With all the help we’ve received on the farm this year, Brett and I have had the opportunity to clear land and to develop a series of mowed paths, winding here and there within the property. The goal is to create a path as ambling and slow as a fine summer evening’s walk. So I’ve had the chance this year to experience the farm from new visual perspectives, and these new visual perspectives seem always to provide the chance make a new connection with the land. Each new vista appears as some new, startling, delightful persuasion to feel, at least in some instant, the awesome beauty of the universe itself, right there!, tucked amid the folds of rising green tomatoes and sloping sweet corn. Of course, all of us have worked to make these fields of corn and tomato, so I’ve wondered about that making, wondering about the human contribution to the land’s, and maybe the universe’s, beauty.
One of my old dissertation advisors, an ecologist, told me that humans do not participate in the local ecosystem, do not occupy a niche, but are at best “observers.” I decided that he spoke like a scientist in the positivist tradition; he believed, on faith as far as I could tell, that humans could best experience an ecosystem without altering it. I disagree that scientific forms of experience articulate the best manner of experiencing ecosystems. My commitment to the humanist tradition demands my loyalty to the intuition that humans are good. Our old animal habits once contributed to the savanna ecosystem of Africa. Our emergence into intelligence, into our distinctive humanity, surely must also make an ecological contribution. Our destiny, and our path of responsibility, must lie not with sustaining observer status but with making a positive contribution to the natural world.
The issue is that intelligence can imagine alternatives to the non-human ecosystem from which it evolved. The non-human living community built its ecological order dedicated to the effort at reproduction. Its beauty commands our respect and adoration. But intelligence functions on Earth in the manner of a Spirit, offering a new gospel. Human intelligence can imagine whole new ways of life. How might this Spirit participate in the vast and lovely work of Earth’s life?
The rise and slope of the farm’s land, touched at every point with golden evening light, reveal a work of grace that I find disciplines, directs, and ennobles my own inner life. There dwells in that landscape a grace beyond my own grace, urging me toward improvement. The land might express the work of non-human creatures, but the land itself persuades toward civilization, towards a fineness of human action both expressing the beauty of the land and improving that beauty. I believe it is just as Shakespeare puts it, in The Tempest, Miranda speaking
There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple:
If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
Good things will strive to dwell with’t [I.ii. 459-461]
So if we grant, rather with the American Transcendentalists, that the land functions in human experience to provide moral inspiration and moral discipline, then the human contribution to the ecosystem must be something that conforms to natural grace yet expresses the distinctive gift of intelligence. This contribution, generally put, I wager is to experience all the pieces of one’s own experience – other people, animals, and even corn and tomatoes – as they contribute to the beauty of the universe itself. Human intelligence must offer to the ecological community a telling of how much each member of that community matters to everything. This offering is tenderness; to treat each item in experience graced with the sense of its full contribution. Animals can only value something insofar as it aids the reproductive success of that animal. But humanity must function in the ecosystem as a messenger from God: to tell each item in experience how much it is loved by the nature of things.
In place of my dissertation advisor’s concept of “observer,” I offer that we see ourselves as witnesses, in the biblical sense of the term, transformed by the event of grace in our ecosystems, and expressing it back. We are not proselytizers; this grace, this beauty, is fundamentally ecological, not human. The land can speak for itself.