddenly realize must be a moose. It is stripping leaves from the lower limbs of trees. Moose have not been sighted in this part of Minnesota for decades. Barely moving, we glide towards it

27 slowly for a better view. At first shadows and trees obstruct our view, but we gradually make out the awkward curves and angles of her back, and the nostrils — black holes in the drooping nose of that huge head. We think that she must be six feet tall at her shoulder. She walks in an ungainly way, picking each foot up high, her knees jutting into the air with each step. Then we notice beneath her, seeming to walk between her legs, is a calf a fraction of her size. We follow behind them until we come to a spot where the lake spills into a bog. With no obstructing trees we have a close and perfect view. She does not notice us and seems harmlessly cow-like. After forty minutes or so of watching, we paddle quietly and slowly away. We had been frightened to think we might startle them. Later we learn that a moose with her young is dangerous and will charge a canoe, that a healthy moose-cow is able to stand off wolves, that she can run thirty-five miles an hour, and that she can swim faster than two men can paddle a canoe.

★

This year we arrive at what we think of as our second home only a few weeks after I have retired from teaching. That last semester has been gut-wrenching, my emotions out of control as I realize that this would probably be my last time to talk to young people about the very serious threats to their future posed by environmental problems. As an environmental philosopher teaching courses on this subject, we have many serious discussions. I worry endlessly about what lies ahead for my students. My academic career has been the primary source of meaning in my life for the last thirty years. My only reason for retiring is the toll it has taken on my psyche, trying to convey to my students a message of hope and encouragement that rings less and less true to me. This is our first two-week vacation—one week at our cabin and then another week that Barb has arranged as a gift for me, on a houseboat on Rainy Lake, which is part of

Voyageurs National Park—a place we have never been. During the first week I am fishing alone

28 on my favorite lake while Barb is on a hike when I hear an unfamiliar honking sound behind me.

I turn to see my first trumpeter swan—a huge and beautiful bird with an unlovely voice.

Entranced, I watch it wishing that I could share this experience with Barb. Later, early in the morning on Rainy Lake I hear a loud chorus of honks, and just beyond and to the side of an island across from where we are docked, a whole flock of swans descend. They seem to be calling to each other and to another flock elsewhere on the lake that answers like an echo.

★

In 1982 I entered the graduate program in philosophy to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of

Chicago. This is our first experience of a big city, and it is exciting to have access to so many cultural riches. But we also experience some shock at how impossible it is for us to find places uncrowded by people and removed from the noise of traffic where we might enjoy the company of wildlife, other than starlings, squirrels, pigeons, and house sparrows. Completion of my degree offers the opportunity of respite when I am hired for a temporary position at Virginia

Polytechnic Institute and we move to Blacksburg Virginia and rent a house only twenty minutes from the Appalachian Trail. This is the most beautiful place I have ever lived and my wife and I spend many hours hiking the mountains and hills and paddling the rivers. At the end of my contract, I am hired for a tenure track position at the University of Dayton.

We travel to Dayton, Ohio to find a home to buy. As we enter the city on Interstate 35 what I see makes my heart sink. While not overwhelming in the way Chicago is, Dayton is a depressed urban environment with houses crowded together and heavily traveled roads. We try hard to find a place in the country within driving distance of campus, but cannot. We settle for a house with a half-acre plot and a creek running through it in a heavily wooded neighborhood in

29 Bellbrook, one of Dayton’s suburbs. A nature reserve is within walking distance and the areas surrounding our neighborhood are covered with forests and wild fields.

It is in Bellbrook that my real education about the nature and importance of ecosystems begins, as well as an appreciation of the need to work with nature rather than against it. One part of this education begins on Memorial Day during our first year. When we bought the house, the creek in the back attracted us. What we did not notice was the implications of how the creek had been diverted at nearly a right angle just at the edge of our property line so that our house could be built where the creek previously ran. During our first days in the house, as we meet the neighbors, a question we are frequently asked is whether the sellers had told us about problems with flooding. Given how little water runs through the creek, we do not take this seriously. On

Memorial day, over a period of several hours we have a torrential storm in which five inches of rain falls. The creek rises rapidly, overflows its banks, and returns to its original and more natural route, which is through our front door. As the house fills with water we work frantically to find ways to elevate our furniture above it and remove everything from the floor. The next day, after the water has receded, we begin the work of removing the ruined carpet. We live for 2 years with a bare concrete floor while we save money for new carpet. To forestall the recurrence of another such a disaster I spend months digging ditches and mounds around the house by hand and laying perforated drainage pipes. We install a new driveway with a grate running across its width that connects to this drainage system. If my efforts to divert water away from the house should fail, and the creek tries again to follow its original path, I hope that it will be intercepted here. We make gardens of the ditches and mounds.

For the first time in our adult life, my wife and I are able to garden and create our own landscape. We turn most of the lawn into gardens and, when we eventually find a place in the

30 country and try to sell our house in Bellbrook, we will find that potential buyers are intimidated by the amount of gardening our landscape would require of them. So to sell the house we will end up replacing most of the gardens with sod. The plants that attract our attention at this time are those with interesting foliage and showy blossoms.

Every year new exotic specimens arrive by mail. So pretty are our gardens that the neighbors tour them when they think we are not at home. We love to pour over catalogues, gardening guides, and books on plants and I join the Garden Book Club. One day I order a book called My Weeds: A Gardener’s Botany, by Sarah Stein. This book turns my world upside down through its discussion of native plants, their ecological importance, and how we have denuded the landscape of them in our love affair with exotic species and grass lawns. At a faculty reception, I seek out biologists to discuss with them what I have read. One of them, Don Geiger, is a restoration ecologist and an inexhaustible fount of information. From him I learn of the problems created by the introduction of invasive species, such as honeysuckle bushes and vines, garlic mustard, and Asian bittersweet. These plants completely overwhelm ecosystems, change the chemistry of the soil to prevent the seeds of other plants from germinating, and crowd out native plants. In our back yard, we have a single large honeysuckle bush. I have admired this shrub because of its pretty and wonderfully fragrant blooms and the bright red berries that follow. With my new knowledge, I now know that it poses a threat, so I decide to remove it. I do this with great effort using a saw poorly suited for the purpose. I do not know it at the time, but this presages some mighty future battles against invasive exotic species. How I react to elements of the landscape is changing. Many plants that I once saw as beautiful now appear to me as ugly and sinister, poising for an attack on the land. For example, I now notice that the nature preserve near our house, where we have enjoyed many walks, is overrun by honeysuckle.

31 Various non-native honeysuckle vines and shrubs, Asian bittersweet, garlic mustard, and ailanthus are only a few examples of plants that are benign in their countries of origin and were introduced into our area either accidentally, as their seeds were carried in the pots of other plants, or because of their aesthetic or culinary appeal. They have escaped from gardens and yards and now penetrate the woodlands where they are unchecked by natural enemies and pose serious threats to native ecosystems. It is difficult to imagine any final solution to this problem.

Addressing it seriously requires constant and intense effort. Government funding or some institution similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps seem to be the only ways of maintaining the effort that is needed.

Douglas Tallamy points out that this invasion of our ecosystems by exotic species is not confined to those that have escaped cultivation but is also replicated in our gardens and lawns, as nurseries have primarily concentrated on providing us with “pest free” plants. The reason these plants are free of pests is that they come from alien ecosystems, and within our own ecosystems no insects have adapted to feed on them. This sounds like a blessing until one realizes that it they serve no ecological function. The general dislike of insects in our culture has blinded us to their importance.6 Tallamy points out that of global species of animals 37% are herbivorous insects.

Among the most important of their ecological functions is incorporating the tissues of plants into their bodies, which are a most important source of food for wildlife. Birds, especially, depend on them. One cannot love birds and despise insects or love the exotic species that dominate so many gardens.7

It is estimated that as much as 75% of our crop species depend upon insect pollinators and that their contribution to the production of food is worth around $215 billion annually. We have become dependent upon honeybees, a non-native species, for pollination of many of our

32 crops. Honeybees are now afflicted with what is being called “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which appears to be a result of multiple humanly introduced stressors that affect native bees as well. It is calculated that in the United States 59% of honeybee colonies were lost between 1947 and

2005. Native pollinators are also in serious decline. Habitat has been lost, a source of both food and nesting sites. Parasites and pathogens, which humans have inadvertently carried from place to place, afflict bee populations. Industrial agriculture increasingly relies upon pesticides that expose pollinators to a mixture of toxic chemicals, such as fungicides and pesticides like neonicotinoids. So much so, that a study in the United Kingdom found a greater number of species of bees in urban areas than in farmland.8 Plant species produce nectar that varies widely in how much protein, amino acids, lipids, starches, vitamins, and minerals they contain. Just as we cannot live on a diet of a single food neither can insects. Many pollinators are specifically adapted to certain plants. Without those plants, the pollinators cannot survive, and neither can the plants without those specific species of insects. The decline in the number of native flowering plants that native insects need for food has devastated populations of indigenous insects with cascading effects throughout ecosystems. Climate change is also causing plants to bloom before or after the emergence of the insects that pollinate them or to migrate to locations where these insects cannot survive.9

As my understanding of the role of insects in ecosystems increased, I become fascinated by the beauty and complexity of the seemingly infinite number of their varied forms—another transformation in how I perceive the world. Many are repelled by their alien nature and regard insects as little monsters or mindless automatons, programmed to afflict us. I become increasingly horrified by the gut response of most people to kill them, regardless of their kind.

Our neighbors next door to us in Bellbrook have a bug-zapper, and every night as I hear the

33 sizzle of electrified insects, I wonder how many beautiful and interesting creatures are being exterminated. One time, returning to Ohio from a visit to my mother in Burlington Iowa, I stop at a restaurant for lunch. After eating I approach the exit and see through the window a man stomping his foot forcibly upon the pavement. Wondering what was so threatening, I approach that spot. There I see the flattened remains of a large beetle with an iridescent green and blue exoskeleton that would have been stunning to behold in its whole and living form. I can only imagine the previous magnificence of this creature. Of course, we all kill insects. Sometimes they annoy us, pose an inconvenience, or threaten our gardens. But, I wonder how this man, without a second thought, could wantonly destroy a beautiful living thing that, for all he knew, might play some important role in the ecosystem. I could only conjecture upon his motivations.

Perhaps the sole sin that marked this beetle for death was that it had intruded on the artificial landscape surrounding the fast-food restaurant that marked it as a human place. A friend described to me a scene he witnessed at a bus stop. On the sidewalk was a walkingstick

(Diapheromera femorata) a slender, elongated insect that escapes predation by its camouflage—it looks very much like a twig. Either because this species is rare where I have lived or because its disguise is so good, I have only seen these incredible creatures a handful of times. They are a rare and wondrous sight. Among the group of people waiting for the bus, one sighted this seldom seen insect—perhaps one he had never before observed, walked deliberately towards it, and rather than marveling at its exquisite form squashed it to a pulp.

While I do not know what kind of beetle was squashed on that day, beetles are more properly objects of wonder than something to be indiscriminately exterminated. The iridescence of the beetle’s wing-casings alone is something that ought to produce amazement. Scientists have

34 discovered that it is produced in beetles by a variety of complex physical mechanisms that manipulate light in various ways.10

Also to be marveled at are what lies beneath the wing casings—semi-transparent wings much longer than the beetle’s body that are intricately folded to fit under the small space beneath the wing covers when the beetle is not in flight. In a small fraction of a second these wings are unfolded in order to fly and upon landing, they are refolded almost as quickly. It would take a master at origami to fold something so complex and functional. To solve the mystery of how this is done, scientists turned to ladybeetles. The wings of a ladybeetle are rigid structures four times its length. Scientists removed a section of one of its wing casings and replaced it with a transparent film so that they could use microcomputed tomography to film the ways the wings are folded and unfolded. What was discovered was considerably more complex than I can easily explain, but in general outline to fold its wings, the wing casings and abdomen were found to have tiny structures that, when put in complicated motion create friction that folds the wings in and over into a Z shape and hold the hind wings in place as they are tucked under the wing- casings. The veins in the wings have an arc-like shape similar to a tape spring—the kind of spring one finds in a metal measuring tape, that when released from the pressure of the wing- casings unfold the wings for flight.11

It is worth noting that the scientists conducted this study because they were interested in developing structures like large sails and solar power systems that could be deployed in space. It illustrates one of the many ways in which each species provides humans with valuable knowledge—in this case through biomimicry, which Janine Benyus described as a “new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems.”12 While I believe that the creatures that surround us are

35 miraculous beings, worthy of respect in themselves, each species is also like a single book in a great library with unique and valuable information. When we drive a species to extinction, it is like burning one of these precious volumes. Some project that as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species might be extinct by mid-century because of human activity—an incalculable loss of potential knowledge.

Many of us remember how our windshields would be caked by splotches of the remains of insects after a drive down the highway and notice how much less this happens now. Some have assumed that this is due to increasingly aerodynamic cars. But recent studies have shown that the reason is that populations of insects are dramatically decreasing.13 A recent study of 63 protected areas in Germany, conducted over a period of deployed over 27 years found a seasonal decline of flying insect biomass of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% over that period.14 An earlier study established that 67% of populations of monitored insects show an average decline of 45%.15 Without insects, neither animals nor humans can survive.

Drive down almost any street and look at the lawns for any native plants that might provide habitat for insects and you will primarily see small or large yards of grass, ecological deserts, and occasional clusters of exotic plants or flowers that provide native insects and animals with neither food or shelter. Pass down roads lined with farmers’ fields in which the use of Round-Up-Ready crops enable farmers to use herbicides to kill all the “weeds” in the field without harming these crops. Many of these “weeds” would ordinarily be native grasses and flowers that provide food for birds and insects.

Our cultural prejudice against insects and spiders is so strong, that we rarely reflect upon their ecological and economical importance and my study of insects reveals that we have more in

36 common than we might think with these creatures so remote from us on the evolutionary tree.

They are kin to us and members with us in a common community.

The Internet has ushered in a dramatic surge of interest in genealogy. Websites to facilitate research on family history are among the most popular websites in the western world, and there are hundreds of books on the subject. Why is there so much interest in those who lived in the distant past and one’s connections with living relatives with whom one has only the slightest blood relationship? We draw lessons from the stories of those who preceded us, whether they are ordinary, inspiring, or horrifying, and equip ourselves to become tellers of edifying stories to others.16 But it seems that genealogy primarily provides a way of constructing narratives disclose elements of our identity. In the stories of relatives distant from us in time, we find ways to construct connections between ourselves and others. We learn about ourselves by learning whence we came. By searching back in time to our roots, and then moving forward in time along the various branches that sprout from that root—our remote living relatives—we come to a new understanding of who we are. Our identity spreads out to a larger family extended over time and space.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle tried to explain the peculiar friendship that exists within families as a common being or identity distributed between different persons:

Parents love their children as being a part of themselves, and children their

parents as being something originating from them…. Parents, then, love their

children as themselves (for their issue are by virtue of their separate existence a

sort of other selves), while children love their parents as being born of them, and

brothers love each other as being born of the same parents; for their identity with

37 them makes them identical with each other (which is the reason why people talk

of ‘the same blood’, ‘the same stock’, and so on). They are, therefore, in a sense

the same thing, though in separate individuals…. And [1162a1] cousins and other

kinsmen are attached by derivation from brothers, viz. by being derived from the

same parents. They come to be closer together or farther apart by virtue of the

nearness or distance of the original ancestor. The friendship of children to parents,

and of men to gods, is a relation to them [5] as to something good and superior;

for they have conferred the greatest benefits, since they are the causes of their

being and of their nourishment, and of their education from their birth. [Italics

added].17

Marshall Sahlins generalizes the relational concepts contained in this account of kinship as

“persons who belong to one another, who are parts of one another, who are co-present in each other, whose lives are joined and interdependent.”18 According to this definition two beings are kin if they “are intrinsic to one another’s existence” so that what one “suffers also happens to others.” We are kin with another when our being is mutual such that “experience is more than individual”19 and our identity is extended beyond the boundaries of our isolated selves to the selves of others.20 This abstract description applies even in our culture, where kinship is not entirely biological. Our in-laws and the children we adopt are all considered kin. We sometimes speak of close male friends as “brothers by another mother” and our lives are often more deeply entangled with the lives of those not related by blood than those with whom we are biologically related.

Kinship defined as “mutuality of being” makes us all kin to many who are not closely related by blood. We hear the espousal of ideals that deny this fact. Some tell us to strive for

38 autonomy and self-sufficiency, and the “self-made” man is held up to us as the pinnacle of personal development, free of participation in the lives of others. A little thought reveals the vain-gloriousness of these ideals. Who among us is autonomous—governing themselves alone, without imposition of external constraints or the advantages provided by the collective efforts of our culture, such as roads, bridges, and financial instruments provide by cooperation with our fellow citizens through the institutions of federal and state governments?

If we hike through a forest, where we are able to go is circumscribed by obstacles such as rivers, boulders, trees, and mountains. If we travel across country, where we are able to go is largely determined by what roads there are. The paths we chart for our lives can only follow open trails. Hunters who kill their own game rarely make their weapons. They travel to their hunting grounds on roads, wearing clothes, and drive there in cars—all made by others. There are no self-made men, because no one does anything alone. We require a vast network of cooperation. We have no choice but to depend upon work done by others. We cannot even eat, breathe, or drink without the cooperative agency of an immeasurable number of living things that, along with us, compose ecosystems. If kinship is mutuality of being, our kinship extends widely to the natural world as well as our fellow human beings.

This broader notion of kinship is found in many cultures and was dominant everywhere until relatively recent times. The case for this is made by the anthropologist Philippe Descola, who shows that the distinction between nature and culture drawn by the westernized world is somewhat anomalous. Previously, and elsewhere now, the boundaries of society were extended beyond humans to include the whole of the surrounding world of nature.21 In these systems humans and non-humans share a common inner core, however much they may differ in their external forms.22 The westernized world tends to confine what we share with other living things

39 to material constituents and fundamental organic structures or processes. What we have in common with other species is not much different from what we have in common with the non- living world:

[S]ince Descartes and above all Darwin, we have no hesitation in recognizing that

the physical component of our humanity places us in a material continuum within

which we do not appear to be unique creatures any more significant than any

other organized being…. As Bouvard and Pécuchet discover with a slight sense of

humiliation, we must get used to the idea that our bodies “contain phosphorus as

do matches, albumin as do egg whites, and hydrogen gas just as do streetlamps.”23

But we recognize no, or little, continuity between what goes on within ourselves and other creatures. We often seem to consider humans the product of a rupture in the biological world, exceptional in the possession of an inner life, community, and culture.24 We have even denied that we share these properties, or at least these properties at the highest level, with other human groups.

In his famous essay, “The Land Ethic,” Aldo Leopold describes how morality has evolved over time. Once we believed that it was morally permissible to possess humans as property. He points out that how we dispose of our property “was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.” What we say we own becomes a mere thing entirely subject to our whims and control. Much of the world has come, in principle at least, to acknowledge that ethical consideration extends to all human beings. But Leopold proposes that this is not enough, that we have not recognized the larger community to which we belong, that kinship extends farther than we have realized, and that we need a new ethical orientation. Ethics pertains to the modes of cooperation that govern our behavior within a community, and a community is

40 composed of interdependent beings. On these grounds, he argues, we ought to have a moral regard for the land that sustains us. By “land” he means the whole of that which makes life possible, which includes both living and non-living things: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Abiotic elements must be included in the community, because we cannot live without clear air, clean water, sunlight, and healthy soil. From this point of view, polluting the air, water, or soil are among the morally worst things we can do, since it is a poisoning of that which makes life possible. Understanding community in these terms makes it easier to understand those cultures which did not see the natural world as something outside of culture. Like them, he regards us not as conquerors of “the land community,” but rather “plane members[s] and citizen[s] of it,” and this “implies respect” for our “fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”25

Our attitude towards the natural world ought to take into account the common origin of living things and similarities among them, which makes them our kin, and our dependence upon them, which makes them members of our community. The deeper sense of self sought by enthusiasts of family history raises some questions about what we call our “selves.” How far back we must we go for an accurate picture of who and what we are, and how wide is the circle encompassing our living kin extends, define the boundaries of the self as it extends beyond our isolated bodies.

In our culture there are primarily two accounts of human origins, one from biological evolution and one from the book of Genesis. According to a June 2, 2014 Gallop poll more than four out of ten Americans reject the evolutionary account as incompatible with their religious beliefs,26 but not all Christians view these as rival accounts. For example, the Catholic Church

41 reconciles them, noting that “Scripture does not tell us in what form the present species of plants and of animals were originally created by God.”27

Alfred Russel Wallace developed evolutionary theory around the same time as Darwin.

Darwin included Wallace’s account along with his own in his first publication of the theory in the jointly authored essay, On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the

Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, presented to the Linnaean

Society on 1 July 1858. While Wallace was no Christian, and might not even have been a theist in any conventional sense, he famously wrote that

Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any

account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life. They may teach us

how, by chemical, electrical, or higher natural laws, the organized body can be

built up, can grow, can reproduce its like; but those laws and that growth cannot

even be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with consciousness.

But the moral and higher intellectual nature of man is as unique a phenomenon as

was conscious life on its first appearance in the world, and the one is almost as

difficult to conceive as originating by any law of evolution as the other.28

Yet Wallace was among the staunchest defenders of Darwin.

Even if one were to insist on the literal meaning of the stories of creation provided in

Genesis and reject evolutionary theory, there are reasons for thinking that this does not weaken claims about the kinship of living things. In Genesis 2, we are told that God formed both humans and all living things from “dust of the ground.”29 On this account all living things share a common origin in God and the material from which they are formed. What can we conclude from this but that we are all kin.

42 Biology confirms that we share common genes and anatomical similarities with other creatures. One of many reasons that that evolutionary biologists conclude that all living things have descended from a common ancestor, is that all eukareotes (organisms with nuclear cells containing genetic material), from single celled organisms to human beings, share thousands of genes.30 As Carl Zimmer puts it, “A Human and a grain of rice may not, at first glance, look like cousins. And yet we share a quarter of our genes with that fine plant. The genes we share with rice—or rhinos or reef coral—are among the most striking signs of our common heritage….

Even yeast has something to tell us about ourselves.”31 In addition to sharing genes, humans are similar to other life forms in a multitude of other ways.

The word “community” comes from the Latin communitas the root of which communis— that which is common. Although a variety of definitions for “community” are listed in the

Oxford English Dictionary, they are all linked to the meanings of the communitas. The concepts identified by this term include joint ownership, the sharing or forming part of something, an organized society, and having a shared nature or kinship. In discussing the notion of community,

Aldo Leopold emphasizes the participation of interdependent parts in an organized whole—the inter-relationships between the elements that constitute the system of life. Recognition of our place in that system, he says, requires a new moral orientation:

An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations

so new and intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social

expediency is not discernible to the average individual.32

In other words, the system of life is so interconnected and relationships so complex, that the consequences of our actions—how they affect the living world and ourselves—are not immediately apparent. It takes a deeper understanding of nature than most of us have, or perhaps

43 any of us, to comprehend how our behavior might send ripples of destruction through an ecosystem or across the globe. An ethic of conservatism, circumspection, and humility are the appropriate response to this reality, as well as a fitting understanding of the kinds of beings we are, our relationship to the natural world, and our profound dependency upon it.

As a child I experienced myself as not an isolated individual, but a member of the community of life and, as I have described, my students report their own experiences of this in the disappearing special places of their childhood. Under the pressures and values of our culture the significance of these experiences are easily trivialized, suppressed, or forgotten. But they form the foundation of many indigenous cultures. For example, the anthropologist Richard

Nelson describes how in spite of his long and thorough acquaintance with the northwestern forests, his time with the Koyukon natives of Alaska changed his perception of “every living and nonliving thing” within that familiar environment, imparting “an entirely new way of seeing.”33

Nelson relates how the Koyukon people live in a world that watches—in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature—however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be—is never truly alone.34 We are engaged together with our kin and companions in the great drama of life. In their early years most children regard their engagement with the elements of nature as a relationship between persons.35 Based on what science is beginning to uncover about the nature of many of the creatures around us, there is good reason to believe that this is appropriate.

44 Chapter 3: The Thoughts of Insects and Spiders

Endowed with instincts so subtle, fine, and pliant, what need, it may be asked,

have insects to possess even a modicum or reason? That the gift is not useless or

superfluous if given them, is to this sufficient answer, and that it is, would appear

no unfounded supposition, judging from a variety of acts betokening and

intelligence which, if not Reason’s very self, bears its very image.

———L M. Budgen, Episodes of insect life (1851), p. 346

Let us return to insects and consider spiders as well. Humans experience a subjective life. We have conscious purposes, desires, and sensations. There is something that it is like to be a human being. As we approach the lives of insects, we might be surprised by the claim that they possess consciousness—that there is something that it is like to be them and a perspective from which they take in the world. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio defines consciousness as “a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings” that is “experienced in the first-person perspective” of each organism with “an automatic, unprompted, undeduced sense of self as protagonist of the experience.”36 As Thomas Nagel famously argued in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” we can know that an organism has some sort of subjective experience or consciousness even though cannot know what it is like for that organism. At the most, we can imagine what it might be like for us to be that creature, but not what it is like for the creature itself.37 However impenetrable, it is important to acknowledge that at least some animals have inner lives. Many reject any such notion as anthropomorphism— illicitly projecting human properties on those things that do not possess them, imagining the

45 living things around us in our own image. However, it is known that insects and spiders have central nervous systems: the neurons in human brains “are basically indistinguishable from those of a killer whale, elephant, or mouse—or fly. The synapses, various nerve cell types, connections, even the genes creating those neurons” are “essentially identical across species.”38

As the ornithologist, Alexander Skutch, pointed out, recognizing anatomical similarities between humans and other creatures does not provoke accusations of anthropomorphism. Since our inner lives emerge from our anatomical structure, why is it a fundamental error to assert that anatomical similarities give rise to some correspondence between our inner lives and those of animals? Evidence increasingly shows that, like us, insects have sensations, solve problems, and learn from experience. Some, at least, are cognitive beings, capable of acquiring knowledge and understanding.39

In 2012, a group of experts in cognitive neuroscience, neuropharmacology, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and computational neuroscience attended a conference on

"Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals" at Cambridge University in the UK. They signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which concludes with the following statement.

We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to

preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence

indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and

neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to

exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that

humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate

46 consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many

other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.40

Using carefully established criteria, Feinberg and Mallet conclude that it is very probable that consciousness extends even to insects—a conclusion with which Peter Carruthers agrees in The

Architecture of the Mind.41

Many forms of human cognition are so customarily employed, that we generally fail to recognize how remarkable they are. Every day we make our way about the world categorizing the objects around us, extrapolating from past experiences to new ones, and discriminating between the things we encounter foreknowing how they will affect us. Since we so easily overlook them in ourselves, it is not surprising that we should overlook them in what E. O. Wilson calls “the little things that run the world.”42 Considering how these cognitive capacities enable insects to operate in their environments might enable us to more fully appreciate the richness of the world around us. How wonderful to consider that we share some sorts of intelligence with all the living things around us! And it should be humbling to recognize that some of the sensory and cognitive capacities of other creatures exceed our own in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

Even though evolutionary theory would lead us to believe that there is continuity between human consciousness and cognition and other animals, many biologists have been reluctant to admit that other animals have cognitive capacities and inner lives analogous to our own. A number of difficulties lay behind this. Science insists on careful measurement, but consciousness cannot be measured, and an organism’s cognitive capacity must be specifically adapted to what it needs to survive in its particular environment. Cognition must by necessity take a large variety of forms defying the scientific tendency to seek well-defined categories.

47 Scientists also emphasize results that are repeatable in the artificial environment of a laboratory. But placing any animal in a laboratory where controlled experiments can be conducted immediately removes it from the niche to which its cognitive abilities are adapted, so that any results must be distorted. In the case of other humans, we can usually detect cognitive processes by communicating through language. But this cannot easily be done with animals.

Scientists have attempted to teach sign language to apes, train animals to use computers to communicate, and teach human speech to birds, such as African parrots, but all this is based on the questionable assumption that we can measure another animal’s cognitive capacity by their ability to master languages and devices devised by humans. Humans, like animals, have a language that suits their particular needs, which are not necessarily shared with other creatures.

Scientists also prefer to avoid any unnecessary assumptions to explain behavior, using a version of Ockham’s razor: do not multiply the things supposed to exist beyond what is necessary to explain the appearances of things. So they have often preferred not to introduce the additional element of cognition in their explanations of animal behavior.

David Griffin has turned this rule on its head by proposing that some sort of thinking is the simplest explanation for many forms of behavior in animals, including the behavior of insects. I remember reading the first edition of Donald Griffin’s Animal Minds in 1992. Reading his many accounts of the complex and astounding behavior of animals and his arguments that they possess consciousness and thought altered my perception of the world. I felt never alone, watched everywhere by the tiny minds of insects and the larger minds of other animals.

A broad range of behaviors are found among insects and spiders. Some of these are very simple, and might easily be explained as the result of genetic programing or instinct. We have a tendency to think that instinctual behavior is absent of thought and is not involved in learning. It

48 has become more and more apparent that this is a profound error, that instinct is not incompatible with thought and often provides a foundation upon which skills are refined through learning.

Many insects have amazingly complex behaviors. These are no doubt based on genetic predispositions of various kinds, but so is human behavior. In our own case, we can readily admit that we have basic drives that are encoded in our genes to produce a kind of instinct. But that is only one level, or one kind, of explanation for our behavior. Take, for example, the sex drive. Evolutionarily speaking, this has evolved in order to ensure the survival of our species and is biologically driven by such things as hormonal reactions. But it would be preposterous to claim that two lovers are not in any way guiding their actions by thoughts and judgments. If someone were to tell me that my love for my wife is reducible to nothing more than electrochemistry I would find this laughable. And the evolutionary explanations of the origin of sex as a method of perpetuating our species does not imply that all humans making love are guided by the thought, “I must reproduce my species.” Evolution deals with the history of how a capacity arose, not with how the exercise of that capacity feels, its immediate motivation, or what thoughts accompany it. Lovers have loving thoughts and can become more skillful through assessment and learning that modifies their judgments about how best to please their partners. I suspect that a careful analysis would show that most of our behavior similarly combines instinct with activities of the mind.

Learning is not an alternative to, or the opposite of, instinct. Learning is itself an instinctively driven activity. Animals are innately driven to learn certain kinds of things. Bees, for example, are moved by instinct to learn what flowers best provide them with the food necessary for their survival. But it is absurd to think that instinct is so specific, and so completely drives their behavior, that they somehow have a field guide to these plants encoded in their

49 genes. Evidence strongly suggests that even the human ability to learn speech is driven by innate capacities and inclinations. For example, human infants have innate recognition of most or all of the consonant sounds that are used in human speech, even if those sounds are not in the language they normally hear. This enables infants to focus on the sounds of speech among the cacophony of other kinds of sounds and provides a sort of a template that children use to learn and begin to reproduce the elements of speech. Instinct paves the way to unlocking the meanings embedded in the enormously intricate and diverse sounds of human speech and exercise linguistic intelligence.

Each species is intelligent in ways that natural selection has prepared them for, and stupid in the areas of their lives that do “not require a customized learning program.” We are smart in the ways that our survival as a species has required, but stupid, and far surpassed, by the intelligence of animals in other ways.43

Some scientists consider that if an insect or spider is found to be capable of learning by association, integrating information derived from their various sensory capacities, making choices, or revealing in other ways that their responses are not merely reflexive, then this is enough to show that they have cognitive capacities. But others insist that cognition can only be established by showing that they have “higher” capacities, such as the ability to learn concepts and construct “cognitive maps”—mental representations of their environment. Yet others lay down even stricter standards, insisting that cognition involves something like rational planning.44

The behavior of some insects is so inflexible that it might not be accompanied by thinking. But thinking can be simple or complex. An insect might engage in simple thinking in the form of perceptual searches for objects that match some genetically encoded pattern. But this would still be a form of thinking. For example, suppose I were to give you a diagram of a geometrical shape, say a star with five points, present you with blooms from a variety of flowers,

50 and ask you to pick out the flower that most closely matched the shape of the star. It seems that your systematic comparison of the flowers with the star is a kind of thinking and involves judgment. Human thinking often involves searching for a match between patterns and perceptual experience. That is how we learn to identify birds, plants, or insects in a walk through a forest.

Beyond thinking of this simple kind, we might want to know whether insects and other animals have understanding, cognition, or intelligence, considering these roughly the same thing.

In spite of valiant efforts to do so, there is not satisfactory formal definition for what we mean by these terms.45 Weir has claimed that we seem to mean something like the capacity to react appropriately to new situations that require more than an instinctive response or simply generalizing from past experience.46 In the case of humans, we can discover this simply by asking persons for explanations of why they did something. Since we do not have this luxury with other animals, except those that have been trained, like Alex the African parrot, to use human language or some other symbolic system, the best that we can do is examine behaviors which seem to be better explained by intelligence than by instinct. Although, as I will show below, even generalizing from past experience seems to require the formation of concepts and a type of thinking.

It is hard to articulate what we mean when we say that a creature has a mind and thinks.

But we seem to mean something like this. A being has a mind when it is capable of having perceptions that inform beliefs, and those beliefs guide behavior by interacting with a set of desires in order to choose a course of action. Minds can be more or less capacious with respect how many perceptions they have, how many beliefs they are capable of forming from those perceptions, how many desires they have, and how flexible they are in their choices. Minds can also take a variety of forms, as is fascinatingly illustrated by Peter Godfrey-Smith’s discussion of

51 the minds of the octopus, squid, and cuttlefish.47 The character of a mind is connected to the kind of physical system it has for the processing of information and desires and the selection of potential courses of action.

While it is obvious that the brains of vertebrates are larger than those of insects and spiders, we share with them some neural structures that are organized in fundamentally similar ways. Humans share physical traits with insects—striking similarities in the development, function, and architecture of the nervous systems. And the molecular, functional, and cognitive structure of their brains show a common “developmental elaboration” involving the same genetic patterns that form the same the types of neurons and functional connections between them. The modular structures and processes of the two types of brains are fundamentally identical in many of their parts and the same underlying molecular processes occur in both.48 Both contain modules of densely organized networks of nerves that shape the character and variety of sensations and are connected to centers that integrate these sensations.

Much behavior of insects and other arthropods is clearly driven by innate preferences.

This has been the main focus of much research on their activities and has led some scientists to describe them as machines without minds.49 However, over the last thirty years, research has established that at least some insects and spiders have memories and are capable of learning.

They have exhibited the ability to remember experiences and integrate those with what they presently sense in order to make flexible judgments and solve problems about what actions to perform in response to novel and complex situations.50

While he did not explicitly consider insects, as early as the 18th century, the great philosopher

David Hume attributed causal reasoning to animals. Indeed, he held that even though humans are

52 capable of refining causal inferences in a more sophisticated way, the foundation of causal beliefs is the same in animals and humans. In both cases patterns discovered in experience produce a mental association through conditioning. Because we experience that an event, E2, repeatedly follows a previous event, E1, we come to believe that whenever we encounter E1 it

51 will be followed by, and produce, E2. Hume characterizes this as the belief that E1 causes E2.

We use these causal inferences in order to negotiate the world and determine the means for achieving the ends we desire. At least some insects and spiders seem to engage in such causal reasoning.

But insects engage in other behaviors based on forms of learning that are not reducible to this kind of associative learning or to narrowly programmed behavior alone. One example can be found in the navigational skills of insects like the Tunisian desert ant, a species of the genus cataglyphis. This ant is able to navigate by dead reckoning—a method of calculating where one is currently based on one’s previous position and the speed one has traveled a course over a given period of time.

Humans can dead reckon by using arithmetic and trigonometry. It requires good records and the accurate measurement of the speed, time, and direction of travel, as well as precise instruments, charts and tables. Obviously, the desert ant uses no such devices, but, however much it wanders, it is able to know its current position and the most direct path back to its starting point by integrating information about the multiple distances and directions it has traveled in all the legs of its journey. As its path changes, it continually recalculates the direct path home.52 The directional information is derived by reading the location of the sun from the polarization of sunlight.53 Its knowledge of the distances traveled in each vector of its journey has been shown to rest on their memory of the number of steps they have taken. But it does not

53 rely on this alone, since number of steps is not an accurate measure when travelling over hilly terrain. So it adjusts information taken from counting steps by integrating knowledge of whether those steps were taken in a flat line, or up or down slopes.54 Spiders that travel distances from their lair to hunt have similar abilities.55 It would not seem that this ability can be a conditioned or a simple instinctive response, since these creatures dead reckon even when in novel environments with variable stimuli.56 Like many other kinds of animals, they seem to construct mental maps or pictures of their environments which they update through observation in order to successfully navigate their surroundings.57

Scientists have shown that the ability of wasps to recognize their prey and their selection of a method of attack, as well as their construction of nests are instinctual responses to various cues. But, as with humans, instinct can provide a foundation for various kinds of mental activities. Any wasp must be able to remember the location of her nest to which she brings back materials to construct it and, later, to provide provisions for her offspring there. Doing this requires the correct interpretation of changing celestial markers and a mental map of earthly landmarks. During each foray she must not only relate her journey to the position of the sun during that time of day, but keep track of her rate of movement, in order to find her way near home where local landmarks can direct her to its specific location. Even if wasps instinctually follow the same general pattern of activity in building their nests, they become increasingly adept at identifying the most suitable consistency of mud for the construction of their nests and learn to improve the structure of their nests over time.58

We use and modify natural materials in order to accomplish our aims and solve problems. In the early stages of human history, our tools were quite simple. Stones, sticks, hide, and fibers were

54 used in either rudimentary ways, or altered and assembled into such things as spears, bows, and arrows. We regard technology, even in such early forms as this as one of the defining features of human intelligence. Because language provides us with a method for transmitting what one generation has learned to the next we have been able to refine and improve our technologies dramatically over time, but the basic intelligence that enables us to use tools has remained relatively constant over time. What has changed is the amount of information we are able to utilize in the tools we make.

Many insects also use and modify natural objects to serve their purposes. Remarkably, they have their own technologies. I can only mention a few examples, but one of these technologies involves the making of traps for catching prey, as is done by the larvae of antlions

(Neuroptera), worm-lions (Diptera), and some cadissflies (Trichotera). These traps must be effective enough to justify the investment of time and energy to make them.

Antlions are found in Ohio and are widely distributed across the United States and the world. They construct traps in sand or loose soil.59 Prey fall into the depression and find escape difficult and time-consuming because the loose sand on the vertical surface collapses as they try to escape, making them more vulnerable to attack. The diameter of the pit is such that prey too large and dangerous for the antlion to handle can easily escape. The manner in which the pit is constructed is a marvel of precise engineering and meticulous use of materials. An antlion first pulls itself in various directions under the surface of sand using its hind legs and contractions of its abdomen to create a furrow and then begins to move in a circle, flicking sand to the outside.

The furrow is deepened and expanded as it moves in an inwards spiral. As it moves it sifts the finer sand from large particles by vibrating its forelegs. If the larger particles are not too large, it flicks them from the pit. It has been demonstrated through mathematical analysis that antlions

55 are capable of precisely determining, and maximizing the distance that larger particles are thrown away from their pits by controlling the angle of trajectory—around 45 degrees—and the velocity with which particles are thrown. When it finds grains of sand too large to toss, it carries them out on its back. Eventually an asymmetrically inverted cone is formed.

The antlion resides in the part of the pit with a lower slope, burying itself with its mandibles extended. The side of the pit it faces has a steeper slope and is thickly coated with the finest and most slippery sand. The antlion is thus positioned at the apex of an inverted cone towards which any more passive prey that alight on the steeper slope will slide. In the case of more active prey, the antlion tosses sand over its back to subdue its efforts to crawl out of the pit by interfering with its footing. The sand it throws is taken from the base of the steeper wall, causing the sand to slide towards it carrying the prey with it so that the antlion can pierce it with their mandibles and inject enzymes that break down the soft tissues for digestion. Capturing prey inevitably disturbs the distribution of sand in the trap. Antlions flick the exoskeleton and large particles of newly fallen sand from the pit, and distribute the finer grains of sand in such a way as to reestablish the angles of the pits and again line it with the finest sand.60

Another example of animal architecture or technology can be found in the behavior of caddis-fly larvae. 12,000 species of caddis flies have been described, most of which use silk as a kind of tape to bind together ingredients to construct a structure to protect itself and, in some species, to trap food. Since we currently have no glues that are able to bind materials under water scientists are studying the adhesive properties of this silk which enable it to form complex physical and chemical bonds in aquatic environments, displacing water where the tape meets the stone. The tape bonds more thoroughly to surfaces fouled with biological residues such as decaying matter and bacteria. Because the human body is a watery environment, by reverse

56 engineering this tape, scientists hope to produce a glue that can repair soft tissues and tendons— one of the innumerable instances one how we derive benefits for humans from the study of the lowliest of creatures around us through biomimicry.

