Footprints

...the Wangarr created through their activities the present features of the landscape and seascape such as rivers, rocks, sandhills, trees and islands, and left the land and waters imbued with their spiritual essence.

They also ‘sang’ the names of everything they created or interacted with, making certain species sacred to the clan on whose land or in whose waters the naming took place. 

Additionally, although the Wangarr were manifested in human form during their creative travels and activities, many, though not all, are also considered to have had the attributes of a particular species, such as crocodile or shark... 

As well as the landscape they had created, the Wangarr also left behind for the clan sacred objects, designs and names that were manifestations of themselves, imbued like the land and water with their spiritual essence and power.

— from an introduction to Yolngu culture

Image from joobili.com

Ippókampos

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Nature, the Sublime, Wonder and Deep Freedom

An earlier post on this blog noted, and questioned, the claim that nature could no longer supply a feeling of the sublime.

Sublime is a big word. What about wonder? The two are related but they are not the same. Also, both are historically and culturally contingent. [1]

I agree with George Monbiot that unplanned or re-wilded places can arouse a sense of wonder.  I also agree that there are dangers in dreams about space exploration when they lead people to devalue what we have on earth and deny or ignore the challenges, especially for the poor and oppressed, right in front of us. [2]

In Nature in its Place, Roberto Unger writes:

At first, we needed nature so much that we worshipped it. Now we need it less and less...As a result of [our] growth in power, our experience of nature has fallen...into four pieces, each marked by a distinctive attitude toward the natural world and a...contest of aspirations. [3]

The four phases, says Unger, are: the delight of the gardener —  we treat nature as a setting for escape from strife and striving into aesthetic freedom; the responsibility of the steward —  we view ourselves as managers of a sinking fund of non-renewable resources in trust for future generations; the infirmity of the mortal — we work to cure the illnesses that waste us, and dream of undying life; and the ambivalence of the titan —  a conflict we cannot hope to settle, only to endure, to understand, and to direct.

Our experience of nature, he says, is torn into these four shreds.  Resolution, if there is to be one, will come from the capacity to remain open to alternative futures:

We are unquiet in nature because the mind concentrates and focuses a quality diffuse in nature: the [human] mind is inexhaustible and therefore irreducible and uncontainable. No limited setting, of nature, society, or culture, can accommodate all we — we the species, we as individuals —  can think, feel, and do. Our drivenness, including our drive to assert power over nature, follows from our inexhaustibility. We should not, and to a large extent we cannot, suppress, in the name of delight, stewardship, or reverence, the initiatives by which we strengthen our command over nature. 

We nevertheless have reason to stay our hands from time to time and gradually to extend the areas of the planet and the parts of each human life that we set aside for activities free from the tyranny of the will and the dictates of society. By dividing our time between restless conquest of nature and artless reencounter with it...we can guard against brutalizing ourselves.

Notes

[1] See, e.g., Daston and Park (1998):

Boyle and many of his contemporaries saw wonder as a goad to inquiry and wonders as prime objects of investigation. Descartes called wonder the first of the passions...Bacon included “a history of marvels” in his program for reforming natural philosophy. Their focus on wonder and wonders in the study of nature marked a unique moment in the history of European [science].  But before and after, wonder and wonders hovered at the edges of scientific enquiry. Indeed, they defined those edges...Wonders as objects marked the outermost limits of the natural. Wonder as a passion registered the [frontier] between the known and unknown...A history of wonders is therefore also a history of the orders of nature.

[2] Fascination with the possibilities of space does not, of course, have to result in indifference to life on Earth. Indeed, the opposite can be true. Many who reflect on the prospects for life in the universe turns back towards Earth with a heightened sense of how marvelous life on this planet is, and how worthy of attention and care.

[3] This appears as a digression, or appendix, to The Self Awakened (2007). Here is an excerpt from Unger's The Religion of the Future (2013)


Image: Selk'nam, early 1900s.

Photon buckets

Caleb Scharf celebrates the go-ahead for the European Extremely Large Telescope:

Equipped with adaptive optics E-ELT should.... be able to routinely study Jupiter down to scales of about 20 kilometers – by comparison the Great Red Spot is at present about 20,000 kilometers across. Mars can be imaged to roughly 5 kilometer resolution (depending of course on the relative separation of Earth). In other words, on a nightly basis we will be able to monitor the worlds in our solar system with a fidelity comparable to fly-by missions of yore. [1]

Images like this (but not this) might become commonplace.

