Peripheral Visions

sensory range and a learned capacity for narrowing in. We learn patterns of attention, ways of concentrating, and things to watch for, often culturally defined. We can also modify these patterns of attention, as the blind man may develop extra acuity in other senses to compensate for the loss of sight, and we can learn to see through multiple lenses. How might human beings become sensitive to the effect of their actions on the toads and salamanders? The very ease with which a child can imagine kinship with other species is a starting place for understanding as valuable as the disciplines of the laboratory.
    The Gaia hypothesis pulls the data together, but it goes further by offering a metaphor for organizing awareness of the interconnections. Beyond that, it proposes empathy as a way of knowing and imagining connections about which we cannot yet be explicit. It cannot, however, guarantee love or respect any more than centuries of religion and philosophy have been able to end the exploitation by human beings of one another. We continue to be unable to provide adequate care either for the old, our parents, or for the young, our children, to whom we will entrust the future, so it is no wonder we mistake the planet that represents both source and destiny for a shopping mall. What would it be like to walk through the woods or the city in the presence of—aware of—Gaia? Part of that awareness can be built up by letting children look through microscopes, germinate seeds, learn about soil chemistry, but part of it comes into being through the experiences of loving and being loved, resolving quarrels, learning new ways of family life, attending patiently to things we do not understand.
    What does it take to notice when the peepers or the bull-frogs aren’t as loud this year as they were a year ago, as Rachel Carson did with birdsong? We have a name that we use for noticing without being sure of the exact cues, the details that might be offered as evidence. We tend to call that intuition. Most of what is called intuition has to do with information processed subliminally, unconsciously. “Mere” intuition it is not very respectable, like “mere” metaphor. Yet even though the boundaries of analysis will be pushed ever further, it is a mistake to discard the hints and suspicions that are not accounted for by a given paradigm.
    All thought relies on metaphor, on ways of noticing similarity so that what has been learned in one situation can be transferred to another. Scientists try to purge metaphor and intuition from their publications, but freed from the formal constraints of scientific publishing, the speech of scientists is like all human speech and thought, full of metaphors, often unconscious and unexamined.
    The solution is not to purge metaphors from speech and try to ignore them; the solution is to take responsibility for the choice of metaphors, to savor them and ponder their suggestions, above all to live with many and take no one metaphor as absolute. There are truths to be discovered in equating one’s mother with a toad; there are truths to be discovered in looking at a butchered sheep and recognizing heart and lungs and death itself as common. We have work to do to make empathy an acceptable form of learning and knowing for people who are not poets and therapists. We have to make it possible for manufacturers and politicians to admit empathy as a legitimate, conscious discipline, thoughtful empathy as a form of knowing, leading to effective action.
    It would be well to have our vision of the planet based on metaphors that would evoke no blindnesses, no impulse of exploitation, but there is too much blindness and exploitation in ordinary life for such clarity. We will not arrive at the point of treating the planet with respect until we are able to treat all the members of our own species with respect. In the same way, we will not be able to treat the natural world with respect as long as we lie to ourselves about ourselves, so it will be important to become accustomed to the reality of death.
    Human beings are economical in their patterns of thought, transferring ideas from one context to another, using a multitude of unconscious metaphors. Not long ago, in 1988, a group of parents in Tennessee brought a lawsuit protesting that their children were being taught the religion of “secular humanism” in the schools and objecting to the use of fantasy and mythology in education. A picture from a reading primer