Rethinking People's Relationship With Nature When COVID Is Over

[I thought I posted this last week.  Whoops.  This is a good one.]

This has gotten too long for one post.  So here are the basic interconnected themes I'm trying illustrate.  Trees role on earth, humans' relationship to nature, science and capitalism's roles in all this, and COVID-19.

Overview

1. The natural world's value has not been understood in by human beings.  We see nature as
1. something we can use (food, energy, tools, etc.)
2. something in the way (trees to be cleared for land we can use)
3. something dangerous to be eliminated or tamed (wild animals, hostile weather, volcanoes, diseases)
2. As science has advanced we've used it to exploit nature for our own benefit with little or no understanding of
1. the ways nature - plants, rivers, oceans, and all the animals - live in a balance that filters the air and purifies the water and feeds nutrients to the soil
2. or how our exploitation of nature - destroying forests and the species in them, fishing to depletion the species in the oceans - disrupts the infrastructure that keeps the earth a  hospitable place for humans to live
3. the evolution, with science's help, of humans' separation from nature, moving from living as part of nature to humans seeing themselves as the conquerors of nature and losing their intimate understanding of the natural world around them, 
4. how capitalism has used science to accelerate humans' ability to destroy the living natural world either directly (destroying forests for wood or land) or indirectly (destroying wildlife by destroying their habitat and by changing the natural cycles such as climate) and the thus destroying the conditions that make living on earth comfortable for humans
3. The laws of nature keep working whether we pay attention to them or not.  So, when we destroy the world's forests and burn fossil fuels without thought, then we set into action natural changes in the temperature on earth and the weather patterns that threaten the survival of many life forms on earth.  And that our destroying of forests with diverse life forms means that there's more interaction with wild animals and the viruses that live in them.  

All this together suggests that COVID-19 is a natural outcome of our lack of understanding and lack of attention.  While I don't think there's intent on the part of nature, when one species gets wildly out of balance, forces eventually get unleashed to bring things back into balance.  We know that prey and predators have cycles that keep both populations from getting to numerous or too scarce.  As humans 'overgraze' their habitat, there are consequences.  It appears that this virus will only make a tiny dent in the human population on earth.  But it has also slowed, however temporarily, our destruction of the earth.  

The Overstory

This first post will focus on the natural world and our relation to it.  (Points 1 and 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3, and 3 in the overview.) The post was inspired by my reading of The Overstory by Richard Powers.  And as I read the book, lots of other articles caught my attention that reinforced the story he was telling.  

When people ask me why I live in Alaska, my feeble attempts to talk about living very close to relatively unspoiled natural settings are inadequate.  The way my body relaxes and comes to life in the forests is hard to explain.  How the dead trees covered in lichens and mosses and fungus, and teaming with life stir my mind and spirit just doesn't seem compelling as I try to describe this to people in Los Angeles, who know that they couldn't survive where the temperatures rests below 40˚F more often than not.     

In the The Overstory, Richard Powers makes my awe of nature much more understandable.  I got to rub elbows with characters far more immersed in the power of nature - particularly trees - than I am.  I felt I was with others who could get obsessed with the fecundity of the forest.  

So let's start with The Overstory.

I'll let CG Fewston get to the guts of the book, which he does well in a blog post:

"Ultimately, The Overstory is a love-letter to trees. The reader can feel the love and admiration the author has for trees and all things related to flora. There’s no question that humanity—at this time more than ever—needs a book that pays homage trees, to the planet, to Nature, to the environment, to the living-green things that produce oxygen and help in many uncountable ways to keep humanity alive. The Overstory is without question worthy of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. . .

"Richard Powers throws a spotlight onto the importance of trees and how their survival is tied to the survival of the whole human race. He brings Nature humming to the page, and the words leave a haunting effect over the reader as they learn of this sad planetary struggle.

"The villain of this story is the entire human race. Trees, far older and wiser than humans, are the heroes. Readers cheer for these green, silent heroes and cry when a single mammoth tree is cut from the heavens and comes crashing down. Richard Powers turns the tables on humanity, making them appear an ugly race of animals who lack an intelligent connection to their surroundings.

"Humans are the idiots. Humans are the fleeting species. Trees are the genius. Trees are the lasting species.

"There is a deeper message humanity needs to learn when it comes to trees. In The Overstory the trees are the patient teachers who instruct by being. If humanity could only learn to listen more closely to the planet and the environment, to Anima Mundi, we might see a better way forward than our current path of destruction, desolation and unsustainability."  (emphasis added)

Now let me offer some quotes from The Overstory.  I'll try to minimize the context so this doesn't get too long.  And this is a novel filled with interesting people doing interesting things.  But here I'm focusing more on the trees.

