John Muir's Campbellite Father

John Muir’s father, on his farm in Wisconsin, was a Campbellite. And so, about 150 years later, was I. What does this mean?

Following the teachings of Thomas and Alexander Campbell, participants in the “Restoration Movement” wanted to “restore” Christianity to its pure Biblical basis. There were to be no doctrines or creeds that were not specifically in the Bible; the Bible alone was to be their basis of faith. You will find modern churches that identify with this tradition, usually called Churches of Christ. The Disciples of Christ denomination began from this tradition but has branched out to no longer be fundamentalists. And among the Churches of Christ, you have to look carefully for the true, utterly pure Campbellites. I was a member of a Church of Christ sect that insisted that you should use a single cup for communion, and the churches that used multiple cups (a separate cup for each communicant) were “erring brethren.” You couldn’t tell from the church signs which church was which; the signs did not say “We use only one cup/multiple cups in communion.” While this seems like a trivial controversy, it was deeply important to us, and we spent a lot of time, sermon after sermon, denouncing the erring brethren. How many hours of my life I wasted on this!

Of course, Campbellites reject the label. They, as I did, claim that they are followers of Jesus, not the Campbells.

But us Campbellites clung to many doctrines that were NOT in the Bible at all. One example: we claimed that no instrumental music could be used during church services. Such a command is not found anywhere in the Bible. The Bible does not even say, “You cannot do anything during a church service that is not specifically authorized by Scripture.” We just made that crap up.

Another, and I believe more important, example of non-Scriptural assertions of Campbellites is, or was, what John Muir’s father tried to indoctrinate his son John to believe. He believed that the entire world, including the natural world, the forests and its trees and birds and soils, was fallen and evil, and we should not celebrate it. He actively tried to get his son John to NOT love the natural world. Fortunately, he failed, and we had John Muir to lead us into an era of conservation awareness. Search the Bible all you want, but you will never find any reference to the natural world to be the realm of Satan, or that loving the natural world is a sin. Just read Psalm 104 and try to tell me that the love of nature is a sin. Just try it. Since I do not expect any Campbellites to read this essay, I expect no response to this challenge. Campbellites live in a little isolated world in which they, and they alone, are faithful to God, and perhaps more recently to worship Donald Trump instead of God.

 

I have a particularly vivid and painful memory in regard to this specific belief. The Bible tells about how the old heavens and the old earth will be destroyed, and a new heaven and a new earth will be created. As a lover of nature, I was overjoyed to hear this. The forests and flowered hillsides I loved so much would not be destroyed forever but be recreated without the taint of human sin that currently fouls them. When I was asked to give a sermon, our “evangelist” was sitting in the front row paging through his Bible. I did not know at the time that he was planning to lambast me about this horrible belief—the idea that anything in the world, even the forests and wildflowers, could possibly be good.

The next week he delivered a sermon that was directed specifically at me. He said that “certain teachers” (translation: me) actually said that God would create a new earth. Then he went through a really contorted and wicked line of reasoning. He said, the old earth was the Old Testament, since before Jesus our earth (or dwelling) was the Old Covenant. The new earth, therefore, had to be Jesus’ new covenant. Anyone who believed that it would be a literal new earth, with trees and stuff, was utterly wrong and bound for hell. Gee, thanks, Bob Sanders.

You can imagine the effect that this had on me, as a high school student. To be utterly shamed as not only an infidel but a heretic in front of the congregation which I loved very much! I was utterly depressed by it. Some people would interpret what he did as verbal child abuse. I believe this form of verbal child abuse continues today in fundamentalist churches. Of course, it turns out he was wrong about this, and about almost everything else.

Thank God, if there is one, that I am no longer a Campbellite, and that I revere the work and memory of John Muir.

 

Opus 700: When Botany Was All the Rage

 THIS IS THE 700TH POST ON THIS BLOG!!!

Throughout the nineteenth century in Europe and America, botany was extremely popular. It was not unusual for a popular botany book to sell a quarter million copies. It was not uncommon to see someone taking a botanical hike, carrying a vasculum on a strap around the neck. The vasculum was a metal cylinder with a little door. Inside the cylinder, the collector would place fresh plant specimens, which would stay moist by means of damp cloths. The collector would go home and press the plants in a plant press in order for them to dry and be suitable for mounting on paper for a collection. Doesn’t sound like your idea of a good time? It would have 150 years ago. In this drawing, a wise old botanist is explaining plants to some utterly fascinated young men.

Why was “botanizing” so popular? Elizabeth Keeney, in her 1992 book The Botanizers, gives some reasons. The drawings and quotes posted in this blog come from her book.

First, botanizing was a mentally and physically good form of exercise. Looking at and collecting plants was a good way (and still is) of getting people to think about the world around them. It helped them to notice the tremendous diversity of life that they would otherwise not notice. And this would, in turn, make them more relaxed. We know from scientific studies today, as they knew from experience 150 years ago, that walking in the woods leads to relaxation. People also knew, especially if they had indoor jobs, that they needed exercise. One man even got his exercise by carrying shovelfuls of soil from one side of his basement to the other, then back to the first side. This was just boring, repetitive exercise. But taking a botany hike was also exercise (especially if you climbed a hill) and was interesting. One author wrote, “Many boys and girls go through the world, almost without seeing it. Now he who has eyes and does not use them, in such a beautiful world as this, is very much to be pitied. But the study of Botany will learn [sic] him to keep his eyes open…” especially to keep from blundering into the poison ivy.

