2. Compassion and Coexistence Mean It’s Not All about Us
If we don’t always start from nature, we certainly come to her in our hour of need.
— HENRY MILLER
In the traditions of the many different Native peoples of North America, animals are almost universally seen as equals to humans on the circle of life. The word “circle” is especially appropriate, for all living things, animals and humans alike, are part of a great circle. No part of that circle is more important than another, but all parts of that circle are affected when one part is broken. In the eyes of the Native American, animals are all our relations.
— JOSEPH BRUCHAC
To rewild, we need to make compassion, empathy, and peaceful coexistence social values. In Humanity on a Tightrope, Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein make a strong case that one way to solve the numerous challenging predicaments in which we find ourselves is by “quickly spreading the domain of empathy.” We live in a messy, complicated, frustrating, demanding world, and it is impossible to do the right thing all of the time, however we define it. Compassion is the glue that holds ecosystems, webs of nature, and circles of life together. Compassion also holds us together. We are an integral part of many beautiful, awe-inspiring, and far-reaching webs of nature, and we all suffer when these complex interrelationships are compromised. This is not a new idea. Interconnectedness and interdependence are central to a Buddhist perspective as well as to all indigenous spirituality. Often, we imagine ourselves standing apart from and above nature, as what Neil Evernden calls “natural aliens.” Yet Pat Shipman asks poignantly, “If our species was born of a world rich with animals, can we flourish in one where biodiversity is decimated?”
Rewilding names the revolutionary paradigm shift we need in how we interact with other animals and Earth. Since it has to begin somewhere, we might easily start with the question, “Who do we think we are?” Indeed, much of this book deals directly or indirectly with this truly daunting question. In this chapter, I address the “It’s all about us” paradigm that guides so many of our decisions. Too often, we cause ecological problems and animal suffering because we think of ourselves as the only beings who matter.
Rewilding aims to undo two particularly damaging and self-destructive attitudes: one, that humans as a species are “better” and “more important” than other animals, and two, that humans are somehow immune from the incredible destruction that our activities are causing to the planet. Chapter 1 hopefully dispels any lingering doubt about the latter. So what about the former? No matter what we otherwise claim, most of the time we justify any negative impacts by engaging in rampant anthropocentrism. On some level, whatever we do is okay because “it’s all about us.” This is speciesism, plain and simple, and it’s guided human thinking for a long time (as Gary Steiner relates in Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents). Yet it’s a selfish attitude that not only is ethically bankrupt and harmful to our own welfare but is bad biology and science.
First of all, as anthropologist Barbara King points out, it is not “our human evolutionary birthright to be the dominant animal in the landscape. . . . The Anthropocene is not a natural outcome of our evolutionary trajectory.” We remain, as we always have been, one of a gang of many species who give and take from one another and from the habitats in which we live. We remain part of the natural world, part of a collective in which all animals play important roles. Ecologically speaking, humans are far from the most important species. In this collective, “entangled empathy” (to quote the 2014 book by Lori Gruen) is a necessary ingredient. We must understand what other individuals, human and nonhuman alike, want, need, and feel so that the collective is cared for, not just one species at the expense of countless others.
Without question, the human species evolved traits and abilities that allowed us to become the dominant animal, but as any grade-school child will tell you, the ability to dominate others is not what makes someone the “best” or most deserving. Bullies dominate. Of course, by definition, the human species is different from other species, and in some truly unique ways, but that doesn’t mean we are the template against which all other beings should be measured, nor does it mean that our selfish interests should trump those of the other species with whom we share our planet. Rewilding stresses the importance of reciprocal interconnections among species, who depend on one another to maintain balance in our complex world. Even if this were not so, it’s equally true that other animals are unique, special, and “exceptional” in their own ways. When other animals do things that humans can’t, does that make other animals inherently “better,” more important, or more valuable than us? Human exceptionalism fails because we’re one of the gang, part of the complex, magnificent, and daunting puzzle of an interconnected Earth.
Still, people sometimes ask, aren’t the attributes that make humans unique “better” than the attributes that make other animals unique? Aren’t our thoughts more complex, our emotions richer, our morals higher? Aren’t we, on some level, still qualitatively “better” than other animals, even if, as animals, we are still connected and, to wildly varying degrees, related to other species? It’s very seductive to think so, but no.
