NATURE

Wisdom Lives in the Wilderness

We’d be able to see the forest if only all those damn trees weren’t in the way. Let’s cut them down.

That’s the kind of twisted wisdom our “civilized” way of thinking prescribes. But there must be a more coherent way, more tied into the reality of human needs—a kind of understanding that would make better predictions, feel friendlier, take nature into account.

My thinking in this direction began during a recent cold spell with temperatures in the 30s and torrential rains. “How do the wild animals deal with weather like this,” I wondered. And then I tried to think what human life must have been like 40,000 years ago, before towns and cities, before agriculture, before temples. Had I ever seen a depiction of that?

Well, I’d seen Hollywood’s versions of prehistoric life, usually with pretty girls in skimpy clothing being chased by club-wielding troglodytes, but nothing that seemed realistic. Oh! Wait…I had seen something that revealed what the world must have been like in the deep time of prehistory. It was Akira Kurosawa’s film, “Dersu Uzala,” and it won Best Foreign Film at the 1976 Academy Awards.

It was based on the 1923 memoir by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, about his venture into the Russian Far East over the course of multiple expeditions in the early 20th century. During his Siberian explorations, he forms a deep friendship with Dersu Usala, a trapper who helps him navigate the wilderness of the taiga.

The film reveals the taiga to be a place of great beauty and great danger. Dersu Usala’s understanding of the wild nature that has been his home for his whole life saves Arsenyev from certain death from cold and exposure. Dersu Usala senses when a life-threatening storm is beginning to brew and shows Arsenyev how to construct a shelter from reeds and materials at hand. Dersu Usala’s wisdom comes from his understanding of nature, just as it evolved in the animals that survive long, brutal winters.

Nature is the great teacher. Not only in Siberia, but everywhere on this planet. Nature might have a hard time getting her wisdom through the chain-link fences of modern pedagogy, but she’s there, squiggling under the turf of commercial grasses on suburban lawns, fitting her rats and pigeons into barren cityscapes. Her thunder and lightning assaults our cities and towns as well as the wild forests. Her ocean waves roll equally onto private beaches groomed by paid employees and empty beaches on Pacific atolls. Nature is water that will wear down solid rock and turn craggy shards of granite into smooth boulders. Though slippery and fluid, it has power to shatter glass bottles if frozen when full and stoppered. Nature is water that runs through all her plants and animals; the same recycled water that has run through all her creatures since the beginning of time. Water, in fact, is the carrier of life.

Nature produces trees with arrays of leaves that absorb sunlight and send its energy down pathways to the chloroplasts, the little green engines that use this energy to transform carbon dioxide from the air and molecules of water into sugar.

The leaves check all their many pathways for the sun’s energy to reach the chloroplasts, looking to find and use the most efficient one that produces the most sugar for the least amount of energy. But it doesn’t evaluate them one at a time. It evaluates all of them at once in a few femtoseconds (a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second).

In other words, leaves aren’t just mechanical solar panels, they are bioelectrical quantum computers. While physicists build quantum computers that must remain dry, very cold, and use monumental amounts of energy to operate, leaves work at ambient temperatures in wet environments using only sunlight. That’s nature for you—always there first and right at home in the real world.

Right now, our society is awash in waves of anxiety about artificial intelligence taking over many of the jobs available to our workforce, and the social disruption and permanent underclass they may engender. While the swift development of ever-more powerful AI is sure to change our workplace, its tech-based intelligence has limits. For instance, its immense advice on planting crops in the right soil in places where the weather cooperates may be intellectually helpful to farmers and gardeners, but it misses the human experience of digging in the soil, touching plants, bonding with the life of crops, feeding real food to real people, feeling the hot sun on bare skin, smelling the ozone after a thunderstorm passes violently through a field of corn, finding quail eggs nestled in dry straw down in green growing grass, hunting deer on a frosty December morning, spits of hail finding their way under your collar and trickling ice water down your back; field dressing that buck’s carcass and smelling its guts, getting your hunting clothes speckled with blood as you haul the carcass out to the road where your car is parked, then driving through town to show the buck strapped to your front bumper to all the folks who stayed in bed that morning—none of this is available to AI and never will be. Nature exists beyond the world of information processing and when you are immersed in it, it engages all your senses. It puts you into the reality of the swirl of wind, weather, visual beauty and visible horror, mud and water, meat and bone, nature’s soundscapes and life’s activities. Artificial intelligence is, after all, artificial.

