Born to Make a Mess

We need to tell a new story of humanity’s place among our fellow beings.

IN 2007 ALAN WEISMAN published The World Without Us — a thought experiment in which the journalist and author examines what might happen to human-built structures and creations if our species vanished in short order. The book explores how our cities would quickly crumble without people to constantly maintain them, how our factories might run amok without their attendants turning valves and pushing buttons, and how long it might take for natural processes to erase all visible traces of humanity’s existence. When Weisman came to my hometown on a book tour, I went to see him. I don’t remember much of what he talked about on that evening in Minneapolis, but I do remember that he mentioned that people had frequently approached him during his tour and expressed support for the idea of rapid human extinction. These folks seemed to think “the world without us” was a rather good idea and a goal to be sought. As I recall, Weisman was horrified at this reaction and took pains to state that he did not advocate human extinction (nor the eradication of any species).

Illustration by Michael Morganstern.
Illustration by Michael Morganstern.

While we must face the harsh realities of the damage our extractive economy has had on the planet’s systems and cycles, the notion that humans are an essentially parasitic species and that, by nature, we despoil Earth is both false and dangerous.

The idea of the parasitic human stems from a sense that our species is apart from all others and that, unlike every other animal, plant, fungus, and microbe on this shining blue planet, we have no role in the ecosystem.

The idea of the parasitic human stems from a sense that our species is apart from all others.

This narrative underlies the creation of our eponymous new designation for the present geologic era: the “Anthropocene” (essentially the era in which we completely f***ed up the world). However, the story that human beings were dropped into a thriving virgin ecosystem of which we had no real part, the story that we are the despoilers of an Eden, is a toxic myth.

Underlying this myth is the fantasy that there is a human realm, and there is a wild place that is untouched by mankind. The concepts of the virgin wilderness and of wildness in general spring from a way of being in the world that developed about 6,000 years ago and featured large, permanent human settlements (cities) supported by large-scale mono-crop agriculture: what we have come to call “civilization.” While the word “civilization” has acquired various connotations over the millennia of its existence, at its core it simply means a form of life in cities. Without the perspective of being walled off in cities, outside of the rest of creation, “wildness” has no meaning. The word “Eden” is derived from the Sumerian word “edin,” which refers to the forests and mountains beyond the city walls and the accompanying fields and pastures. (In the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the hero’s wild hairy companion, Enkidu, is created from a piece of clay and placed out in the edin to run with the herd animals.)

In my work as a storyteller, I have come across stories from a number of cultures. In stories from so-called hunter/gatherer cultures I have not seen a parallel to the concept of Eden, or of wilderness “untrammeled by man.” To be sure, in the stories there are villages of people and there are remote areas where there are few people, but the idea of a virgin nature does not appear. There are creation stories in which people have yet to be created, but this condition is generally presented as a world that is incomplete rather than holding the image of an unpeopled world as paradise.

The concept of the unspoiled natural paradise stems from a psychological projection on the part of settled agrarian and urban cultures. The concepts of “wildness,” of “nature,” of human exceptionalism, are projections upon the world by people and cultures that walled themselves from their environment and who began to think of themselves as apart from the rest of creation. In fact, no human has ever experienced nature untouched by humans. Even on the most remote mountaintop or lonely atoll, humans, like all animals, have a profound effect upon the world around them. Try walking through a wood without being sensed by the animals there. Birds will announce the human presence almost every time. Like all animals, we are supposed to have an effect.

In a September 2016 article in KCET titled “What John Muir Missed,” author Lawrence Hogue discusses the writings of the nineteenth century naturalist. During the time he spent in California, Muir observed the native peoples of the Sierra gathering “wild” rye, but as Hogue points out, the plentiful patch of elymus (wild rye) was, in fact, the result of centuries of human cultivation. Muir had projected the civilized notion of Eden, the pristine garden with food free for the picking, upon a landscape that had been enriched for thousands of years by human technology. It is not only Muir who is caught in this paradigm and projection. A 2017 study published in Science concludes that the immense biodiversity of the Amazon basin is the product of a long history of cultivation by the native peoples of the region. It seems the “wilds” of the remote Amazon are, in fact, a product of a kind of technology that we “civilized” folks are only starting to recognize.