Second, it was sometimes a popular way for men and women to meet one another. In one case, a man and a woman met on a botanizing expedition, later got married, and spent their honeymoon collecting plants. It was not unusual for colleges to keep men and women entirely separate—separate gardens, separate sidewalks—except on botanizing expeditions, where males and females could mingle. I wonder how many first dates today would go better if the couples went botanizing rather than to a dinner or a movie. On a similar note, botanizing was considered a safe form of recreation for delicate young women, as in this drawing. One author wrote, that botany was sufficiently refined for female attention. Flowers, with their “fragility, beauty, and perishable nature,” were like “a pure-minded and delicate woman, who shrinks even from the breath of contamination.” Males and females were not supposed to meet in bars, and meeting in a parlour at home was stuffy, so why not meet on a botany trip? Sounds fun to me, especially if the young man and woman have to hide under a bush to get out of a sudden rainstorm.

One author wrote, “In botany all is elegance and delight. No painful, disgusting, unhealthy experiments or inquiries are to be made. Its pleasures spring up under our feet [and] reward us with health and serene satisfaction. [No one could] pollute its lovely scenery with unamiable or unhallowed images…[Botany is] among the most innocent things in the world.” At least, so it would seem, until you realize that flowers are sexual structures with their organs all out in the open.

Finally, to some religiously-minded scientists, botany was an excellent way to see the mighty hand of God in the natural world. Studying plants will incline your mind to holiness. One botanist who championed this approach was Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who, incidentally, was the major American proponent of the theories of Charles Darwin. Here is the cover page of Asa Gray’s botany book for young people.

The good news is, you can still go botanizing. Just find a like-minded friend for a hike, or take a hike by yourself. Even if you take the same hike over and over, you will see things changing over the seasons. Gotta go now; my wife and I are going to take a botany hike.

Beautiful Planet

 

Imagine yourself on an alien planet, with weird rocks and an almost barren surface. The scene can be very dramatic, as in this example:

But for most of us, a beautiful green forest as seen from a mountain top, with blue skies, or else a green tropical forest from which rain drips refreshingly, is much more beautiful. This is a photo from a forest near my home in Tulsa.

Yet there is no logical reason why the second scene should be better than the first. It is impossible to define beauty in logical terms.

But it is possible to define it in evolutionary terms. To the extent of their mental capacity, all animals have evolved to feel that their environments are beautiful. Because of our large brains, which allow a feeling of spirituality, we humans are the animals most powerfully moved by the sense of beauty. And it is our natural environments that we find most beautiful.

Why would evolution create a sense of beauty in our minds when we see our natural environment? Because if we feel inspired by the beauty of our natural environments, we are more likely to endure its occasional hardships and to live productively within it, finding all the resources we need for our fitness. Someone who thinks that their environment is ugly is unlikely to try very hard to find resources within it. More generally, if we are happy, we will be healthy and get along better in our social circumstances.

But that almost never happens with humans. No matter where people live, they find their environment beautiful. Even on the barren steppes of Siberia. I had a student once from northwest Kansas. There are beautiful parts of Kansas, but this was not one of them. Yet she said, “It is the most beautiful place on Earth.” Probably, even the poor people who search for usable garbage near the landfills in South America think that a mountain of trash can be beautiful, even as they see the peaks of the Andes in the distance.

I find that beautiful natural scenes from this planet are the scenes that move me with the greatest sense of beauty. And evolution is the reason for it.

Springtime Secrets (Something to Do During the Pandemic)

I am posting this from the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in America. Many of us are down two only two major activities: working online, and taking walks. Like most universities and colleges, the one where I work is closed the rest of the spring semester, and students will complete their classes online. My wife and I take walks out away from other people, and watch all the wonders of nature, even when it is despoiled by human activity. This is what we have always done, but for some people, taking a nature walk might be a new activity. If you are one of those people, let me tell you some of the things you might notice.

Spring has been underway for some time in Oklahoma, where I live and work. But it has only recently been making itself obvious. Spring comes, but not all at once. The first thing to notice as you take your walk is that not all the trees open their buds at the same time. The elms opened their buds over a month ago, and they are now fully displaying their green seeds. Whole forests of elms are blushing a light green right now. This color is due to seeds, not leaves, which are only now beginning to emerge from their own buds.

Meanwhile, other tree species appear to still be dormant. In the photo below, the elms are green but the Kentucky coffee-tree (identifiable by its big seed pods) is still dormant.

Notice, then, that each kind of tree follows its own spring schedule.

The trees also display diversity within each species. The photo below shows two cottonwood trees. One is in full bloom (on the right, with clusters of little reddish flowers), the other is not. In this case, the tree in full bloom is a male tree, while the other one is female. Its greenish flowers will open up a little bit later. Just as male birds migrate before female birds, the male cottonwoods open their buds before the female cottonwoods. In trees, as in animals, the males compete with one another for access to the females even when, as in cottonwoods, it is completely without intelligence.