Caddisfly larvae, which are found in Ohio and across the globe, are well known for their construction of cases, nets and retreats, which vary according to the particular ecological niche in which they live. The design and composition of the cases and retreats is dependent on the ecological niche of each species, and the design of some of these is quite remarkable. Silo pallipes lays its eggs in small streams. Upon hatching, a larva first constructs a simple tube within which to reside, consisting of grains of sand uniform in size that are glued together with silk. As they grow, shedding their old skins and taking on a new larval form, called an instar, they shift their criteria for selecting building materials to construct dwellings in which each side is formed of two small pebbles, the ones at front being larger than the ones at the sides, while the roofs and floors are composed of finer particles of rock. When a larva in its fourth instar prepares to molt it cements a small stone in the opening of the structure that it removes after the old skin has been shed. After growing in size for several weeks, a larva enlarges its house by adding to each side two yet larger stones, and again blocking the opening at the front with a pebble. It then turns around inside the structure and cuts away its previous casing, turns back to the front and removes the blocking stone. By the time of their fifth molt or instar their houses are approximately 1 cm or a fourth of an inch in length.61 In experiments in which sections of the structures were removed the larvae engaged in an assessment of which particles were appropriate for making the repair. They first separated the particles by size and then carefully measured them, cementing that with the closest fit into place.62

57

By permission of Bob Henricks

Larvae of the caddis-fly Macronema transversum build another kind of residence that includes what has been called “one of the most complicated feeding structures constructed by the non-social insects.” These are created of sand and silk. From the upper surface of the edifice extend two tubes. One of these, the longer of the two, curves slightly at the top in the direction of the water’s flow while the shorter tube allows the inflowing water to escape. Inside of the assembly, between the two tubes, is a chamber, across which the larvae spin a very fine net that captures fine particles of organic matter, microscopic plants (phytoplankton), and bacteria that carried in by the flow of water through the chamber. The larva resides in a separate chamber with a larger opening that enables it to gather food the side of the net that captures particles from up- stream and a smaller hole to allow the passage of water and feces. 63

58

From Wallace and Sherberger 1975, by permission.

Summarizing the research on the behavior of caddis-fly larvae, Griffin remarks on the versatility they show in both the initial construction and repair of their homes. And he notes that they do not exhibit the stereotypical behavior that we customarily associate with insect larvae,

59 but “have highly organized central nervous systems with hundreds of neurons and synapses that are quite capable of organizing relatively complex and flexible behavior.” He suggests that the best explanation for this complex behavior is that their adjustments in building and repairing their homes “seem to be aided by simple thinking about what they are doing,” even if this thinking involves only seeking to match the objects they perceive with genetically encoded instructions.64

Social insects have methods of communicating precise information among themselves, some of the most astounding of which are found in honeybees. The communicative functions of honeybee

“dances” were first discovered by the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch in 1945. Donald

Griffith summarizes the enormous amount of research that has shown how through these dances, and by other means, bees convey to the hive information about sources of nectar, pollen, water and suitable locations for colonization.65 This form of symbolic communication is so different from anything else we know, and so upsetting to our assumptions about language, thought, and the uniqueness of humans, that it has been difficult for scientists to absorb its significance.

Honeybees have a process for reaching consensus on decisions crucial to the survival of the hive that has been called “honeybee democracy.”66 And honeybees display sophisticated cognitive abilities in collecting the knowledge that they share.

Foraging bees must find food. It has been shown that bees remember what times of day a flower’s blooms will be open, what colors are characteristic of the most nutritious blossoms, the landmarks that mark the paths to places that it has gathered nectar or pollen in the past, and the odors associated with the food. Most importantly it must gather information that will enable its fellow bees to navigate to the site. To do this the bee must record information about the

60 relationship between where the food is and the angle of the sun to the horizon. Since the sun moves throughout the day, it must also remember how this movement occurs in relation to time and take this into account when communicating locations to the hive.67

Upon returning to the hive, the forager may communicate information to the other bees through face-to-face encounters, in which the bees probe each other’s antennae and head. A forager will regurgitate part of the content of her stomach which is then taken up by others who taste and smell it. If a hive has an adequate supply of a particular food, foraging bees bringing information of its location finds the others less responsive. This informs the forager about the degree of the hive’s need for that sort of nourishment and changes what the returning bee looks for on its next trip, for example, switching from nectar to pollen, or, when temperatures are warm, from gathering pollen or nectar to water, which they regurgitate in small droplets that, by fanning their wings, the bees in the colony circulate throughout the hive to cool it.

When stocks of food are urgently low, foragers who find a new source inform the hive of its location through a symbolic dance. First they walk a short distance into the hive, often communicating with some of the bees through the face-to-face interactions I have described above. Then a remarkable thing happens. They perform one of two kinds of dances, either a

“round dance” or a “waggle dance.” The round dance is executed when what the hive needs is nearby. A bee moves in a circle, now clockwise, now counter clockwise, briefly vibrating its body laterally at the end of each circuit. The dances indicate no particular direction for the other workers to search in. Because the food is close to home, it is only telling the others to search all around the immediate area.

When foragers find food at such distance that it is necessary to describe the direction to its location, they engage in an extraordinary symbolic performance—the waggle dance.

61 Waggling their bodies at an accelerating pace they walk in a straight line up the inside of the hive to indicate the direction to the food source. They then circle back, without waggling, to the point at which they began their walk and repeat it. Their movements describe a circle intersected by a straight line. The direction of the line formed inside of the hive by the waggle dance is symbolic of what direction to travel in relation to the sun’s location. A vertical dance up the inner hive indicates that the food is in the direction of the sun and a downward dance that the food is in the opposite direction of the sun. If a dance is perpendicular to a vertical line and to its right, then the food is located at 90 degrees to the sun, and so on. Further, the length of the waggled line indicates distance. The dancing bee even makes adjustments in its dance in order to indicate the difficulty of the journey according to the direction and speed of the wind: “if a forager must fly against a strong wind to find a patch of flowers, her dance will exaggerate the distance, in effect, she is telling her sisters that, judging by airspeed, the flight will seem like a long one.” At the same time the intensity and duration of her dance indicates the attractiveness of the target, perhaps because there is much food there or because the return journey will be with the wind. 68

So a bee’s decision about how to dance requires the accumulation of much information, as well as judgments as what direction, how long and how intensely to dance.69 A bee must assess the colony’s needs, how much labor is required to extract nourishment in relation to the number of flowers at the location and how much nectar the flowers contain. In other words, a bee makes judgments about the energetic efficiency of utilizing the site—how much energy can be appropriated from the food in relation to how much energy is required to harvest it. If another bee has encountered predators at the indicated source, it attempts to disrupt the waggle dance of a be directing the hive there by butting her head against the dancer and sending brief vibrational signals.70

62 Symbolic dancing also occurs when a hive needs to divide because of overcrowding, which leads to swarming. Part of the hive will remain in the old home to raise a new queen, while the rest of the hive must find a new location for itself and the old queen. Scouts precede this migration by exploring potential sites, evaluating them, and communicating the information they have accrued to the rest of the hive, again by means of dancing. Under these conditions, the scouts dance on the surface of the swarming bees. The same symbolic system is used to communicate the distance, direction, and favorability of the prospective site for relocation as is used for directing the hive to sources of food. Within several hours after the swarm has emerged from the hive, scouts will be dancing to communicate information about a wide variety of locations. Bees who find disappointing sites, will dance with less intensity and for a less prolonged period than those who are enthused about the locations they have explored. Over time those less inspired about the sites they have found either cease dancing, or join in the dance of another bee indicating a stronger preference. Some workers will leave to explore the sites that other bees are “talking” about and make decisions about whether to join in the dance for that site.

Eventually a consensus emerges, and the swarm departs to make a new home.

Donald Griffith argues that when assessing what is going on in this rather astounding behavior we should be intellectually consistent. We do not directly know the subjective consciousness of our human peers. That can only be known through their communicative behavior. Since honeybees gather information, make judgments, and then communicate their opinions to their fellow bees, consistency would seem to require that we attribute some inner consciousness to them, even though we have no way of knowing what that is like for them.

Experiments have demonstrated that honeybees employ abstract concepts. Concepts are broad categories that can be applied to new experiences. Some such concepts are based on

63 perceived similarities among members of a class, such as the way humans form the concept of cow by combining such specific features as having four legs, hooved feet, horns, and producing milk. Experiments have shown that bees are capable of forming abstract concepts which enable them to discriminate between symmetrical and non-symmetrical patterns, differently oriented patterns, and other complex differences between classes of objects.71

There are also more abstract concepts that not based on generalizing perceptions to form the concept of a class, but on the relationships between objects. These include such concepts

“‘same’ or ‘different’, ‘more than’ or ‘less than.’”72 Of course, humans are able to use such concepts, but scientists have shown that other primates and some birds can also.73 Many animals have to navigate in complicated environments where such concepts would be required for their survival. So it should not be surprising that animals are capable of forming concepts of spatial relationships, such as something like our concepts of “east,” or “west of,” “to the right” or

“below of,” “above of,” etc. Scientists have been able to experimentally confirm that honeybees employ such concepts. For example, when rewards were placed at various positions above a vertical line bees were shown to employ the concepts above and below, learning that a reward would be found in targets in any position above a vertical line, but not below it.74 Similar experiments showed that in addition to the concepts “below” and above, bees could form the notions of “to the right of,” and “to the left of.” In addition to spatial concepts, bees have been shown to use concepts like “same” and “different” and to be able to employ two distinct sets of concepts simultaneously, such as combining spatial position with the concepts same or different.75

Remarkably, there is also evidence to suggest that honeybees may experience emotion.

This is based on the fact that in humans, negative emotions are associated with pessimism—a

64 cognitive bias in which worse outcomes are expected than are merited by the information that is gathered. Persons afflicted with feelings of anxiety have increased expectations of punishment or misfortune, pay more attention to potential threats, and tend to interpret ambiguous events as threatening. Experimenters first trained the bees to associate one odor with a reward of sucrose and another odor with a lesser reward of sucrose or a punishment, such as a mixture of quinine.

After the bees had learned these associations, half of the bees were subjected to vigorous shaking that simulated an attack on the colony by a predator trying to gain entrance to a concealed hive.

After being shaken, the scientists found changes in the chemical composition of the hemolymph

(the insect equivalent of blood) in the shaken bees that is thought to be associated with stress in insects. The bees were presented with a random series of five odors, including one they had been trained to associate with a reward and one with a punishment or lesser reward, as well as three other odors composed of varying ratios of the original two. Shaken bees were less likely than unshaken bees to feed on food in which the odor was ambiguous, for example when the odor associated with reward was predominant and there was only a slight amount of the odor associated with punishment or lessor reward. Although they admit that their experiment does not entitle them to make claims about the subjective feelings of these insects, they point out that scientists have claimed that pessimistic cognitive biases are indicative of anxiety in dogs and rats

(and humans as well, although this is not mentioned). It is logically inconsistent, they claim, to deny the same interpretation of negative cognitive biases in honeybees.76

While the remarkable behavior of honeybees has drawn the most interest from scientists, other insects have been shown to engage in intelligent behavior and learning. To mention but a few of many examples, recent experiments suggest that some wasps are able to identify other

65 individuals by the markings on their faces or abdomens.77 Bumblebees learn the best locations to forage for food from other bees.78

Spiders seem to be one of the most despised and feared arthropods, yet, when fairly considered, some of their abilities are quite astounding. I recall an early evening when, stepping out onto our deck we observed a very large and fat spider suspended from the top of the gazebo I built. As we look more closely, we saw that it is in the process of weaving an enormous web, part of which has already been constructed in a beautiful geometric pattern of threads which the setting son had made luminous. We watched this spider drop from the roof trailing a thread of silk behind it, swing back and forth until it could clutch and attach it to an adjacent thread in the already constructed portion of the web. It climbed that thread back to the roof, moved over, and dropped again, patiently, precisely, and with expert judgment building a thing of beauty and utility. I have had occasion to describe what we saw to my students when we were studying the argument that there must be an intelligent creator of the universe because the things within it have a design that could not result from mere natural causes. As a criticism of this argument, I suggest that we frequently see natural things that have what appears to be a well-crafted designed. I recounted what we witnessed on that evening and, in what I thought will be considered a challenge to this argument. I ask them whether they think that this spider, which is doubtless spurred by instinct to construct a web, was in any way guided by some kind of native intelligence and learned skills as it acted on that instinct to execute its design. I had assumed that they would deny intelligence to the spider. To my surprise, they were always convinced of the contrary. Yes, they say, that spider had some sort—some impressive sort—of intelligence and skill. I share that conviction and am

66 filled with wonder at the intelligence and skills of the living things with which we share this planet.

Spiders typically build their nests at night and their behavior suggests that they have the ability to remember and understand the spatial relationships between the components of their webs as they build them. A spider typically spins its web between two vertical structures, A and

B in the diagram below, such as branches. She climbs upward on one of these to release a delicate strand of silk that is sticky on the end. Blown by breezes it eventually attaches to a horizontal point that anchors it. The spider detects this by the increased tension of the thread and then walks its length extruding a heavier strand behind it, pulling it tight when she reaches the anchoring point of the first strand and fastening it there in order to define the top thread of its web, C.

The spider then crosses this line to her starting point spinning behind her a loose line that is heavier than the first, but lighter than the second, attaches it, and walks back to the middle of this thread, which sags under her weight and because of its extra length to form the center of the web, D. She attaches another silk thread, E, to this point, spinning it out as she descends, pulls it tight, and secures it below. She has now formed three radial lines from the center of the web. To begin constructing the outer framework of the web, the spider fastens a new strand of silk to the center of the web and walks up a radial line to one end of the top thread where she fixes an additional line. She spins this thread, F, behind her as she drops and glues it below to one of the perpendicular structures between which the web is being formed. While she is doing this, she carries with her the line she spun from the center of the web as she ascended to her perch, which now extends horizontally from the center. She tightens this line to form another radial thread, G.

This process is repeated until the radial lines and outer edges of the web are formed.

67 C

D

G F

E

A B

Upon this framework, the spider spins, from the center out, a spiral thread from radial line to radial line. Then, using this spiral thread as a walkway she walks from the outside in, weaving a narrowly spaced spiral of sticky threads to trap prey. She will later remove this walkway by consuming it. When the web is complete, spiders most often cut the threads in the center to form a hole and then strengthen its border, allowing it to move from one side of the web to the other, depending upon which side the pray is ensnared.

68

(Drawing and description below from http://www.oocities.org/brisbane_weavers/ScientificPage.htm, by permission of

Peter Chew)

The spiders web is made of different type of spider silk. Spiders can generate different type of silk to build different parts of their webs.

Bridge thread

Bridge thread is constructed by very strong spider silk. Usually came back and forwards along the bridge thread, to lay more silk on it to make it stronger. Bridge thread support the weight of the whole web.

Anchor thread

The spider carefully select the Anchor point and lay the anchor thread. Anchor thread is also constructed by strong silk, but usually it is only one single thread.

69 Frame thread

Frame thread is attached on both sides on Anchor thread. Together with the

Anchor thread, they form the outside frame of the spider web. Frame thread is

constructed by less strong silk, and is only one single thread.

Radius

Radius is the silk connect from web central to the frame. The silk used to make

the frames and radius are not sticky. They serve for supporting purpose. The

spider will walk on those radius and not be entangled by its own silk.

Auxiliary spiral

The auxiliary spiral is used as reference for laying the capture spiral, the sticky

silk. Most spiders will remove the auxiliary spiral silk when laying the capture

spiral silk.

Capture spiral

Capture spiral is the only sticky silk on the spider web. It entangled prey if they

enter the web.

Every spider’s web must be adapted to the position of the initial points to which the axis can be fastened and the number of radial lines varies from web to web. When the web is damaged, spiders immediately repair it and they do this, not by rote, but by addressing quite exactly the type of damage they find. Scientists believe that all of this requires complex spatial mapping and the ability to adapt mental maps to the particularities of the environment in which the web is woven. Scientists have found that when multiple parts of the web are vibrated at the

70 same time, a spider will move to one source of the vibration to check for prey and then dart out to the locations indicated by its memory of the previous vibrations.

Some species of spiders use webs as tools. They manufacture a net only one inch in diameter by first building a rectangular web, three inches long on each side, on silk attached to surrounding vegetation. From this web a net is cut. With their front legs, the spiders grasp the four corners of the net and, when a victim comes within range, cast it over their prey—a clear example of using a tool to accomplish goals.79

71

Net-Casting Spider (Photograph by Peter Chew)

72 All of this behavior, from spinning orbs to constructing nets is adjusted to the contingencies of specific and varied environments. It is difficult to conceive how genetically coded instinct could include how to act in these widely varying circumstances and more plausible to assume that learning, memory, and perhaps insight are employed.

The large group of arachnids known as jumping spiders weave no webs, but use keen eyesight and subterfuge to hunt and stalk their prey in ways that seem to require advance planning. When hunting web-building spiders they use duplicitous techniques. Since their prey

“reads” vibrations in the web to locate their prey, sometimes they move only when a gust of wind will make it more difficult to detect their footsteps, sometimes they walk across the web with irregular steps or set it into violent motion to make their approach resemble the natural jostling of the threads rather than struggling prey. In hunting other prey, they will often make detours, during which they might even lose sight of their intended victim for a while, order to catch it unawares.80

Some experiments have revealed remarkable foresight and planning among jumping spiders. In one set of laboratory experiments individual spiders were placed on top of a pole with potential prey in sight on one of two platforms perched on complexly branched structures with differently shaped bases. To reach their prey, the spiders had to descend their pole. From that moment until the climax of the hunt they were unable to see their intended victims.

Astonishingly, the spiders succeeded in their hunt, sometimes passing the trunk of an empty platform on their way to the base of the branched assembly that supported the stand on which their prey was located. It seems that the spiders must have planned their routes during their observations from the tops of the poles and remembered it as they hunted.

73 In another experiment, from the tops of their poles the spiders were able to see prey with two different sequences of beams that led to it, one of which had a gap that would create an obstacle to their approach. The spiders, descending from their poles took the route without a gap.

Videotapes of their behavior at the tops of the poles revealed that they carefully scanned both pathways, and, when they observed a gap, returned their gaze to their prey and traced the pathway to it in reverse order until they identified the successful route.81

I have given only a few examples of the frequently overlooked wonders to be found in the world of insects and spiders. They are ecologically essential to our survival. They take on a wonderful variety of forms, have some capacities similar to our own, as well as many that are beyond us.

They are analogous to us in fundamental ways that show our descent from a common ancestor.

They are our kin. Learning about them can transform one’s perception of the world, as it did mine, and with this transformation of perception comes a transformation of feeling and attitudes towards what E. O. Wilson has called the “little things that run the world.”82 They are all around us thinking their insect-thoughts in a world filled with an astounding variety of minds with distinct forms of intelligence.

74 Chapter 4: The Search

As time went by, I … realized that the particular place I’d chosen was less

important than the fact that I’d chosen a place and focused my life around it.

Although the island has taken on great significance for me, it’s no more inherently

beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth. What makes a place special

is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it’s flat or rugged, rich or

austere, wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like

every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way

in which its bounty is received.

———Richard Nelson, The Island Within (1991), p.xii.

I have said that what I was learning produced changes in my perception of the surrounding world. Along with these changes in perception came a transformation in my appreciation of natural beauty—my aesthetic response. No experience is constituted of passively received sensations. The mind is active in every experience—filtering, organizing, categorizing.

Experience is a union of conceptual structures, the mind’s activity, and the sensuous. Aesthetic experience of nature is not different from other kinds of experience. An experience of natural beauty can be more or less deep, accurate, and authentic, depending upon what concepts are employed in order to know the “inner character” of what one observes. Accurate perceptual awareness of a landscape must include the “natural processes by which the land and the living things upon it have achieved their character (evolution) and by which they maintain their existence (ecology).”83

In “Marshland Elegy” Aldo Leopold illustrates this by meditating on a landscape that is not conventionally pretty or picturesque. He weaves together sensual observations of cranes and

75 a bog with his knowledge of evolutionary history and the history of that particular landscape. He begins by recording his experience of the cranes and the bog on a particular day:

High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles,

croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet

disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great

echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a

final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding

grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

In the course of his elegy, he provides the historical context of the bog in recent centuries when they were regarded as a wasteland. The bogs were filled in to grow crops, and the cranes disappeared. The crops eventually began to fail, the bogs emerged again, and with them came the return of the cranes.

But there is a longer history to be told and it is part of this place: A sense of time

lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has awakened

each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid

down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the

sodden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the

mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the

cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the ice sheet. An endless

caravan of generations has built of its own bones this bridge into the future, this

habitat where the oncoming host again may live and breed and die.

Aesthetic appreciation of the crane, he says is enhanced by an understanding of its ancient evolutionary origins:

76 The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed

within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet

in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that

incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of

birds and men.

These cranes, he says, exist not merely “in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time.”84

Perception is enriched by such meditations. As my perceptual capacities are being transformed Bellbrook itself begins to change. One of the large tracts of woods that had attracted us to the area is bull-dozed, and in its place are erected big box stores, such as Lowes, Wallmart,

Staples, Home Depot and a host of others. Acres of pavement are poured. A new Kroger is built, even though there is another only a mile away. This will continue up until the present day. A surviving tract of forest next to this development has only recently been cleared to site a Costgo, yet another Kroger, and a multitude of large big box stores. Farmers in the township saw economic opportunities in the encroaching development, and successfully demanded changes in zoning that would permit them to sell their agricultural land to commercial and residential developers. They claimed that it was their right to have the laws changed in order to maximize their profit from the land. Farms, woods, and fields are rapidly disappearing from the township, being replaced with large and expensive homes, as well as commercial developments. I often feel despair and a kind of homesickness as I witness the steady emptying of species and natural environments from our world. It has made me feel that humans are the most difficult of animals to know, and to wonder at what we are collectively doing to this beautiful and rare planet.

My wife and I begin hankering to move to the country. I want to do something

77 measurable, concrete, and personal to address the tragedy I am beginning to understand and learning to see. Writing and teaching about these things does not give me much sense of accomplishment with regard to these most important of matters. They produce no visible results.

Aldo Leopold observed the power and privilege that physical action affords us:

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may

circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one

need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel. By virtue of this

curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and

there will be one.

If his back be strong and his shovel sharp, there may eventually be ten thousand.

And in the seventh year he may lean upon his shovel, and look upon his trees, and

find them good.85

So we search for a house on a large acreage that needs ecological restoration. We want ruined land that we can bring back to health. We want a place to love and center our lives around. After several years of looking, we finally find a place in Spring Valley Township about a mile from the village of Spring Valley, which has a population of around 500. This landscape sharply differs from the flat areas to the west. It is more like the Appalachian foothills one would find farther south in Ohio. It is hilly, heavily wooded, with creeks, springs, and the Little Miami—a State and National Scenic River—running through it. Our new home is midway up a hill that I believe is the second highest in Greene County, with a forbiddingly steep driveway.

The house is sited on twenty-one acres. About seven acres extend first from the street up to the top of a hill where the property narrows before spreading out into a plateau of about fourteen acres, seven acres of which are a field planted with alfalfa bordering seven acres of a

78 wooded area with ravines and springs. The surrounding properties are all thickly wooded. We think of the house below this plateau, which I have described in the Prologue, primarily in terms of its possibilities. Knowing that we will have to radically remodel it, I make a list of all the things that have to be done and what we can do in order to reduce the costs. I feel a foolish confidence that we can do most of the work ourselves. What I do not consider is how long it will take us to do these things. For five years we live in the damp basement, which frequently floods during heavy rains when water penetrates the wall somewhere behind the huge non-functional fireplace. Later we will remove the fireplace and a friend, who is a builder, will drill through the concrete to make a drain to conduct the water from the side, where it enters, under the floor to the front of the house and this does finally solve the problem. When, after several years of labor, we reach the final stage of remodeling, we remove the rock-sheet from the concrete walls downstairs and discover that they are covered with dangerous mold. We also discover the cause of the frequent electrical shocks we receive when we use the wall-switches. The electrical wires have been run through conduits in the floor and these conduits are filled with water. While the house will eventually be transformed into beautiful dwelling our struggles during remodeling are somewhat epic, and recounting them would require a book unto itself.

Soon after moving in we discover that various forms of violence are part of the history of our property. When we meet neighbors, several ask us whether we have found bullet holes in the walls of the house. We learn that a couple who previously occupied the house had each tried to kill the other. At one point, the wife tried to shoot her husband, at another he locked her into a barn and set it on fire. There had also been acts of violence against the land itself. The topsoil had been illegally scraped off and sold except in the ravines which were only saved because their steep sides made excavation difficult.

79 While one of our primary goals is to increase the biodiversity of our land by introducing a greater variety of native plants, before we were able to do that we need to remove the invasive species choking the woods. Our first effort to do so began with the march up the hill that I described in the Prologue. Early on, we do not yet know much about controlling invasive plants, or what native trees, shrubs, and flowers should be found in a healthy Ohio woodland. I consult a colleague who is a restoration ecologist. He tours our land to tell us what trees we have and where to begin in our efforts to battle exotic species. We find that we have a surprising diversity of native trees and shrubs. He points out that, among others, we have white, red, and glossy- leaved shingle oaks, tulip trees with their remarkably straight trunks, hawthorns, viburnums, hickories, and muscle wood. He advises us to begin by getting the vines of honeysuckle and

Asian bittersweet vines out of the trees. Once we finish that we should apply one of the safer herbicides to the vines and go after the bush honeysuckle.

I resolve to replace the field of alfalfa on the plateau with a prairie. I contact the Ohio

Department of Natural Resources for information on how to do this and they direct me to someone who hires out to plant prairies. But I discover that the cost of hiring him would amount to about half of the cost of a used tractor, and I will need one for annual mowing of the prairie in order to prevent it from being overwhelmed by trees. So we decide to wait until we can afford to buy our own tractor, borrow a seed drill from the Department of Natural Resources, and I can seed the prairie myself. After a year of cutting honey-suckle with machetes, mowing paths through the woods with a push-mower and flirting with sunstroke, we finally save enough money to buy a tractor.

For months we shop, gleaning what information we can. This is not without its psychological price. My usual practice in matters like this is to conduct research, but this was

80 before such research was made easy by the internet and my searches of libraries turns up no information on tractors. All I know is that I need a tractor with at least a 40 horsepower engine and a hydraulic rear end to power and pull a seed drill. Prairie grasses, such as little bluestem, big bluestem, indian grass, sideoats gramma, and switch grass, have fuzzy seeds that cannot just be scattered if effective germination is to occur. A seed drill inserts the seeds into the ground.

My questioning of dealers in heavy equipment is always done with the shame-faced knowledge that “greenhorn” is written all over me.

One winter's day, when the temperature is in the teens, Barb and I visit Warren County

Equipment. We walk through the snowy yard filled with rusty tractors, steam rollers, bull-dozers, back-hoes, and even school-buses and enter a shabby little office. There we meet Jackie who, born and raised in Kentucky, is now the right-hand man of the proprietor, Charlie. Jackie shows us through the rows of tractors, telling us their prices and which will suit our purposes. But this is before I can judge of what constitutes a fair price for a used tractor, and the rusty machinery before me does not inspire confidence. This is also before I meet Charlie and fall under his spell.

So we tell Jackie we want to look around a bit more, and he bestows a parting gift—a cap with

Warren County Equipment in cramped script above the bill.

A few weeks later we come to realize that the prices Jackie quoted are the lowest around, so we return and meet Charlie—a short man with a significant gut, his pants belted low beneath it, and buttons straining everywhere. Charlie's unique mastery of speech is unhindered by the unlit cigar glued to one corner of his mouth. He shows us around the lot, vouching for the mechanical soundness of his tractors and the steadfastness of his crew in providing service to his customers when the machinery needs repair. We are attracted to a Ford, primarily because it is the only tractor with more paint than rust, but Charlie feels compelled, he says, to deliver his

81 professional judgment about our inclinations towards the Ford. In his opinion we are over- looking the better buy—a Massey Ferguson 135 we passed by earlier because it looked like such a wreck. This tractor, he tells us, is the same price as the Ford, but it has only been used on a golf-course, where tractors find their burdens extremely light. Further, “It is a Massey Ferguson.

The name says it all.” I later query one of Barb's uncles who is a farmer, and he assures me that the tractor we purchased is from a line of Massey Fergusons than which no better can be found.

Listening to Charlie, who is a master salesman, I discover that I have faith in the man. I ask

Charlie if his mechanics check over the machinery before it leaves the lot. He responds with a drawl, his right hand stroking the air, “We check the whole thing out — everything. We clean

'em up, fix 'em up, and paint 'em up good.”

“Do you check the brakes?”

“We check the brakes,” he said, “We check everything.”

“The reason I ask,” I say, “is that our house is on a steep hill and the previous owner lost his leg in an accident when he lost control of tractor at the top of the driveway. It turned out that the used tractor he bought had bad brakes.”

“Well, in that case, just for you, we'll really check the brakes out.”

This isn't too assuring. But Charlie offers that, if we should be disappointed in its performance, he will buy the tractor back from us, anytime, at the same price we pay. He even puts this in writing when we sit down to close the deal. He tells us that for eight hundred dollars extra they will paint the tractor, replace the broken seat and rusted fenders, and fix anything they find wrong—“the whole works.” I ask him how he arrived at the price, given that he does not yet know all that might need to be done. He explains that this is simply his set price. I say that I really didn't care about the fenders and the paint, as long as the tractor runs well and ask if he

82 will reduce the price in order to deliver something less than “the whole works.” He responds,

“You say that. You say you don't care about the paint and the fenders, but you really do. We'll make her look real nice—a nice paint job, new fenders, the whole works.” I yield out of the conviction that he will not budge. No matter that they looked like wrecks on the lot, none of

Charlie's tractors leave that lot looking less than bright and clean, none with less than the “whole works.” He promises to have it ready for us in a month, and, again under his spell, I give him a check for the entire cost of the tractor. The idea of making only a deposit, as I would usually have done, does not even enter my mind.

After arriving home, I remember that I have promised my worried Mom that I will get a roll bar and seat belt. I call Charlie's office where ask Jackie whether these can be added to the deal. He yells back and forth to Charlie a few times and finally replies “Charlie says we can do

'er. It might cost a bit more, but we can do 'er.”

The promised day for delivery comes and goes. I begin calling Charlie weekly and start to have serious doubts about whether I will ever see that tractor. Finally, though, Charlie calls to tell me the tractor is ready and we set a time for delivery.

In 1996 I become the proud owner of a 1981 Massey-Furgeson 135. The tractor arrives on a flat-bed truck. I look out the window to see the truck pulling up our steep hill. Rushing outside I discover that the driver has parked his huge vehicle across from the house, on one of the steeper parts of the drive. Nervously I talk to him, directing him up the hill to the field. I think a flat place best for learning how to use the tractor, and do not want my first lesson to be driving up that hill. He pulls on up and unloads. The tractor is beautiful—bright, shining, and red

(even the air-filter), with the Massey Ferguson logo newly stenciled, and large metal beams welded to form a black roll bar.

83 After delivery, I read through my manual and call Charlie with a question before turning the key. He answers, but before hanging up he says, “Now Dan, I want to tell you that I know yer green. What I'm saying is that I want to he'p you. If you have trouble or can't figure something out, don't feel stupid. Call me. I got a man, Kevin, lives out by you. If you have trouble, call me, and I'll have Kevin stop by on his way home.” Kevin figures in the story again later, so I should tell you the correct pronunciation of his name. The first syllable is drawn out and accented, sounding almost like a long "a."

Charlie never bills me for the roll bar. I begin using the tractor and find my heart strangely moved. This tractor embodies an interesting and specific technology. It is designed to allow a person to accomplish singly a multitude of tasks on the farm. It has hydraulic systems to raise and lower devices on the back, and to run a series of other contraptions like pumps, moving rakes, or belts. The engine itself is the chassis. The tractor is really no more than a large engine and system of hydraulics on four wheels, but it is like a traveling factory. I find that with the tractor I can bush-hog as much honeysuckle in an hour as I could cut down by hand in a month.

For some time after delivery I am still figuring out what all the tractor's various levers, knobs, and dials can do. One morning it will not start. I fiddle around with all the sundry controls, and read through the manual. I cannot figure out any obvious problem I can fix. The tractor just will not start. I call Charlie, who sends Kevin over that evening. Kevin is darkly bearded, tall, and thin, wearing a striped work shirt, a polyester jacket, and pants that somehow look like an official uniform for mechanics who work on tractors. He brings with him a younger fellow with a pony-tale who seems to prefer riding in the bed of Kevin's pick-up to being on the front seat beside him. I introduce myself and ask the name of Kevin's partner. His name, I discover is also Kevin. So Kevin and Kevin (henceforth Kevins alpha and beta) set to messing

84 around with the tractor, and eventually decide it needs a new starter. In the course of chatting with them, I enquire about how Charlie’s crew had gone about checking the tractor's brakes.

They had not, I discover, actually inspected the brakes, but when they stomped on the brakes the tractor stopped, so they deemed them to be sound. When I direct alpha-Kevin's attention to the steep slopes of our land and enquire about the safety of driving this tractor up and down them, he responds “I wouldn't want to say anything about that.”

Alpha-Kevin comes and goes over the next couple of days. He picks up one starter, only to find it will not fit, and has to track down another. Eventually, though, the starter is replaced. I expect to receive a bill, but none ever comes.

Over the next year I have to call Charlie a couple of times with questions, but all goes well. My love for my tractor deepens. A year after my purchase, alpha-Kevin stops by. When I bought the tractor I had expressed interest in a front-end loader. Charlie had come across one that would fit my tractor. He couldn't remember my name and number, so he sent Kevin to see if I wanted to buy it. I stop by Charlie’s place to look at the loader. Unsurprisingly, the bucket is rusted through. Charlie assures me they will “fix it all up.” He explains to me that the loader has its own system of hydraulics. He chucks his hand under the front and yells, “The canisters don't leak.” Under Charlie's spell again, I decide to buy. Before paying, though, I tell Charlie that I am expecting the Department of Natural Resources to deliver a seed-drill that I am borrowing towards early April when, having already hired someone who killed the alfalfa, I am to plant the prairie seeds. Since I only expect to have loan of the seed drill for a week, I need to be sure I will have the tractor in time. He assures me it will be no problem, because so little has to be done to install the loader on the tractor.

85 While his secretary is making out the paper work, Charlie picks up the phone, and I cannot help but catch parts of his shouted conversation: “I got your dozer here. Do you want it?

... It don't much matter to me how you pay. It’s all still money. ... So, do you want it? ... Call me in an hour and let me know. ... An hour! ... An hour!” Charlie is getting pretty excited and loud, and looks like he is about to bite off the end of his cigar. “$50,000.00 and its yours! One hour! ...

$50,000, and you come in today. Today!” Finally, red-faced, he shouted one more time

“$50,000. It’s yours! You got a dozer! It’s yours!” and he slams the phone down. He turns to me and says, “I been trying to sell that guy a dozer for three weeks.” I can’t tell whether he had actually closed the deal.

Charlie sends a man in a flat-bed truck to pick up my tractor. He promises its return, with the loader installed, in a couple of weeks. Several weeks pass. Luckily the seed drill has not yet arrived. Several more weeks pass. The seed-drill is delivered and the tractor has not yet been returned. I call Jackie, at Charlie's office, and discover they just finished the work. They deliver my tractor that same day. After the delivery-truck leaves, I discover the tractor will not start. I call alpha-Kevin, who suggests it must be a loose wire. He tells me to check all the wires. I tweak every wire I can find for a couple of hours and cannot get the tractor to turn over. I call alpha-Kevin, and he tells me that he that he will stop by after work. Around 4:00, I find the wire that needed wiggling. The tractor starts. I turn it off and try again, but this time it will not start.

Kevin comes by just as I am leaving for the Seniors’ Banquet at the University of Dayton. He drives up the hill from our house to the tractor, returning quickly to tell me that I had the choke in the wrong position. (Yes, I am still a greenhorn.) I tell him that I feel like an idiot, but he kindly responds, “You can't remember everything.”

86 The next morning an agent from Ohio's Department of Natural Resources stops by to show me how to use the seed drill. We cannot figure out how to activate the upper hydraulic outputs as needed to operate the drill. A call to alpha-Kevin leads to the suggestion that I try raising the 3-point hitch before switching a lever, and the suggestion proves successful. The seed-drill has 3 bins. One is for prairie seeds, one remains empty, and one will hold the oats I am planting as a cover crop. The seed drill works in this way: Metal cogs move through each bin, pushing seeds into funnels which lead down to sets of two metal disks at an angle to each other so that they meet at the soil-line. The seeds fall to the bottom where the disks meet, cut the soil, and deposit the seed. Behind the metal disks are rubber disks that tamp the soil over the slits. The agent assures me that the dial on the back of the drill, which determines the rate of feed, is correctly adjusted for prairie seeds, but tells me I will have to figure the rate for feeding the oats by trial and error.

I set to work. A couple hours later I have completed a single pass over the whole field.

Theoretically, this should have used up my entire supply of prairie seeds. I stop the tractor to check, and find the bin around nine-tenths full. Over another couple of hours I complete a second pass, and find the bin around eight-tenths full. At this rate it will take ten passes and many hours for what should have taken one pass and just a few hours. Clouds are thickening and rain is predicted. I need to finish. I look more closely at the dial and see that the indicator seems to be pointing at the number 2, but the aluminum dial is hard to read. I decide that it must be incorrectly set. Assuming that higher numbers on the dial indicate a faster rate of feed, I push the lever to the part of the dial most distant from the number 2. I set off again, faster this time, racing around and around the field. A couple hours later I checked the bins again. The oats are long gone, but the prairie seeds are hardly depleted. I look again at the dial and discover, to my

87 dismay, that upon closer inspection what I thought was the number 2 position is 12. I had moved the dial from fully open to closed. I swung it back to full and set out again circling even more rapidly around the field, rocked by the bumpy ground. In this seemingly endless journey I begin to experience an altered state of consciousness in which time stands still. Several hours later, thunder and lightning bring me to my senses. I stop and limp, saddle-sore, over to the bin. I find some remaining seeds, but few enough that I decided to broadcast them by hand. The rain starts as I walk down the hill, my first prairie now planted.

About a month later I mow the tops off the oats and tiny shoots of prairie grasses are coming up. I owe it all to Charlie and the boys. My love for that tractor fades over the years. The brakes fail more than once. And eventually I can be sure that, each spring, the tractor will not start and some new major repair will be required. It begins to leak fluids of various sorts. Each time I mow the path up the hill from our barn to the field and back down, or smooth the gravel on our driveway I fear for my safety. After calculating how much I value my life, I finally decide to buy an expensive new Kubota. I get a good price and am able to convince the owner of the dealership to take my Massey Ferguson as partial payment, even after telling him that it had a leaky hydraulic system. He agrees that when he delivers the Kubota he will pick up my old tractor. When he arrives he parks his truck by the house and unloads the Kubota. I lead him to my old tractor, which is parked in a shed at the top of our hill. After trudging up the steep hill and seeing the tractor, he refuses to drive it down. So I drive it down with him trotting behind me. When we reach his flatbed truck and I stop the tractor, he yells, “You’re lucky to be alive.

That thing is a death trap.” So now, with my reliable new Kubota I no longer fear for my life when I have to navigate the hill.

When we remodel the house, we decide to eliminate the massive concrete parking lot that

88 surrounds it and reconfigure the driveway to a slope more gradual than a ski-jump. To do this, the driveway has to be wound back and forth, which requires a considerable amount of excavation. There are some patches of crown vetch that the previous owners had planted along the drive to prevent erosion. After excavation, there are no visible traces of it. I decide to plant a prairie on the land sloping down to the pond below the house. This is too steep for a tractor, so, after I think I have killed all the remaining non-native vegetation, I drive nails through one side of a wooden pallet and attach a rope to it. I scatter the prairie seeds over the hill, wrap the rope around my chest and pull the pallet back and forth to cover the seeds with soil. Over three years the prairie matures, with native grasses and forbs. There are some spectacular stands of ten-foot tall members of the Silphium family, including prairie dock, compass plants, and cup plants, all of which are important food sources for wildlife. The leaves of cup plants form small “cups” where they meet the stem, collecting dew and rainfall that birds are able to drink. I have been eager to introduce this family of plants into our landscape because of a passage in Sand County

Almanac.

Aldo Leopold mourns the scrubbing of Silphiums from midwestern landscapes in a meditation on a small graveyard in Wisconsin that he frequently passed.

