Our state of being is fundamentally affected by our environment. This is simple to understand when thinking about the environmental impacts of: a bad relationship, a sick parent, road construction nearby, a farm field plowed under for housing, a pandemic. And in fact all environments affect our state of being, our immediate surrounds up to the largest global issues. How environment register with us is not just through thinking mind. Environments affects our ‘knowing’ through our embodied brains. It turns out that half of our ‘knowing’ is from our sensory interaction with our environment(s). And the half of our ‘knowing’ that comes through the embodied brain is mostly unconscious.
As the world becomes more complex, people are seeking ways to diffuse the bodily effects, work arounds to de-stress: spending more time in harmony with nature, taking a digital detox, meditating and journaling, focusing on personal health. All reasonable and helpful personal responses. But in this context, all the adjustment is within people, there are ways to influence the environment itself in a larger context, remain as they are with little adjustment. Yet as society moves from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age, it is moving from linear and machine-like ways of thinking and organizing to a systems approach for thinking and organizing. As ecologists and biologists and others operating in the natural world have learned, there are many advantages to wholeness.
Anne Spirn describes specialization as it relates to landscapes, “Ironically, the professionals who specialize, reading certain parts of landscape more deeply than other parts and shaping them more powerfully, often fail to understand landscape as a continuous whole. Once those who transformed landscapes were generalists: naturalist, humanist, artist, engineer, even priest, all combined. Now pieces of landscape are shaped by those whose narrowness of knowledge, experience, values, and concerns leads them to read and tell only fragments of the story. To an ecologist, landscape is habitat but not construction or metaphor. To a lawyer, a landscape may be property to regulate, to a developer, a commodity to exploit, to an architect, a site to build on, to a planner, a zone for recreation or residence or commerce or transportation, or “nature preservation.” As in the story of the blind men who each touch a different part of the elephant — trunk or tusk or tail alone – then arrive at a false description of the whole animal, so each discipline and each interest group reads and tells landscape through its own tunnel vision of perception, value, tool, and action.” Everything in the natural world is interconnected, interdependent, yet those working in landscape might operate at times like dueling specialists, each framing a focus based on a different purpose, a different goal. Still, those working in landscapes better understand systems than those in any other field that remain operating under linear, mechanical approaches. In this context it is difficult to get a handle on a desired state, on a sense of wholeness at all.
It is not possible to imagine it, it’s too big, too complex. But ecologists offer some clues. Climate change, environmental degradation, quality of place, clean food, require rethinking and in some cases restoring wholeness. Put another way, wholeness is a deeply felt sense of things – that things are working together as they should. There is a sense of rightness. Our embodied brains ‘know’ wholeness, rightness.
The deep goal of ecological awareness is to achieve a balance, a wholeness, a rightness, in which people can live happily and fruitfully and leave future generations the same opportunity. There is a lot of momentum in favor of these new directions. But there is very little education for people about how systems function, and about complexity. And there is a lot of misdirection. Consider this.
Most kids studied The Road Less Taken, by poet Robert Frost. It works for children, rich in both the sense of nature and future direction. The poet won the Pulitzer Prize four times. Literary critics evaluating his work diverge: a country poet who writes honestly about ordinary people, a traditionalist out of touch with modern life and given to simplification, a poet more modern than people think with a dark side. This homespun Harvard man, a teacher at Middlebury College summers and falls for forty-two years, was a man of letters. When his 88 years ended, his gravestone carried an epitaph from his poem The Lesson for Today, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” In The Road Less Taken he was a trickster. The title gives misdirection, “don’t go with the crowd.” But the language of the poem says either road was just as good. And like an old rock star required to play the same song at every performance, Frost imagines cynically having to perform this poem focused on the simple take. He had to play this “song” straight, fully aware that there is a deeper truth.
To seeing a whole, our task is to up our awareness and go forward with the complexities. So was his.
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