As I’ve written in other places, research over the last fifty or so years, but especially recently, has undermined one point of human exceptionalism after another. Nonetheless, some people ignore or deny what we really know about the lives of other animals. We know, for instance, that other animals are conscious, rational thinkers who communicate using a wide variety of complex signals. We know that many animals have rich and deep emotional lives that range from unfettered joy and happiness to devastating sadness and heart-wrenching grief. Some species can also lie, make jokes, laugh, cry, console, cooperate, and organize a complex jailbreak from their zoo cages that includes picking locks and fooling zookeepers for weeks. We know some species use and make tools (including fish and amphibians) and some engage in symbolic communication; dolphins and apes have even learned to “talk” with us using systems of human-created symbols and signs. We also know certain animals make moral, compassionate choices to help others or avoid causing pain to others, even if they have to make sacrifices for themselves. Rats, for example, will choose to help another rat in need rather than eat chocolate themselves. Of the more complex emotions and morality, very few traits cleanly separate us from other animals. We simply cannot know if other animals hold spiritual beliefs, but other animals have been observed acting in ways that suggest they possess a sense of awe and wonder about the world. With the aides of language and writing, along with our big brains, humans may indeed be capable of the “most complex” thoughts, but an ever-growing database of research cautions that we honestly cannot say that our thoughts are always more complex or that our emotions are more deeply felt than those of other animals.
I find it amusing, in fact, to try to create lists of the things that actually make our species unique — those attributes and activities that, as far as we know, no other species displays. So, what does set us apart? Here is a short sample of unique species attributes:
We are the only species who cooks food.
We are the only species who makes and uses fire.
We are the only species with a written language.
We are the only species who engages in mass murders and wages global wars.
We are the only species who has farting contests or tries to light farts (although I have shared my home with dogs who sometimes seemed to be trying to outdo one another).
We are the only species to hold bake sales.
We are the only species who wears raincoats, hats, or running shoes.
We are the only species who uses condoms.
We are the only species who tattoos themselves.
We are the only species to use modes of transportation other than our bodies.
We’re the only species who uses computers, Twitter, or Facebook.
We are the only species who has tried to leave the planet.
And we’re currently the only species whose lifestyle and reproductive capacity impacts and damages every ecosystem on our planet.
Most of my career has been spent researching and publicizing the amazing abilities of nonhuman animals. However, this has not been done as a way to somehow denigrate humans while elevating other animals above us. To me, comparisons, hierarchies, and qualitative judgments like “better or worse,” “smarter or dumber,” or “higher or lower” are highly misleading and “bad biology.” Ultimately, rewilding our hearts and reconnecting with nature and other animals means striving for peaceful coexistence no matter how sentient or smart we believe nonhuman animals to be. Rewilding is about the moral choices we make. It’s about valuing all life as inherently good and worthy, without qualification. It’s about expanding our relatively closed human clubhouse to incorporate all of Earth. Our fellow creatures depend on our goodwill for their survival, and we cannot continue as we have, willy-nilly, without taking into account their presence.
Rewilding is a pact we make with nature: to do no intentional harm, to treat all individuals with compassion, and to step lightly into the lives of other beings and landscapes, including bodies of water and the atmosphere. What this means in real terms will vary depending on each situation and circumstance. It will be difficult, challenging, and frustrating to achieve win-win solutions all of the time. Few of our problems today lend themselves to perfect solutions. There are always trade-offs. All stakeholders may have to give up something, and some more than others. But if we set any lower standard than compassionate coexistence, we can be sure that everyone will lose eventually.
The truth is, coexistence can be difficult. Other animals can cause problems for us. In frustration, some people call certain animals “pests.” They refer to them as a nuisance, vermin, or trash. Obviously, calling animals “pests” or “trash” conveys the unsubtle message that their welfare isn’t as important as ours. These labels make it easier for us to justify harming and killing these animals. But the animals who trouble us are not the real problem; they are only the messengers for a situation that is unworkable, out of balance, or destructive. As my colleague Philip Tedeschi, who heads the University of Denver’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection, notes, “We have created the human framework for the problem, and then blame the animal.”
Thus, the flip side to the imperative to do no harm is to take responsibility for our role in every situation. We often have unrealistic expectations, or we define our needs and build our communities such that animals will inevitably become a problem. This reminds me of how some zoo administrators call animals who are not part of their captive breeding program “surplus” animals, and then they kill these animals because they are of no use to the zoo. For example, in early 2014, the Copenhagen Zoo killed a young healthy male giraffe named Marius because he couldn’t be used as a breeding machine, and later four lions, including two cubs, were killed at the same zoo so that a new male could be introduced to the remaining females. It’s a perversion of logic and morality to breed animals to “save” species only to kill those same animals when they become too inconvenient to care for.
