Peripheral Visions

that both are mutable, both realize their distinctive characteristics in intimate contact with their environments. Vanni would have had a good deal of reason on her side if she had looked at the toad in its roomy jar and said, That could be my mom; the herpetologists who see the crash of amphibian populations as a warning to human beings have multiple layers of truth on their side. But many of them read the evidence more narrowly, and most of us decline to see its relevance. Having learned to think of child development as a process of differentiation, I thought that the association of mother and toad was to be avoided. I lost, perhaps, the chance to establish a pattern of metaphorical thinking, especially the kind of metaphor called empathy, with the deepening of attention it offers.
    Vanni might have learned a number of other important lessons if she had kept the toad in a jar by her bedside. For one thing, she would sooner or later have had to deal with its death. Most people encounter death first in a pet or a road kill or a dead bird found by the door and only gradually discover that death is a common heritage. It is not easy for children to learn that parents are vulnerable, fallible, mortal, to learn the necessity of protecting even while being protected. It is important to learn that when you think you own a frog or a houseplant or even a biological community like a forest or a lake, although you can destroy it, you may not be able to keep it alive. Human conventions of ownership permit the possibility of destruction, but they do not guarantee the ability to preserve.
    For a long time it has been assumed that the natural world is knowable and that the capacity to know equals the right to use and rule. Knowledge is a form of domination and a step on the way to more practical kinds of domination, but in practice domination has preceded understanding. We work out our relationships with other species across a gulf of incomprehension, even of those that have been studied for centuries and are maintained under the most artificial conditions. When many species meet in a complex ecosystem, their balance is often beautiful to the observing eye, but the orchestration is elusive, and the fit that makes possible a joint performance bridges differences far greater than the mutual intelligibility between members of different cultures.
    We began from the image of a Persian garden as a setting in which plants and animals have been cultivated and controlled, a setting in which people of different backgrounds and understandings encountered one another and managed, for a time, to join in a single performance. The walls had been built to exclude wildness of all sorts: wild animals, desert weeds and weather, nomadic raiders, the predations of rulers and neighbors. But there is still a wildness inside the garden. Even in Persian carpets, modeled on gardens and like them the work of human hands, there is a hint of the unknowable in the tradition that every carpet should contain a deliberate error, for perfection belongs only to God. Through the centuries of cultivation, gardeners have learned to manage mysterious processes they could not understand or see. Some of these have one by one become transparent to scientific instruments, but then new knowledge reveals further layers of mystery in their interactions.
    An ecosystem, even that largest of all ecosystems, the biosphere of this planet, is not created by knowing the properties of all the parts and fitting them together, nor do we as human beings know all the steps of the complex dance in which we participate. This was demonstrated by a large and curious experiment in Arizona called Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 being the one we all inhabit). Biosphere 2 is a kind of Persian garden. It is a huge, sealed dome erected near Tucson, within which a dynamic model of the planetary biosphere was constructed, containing a carefully designed diversity of organisms of different kingdoms in appropriate ratios—plants, a few animals, a small group of human beings—in the hope that they would establish and maintain the cycles needed to survive over several years. But the most important lesson of Biosphere 2 may be the unpredictability of the process, with surprising fluctuations at every level, from the mix of gases in the air to the hearts of the human inhabitants.
    The planet we inhabit, larger and more complex than any model, has its own ancient stability, yet it continues to change, new