Encouraging children to open their senses in a world of ecological wounds

Interview with Stephan Harding, by Jan van Boeckel, at Schumacher College, June 2008 

Jan Van Boeckel: If one starts to know more about nature, about  ecosystems, about the integrity of it all - how  then does this body of knowledge impact one’s  appreciation of its aesthetic qualities or the  spiritual qualities? To give an example of what I  mean: One might think of a certain tree in a  forest, that it has a peculiar shape, that there is a  “human” figure in the trunk of the tree or in  the bark. Then, at some point, a biologist might  come along and say: “Well, what you see as a  face is actually a cancer, killing the tree.”  

 Once you have this knowledge, it is very hard  to get back to the original.

Right, yes, I think that that kind of scientific  knowledge can go both ways. It can either  distance you from nature, or bring you closer to  nature. It depends on how you use it. Because  scientific knowledge is based on abstraction; it is based on the notion that we can only acquire knowledge by focusing on quantitative  relationships in the world, and stripping away all irrelevant sensory experience. But this tells you nothing about the world nor all the  qualities that you feel in nature, since they too must be stripped away. 

As a scientist you must focus only on the quantitative relationships and you also have to have an agenda because you are trying to prove a  hypothesis. You can’t just collect data  randomly, because then it will be meaningless.  

In other  words, you have to have a preconceived idea that you are testing. So you are asking a  question of nature, and the answer can only  come through numbers. It’s the only way. Galileo said, you know, “The book of the universe is written in the language of mathematics.” 

So if you do science in that way, it can distance you from nature because it's a method of forcing an answer out of nature; furthermore, you are trying to get this answer in order to control and dominate nature – not always, but often. In this way you start to see yourself as superior to nature, and as the only rational intellect in the whole natural world that has got this capacity for rational  scientific understanding.  

But, on the other hand, you can also do scientific work, of this kind, but do it with  tremendous humility. And realize that you are  asking mathematical questions of nature whilst realizing that nature is far more mysterious  and far more alive and sentient than we can  dream of. In fact you can think of nature as a great psyche in which our psyches are  embedded, or are in fact indissoluble from. 

Then you can go to nature and say: “Look I am very interested in knowing  how many blackbirds there are here and what they are eating, because if I find this out, it gives me a greater sense of belonging, and of participation with this ecosystem. And so, will you give me permission to ask these questions and to do some surveying work, to collect some numbers, to do some quadrates, measure some trees, maybe even catch a few blackbirds and weigh them. Will you give me  permission?” 

With this approach I can enter into the whole much more fully. Then I can share that knowledge with other  people and help them to plunge into nature as a great psyche, as a mysterious, sentient being.  

And then nature will say: 

“No, perhaps this is too much, catching blackbirds and nets is not acceptable.” 

Or she might say: 

“OK, on this occasion, yes.” 

So then you enter into the  scientific work much in the same way as the detached scientist would have done, but now you do it with a much greater sensitivity.  

And also, whenever you are doing the  work in this more holistic way, you will often stop and just listen to what the whole forest is  telling you. And everything you see in the  

forest will be regarded as a kind of language, like the  movement of the trees. 

And of course, if you  are studying birds, the bird song itself. You will  start listening to the song as a quality, as a form of communication which embodies the essence of the forest “birdly,” in a “birdish” way. So  you will be hearing things in a completely  different way.  

You will also drop any theories or any  hypotheses in those moments of complete  wonder. So you just drop all of that. You realize that is only a sort of game or a provisional question to be dropped. And then you will have contact with the whole and that contact with the whole will then inspire  your scientific work and actually make you a far better scientist than you would have been in  the old conventional, mechanistic, detached  way. 

But can knowledge be a burden too? Thoreau  was saying: “If you really want to make  acquaintance with the ferns, you have to forget your botany, and all the prior knowledge you have about them.” 

Well, I think both are true, you see. It depends  on how you use the knowledge. Because if you  know the ferns first appeared x-hundred  million years ago, and you know something  about their amazing reproductive history, and  where they fit in the evolutionary lineage of the  plants, then you can enter, through the fern,  into the dynamical coming into being of the  planet as a whole and of the plant kingdom as a  whole. You can suddenly plunge into the  whole evolutionary history of the earth,  through a fern, through a stone, through a rock, through a bird, through another human being, through anything, you can plunge into the whole. So that knowledge can be used, very skillfully, to contact the whole. So I think Thoreau is maybe being too categorical, you see. I think he is right, and that can happen, and it has happened in our culture, particularly  during his times in the Victorian era when there was a very big movement towards this reductionist understanding of nature. Of course he was responding to that, by moving away from that.  

On the other hand, you can also enter into the whole without knowing anything. I mean traditional people have done this before. Not that they did not know anything; they knew in different ways. You can still have a sense of the whole without any modern scientific knowledge. But it can help you greatly. 

I have a friend in Sweden and sometimes when we would go walking into the woods I would be looking at the play of the light coming down on the mosses. But he is a moss expert, so what he would see first was an impoverished ecosystem, he could not see the dance of light.

O, I see. That’s interesting. Because I have that here with the redwoods, this redwood grove.  The redwoods are exotics in Britain, and I am  always against them and I don’t like them. But  on the other hand this grove back here, near  the college, is actually very beautiful. And I  take my son there; we make little camps and  make fires there. Now I have learned to see  them as just color, light and presence. I still know that they’re exotics, and  that is still in the background. But I can drop that and bring the phenomenological understanding to the full.  

How are you able to do that, to store it away? 