"The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community."  (p. 126)

"You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor .  A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.  But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . ." (p. 152)

"Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush.  The air is so twilight-green she feels like she's underwater.  It rains particles - spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonize mites, bits of insect grass and bird feather . . . Everything climbed over everything else, fighting for scraps of light.  If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her.  She walks in silence, crunching ten thousand invertebrates with every step, watching for tracks in a place where at least one of the native languages uses the same world for footprint and  understanding." (p. 154)

"The older man is on the ground, on his side, popping tiny creatures into specimen bottles.
"Ambrosia beetles?"  The two heads turn toward her, startled.  Dead logs:  the topic was

Dead trees near Portage Glacier

her passion once, and she forgets herself.  "When I was a student, my teacher told us that fallen trunks were nothing but obstacles and fire hazards."
The man on the ground looks up at her.  "Mine said the same thing."
"'Clear them off to improve forest health.'" . . .
"'Lay down the law and get the stagnant place producing again!'"
All three of them chuckle.  But the chuckle is like pressing on a wound.  Improves forest health.  As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come and cure them.  Science in the service of willful blindness:  How could so many smart people have missed the obvious?  A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones.  But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine." (pp. 158-159)  (emphasis added)

"All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life's work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years:  how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground.  How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil.  How they build immune systems as wide as a forest.  She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species.  Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees.  She describes the drupes and racemes, panicles and involucres that a person could walk past for a lifetime and never notice.  She tells how the woody-coned alders harvest gold.  How an inch-high pecan might have six feet of root.  How the inner bark of birches can feed the starving.  How one hop hornbeam catkin holds several million grains of pollen.  How indigenous fishermen used crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish.  How willows clean soils of dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals."  (pp 217-218)

The following takes place on a 7X9 foot platform in a giant redwood, twenty stories above the ground.  Maidenhair and Watchman have been living there for nearly a year to keep loggers from

Me, long ago, at the base of a giant sequoia

cutting it down.

"The subjects sit on the platform, gazing at the questionnaire and the pencils Adam gives them.  Their hands are stained brown and green, with crusts of duff under their nails.  They smell ripe and musty as redwood.  The examiner has gotten himself above them in the lookout hammock, which won't stop rocking.  He studies their faces for the strains of paranoid salvationism he has seen in so many of the activists he has already interviewed.  The man - capacious yet fatalistic.  The woman - self-possessed in a way that no one getting hammered as badly has a right to be.
Maidenhair asks, "This is for your doctoral research?"
"It is."
"What's your hypothesis?"
Adam has been interviewing for so long the word sounds alien.  "Any thing I say might affect your answers."
"You have a theory about people who . . .?"
"No. No theories yet.  I'm just gathering data."
Watchman laughs, a brittle monosyllable.  "That's not how it works, is it?"
"How what works?"
"The scientific method.  You can't gather data without a guiding theory."
"As I told you.  I'm studying the personality profiles of environmental activists."
"Pathological conviction?"  Watchman asks.
"Not at all.  I just  . . . I want to learn something about people who . . .  people who believe that . . ."
"That plants are persons, too?"
Adam laughs and wishes he hadn't.  It's the altitude.  "Yes."
"You're hoping that by adding up all these scores and doing some kind of regression analysis ---"
The woman fingers her partner's ankle.  He hushes at once in a way that answers one of the two questions Adam wants to sneak into his questionnaire.  The other question is how they shit in front of each other, seventy yards in the air.
Maidenhair's smile makes Adam feel fraudulent.  She's years younger than he is, but decades more certain.  "You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.  You should be studying everyone who things that only people matter."
Watchman laughs, "Talk about pathological."
For an instant, above them, the sun pauses.  Then it starts its slow drop westward, back into the waiting ocean.  Noon light washes the landscape in gilt and watercolor.  California, American Eden.  These last pocket relics of Jurassic forest, a world like nothing else on Earth.  Maidenhair flips through the booklet of questions, though Adam has asked her not to look ahead.  She shakes her head at some naïveté on page three.  "None of this is going to tell you anything important.  If you want to know us, we should just talk."
"Well."  The hammock is making Adam seasick.  He can't look anywhere but at the forty-nine-square-foot country below him.  "The problem is ---"
"He needs data.  Simple quantities."  Watchman waves southwest, the saw-whine song of progress.  "Complete this analogy:  questionnaires are to complex personalities as skyline yarders are to . . ." (pp 318-320)

The subjects continue to question the researcher.

"Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?"
The question seems so far beyond calculation it's meaningless.  Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it's like an unblinding.  "Yes."
"Thank you!"  She's pleased with her overgrown pupil.  He grins back.  .  .
"It's so simple,"  she says.  "So obvious.  Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.  But people don't see it.  So the authority of people is bankrupt." Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity.  Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking.  "Is the house on fire?"
A shrug.  A sideways pull of the lips.  "Yes."
"And you want to observe the handful of people who're screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn." (p. 321)

"You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move." (p. 375)

"No one sees trees.  We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade.  We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage.  Obstacles blocking the word or wrecking the ski slope.  Dark, threatening places must be cleared.  We see branches about to crush our roof.  We see a cash crop.  But trees -- trees are invisible."  (p. 423)

"Trees know when we're close by.  The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near . . ." (p. 424)

"'If we could see green, we'd see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get.  If we could see what green was doing, we'd never be lonely or bored.  If we could understand green, we'd learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress.   If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn't have to choose between the Earth's interests and ours.  They'd be the same!'" (p. 454)

All that above is about or from the book The Overstory.  There may be skeptics who think I should offer the counterarguments to Richard Powers.  My response to such a request is this:  99.9% of what we have learned at home, in school, in houses of worship, at work, on television and in movies, and in various other media assume the counterarguments.  You're all well immersed in those concepts.  So much so that many of you don't even realize there could be any other way of thinking.  So there's really no need for me to present that way of thinking.

As I read the book and thought about this post I kept coming across things that reinforce Wright's notions.  So here are a few.

From an interview in The Sun Magazine  Two Ways Of Knowing: Robin Wall Kimmerer On Scientific And Native American Views Of The Natural World.  (If it's not clear, Kimmerer is Native American.)

"From as far back as I can remember, I had this notion of plants as companions and teachers, neighbors and friends. Then, when I went to college, a shift occurred for me. As an aspiring botany major, I was pressured to adopt the scientific worldview; to conceive of these living beings as mere objects; to ask not, “Who are you?” but, “How does it work?” This was a real challenge for me. But I was madly in love with plants, so I worked hard to accommodate myself to this new approach.
Later in my career, after I’d gotten my PhD and started teaching, I was invited to sit among indigenous knowledge holders who understood plants as beings with their own songs and sensibilities. In their presence, and in the presence of the plants themselves, I woke from the sleep I’d fallen into. I was reminded of what I’d always known in my core: that my primary relationship with plants was one of apprenticeship. I’m learning from plants, as opposed to only learning about them."

An LA Times Op Ed

"Pathogens have leaped from animals to humans for eons, but the pace of this spillover has increased rapidly over the last century. As 7.8 billion people on this planet radically alter ecosystems and raise, capture and trade animals at an unprecedented scale, “the road from animal microbe to human pathogen” has turned into a “highway,” as the journalist Sonia Shah has written.
The growing body of scientific research is clear: Diseases like COVID-19 are an expected consequence of how we’re choosing to treat animals and their habitats."

But the wildlife trade is just the tip of the iceberg. Humans have altered three-quarters of terrestrial environments and two-thirds of marine environments. Our ecological domination, aside from risking mass extinctions, makes humans more vulnerable to disease. . . .
The human health effects of deforestation are even more devastating in global disease “hotspots,” which are tropical areas with high wildlife biodiversity. When these forests are felled — be it in the Amazon, East Africa, Thailand, or Indonesia — the mosquitos that transmit malaria become more abundant and infect people at higher rates.
And then we have the bio-catastrophes that are modern factory farms. We pack most of the world’s livestock animals, for all or part of their lives, into crammed living conditions that are hotbeds for viral and bacterial pathogens, and then we lace their feed with the world’s most medically important antibiotics, creating perfect conditions for antibiotic-resistant pathogens to develop. The public pays the price in the form of drug-resistant UTI and MRSA infections, feces in the air and water, and increased risk of deadly viral epidemics like the 2009 H1N1 outbreak that sickened an estimated 59 million people. . .
To prevent future outbreaks like COVID-19 or worse, we have to treat planetary, animal and human health as inseparable. This will require radical changes to business as usual. To date, we’ve operated under the fallacies that medicine and ecology can be understood independently and that the conditions that impact the animal kingdom are separate from those that impact humans.

From  Arundhati Roy in The Financial Times

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.
The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.  Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. 
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (emphasis added)

From The Guardian:

"Scientists have shown to be true what JRR Tolkien only imagined in the Lord of the Rings: giant, slow-reproducing trees play an outsized role in the growth and health of old forests.
In the 1930s, the writer gave his towering trees the name Ents. Today, a paper in the journal Science says these “long-lived pioneers” contribute more than previously believed to carbon sequestration and biomass increase.
The authors said their study highlights the importance of forest protection and biodiversity as a strategy to ease global heating. They say it should also encourage global climate modellers to shift away from representing all the trees in a forest as essentially the same." 

From the LA Times after a couple of weeks of the closure of Yosemite National Park the bears have quadrupled in Yosemite Valley with the absence of people.

And all the other forms of wildlife there are taking back their land.   

And from the EPA - a look at Los Angeles air quality 

The arrow points to March 2020 when people went into isolation.  It's the greenest (best air quality) period in 25 years.  

I'm going to trust the reader to put together the points in the overview, the quotes about and from The Overstory, and the quotes and images from other sources at the end.  The points on science and capitalism probably need more spelling out.  If I get that done, I'll put a link here to that future post.