Crystalizing some ideas…
Using a keyboard, instead of a pen though
Despite my previous post, I will continue to type my essays but will use a pen to make notes in my notebook. While making notes using a pen helps me remember the material better, one downside is that my notebook does not have a search function. The flipside is that I end up going over my notes every time I want to find something, so strengthening my memory. I just need to make sure I can continue to read my own handwriting…
In the next set of essays, I want to explore some ideas surrounding our species’ place in nature. I am particularly interested in understanding how we see ourselves fit into the natural environment. Are we per definition an evil force, or can we also be a force for good?
The answer to that question appears to depend on which people one is talking about. For hundreds of years thinkers, as well as explorers, have made a distinction between tribes living a traditional life - think hunter-gatherers - and those living in cities. The former were seen as in touch with the land, whereas the latter most certainly not. In countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and North America, such dichotomy has led to the notion of Indigenous Knowledge, the idea that the country’s first inhabitants have special knowledge that allows them to live in harmony with their environment. A knowledge that non-Indigenous people do not possess.
There is a lot to unpack here. Especially for an evolutionary biologist.
Is it even possible, or conceivable, that a species, any species, has no negative influence on its environment. Does something like ‘only taking what you need and nothing else’ exist in nature?
I became interested in exploring how species exploit their environment through my first encounter with one of the locals when I moved to the tropics in Far North Australia a few years ago. To avoid confusion, that local was not a human.
Living in the tropics certainly comes with challenges. For one, one is never truly alone, especially when one’s house is surrounded by rainforest. I don’t mean that in a creepy sense, although for some my living conditions may feel creepy, particularly if you are not that fond of insects and spiders. Or snakes. But what I mean is that, occasionally, you discover that in the night someone visited your fruit bowl. My fruit bowl was certainly no exception.
When my husband and I moved into our tropical hide-away, our living quarters were far from animal-proof. As a lover of tropical fruits, I despaired when the what-ever-it-was (we were not yet familiar with the locals) had taken a bite out of each mango, making them all prone to infections with mould and fair game for fruit flies. Why-o-why not just eat one whole mango and leave the rest for me? Can’t we just share instead of being so wasteful?
To keep my mangoes to myself, I had to outwit my competitor. And so I placed the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter in the assumption that the sides were too steep and too slippery for anything to climb onto. Clever move, I thought. Well, it turned out that the common name for our nightly visitor was ‘climbing mouse’. Needless to say, I lost the battle over the mangoes. At least until we creature-proofed our house.
My mango-mouse experience reminded me of a brown bear story I used in one of my first-year lectures when I was still teaching at the University of Sydney. Brown bears love salmon. But they are picky eaters, especially during the salmon run when there are salmon aplenty. The story I told the students was about the link between picky brown bears, discarded salmon, flies and trees. It was one of three scenarios I gave the students, one false and two real, and they had to figure out which one was the fiction. The bear story was sufficiently far-fetched to fool the students most of the time.
This was the story I told the students.
Canada’s British Columbia seems to have trees that are too tall. Too tall for the supposedly nutrient-poor soil they grow in that is. Because they grow on a slope in an area with high rainfall, the topsoil regularly washes away leaving insufficient nutrients for the trees to reach a respectable height. Well, the soil is supposed to be too nutrient poor. Near the forest runs a stream. Once a year the stream fills up with salmon which, in turn, attracts bears. Faced with an over-abundance of prey, the bears become picky, catching a salmon, carrying it a little up the slope into the forest and eating only the most nutrient-rich parts of the fish. The rest is left to the flies and then rots on the forest floor, providing precious nutrients to allow the trees to grow. From wasted salmon to tall trees.
The brown bears and climbing mice made me think. If they can be wasteful and take more resources than they need, can there then be any truth in the belief within certain quarters that pre-industrial human populations lived in harmony with nature, never running the risk of over-exploiting their resources.
In other words, does the prudent predator exist? I want to find out. Join me on my journey. Somewhere along the line we’ll also talk about the role language played.
At an age when he honorably bore the title "Olde Farte", Lewis Mumford (1895 -1990) had this to say in an 1972 interview, on the topic of writing in long hand (this was at a time when the literate zones of the United States still knew who he was, as his two volume "The Myth of the Machine", had come out between 1967 and '71, and for that brief spell of time he was part of the wake-up call, along with books like 1972's "Limits to Growth" ~ that soon enough everyone would forget about, as such "nonsense" interfered with making money and the "wonders" of technology):
“One by one, many of the processes that we’ve turned over to the machine must be recaptured by the human organism. I write, for example, on a typewriter, and I’ve written on typewriters ever since I was sixteen years old, I wouldn’t give them up.
"But at one point in my life I realized I was the victim of the typewriter ~ that if I didn’t have it at hand, I wouldn’t be able to write a long book, because my handwriting was illegible, and I never felt at ease using the hand. And at that point I decided to learn the art of handwriting all over again. I studied the books on the chancery script ~ the fine Italian hand that the bureaucrats used in the 16th century ~ and acquired a pleasant kind of handwriting, which is entirely legible.
I feel I had a great gain, and I’m not the victim of the typewriter, I could do without it. If all the typewriters in the world were destroyed, I could still go on writing books.
"And this applies to other things. We turn our memory, and even our mind, over to computers. I would have memory training brought back as a fundamental study, beginning at the earliest age in school. So that by the time a student is out of college, his memory would be as colossal, as capacious, as that of a Greek poet who could recite every chapter in Homer without looking at a book.”