Jack Manno
September 2005
Published in the Local Planet, Nov.
2005
Given the unbounded curiosity of infants, the constant probing
and experimentation of toddlers, and the natural delight humans take in learning,
there seems to be enough evidence to suggest that the inherent human relation
to the natural world is one of curiosity and attention to all its wondrous
details. This is, no doubt, one of the reasons for humanity’s success
(so far) in learning how to thrive in nearly every ecological zone on earth.
Human intelligence appreciates order. Most of the thousands of cultures that
have survived on Earth up to now have done so by learning the patterns of
energy flow, life strategies and ecological relationships of a particular
place or region, and adapting its livelihoods and economy so as to nourish
itself and protect the ecosystems on which it depends. In the relationship
between humans and our environment, our attention and intelligence are the
most important natural resources we have available. Through what the Onondaga
people, my neighbors and teachers, call the “Good Mind,” our encounter
with Nature changes from fear and ignorance to peace and understanding. According
to their teachings, the Creator has given every being an original set of instructions.
Green plants transform sunlight into food and make medicine, the winds carry
the rains, the moon guides the cycles of fertility, the berries bring forth
sweetness and nutrition and feed the birds who do their job and on and on.
We too have original instructions from the Creator and our task is to cultivate
our minds, to observe carefully and with respect, to learn from the ways of
each being and perhaps most importantly, to give thanks. True gratitude requires
reflection, it is an impulse that arises from true intelligence, from an understanding
of the improbability of survival and an appreciation of the extraordinarily
complex set of relationships that make our life possible.
Our intelligence is our ability to recall and learn from the past, perceive
and assess the unique circumstances of the present moment, imagine and predict
likely futures and then act on the results of our forecasts to promote our
survival and well being. True intelligence is inherently pro-survival and
pro-human. It has little if anything to do with what is measured by so-called
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests. IQ measures a variety of cognitive skills
that people may or may not use intelligently. It has even less to do with
military intelligence, the gathering of information in support of power. Human
intelligence, the Good Mind, is the capacity our species has evolved for detailed
attention, understanding, experimentation and creativity. Human intelligence
is the name we give to our ability to take in information through our senses,
to be aware of what is outside us as well as our internal feelings and thoughts,
to distinguish between emotions and rational thought, to be able to focus
our attention purposefully, to distinguish past, present and future, to process
information and to make rational choices based on the information available
to us and our understanding of its meaning. Intelligence operates in levels
allowing us to perceive what’s going on in our own minds, in other words,
to be able think about our thought processes while they are happening. Intelligence
makes it possible for us to decide to act on our ability to think even when
fear, addictive pulls, despair and other emotions urge us to act otherwise.
Moreover intelligence is inherently social. It thrives in the company of other
intelligent beings.
With our full intelligence intact, we would look upon all the complex orderly
relationships in the environment such as water cycles, ecosystems, nutrient
cycles, mutualism and synergy and see beauty. The world we are part of is
the evolutionary outcome of ecological forces driven by a powerful striving
and will to live. Ecology and evolution is a process of continuous interaction
and improvisation in the service of survival. For intelligent creatures, nothing
could be more fun. Recent genetic discoveries prove what we already know,
that we are deeply connected to all of life. We share hundreds of the exact
same genes with flowering plants, bacteria, weasels, and shellfish. We get
to think and experiment with how to make things go well in the world around
us. That requires that we have lots of free attention and a commitment to
making choices based on rational thinking. As humans we are, as far as we
know, the only creatures with intelligent foresight. We can actually foresee
danger ahead and plan to avoid it and we can set goals and achieve them. With
new tools we also have the ability to learn from the distant past in ways
no other creature possibly could. The warning signs of impending environmental
catastrophes are everywhere evident and we now have the chance to make decisions
collectively to choose a better future. This is why the reclaiming of our
intelligence, the healing of our intelligence, is so important for the healing
of the planet from the multiple scourges being unleashed on the planet by
the industrial growth society.
