The Ecosystem of Us

Everything is ecosystems.

You are a we.

There is no I.

The stories we tell matter.

They shape us.

They shape how we see the world.

They shape how we interact with the world.

How might our behavior change if we understood the extent to which cooperation within and among species undergirds the natural world and makes it thrive? If we looked for that cooperation? Could we begin to see ourselves as partners and helpers, part of a greater fabric of giving, instead of exploiters and colonizers and wreckers?

~ Sweet in Tooth and Claw, Kristin Ohlson

Life makes you believe in certain things, a certain order. A certain reality. The world is not simple. The world is not one place. It's the sum of an impossible number of incomprehensible things, and if you start out on any road in the world and follow it for any distance at all, sooner or later you enter into strange country.

So, the world is not simple, but it would be much, much better for us if it was. And we can sense that, even if we do not understand or perceive the full complexity of things. So we look for order.

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"It makes perfect sense to me, but I can promise you that what I understand is entirely different from what you do."

"Then I'm wrong, aren't I? I really thought . . . but . . . "

"You think just because you and I understand two different things, one of us has to be wrong?"

"Well . . . yes. If it's a book of instructions--well, there has to be a right way and a wrong way to read it. That's only logical, isn't it?"

"If there was only one was to read a book--any book in the world--if there was only one way to read and understand it, what would be the point of reading that book?” 

~ The Broken Lands, Kate Milford

In the introduction to her book Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World, Kristin Ohlson describes a small group experience she had. The facilitator instructed everyone in the group to look around the room, making a note of everything blue. After a minute, she told them to close their eyes. Then she asked them to name something in the room that was yellow. No one could. They had been so focused on seeing the blue things that they had been blind to the yellow ones--along with all the other colors that were not blue. They saw only what they looked for and nothing else.

He had made a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that which was good-for-nothing and looked ugly was shown magnified and increased in ugliness. In this mirror the most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best persons were turned into frights, or appeared to stand on their heads; their faces were so distorted that they were not to be recognised; and if anyone had a mole, you might be sure that it would be magnified and spread over both nose and mouth. . . . 

[The mirror] was dashed in a hundred million and more pieces. And now it worked much more evil than before; for some of these pieces were hardly so large as a grain of sand, and they flew about in the wide world, and when they got into people's eyes, there they stayed; and then people saw everything perverted, or only had an eye for that which was evil. This happened because the very smallest bit had the same power which the whole mirror had possessed. Some persons even got a splinter in their heart, and then it made one shudder, for their heart became like a lump of ice. Some of the broken pieces were so large that they were used for windowpanes, through which one could not see one's friends. Other pieces were put in spectacles; and that was a sad affair when people put on their glasses to see well and rightly.

~ The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Andersen

I've written on this blog about how I like to take "awe walks," trying to see unexpected beauty to get myself out of my head, feel more connected to the world around, and into a state of appreciation. They help me move from seeing things in an egocentric way, distorted by anxiety, insecurity, and my other insular concerns. But it's not an automatic thing.

The other day I went for a walk after a work meeting that had left me grouchy with strong emotions. Within ten minutes, without trying, I found the following two faces looking up at me from the ground.

The world is a mirror, reflecting back at us what we feel and think.

The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world.

Ecosystems

Polycultures

Mutualisms

Cooperation

Biodiversity

Complexity

You can be sure the trees benefit from the squirrels equally. That's how mutualisms work.

In The Acme of Evolution, I shared extensively from This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan Wilson, including his primary point:

To paraphrase, evolution is groups working together to improve and grow through trial-and-error learning. From the level of genes and cells, bacteria and simple organisms, scaling up through plants and animals to humans and cultures, the lesson of evolution is “that the primary way to survive and reproduce [is] through teamwork.”