This is also the time of year that birds begin their social activities. In Oklahoma, mockingbirds and cardinals are already singing.

The final thing to notice is the garbage. Before the leaves open and the grass grows, thousands of pieces of garbage are visible all around the “natural” areas of Tulsa. (We have counted some of them; I do not exaggerate.) March is the best time of the year to see one of the ugly impacts that humans have upon the natural world.

Take a walk. It doesn’t cost anything, and it doesn’t expose you to viruses. You don’t need to download a movie. The natural world around you has plenty to see.

The Secret to John Muir's Success

John Muir hiked around in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and climbed a lot of peaks. He wrote about them also. Many of us think of him as the original and the most powerful voice for conservation in California. He and his associates were successful in saving Yosemite Valley from being turned into a reservoir, but lost the battle for nearby Hetch Hetchy. He could be considered the granddaddy of American conservation. As we face the biggest ecological threats since the Cretaceous Extinction, we should consider how John Muir accomplished what he did.

John Muir did not argue that setting aside wilderness was a good investment for society. He did not base his life on the conviction that we need to save wild biodiversity because it might come in handy for agriculture or forestry, or because trees protect watersheds. Thousands of people since Muir’s time, including me, have made this argument in books. Muir’s enthusiasm was based almost entirely on his love of the forests and mountains. If you read The Mountains of California, Muir’s Swedenborgian ecstasy is unmistakable in every paragraph. He loved the natural world so intensely that his thrill was contagious to everyone who knew him and to all who continue to read his writings.

Muir was the kind of man who would visit one of his friends in a cabin in the mountains; then, when a storm began, instead of staying inside, he would run out into the storm and experience the fulness of its power. He would watch the powerful winds bend the trees, some of them almost to the ground. He claimed it was no less safe to be outside in a storm than inside a cabin. Not only that, but during the storm he climbed the highest nearby peak, and climbed to the top of the tallest tree on that peak! He was the kind of man who would, without very much preparation, decide to go climb a mountain: running, leaping, and grasping onto vertical cliffs. When he found himself stuck in a place where he thought he would surely die, his strength was renewed and he scrambled to the top of the peak. The kind of energy that comes out of people in extremis would pour out of Muir all the time.

Muir did not look; he beheld. One way he did that was by thinking about the processes that were going on behind the scenery. He did not just see glacial lakes; he saw the processes by which glacial lakes were gradually filled with sediment and vegetation, and how lakes connected by streams were different from lakes isolated on the tops of granite peaks.

Muir saw a world that has vanished. He saw Native Americans hunting and foraging in the mountains, before the campaign to exterminate them proved largely successful. The California legislature put a bounty on Indians. Some, such as the Chumash, became extinct as tribes, though their genes live on; others, such as the Yokuts, had at least some cultural continuity. Moreover, the major disturbance that Muir saw was shepherds bringing sheep through the mountains, which damaged the vegetation and trampled the clear water of the lakes. He did not imagine the extent of disturbance that we see today even in the most protected places.

Muir’s writing was not, from my viewpoint as a writer, very good. He used every possible superlative and simile and metaphor for everything from a mountain peak to a dormant brown sedge. My soul feels tuckered-out after reading just a page of his book. And when he started writing about squirrels, watch out! I can do little better than to quote some of his description of the Douglas squirrel:

“He threads the tasseled branches of the pines, stirring their needles like a rustling breeze; now shooting across openings in arrowy lines; now launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden zigzags, and swirling in giddy loops and spirals around the knotty trunks...punctuating his most irrepressible outbursts of energy with little dots and dashes of perfect repose. He is...a fiery, sputtering little bolt of life, luxuriating in quick oxygen and in the woods’ best juices...”

Muir made no attempt whatever at scientific accuracy. He just jotted down his observations, and how he felt about them; he had no time for scientific description—he used his time instead to make more observations. Sometimes he even got cause and effect backwards. Consider this passage: “The mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with love on the forests to develop their strength and beauty.” I think he really meant this; he thought the wind blew as it did because it loved the trees. We usually think of the little trees at timberline to have the shape they do because of their responses to the wind, over evolutionary and physiological time; but to Muir, the winds blew strong because that is what the little timberline trees need. But, you see, he left the scientific description, just as he left the practical values of the trees, to other people. He was too busy being ecstatic.

And it is that ecstasy that made his work successful, and that is why we remember him.

As far as I can determine from his writings, he lived entirely off of tea and bread. I doubt, however, that this was his entire source of physical energy. But the thrill of nature seemed to be his entire source of mental and spiritual energy. Nothing less than this, on our part, can get modern people to save the natural world. People have to love the natural world, which means they have to see us love it. What that means is, if I see you out on a nature trail, I am going to walk up to you and start talking about the plants, and from there, the entire ecosystem. You might think I’m a little crazy, but you might start loving the natural world too.

This does not mean, however, that Muir never performed scientific experiments. The next essay will be about a whimsical experiment that Muir performed on the animals of the forest.

