Why do we find it so difficult to change what we are doing, to solve the pressing problems of our planet like climate change, pollution and poverty? Of course there's a lot about power and wealth, but I've increasingly been thinking that a big part of the problem is lack of imagination. We are unable to envisage different ways of viewing the world and assume that our mental constructs are the only possible reality. In order to make the world different from what it is, or indeed to accept and build on the differences that are already there, we need to be able to see or imagine things differently.
I've just finished reading Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald. It's a collection of essays on natural history, mostly about birds and peoples' interactions with them. I'm not going to review it except to say it's beautiful. In the final essay 'What Animals Taught Me', she says this:
How do we see something from an animal's point of view, or from a tree's? When they look at the world what do they see? What are they planning? What makes them happy? Do these questions even have meaning in their world?
I recently read an article about 'awe walks'. An awe walk is a 15 minute walk in which the person pays close attention firstly to their own breath and the feel of their feet on the ground, and then to the things around them. The promoters of the idea suggest things that may inspire awe, like a grove of tall trees, a mountain or rooftop vista or an art gallery. Research suggests a number of psychological benefits from the practice at least among older people - greater happiness, more pro-social attitudes, reduced self-focus and so on.
I don't exactly do awe walks but without ever having heard the term I've been practicing some elements of this over the past couple of years. Most days if I don't do any other form of exercise I go for a walk in the middle of the day. I don't pop headphones in my ears, or play with my phone except maybe to take the occasional photo. Instead, I try to pay attention to what's around me - to the trees growing by the side of the road or by the river, to the birds, to the lizards that run across my path. If I go over or along a watercourse, even a concrete drain, I stop and look over the edge to see if anything lives in the water.
Many of the plants I walk past, perhaps most, have been deliberately planted by humans, but many of them haven't. Seeds blow on the wind, plants sent out tubers, birds and flying foxes spread them around. They can pop up in the most unlikely places. I'm always amazed by the tenacity of the shrubs and scrubby grasses that cling to the embankments beside railway tracks or to little pieces of dirt between slabs of concrete. And many species, like swallows, have adapted their lives to the presence of humans, building their nests in little niches of our homes and infrastructure - like the ones nesting under the freeway and on the underside of the footbridge I walked over this morning. They don't care that it's not a tree, as long as their chicks are safe and there's lots of flying insects to catch.
They're not doing it for me. They're doing it for themselves. They have a drive to survive and reproduce and they do it any way they can, even in the least hospitable environments. How do they feel about where they live and what they are doing? Does this question even have meaning? I don't know, I can see plants, I know what they look like, how they germinate, even some of the names we give them, but their inner existence, if they have one, is a mystery to me.
Other creatures are closer to us biologically. Birds, for example, have brains like we do and communicate with one another via a code of signals that resembles language in some ways. Many of them are even territorial like we are. This Spring a pair of magpies has been nesting in what we think of as our yard, high up in a silky oak tree at the bottom of the yard. Magpies are highly intelligent birds as humans judge these things. They appear to be able to count up to ten, and to remember around 100 different human faces, distinguishing those they see as no threat from those they view with suspicion. The ones in our yard recognise us and leave us alone, but the male fiercely swooped strangers on bicycles until the chicks left the nest.
Still, when they walk around the yard looking at me with that strange sideways glance birds have, I have no idea what they are thinking. Do they feel happy seeing me the way I feel happy in their presence? Are they keeping a wary eye on me in case I turn nasty? Are the sizing me up and deciding I'm too big to eat? Do they know that I regard this as my yard, in the same way I know they see it as part of their territory? And when two of their chicks died shortly after leaving the nest, did they feel grief? Do they feel anxious that the warmer springs mean their eggs hatch earlier than they used to? Do they even know that? Just like trees, I have no insight into the inner workings of their brains, I can only observe their behaviour and draw whatever slight conclusions are possible from that. One thing I'm pretty sure of, though - I don't think they're worrying about my mental health.
Life is going on all around me, and most of it has little or no reference to me. We just happen to be in the same geographical location. I live amidst endless wonder and mystery.
Later in her essay Helen Macdonald says this.
You cannot know what it is like to be a bat by screwing your eyes tight, imagining membranous wings, finding your way through darkness by talking to it in tones that reply to you with the shape of the world. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel explained, the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be a bat. But the imagining? The attempt? That is a good and important thing.
As long as we see trees and animals as background to our busy lives, or unfortunate collateral in our need for endless economic growth, or even as aids to our mental health, we will never be truly motivated to preserve them from the growing tally of extinctions, or to keep space for them amidst our increasingly rapacious acquisitiveness. But if we begin to see them as creatures in their own right, as existing for themselves and inhabiting the world just as we inhabit it, then perhaps the idea of their loss will begin to cause us real grief, and we will grant them mercy.
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