Woods Wanderer

A dense fog has settled over the region during the past few days, accompanied by unseasonably warm temps and intermittent rain. “Gloomy” is how one weather forecaster describes it, and that’s how my wife Judy and many other people feel about it. Where is the snow that makes northern Vermont a winter wonderland this time of year? It hard to keep from thinking the worst.

I, on the other hand, look at it a different way. This thick mist matches my frame of mind these days. I gaze into the forest in my backyard and see familiar objects – namely trees – fade into the misty depths, becoming silhouettes then faded outlines of themselves, then nothing at all. What lies beyond what I can see? Only a blank gray wall.

This is exactly what happens whenever I contemplate Nature spelled with a capital “N.” I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Nature is chockfull of mystery. The three greatest mysteries recognized by most scientists are: the origin of the universe, the origin of life in the universe, and consciousness. All three address, either directly or indirectly, what we human beings are.

The universe supposedly emerged via the Big Bang from an infinitely dense singularity prior to all spacetime, whatever that means. Life emerged later, most likely, from a primal soup on this planet billions of years ago, near some volcanic vent. The level of consciousness that we humans currently enjoy can be traced back to artifacts and cave art created 30,000 to 60,000 years ago. The roots of it probably go back in time much farther than that. As to the consciousness of other animals and the extent to which consciousness pervades the universe, well, that’s anyone’s guess. All this underscores the fundamental mystery that is Nature: why anything exists at all, and why there is the semblance of order in the universe instead of absolute chaos. If none of this makes your head explode, then you are not really thinking about it.

I for one have had moments in my life when I have gazed deep into the unknown, beyond all perceivable objects or the mere suggestions of them, and apprehended What-Is. No, I have not comprehended Nature in its entirely, but I have in these fleeting, mystical moments apprehended it, just as everyone apprehends a dense fog. I have stood awestruck before what some people call mysterium tremendum – the Great Mystery. Such moments are common to those of us who go to the edge of scientific discovery and look beyond it, into the abyss of the unknown. This is how we humans go about making sense of ourselves and the world. This is where reason begins and ends.

As a natural philosopher, I have my speculations about What-Is. Thanks to my senses and cold, hard scientific facts, I have a rough idea what is going on here and elsewhere in the universe. Yet the unknowable still looms large like the dense fog that is lingering over the landscape these days. And I remain awestruck by it.

Tags: consciousness, facts, mysterium tremendum, mystery, mysticism, natural philosophy, nature, origin of life, origin of the universe, reason, science, speculations, the unknowable, the unknown

The urge to further explore the cosmos is coming back to me. When the night sky is clear, I can’t help but look skyward and marvel at the universe. Not long ago, I pulled out my binoculars and revisited the Andromeda Galaxy. More recently, I went to the Astronomy Picture of the Day website and checked out the incredible photos there. I think it’s time to crack open some cosmology books, dust off my telescope, and let the cogs in my head whirl about once again.

I reviewed my cosmos manuscript the other day, clicking into it after a short round of writing. What I found there got me thinking. It’s pretty good for being an early draft. Why not finish it?

I abandoned the cosmos manuscript years ago. At that time I couldn’t justify putting a year of work into something that would be difficult to market. After all, I’m no expert in the field. But I have a passion for the subject and that’s reason enough to finish the book. Besides, I am ready to have my mind blown again.

Cosmology is not for the faint of heart. The wild universe, hidden in plain sight, undermines any complacent understanding of things. Do not go there if you like having your feet planted firmly in some comfortable worldview. I have delved deep into the matter only to have my head explode, time and again. It’s intellectually thrilling yet exhausting. If you have ever pondered the big bang, red shifts, black holes, or dark matter, then you know what I’m talking about.

Unlike most people with a scientific bent, I do not look skyward and say, “God is dead.” On the contrary, I find in the night sky affirmation that we live in an ordered universe, that it is not all chaos and random occurrences. One look at a spiral galaxy is proof enough to me that some organizing force is at work. Gravity alone defies chance.  But what is really going on out there? Like I said, the subject isn’t for the faint of heart… or the simple minded.

Tags: astronomy, cosmology, metaphysics, nature, religion, science

For over a year now, I have been reading and rereading the works of John Burroughs, along with critical and biographical essays. He continues to fascinate me because he was a curious mix of contradictions: literary man and dirt farmer, naturalist and abstract thinker, recluse and socialite. His work is a sea of mediocrity seasoned with flashes of brilliance. He was deeply religious yet wholeheartedly embraced Darwinism. Few nature writers have ever been as popular as he was at the peak of his career, yet his work is largely unknown today. He chummed around with both Walt Whitman and Henry Ford. That alone makes my head spin.