I think it is because I have been doing holistic science here, at Schumacher College, for 10  years. And we do a lot of work with Goethe’s approach to science, which is  

phenomenological. Just merely, as you were  doing, to look at what the senses offer you.  And sometimes it is good to bring the knowledge in, and sometimes it is better not to bring the knowledge in. It depends. 

There is this quote of Aldo Leopold, that  ‘ecological consciousness brings…’ 

‘…a world of wounds’? Yes I know. I suffer  from that a lot, here in England, the world, to  see how wounded it is. But on the other hand,  it is possible, particularly on a beautiful sunny  summer day like this, just to look at the British  countryside purely phenomenologically and find it quite beautiful: the shapes of the hills, the light green fields, the dark green hedgerows. 

But I think the more severe the damage, the more difficult it is to hold that knowledge at bay. You might hold them both together, but then the knowledge might become more important than the phenomenology. Well OK, this is beautiful,  this English countryside. Yes, I can appreciate it for what it is. I can, I can let go of the knowledge [deep sigh] and just enjoy the fields and the colors and let myself enjoy that. But at the same time, there in the background is the knowledge of what used to be here before and what has been lost.

At the same time, it is present? 

Well, I suppose when you fully enter into the  phenomenology, prior scientific knowledge disappears and you just enter into the joy of the light and the color of the fields. And then you step back from that and the knowledge is there again.  

David Abram has pointed to the fact that some  people are more sensitive than others, that they pick up more, they are more absorbing, more transparent, more like a sponge. If you are to  encourage people to be more open, to be more  receptive – especially with children – it means also taking down your protective shields, to let in more from the outside world.

Is there a  danger, you believe, in the times we are living  in today, with this massive sort-of dark shade – of global warming, species extinction – of allowing ourselves to be too open, especially in the context of children, in the face of what’s coming in then? 

Yes, I see. Well I don’t think you should tell  children too much about the crisis, actually. I think they need to know about it. I mean, it  

depends where they are living. In England,  where it all seems fine, you know, you can’t  feel the extinction, particularly not on a day  like this, the countryside is absolutely beautiful. There is no need to tell them anything, I think  they shouldn’t be told about climate change  and species extinction until they are about maybe 10 or so. But of course it is in the air and so they pick it up. But if they don’t know  it is better not to tell them, better to let them  develop their own phenomenological relationship with nature in a very pure way.

My grasp of it is that we have only just begun  to sort of go into this direction, so we don’t  really fully understand the implications if we  would do it in a more radical way, especially  with children: to allow for this receptivity, to  really encourage them to be open and that  maybe they would be able to pick up a general  sense, a feeling in the back of their minds that we are going downhill.

Yes, well, I think they do. For example my son, of course he is at Schumacher College. He is 6. He knows all about carbon footprint and  climate change, and I think most of the  children in his school will know. So I think a  lot of children will know, because their parents  are talking about it. At least sort of… even in  families that don’t really talk about issues very  much, I think climate change will be there, it is  on everyone’s radar. It is in the Zeitgeist. So children will pick it up.

But when I am with my son in the redwoods back there,  we don’t talk about the fact that they’re exotics. I mean, he has asked me whether they are natives or not. I said, “No, but never mind,they are very nice trees.” So I think one should  not alarm children too much.

And you would still encourage them to be as open as possible? 

Yes I would! You’ve got to be open. How can  one not encourage someone not to be open,  even in the face of a very difficult situation?  Because that openness is a bit like Aikido. That  openness is actually the best defense. The best  way to cope is to be open, I think. If you are truly open you can allow the grief to flow  through you and out. And then the grief maybe  can inspire you to be active. That is Joanna  Macy’s idea; from despair to empowerment.  But if you let the grief get blocked up in you,  then it can do tremendous damage to you and  to other people. So it is better to practice to be  as fully open as possible, so you are like a  whirlpool of water. The water comes through  into the whirlpool, it causes a disturbance, but  it flows out again. 

Also with children?

I think so. It is important to teach them  openness to nature, definitely. Be as open as  possible, as receptive as possible. They need to  stand in front of a magnificent tree, or, if they  are lucky, of a mountain or the wide ocean and  really feel its qualities to the max, they need to  feel that, to the absolute maximum, because  that is the basic foundation of life. Our roots in  nature are absolutely fundamental; our roots in  the psyche of nature. And if children haven’t  got that, then they have nothing. They only  have the human world; they don’t have a  fundamental embeddedness in the psyche of the  world.  

You mentioned Joanna Macy, absorbing the grief and letting it go again, and in being open to grief and the dark side. For me that is why art is so important, it allows for  expression of these deeper feelings which might  pop up in a nightmare: that they are made  explicit, and in that way you can communicate  about it, or deal with them in another way.  

Yes, that’s right; very important. And maybe one can help children as they grow, to show them ways of dealing with these negative feelings that they will feel. Maybe through doing Joanna Macy-style practices with them, or with art. Teaching them skilful ways of  dealing with the grief that they are going to  feel.

To me, in arts-based environmental education,  the work we are doing during this course with  Lynn Hull, engaging with what you find in the  woods, is as important as this other side, of dealing with grief, of coping with the  ecological crisis in an unconventional way.  

I think one of our chief responsibilities is to  develop a deep love of nature. That is one of  the most important things that each individual needs to do. I like what Jung said,  “The answer is not with the collective, it is with the individual.” The individual is the  solution. 

But the whole culture is moving in the opposite direction. More and more people  are moving into the cities. And this is an absolute psychological disaster, both for each human being and for the earth, of course. 

So every person needs to develop a deep love of nature, and one way to do it is to engage actively with nature in the ways you are doing, by touching, building wooden sculptures for birds, or making rock pools, or  gardening. Just anything that connects you with  nature once more is very important for  everybody.