Nature cares for the whole earth’s ecosystem. If there’s a life-form that serves a purpose in the world’s ecology, that purpose will be preserved and protected within the natural system it inhabits. Top carnivorous predators enhance the health of their local herds of herbivores by culling he weak, sick, injured, or incautious, while at the same time managing herd size. Mountain lions will reduce a herd of deer until the mountain lion population dwindles for lack of prey. Dwindling mountain lion populations will allow deer herds to grow, which then allows more predators to eat. Both deer herds and mountain lion populations reach the fine balance we call health.

In the plant kingdom, we often see cooperative systems at work. Mycorrhizal fungi colonize the roots of many plants to absorb the sweet, sugary exudate that the roots secrete. The fungus has no chlorophyll and so can’t make its own sugar, which it needs to grow. The roots supply it with sugar, and in return, the fungus extends its hyphae—long filaments—into the soil around the plant whose roots are feeding it. It grows well beyond the extent of the roots and gathers scarce nutritive elements like phosphorus, potassium, and water and sends them back to feed the plants whose roots keep the fungus alive.

Another balance in nature is how she apportions her resources. I have four cherry trees in my orchard. In dry years, the trees bear enormous amounts of cherries, giving the lion’s share of her energy to reproduction, lest drought kill or damage the trees. Each cherry pit is a chance for a young tree to grow. Yet in years of abundant rainfall, where excessive growth is possible, she cuts back the yield of fruit in favor of increased woody growth of branches and trunk and roots. The trees may be covered in blossoms, but little fruit is set. The trees produce fruit or woody growth depending on what they feel is the best strategy for survival.

Another symbiotic relationship involves a class of plants called legumes--alfalfa, peas, beans, clover, and others—and rhizobia, a group of nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria that colonize the root hairs of legumes. These bacteria form colonies in the roots and take nitrogen molecules (N₂₎ from the air, split its two nitrogen atoms apart, and, with hydrogen from water, put them back together as ammonia (NH₃), which is a fertilizer that plants need for strong green growth. At no cost to the farmer.

Organic and Biodynamic gardeners and farmers long ago learned that their fields and gardens are full of these kinds of symbiotic processes, all working to support the health of the whole system.

Thousands—millions!—of nature’s interactive processes are operating throughout our planet: underground, at the surface, among all creatures, and throughout the inorganic world of rocks and weather. Nature is the way the planet operates for the maximum health of all creatures, plants or animals, large or small.

The earth is naturally seeded with resources—not everywhere in abundance but differentially depending on climate. If there’s a resource, there will be a creature using it for food, shelter, or nesting materials. Since every creature has its place in the interlocking web of life that covers the earth, nature doesn’t favor one creature over another. She’s interested in promoting the greatest biodiversity so that the whole system works best. Where it fails and creatures die out, it’s because of changes in conditions (like an extended drought), an outbreak of reproductive capacity of a predatory species, a disease organism (for which nature provides a resource in the form of its victims), or a balancing of one of her symbiotic systems.

These insights into natural processes lead organic-minded farmers to avoid life-disrupting herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals designed to kill members of nature’s communities. Instead, they rely on a rich diversity of creatures to set up checks and balances that control pest outbreaks naturally. Herbicides can damage more than the weeds they’re intended to control (studies show Roundup, the world’s most common herbicide, may cause cancer in humans). Weeds can be controlled by disking or smothering them with nutritious mulch.

Agricultural chemicals must be re-applied routinely—often every year. But a biodiverse system of checks and balances is sustainable, meaning it continues to function on its own with little help from humans. In other words, humans can farm and garden by augmenting nature’s ecologies, reaping the benefits that nature provides to the wilderness.

As some put it, “Nature knows best.”

That’s where we as a species need to turn for the least resource-expensive and most effective ideas to ensure adequate ecological health for the land from which we derive life. We are, after all, just another of nature’s children, entitled to no more or less of her life support than any other creature.

In return for her support for our lives, we need to live on this earth in a way that supports her. She’ll teach us how if we care to observe her with enough understanding.

We can start by understanding that nature’s processes and impetuses are not something outside ourselves. They flow in our veins and arteries. They are found in our organs, most of whose purposes we already know, although there are bodily systems we still don’t grasp. Her wisdom flows in our bodies the way water flows in the ocean. Our intelligence and understanding are incomplete, yet our thinking can become universal because nature is universal.

A mother who has come to term and is about to deliver a baby will undergo a rigorous understanding of who is in control when the contractions are strong and the pelvic structure is widening to accommodate the baby’s passage into the world. She can fight it or surrender to it, but in the end, it is nature who has devised the process and will have her way.

And so it is with everything that’s natural in life.

###