That leads nicely into the book I just finished, Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World by Kristin Ohlson. The quick description I wrote for my review:

The common narrative describes evolution as a competition, a struggle in which all parts of nature fight all other parts. Ohlson argues in this book that we see the natural world as such because that's what we've gone looking for. If we switch our perspective, though, to looking for cooperation, we can find just as much evidence to support a view that nature and evolution are a story of mutualisms, of diverse, complex, cooperative, polycultural ecosystems where lifeforms depend upon and help each other, stronger together. Cooperation is as much the norm as competition, if only we can see it.

This book is Ohlson's attempt to shift the narrative. Each chapter demonstrates a different realm of natural cooperation, where science has only recently come to understand the dynamics of the beneficial relationships at work--and of people putting that science into action in new and dynamic ways. Of how humans are learning to be cooperative partners with nature for mutual benefit. Her accounts are personal and narrative, as she spent time with each of those she writes about, even as she delves into the science involved. Her writing is meant to inspire readers to join in seeing and acting differently, and in that she succeeds eloquently.

How might our behavior change if we understood the extent to which cooperation within and among species undergirds the natural world and makes it thrive? If we looked for that cooperation? Could we begin to see ourselves as partners and helpers, part of a greater fabric of giving, instead of exploiters and colonizers and wreckers?

Other quotes:

I couldn't help but believe that every quivering twig, every lip of fungus curling away from a fallen tree, every sprightly tuft of moss--everything--was throbbing with a dance of life carried on by multiple partners. Science is just barely beginning to catch on.

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Scientists now find that just about every complex plant, fungus, and animal hosts a dynamic microbiota--a community of bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, and other microorganisms that live in us and on us and are essential to our health, just we are essential to theirs. We are not individuals but ecosystems, each of us hosting a whirl of organisms busily interacting with us and with each other in a complex web of connection. The ecosystem of us lives within larger ecosystems--our gardens, our neighborhoods, our farms, our cities, whatever wilderness we have left--where we interact and overlap with other animal-plant-fungal ecosystems and the invisibles inside them as well as free-living microbes throughout the environment that aren't associated with hosts. Those larger ecosystems are nested within and interacting with even larger ones, on and on until they encompass the entire planet.

And if the rub-your-stomach, pat-your-head mental exercise of picturing those nested ecosystems isn't mind-boggling enough, consider that even our microbiota have a microbiota. Viruses and even small mobile "genetic elements" (meaning, things that move bits of genetic material around but don't meet the traditional definitions of life) weave in and among the bacteria in our guts, changing the affected bacteria's own genetic potential for harm or good.

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The Smiths offered to put their ranch up as an experiment in this new approach--it was the only thing they thought might save their cattle business, and besides, they were now excited about this whole new way of looking at nature. Amazingly, the state and federal agencies all agreed that it was worth a try. . . . Further, the agencies agreed that the Smiths could expand the herd from three hundred cows to a thousand because this new approach turned the old thinking about livestock on its head: instead of being a scourge, it held that well-managed cattle had a positive impact on the land and that you needed enough of them to do the job right.

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Johnson has found that as soil becomes richer in carbon, its microbial community has the energy to take on bigger and more varied tasks. . . . 

At this point, Johnson says, the bacterial colony can muster the kind of cooperative efforts that exist in human cities--the mocrobial version of traffic laws, hospitals, and community gardens. This large-scale cooperation enables them to use carbon more efficiently and can turn a piece of degraded land from one that's gassing off copious amounts of respired carbon dioxide into healthy hland that actually retains carbon. . . . 

"If you have a chemical view of soil, you just think of soil as a place to grow plants," Kloot says. "With that view, the only way to make things grow is to manipulate them chemically. But if you see soil as a living, mutualistic dynamic ecosystem that's changing all the time, that's full of microbes, it's a whole different view and it affects the way you do things."

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To create biophilic cities--and we are so accustomed to bleak and dystopian visions of cities that it's hard for us to believe that there can be soft and verdant ones--we need citizens who are that excited about nature.

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We humans expect much of our own ingenuity and cleverness, but we often fail to consider that many of the answers we seek already exist and are part of the greater creativity--and generosity--of nature.