It is about time we replaced the story of humans as parasites on the Earth (and its other face: the story of humans as masters of nature) with an older story — the story of our role in the ecosystem.

Our technology is an aspect of our niche role in the ecosystem.

So, what is our purpose? What niche do humans fill in an ecosystem? I’d say that all evidence points to the fact that we are animals with a tendency to move things around and manipulate them, to use our nimble hands, our fruitful imaginations, and our sense of a potential future to plant, and dig, and harvest. When we do so with a proper sense of relationship to our fellow beings, we actually make life more complex, varied, and abundant.

Other animals fill a similar role. Parrots, for example, have evolved to live in the high canopy and to use their powerful beaks to tear open fruit rinds and to crack nuts, but parrots are notoriously sloppy eaters. Three quarters of the fruits and nuts they harvest and crack open end up on the forest floor. This rain of partially processed food feeds thousands of other species and enriches the diversity of life.

I suspect that humans have a similar function. We are meant to mess with things in a certain way. Our technology is an aspect of our niche role in the ecosystem. That technology, that messing about with the world, however, works to fulfill our ecological role only when we are in close connection with our ecosystem. Put the parrot on a perch above a tile floor and all you get is a mess. Put humans behind walls, psychically separated from our fellow beings, and our technology can take a nasty turn.

Our word and concept of “technology” comes from the Greek concept of technê. Technê is a kind of intelligence of the hands, typically translated as either “craft” or “art.” The Greek god most associated with technê is Hephaistos, the God of the Forge (Vulcan in His Roman expression). Hephaistos, who is also the god of masonry, carpentry, and sculpture, constructed all the tools used by the gods and built clever machines as well. As a sculptor and a smith, he is able to create animated figures — automata and statues that move.

In addition to technê, however, Hephaistos carries another kind of intelligence. His technê is tempered by a kind of tricky wisdom and the ability to set traps. This kind of trickster and trapper intelligence was called “metis” by the Greeks. Metis is a kind of old, non-linear wisdom. It is the wisdom of being in a tangled relationship with being. The word metis is derived from the name of a Titaness, Metis, who was first wife of Zeus, king of the Greek gods.

Metis is the goddess of connection, of the kind of empathy good hunters have for their prey. It is an intelligence of sensing the underlying patterns and complexities of the world and of being able to gently pull the right strings to make things happen. She is the wisdom of the time before civilization. Her name may be derived from the root “meta,” which refers variously to that which is “after,” “behind,” “among,” “between,” and also, “that which is changed.”

Changing the things that humans are among and between is an apt description of the works of the Native peoples that John Muir observed and those many generations of Amazonian Indigenous peoples referred to in the Science study. Their technê was tempered with metis.

The story goes that when Zeus heard a prophecy that Metis would bear him a son who would come to replace him, he convinced her to transform herself into a fly and then he swallowed her. In much the same way, when humans moved into built, urbanized environments, our metis disappeared deep inside. Most of our technologies today have lost that ancient wisdom.

If we practice being in conversation and exchange with the nonhuman world around us, we have the power to enrich that world instead of destroying it.

But our sense of being among and a part of the rest of the cosmos is still within us. Metis waits to be reawakened and re-accessed in human consciousness.

We can already see some examples of this reawakening in the permaculture movement and in places where people are using their imaginations to “rewild” lands after centuries of intensive agriculture. To be sure, mistakes will be made and there will be instances where our powers outrun our wisdom, but if we use our sense of empathy, and if we practice being in conversation and exchange with the nonhuman world around us, we have the power to enrich that world instead of destroying it.

As I write this, for the first time in human history the world has surpassed the threshold of 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. It is important, at this time especially, to retell the story of humans. Not as some extra-natural being, and not as some destroyer of worlds, but as an animal among others with an evolved role to play in the web of being.

It may be that we go down into extinction. We must acknowledge the possibility. But even in that case, let us at least go down trying to express our original purpose: messing with the world in a good way.

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