Ecological Intelligence Read online

  ECOLOGICAL

  INTELLIGENCE

  REDISCOVERING OURSELVES IN NATURE

  IAN McCALLUM

  Foreword by Lyal Watson

  © 2005, 2008 Ian McCallum

  Originally published in 2005 by Africa Geographic.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the permissions granted by the many individuals and publishers for material quoted and otherwise used in this book.

  The excerpt on page 67 from A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, published by Bantam Press, is used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

  The cartoon on page 95 from Goatperson and Other Tales by Michael Leunig, is used by permission of Penguin Books Australia.

  The excerpt on page 97 from Robert Bly’s translation in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, published by HarperCollins, and the excerpt on page 21 by Francis Ponge, translated by Beth Archer in News of the Universe, are used by permission of Robert Bly.

  The excerpt on page 101 from Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals by Frans B. M. de Waal is used by permission of Harvard University Press. © 1996 by Frans B. M. de Waal.

  The poem “Lost” on page 177 from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems by David Wagoner, published by the University of Illinois Press, is used by permission of David Wagoner and the University of Illinois Press. © 1999 by David Wagoner.

  The excerpts on pages 132, 155, and 176, from Memoirs by Pablo Neruda, published by Penguin Books, are used by permission of Souvenir Press Limited.

  The excerpt on page 218 from Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan, published by Random House, is used by permission of the Estate of Carl Sagan. © 1997 by The Estate of Carl Sagan.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCallum, Ian, 1944-

  Ecological intelligence : rediscovering ourselves in nature / Ian McCallum ; foreword by Lyall Watson.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Cape Town : Africa Geographic, 2005.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-55591-687-9 (pbk.)

  1. Environmentalism. 2. Green movement. 3. Environmental responsibility. 4. Nature--Effect of human beings on. I. Title.

  human beings on.

  GE195.M4 2008

  304.2--dc22

  2008039669

  Printed on recycled paper in Canada by Friesens Corp.

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Design by Jack Lenzo

  Fulcrum Publishing

  4690 Table Mountain Dr., Ste. 100

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  www.fulcrumbooks.com

  This book is dedicated to three strange angels—

  the naturalist, the scientist, and the poet in all of us

  The thorns of the tree Ziziphus mucronata are spaced along the length of every branch in pairs. One of the pair points robustly outward and forward while the other curves back and inward in the opposite direction. The Nguni African legend says the thorns tell us something about ourselves—that we must look ahead to the future …but we must never forget where we have come from.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WILDER NES

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE

  REMEMBERING WHERE WE HAVE COME FROM

  1. THE RES HAPING OF MYTH AND LANGUAGE

  2. EVOLUTION IN PERS PECTIVE

  3. THE WAKE-UP CALLS

  4. FACING OUR SHADOW

  5. REMEMBER ING OUR WILD SIDE

  6. LIVING IN A MINDFIELD

  PART TWO

  LOOKING AHEAD

  7. THE BLIND SPOTS

  8. RECONCILIATION

  9. THE KEE PING OF THE ZOO

  10. HEADING OUT—COMING HOME

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE ADVICE, support, and inspiration of the following remarkable people: Peter Borchert, Alessandro Bonora, Gillian Black, Mary Duncan and Shelley Prince of Africa Geographic, Anne Anderson, Jean Badenhorst, Chris Bakkes, Joan Berning, Antony Burgmans, George Ellis, Barbara Fairhead, Chic and Danna Flack, Brian Gaze, Michelle and Steve Henley, Map Ives, Lochie Jacobs, Dereck and Beverley Joubert, Festus Mbinga, Marlene McCay, Ian McMillan and Ian Michler of Invent Africa, Gus Mills, Jock and Rosie Orford, Di Paice, Nita Permuy, Peter and Beverly Pickford, Ian Player and the Wilderness Foundation, Felicity Swanson, Hermann Wessels, Lyall Watson and Grant Woodrow.

  A special thank you to my editor, Di Paice, and to Felicity Swanson, who was an essential part of the flow and early formatting of this book.

  To the wild animals of the Okavango and of the Linyanti in northern Botswana, thank you for sharing your river with me and for helping me to redefine the word intelligence.

  To Colin Bell, Malcolm McCullough, and Grant Woodrow of Wilderness Safaris, thank you for making my Linyanti adventures possible.

  To the many Botswana guides with whom I have worked—Greg Hughes, Vundi Kashamba, Marks Kehaletse, Bolatotswe Makgetho, Copper Malela, Frank Mashebe, Mike Myers, Moses Ntema, Clinton Phillips, James Pisetu, Isaac Seredile, and Maipaa Tekanyetso—thank you for what we have shared.