Intelligent beings constantly take in information, evaluate it, act accordingly,
monitor the results and change our behavior if and when we learn that our
actions/our behavior is counter-productive to our wellbeing and future survival.
Because we are social as well as intelligent animals, our wellbeing depends
on the health of the community as a whole and of the ecosystems from which
we draw our sustenance. Human intelligence never flourishes when it is focused
solely on personal achievement, nor when we analyze things in isolation without
accounting for the web of relationships in which we and the thing we are analyzing
are involved. Our intelligence, our “good mind” is our guide in
the continuing relationship with our community and our environment. When humans
act self-destructively by undermining community or compromising nature’s
ability to sustain the life-supporting environmental conditions in which our
species has evolved, it is a sure sign that human intelligence has been damaged,
hurt in some way. To stop and then reverse destructive forces unleashed on
the planet by our ignorance, it is essential that we uncover how this damage
occurs and how it can be healed. Without the distresses from emotional damage
to our intelligence, we would, I propose, be naturally attentive and curious
about the world and its incredible design. Our feelings would be characterized
by gratitude at being alive at this time and place surrounded as we are by
incredible beauty and order.
Any society whose ways of life undermine the ecological basis for its own
wellbeing is doomed by its ignorance. Since this is clearly the situation
of the modern global economy in relation to the biosphere it is essential
that we uncover the source of that ignorance soon so we can go about the business
of healing from whatever hurts have damaged our intelligence and caused humanity
to become so self-destructive. Ignorance is a deep and profound hurt that
is not “natural” to human beings. No one chooses ignorance any
more than one would choose any other injury. It has to be installed against
our will and against our own interest. The name for the process that injures
our intelligence is oppression. It is fair to assume that none of us gave
in to oppression without putting up a fight. Reclaiming our full intelligence
is partly a matter of reclaiming that rebellion. Oppression arises from the
tragic alliance of power and ignorance. It reproduces itself through social
institutions. In evolutionary time scales it never lasts long because it is
inherently self-destructive. Oppressive societies may spread and grow for
many human lifetimes, but they always collapse. During their rise and fall
they do enormous damage to the Earth and human intelligence. Past oppressive
societies unleashed ecological violence in the territory they controlled.
Today the threat is global. Opposition to oppression is always pro-survival
in the long term, whether or not the results of that opposition can be witnessed
in a single lifetime. The most significant act any human being can take in
opposing oppression is cultivating one’s own intelligence and assisting
others to do the same.
Damage to the functioning of human intelligence can result either from physical
or chemical brain injury or by emotional injuries suffered during early development.
Physical damage can occur early in life from abuse, neglect, or chronic lack
of nutrition and stimulation. Chemical injury can be caused by poisons ingested
in contaminated food and exposure to neurologically active compounds in our
air, water and soil. By far, the greatest damage to human intelligence results
from emotional and physical mistreatment that occurred when we were first
learning where and how to focus our attention and engage our intelligence.
The greatest gift a child can receive is when our teachers, the adults around
us, focus their loving attention and intelligent caring on us. This kind of
loving attention is like sunlight and nourishment for the developing mind.
What is parental love but exactly that intelligent attention beamed in one’s
direction. Every parent has tried her or his very best to provide an environment
conducive to the development of their child’s intelligence. Parental
failings to foster a child’s wellbeing came not from their intention
but their confusion, the ways in which their intelligence had been hurt. This
is the great tragic cycle of history and the way oppressive societies continue
as long as they do until their inevitable collapse. Children whose intelligence
has been hurt grow up to be parents who act in unintelligent ways resulting
in the hurt of their children. Every parent fights hard against it, just as
they fought hard as young children when they were being hurt, and often are
able to lessen the hurt to their children. In this way, healing occurs over
generations even as hurts are passed on. Emotional distress results from these
early hurts and has the effect of pulling our attention away from fascination
with the outer world and other humans and turning us inward in an ongoing
repetitive exchange with ourselves and others that reflects the way we’ve
been hurt.