The Human Age

I have been reading Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age. As usual, I read good books several years after they come out.

The point of Diane Ackerman’s book is that humans have completely transformed the Earth to such an extent that no place is truly natural—nor is there, perhaps, any place that is entirely artificial. Humans have so completely transformed so much of the Earth that even the places we seemingly have not touched are now different, for example by global warming. But at the same time, all kinds of species have “invaded” the human landscape, whether transported by humans such as many invasive species (starlings from Europe, for example) or simply by exploring their way into our cities (as with coyotes downtown in cities).

Ackerman must be the world’s best science writer (in English, anyway). Try these quotes:

About urbanization: ...like splattered balls of mercury whose droplets have begun flowing back together, we’re finally merging into a handful of colossal, metal-clad spheres of civilization.

[The sun] reaches into the mumbling corners of our private universe, spurs growth, sheds light on all our episodes and exploits, transfigures daily life. Its edible rays feed the green plants on land and sea, which animals graze upon, and we dine upon in turn, and so it quivers through our blood. Every molecule of our being, every mote inside us, every atom and eave in the mansion of the body and the penumbra of the mind was forged in some early chaos of a sun.

And finally: Sometimes it seems as if Gaia were so pissed off she finally decided to erase her workmanship, atomizing the whole shebang and flicking our Blue Marble back into the mouth of the supernovas where our metals were first forged.

Years ago, someone who wrote a blurb for the jacket of my second book compared my writing to hers. Only now, upon reading Ackerman for the first time, do I realize what a compliment that was.

Much of Ackerman’s book is filled with small- or large-scale success stories of people who have capitalized upon the increasing desire among humans to reduce our impact on the Earth. She seems particularly impressed by natural buildings and vertical farming. All of this optimism is set against a background of terror, that humans are changing the Earth so much that we will no longer be able to fit our civilization into it, but she doesn’t talk about this very much. It is never very far, however, from the reader’s mind.

It was certainly never very far from my mind as I read the book. I was helping to supervise my ten-month-old granddaughter, who is exhaustingly cheerful. She loves exploring, or having attention paid to her, or being left alone to bang on things, and (we are lucky) she even likes most foods. She must have some incredible smile-muscles. And I kept thinking over and over about what kind of world she will encounter, a world messed up by earlier generations. It is not just my love for nature that makes me write and teach about environmental issues. I can always see her silhouette against our picture window with a view of flowers and leaves whenever I teach or write.

How One Scientist Writes Fiction

I am a scientist and I write fiction. (Time will show whether I publish any.) People assume, therefore, I must write science fiction. But this is not the case.

If I did write science fiction, I would probably write about an apocalyptic future in which humans have defiled the Earth so much that it loses its Gaia equilibrium and lurches from disaster to disaster. There is a long history of such literature, from the 1960s The End of the Dream by Philip Wylie to the more recent move Wall-E. Some writers, with scientific backgrounds, have science as part of the plot, especially the rise and rapid spread of new epidemics, such as the movie Contagion.

In these examples, science propels the plot or acts like a causative character. The human characters tend to be shallow and predictable in their responses to science-based catastrophes. The scientific concept is in charge.

But in my fiction, the characters and their struggles are foremost. I like to create characters whom the reader can really love (or sometimes hate) and who interact in complex ways. The characters advance the plot, and whatever does not advance the plot must be excised. In my case, I sometimes stick in didactive passages of science education, which I later remove. Does science play any role in my fiction?

Yes, of course it does. It is always in the background. In my fiction, the characters are (almost) always aware of the world in which they live and know how it works. In my fiction, a forest is not just a forest. The drier forests on the hillsides are different from the moist bottomland forests. My characters know the different kinds of trees. They know about germs, but also about the rich and fragrant microbial life of the soil. In my fiction, soil is not just dirt. My characters learn things from watching plants grow and finding fossils in rocks. In my fiction, nature is not a character but is a force: it is neither malevolent nor safe, but something entirely its own that we need to respect. I wish everybody knew enough science to understand how the world actually works; in my fiction, my characters generally do.

Shakespeare said all the world’s a stage. But a stage is dead. It has dead props that humans can move around wherever they want. But the world, scientifically understood, is not like this. It is a living planet to whose processes we must all fit our activities.

Consider the lilies

One of my favorite sayings of Jesus, many of which were later condensed into a single Sermon on the Mount, is to “Consider the lilies of the field.” It is Biblical passages such as this that are a much more fruitful source of dialogue between science and religion, rather than haggling uselessly about whether the Earth is only a few thousand years old.

The lilies to which Jesus referred were the wildflowers that blanketed the Galilean hillsides briefly in the early spring, before withering away in the summer—just as they still do in the Middle East and other similar climates such as that of California. As a botanist, I really like this passage. Many of these spring wildflowers are, in fact, lilies.

Jesus did not say to glance at the lilies and then forget about them, or to walk past them while you are looking at a scroll or a cell phone. You have to stop and look carefully at them. They are so small that you will probably have to get down on your knees to do it. You will have to pull one of them apart to see the full glory of their structure hidden inside. When you do so, you will find Jesus’ promise fulfilled: “Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” That is, the most amazing creations of humankind cannot compare with even one of thousands of short-lived flowers.