  Finally, to my best friend and wife, Sharon—thank you for your love, your generosity of spirit, your patience, your attention to detail, and the countless hours you spent reading and rereading the manuscripts that gave rise to this book.

  ecology [ee kol o ji] n. —study of the relations of living organisms to their environment; study of ecosystems; study of the environmental conditions of existence (Croall and Rankin)

  intelligence [in telli jans] n. —the capacity to learn from experience, to think in abstract or symbolic terms, and to deal effectively with one’s environment (Atkinson, Atkinson, Smith, & Hilgard); the capacity of an animal to use tools, to solve problems, to find its way home, and to learn by imitation (Hauser)

  WILDER NES

  Have we forgotten

  that wilderness is not a place,

  but a pattern of soul

  where every tree, every bird and beast

  is a soul maker?

  Have we forgotten

  that wilderness is not a place

  but a moving feast of stars,

  footprints, scales and beginnings?

  Since when

  did we become afraid of the night

  and that only the bright stars count?

  Or that our moon is not a moon

  unless it is full?

  By whose command

  were the animals

  through groping fingers,

  one for each hand,

  reduced to the big and little five?

  Have we forgotten

  that every creature is within us

  carried by tides

  of Earthly blood

  and that we named them?

  Have we forgotten

  that wilderness is not a place,

  but a season

  and that we are in its

  final hour?

  FOREWORD

  We are connected with each other in surprising ways.

  I LEARNT THIS WHEN I WAS JUST EIGHT YEARS OLD, A CURIOUS CHILD TAKING pleasure in wandering barefoot and alone across the Great Karoo, semidesert plain that covers most of South Africa’s dry interior.

  At first acquaintance these are bleak places, rusty and unforgiving, stretching to horizons
broken only by occasional flat-topped stone koppies. But like all deserts, their delights lie in the detail.

  Every day I discovered something new. Floral stones sculpted by the sun and wind and, between them, a wonderful variety of succulent plants camouflaged to look like pebbles waiting patiently for the next rare fall of rain. And once in a while I would be encouraged to encounter a whip-tailed lizard, a trap-door spider, or even a fossil shell left behind by an ancient sea.

  These signs of life delighted me. They promised continuity, but I was totally unprepared for what I stumbled over one cloudless day…

  It was a shiny stone, larger than my foot, one amongst many others, polished by the elements with reflective desert varnish. But this one was different. It was golden and beautifully shaped with the sort of symmetry that set it apart from the others. More than just a stone.

  I knelt to get a closer look, and for a long time that was all I dared to do. I was afraid to touch it, but eventually my curiosity overcame my hesitance and I put my hand gently on it. And as I did, every hair on the nape of my neck bristled.

  I knew what it was! A hand ax, carefully crafted to fit even my small hand. A message from the Stone Age, passed directly from the maker’s hand to mine across the gap of a million years.

  I learnt much later that tools of this kind were manufactured by Homo erectus who used it as an all-purpose instrument for throwing, hammering, skinning, cutting, and scraping. The Paleolithic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. Something made and used on the spot, or carried to the next site if it was found to be especially pleasing.

  I still have this strange gift on my desk and it now fits my hand like a glove, continuing to give me great pleasure. To me it proves that intelligence is not peculiar to our species. It is the product of collecting, collating, crafting a deliberate choice, a work of art and early science.

  This is what Ian McCallum calls ecological intelligence—involving “rediscovering ourselves in nature.” And it seems to me that his insights are the product of three skills.

  Ian is a physician who doesn’t believe that there are any quick medical fixes, nor any easy ways to heal, for ourselves or our environments. But like Pythagoras, he suggests that everything is intelligent in its own way. He practices remedies that involve our return to nature. He encourages the rediscovery of our place in the world, and he teaches the restoration of ‘soul places’ whose absence from our lives are a direct cause of homesickness.

  He is also a Jungian practitioner. He understands the importance and significance of having both a collective unconscious and a personal shadow. Armed thus he has a sound and balanced sense of evolutionary history, vital to understanding some of the mysteries inherent in the construction of weaverbird nests, termite mounds, shoaling fish, and all the other ‘ideas’ that help a number of species to compete in their Darwinian struggles for survival.

  But perhaps most important of all, Ian is a published poet, a romantic who is not afraid to stretch scientific horizons and is uniquely qualified to deal with the paradoxes that run wild in the mindfield that lies between the extremes that science is forced to confront in questions involving the existence of the mind.

  I admire this brave attempt to tackle a very difficult subject, which sheds new light on James Lovelock’s forecast that through human beings, the Earth may have its best chance of becoming conscious of itself.

  LYALL WATSON

  Ireland, 2005

  I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no:

  I sing and kill and work…

  Carl Sandburg

  We are a poetic species.

  Richard Rorty

  INTRODUCTION

  TOWARD A GREATER AWARENESS OF THE PRIVILEGE OF WHAT IT MEANS TO be the human animal is what this book is about. To me, it is a wild and ethical imperative—an urgent reminder that we are inextricably linked to the land; that the history of every living creature is within us; that we are above all a mindful, poetic species and that we are the “keepers of our zoo.” If we cannot accept this then we will continue to be the creatures of our own undoing.

  When we review the history of life on this planet, it is evident that death and, eventually, extinction is the fate of all species and that life, with a will of its own, will continue to find new ways of expressing itself. This in itself is a miracle. But there is another side to this awe-some process. Prior to the emergence of humans, nowhere in the evolutionary narrative does it show any one species contributing quite so dramatically to its own extinction, let alone to the extinction of other species such as birds, butterflies, and marine animals, plants and beetles, as well as many species we don’t even know about.

