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See other Writings ...And the Future is Now (IV)by Jim Nollman (2003) Part (I) Introduction, Debbie Mathew, Jim Cummings, Lillian Cooper, and Shan Wells, Part (II) John K. Grande, Michael Vitti, Marion Weber/Danny and Sandra Hobson, Peter Fend, Part (III) Tim Collins, Henry Corning, Aviva Rahmani, Laura Audrey _____________________________________________
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. Thereafter, any general vote among the council members included an equal vote cast by a representative who spoke for the needs, the survival, and the dignity of those who would live a hundred and fifty years in the future. For the Iroquois, the generational format of their council defined a longterm relationship between government and ecology. The rights of future generations was not precisely an issue of policy because it was, instead, the context of policy. Conservation was the foundation upon which their culture was built. The medium was the message.
In the process of blueprinting our own American system of government, Thomas Jefferson was said to have drawn much inspiration from the Iroquois version of representational democracy. It makes one wonder about things that might have been. For example, had Jefferson written the rights of future generations into the U.S. bill of rights, would we, who live ten generations after Jefferson, still be dependent upon non-renewable fossil fuels which causes global warming? Or imagine what life would be like today if, a hundred years ago, we had set in place a public mechanism to test the ecological value of the automobile or, fifty years ago, the social value of the television set. But there was no debate. Unlike the Iroquois, our parents and our great-grandparents had no public mechanism that spoke to the long term effects of their inventions. Nor do have any mechanism today to examine genetic engineering, or nanotechnology. Rather, we remain saddled to the little questioned tenet of "progress", and it makes us deaf to anyone who would speak intuitively for the rights and needs of future generations. Certainly, the majority of our elected officials are deaf. One might ask how the future would be different if we started electing politicians possessed of better hearing. Whereas wildness was central to the Iroquois' daily perception of the world, it is reduced to the margins of our own and so we have little memory of what it is we have lost. Because language reflects perception, it is possible to locate certain signs of this perceptual loss in our language. We find, for instance, that our culture often uses the term natural resources as if it 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 reflects public policy. Today's wilderness policies is molded by men of power who get their information from data sheets and their money from commercial interests, and who 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 does data actually tell the story of nature? Echoes reverberate through the halls of congress declaring in a self-assured language that, yes, certainly, those are precisely the measures our system of government uses to determine wilderness legislation. How else could we do it? Anyone have a better idea? Actually, somebody possessed of a different language that mirrors a different perception of nature, might make the observation that our need to gather data is always going to reflect a parallel need to exploit that data. Put another way, data makes power even as it numbs the senses. The legislator's data sheets are prepared by biologists whose own perceptions about nature have been formed by the same paradigm. They are the data scouts. But as they wring their observations and their conclusions dry of all subjectivity and personality, the message loses vitality, and therefore a certain truth-telling capability better told through story. Policy ends up reflecting science which reflects culture reflecting language, and perception which completes a circle by reflecting policy. Each spoke of this wheel influences every spoke over and over and over. The wheel suggests that our culture's much sought after objectivity actually reflects a point of view, a relative and a cultural truth. Data may be objective, but this objectivity is, itself a fraud, a semantic objectivity. Something of a fraud because it offers a distorted view of nature, in its commonplace role as an arbiter of ecological truth. Data remains data. The culture assigns much utilitarian value to its numbers, its resources, and too little value to the idea that nature might possess some inherent value apart from ourselves. Not being part of ourselves, the data-driven view ceases to exist the moment our attention flies to something else. Tragically, our attention is too often elsewhere. How else could the economy appear to be growing strong while nature is everywhere in full retreat? Current wilderness policy overwhelmingly reflects these data-driven perceptions. The policy makers consider it unauthoritative, impractical, or simply impossible to legislate policy guided, not by data, but by compassion and a sense of place. They seldom act when an earnest non-expert rises up from the throng to deliver an emotional harangue that declares essentially, that some policy is simply wrongheaded. "If it's wrong," declare the legislators in response, "where's the data to prove it?" Obviously, something crucial is amiss when those who do "prove it" use their proof to implement policies that implement the aerial shooting of wolves, the