Jesus did not say to glance at the lilies and then believe whatever your preacher says they should look like, but to consider what they actually look like. But there are millions of fundamentalists (not quite all of them in Oklahoma where I live) who will believe whatever their preachers say, even regarding things they could easily go and look at for themselves. These deluded followers will not even bother to read the Bible, about which they actually know very little, for themselves, but just believe what the preachers tell them it says.

Jesus did not say to ignore the lilies of the field while driving your tractor or four-wheeler over them, or while pouring chemicals on them, or while paving them over or peeing on them.

I recommend that you actually get down on your knees to look at the flower, rather than picking it and holding it in your fingers. By picking it you have already vanquished it and made it into a thing, an expendable resource, rather than a living being with which you share the world. Pick it only if you are dissecting it for closer study.

I like to believe that if people who consider themselves Christians will actually get down on the ground and look at a wildflower, this will begin a cascade of consequences that will make them start thinking for themselves rather than just believing their preachers. This is important since some preachers, most famously Pat Robertson, tell them that God wants them to believe everything that Donald Trump says. How can you worship Donald Trump once you have looked closely at the intricacy of a flower?

In case you missed my video on this topic, see it here.

The Fear of the Lord

Most conservative Christians believe the Biblical statement, which I am in too much of a hurry to look up right now, that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Most agnostics and humanists would vigorously reject this statement. But maybe it is, in a way, true. If so, how?

Conservative Christians really do mean “fear.” And by fear of the Lord, they mean that we should be afraid, very afraid, that if we question so much as the tiniest point of doctrine that they assert about the Lord we will go to Hell. The fear of disagreeing with any of the self-appointed spokespeople of God is supposed to be the basis of all wisdom.

But they have it wrong in two ways. First, I think they misunderstand “fear,” giving it a modern English interpretation. They think it means that we should be very, very afraid of asking questions such as “How do you know that thing that you assert?” But instead I believe that “fear” means awe and wonder. One can have a great deal of technical knowledge about the natural world, but unless one feels awe and wonder then the natural world is not God’s creation but is just a pile of resources for rich Republicans to make money off of. Most scientists I know—and I know a lot of them—feel awe and wonder at the cosmos that we are privileged to investigate. It is we, the scientists and anyone else who feels awe and wonder, are the ones who truly fear the Lord.

Second, the Biblical statement says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, not the entirety of it or the end of it. Conservative Christians think that your unthinking acceptance of their assertions about the Lord is the entirety and the end of wisdom.

Although I do not assert many of the traditional doctrines, I do have the fear of the Lord as the beginning of my wisdom: I feel awe at the universe, and I use that as my starting point for learning more about it, from my own research and investigations by others.

Henry David Thoreau, the man

I begin a series of three posts about Henry David Thoreau, adapted from my two encyclopedias. The first is a general biography of this remarkable person, who was an inconvenient man in both his academic and cultural surroundings.  In the second essay, I describe his contributions to modern science (something that is often overlooked). In the third, I share thoughts from a recent biography about him.

Henry David Thoreau is widely revered as a “prophet of environmentalism” because the ideas he wrote and put them into action appear to have been at least a century ahead of their time. He is less often mentioned as one of the leading scientists of early 19th century America. He was an amateur scientist, but laid the groundwork for the ecological study of seed dispersal and ecological succession. He collected data that constitute one of the earliest studies of the adjustment of organisms to changing seasons. His data sets have been used by modern scientists to document climate change that has occurred since his time.

Thoreau went out into a woodlot owned by Emerson (one of the few forest tracts near Concord that had not been cut down) and built a cabin near Walden Pond. The woodlot was not wilderness, but was a second-growth forest, and was less than two miles (a little over two km) from Concord. He started his work on July 4 of that year, intending it as a statement of independence from the pursuit of wealth (which, he said, led most people into “lives of quiet desperation”) just as July 4 marked American independence and just as Concord was the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. But he also intended his cabin as an experiment. He kept a journal the rest of his life, some of which he published in the book Walden, or Life in the Woods, which has become the environmental classic of the 19th century. In the journal, and book, he wrote detailed records of how much it cost him to build the cabin, and how he raised or caught much of his own food, going to town only for a few staple food items. He even built the cabin from wood and nails left over from a laborer family’s shanty. He spent only a couple of years in the cabin. He did not intend it as a permanent change in lifestyle, but to demonstrate that it could be done.

Thoreau was also famous for his essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” later known as “On Civil Disobedience,” which was based upon an experience he had in 1846. For six years, he had refused to pay poll taxes because of his opposition to slavery and to the Mexican-American war. Massachusetts had no slaves but profited from goods produced by slaves, and the federal Fugitive Slave Act required all citizens to aid in the capture of slaves who had escaped from the South. He also considered the war to be nothing more than aggression. The Concord tax collector liked Thoreau but was obligated to arrest him. Thoreau was ready to spend a long period of time in jail as a protest, but his aunt paid his taxes and he was released after one night.

