Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (9 page)

Reading these accounts made it clear to me that all life in the jungle is constantly aware of all other life in exquisite detail. Through all this, the Indians gained information about the way natural systems interact. The observation was itself knowledge. Depending on the interpretation, the knowledge might or might not become reliable and useful.

Each detail of each event had special power and meaning, understood as part of a larger pattern of activities and forces. The understanding was so complete that it was only the rare event that could
not
be explained—a twig cracked in a way that did not fit the previous history of cracked twigs—that was cause for concern and immediate arming.

Rios recounted the way the Indians would capture and kill pigs. They knew that the pigs were led by a single sow, and that they walked through the forest in a very widely dispersed, but specific, fanned-out pattern behind the lead sow, much as birds fly through the air in formation. The Indians knew that killing the lead sow would throw the others into a state of confusion while they worked out who the new lead sow would be. During the confusion, the Indians would kill a few pigs, being careful
not
to kill any emerging leaders. Instead, they would allow the new lead sow to emerge and lead the surviving band out of danger. Then they would take the dead leader, and cut off her head. They would plant the head just below the surface of the ground, facing in a specific direction
exactly.
If they did this just so, the entire band would return to that exact spot in precisely three moons. If they erred in any minute detail of the procedure, the band would not return, and the Indians would have to hunt for a new band.

Rios saw this work many times. No one ever asked why it worked so well; the knowledge of it was merely passed down, generation to generation, and there was always plenty of pig to eat.

Many books written by Indian people describe another method by which knowledge of plants and animals could be amplified and integrated into the observer, directly, physically: emulation. By imitating a creature, “getting inside” it, one learns to understand it better. A person imitates a plant’s stance and movements, its behavioral characteristics, in order to be as it is, to integrate its mood and character into herself or himself.

This is often done tribally, or personally, in dances and ceremonies, and includes not only plants and animals but also the attitudes of wind, rain and other people.

Indian literature as well as the literature (what we call “myth”) of pretechnological people, including our own European ancestors, is filled with stories of humans turning into wolves, bears, birds, snakes, or insects, in order to circumvent some otherwise insurmountable difficulty by using the knowledge of the appropriate creature. If stealth were the capacity human beings needed, a way of gaining knowledge of stealth would be to observe stealthy creatures—panthers, for example —and then imitate them. If instant strike from repose was desired as a protective ability, then the cobra was a good model. If calmness and flow were sought, observe streams. If airiness or lightness were wanted, imitate the butterfly.

Indians did not name people after particular creatures from some kind of charming aesthetic sense—Many White Buffalo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull. The animals and natural elements that were part of the names had concrete observable characteristics: strength, constancy, agility, slyness, fierceness and so on. Nature was not only a metaphor for human behavior, nature was literally a teacher. The way animals solved problems, or the way they moved or otherwise behaved, became the model for human behavior.

Even today, imitation and emulation inform human behavior. We read that Muhammad AH says, “I dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” By using such phrases, he mentally associates his own movements with those of the creatures. While he cannot behave exactly as they can, he does probably succeed in integrating some creaturely movement into himself. Of course, if he had never seen a butterfly or a bee, he could not learn anything from them.

The imitative process is automatic with children. They imitate whatever is around: parents, cats, dogs, insects, plants, cars, each other, and whatever images are delivered through the media. Of course, imitating the animal seen in the media image is not the same as imitating the animal seen in the forest.

To achieve their exquisitely detailed knowledge of the world around them, human beings living in nonmediated environments had to use all their abilities to observe themselves, the planet, and the things that grow from it. They might not have even considered the planet to be something that was actually outside them since their senses told them it was also inside them. Their world was organized along flow lines, not in separate and distinct boxes.

Knowledge results from personal experience and direct observation—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. These are aided by several inward systems. There is instinct, for example, gathered by innumerable previous generations and carried forward in the cells. There is intuition, what Eastern religions call “knowing without seeing.” In addition there are feelings, which may have been informed by prior experience. All of these—the five senses plus instinct, intuition, feeling and thought—combine to produce conscious awareness, the ability to perceive and describe the way the world is organized. Western people like to think of these human qualities as separate from one another and some as more “real” than others. Yet all of the abilities interact both between person and planet and among each other. One sense interacts with another sense, the senses interact with feelings. Intuition functions together with instinct, thought flows constantly in and out of all experience. The fully functional human being can be understood as a kind of microcosmic ecosystem inside a wider eco-system inside a wider one and so on, all systems flowing in and out of each other. As with other systems, when one thing is altered, the overall balance is altered. Changes in one aspect of human perception or experience affect all others.

When a person has all senses fully operative, we call the person “sensitive.” People who live in environments that stimulate the full sensory range from the most subtle to the most obvious are more sensitive than those who don’t. The senses developed in interaction with the multiple patterns and influences of the natural environment; no sensual capacity was developed by accident. No sense maintains itself if it is not used. If a sense remains unused, it atrophies.