  There is hardly a place on the face of our planet that we have not explored, settled, and altered in some way to satisfy our own ends, and the news is not good. The denuding of tropical forests, acid rain, air and water pollution, diminishing wilderness areas, the introduction of alien vegetation, and greenhouse warming all have one thing in common—the human factor. A sobering thought. Even more sobering is the realization that the natural selection process of evolution is happening right in front of our eyes and we are the force behind it. In response to the well-intentioned use of insecticides, antibiotics, and other organic chemicals, the Earth is now host to multiple new strains of resistant organisms, from bacteria and viruses to weeds and insects, including more than a hundred new strains of DDT -resistant mosquitoes. Having turned a blind eye to the fact that we are a part of Nature’s great diversity, we have become ecologically unintelligent. Lopsided in favor of the angels, we have steadily distanced ourselves from our biological past.In what is sometimes referred to as the Human-Nature split, we have ignorantly, if not arrogantly, placed ourselves at the apex of creation. It is time to come down from that precarious pedestal.

  The big question, of course, is can we reverse this destructive, self-deceptive trend? Are we willing to come off that pedestal? Something in me says no. It is difficult to counter the argument that the down-ward spiral of human coexistence with this planet has already begun and that it is too late to make amends; but something in me says yes. It is that something that allows me to continue my work as a psychiatrist, that affirms the belief that when we commit ourselves, we can learn to see ourselves differently. That it is in our nature to change, to adapt, to diversify, to deal with suffering, and to discover, with time, that our suffering is sometimes an important part of our healing. It is a belief that the future of human coexistence with the Earth is going to depend just as much on the creativity of its scientists and poets as it does on changes in climate and vegetation. And so, if it is not too late, how do we begin to rediscover ourselves in Nature? How do we begin to heal or to reconcile the Human-Nature split?

  First of all, we have to stop speaking about the Earth being in need of healing. The Earth doesn’t need healing. We do. Utterly indifferent to human existence, the Earth will thrive—when we are gone. We are the ones who need to redefine our relationship with it. We are the ones who have become ashamed of our wild nature, and by this I do not mean the coarse, aggressive, and self-destructive sense of the word. That is savagery. Instead, we have become apologetic for being dispassionate, spontaneous, raw, territorial, protective, and angry. We are the ones who need to do the reaching out, not to save the Earth, but to rediscover ourselves in it.

  Healing and mending are often regarded as being the same thing but it is going to be important that we understand the distinction between the two. Healing seldom occurs, if at all, without a profound change in attitude not only to oneself and to the world, but to oneself in the world. Mending—the quick fix—on the other hand, is something else. As necessary and as convenient as it may be, it seldom makes any demand on one’s capacity to reflect or to change one’s ways.

  Secondly, if we are serious about the healing of the Human-Nature split it is essential that we become more evolutionary minded. We have to wake up to the privilege of what it means to be human: that we are part of a web of life
in which everything is genetically and molecularly linked and that human psychology has deep evolutionary roots. We are naturally resistant to change, let alone to admitting our animal past. And yet the evidence is there. With the unraveling of the human genome and the subsequent discovery that more than 90 percent of it is shared with every other mammal, the poets and the old shamans have been proven right. The animals are our soul mates and we are the human animal.

  And then there is our link to the Earth itself. I believe that our identity is intimately associated with a deep historical sense of continuity with wild places and the animals that live there—that we have an ancient, genetic memory of where we have come from. These are the places that permit us to say, sometimes unreservedly, “it is as if this place is in my blood…it is as if I have come home.”

  To lose one’s sense of union with wild places is to preempt what I believe is one of the most overlooked conditions in modern psychiatry—homesickness. Often presenting as a restless depression, home-sickness and a loss of wildness are the same thing. So is a loss of soul. Our creativity suffers and so do our relationships. Anyone who vaguely understands the significance of a walkabout or who longs for the chilling night call of the spotted hyena, Crocus crocuta, or the shape and the shade of the Umbrella Thorn tree, Acacia tortilis, will know that rest-lessness. It is also likely that they will understand the unmistakable homesickness in these lines by poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

  Sometimes a man stands up during supper, and walks outdoors and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

  The cure for homesickness is to remember where we have come from.It is to rediscover that original church within oneself and to remember that the wild areas of the world are the landscapes of the soul and that the creatures who belong there are soul makers. We need these places in much the same way that the ancient Celts needed their sacred groves—not because they are there, or because they are beautiful, but for that compulsive union of fact and feeling that we experience when we go there. Deeply visceral, it is the experience of soul. And it is impossible to put a price on it. To remember that church is not enough. We have to be able to go there also. Be it the desert, the savannah, the mountains, the sea, or the wild lands of ice and snow, we have to be able to go to the places where we most belong and where we are most ourselves. It is an inner and an outer journey and our healing depends on both.