Reconnect With Nature Blog

Cooperation, Not Competition

Our culture conditions us to think in competitive ways. We compete for jobs, for money, for approval. We tend to think that everything is a zero-sum game. What we lose, someone else wins. One sports team wins, another one loses. And we transfer this outlook to our view of nature as well. Ecologists talk about competition being responsible for structuring communities of plants and animals, and refer to the Competitive Exclusion Principle (where two species cannot occupy the same ecological niche without one species excluding the other) as something that happens often in nature. This principle, first suggested by Gause (see G. F. Gause, 1934, The Struggle for Existence), was demonstrated in the lab when he placed two species of Paramecium into a confined space and showed that one species outcompeted the other for the resources that were available.  This has led us to think that competition is common in nature.

But in actuality, cooperation is found more often than competition in nature. Think of the human body, with its vast collection of cells, all cooperating to keep the body alive and going. Ah, say the biologists, all of these cells are related to each other (i.e., they have the same complement of genes) and that is why they all cooperate. But the cells that make up the body are composed of structures that once were different organisms, and joined together into cooperative structures. Lynn Margulis has proposed the endosymbiotic theory (see L. Margulis, 1970, The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells), in which she suggested that animal cells were collections of cooperating organisms. We now know that mitochondria have their own DNA, a fact that validates Margulis's theory.  At some point, animal cells did not have the same complement of genes within a larger body, yet they cooperated to form the body.

As we look at nature, we can see a lot of other examples of cooperation. Ants defend acacia trees from predators, and in turn the acacias feed the ants. Cleaner wrasse pick parasites off of predatory fish that could swallow the wrasse in an instant, but do not do so because of a cooperative relationship. The examples are numerous. And where ecologists have tried to find competition in action, the results have been elusive. Sometimes ecologists have had to resort to a historical argument, suggesting that even if competion cannot be documented now, it must have occurred in the past to separate species into different niches.

Rather than being competitive, nature tends to be cooperative. Instead of a zero-sum game of scarcity and winners and losers, nature tends to be a win-win game, with mostly winners. Yes, sometimes there are periods of scarcity and deprivation, and species can go extinct. But most of the time nature provides periods of plenty, and species cooperate with each other to use nature's bounty. A part of reconnecting with nature is recognizing the harmony that exists among species in the natural world.

Genesis, the Bible, and Evolution

As most everyone knows, the Bible says in Genesis 1:28 that mankind should rule the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, and every living thing that moves upon the earth. Various translations modify the "rule" part to read "have dominion over."  This sets the stage for mankind being master of the earth, and provides justification for the kinds of things that we humans are willing to do to animals.

A friend who is a Hebrew scholar was telling me recently that the "rule" part might have been misinterpreted. He said that "rule" has been translated from the Hebrew "vih yerdu," which comes from the root "yahrad," meaning "to come down from, to descend."  If my friend is correct (and I will put in a disclaimer here that I am not a scholar of Hebrew, do not know the language, and have no idea if his translation is correct), this would change the meaning of Genesis 1:28 to something like "mankind descends from the fishes in the sea, the birds in the air, and every living thing that moves upon the earth."  Now isn't that a description of evolution?  If my friend's translation is correct, this might mean that the Bible talks about evolution in Genesis, and the debate between creationism and evolution is really moot.

Fear of Nature

November 15, 2006. The other day, I had to give a talk in downtown Phoenix. I arrived early, not knowing what the parking situation was likely to be.  Fortunately, there was a city garage right across the street from where I was supposed to talk, so I found that I had more than 30 minutes of time on my hands. It was 12:30 pm, and a number of office workers were out having lunch on benches near the sidewalk.  I sat down on one of the benches and watched the people and the traffic.

All around me were hungry birds, pigeons and sparrows, that were trying to pick up crumbs that fell from people’s sandwiches. As I watched this, I was amazed to see that most people did not appreciate having the birds come close to them. In fact, a number of people expressed some fear of the birds, moving their bodies slightly away from the approaching bird and sometimes kicking out with their leg to keep the bird from getting too close. Some people gave soft screams or yells as a pigeon came close to their shoes, and others expressed to their lunch companions that they did not want a dirty bird to get very close.

Sparrows and pigeons are pretty innocuous. They do not have huge talons that could rip flesh, nor do they have beaks that could injure someone. Yet the people around me were clearly afraid of the birds, or at the very least uncomfortable with their presence.

I realized then that this is one of the problems that people face in reconnecting with nature. Fear. Nature to many people represents an unknown, and people tend to be afraid of the unknown.  The people around me probably knew nothing about how these birds live, had no appreciation for these birds as living being that are a part of nature. When they were growing up, they might have been taught by their parents or by other kids that animals were dirty, unclean, untouchable.  I have heard people talk about pigeons as rats with wings, and part of folklore is that rats are dirty and disease-ridden. So pigeons must be dirty too, and we can throw sparrows into the same category for good measure.

Reconnecting with nature starts by letting go of the fear. Most animals are neither disease-ridden nor are they out to hurt people. The more we learn about the lives of other beings, either people or animals, the more we understand that they are concerned with their own existence and are not out to get us. 

Rattlesnake 2

October 26, 2006. Today I parked my car in the driveway and was headed for the front door, shuffling mail in my hand and looking through bills, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something was moving near me. I stopped and looked. There in front of me, on a path intersecting mine, was the 3-foot-long rattlesnake that had been hanging around the house. It stopped when I stopped, and we both looked at each other. I wanted to go past the snake to get to the front door, and the snake wanted to get past me to go on its way around the house. We looked at each other for perhaps a minute.  The snake did not move. Apparently it thought that it had the right-of-way to pass, but was polite enough to wait and see what I was doing. I decided that the snake could go where it wanted, backed up and went into the house through the back door.

