Here’s a transcript of a speech I gave tonight; my girlfriend made fun of me because I wrote in the jokes. Anyway, the speech is in its rawest form, so pardon any weird punctuation, etc. Video was taken, so I might try and get my hands on that and put it up, as well. Let me know what you think!
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First off, I’d like to thank you all for everything you do. It’s an honor to speak with all of you this evening, and I’d especially like to thank Clarke for giving me the opportunity to come here and give my two cents. We’ll see how this goes…most people try to get me to shut up, so being asked to talk for fifteen minutes is sort of new to me. She was actually going to get the Dalai Llama to speak, but I guess that didn’t work out, so sorry.
But in any case, I’d like to speak about Nature tonight. My name is Bryson Nitta, I’m a sophomore environmental studies major here at SU. I’m here on behalf of my organization, the Environmental Students of Seattle University, and I think I’ll sort of begin with a brief story. It’s the story of our species.
Modern homo sapiens evolved about 200,000 years ago on the continent of Africa. Their population, after a brief period of near extinction, has grown to nearly 6.7 billion. The species inhabits nearly every biome on the planet, from the deserts of Earth’s equatorial regions, to the frozen glaciers of the north, to the diverse forests of the tropics. All this happened in the blink of an eye. Their enlarged cerebral cortexes developed language, tools, and even self-awareness.
Nearly 11,500 years ago, homo sapiens began to develop civilization. Since then, human migration tends to lead out from sparsely populated areas into densely populated areas, called cities. Cities grew to nations, nations, to empire, until the entire the planet was under the dominion of a human civilization. That period of time, 11,500 years, accounts for not quite six percent of the time that homo sapiens have been on this planet. Recorded history, which originated about six thousand years ago, accounts for three percent of homo sapiens existence.
And yet, in that brief amount of time, Earth has been changing rapidly. Species have disappeared from this planet. As things stand now, the number of threatened animal and plant species worldwide: 11,046. The number of known species humans have forced to extinction in the past 500 years: 816. Some scientists call this period of time we live in, “The Sixth Extinction.” Of course, the last great extinction was 65 million years ago, when a meteor stuck the earth and the dinosaurs died off.
Even worse, things aren’t getting better. Percentage of known mammal species listed as threatened: 24 A quarter of known reptile species are listed as threatened.
Nearly a third, thirty percent, of known fish species are listed as threatened.
So what happened? How did it come to this? In such a short amount of time, it seems evident that something caused our species to grow distant, to grow apart from the rest of the planet. Was it technology? Was it time? Or are we just exploiters, pirates, thieves at heart?
I don’t think it was any of those things. Neil Evernden, a famous environmental philosopher and prominent deep ecologist says that environmentalism shouldn’t just be about cleaning up pollution, or capping CO2 emissions, or saving the rainforest. He says that those things are simply the tip of the iceberg, and that underneath waters, the true problem that we’re facing, the problem that manifests itself in climate change and acid rain and oil spills, the problem that we’re facing is a question of philosophy, outlook, and relationship.
William J Hill, a professor at Oxford University, wrote a paper in which he suggested that the main problem can be viewed in light of the metaphorical vision of nature that our society for the most part embraces. For Hill, a metaphor isn’t just a poetic or symbolic statement or concept…no. He views metaphor as an important interaction between reality, and the human mind. He writes that “one particular metaphor is chosen and becomes the vehicle around which a systematic vision of the world is then organized.” . The metaphorical vision of nature sums up the attitude of a particular society towards the earth.
So, what’s our metaphor? Hill says it’s that of a machine. With the emergence of atomistic science a few hundred years ago, our attitude towards nature has turned from a positive one to an exploitative one. He writes, “No longer is our environment resonant with meaning as it was in the Middle Ages, and no longer can we feel at one with it in the manner of Renaissance. The world of our choice is different.”
And I think Hill is right. We do view nature as a machine. How many times have we heard a cell described as a factory? In my geology class I’m taking this quarter, my professor has described plate tectonics as a conveyer belt. We here about DNA as the “building blocks” of life. This sort of language has never been used before in history to the extent that it is now. And just to sort of cement my point, here’re some commercials that I’d like to show you…
So, you can see this mechanistic metaphor everywhere you look. And it affects us. But how? Say we agree that the mechanistic metaphor is present in our society? What does it matter?
Well, I think it leads us to view nature as a thing we can take apart. It’s not an entity, it’s not an organism. It’s a tool…it’s something we can control. It’s sad to me, to think that this is how we treat the planet, the thing which has given us literally everything we have. We lose sight of the wonder and the awe in nature. Max Oelschalger describes the loss of wonder to science and mechanism in his description of Galileo. “Through the telescope Galileo confirmed the Copernican hypothesis. What he lost was the sweeping field of view of naked eye astronomy, the relation of the Milky Way to the starry sky, and the movement of the wandering stars across the ecliptic plane. And perhaps, in his intense concentration, he lost also the sounds and smells of the night and the awareness of himself as a conscious man beholding a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle. Galileo was no longer within nature, but outside it.”
I’ve been attending Catholic schools my whole life, especially Jesuit schools. When I was in high school in Spokane at Gonzaga Prep, I was taught this meditation by a Jesuit priest. And he sat me down, and he had me take out some paper. We sat down, we said a prayer, and then the meditation began.
The meditation went like this: the priest asked me to list the name or a brief description of every single person I could remember ever having met in my entire. Everyone. My family, friends, friends of friends, family of friends, strangers…it took me a while, but at the end, written on a physical sheets of paper, there was a portrait of my interactions in this world with my fellow humans. Every single one. And the priest then told me to look at the names, and ask myself, “When I met this person, in my contact with this person, did I act with love? Did I act with compassion? Or did I act out of fear? Or hate? Or ignorance?”
And as I looked at that list, I realized I wasn’t as loving a person as I wanted to be. And it changed me a little bit.
Now, a few years later, I imagine what would happen if humanity sat down with some paper. And instead of writing the names of all the people that we’ve interacted with, instead, humanity wrote down the names of every species it has interacted with. Frogs, kangaroos, trees, fish, birds, whales, worms, everyone. And then, after we’d finished our list, what if someone asked us, “When you met this species, in your contact with that organism, did you act with love? Did you act with compassion? Or did you act out of fear? Or hate? Or ignorance?”
I think that we would recognize then, how terribly we’ve treated the planet. It wouldn’t be hard to see. But that’s not the part that concerns me. What concerns me most of all, is that I’m not sure that humanity is willing to try to change its ways, to try and love this place we live in, and the creatures that we live with.
We’ve been given so much. The rain doesn’t fall because we tell it to, and the sun doesn’t shine because control it. The earth spins, the seasons change and flowers bloom all on their own. The food we eat grows because it grows, not because we tell it to. And yet, despite these blessings, we still have the audacity to think that we are the only ones that matter.
Preserving this planet is about respecting our place. Nothing more. It doesn’t take that much for an individual to be in awe and to see the worth in nature herself; but what will it take for an entire society to see that worth? We cannot commodify beauty. We certainly can’t put a price tag on the things that we’re given from nature. So what do we do?
I don’t have the answers. Not yet. Probably not ever. But I think it starts with a reversal of this metaphor of a machine, and I think that this can carry us to a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with other species, and with nature. As Philip Wheelwright wrote, “If reality is intrinsically latent and unwilling to give up its innermost secrets…then the best we can hope to do is catch partisan glimpses, reasonably diversified, all of them imperfect, but some more suited to one occasion and need, others to another. If we cannot ever hope to be perfectly right, we can perhaps find both enlightenment and refreshment from changing from time to time, our ways of being wrong.”
Thank you.