I’d like to spend a couple minutes pivoting, the frogs will reappear in a minute, but pivoting and talking a little bit about what I’ve noticed as a scientist and a science educator about what are the worldviews that are contributing to the biodiversity crisis we find ourselves in and what are the world views that we might need to recruit in order to really change the way things are going?
When I say worldview, I literally just mean how we see the world. We have a set of assumptions, values, beliefs that we’ve learned and adapted that constitute a worldview. And all of the evidence, if you look at the world objectively, all of the evidence suggests that we live in an absolutely networked and interconnected system. This is true for human society, but it’s true in the biological world. It’s irrefutable. Nothing exists without the totality. If you don’t have trees, if you don’t have the sunlight, if you don’t have soil, you don’t have frogs, you don’t have humans. You don’t have anything on this planet without the totality. It doesn’t mean that a species can’t go extinct here or there, and that the systems resilient, but there is connection, ecologically and evolutionarily that is in controvertible.
We don’t exist without the rest of the tree of life. We just don’t exist. We like to pretend that we are one species and we do it all ourselves, but we don’t exist without that connection. But the problem that I’ve come to see is that knowing and understanding interconnectedness at an intellectual level is totally different than feeling it to be true, than living from a really deep understanding of interconnectedness. And I wanted to share a little vignette about how this is true even for those of us that think about these topics every day of our lives. This is a little frog that I met in Panama when I was at our field sites last. And I was introduced to this frog because she was the only and the last known member of her species.
This is a species that was completely undescribed to science. No one had ever found a similar frog before in the Panamanian rainforest, they found one. They brought her into captivity and they went back to the same patch of rainforest for 10 years and never found another. But when I came to Panama and I was holding this little frog, she’s 10 years old waiting to see if they would find another one of her species which they never did. And she was dying. It was very clear she was lethargic and just sitting in my hand and staring at me and I am a scientist who studies extinction. I am a scientist who thinks about biodiversity and interconnectedness every single day. I am a scientist that teaches about these themes, but the difference between thinking about it and feeling a life slipping away in my hand and knowing that it was the last of an entire branch of the biodiversity on our planet was emotionally impactful in a way that I never could have expected.
And again, sometimes people have a feeling of like, it’s just a frog, like there’s terrible things happening all the time all over the world and I do not deny that, but life is life is life and seeing and holding a life form that’s dying in your hand feels like something and you feel the connection as life witnessing life. And so I really woke up in that moment to how hard it is to feel the interconnectedness for students in society even if we know it to be true. And I’ve been thinking a lot since then about why is that? Why do we have a worldview that keeps the reality of connection always at arms length? Why don’t we feel it on a day-to-day basis? Why don’t we feel the connection and the gratitude for the air we breathe and the plants we eat and I know many people have gratitude practices, but as a society at large, why don’t we feel it on a day-to-day basis?
And I think a lot of why we don’t feel it is because we are being constantly, constantly bombarded by fear. And fear is such an unpleasant and overwhelming emotion that when we try to shut off so we don’t have to feel as much fear, we also shut off the potential for the emotional connection on the positive front. And we all know this is happening all the time. The metaphors that we’re given about where humanity is and where the planet is, they’re dramatic, they’re extreme, they’re painful. And it feels like they’re tied to stories that we’ve been telling about our environmental worldview for a long time. They’re subtle stories but I wanted to just bring them out into the open for a minute because I think that in order to get to a more empowered worldview, we have to look honestly at what worldviews we’re already holding that are disempowered.
I wanted to share with you two disempowered worldviews that I see operating all around and then offer a slightly more empowered option. I’m just going to quickly share these as two kind of tired stories. The first tired story is the tired story of humans being at top of the pinnacle. So this goes back way back thousands of years. This is Aristotle’s ladder of man where man’s on the top and we know scientifically that this isn’t true but we see it represented over and over and over again in our culture even in simple cartoons about human evolution that picked human evolution as a linear progression towards a final tall white man. And we know that this is not even true about human evolution. This isn’t even how human evolution looked. Human evolution was way more plurality diversity, multiple species walking the earth at many different time points overlapping.
So the stories aren’t true but they’re there in our psyche. They’re in our psyche that says humans are the top. Humans deserve to have what they want. And what that story has led to is an incredible amount of extraction and depletion of the natural world and it hurt human societies as well as non-human species, because the subtle unconscious belief that our species is better means that we can extract and deplete with impunity. I’m not saying many of us hold this idea consciously, but we hold it unconsciously because it’s part of the history of our society.
The contradictory story, which I call the tired story number two is the opposite. And it’s summarized by this cartoon, go back, we screwed everything up. This is the story that says, humans suck. Not only are we not at the top of the pyramid, but everything’s messed up because of us and what this leads to is an incredible amount of guilt, an incredible amount of hopelessness and what my students and I talk about a lot is the credible amount of self righteous anger. And so I’ve always loved this cartoon because it captures, if you think humans suck and are the cause of everything being screwed up, then it’s really easy to shift into blame very quickly, look for someone to blame. And the interesting thing because I teach hundreds, if not thousands of undergraduates every year in the environmental science’s realm and I take polls all the time about which of these narratives do they believe in? And what I find over and over again is that most people in our society actually simultaneously believe both of them, even though they’re contradictory.
So they believe simultaneously that we are a pinnacle species that should get whatever we want and that we suck and we’re destroying the earth and what this leads to is a lot of cognitive dissonance. And it also leads to what I call daggers in and daggers out. So we’re simultaneously sticking our daggers out, looking for someone to blame, but we’re also sticking our daggers in feeling guilty about our participation in the whole thing. So we need a way out of this because not only are these environmental narratives painful to live inside of, but they’re not helping, they’re not helping us address the grand challenges of our time. It doesn’t help us to be lost in despair, hopelessness, guilt, fear, and blame. Those are not empowered stances. They do not foster a sense of connection and transformation.
hat I’ve really come to, especially as an educator at Berkeley is that if we want a new story and a new environmental worldview, a new narrative, then we have to be the ones to tell it, we have to be the ones to do that work. And it’s not just us who have been thinking about this, it’s been decades of scientific environmental philosophical thought about the reality that we need a new way of approaching being human. We can’t just rely on the same worldview, the same approaches that have brought us to this point.
One of my favorite environmental thinkers, Joanna Macy, frames this worldview shift as, what if our worldview was around an idea of the great turning rather than the great unraveling, rather than being bombarded with images of unraveling. What if we were being given images of turning, of changing, of transforming. And so what I’d like to offer in the last few minutes is a few ideas about what I think the medicine for our environmental worldview needs to look like with an understanding that you can’t just chug the medicine and be done with it or read Joanna Macy’s book and have a new worldview because we have to live it. We have to actually be interested in our own worldviews and seeing where we’re operating from a story of distortion or exploitation or guilt or fear and how we can actually address that. So I think that there’s two main characteristics of all hopeful environmental worldviews. And I’ll just talk briefly about these two characteristics. I think the two characteristics of empowered worldviews is that they link the individual and the collective and they link the internal and the external.
Many of you are familiar with the idea of The Hero’s journey. This is a foundational story in our society. If you think of any great book or movie you’ve read, it probably had a hero journey in there somewhere. And the key part of The Hero’s Journey is always the abyss, always. You don’t have the Lord of the rings if you just know everyone’s going to come home happily ever after at the end. And so what I often talk with students about is what does it look like at a personal level and a societal level to really meet those abyss moments well because as humanity on this planet, we are in an abyss moment. We are in a moment where our individual journeys and our collective journeys are linked.