I have been meaning to write a book (yes, a
whole book) on a contemporary, pragmatic approach to Buddhism for some time
now. I turn it over and over in my head: whenever I walk, when in the bath and
in the subtly splendid quiet of morning’s twilight. The book remains unwritten
but each day I get better at understanding how and why I want to write. Perhaps
this is all mere vain cleverness substituting for procrastination?
One of the cerebral off-shoots of this running
internal monologue is an issue which chimes in a semi-regular rhythm:
anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism presently refers to the process of
attributing human qualities/properties to the non human. Curiously the etymology
of anthropomorphism traces its definition to the attribution of human
properties to deities. This earlier use predates the current by over half a
century.
Most of us anthropomorphize somewhat
frequently. It is all too easy to bestow human motives on a pet cat, invest a
treasured possession with memorial and emotional significance as the object is
somehow magically special and not merely our relationship with it. Before you
cry out, read a little further. I am not saying that pets do not have “personalities”.
They certainly do have some sort of cerebral landscape and are capable of
feeling pain, pleasure, satisfaction and fear like (better than?) us bipeds.
The fact is that they do not do what they do because they want to be human
(perhaps they do but this equally is unknowable) they do what they do simply
because they are.
The same applies for plants. Many
conservationists perhaps rightly lament the introduction of certain species
into an ecosphere. They speak of nature going out of balance and talk about
loss of species and diversity etc. But these are all human concerns. Certainly,
it is humans who perform the majority of intercontinental redistribution of
biological matter by means of cognitive will and motivations linked to cultural
outcomes but once their labour is performed the result is only an imbalance in
so far as it balance is represented within a particular social, cultural and
historical context.
In Australia, as introduced “pests”
lantana, privet and camphor “infest” large areas. People have worked hard to
eradicate and control them. And yet to echo Masanobu Fukuoka, if the conditions were not set for
their flourish then these species would not flourish. Decades, centuries of
indiscriminate land clearing and over farming created landscapes where gaps for
frontier species appeared. Nature has not motive but life: where there is space
there can be life. Where there is life there can be life. Perhaps the greater
pests in these landscapes were the grains and livestock which created the
conditions for humans of one sort from another continent to flourish. And
nature is just taking back what is hers… (see what I did there? Not easy not to
do).
In other words, those pests, the weeds in
the garden are not out to make life more difficult. What they are doing is
filling a vacuum created by human taxonomy whereby one species is valued over
another and whole ecosystems are organized according to this principle.
Similarly, it pays us to remember that modification of the environment by
humans is natural because humans are nature. The poisons we produce and pump
out are all possible because they are possible and they in turn produce new
types of environments in which we have to live. Are they necessarily favourable
or pleasant? The answer is not always so clear cut. One thing is, however: our
current approach to nature leaves a lot to be desired.
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