virtual annihilation of pelagic dolphins in the cause of pet food, the nuclear stockpile. But no time soon will legislators acknowledge their inability to govern a nature that is not a synonym for natural resources? No time soon will they acknowledge that the expert who steps forward is, too often, no expert at all. Lately we are told that the science of ecology--which illuminates the linkage inherent within nature--will alter the current equation. Because perception reflects policy, one needs to ask if this field of ecology defines the science of linkage or the experience of linkage? Recognizing the difference between the two terms provides a crucial clue about the welfare of future generations. The first term reflects a data-driven relationship to nature. Biologists point their feelers outward; their data describes a linkage that exists outside their own perceptions. Yet because they work so hard to maintain this separation, biologists can never make the environmental crisis go away. They don't approach it directly. Even at their most constructive, they do no better than to retain a certain aloof neutrality. Even those ecologists who display a clear passion to preserve the environment must recognize that their perceptual center is counterproductive to their goal. By contrast, we are right inside this second, subjective definition of ecology. The experience of linkage includes our perceptions, feelings, intuitions, responsibilities, and hopefully our right relation to nature. There is nothing much objective about any of this, which is why it doesn't make for much of a science. A case could be made that the experience of linkage actually refutes objectivity. Objective linkage--the science of ecology--is 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 to the objective pose--new kind of science not driven by data.
Human beings are not born with a natural predilection to destroy nature. But neither does the destruction occur independent of human intentionality. In fact the environmental crisis is something we are taught to perpetuate. Regard the result of our cultural training to be a kind of psychosis. In fact many environmental writers have pointed out that our global resource dependency is an addiction. Gar Smith, writing for Earth Island Journal, described the Exxon Valdez oil spill this way: As the damages mount with each new outrage, oil company officials are beginning to sound like problem drinkers who continue making promises they can't keep...Oil-hauling, like alcoholism is a form of addictive behavior that is inevitably destructive. It's the same old story told by any growth industry that possesses too much marketing momentum to the detriment of the seventh generation. Or an example closer to home: out here in my own rural county, some gun-shooting addict recently started using the endangered trumpeter swans for target practice. Last winter we had 15 swans on the local pond, this winter there are none. The cure for this addictive psychosis may seem heretical to someone educated to honor, without question, the scientific worldview. It is this: the environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. The crisis in perception begins and ends inside each one of us. Retaining the separation between subject and object exacerbates the problem. The cure demands that each of us learn to transform our perceptions about nature. We act connected when we get connected. Our actions, our lifestyle, our policies will all follow. Paraphrasing the Buddhist concept of the Bodhisattava, no one is cured until everyone is cured. This cure does not rely on a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, to arrive and lead us into the promised land. Imagine a future in which the de facto authority our society presently grants to scientists to describe nature and, in fact, speak on nature's behalf, is granted, instead, to our ethicists, musicians, dancers, poets, shamans, even children. What all these seemingly disparate people share in common is a deep subjective trust of life and linkage. These are people who give real power to intuition. Metaphors possess more authority with them than data. These are people who possess a perceptual grasp about the abiding unity of nature because, unlike many politicians and all scientists, they do not attempt to stand outside their subject. Not bringing a shopping list to the task, they comprehend the key difference between nature and natural resources. I am suggesting that the culture's relationship to nature will improve dramatically on the day that Senate subcommittees about land use start consulting with these people as a matter of course. Let us address our best dreamers as wise men and wise women, and then calmly elevate them to the critical position currently occupied by the technocrats: that of defining and explaining nature for the rest of us. Actually, modern Western culture may be unique in not already doing so. Future generations suffer because of it. Everything about our culture recommends that the seventh generation does not actually exist. I would suggest, instead, that they 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. Just like the human heartbeat, the seventh generation is singing its quiet song just about everywhere these days. Teach yourself how to listen. Teach a friend. An enemy.
_____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________
...Part (II)"
...Part (III)"
...Part (IV)" So what do you think? Join the ongoing discussion in the Forum...
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