The tendency to reproduce distress across generations is the unfortunate but
necessary outcome of the ways we are “wired” for action. As a
result of our evolution as animals we have at least three powerful and distinct
internal prompts or urgings that motivate our behavior: instinct, conditioning
and human intelligence. The first two we share with all animals.
Instinctual drives and conditioned responses are experienced as feelings that
prompt us quickly into action. When being chased by a predator it’s
best not to waste much time thinking about a response. The origins of instinct
(genetic) and conditioning (developmental) each enter our awareness as feelings:
longing, loathing, attraction, fear, hunger, desire. Instincts are passed
on to us biologically and are pro-survival at the level of the species. They
bestow on us the motivation to find food and drink, enjoy a mate, and nurture
and protect offspring. Often instinctual urges are experienced as feelings
so powerful that they often make it extremely difficult to think rationally
about sex, food, shopping and child-bearing and child-raising even when it
is in our interest to make intelligent choices in these arenas. Conditioning
is the process that installs on us a reliable set of physiological or psychological
responses associated with a particular stimulus. The classic example is the
conditioning of a dog to respond by salivating in anticipation of food when
a bell rings, if the dog’s regular feeding is preceded by the ringing
of a bell. The pro-survival evolutionary mechanism operating here is the establishment
of a hard-wired recording of a stimulus and response together. It conditions
us to react quickly without thinking. The stimulus is usually associated with
feelings of pleasure (conditioning an attraction) or pain (conditioning an
avoidance). We encounter a stimulus (the bell) and our bodies produce a hormonal
and electrical set of responses we experience as the feelings that originally
became associated with the stimulus, like the dog’s feeling of anticipation
and excitement that starts him drooling. When the feelings are pleasurable,
we may try to reproduce the stimulus regularly and this can readily lead to
various compulsions and addictions. When the feelings are bad (terror, sadness,
anxiety) we react negatively and are set up for chronic avoidance, isolation,
self-torment which also can lead us to compulsively avoid certain experiences
or to soothe our feelings addictively. The susceptibility to conditioning
of humans and other animals is pro-survival. It is important in our development
that we learn and remember signs of danger or opportunities for food in such
a way that again we act quickly and without thinking. The terrible cost for
human well-being is that oppressive systems learn how to deliberately exploit
the installation of feelings in order to produce behavior that appears to
benefit the oppressor in the short term but is unsustainable (ant-survival)
in the longer term. We have multi-billion dollar industries designed to restimulate
certain feelings in order to trigger certain behaviors such as getting people
to spend their money in unthinking ways. Oppressive social systems are able
to reproduce themselves by systematically mistreating people in ways that
often sets us up for self-destructive behavior. And for a communal species
that must rely on each other and the world around us, all destructive behavior
is necessarily self-destructive. An entire economy can be set up so that people
act systematically against their own self-interest in ways that serve a given
power structure. Oppression operates in this way to keep the oppressed from
successfully resisting their oppression. When people are systematically hurt
by having their thinking ignored and their person disrespected we become conditioned
to feel bad and powerless in response to many of the conditions of our lives,
including the destruction of the natural of which we are a part. This conditioning,
like all conditioning, is designed to foster unthinking behavior. Thankfully
we are able to change this situation. Even when we are conditioned by powerful
feelings to act in unthinking ways, our intelligence is fundamentally unimpaired.
We are always capable of deciding to act on our thinking rather than our feelings,
especially when we understand the role of these installed feelings in disempowering
us. In a powerfully destructive system such as the present industrial growth
society, everyone is subject to the manipulation of instinctual and conditioned
feelings in ways that tend to reproduce the oppressive relationships in a
society. This is how oppressive societies self-organize in ways that are contrary
to the long-term survival and flourishing of the society. People are systematically
damaged in ways that reproduce the oppressive society and the damage done
to people’s intelligence ultimately undermines the long-term sustainability
of that society. Both the oppressor and the oppressed are hurt in this relationship,
exactly to the extent they participate or collude in the oppression.