It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the

usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday

bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular

instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point

remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the

1840's. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of

original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or

89 cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling

sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the

sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of

Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question

never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

One day he noticed that the fence had been removed and the silphium cut down. “It is easy,” he wrote, “now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch.” He compares this “one little episode in the funeral of the native flora” as humans “clean up” the landscape to the burning of books of history. “It might be wise,” he said, “to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.”86

It was because I took such meditations to heart, that I was trying to plant prairies. But the prairie below our house has not been as successful as the one that replaced the field of alfalfa.

They were both planted on rocky clay, but alfalfa fixes nitrogen and I assume that this accounts for the difference. In addition, the crown vetch that had been planted along the sides of the original driveway, which I thought had been eradicated by the excavation, turns out to be one of the most invasive species imaginable. It is commonly planted on the hills next to overpasses on the highways. Over two decades I have sprayed, hoed, and tried to dig out these plants. But they always spring back and creep among the prairie plants, which they overtop and smother if I do not periodically pull them off and cut them by hand—a long and back-breaking labor. Every year

I email a colleague who is a restoration biologist for advice, every year I report on the failure of the method he had recommended the previous year. In the twenty-fifth year of this, his advice is

90 especially disheartening. I need to cover infested sections with thick black plastic to shade out the vetch and absorb heat. He instructs me to cover each section for two years, and then replant them. Since I don’t want to cover five acres entirely with plastic, I have decided to do it in sections. Only time will tell whether this method works where the others have failed.

As I have mentioned, in addition to the prairies, over the years we have planted thousands of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers around the pond, on the edges of the prairie, and in the woods to replace the invasive species we are gradually eliminating with a more diverse understory of native trees, shrubs, and plants that will provide habitat for wildlife. In many years, nearly all we plant dies due to the absence of topsoil, dry conditions, and even draughts. It has proven nearly impossible to water the seedlings during dry spells. I tried running a hose the hundreds of feet up to the plateau where I had established a nursery, but the water pressure was not high enough to produce a flow of water at that height above the source. I have loaded barrels of water on my truck, hauled them up the drive into the woods, and tried to find ways of running the water to the seedlings. I have hauled five gallon buckets of water by hand, in my truck, or perched on the front loader of my tractor to distressed seedlings. None of this enormous effort has been enough to save the plants during really dry periods, which have become increasingly frequent in the late spring and early fall. How depressing it is when our backbreaking labor in the spring comes to naught as trees and shrubs we plant shrivel, dry out, and disappear. In spite of this we are succeeding in gradually increasing the biological diversity of our land.

Over time we will create almost all the soil now on our property. We will compost innumerable truckloads of manure, hay, and anything else we can get our hands on. Over a period of around thirty years the surface of the ground in one of the two prairies I establish will turn from clay to black and fertile soil, but the floor of the woods remains heavy clay, in spite of

91 the annual fall and decomposition of leaves from the trees and shrubs. In our dreams of restoring land, we did not consider that we would have to struggle with the absence of something so basic as fertile soil—the legacy of a previous owner of this property. I now notice that it is disappearing all around me. Erosion is gradually robbing farms of this source of life. As I drive to work, passing the new subdivisions that seem always to be under construction, I notice topsoil is not put aside and stored to be returned to the surface of the land when construction is complete. Instead it is buried and compacted in the process of building. Grass sod is placed over the clay surface to create lawns that will require constant use of chemical fertilizers to keep them growing—fertilizers that actually damage or destroy the organisms that generate soil fertility.

When I think of these things, and what was done to our property, I cannot help but feel that there is something unethical about this treatment of the land, but I do not know how to conceptualize it and make an effort to do so in an article I eventually publish in Environmental Ethics, entitled

“Humans and the Soil.”

92

Chapter 5: Human Life and the Life of the Soil

The indissoluble link between man and soil is manifest in the very name ‘Adam,’

derived from adama—a Hebrew noun of feminine gender meaning earth, or soil....

‘Hava’ (rendered ‘Eve’ in translation) literally means ‘living.’ In the words of the

Bible: ‘And the man called his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living.’

Together, therefore, Adam and Eve signify ‘Soil and Life.’87

———Daniel Hillel, Out of the Earth (1991), p. 14.

To think of land as something that we own and have rights to do with as we please, is to think of ourselves as something analogous to an absolute ruler of what goes on upon it. Aldo Leopold points out a central fallacy to this way of thinking.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role. is eventually

self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror

knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick; and just what and

who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always

turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat

themselves.

To view land in this way is to misunderstand our relationship to, and dependency upon, the land, where land is understood as the combined living community and abiotic elements that make our lives possible. He discusses the pyramid of life, something analogous to the food chain. The layers of the pyramid start with what makes all life possible: soil, air, water, and sunlight. “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and

93 animals, or collectively: the land.88 According to this representation, the morally worst things we can do are to degrade that upon which all life depends, such as fertile soil, air, or water. Above this layer are the microorganisms that enable plants to grow. Each layer above the base is dependent on all the layers below it. As one ascends the layers of the pyramid one finds creatures that are increasingly dependent, and vulnerable. Humans are among the creatures at the apex of the pyramid—those who are most dependent on other members of the biotic community, the ecosystem to which we belong. Yet, in what almost seems like a death wish, many are largely indifferent to, or unaware of, the many ways in which we are undermining the health of this larger community.

There are many possible explanations of human indifference to environmental degradation. Some environmental problems are difficult to visualize or require specialized knowledge to understand. The deleterious effects of our actions are often remote in time and space from their causes. Some environmental problems are of such a nature that they do not easily arouse the moral emotions, imagination, or sentiments. One such problem is occurring beneath our feet. Human practices are destroying the life of the soil upon which depend our own existence as well as that of the beautiful creatures around us.

I am sure that the previous owner of our property had no moral qualms when he stripped away and sold the top soil. I imagine that, although it was illegal to do so, he felt secure in his right to dispose of his property as he pleased. But in doing so he, a temporary resident on this plot of land, created an impoverished heritage for future generations. My wife and I have received his inheritance in the form of depleted soil that is a constant obstacle to our attempts at ecological restoration and healing this land. Of the native vegetation we have planted— thousands of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers—more die than live. As I pass by sites being

94 excavated for new developments and see topsoil buried under clay I doubt that the developers think that there is any moral dimension to what they are doing. Outside of a relatively small number of scientists, the nature of healthy soil and the urgency of preserving it seem hardly understood. One would have a hard time discovering any mention of the problem in the news media. It seems that those who are creating the crisis by the way they farm, by the kinds of backyards and landscapes they favor, and by the way they control patterns of development are hardly aware of the consequences of their actions.

Soil has been commonly viewed as something analogous to an inert medium that anchors plants and acts as a sponge to absorb chemical fertilizers and convey them to the roots. But soil fertility depends on an exceedingly complex ecosystem or food web. Through photosynthesis plants produce carbohydrates, amino acids, and other organic compounds that are exuded into the zone of soil around their roots (the rhizosphere) to provide nutrients for bacteria, fungi, and other organisms. The diversity of organisms in soil by far exceeds that in any other ecosystem. A square meter of an organic agricultural soil may contain thousands of species of organisms with astounding densities of population. A single gram of soil may contain more than a thousand fungal hyphae—the fine filaments of fungi that release enzymes and absorb nutrients—and a million or more bacterial colonies. It is estimated that in less than a teaspoon of healthy soil there are from 10,000 to 50,000 species and more microbes than human population of the globe.

These microbes are nourished by plants and nourish them in turn. They release compounds with adhesive properties that hold together clusters of the mineral and organic components of the soil and provide food for larger organisms such as protozoa and nematodes, which then become prey for insects and other inhabitants of the soil. Fungi, bacteria, and arthropods decompose waste to produce organic forms of carbon needed for microbial activity.

95 The soil community can also benefit from earthworms or other fauna that mix, aerate, and structure the soil so that it retains water and nutrients. Although earthworms are not indigenous to the northern portion of the United States where their introduction has actually damaged forest ecosystems, where they are native they play the important role of ingesting mineral, soil, and organic matter, mixing them with organic secretions, nutrients from plants, and microbes and egest particles bound together with secreted polymers that stabilize and enhance the fertility of the soil.

Mycorrhizae, a symbiosis between fungi and the roots of ninety-five percent of all plants, have been increasingly understood to play a central role in healthy ecosystems. Fungi penetrate roots and exchange nutrients with them. Because the strands of fungi extend much farther than the roots, and penetrate smaller spaces in the soil, they increase the range of nutrients available to plants and trees.

Soil organisms define the architecture of the soil, governing the movements of gases, liquids, particulates, and organisms and providing sites for colonization by microorganisms.89

The relationship between soil organisms and soil structure suggests that healthy soil is a self- organizing system that can be disrupted by changes to soil structure as well as to the living things within it. The flow of energy produced by plants converges with the energy produced by decomposers of dead organic matter to produce fertile soil and control pests and diseases.

Healthy soil sequesters greenhouse gases, detoxifies noxious chemicals, reduces the need for water management, pesticides, and fertilizer inputs, and decreases runoff and erosion. Soil is a complexly integrated ecosystem, such that disturbance of one ecological function effects the dynamics of others.90

96 Ecosystems services are benefits freely provided by healthy ecosystems that are expensive, difficult, or impossible to replicate by artificial means. While I resist the tendency of our society to commodify everything, it is important to recognize that these services have enormous economic benefits that are almost never considered when the costs and benefits of altering an ecosystem for human purposes are weighed. One way of measuring the economic value of healthy soils is to consider the costs of artificial systems of growing food. The price tag for constructing and running a hydroponic system 2.47 acres in size has been calculated to be more than $850,000. When the benefits of cleansing toxins, processing organic wastes, recycling nutrients, and regulating greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides) are added to this mix, healthy soils provide services worth trillions of dollars annually.91 Soil ecosystems are also one of the richest sources of compounds important for biotechnology and medicine, and its regulation of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles is likely to have made possible the evolution of life on Earth as we know it.92 Taking all of this into account, healthy soil is really priceless.

A great many of our practices destroy soil fertility. Farming that employs heavy tillage, irrigation, or repeated applications of agrochemicals kills soil organisms, reduces the functional capacities of the soil ecosystem, disrupts the structure of the soil, produces salinized and alkalinized soils, depletes aquifers, and releases greenhouse gases. Growing crops in such a way replaces natural processes of nutrient cycling with an artificial ecosystem requiring constant management through continued applications of chemical inputs from non-renewable sources and intensive manipulation of the soil with harmful consequences.93 Pesticides, however they are applied, are likely to affect soil organisms and degrade soil’s ecological functions. Industrially produced fertilizers inhibit nitrogen fixation—the process by which atmospheric nitrogen is

97 naturally converted into organic compounds that are needed for the growth of plants. They also release greenhouse gases, diminish stratospheric ozone, contribute to smog, contaminate drinking water, and acidify rain.

Chemical fertilizers and improperly applied manure also run off land into bodies of water. This is the primary cause of the epidemic of toxic algal blooms that have been so much in the news lately and causes dead zones—large aquatic regions in which oxygen levels have decreased so much that animal life suffocates and dies. Each year, in late summer, a dead zone the size of Massachusetts forms in the Gulf of Mexico. The rate at which new dead zones are forming has rapidly increased. In 1960 there were only ten documented cases of dead zones.

Now there are at least four hundred and fifteen dead zones that scientists have identified in the world’s oceans.94

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture about half of the fertilizer used each year in the United States does nothing more than provide a substitute for nutrients lost from erosion of topsoil. In the long term it makes economic sense to farm in ways that reduce erosion.

It also makes moral sense, since we have a duty to leave our children a planet capable of feeding them. But farmers have little economic incentive for changing their practices, because the annual reductions in crop yields that from result from erosion are usually negligible. However, recent studies have shown that small annual decreases in yield caused by erosion eventually reach a threshold after which yields can decrease by as much as fifty-nine percent.95

Top soil is not a renewable resource. Earth scientist David Montgomery calculates that it takes 700 to 1,500 years to generate an inch of soil. And we are steadily approaching a crisis in our ability to produce food. In the last forty years, around one-third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion. Using the rate of erosion caused by plowing, Montgomery predicts that

98 agricultural civilizations that depend upon it will have a lifespan of 800 to 2,000 years, which matches the historical record for the decline of ancient cultures, such as the Greek, Roman, and

Mayan. Geoarchaeological studies confirm the connection between soil erosion and the collapse of many ancient cultures.96

Scientists at Cornell University estimated that remediating soil erosion would cost the

U.S. around $44 billion a year, but that an annual investment of about $6 billion could reduce erosion rates to the level of soil production. They calculate that each dollar invested in soil conservation would produce a savings of five dollars.97 So changing our practices makes clear economic sense. And there is a vast literature on alternative methods of farming that have proven to be profitable without producing erosion and other damaging effects associated with conventional methods of farming. This is but one of many cases in which it is obvious that we need to change our cultural attitudes and practices but are prevented from doing so through ignorance and resistance to change, as well as the political influence of corporations, such as agrochemical manufacturers.

But it is not only farming that is destroying the soil. The construction of roads, parking lots, and the ways we build on and landscape residential, commercial, and industrial sites have profound impacts. The processes of construction increase erosion, compact the soil, and remove fertile topsoil. Instead of cultivating native grasses, shrubs, and flowers consistent with healthy soils, Americans are addicted to exotic flowers and grass lawns—monocultures of fescue that support little life. American lawns require huge inputs of water, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides with the same devastating consequences for the soil community as industrial agriculture. As I drive through cities and suburbs I have been awakened to how barren they are.

We are seeing the steady loss of pollinators on which much of our food depends, and yet I often

99 look in vain at the landscapes around me for the plants that would ensure their continued survival.

At its ninth annual meeting in 1996, the International Soil Conservation Organization declared that the way we manage soils and use the land “should be considered to be more destructive than climate change” during the few next decades. The effects of human activity on the microbial communities in the soil are themselves major contributors to the changing climate.98 A third of the total carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere since the

Industrial Revolution has come not from fossil fuels but from disturbance of soil ecosystems.

Improved management of soils could convert them from sources of greenhouse gases to net carbon sinks.99

In our culture, short-sighted economic values, infatuation with expensive mechanisms that promise to ease the strain of labor, and what seemed like the success of the early years of the

“green revolution” have created an agricultural ideology that is now entrenched among farmers, agricultural schools, and policy makers. So even the task of raising awareness of the problem is difficult. It also requires a great imaginative effort to include the impacts of our activities on future generations in our moral calculations, even when we recognize that among them are the infants we now carry in our arms.

Concern for soils is made more difficult because the world beneath our feet is largely invisible and is populated with microbes, fungi, and invertebrates. We apply some of the central tools of ethical reflection—our imagination, moral emotions, and empathic response—to other creatures in proportion to their similarity to ourselves. We suffer from the misconception that the life in the soil is alien—far different from ourselves.

100 Stephen Kellert has found that Americans have little knowledge of, or appreciation for, ecological systems. He speculates that this is due to the fact that “most ecological processes depend on the functioning of obscure invertebrate and microbial organisms.” Most people, he thinks, have only the vaguest awareness of these organisms and the essential ecological services they provide. Humans focus upon the more visible and obvious organisms within the natural environment and the more prominent features of the landscape. Kellert documents that

Americans have strong antipathy to insects and other “vermin,” 100 and every mushroom hunter has been dismayed by finding stands of choice, beautiful, and edible fungi kicked apart by someone who viscerally dislikes “toadstools.”

Changing our behavior to prevent abuse of soil requires more than knowledge. It requires concern for the natural world and the fate of those who follow us. But to develop that concern we need a better understanding of what we are and our relationships to other organisms and ecosystems. We falsely imagine ourselves to be autonomous individuals and this has been a major obstacle to our ethical development.

We think of humans and ecosystems as separate things, but we ourselves are ecosystems, with functional parts very similar to those in the soil community. Recently there have been important advances in what is called metagenomics. The human “metagenome” comprises both the collection of the genes contained in the Homo sapiens genome and in the microbial communities that colonize our bodies.

The organisms within these communities are collectively known as the human

“microbiome.”

The metagenome of these communities encodes physiological traits that humans

have not had to evolve, including the ability to harvest nutrients and energy from

101 food that would otherwise be lost because we lack the necessary digestive

enzymes. . . . Without understanding the inhabitants of the human microbiome

and the mutualistic human-microbial interactions that it supports, our portrait of

human biology will remain incomplete.101

Just the number of microbes inhabiting the surface of our skin is ten times greater than human cells in our bodies. The total amount of metabolic information encoded in our microbial components is many times greater than that contained in our own genes.102 These microbes have been shown to be instrumental in the healthy development of organisms from the time they first enter the world into adulthood. They shape the bodies of animals. They are able to do so, because we share a common ancestor and entwined themselves in our evolutionary history.103

What we call our “selves” are not individuals but whole interdependent communities, and this is true of all animals. The microbiologist Lynn Margulis, whose work microbial contributions to evolution has been revolutionary, concludes that “We must begin to think of organisms as communities, as collectives” the members of which exchange matter, energy and information. “And communities are ecological entities.”104

Scientists are a long way from a complete description of the human microbiome, but it has been established that specific sites on our bodies (such as the skin, mucosal surfaces, and the gut) furnish homes for microbial communities that fulfill roles essential to our health and functioning. To give only a few of many examples, bacteria make K and B vitamins that are absorbed through our intestinal walls.105 The carbohydrates furnished by plants are not digestible by humans. They provide substrates for microbial growth in the colon. Microbial fermentation in the colon, in turn, provides sources of energy for their host—us. Our microbial symbionts also secrete molecules that inhibit pathogens and detoxify harmful compounds. They influence the

102 expression of genes that govern physiological functions and send signals to the brain that control the immune system.106

Once we recognize the degree to which we depend upon intimate and ongoing mutualistic interactions with the vast populations of microbes for which we provide habitat, our usual ways of thinking turn upside down. It is paradoxical to describe the microbes as if they only have value as a means to an end—our health because we cannot live or function without them. They are a central part of what we are. Organisms are not single autonomous things. It is not even clear how we should describe or refer to them. Tom Wakeford asks, “Is a cow an animal or a microbial fermentation vessel, when without the microbes, the cow would not exist?”107 We can ask similar questions about ourselves. As a result of our evolutionary history, the human metagenome contains thousands of times more genes than the human genome.108

More than half our genes are either viral genomes or fragments that have been naturally selected in the course of human history.109

Evolutionary biologists have, until recently, emphasized that random mutations in genes are the drivers of evolution. More recently biologists have recognized that some of the most significant agents of evolutionary change have been microbes. New species emerged through symbiotic relations between distinct organisms that eventually resulted in a fusion of the two into one organism. These absorbed organisms reproduce in different ways and at different times than the cells that contain them. One such example is the mitochondria that live within every eukaryotic human cell (those cells with a membrane enclosing specialized structures such as the nucleus) where they take in nutrients and convert them into the energy that powers our bodies.

Mitochondria are relicts of bacteria that originally existed independently and developed the capacity to generate energy from oxygen. Somewhere in the course of pre-human evolutionary

103 history some more complex single-celled organisms engulfed these bacteria to appropriate their powers. Mitochondria have their own distinct DNA, genes, and proteins.110 This is but one illustration of how the “living subvisible world ultimately underlies the behavior, development, ecology and evolution of the much larger world of which we are a part and with which we co- evolved.”111 Around 250 of our human genes that code for proteins have been acquired from bacteria.112 We would not be what we are without these invisible citizens.

Louis Pasteur introduced the world to microbes under the characterization of germs— invisible invaders that attack us with diseases and must be hunted down and killed.

Unquestionably, some microbes are pathogens that can adversely affect our health or even lead to our deaths. But, as I have explained, many microbes are integral to our ability to live and function. For example, in 2010, a woman afflicted with a wasting disease was cured by a procedure known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation that restored the ecology of her intestinal microbiota.113 Since then, this procedure has become increasingly common. Medical research has established that human health can in large measure be understood as an issue of ecological relationships among the cells, organs, and microbial communities inhabiting our bodies.

Our treatment of the soil should be modeled on the practice of medicine, a branch of science that has a moral judgment at its core—that health, an ideal of human flourishing, ought to be promoted. Soil health is based on an ideal of what constitutes the flourishing of a biologically productive and regenerative ecosystem: “Soil health is the capacity of soil to function as a vital living system, within ecosystem and land-use boundaries, to sustain plant and animal productivity, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and promote plant and animal health.”114 Nurturing soils ought to be among our preeminent moral goals.

104 It has been common to distinguish human concerns from environmental concerns and adopt the view that humans are the only beings with value in themselves, while all else is valuable only insofar as it contributes to the wellbeing of humans: on the one hand there are humans, and on the other non-human organisms and ecosystems, each distinct. Some philosophers have resisted this and argued that all living things deserve moral respect. One such philosopher is Holmes Rolston, III. But even he attempts to draw a line between “skin in” and

“skin out” dimensions of organisms:

Within an individual organism the organs are so tightly integrated that we do not

term the organism a community at all. No one complains that the goods of heart

and liver are only instrumental to the good of the organism. But communities,

social or biotic, never have this kind of organization. Biotic communities leave

individuals “on their own” as autonomous centers … defending their life

program.115

With regard to “skin out,” he says, organisms form communities: “An ecosystem has no genome, no brain, no self-identification. It does not defend itself against injury or death as do blue jays, milkweeds, cougars.”116

But what I have been saying is that no such hard line can be drawn between organisms and ecosystems—the two are woven together. Not only are organisms biotic communities, bacteria created the very conditions that make our lives possible. Plants and animals would be starved for phosphorus without fungi.117 Infants acquire the microbiota they need for survival from their environments, during the first weeks, months, or years of their lives.

The ecological inheritance we impart to our children will determine their evolutionary fate. Humans, however we think of them, impair their own fitness, as well as the fitness of other

105 members of the ecological community, by degrading their environment. These are morally serious grounds for a profound reevaluation of our mode of existence.

Knowledge of how we ought to treat soils is readily available. A blueprint for agricultural reform has been published by the National Research Council.118 Planners, zoning commissions, and citizens could, with a little knowledge and guidance, change their ways. As Leopold famously pointed out, through the course of history humans have managed to expand their moral awareness by moving beings, such as the slave girls of Odysseus, from the class of propertied things to persons. J. Baird Callicott points to Leopold’s emphasis on the role of ecologically and evolutionarily informed imaginative activity to make possible the new kinds of perception we need.119 Leopold, discussing Daniel Boone’s perception of the natural world, claims that

Daniel Boone’s reaction depended not only on the quality of what he saw, but on

the quality of the mental eye with which he saw it. Ecological science has

wrought a change in the mental eye. It has disclosed origins and functions for

what to Boone were only facts. It has disclosed mechanisms for what to Boone

were only attributes. We have no yardstick to measure this change, but we may

safely say that, as compared with the competent ecologist of the present day,

Boone saw only the surface of things. The incredible intricacies of the plant and

animal community—the intrinsic beauty of the organism called America, then in

the full bloom of her maidenhood—were as invisible and incomprehensible to

Daniel Boone as they are today to Mr. Babbit. The only true development in

American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in

Americans.120

106 Leopold insists that this sort of development is not the sole province of ecologists, but rather a new way of looking at the most ordinary things around us, such as “weeds in a city lot.”121

I am not defending a view that assigns rights to microorganisms, or inhumanely refuses to distinguish between those that are pathogens and those upon which we depend. I am suggesting that the evolutionary history that shaped us and our current dependency on certain communities of microorganisms, both in our bodies and in the soil, link us so closely to them as to make it paradoxical to claim that they only have value as a means to an end. Lynn Margulis observes that “[t]he environment is so interwoven with bacteria, and their influence is so pervasive, that there is no really convincing way to point your finger and say this is where life ends and this is where the inorganic realm of nonlife begins.”122

We ought to form attitudes that recognize the centrality of the kinds of microorganisms from which we have evolved and upon which we depend. We have derived our being from them.

They sustain our existence. They fill us and surround us. Our fate is in their hands and is tied to how we treat them. We ought to be grateful for what they give us, respectful of what they are, humbled by our dependency upon them, cautious in tampering with their life-generating and life- sustaining functions. Perhaps we ought even to be reverent of them. Certainly, we ought not to treat them callously and as unworthy of moral consideration. Bacteria perceive and communicate with one another,

develop collective memory, use and generate common knowledge, develop group

identity, recognize the identity of other colonies, learn from experience to

improve themselves, and engage in group decision-making, and additional

surprising social conduct that amounts to what should most appropriately be

dubbed as social intelligence.123

107 We can more easily live without our legs and arms than without these microbial communities.

We are ecosystems. Understanding what we are opens the door for moral concern for the soil community. Moral concern for humans encompasses moral concern for ecosystems, including those that create fertile soil. Planners, farmers, politicians, landscapers, and plain citizens treat the soil as they do partly because they know no better.

Evolutionarily speaking it is, if not quite literally true, then nearly so, that as stated in

Genesis 2 we were made from the soil. If we are made in God’s image, then God may be something like an ecosystem. But even if we were not, ecosystems as they exist within and without the bodies of every organism, are worthy of moral respect. We depend upon the soil community for the survival of our children and children not yet born. Appreciating the awesome complexity and beauty of the human ecosystem might enable us to see our own image in the ecology of the soil and in ourselves an image of the soil. The story of life in the soil and our connection to it offers rich resources for the moral imagination that could stimulate the ethical evolution upon which the survival of humanity depends.

108

Chapter 6: Encounters on the Land

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a

second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than

accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles

were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable

side-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her

eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to

me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young

then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more

deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire

die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac ([1949] 1987), p. 130

Amidst all the hard work of clearing our land of invasive species, there are also revelations, mysteries, and a return of the fellow feeling for other creatures that I felt as a child. In the

Prologue I mentioned the epiphany of wood thrush song that I experienced on our first night of camping in the woods after an afternoon of cutting vines from the tangled forest. The site at which we camped becomes our picnic area because of its beauty. It is bordered on three sides by ravines. The slope of one of these has been undisturbed and in spring is covered with native wildflowers, such as trillium grandiflorum (the snow white petals of which gradually turn pink), woodland creeping phlox, baneberry, may apples, bloodroot, and Solomon’s seal.

109 In our first February on the property, we hear a sequence of choruses emanating from the pond below the house—piercing chirps increasing in intensity over a number of days until they become almost deafening. We do not know what can produce this incredible volume of noise, but eventually conclude that it must be some kind of frog. In the night we creep as quietly as we can around the pond with flashlights trying locate the source of these high pitched songs, but we find not a single one. Just when we think we have identified a nearby singer and slowly approach, it falls silent. The sweep of our flashlights reveals nothing visible. One night I come home to find the tiniest of frogs only about one-half inch long clinging to glass on our door. It is light brown, almost yellow, with darker markings on its back and legs, a brown X on its back with an inverted V towards its rump, and a few stripes on its back legs. Eventually I am able to determine that the strident aural cascades are produced by spring peepers and that the females can be distinguished from males by their lighter color. They will sing until May.

The sounds produced by these tiny frogs are loud enough to project over great distances because they are amplified by vocal sacs, elastic pouches of skin that act as resonating chambers.

To produce its song, a frog closes its mouth and nostrils and forces air from its lungs over the vocal cords and cartilages of its larynx (causing them to vibrate) and into the vocal sac. The frequency of the sound is modulated by controlling the tension of the vocal cords. Frogs force the air back and forth between the lungs and the sacs. The skin of each peeper’s throat forms a single resonating chamber that looks like a bubble, small, but huge in proportion to the size of the frog. That such a huge volume of sound can be produced by such a tiny creature amazes me.

Their repertoire of calls, as with all frogs, announce to willing females that they are eager for sex, as well as warning other males that a specific patch of territory is occupied.

110 I contemplate the nearly unbelievable fact that such miniscule creatures have survived the winter. I learn that, in contrast to aquatic frogs such as the leopard frog and American bullfrog, which typically hibernate underwater, spring peepers and other terrestrial frogs live in the woods after mating and laying their eggs in water. During the winter they hibernate under logs or beneath the loose bark on trees and are sometimes frozen solid. Yet they live to emerge and sing in the first warm days of early spring. They are able to do this because as temperatures drop their bodies manufacture special proteins that promote the slow and controlled formation of ice crystals of the non-cellular water in their bodies. At the same time their livers begin to produce large amounts of a concentrated type of sugar (glucose) which is absorbed by their cells to keep water from being drawn out of them and crystalizing in ways that would cause their death. When frozen, a peeper will stop breathing, its heart stops breathing, and it becomes hard and brittle, until warmer temperatures resurrect it. But temperatures below about 21°F (-6°C) can be fatal if they are not sufficiently sheltered.

Over the years our ears become more attuned to the sequence and variety of amphibian songs that begin early in the year and last through the summer. We begin to notice that, even earlier than the racket of spring peepers, come the subtler clucking songs of the wood frog that, when heard in a chorus, some have compared to the quacking of mallard ducks. These are beautiful frogs that range in size from a little less than an inch and a half to three and a quarter inches in length and are colored with various shades of brown and red. Most have dark mask-like markings below and behind their eyes. They have not one, but two vocal sacs that extend along the upper portion of each side of their heads. Like the peepers, they live most of their lives on land, where they hibernate during winter in crevices in logs or rocks or by digging down into leaf litter. They are exquisitely adapted to extreme cold and can survive freezing so much better than

111 spring peepers that they are, as far as I know, the only frog known to exist within the arctic circle. The tadpoles of the wood frog seem able to recognize members of their own family, the siblings seeking each other out and staying in a group.

As the season progresses we hear a series of distinct songs, that often overlap the seasonally preceding songs of other amphibians. To identify them I purchase a compact disc recording of frogs that is narrated by a man who sounds very tough, not quite like John Wayne, but approaching him. I imagine that he was once a child whose interest in amphibians marked him as an oddball and perhaps a sissy, that he was picked on by boys interested in sports and other “boy things” and adopted these vocal mannerisms to project manliness. And his speech is very manly. Now I know that the growling sounds that begin in March are the songs of northern leopard frogs that last until May, that from April through July we are hearing the harsh trills of gray tree frogs, and that from March to May the gentle snarls of pickerel frogs. March also bring the delicate sounds of chorus frogs that sing into June, sounding like a fingernail dragged along the teeth of a plastic comb rising in pitch and frequency. In April the cricket frogs begin and continue into July, sounding like small pebbles being tapped together—first slowly, then accelerating in tempo, only to slow again. From the beginning of May through August we hear the gulping sounds of green frogs that always make me laugh because they sound like someone making a hard swallow. Finally, from May through the entire summer, bullfrogs bring the lower register of a pipe organ to the chorus.

Members of the same and different species seem to accompany each other to create some kind of transcendent symphony. There are rules or algorithms that govern the calls of frogs, toads, and insects and produce acoustical patterns both in the chorus of each species and audible interactions between species.124 One of the more charming is that rounds of singing by peepers

112 are often performed by trios started by those with the deepest voices. Each amphibian must find a way to insert its song into a gap between the songs of others and sometimes one seems to answer another. A pattern of sounds by one species is in this way merged with the patterns of others. Eventually rhythmical sonic structures are produced, although the rhythms vary from moment to moment often after reaching a crescendo when it seems that there is no sonic space for another frog to sing its song, and then for no obvious reason there is a period of silence after which one frog sings and then another and a new musical structure begins to assemble itself— music with all the drama of a symphony.

I love these amphibians and the beauty they bring to the world. But they are also important elements of healthy ecosystems, they control pests, and are an important source of new medicines.125 I am immensely sad to learn that their populations globally are drastically declining and that around 43% of all amphibians are threatened with extinction. In the U.S. 25 species are listed under the Endangered Species Act. A study published in 2013 found amphibians in the

U.S. are dying off at such a rate that most of the habitats in which they now exist could be emptied of their presence.126 The causes of this tragedy are various human activities. Their habitats are destroyed to make way for development. Tadpoles are sensitive to acidity and acid rain, largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Toxic heavy metals produced by agricultural runoff, industrial pollution, mining and smelting are another cause.127 Developmental abnormalities and death have been linked to herbicides and pesticides that flow into bodies of water during heavy rains. Nutrient pollution—the runoff of fertilizers is increasingly eutrophying lakes and ponds by producing algal blooms that deplete the water of oxygen and sometimes produce poisons. Climate change is producing earlier warm temperatures that bring frogs out of hibernation, but these warmer periods are followed by sudden spells of cold that can affect frogs.

113 For the same reason, in the Midwest fruit crops are bearing less fruit because they bloom earlier, only to have the blooms hit by frosts. Increased environmental stresses are making amphibians more susceptible to infection by parasites.128 Frog populations are also being devastated by a fungal infection that has been spread through global trade in frogs for pets or scientific purposes and by the inadvertent transport of frogs hidden among imported produce.129

In addition, amphibians have been shown to be especially vulnerable to road kill because they migrate in large groups to and from their breeding grounds. Over seventeen months, researchers at Purdue University found ten thousand and five hundred dead animals, including more than sixty-five species, along eleven miles of roads. Nearly ninety-five percent of the dead animals were frogs and other amphibians. More than seventy-five percent of the carcasses were found along a one-mile stretch of road crossing through Celery Bog in West Lafayette, Indiana.

This suggests that part of the reason for the decline might be simply where and how we have constructed our roads.130 Why build a road through a bog? And roads can be constructed with culverts and wildlife crossings to reduce road kill.

★

In the early mornings of summer, a brash blue kingfisher makes regularly timed visits, flying with its odd rattling call to a tree above the pond. Periodically it leaves its perch to hover over the water and then plunge downward with a splash to seize a tadpole or frog in its powerful beak. I do not know if it takes this food back to its nest, a tunnel that extends from three to six feet into a bank somewhere nearby. Sometimes I glimpse a green heron with its long bill like a dagger. It looks stocky hunched on the pond’s edge with its yellow legs. But when it strikes its prey I suddenly notice how long its neck can extend. Later I will watch videos of these birds placing pieces of bread, twigs, or insects into shallow waters as lures to attract fish within striking

114 distance, carefully manipulating the bait time and time again until it succeeds. These birds are really quite gorgeous, with slightly iridescent green feathers on their backs, darker green feathers on their heads that sometimes rise into a slight crest, and rich chestnut colors on their necks and breast.

Later, in the summer and fall, insects serenade delicately, except in the years when cicadas emerge—among them, the black-horned and broad-winged tree crickets, the curve-tailed and fork-tailed bush katydids, the common virtuoso, coneheaded, and lesser angle-winged katydids. When I see one of these insects, I am always taken by their beautiful colors and how their bodies are so perfectly structured for both leaping and making music. There is wild music all around us most days of the year.

In our first year here, I find one section of the woods denuded of trees and covered to a depth of about three or four feet with honeysuckle vines. Before I learn how hard it is to kill these vines, I decide to clear it before planting some trees. At this time I have no powered tool that might do this except a lawn mower. I push it up the long steep hill, mow a path through the alfalfa and through the woods to this spot. I tip the mower back and thrust it up, forward, and then down over and over again. At one point, as I pull the mower back, I uncover a nest of large greenish blue eggs about the size of chicken's, two of which I have broken. I feel bad about this.

I pull brush over the nest, which was a depression in the soil lined with grasses. I look through descriptions of the eggs of every land-bird that seems large enough, but I cannot identify what kind of bird it might be. The next day I am in the same area planting trees, when I see the bird— a duck! I am surprised. We do have a pond, but it is at a great distance from this spot, at the base of the hill, near the road at the front of our house. Its coloration is not distinct enough to recognize, so I'm not sure what kind of duck it was, but I later determine that it must have been a

115 female mallard. The next day, every egg of the nest is gone. Later I am scattering some straw from a bail that must have been there for over a year, using it as mulch for some walnut seedlings. I find another mysterious egg in the middle of the bail.

One day it begins to rain as my wife is working in the woods. Walking to the house down the rough road that extends from the prairie and woods above, she comes across a box turtle with its head upraised and its mouth opened wide to catch rain drops. Another time, upon returning from the woods she approaches me with excitement as I am building a rock wall. She tells me there is something in the woods that she wants to show me. I am reluctant to leave my work, but

I follow her up the road. She cautions silence as she leads me into the woods, I trail her by several feet down a trail near some old oaks near a ravine. With all the recent rain, our woods is almost unrecognizable. In just a few days, the understory of the woods has leafed out. Suddenly she stops, turns toward me and points to the ground at my left. There only a few feet away, curled, unmoving—except for a few trembling twitches of its ears, is a tiny fawn no larger than a small to medium sized dog. If I bend over, I could touch it.

★

The sun appears just above the eastern horizon. A stab of light shines on our house on the hill.

The thick fog starts twenty feet below me. The whole valley is hidden by grey mists. I am alone, except for the field sparrow that has been my early morning companion every day for over a month. Perched on a small tree near me, his head is thrown back in ecstatic song.

★

As we increase the variety of trees and native plants on our property we notice a significant increase in numbers and species of birds and insects. Each spring, as the locust trees bloom, we begin to hear the cheerful sound of returning orioles and scarlet tanagers. We see their bright

116 colors as they fly across our prairie from one tree to another. One night, right near the deck, we watch an oriole pluck one tent caterpillar after another from their web-enclosed home. Swallows circle endlessly around our house. In late summer and fall flocks of goldfinches fly in short arches over the prairie collecting seeds from purple coneflowers and other plants. Up they swoop and as they come down they call, brightly tweeting.

Because our house sits above the valley below us, we can observe the flight of birds that would otherwise not be visible. Specks on the horizon transmogrify into great blue herons, hawks, or other birds passing far above our heads. We did not know how beautiful in flight the ugly turkey vultures could be. They are pure grace in the air as they rise, swoop, and circle with no apparent movement of their wings, only a turning of individual feathers this way and that.

Sometimes we see a dozen or so climbing thermal currents until they are almost invisible, sometimes they circle so close above us it seems we could hit them with a stone.

One day, on a ladder building the roof of a gazebo on our deck, I hear the screams of red- tailed hawks. I almost fall off the ladder as I gaze upward to see three of them, way up high. The light catches the red on their tails. They are luminous.

Pokeberries begin to proliferate beyond our kitchen window in the back. I look out and see blue birds, brown thrashers, robins, and cardinals hovering around them and plucking the jet- black berries. There are so many that I cannot count them.

Our pond has become overrun with cattails and thickly populated with nesting red- winged blackbirds. It is amazing to watch their patterns of flight. Huge flocks of them rise from their nests from among the cattails and willows, spiraling upwards from the pond in formation, and then, at the top of the spiral, they disperse in many directions. Later in the day, they return,

117 spiraling down from above. We sit by the pond and listen to them call back and forth in some unintelligible conversation of varied calls.

★

It is June 10, 2003. We go down to sit by the pond, which we judge the best location from which to observe an annular eclipse of the sun. The changing light transforms all. Some things seem to sharpen in the field of vision. As if through a zoom lens, we see a hummingbird plucking fibers from the deteriorating blooms of cattails. We see blackbirds sitting on the nests they have woven and hidden among the cattails. We have been down here many times, but this evening, in the enchanted changes in contrast and color produced by the transformation of light we see the inhabitants and visitors to the pond more clearly and more magically than ever before.

★

Over two years I am baffled by a wooden hollow sound I can recognize as neither bird, insect, or amphibian. One day we walk through our woods with a friend who is an expert in identifying birds. We hear the slow ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kow-kow-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp, she casually says,

“Oh, a yellow billed cuckoo,” and the mystery is solved. Later I finally see one of these furtive creatures—slender with a long striped tail, yellow curved bill, dark mask, warm brown above and white below. The bird seems large, but as it moves among the tops of trees now I see it, now

I don’t. It is beautiful, secretive, and enigmatic.

★

It is Sunday, time to call my mother whose love of the natural world helped inspired my own. In her old age she has been made a shut-in by problems with her health. I call her every week to share what we are experiencing around us. I take the phone to the deck outside to hear the birds

118 as I dial. My mother answers. The chorus rises so much that I can hardly hear her. “It’s spring,

Mom. Do you hear the birds?”

★

The crows are always engaged in a busy and noisy social life. I’m convinced that they have a lot to say to each other. They take no notice of me. I am of no account to them, except occasionally.

One day they take exception to one of my cat’s presence in the front yard, under the flowering crabs. Usually bold and saucy, mobbed by the crows, she crouches low, her ears back, waiting to see what unfolds. I come forward to rescue her from this attack, carrying her back into the house.

★

One spring I establish a new woodland garden adjacent to our house. Here I hope to grow woodland flowers that I can propagate and transfer up into the woods. I build soil with truckloads of composed horse manure donated by one of my horse breeding friends. I buy and plant dozens of ferns and wild flowers and feel a sense of accomplishment as I depart in May to see my mother. Upon returning, I go out to admire my work and notice one unplanted fern lying on the ground. I think to myself how stupid and absent-minded I have become. Obviously, after I had laid out the plants before planting, I had simply missed this one, which was surprisingly healthy in appearance. I dig a hole, plant the fern, and wander off without a further thought. The next day I go out to weed this garden only to discover several more uprooted plants.