Ohlson's book pairs excellently with Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (see Cosmologies Are a Source of Identity and Orientation to the World.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was throwing a frisbee around with my boys in the backyard. They kept apologizing for throws that didn't come perfectly to me. I responded that frisbees are hard to throw and almost never go exactly where you want them to. It's all part of the activity, so they didn't need to apologize or feel bad. "I never expect a frisbee throw to be perfect, so I'm never disappointed if I have to chase one a bit," I said. "So don't worry about what's not perfect, just accept that's how it works and enjoy the activity."

Even as I said it, I felt it was a good metaphor for relationships and people. I never expect a person to be perfect, so I'm never disappointed if they have flaws and make mistakes. It's not about having low expectations, though; it's about being accepting, non-judgmental, and understanding. Everyone's going to be tilted and wobbly at times, take curved paths, get pushed off-course by the wind and other outside forces, and miss the target. That's reality. There's no point being upset about the imperfections. Instead, focus on what's good and enjoy getting to be together. It's an orientation for interacting with others.

This bit is pretty tangential to the rest of the post, I simply share it because I love how well this piece of writing succeeds at the mantra "show, don't tell" when describing someone in a very unhappy place.

Her lifestyle is simple.

She launders her few black outfits without delay, shops for the minimum of groceries at the nearby store, prepares the minimum of food and, after eating, promptly tidies everything away. In the daytime hours when she is not occupied with those basic tasks, she generally sits unmoving on the living-room sofa looking out at the tall trees' verdant branches and thick lower trunks. The house grows dark when it is not yet evening. Around the time when the trees' contours grow black, she opens the front door and goes out. She passes through the apartment complex as dusk is falling, reaches the pedestrian crossing where the green light doesn't stay on for long and carries on walking.

She walks in order to exhaust herself to the point of no longer being able to walk. She walks until she is unable to register the quiet of the house to which she must now return, until she has no strength left to cast her gaze over the black woods, the black curtains, the black sofa, the black Lego boxes. She walks until, giddy with tiredness, she will be able to lie down on her side on the sofa and fall asleep without washing or tugging a quilt over herself. She walks so that she will not wake in the middle of the night even if plagued by nightmares, so that she will not toss and turn with her eyes open until dawn, unable to achieve sleep again. She walks so that, in those vivid dawn hours, she will not have to doggedly recall and piece together the broken shards of memories.

From Greek Lessons by Han Kang, which I described as: A sensitive, quiet story about two damaged people slowly, gradually emerging from their individual isolations to find consolation in connection with each other. Wonderful writing.

I've recently been enjoying the music album Signs of Life by Neil Gaiman & FourPlay String Quartet. As a librarian, I can't not love these words.

Credo

I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea, because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.

I believe that you can set your own ideas against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatise and deny.

I do not believe that burning, murdering, exploding people, smashing their heads with rocks (to let the bad ideas out), drowning them or even defeating them will work to contain ideas you do not like. Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as difficult to control.

I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas.

I believe that people and books and newspapers are containers for ideas, but that burning the people who hold the ideas will be as unsuccessful as firebombing the newspaper archives. It is already too late. It is always too late. The ideas are already out, hiding behind people’s eyes, waiting in their thoughts. They can be whispered. They can be written on walls in the dead of night. They can be drawn.

I believe that ideas do not have to be correct to exist.

I believe you have every right to be perfectly certain that images of god or prophet or human that you revere are sacred and undefilable, just as I have the right to be certain of the sacredness of speech, of the sanctity of the right to mock, comment, to argue and to utter.

I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things. I believe your remedy for that should be to argue with me or to ignore me, and that I should have the same remedy for the wrong things that you think.

I believe that you have the absolute right to think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write, or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you, or take away your liberty or property because I find your ideas threatening or insulting or downright disgusting. You probably think some of my ideas are pretty vile, too.

I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. 

Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true.

Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.

You can read more words, sample music, and learn about the project at their website.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

watashiato

n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.

Be curious.

Know you're connected.

We are each an us.

Ecosystems are all there is.

Learn to see ecosystems.

Learn to think in ecosystems.