“There is no light more mysterious than the light of common day,” Burroughs wrote in his journals. That sums up both his approach to understanding the world, and the man himself. In many ways he was a common man with many commonplace beliefs. Yet there is no mistaking the rarity of his vision. I have read a lot of naturalists and philosophers over the years. Few have been as scientific in their thinking as he was without discarding the concept of God altogether. Even fewer have speculated about the nature of the universe at large while growing grapes. He was a rare bird, indeed.

It is no mistake that I have been drawn to Burroughs and his work. His spiritual father was Ralph Waldo Emerson. In my latter years, I too have gravitated to Emerson’s way of seeing the world. All three of us have one thing in common: a deep and abiding pantheism. And while that word does none of us justice, it comes as close as any word can to explaining how they felt and I still feel while beholding the divine in nature

The danger in reading the likes of Emerson and Burroughs is that one loses touch with the spirit of these modern times. It’s hard to imagine either man yapping on a cell phone, watching television, or surfing the net. Burroughs drove a car in his old age but had a hard time keeping it out of ditches. That said, I think either one would make a good trail companion if they were alive today. Some things never change. Our relationship to the wild is one of them.

Tags: John Burroughs, natural philosophy, nature, nature writing, pantheism, religion, science

During the balmy days of autumn, I stumbled upon a dozen or so woolly worms in various places, and studied them for some sign of the coming winter. The wider the brownish-red band, the milder the season or so the saying goes.

Well, it looks like it’s going to be a mild one this year.

I’m not a big one for folklore, and don’t really believe that tiger moth caterpillars can predict an entire season any better than our weather forecasters can. Yet I wonder what lies ahead. Right now, in the dismal light of December with a bone-chilling fog clinging to the barren, snowless landscape, the woolly worm prediction seems to be holding true. Will the trend continue?

Predicting the weather is difficult. Predicting an entire season even more so. Nature is chock full of omens but earth science is another matter altogether. The planet is a complex system. There is never enough information to say with absolute certainty what is going to happen in the near future. All we can do is make educated guesses. And climate change? There is always a need for more information when it comes to that. If we want to know all the facts before taking action, then we will be waiting indefinitely.

I don’t know to what extent human activity alters the climate. I don’t know how hard this winter is going to be. I don’t even know with absolute certainty what the weather is going to be like tomorrow. But I’ve noticed that such things aren’t quite as predicable as they used to be, woolly worms or no. So I wonder with with considerable apprehension what lies ahead.

Tags: climate change, folklore, science, seasonal change, weather

Last week I finished reading a book called The History of Nature and drew surprising insight from it.  I found the obscure tome in the science section of a used bookstore a few years ago.  The book was published in 1949 so you can imagine how out of date the science in it is.  But the last few chapters – “The Soul,” “Man: Outer History” and “Man: Inner History” – looked interesting.  I bought the book and read it despite its age.

The book was written by C. F. von Weizsacker, a German nuclear physicist.  Von Weizsacker was the first to identify nuclear reactions as the energy source for the sun and stars, so he was no slouch when it came to science.  The first three-quarters of The History of Nature is a good review of what humankind had learned about Earth and the cosmos by 1949.  But this heavyweight scientist wasn’t much of a philosopher, as the last quarter of the book clearly illustrates.

This comes as no surprise.  Few heavyweight scientists are heavyweight philosophers, as well.  In this age of specialization, we don’t even expect it.  As C. P. Snow pointed out a half century ago, science and the humanities have developed into two separate cultures.  Therein lies the problem.  The more we compartmentalize knowledge, the harder it is for any of us to see the big picture.  I give von Weizsacker credit for attempting, at least, to bring all knowledge together in a synoptic view of things.  Most thinkers don’t even try.

That said, what struck me about von Weizsacker’s worldview was the inconsistency of it.  “Body and soul are not two substances but one,” he states outright, suggesting a worldview one that would expect from a Platonic thinker, a Rationalist from the Enlightenment, or a Buddhist.  Then he blathered on about the rise of free thought over instinct, good and evil, and the virtues of the Christian love, as if this kind of dualism wasn’t at odds with his original body/soul statement.  Fuzzy thinking at best.

As I finished this book, it suddenly occurred to me that Humanism, preached by religious and secular thinkers alike in the middle of the 20th Century, is now antiquated.  The contradictions of it have simply become too glaring.  That we, Homo sapiens, are qualitatively different from the rest of nature is something any informed person living today must find very hard to swallow.  What basis is there in science for this kind of thinking?  At what point did we abandon our animal selves?  When exactly did we divorce nature and become human – when we turned to agriculture and started building towns, or when we started burying our dead and painting on cave walls?  How about when we fashioned the first tool?  When Lucy walked upright across the savanna, was that the beginning our separation?

No, I don’t see it.  I don’t see human nature apart from Nature.  Nor do I see human progress as the gradual removal of our selves from the physical environment.  Certainly, our ability to think abstractly – to love, hate and reason – is an integral part of our humanity, but so is eating, sleeping, dreaming, bleeding and sex, to name but a few of our more down-to-earth attributes.