In his book Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, which should be required reading for everyone working in the conservation sciences, philosopher Paul Taylor outlines four broad rules of how we should interact with animals and other nature. These duties include the rule of nonmaleficence, the rule of noninterference, the rule of fidelity, and the rule of restitutive justice. This means: We must strive to do no intentional harm, to treat other animals with respect, to be faithful to other animals, to not interfere in their lives, and to give back to nature and other animals what we take away. Taken together, these duties represent a powerful and sweeping argument for taking seriously the lives of individual animals. We must be committed to looking for the most humane solutions to the problems at hand and to require of ourselves compelling and forceful arguments when overriding these strictures. The interests of all stakeholders must be taken into account, and a hands-off approach should always be considered the best thing to do.
However, besides living up to our own moral standards, we should treat nonhuman animals with compassion because, as I note above, we know they possess empathy and compassion as well. Research now proposes that morality and compassion are “rooted in our biology rather than our intellect.” That is, these responses are, in part, evolved and innate, rather than only learned. We also know that these feelings readily cross species lines. Many different animals display compassion for other species, so it should be natural for us to call upon compassion to alleviate the suffering of others. Richard Foster, editor of the Daily Kumquat, wrote me a most moving comment: “The blind eye we turn to the suffering of animals is probably the greatest example of cognitive dissonance in the world.”
People often send me stories and examples of animal “odd couples,” those individuals of different species who display compassion for each other and form unlikely friendships. These are species who “shouldn’t” develop strong and enduring bonds, but they do. These friendships demonstrate that joy, love, empathy, compassion, kindness, and grief can readily be shared across species lines, even between typical predators and prey. Examples I’ve heard of include a cat and a bird, a snake and a hamster, a lioness and a baby oryx, a cheetah and a retriever, a lion and a coyote, a dog and a deer, a goat and a blind horse, and even a tortoise and a goose. Of course, the best examples of shared caring between different species are those close and enduring relationships we humans form with our companion animals and with those nonhuman animals with whom we work closely to rehabilitate and heal when they are in need.
Along these lines, Marius Donker, a retired Dutch psychologist, sent me this wonderful story:
Your remarks on elephants reminded me of a short article in a Kenyan paper, when I visited Kenya around 1978. From what I remember the story went like this: Enjoying the sunset a British lady ventured outside the perimeters of a lodge near Nairobi into the high grass. A few hundred meters from the lodge she sat down, relaxed and fell asleep. She woke up surrounded by an elephant family that gently touched her body. Scared and not knowing what to do, she kept her eyes shut and feigned being dead. After more sniffing and touching, the elephants covered her carefully with collected thorny branches and left. She was found by a search party a few hours later. I always wondered if these elephants knew whether she was alive or not. Anyway, it was a compassionate action to protect this tourist from predators.
Ultimately, rewilding is not merely a logical argument or a moral imperative. It is an expression of love. It is our response to the unspeakable wonder and amazement of creation itself. The new social revolution that centers on rewilding our hearts is a silent and spiritual movement that honors simplicity. In The Great Work, the late theologian Thomas Berry stressed that our relationship with nature should be one of awe, not one of use. Individuals have inherent or intrinsic value because they exist, and this alone mandates that we coexist with them. They have no less right than we do to live their lives without our intrusions, they deserve dignity and respect, and we need to accept them for who they are.
Almut Beringer, from the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada, describes this as a “spiritual handshake.” We all need to take care of ourselves, and we also must take care of others, and so we should approach every situation as a balance between personal self-interest and service for the common good.
Others call this perspective deep ethology, which balances our studies of animal minds with respect for their hearts. Deep ethology rewilds our hearts and helps us overcome speciesism. Leslie Sponsel, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, describes this same idea as “spiritual ecology” (in his book of the same name). Through simple activities like taking a morning walk in nature, he proposes we can restore our “ecosanity.” In a similar way, my esteemed colleague Michael Tobias, an ecologist and award-winning filmmaker, rocked the souls of everyone at a 2012 symposium on biodiversity and conservation when he asked, “How hard is it to give a crumb to a bird or a child?”
Given the severity of the problems facing us, it may seem crazy to suggest that simple, tiny acts of caring could lead us out of our troubles. But this is what I have come to after thinking about the nature of human-animal interactions for decades. Every act matters, and every act reflects the deeper attitudes behind it. Those attitudes influence all our actions. Nothing will ever get solved if we don’t reconnect with the deep richness of diverse and magnificent nature in intimate, personal ways. Like feeding the birds, our everyday interactions with nature and animals should engender moving feelings of warmth and care. This is why I say that rewilding is not a program or a list of actions; it is an intuitive feeling of connection, one that continues to grow and become ever-more inclusive. Rewilding is an emotional, moral, and spiritual guide for evaluating all our interactions, big and small, with other animals and with Mother Nature. It is a felt truth of honesty and engagement. When I think about connecting and reconnecting with nature, I get a warm feeling that fills me with hope and inspiration that I want to share with others.
