Neither Alone Nor Unacknowledged

9/9/21

Sep 10, 2021

Hello everyone: For this week’s curated Anthropocene news, I want to enthusiastically point you to two brilliant, wonderful essays:

1) “What Slime Knows” in Orion by Lacy M. Johnson, about slime molds and our longstanding myths about hierarchy in taxonomy. Here’s a sample:

“Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell that can grow as large as a bath mat, has no brain, no sense of sight or smell, but can solve mazes, learn patterns, keep time, and pass down the wisdom of generations.”

And check out more of Alison Pollack’s beautiful slime mold photos here.

2) “Returning the Gift” in Humans and Nature by Robin Wall Kimmerer, about realigning ourselves with life rather than against it. For example:

“Paying attention to other beings—recognizing their incredible gifts of photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation, migration, metamorphosis, and communication across miles—is humbling and leads inescapably to the understanding that we are surrounded by intelligences other than our own: beings who evolved here long before we did, and who have adapted innovative, remarkable ways of being that we might emulate, through intellectual biomimicry, for sustainability.”

And 3), if you have time, check out an interview with scientist Edith Widder, who I quoted last week. Here she talks about her groundbreaking work photographing deep-sea bioluminescent species. Even if you don’t plan on reading it, click on the link just to see the incredible photos.

A deep-sea shrimp spews bioluminescent chemicals at a viperfish. Edith Widder

Enjoy. Now on to this week’s main story:

I’ve been ruminating for a while now on the term “species loneliness.” Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about it in Braiding Sweetgrass, and Robert Macfarlane talks about it in Underland. It’s been around for a while, apparently, since a 1993 article in Environmental Ethics by Michael Vincent McGinnis, who revisited it in a 2012 article about the loss of California landscapes with this stark phrase: “Species loneliness in a wounded landscape.” There are two layers of sadness in the phrase, which I conjure up when I imagine (or remember, really) walking through a clear-cut. There’s the destruction of vast swathes and multiple generations of the community of life, and then there’s the emotional grit of complicity.

I’m curious what comes to mind for each of you if you’re hearing the term “species loneliness” for the first time. Its intent, as I understand it, runs much deeper than my example above. As the word “species” indicates, the term does not simply identify our mistakes but seeks to name a human emotion rooted in our separation from life and landscapes. Macfarlane defines it (on Twitter) as “the sense of isolation and sadness arising from human estrangement from and extinction of other species.” Kimmerer describes it as “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.” Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and Our Wild Calling, among others, calls it “the gnawing fear that we are alone in the universe, with a desperate hunger for connection with other life.” And McGinnis refers to it as a “collective anxiety” suffered by “disabled creatures.” He means us.

So, to merge these definitions: Species loneliness is a sadness, a fear, a disability, an anxiety, an estrangement, and an awareness of our estrangement. That awareness makes it a cognitive condition to some degree – a melancholy emanating out of the knowledge of what we’ve done – but largely, I think, it exists as a natural response to the impoverished species-specific world we’re creating. We don’t remember the last time we spent unclocked hours outside; we don’t have a tree or a meadow or pond that we love and repeatedly visit; we don’t know the names or qualities of the plants in our yard; or we’re not sure that life on Earth will welcome us when we do venture out.

Having said all that, I wonder if we do need to know much of the litany of loss to feel some of the grief. Or do our ancient relationships with plant and animal exist deep enough in our genes to infect even the seemingly oblivious urban human? I think Macfarlane, Kimmerer, and Louv would all vote for the latter. Louv explains:

“All of us are meant to live in a larger community, an extended family of other species… An individual or family cut off from positive social contacts with other people is more vulnerable to alcoholism, depression, bullying, and abuse and is more easily controlled. Cult leaders understand this too well. Likewise, our species’ vulnerability to all manner of pathologies grows with our distancing from other species. Without contact with other-than-human kith and kin, the family of humans loses comfort, companionship, and perhaps even the sense of a higher power, however one defines it.”