Thoreau’s civil disobedience inspired generations of social reformers, such as Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi, and American reformer Martin Luther King, Jr. But his insistence that frugal living (what today would be called “having a small ecological footprint”) is not only possible but enjoyable contributed to his modern reputation as the prophet of environmentalism. Since the most ancient times, prophets have predicted disastrous outcomes to the way most people in their society lived; called for repentance from that way; and themselves lived in a way that was a constant reminder of the way of repentance. This is exactly what Henry David Thoreau did. Like all prophets, Thoreau was an inconvenient man. Though by no means a hermit (he went to town every couple of days even during his cabin phase), he was always separated from the normal crowd: when in town, he observed people as might an anthropologist from another planet. His presence was a prophetic denouncement of materialistic society. Thoreau was particularly vivid (and virtually alone) in his criticism of people who did not take care of their land. Thoreau wrote that Flint’s Pond (also near Concord) was named after an “unclean and stupid” farmer who laid its shores bare, loved a shiny dollar more than a shiny pond, reflecting “his own brazen face,” “regarded even the wild ducks…as trespassers…” “…who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it…who exhausted the land around it…he would carry his God to market…whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.” Thoreau defended biodiversity against an agricultural mindset that, then as now, reduced a farm or a woodlot to its economic value, and evaluated every plot of land on Earth, however different each was from the other, according to just one scale of value.

The most famous Thoreau quote, which reflects his important insights into the environment and science, was “…in wildness is the preservation of the world,” often misquoted as “wilderness.” To Thoreau, wildness could be found in a well-managed woodlot as easily as in the Maine woods that he visited as a young man.

Thoreau was inspired by the writings of scientists who closely observed the world during their travels, particularly American botanist William Bartram who traveled among the Cherokees of the Appalachians in the late 18th century, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Thoreau strongly believed in the complete connectedness of humans and nature (“Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?”) but did not fully understand it until he read Darwin’s Origin of Species shortly before his death. Previous to this, he had believed, as a transcendentalist, that all of nature reflected spiritual patterns. He was very serious when he observed leaf-like patterns in thawing clay and said that it was the same natural law that produced the shapes of real leaves and also of human internal organs. The Earth had a body, but its organs were on the outside: “What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” When he saw a mouse girdling a pine tree (chewing a ring of bark), he thought it was the Earth’s way of thinning out the pines. Darwin’s Origin of Species undermined Thoreau’s faith, and Thoreau spent his last years making scientific observations with few transcendentalist insights.

Without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there would have been no remembrance of Thoreau. It was Emerson’s woodlot in which Thoreau briefly lived. Emerson popularized Thoreau after the latter’s death. But they were very different. Emerson would write long flowery-tongued passages about things, whether about the world of nature or the breathlessness of love, which he had not closely observed. To Thoreau, nature was a living world from which to learn; to Emerson, it was a canvas upon which to paint his grand ideas. For example, Emerson said that “savage” languages were simple and consisted mostly of nouns. Had he even bothered to ask anyone who had learned Native American languages—and there were plenty in his scholarly circle—he would have known this was wrong. But Thoreau was fascinated by what he could learn from Native Americans. (His last words were “moose” and “Indian.”)

Thoreau caught pneumonia when he was in the woods counting tree rings. He was only 44 years old when he died on May 6, 1862.

Green Peace

I like to keep a layer of trees between me and the rushing madness of humanity.

Trees do not merely hide the frantic activity of business and politics, but actually absorb the pollution and noise. Psychological studies have shown that patients recover from surgery more rapidly when they can see a landscape of trees, and that children have reduced symptoms of hyperactivity if they play not just outdoors but in a setting of green plants.

But the peace that plants create is not merely a quiet absence of noise. Many people walk through parks and forests without noticing the plants, and while making their own loud noises. If there are no human structures in the forest, they may say “There’s nothing out here!” (Guess how many times I have heard this from my students.) But if you listen quietly and notice the details, you will become aware not just of the absence of noise but the presence of a powerful beauty. Gustav Mahler tapped into this power as he wrote his Third Symphony in a cabin by a forest and a meadow in the 1890s. It is a power that becomes stronger when you learn more about plants, ecology, and the evolutionary history of the Earth.

The world of plants is the real world, unlike the world of corporate boardrooms, paneled by dead trees. The powerful knowledge that you take back with you from the forest into your work and into human society will enable you to live joyously and to make the right decisions.

Originally published on http://www.stanleyrice.com in January, 2008.

It Isn’t Pretty, It’s Ecology

Sometimes we like to think that the natural world is all full of nice animals and plants just waiting to be explored by day hikers like me. We all know this is not true, but it is a nice feeling. On the other hand, certainly in the world of bees and flowers, the world must be pretty nice, right?

It would be nice if pollinators and flowers just helped one another out: the pollinators get pollen and nectar as food, while the flowers get to cross-breed and enhance their genetic diversity. But the reality can be pretty messy. Pollinators do not just need resources, but they need to be the first pollinators to get those resources. The first pollinator to visit the flower gets the nectar, which may or may not be replenished by the time the second pollinator arrives. With this kind of competition, some pollinators may not even wait for the flowers to open. They might chew a hole through the petals to get at the nectar in an unopened flower. In so doing, they do not pollinate the flower, since they do not brush up against either the stamens (which produce pollen) or the stigmas (which receive it). These insects are just like the Sooners in Oklahoma history, who sneaked into Oklahoma Territory to stake out their land claims before the official opening shot.

