Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
the little animal as a bolus of food bulged along its oesophagus and into its mouth. I
loved the halfclosed eyes, the meditative tranquillity, and the delicious, warm, chamois-
leathery sort of feeling that exuded from them like the aroma from a richly scented
flower. It was as if a gentle yellow light emanated from them into the surroundings. My
own animal body gleaned something of the ease and comfort with which they lived their
lives, as though they were informing my senses with a kind of contentment I had not
known before.
It is now more than 20 years since I did this work, and looking back I realise that I
learnt as much, and possibly more, from the simple exposure of my own sensing organ-
ism to Rushbeds Wood and the muntjac than I did from the data collection and analysis
that I was engaged in to gain my doctorate. Of course, analysing data and writing up
the results were enjoyable pursuits in their own right that trained my rational mind and
made it possible for me to become a card-carrying member of the scientific community.
The science also allowed me to put together a fascinating and factually based account of
the lives of the little deer that would have been impossible to achieve in any other way.
But the learning that ultimately gave me the most valuable lessons about nature came
from the unexpected qualities revealed to me by Rushbeds Wood and by the gently ru-
minating Whipsnade muntjac.
To my intense disappointment, there was no place for an exploration of these qualities
in the fat doctoral thesis that I eventually submitted, for they were considered to be just
my own subjective impressions. They were suitable for poetry perhaps, but did not be-
long to a way of doing science that wanted to banish me to a soulless world of bare facts
devoid of inherent meaning. In an eloquent expression of this outlook, Bertrand Russell,
the great 20th-century English philosopher, said that “Our origins, hopes and fears, our
loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.” In similar
vein Jaques Monod, the much respected Nobel laureate in biochemistry, thought that the
science that he practised required man to “wake to his total solitude, to his fundamental
isolation”, to “realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world”.
It was only when I came to work at Schumacher College, some three years later,
that I encountered the notion that the major flaw with this perspective is the belief that
the whole of nature, including the Earth and all her more-than-human inhabitants, is no
more than a dead machine to be exploited as we wish for our own benefit, without let
or hindrance. This idea, which has held centre court in the Western mind for about 400
years, has led us to wage an inadvertent war on nature, of gargantuan proportions. The
casualties are mounting even as you read these words. Key indicators of planetary and
social ill-health are growing exponentially fast, including species extinctions, water use,
the damming of rivers, urban populations, the loss of fisheries, and average surface tem-
peratures. It is a war that we cannot possibly win, as E. F. Schumacher so drily observed
