I recently had the pleasure of hearing Carl Safina speak. He is the author of “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Speak.”
He started his journey of learning about various wildlife species by talking with a researcher who had studied elephants in Africa for decades. He wanted to know her perspective on elephants based on their similarity to humans, and what we can learn about ourselves.
We are so focused on our own species that we almost always ask first, “What’s in it for me?” — in this case, “What can elephants tell us about humans?”
She set him straight right away, telling him she didn’t much care how elephants were like humans. She studies elephants for the sake of learning about elephants.
In our anthropocentric view of the world, we often look at all parts of the natural landscape with only the focus on how it or they can relate to or benefit us humans. We miss a lot that way.
Animals, plants, mountains, oceans, and all of nature are parts of a community. We are part of it too, but only a part.
“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics,” said the great naturalist and philosopher, Aldo Leopold.
“A land ethic . . . reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”
Therefore, our human efforts to restore and conserve natural spaces, such as our preservation of the Carpenter Creek estuary, is not the grandiose work of brilliant humans who are magnanimously “fixing” the broken ecological community system. Not at all. It is the very humble work of one species trying to help out another species, or many species, by removing our barriers to the self-renewal of the land.
When we humans do grand things, such as replacing little culverts with long bridges, we feel very proud of ourselves. And we should. We know that the fish and all the other creatures and plants are much happier and can thrive again, now that we have somewhat reversed the damage that our human ancestors did to the natural system. And we can definitely be happy with ourselves for doing something right for our fellow inhabitants of the ecological community.
However, Leopold would call us to a higher ethic and a much more important task: humbly figure out how to live on the land — any land — without spoiling it, without making it impossible for other species to continue to live with you on that land. This applies whether you are thinking of the entire planet, or the community of Kingston on the shores of Puget Sound, or just the bit of land where your home is built.
The land and its fellow inhabitants deserve our utmost respect.
— Naomi Maasberg is director of Stillwaters Environmental Learning Center. naomi@stillwaters environmentalcenter.org