As a result of the misinformation recorded in us during our early experiences
of emotional hurt we are often engaged in a monologue of self-criticism, feeling
bad about ourselves, constant criticism of others and feeling bad about them,
fear of danger, fear of closeness, chronic loneliness, anxiety, feeling better
than or less than others etc. Each person has her or his own internal noise,
the playing of mental recordings of distress that on some level one understands
to be largely nonsense but yet nevertheless draws our attention away from
the world around us, constraining our intelligence to exactly the degree that
our mind is elsewhere, unable to be fully present. The constant internal noise
of distress recordings plays and is accompanied and amplified by an ongoing
assault on our awareness orchestrated by ingenious commercial promoters trying
to get our attention. Most of the attempts, either commercial or political,
to draw our attention, are carefully designed at great expense to stimulate
and reinforce the internal distress recordings. Most commercial operations
in the overdeveloped part of the world in the age of hypercapitalism depend
on us to buy things we don’t need. Simply to meet basic needs for food,
clothing, shelter, closeness, and creativity would require only a fraction
of the economic activity of modern consumer societies. Therefore to keep the
industrial growth society growing they must rely on us to act stupidly in
relation to our best interests by driving too much, falling into the allure
of addictions, buying things we don’t need and in general wastefully
using up the gifts of Creation. Given the cacophony of internal distress recordings
and external huckstering, its an amazing tribute to human intelligence that
we actually have enough attention to care for our families, to form bonds
of friendship and community, and to produce art of great beauty and intelligence.
Starting from our intelligence and connection with each other and the earth
it is clearly possible that we can yet learn how to live well within the web
of life without tearing it asunder. But this will, I maintain, require a real
commitment to liberating ourselves from the affects of our early hurts in
order to heal our capacity for intelligence, our Good Mind.
What are the implications for the environmental movement of this emphasis
on the liberation of intelligence and the fostering rational caretaking of
the planet? First environmentalists should understand that human attention
and creativity are the most important natural resources we have in our efforts
to protect and preserve life-sustaining environmental conditions on the planet.
We should emphasize education explicitly designed for liberating the human
mind, the outlines of which have been explored by Paolo Freire and many others.
We need to significantly improve our understanding of human intelligence,
especially how our intelligence can be injured as a result of emotional and
physical damage and what methods work best for recovery. It also means that
we need to examine some of the widespread misconceptions in the way many environmentalists
think of the problem: one, the economist’s conceit that the relationship
between people and the earth’s natural resources is necessarily one
of scarcity, and two that by nature, humans are inherently a scourge on the
planet, our spread across the globe likened to a cancer. Let’s look
at both of these.
“Scarcity is the problem”: Environmentalists often warn us that
the Earth’s resources (water, fuel, soil, food) are scarce. They try
to frighten people into action with images of shortages and resulting violent
competition over dwindling resources. Environmentalists are right to point
out the damaging impacts of waste and over-consumption, but trying to frighten
people into believing that the planet is running out of resources is the wrong
approach. Actually there are more than enough natural resources to meet everyone’s
rational needs. There is no rational reason on earth for anyone to go without
adequate food, clean water, comfortable shelter, beautiful clothing. Most
of the earth’s resources are wasted in the service of distress; weapons,
addictions, substitutes for real connection and community. People are condemned
to conditions of scarcity because of injustice and theft of their resources.
This is not news to anyone. The most important resource in the world is human
intelligence and that often appears to be scarce because it’s suppressed
by the oppressive society. The most important environmental task before us
is freeing human intelligence. With enough intelligence we can mimic natural
ecosystems in all our human systems, making all waste become resources, reusing,
recycling, conserving. If we used only the amount of oil and gas needed to
meet rational human needs there would be plenty of time to transition from
fossil fuels to clean renewable energy.