Now I know that it was not my absent-mindedness but some animal that is responsible.

Holes clearly mark the spots from which they have been plucked. A bit agitated, I replace them and begin to cogitate. What kind of animal had been at work? My mind turns to groundhogs and raccoons. My books confirm that raccoons are eaters of grubs, which they like to dig from loose soil. I had also seen a young groundhog around the house. I decide to set out a live trap. The next

119 morning I find a young raccoon in my trap who is pretty cute. I debate with myself the wisdom of declaring war on raccoons, which are numerous around here. This I know from a past attempt to grow corn which ended in a well-organized pile of fresh ears with husks neatly pulled back to reveal the bare cobs. I could picture the raccoons, with their clever little hands, delicately preparing their feast. I decide that I am not about to set out on a campaign of ethnically cleansing my property of raccoons, so I let the poor fellow go. I try every suggestion in my books on how to repel racoons. Around the plants I sprinkle baby powder. When that doesn’t work, I try spraying the ground with water steeped in hot peppers. After each successful failure, I try some new method until I have exhausted the remedies suggested by my books, all to no avail.

Finally, I am fed up and decide that I am going to catch that rogue raccoon and take him to the swamp in the Spring Valley reserve. I set the trap again. The next morning, I quietly approach the trap only to find a white-capped young skunk inside, also rather cute and an eater of grubs. I return inside and read study methods for transporting trapped skunks in the books I had previously mined for information on deterrents. I imagine myself approaching the cage with a blanket, as recommended, flinging the blanket over the cage, bundling the blanket around the cage, placing the blanketed cage in my pickup, removing the cage, removing the blanket, and freeing the skunk. I contemplate the many way that this could end badly for me and this option rather uninviting. I decide that the safer course is to release it. I take an eight-foot length of lumber and crawl towards the trapped skunk. At one point it spots me and turns his back end in my direction, tail stiffly erected. I quickly position myself so that the door to the trap will block any liquid missiles that might come my way. I carefully wedge the tip of the narrow board under the trap door and twist it to open a space of about four inches, and crawl away backwards.

120 After releasing him, I tell myself that I am smarter than skunks and raccoons and will use my vaunted human reason to discover a solution. Besides that, I tell myself that even if my newly declared enemies persist, all the grubs in the loose soil will eventually be eaten and then they will move on. I place rocks around all of my plants, to no avail. Then I remember that I have recently killed an invasive, and very thorny, non-native plant—a multiflora rose. I collect the brambles, cut them into small pieces, and scatter them around my plants. This is a successful strategy, except that the thorns are not only a deterrent to skunks and raccoons, but to my attempts to weed. Every session of weeding involves a baptism of the plants with my own blood.

★

Early in our time here, we walk up the steep hill to the prairie and find three young deer grazing.

We freeze to watch in. The deer raise their heads to stare at us. One of us makes some small movement. Startled, the deer make their strange coughs and head towards the woods in great leaps, white tails raised like flags. But they stop short of the woods, turn, and look back at us. We stand motionless, they take a few paces towards us, ears attentively quivering. They stop and watch, then come farther forward. Each time we move, they repeat their first performance, coughing and leaping towards the woods, then stopping short, and slowly trotting towards us with obvious curiosity. Over time, the deer become less wary. They even remain grazing when I drive the tractor in the field. Sometimes I feel that it might be my duty to throw a rock at them in hopes of inspiring more wariness towards humans.

One evening we camp out in the prairie for a night of stargazing. Clouds move in, the stars are obscured, and darkness encloses us. We start a campfire, the light of which impedes our night vision. Periodically we begin to hear strange noises from the far section of the field. For a while we think it might be a bird— the rasping call of a crow, or an owl seizing its prey. The

121 sounds repeat, come closer, then move away. Finally, I recognize the them as the coughs of deer.

I imagine them guardedly approaching the fire, pirouetting and leaping away, then returning to repeat this pattern, just as they did that day of our first encounter, caught in a conflict between caution and curiosity. Perhaps, having never witnessed fire, they are investigating. I begin to realize how powerful and prevalent curiosity is among animals, something they possess in common with us.

We had adopted a cat, Gabbey—a feral kitten whom we gradually tamed, and could not bear to keep shut in the house. One day I look down the hill towards our pond and there is

Gabbey perched on a boulder nose to nose with a deer. She moves forward for a smell of the deer, and the deer backs away, but returns. The deer moves forward for a smell of Gabbey, and she backs away but returns. This goes on for so long that I finally cease to watch, and later regret not seeing how the encounter ended.

★

During a visit from Bev, my sister in law, and Andrew, our nephew, we camp on the edge of our field. The sky is clear, the moon nearly full, and the stars are bright, undiluted by any city's lights. Through the binoculars we are able to see much detail on the surface of the moon’s surface. One mountain on the edge of the earth's shadow stands out, caught in light. We also see, for the first time, the moons of Jupiter. It was magical to camp under the stars in a field all to ourselves, feeling as though we were perched on a plateau that rose above the surrounding world.

During that night, as the others go down to the house to shower, I sit alone and hear an unidentifiable sound, a high-pitched whinny, strange beyond words, the kind of sound that you suspect you are imagining rather than hearing. I suffer from tinnitus (ringing in my ears), so I

122 wonder if that is producing the sounds I am hearing, but when the others return they hear it too.

The sounds move closer until their source seems to be only yards away from our campsite.

The next night I hear this sound more clearly emanating from up and down the valley below our house, which seems to amplify sounds within it. I had never noticed it before. I retrieve my CD of birdcalls and eventually identify it as a screech owl. One night later in the summer Barb and I decide to try luring a screech owl within our sight. We have heard, but never seen one. I record on a small tape player one of their calls from my CD of birdcalls, and we walk the trails through our woods, stopping every few minutes play the recording. We have been at this about 45 minutes and are about to give up. Our last stop is in a portion of the woods I have recently cleared of honey-suckle with my tractor, so it is unfamiliar. The sun is setting. I play the tape one last time, and begin to stow it in preparation for leaving. Suddenly Barb touches my arm and points. There, not 15 feet away, we see a screech owl. It is about the size of a crow, but stubby in body, with a large head, and "ears" slanting backwards. The colored patterns of its feathers are barely visible in the dim light. Eye to eye we study each other, the three of us surrounded by silence and trees. This dream-like encounter must have lasted five or ten minutes, or maybe only a few, owl and humans linked by common curiosity. It does not seem an owl, but a person, more intimate than a neighbor— a co-inhabitant more truly the owner of the land than we are. The owl takes flight. Barb and I gasp and turn toward each other, first silently then whispering. It seems wrong to speak loudly. We consider playing the tape again, and trying to recall the bird, but decide against it. The magical moment has passed and part of that magic was its singularity.

★

123 One spring, after I have mowed the prairie on the plateau above our house, I experience another instance of the way curiosity binds living things together. As I enter the mowed field I see a fox with her cub, around 300 feet from me. The mother immediately dashes into the tree- line, but her youngster is entranced with me, and refuses to respond to its mother’s urgent calls.

It trots eagerly towards me while its mother calls to it again and again. Not wanting to distress its mother, I eventually walk away, even though I would welcome a closer encounter with such a beautiful animal.

Later, my wife, Barbara, walks up the hill carrying a cup of coffee on her way to battle invasive plants in the woods. She sets her cup down at the entrance to the prairie. When she later returns, she sees the young fox slowly advancing towards her coffee. It sniffs the liquid at the bottom of the cup, and then takes the cup between its jaws. As it lifts it upwards the coffee spills into its mouth. Alarmed, apparently, by its bitter taste, the fox drops the cup and races away.

★

We are winding our way through parts of the woods that we seldom traverse. A chickadee suddenly descends to the branch of a tree around five feet away and begins to noisily chew us out. We have violated some rule, it seems. We stand motionless taking in its wrath. It shows no fear. These and other face-to-face encounters with the animals that live here bring back the feelings of my childhood. I expect them to speak to me, and sometimes, as in the case of the chickadee, they do in their own way. These animals are truer owners of the land than we are.

They are our companions—wild things that are often as curious about us as we are about them.

★

As the sun rises in early December of 1996, I look down at the pond from the house where a number of mallards have been regular visitors. What at first appears to be a duckling, smaller

124 than all the rest, trails one group who flap their wings with alarmed quacks and skim across the surface of the water in advance of the smaller animal, but never leave the pond. The rest of the ducks groom themselves contently among the cattails. But the small creature leaves the group it was previously provoking to trail these who now became the more agitated group. Curious about this behavior I walk slowly down to the pond and notice an undulating motion in the wake of the smaller "duck." It is not a duck at all, but a muskrat, the first I’ve ever seen, which continues this behavior for half an hour. It seems to be chasing the ducks for the sheer fun of it, and eventually disappears into a hole in the bank. Muskrats have moved into our pond. For most of the year they live in that burrow in the bank, but in the fall they harvest the remains of cattails and use them to build a hut in the middle of the pond. Over time, they rid our pond of cattails and all but a few of the host of blackbirds we have observed for so long disappear.

★

One day we take a break from working on our property and take our Kayak to a nature preserve only a few miles from us. It contains a large swamp through which we paddle, passing among lily pads, cattails, blooming button bushes, and other aquatic vegetation. We see many birds, and hear others that we never see. The calls of some of these unseen birds are hoarse and strange.

One I later identify as that of a least bittern, a tiny heron that is so furtive and well camouflaged that it is rarely seen, and never yet by me. When alarmed by a threat, these birds freeze in place, point their bills upward, face the direction of danger, and sway so that they resemble the vegetation of the marsh blowing in wind. Its call is a low, flat, and rapid series of coo-coo-coos.

Other calls we hear I later discover are those of a sora, a wading-bird, awkward in appearance, with a bright yellow beak, a black mask on the front of its face, a stumpy tail, and thickly jointed legs long for its size. The calls of this bird are variable and unexpected—a loud "ker-wee" that

125 rises in pitch like a question, a puzzling whinny that sounds uncannily similar to the high pitched

"woob-woob-woob!" that was one of Curly’s trademarks as a member of the Three Stooges.

Later we will finally see this bird during another visit to the swamp.

All these experiences are of ordinary things, which, because we are like children new to this world, are extraordinary revelations to us. To others our responses might seem parochial or naïve. And we learn so much over the years that we might look back and regard our reactions in the same way. But we never do. We remain enchanted.

★

When I begin teaching environmental ethics, I am dismayed by the ignorance of my students, even of those majoring in biology, concerning the living things that surround us in our daily life, even in the cities and suburbs in which they have lived and the tidy campus where they now reside. I decide to show them the complexity of a life form that they encounter daily, but which they seem not to notice or appreciate—birds. I have them read selections from Alexander

Skutch’s The Minds of Birds and show them clips from David Attenborough’s documentary The

Life of Birds. Students are invariably stunned to learn of the intelligence, behavioral complexity, and even aesthetic sensibility of these creatures. They watch as a male bowerbird builds a hut around five feet tall and six feet wide. In front of the hut, the bird is carefully arranging a display of colored objects. I will describe these structures in more detail later, but what is clear to my students is that these birds have definite ideas about what is beautiful, and it are constantly adding to, subtracting from, or rearranging their configurations of objects to perfect their art. The females choose their mates based on their aesthetic judgment of these displays assembled by competing males. Once she mates, the female flies off to construct a nest in which to hatch and

126 rear the young without the males help. The huts and their displays of art serve no other function than to attract mates, and it is beauty that charms them.

Students watch a clip of male African weaverbirds tying knots in strings of reed, palm, or grass in order to construct the outer structure of a nest that will be completed by a mate, should they attract one. The complexly woven baskets hang, suspended from the branches of trees.

Guided not by aesthetic standards, as female bowerbirds, these females make judgments based on what makes for good engineering. They move from one nest to another, testing the knots, inspecting the overall construction, and judging their sturdiness. The older males, having learned from past experience, most often construct the soundest nests and attract the most mates.

Students watch the courtship ceremonies of Clark’s grebes. One of the pair dives and brings from the bottom of the lake a bit of organic matter suitable for constructing a nest, as if to show that it will be a responsible parent. They begin a ritual in which one makes a movement, and the other matches it, until they achieve a harmonization of their actions. They run on the surface of the water together in coordinated steps. Their ritual can only be described as a dance.

They watch New Caledonian crows that have culturally transmitted a practice learned by some bright bird of the past. Adults take a twig and insert it into the holes dug into dead logs by grubs, annoying the grub until it seizes hold of the tip of the offending twig and the crow pulls it out to feast upon it. Some crows find a twig so effective that it becomes their favorite tool, carried with them wherever they go. Young crows study and imitate this behavior, taking about two years to perfect the technique.

These and other clips from David Attenborough’s documentary, and the selections they read from Skutch’s The Minds of Birds transform my students’ understanding of birds. Animals

127 surround and interact with us, yet we rarely notice them, reflect upon their complexity of behavior, appreciate their beauty, or recognize our commonalities with them.

★

The anthropologist Richard Nelson describes how in spite of his long and thorough acquaintance with the northwestern forests, his time with the Koyukon Indians changed his perception of

“every living and nonliving thing” within those forests. He “acquired an entirely new way of seeing.”131 “Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature—however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be—is never truly alone.”132 This was the perception of nature I had as a child. As I have described, during my many hours in the woods I felt the creatures I encountered were kin and companions in the great drama of life. Studies have shown that in their early years most children respond to nature in the same way.133

Experience of the companionship of living things and sensitivity to the ecological relations in which they are embedded connect us to the natural world in vitally important ways.

They sensitize us to the life that surrounds us and to the conditions conducive to its flourishing.

They enable us to know who we are, that we are not alone, and that we are part of a community of others.

Alexander Skutch comments on how some advocates of space exploration are motivated by the depressing thought that we might be “alone in the universe.” At great expense we build huge disk antennas and use other technologies to search for intelligent life. He points out that if there is extra-terrestrial life it is likely to be “inconceivably alien,” and suggests that we would be wiser to make the acquaintance of the creatures that share our home on this planet.134 The

128 ordinary person hardly knows them, and even those who professionally study them admit that they have barely scratched the surface.

I find comfort not only animals, but in plants. I often find that plants I have introduced years ago, and which seemed to disappear, suddenly make an appearance in our woods. When this happens, I feel joy. They have been with me all along, although they were hidden from my view. I feel what can only be characterized as love when I encounter a stand of ancient trees or even flowering shrubs that I know provide food for birds and other animals. I feel some sort of complicated sense of kinship and companionship with them. I feel myself connected to them in ways that I do not understand. I am an academic philosopher. I don’t have the time to intensively study the many animals, insects, and plants that surround me. Scientists often spend a whole lifetime in such pursuits, trying to unlock the mysteries of just one particular species. Wanting to understand what I feel, I must turn to them, hoping for clues as to why I feel the way I do about both animals and plants. I discover an explosion of research in cognitive ethology that has revolutionized our understanding of animals. This science studies the way animals’ conscious awareness and intentions influence their behavior. And recent advances in botany have entirely transformed our understanding of the lives and sensitivities of plants.

129 Chapter 7: The Inner Lives of Animals

“[W]e are obliged to acknowledge that all psychic interpretation of animal

behavior must be on the analogy of human experience. We do not know the

meaning of such terns as perception, pleasure, fear, anger, visual sensation, etc.

except as these processes form a part of the contents of our own minds. Whether

we will or no, we must be anthropomorphic in the notions we form of what takes

place in the mind of an animal.”

———Margaret Floy Washburn, The Animal Mind: a Text-Book

of Comparative Psychology (1909) p. 13.

“[W]e are humans, and we have by necessity a human view of the world. The way

we describe and explain the behavior of other animals is limited by the language

we use to talk about things in general. By engaging in anthropomorphism we

make other animals’ worlds accessible to ourselves and to other human beings.

By being anthropomorphic we can more readily understand and explain the

emotions or feelings of other animals. But this is not to say that other animals are

happy or sad in the same ways in which humans (or even other members of the

same species) are happy or sad…. Merely referring to the firing of different

neurons or to the activity of different muscles in the absence of behavioral

information and context is insufficiently informative.”

———Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness,

Emotions, and Heart (2002) p. 48.

130 When I stare into the eyes of a screech owl only fifteen feet away, when that chickadee gives us a lengthy scolding almost within arm’s reach, when that fox cub eagerly trots towards me with body language expressing deep and fearless curiosity, when we encounter those deer in the prairie that, after first fleeing, trot back to examine us, when I listen to the raucous conversations of crows calling back and forth in such a variety of vocalizations, feel myself confronted with a mystery. There is no doubt in my mind, and I have always believed, that these creatures have inner lives and thoughts however much I am unable to imagine their exact nature. I confess that I cannot fathom why others would deny this.

As a child I had a shaggy dog, Boots. I am convinced that she loved me as much as I loved her. When I went away to college, she became depressed for a while. When I would return home on vacations she would leap on me, roll at my feet and run around in wild, frenzied circles.

I can find no way to describe this except as a manifestation of the purest kind of joy. Later in life, my wife and I had a series of cats, at one time three at once. Each had a distinct personality. I would watch one of them as it stared at me, or sleepily looked out the window, or engaged in mischievous behavior. Sometimes it seemed to me that each had a sense of humor or fun unique to itself. I would occasionally say to Barbara, “I wonder what cat thoughts are like.” Her response was always, “Don’t go there. There lies madness.” She did not mean to deny that they had mental lives, but only to say that we do not have the capacity to understand exactly what they are like. Most people who have pets believe that their pets have emotions, some sort of intelligence, and sometimes even moral virtues. Yet when they consider the wild animals around them they often seem to regard them as something like mindless and emotionless machines driven only by instinctual responses to stimuli.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I had many conversations with a biologist colleague

131 trained as a behaviorist. Behaviorism was a long dominant school of thought that held that animal behavior should be explained purely in terms of conditioning, without appealing to thoughts or feelings. I held that animals have minds and intelligence. He denied it. I described to him some behaviors of our cat, Nixdorf, a highly intelligent Birman, who was also one of the most beautiful animals I have ever seen. We inherited this cat during a year when I had a temporary position in the philosophy department at Virginia Tech. We rented a house, and after several days he showed up and charmed us. We later learned that when the previous occupants moved he was roving or spooked away, and they left without him. When, after more than a month, these people stopped by to retrieve the cat. We informed them that we had discovered that he had feline leukemia and persuaded them to let us keep him. In spite of this illness he lived six more good years. When we prepared for our move from Virginia to Bellbrook, a suburb near

Dayton, Ohio, where I was hired for a tenure track position by the University of Dayton, we feared that he would again escape and be left behind. So we shut him in our house. Nixdorf resented this and made every attempt to escape to the outdoors, including leaping up and wrapping his paws around the doors handle, trying to turn it. When I described this behavior to my colleague, he made many contorted attempts to explain it without appealing to intelligence or insight, which seemed to me the obvious explanation of Nixdorf’s behavior.

When we lived in Bellbrook, we tried to curb Nixdorf’s wanderings. I built a huge screened in area under the deck hoping that would give him enough exposure to the outdoors to satisfy him. But it was as though I had ruined his life. So, even though I know that cats are a major threat to birds, I let him out and tried to keep him close to home by calling him in when he left our back yard. One day I spotted Nixdorf crouched on a fence post coiling himself for action.

Following his gaze, I saw that a neighbor’s very large German shepherd had broken its chain and

132 was approaching Nixdorf in an aggressive manner. He did not run up a tree or try to flee, but gathered himself for battle, obviously prepared to fight to the death to protect his territory. I ran towards the dog, grabbed his chain, and pulled him back to our neighbor’s property. One time I cited this in class as an example of a virtue, courage, in an animal. One of my students said scornfully, “more like stupidity.” The class laughed. I responded by asking them whether the courage soldiers risking their lives to defend their nations are similarly stupid.

A good friend of mine from graduate school visits us in Bellbrook. Always a bird lover, I make some comments about what seemed to me the inner lives of the birds whose activities we are observing in our back yard. He confesses that to him birds seem no more them mindless automata. I describe a documentary I had seen on grizzly bears. In one scene a bear was sledding on its back down a snow bank and into an icy pool. It did this repeatedly and almost danced when it landed in the water. I remarked that in this animal’s behavior I thought I had witnessed a pure instance of joy—a joy that perhaps humans were unable to experience because our moments of joy are so often tempered by our thoughts and worries. He was shocked and dismissive. In a later conversation with another friend he brought up my comment as something ridiculous, attributing an emotion so sublime to a non-human being.

As I develop a deeper and deeper sense of kinship with our co-habitants on our twenty-one acres,

I increasingly feel that the barrier that so many erect between humans and the living things that surrounds us stifles the emotional, aesthetic, and moral response that is appropriate to the miraculous nature of this planet, which is far more than a set of resources to exploit for economic purposes and the construction of the artificial worlds with which we surround ourselves. A

133 reconsideration of the intelligence of animals and other living things is one way to discover our kinship to them and our membership in a common community.

The scientific study of animals has long been dominated by what seems to be an irrepressible desire to maintain the superiority of the human mind. This was expressed in what has come to be known as Morgan’s Canon: “In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development.”135

The desire of scientists to maintain the boundary between humans and animals is documented time and time again in The Ape and the Sushi Master, by Frans de Waal.

Each time scientists have tried to define forms of intelligence that make human beings uniquely superior, they have been challenged by examples of non-human animals who satisfy the criteria set out in the definition. Most of these scientists have not responded by allowing that these animals match our intellectual capacities. Rather they have responded by modifying the criteria arbitrarily in order to exclude animals. For example, tool use, culture, insight, and teaching have all been used as examples of what is unique about human intelligence. Because it was later discovered that all these things can be found in animals, these definitions have been either successively narrowed or made circular by arbitrarily describing them as exclusively found in humans, so that intelligence accompanies only the human use of tools, human culture, intellectual insight among humans, and humans teaching each other.136 The history of this vein of reasoning is both amusing and pathetic. While one can still find evidence of scientific reluctance to admit that we are on a continuum with animals, the mountain of evidence that cognitive

134 ethologists have accumulated over the last several decades makes it increasingly apparent that animals have forms of intelligence, some of which exceed our own. Indeed, I will later argue that intelligence is a characteristic of life itself.

The primatologist, Frans de Waal, tells several amusing anecdotes that illustrate the degree to which we feel threatened by the thought that animals might be our match. A colleague of his worked at the London Zoo at a time when one of the main attractions was the staging of an ape tea party.

Gathered on chairs around a table, the apes had been trained to use bowls, spoons,

cups, and a teapot. Naturally, this equipment posed no problem for these tool-

using animals. Unfortunately, over time the apes became too polished and their

performance too perfect for the English public, for whom high tea constitutes the

peak of civilization. When the public tea parties began to threaten the human ego,

something had to be done. The apes were retrained to spill the tea, throw food

around, drink from the teapot’s spout, and pop the cups into the bowl as soon as

the keeper turned his back. The public loved it! The apes were wild and naughty,

as they were supposed to be.137

In a set of experiments with a young male chimpanzee, Ayuma, Japanese primatologists discovered that chimps have photographic memory.

Trained on a touchscreen, he can recall a series of numbers from 1 through 9 and

tap them in the right order, even though the numbers appear randomly on the

screen and are replaced by white squares as soon as he starts tapping. Having

memorized the numbers, Ayuma touches the squares in the correct order.

Reducing the amount of time the numbers flash on the screen doesn’t seem to

135 matter to Ayuma, even though humans become less accurate the shorter the time

interval.

Ayuma is able to do this, remembering up to nine numbers with 80% accuracy, even when the numbers are visible for only 210 milliseconds.

This caused a great stir in the scientific community, who were distressed at the possibility that an ape might be capable of some intellectual accomplishment that surpassed humans. Some scientists immediately began training humans to succeed, if they could, at beating chimpanzees at this task. In one case they sought out a man who was famous for his prodigious memory, able to memorize an entire stack of cards. They pitted him against the chimpanzee, and the chimpanzee one. Humans are not able to come close, even after long periods of practice, to achieving what comes easily to Ayuma.138

To project every quality of human intelligence and emotion onto animals would be to live in a world of fairy tales. But the absolute refusal to acknowledge any shared qualities with animals puzzles me since we ourselves are animals and share a common ancestry. Alexander Skutch, in The Minds of Birds, writes,

In my student days, anthropomorphism was one of the most flagrant of scientific

heresies, only a little less heinous than the unforgivable sin of falsifying one’s

observations or data. Anthropomorphism is the attribution to non-human creatures

of behavior or mental qualities that we are pleased to consider uniquely human.

Nevertheless, when we recognize that we can hardly imagine any psychic state

that we do not from time experience in ourselves, the rigid avoidance of

anthropomorphism might exclude the possibility of attributing to nonhuman

animals any psychic life at all.139

136 If we do not recognize our kinship with animals and that we are on a mental continuum with them, we are left with an impoverished picture of their lives as well as the world in which we live.

In addition, Skutch points out, failing to recognize that we share qualities of our inner lives with animals is arbitrary in light of our biological similarities:

Without being disparagingly accused of anthropomorphism, the anatomist can

apply to the bones in a bird’s wing the same names given to those in a human

arm. Indeed, the structural similarities of all terrestrial vertebrates, and the

anatomical features they share with fishes, are among the strongest supports of the

theory of evolution. It would seem that animals so similar to humans anatomically

might also, in some measure, resemble them psychically. It is not evident why

anthropomorphism, respectable in comparative anatomy, should be rigidly

excluded from comparative psychology.140

We have been slow to recognize that the animals around us are subjects of experience with thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But over the last several decades the work of cognitive ethologists and neuroscientists have provided an avalanche of new evidence to support this view.

If their work were widely understood, it might awaken us to the tragic dimensions of human cultures that have pushed so many species to extinction and decimated the populations of those that remain.

Cognitive ethology studies animal behavior through the lens of the animal’s conscious awareness and intention. The foundations of this discipline can be found in Donald Griffith’s book, The

Question of Animal Awareness, first published in 1976 and expanded in 1980. Still controversial,

137 Griffith provided a series of powerful arguments that the simplest and most cogent explanation for many behaviors of animals was that they are thinking about what they are doing. Cognitive science and studies of the brain and nervous system have provided empirical foundations for the view that animals are conscious beings with thoughts and emotions. The things we consider to make us human—intelligence, empathy, architectural abilities, communication, using tools, the experience of love and grief and other emotions—are found to one degree or other among other vertebrates. All share brains, nervous system, and hormones of fundamentally the same kind.

In Chapter 3 I briefly mentioned famous essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel entitled

“What Is it Like To Be a Bat.”141 Attempts to define consciousness often begin with this ingenious essay in which he makes the case that it essentially involves subjective:

But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious

experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that

organism…. Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only

if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the

organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience.142

Obviously, consciousness in other creatures, even other humans, cannot be directly observed. It must be inferred from behaviors and from the neural substrates implicated in consciousness. Our biological kinship with and similarities to animals provide some of the strongest evidence for subjective character of the inner lives of animals.

Consciousness, intelligence, and emotion have a biological basis in the brain and nervous system. Brain scans have shown that core emotions, such as sadness, joy, rage, and fear arise from “deep and very ancient circuits of the brain, where neuroanatomical and neuro- functional homologies abound across species.”143

138 In 1998, neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp controversially set forth the case for emotions in animals, with a particular focus on mammals. He points out that behavior not triggered by feelings and emotions would be unmotivated, and therefore inexplicable.

Although the details of human hopes are surely beyond the imagination of other

creatures, the evidence now clearly indicates that certain intrinsic aspirations of

all mammalian minds, those of mice as well as men, are driven by the same

ancient neurochemistry. These chemistries lead our companion creatures to

investigate and explore their worlds, to seek available resources and make sense

of the contingencies in their environments. These same systems give us the

impulse to become actively engaged with the world and to extract meaning from

our various circumstances.144

Emotional systems serve the function of enabling an animal to negotiate its environment by producing inward changes—feelings and emotions—that prepare it to act and think in appropriate ways. Fear can prompt an animal to run from a threat and thus survive. Prompted by anger another animal defends its territory so that it may live longer and reproduce more successfully. Creatures who love, and thus protect, their offspring leave more descendants.

Pleasure taken the physical activities essential to survival, such as running, flying, or digging makes creatures more fit. I recall one of my cats who, before being overtaken by old age, simply loved to run as hard as he could. When I called him, he would always arrive panting but clearly exhilarated by his effort. The joy of running motivated him to run whenever there was an excuse to do so. Had he lived in the wild, this would have served him well, preparing him to flee threats or pursue prey more effectively.

139 Affective neuroscience (the study of the biological basis of feeling and emotion) has discovered that emotions and the processing of information are intertwined.

Separating the two has been called one of the “seven sins” of those who study emotion because of the way in which the neural networks for processing information and emotions are so thoroughly entangled and overlapping.145 The pathways that generate emotion and cognitive activity are not separate. Responding appropriately to environmental and social cues requires assessing their significance, which cannot be perceived through the senses. The interactions between emotion and thought provide a basis for such assessments. The emotional “charge” that results from emotionally laden cognition enables the organism to know how to react. Emotions play central roles in evaluating the meaning of a situation and deciding on a course of action.146 “[T]he special role of emotion seems to be that of an intelligent interface that mediates between input and output on the basis of what is most important to the organism at a particular time.”147

Panksepp points out that our biological understanding of some human emotions rests mainly on “research on the brains of ‘lower’ animals.”148 I will not go into the details, but he provides an impressive array of arguments resting on the fundamental homology, or structural similarity, between the brains and nervous systems of humans and animals that, according to evolutionary theory, is a result of our descent from a common ancestor. If we plausibly assume that similar structures perform similar functions, then we will have to admit that we share some basic feelings and emotions with animals, such as anger, fear, the sense of fun in playful rough housing, and even “that ineffable feeling of experiencing oneself as an active agent” in the world that seems to be necessary condition of even having an emotion. We will also be forced to acknowledge, as “is now widely accepted,” that mammals and birds share with us

140 “psychobehavioral systems” that produce “social bonding as well as other social emotions, ranging from intense attraction to separation-induced despair.”149

At the same time, as in humans, the emotions that enhance survival in an animal over all can sometimes impede it. An animal prone to love, as humans are, might not only provide better care for its offspring, but also to “care for disabled offspring or companions that have no chance of surviving, or expose itself to hazards mourning dead ones. It may adopt the babies of others, not passing on its own genes. These actions would not enhance, and would probably decrease, its own fitness. In such cases the actions seem to be motivated directly by emotions and not by a drive to survive.150 And to say that emotions evolved in order to enhance survival, does not mean that the motivations provided by emotion are self-centered. As Frans de Waal observes,

When I see a pair of parrots tenderly and patiently preening each other, my first

thought is not that they are doing this to help the survival of their genes. This is a

misleading manner of speaking, as it employs the present tense, whereas

evolutionary explanations can deal only with the past.151

The fact that the survival of the species shaped the emotional lives and intelligence of animals, does not imply that the content and character of all their thoughts and feelings is selfish. And when we discover that the biological properties that give rise to our own inner lives are also found in animals, we have every reason to assume that they are, to one degree or other, analogous to our own.

While, as I have said, subjective experiences are not directly observable, emotions do have an observable component. When I experience an emotion, part of what I experience is a bodily state—real and measurable physiological changes. Techniques have now been developed for establishing the neurobiological mechanisms and systems implicated in emotions. (The

141 relevant regions of the brain, according to current knowledge, are “the amygdala, thalamus, ventral tegmental area, ventral pallidum, nucleus accumbens, anterior cigulate cortex, peri- aqueductal grey, hippocampus, and pre-frontal cortex”). There are also measurable physiological accompaniments to emotion, such as heart rate, blood pressure, the temperature of the skin, and blood chemistry.152 The physiological accompaniments of emotion are as observable in animals as they are in humans.

When considering consciousness in animals—what it is like for an animal to perceive, think, and feel, it is important to remember that species and individual members of a given species are not all intelligent or emotional to the same degree or in the same way. As a teacher I have been trained to recognize that there are various forms of intelligence and learning styles, and that my students are not homogeneous with regard to the emotional forces that motivate them. So it would be contrary to common experience and to common sense to expect every animal to exhibit the same kind or degree of intelligence or emotion. In general, each species has the kind of intelligence it needs to survive and flourish in its particular environmental niche. One of my cats illustrated this point. We adopted her as a feral kitten who came from a stock of very tough barn cats on a neighbor’s property. She was a natural wonder. She could zip to the top of a tree in only a few minutes. With astounding agility, she could knock insects out of the air and eat them. Watching her feast on flying grasshoppers, my wife called them cat potato chips.

To my regret, she was also an incorrigible and skilled hunter. The ability to philosophically reflect or ruminate on the moral quality of her life as a killer would have impeded rather than enhanced her ability to survive. A Cheetah’s intelligence, like my cat’s, is directed toward reading environmental cues such as determining what can afford

142 it camouflage that will enable it to approach its prey as closely as possible before springing into action, calculating how close it must be to its prey in order to bring it down once the chase has started, and singling out the most vulnerable member of a heard.

These mental abilities constitute part of the kind of intelligence it requires to survive. It is unreasonable to disparage this intelligence as inferior because a cheetah lacks mental abilities which would make no contribution to, and might even impede, its survival.

I recall a memorable hike through a nearby nature reserve. Among the hikers were a botanist, a geologist, and an expert on the social history of the area. As we walked along, each was able to read a different set of cues to which he had been sensitized by experience and training. We would stop at a place. The botanist would reconstruct the history of the land over the last several hundred years by what trees were growing, how they were growing, and their size. The geologist would bring to light how over millions of years the massive forces of glaciers, streams, and rivers had formed the general features that surrounded us. The social historian would detect and interpret signs of previous settlements that explained some of what the botanist observed. Each had the ability to read the environment in a distinct way. In this case, these mental abilities arose from abstract curiosity, academic training, and experiential knowledge. The mental abilities of animals arise from the more demanding and urgent requirements of survival.

Every form of life must feel, sense, think, and respond appropriately to features of the world.153 Some of these responses, in both humans and other animals, are innate. But innate responses are insufficient in the face of novel or unique circumstances. As Trewavas and

Baluška observe, in their essay “The Ubiquity of Consciousness,”

143 Clearly, not every behavioural trait is a sign of intelligence, but when the

environment is unpredictable in terms of food resources or the presence of

predators, innate behaviour is maladaptive and threatens survival. Fitness favours

those organisms that can adapt.154

Intelligence enables organisms to respond appropriately when innate behaviors are insufficient to ensure survival. As a result, flexible behavior and novel responses to novel situations are common among animals, and provide plausible evidence of unprogrammed behavior that, it seems, can only described as intelligence.155

Scientific interest in the inner lives of animals has focused primarily on what might be called the superstars of the animal kingdom: non-human primates, ravens, New Caledonian crows, parrots, bowerbirds, elephants, and bottlenose dolphins. Research has not only focused on the intelligence of these animals, but also on their emotional lives. The focus on these charismatic species is not surprising, since they exhibit some remarkable behaviors. As I have mentioned,

Chimpanzees have been shown to have photographic memories and surpass humans on tests for short-term memory.156 Parents actively teach their young.157 They possess culture158 and fashion and use tools.159 In a number of well-researched books, primatologist Frans de Waal has demonstrated the existence of empathy, concern, and mutual helping among primates (as well as elephants, rats, and other animals) and argued for the role of beneficence, altruism, and cooperation in evolution.160 Primates and ravens also demonstrate that they are able to take the perspective and read the minds of their conspecifics to engage in tactical deception.161 It has been established that chimpanzees (as well as other animals) have learned to treat their illnesses with plants that lack nutrients but have medicinal value.162 Primates, as well as monkeys, carrion

144 crows and ravens seem to exhibit a sense of justice and fairness. When performing the same task as a conspecific, but receiving unequal rewards, they refuse to cooperate and even reject the reward altogether.163 Such an experiment showing the comically intense outrage of a cheated capuchin monkey can be viewed online by searching for Frans de Waal’s TED talk, “Moral

Behavior in Animals.”

In some carefully constructed and well-known experiments ravens have been shown to use logic and insight to solve problems, possessing the ability to test actions in their mind and foresee the consequences. In one set of tests ravens were presented with food hanging on a string attached to a branch.

To get the treat, they had to reach down from a perch, grasp the string in the bill,

pull up on the string, place the loop of pulled-up string onto the perch, step on the

string and apply the appropriate pressure to prevent slippage, then let go of the

string and reach down again, repeating this sequence six or more times in a row.

Adult ravens would sometimes examine the arrangement for several minutes and then immediately complete the steps necessary to fetch the food. Since the animals had not been trained to solve the problem and would not have encountered similar situations in the wild, this could not have been learned through trial and error. Instead they imagined what possible actions they could take and understood the necessary steps to fetch the food.164

Ravens, like some other birds and animals, cache or store food for future feeding. These caches are under threat of theft by other members of their species who observe where they are hidden and can use their spatial memory to locate them.165 Thus a raven must take precautions and employ deceptive tactics to protect its caches. Observations and experiments with ravens and western scrub-jays (both corvids) have shown that these strategies are not simple. For example,

145 they cannot be reduced to a simple rule such as only hiding food when there are no competitors within sight. Rather their strategies are highly flexible involving the ability of the raven or jay to adopt the visual perspective of the prospective thief.166 Ravens make their tactical decision based on remembering what surrounding ravens paid attention to and attributing to them the ability to remember. They also take into account the social status of each individual raven and how dominant and likely it is to get its own way. This information is integrated in order to develop a strategy for where to cache food and when to retrieve it almost immediately employed and without trial and error.167 A raven may hide itself behind a structure to cache food; if a possible raider makes movements toward the cache, the raven may interrupt the caching and change hiding places, wait until later to cache it, or immediately search for another place. Even when another raven makes no movement toward the site of the cache, if a caching raven notices that it’s caching has been observed, it may wait until the other raven is distracted before transferring the food to another site.168

Ravens also exhibit empathy. They have been observed reconciling with those with whom they have quarreled and consoling other distressed ravens.169 They remember former members of their group and the relationships with them for years.170 Ravens play politics. They recognize the hierarchical relationships that govern their group, are sensitive to changes in that hierarchy that have bearing on their own standing, and will intervene to prevent alliances from forming that threaten them.171 And Ravens cooperate with each other by, for example, by coming to the aid of an affiliate who is in conflict with another,172 hunting in groups,173 and working together to chase away large predators from prey.174 It has been increasingly recognized that they possess some abilities that match or exceed those of the great apes.175 New Caledonian crows, another member of the corvid family, are famous for skillfully fashioning a variety of

146 tools for extracting grubs from rotten logs. They refine the ways they fashion these tools over generations, and engage in causal reasoning.176

The extraordinary intelligence of African grey parrots has become known primarily because of Irene Pepperberg’s work with Alex, a grey parrot who achieved great fame because of his ability to correctly name an astounding variety of objects. He was able to extrapolate from familiar to novel objects in order to characterize their attributes. For example, he could correctly answer questions about a novel object, such as “What is its color?” and “What is its shape?” and could identify shapes by the number of their angles. When presented with two objects of the same color or shape and asked what is the difference between their colors or shapes, he would respond “none.”177 He was also able make specific requests, and place into categories over one hundred diverse things. And these are few examples of the remarkable mental abilities of Alex.

The bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea are one of the most intriguing and remarkable animals on the planet. As I previously mentioned, I show clips of the behavior of these birds in order to demonstrate that animals can have an aesthetic sense. Male bowerbirds are unquestionably artists, as well as architects, and users of tools. There is variety of bowerbird species, but what they all have in common is that the males build complex structures that serve the function of displaying works of art. These are not nests. The kinds of structures and displays vary by species abd serve only to attract females who choose to mate with the male whose architectural, artistic achievements, and sexual displays please them the most. After mating, the female flies off and constructs the actual nest and raises her young without the aid of her mate.