For the next hour, the snake crept around the house, curling up in sunny corners for a few minutes, then moving along to some other spot. I periodically came out of the house and watched. At one point the snake found a 2-foot long piece of drain pipe that had fallen off the house during a windstorm and I had never replaced or picked up. As the snake entered the pipe, its tail started to swish back and forth like an excited cat. It crawled in, then discoved that the pipe was too short, with its head and its tail sticking out of the ends. Rather than crawling entirely out of the pipe, the snake decided to head back inside it, while the rest of its body filled up most of the diameter of this piece of metal lying on the ground. I wondered if the snake would get stuck, and if it did, what was I going to do? Somehow the thought of trying to extricate a rattlesnake from a piece of drain pipe was not an enchanting project. The snake started to move its body back and forth, at least the part that I could see, while the tail thrashed even more violently. Finally the head appeared next to the tail, and the snake flowed out of the pipe and continued on its way.

I tried to decide what the snake was doing. I could see that the skin around the back end was somewhat milky, suggesting that the snake was about to shed. I knew that snakes are not in the best of moods when they are shedding, so I tried to stay as far as I could from it and still see what it was doing. The snake, however, was totally unconcerned. I had the feeling that I could have walked right up to it, and it would have ignored me entirely. Since this is October and the weather is turning cold, I thought that perhaps the snake was looking for some place to hibernate for the winter. However, this seemed unlikely, because rattlesnakes have traditional hibernacula to which they go during the winter months. In fact, a rattlesnake expert once told me that if a snake is moved several miles away from where it was found, it might not make it back to its hibernaculum and might die during the winter. A third possibility that occurred to me was that perhaps the snake was looking for a last meal of rodents before heading off to overwinter in some nearby cave or rocky outcrop.  Judging by the rodent droppings that can be found around my house, the snake might think that it has come to a five-star restaurant.

Finally the snake had had enough of a promenade, and went back to the knothole in my back porch and disappeared under the house.  I didn’t want to have to contend with watching out for a rattlesnake for the rest of the afternoon, so I covered the knothole with a brick, which I will remove once evening comes and no one has to come and go out of the back door.

We have tried to make our property a place where all animals can feel safe. They are not shot, killed, poisoned, or removed. Apparently the rattlesnake has no trouble believing that. It has made itself right at home.

Rattlesnake

October 23, 2006, I was walking to the back door of my house when I noticed that a 3-foot-long diamondback rattlesnake was on the back porch. I had just come out of that door moments before, so the snake must have been in the weeds a few feet or perhaps even inches from where I walked. The snake was quite calm, exploring the porch and pushing on the door with its head. I walked up to within about 10 feet, admiring the beauty of this magnificent animal.  The snake kept on exploring, and then slowly started to move off the porch into the surrounding weeds. Then it changed its mind and came back to the porch. Finding a knot-sized hole in one of the porch boards, the snake first stuck about a foot of its body into the hole, then emerged to look at me for a few moments, and then slowly slid entirely through the knot hole, out of sight and under the house.

I thought of how calm the snake was. It made no attempt to coil up, no attempt to rattle, no attempt to attack me. We mutually acknowledged each other, and we went our separate ways.  My neighbors kill rattlesnakes when they find them, and the snakes are aggressive and defend themselves. But here there was no aggression. Only perhaps mutual respect.

This led me to think of J. Allen Boone’s book, Kinship With All Life, where he describes how an old pal who prospected in the Mojave Desert encountered rattlesnakes fairly frequently, and did not think of them as enemies, but as little brothers who had a right to be there and a right to live. The snakes in turn did not see this person as an enemy either, and spent no time trying to bite him.  After all, snake venom is energetically expensive for a rattlesnake to produce, and there is no point in wasting it on someone who means you no harm.

I know a person who studies the behavior of rattlesnakes. She was telling me that the snakes that she studies seem to recognize her and are very calm around her. Occasionally, if she gets too close to a particular snake, it might give a brief rattle, more to say, I’m here, please don’t step on me. The snake and the person have mutual respect.

Mutual respect involves letting the animal go its own way and leaving it alone. Many people who get bitten try to catch the snake or pick it up, either to show others that they can do it or to feel good about their prowess as snake-hunters.  Trying to catch a rattlesnake is not a wise thing to do, because then the snake feels threatened and is willing to spend its precious venom to defend itself. And bites of rattlesnakes can be fatal.

Today I was driving through our local state park. In the middle of the road, in a 15 mile per hour zone, was a foot-long squashed garter snake. Whoever ran over the animal had to have swerved into the middle to hit it.  There were no houses nearby, and even if the snake were poisonous (and garter snakes are not) there is no way that this snake could have been a danger to anyone. Yet someone went out of their way to run over it.

We humans seem to have a desire to kill animals that we think are dangerous. However, if we approached animals with respect, left them alone to live their own lives, and did not try to kill them, perhaps they would not be so dangerous to us.  The first step to reconnecting with nature is to respect all living things, and to remember that all life wants to live.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Reconnect With Nature Blog. On this site, I will discuss how we have lost our connection to nature, and how that is affecting our well-being. I will post essays on nature-oriented themes, and will have comments on how we can reconnect with nature, so that we can once again appreciate and treasure the beauty of the world around us.