“The sad truth is that many scientists believe they have the sole method for understanding the workings of the natural world. [Artist Jackie Brookner] has discovered more about moss establishment on rock than any scientist I know.”

– Robin Wall Kimmerer in Gathering Moss

We late moderns have come a long way. Public education that honed aural, literary, and ethical skills to the level of Shakespeare has guided us through explorations of free-thinking and discovery that took us to the moon and—through our instruments—into worlds of strings and black holes. Undreamt-of rights have spread worldwide, with one key one on the horizon: the rights of wildlife—which come with the newly-recognized responsibility of caring for that life. The evils of colonialism, slavery, casual murder, and genocide—the evil of force itself—are giving way to a new view of the sacred that centers on the body of life on which all lives depend.

Human exceptionalism and low-EQ ideas of separation (to which urbanites are vulnerable) are disappearing like illuminated shadows. This may help to trace the trajectory of the transition from the morally-old and intellectually-exhausted modern obsession with “curing” death to recognizing it as the source of continuation. As Jonathan Weiner pointed out in The Beak of the Finch, “Evolution discloses a meaning in death… Even drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed.” In this way, an individual life is an experiment that serves the species.

Case #1: The failures of the war paradigm reveal themselves.

In Jennet Conaut’s The Bombing and the Breakthrough, we see how the Bari catastrophe of World War II led to the deaths of 1000 servicemen as well as to the application of agents of biological warfare in the treatment of cancer. I will never forget the way that those patients died, as if tortured in war. And, of course, I will never forget the chronic poisoning by glyphosate and Bt toxin similarly applied to food crops as part of the ill-conceived Green Revolution and its demonic ‘children’. The modern confusion of hurting and killing life with caring and curing it is indicative of the impotence of the war paradigm and the overdue end of the modern era, which unfortunately clings to sapiens like an oil spill.

Case #2: The ascendance of unloving science is ending.

Peter Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and recent comics’ satires of cryptic statistics (likes like twenty percent of fifty percent of one percent of…) have all turned the tables on scientists who lack the perspective to see the humor in what they do. Truth is even stranger, of course; in a recent Smithsonian article by Lindsay Stern, we see the apes trying to get the humans to just get along as the keepers of a research station stamp out interspecies affection and return to the scientific “normal” of dissociation and alienation. Higher-EQ work by field biologists like Karsten Heuer, Joe Hutto, the sources for Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass all shed light on the need for relational science—here defined as acknowledging the inevitable, and wonderful, reciprocity between species.

Case #3: Loving restoration of life on earth is going viral.

Doctors are very tardy in recognizing the survival of life on earth as important to their patients and to their patients’ kith and kin. Fortunately, just as patients are learning to doctor themselves, sapiens as a whole is learning to doctor life. The bloom of this restoration is like water that permeates and goes around all obstacles—enough, I think, to restore faith in our species. Perhaps even enough to avert the sixth extinction.

In the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Plant Conservation Report 2020, Suzanne Sharrock evaluates its progress—which is disappointing—as well as lessons learned. One key lesson is that aims are best presented as targets that are “approachable, concise and clear, addressing specific goals in a measurable way… and take into account the importance of plants for people, especially in relation to sustainable use.” This makes clearer the inutility of restoration in spite of—rather than because of—people needing to help themselves now.

Next, I will explore this topic in three new series: The Loving Earth, Wider Circles, and How Do I love Thee?