If we are serious about being fully human, then we must cultivate our affinity with wild nature instead of alienating ourselves from it.  Besides, the wild is as much within us as it is out there.  Like all things in nature, we are evolving, but the words “progress” and “human” do not go together very well.  For better or worse, a human being will always be an animal to some extent.  And I for one revel in that fact.

Tags: being human, nature, philosophy, science

When I was a teenager, I firmly believed that the Apocalypse was at hand, that the end of the world as portrayed in the Bible and interpreted by Christian Fundamentalists was just about to take place.  This belief framed my worldview until I studied enough history and philosophy to convince me otherwise.  Now I see things differently.  Now I realize that the world is constantly changing.  Now I see that the Apocalypse occurs every day for someone somewhere on the planet.  Every time a culture perishes or a species goes extinct, it is the end of the world as we know it.

Like all other apocalyptic narratives, Global Warming is predicated upon a set of inflexible beliefs.  It goes something like this:  The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is rapidly increasing, and soon it will trigger a wholesale collapse of the entire planetary ecosystem.  Most of that increase is due to human activity.  We have to change our ways and radically reduce the amount of greenhouse gas we emit before it’s too late.  The most important part of this narrative is the last part: before it’s too late. No apocalypse worthy of the name omits that disclaimer.

Environmentalists warn of a tipping point – a point of no return.  Once there are enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, an irreversible breakdown of the planetary ecosystem will occur.  But there’s still time, we are told.  If we act now, we can still stop it.  Hmm.  That sounds an awful lot like the kind of hard-sell pitch that hustlers make on television late at night.  Act now. . . before it’s too late!

How will we know when it’s too late?  Scientists are generating all kinds of computer models to tell us just that.  They assume that it’s possible to know all the critical elements of a planetary ecosystem as complex as ours.  Are our scientists really arrogant enough to think they can determine the tipping point?  Evidently so.

Clearly, for the thousands of species of plants and animals that have gone extinct, it is already too late.  For the glaciers that have disappeared in the north, it is already too late.  For those who want the weather to make sense again, it is already too late.  The sea level is rising.  It’s up a couple inches already.  Soon it will be up to mid-calf.   Will it be too late when it reaches our knees?  How about our waists?

The tipping point concept is more politics than science.  It smacks of high drama.  Like all apocalyptic narratives, it is designed to inspire us, to force a behavioral change that will save us from ourselves.  But the stark reality of our situation is much less forgiving.  If we act now, then maybe we can salvage what’s left of an ecosystem that has been so good to us for so long.  If we act now, then maybe we can reverse the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere during the next hundred years.  Then again, maybe not.  Either way, we will continue suffering the consequences of industrialization for centuries to come.  Either way, the world will change.  There’s no going back to the way things were.

Tags: change, global warming, politics, science, the environment

Judy and I were returning home from a late dinner out the other day when we looked up and saw the Milky Way splayed across the sky.  No moon, not even the wisp of a cloud anywhere, and the sun was long gone.  Thousands of stars glittered overhead.  Judy suggested that I pull out my telescope for a quick look.  I noticed that there were no bugs out and the air temperature was nearly ideal, so I did just that.

I pointed the instrument at the brightest object in the southeastern sky, thinking it could be Jupiter.  Sure enough, it was.  Once I centered that planet and its four biggest moons in the eyepiece, Judy took a look.  I told her that she was seeing what Galileo saw with his telescope four hundred years ago: another planet and its satellites – the first hard evidence that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe.  I think she was impressed, not so much by my words but by the image itself.  Yeah, when it comes to astronomy, seeing really is believing.

Judy has encouraged my stargazing over the years but hasn’t taken much interest in it herself.  Quickly sweeping through the sky, I looked for nebulae, recalling how impressive they looked to me when I first saw them.  I wanted to wow my wife.  I had no star map in hand, though, so I gave up that hunt before Judy lost all interest.  I went looking for Andromeda Galaxy, instead.  The Great Square was in clear view directly overhead, so finding Andromeda wasn’t too hard.  All I had to do was follow a familiar path away from the Square with my binoculars.

When finally I got Andromeda Galaxy in sight, I showed it to Judy.  She saw only a fuzzy spot in the eyepiece.  I told her that was all she was going to see with my humble instrument, then reminded her that she was looking at an object two and a half million light years away.  Numbers like that are difficult for anyone to grasp, though, so I expounded:  When the light now reaching her eye left Andromeda, our ancestors were just starting to use stone tools.  But even that was a gross understatement.  Spacetime defies all description, really.  All we can do is approximate it.