So amazing are the architectural and aesthetic properties of the males’ bowers that the first

Europeans to encounter them were convinced that they were “fanciful dollhouses made by aboriginal children or their mothers.”178

147 The satin bowerbird constructs an avenue of hundreds of precisely placed uniformly shaped twigs to form parallel lines that curve inward. To ensure that the sides are parallel, males stand in the middle of the bower and use a measuring stick as a tool. Standing in the midline of the bower avenue, he grasps a stick in his beak placing it against one wall and then rotates the stick to ensure that it touches the other wall at the same distance. The building of the bower requires the ability to precisely manipulate sticks in this and other ways, a skill that takes young satin bowerbirds seven years to master through practice and observation of mature adults building their bowers. Once the bowers are constructed, the male decorates them with colored objects, preferring blue—usually blue feathers of other birds rare in the environment, and shunning red.179 They also pulverize colored plants, mixing it with their saliva to paint the inside walls of their bowers.180

Perhaps the most beautiful structures are constructed by Vokelkop bowerbirds, which, as

I briefly described earlier, build huts around the trunk of a tree sapling. Their roofs are woven from the stems of orchids. In front of the hut these birds lay out a carpet of carefully tended moss on which are arranged piles of brightly colored objects—blossoms, fruit, the iridescent wings of beetles, along with any other decorative item that catches the birds’ fancy. Each bird displays a distinct aesthetic sensibility and actively modifies this canvas as blossoms fade and need to be replaced, new objects are found, and new possibilities for how to arrange the objects are created in its imagination and then executed in practice. The birds will tentatively place items, step back to view their effect, then rearrange them until they are satisfied. When researchers have tampered with these displays, the birds quickly set about putting them in their preferred order.181

A remarkable aspect of great bowerbirds is their mastery of optical illusions. Their bowers are two parallel walls of sticks that form an avenue lined with around five thousand

148 reddish-brown twigs. In front of the avenue is arranged a display of white objects that may include stones, bones, and bleached snail shells. This provides a contrast to the shiny objects placed at the entrance of the avenue, green ones laid out in lines or ovals on the sides and red objects scattered at the edge. These items are arranged so as to produce an optical illusion called

“forced perspective,” accomplished by steadily increasing the size of the objects as they are more distant from the entrance of the avenue. This is an architectural trick used in Las Vegas casinos, as well as the Parthenon in Athens, that makes the male appear larger than he is as he engages in a sexual display within the walls of the bower. When the female stands at the front of the avenue to watch the male dance, reddish light reflecting off the sticks in the avenue also alters the female’s perception of color, intensifying red, green, and the lilac color of the nape of the male’s neck.182

Elephants and dolphins mourn the loss of their companions, they seem to experience grief over the loss of a loved one and have an understanding of death. The response of elephants to death is one of their most unsettling behaviors. When an elephant dies, its companions often tug, push, or use their tusks to try to set it back on its feet. When in their travels they come upon the remains of a dead elephant, they circle around it in silence, using their trunks to gently investigate the body. Sometimes they bury the remains with dirt and foliage, and even apply mud to its wounds.

Occasionally a mother will carry her deceased child around on her tusks, something they never do when the infant is alive. She will exhibit obvious signs of grief, trailing her family at a distance, showing little appetite for food, behaving listlessly. When a group encounters the bones of a long deceased elephant, they will stand around them and tenderly handle the bones with their feet and their trunks, taste them, and sometimes carry bones away with them.183

149 They are among the most social, emotional, and cooperative of animals. Related elephant mothers care for each other’s children. Cooperation in solving problems is regularly observed.

For example, when an individual is trapped in mud or drainage ditches, two or more elephants will work together to free it. When a calf is threatened by a predator, the clan will form a circle around it facing outward to ward off the threat. Members of a clan communicate with each other vocally, as well as with physical interactions and over a hundred different kinds of gestures, such as tilts of the head or flaps of their ears.184 They seem to deliberate and make group decisions for their common good.185 Joyce Poole, an expert on elephants, reports that

When they are getting ready to do a group charge, for example, they all look to

one another: “Are we all together? Are we ready to do this?” When they succeed,

they have an enormous celebration, trumpeting, rumbling, lifting their heads high,

clanking tusks together, intertwining their trunks.186

If a member of a clan is sick or injured, they often refuse to leave it behind, even if it is not one of their direct relatives. They actively console anxious members.187 It is well known that elephants in captivity, deprived of the complex social life that is natural to them, exhibit signs of depression.

It has been difficult to study the cognitive abilities of elephants because their long lives make it difficult to study them over lifetimes, because of their size, and because of the inherent dangers of working with them. But elephants display intellectual insight, that is, the ability to solve a problem in their minds and then immediately execute the solution. At the National Zoo in

Washington D.C. scientists suspended fruit just out of reach in a captive elephant’s yard and placed a large plastic cube nearby. Although he had never seen such a cube before, after discovering that his reach fell short, he immediately fetched the cube and used it as a stool to

150 fetch the food. In addition, the elephant generalized from this insight and when the cube was not available used other objects on which to stand, stacking them when necessary to reach the food.188 Elephants fashion branches into tools for shooing flies away and captive African elephants have been observed using at least 10 tool types.189 Experiments suggest that elephants can better discriminate between larger and smaller quantities than great apes and humans.190

Their spatial and social memories are prodigious. They are able to create mental maps of hundreds of miles of terrain, returning to the same water holes over many years. Experiments showed that wild African elephants recognized the vocalizations of members of their family who had been separated from the herd 12 years previously191 and it has been shown that elephants can identify the individual calls of as many as one hundred other elephants from other families and clans.192

Experiments in which differently colored or scented garments were presented to elephants showed that they used both visual and olfactory clues to distinguish those that were related to ethnic groups that pose dangers to them. They reacted with hostility and alarm to red garments, red being the color of the clothing worn by Massai warriors who hunt elephants. Thus elephants are able to categorize a species—humans—into subclasses according to their level of threat.193

Finally, the bottlenose dolphin has been the object of much research and what has been discovered of cognitive abilities is too vast to summarize, so I will provide only a few telling examples. Some of the most impressive discoveries have concerned their use of language. They are able to understand the meaning of symbols in an artificial language—linguistic systems invented by humans and taught to them. They can understand symbols for things, abstract

151 concepts such as classes of objects, relational concepts, and actions. But more remarkable is their ability to understand syntax—the ways in which changes in the order and arrangement of symbols produce changes of meaning. In other words, they are able to comprehend and form abstract rules related both to language and to relations between objects and events. For example, scientists devised sentences in a language composed of human gestures. These sentences were constructed of three gestures. One sentence (type 1) was composed of a sequence of gestures with a grammar in which the first indicated location, the second a kind of object, and the third the action the dolphin was asked to perform on the object. The grammar of type 2 sentences involved a first gesture specifying one type of object, a second specifying another type of object, and a third the relationship between the two, for example symbolizing “ball,” “cube,” “together,” requiring the dolphin to place the ball and the cube next to each other. After the dolphin learned these two sentences, without any further instruction, she immediately understood and was able to respond appropriately to a series of four and five gesture sentences with different grammars: including (1) type 1 object, location, type 2 object, and a relation between them; (2) location, type 1 object, location, type 2 object, and a relation between the objects. Thus, once she understood the sentences she was taught, she was able to spontaneously infer the abstract rules governing their grammar—the syntax of the sentence as well as the meaning of the terms.194 She was also able to apply these rules to another system of communication in which the scientist pointed first to object O1, then to object O2, followed by a gesture indicating a relation. When this dolphin, Ake, was presented with long strings of symbols that violated the rules of grammar she had inferred, she abstracted and carried out instructions of shorter sequences within the longer string of symbols that followed those rules. When given instructions that were grammatical, but had nonsensical terms, such as calling an object a relation, she refused to

152 respond. The implications of this might not be immediately apparent, but are actually profound, demonstrating an understanding of the implicit relations within the grammar of an artificial language, as well as the ability to reinterpret the relationship between the symbols and objects when given an anomalous command and to recognize when a sentence is incoherent. This flies in the face of the claims of many philosophers and scientists that humans alone are capable of forming or understanding a language with a grammar.195

Further, dolphins seem to have their own grammatically structured language composed of a wide range of vocal signals, visual cues indicated by bodily postures, touching one another in a variety of ways, and physical actions that are governed by syntax. And these systems of communication appear to be partly the product of the cultures that govern different communities of dolphins, since they are not universal.196

One of the games that dolphins play is to blow and manipulate “bubble rings.” This takes some practice. The game involves exhaling bursts of air from their blowhole. To form a ring, the bubble formed must be at least .78 inches in diameter. Water pressure increases with depth, so the higher pressure on the lower side of the bubble will overcome the surface tension of the bubble at the base and pierce it with a hole through the center to form a ring. To produce a ring that does not disintegrate as it rises requires practice, skill, and planning. A dolphin must assume a specific posture at a certain depth and expel the air in a particular manner. Once a stable ring has been formed, a dolphin will then manipulate it, alone or with others, by creating vortices around it that turn it in specific directions and cause it to assume various positions in the water.

A second ring is sometimes blown in a way that will make it rise and join the first to form a larger ring. Sometimes the force with which the two rings collide will result in the expulsion of air to form a third bubble that dolphins will manipulate. To decide whether to blow a second

153 bubble ring, dolphins must assess the likely permanence and integrity of the first ring as well as the probability that a second ring can be blown in such a way as to catch up with it. They must not only assess, but plan, and have some understanding of causal relationships. 197

Research on dolphins has shown that they also possess extensive knowledge about the identity and character of others in their social group, self-knowledge, keen memories, and even understanding of what they know and do not know—when they are uncertain. They use tools, probing crevices for prey with sponges and culturally transmit knowledge from generation to generation.198

We do well to marvel at what has been discovered about these charismatic animals, but it would be an error to assume that they form an exclusive club. Even the “lowliest” animals possess some remarkable capacities to which we are largely oblivious. Take for example what scientists have discovered about the cognitive capacities, aesthetic judgments, an emotional dimensions of the singing of common birds. We tend to think that the call of every robin, cardinal, phoebe, or northern oriole is the same. However, there are regional differences and local dialects. This indicates that birds learn their songs and that there is a cultural component to bird song. Culture is one aspect of human life that enables us to transcend our evolutionary heritage. In biological evolution what an animal learns is not passed on to its progeny, but in cultural evolution it is.

Cultural evolution enables us to pass on accumulated wisdom. Experiments have shown that foraging strategies, as well as the preferences of female birds for certain characteristics in males and courtship rituals among males can be culturally transmitted.199

We often take songbirds for granted, not realizing how much how complex are the cognitive processes through which they learn to sing their songs. Experiments in which white

154 crowned sparrows were raised without any exposure to auditory stimulation demonstrate that there is some innate component. When about a month old, a chick begins to vocalize in what is called subsong—the bird equivalent to a human baby’s babbling. The chick appears to have an innate mental template of the basic features of their species’ song and tries to match it by experimentally manipulating its beak, syrinx, and pulmonary muscles, and listening to the results. After about 100 days it will develop a highly schematic version of the characteristic songs of its species. In the wild, a white crowned sparrow listens to the syllables, tempos, and phrasing of the songs of others in its region and learns how to reproduce what it actually hears, producing a much richer song than those raised in isolation.200 But this is not all. It appears that each bird exercises creativity to produce its own individual song. When, for example, marsh wrens were raised in identical laboratory conditions under which they were each exposed to the same tapes of other species singing, each invented its own variant of song.201 Field scientist have used technology to establish that no two birds of the same species have identical songs.202 While it cannot be proven, this suggests that songbirds exercise aesthetic judgments as they experiment to develop a song that sounds best for them.

Through experiments that recorded activity in the basil ganglia of singing birds as a basis for projecting what was happening in their dopamine neurons, scientists have concluded that they sing with a musical goal, making an effort to hit the notes they intend and feeling displeasure when they miss the mark.203 Females take pleasure in a fine vocal performance by a singing male and the neurochemistry behind this pleasure is closely analogous to human responses to music.204

Singing males take pleasure in the songs they sing.205 Advances in affective neuroscience indicate that beneath the behavior we observe in the animals around us are rich emotional lives based on the same basic circuitry of the brain that produces emotion in humans.206

155 Advances in audio technology have revealed remarkable similarities between the songs of birds and the musical compositions of humans. Birds use every basic rhythmical effect found in human music, varying these rhythms, relationships between pitch. As with human composers birds invert intervals between notes, introduce simple harmonic relations, and transpose melodies and motifs into new keys. Some employ another common device of human musical compositions based on imitation—matched counter singing. One bird will sing a long series of short themes

(as many as 120 in a fixed sequence) and its neighbor responds by matching each theme. Other birds will sing together in the pattern of call and response. And birds will use sounds not produced by their vocal-tracts as accompaniments to their music, such as specially structured feathers or pounding on an object with a particular resonance. Some birds even use the same scales as western music. Birds do compose music in every sense of the word.207

In When Elephants Weep, Masson and McCarthy discuss a passage from Joseph Wood Krutch that illustrates our tendency to dismiss the emotional complexity of animals, and the beauty that brings to the world. Krutch invites us to imagine ourselves enthralled by a Mozart opera, and especially by one performer’s singing of an aria. You assume that she “genuinely loves music” and experiences intense and elevated emotion as she sings it. But then you have a conversation with an economist, who offers an alternative interpretation based on the hard “evidence.” Based on the fact that “she won’t sing in public unless she is paid quite a large sum,” he concludes that professional singers “sing for nothing but money.” But this is a fallacy often found in interpretations of human behavior in the social and natural sciences—“the fallacy of the ‘nothing but’” that narrows the complexity of human behavior to a single, usually measurable, variable. It is as if one said, “He does not really love his children. His actions are solely explained by

156 evolutionary history, the chemistry of the brain, or a desire to ensure that he has a caregiver when he reaches his dotage.” Surely the origins of parental love are partly explained by evolutionary history: survival of the species is higher among those that lovingly care for their young. Surely, as with everything we experience, there are physical correlates in the brain and nervous system that accompany a parent’s feelings of overwhelming tenderness towards his offspring. And all of us would like to having someone with whom we are intimate share the pain of our last years. But none of this explains the immediate motives of action, nor eliminates the realm of feeling in which we live and act. I am paid for teaching my students (although less than

I was in my earlier employment), but I do love teaching them. Nothing convincingly suggests that a bird singing from a branch during the mating season is less than joyous, taking pleasure from the “vigor and artistry” of his own song. And studies of the measurable brain chemistry of birds confirms that they experience intense pleasure in their singing. “Whoever listens to a bird song and says, ‘I do not believe there is any joy in it,” has not proved anything about birds. But he has revealed a good deal about himself.”208 But what exactly has he revealed about himself?

Perhaps a blindness or a stubborn unwillingness to recognize what we share in common with other living things—an inner life enriched by emotion and aesthetic appreciation.

I have often discussed with my students the pleasures that animals take in eating, hunting, playing, and exerting themselves in what they are so perfectly equipped to do at the height of their fitness. I have described to them one of my cats, who being allowed outside would immediately approach a large tree in our yard, effortlessly and quickly climb nearly to its top and then rapidly descend. I always thought that she took obvious pleasure in this astounding exercise of her prowess. And she loved nothing more than to roll on her back, wiggling to scratch it, below me in the spot I was attempting to weed. I have recounted stories of another of my cats

157 who, when called, never meandered towards me, but ran as fast as he could until he arrived panting at my feet. My cats, in these and other instances, seemed entirely enraptured by the pure physicality of their exertions. I have asked my students whether humans are able to experience these kinds of feelings in the way that animals can. After all, we can climb trees, run, and roll on our backs as well as they. After some discussion, they generally conclude that we cannot, or only rarely can, because of the purity of these pleasures in animals, unaffected by such things as the worries that accompany competitiveness and other mental associations a human would have doing these same things. Julian Huxley described the courtship of herons who entwined their long necks together, and said “Of this I can only say that it seemed to bring such a pitch of emotion that I could have wished to be a heron that I might experience it.” And Joseph Wood

Krutch, discussing the rapture of a dog anticipating being taken for a walk, observes “It is difficult to see how one can deny that the dog … is experiencing a joy the intensity of which it is beyond our power to imagine.”209

Some years ago, wild turkeys began to roam our property and nest upon it. Our ability to observe these wary birds has been limited to a few fleeting glimpses and images captured on a game camera we mounted in the woods. But in Illumination in the Flatwoods, Joe Hutto recounts his close relationship with a troupe of wild turkeys over a period of nearly two years. He hatched, raised, and prepared them for life in the wild as adults. Almost constantly their companion, he was able to closely observe the manifestations of the cognitive processes of these magnificent birds. In light of how often the intelligence of turkeys is impugned, he was surprised to discover how completely they are furnished with a set of genetic predispositions that enable them to adapt instinctual knowledge to the particularities of their specific environment. Daily he saw evidence that

158 the most important activity of a young wild turkey is the acquisition and

assimilation of information…. They are curious to a fault, they want a working

understanding of every aspect of their surroundings, and their memory is

impeccable. They gather specific information about a particular environment,

conspicuously apply that information to a framework of general knowledge, and

make appropriate choices in modifying their behavior.

Living in their presence, he felt himself “dull and insensitive by comparison,” and actually embarrassed when he made his “ignorance and stupidity known to them in some way.” On those occasions he often received looks from his little flock that he could only interpret as incredulity at how slow-minded he was. Having also imprinted and raised crows, whose intelligence is so often rightly praised, he found that wild turkeys are even more curious than crows, have more complex social relationships, and a richer vocabulary.210

He also found himself transformed in unexpected ways by his glimpses of their subjective experience of their environment. Though often engaged in foraging, they appeared to be “more interested in exploration and observation” than finding food and often profoundly motivated by wonder.” He observed “the absolute joy” they seemed to take in their daily existence with unvarying “enthusiasm and a dignified excitement.” In all that they did, they were

“exuberant and completely devoted to the moment. It is as though they would change nothing— they are in love with being alive.” He seems to envy the complete satisfaction that they seem to find in life—a contentment that far transcends what humans can achieve.211

Elephants are known for their prodigious memories, but more common animals that we take for granted equal or surpass them in some respects. Grey squirrels have been shown to remember

159 where they bury their many nuts, and not to rely solely on smell.212 After learning to solve a puzzle and being given the same fundamental problem in different apparatus twenty-two months later, they remember and are able to generalize and abstract from the solution to the earlier puzzle to solving the new one.213 Food-caching birds, such as corvids, have amazing recall. Scrub jays, construct mental maps of where they have hidden food which enable them to engage in acts of remembering that exceed the powers of humans. They recall the positions of many hundreds or even thousands of hidden seeds after some months, and remember from which caches they have already retrieved food.214 They also remember when they cached their foods.

When scientists give them perishable food, such as grubs, they immediately eat some, while caching others. But when enough time has passed that the cached grub would have grown rotten, they do not bother to retrieve them.215 They also exhibit foresight. If they notice that a competitor has seen them caching their food, and in the past they themselves have robbed a rival’s cache, when the competitor is no longer watching, they will move where they hide the food.216

Crows not only have good memories, but they are able to recognize the distinction between one human face and another. Researchers conducted an experiment in which those who trapped, banded and released crows were given a unique mask. After trapping anyone who walked along wearing the mask was scolded and mobbed by crows.

Furthermore, the information was communicated to other crows so that those who had never been trapped visited their wrath upon anyone who wore the mask. When the mask was worn upside down crows would recognize it by adjusting the angle at which they viewed it. Even numerous years after the initial experiment, the knowledge of the threat posed by those who wore the mask had been passed on to a new generation of crows who had never been captured in the traps.217

160

I have already noted how the animals on our land exhibit signs of curiosity. While curiosity can certainly be a dangerous thing, it is also essential to learning and making new discoveries, which are of course necessary for survival. But Richard Byrne points out that

If animals only behaved according to basic principles of survival and

reproduction, their lives would be entirely filled with the search for key resources:

finding food, drink and mating partners; avoiding undue risks, even when asleep;

building up useful relationships; rearing offspring; and all the other utilitarian and

essential functions biologists study.

But many, perhaps even most, animals do not behave in this way. They show an interest in the world that goes beyond what is merely practical and play with what seem to be useless things.218

Play is linked to curiosity. It is both a spontaneous activity, rewarding in itself, and a way of exploring the properties of an object. Play seems to engage the imagination, emotions, such as surprise, and feelings of pleasure. In The Minds of Birds, the ornithologist Alexander Skutch emphasizes how much playfulness in animals reveals about them.

Unlike the indispensable life-sustaining activities, it appears to escape from the

rigor of natural selection into the realm of spontaneity and freedom. Instead of

being innate modes of behavior widespread in a species, some kinds of play are

rare or have been so seldom reported that they appear to be inventions of active

minds, perhaps imitated by companions.219

My love of birds makes many of his accounts of birds at play irresistible to me, so I must exercise some self-control not to recount them all. But a few would strike anyone’s fancy.

Skutch describes a barn swallow swooping down to retrieve one of the white feathers

161 shed by a group of ducks and geese, then sailing up to circle above the other swallows to drop the plume. In its float downward, it was caught by another swallow who, like the first, made a circuit above the others and dropped it, to be caught by another. And the game continued. My wife and I often gaze in awe at the swallows that circle around our property, and how gracefully and effortlessly they seem to swim through the air. I can only imagine how beautiful this scene of play must have been.

He describes a man watering his garden surprised by an Anna’s hummingbird that first attempted to perch on the solid stream of water. Finding that it was not the sort of solid perch she expected, she turned herself sideways to ride the flow downward, and then returned for new rides over and over. G. Murray Levick describes how the Adélie penguins of Antarctica also enjoy taking a ride. As small ice-flows drift past them in the water each, is boarded by penguins until it can hold no more, shouting calls at those they leave behind, who call back in return. When, half a mile or so down the stream, the penguins have to abandon their craft, they dive into the tide and swim back to the place from which they were are to jump on the next flow for another ride.220

Recently a video was posted on YouTube by Russia Today went viral. It shows a crow who had flown with a circular disk to the top of a snowy rooftop in Russia. The crow nudged the disk to where the roof pitched downwards, clasped the disk with its feet, and rode it like a sled down the slope. When the ride was finished, it grasped the disk with its beak, flew back to the top, and sled downward again, repeating this behavior over and over. A friend of mine who once owned a bar, discouraged by the behavior of one her patrons, walked outside to collect herself by sitting near a pond occupied Canadian geese. One goose took flight, circled around the pond and landed in back of the flock extending its feet so as to create a great splash of water that showered the flock.

The other geese raised a great and noisy fuss, but finally settled back down. The mischievous

162 goose then repeated this behavior. Who can doubt that these animals are having fun. Brain studies strongly suggest that they are.221

Even amphibians, fish, and reptiles play. Vietnamese mossy frog tadpoles and some fish have been observed to repeatedly ride bubbles from an airstone at the bottom of a tank to the top.

Fish play, for example, by leaping over one another. Recently a study of three male fish of the species Tropheus duboisi recorded hundreds of instances of them attacking or deflecting an object floating in their tank that rapidly returned to an upright position. Not only does this seem to fit the criteria for play, but scientists observed that each fish developed its own style of play.

The mormyrid species of fish have been observed to play by balancing twigs on their snouts and, when they tumble off, retrieving them, even before they have reach water’s bottom, to balance them again. Stingrays compete with each other to bat around balls. Turtles, tortoises, and

Komodo dragons will chase a ball and engage in tugs of war with their keepers. When filmed and played at high speeds, their behavior appears little different from the play of dogs.222

Tool use, once thought to be a uniquely human property, abounds in the animal kingdom.

Some wrasses, a large family of oceanic fish, many brightly colored, use tools, smashing urchins and shellfish against rocks and coral to break them open.223 Although it is primarily the New Caledonian crow that is famous for using tools, American crows also use tools by holding stones in their beaks and using them to pound open acorns or by dropping a nut in the path of a car and collecting the shattered meat of the nut when the car has passed.224 One species of ants drops stones into the entrances of competing colonies to deter them from competitive foraging. A type of assassin bug uses scrapings from the nest of termites to conceal itself visually and obscure its scent as it hunts them.

163 After successfully capturing a termite, these bugs will often use the hollow carcasses that remains after they have taken their meal as a lure, pressing them into the openings of termite nests and giving them a tantalizing jiggle to which workers respond by trying to wrestle the carcass from the assassin bug. The bugs slowly pull the workers backwards out of the nest to where they can more easily be seized.225 These are only a few of many examples of animals using tools.226 And it seems likely that this behavior is possible only because the animals some animals have evolved the ability to form beliefs about causes and effects.227 The same would appear to be true about animals who use non-nutritional substances to treat effectively treat ailments they suffer. These include not only elephants, and chimpanzees, but birds, bees, and lizards.228

Animals not only use tools and practice medicine, but they are also capable of some impressive architectural accomplishments. Take, for example, the nests of birds. In the winter months, when the trees are bare, Barbara and I take great pleasure in discovering and examining the structure of the nests concealed from us by the lush growth of summer. As is so often the case, many regard the building of nests as purely instinctual and unguided by intelligence. Instinct obviously plays some role—a robin’s nest is built differently than a northern oriole’s or a chickadee’s. But there is also flexibility—one robin’s next is not exactly like another. Instinct or innate knowledge does not entirely program behavior. As I have already indicated, what we call instinct can be understood as innately guided learning that is important for both animals and humans, providing the animal knowledge of “when it should learn, what cues it should attend to, how to store the new information and how to refer to it in the future.” It may even

164 provide the foundations for the ability to categorize objects, behavior, and events and the cognitive resources to learn through trial and error.229

It seems, that birds are born with innate knowledge of a general pattern that guides their efforts, but that they individually vary in how they construct their nests and gain skill through practice.230 That learning is involved is evident from studies that show that birds choose the materials from which to build their nest based on experiences from which they form judgments about their structural effectiveness and that the quality of their nests improve with practice.231 In 1902, Charles Dixon noted that “A bird’s nest is the most graphic mirror of a bird’s mind. It is the most palpable example of those reasoning, thinking qualities with which these creatures are unquestionably very highly endowed.”232

Consider the example of one of the most commonly seen nests—those of robins.

Robins begin by pushing sticks into a notch between structural members of the site they have chosen. If they choose a tree, then of course these are branches. Some of the sticks fall to the ground, but over time enough twigs are held together by friction and entangle each other notches to form a starting structure. Over time the twigs are arranged into roughly circular formation. When stable enough, the birds land on what they have built and move themselves around within it extending their legs backwards to form a depression, converting the lattice of sticks into a cup that is molded around the body of the female. Sitting in the cup, she inserts finer twigs between the courser twigs with a vibrating motion of her beak. Mud is used to bind the branches together and is eventually used to form the rim of the cup, which is then lined with moss, string, or more usually grass, which is bent into the nest’s inside edges. But forming a rim of mud on the cup of

165 the nest is not as simple as it might seem, as anyone who has worked with clay will know. The mud varies in thickness from an inch at the bottom to a quarter of an inch at the rim. A robin must find a source of mud, but it must be mud of a particular texture. It cannot be too wet, lest it not hold its shape, nor too dry, lest it crumble. And the building up of layers of mud is itself tricky. A layer of wet mud placed on another layer of wet mud could lose its shape, but if a layer dries out too much a new layer of wet mud will not adhere. The moisture of the mud that is retrieved for construction must be carefully chosen, and to ensure that each new addition of mud adheres to the existing layers and retains its shape the Robin must control the process of drying by carefully timing the extrusion of mud from her mouth. And all this must be done with what is required for the next layer to adhere in mind.233

Or consider an increasingly common animal—the beaver. In our annual trips to

Minnesota, we have observed dramatic changes in the landscape engineered by these remarkable rodents. These creatures practice engineering to regulate or create the flow of water, to provide security by ensuring that the levels of water block the entrances to their homes, and to create waterways that enable them to find food and transport the materials they need for building.

Because every ecosystem has unique hydraulic properties, no single design can be followed.

Beavers have a variety of innate behaviors, such as digging and the cutting and shaping of wood that are employed in construction. But it is not easy to see how the variability of their lodges and dams, each adapted to the particularities of the environment, can be explained entirely in terms of instincts. If were purely instinctual, then we would have to implausibly attribute to these animals an incredibly complex set of hard-wired reactions. The simplest and most plausible explanation is that they assess each situation, make judgments about what they need to do, and

166 creatively plan how to modify the environment in order to meet their needs.234

For example, beavers employ different methods of construction often tailored to the particularities of the body of water in which they build live. When the flow of water is slow enough, beavers might lay the trunks of trees across the stream without the risk that they will be carried away by the current. In faster water the trunks might be placed parallel to the direction of the water with the ends of some embedded in the stream’s muddy bottom. Another of their strategies for building in swiftly flowing water is to erect vertical trunks in the bed of the stream and brace them with other trunks and Y-shaped branches that capture the vertical trunks in their crotches. The ends of the braces are anchored with rocks or by wedging them into the mud. A fourth method begins by cutting down one or more trees such that they fall horizontally across the stream. These trees are then anchored in the mud with sharpened vertical branches, and then more horizontal limbs are position to fill in the gaps.235

In her four-year study of a family of beavers, Hope Ryden describes in detail how they maintained their dam and periodically modified it to adjust the flow of water and size of their pond as conditions required. For example, in winter they modified the dam to lower level of water and create a layer of air that enabled them to breath as they navigated under winter ice.

The father of the family engaged daily in a diligent and thorough inspection of the dam, looking and listening for leaks. When leaks were discovered, the beavers showed judgment and skill in selecting the materials and strategies of repair appropriate to the nature of the breach.

One of the most dramatic moments of her book occurs when she discovers that a vandal has maliciously created a severe break in the five-foot tall dam that threatened to completely empty the pond and render the beavers’ home unlivable in a matter of hours. It seemed that there was no way the breach could be repaired, the water flowing so strongly that it was likely to carry

167 away any object used for repair. In an agitated state, the patriarch swam back and forth in front of the dam, taking in the damage. He first dragged a six-foot tall shrub across the water and with great effort managed to wedge it into the crevice. This did little to stop the flow, so he tried to caulk the gaps below water level with uprooted water lilies, working both sides of the am “at a fanatical pace—diving, plucking, packing” over and over, as he was joined by others of his family who imitated his efforts. In the midst of these attempts to plug the leaks, he periodically fetched cuttings of wood for further reinforcement, deliberately arranging them in various ways.

As the water in the pond steadily lowered, they eventually succeeded in reducing the leak by around two thirds. After a full night of exhausting activity, the beavers retired to their lodge to sleep. Upon first emerging the next evening, the father of the clan immediately pulled a log, six- feet long, from the top of the lodge, towed it one hundred yards to the dam, put it in place and began dropping sticks before it where they were trapped. The rest of his family again imitated his efforts, removing more substantial logs from their home, placing them where needed, and trapping sticks and debris flowing downstream in the emerging structure. After a lengthy effort, this finally staunched the flow. What was remarkable about this, is that their ultimate success was accomplished because, it seems, as the patriarch emerged from his lodge he remembered the condition of the dam when left it the previous night and had determined what was needed, acting with foresight.236

Evolution is usually cast as a competition for survival—an ongoing battle in which only the fittest survive. In the 19th century, Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin and his most vigorous defender, characterized this view in his “Struggle for Existence and Its Bearing upon

Man:”

168 From the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same

level as a gladiators’ show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight,

whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.

The spectator has no need to turn his thumb down, as no quarter is given.237

But it has since been learned that competition is not always the key for the survival of a species or of an individual of that species. Our understanding of life as a competitive process may be more a reflection of our own culture than the way nature works. Mutualism, a relationship in which both species benefit, is common in nature, as is cooperation, which can increase the chances of survival.238

Rather astonishingly, cooperation can also occur between members of different species.

For example, some groupers hunt cooperatively with moray eels. The abilities of these species are complementary. Groupers are capable of the bursts of speed necessary for capturing prey in open water while moray eels are able to pursue prey inside the crevices to which they might flee for shelter. By working together, they are both able to increase their chances of success.

Groupers employ two signals to initiate cooperative hunting. In one of these it seeks out a moray eel in its shelter and shimmies its body horizontally in front of it, sometimes directing its gaze toward the eel. The eel leaves its shelter to be escorted by the grouper. The grouper has a second signal used to direct the attention of its partner towards where a fish that has escaped it is taking shelter: it assumes a vertical position over the prey with its head down and shakes its head with pauses between periods of shaking. The eel will then either succeed in taking the prey itself or fail, but flush it into the open where it can be taken by the grouper.239

Of course, cooperation is more common among members of the same species.

The cooperative behavior of social insects is common knowledge, but it also occurs in

169 birds and mammals. Crows are prominent and noisy inhabitants of our land. They often seem to be involved in urgent business, loudly discussing it as a group, before they fly off with raucous calls to attend to it. One way that crows cooperate is in foraging. One favorite stratagem is for a few of them to land near some animal that has just caught and begun to consume its meal. Ignoring the food, one of them casually approaches the animal’s rear, and pecks its rump or pulls its tail. When the food is released to deal with the annoyance, another crow grabs the meal and flies off with it.240

Biologist and fox watcher David Macdonald has written that “Thou shalt not share thy food” appears to be one of the commandments of red fox behavior. However, he has also seen foxes bringing food to adult foxes when they are injured. In another instance he observed that when a dog fox was disabled by an infected paw the dominant vixen in this group brought him food until he recovered.241

Alexander Skutch records a startling example of helping among blue tits in the cottage of someone who, during warm weather, opened the windows to provide access to the birds in her yards whose indoor company she enjoyed. In winter, though, she opened only one entrance through which a blue tit, new to the cottage, flew inside. After a while the bird tried to exit through a closed window, banging itself against the glass. Another blue tit familiar with the house, observed the frantic plight of the frightened bird, and flew into the house through the only entrance to which it tried to entice the trapped bird to follow by calling. When this failed, it flew across the room, touched the bird, and led it back to escape.242 Two scientists report that through two seasons they observed a male crow, who was mated, reliably bring food to a deformed and partially blind unmated female, even while it was busily taking care of its own young.243

170 These and other instances of one animal helping another of its species, and in some cases providing assistance to a member of another species, appear to require that some animals, at least, experience empathy, which some philosophers (most notably

David Hume) consider one of the foundations of moral development. In the last several decades there has been extensive research on the cognitive functions and neurological basis of empathy in humans. As defined by Decety and Jackson, the empathic response is

the capacity to understand and respond to the unique affective experiences of

another person. At an experiential level of description, this psychological

construct denotes a sense of similarity between one’s own feelings and those

expressed by another person. At a basic level of description, empathy can be

conceived of as an interaction between any two individuals, with one

experiencing and sharing the feeling of the other.244

Experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have revealed that observing pain in others activates regions of the brain “implicated in processing the affective and motivational aspects of one’s own pain.”245 Empathy rests on a mechanism that gives an observer access to the internal state of another through the neural changes in observer’s own brain. When a subject observes the outward signs of an inner state, such as suffering, “the subject’s neural representations of similar states that it has experienced are automatically and unconsciously activated,”246 triggering an analogous experience.

Empathy is distinct from sympathy, as it is currently defined. Sympathy is a response to empathy in which feeling and understanding what another is experiencing produces feelings of concern or sadness and is associated with altruistic motivations.247

171 Frans de Waal suggests that, as is the case in most mental properties, “advanced forms of empathy are preceded by and grow out of more elementary ones,” in both developmental and evolutionary terms. Culture and language influence the character of human empathy, but the origins of empathy are biological and seemed to have originated in neurological developments in animals that ensure parental care of their offspring and produce what is called “emotional contagion.”248 Emotional contagion is a simpler response than empathy, although its neurological basis is similar. It occurs when the emotion of one or more individuals gives rise to similar feelings in others. This is why, for example, a comedic performance seems funnier when experienced among members of an audience. One person’s amusement is communicated to others, so that many participate in a common response. And when one infant throws a tantrum, infants around her find themselves similarly unhappy. Empathy could not have arisen without the neurological developments that produce emotional contagion, but “goes beyond it in that it places filters between the other’s and one’s own state.”249

Empathy and sympathy among animals has not been much studied, but is clearly suggested by the examples I gave earlier. Empathy has been most thoroughly studied among primates. For example, the keeper of a young chimpanzee found it difficult to coax him off of her roof by either threats or rewards. But if she pretended to be crying, he would rush from the roof or any other place, look around for the cause of her distress, then stare directly into her face, take her chin in one hand, and gently stroke her face. Another remarkable example is of a bonobo, named Kuni, who captured a stunned starling that had fallen into her enclosure. Urged by her keeper to release it,

172 Kuni picked up the starling with one hand and climbed to the highest point of the

highest tree where she wrapped her legs around the trunk so that she had both

hands free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread them

wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird.250

There are a number of remarkable aspects of this altruistic act. Kuni responded sympathetically to a member of another species, knew enough about birds and how they navigate to have some notion of what would be good for the bird, and acted upon that knowledge.

Experiments have shown that even the lowly rat experiences sympathy, as well as empathy. In 1933 experiments were conducted in which baby rats were placed on the floors of cages separated by an electrified grid from rats who were mothers and, in some cases, females who were not. The adult females unhesitatingly crossed the grid, receiving shocks in the process to retrieve even unrelated babies and bring them back to their nests. Wondering how long these females would continue this behavior, one rat was offered, and retrieved, fifty-eight babies. The female appeared as ready to do this at the end as at the beginning, and the researchers only stopped the trial because they ran out of babies to offer. This behavior neither enhanced the survival of the adult females nor increased their opportunities to pass on their genes.251

More recent experiments testing for empathically motivated behavior in rats involved placing a free rat with another in the same cage that had been trapped in a restrainer. After a few sessions, the free rat learned how to open the restrainer and free the trapped rat. When faced with a choice between freeing their fellow rat and eating a piece of chocolate, the freed rats first opened the restrainer and typically shared the chocolate.252

173 How astonishing is this planet we live upon! We are surrounded by many animals that share each other’s feelings and respond with care and concern. When we observe such behavior in humans, we regard it as morally virtuous. The inner lives of animals are more complex, interesting, and admirable than commonly understood and perhaps, at least on occasion, even have something like moral qualities.

In light of these revelations about the inner lives of animals, it should not be surprising that they sometimes cooperate with one another. I have mentioned some forms of cooperation in ravens and crows. Another form that cooperation can take is through vocal communication. Whether animals have an actual language, in the sense that humans have, has long been a contested and highly technical question among philosophers and scientists.253 This is further complicated by the questionable assumption, long made by philosophers and linguists, that without language there can be no real thinking. In denying that animals have a language they are denied thought.

But it is not doubtful that animals communicate in a variety of ways including vocalizations and other methods of producing sound, postures, stereotypical bodily movements, and scent. And recent research has consistently found that animal communication is at least more “language-like” than previously assumed, and is perhaps a real language of some kind. The investigation of the capacity of animals for language has been hindered by the assumption that it is best studied in a laboratory where conditions can be carefully controlled. But a cage in a laboratory is clearly different from the natural contexts in which animals typically communicate and not likely to reveal these capacities most fully. Another approach has been to see whether animals can learn a

174 language devised by us. Parrots, like Alex the famous African parrot, have been taught human vocabularies to determine whether they can understand what nouns refer to, how verbs function, construct their own sentences, and express their own thoughts and wishes.254 To explore similar questions among apes, scientists have tried to teach them

American Sign Language or how to use computers to express themselves. But such efforts seem to me misguided. Humanly designed languages are based on human needs, or contrived and taught to animals to determine whether they can communicate about the matters that we assume are important. But clearly, the context of the lives of animals and what and how they communicate are entirely different from our own.

Recent studies have suggested that our ability to decipher the methods animals use to communicate is also limited by the manner in which our sensory modalities prevent us from accurately hearing the individual components of vocalizations by animals, let alone distinguish the various ways in which these components are organized and arranged. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to distinguish the time-scale of an animal’s signals from the time-scale of our perceptions. Through technology humans are able to compress a great deal of information into a brief electronic transmission, which can only be deciphered through the use of technology that resolves the signal into its various components. The biologist Con Slobodchikoff conducted field studies that show that a similar gap exists between the amount of information that an animal, such as a prairie dog, encodes in its vocalizations and how we perceive them. His research team exposed prairie dogs to carefully arranged situations, recorded their calls, and generated sonograms to provide a visual representation structure of the vocalizations, including frequencies and tempos. After publishing a great many technical presentations of the

175 results of his analysis in scientific journals, he provided a more popular account in his book, Chasing Doctor Dolittle. Among his discoveries is that

The alarm calls of prairie dogs sound like a simple “cheep” to us, yet … if you

slice up this “cheep”—which lasts about one-tenth of a second—into twenty time

slices, each lasting five-thousandths of a second, we find significant acoustic

structures of information in each time slice. The sound we hear as a very brief

“cheep” packs in as much information to prairie dogs as a long drawn-out

sentence would for us.255

Through careful correlations between the acoustical structures and the behavioral responses of prairie dogs, they were able to identify linguistic elements in their calls.

In their early work they were able to establish that prairie dogs had noun-like calls for distinct categories of predators, such as dogs, red-tailed hawks, humans, and coyotes, badgers, gopher snakes, and rattlesnakes, with each call eliciting distinct and appropriate escape strategies by members of the colony. If a predator, such as a coyote, starts to run, numerous prairie dogs call. By shortening or widening the intervals between their barks they are able to communicate the speed of its approach. Further linguistic elements were deciphered by studying prairie dogs in their natural setting, varying isolated elements in novel ways, recording their vocal responses, and analyzing how they consistently varied.

