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July 17, 2014

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Re-understanding man and nature is our ultimate hope to survive our arrogance

DEAR Wang Yong:

I enjoyed your wonderful article that appeared in the July 4 edition of Shanghai Daily. Your words “As I rambled in the shade, watching leaves waving in the wind and hearing insects singing toward each other” brought back wonderful boyhood memories.

My parents built a home in the early ‘40s in a part of Davenport, Iowa, that bordered on acres of uncleared woodland. My brother and I — with a pack of neighborhood boys — would happily spend hours each day in those wonderful woods, surrounded not by the sounds of traffic but of buzzing insects and trilling birds. We buried “treasures” in the ground, and then carefully made maps so we could rediscover them.

We would pretend we were American Indians stalking game as we crept through the brush, listening to and following the rustlings of rabbits and squirrels. Even on the brightest days the forest filtered the sunlight through beautifully glowing leaves that left shifting patterns on the leaf-strewn forest floor.

I remember one ravine, in particular — which, to a boy of 9 or 10 years — seemed challengingly wide and deep — where we loved to take turns swinging over that crevice clinging to a series of thick vines hanging from the old trees. What fun! (By my mid-teens, however, that part of the city had become developed — those woods, with their mysteries, are no more.)

Love for nature

That early acquaintance with, and love for, nature has remained with me all of my life. I continue to be drawn to forests, rivers and waving fields of grain; they nourish my soul in ways that nothing else can. For half of the 30 years I lived in Iowa’s capital city — Des Moines — I was privileged to live in a house where the back yard included a creek with abundant trees and other greenery on both sides. Deer wandered into the city along this greenbelt and, since I fed birds and squirrels daily, they quickly learned to come to our house for snacks.

Your article of the 4th then introduced a more somber note. “The biggest problem of man as a species, especially of modern ‘scientific man,’ is his biased belief that only man can think... Influenced by such a biased belief, man treats many lives of other forms — from plants to animals to our planet — as secondary beings of lesser or zero spiritual capacity... Urbanization and industrialization, for all the convenience they might have brought to human life, tend to prevent man from thinking intelligently about who we are and where we are.”

Yes, and thus having lost that interconnectedness we essentially have our way with other creatures and nature itself as easily as we war on each other.

I read your thoughts as I was midway through a new book by the Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson called “Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the Love of God.” It is an extended meditation on both the intricate wonders Darwin observed in his “Origin of Species” and on how theologians in the Western tradition have — until recently — lost the strong connectivity between human life and all other life on our planet that is present in the books of the Old Testament.

She took her title from this passage of the Book of Job:

Ask the beasts, for them to instruct you,

And the birds of the sky, for them to inform you.

The creeping things of earth will give you lessons

And the fish of the sea provide you an explanation:

There is not one such creature but will know

That the hand of God has arranged things like this!

In his hand is the soul of every living thing

And the breath of every human being!

I am also near completing another of the “Great Courses” from The Teaching Company entitled, “Human History and the First Civilizations,” taught by Professor Brian M. Fagan (of the University of California at Santa Barbara). Dr. Fagan repeatedly stresses the intimate connection between the earliest human hunter-gatherers, the animals they stalked for food, and the plants they utilized to supplement their diet. These people understood that “the beasts” shared a sacred web of life with them.

From their earliest artwork — reaching back almost 40,000 years — we can see that their spiritual consciousness (that is, their appreciation of a reality not limited by time and space) celebrated this connection with the animals as well as with their ancestors.

Somehow, over the centuries, as fewer humans grew or hunted food, and more of us crowded into cities, and as our political and theological theories became arrogant and human-centered, we lost this intimate understanding of our relationship to all other life and, instead, embraced our “right” to dominate and control. Since the onset of the industrial age, especially, humankind has polluted our planet’s air, land and water.

Our spiritual connection with the rest of life has been sundered — as if, in our arrogance, we believe that we can survive without them. Nothing, it appears, is any longer sacred or holy.

And we act accordingly, doing violence not only to nature, but also to each other. In the 20th century, upwards of 60 million people were slaughtered through wars and ethnic cleansings.

Dismally, the 21st century seems destined to follow this bloody path.

Are we collectively crazy?

Are we collectively crazy? Is there some fatal flaw in the composition of the human species? Let me return again to Ms. Johnson’s book.

After spending considerable time laying out anew the process of discovery and reasoning Charles Darwin used over a century and a half ago, she then discusses important advances in understanding how evolution occurred that have unfolded in the intervening years. Unlike their colleagues in the 19th century, scientists now believe that evolutionary advances were not slow and steady but that sudden explosions of new life forms occasionally happened, reflecting relatively rapid adaptation to changing environments.

We humans possess brains of astonishing abilities; many also suspect that it possesses powers of which we are yet unaware (or have forgotten).

Is it possible that — faced with the certain knowledge that we must change our ways of polluting the environment and driving species to extinction or risk extinction ourselves — we are capable of converting to an expanded consciousness in the short time we have left to act?

Sometimes it is in these times of greatest crises that we humans somehow summon the courage to do what we otherwise would shun.

The United States and China could join hands in demonstrating the kind of joint leadership that is required if we are to avert the worst of future disasters.

Can we rediscover in time the sacredness of the world and all of its creatures — including us?  If we come to our senses in time, we will grasp that it is in our ultimate human self-interest: It is our children’s survival that is at stake!

The author has been a college teacher of American history and political science and director of the US National Catholic Rural Life Conference; he served as a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives and retired from public service in the Iowa executive branch in 2004.




 

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