CHAPTER 52MIND IN THE BIOSPHERE; MIND OF THE BIOSPHERE
MICHAEL E.SOULÉ
Adjunct Professor, School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Say you want to convince your father-in-law to get involved in conservation—in rescuing biodiversity. How would you start? Would you tell him about the genes for disease resistance in wild relatives of crops plants? Would you mention the probable existence of undiscovered, valuable pharmaceuticals, talk of tropical rain forests and their rates of conversion, or describe a personal experience of nature that still brings tears to your eyes or goose bumps to your skin? That is, would you appeal to his intelligence or to his emotions? The chapters in this section may help to inform us about this choice.
There are many ways of seeing the biosphere. Each of us is a unique lens, a lens ground and coated by nature and nurture. And our responses to nature—to the world—are as diverse as our personalities, though each of us, at different times, may be awed, horrified, dazzled, or just amused by nature.
Most such experiences are quite ordinary, everyday encounters with suburban birds, street trees, garden pests, or domesticated plants and animals. But some of these experiences leave vivid memories and can change our behavior. These so-called peak experiences can fuse our separate selves to nature, establishing a lifetime bond.
Ordinary or sublime, such encounters constitute just one of several dimensions of our total involvement with the natural world. It is the fundamental dimension, though, because experience provides the raw material out of which the more conceptual dimensions are formulated.
What are these ordinary dimensions? Previous sections in this volume deal with some of them, including the value dimension, which is dominated by the polarity
FIGURE 52–1 Three dimensions of mind involved in our perception of nature. The basis for the overlap of these dimensions is both neurophysiological and experiential.
between utilitarian values on the one hand and intrinsic (spiritual-ethical) values on the other. Another is the scientific-analytical one, in which the mind perceives biodiversity as a phenomenon to be organized and explained.
The relationships among these three dimensions are shown in Figure 52–1. First, there is one’s immediate, sensory experience of nature; it is mediated by the sensory-neural apparatus of the nervous system. Next, this input is categorized, interpreted, and analyzed by the mind (mostly the limbic and neocortical organs of the brain). If the input is particularly arousing, the limbic-hypothalamic centers may trigger emotional responses such as fear, disgust, or sublime joy. In addition, there may be physiological changes such as sweating, goose bumps, and tears, or attack, flight, and exclamations.
Mental activity of another sort may be launched. One sort of activity is normative or judgmental; this is the value dimension mentioned above. The judgments and classification are partly learned. At some stage in our life we may make a generic judgment about nature, deciding whether it is, on the whole, good or bad, or whether it is a part of me1 or, at the other extreme, is a hostile but useful other. Many neural structures, including the highest cortical centers, play a role in the normative process.
Finally, the scientific-analytical dimension of mental activity mentioned above occurs in the greatly expanded human cortex. This structure, called the neocortex in humans because of its evolutionary newness, occupies about 70% of the cranial vault, but it is almost nonexistent in the reptile brain. It is in this structure that complex associations are made, theories are conceived, and conceptual systems are born.
When biologists function in this dimension, their desire is to generalize and predict and ultimately to control. Their self-appointed task is to narrow and channel the Amazon of input from nature—to somehow place it into a few, manageable categories. Experience teaches that this process of pigeon-holing can lead to interesting or useful ideas.
The intellectual’s standard operating procedure, therefore, is to discriminate, dissect, and simplify, reducing the infinite variety of things and processes to a
1 / Such identification with nature is probably the emotional root of the cognitive experience of intrinsic value. See Naess, 1985.manageable number of categories and to the simplest atomistic parts and processes. This reductionistic approach has worked well in physics, chemistry, and in much of biology. Quite often, when we are finally able to reassemble the whole, it makes more sense (and is more beautiful) than before. For the scientist, in other words, understanding, not ignorance, is bliss.
MOTIVATION
Clearly, then, doing science, a characteristically neocortical-analytical activity, is not the same as loving nature, a limbic-emotional process. But this distinction between scientific activity and our appreciation of nature is a rock that often trips up many of us. Biologists wish to convince others of the importance of protecting biodiversity, including ecological and evolutionary processes. The problem is that very little thought and research has gone into the best ways to accomplish this vital goal.
Scientists, like everyone, usually revert to habitual ways of communicating. Their favorite format is the lecture. Facts, mixed with inductive or deductive reasoning, are presented with the idea of convincing the listener by the power of evidence and logic that nature is important and deserving of support. To the biologist, it may appear to be perfectly obvious that knowledge will lead to action—that once another human being (including a father-in-law or politician) understands the dimensions of the current spasm of species extinction and understands the agricultural, economic, and climatic implications of deforestation and desertization, that human being will have to do something about it and will simply be forced to join conservation organizations, change his or her life-style, contribute lots of money to the right causes, and vote the right way.