For example, in one set of experiments they first established the general structure of the alarm calls when humans intruded into their environment. Then, in one set of experiments, a researcher repeatedly walked down a specific pathway, always “at the same speed and pace, with eyes straight forward.” She always wore the same clothing, which included a T-shirt. They then varied the color of the shirt, and recorded the alarm calls given in response to each variation, and

176 found that the calls differed when the change in color was perceptible to the prairie dogs. This suggests that some calls contain descriptors or adjective-like elements. Further experimentation revealed that when a coyote is spotted, each prairie dog’s alarm call not only communicates what type of predator is approaching, but a description of the individual coyote as well. This information is important, because each coyote employs a distinct hunting strategy. Knowing the identity of the individual and its method of hunting is important information for devising a successful defense. In other experiments the researches established a system of pulleys to draw variously shaped pieces of plywood, painted black out of a place of concealment across a portion of the colony. Through analyzing their vocal responses to each type of silhouette it was discovered that the prairie dogs had specific calls even for animals that were not predators, such as skunks, and geometrical shapes, such as ovals, squares, circles, and triangles. Since it is doubtful that the prairie dogs had ever seen these precise shapes before, they apparently have the ability to invent new words for novel objects. As in so many cases, this was previously thought to be something that only humans could do, as was the ability to refer to things that are not immediately present—which prairie dogs are also able to do. Adverbial elements of their language were discovered that communicated whether, for example, a hawk was merely circling overhead or swooping downwards to the colony, each evoking a different response from the prairie dogs that heard the alarm. How surprising it is to find that these unimposing and widely despised rodents have such complex cognitive capabilities that they can communicate something as specific as “a tall, thin human wearing a blue shirt is approaching,”256 that they can modify their language in response to encounters with novel objects, and that some elements of prairie dog language are culturally transmitted inventions. The latter is suggested by the fact that each colony has its own dialect—features of language peculiar to it—that vary in proportion to the

177 distance between colonies.257 Distant colonies would be unable to understand each other’s languages.

One of our greatest winter delights is observing the birds that come to our feeders, some of which we have placed within a few feet of our kitchen window. Among our favorites are the black-capped chickadees, titmice, and white-breasted nuthatches. Each elegant in form, we admire their beauty, but also their agility and quickness as they move among the trees, swoop down to the feeder, gather up seeds, and retreat to the trees were they consume them. There are some favorite stations for cracking these seeds, crevices in the structure of trees well-suited to anchor the end of a sunflower seed as these tiny birds hammer them open. It is then interesting to discover what scientists have discovered about the linguistic abilities of such the common, spritely, and tiny chickadee.

The calls of black-capped chickadee can contain from one to several syllables, but studies have shown that these calls have syntax, following grammatical rules. Chickadee calls always follow the rule that A notes precede B notes, which always precede C notes, and C notes always come before D notes. But the number of each note can vary, producing a change in the meaning of the call. ABABCC, AAAABBCCDD, or

BCDDDDDDDD all convey different information. This rule-governed variation of meanings had been thought to be an exclusive property of human language. When scientists composed a library of calls of Carolina chickadees and electronically edited them to produce calls that violated these rules, the chickadees responded in ways that indicated that they found them meaningless. This, too, is analogous to human language.

Others can understand me when I write sentences that follow the rules of grammar, but

178 sentences using the same words, but violating these rules, are uninterpretable nonsense.

For example, the sentence “He went to the store to buy some food” makes sense, but not

“To store the some to food he buy went.” The pitch, as well as the arrangement, of notes has also been found to convey information in some rule-governed way. The responses of chickadees to recordings of their calls with variations in pitches that violate these rules indicated that these songs too lost informational content. Meaning is also encoded in the temporal duration of each note.

Chickadees calls have been shown to convey a great variety of meanings to their con-specifics. That a flying raptor is within sight is signaled by a “seet,” alarm call that is high in frequency, but low in amplitude. In response to the proximity of a perched or stationary predator, they produce a loud, broad-band alarm, one of the many variants of the ‘chick-a-dee’ call, that recruits both fellow chickadees and birds of other species to mob and harass the predator. Other deciphered variants convey information on the identity of the individual bird, the identity of the flock, the location of food, the type of a predator, the degree of risk posed by a predator, the urgency of the threat, the length of its body, or the wingspan of a raptor. But the complexity of these calls and the difficulty of decoding them leave it an open question what other information may be conveyed. From one sample of around 3500 calls one study determined that 362 had distinct composition of notes. Another astonishing feature of this system of communication is that it is known that at least ten, and perhaps as many as twenty-four, other species of birds have developed the capacity to understand it. Scientists who have studied their calls have concluded that “the chickadee call system [is] one of the most complicated nonhuman animal signaling systems ever described” with striking parallels to the way that human

179 language operates. And it will require much further study before scientists come close to unlocking the full complexity of this language.258

Only a few systems of communication have been studies in such detail as the generally despised prairie dog and the chickadee that flits around the periphery of many of our lives. These studies reveal how much we tend to underestimate the cognitive capacities of animals. Scientists have barely scratched the surface, and there is no reason to believe that many other of animals communicate with each other in complex and sophisticated ways.

Animals have inner lives. Like us they have thoughts, experience joy, grief and other emotions.

They talk with each other, and solve problems. Many of them display something that is analogous at least to moral virtues, such as sympathy. Many have cultures that are passed on from one generation to the next. Knowing this reveals how deeply our kinship with them extends and how similar we are to them and should transform our understanding and treatment of the living world and how we feel about it. Richard Nelson’s memoir, The Island Within, records the process by which he tried to transform himself in order to become the kind of person he thought he ought to be after living with Koyukon people. He sought to change the way he thought and felt about this magnificent planet. In one passage, he describes his wonder at some tiny animals that might seem insignificant until we grant them our attention and make them a subject of reflection.

The wren does a flip turn and flies back into the thicket…. Shortly after he

vanishes, a burst of wren song rattles out like the babbling of a madman, ranging

wildly up and down the scale…. How can lungs that fit inside a bird not much

180 bigger than my thumb through out such a labyrinth of sound? A close look at tiny

creatures like wrens and shrews and hummingbirds reveals exceptional power and

energy. Koyukon people have a clear sense for this. They emphasize that animals

are something to be reckoned with, regardless of their size or their importance in

the human scheme of things.259

How they should be “reckoned with” is a question worth a great deal more attention than our civilization has given it. In general, the circle of our concern is narrowly drawn around ourselves, our families, our friends, our pets (if we have them), and a relatively small group of human others. As a result, both our own lives and the lives of our fellow non-human creatures have been profoundly impoverished. How much richer would be our enjoyment of our lives if we pondered the complexity, beauty, and mystery of our living companions, both what we share with them and what makes each one unique. And how much fuller our lives would be if we made more space for these creatures both where we live and in places set aside for them, unravaged by the destructive human activity that is pushing so many towards extinction.

181 Chapter 8: Our Vegetal Kin

Perhaps it’s human nature to embrace the absoluteness of one culturally defined

worldview. In Western society, we rest comfortably on our inherited truths about

the nature of nature. Our burgeoning environmental literature, for example,

contains a nearly endless variety of statements about the absence of mind in

nature. The environment is numb to a human presence—blind, deaf, inert,

insentient, compassionless, sometimes brutal in its raw, random power…. Despite

our certainty on this matter, the anthropological literature indicates that most of

humankind has concluded otherwise.260

———Richard Nelson “Searching for the Lost Arrow” (1995), pp. 217-18.

My mother opened my eyes to the beauty of this world in countless ways. During my childhood, she was an avid gardener who surrounded the borders of our property with beautiful flowers. As she grew decrepit, and was no longer capable of the work a garden required, one of my greatest delights was shopping for her favorite, always the most colorful, annual flowers as a gift for

Mother’s Day. My sister would pot them and we would arrange them on a series of shelves on the patio outside of her back door. Her pleasure in this display was immeasurable. Inside the house she had rows of African violets, ferns, and other plants which she lovingly tended every day, naming them, talking to them, and closely observing their growth, health, and every new development of their particular forms of beauty.

My mother was also a painter who was especially fascinated by abandoned rural homes on landscapes that had escaped the narrow confines of tidiness and reverted to the wild. Our

182 house was filled with these paintings of landscapes and structures that seemed like ghosts of past lives. For much of her later life, she was unable to travel. She loved Barbara as Barbara loved her, and wherever we traveled we sought ways to bring the beauty of the world to her narrowly confined life. We brought her photographs of the prairies I planted as they matured, of our woodland as it revived, and of wild places to which we traveled and through which we hiked. In the winters, when the nests of birds were more easily visible and collected, when I would find remains of deceased animals on our property—the shell of a box turtle or the skull of a raccoon, possum, or deer, when we found the tail feather of a red-tailed hawk or feathers of other birds, such as blue jays, goldfinches, owls or wild turkeys, we would collect these things and bring them to her. When we visited museums, I always bought the books containing prints from the exhibits. When we showed her these things, I could not help but marvel at how long she would examine each and every image or thing. She would become lost in these things. Observing her doing this made me realize how little I was seeing the world. In many ways, she taught me how to see.

In the middle years of my teenage life I became enchanted with colorful plants, such as dahlias, lilies, and irises and planted my own gardens in our back yard. One was a display of those with the showiest blooms, another a rock garden with more diminutive, but still colorful plants, and an artificial waterfall. I have already described how this fascination with the showy and exotic governed our own landscaping when at last we owned a house, and how my aesthetic appreciation evolved into a fuller appreciation of how the plants functioned in the context of their native ecosystem. As my study of the lives of plants has continued, I have developed a deep admiration for this life-form itself and the sense that even they are my kin.

183 We have found that one of the best ways to restore the health of soil on our land is to coax plants to grow in barren areas, whether these be those regions of our property that were skinned of their vegetation and soil or the understory of the woods that is largely barren once we have removed the invasive plants. The soil itself has been polluted by chemical changes produced by these plants to inhibit the germination of the seeds of native vegetation. I have already mentioned the difficulty of getting trees, shrubs, or wildflowers to grow in these areas and the frustration of seeing so many of them die after the exhausting labor of planting them by the hundreds each spring and fall. But when, often after repeated attempts, some do begin to grow others seem to find it easier. Plants, it seems, want to live in community with other plants and have the power to transform the soil itself into a more congenial environment for their growth.

It has often happened that we think our efforts to add to the biodiversity of our land has failed, only to find years later that some plant had been so stunted that it had escaped our attention, only to spring up in a spurt of growth and appear like magic in the prairies or forest.

Suddenly, a viburnum or dogwood is displaying glorious blooms. Trilliums, baneberry, wild ginger, Mayapples, or hepatica appear in an area of the woods where there previously were none.

These discoveries restore my hope. Life springs forth more abundantly once it gets a toehold.

There is a strange comfort and sense of companionship to be found among these emerging communities of plants that usher in greater populations and varieties of insects and birds.

As a vegetable gardener, each spring I marvel afresh at how the tiny speck of a seed develops into a large plant that offers me an abundance of food. It seems a kind of miracle.

Whereas soil rarely receives any human consideration at all, it is obvious from the abundance of plants in buildings and gardens that plants offer some sort of comfort. But they often entertain the imagination merely as decorative objects. But a closer look at plant communities reveals a

184 complex, interdependent system of intelligent beings in which information is continuously exchanged from one plant to another and between plants and the organisms in the soil.

I have said that the soil community and the human body can be viewed as images of each other. The same can be said of plants and this might go part of the way towards explaining how we can come to see plants as companions. As I have found consolation in the gradual regeneration of native plants, shrubs, and trees on our property, I have often wondered why?

Why do living things so apparently different from ourselves provide comfort as well as aesthetic appreciation? What is the source of this consolation? In our culture, we regard a common genetic heritage as one mark of kinship. But we also call someone who responds to the world in ways similar to ourselves “kindred spirits.” Both these notions of kinship can be applied to our relationship with plants.

For many years I have had my students read Richard Nelson’s “Searching for the Lost

Arrow” a reflection of what he learned during the years he lived as an anthropologist among the

Koyukons, a native Alaskan people. My students always express admiration for the moral attitudes and practices of the Koyukon that grow from their reverential understanding of the natural world—a world in which all things are pervaded by power, intelligence, and spirit. I ask them whether there might be a way that our culture could appropriate some of the values of the

Koyukons. This has never generated a very fruitful discussion, because they feel that it would require abandoning beliefs basic to our society—beliefs rooted in science, economics, and a utilitarian view of nature as a set of resources to be exploited.

Eventually, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, I discovered that Richard Nelson himself tried to answer the same question I ask my students. He moved near an Alaskan island and devoted himself to become intimately familiar with this place. He sought to imaginatively

185 reconfigure his worldview and appropriate the wisdom he found among the Koyukons without abandoning his belief in science. He felt, he says, “compelled by the wisdom of establishing a moral contract with the natural world which gives sustenance” [italics added].261 He recorded his efforts in an extremely beautiful memoir, The Island Within, which some have called a holy book. At one point, he experiences a kind of revelation that transcends his previously, merely intellectual, understanding of the relationship between living things. Not only are we interdependent parts of the same community, but we are all formed from a common substance.

After coming so close to a young male deer as to be able almost to touch it, surrounded by the vitality of the dense forest, he becomes enthralled with the realization that all of it—all living things—“are nothing less than the earth expressing itself in living form.” This is most obvious in plants, “the earth drawn up through the roots, transformed into stalks and branches, quivering as leaves and bursting into flower.” But, less obviously,

The little buck is nothing more or less than earth, grown out from within to

express itself as deer. The glaucus-winged gull, surf scoter, varied thrush, bald

eagle, dark-eyed junco …—all of them, earth shaped into birds, shaped into bright

feathers and not blood, shaped into morning songs, shaped into flight and flung

out over the soil like molten lava…. Fleeting expressions of earth, shaped for a

moment to crawl up into the light, fall back onto the surface, and sink down

inside. In such a world, where is the real separation between organic and

inorganic, living and nonliving?262

And, as well, we are all composed of oxygen, another abiotic element of earth: “every breath I take draws the clear flesh of earth through my self, creates a never-ceasing flow of particles in and out of my body.” These are “the same particles that made songs in the throats of hermit

186 thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, … that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds.”263

These reflections are factually true, and yet they lead to what many would consider a mystical or spiritual vision of the unity of all things:

There is nothing in me that is not of earth, no split instant of separateness, no

particle that disunites me from the surroundings. I am no less than the earth itself.

The rivers run through my veins, the winds blow in and out with my breath, the

soil makes my flesh, the sun’s heat smolders inside me. A sickness or injury that

befalls the earth befalls me…. Where the earth is cleansed and nourished, its

purity infuses me. The life of the earth is my own life. My eyes are the earth

gazing at itself.264

The Earth is one and no individual stands alone or separate.

He describes his reaction to what he calls “mated trees,” whose roots have become entangled with each other so that they are physically joined throughout their lives. He can, he says, “hardly imagine that they’re not aware of each other or interacting in some way.” 265 He also imagines an analogy between how the roots of a tree on the island grip the rocks and how a human climbs a mountain, “shaping his arms, hands, and fingers to each irregularity in the rock.

The two responses are identical, except that one shapes itself slowly and permanently, the other quickly and temporarily.”

But he regards this as the barest approximation of the way the Koyukon think about members of the plant kingdom. According to them

the tree I lean against feels me, hears what I say about it, and engages me in a

moral reciprocity based on responsible use. In their tradition, the forest is both a

187 provider and a community of spiritually empowered beings. There is no emptiness

in the forest, no unwatched solitude, no wilderness where a person moves outside

moral judgment and law.266

Nelson struggles, but fails, to view the tree clinging to the rock in the Koyukon way.

He runs his hands over its exposed roots and considers that scientists would provide a purely mechanical explanation of the response of the tree to the rock. He calls into question the completeness of such an account by showing the inadequacy of a scientific description of

how the climber shapes his body to a rock, responding to his senses of touch and

sight, analyzing how best to support himself, judging the results of each move and

calculating what to do next. His behavior could be explained as a result of the

chemical and electrical processes that underlie thought and movement, but this

would seem as ridiculous as suggesting that the tree responds to its own senses

and consciously designs itself to the contour of rock, the pull of gravity, and the

peril of storms.267

But recent research on trees and other plants reveals a deeper analogy between them and humans than Richard Nelson imagined. And this, in turn, provides a basis for attitudes more consistent with the Koyukon’s than he was able to achieve. Science does not deal with spiritual things, but spiritual things can have a basis in scientific truths.

Science has recently provided a closer look at the specific ways in which plants resemble us, are kin to us, and participate in the intelligence characteristic of living things. Thinking of plants in the ways I propose in this chapter might be disconcerting, but deep reflection upon these themes can be transformative, enabling us to understand more deeply both ourselves and our

188 surroundings. And this deeper comprehension can evoke a sense of wonder at the nature of life itself.

Plants, rather than humans, are the dominant form of life on this planet. It is estimated that if we were to combine the mass of all living things into one, between 99.5 and 99.9 percent would be constituted of plants. The weight of all animals, of which humans are only a tiny fraction, would be only 0.1 to 0.5 percent—a small drop. Nature comforts and the largest proportion of the natural world is composed of plants. Our kinship with plants is not easily recognizable, because they have followed a different evolutionary pathway, surrendering the power of terrestrial movement for a relatively stationary existence. Animals can move to protect themselves and have distinct organs—brains, kidneys, livers, eyes, etc.—that perform distinct functions. For the most part, animals cannot survive being divided into parts. Defending their existence requires preserving the integrity of these organs by flight or other active strategies. The stationary life of plants makes them more susceptible to predation. So plants have developed a form that enables them to regenerate themselves when their parts have been torn off or even when they have been eaten to the ground —a modular design in which the functions necessary for survival are distributed among many components rather than confined to specialized organs:

“plants breathe without having lungs, nourish themselves without having a mouth or stomach, stand erect without having a skeleton, and … make decisions without having a brain.” This creates not only regenerative powers, but also perceptual abilities and the capacity to appropriately respond to a wide variety of stimuli.268 The power to do this depends upon the same kinds of chemical transmission of signals as occur among the neurons of animals.269

My students, at least, often claim that humans are the most evolved creatures, and I suspect that most Americans believe this, but every creature is equally “evolved.” That is, every

189 creature is the end point of a line—a succession of changes that have formed it to solve the problems of survival within its particular ecological niche. In this sense each creature is the embodiment of a specific kind of intelligence.

Sensation enables an organism to flourish, propagate, and defend itself. Because plants are stationary, they have perhaps an even greater need than animals for detecting elements of their environments that affect them. Their survival depends upon their ability to sense, measure, and appropriate elements such as carbon dioxide, water, and nutrients in the soil. They must be able to detect and respond to a host of organisms that are necessary for retaining their vigor and enabling them to reproduce, as well as those that threaten them, whether these be microbial life, other plants, animals that feed upon them, pollinators, or dispersers of their seeds. It is estimated that in addition to the sensations they share with humans, plants have at least fifteen other modes of perception.270 Much of the perceptual sensitivity of plants rests on chemical reactions in protein receptors extending from the interior of individual cells to the surface. These receptors lock onto chemicals and initiate chain reactions that provide the plant with information ranging from the character of its abiotic environment to infestations by pathogens.271

Electrical signals generate brief changes in the electrical potential of a cell’s membrane that open channels for the rapid exchange of ions with other cells that trigger sensory receptors.

These receptors can also communicate information about invasion by pathogens and wounds to the physical structure of the plant. Their functions are analogous to the processes that govern communication by nerves, the formation of memory, and learning in the nervous system of vertebrates.272

Calcium ions are essential to the function of the nervous system of animals and to the conversion of the electrical impulses it transmits into chemical signals in the brain.273 Calcium is

190 also an agent for intercellular communication in plants—what could, by analogy, be called their nervous system.274 It appears that individual cells modulate the action of calcium in order to produce the signal required for the proper response of the plant. In addition, the signals it produces cause the coalescence of the proteins instrumental to the response. These, in turn, influence the cell’s future behavior, so that they constitute a kind of cellular memory that makes learning possible: the history of a plant’s growth influences its future development. A plant learns to respond more quickly to stimuli that it has experienced in the past.275

Sight can be narrowly defined as the perception by visual organs, or more broadly by the kind of information it provides and the function it plays in the life of an organism. What our visual organs enable us to do is more important than how they do it. The function of sight is to detect light and the objects it illuminates. In this sense, plants have sight. I addition, the same genes regulate responses to light in both humans and plants. In fact, the first and simplest eyes were photoreceptors protected by membranes on algae, bacteria, fungi, and protozoa.276 Through the course of evolution these original receptors diversified into two kinds of visual systems, one characteristic of plants and the other of animals. Plants use this visual information in order to

“decide” how much, and in what direction to grow.

In fact, plants monitor their visible environment all the time. Plants see if you

come near them; they know when you stand over them. They even know if you’re

wearing a blue or a red shirt. They know if you’ve painted your house or if you’ve

moved their pots from one side of the living room to the other.277

The photoreceptors found in plants and humans both consist of proteins connected to light- absorbing chemical dyes.278 If sight is the ability to detect and respond to electromagnetic waves,

191 then plants can “see” even if they do not perceive in pictures the way we do. The growing shoot of a plant perceives the gradations of direct light, as well as the light reflected from the surface of its leaves in order to determine the locations and positions of its neighbors. Each cell of the shoot forms a three-dimensional representation that enables it to direct its growth and the angles of its leaves in ways that maximize the capture of light. It can also calculate the total amount of light to which it is exposed, the direction of the light’s source, the intensity of exposure, the length of time it is exposed to the light, and its color.279 Plants have the capacity to distinguish between shade cast by plants in active competition with them and other kinds of objects and vary their responses accordingly. They encode information about the positions of neighboring plants, anticipate future competition for light, and respond by growing away from those that might shade them.280

Plants have a sense of touch, which is really a variety of sensations. In animals, touch activates nerves that send signals to the brain which translate them into different kinds of sensations, such as smooth, rough, cold, hot, and pressure.281 Signals are transmitted along pathways as a result of what are called action potentials in nerve cells—a brief rise and fall in the electrical potential on the surface of a neuron that that travels from nerve to nerve to the brain.282 While a plant lacks a brain and a dedicated nervous system, it does perceive touch, whether above or below the ground through a fundamentally similar process. The cell of a plant making contact with some object releases chemicals that alter the electrical charge in its membrane, producing an action potential.

The altered electrical charge is transmitted along cells in a signaling pathway.283 Plants integrate the perception of touch with the sensory information from other signaling pathways in order to

192 respond in ways that enhance the plant’s ability to survive.284 Some of this signaling, like our sensation of pain, can communicate to the plant as a whole that it has an injury.

To give only a few examples of how touch functions in the behavior of plants, some flowers, perceiving the touch of a pollinator on their blossoms, close their petals to trap it within until pollination is complete, at which time they release it.285 When a blossom of a lupine senses that it has been visited by a pollinator, it changes its color, thereby informing pollinators that the blossom is now deprived of nectar and pollen.286 This is a helpful strategy for both the plant and the pollinators. A bee need not waste its energy visiting a blossom with no nutritional value, and the plant communicates information that ensures the pollination of each of its blossoms. A burr cucumber can be stimulated by the touch of a string weighing only nine-thousands of an ounce or

.25 grams to start winding itself around an object for support as it grows. Our sense of touch is not nearly as fine as this. The Venus flytrap (dionaea muscipula) is a plant with a remarkably precise sense of touch. An insect landing on its trap, and touching two hairs within about twenty seconds of each other, causes the plant to generate an electrical pulse that travels along the surfaces of cells in a signaling pathway that stimulates motor cells to close the trap. The process is very similar to the way nerves contract a muscle. When at least three hairs are touched the plant produces a signal that stimulates the release of the digestive enzymes that dissolve the insect into food.287

Plants smell as well as see and touch. In animals, the sensation of smell is produced by the stimulation of olfactory nerves by molecules dissolved in the air. Plants smell when volatile molecules stimulate receptors on the surfaces of their cells. For example, when a fruit ripens it emits ethylene, a plant hormone. When a tree smells the ethylene from a ripening fruit, it

193 responds by hastening the ripening of its other fruit. This releases more ethylene that is smelled by neighboring trees, which respond by ripening their fruit. This coordinated cascade of ripening attracts animals who eat the fruit and disperse the seeds. In the fall, a similar cascade leads to the coordination of changing leaf color.

One of the most important functions of smell in plants is to communicate with other plants, both as described above and in the pheromones they release when under attack by insects.

When other plants smelling these pheromones, they “know” that they need to initiate chemical defenses should the infestation come their way.288 The dodder plant not only smells, but prefers some smells over others—the odors emitted from plants that serve as its food.289 While humans depend more on acute visual sensation and hearing than plants, plants are much more sensitive to smell and other chemical cues that we are unable to perceive.

Taste, like smell, is a perception of the presence of chemicals and is especially important for plants because they feed on chemical substances that are variably distributed in the soil and they must seek them out. They do this through receptors on their roots that explore the soil by tasting it for information about minute differences in the distribution of nutrients such as nitrates, phosphates, or potassium. Once the roots identify the locations of the greatest concentrations of mineral salts, they expand their development in those areas to feed with maximal efficiency.290

Through their connection with the mycorrhizal network—the network formed by the union of roots and fungi, plants also taste chemical warnings about pathogenic threats sent by to them by other plants. And through sensations of taste a plant is able to recognize its kin, curb its competitive impulses, and give them room to grow.291

194 Recent experiments indicate that plants also have the sense of hearing. Scientists who played a recording of a caterpillar chewing a leaf found that plants recognized what kind of insect it was and produced the particular chemical defenses that would deter it.292 This is another remarkable example of the amazing, and generally overlooked, capacities of plants. They are far from passive objects and more like us than we generally realize.

Plants also sharing with us a sixth sense called proprioception—our awareness of the location of our bodily parts in relation to each other. Without this, we would not be able to do simple things, such as walking, playing a sport, or even writing with a pencil or pen. We would have no ability to coordinate our movements with visual information. Purposefully directing and harmonizing the motions of our bodies depends on the integration of impressions of balance, conveyed by the inner ear, with information communicated by dedicated nerves located throughout our bodies.

The inner ear is connected to canals, filled with fluids, that are positioned at right angles to one another. When we change the position of our heads, nerves in these canals detect the motion of these fluids. Fluid is also contained in another cavity, the vestibule, which has a covering of sensitive hairs and holds a collection of small crystals that respond to gravity.

The nerves connected to these various parts are what enable us to sense our spatial orientation and the proprioceptive nerves extending throughout our body enable us to sense the position of

195 our limbs.293

When I weeding my vegetable garden I am sometimes too lazy to carry the weeds I have pulled to a compost bin, instead leaving them to lay, roots upward, as a mulch on the soil. If the weather is moist, so that the plants do not immediately dry out and die, I have noticed that plants also have some sort of proprioception that has enabled them to realign their direction of growth.

When I next tour my garden it sometimes appears that it has not been weeded at all, the weeds growing as vigorously as before I uprooted them. The roots of weeds I left pointing upward have reached downward and penetrated the soil, while the stems that were underneath have grown upwards towards the sun. What enables them to do this are statoliths, objects analogous to dense balls that are contained in the stems and tips of the roots. These respond to changes in orientation like the crystals in the vestibules of our ears falling to the bottom of the structures that contain them. This enables plants to determine which way is up and which way is down. When wind or other forces, such as a human weeding his garden, alters the position of stems or branches, plants are informed of this and are able to correct their orientation by producing hormones that control the direction of growth.294

As mentioned above, in addition to the senses they share with humans, plants are estimated to have at least fifteen other modes of perception, many only barely understood. Some of these enable them to precisely determine properties of the soil yards away from where they are rooted, such as its humidity and chemical composition. With this information, they are able to extend their roots into beneficial locations and avoid soils that would harm them. Other senses enable them to perceive gravitational and magnetic fields.295

196 Plants are much more dynamic creatures than we might think. For example, some plants use dynamic strategies for propagation when they perceive the presence of a potential pollinator.

Some orchids, sensing the approach of a pollinator, actively shower it with a cloud of pollen. The male flowers of other plants aggressively glue their pollen onto the backs of visiting bees. The violence with which they do this dissuades bees from visiting other male flowers and to instead seek out female flowers, which are then fertilized. Here it is the plant that is in control, actively directing the behavior of its pollinators. Some female plants are able to perceive which of the developing embryos have the greatest probability of viability and future fitness and make decisions about which they will allow to mature and which they will abort.296 Some plants actively recruit microbes that increase the viability of their seeds.297

In spite of their stationary form, plants are capable of defending themselves against threats, not only with passive weapons, such as thorns, but also with an array of active strategies.

Every defensive strategy is costly to a plant, requiring it to use carbon and nitrogen that could be otherwise employed. A plant must allocate its resources carefully to achieve a variety of goals— survival from attacks, vigorous growth, long term vitality, length of life, and the ability to reproduce. So a plant must be able to not only identify but also prioritize hazards.298 All of this requires the collection and synthesis of a great deal of information conveyed by internal signaling in order to make complex judgments. Animals have various sensory organs that transmit electrical signals through the nervous system from one part of the body to the brain, and the brain responds by sending signals that control muscular response. Plants, on the other hand, can conduct messages directly from one of their bodily parts to another without the mediation of a brain. In some ways this is a more efficient system for processing and responding to information. But the fundamental similarity between the processes through which information is

197 internally processed by plants and animals is suggested by the fact that since the 19th Century it has been known that both animals and plants can be anesthetized with ether and chloroform.

Anesthetized plants, like animals, lose the ability to response to stimuli, as well as their ability to engage in photosynthesis, and anesthetized seeds lose the ability to germinate.299

Plants gather information internally, by creating short electrical pathways through openings in the walls of connected cells (plasmodesmata) and longer pathways, such as between leaves and roots, by conducting electrical signals through the fluids of their vascular systems. In contrast to the vascular system of animals, which requires the heart to act as a pump, plants have specialized tissues that transport fluids either upwards or downwards. Water, mineral salts, and other substances are conducted by the one of these tissues, called the xylem, upwards from roots to the crown. Some of these fluids provide signals to the plant about such things as the level of moisture in the soil that provide the plant what it needs to make an informed judgement.

For example, the surfaces of leaves have structures, called stomata: small openings or pores surrounded by cells that open or close them in response to the availability of water and light. The carbon dioxide necessary for photosynthesis enters through the open stomata, but at the same time the stomata allow water vapor to escape. This requires a delicate balancing act: the price of photosynthesis and the production of sugars that sustain a plant is a decline in the amount of water in its vascular system, which is equally necessary for the plant’s survival.

Achieving the right balance requires active management. In times of drought a tree might easily expire from dehydration if its stomata remain open. It must also have some internal representation of the level of moisture necessary to preserve fitness and accurate information on the amount of moisture available to it in the soil. This information is provided through multiple channels. When a tree suffers from a loss of the internal fluids it needs for survival, it sends

198 electrical signals to the leaves, causing them to close their stomata. More complete information is provided by the slower movement of chemical or hormonal signals that are pumped to the leaves by the xylem. This information might include the cause of the decline of fluids in the vascular system, such as whether it is caused by a leaking wound or the absence of moisture in the soil.300

Plants must make judgments on the basis of this information and how plants respond to the same environmental conditions varies from individual to individual even in the controlled conditions of a laboratory.301

The cells of a plant can also detect when it has been invaded by a pathogen. In response to learning that it has been infected, a plant can initiate an array of defensive strategies, some of which have striking similarities to the immune system of animals.302 It can produce chemicals that are toxic to the pathogen and enzymes that degrade its vigor.303 As the immune system of vertebrates detects invaders and produces agents, in the form of antibodies, that recognize and orchestrate their destruction, plants generate agents that recognize the genetic sequence of the

RNA of an attacking virus and direct the plant’s system to destroy them. One such defense, called RNA silencing, is quite remarkable. Ninety-percent of the viruses that attack plants multiply by producing RNA with two strands. RNA silencing occurs when plants recognize these molecules and digest them into fragments that halt the infection.304 The defensive system of plants, like the immune system of animals, remembers the agents that infect them. By remembering the genetic structures of viruses that they have previously digested they are able to respond more quickly to similar viruses in the future.305

Proteins and enzymes in the walls of a plant’s cells actively direct the shaping of the wall during growth. These are also employed to provide an additional defense by thickening and strengthening the cells’ walls where a pathogen is detected. The enzymes also stimulate the

199 production of extremely reactive oxygen molecules that can damage the cells of the pathogen.

Plants are able to recognize the molecular structure of whole classes of attacking microbes and impede their penetration by sending signals to cells that initiate the synthesis of polymers between their walls and the membrane closest to the sites of invasion.306 Another response of plants to microbial pathogens is a genetic program that causes the rapid death of cells in the area around the site of an infection. As in animals, mitochondria receive and integrate signals of distress from the cells under attack and respond by producing messages to cells in that region that initiate their death, thus isolating the infection to restrict its the growth.307

Plants have a remarkable variety of sensory modes for detecting and analyzing threats posed by insects that enable them to tailor their defensive strategies to the particular threat. They are able to recognize what kinds of insects are attacking them by reading their chemical signatures as they walk over the surface of their leaves and by detecting the characteristic way they clasp their leaves.308 Plants also have special proteins receptors on the membranes of their cells that enable them to analyze the molecular composition of fluids discharged by their attackers, whether these be the saliva of chewing insects or secretions made by an insect depositing an egg. Once the fluid of chewing insects is identified, intercellular signals inform the plant how to respond by producing chemicals that are toxic, repellant, or disruptive to their digestive systems. Plants are also able to detect variations in the way insects attack them, whether it be by chewing, piercing and sucking its fluids, penetrating and mining a plant’s tissues, forming a gall, or lacerating its cells, as well as how frequently they feed, and when they feed. Plants perceive and discriminate between these variables and use the information to decide what kind of defense to launch.309

200 In defending itself, a plant may call also for, and receive, help from other plants or insects by releasing volatile chemicals with a complex mix of molecules. The mixture is influenced by type of herbivore attacking the plant and its stage of development. Some provide signals that are recognized by predators of the insects attacking the plant.310 For example, parasitic wasps are recruited to lay their eggs in larvae or caterpillars chewing the leaves of a plant. When the eggs hatch, they prey upon their larval hosts. And a plant under siege by spider mites can send out a signal that enlists predatory mites to combat them. Not only this, but a plant calls upon its neighbors for help. Other plants in the neighborhood, even plants of a different species, sense the volatile chemicals and themselves begin producing them to intensify the signal.311 This exchange of information is mutually beneficial. When other plants sense the pheromones or volatile gases that a plant under attack emits to enlist their aid, they are also warned that they may be the next target of the pests so that they are able to produce protective chemicals that deter them or inhibit their growth. Other chemical signals warn the plant community to boost their immune systems to ward off bacterial infections.

Plants also strategically control the timing of the signals, toxins, and repellents they send forth. Calls to parasitic wasps are timed for when they are actively hunting. Tobacco plants release a specific combination of volatile chemicals only during the night. Nocturnal moths sensing them know that the plant is manufacturing a chemical attack upon caterpillars and are deterred from laying their eggs, which would, of course, hatch into caterpillars that would be harmed by chewing on the plants. Some plants create a defense against herbivores by releasing nectar in their non-floral parts to encourage colonization by ants—a large and formidable army of defenders.312

201 An important instrument for further methods of communication and cooperation between plants is provided by mycorrhizae, the mutually beneficial union between the roots of plants and fungi. Plants encourage this union by sending signals to developing spore of helpful fungi that encourage them to penetrate and colonize their roots.313 Once this relationship has been established plants adjust their growth and allocation of resources to benefit their partners.

Mycorrhizae excel in taking up minerals and water, which they make available to the roots of plants they have colonized. Plants respond by supplying mycorrhizal fungi with the carbohydrates and carbon they manufacture through photosynthesis. The fungi and plants adjust the provisions they make available to each other based on a calculation of costs and benefits.

Mycorrhizae supply more assets to those plants that nourish them the most, and plants supply more nutrients to the most beneficial fungi.314 This cooperation between plants and fungi makes possible further cooperation between plants.

Vast mycorrhizal networks link together the individual parts of an ecosystem and are essential to its health. They transport chemical compounds and signals back and forth between plants in ways that benefit the entire community. When a plant is under attack it can communicate further warnings to others in its community by sending signals through this network, which also provides plants with further means for mutual assistance.315 Experiments have also shown that through mycorrhizal networks some trees transfer carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, or water to distressed neighbors of the same or other species and to seedlings in need of nourishment.316

Plants are especially collaborative with their own kin, and determine whether a plant is genetically related before competing with it for space. One experiment that demonstrated this involved planting thirty seeds from the same plant in one pot, while another was planted with

202 thirty seeds from different parents. In the first pot, each seedling avoided competition by shortening its roots and directing its growth away from its neighbors. In the second pot, each attempted to dominate the entire pot.317

As I have previously discussed plants cooperate as well with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria they host. As they do with beneficial fungi, plants supply bacteria with nutrients in return for the organic forms of nitrogen they provide and allocate more resources to those bacteria that supply them with most benefit. These bacteria become so entirely dependent upon the plant for survival that they become an essential component of the plant’s metabolism.318

Our kinship with the vegetal kingdom runs deeper than we might have imagined. They perceive dimensions of the world that we do and a great many more, they process information, learn, remember, solve problems, and form cooperative relationships with others, including organisms of different species. We share common genes with them. They possess something closely analogous to our own nervous system. They can be understood to possess a form of intelligence.

Indeed, some type of intelligence seems to be a property of every living thing.

The Latin roots of the word “intelligence” are inter ("between") and legere ("to choose, pick out, or read”), suggesting that, fundamentally, intelligence is something like the capacity to read, or process information, in order to choose between options. Another way of saying this is that intelligence involves the capacity to learn and apply what has been learned to the solving of problems related to some goal. Goals can be either consciously or unconsciously entertained. It is the goal of an acorn to become an oak tree, and of an oak tree to reproduce. The goal of all living things is to seek conditions under which they are able to flourish. In the sense in which I use the term, intelligence can occur without conscious thinking. It only requires an organism have an

203 organized internal system for taking in and processing information in order to determine a course of action. Our reluctance to attribute intelligence to plants is likely due to our tendency to think of the brain as an internal unit that exercises centralized control—something not found in plants, where intelligence is an emergent property of the whole organism. But even the brain itself and the nervous system can be understood as decentralized society of cooperating cells, from which intelligence emerges as a property of the system as a whole.319 As Michael Pollan points out, the brain contains no central command, but is “a leaderless network.” If the absence of a central control is a reason to deny that plants are intelligent, then we have as much reason to deny that organisms with brains are intelligent.320

When I ask people how they define intelligence, they often respond that it is the conscious making of decisions. But this is a description of one form of human intelligence. It is a description of it from the inside out—how we subjectively experience the exercise of this particular kind of intelligence. And it is clearly too narrow. I drive my car to work, negotiating turns, adjusting the speed, breaking to avoid an animal or pedestrian crossing the road. Yet my mind is often elsewhere, and when I return my attention to my surroundings and actions I sometimes find myself wondering where exactly I am on my route. I always discover that I am on the correct course to arrive at my destination. I have successfully made navigational decisions, but not consciously. Is my driving, then, unintelligent behavior? Likewise, I make no conscious choices as I type these words on my keyboard. Frequently, I do not consciously choose particular words to compose a sentence in advance of typing it. And in conversations I almost never consciously compose a sentence in advance of saying it. It all unfolds spontaneously. If we were only intelligent when making consciously considered choices, then our behavior could only rarely be characterized as intelligent. Yet the times when we read an

204 author’s words, or listen to a conversational partner are when we might be most inclined to say that we are encountering signs of intelligence. What exactly do we mean when we say that we recognize intelligence in a creature?

After surveying a lengthy series of definitions, Legg and Hutter try to formulate a core definition of intelligence as a measure of “an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.”321 In trying to come to a general account of intelligence, the zoologist and philosopher, David Stenhouse described it as “Adaptively variable behaviour within the lifetime of the individual,” with higher levels of adaptivity corresponding to higher degrees of intelligence.322 The activities of plants I have been describing meet these criteria in ways that would classify them as possessing a high degree of intelligence. Silvertown, and Gordon define intelligence as responsiveness to signals, both internal and external.323 This, too, as I have shown is characteristic of plants. Indeed, according to these definitions, intelligence is a property of all living things—even bacteria and fungi, one more indication of the kinship that binds together the community of life.

Trewavas argues that intelligent behavior in animals requires an internal representation of the conditions that are conducive to flourishing. Animals exhibit intelligence by comparing this to changes in the surrounding environment. This results in the formation of goals as they confront obstacles to their continued fitness and require the solving of problems. In animals this goal-oriented problem solving includes altering the environment or moving to a new location.

