Posts
 |
| Enveloping Patterns of Nature Along the edge of Jenness Pond 4/2/14 CC Jean Stimmell |
I recently
wrote about the movie Melancholia,1 pointing out how science has
no magic answers when natural catastrophe strikes. Mark Bittman recently made
the same point in the aftermath of the new, alarming UN report2 about the calamitous reality of climate change, saying:
Science “will not build a big umbrella that will reflect all that excess sun back into
space; “they” will not compress and suck all that carbon underground; “they”
will not release the secret plans for nuclear fusion “they’ve” been hiding.”3
It’s
magical thinking to believe otherwise.
This idea
that science will save us is a mindset that began with the scientific revolution
after Galileo “discovered” that the earth is not the center of the universe,
challenging our old religious sensibilities. The transformation is now
complete: although we give lip service to religion, it is now science who is
our god, the go-to one who provides meaning to our life by mesmerizing us with an
endless stream of new technology and toys, fooling us into believing that with
the help of science we can control our destiny.
Fritjof
Capra,4
influential physicist and systems theorist, is quick to challenge that
assumption, pointing out that while empirical science has produced great
triumphs, the most fundamental questions of life still remain unexplored and
unanswered. In the field of molecular biology, for instance, “biologists still
know very little about how we breathe or how a wound heals or how an embryo
develops into an organism.”
Capra says
science today is looking for ‘the essence of life’ in the wrong places by
focusing on breaking things into smaller and smaller parts. Sure, this approach
has lead to miraculous gadgets and stupendous technology, but the true essence
of life keeps receding into the distance like a mirage in the desert;
scientists are losing their way in an attempt to count how many quacks can
dance on a electron accelerator – as fruitless as a monolithic, one-god
religion, attempting to count how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Instead, Capra
says, we need to shift to a different kind of science that, up until now, has
been given short shrift: a holistic science which finds meaning not by tearing
things apart but by, instead in how they fit together:
“As I
said, when you study pattern, you need to map the pattern, whereas the study of
substance is the study of quantities that can be measured. The study of
pattern, or of form, is the study of quality, which requires visualizing and
mapping…This is a very important aspect of studying patterns, and it is the
reason why, every time the study of pattern was in the forefront, artists
contributed significantly to the advancement of science. Perhaps the two most
famous examples are Leonardo da Vinci, whose scientific life was a study of
pattern, and the German poet Goethe in the eighteenth century, who made significant
contributions to biology through his study of pattern. This is very important
to us as parents and educators, because the study of pattern comes naturally to
children; to visualize pattern, to draw pattern, is natural.”
This
attention to pattern, this study of quality, which requires visualizing and
mapping, is essential to our survival in the age of climate change.
It is
through the study of patterns that we discover the whole: we discover what our
bodies and unconscious self have always known: the ecosystems within our body
interrelate with a myriad of surrounding ecosystems, human and more than human,
all together forming an indivisible whole.
That’s the
true essence of things: Not tearing things apart but learning to interconnect
seamlessly as part of the whole. As Capra says, “All of the coordinating activities of life can only be grasped when
life is understood as a self-organizing network…[These] systems working
together, all parts of an indivisible whole, that is the very essence of life.”
What we
need to do is go back to the future!
The type of science Capra is talking has been
a part of us since the first human being strode forth on the earth: our innate
ability to live seamlessly within the rhythms of nature and our living,
breathing mother earth. It’s in our genes. And it has a name: Sustainability.
“The law of gravity, as you know, was formalized
by Galileo and Newton, but people knew about stepping off cliffs long before
Galileo and Newton. Similarly, people knew about the laws of sustainability
long before ecologists in the twentieth century began to discover them. In
fact, what I’m going to talk about today is nothing that a ten-year-old Navajo
boy or Hopi girl who grew up in a traditional Native American community would
not understand and know.”
The choice
is ours: to perish in a world we view as inanimate, a commodity to be exploited
and picked apart for profit – or to come together as one to celebrate the
sacredness of our living-breathing Mother Earth and to work heroically to save
Her – and us.
xxx
1 http://jeanstimmell.blogspot.com/2014/03/weaving-our-own-sacred-canopy.html
2 http://ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/pr_wg2/140330_pr_wgII_spm_en.pdf
3 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/opinion/bittman-the-aliens-have-landed.html?emc=edit_th_20140402&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=30753738
4 http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/ecology-and-community
No comments:
Post a Comment