Not only that, but flowers are specialized for certain pollinators. Wisteria flowers, for example, have petals in the form of a banner, wings, and keel. The pollen and nectar are down inside the keel. The keel is closed up, and only a fairly heavy pollinator, such as a bumblebee, can open it. Honeybees cannot easily open them.

When I walked home from work one recent afternoon, I saw honeybees flying around newly opened Wisteria flowers. Usually I see bumblebees, but this does not seem to have been a good year for them. But why were the honeybees there? It turned out that the honeybees were chewing holes in the side of the flower to drink the nectar down inside, as in these photos.

Mother Nature can be one tough mama. Snakes eat cute little nestlings, parasites are everywhere, and even when bees visit flowers there is a Darwinian struggle for existence going on. Of course, I feel a sense of awe when I behold the overall structure of nature.

A Brain Takes a Nature Walk

I am currently reading Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman. It is one of several books based on modern psychology that give us new insights into what our brains are like—insights that are both disturbing and liberating.

I already knew that the brain does not present us with an objective picture of reality. I thought that it processes sensory information into a model of reality, one in which the information from the environment is presented to us in a useful fashion. For example, I knew about sensory fatigue, in which an unchanging sensory input is soon ignored by the brain. This keeps the conscious brain from being overwhelmed by information. I also knew that color is an illusion. The brain uses inputs from three kinds of retinal cones to create a false-color picture of the environment, one in which ripe fruits are red so that they can be easily spotted by hungry animals without having to think about the complex mixture of wavelengths reflected from the environment.

And this is what I have been teaching my classes for almost three decades. But it turns out I might be wrong about this. The brain does not, apparently, process sensory information into a model of reality. Instead, our brains (according to Eagleman) internally generate a picture of reality. That is, what we see, hear, and feel is a model that the brain generates from its own memories and expectations. The brain uses sensory input only to modify and adjust this model as needed.

I took a walk in the woods this morning. It was the perfect time for a walk on Turkey Mountain, just outside of Tulsa. A Tuesday morning is almost the only time the parking lot is not full. The temperature was perfect, the sunlight was clear, and the leaves were light green, soft, and profuse (they will later be dark green, hard, and scraggly). It was also the last time for a while: the abundant rains that have suddenly filled our low reservoirs will return tomorrow. I walked on trails I have explored dozens of times. My mind pretty much knew where to make my body go. My mind utilized sensory input only to modulate where my feet moved so as to position themselves correctly on the rocks that my subconscious mind probably already knew were there. I could not have walked blindfolded, but just a few visual data are all that were necessary to allow me to walk—a few more than usual, since I had to avoid mud holes that others before me had not, and fallen branches and trunks.

Every person who was on the trail had a different mental image of it. Some joggers noticed only where the rocks and mud were, as they ran along listening to headphones. Some hikers saw little more than this, perhaps being aware of the vaulted canopy of branches overhead, as they concentrated mainly on their own animated conversations. The brains of dirt bikers had to do quick calculations of velocity and momentum, not having time to notice anything else.

And then there was me, the botanist. I noticed all the different kinds of trees: no matter how many times I see them, I feel like they are old friends. I wonder how many other hikers realize just how many kinds of trees there are. I also noticed the spatial patterns of the trees: the post oaks in higher and drier spots, the red oaks in the lower and wetter spots. I also noticed that poison ivy and aromatic sumac (with which it can be easily confused) never grow in exactly the same place, the former preferring shadier and wetter microclimates. Moreover, pollinating insects do not get poison ivy and smooth sumac (whose flowers look almost alike) mixed up since poison ivy is blooming right now and the smooth sumac flowers won’t open until at least next week; and they cannot confuse either of these with aromatic sumac, whose flowers open before any of the leaves have come out.

Here are photos of poison ivy flowers, and the gigantic leaves!

I also notice the bark of each tree. My daughter thinks I have a picture of every tree trunk in Oklahoma, but I know I’ve missed more than half of them. Bark is beautiful, each species having its own kind, each life stage having its own kind, and each tree having bark that reflects its own personal story of experience, growth, and recovery, as in this post oak that has had to start its life over again at least twice:

I see the forest as a functioning system in space and time, rather than as a backdrop for my own human activities. My brain noticed all these things because I consciously decided to look for them.

But my brain ignored a lot of things that other scientists could have pointed out to me. I am sure there were lots of insects, and insect galls, that I did not even see. To me, an insect-damaged leaf was one to ignore when taking photos, instead of a vital piece of information to understand the food chain of the forest. It was only by chance that I noticed a wild bee pollinating a Phacelia flower.

As for birds, you have to look closely to see the indigo buntings, whose blue backs appear black at first glance. A geologist would be able to explain how processes millions of years ago produced sandstone in some places, and shale in others, on what is now Turkey Mountain, and until recently I walked right past fossilized impressions and even petrified wood of prehistoric lepidodendrid trees without even seeing them. My brain was in plant mode just as the joggers’ brains were in don’t-slip-in-the-mud mode. I, too, entered the forest with an internally-generated model of what it was supposed to be like.