While scarcity may not be the problem, feelings restimulated by fear of scarcity
definitely are part of the problem. Much of the distress that drives over-consumption
is based in early hurts around not having enough: food, or clothing, or attention,
or love. If there is scarcity, you can feel justified in hoarding. Fears of
scarcity by people who are running oppressor patterns leads to the plunder
of other people’s resources who then experience real scarcity. These
oppressor patterns and fears are installed early. Young people are taught
to compete with each other based on notions that there will never be enough
recognition, or prizes or good grades for everyone. Power comes with being
able to mete out rewards. School children are taught about the competitive
“struggle” for survival that drives evolution while ignoring the
millions of examples of cooperation and coevolution constantly transpiring
around us. Everyone in capitalist societies has been deeply hurt and confused
by this. Systematically restimulating people’s fears of scarcity is
not going to improve our chances of having good environmental policies. Humans
are the problem. Environmentalists often paint a bleak picture of the impact
of human beings on the earth. We often fantasize, “If only there were
far fewer people on earth (of course its always people we don’t know
we want rid from the planet, certainly not us or our loved ones) or if human
beings as a species were simply eliminated then life on earth could thrive
without us.” This is nonsense. Many more species then currently exist
on earth went extinct long before human intelligence made its first appearance.
Millions of ecosystems dried up, froze, or drowned. In fact, each human being
of all varieties is precious. All living things are better off if people are
actually thinking about them. The world is a better place for each human that
is born. We don’t know how many people could live well on earth in harmony
with the great diversity of other life forms if we were freed from distress.
My guess is that it would be considerably more than current population but
it wouldn’t be limitless. We are more than capable of limiting the total
number of human births particularly if we make certain that every infant is
welcomed into the world with a large team of adults and older children ready
to care for her and love him. Misanthropy, the chronic disdain for human beings,
is often not far below the surface in much environmentalism.
We are incredibly lucky to be alive at this point in human history. We are
now called upon to act in a leadership role on behalf of all life on Earth.
What a great challenge. We get to notice how deeply we care about the special
places and plants and animals we know and love, even some we don’t know.
We get to fight for them as if they were family (which they are).
We need the rapid spread of tools that help us to heal our intelligence in
order to stay connected with each other and to the powerful pro-survival forces
that derive from the universal will to live. There is considerable evidence
that we have these tools readily available to us and many more are being recovered.
There are a variety of spiritual disciplines that help us to find peace in
prayer or silence, a respite from the constant bombardment of distress in
our own minds and beamed at us in attempts to capture our attention. There
is the “work that reconnects” designed by Joanna Macy, exercises
that encourage people to assist each other in expanding their perspectives,
acknowledging fully the damage being done by the industrial growth society,
facing and welcoming the deep pain and discouragement this acknowledgement
brings and most importantly deciding to act individually and with each other
in slowing the destruction, tending the wounded and building alternatives.
There is the work and insights of Reevaluation Counseling (RC) that has discovered
the healing power of emotional discharge —tears, tremblings, laughter
and so on—in a practice of mutual aid through co-counseling specifically
intended to aid in the healing from the effects of early emotional and physical
hurts.
Perhaps most importantly we need to grieve. Much of what we love is in serious
danger. For me weeping comes easily when I think of polar bears, even easier
when I talk to someone about them who’s able to listen to me. I remember
children’s books about polar bears I read to my children. I look at
pictures of polar bears. I’ve never seen one in the wild and I probably
never will but their fate matters to me. I know that global warming is threatening
their habitat and their food supply and they may not survive. I’m sure
you have a special plant or animal or place you love that may not make it.
This is an incredible loss and it needs to be grieved thoroughly. Every time
you grieve about possible future losses helps to keep your attention on what
you love about that special part of the natural world. What have you learned
from it? How are you connected to it right now?
The expression of grief usually involves tears, sometimes sobs, the shaking
and laughter of fear and embarrassment, the storming of rage. Expressing our
feelings is healing. It’s the body’s natural release of tension.
When young ones are hurt they look for some loving attention and with that
person or people cry or rage until they are done. Too often the natural release
of emotions is interfered with. Confusing the discharge with the pain or sorrow,
adults assume that by stopping the release of emotion they have soothed the
hurt. This is one of the key errors that have caused large-scale damage to
our intelligence. Every time we get hurt and aren’t supported in releasing
the associated swell of emotions, we become tighter, less flexible in our
ability to think freshly. Starting now, with our grief over the damage being
done to the earth we love, we can start the process of healing from all the
hurts that have limited our sense of power to be able to halt the destruction
and begin the restoration. Like us the earth too has its natural healing processes
and will recover once the destructive patterns of the oppressive society are
abandoned.
