Ecological Intelligence Read Free Page A

outer world, but this is only a part of our nature. Human nature is powerfully subjective too; it is both abstract and abstracting, never entirely satisfied with what can be measured, which is why, for everything wonderful about science, somehow it seldom answers the deep, existential questions in our lives.
    How, for example, can one possibly discredit those great poetic dimensions of human society—spirit and soul? We readily speak of the spirit of adventure and the spirit of science, of soul mates, soul places, and the dark night of the soul. The words are at the tips of our tongues. They are intrinsic to our descriptions of kinship, belonging, connection, and continuity. And we know what they mean, even if we cannot fully explain them. They may well be linked to neurocircuits, neurotransmitters, and circulating hormones, as I am sure they are, but how they are linked and to which combinations of circuits or neurochemicals, we’ll probably never know. It would seem they can’t be measured, or better still, they refuse to be measured. Does that make them any less real or, indeed, irrelevant? I think not. Instead, because they are dimensions that are experienced and that add to our sense of meaning, they need to be understood as psychologically significant and therefore valid.
    A nd then there is language. If we are serious about rediscovering ourselves in Nature, we are going to need a language that speaks for science and soul, that narrows the gap between subject and object, that slips between yes and no. We will need a language that continually reminds us of where we have come from and of what we have to do if we are to become ecologically intelligent. For the time being, the only language I know that can begin to do this is poetry. It may be an extravagant claim, but there is a history to it…
    At the end of 1997, after eight years of working with troubled adolescents and mentally handicapped children, I resigned from my post as the head of the Child, Family, and Adolescent Unit at the Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital in Cape Town. My wife and I headed off to the Linyanti wilderness of northern Botswana where, working as a guide and comanager of a small tented lodge, I was overwhelmed by a sense that I had come home. I tried to keep a diary, but every time I tried to write down my experiences with animals, it came out in stanza form.Prose somehow escaped me. Instead, what I was writing was verse—“pure nonsense…pure wisdom” as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda said of his first written lines. Where did it come from? I don’t know.Gripped by them, it was as if the poems were writing me. I tried to ignore them, but it didn’t work. Some of them came quickly, decisively.Some of them refused to be rushed, waiting instead until I was ready for them. Others wrestled with me, sometimes deep into the night. I came to see them as wild gifts.

To begin
to know wilderness,
something in me had to die—
the pregnant parts,
the motherly expectations
and the test tube notions
of a safe delivery.
    In the wild
dead fetuses are for real,
vultures are the midwives of new life
And to be abandoned is to grow.
    To begin
to know wilderness,
something in me had to come alive—
my wild side,
the part that knows
that it is impossible to sleep with the dead
without being awakened by them.
    In the wild
the animal spirits are for real
they are the shadows in our bones
and they come to us
as wild gifts.
    T o rediscover ourselves in Nature does not mean turning one’s back on technology as is often advocated. Technology is part of our nature. It is part of the evolution of a problem-solving, tool-making species. The harnessing of the molecular formulas of genes, medicinal plants, hormones, and tissue extracts to enhance the quality of life of countless human and nonhuman beings has to be understood as being just as significant as the harnessing of fire by our ancestors Homo erectus less than a million years ago. Without technology we could