Many ways in by Emilie

As a Philosophy and Anthropology student among biologists, I sometimes think that the poetic ways I have of thinking about nature connection are only frivolous appendages to the ‘real’ practical work of protecting biodiversity. However, while I do want to learn more of the practical side, I also know that we protect biodiversity because we value it, and we value it because we’ve allowed it to influence our lives in ways that are emotional and messy and often quite philosophical and even more often silly and playful and fun. I thought I’d try to lay out some patterns I recognised in what nature has meant to me over the course of my life, illustrating the huge variety of ways in to the natural world that I found both before and after joining this project.

1. Forest – bathing

The first and the easiest ‘way in’ that I found was the simple pleasure of being in a rich natural environment. There’s something immensely soothing about lying down surrounded by green and doing nothing except pay attention to all the life that is happening around you. Simple acts like watching flies dance on a river’s surface or watching an ant crawling on a branch can seem to unravel the mind’s knots into little strings of movement and colour and sound rippling easily over each other. I think part of the effect is how external this form of attention demands that you be. You’re not inside your head but out in the branches where you hear treecreepers calling to each other, or out on the leaf as you watch the sunlight go alternately through and on and under it as it dances in the wind, hues of green subtly shifting and sometimes flashing gold.

This is something that I appreciated before the project. Not only was it vital to my sense of wellbeing, but the careful attention and the willingness to stop, look and listen also fostered a deeper curiosity and the urge to learn more. This is why I think that access to green spaces is so important. It seems almost inevitable that, with an appreciation of the natural world grown through simply paying attention, you would start to notice patterns and familiar creatures and want to understand more about their lives. One moment you’re watching flies dance over the water, and the next you’re wondering what it’s like to be a fly… it’s a slippery slope!

2. What is it like to be a fly?

I found myself doing exactly this a few days before term started, when I’d signed up to the VIP and started to think about my relationship to the natural world but still had a lot to learn. I was watching a fly bumble against my window and decided to watch it really closely. I started to wonder what sort of vague awareness was guiding its movements, what sort of sensations it felt as it circled and recircled in the small drafts from outside.

I realised I’d never thought about how flies navigate before, so I decided to look it up. I found out that hoverflies and perhaps all winged insects, lacking the inner-ear accelerometers that most other animals use to orient themselves, use vision to know which way is up. They don’t have a ‘sense’ of gravity as we do. What would it be like to navigate this way? Is it impossible to imagine? The philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out that one can never know what it’s like to be a bat. You could imagine what it would be like for you to be a bat, doing bat-ish things in a bat-ish body, but what it’s like for a bat to be a bat is entirely beyond our comprehension. Perhaps it is impossible, then, to imagine what it’s like to be a fly, but my light-hearted attempt certainly led my curiosity in new directions. I also found a thrill in recognising how radically different and fascinating other lives and minds are and coming face-to-face with them in their small buzzing mystery.

In a more extreme and hippy-seeming example of this kind of imagining, I considered something even more radically different and came up with quite a poetic response. While this might seem like an act of creativity fairly removed from the realities of nature, I think it reveals another aspect of the ways we can learn and find value by paying attention to the natural world.

3. Poetry

I recently came across a video of a leaf unfurling from its stem in sped-up time. Trying to get more into the habit of wondering, I decided to keep thinking about it for a while. A few days later, as I lay on my back on the grass under a midday sun, I thought of the unfurling leaf. I felt the light and heat on my chest, an orange glow fuzzing out behind my eyes, and I felt the simple need to lift my chest to meet the sun almost indistinguishable from the feeling of the heat itself. The energy of the sun and the intensity of the light seemed to necessitate movement. Is that part of what it is to be a plant, the simple growing urge to arch into light? Perhaps this observation was simple and fanciful, but it seemed that trying to think with the unfurling plant had helped me to experience something that might never have occurred to me otherwise.

Though I likely didn’t learn anything about the ‘experience’ of plants, I did come to understand something about how humans grow by considering the image over the next few days. I thought about a whole tree growing through the action of all its hundreds of branch-endings and root tips unfurling towards something just out of reach. It wasn’t the final form of the tree they were stretching towards, I realized, but whatever small feeling of necessity or need was just ahead in the air or sunlight or soil. This helped me to think about my own various ways of changing, which was something I’d been thinking about a lot. It seemed very true to me that change doesn’t happen by holding a destination in mind and charting a path to it but by making tiny adjustments to align with some combination of desire and intuition of what simply feels necessary and right. Considering the unfurling bud and trying to make a kind of poetry out of it helped me to realise I wasn’t doing it wrong. ‘Imperfect’ change is the most natural thing.

This way of engaging with natural things was the foundation which into what the project has added – another layer of knowledge that I’m just starting to explore.

4. Knowing

I noticed from the first bird walk how I started to be more aware of the life around me, even just by listening for birds as I was walking to classes and noticing the starlings on the rooftops with their zipping and bubbling calls. As I learn more, I find more things to notice and more little moments of wonder and wondering. Yesterday I noticed a Herring Gull ‘dancing’ on the ground, doing a rain dance to lure worms to the surface. Before that I saw a hedgehog as I walked home at night, and a group of razorbills and guillemots diving for fish off the rocks by west sands. I’d not noticed these things so vividly in the past 2 years I’d been here, but now that I am focusing on looking there is so much to see and a special leaping feeling of joy and excitement at seeing something new, wondering about it, and learning more.

All these ways in provide so much joy, and hopefully show that you need very little knowledge to begin to engage and to wonder. As I found, one thing tends to lead to another. Once you start to look, you start to notice; once you start to notice, you start to wonder, and once you start to wonder you start to learn and that learning process brings endless joy and connection. While the science of protecting biodiversity is important, it’s the direct and emotional connection to all its forms of life that motivates us to act and brings richness and playfulness to our lives.