IONS Review #65 • August 2003

Perceiving Nature

Jim Nollman | IONS Noetic Sciences Review | IONS Review #65 |

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The Iroquois concept of the seventh generation has transformed into an important symbol of the deep ecology movement. As the story goes, when the indigenous Iroquois held their council meeting, one member first spoke this invocation: "In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."

For the Iroquois, the generational format of their council defined a long-term relationship between government and ecology. The rights of future generations were not an issue of policy because they were, instead, the context of policy. Conservation was the foundation upon which their culture was built.

Wilderness was central to the Iroquois' daily perception of the world, but today it is reduced to the margins. We have little memory of what we have lost--though the loss is reflected in our language. For instance, our culture often uses the term "natural resources" as though this were synonymous with "nature."

The prevailing educational system instructs our children how to observe nature, while teaching almost nothing about nurturing a sense of communion with nature. These semantics of distinction are telling. Observing suggests standing outside looking in, while communion signifies a conscious linkage.

As language reflects perception, it also influences public policy. Today's wilderness policies are molded by men and women of power who get their information from scientific data sheets, and their money primarily from commercial interests. They then debate legislation inside cavernous, artificially-lit halls within an urban environment. These are well-educated people who, just like the rest of us, have been taught that nature is an observable resource needing to be managed. They regard the nation's relationship to nature as a body of quantifiable information.

But do data actually tell the story of nature?

Actually, somebody with a different language that mirrors a different perception of nature might notice that our need to gather data is always going to reflect a parallel need to exploit the data. Data yield power even as they numb the senses.

The legislator's data sheets are prepared by biologists, many of whom have perceptions of nature formed by the same paradigm. Biologists and ecologists are the data scouts for government. As they try to wring their observations and their conclusions dry of all subjectivity and personality, the message loses vitality. Policy ends up reflecting science that reflects culture, reflecting language and perception, which in turn completes a circle by reflecting policy. Each spoke of this wheel influences every other spoke over and over. Consequently, our culture's much sought after objectivity actually reflects a complex mix of subjective points of view. Data, therefore, should not be viewed as a source of ecological truth.

Our culture assigns a great deal of utilitarian value to numbers--to resources--and too little value to the idea that nature might possess some inherent value apart from its benefits to humans. The data-driven view is capricious: What we deem important depends on where we focus our attention, and tragically, our attention is too often directed elsewhere. These days, policy is far more focused on the economy than ecology, and as a result, nature is everywhere in retreat.

Experiencing Ecology

Lately we have been told that the science of ecology-- which illuminates linkages inherent within nature--will alter the current equation. Because perception reflects policy, one needs to ask whether the field of ecology defines a science of linkage or an experience of linkage. Recognizing the difference provides a crucial clue about the welfare of future generations. A scientific understanding of ecology reflects a data-driven relationship to nature. Biologists tend to point their feelers outward, and their data describe a linkage that exists outside their own perceptions. As long as they work hard to maintain this separation, they can never make the environmental crisis go away. They don't approach it directly. Even at their most constructive, most do no better than retain an aloof neutrality. Even those ecologists who display a clear passion to preserve the environment are burdened by a form of perception counterproductive to their goal.

By contrast, other people live right inside the second, subjective definition of ecology. The experience of linkage includes our perceptions, feelings, intuitions, responsibilities, and right relation to nature. There is nothing much objective about any of this, which is why it doesn't get incorporated into science. In fact, a case could be made that the experience of linkage refutes objectivity-- and therefore the science of ecology (objective linkage) would be an oxymoron. Yet so many ecologists care so deeply about the environment that one might wonder if there could be a new kind of science not shackled by the objective pose--a new kind of science not driven by data.

Imagine a future in which the de facto authority for describing nature (or even for speaking on its behalf) is granted not to scientists (or at least not exclusively so), but to ethicists, musicians, dancers, poets, shamans, and even children. What all these seemingly disparate people share in common is a deep subjective trust of life and linkage. For them, metaphors possess more authority than data. These are people who give real power to intuition. They possess a perceptual grasp of the abiding unity of nature because, unlike many politicians and scientists, they do not attempt to stand outside their subject. They comprehend the key difference between nature and natural resources.

I am suggesting that one culture's relationship to nature will improve dramatically on the day that government subcommittees on land use start consulting with these kinds of people as a matter of course. Let us address our best dreamers and visionaries as wise men and women, and let's turn to them to define and explain nature for the rest of us. Actually, modern Western culture may be unique in not already doing so. Future generations will suffer because of it.

Everything about our culture suggests that the seventh generation does not actually exist. I suggest, instead, that future generations do exist, but for the moment they remain incapable of doing much of anything on their own behalf. They are seated along the temporal sidelines, as it were, holding their collective breath, waiting in anticipation, watching how our future (yours and mine) is going to transmute into their present.

Perhaps we can give them more substance by granting them a story. In this story, they are singing at our doorway like carolers on Christmas Eve. They are singing that we may hear them, that we may undertake the monumental task of changing the way we perceive them. Take a perceptual leap with me: Can you hear them? Listen closely. It's really not much more than a low whisper, a low pulse, not unlike the background hum of the big bang, or perhaps your own heartbeat. Like the human heartbeat, the seventh generation is singing its quiet song just about everywhere these days.

The environmental crisis is a crisis of perception that begins inside each one of us. Scientific separation between subject and object exacerbates the problem. The cure demands that each of us learns to transform our perceptions of nature. We act connected only when we get connected. Our actions, our lifestyles, and our policies all follow from what we perceive.

JIM NOLLMAN is an author, musician, as well as executive director of Interspecies.com. He is currently directing a project to test the hypothesis that beluga whales possess a true language based not on words, but on echolocation content encoded within the patterns of their calls.