When I was 7 years old and the pediatrician asked if me I knew where carrots came from, I answered with the blithe certitude of my age and inexperience that carrots came from the vegetable aisle in the Acme market. The pediatrician then invited my mother to drive me to his house one day so he could show me something important. It was a long drive into the deep countryside, and he led us to an open area planted in rows and bounded by woods. He knelt, pointing to a spot on the ground, and asked me to describe it. I told him that I saw green weeds. Taking a pen knife from his hip pocket, he dug a small circle around the “green weeds,” loosened the dirt and said that if I pulled gently, there would be a surprise. I did as he said, and suddenly, the warm earth yielded, and in my hands was a very young and very splendid and very orange five-inch carrot. I was transfixed, transported, and transformed. My development as a human being, I think, began on that summer evening when nature became a revered, if mysterious, teacher.Thirty years after the carrot, there was the turtle. My husband had died from hospital and doctor carelessness at the time of a suspected heart problem. He was only 35, with a beloved two-year old, and he was suddenly gone from our lives forever. Nearly two years later, I participated in a scientific expedition protecting the hatchlings of giant leatherback turtles on a remote part of the island of St. Croix. My child and I agreed that the turtles --an endangered species though they were half the size of a Volkswagon -- needed care.
Twelve volunteers moved in teams of three, patrolling the sands from dusk to dawn, tagging turtles, protecting the nests from predators, and moving nests to safety above the high water line if necessary. My team came across an almost upright 1,700 lb. leatherback, stuck as she tried to climb a five-foot erosion bluff to get above the high water line to nest. My teammates favored continuing our patrol, as the turtle appeared hopeless; but I was not so far from the birthing experience myself, and I felt a calling.Every academic treatise on the leatherback laying her 140 eggs in a two-foot deep nest says she is a purely instinctual creature. The sighs and the tears which run down her cheeks are merely an adjustment to being on land rather than under water. Yet my turtle waited with me for two hours in her vertical position against the sand bluff while I lay across the hard, even sand above her, my face no more than five inches from hers. She remained in that position, sighing and crying as I told her how I would clear the sand so that her maternity could fulfill itself. Soon, I was telling her fairy tales and cautionary tales. I told her about the madness of King Lear and the vaulting ambition of Macbeth. I told her how I had a 36-hour labor in a hospital so full that I delivered in the hallway, and we cried together when I told her why I was lying on the sand and how my husband had died from institutional carelessness that I couldn’t quite forgive and how I needed to heal the terrors of the heart that woke me at night and that somehow, to do it, I had to leave home and come here, so far away from my own baby, to help other babies. I believe that I told her all the stories of the human race, softly and soothingly, and I don’t know if I was speaking to her or to myself.When I had cleared enough of the heavy, wet sand for her to climb up, I spoke to her in a haze of kinship and said, “Okay, we’re ready, so I’m going to lift my arm across the sand and if you understand me, lift your flipper and put it on top of mine.” Slowly and deliberately, she lifted her flipper and placed it across my arm. In that exquisite moment, time was rendered timeless, and the sea turtle, the bereaved young mother, and all creation were bound.Dermochelys coreacea, named by man but Nature’s offspring, restored what had been lost in the hospital when I bore witness to man’s carelessness and urge to destruction and chaos, and she returned me to life. With my child, wonder began to replace despair as we pondered the sheer art of the leaf, the architectural balance of a tree, the music of a pounding surf, the continuity in the dry riverbed beneath ancient Anasazi ruins.
