To Be Continued
The Iroquois concept of the seventh generation has transformed into an important symbol of the deep ecology movement. As the story goes, when the indigenous Iroquois held their council meeting, one member first spoke this invocation:
In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
Thereafter, any general vote among the council members included an equal vote cast by a representative who spoke for the needs, the survival, and the dignity of those who would come a hundred and fifty years in the future. For the Iroquois, the generational format of their council defined a longterm relationship between government and ecology. The rights of future generations never became an issue of policy because it was, instead, the context of policy. Conservation was the foundation upon which their culture was built. The medium was the message.
In the process of blueprinting our own American system of government, Thomas Jefferson was said to have drawn much inspiration from the Iroquois version of representational democracy. It makes one wonder about things that might have been. For example, had Jefferson written the rights of future generations into the U.S. bill of rights, would we, who live ten generations after Jefferson, still be dependent upon non-renewable fossil fuels which causes global warming? Or imagine what life would be like today if, a hundred years ago, we had set in place a public mechanism to test the ecological value of the automobile or, fifty years ago, the social value of the television set. But there was no debate. Unlike the Iroquois, our parents and our great-grandparents had no public mechanism that spoke to the longterm effects of their inventions. Nor do have any mechanism today to examine genetic engineering, not to mention no-brainers like excessive product packaging. Rather, we remain saddled to technological [progress] and it renders us deaf to anyone who would speak intuitively for the rightsd and needs of future generations. The majority of our elected officials are deaf. One might well ask how the future would be different if we started electing politicians possessed of better hearing.
Whereas wildness was central to the Iroquois' daily perception of the world, it is reduced to the margins of our own. We have little memory of what it is we have lost. Because language reflects perception, we are able to locate certain signs of this perceptual loss in our language. We find, for instance, that our culture often uses the term natural resources as if it were synonymous with either nature or wildness. Or the prevailing educational system instructs our children in great depth how to observe nature, while it teaches almost nothing about nurturing a sense of communion with nature. The semantics of the distinction are telling. Observing suggests standing outside looking in while communion signifies a conscious linkage.
Language not only reflects perception, it reflects public policy as well. Such a connection may explain the origination of wilderness policies molded by men of power who get their information from data sheets and their money from commercial interests, and who then debate legislation inside cavernous artificially-lit halls within an urban environment. These are well-educated people who, just like the rest of us, have been taught that nature is an observable resource meant to be managed. Their education taught them well to regard the human relationship to nature as a body of quantifiable information. I
Is that what nature is\quantities of data? Echoes reverberate through the halls of congress assuring us in a self-assured language that, yes, certainly, those are precisely the measures our system of government uses to determine wilderness legislation. How else could we do it? Anyone have a better idea? Actually, somebody possessed of a different language that mirrors a different perception of nature, might make the observation that our need to gather data is always going to reflect a parallel need to exploit that data. Or put another way, knowledge is power but not necessarily wisdom.
The legislator's data sheets are prepared by biologists whose own perceptions about nature are formed by the same educational and cultural mores as the rest of us. Their data may be objective, but whether it reflects the truth is far less certain. In fact policy reflects science reflects culture reflects language reflects perception reflects policy. Each spoke of this wheel influences every other spoke. The wheel also suggests that our culture's much-sought after objectivity reflects a point of view (perhaps a relative or cultural truth) but never an absolute truth. Data remains objective, but is now revealed to be something of a fraud in its commonplace role as an arbiter of ecological truth.
The result is a contorted view of nature. The culture assigns much utilitarian value to its numbers, its resources, and too little value to the idea that nature might possess some inherent value apart from ourselves. This data-driven nature of ours also does a disappearing act; it ceases to exist the moment our attention flies away. Tragically, our attention is too often elsewhere. How else could the economy appear to grow strong while nature is everywhere in full retreat?
Current policy overwhelmingly reflects these data-driven perceptions about nature. The policy makers find it unauthoritative impractical, (or simply impossible) to legislate ecological policy guided, not by data, but by compassion, intuition, or a sense of place. They seldom act when an earnest non-expert rises up from the throng to deliver an emotional harangue that declares essentially, that some policy is simply wrongheaded. [If it's wrong,] declare the legislators in response, [where's the data to prove it?] Obviously, something crucial is amiss when those who do [prove it] use their proof to implement policies that implement the aerial shooting of wolves, the virtual annihilation of pelagic dolphins in the cause of pet food, the nuclear stockpile. But no time soon will legislators acknowledge their inability to govern a nature that is not a synonym for natural resources? No time soon will they acknowledge that the expert who steps forward is, too often, no expert at all.
