Ecological Intelligence Read Free Page B

not speak about DNA, there would be no photographs of Earth from space, no understanding of the AIDS virus and no long-distance calls from a daughter on her travels in a foreign land. Without technology, the monitoring and protection of many of the world’s endangered species would be impossible. Celebrate it. Learn how to say yes and no to it.
    T hroughout this book I have used the paired words yes and no for two very specific reasons. The first is to encourage the reader to become a little more comfortable with paradox—discovering the sometimes irrational yet meaningful truths that are hidden in statements that are seemingly contradictory or absurd. Science has long been familiar with paradox, for example chaos theory and with it the recognition that there are patterns of order in what we all too readily interpret as chaotic. And then there is the paradox of the dual perception of light—that it can be perceived as being either waves or particles. The paired words, then, are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they convey a simple wisdom: everything is in process…every idea, every interpretation, and every strategy has at least two sides. The second reason is to remind the reader that yes and no are the two most powerful words in the vocabulary of a species that has become capable of deciding what to do about its future.

Astonishing! Everything is intelligent!
    Pythagoras

1
    THE RESHAPING OF
MYTH AND LANGUAGE

    T HERE IS NOT A CULTURE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE MYTHS, legends, or fairytales—explanations, no matter how fantastic, of the origins of the world and of life, of heroes and villains, of how we ought to behave and how not to. While many of them are based on elements of fact, they nevertheless acquire a peculiar potency. Embellished by the human imagination, they often represent a highly invested truth for a group or an individual. This means that they must never be negated as being mere figments of the imagination.
    Any story that begins “Once upon a time…” is magnetically charged with this potency. It draws us into the narrative that follows and the reason for this is that we inevitably discover within them our own life narratives. The hero and the heroine is in all of us. So is the victim, and, believe it or not, the villain too. Myths and legends are the carriers of meaning and the quest for meaning is one of the most defining characteristics of the human animal. Myths have a profound psychological significance. We are shaped and guided by them. However, we sculpt them also. We give them new clothes and new voices. We not only derive meaning from myths, but we add meaning to them too. As hard as we try to dismiss them, they refuse to go away. “They are insidious,” says Canadian psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff, “great secret dragons which may appear to be slain and discredited, but which mysteriously reappear as powerful as ever to press their perennial claim to a territory of belief and understanding.”
    N early all of our scientific theories have a subjective core, and they almost all originate from intuition and myth, said the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl Popper. For example, the bushmen hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari knew nothing of the shared genes between humans and animals, but their thirty-thousand-year mythology tells us that all living things are connected. They have been proven right. And what about Empedocles, whose intuition thousands of years before Darwin was one of evolution by trial and error? Imagine how much more there is that remains unproven but nevertheless valid and vital to our sense of meaning. The poetry, the myths, and the legends of our past not only stir our imagination but it would also appear that we cannot live without them.
    T o rediscover ourselves in Nature, we are going to need a new myth, or perhaps the redressing of an old one to help us. We need to reshape the way we think and speak about ourselves, about our history, and about our