Nature is all around us all the time – no farther away than the blades of grass underfoot, the bee buzzing past, or the breeze caressing our brows.  We have come to know it well through our senses, and nearly everyone knows intuitively the difference between what is natural and what is man-made.  But there’s a greater nature out there that requires our reasoning skills as well as our senses to understand, where the boundary between the concrete and the abstract is blurred, where cosmic forces are hard at work and objects are much, much farther away than they appear.  I for one can’t gaze deep into the night sky without thinking about God, about nature with a capital “N.”  Someday I will wander aimlessly through that wilderness as I do the woods.  Someday I will wander and wonder without physical restriction.  Someday.

Tags: astronomy, nature, reason, science, stargazing, the night sky

From what I can tell, there are two prevailing approaches to nature these days: the holistic and the rationalistic.  Those who take the holistic approach perceive nature as a seamless whole, which holds itself in eternal balance – when undisturbed by humans that is.  Those who take the rationalistic approach assert that there is a logical explanation for everything in nature, even the allegedly erratic behavior of individual plants, animals and people.  This is the fundamental difference between East and West, between the philosophies of the Orient and those that arose from ancient Greece.  Or so we are told.  But I don’t buy it.

In the 21st Century, a third approach is emerging – one that fuses the holistic with the rationalistic, the East with the West, the right brain with the left.  In this approach, Mother Earth is respected even as science is embraced.  Taking this approach, reasonable men and women work as stewards, helping nature restore itself to its proper balance.  But I don’t buy this, either.

There is, of course, that old-time view of nature as a world “red in tooth and claw,” where strong prevail and weak perish, but aside from a handful of libertarian anarchists, I’ve never met anyone who truly believes this.  The problem with this approach is that civilization keeps getting in the way.  What room is there for civility in such a world, for law and order?

The way I see it, the wild has no place in any of these views.  And when I say “wild” here, I mean truly wild – wild in a way that no theologian, scientist, or philosopher could ever fully explain.  The wild as fundamental contradiction, as aberration of nature, as inherent absurdity.  I seem to be one of the few people who believe that wildness of this sort exists.

After several decades of rumination, I have reached the conclusion that nature is predicated by the irrational.  I don’t think there can be any serious discussion about nature without the thorny issue of wildness being addressed, first and foremost.  And yes, I suspect that wildness and irrationality are cut from the same cloth, that all deviations from the norm are, in fact, as much a part of nature as the norm itself.  In other words, nothing stands outside of nature.

So go ahead and call me a Pantheist.  I won’t deny it.  It would be irrational for me to do so.  Then again, it’s hard to say how I’ll react to any box drawn around me.  And this is precisely why wildness, human or otherwise, is so dangerous.

Tags: being human, existence, nature, philosophy, reason, science, the wild

A few weeks ago, I posted a rumination called “Evolution is Religion” at this site, drawing fire from those who don’t wholeheartedly agree with me.  My friend Andrew’s criticism of my take on evolution and religion, at his site: http://evolvingmind.info/blog/ , is as good as any.  Check it out.  For those of you more interested in the hard science of evolution, which speaks for itself, there’s a big spread on it in this month’s issue of Scientific American.  For those of you still interested in trying to figure out what the hell I was saying in last month’s blog, read on.

Where did the first living cell come from?  In a sense this question is rhetorical because there’s no possible way for us to reasonably answer it.  I emphasize the word “reasonable” here to dismiss all wild-eyed theories about how it could have emerged, as well as all assertions based upon sacred texts.  A similar question is: What existed before the Big Bang?  That question has the time-bound word “before” in it, thus making it patently absurd to any serious student of cosmology.  I trade in these paradoxes and absurdities on purpose to illustrate how little we really know about nature.  We’ve filled entire libraries with the particulars of the natural world, but the whole of it still confounds us.

Knowing what we do about the particulars of the natural world, I don’t see how anyone can reject the mechanics of evolution outright.  It appears to be written in DNA itself, not to mention the multitude of fossils we’ve collected over the past couple centuries.  But all this suggests that nature as a whole is organized – a concept which begs the existence of some kind of organizing force.  Call that force what you will.  I call it God.

I understand the scientist’s natural revulsion to any kind of Godtalk.  One only has to conjure up images of Copernican heretics burning at the stake to see why men of reason cringe at the mere mention of anything remotely religious.  I also cringe when folks whip out their sacred texts, knowing that there’s a noose and/or torture chamber somewhere waiting for the likes of me, as well.  But that doesn’t change what I see in wild nature.  I see order as well as chaos at work in it, and I can’t for the life of me explain this.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years, my version of God is weak indeed.  I doubt it would hold up in any court, be it religious or secular.  But the wild keeps telling me that I’m onto something here.  And for that reason, I will follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion.  I just hope there isn’t a cup of hemlock waiting for me at the end of this road.

Tags: evolution, nature, philosophy, religion, science