Lately we are told that the science of ecology (which illuminates the linkage inherent within nature) will alter the current equation. Because perception reflects policy, one needs to ask if this field of ecology defines the science of linkage or the experience of linkage? Recognizing the difference between the two terms provides a crucial clue about the welfare of future generations. The first term reflects a data-driven relationship to nature. Biologists point their feelers outward; their data describes a linkage that exists outside their own perceptions. Yet because they work so hard to maintain this separation, biologists can never make the environmental crisis go away. They don't approach it directly. Even at their most constructive, they do no better than to retain a certain aloof neutrality. Even those ecologists who display a clear passion to preserve the environment must recognize that their perceptual center is counterproductive to their goal.
By contrast, we are right inside this second, subjective definition of ecology. The experience of linkage includes our perceptions, feelings, intuitions, responsibilities, and hopefully our right relation to nature. There is nothing much objective about any of this, which is why it doesn't make for much of a science. A case could be made that the experience of linkage actually refutes objectivity. Objective linkage\the science of ecology\is an oxymoron. Yet so many ecologists care so deeply about the environment that one might wonder if there could be a new kind of science not shackled to the objective pose\new kind of science not driven by data.
Human beings are not born with a natural predilection to destroy nature. But neither does the destruction occur independent of human intentionality. In fact the environmental crisis is something we are taught to perpetuate. Regard the result of our cultural training to be a kind of psychosis. In fact many environmental writers have pointed out that our global resource dependency is an addiction. Gar Smith, writing for Earth Island Journal, has described the Exxon Valdez oil spill this way:
As the damages mount with each new outrage, oil company officials are beginning to sound like problem drinkers who continue making promises they can't keep...Oil-hauling, like alcoholism is a form of addictive behavior that is inevitably destructive.
It's the same old story told by any growth industry that possesses too much marketing momentum to the detriment of the seventh generation. Or an example closer to home: out here in my own rural county, some gun-shooting addict recently started using the endangered trumpeter swans for target practice. Last winter we had 15 swans on the local pond, this winter there are none.
The cure for this addictive psychosis may seem heretical to someone educated to honor, without question, the scientific worldview. It is this: the environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. The crisis in perception begins and ends inside each one of us. Retaining the separation between subject and object exacerbates the problem. The cure demands that each of us learn to transform our perceptions about nature. We act connected when we get connected. Our actions, our lifestyle, our policies will all follow. Paraphrasing the Buddhist concept of the Boddhisattava, no one is cured until everyone is cured.
This cure does not rely on a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, to arrive and lead us into the promised land. Imagine a future in which the de facto authority our society presently grants to scientists to describe nature\and, in fact, speak on nature's behalf\is granted, instead, to our ethicists, musicians, dancers, poets, shamans, even children. What all these seemingly disparate people share in common is a deep subjective trust of life and linkage. These are people who give real power to intuition. Metaphors possess more authority with them than data. These are people who possess a perceptual grasp about the abiding unity of nature because, unlike many politicians and all scientists, they do not attempt to stand outside their subject. Not bringing a shopping list to the task, they comprehend the key difference between nature and natural resources. I am suggesting that the culture's relationship to nature will improve dramatically on the day that Senate subcommittees about land use start consulting with these people as a matter of course. Let us address our best dreamers as wisemen and wisewomen\and then calmly elevate them to the critical position currently occupied by the technocrats: that of defining and explaining nature for the rest of us. Actually, modern Western culture may be unique in not already doing so. Future generations suffer because of it.
Everything about our culture recommends that the seventh generation
does not actually exist. I would suggest, instead, that they do
exist, but for the moment, they remain incapable of doing much
of anything on their own behalf. They are seated along the temporal
sidelines as it were, holding their collective breath, waiting
in anticipation, watching how our future (yours and mine) is going
to transmute into their present. Perhaps we can give them more
substance by granting them a story. In this story, they are singing
at our doorway like carolers on Christmas eve. They are singing
that we may hear them, that we may undertake the monumental task
of changing the way we perceive them. Take a perceptual leap with
me. Can you hear them? Listen closely. It's really not much more
than a low whisper, a low pulse, not unlike the background hum
of the big bang, or perhaps your own heartbeat. Just like the
human heartbeat, the seventh generation is singing its quiet song
just about everywhere these days. Teach yourself how to listen.
Teach a friend. An enemy.
To Be Continued
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