A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
The last few words of The Eight Master Lessons of Nature stay with me long after I close the book.
Beauty is right here, within easy reach. You can feel it under the branches of an old maple tree on a summer afternoon, when in a kind, gentle startle it dawns on you that there’s no action for you to take, no problem to solve, no plans to make. Only the shade, the sun, the sound of the breeze in the leaves. And an extraordinary and effortless exchange. You, with every breath out, nurturing the tree. The tree, in turn, giving oxygen for your next breath.
And so the world turns.
And so you turn the world.
Looking around at the world today – a world of skyscrapers, super-highways, melting ice caps and rampant deforestation – it is easy to feel that humanity’s ties to nature are fraying.
For those who long to reclaim our relationships with the world around us, to reweave connections that can lead us home, Gary Ferguson presents a riveting description of what nature teaches us about living well in the world. Lessons that are applicable in more ways that you imagined.
With new insights into the inner workings of nature’s wonders, he explains how many of the most remarkable aspects of nature are hard-wired into our very DNA. And interdependence, suggests Ferguson, is less about saving one species than it is about saving us all.
Through cutting edge research, drawing on science, psychology, history and philosophy – and personal insights – Ferguson reveals the astounding web of connections that holds powerful clues about how to better navigate our lives.
Scientific discipline has thrived on being objective, on the observer being disconnected from the observed. And yet, with all that this has yielded, today’s science recognizes that this kind of seeing places limits on all that we can know and learn.
Categorical thinking and binaries make life brittle and less interesting. And as Harvard chemistry and physics professor Eric Heller reminds us, “Be careful how you interpret the world. Because it is like that.”
Sister Helen Prejean, whose work with the severely troubled including convicted murderers became the basis of the Susan Sarandon-starrer Dead Man Walking, tells him that we can learn a lot from the Greeks on how to respect the planet. They defined respect as to look again and in looking again, we can make something fresh, we can bring “an ideal more fully to life by making it real in our everyday world”.
He quotes everyone from Einstein and Carl Sagan to Jane Goodall, all of whom delved into the profound mystery of nature. Goodall, he says, remains unwilling to explain life thro-ugh truth and science alone. “There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.”
And he sheds new light on expressions many of us have used not-so-correctly all our lives. Survival of the fittest, for instance, did not mean survival of the physically strongest or most aggressive of the species, says Ferguson.
Originally that phrase referred to being “fit” in the sense of being fit enough to stay in sustained relationship with the available resources. “I use this term (struggle for existence),” Darwin said, “in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another.”
Much like Peter Wohlleben did in The Secret Life of Trees, Ferguson describes how a community of trees looks after the needs of all the members. Passing nourishment from those who had enough to those who didn’t, sending each other messages to trigger a defence response to blight.
Ferguson begins the chapter on Lesson two – Life on Earth Thrives Thanks to a Vast Garden of Connection – with a Pygmy legend: The man killed the bird, and with the bird, the song, and with the song, himself.
He explains the notion of Ubuntu according to which “true wealth, true satisfaction, can never fully be realized if our own prosperity isn’t shared with the others with whom we travel the world”.
Diversity? Nature can teach us a thing or two about that. Lesson three: The more kinds of life in the forest, the stronger that life becomes. As a young student, Ferguson learned that different flowers have different survival strategies, that if some get wiped out, others will survive. And because they survive, the system survives. In other words, nature hedges its bets.
He quotes Maya Angelou who advised parents to teach their children about the beauty and strength in diversity. And Malcolm Forbes who defined diversity “as the art of thinking independently together”.
Fun fact: The Latin word for thinking, cogito, comes from a root term that means “to shake together”.
Diversity of course refers to diversity in race as well as gender. He gives countless examples from nature in which females lead the pack, literally. And yet, “one of the most prestigious scientific communities in the world, the Parisian Academie Royale des Sciences, founded in 1666, would not admit the first woman –she the wife of an academy member – until 1979.”
To see through a feminine lens, suggests the ancient Tao-te-ching, is to see that which “clothes and feeds all things but does not claim to be master over them”.
From the animal kingdom we learn that leadership is based not so much on physical dominance as on reputation and skill.
“The more social the species, the more valuable are the mature leaders – those who can apply their experience to a wide range of needs in their communities.”
Look up at a star-filled sky or kneel down in your garden, urges Ferguson, and you will be “nudged back into the realms of wonder”.
It’s mostly a matter of getting out of your own way.
The Eight Master Lessons of Nature by Gary Ferguson is published by Dutton, $36.