Henry Miller’s quotation with which I begin this chapter rings true for me and for many others. So does University of North Carolina psychologist Marc Berman’s views that nature can improve brain performance. But why is this so? Why do we go to nature for guidance? Why do we feel so good when we see, hear, smell, and if possible, touch other animals, when we look at and touch trees and smell the fragrance of flowers, when we watch rushing water in a stream or the waves of the ocean? We often cannot put in words why nature has such positive effects on us — why, when we are immersed in nature, we become breathless. We can place a hand on our heart and feel our heart rate slow down in the presence of nature’s beauty, awe, mystery, simplicity, multiplicity, and generosity. This is why rewilding is a “silent” revolution. Rewilding occurs in the breathless awe of our encounters with nature. But just because we cannot translate our experience into words does not mean that nature does not have deep and long-lasting positive effects. Clearly she does.
Perhaps our inability to express nature’s effects simply means that the feelings evoked are too deep, touching our souls. There are no words deep or rich enough to convey these feelings. We usually feel joy when we know that nature is doing well and feel deep sorrow and pain when we perceive that nature is destroyed, exploited, and devastated. I ache when I feel nature’s wisdom being compromised and forced out of balance. My primitive brain remains closely tied to nature. Rewilding is just that: the sheer joy we feel when nature is healthy, the joy we feel when we are embedded in nature’s mysterious ways. It is the peace that occurs when the distance collapses and we feel at one with nature and all her creatures.
When we make decisions that damage the environment or harm animals, it is rarely because of a lack of knowledge and concrete data. Rather, losses to biodiversity, inadequate animal protections, and other negative impacts are typically due to problems of human psychology and social and cultural factors. Science alone doesn’t hold the answers to the current crisis nor does it get people to feel compassion or to act differently. As historian Lynn White wrote in his classic 1967 essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”: “More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.” More than four decades later this claim still holds: We do not need more science. We need a new mind-set and social movement that is transformational and centers on empathy, compassion, and being proactive. By rewilding our hearts, we focus on building strong and intimate connections with nature, and these experiences are essential for effective social change. This is deep work. Rewilding reconnects us with wildness, not just “the outdoors.” I always like to keep in mind what Kathleen Dean Moore, a philosophy professor at Oregon State University, reminds us: “There is a difference . . . between the call of the outdoors and the call of the wild.”
Along these lines, Michael Shermer writes, “The majority of our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear contradictory evidence. Belief change comes from a combination of personal psychological readiness and a deeper social and cultural shift in the underlying zeitgeist, which is affected in part by education but is more the product of larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and social changes.” Echoing this, Joe Zammit-Lucia says poignantly, “Conservation is all about people.” However, let me also stress that I agree totally with Dave Foreman, who notes in his important book Take Back Conservation that we must always keep nonhuman animals first and foremost in our deliberations and behavior. While rewilding is primarily a human social movement, our efforts to protect and save other animals should not be driven by our own interests. Indeed, focusing more on our needs would be exactly the opposite and wrong result. Rewilding conservation is to become less self-centered, not more so.
Of course, science and the results of empirical inquiries are important. This information can clarify the problems at hand and tell us what to do and how to act; science and research provide the critical practical information to make wise, effective decisions. But science doesn’t move us to act in the first place. Despite all we know, environmental education has largely failed (for instance, see The Failure of Environmental Education, by Charles Saylan and Daniel Blumstein). Workable solutions to current and future problems depend on people from different disciplines first recognizing their common interests and then talking with one another, not at one another, and respecting each other’s contributions. All the science in the world will not help us if we do not use its results. So, along with learning more, we must reach out to and listen to each other. We must respect the diversity of opinions, while convincing everyone that coexistence and compromise are the only attitudes that will lead us out of this mess and change things for the better. To convince people to right the wrongs, we have to better understand each other and create a common consensus that we can and must work to fix the things we break.
So, while scientific research continues and fills in the gaps in our knowledge, the precautionary principle mandates that we know enough right now to begin to right the wrongs. Our attitude should be “better safe than sorry.” Whatever data we still lack, there are clear problems that need fixing. If our actions turn out to be ineffectual, we can learn from that and change what we’re doing, but inaction is inexcusable.