Many of us turned to the natural world as young ones. Often we had wild places
nearby that proved to be a respite and shelter from the harshness or emptiness
of our homes. I remember hours of lying on my back watching clouds, studying
flowers, watching insects, breaking open common rocks and finding incredible
design within. We need to remember these places and creatures. They meant
something special to us at an important time in life. Tell the stories of
our earliest memories of the natural world. Sometimes the memories are sweet,
sometimes terrifying, sometimes painful. I stepped on a hornet’s nest
on the bank of the creek. When I cried out in surprise several flew in my
mouth and stung me. I still need to heal that pain.
We feel scared. If we pay any attention to what is happening to the natural
world we learn of dangerous changes to the planet and it feels like our life
is threatened, and worse, the lives of our children and loved ones. We have
the tendency to want to numb out, to not believe the warnings. When several
hundred scientists, including more than half of all living Nobel prize winners,
signed a “Scientists Warning to Humanity” it was virtually ignored
by the world media. It’s incredibly important for us to face the dangers
head on. If we don’t do it, who will? The current situation will remind
us consciously or not of every situation we faced as a young person when we
felt we were in danger, every time we experienced chaos and disorder in our
families and then didn’t get to heal. We felt/feel baffled. “Why
is this happening,” we cried/cry out. We need to tell the stories, especially
noting what happened that caused us to survive. If we grew up when the US
and the Soviet Union were regularly testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere
and in outer space, we grew up terrified that our lives, perhaps all life,
might be obliterated at any moment in a nuclear war. Bad news from planet
earth will bring up all that old terror. We need to let ourselves feel as
scared as we did back then with the support of someone close and notice that
we did in fact survive. If we don’t discharge our terror we will act
on it, often by trying to scare other people into action. This is what environmentalists
often want to do. We think, “If everyone could be made to feel just
as scared as I do, then we’d get together and do something.” Forget
it. Everyone is just as scared as we are and they are not discharging but
drinking, shopping and otherwise trying hard to not feel so scared. We need
to face and release a lot of our own terror so we can listen to the fears
that everyone has about the future. Only then can we offer and work together
to achieve sound policies to protect what we hold dear.
What we don’t face we can’t pay attention to. And what we don’t
pay attention to we can’t notice our connection to. This is a terrible
loss. We are and always have been deeply connected to the natural world. We
never lost that connection. We don’t have to travel to distant remote
places to see natural wonders in order to feel that connection, we always
have it. Every breath we take we are inhaling what the greenery has exhaled.
Our every cell is full of the same water, the same minerals, in the same proportions
as in sea water. Our every move and thought is powered by solar energy first
captured by plants. When a dying star explodes in a distant galaxy its molecules
disperse through the universe becoming the raw material of emerging worlds.
We are literally made of stardust.
When we notice our connection, we also notice our responsibility. The feeling
that this responsibility is some kind of burden is distress. Part of living
a good life is taking responsibility to see that our world is cared for and
protected as best we can. It’s the sure path to accepting and understanding
our power. There is a difference between responsibility and obligation. Responsibility
is something we freely take on; obligation is forced on us. It’s true
that it’s not fair that we should have to take charge of all life on
earth at this point, but it would be even less fair if we didn’t give
ourselves that chance. Every moment in time, every place on earth there is
an opportunity to pay attention to and notice the amazing life that is around
us. To have such fullness we have to risk having lots of feelings. The good
news is that by opening to those feelings and allowing the natural healing
power of emotional release to occur we take a big step in liberating our intelligence
and reclaiming our “Good Mind.” One of the great things about
intelligence is that it’s one of those resources, like love, that is
not only renewable and sustainable but self-perpetuating. The more you use
of it the more there is.
