Reflections on Issue Six

The Tangle of Arithmetic

“It is our inward journey that leads us through time—forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge…

I’m prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer had any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience.”

Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

The confluence that Welty reveres is one of the principal reasons I began writing The Understory—to create loops of discovery and remembering. But I fear I may have fallen prey to the exact pattern I was trying to help you escape when I wrote about the challenges of a 24/7 life in Issue Three: Who Has the Time to Read Anymore? To read, think, seek counsel, and ask astounding questions requires not only attention, but time. So I am pausing to change the publishing structure of The Understory a bit, as well as to express gratitude for your continued attention to my writing and thinking.

This week is not a new issue. My hope is this is a worthwhile and welcome change of course. When I set out on this publishing journey it was to create a new practice for myself that ensured every week I would expand the writers I was reading, reflect on my learnings, and find ways to incorporate this new wisdom into my week and the weeks of others. While demanding, I’ve loved researching, writing, and sharing the first six issues of The Understory with you. But after speaking with a number of my subscribers, I’ve come to realize that I have not left enough time between issues for your own confluence with what I have been sharing. 

I am going to try a new rhythm. Every two weeks I will publish a new issue of The Understory. In between weeks I will share my reflections and those I have had with others through comments and conversations about the previous week’s issue. I hope that this allows for the slowness that I promised when you subscribed, so we have more time to learn, feel, think, and contemplate without feeling like The Understory is yet something else to keep up with. My hope is to help foster the unhurried life rather than contribute to feelings of overwhelm.

I’d love to hear your feedback now or anytime about how this new rhythm is working for you.

Reflections on Issue Six

Kevin Tong, The Earth Machine

Over the past week, I’ve had rewarding conversations with subscribers about our separation from nature and the implications in how we choose to care/not care for the living planet and each other. Everyone seems to have their own story of separation that they can point to when there was an experience toward or away from interconnection. And in the magical way that frequency illusion works, once we start thinking about a topic, we notice sources talking about it all around us. 

I had such a moment this week when reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. In the book, environmental biology professor, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, tells of a survey she gives to students in her General Ecology class at Syracuse. Dr. Kimmerer asks students to rate their knowledge of the positive interactions between people and the land. She found that the median response was none.

"I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment?...How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what that path feels like?"

Because scientific objectivity centres around rationality, environmental scientists often exclude values and ethics from their work. As Dr. Kimmerer notes, “a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can’t just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics.”

Reading Braiding Sweetgrass provided a vivid example of Eisenstein’s “Story of Separation,” and also caused me to reflect on my own story. When applying to university, I knew what I wanted to study and what my desired career would be. I wanted to become an environmental lawyer and would major in environmental science as an undergraduate to ensure I had a structured knowledge of the natural world. This would enable me to create rational cases for how to defend the living planet that I loved. In my upper-division course in Ecology, I realized that the natural world I was learning to carefully understand and categorize no longer seemed mysterious. Despite being in a course that was all about interconnectedness, it was reliant on reductionist logic and categorization. The awe of nature that I described in Issue Five and what compelled me to major in environmental science in the first place was absent from my scientific ways of knowing. And so I changed my major to History, where I could explore the relationship between people, ideas, and places over time. 

Dr. Kimmerer’s approach demonstrates that it didn’t have to be this way. My biology instructors who I believe had a deep love for the living planet and hoped to inspire students to protect it, did not find a pedagogic bridge within the rigours of science to link values and ethics. I imagine this separation often occurs not only in our schools, but also in our workplaces, despite being counter to the convictions of the parties involved.

In reading The Guardian interview with The Overstory author Richard Powers, it seems that his path was not dissimilar to mine. In discussing how he was a generalist by nature even as a child, Powers said,

“I was curious about everything and every year was another passion. When I reached 16 and it came time to start specialising, I felt a constant panic. I remember freshman year in college I had a pit in my stomach the whole year. I ended up actually checking into the clinic – I thought I had ulcers or something.”

Powers studied physics as an undergraduate hoping it would allow “him to explore the big picture of life. It didn’t. Nor did a master’s in literature, where specialisations became increasingly esoteric” he shared with The Guardian. So Powers has used his career as a writer to build connections across those disciplines of knowledge that had been separated for him in academia—artificial intelligence, genetics, neuroscience, music, virtual reality, and forestry. Powers came to the conclusion that 

“Every form of mental despair and terror and incapacity in modern life seems to be related in some way to this complete alienation from everything else alive. We’re deeply, existentially lonely.”

In the next issue of The Understory, I will describe cosmologies centred on interconnection as a counterpoint to the mechanistic view of separation by Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz shared in Issue Six. If you have suggestions for books, writers, or topics that I should include, please reply to this email or leave a comment on the website.

I hope this week between issues provides the space for the confluence of discovery and remembering. Perhaps you may even remember a moment of separation in your own life.

Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. See you next Saturday with Issue Seven.

Adam