1 Rant 101: The Seventh generation
Before the traditional Iroquois convened their consul meetings, they invoked this declaration:
In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
Each subsequent vote included a ballot cast by a representative who spoke specifically for the needs, the survival, and the dignity of those who would live a hundred and fifty years in the future. For the Iroquois, the generational format of their council defined a longterm relationship between government and ecology. The rights of future generations never became an issue of policy because it was, instead, the context of policy. Conservation was the bedrock upon which their government was built. The medium was the message.
Today, we have no political mechanism to debate genetic engineering, or even no-brainers like excessive product packaging. We are saddled, instead to abstract tenets such as "progress", and these tenets render us deaf to anyone who would speak intuitively for the rights and needs of future generations. One might well wonder how the future would be different if we started electing politicians possessed of better hearing.
Knowledge or Wisdom
Whereas wildness was central to the Iroquois' daily perception of the world, it is reduced to the margins of our own lives. We have little memory of what it is we have lost. Because language reflects perception, we are able to locate faint signs of this perceptual loss in our language. We often rely, for instance, on the term "natural resources" as if it were synonymous with nature and wildness. The prevailing educational system instructs our children in great depth how to observe nature, while it teaches almost nothing about nurturing a sense of communion with nature. The semantics of the distinction are telling. Observing suggests standing outside looking in. Communion signifies a conscious linkage.
Language not only reflects perception, it reflects public policy as well. Such a connection may explain the origination of wilderness policies molded by men of power who get their information from data sheets often compiled by vested interests, and who debate the future of nature and animals inside cavernous artificially-lit halls within an urban environment. These are well-educated people who, just like the rest of us, have been taught that nature is an observable resource needing to be managed. Their education taught them well to regard the human relationship to nature as a body of quantifiable information.
Is that what nature is: data? Echoes reverberate through the halls of congress assuring us in a self-assured language that, no, certainly not. Everyone knows what nature is. Right? But data about natural resources is the best packaging we have to determine wilderness legislation.
How else could we do it? Anyone have a better idea? Actually, somebody possessed of a different language that mirrors a different perception of nature — Hopis or Tibetans — might make the observation that our need to gather data is always going to reflect a parallel need to exploit that data. Or expressed more obliquely: knowledge is power but not necessarily wisdom.
The legislator's data sheet is prepared by biologists whose own perceptions about nature are formed by the same educational and cultural mores as the rest of us. Their data may be objective, the most certain criteria at our disposal for mining truth. Whether this so-called truth reflects nature, remains far from certain.
Policy reflects science reflects culture reflects language reflects perception reflects in a circle back to policy. Each spoke of this wheel influences every spoke. The wheel also suggests that our culture's much-applauded objectivity actually reflects a point of view—a relative or cultural truth—but never an absolute truth. How is that? Even as data arbitrates our view of natural resources, it casts a fog over our dwindling capability to know what it means to be a part of nature. This culture of ours assigns much utilitarian value to its numbers, its resources, and too little value to the idea that nature might possess some inherent value apart from ourselves.
Our data-driven politics is prone to capriciousness. It ceases to exist the moment our attention flies to some other compartmentalizedf issue: Iraq, the economy, space, technology. Where did nature vanish to, you may ask? This answer is this. It is hiding outside ourselves. Our modern minds have never learned to register nature as the context of our lives. Pragmatists assert that this compartmentalization is the only way the culture can sustain itself.
How else could the economy appear to grow strong while nature is everywhere in full retreat?
Government policy overwhelmingly reflects the nature compartment . Senators call it unauthoritative, impractical, or simply impossible to legislate ecological policy guided, not by data, but by relationship, morality, or a sense of place. These people are not easily moved when an earnest non-expert rises up from the throng to deliver an emotional harangue that declares, for instance that fisheries policy is simply wrongheaded because it is causing the sea turtles to go extinct. "If it's wrong,"declare the legislators in response, "Show us the data that proves it?" This prompts an industry spokesperson to demonstrate that experts can, indeed, place a dollar value on disappearing turtles. Employing a lethal dose of legal terminology, thwey can show that this value is of a lesser amount than the value of the shrimp industry left to fish unimpeded by impractical netting methodology that does not entrap turtles.