There are two lines of evidence, however, suggesting that such a didactic approach—the lecture-hall model—is inefficient and insufficient. The first is motivational science, the most frequent application of which is commercial advertising and promotion. I won’t say much about this, because it isn’t my field. But I hope that I won’t be too far off the mark if I point out that the content of advertising is rarely informative or logical. Instead, commercials are designed to arouse and to evoke pleasurable emotions and desires. More precisely, they bypass the cognitive centers, communicating through our basic physical desires (oral, sexual) and emotional needs (security, status, control, potential profits)…
On the other hand, if our objective is to motivate people, the best way to do this is probably with pleasurable experiences and memories. If neurobiology has told us anything about the mammalian brain, especially the human brain, it is that the mind and the body are not separate. Furthermore, the most direct and powerful pathways to pleasurable emotions are not via the thought centers of the neocortex but through the sensory-motor centers of the brain stem and cerebellum, and from there into the emotional centers of the limbic system. This is also the region that houses the playful, nurturing, and social behaviors that we find so pleasurable and that must be evoked in the people we wish to involve in the cause of biodiversity.
Perhaps it would be more effective politically to stress that the members of the movement to save nature can have special, positive experiences—peak experiences that flow from participating with others in doing something of great importance and value. Furthermore, the new motivators for nature might take a page from the advertiser’s book, promoting a wider love of nature with a sensory, physical experience of nature in the convivial company of like-minded friends.
One reason for the apparent frustration of the conservation educator may be inattention to the distinction between mentation and motivation, between the neocortex and the cerebellar-limbic axis. Students and others may be convinced cognitively, neocortically, of the value of life and diversity, but somehow our audiences don’t follow through. The urgency isn’t there. It is as if the organ of learning were not hooked up to the organ of doing.
The hypothesis is that if our pedagogy is purely cognitive, our chances of motivating a change in values and behavior are nil. We can’t succeed in teaching people biophilia (Wilson, 1984) (i.e., the love of life), with economic arguments and ecological reasoning alone. We must see to it that they have limbic experiences, not just neocortical ones. We must learn from the experts—politicians and advertising consultants who have mastered the art of motivation. They will tell us that facts are often irrelevant. Statistics about extinction rates compute, but they don’t convert.
We must also ask if there are critical developmental stages in the training of the limbic system for bonding with nature. Just as Harlow’s rhesus monkeys must have physical contact with warm, moving bodies if they are ever to breed suc-
Returning to the father-in-law, who is still waiting to be convinced of the importance of biodiversity, we come face to face with the urgency of communications. What is the message that we want to get across? A Buddhist sutra teaches, “Each thing has its own intrinsic value, and is related to everything else in function and position.” Ecology affirms it. But what then? How do we convince others? Maybe it begins with the courage to let ourselves describe our private, emotional experience of nature to our father-in-law…
REFERENCES
Lovelock, J.E. 1979. Gaia. A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 157 pp.
Naess, N. 1985. Identification as a source of deep ecological attitudes. Pp. 256–270 in M.Tobias, ed. Deep Ecology. Avant Books, San Diego, Calif.
Orians, G.H. 1986. An ecological and evolutionary approach to landscape aesthetics. Pp. 3–22 in E.C.Penning-Rowsell and D.Lowenthal, eds. Landscape Meanings and Values. Allen and Unwin, London.
Wilson, E.O. 1984. Biophilia. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 157 pp.
The Earth as a Living Organism
James E. Lovelock
The ideas that the Earth is alive may be as old as humankind. The ancient Greeks gave her the powerful name Gaia and looked on her as a goddess. Before the nineteenth century even scientists were comfortable with the notion of a living Earth. According to the historian D. B. McIntyre (1963), James Hutton, often known as the father of geology, said in a lecture before
the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the 1790s that he thought of the Earth as a superorganism and that its proper study would be by physiology. Hutton went on to make the analogy between the circulation of the circulation of the blood, discovered by Harvey, and the circulation of the nutrient elements of the Earth and of the way that sunlight distills water from the oceans so that it may later fall as rain and so refresh the earth.
This wholesome view of our planet did not persist into the next century. Science was developing rapidly and soon fragmented into a collection of nearly independent professions. It became the province of the expert, and there was little good to be said about interdisciplinary thinking. Such introspection was inescapable. There was so much information to be gathered and sorted. To understand the world was a task as difficult as that of assembling a planet-size jigsaw puzzle. It was all too easy to lose
sight of the picture in the searching and sorting of the pieces.
