They Only Saw the Surface of Things more

Trull 1 J.W. Trull They Saw Only the Surface of Things To think completely, in absence of completion and difference, watch beneath the surfaces we have folded to concretion. Carefully checking for creases where solid edges are shown to be fault lines, concealing uncertainty below with great intention. Suspended from connection points between connected objects, sitting in the series summed of this sequence; spinning through nowhere, without arithmetic to mark our geodesic topology in paces. To see that distance, whorling in joyous expansion, thinking closer and closer to dream, our image escapes containment. In thought, thinking deeply, surfacing transparent constructed accumulations, sinking to the verge of possible extension. Demarcating the citadel collapsing before our eyes, existed in transposition. In Wealth of Nature, Donald Worster argues in his chapter “Restoring a Natural Order,” which serves as an homage to the great American ecologist Aldo Leopold, that the root of the modern environmental crisis lies in the depreciation of the order of nature, the devaluation of nature as supreme measure (Worster 181). Amidst an era of widespread biotic transformation and ecological devastation, Leopold criticized those who floated “a drift in history,” unhitched from the patterns of nature and unanchored in the sciences of time, possessing the land rather than belonging to it. (Leopold 97). Worster, locating the locus of our crisis in thought, argues for a revolution of the mind, of perception, calling for experiencing through “the habit of aesthetic apprehension,” a term he borrows from twentieth century process philosopher and member of the Ecology Group, Alfred North Whitehead (Worster 182). Ultimately, Worster asks his readers to grasp a new aestheticism which undoes the dissection rooted in scientific thought to rediscover natural coherence by reinstating wonder as a method of interpreting and interacting with nature and restoring the place of humans as animals, as artists, of ecology. Trull 2 Modern thought has become entangled, misplaced among a confusing array of subjectivities and relativities; clouded by sciences which fragment, philosophies which mystify, and politics which isolate, the natural world seems to have lost the coherence which once defined it (Worster 175, 176). The science of ecology, which emerged out of evolutionary (Darwinian) thought, once demonstrated, in the words of American plant ecologist Frederic Clements, that “organic nature in the composite resembles a kind of organism—a superorganism” (Worster 175). Nature was understood not as a collection of discrete services and products, not as air and earth and water, but the land was seen as a totality, as a “complex structure,” an interpenetrating, interdependent collection of biological parts collected into an ecological whole (Leopold 216). Stemming from a line of evolutionary thought which understood “the beauty of process [rather] than of fixed relationships,” nature was seen to have a fundamental “pattern of order” (Worster 174, 175). Contemporarily, process thought has been taken to such an extreme by scientific thought that it has dissolved the very concept of process itself; nature is now seen as utterly ineffable and discordant, “[t]here is in fact no whole, they insist, there are only fragments” (Worster 176). Ecology, in this view, has been made into a “multitude of limited, specific processes going on,” all at odds, never reaching an intelligible condensation, “never merging into some unified flow or outcome” (Worster 176). In a landscape dehistoricized, detached from meaning, and made to be radically chaotic, no given state can be said to be healthy, balanced, or beautiful, “[o]nly human subjectivity can decide which state of the earth is preferable to another” (Worster 176). In order to counter the dangerous tendencies hidden within such views, Worster argues that modern ecology must recapture the wonder which makes nature at once “historical, dynamic, and innovative” (Worster 175). To accept that nature is processual rather than static Trull 3 requires an acceptance of the idea that all of the „things‟ we purport to experience, the sensation of possessing or knowing a discrete entity is entirely a phenomenological effect of our limited sense of perception. Worster reminds us that the very notion of an ecosystem implies that science can only make sense of nature by “selecting small ordered pieces of it to study and describe” (Worster 175). From the ecosystem perspective, things, understood as discrete, isolated entities, melt into processes, complex, interdependent structures. In Leopold‟s words, the sole “numenon of material things,” the only thing-in-itself, is ecology, the interrelated whole (Leopold 138). In pursuit of a holistic ecological vision, Worster warns against the “atrophy of the aesthetic faculty”: “the more facts we gather, the more knowledge we disseminate, the less able we are to see into the heart of things;” “the awareness of how things are joined together, how they form patterns with one another” disappears beneath a deeply reified objectivity (Worster 182). For Leopold, it is only the mountain that has “lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf,” to understand it as a single, but absolutely necessary, chord in the complete symphony of nature (Leopold 129, 200). Reinstating our wonder for nature, we can see how science is “the product of broader social processes” and fails to adequately meditate upon our place in nature (Worster 177). Despite our complicated confusion, our disorientation in a maze of modern industrialism, extensive mechanization, and chaotic uncertainty, Worster tell us “[t]here is, after all, a way back to the Garden” (Worster 172). Each person must possess an aesthetic faculty, a human apprehension of their place in nature. Such a realization requires an adherence to an ethic of love and respect for all being, an acceptance of the idea that “[e]verything in the world […] is meaningful in the total scheme of things regardless of its usefulness to any other component” (Leopold 270). Standing at this height, “[i]t is not only the boundaries that disappear, but also the Trull 4 thought of being bounded,” discreteness disappears into the monad of our infinitely connected being (Leopold 41). This fractaled reality makes each thing, each experience, a complete explanation of the totality of all things—an ability to see the numenon of the real, to “make shift with things as they are” (Leopold 138, vii). Ecology and perception are analogous structures; they can each be “split into infinitely small fractions without losing [their] quality” (Leopold 174). Worster argues, as John Muir and Leopold, that one should read the natural world as a text, “a kind of literature” which contains the instructions for a proclivity toward sensation as an “esthetic harvest,” opening the order of nature as a canvas, a substrate to “construct harmonies of [our] own” (Muir 226; Leopold viii; Worster 182). Capturing such an animism requires opening the frame of reference to ever more extensive assemblages of connectedness through ever longer cycles of time, to find the patterns in nature, “the most complete order we discover” (Worster 183). To restore the natural order and transform our ecological landscapes will require a renewal of the inner landscape of our disjointed, displaced, and discontinuous minds. Hitching ourselves to the patterns of nature and anchoring ourselves to science of duration, humanity can reclaim its place in nature and uncover an ecology which repairs the fragmented and chaotic relationship we have developed with the Earth. As artists of ecology, as doctors of nature, we can rediscover the natural coherence which gives meaning to all life and provide the loving, healthy balance of our ever interconnected destiny. Trull 5 Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Muir, John. "My First Summer in the Sierra." Muir, John. Nature Writings. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc, 1997. 145-309. Worster, Donald. The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.