Peripheral Visions

the steady activity of green plants. The soil and most of the rocks we think of as lifeless are the product of life processes over vast stretches of geological time. Because the earth is different from us and mysterious, changing constantly, every encounter with the environment is an opportunity for learning. Our planet is not an inert piece of real estate subject to rezoning, for its surface has been shaped by life processes, with their own lawfulness. We cannot treat the earth as inert, just as we cannot treat a tree as an iron pylon or a meadow as a piece of wall-to-wall carpeting.
    Environmentalism began with piecemeal concerns about parts of the natural world: saving this forest or that bay, the whales or a particular lake that had become polluted. The issue becomes very different when we realize, as the Gaia hypothesis demands, that we are totally contained in and sustained by a single living system, in which all the parts are interconnected and everything we do resonates with the whole. Nothing is fully localized. The destruction of an ecosystem or a species is an amputation and, like the amputation of a limb, can trigger fatal shock or, at the least, require learning new ways to function. One extraneous item introduced in the wrong place in a living body can trigger pathology. The Gaia hypothesis becomes, at every level of its metaphorical evocation, a reminder that the world we live in is a biological, or if you like a biologized world, a sacred process in which we share, a community to participate in, not an object to be used.
    We don’t see it. Our habits of attention work against seeing, and the connections in the system are invisible. Most of the time, we are like the blind men with the elephant. Focusing on the pursuit of particular, narrow goals, we pay attention to a fraction of the whole, block out peripheral vision, and act without looking at the larger picture. Cutting down forests for timber, it is easy to ignore their role in the regulation of climate. Poisoning insects to increase crop yields, it is easy to ignore the concomitant deaths of natural predators, which lead to an increase in pests the following year. All of this could be spelled out in environmental impact statements with elegant diagrams showing the interconnection of the different factors, but the Gaia hypothesis may help to make these interconnections seem intuitively obvious. Environmental politics has looked very like other kinds of politics, many groups dealing separately with different obsessions rather than with a single, interdependent whole. Certainly practitioners have to concentrate and certainly there have been victories, but it seems unlikely that lasting stability will be won with piecemeal approaches.
    There is a curious kind of blindness in the way we formulate our conscious purposes and press ahead, blind to consequences, blind even to those consequences that eventually loop back and affect the overall viability of the system. My father, Gregory Bateson, wondered whether this phenomenon was a flaw in the perceptual system of our species or only a culturally induced blindness produced by religious traditions or the mechanistic view of the natural world developed in the Enlightenment. He was especially suspicious of the Cartesian partition between body, that which we study and manipulate, and mind, which he associated with patterns of organization and self-regulation but which Descartes saw as transcendent.
    The Enlightenment represented a moment in the way philosophers describe the world, but human beings have always been blind in many ways, for like every other species we are characterized by the sensory limitations that match our evolutionary adaptation, fitting us to a hunting-gathering lifestyle. We are blind and deaf and otherwise insensitive to a great deal that other animals can perceive. There are patterns on the petals of flowers like landing pads for bees to lead them directly to where the nectar is, but because they are outside our visible spectrum we cannot see them without extra instrumentation; the sensory capacity to receive and process that information is not part of our biological equipment. The puppy we have imagined sitting on the blind man’s lap can smell and hear many things that the man cannot. These capacities have to do with how the ancestors of dog and man and bee made their livings. The toad has the appropriate perceptual system for catching flies.
    In fact, human beings have a very broad