There is always more than one way to look at things … unless you are locked into a belief about the matter under discussion that is unshakeable. Margot Fleck’s excellent My Turn essay on April 14, “Our place in the universe,” is one way to view planet Earth. Another is the view of Earth from the 1968 Apollo 8 orbit around the moon.
“Too often,” she begins her My Turn with, “I hear deeply caring people speak of nature as though it were an entity apart from us, like a huge warm animal suffering neglect, something we must take better care of because it is so beautiful and it sustains us in so many ways.”
“The intuitive sense I had of the universe as a child,” Fleck continues, “was that All is One. We are a fragile species and it is estimated that we have existed as Homo sapiens for a mere 300,000 years. If only,” she says, “we had been taught Darwin in kindergarten. …”
In her stunning book, “The Human Age,” Diane Ackerman echoes Darwin by writing “Only moments before, in geological time, we were speechless shadows on the savanna, foragers and hunters of small game. How had we become such a planetary threat?” Fleck answers that question with another question: “Had we learned to appreciate all living things through real knowledge of them and a joyful acceptance of our connection to them, would we live on this planet as we do?”
Real knowledge. We are living in an era of so much “knowledge” coming at us it is nearly impossible to absorb it all much less know if it is real. Or how to distinguish fact from fiction.
“If we understood,” Fleck went on, “how our intricate bodies worked, grasped the amazing adaptations of plants, the consistent carbon chemistry of all life,” Fleck continued, “would it make a difference in our attitude toward climate change? And might we become more empathic toward the suffering of all creatures?”
Fleck’s early intuition (not real knowledge) that “All is One” was later certified by the facts she had learned in her classes on comparative anatomy, plant morphology and organic chemistry. In other words, the collective evidence thus far discovered in these fields provided Fleck with real knowledge. I repeat “thus far discovered” because to answer specific questions about the natural world, the scientific process involves formulating a hypothesis, making observations and conducting scientific experiments. Scientific inquiry starts with an observation followed by the formulation of a question about what has been observed. Discovery is an on-going process that can continue to unearth new evidence.
In his engaging My Turn article on the same day — “Role of evidence in social life” — I found that Jon Huer curiously contradicts Fleck’s position that “real knowledge” (evidence).
Referring to a previous My Turn I had written citing Ursula Le Guin’s belief vs. acceptance (of evidence), Huer wrote that “Bos uses evidence to advance the idea that environmentalism is correct, or that racism exists, or that socialism has benefited Americans … American society today is rife with evidence of all sorts”
I was actually making a distinction between evidence based upon facts vs. unsubstantiated beliefs, not that facts can directly reshape a particular belief. Social science is crammed with studies that reveal that many people only accept evidence that bolsters their beliefs and rejects that which refutes those beliefs.
Fleck closes her essay by urging us to “… lean into the intuitive wisdom of indigenous people who have lived closer to the earth for generations and therefore know better their place within it.”
Fast forward to some extraterrestrial wisdom on Christmas Eve,1968. When the crew of Apollo 8, William Borman, James Lovell and William Anders, had finished their fourth orbit around the moon, they emerged from the moon’s dark side to see in awe the Earth rise before them. Anders took the iconic photograph that came to be called “Earthrise.”
Remembering the sight of a very fragile looking Earth, a very delicate looking Earth, Anders said “I was immediately almost overcome by the thought that here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.”
I find it profoundly moving that Margot Fleck’s micro view of Earth’s is as powerful and relevant as William Ander’s macro view of our same Earth from 238,855 miles (about 30 earths) away. They are both witnesses of the fragility of Earth from uniquely different vantage points.
Greenfield resident John Bos has been writing about climate change, then climate crisis and now the climate emergency for 10 years. He is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times, Citizen Truth and is a regular My Turn contributor to the Greenfield Recorder. Comments and questions are invited at john01370@gmail.com.