When we saw a few years ago those first pictures of the Earth from space, we had a glimpse of that it was that we were trying to model. That vision of stunning beauty; that dappled white and blue sphere stirred us all, no matter that by now it is just a visual cliche. The sense of reality comes from matching our personal mental image of the world with that we we perceive by our senses. It showed us just how far from reality we had strayed.
The Earth was also seen from space by the more discerning eye of instruments, and it was this view that confirmed James Hutton's vision of a living planet. When seen in infrared light, the Earth is a strange and wonderful anomaly among the planets of the solar system. Our atmosphere, the air we breath, was revealed to outrageously out of equilibrium in a chemical sense. It is like the mixture of gases that enters the intake manifold of an internal combustion engine, i.e., hydrocarbons and oxygen mixed, whereas our dead partners Mars and Venus have atmospheres like gases exhausted by combustion.
The unorthodox composition of the atmosphere radiates so strong a signal in the infrared range that it could be recognized by a spacecraft far outside the solar system. The information it carries is prima facie evidence for the presence of life. But more than this, if the Earth's unstable atmosphere was seen to persist and was not just a chance event, then it meant that the planet was alive--at least to the extent that it shared with other living organisms that the wonderful property, homeostasis, the capacity to control its chemical compositions and keep cool when the environment outside is changing.
When on the basis of this evidence, I reanimated the view that we were standing on a superorganism rather than just a ball of rock (Lovelock, 1972; 1979), it was not well received. Most scientist either ignored it or criticized it on the grounds that it was not needed to explain the facts of the Earth. As the geologist H. D. Holland (1984, p. 539) put it, "We live on an Earth that is the best of all possible worlds only for those who are well adapted to its current state." The biologist Ford Doolittle (1981) said that keeping the Earth at a constant state favourable for life would require foresight and planning and that no such state could evolve by natural selection. In brief, scientists said, the idea was teleological and untestable. Two scientists, however, thought otherwise; one was the eminent biologist Lynn Margulis and the other the geochemist Lars Sillen. Lynn Margulis was my first collaborator (Margulis and Lovelock, 1974). Lars Sillen died before there was an opportunity. It was the novelist William Golding (personal communication, 1970), who suggested using the powerful name Gaia for the hypothesis that supposed the Earth to be alive.
In the past ten years these criticisms have been answered--partly from new evidence and partly from the insight provided by a simple mathematical model called Daisy world. In this model, the competitive growth of light- and dark-competitive plants on an imaginary planet is shown to keep the planetary climate constant and comfortable in the face of a large change in heat output of the planet's star. This model is powerfully homeostatic and can resist large perturbations not only of solar output but also of plant population. It behaves like a living organism, but no foresight or planning is needed for its operation.
Scientific theories are judged not so much by whether they are right or wrong as by the value of their predictions. Gaia theory has already proved so fruitful in this way that by now it would hardly matter if it were wrong. One example, taken from many such predictions, was the suggestion (Lovelock, 1972) that the compound dimethyl sulfide would be synthesized by marine organisms on a large scale to serve as the natural carrier of sulfur from the ocean to the land. It was known at the time that some elements essential for life, like sulfur, were abundant in the oceans but depleted on the land surfaces. According to Gaia theory, a natural carrier was needed and dimethyl sulfide was predicted. We now know that this compound is indeed the natural carrier of sulfur, but at the time the prediction was made, it would have been contrary to conventional wisdom to seek so unusual a compound in the air and the sea. It is unlikely that its presence would have been sought for the stimulus of Gaia theory.
Gaia theory sees the biota and the rocks, the air, and the oceans as existing as a tightly coupled entity. Its evolution is a single process and not several separate process studied in different buildings of universities.
It has a profound significance for biology. It effects even Darwin's great vision, for it may no longer be sufficient to say that organisms that leave the most progeny will succeed. It will be necessary to add the proviso that they can do so only so long as they do not adversely affect the environment.
Gaia theory also enlarges theoretical ecology. By taking the species and the environment together, something no theoretical ecologist has done, the classic mathematical instability of population biology models is cured.
For the first time, we have from these new, these geophysiological models a theoretical justification for diversity, for the Rousseau richness of a humid tropical forest, for Darwin's tangled bank. These new ecological models demonstrate that as diversity increases so does stability and resilience. We can now rationalize the disgust we feel about excesses of agribusiness. We have at last a reason for our anger over the heedless deletion of species and an answer to those who say it is mere