Can we call species loneliness an evolutionary emotion? I ask because to think for even a moment that humanity’s self-involved inward spiral of the last few centuries bears any resemblance whatsoever to the previous million years’ coexistence with animals and plants is an act of blindness. A good question to ask is whether that blindness is born out of the same blindness that got us here in the first place, or out of the forgetfulness that results from living alone for too long.

When I say evolutionary emotion I also mean a physical reality that we feel. There are a plethora of studies that show that connecting with nature – even if just bird watching or walking under trees in a park – reduces anxiety and stress and increases our sense of well-being. This is particularly important for kids, both for health in the short-term and self-reliance in the long-term. Children living in abstraction from the Earth grow up to increase the abstraction. It happened to our grandparents, to our parents, and to us, and it’s happening to today’s kids.

Almost two centuries ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in his essay “Nature,” about the necessity of walks into nature with his usual mix of concision and mysticism: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.” That relation, that connection, however silly it may seem here in the image of a Harvard man in starched collar nodding to a Black-eyed Susan, is essential. Of course Emerson wasn’t distracted by notifications on his smartphone nor, as a wealthy white man in a rural world, was he attuned to the difficulty of making such relations in 19th century slums, but then as now we’re all somewhere on the spectrum of species loneliness, and thus somewhere also on the spectrum of “occult relations” with other life. We live in our boxes, but we’re always able to step out and reconnect.

Emerson’s nodding at plants reminds me of Barry Lopez making small embarrassed bows at the bloodied roadkill he stopped to remove from the highways and set into prairie grass in a brief impromptu funeral rite. What he was doing for them he was also doing for himself: acknowledging relationship and making meaning of the loss. Which is what we all need to be doing now to reduce our isolation.

So how did we start down this road toward species loneliness? How much time do you have…? It’s part of the story beneath the story of civilization. I could hypothesize about the shift from flocks of animist gods which inhabited the real world to a monocultural God which landlords over some vast abstraction, or I could take a deep dive into the cultural shift that turned landscapes into species-specific agriculture. (Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts.) However it happened, we shifted from belonging to the world to assuming the world belonged to us. We’re left now to cope with an actual aloneness created from centuries of an imagined aloneness, a childlike fiction that pushed us (and pushes us still) to rebuild reality around the lie that we are somehow special, that we are somehow above and outside the relationships which bind all life together.

The good news is that science reminds us on a daily basis that the mystics were right all along: we’re not separate from the community of life. We’re woven into it and dependent upon it, even as in the Anthropocene we eat away at it like eight billion moths in a closet. All of our self-centered ideas of separation (our intelligence is somehow better than or distinct from others; our fate is somehow unrelated to that of plants and animals; our future is not subject to the laws of ecology; etc.) have fallen like scales from our eyes. Our consciousness is at least as dependent upon our microbiome as it is upon our senses. Tool-making, puzzle-solving, complex language, and even story-telling can all be found in other species.

Not only are we not superior, but “Superiority is not an inherent reality of the natural world,” as Lacy M. Johnson explains in her essay “What Slime Knows” (link above). More importantly, symbiosis and inter-species relationships may be more central to natural selection than the Darwinian idea of species. More ironically, our planet-altering actions rooted in our ideas of separateness have only proved the opposite: as species disappear and the climate shifts and civilization destabilizes, we are forced to acknowledge the relationships that bind our fate to that of others. In the meantime, though, the impacts of our mistaken hypotheses are widespread and far-reaching.

Kimmerer writes that “We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night,” and I know she’s right, but I feel another human trait at work here beside fear and arrogance: complacency. We are deeply and weirdly comfortable – loneliness notwithstanding – living in these abstract spaces. Not just the comfy, brightly lit ones amidst our fear of darkness, but also stagnant midafternoon city streets and fluorescent office cubicles and Antarctic bases and internet chat rooms. Our astonishingly rapid acceptance of a life staring at screens speaks volumes about our cognitive rootlessness, even as our souls and bodies protest. (We imagine a life on Mars as the next logical step for culture, though that’s as irrational as it is unlikely.) A screen saver with gorgeous nature porn seems to help, as do nature proxies like a World Wildlife Fund calendar on the fridge, Sir David Attenborough in the Netflix queue, a dog on the couch, and a houseplant on the windowsill.

