Linked through Story: Natural Science, Nature Writing, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge John Tallmadge John Tallmadge ([email protected]) is a nature writer and independent scholar of environmental literature, 6538 Teakwood Court, Cincinnati OH 45224 USA. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) has become topical in discussions of natural history as a key component of environmental research, education, and practice. Likewise, contemporary nature writing has drawn on it to illuminate and critique Western values, practices, and beliefs. This paper explores the function of narrative in the mythological and classification systems of tribal peoples as well as in Western science, arguing that story may provide a useful way of understanding and linking traditional ecological knowledge with scientific and literary natural history. The argument draws on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the differences between scientific and mythological thinking, Martin Buber’s doctrine of relationships, and Barry Lopez’s ideas about the interaction between landscape and narrative. Citation.—Tallmadge, J. 2011. Linked through story: Natural science, nature writing, and traditional ecological knowledge. Journal of Natural History Education and Experience 5: 49-57. work (Pierotti and Wildcat 1998, Rinkevich et al. 2011). The natural world demands a response that rises from Despite manifest differences in geography and culture, the wild unconscious depths of the human soul. – such knowledge systems all rely on direct experience Thomas Berry (1999) with the world to provide, test, and refine information: they are grounded in particular places at local scales; Recent discussions about revitalizing natural history they consider humans as members of a larger have crossed into fertile ground at the margins where community that includes both the material and the normal science meets literature and anthropology. On spiritual worlds; and they include moral, ethical, and the one hand is nature writing, which has enjoyed an religious considerations (Barnhardt and Kawagley extraordinary renaissance over the past three decades, 2005). and on the other is traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which has been proven increasingly useful to TEK has much in common with Western ecological designers of environmental research, education, and science, including direct field observation, testing, policy. systems of classification, and, often, corresponding results, but it differs in its wholistic world view, local Contemporary nature writing has adapted the subject focus, and inclusion of spiritual and moral concerns that matter and methods of natural history to pressing Western science normally eschews in favor of the arts ethical, moral, and even religious issues. TEK has or humanities. Most significantly, however, both kinds deepened or qualified the results of conventional of system rely on stories. This is particularly evident in scientific inquiry. At a recent symposium convened by TEK, which is transmitted through personal narrative as the Natural History Network, participants wondered well as myth, that is, through both individual and how, apart from a congruence of results, TEK and communal stories. Western natural history could be linked. This paper offers “story” as a basis for thinking about such a But story is deeply at work in Western science as well. connection. The very term “natural history” embodies the notion of story. A history is a record of what happened; it “Traditional ecological knowledge” has emerged as an presupposes characters, setting, themes, and a sense of umbrella term for the comprehensive, wholistic, local unity or significance, as well as a historian, that is, a understandings and practices that indigenous people storyteller. The qualifier “natural” further sets a marker develop about the landscapes in which they live and between the subject at hand (“nature”) and other kinds The Journal of Natural History Education and Experience Tallmadge www.jnhe.org Volume 5 (2011) 49 of history, such as sacred history or human history, A relationship can be thought of as a series of which can be further subdivided into categories such as transactions or exchanges unfolding in time. Ecological religious, political, cultural, military, intellectual, and so relationships are ongoing exchanges of energy, forth. nutrients, and information among neighboring organisms and their habitat. Likewise, human Natural history is commonly understood as the practice interpersonal relationships are exchanges that transpire of observing wild creatures in their native habitats, over time. They may be invisible, but they endure and classifying them, and studying their origins, behavior, manifest through their effects a persistent character, like and interrelationships. This sort of activity has been standing waves in a stream. They also radically practiced by humans for ages. As Lévi-Strauss (1966) determine the quality of a person’s life. That, I believe, observes, following Durkheim and Mauss (1963), all is why people invented stories: to make relationships cultures develop elaborate and sophisticated systems for visible and tangible so that they could be remembered, classifying natural phenomena. Likewise, story appears studied, understood, shared, and preserved. Because to be a universal activity. Its processes, features, and stories reveal truth as a pattern rather than a proposition, dynamics, like those of language itself (grammar, they can overcome differences of thought and character syntax, vocabulary), transcend cultural differences. “by creating a space that contains both, as ecosystems provide niches for mortal enemies” (Tallmadge 1997). Indeed, story is the oldest and most enduring technology Or, as Lévi-Strauss (1967) puts it, myth provides “a that humans have devised for constructing, preserving, logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” and transmitting knowledge. It is still the primary way that humans make sense of the world. What can account Few thinkers have pondered relationships more deeply for its universality and persistence? Lopez (1989) says than Martin Buber (1970), who maintains that life that a story reveals truth as a pattern rather than a consists of more than experience and instrumentality proposition. He relates these patterns to ecological alone. Humans are relational beings, and their relations relationships in the landscape and accounts for the can occur in one of two modes, which he calls I-It and I- salubrious and healing effects of story in terms of Thou. I-It relations are those of subject and object, connecting these facts to the “inner landscape” of the while I-Thou relations are person to person. The former listener. Sometimes, Lopez (1990) writes, a person creates the world of experience, the latter the world of needs a story more than food to stay alive. The Inuit “presence” or encounter. In life, people move back and word for storyteller, isumataq, means “a person who can forth between these two modes. Buber says, further, create the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself” that such relations can arise in three areas: life with (Lopez 1986). With respect to landscape, Lopez further nature, life with human beings, and life with spiritual observes (following Yi-fu Tuan) that “it is precisely beings. Natural science, I would suggest, concerns what is invisible in the land that makes what is merely itself primarily with the first, natural history with both empty space to one person a place to another” (Lopez the first and second, and mythology with all three. 1986). He is referring here to memories, both Story links them all; it is their common ground. individual and social, that link people to the landscape. Both these and the ecological relations that give the With respect to science, historian R.G. Collingwood landscape its coherence are invisible, manifested only (1945) argues that because science reports on the world through their effects. as it is observed, recording and interpreting experience, it must be considered a historical discipline. But story can make them visible, and a moment’s Experimental science records and interprets what has reflection suggests that the things that matter most, that been experienced under controlled conditions; it aspires give life its flavor and quality – the things that really to objectivity, validates observations by their lead to happiness, well-being, and a sense of purpose – replicability, and tests interpretations by their predictive are not material things like wealth or possessions, but success. Lévi-Strauss (1966) adds that science works rather relationships, which cannot be weighed, by metonym, whereby a single event is taken to measured, or grasped with the senses. Relationships can represent an entire class of events that, in turn, reflects certainly affect the physical world, but they are not the operation of abstract and changeless “natural laws.” material things in themselves; in that sense, they are not From this perspective, the ideal story is one in which the phenomena and they don't exist in the same way that observer is rendered fully transparent, or even absent objects of scientific inquiry do. They can’t be directly altogether, and the preferred idiom is mathematics. As seen or touched, but they have dramatic effects. Galileo (1615) argued to the Grand Duchess Christina, the Book of Nature cannot be read by the uninitiated, for it is written in the language of geometry. The Journal of Natural History Education and Experience Tallmadge www.jnhe.org