I guess the adaptive optics resemble those at the Keck observatory in Hawaii, where lasers are beamed into the night sky to create artificial stars. The false stars become reference points because astronomers know what the laser should look like in the heavens were there no atmospheric distortion. That, at least, is part of how Steven Johnson describes them in How We Got to Now.

Johnson's reference to Keck is brief as his book explores a range of innovations that make the modern world.  None of those innovations are more important than those that transform the way humans extract energy from their surroundings, and in this regard the book highlights research at the US National Ignition Facility, which seeks "to create an artificial sun on Earth."  In Johnson's analysis this is looks likely to be a, if not the, great hope for meeting the energy challenge. [2]

But could solar technologies such as those being developed by the physicist and astronomer Roger Angel be a significant part of the way forward?   The technologies are, as Lee Billings puts it in this article, essentially clever ways of maximising efficiency in collecting, concentrating, channelling, or diverting the energy radiating from an already existing star. That could, I think, be rather wonderful. [3]


Notes

[1] I reviewed Scharf's book here. He has kindly said that my Book of Barely Imagined Beings contains "some fantastic ideas and insights to the nature of life."

[2] Brian Cox comes to the same conclusion in the last episode of his recent TV series The Human Universe.  A website for Johnson's TV series identifies some solar projects as sources for hope on a small scale.  Thanks to TH for loan of a copy of Johnson's book.

[3] On some environmental impacts of solar concentrators, and other technologies, see Rebecca Solnit.


Image: the site for the future E-ELT looks almost like Mars...if you ignore the blue sky, the snow on the peak and the extensive tracks.

As a man is so he sees

Fritz Hardenberg had spoken to him of a fable, which he had found…in the work of the Dutch philosopher Franz Hemsterhuis — it had been about the problem of universal language, a time when plants, stars and stones talked on equal terms with animals and with man. For example, the sun communicates with the stone as it warms it. Once we knew the words of this language and we shall do so again, since history always repeats itself… 

[Fritz's father] replied that his son would not need a different language than German to conduct his duties as a future salt mine inspector.

— from The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)

Image: Vyacheslav Korotki photographed by Evgenia Arbugaeva. "He doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself."

A miracle for those with eyes to see

Acacia nilotica — known as thorn mimosa, scented thorn, Vachellia nilotica, or prickly acacia…is a super plant. It can grow up to 65 feet tall, with a crown as wide. It thrives in poor, dry, and saline soils, adding three-quarters of an inch in diameter each year. It needs little rain. It is resistant to fire. By its fifth year it can produce up to 175,000 seeds annually, and although most of its seeds do not sprout when the pods drop, they still can germinate 15 years later. The seeds are rich in protein. Of all the acacias, the nilotica has one of the deepest rooting systems, up to nine feet, which means it can tap into relatively deep ground water. The horizontal spread of its lateral roots is 1.6 times greater than the umbrella span of its crown. Prickly acacias may stand two dozen feet apart but underground they clasp the soil together in a tight, resilient web. Along a river they create an indigenous natural revetment. 

Africans use prickly acacia’s seeds as food flavoring and dye, its glabrous bark for tea, its leaves as fodder and antibiotic, its sap to bind pigment to colored fabric, its twigs as toothbrushes, its thorns as awls, its inner bark and pods to tan leather. It is a nitrogen fixer, so grain yields are richer in its shade.

— from The Men Who Planted Trees by Anna Badkhen.

Image: Inland Niger Delta.

Wonder on our doorsteps

...I realised at that moment that I had been suffering from a drought of sensation that I had come to accept as a condition of middle age, like the loss of the upper reaches of hearing. 

...We can recharge the world with wonder, reverse much of the terrible harm we have done to it. 

...In [rewilded] places we can leave our linearity and confinement behind, surrender to the unplanned and emergent world of nature, be surprised once more by joy... We can rediscover those buried emotions that otherwise remain unexercised. Why should we not have such places on our doorsteps, to escape into when we feel the need?

— from Back to Nature by George Monbiot.   What is necessary today, writes Anna Badkhen:

is a type of ecological restoration in which humans are everyday participants, immediately invested in nature because they understand themselves to be a part of it. We all should be planting back the bush—in our homes, communities, cities, parks.

Image: Llyfnant by Nigel Brown, geograph.org.uk via wikipedia