I would like to leave you with this thought. You can always enjoy a place more if you look closely and start noticing things. If you keep your brain in energy-savings mode, so that it responds only to threats and inconveniences, you are  missing the joy of being alive. Of course, I do not need to say this to anyone who is reading this essay right now! And the people who come to the forest only to jog might, in fact, find themselves surprised and pleased at discovering something about the forest through which they had merely intended to run.

The Price of Success

In my teaching and writing I have championed the idea of people getting outside to see the real world of nature: to walk in the woods, to hike in the mountains, to even get rained on once in a while, to see that the real world consists of trees, not of fake lumber-paneled boardrooms. This is especially important for children, who might otherwise grow up in front of a video game screen. My publicity on this point has not been mainly in an entry in my obscure (but good!) Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, and not as extensive as that of RichardLouv, but my message, like his, has been that people should take their kids outside in the woods.

Meanwhile, I like to walk in the silent woods and be alone. You can see where this is going. The more that people take their kids out in the woods, the less silence and aloneness I can enjoy in those same woods. As a matter of fact, I used to be able to drive to Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness and park in the lot and walk around the woods and bluffs. Now it is almost impossible to find a parking place there. Lots of parents and church groups and home schoolers take their kids there. And kids will do what kids will do. But at least they are not carrying electronic equipment with them and living in their internal worlds when they are out in the woods. And if I don’t like rambunctious kids, too bad. This is the price of success. I am happy to report that my aloneness in the woods is often disturbed by kids learning, at least a little, about nature.

The Real World

The real world is the world of light, air, water, soil, and food. It is the world that trees and other plants create for us by producing oxygen and food, by enriching the soil and holding back floods. It is the world of ecology and evolution.

In contrast, the financial world is an artificial world. This fact has become apparent to those who thought that the real world just consisted of moving other people’s money around. Before the Collapse, James E. Cayne was a billionaire and the chairman of Bear Stearns. He lost $900 million of that in 2008. Noted New York Times’ Landon Thomas Jr. on March 28, 2008, “It represents a humiliating capitulation for a brash executive who, with his ever-present cigar, suspender-snapping ways and Friday golf outings…epitomized the classic, if outdated, picture of the Wall Street chieftain.” We have one of these bankers, right down to the cigar, where I live in Durant, Oklahoma. He just built a huge mansion that is a pastiche of every style smushed together; its only unifying theme is arrogance. He paid almost as much for his front door—not the whole porch, just the door—as I did for my house.

If you drive through rural Oklahoma towns, you will see all of the buildings run down, except, of course, the bank. Interest, or usury, is the best source of wealth today. But it is parasitic and unstable. Just ask Mr. Cayne, who now has to suffer with his remaining pittance of $61 million.

I don’t think Mr. Cayne has a clue about what the real world is. But I’ll tell you who does. Wangari Maathai is an African woman who has led millions of Kenyan women to plant trees, not instead of improving their economic lives but in order to improve their economic lives. She won the Nobel Peace Prize, the only environmentalist (and African woman) to have done so. But her Green Belt Movement was a major financial benefit—to the rural poor of Kenya. Now there is a woman who understands the real world.

We have to accept the reality of light, water, air, soil, and plants. We cannot create reality. George W. Bush said, “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” To me, this sounds like blasphemy.

The real world is bears, not teddy bears or Bear Stearns; and is green, not greenbacks.

A version of this essay appeared on my website on November 23, 2008.

The Evolution of an Evolutionist

Let me tell you briefly how I became an evolutionist. I'd be delighted to hear brief stories from you about your experiences as well.

I started off as a creationist, as fundamentalist as they come. This lasted through my undergraduate days as a biology major. But I gave up these beliefs for two reasons. First, I kept learning more science. I found out that the creationists I had believed were wrong: there is lots of evidence for evolution, from DNA to fossils. Second, and this may surprise you--I kept reading the Bible. And I finally realized that a literalistic interpretation of the Bible just didn't work. So I would encourage creationists to do as I did--read the Bible for yourself, don't just believe what preachers tell you about the Bible. This may very well lead you, as it did me, to a figurative (literary) interpretation.

My evolution was partly gradualistic, and partly punctuated equilibrium. I gave up creationism in stages (gradualism). But there were certain memorable points in time when I had important insights about both religion and science (punk eek). I'll tell you about them sometime.

I have always been a great lover of nature. Hiking in the mountains and riding my bike in the country inspired me when I was young. At first, my admiration was framed in a creationist praise of a Creator who made everything exactly as it was. But I gradually realized that, if God made it exactly as it was and without the ability to evolve, then the world was not built to last. If life does not evolve, it will come to a crashing demise when the environment changes, as it always does. To a fundamentalist, this is no problem: they believe that any minute now Jesus will come back and destroy the world, including nature. I always had trouble with this, even in my fundy days. But I realized that, without accepting evolution, I had to see the natural world as NOT BUILT TO LAST. This seemed to me to be an insult to God.

More later. Let me know what your experiences have been.