Despite all the loss, despite our bulldozing so much life toward impoverishment or extinction, we are still not alone. Relationships are as available as the nearest tree, bird, park, forest, beach, and hill. Pets are even more available. Richard Louv writes that we are “self-medicating with animals,” and that in the U.S. growth in pet ownership has outstripped total household growth. But as much as I love my dog and value that relationship, I think she and other pets are mirrors of our transformative powers rather than conduits for the essential qualities of the independent community of life.

Pets, photographs, and houseplants are not enough, and we know it. We are an increasingly lonely species, but we don’t have to be. The social isolation of the digital age seems like one more mirror of our estrangement from nature. The social media/smartphone nexus feels to me like a digital zoo, where we perform in small-screen captivity for peanuts of attention. “Human beings,” McGinnis writes, “remain isolated actors in an earthly cage.”

Life in the Anthropocene is not enough because our individual health and societal health depend entirely on a healthy planet. It’s not enough because our evolution dictates that we live in a vibrant community rather than an industrial food chain. It’s not enough because we feel – we know – that it’s not enough.

So what do we do? We de-escalate our destruction, we reprioritize the meaning of our lives to include nonhuman lives, we slowly and responsibly reduce population, we replant forests and grasslands, we rebuild wetlands, we cite the science, we make art that incentivizes all of the above, and we get ourselves and others outside to pick up the threads of the tapestry that still surrounds us. (Louv notes that some physicians, especially pediatricians and psychologists, are writing “nature prescriptions” for their patients.) We learn the names of our nonhuman neighbors and, as Kimmerer suggests, we get in the habit of calling out to them in meaningful ways.

In doing all of these things, we must remember that we are neither alone nor unacknowledged. Case in point: As my mother and I sat outside talking recently, she raised her finger to make a point and a mourning cloak butterfly landed on it.

We also have to remember to keep our spirits up in difficult times. Our loneliness tends to negatively define our attitude toward the natural world. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit,” says Emerson in “Nature.” “To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape…” As the calamity of the 21st century unfolds for us, and the natural world simultaneously suffers and includes us in its suffering, we’ll have to work even harder to reconnect with nature. We will need an optimism of the will even as we harbor a realistic pessimism of the intellect.

It’s always a good idea to read some poems by Mary Oliver, poems that guide us back into the wild around us. I always wonder how much can art do, though, whether book, poem, film, play, or essay like this one. It can confirm what those of us who worry/think about this already suspect, that we need to rebuild connections, re-create community with life at large. But can it convert skeptics, convince the apathetic, roust out the uninformed and unfeeling masses? Who will read Emerson’s fine lines on our occult relationships and thence leap up from their gaming computer and move briskly outside to embrace fields and woods?

We don’t have a choice. We need to tell new stories that are really new versions of our most ancient stories: We belong, we’re home, we have work to do. We need to give voice to the world we inhabit. We have to work to counteract the fundamental flaw in our languages that portray trees and bears and slime molds and lakes as “it.” We have to animate them to give them meaning. Or as Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it:

“…in our Potawatomi language and indeed many other indigenous languages, there is no “it” for birds or berries. The language does not divide the world into him and her, but into animate and inanimate. And the grammar of animacy is applied to all that lives: sturgeon, mayflies, blueberries, boulders, and rivers. We refer to other members of the living world with the same language that we use for our family. Because it is our family.”

The writer Amitav Ghosh explains that rather than being irrelevant, artists are central to rewriting civilization:

“This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.”

There are many, many ways to justify urgency in these times, but let me add another: Other species are likely experiencing their own loneliness in the midst of our disruptions.

Field Guide to the Anthropocene

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