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| Sand Dunes at Hampton Beach State Park CC Jean Stimmell |
Back in 2019, I wrote a column for the Monitor1 about “moral injury,” a label first given for a malady afflicting Vietnam vets: the guilt and betrayal they felt(and still feel) for not doing 'what's right.' Moral injury, now recognized as a universal human reaction to war, has been described in history going back to the 8th century BC when Homer wrote the Iliad.
Recently I listened to a podcast by Stephanie Kaza, professor emeritus of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, who has extended the concept of moral injury to include the guilt we feel for the part we are playing in the destruction of the natural world.
I don't want to discount the seriousness of moral injury: it can cause severe depression and suicide. But Kaza's podcast made me wonder if there might be a silver lining, revealing society's deepening facility to feel the pain of others: We seem to be gaining empathy for life's creatures, large and small. Could it be we are rediscovering the animate world of our indigenous ancestors who saw all of nature as aware and capable of feelings?
During my own life, I've seen a significant shift in that direction.
I grew up in an avid hunting family in the 1950s, competing with each other to see who could shoot the most ducks, grouse, and pheasants each fall. Even as an eager participant, I remember feeling terrible about the suffering I caused when the kill was not clean. Then, in college at Columbia, I was assigned three white rats to use in psychological experiments to test various hypotheses, often using electric shocks as negative reinforcement, resulting in one of my rats going insane. It's hard to believe today that such behavioral research was cutting-edge psychology in 1963. I slink down in my chair as I write this, mortified at how I have treated animals. After that, something even worse happened: my tour in Vietnam.
I have changed over my long life, as has society. Folks treated dogs as canine alarm systems back in the day, often keeping them chained outside, even in winter. Dogs were expendable, having no more legal protections against abuse than slaves had against their plantation owners. Now dogs are revered by their owners, pampered, treated almost like children. And that kind of loving care continues to extend to a wider variety of pets – including a pet chicken friends of mine adore.
All around us, we are waking up to and gaining empathy for, what the ecologist David Abram calls, the more-than-human world. While we have long felt a close connection to certain animals, like the great apes, with whom we share as much as 99% of our DNA, we are now gaining an appreciation for the intelligence of birds like ravens, whom our Maine neighbor, Bernt Heinrich, has written about.
A recent piece in the NYT points out similar intelligence in various other birds before discussing species like the cuttlefish, who are closer to insects than humans. Despite having green blood, no bones, and a body like an iridescent football, they retain "the full portfolio of mental abilities as these birds.”2 Of course, we can’t leave out the cuttlefish’s star cousin, the octopus, whose extraordinary abilities have been the focus of several recent books. In praise of them, Sy Montgomery, National Book Award finalist, has written, “If I have a soul, and I think I do, an octopus has a soul, too.” 3
And that's just scratching the surface: recent books like Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard show how intelligent and relational trees are: She explains how old mother trees connect all the forest trees through a 'jungle of threads and synapses and nodes… 'communicating and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals… identical to our own neurotransmitters.' 'The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin [and] nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children." 4
Shedding our thick rhino-skin myth that we are superior to all others, that we are the only species who can think and feel, is our best hope to survive and flourish in the future.
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1https://www.concordmonitor.com/Moral-injury-28573439
2https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/science/cuttlefish-cognition-cephalopods.html
3“The Soul of an Octopus” by Sy Montgomery.
4Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree (p. 5). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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