Something is amiss when those possessed of the talent to "prove it" use that proof and that talent to implement policies that prompt the aerial shooting of wolves, the virtual annihilation of pelagic dolphins in the cause of pet food, the nuclear stockpile. Global warming. Sadly, such horrors will continue to unfold as long as legislators remain unwilling to acknowledge their inability to govern a nature that is not a synonym for natural resources. Yet no time soon will they acknowledge that the expert who steps forward is, almost always, no expert at all. He's another well paid lackey for business as usual.
Linkage and Linkage
Now we are told that the science of ecology, said to illuminate the linkage inherent within nature, will alter the current perception of business as usual. But whose ecology is it? Does it define the science of linkage? Or does it motivate the experience of linkage? Recognizing the difference provides a clue about the welfare of future generations.
The first term reflects that same data-driven relationship to nature. Biologists point their feelers outward. They do so in order to accumulate data that describes a linkage that exists outside their own perceptions. Yet precisely because they work so hard to maintain this separation, biologists will never be able to make the environmental crisis go away. They exhaust too much of their own genius retaining an aloof neutrality. Even Many ecologists display a deep passion to preserve the environment. yet those are the ones who suffer the most. Whene they argue their case before the legislators who govern policy, they soon discover that their passion destroys their authority.
By contrast, we live inside the second, experiential definition of ecology. The experience of linkage includes our perceptions, our feelings, intuitions, responsibilities, and hopefully our right relation to nature. There is nothing much objective about this second definition, which explains why it doesn't make for much of a science. A case could be made that the experience of linkage actually refutes objectivity. In some odd way, the science of ecology is best understood as an oxymoron.
Yet so many ecologists care so deeply about the environment that one might wonder if there could be a new kind of science not shackled to the objective pose; a new kind of science not driven by data. Human beings are not born with a natural predilection to destroy nature. Nor does the destruction occur independent of human intentionality. As the concept of the seventh generation is meant to demonstrate, the environmental crisis is something we are taught to perceive.
Our cultural training is a kind of psychosis. Many environmental writers have pointed out that our global resource dependency is an addiction. Gar Smith, writing for Earth Island Journal, once described the Exxon Valdez oil spill this way:
Oil company officials are beginning to sound like problem drinkers who continue making promises they can't keep...Oil-hauling, like alcoholism is a form of addictive behavior that is inevitably destructive.
The environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. It begins and ends inside each one of us. Retaining the separation between subject and object exacerbates the problem. We act connected when we get connected. Our actions, our lifestyle, our policies all follow. Paraphrasing the Buddhist concept of the Boddhisattava, no one is cured until everyone is cured.
Imagine a future in which the de facto authority our society presently grants to scientists to describe nature and, in fact, speak on nature's behalf, is granted, instead, to ethicists, musicians, dancers, poets, shamans, even children. What all these seemingly disparate people share in common is a deep subjective trust of life and linkage. These are people who give real power to intuition. Let's choose artists who grant imagery more authority than data, and comprehend the key difference between nature and natural resources. These are people who possess a perceptual grasp about the abiding unity of nature. Unlike many politicians and all scientists, they do not attempt to stand outscomprehend the key difference between nature and natural resources.
I am suggesting that the culture's relationship to nature will improve on the day that Senate subcommittees about land use start consulting our best dreamers as wisemen and wisewomen and elevate them to the critical position currently occupied by the technocrats: that of defining and explaining nature for the rest of us. Ironically, Western culture may be unique in not doing so. Future generations suffer because of it.
Everything about our culture recommends that the seventh generation does not exist. I would suggest, instead, that they are real people. They do exist. Yet for the moment, they remain incapable of doing much of anything on their own behalf. They remain seated along the temporal sidelines, as it were, holding their collective breath, waiting in anticipation, watching how our future (yours and mine) is going to transmute into their present. Perhaps we can give them more substance by changing the way we perceive them.
Take a perceptual leap. Can you hear them? Listen closely. Their call is not much more than a low pulse, like the background hum of the big bang, or perhaps our own cumulative heartbeat. The seventh generation is singing its quiet song just about everywhere these days. Teach yourself how to listen. Teach a friend. Teach an enemy.