Plants, too, would seem to know what they need to flourish, detect changes in their surroundings that threaten their survival by sensing and monitoring at least seventeen variables and, on the basis of a change in one of these variables, modifying their responses to the others.324 They must process a vast amount of information to reach decisions about what physiological and

205 biochemical changes to initiate. Among other things, they must reach decisions about in what direction and at what rate to grow stems, leaves and roots, how to foster the associations with fungi and bacteria that contribute to their vigor, and how to coordinate the formation and development of buds with seasonal changes. 325

None of this can be easily explained by hypothesizing that plants follow a simple set of encoded instructions. For example, how roots grow cannot be explained by positing that they follow some rule, such as “Grow in the direction of water.” That their activity is guided by a kind of intelligence famously inspired Darwin to propose that

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle [root] thus endowed

[with sensitivity] and having the power of directing the movements of the

adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being

seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-

organs, and directing the several movements.326

Oxygen, mineral salts, water, and nutrients are variably distributed in the soil, often at a distance from one another. A root is confronted with complex decisions about which direction to grow, such as whether to grow in the direction of phosphorus, nitrogen, water, or oxygen, all of which it needs in order to survive. It must monitor the humidity, oxygen, carbon dioxide, chemical gradients, toxins and other properties of the soil, assess the inputs of other roots, and adjust its growth in accord with the needs of the plant as a whole. A root must negotiate obstacles such as rocks, as well as avoid pathogens, and parasites.

And this is not all. Plant are able to discriminate between their own roots, the roots of other plants, the roots of the same and other species, and the roots of their

206 offspring, to each of which they differently respond.327 The remarkable sensitivity of the tips of roots and their guidance by some sort of flexible intelligence is reflected in the amount of electrical activity that occurs in them, which closely resembles that of neurons.328 Studies suggest that they are able to construct a three-dimensional representation of their local space as they navigate their way through a maze, one of the common tests for intelligence in animals—an unimaginably complex “environmental maze.”329

Some plants propagate by cloning themselves. They do this by developing their roots into what are called “ramets.” These are physiological distinct, but genetically identical, individuals that form an interconnected colony that develop a cooperative and efficient strategy for accumulating resources for the group as a whole. The individual clones or ramets do not try to take up all the nourishment they can. Instead, each individual specializes in taking up the most plentiful nutrients in its location and exchanges these resources with others.330 Such coordination requires fine discrimination of what resources are available and complex processing of information about the needs of the community as a whole.

Plants have something like memory that enables them to change strategies for how to grow, extract resources, defend themselves, or reproduce based on what they have learned. An interesting protective behavior of some plants is to immediately retract their leaves when they are brushed in a way that suggests a potential threat. A closely examined example of this can be found in Mimosa pudica, sometimes called the sensitive plant. The defensive retraction of their leaves when external objects make contact does not seem to be a conditioned response, since it

207 does not occur in cases when their leaves are disturbed by non-threatening agents, such as wind or water. These plants can also learn that a particular kind of disturbance, initially taken as a threat, is really harmless and respond by changing their reactions. The first recorded notice of this was by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–

1841). Lamarck asked de Condole to observe the behavior of a group of Mimosa pudica as he transported them on a cart through the streets. At the beginning of the trip the plants responded to the bumps on the cobblestone road as if they were threatening and closed their leaves. But after a time, when no harm resulted, the plants reinterpreted the stimuli as harmless, opening their leaves for the rest of their journey.331 This ability to learn from experience was demonstrated more recently in controlled experiments that involved repeatedly dropping Mimosa pudica a short distance over various amounts of time. As in the earlier case, the plants at first responded as if threatened, retracting their leaves, but learning that the drops were innocuous, left their leaves extended during later drops.332 This capacity to learn from experience and remember is evident as well in the most basic behavior of plants.

In the ordinary course of their lives, plants make frequent choices based on the integration of new information with what they remember from the past. For example, plants remember past experiences of drought and other threats, what they did to survive them, and use that information to more rapidly deploy effective strategy in response to later similar threats.

Plants learn from their mistakes. Some plants are able to alter their reproductive strategies when their initial gambit fails. A plant that, at an early stage of development, unsuccessfully opts for pollination by another plant may decide to transform itself in order to become capable of self- fertilization.

Plant not only able to remember and learn from experience, they are also able to make

208 decisions based on the likelihood of future conditions. For example, a plant must choose in what locations to develop a more vigorous system of roots. Suppose the choice is between two regions, A and B. If the plant has detected that the level of nutritional resources in B are increasing, it will choose B, even if A currently has more nutritional value. To track the trend of increasing resources in B, a plant must remember past conditions and compare them over time, but in this case it is also basing its decision on the projection of that trend into the future.333

Some plants extrapolate from their history of growth in a particular location to what future conditions are likely to be, and alter the nature of their offspring in light of those expectations by changing the number, structure, and chemical composition of the seeds they produce. Plants that have grown in impoverished soil may produce offspring that will develop roots more capable of extracting nutrients from depleted soils. Plants grown in poor light can generate progeny that allocate more resources to the development of stems and leaves and less to their roots. New generations of plants of the same species will differ from one another because they have been endowed by their parents with specialized tools suited to the particular environmental niche in which they find themselves.334

Scientists who study animals define learning in a neurocentric way—as a behavioral change that is mediated by the animal’s nervous system. This arbitrarily excludes the possibility of other forms of learning. A more neutral definition of learning would not equate it with a particular physiological process but on the capacity of an organism to collect, store, and retrieve information, to make projections into the future, and to modify its behavior, and even its responsiveness to stimuli, as a result, regardless of the biological process by which this is achieved.335 Plants, as well as every other form of life, possess this capacity

209 It will no doubt seem counter-intuitive and a departure from common understanding to attribute intelligence and sensation to plants. I am not saying that plants suffer sorrow or other subjective experiences in the ways that humans do, nor am I saying that they consciously reason in the human ways do or animals might, or that they are capable of the abstract reasoning of philosophers, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. But plants do have something like awareness of themselves and their environments, they do learn and solve problems, and they are somehow able to anticipate and plan for the future. They achieve some of these things in ways that are biologically similar to the ways that humans and other animals accomplish them. They have something that can appropriately be called intelligence, even if it falls outside of some of the ways we commonly understand it. One might well ask why I insist on such an inclusive understanding of intelligence and what is the point of it.

The way we use the term “intelligence” becomes a perceptual filter. It has an influence on how we see this planet, what we see in our fellow creatures, how we feel about them, and our attitudes towards them. A narrow understanding of its meaning limits our responsiveness to the amazing world in which we live, stunting our aesthetic and spiritual reactions, such as wonder and awe. To see something of ourselves in plants—enough to consider them our kin—opens us to new ways of seeing and thinking about our place in the world, ways more appropriate to the kind of beings we are and the kinds of creatures around us.

210 Chapter 9: Seeing and Feeling

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-

made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to

forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and

sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the

manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have

evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very

structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off

from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other

sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their

integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact,

and conviviality, with what is not human.

———David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), p. 22.

The woods of my childhood were magical, filled with beauty, grace, and wonders. Natural areas still strike me this way, but my perception has been deepened and transformed by our experiences on both our land and wild land elsewhere, and insights gleaned from biology, cognitive ethology, ecology, and evolutionary history. But there has been a price. My joy in the living world was unalloyed as a child. But, as Aldo Leopold noted in his journals,

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world

of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An

ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of

211 science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of

death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told

otherwise.336

I am often overwhelmed by sadness and grief as I track the decline of the wild things.

I am always puzzled, and even offended, when I meet those who regard the natural world as nothing more than a set of resources to be exploited for human purposes or as a mere backdrop for human activity. It must be that some able to stand in the presence of the most profound beauty and see only profits to be reaped or something they call progress that is worth the price of ravaging it. To some, it must be the case that there perception is affected by the conviction that humans are the be all and end all, rather than one of many species tightly woven into the common fabric of life. Once, an outdoorsman who was a guest at our Minnesota resort, was called over by the owner to observe something rarely seen and never seen by me. On a small island just thirty feet from shore, the eggs of a pair of loons, those magnificent birds, were hatching under their parents’ gaze. Our friend, the owner, expected a different response than he received. The man invited to witness this miracle of life could only wonder, “But what are loons good for, anyway. Can they be eaten?” It seems that he was unable to perceive the unspeakable beauty of what was unfolding before his eyes.

Many are forced by circumstances to go about the business of their lives isolated from the full magnificence of the living world, surrounded by only by the artificial worlds we have created. The myopic vision this produces is excusable, but tragic, impoverishing human experience and diminishing our humanity. We are in danger of losing the sensitivity and responsiveness to the beauty of the living world necessary to achieving the richest and fullest life. We face the risk of losing the ability even to perceive those aspects of the world important

212 to the development of some central human virtues, such as the humility that arises from awareness of how small is the self in the whole scheme of life, knowledge of what we ourselves actually are, and gratitude for what we have been given.

It need not be this way. We could learn to exercise constraint. We could become more mindful of wild creatures, and design our landscapes in ways that invite them to live among us and provide them what they need to survive. We could integrate elements of the natural world in the places we live. Instead of developing all the “vacant” places, we could preserve some, providing opportunities for experiences of the natural world that take us by surprise and transform us. We could consider how to incorporate reminders of our membership in a larger community, of our kinship with the organisms that surround us, and of our dependency upon them

The notion of wilderness—environments not affected by human activity—has become obsolete in the age of climate change and other global environmental problems. There is no place free from the traces of human activity, including the poisons we have spewed into the water and atmosphere. It is a profound error to speak, as we often do, of humans and nature as if they were separable things and wilderness as places untouched by humans. Yet it still makes sense to speak of natural environments as those in which we can observe ecosystems functioning with more or less integrity. There is a continuum that extends from environments the least supportive of life, such as parking lots, mining sites, and industrial “parks” to those that are relatively undisturbed and possess greater biodiversity and integrity, such as designated wilderness areas. Some ways of conducting our lives unsustainably disrupt ecosystems while others leave them relatively

213 intact and functioning in life-supportive ways. Our choices as a society trend more and more to the former.

Science can enhance our ability to appreciate of nature, by unfolding its complexity through careful observation, experimentation, by tracing the evolutionary history of the creatures around us, and telling us how to “read” the environment. It has the power to disclose the wounds we have inflicted on the living world and how we might begin to heal them. New understandings can lead to changes in what we perceive as beautiful and cause us to reevaluate our chosen way.

I have described how showy exotic plants, such as honeysuckle or purple loosestrife impressed me with their prettiness, until I understood their devastating environmental effects when they are out of their natural places. Now I perceive them as blights upon the landscape, anxiety-inducing signs of a diseased and destabilized landscape. What we see as beautiful can be more or less shallow or deep, depending upon the degree to which it is informed by understanding of what we are seeing. Well-manicured lawns and gardens of exotic flowers can please the eye until we become aware that “[t]here simply are not enough native plants left in the ‘wild’—that is, not enough undisturbed habitat remaining in the United States—to support the diversity of wildlife most of us would like to see survive into the distant future.”337

We cannot all be scientists, and scientific understanding, while it can increase our sense of wonder, does not always do so. There is beauty around us that science cannot illuminate. To perceive it requires a willingness to recognize and respond to what is mysterious or surprising in even the most everyday things. Understanding that the forms and behaviors of birds are a result of evolutionary processes does not really elucidate the grace of a swallow in flight or a red-tailed hawk riding a rising column of warm air turning this way or that with slight movements of individual feathers and no flap of a wing. Nor does it illuminate the awesome power of a falcon

214 as it stoops and dives upon its prey like a falling star. A loon’s eerie vocalizations, the stunningly coordinated dances of western and Clark's grebes, or the pallet of colored and textured objects produced by male bower birds have a beauty with power to take our breath away that transcends what science can tell us. These potent things, as well as the subtle spectacles revealed by close observation of the most ordinary natural things can evoke wonder, if we let them, and offer us opportunities for self-transformation. They invite us to reconsider the social choices we are making.

Indigenous cultures immersed in nature, and more immediately aware of their dependency upon it, often experience the world as a sacred place, filled with spirits, mysteries, and drama. Their understanding of nature, gleaned from careful observation and encoded in folklore, legends and myths, is non-scientific by Western standards, yet it would be a distortion to say that it has no foundation because it is uninformed by western science.

It can be argued that the attitudes and emotional responses cultivated by indigenous societies are more appropriate and consistent with what science has discovered than those of the dominant culture. And their perceptions and awareness of the natural world are often remarkably accurate, subtle, and precise. The philosopher Arnold Berleant offers an extended quotation from a Native American taken from the documentary Waterwalker:338

Being an Indian means being able to understand and live with this world in a very

special way. It means living with the land, with the animals, with the birds and

fish, as though they were your sisters and brothers. That is the way we feel about

our land. It is our flesh. The grass and the trees are our flesh. The animals are our

flesh. This land is our blood. The land gives us life. We still live on the same land

as our parents and grandparents, so it is just like they are still living with us. To

215 me the earth is like a mother: She gives life; I am her child. Yes, the earth is a

good mother to me, and she is also beautiful. Every day I look at her face and sing

in my heart.339

Berleant thinks that such sentiments are in some ways more discerning because they are fundamentally religious in character, and that we are too quick to dismiss the “primitive” animism behind this view of nature. When we consider how short-sighted human interests have often irreparably degraded the environment upon which we are so completely dependent, we ought to consider the view that the natural world is sacred enshrined in some Native American cultures as “not a case of primitive piety but a deep and inescapable insight.”340

Since ancient times the value of self-knowledge has been recognized. That we were made to live in nature and cannot flourish without it would seem obvious on the face of it. But rigorous scientific investigation has also provided overwhelming empirical evidence of its truth. Even very limited exposure to nature, such as views of trees and vegetation through windows, walks in natural areas, being in a room with flowers and plants, viewing images of nature, or living in proximity to trees and shrubs have been shown to engender greater psychological health, such as increased feelings of vitality and happiness, lower levels of anxiety and frustration, greater mindfulness, feelings of gratitude, a sense of meaningfulness, increased satisfaction with life, and reduced mental fatigue. 341 Brain-scans (functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) reveal that viewing rural scenery activates both those areas of the brain associated with the regulation of cognitive and emotional processing and those linked positive emotions and happiness. In contrast, viewing urban scenery activates those regions associated with the detection of danger and fearful emotions.342 Recovery from stress is promoted by exposure to natural scenery and hindered by views of urban landscapes.343 Exposure to the natural world

216 produces improved cognitive abilities,344 better health,345 and more rapid recovery from sickness.346

Subjects with little previous exposure to nature who spent four days immersed in nature without access to multi-media and technology showed a 50% increase in tests for creativity and problem-solving.347 Another effect of immersion in nature is an increased sense of autonomy, where this is understood as a kind of liberation—freedom to behave and express oneself in ways that are consistent with one’s higher and abiding values and interests. This is experienced as being in touch with oneself, empowered to look honestly within and become the author of one’s own life, and free from the pressure to do otherwise. The self becomes more coherent. The desire for extrinsic goods that are not rewarding in themselves, such as money, fame, the approval of others, or material possessions, declines and motivation increases to pursue what is more intrinsically rewarding—what is consistent with one’s deepest values and a more authentic life.

Immersion in nature also produces an expanded sense of identity in which nature is included in one’s image of oneself. This changed self-image is another way in which immersion in nature produces a more authentic view of the self, since it dispels the illusion that we are independent of the natural world and defined by the artificial environments we have created. In contrast, immersion in non-natural environments stunts our capacity to understand our relationship to the natural world, to achieve autonomy, to live in conformity with what we value most profoundly, and fosters alienation.348

Even modest amounts of vegetation in the inner city have been linked to lower crime rates and violence, and, in those struggling with the demands of poverty, improved ability to cope with violence and the demands of raising children, increased resilience, lowered mental fatigue, decreased aggressive emotions, and a greater sense of empowerment.349 Impoverished

217 people with access to green spaces have even been found to have lower mortality rates than those who do not.350

Degraded environments inflict both mental and physical harm on humans. One dramatic illustration is a study of the effects of a natural environment disrupted only indirectly by humans: the effects of lost tree cover in fifteen states due to infestation by emerald ash borers. These borers were probably introduced into the United States by global trade, as infested wooden packing materials was carried on cargo ships or airplanes originating in their native Asia. Ash trees have been a dominant tree in our eastern forests and urban landscapes. They constituted a significant portion of the tree cover on our own twenty-one acres. The decimation of ash trees over fifteen states was implicated in an increase of 6113 deaths related to illness of the lower respiratory track, and 15,080 deaths due to cardiovascular problems.351

The philosopher Arnold Berleant introduced the notion of “aesthetic harm,” that is to say that we can be harmed by ugliness. Artificial environments unadorned by natural beauty are not only physically and psychologically harmful, but they can also so desensitize us to natural beauty that can lose the very perceptual capacities through which we comprehend the values and meanings embedded in human experience. They can warp our view of reality in ways that impede the achievement of a good human life.352 That so many are forced by circumstance to live in such environments amounts to a moral failure of our society.

The ability to appreciate natural beauty requires cultivation, but it cannot be cultivated in a vacuum. Marcia Muelder Eaton suggests those in whom this ability is unformed have been deprived of what is required for human wisdom and a fully developed moral character:

An American president reputedly said, ‘If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ’em

all.’ Shouldn’t such a shallow aesthetic judgment be a tip-off about corresponding

218 inability to make wise choices in the arena of human action? It is one thing to fail

to take the time to view sunsets, quite another to take the time and fail to respond.

Surely there is something missing in the character and experience of a person who

never delights in such things.353

Such a lack of sensitivity can lead to aesthetically harmful decisions about how to design cities and suburbs and an inability to perceive what degrades a landscape. A vicious circle is created.

Insensitivity among those with the power to shape the land results in the construction of environments impoverished of natural beauty. This, in turn produces coarsened perceptual faculties in those who make future decisions about land use. It also traps some citizens in the worst of these places where they are more likely to further degrade their environments by littering the streets, defacing buildings, or other forms of vandalism.

That how we use land represents a stunning moral failure of our society is, perhaps, most evident when we consider the benefits of natural settings on children and the harms created when they lose access to them. It is well known that there has been an increase in Attention-

Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in the United States. An investigation of this epidemic by the

Center for Disease control found that the number of parents reporting that their children suffer from this disorder increased by 42% from 2003 to 2011. Cases in which medication was prescribed for ADHD increased by 28% from 2007 to 2011. From 2003 to 2011, there was an increase of 2 million more children between the ages of 4 and 17 years medically diagnosed with

ADHD.354 A study has shown that children with this disorder have reduced symptoms after playing in green settings and that benefits increase in proportion to the naturalness of the area of play.355 It is an open question whether being deprived of natural environments might be a contributing cause of the disorder itself.

219 It is well known that children growing up in the inner city are exposed to a variety of greater risks. Among these are academic underachievement, juvenile delinquency, and teenage pregnancy. How to mitigate these risks is certainly a complicated question, but it seems obvious that finding ways to increase their self-discipline would be helpful. Environmental psychologists have found evidence of a surprisingly simple way of doing this. 169 inner city children living in high rise buildings that were architecturally identical, but had varying exposure to nearby nature, were tested for three important elements of self-discipline: their abilities to concentrate, to inhibit initial impulses, and to delay gratification. Girls living in places with views of nature performed

20% better on tests for these abilities.356

Even the very limited examples of nature, such as clumps of trees and shrubs in an urban area, provide children with greater mental resources required for a successful and happy life.

More immersive experiences of nature provide even larger benefits. A meta-analysis of studies of adventure programs, such as Outward Bound, showed a number of important lasting benefits.

To varying degrees, depending upon the exact nature of the program, children were found to have increased abilities to solve problems that were reflected in improved academic performance. But the greatest effects were in the development of the self, where children were found to have increased independence, confidence in their ability to deal with difficult situations, and understanding of themselves. Other effects on personality were reduced aggression and neurosis and greater emotional stability, motivation to achieve excellence, self-control, ability to make wise decisions, and maturity. These can be summarized as a greater sense of their ability to regulate the self. Studies of children after the completion of these program showed that most of these benefits increased, to varying degrees, over time.357

Most parents feel love for their children, but what matters more than this feeling is how

220 we express it. David Orr argues that the world we have designed for our children reveals how profoundly we have failed to express love appropriately.

No society that loved its children would divorce them so completely from contact

with soils, forests, streams and wildlife. No society that loved its children would

create places like the typical suburb or shopping mall. No society that loved its

children would casually destroy real neighborhoods and communities in order to

build even more highways.

Our culture has bequeathed to our children environments that cut them off from the possibility of whole and joyous lives.

Many are hardly aware of the completeness with which we have designed our landscapes to exclude nature and surrounded ourselves with a ravaged environment. One year in teaching environmental ethics, I had my students read the whole of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County

Almanac. Because most of the book does not advance philosophical arguments, but is composed of poetic meditations that disclose how complexly and tightly the elements of the world are bound together, I allowed students the option of writing a creative, rather than a philosophical, essay. I recall a paper by one students who took this option. She intended her essay to be a meditation on the beauty of nature. She rhapsodized about a day in which she was reposed on a large mowed grass section of the campus with the delicious scent of hamburgers on a grill wafting her way. She went on at length in this manner, never realizing that she was describing a completely artificial environment. The grass lawn was, of course, could only exist because the native plants had been removed, fescue (that provides no habitat for wild things) had been planted, and it was regularly mowed with machines powered by fossil fuels. The chemical

221 fertilizers and pesticides regularly applied to it had extinguished the web of life that generates healthy and productive soil beneath. The trees, shrubs, and flowers that surrounded her were mostly exotic rather than native and incapable of supporting more than a few native insects, mammals, or birds.

The occasions on which we most truly see the character of the natural world and feel most appropriately towards it have the qualities of an epiphany. They require preparing the mind through the cultivation kinds of awareness not much valued or practiced in our society. They make no contribution to success as it is usually defined. They do not make us more competitive or capable of acquiring wealth or the objects of consumption that constitute the American dream.

To make ourselves conscious of how we are thoroughly, if momentarily, rooted in a particular natural place requires putting aside the distractions of our chattering thoughts. Sharpening our attention, concentrating on what surrounds us, taking in its vividly singular qualities, and fully engaging the senses makes possible an experience of the unique and special significance of the moment and place. Absorbed by our surroundings what we perceive is almost magically enlivened and our sense the self is transformed as its normal boundaries are expanded in an experience of oneness with nature. These are truer than ordinary perceptions of what we and the world are. Through them we discern and feel that we are not the individually isolated and autonomous beings we so often assume. We become aware of the living things around us as more than a mere backdrop for our lives, that one individual member of a species is not entirely like all the others, that each is suffused with individuality and even a kind of personality, that every living being is entangled in a vast web of relationships that constitute and sustain us.

We seem most capable of these experiences as children. When I ask my students whether they have ever had such experiences, I always find that they have. But I must probe them with

222 questions to discover this, because they have been conditioned to disregard their importance and to interpret them as merely subjective responses to the world that have no basis in reality. Those very experiences that were most meaningful to them in their younger years are gradually being erased and they are being socialized in ways that make them less and less capable of having them. I doubt that anyone had previously asked them to recall those moments and consider their meaning. But when I do, they are taken back in time, resurrect and reclaim those moments as revelations that shaped their lives, at least for a time, in central ways.

Edward Hoffman’s Visions of Innocence records many instances adults remembering such transformative experiences of their childhood. His findings were not collected from a representative sample of adults, but were the responses to an author’s query posted in newspapers, magazines, and journals. His query was as follows:

Can you recall any experiences from your childhood—before the age of

fourteen—that could be called mystical or intensely spiritual? Or, to put it another

way: Can you recall any childhood moments in which you seemed to experience a

different kind of reality—perhaps involving a sense of rapture or great harmony?

... I am especially interested in childhood experiences or perceptions that have

endured in your memory and may have permanently affected your view of life or

death, God, the universe, or the nature of human existence.358

Many of the respondents recounted experiences in which they came to feel that they were one with, or swallowed up by, nature. For example, one subject describes awaking one morning in her Girl Scout camp, going on a walk, and sitting on a boulder where in the clear, still, air she saw a vulture gliding above her: “Suddenly I felt totally transfixed. Time simply stopped.

Nothing else existed. I was one with the bird and the sky.” The subject reports that this kind of

223 oneness with nature was experienced at other times during her childhood when examining flowers, listening to streams, looking at distant mountain ranges, or viewing the sky at night.359

Another recalls looking at a large tree outside her window during a moonlit winter night and feeling herself “absorbed into the light—drawn up in a sense, into the moon” and entering “a timeless moment of oneness with everything.” Another points to a moment when playing in her yard, she looked up at the sun to see its beams of light flowing out from the clouds that floated across it: “At that instant, I just knew that God was in everything and that everything was a part of God. I felt awed by the whole experience.”360

Some of the more intense, but perhaps less mystical, experiences of nature are characterized by awe—reverence mixed with wonder. Awe is inspired by perceptual experiences of natural vastness or unboundedness in which we discover the inadequacy of the categories we normally use to sort out the objects of experience. In that sense it is an experience of the transcendent. The unbounded can be found in what looms hugely in our field of vision, such as the Grand Canyon, mountains, or a grove of ancient sequoia, but it can also be found in attention to the immeasurable complexity of the small, such as the complexity of a mound of mixed mosses, the patterns formed by lichen on a rock or tree, or the behavior of micro-organisms.

Psychological research on awe links it to what is sometimes called the “small self”—the individual ego and its concerns are put into a new perspective, dissolved, as it were, and subsumed by something greater. Studies of awe have shown that its effects persist beyond the moment, and that the new perspective on the self can persist through time. One’s goals and concerns become less important than the greater natural and social whole of which one is part.

After experiences of awe subjects show measurable increases in the desire to act in ways that benefit other individuals and society. They are more helpful towards others, more cooperative,

224 more altruistic and generous, more ethically conscientious, and more compassionate. They display a decreased sense of entitlement and an increased concern for the well-being of society and humanity as a whole.361

I said that experiences like this are truer than ordinary perceptions. While they are grounded in perceptions of particular things they disclose fundamental and real relations between the object of perception, the self, and pervasive features of the natural world. Instead of the usual way we divide objects, including one’s self, into discrete, autonomous, and separable things, the harmony or unity between them is disclosed.362 These moments are occasions of self-discovery, intense and immediate realizations that one is part of the larger whole of the natural world.363

These are true perceptions of what science tells us is the way things are. We are in fact

“one” with the world, participating in natural processes that govern all, filled with the same life as other living beings, and share the same origin as all other organisms—even the most seemingly alien. When we understand these things intellectually as implications of scientific theories, we merely entertain them as one cluster of concepts among others. They do not generally grip or move us. But when we directly experience an assimilation of self by the limitless natural world that surrounds us we are moved by perceptual and emotional insights that exceed our intellectual comprehension. And Berleant argues that this is not only because intellectual knowledge is always limited, but because there are higher relations to things than the merely cognitive—relations in which awe is an essential element of the appropriate human response.364

Ronald Hepburn, a philosopher, recognizes that scientific explanations can deflate aesthetic experience of nature by suggesting there is nothing awe-inspiring or wonderful in what we perceive, it being only what science leads us to expect.365 But realizing that we lack, and will

225 never have, a complete and final explanation can be a source of wonder. The entirety of all that exists and the laws that govern them could have been different. Why this world and these laws rather than others? Leibniz regarded the deepest philosophical question as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And he pointed out that there is no this-worldly way of answering it.366 The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein described wonder as a kind of aesthetic experience of the miraculous: the miracle is that there is a world at all, that what is exists.367

Hepburn describes wonder as being enthralled and gripped by “an odd sense of the gratuitousness of the object and its qualities. Its existence strikes us as a gift, undeserved. A sense of unlikelihood pervades the experience.”368 Awe and wonder arise through the perception of particular natural objects as something like symbols of the whole universe and its inexplicable nature.369 Our obliviousness to who and what we are, what the world is, and the fantastic contingency of it all is stripped away in a more than intellectual apprehension that can change the kinds of persons we are, producing an appropriate humility and the sense that life is gift.

Previously I mentioned that when I teach environmental ethics I find that my students are oblivious to the non-human lives that surround them and try to awaken them to the complexity and richness to be found in a life-form that they encounter daily by showing the selections from

David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds. European-Americans generally have impoverished perceptions and knowledge of nature. This cognitive impairment has serious consequences, because it impedes our ability to perceive what we are doing to the ecological balance of living things. Two social scientists, Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, spent two decades rigorously attempting to determine how much our perceptual awareness and “commonsense understanding of the living world” has deteriorated. Their study included comparisons between perceptions of

226 nature in the dominant culture and those of native people. While urban dwellers have limited exposure to wild animals, this is not the case with trees, of which they are likely to have seen many different kinds, and because of their size and prominence, they are not easy to ignore. Yet the researchers found that they were. Their students were unable to name more than a few categories of trees and were almost entirely unaware of the ecological importance of trees.

Examining the historical record of references to trees in literature of the English language, they found that there is less writing about trees now than in any time in history.370 Based on this and other evidence, they conclude that perceptual awareness of the living world among European-

Americans has radically devolved and that this began in the twentieth century.371

They also found that science education, far from enhancing perception and appreciation of nature, often retards it. They studied academic success in science among Menominee children who have such an advanced cultural understanding of biology that it is their strongest subject in their early years of schooling. On standardized tests given in the fourth grade they score above the national average in science. But by the eighth grade science is their worst subject. Atran and

Medin attribute this to three factors. The first is a mismatch between indigenous peoples, who regard the elements of the natural world as living things, and the mechanistic and instrumental notion of life they are taught in school. The second is the contrast between the deeply ecological understanding of nature among the Menominee and the lack of emphasis on ecology in science education. Atran and Medin found that ecology was often not included in science textbooks, and that, when it was, it was usually one of the last chapters of the book and, because of that, rarely covered. The third factor point to is a conflict in values. They show how consistently western society and the texts used in the classroom present the natural world as something external to humans and as no more than natural resources to be exploit or managed. This is in stark contrast

227 to the attitudes of the Menominee who regard the natural world as an extension of their community. The authors speculate that this “orientation may render some aspects of science education alien to Native Americans in the same way that an economic approach to a family

(e.g., How many dollars is a daughter worth?) is repugnant to most people.”372 Our culture’s devaluation of the natural world has altered both our ability to perceive it and to recognize the nature of its value.

Berleant accuses our culture of intentionally marginalizing the aesthetic in favor of the practical.373 But it is not only the “practical” that has created incentives to ignore the aesthetic, it is our worship of consumption and technology, and the primary emphasis we place on economic justifications for environmental decisions. The assumption of some that abstract scientific theories provide the only true account of nature and that perceptual experiences of beauty and reactions of awe and wonder are subjective illusions can also alienate us from the basic human responses that give our lives meaning. As Dewey observed, when we define “ultimate realities” in terms of abstract properties, we divest nature of the very qualities that “make things lovable and contemptible, beautiful and ugly, adorable and awful.” And we produce a view of nature as

“an indifferent, dead mechanism.”374

A morally wise and virtuous person has self-knowledge, understanding what kind of being she is, what is necessary for her to live well, and the character of a meaningful life. Without a greater sensitivity to the natural world we will remain blind to our kinship with living things, the companionship they offer, the mysteries and intelligence they embody, and the many gifts bestowed upon us by healthy ecosystems. These gifts are coldly expressed in economic terms as ecosystem services. And what nature provides us does, of course, have economic value, although

228 typically unaccounted for in business and policy decisions. In the next chapter I will describe what are called “ecosystem services” or “natural capital”—those things necessary for our survival and prosperity that healthy ecosystems freely provide us. Their annual value has been conservatively estimated to be around $33 trillion annually. To put this into perspective, $33 trillion is 1.8 times the Gross National Product of the entire globe, and the real value of these ecosystem services is almost certainly much higher than this rough estimate.375 But the real value of the natural world and healthy ecosystems is more spiritual than economic. We have been fashioned in an earthly matrix. Our bodily and spiritual life extends beyond our skin to the natural environment in which we live and move and have our being. How can we thrive without being aware of this? How can we learn to love life and live it to the fullest unless we cultivate the capacity to perceive the beauty of nature and our position within it?

Persons who are indifferent to the sight of a clear-cut forest or landscapes otherwise devastated by human activity, or who find them pleasing testaments to human dominance over nature do not know who or what they and the world are. They have lost the capacity for appropriate humility, love, and gratitude for the gift that we have been given. They have lost the ability to perceive pollution of water, soil, and air, the wanton destruction of habitat, and our steady slicing away of one life form after another as the aesthetic and moral sins they are.

These sins may be excused. What else can be expected from individuals surrounded by landscapes designed to exclude, subdue, or degrade nature and raised in a culture that in many ways cultivates ugliness, destroys the beauty of natural environments, crushes and blinds the human spirit, and impedes the felt knowledge of who we are, where we live, our lineage, and our place in the larger community of life. These sins are excusable insofar as we can explain why they are committed, just as we can explain and excuse the abusive behavior of those who were

229 raised by vicious or sadistic families. But explaining their behavior in terms of social forces that shaped them, and, because of this, excusing their cruelty to others or abuse of the natural world does not make the cruelty or abuse any less appalling. Such explanations only point out all the more sharply the need for a cultural transformation.

There is a loneliness to our human-centered life and the landscapes we haveso thoroughly engineered to serve only human purposes. Some of us, at least, feel like prisoners within walls of our own making. Only when we transform the environments in which we live and work, only when we make room for other living beings and natural beauty, only when set aside more places for non-human life to flourish will we ourselves flourish. Until then will we not be able to see the world as it is and feel towards it as we ought. Until then we will not we discover who we are and realize that we are not alone—that we are part of a community of others and have a larger, and more various family, than we have ever imagined.

230

Chapter 10: The View from Where We Are

“[O]ur destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or

a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging

God's gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our

destruction of them.”376

On our twenty-one acres we through only the periphery of the lives of our fellow creatures as they pass through ours. The revelatory encounters are rare. But we cherish the knowledge that they are present around us and that their number and variety are increasing on our land. And I try to understand more about them by reading what those who have devoted their professional lives studying our living world more closely have written, often spending decades concentrating on one particular form of life. Reading these things brings me joy, but also grief as I am confronted by their repeated reminders that many of the most interesting and beautiful things are disappearing from our planet because of the increasing human population, our economic and political institutions, and how we generally conduct our lives. Destructive economic forces are ravaging the earth. We are repeatedly told that we cannot do without such things as new mines, highways, housing developments, malls, or manufacturing sites that destroy habitat, that we must continue to farm in destructive ways, that we need to continue the use of fossil fuels and the spewing of toxic substances into our environment in order to prosper, and that any landscape without a grass lawn and exotic species is unsightly and a threat to our neighbors. I know enough to realize that there are less destructive alternatives, other ways of life, that we could pursue. We have simply chosen not to follow those paths or listen to those who advocate them.

231 I am devastated by the knowledge that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction. In contrast to past extinction events caused by asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, and natural shifts of climate, the current crisis is almost entirely caused by human behavior. And its magnitude is measured not only by new entries to the list of endangered and threatened species, or new species driven into extinction. A recent study revealed that the rate of decline in terrestrial vertebrates alone is extremely high even among species that are listed as of low concern for extinction. The populations and ranges of 32% of known species of vertebrates have decreased, and “will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization.” The study did not even examine what is happening to communities of terrestrial invertebrates, plants, and marine life. We are approaching a future in which it is projected that 50% or more of the species on this planet will be wiped out. The authors of this study characterize this as “biological annihilation.”377 In other words, civilization as we know it as built upon a foundation that is fundamentally anti-life and biocidal. How did we reach this point?

The psychologist Peter Kahn has conducted numerous studies of moral reasoning about environmental problems among children. He came across a puzzling phenomenon. Among a group of children who lived in a highly polluted city and who had a general understanding of the dangers of pollution, only one-third believed that they were being directly harmed by it. In other words, two-thirds of them were unaware of the level and risk of their own city’s pollution. Kahn hypothesizes that an understanding of pollution requires the ability to compare highly polluted areas to those with less pollution. If all we have experienced in our youth is one level of pollution, then the tendency is to accept this as normal, and all future judgments about the degree and threat of exposure are measured against this standard. In other words, the environmental

232 conditions we encounter in our childhood, however dire, become the baseline against which we measure the level of environmental destruction as we continue on into adulthood. In addition, environmental degradation increases from one generation to the next, its full extent goes unnoticed because each generation takes the degraded conditions encountered in younger years to be to normal.378 So now, for example, we have learned to live with the cognitive dissonance of the EPA’s safe eating guidelines for fish and shellfish. On the one hand, the guidelines tell us that “Fish and shellfish are an important part of a healthy diet.” On the other hand, because of pollution, such as the mercury emitted by coal fired power plants, they warn that eating fish puts at risk those who eat too much, the elderly, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children.379

We take these risks for granted, not outraged or shocked by the fact that we have spoiled an abundant, life sustaining resource and contaminated even those bodies of water that appear clear and fresh.

Citizens of our nation seem little alarmed at how much our natural home has been degraded, at increasingly unhealthy ecosystems, fragmented habitats, and shocking increases in the rate at which wild and beautiful animals and plants are destroyed and places of natural wonder lost. It seems we cannot even imagine the awe inspiring natural places of our past. As

David Montgomery observes:

Even though Iceland has lost 60 percent of its vegetative cover and 96 percent of

its tree cover, after 1,100 years of inhabitation most Icelanders find it difficult to

conceive of their modern desert as having once been forested. Most don’t

comprehend how severely their landscape has been degraded. Just as at Easter

Island [which became treeless over time], people’s conception of what is normal

evolves along with the land—if the changes occur slowly enough.380

233 Rarely, a trained eye is able to detect the magnitude of our losses, as when Jared

Diamond visited an Iowa churchyard built in the middle of farmland during the 19th century. Over the intervening years, the fields around the church continued to be farmed in ways that caused erosion. As a result, the churchyard “now stands like a little island raised 10 feet above the surrounding sea of farmland.”381 I was raised in Iowa and always marveled at the rich dark soil. Until I read this, I had no idea that such an unfathomable amount of this priceless soil had washed away.

In other cases, a puzzle presents itself that, when solved, reveals the extent and durability of past ecological destruction. For example, Germany’s Spessart Mountain has radically different landscapes on its north and south slope. Aldo Leopold describes the dramatic difference in the ecology of the two sides.

Its south slope bears the most magnificent oaks in the world. American cabinet

makers, when they want the last word in quality, use Spessart oak. The north

slope, which should be the better, bears an indifferent stand of Scotch pine. Why?

Both slopes are part of the same state forest; both have been managed with

equally scrupulous care for two centuries. Why the difference?

The difference, he explains, was only discovered through advances in soil science that determined that clear cutting of the north side during the Middle Ages had so radically altered the ecology of the soil that centuries could not mend it.382

On other occasions, exploring one of those rare environments that have largely escaped devastation can startle us into an awareness of how much we have lost. In 2008 scientists investigated a new marine reserve around the Phoenix islands—an area the size of California which is so remote that it has largely avoided the fate of other marine

234 ecosystems. These marine biologists were shocked by the health of the coral reefs and the size and abundance of the life they support. Gregory Stone, from the New England

Aquarium in Boston commented that

We were completely blown away by the density of marine life we saw—none of

us had seen anything like it…. We would dive into schools of fish that were so

thick they dulled the sunlight like clouds passing above. Looking down, we saw

thousands of smaller fish blanketing the reef like flocks of birds…. [I]t was the

first time I had seen what the ocean may have been like thousands of years ago.383

These scientists documented dense colonies of giant clams, more than one hundred and fifty species of coral, and five hundred species of coral fish, many of which elsewhere are extremely rare or of much smaller size. Because of intergenerational environmental amnesia it takes lucky discoveries like this, hard scientific work, and leaps of imagination to get even a remote hint of our losses.

When we do see forest fall to chainsaws, prairies and wetlands replaced by urban sprawl, when we read about the rivers poisoned and buried by debris as whole mountain tops are removed for easy access to coal, spills of toxic coal slurry and oil, or other events devastating to humans, plants, and animals, we often seem to shrug our shoulders as though it were the inevitable price of “progress” as we have defined it. Yet the human enterprise, as we now conceive it, is biocidal—the wholesale destruction of life on all levels. Surely we can form another vision for ourselves, however difficult to achieve in the face of the political, ideological, and economic obstacles. While corporations seem to control our government, politicians do have to be elected. If citizens made themselves aware of the terrible price of conducting business as

235 usual and aroused themselves to be concerned about it, they could make commitment to a more life affirming political economy the price of their vote.

The stakes are now higher than ever. Many types of environmental damage are irreversible. For example, pollution of groundwater and aquifers that provide over 50% of the population with drinking water cannot easily be remedied—if at all. And even were it possible to do so, it would be technically difficult and enormously costly.384 Species, once lost, are lost forever. We do not really know how to fully restore collapsed ecosystems. As I know from personal experience, ecologically restored prairies and forests do not come close to the biological diversity and ecological functions of the originals. The causes of environmental degradation are collective human actions, rooted in economic, legal, and political systems. Institutional changes are the only hope of addressing problems of the scale that confronts us and they cannot occur without a revolution in our thinking, a transformation of our perception, and activism at levels that we have not come close to achieving.