In 1916, Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, woeful about the divide between mankind and nature, wrote about how his dog led him to understand something of the oneness of all in nature. I, too, could dedicate myself to bearing witness.Yet a dictionary of words is not enough to contain the 1.5 million species with given names and the tens of millions yet unnamed, but all vulnerable to extinction at the hands of man. It is not even enough to talk about a single spider web in its twin strength and fragility, or the vibration and splendor of a single peacock in its feathery display, or a single rainforest orchid in its complex and amazing beauty.Words are not enough to talk about the bulldozers in Borneo, clearing the forest for more middle-class housing developments at 9 am, when the orangutans are still asleep 100 feet up in the canopy, their babes protected in their cradling arms. When the boughs break, however, the cradles fall and the mothers and baby orangutans come down, a deadly thud hardly heard round the world.Words are not enough to describe the anxiety and depression of a nation after the bombing of the World Trade Towers, a cri du coeur for the certitude of an unending human future. An unending human future. Evolutionary biologists tell us that most people are genetically programmed to plan only for their own generation. The human brain evolved during the long stretch of time when humans existed as hunter-gatherers; life was precarious and short, and the short-term thinker -- who saw to his immediate safety and stomach and reproduced early and often -- did far better than the altruist or the prophet.These days, I often think about a conversation I had with the Governor of the Santa Clara Indian Reservation in northern New Mexico. By day, he managed a bank in Espanola, the nearest town to his reservation. Here, corporate policy rewarded the quick decision on all issues, so that constant action marked his daily successes. In the evenings, as governor of the reservation, he followed ancestral guidelines in which tribal life moved in slow time and with great deliberation, so as to ensure its future. No major change in reservation life could be wrought without a two-year period of deliberation. When the tribal council of men had looked from every angle, the women elders were brought into the circle because, said the governor, women have the ability to see not only the children, but the grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren.
The Indian walked the land in moccasins in order to touch the earth, to better understand his relationship to nature, but not to conquer nature, nor to fool nature. The America we know today, however, with its inherited Western notions of private property and of great wealth for a privileged few, believes it can prevail over nature. We continue to put up with environmental despoliation. We put up with the “haves” cutting off the “have-nots” from our oceans. In our nervous cities, we work without fresh air in towers of concrete. We continue to believe that nothing will happen to the cluttered subterranean world of tunnels descending to one thousand feet below sea level to supply New York City with gas, sewers, and running water. Even in my own modest city of Philadelphia, developers keep building and rebuilding on streets that are perpetually collapsing because they have been built above coursing streams which, in their natural rhythms, both contract and expand. And we look the other way as the leatherback turtle that coexisted with the dinosaur goes down to fishermen’s 60 miles of baited longlines, unnecessarily taking in so many of the planet’s leatherbacks that their future will disappear in the next ten years.We manage all that, but can we live without the wonder and the awe, without the art and the poetry of the natural world? Will we have the courage to face the fact that once a species is extinct, nothing -- absolutely nothing -- will bring it back? T.S. Eliot said that at the end of all our journeying, we will arrive at the original place and know it for the first time. But what if the original place is so altered that it is not recognizable? How shall we become wise?I have been teaching in an urban college for the past 33 years, and I can report from the field that the absence of nature is broad and deep. No one in our beautifully architected building gets more than a few percentage points of fresh air, and we all share respiratory ailments. For years, the carcinogenic chemicals in the photography lab circulated inside that wing instead of flowing outside, and not a window can open. My classrooms are four concrete walls, concrete blocks without end. For my students, who by now have long been dissociated from seed and soil, the real apple, from a tree, is less real to them than the candy machine from which they “pick” their “fruit .” They crave the fruits of capitalism, television, electronics.
Copyright (c) Shinji Ochi
If, for King Lear, ripeness was all, for these young adults, quickness is all. Hardly the children of slow time with its contemplation and dreamtime, its move from seed to flower to fruit, these students are stupefied by speed in any form, even their own impulsive acts. Action trumps thought; sensation trumps meaning. Too often, they seem to live by vicarious experiences intensified by remote control, yet they complain in a collective ritual that they are bored, bored, bored.I often dream of leading all the young children in the city out into the streets to plant cherry trees, nature’s gift of hope and renewal at the end of winter’s dark. But I seem to be working in the more limited sphere of bringing in apples, bananas, and kiwis for my evening students to keep them away from the ubiquitous candy machines in the hallways, and to share with them the difference between fructose and glucose. If I could give them a gift more lasting than the fruit of the evening, it would be an openness, a receptivity to the models -- even the ambiguous and contradictory ones – and the manifold treasures of the natural world.
No Upcoming Events Added! Please Stay Tuned. Thank you.