Further, scientists themselves need rewilding to improve their work; rewilding makes for better and more useful science. By rewilding, we listen more closely to what animals need; we listen to the land. As we reconnect with nature, intuitively “reading” our world becomes as natural as breathing. Historically, science dismisses and cuts off such subjective impressions, this intuitive knowledge, but this attitude has often made scientists “tone deaf” to the animals they study. Too focused on proving what animals know, scientists don’t hear what animals are saying: that they deserve caring, coexistence, and respect.
The perspective offered by David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, captures much of what rewilding is all about. Professor Haskell takes regular walks in a forest owned by the university, a place he calls “mandala.” In this area he sits, watches, and listens. “Usually, if you stay here for a while, something is going to happen,” he once said in a New York Times story, whose writer wrote: “As if on cue, a bird’s cry pierces the cicadas’ hum. ‘There’s a blue jay. There are the cicadas. There are the harvestmen crawling around.’”
This is rewilding in progress. Haskell noted, “Science deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature’s workings become clever graphs.” However, a different understanding arises when you allow yourself to appreciate squirrels playing in the sun. “They are alive; they are our cousins. And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology.” The New York Times paraphrased Haskell’s message: “Science is one story. . . true but not complete, and the world cannot be encompassed in one story.”
I could not agree more. Science alone is not going to make people more compassionate, and conservation is all about getting people to work hard to save animals for the animals’ own sake. This is the aim of the growing compassionate conservation movement, which involves people with wide-ranging interests — both academics and nonacademics — working hard together to balance the well-being of people, individual animals, and the health and integrity of landscapes and ecosystems. Academics, advocacy, and activism go hand in hand.
One afternoon as I was working on this book, I heard a thump on my office window and saw a small bird, a male chickadee, fall to the ground. He was stunned, and immediately two Steller’s jays began attacking him. I ran outside, chased the jays away, picked up the tiny bird, carried him into my office, and placed him on my desk under a warm light. He looked terribly frightened and was panting. He tried to fly but couldn’t. Slowly he recovered and began flapping his wings more vigorously. I took him outside, held him in my palm, and after a few minutes, he flew away as if nothing had happened. This brief rehabilitation really moved and rewilded me. I felt connected to the bird, and this small act of compassion filled me with warmth.
In writing this plea to rewild our hearts, I will appeal in one more way to our self-interest. Our alienation from other animals and nature stills and kills ours senses and our hearts, and we don’t even realize how numb we have become until we witness the beauty of nature and the wonder of life: events as simple as a squirrel performing acrobatics as she runs across a telephone wire; a bird alighting on a tree limb and singing a beautiful song; a bee circling a flower; a lizard doing push-up displays as if to say, “This is my home”; or a child marveling at a line of ants crossing a hiking trail. In these small moments we feel our inherent connection with nature. Peaceful coexistence with other animals and other nature is essential, and our own physical and mental health are tightly bound with theirs. Recent books that highlight this include Spiritual Ecology by Leslie Sponsel, Psychology for a Better World by Niki Harré, and Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World by Stephen Kellert.
While research can struggle to quantify the effects, and specific benefits are sometimes debated, studies are increasingly showing that connecting with nature is, in itself, good for our health. For instance, we’ve learned that young people who backpacked for three or more days showed higher creative and cognitive abilities than people who didn’t. People in hospitals who can see natural landscapes recover faster than those who don’t. Connecting with nature has also been shown to be helpful in reducing stress. Some benefits of being out in nature for youngsters include enhanced creativity and problem solving; enhanced cognitive abilities; improved academic performance, nutrition, and eyesight; and improved social relations and self-discipline. There is little doubt that future research will show even more ways that spending time in nature improves our physical and emotional health, and these good feelings will spill over into increased compassion and empathy for others, human and nonhuman alike.
Similarly, research is showing that, as I often say, compassion really does beget compassion. Surely, no one can be against a more peaceful and compassionate place to live. Rewilding our hearts — letting wildness coarse through our hearts and heads and impel us to act as the good and caring beings we truly are — is one way to create a more peaceful, compassionate, and just planet for all. As David DeSteno, director of the Social Emotions Group at Northeastern University, notes about recent research into the moral force of compassion: “[The] results are striking in that they demonstrate that compassion experienced for one person can instantaneously extinguish punishment for another. In short, His Holiness the Dalai Lama may be right: compassion may function to balance social systems so as to prevent escalating tit-for-tat aggression and downward spirals of prosocial behavior. Furthermore, this radiating ability may explain why sometimes any of us can be more forgiving toward someone than we ever would have predicted.”
Given this, calling upon compassion to alleviate the suffering in nature can be seen as good medicine to heal our own human ills. It is natural and healthy to be good, compassionate, empathic, and moral to other animals. Do we need “more science” to be better or more compassionate? No, it is who we are. It is intrinsic to our common animal nature.