Even if we are so hard-hearted as to believe that humans are the only kind of being that matters, there are overwhelming reasons to take seriously the way we are ravaging the living world—the survival of human civilization depends upon healthy ecosystems. Even if we take the cold view that our decisions should be exclusively governed by economics, the economic value of what nature provides exceeds calculation.

Even when the media reports on how insufficiently protective of human health our environmental laws are, it seems to garner little attention. For example, the American Lung

Association issues annual “State of the Air Reports” based on analysis of data from official air quality monitors. Their 2017 report notes that even though there has been improvement in the

236 quality of the air over the last decade, there has been “an unrelenting increase in dangerous spikes of particle pollution” and that “many cities reported their highest number of unhealthy days since the report began.” They further find that “Nearly four in 10 people (38.9 percent) in the United States live in counties that have unhealthfull levels of either ozone or particle pollution.” In November of 2009 a medical report, "Coal's Assault on Human Health," was issued by Physicians for Social Responsibility with the participation of American Lung

Association and the American Nurses Association. The report revealed that coal is implicated in four of the top five causes of mortality in the U.S., has caused the increased incidence of major diseases already affecting large portions of the U.S. population, and is responsible for between

316,588 and 631,233 children being born in the U.S. each year with blood mercury levels high enough to cause lifelong loss of intelligence.385 And, of course, pollution of all kinds affects not only humans, but animals, insects and plants—the entire web of life. People seem to have resigned themselves to these conditions, and do not seem to think twice when air or water quality warnings are issued for their regions. Meanwhile the current head of the EPA is rolling back the already woefully inadequate regulations on pollution.

I find myself puzzled by this resignation, because what we so blithely accept as normal is morally criminal even by the most conventional standards of morality. Pollution takes human lives and causes ill-health, especially among the most vulnerable, such as children, the elderly, and the poorest among us. How then can we be awakened to the moral dimensions of those environmental conditions that are less obviously harmful, such as why an excess of impermeable surfaces is harmful because it increases storm water runoff of pollutants into bodies of water?

How can people be made aware of how particular placements of roads, malls, and residential developments are a threat to our health and security? And it requires a particular kind of

237 education to understand why it might be more important to preserve a wet-land than to fill it in to expand our industrial base, centers of commercial activity, or housing in convenient locations.

“Common sense” tells us that grass lawns are harmless and even necessary.

The problem of declining biodiversity is especially hard to communicate. Some seem to think that there is not much reason to be disturbed by the endangerment of some species of plants or animals, not realizing that these are symptoms of a deeper problem—the steady degradation of whole ecosystems, the decline of biological wealth, and the loss of ecosystem services on which we depend. In parts of China, farmers who grow apples are now forced to hand pollinate the blossoms—an expensive and laborious process which was previously accomplished for free by the pollinators now extinguished from those regions.386

We are entirely dependent upon healthy living systems for our survival. The Millennium

Ecosystem Assessment is the most extensive analysis of the human impact on the environment ever conducted. Launched in 2001 it was published in 2005 and is comprised of many volumes.

Volume 1 of the series Ecosystems and Human Well-Being contains over 800 pages describing what is known about our reliance on intact natural systems for, among many other things, breathable air, clean water, fertile soil, food, control of diseases, and the regulation of natural hazards.387

We also depend on healthy ecosystems for new discoveries that improve human life.

Scientists study natural systems and living beings because they provide models that advance our knowledge of how to meet human needs in less destructive ways. They can teach us, for example, how to grow food, generate energy, and construct materials without the intensive use of energy and the toxic inputs and outputs characteristic of our present methods of production.

Learning to duplicate the processes through which living beings accomplish these things has

238 been developed into an important field of research called biomimicry that provides some of our greatest hopes for human development in less destructive ways.388

In addition, the volume mentioned above, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, contains a table listing thirty categories of new products and industries that have been derived from the study of living things. For example, Antibiotics have been derived from ants, mollusks, plants, and bacteria. Other medicinal drugs have been discovered through research on scorpions, wasps, leeches, fungi, plants, and other organisms. The study of fungi has even provided us with the knowledge of how to manufacture cold-active enzymes. These are only a few of many improvements in human welfare made possible by the biodiversity of our planet.389 And the future holds the promise of even greater and more far-reaching discoveries that could solve some of our most intransigent problems, provided we plan human development in ways that preserve what could coldly, but still accurately, be called these natural biological laboratories. We have constructed a society that threatens our very survival as a species. Why does this not profoundly alarm every one of us?

The health of us all and the survival of human civilization depend, among other things, on what people do on their land. Wise use of the land requires understanding the importance of protecting the integrity of larger ecosystems of which individual parcels are merely a part. In Ohio, decisions about land use are made by unelected Zoning Boards and Boards of Zoning Appeals whose powers are governed by state law. These boards are generally composed of individuals with no ecological education whose decisions are reached with no consultation of experts in ecology or environmental biology. Those fields of study are considered irrelevant, as are considerations about the aesthetics of natural environments and their importance for happy

239 human lives. Decisions are often based on the notion of the “highest and best use” of the land where this is interpreted as the most economically profitable and efficient use of the land. While ecosystem services, as I have discussed, do have enormous economic value, few people are aware of this and these considerations rarely, if ever, enter into the deliberations of such boards.

I have extensive experience of the dynamics that govern hearings by zoning boards. One set of hearings by the Board of Zoning Appeals is illustrative of the difficulties created by the system governing decisions about land-use. Not only do considerations about the integrity of ecosystems have little or no weight, but the process is not well designed to protect the health of citizens and the well-being of future generations, and is fundamentally undemocratic.

The village of Spring Valley lies, as its name suggests, in a valley, next to the Little

Miami State and National Scenic River. Next to the river and the village are farmlands and forests. Nearby two rare and protected ecosystems are connected by one of the most popular and beautiful bicycle trails in the state, which runs through the village. The village itself is like a scene from the past. Its population is far from wealthy, but its entire main street has been placed on the National Registry of Historic Places because of its architectural importance and rich history.

Gravel can be made from recycled concrete, but our township is known to have many deposits of sand and gravel and it is cheaper to mine this gravel. Over the years, there have been many acquisitions of land here by mining companies. In the year 2000, Martin Marietta applied for a permit to mine gravel and sand on a farm adjacent to the Little Miami and a stone’s throw away from the village and the bike trail. The farm was located in the Township of Spring Valley.

In our township, mining was at that time defined by our zoning code as a conditional use of agricultural land that required approval by the Board of Zoning Appeals. From April to June

240 there were four public hearings, each attended by three hundred people or more—such a large crowd that the only place capacious enough to seat them all was the garage in which the township parks its fire trucks and emergency vehicles. I was among a group of citizens that formed a non-profit organization, Concerned Citizens of Spring Valley, to oppose Martin

Marietta’s application. We acquired the services of a lawyer and recruited residents of the township and village to conduct research and offer testimony at the meetings of the Board, none of the whom lived anywhere near where the mining would take place.

Martin Marietta’s presentation of evidence supporting their request was orchestrated by an expensive lawyer who brought forth a series of purported experts who were paid to testify.

This included a study by an acoustical engineer, which was said to prove that the residents would not even hear the mine’s operations, despite the fact that the operations of another of its mines farther away could already be heard in the village and beyond. A Cincinnati realtor was brought forth to act the role of an expert on the effects of mining on value of nearby properties. With no reference to any sort of study, he assured the audience that there would be no decline in the value of their homes even if they lived close to the site. In fact, he said, their values might even go up, since having a mine nearby might attract wildlife and would be like a park.

The township was assured that, whenever the mining was complete, a completely restored and beautiful landscape would be presented to it as a gift. The proof of this was a photograph of a building, surrounded by a relatively handsome landscape, on one previously mined site, which our research showed was highly unrepresentative of mining sites “restored” by

Martin Marietta. This lawyer also assured us that methods would be employed to ensure that silica dust would not blow off of the site. This, in spite of the fact that these same methods were obviously ineffective on another nearby mining operation. We showed a video tape of numerous

241 episodes in which huge clouds of silica dust emanated from that site.

Only two citizens spoke in favor of the mine—one an excavator, who said that the county needed all the gravel it could get, and the other a non-resident who was a friend of the operators of Martin Marietta’s existing mine. The rest of the three hundred residents, many of whom would be immediately affected by the mine, opposed it. We presented letters from residents near a mine owned by Martin Marietta in another township. In these letters residents stated that they had been forced by the noise and dust to abandon any outdoor leisure. We presented a study by the EPA showing that silica dust from mining is a known carcinogen. Among us was an engineer, who had worked on the Air Force’s standards for controlling noise. He carefully analyzed the acoustical study commissioned by Martin Marietta and showed that the only way it was able to conclude that noise would not be a problem was by dropping a key cluster of contradicting data points.

Those who lived near the proposed mining site gave personal testimony of the money, time, and effort they had put into their homes, which they argued would now become devalued.

We stressed the importance of preserving the idyllic beauty of the area, the economic benefits of the popular bike trail and scenic river, and the importance of preserving the productive farm land on the proposed location of the mine.

We also pointed out that a mine on this site was inconsistent with the county’s land use plan. Martin Marietta’s lawyer persuaded the board that this plan had no legal bearing, being no more than a “vision statement,” even though the township’s zoning ordinance had adopted this as its own land use plan. He also convinced them that nothing that we offered as evidence could legally be taken into account, because we were not professional experts. Many of us were experts on the topics we discussed, but not experts receiving compensation for the studies we prepared.

242 From that point on, each time we offered evidence in opposition to the mine the chair of the board indicated that we were wasting their time because nothing we presented could be considered when the board deliberated. In the end they approved Martin Marietta’s permit by a vote of three to two.

One member of the board was interviewed by a television journalist immediately after the verdict was delivered. He explained on TV why he voted for approval, saying, “I believe that a man has a right to do whatever he wants with his own property.” In Chapter 4, I described how a landscape of farms, wild fields, and forests around our home Bellbrook was stripped bare in order to construct malls, parking lots, and sprawling housing developments. Farmers seeing the opportunity to accumulate great wealth succeeded in persuading the zoning board to change the classification of their land from agriculture to commercial and residential, claim that owners have the right to maximize their profit from the land by doing with it what they pleased. I deny that we have such absolute rights over the land that we “own.” What we do on our property affects the well-being of others, both those now alive and future generations, as well as the once bountiful non-human life around us.

Lynton Keith Caldwell, the visionary American political scientist, was the chief force behind the adoption of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970—the first act of its kind. He had intended that this would be followed by adoption of the National Land Use Policy Act, and in the early 1970s, Congress came within a few votes of adopting the bill. This bill would have set up incentives for states to voluntarily establish agencies to engage in comprehensive planning of land use, coordinate state projects that affect how land is used, and exercise authority over decisions that are of “more than local concern.” These agencies would have assumed

243 responsibility for protecting critical habitats from destructive development. Participating states would also have been required to facilitate public participation in order to prevent the process from being controlled by narrow economic interests.390 Since the defeat of this bill the notion that there should be comprehensive planning of how land is developed has generally has been considered a non-starter. Developers and other economic interests have opposed it, and

America’s prevailing ideology embraces absolutist notions of property rights that are obstacles to comprehensive land use planning and conservation of habitat.

Caldwell wrote extensively about the importance of this legislation, pointing out that land-use policy in America is based upon a history of legal, economic, and political assumptions that make it impossible to take into account the ecological properties of land. In addition, during the 1920’s and 1930’s state legislatures systematically delegated authority for decisions about land use to local governments, considering it only a matter of local concern. But Caldwell pointed out, as I have tried to do in this chapter, that how land is used is not merely of local interest, because “the condition of the land” is “the physical base for human welfare and survival.” What is required to preserve the ecological integrity of the land, and its capacity for self-renewal, is often inconsistent with “the assumptions, boundaries, and uses that law and political economy impose.”391 Our system fails to recognize both the interdependence of humans and human dependency on healthy and stable ecosystems.

What our moral rights to use land truly are depends upon an understanding of our relationship to the natural world. “This relationship is inherently transgenerational and evolutionary, for human life is successional and the earth abides.” Legal rights to ownership of land can only be understood as social conventions invented to regulate temporary custody.392 I have already described how our own ability to restore our twenty-one acres has been

244 circumscribed by what was done by a man who owned the land thirty-five years ago, and his decision to strip off and sell all the topsoil. This has lastingly destroyed the ability of the land to regenerate itself in ways that affect not only me and my wife, but also every future owner of this property. In determining what our rights to use land should be, society has a moral responsibility to consider how they will affect the welfare of humanity, both now and in the future. Any claims to own land can only be understood as holding it, in some measure, as a public trust. Based on these principles, Caldwell reaches the inevitable and biologically obvious conclusion that, whether we like it or not, “all land is in some degree public”393

In fact this is recognized in the very existence of zoning laws, however inadequate they may be, which are based on the assumption that the welfare and stability of a community can only be protected by placing limits on what uses of the land are permitted. If I wanted to place a chemical manufacturing facility on our land, I would not legally be able to do so, because that use of this land would endanger my neighbors. That is why our land is zoned in ways that prevent it. To further restrict what owners are permitted to do with their land in order to protect the health of ecosystems is merely to recognize “those limitations that are inexorable in nature”—what is required in order to preserve the survival of humanity—so “we lose no freedoms that may be made enduring.”394

I have been arguing that out of pure self-interest, humans ought to regard land differently. But the future of humanity is not the only thing at stake. I have tried to make the case that intelligence is a property of life itself, worthy of respect, that the organisms that populate this planet are all our kin and that achieving human maturity, a full human life, and self- understanding requires us to acknowledge this with more than mere words. Many of these

245 creatures are also conscious beings in which their perceptions and experiences of the world coalesce into a distinct point of view. While not a philosophically precise description of his views, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (one of the greatest philosophers of the late 17th and early 18th century) can be understood to have regarded every living thing as a unique form of intelligence that expresses and reflects God and God’s creation from the perspective of its own individual sensitivities. As Leibniz described it, the glory of God is thus magnified in the vast variety of living, perceiving things.395 This general outline of Leibniz’s thought presents a magnificent and beautiful picture of the living world. And, if that is how things are, then our biocidal culture is engaged in extinguishing whole worlds, each of which expresses the magnificence of God and

God’s creation. As we snuff out one form of life after another and systematically rip natural communities asunder, we dim the light of wonder, increase our loneliness by depriving ourselves of the companionship of our kin, and impoverish our children.

Life is an intelligent force that reshapes itself in response to environmental pressures. It might be that it is a manifestation of the creative powers of a transcendent God. It is also possible that life is an emergent property of the physical universe so that the universe itself contains within it the seeds of intelligence and consciousness. In either case, what can this world be called but sacred? Life is a gift, the result of some sort of grace, miracle, singularity, or rare concatenation of events—something precious that has been entrusted to us and is vulnerable to our actions. We will decide its future.

In “Caring for Nature,” Holmes Rolston, III provides a remarkable set examples of how even atheists and secularists who closely study the living world find themselves compelled to describe it a sacred, miraculous thing and even a product of grace.396 Stephen Jay Gould writes

Something almost unspeakably holy—I don’t know how else to say this—

246 underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our

worlds and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction

in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of

which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the

fascination, and the mystery.397

E. O. Wilson writes, “The flower in the crannied wall—it is a miracle.”398 “The biospheric membrane that covers the Earth, and you and me, . . . is the miracle we have been given.”399

Even Daniel Dennett, who certainly has no sympathy for religion, exclaims that “This world is sacred.”400 In reflecting on the glory of the living world, each of these scientists seems unable to avoid a sense of profound reverence and humility, and that we have been given a gift that we do not deserve—that grace pervades the universe. These are the kinds of attitudes that we all ought to have towards our beautiful and rare planet. To speak of it as nothing more than a bundle of natural resources, ecosystem services, or natural capital is the worst kind of profanity. And a culture that systematically eradicates the foundations of life is engaging in the worst kind of sacrilege.

Ecosystems often irreversibly collapse when gradual or linear trends reaches thresholds— a tipping or breaking point which radically, and often unrecoverably, disrupts them. History is replete with examples of how humans have caused such shifts.401 Ecologists and climate scientists know very little about how to pinpoint when we approach thresholds that will cause sudden and profound alterations the biosphere. In 2012, a frightening review of current scientific knowledge was conducted by twenty-two scientists. After examining the record of critical and radical shifts produced in the past by natural causes, they compared these to the forces now set in motion by human civilization. Based on their analysis, we are potentially forcing a rapid,

247 catastrophic, and irreversible transformation of Earth “into a state unknown in human experience.”402

If we continue on this course some forms of life will no doubt survive in the depleted and ravaged planet we seem determined to leave as our legacy. It is even possible that a greatly reduced human population will survive in pockets here and there. What we will become remains an open question, although it is certain that we will not flourish and that suffering and strife will increase immeasurably. The planet will be less supportive of life, with unproductive soils, without the insects that we need to pollinate most of the crops we eat, without the 50% of species we are predicted to drive into extinction as soon as the end of this century, and with runaway climate change producing increasingly harsh conditions.403

Over the course of millions of years, the life that survives will evolve, branch out into a multitude of different forms, proliferate, and possibly even eventually produce a world as rich in beauty and diversity as this one. Perhaps on some planet in the immense universe there is already one like ours. But as far as we know life exists on this planet alone, and if we decrease its diversity here by continuing to snuff out one life-form after another, we will have impoverished the universe.

The urgency of rethinking how we live on this planet is not reflected in our politics or the collective efforts of citizens. I look at the measures we take to deal with risks in our lives. At the present time it is not very likely that any given individuals will have homes robbed, or destroyed by fire or a natural disaster, but most of us pay large sums of money to protect against these risks. How is it, then, that when it comes to the future of humanity and the glory of our biologically rich planet, we seem unwilling to lift a collective finger?

248 To be aware of these things and to dwell on these thoughts is to live in a state of perpetual grief. I look for signs of hope. As we have cleared our land of invasive species and diversified the trees, shrubs, and wildflowers to make it more supportive of living things we find visible measures of our success. The woods have been transformed, new kinds of creatures have moved onto our land, flocks of birds perch in the prairies feasting on the seeds they provide. But then I look over the fence at my neighbors’ properties that are in the same condition as ours was when we started this odyssey. I realize that when we are too old to maintain what we have accomplished, or when we die, our efforts are likely to be erased as the seeds of invasive plants on our neighbors’ property migrate back to ours. We are searching for a way make permanent our small victories on these 21 acres, but as we do so I am acutely aware that lonely efforts like ours are unlikely to endure without neighbors willing to make similar efforts on their smaller properties or something like the Civilian Conservation Corps engaged in a coordinated national effort.

249 In my many years of teaching, I have had many inspiring, idealistic students who live environmentally conscientious lives. I would often tell them that every one of them could live the

“greenest” life possible and it would make no difference, because the problems we face are problems of our culture, economic system, and politics. And they are the results of many people doing little things that contribute, in often unseen ways, to a crisis of enormous proportions.

None of us can do anything about it alone. We depend on our neighbors. We depend upon our communities. We depend upon the efforts of our own and other nations. And we depend upon a fuller understanding of the larger communities to which we belong extending beyond family and friends, beyond our neighborhood, beyond our nation, and beyond our species. The fate of each one of us depends upon our care for each other and the world we have been given. It depends upon love. It depends upon a collective decision about what kind of people we want to be. What

I call my land and you call yours does not really belong to us. It is common ground.

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Notes

1 Thoreau 1964, p. 146.

2 Berleant 1997, pp. 171-72.

3 Ibid., pp. 36, 171-72

4 Strife and Downey 2009, pp. 99–122.

5 Emery and Clayton 2015.

6 Tallamy 2009, pp. 50ff.

7 Tallamy 2009, pp. 21-24.

8 Baldock, KCR et al. 2015.

9 Goulson, Dave et. al.. 2015.

10 Seago, et. al. 2009.

11 Saito et. al. 2017

12 Benyus 1997

13 Schwägerl 2016.

14 Hallmann, et al. 2017.

15 Dirzo et al. 2014.

16 Bishop 2008, pp. 397-8, 401-4, 407-8.

17 Aristotle 1161b1-1162a1.

18 Sahlins 2013, p. 20.

19 Sahlins 2013, p. 2.

20 Ibid., p. 2.

21 Descola 2013, pp. 5-31.

284

22 Ibid., pp. 129-72

23 Ibid., p. 173.

24 Ibid., p. 173.

25 Leopold [1949] 1989, 202-4.

26 Newport 2014.

27 Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Catholics and Evolution.”

28 Wallace 1869.

29 NIV, Genesis 1:1-2, 2:7,19

30 See, for example, Kennedy 2014, p. 44; Wilson 1987, p. 39.

31 Zimmer 2015.

32 Leopold [1949] 1989, 203.

33 Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. xiv.

34 Ibid, p. 14.

35 Gebhard, Nevers, and Billlman-Mahecha, “Moralizing Trees: Anthropomorphism and Identity in Children’s Relationships to Nature,” in Clayton and Opotow (eds.), Identity and the Natural

Environment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2003), pp. 91-111.

36 Damasio 2010, pp. 157, 161.

37 Nagel 1991, 165-80.

38 Safina 2015, p. 344.

39 "Cognition, n.". Oxford English Dictionary Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/35876?redirectedFrom=cognition (accessed June 30, 2017).

40 Low, Philip. 2012

285

41 Feinberg and Mallet 2016, pp. 181-85; Carruthers 2006, pp. 65-83.

42 Wilson, Edward O. 1987.

43 Gould and Marler 1987.

44 Webb 2012, p. 2715.

45 For example, see Brandimonte et al. 2006.

46 Weir 2005, p. 5.

47 Godfrey-Smith 2017

48 Kennedy 2014, pp. 55-56.

49 See, e.g., Gould and Gould 1982.

50 Giurfa 2007, pp. 286-88, 303-304.

51 Hume [1777] 1982, pp. 23-55, 104-108

52 Müller and Wehner 1988.

53 Wehner 1994.

54 Wittlinger et al. 2006; Wohlgemuth et al. 2001.

55 Gould and Gould 2007, 43-44

56 Carruthers 2004, 209.

57 Carruthers 2004, 209.

58 Gould and Gould 2007, 17.

59 The account of antlion behavior below is taken from Lucas 1982 and 1989.

60 Lucas 1982 and 1989.

61 Hansell 1968a.

62 Hansell 1968b.

63 Wallace and Sherberger 1975.

286

64 Griffin 2001, pp. 84-5.

65 Except where other sources are cited, the information on the communicative dancing of honeybees is taken largely from Griffin 2001, 190-211.

66 Seeley, Thomas D. 2010.

67 Gould and Town 1988.

68 Seeley and Levien 1987, p. 42.

69 Seeley and Levien 1987, pp. 40-41.

70 Nieh 2010.

71 E.g., Giurfa et al. 1996, Van Hateren et al. 1990, Avargue`s-Weber et al. 2011, p. 903.

72 Avargue`s-Weber et al. 2011, p. 898.

73 E.g., Zentall et al. 2008.

74 Avarguès-Weber et al. 2011, pp. 889-903

75 Avarguès-Weber and Giurfa 2013.

76 Bateson, Melissa et al. 2011.

77 Tibbets 2002.

78 Leadbeater and Chittka 2005 and 2007.

79 Gould and Gould 2007, pp. 50-53, 45-46.

80 Carruthers 2006, p. 34.

81 Carruthers 2006, pp. 37-38.

82 Wilson 1987.

83 Leopold [1949] 1987, p. 173.

84 Leopold [1949] 1987, pp. 95-97.

85 Leopold [1949] 1987, p. 81.

287

86 Leopold [1949] 1987, pp. 44-46.

87 Hillel 1991, p. 14.

88 Leopold [1949] 1987, p. 204.

89 Nardi 2007, pp. 11–15; Coleman et al. 2004, pp. 36-46; Finlay 2007, p. 142.

90 Kibblewhite et al. 2008, pp. 685-701; Wall and Moore 1999.

91 Coleman 2003, p. 20.

92 van Elsas et al. 1997, “Preface.”

93 Altieri 1999, pp. 19–20, 26; Buck et al 2004, pp. 30–31.

94 http://education.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/dead-zone/

95 Rapport et al. 1998, p. 348.

96 Montgomery 2008a, pp. 4–6; Montgomery 2008b, pp. 49-82.

97 Blesh and Barrett 2006, p. 123; Montgomery Dirt 2008b, p. 76.

98 The major greenhouse gases caused by human activity are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and halocarbons. Methane and nitrous oxide are produced mainly by microorganisms that are stimulated by human activities such as the increased use of fertilizer, cattle production, and waste management.

99 Conrad 1997, p. 264, Montgomery 2008a; Rapport et al. 1998, p. 342.

100 Kellert 1996, p. 13.

101 National Research Council 2007, p. 37.

102 Ingraham 2010, p. 88.

103 Yong 2016, pp. 52-54, 25.

104 Margulis and Sagan 2002, p. 20.

105 Ibid., p. 18.

288

106 Dethlefsen et al. 2007; Turnbaugh 2007; Collins and Bercik 2009; Corthesy et al. 2007

107 Wakeford 2001, p. 167.

108 National Research Council 2007, p. 17.

109 Callahan 2006, p. 39.

110 Margulis and Sagan 2002, pp. 7, 30, 90, 72, 187; Margulis and Sagan 1995, pp. 179, 230,

236; Margulis 1998, p. 39; Ingraham 2010, pp. 6, 111, 178, 180, 273, 299, 300.

111 Margulis and Sagan 2002, p. 204.

112 Ibid., p. 76.

113 Zimmer 2010.

114 Doran and Zeiss 2000, p. 3.

115 Rolston 1988, pp. 182–83.

116 Ibid., pp. 182–83, 162, 173.

117 Margulis and Sagan 1995, p. 181.

118 National Research Council 2010.

119 Callicott 1983.

120 Leopold [1949] 1989, pp. 173–74.

121 Ibid., p. 174.

122 Margulis and Sagan 1997, pp. 92–93.

123 Godfrey-Smith 2007, p. 430.

124 Greenfield 1994, Wells 2007, pp. 336ff.

125 Holthausen et al. 2017

126 Adams et al. 2013.

127 Fergusson 1990; Bradl 2002; He et al. 2005.

289

128 Schotthoefer et al. 2011.

129 Whittaker and Vredenburg 2017; Xie et al. 2014; Nascimento et al. 2003; Vineeth Kumar et al. 2017; Mu et al. 2014; Conlon et al. 2011; Liu et al. 2013; Fieck et al. 2010.

130 Glista, et. al. 2007.

131 Nelson 1983, p. xiv.

132 Ibid, p. 14.

133 Gebhard and Billman-Mahecha 2003, pp. 91-111.

134 Skutch1996, p. 164.

135 Morgan 1903, p. 59.

136 For numerous examples, see De Waal 2001.

137 De Waal 2016, pp. 222-23.

138 Ibid., 119-21.

139 Skutch 1996, pp. xv-xvi.

140 Skutch 1996, p. xvi.

141 Nagel 1991, pp. 165-80.

142 Nagel 1991, p. 436

143 Panskepp 2005, p. 44.

144 Panksepp 1998, pp. 144-45. See also Watt 2005, De Waal 2011, pp. 192-93.

145 Davidson. 2003, p. 129.

146 Paul et al. 2005, pp. 475-76.

147 Scherer, K.R. 1994, as quoted in De Waal 2011, p. 196.

148 Panksepp 1998, pp. 303, 206.

149 Panksepp 1998, pp. 187, 206, 286, 310-11, 262.

290

150 Masson and McCarthy 1995, pp.13-14.

151 De Waal 1989, p. 25.

152 Paul et al. 2005, p. 472-73; De Waal 2011, pp. 192-93.

153 Trewavas and Baluška 2011, p. 1221.

154 Trewavas and Baluška 2011, p. 1221.

155 Seed et al. 2009, p. 402.

156 Hooper 2007.

157 De Waal 2001, pp. 262-64, 327-29.

158 De Waal 2001, pp. 177-273.

159 De Waal 2001, pp. 227-29, 239-42.

160 See for example De Waal 2006 and 2009.

161 Griffin 2001, pp. 226-27; Bugnyar and Kotrschal 2002; Bugnyar and Heinrich 2005.

162 Lozano1998; Koshimizu et al. 1994; Klein et al. 2008; Huffman and Hirata 2004; Kennedy

2014, p. 4..

163 Wascher and Bugnyar 2013.

164 Heinrich and Bugnyar 2007.

165 Bednekoff and Balda 1996a, b; Heinrich and Pepper 1998.

166 Seed et al. 2009, p. 407.

167 Heinrich and Bugnyar 2007.

168 Bugner and Kotrschal 2002.

169 Trewavas and Baluška 2011, p. 1222; Fraser and Bugnyar 2010 and 2011.

170 Boeckle Bugnyar 2012.

171 Massen, Szipi et al. 2014; Massen Pašukonis et al., 2014.

291

172 Fraser and Thomas 2012.

173 Hendricks Schlang 1998.

174 Heinrich and Marzluff 1991, Marzluff et al. 1996.

175 Heinrich and Bugnyar 2007.

176 Ackerman 2016, pp. 3, 18, 63-65, 72-74, 87-90, 96.

177 Pepperberg 1999.

178 Ackerman 2016, p. 172.

179 Keagy et al. 2012; Ackerman 2016, pp. 177-78.

180 Bravery et al. 2006.

181 Ackerman 2016, pp. 178-79.

182 Ackerman 2016, pp. 179-80; Endler et al. 2010.

183 King 2013; Safina 2015, pp. 67-70.

184 Byrne and Bates 2009, pp. 67, 71-72; Jabr 2014.

185 Irie and Hasegawa 2009, p. 177.

186 Quoted in Jabr 2014.

187 Jabr 2014.

188 Foerder et al. 2011.

189 Jabr 2014; Byrne and Bates 2009, pp. 68-69; Bates et al. 2008.

190 Byrne and Bates 2009, pp. 70-71; Irie and Hasegawa 2009, pp. 179-80.

191 Irie and Hasegawa 2009, p. 179.

192 Hart et al. 2008, p. 89.

193 Bates et al. 2008

194 Herman et al. 2008.

292

195 Marino 2004, p. 11.

196 McCowan et al. 2000.

197 McCowan et al. 2000, p. 98-99, 104-05.

198 Marino et al. 2007.

199 Laland and Hoppitt 2003; Aplin, Lucy et al. 2015.

200 Gould and Marler 1987.

201 Kroodsma and Pickert 1984.

202 Moseley and Wiley 2013.

203 Gadagkar et al. 2016

204 Earp and Maney 2012.

205 Riters 2011; Huang and Hessler 2008; Emery and 2015.

206 Panksepp 2005 and 1998; Low 2012.

207 Gray et al. 2001.

208 Krutch 1950, pp. 92-94, quoted in Masson and McCarthy 1995, p. 211.

209 Huxley 1923, p. 113; Krutch 1956, p. 106; quoted in Masson and McCarthy 1995, pp. 222-23.

210 Hutto 1995, pp. 167-68.

211 Ibid., pp. 128, 170-71.

212 Jacobs and Liman 1991.

213 Chow, Pizza Ka Yee et al. 11 July 2017.

214 Carruthers 2004, 210ff.

215 Byrne 2013.

216 Trewavas and Baluška 2011, p. 1222.

217 Marzluff et al. 2010: Marzluff et al. 2012.

293

218 Byrne 2013.

219 Skutch 1996, p. 44.

220 Skutch 1996, pp. 44, 51-52.

221 Emery and Clayton. 2015.

222 Burghardt 2015; Burghardt et al 2015; Burghardt 2005, p. 331.

223 Safina 2015, p. 197.

224 Savage 1995, p. 110.

225 Pierce 1986, p. 99.

226 For many further examples see Shumaker et al. 2011 and Gould and Gould 2007.

227 Wolpert 2003, p. 1711.

228 Surkin, Joel 2014.

229 Gould and Marler 1987.

230 Walsh et al. 2011.

231 Bailey et al. 2014.

232 Dixon 1902, p. v.

233 Gould and Gould 2007, pp. 179-92.

234 Gould and Gould 2007, pp. 253-7.

235 Gould and Gould 2007, pp. 260-62

236 Ryden 1989, pp. 25, 83, 135-56, 170-92.

237 Quoted in Littell and Littell 1890, p. 68.

238 Nowak 2006. Recent literature devoted to cooperation among animals includes many examples, which I will not repeat here. See, for example, Dugatkin 1997; De Waal 2006;

Balcombe 2010, chap. 7.

294

239 Vail et al. 2013.

240 Savage 1995, p. 104.

241 Masson and McCarthy 1995, p. 158.

242 Skutch 1996, p. 116.

243 Verbeck and Butler 1981, p. 186.

244 Decety and Jackson 2006, p. 54

245 Ibid., p. 55.

246 De Waal 2011, p. 198.

247 Eisenberg 2000, p. 677.

248 De Waal 2006, p. 23-24.

249 De Waal 2006, p. 26.

250 De Waal 2006, p. 30-31.

251 Research originally published by Wiesner and Sheard 1933 and discussed by Masson and

McCarthy 1995, p. 69.

252 Bartal et al. 2011.

253 For an idea of just how technical this discussion has become see Kershenbaum et al. 2014.

254 Pepperberg 1999.

255 Slobodchikoff 2012, p. 260.

256 Slobodchikoff 2002 and 2012, pp. 62-63; Slobodchikoff et al. 2009 and 1991; http://www.petroglyphsnm.org/wildsides/pdlanguage.html.

257 Perla and Slobodchikoff 2002.

258 Clucas et al. 2004; Sturdy et al. 2007; Hailman et al. 1985; Charrier et al. 2004; Baker and

Becker 2002; Hurd 1996; Templeton 2005.

295

259 Nelson 1991, pp. 155-56.

260 Nelson 1995, pp. 217-18.

261 Nelson 1991, p. 12.

262 Nelson 1991, p. 248.

263 Nelson 1991, p. 248.

264 Nelson 1991, p. 249.

265 Nelson 1991, p. 13.

266 Nelson 1991, p. 13.

267 Nelson 1991, p. 15.

268 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “Life without Plants: Impossible,” “The Plant World According to

Writers and Philosophers,” “A Plant Is a Colony.”

269 Safina 2015, 23.

270 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “…And Fifteen Other Senses.”

271 Karban 2015, 17-22.

272 Karban 2015, pp. 26-30.

273 Berridge1998.

274 Tuteja and Mahajan 2007.

275 Gilroy and Trewavas 2001, p. 310; Trewavas 2003, pp. 7-8; Phillips 2002.

276 Karban 2015, 10-16.

277 Chamovitz 2012, p. 9.

278 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 3, 10-26.

279 Gilroy and Trewavas 2001, pp. 307, 310.

280 Karban 2015, pp. 69-77.

296

281 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 50-51, 53.

282 Brenner et al., 2006.

283 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 68-69.

284 Turner, John et al. 2002; Trewavas 2003, pp. 5-7.

285 Gagliano et al. 2014, p. 63.

286 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “Honest and Dishonest Plants.”

287 Böhm, Scherzer, et al.. 2016.

288 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 30-46.

289 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 31-35.

290 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “Smell.”

291 Jabr 2011.

292 Appel and Cocroft 2014.

293 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 92-94.

294 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 99-109.

295 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “Smell.”

296 Karban 2015, pp. 110-21.

297 Karban 2015, pp. 129-30.

298 Walling 2000.

299 Grémiaux et al. 2014.

300 Mancuso and Viola 2015, pp. 76ff.

301 Trewavas 2003, pp. 3-5.

302 Dangl and Jones 2001.

303 Jones and Dangl 2006.

297

304 Waterhouse et al. 2001.

305 Boehm 2012; Freeman and Beattie 2008; Jones and Dangl 2006.

306 Karban 2015, pp. 17-22, 50-58; Freeman and Beattie 2008.

307 Lam et al. 2001; Karban 2015, pp. 50-58.

308 Karban 2015, pp.17-26.

309 Walling 2000; Wu and Baldwin 2009; Freeman and Beattie 2008.

310 Whitfield 2001; Walling 2000.

311 Kassier et al. 2004; Freeman and Beattie 2008; Russell 2002; Ryan 2001; Farmer 2001.

312 Linsenmair et al. 2001; Ryan 2001; Farmer 2001.

313 Chamovitz 2012, pp. 35-45; Appel and Cocroft 2014; Babikova et al. 2013; Barto et al. 2012;

Karban 2015, pp. 91-97.

314 Karban 2015, pp. 133-35.

315 Karban 2015, pp. 133-35.

316 Song et al. 2015; Simard and Durall 2004.

317 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “Plants Recognize Their Kin.”

318 Karban 2015, pp. 135-38

319 Vertosick 2002, pp. 12-13.

320 Pollan 2013.

321 Legg and Hutter 2007.

322 Stenhouse 1974, p.3.

323 Silvertown, and Gordon 1989, pp. 349-50.

324 Trewavas 2003, p. 4; Gilroy and Trewavas 2001, p. 307.

325 Trewavas 2003, p. 1-2.

298

326 Darwin 1880, p. 573.

327 Karban 2015, pp. 69-77.

328 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “The Intelligent Plant;” Baluska et al. 2010.

329 Trewavas 2003, p. 3; Trewavas 2005, pp. 414-19.

330 Karban 2015, pp. 78-82.

331 Mancuso and Viola 2015, “Touch.”

332 Gagliano et al. 2014.

333 Karban 2015, pp. 33-40.

334 Sultan 2000; Gilroy and Trewavas 2001, p. 308.

335 Karban 2015, pp. 31-33.

336 Leopold 1993, p. 165.

337 Tallamy 2009, p. 28.

338 A film by Bill Mason (National Film Board of Canada, 1964).

339 Berleant 1997, p. 99.

340 Ibid., pp. 172-73.

341 Kaplan 1973; Zhang, Howell and Iyer 2014.

342 Kim et al. 2010.

343 Ulrich et al. 1991

344 Hartig et al. 1991; Kuo 2001; Tennessen and Cimprich 1995.

345 Moore 1981.

346 Ulrich 1984; Verderber 1986; Verderber and Reuman 1987; Zhang, Howell and Iyer 2014.

347 Atchley, Strayer, and Atchley 2012.

348 Weinstein, Przybylski, and Richard 2009.

299

349 Kuo 2001; Kuo and Sullivan 2001a and 2001b.

350 Mitchell and Popham 2008.

351 Donovan et al. 2013.

352 Berleant 1997, pp. 75-76.

353 Eaton 1989, pp. 164-65.

354 Visser et al. 2014.

355 Taylor, Kuo, and Sullivan 2001.

356 Taylor, Kuo, and Sullivan 2002.

357 Hattie, John et al. 1997.

358 Hoffman1992, p. 18.

359 Ibid., p. 38.

360 Ibid., p. 50.

361 Piff et al. 2015.

362 Hepburn 2004, p. 59.

363 Hepburn 1993, pp. 65 and 69.

364 Berleant 1997, p. 169.

365 Hepburn 1984, p. 140.

366 Leibniz 2017 [1714], pp. 4ff.

367 Wittgenstein 1984, p. 86.

368 Hepburn 1984, pp. 134-35.

369 Ibid., pp. 140-41.

370 Atran and Medin 2008, p. 36

371 Ibid., pp. 38 & 43.

300

372 Ibid., pp. 138-40.

373 Ibid., pp. 20-21.

374 Dewey 1988, p. 28

375 Costanza et al. 1997.

376 Berry 1993, p. 152.

377 Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo 2017.

378 Kahn 2002, p. 106.

379 “Fish and Shellfish Advisories and Safe Eating Guidelines.” EPA. https://www.epa.gov/choose- fish-and-shellfish-wisely/fish-and-shellfish-advisories-and-safe-eating-guidelines. Accessed 25

September 2017.

380 Montgomery 2007b, p. 227.

381 Diamond 2005, p. 489.

382 Leopold 1993, p. 147.

383 Pala 2008, p. 50.

384 Hill 2010, pp. 236-285.

385 http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/psr-coal-fullreport.pdf, p.32

386 Goulson 2010.

387 Hassan et al. 2005.

388 See Benyus 2009.

389 Hassan et al. 2005, table 10.1, p. 275.

390 Healy 1974.

391 Caldwell 1993a, pp. 184-85

392 Caldwell. 1993b, pp. 93-4.

301

393 Caldwell 1970, p. 205.

394 Caldwell. 1993b, p. 95.

395 Leibniz 2017 [1686], 9.

396 Rolston 2004.

397 Gould 2002, p. 1342.

398 Wilson 1992, p. 345.

399 Wilson 2002, p. 21.

400 Dennett 1995, pp. 520–21.

401 Turner and Sabloff 2012, Montgomery 208b, pp. 49-81.

402 Barnosky et al. 2012.

403 Ceballos et al. 2017.

302