What makes us care?

In this blog, it’s clear that spending time with the crows, the robin, the hedgehogs, and the hare connects me to those animals – both as individuals (Divo and Bob) and as species – more closely.

But how many people have the time and ability to do this? And besides, were I to care about only these animals, it would be little better than caring only about my cats.

While I value, hugely, these experiences, they can’t be the driver for my ethical approach.

Immediately, I feel the need to add something: I don’t think that empathy for individual animals or certain species is without ethical value either. Maybe these personal experiences light the touch paper – it’s just that it can’t stop there, and we can’t rely on them. AND there must be an access point for people who do not have immediate experiences.

Documentaries can offer one access point. In David Attenborough’s Wild Isles series, one episode started with salmon. You see the cute dolphins catching the salmon – and playing with them – before the fish even make their way into the River Shannon. Then the salmon have to swim up the river. You see them gather at the foot of a waterfall, jostling and practising and finally launching themselves, all muscle and focus, into the shimmering air, twisting and bending in their attempt to swim through air. The commentary says that in the last 20 years, salmon numbers have decreased by 75%. I burst out crying. These incredible fish, who can sense home from the distant ocean, whose athleticism is so remarkable, dying out because of fishing and pollution and dams. I felt empathy for each salmon, every salmon.

The shock of it that we still – and of course it’s not just salmon, it’s every fish, every water-dwelling species – pollute and dam and kill. How could one consider continuing the harms done to these beings?

Yet, my emotions, my empathy, is preaching to the converted. I already care. And so it seems that I do feel empathy. I already care and so I seek out connection.

What starts the process, if not that?

Maybe someone could get shocked into caring by facts like the decrease in salmon numbers… and here I must add that although Attenborough points out some of these facts, really the programme is a celebration of wildlife. You could watch it and turn a deaf ear to the depressing statistics. I have a suspicion that he would have liked to make it more hard-hitting, to create more cognitive dissonance, more environmental anxiety. But these nature programmes have to be relaxing, entertaining and life-affirming. So, it seems unlikely that a casual viewer would be shocked into a novel world view. If someone didn’t already care about the biodiversity crisis, they seem not the people to watch a show detailing humanity’s depredations and destruction of the natural world.

Back to square one. How do you get those who don’t (yet) care to care?

Karen Bakke of the sounds book says we care about those animals we see, are familiar with and find as cute or charismatic: robins, pandas, tigers. Of course, we see foxes and not everyone gives a hoot about them (though they might about owls – who have forward facing eyes like us). We might, to add to her point – and I don’t know why she didn’t make it in a book about sound – like those we hear, too. Songbirds – though maybe not crows and gulls. We like smart animals: parrots and dolphins and chimpanzees. We like social animals: bees and meerkats and elephants. Of course, we see ourselves as smart and social, so we like the ones that reflect our values. Beavers get a pass because they work hard. Blue whales because they are the biggest. Polar bears because they are cool. We like the animals who’ve had stories told about them, for example, the Yellowstone wolves, Tarka the otter, Mrs Tiggywinkle (a hedgehog), Kes (kestrel – doh). We might like animals because we see them as oppressed, like badgers and coyotes, or hated by ignorant idiots, like bats, weasels and, goodness, someone must like them, hyenas.

But there seems to have to be some kind of reason. I want to say, I care about them all because they are.

What I wanted to say in this post was something that sort of almost maybe kind of came to me while I was sitting with that Headstand Lady tree. I was thinking how sad it was that the oaks and the ashes seemed sick and who would really truly care about them, as them, not for the oxygen or the carbon sequestration or the invertebrates, but for the oaks and the ashes, themselves. And it struck me… something from the idea of the Hollow Places book… and it’s in the Tristan Gooley book too… that myth, legend, story ties meaning to existence in a way that facts don’t.

In my previous post on collecting and organising, I suggested that we try to create our own stories about the Others - and that that is not helpful (it's a colonialising project, an anthropocentric one). But what about if the stories were from the Others' vantage points?

That culture project, part of what it is is to say that animal populations create their own meanings out of environment, relationships, bodies, places, times and seasons – to tell a story in which all populations are revealed as tellers of their own stories. I want to say that we are stripping the world of all other sources of value, makers of meaning, ways of being and knowing and experiencing. I want to say that the loss isn’t only about biological diversity and networked ecosystem relationships, but a loss of varieties of consciousness, a loss of metaphysical richness. And while the trees may not be conscious in the same way mobile rather than sessile beings are conscious, they have their own sensing and knowing, their own appreciation of value and ways of determining what matters, is meaningful, to them.

We ride roughshod over every vantage point – and we shall never have even a glimpse or whisper of this diverse otherness because we don’t care enough to wonder at its existence or seek to gain any slight access to it.

That is the tragedy of our hubris. That is the depth of what we have lost, are losing and will continue to lose: that vast universe of experiencing that once shared our world.