In 1969 my wife and I visited several of the small islands that make up the larger area that colonists named Micronesia. Most of these islands are so small and so remote—hundreds of miles from each other—that many of their native cultures remain largely intact although there is an increasing U.S. military and business presence there.

On one island, we met a man who had a small motorboat. He had been to school in Hawaii, had lived in Los Angeles for a time and spoke good English. He offered to take us for a ride into the ocean to visit some tiny islands he knew about. This required taking one of two routes past the coral reef that surrounded the island. He gave us a choice. One route took many hours to where there was a break in the reef; the other way, he told us, was to follow the pattern of the waves until they are organized just so. Then he would leap the reef with the boat. We decided to go along with him on this latter route.

When we got to the island, he succeeded in spearing a few fish. We built a small fire, and he threw the fish directly into the flames. After a few minutes, he reached into the fire with his hands and turned them over. I asked him if reaching into the fire like that didn’t hurt. He answered, “It hurts a little bit.” We were becoming more interested in this man.

Then he started talking about the reef, a favorite subject. We asked him why he walked around on the reef with bare feet when we had been warned always to wear thick-soled sneakers because of a poisonous starfish that can deliver a painful and sometimes paralyzing wound.

He then told us words to this effect: “Yes, but if you step on one all you have to do is pick it up, turn it over, and place its underside directly on your wound. It will suck its own poison back out of you.”

We asked him how he knew that, and he said, “Everybody around here knows that. Whenever there is something poisonous its antidote is never more than a few yards away. Every-body knows this. It’s the same everywhere.”

We asked him about his life during those years in the big cities of the world, and his story was like any story of any Indian who leaves home to participate in the life of the “developed” world. It was about fights, miserable jobs, jail, and drunkenness. Detailed knowledge of wind, rain, sun and stars only got in his way. It would have been far better for survival in
our
world to suppress those observations and to develop mental agility, persuasiveness, charm, guile and aggression.

Naïvely, we asked why he chose to sacrifice his island life for cities and for this he had no answer, except to say that his own response to cars and machines reminded him of the way the fish becomes stunned by the glint of the diver’s metal face mask. At last he had come back to the island, where he remained, hoisted between cultures.

Motel Education

In 1974 I was one of thirty “leading environmental educators” invited to attend a conference at Ann Arbor, Michigan, jointly sponsored by the Environmental Education Program of the School of Natural Resources of the University of Michigan and the Division of Technology and Environmental Education of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

The goal of this conference was to provide guidelines to the government on how to grant money for environmental education projects. We thirty people would decide what is good and effective environmental education and what is not. We had four days to do this.

I arrived to discover that the meeting place was a motel outside of Ann Arbor, sandwiched between two freeways. If we wished to go anywhere, we had to do so by car. The rooms we slept in had windows which did not open; they offered twenty-four-hour air conditioning or heating. The rooms in which the meetings themselves were held had no windows at all. The light was fluorescent.

The motel had a swimming pool under a glass roof. Artificial palm trees were arranged around the pool area. The glass roof did not open, but there were lounge chairs here and there and portable sunlamps on wheels.

The talk at the conference was in techno-newspeak. We spoke of “educational delivery systems,” “value tradeoffs,” “checklists,” “guidelines,” “needs assessments,” “target groups,” “cost effectiveness,” “impact strategies” and, of course, my specialty, “education of and through the media.”

During the second day of the conference, a small group of the participants interrupted the proceedings to point out that we were all receiving an environmental education directly from our environment of windowless rooms, blank walls, and fluorescent lights. While we spoke of teaching others about an organic environment out there somewhere, the artificial environment that we were in was teaching us that nature was irrelevant, separate from us, and of only intellectual value. The natural environment, if it existed for us anywhere, was only in our minds, in our memories. Our failure to recognize that this was important signified that a widespread aberration of mind had proceeded further than we preferred to believe. It was useless for us to speak of making other people sensitive to environmental values when we, a group of so-called leaders, were satisfied with an environment which totally excluded the organic environment, and did not even notice that condition.

A biologist in her sixties stood up and gave an impromptu lecture, pointing out that a serious distortion had taken place in the very concept of education, and that we were all examples of it. I will paraphrase what she said:

“There are objective educational processes in which rational modes operate. Reading a textbook certainly does transmit a kind of knowledge, but there are also subjective informational-receptive modes. Walking through forests is different from attending classes on forests because each offers information of an entirely different sort; classes on forests can never help us ‘relate’ to forests, or to
care
about them at all. Only being in one can accomplish that, just as the only way to know what dancing is about is to dance.

“When we are inside these motel walls, we begin to think the natural world has nothing to teach us. We environmentalists suffer the same distorted notion of education that all Western people do. We think of education as objective, quantifiable and verbal. Our own words become our basis.

“As a result we don’t have a sense of the Tightness or wrongness of each new technological wonder. We hear about a ‘green revolution’ which will feed the starving millions and we buy the expert’s word, just as everyone else does. Without any experience with natural balance, we forget that things grow only so fast. If you accelerate the process artificially, something is lost.

“We read studies by scientists which say that the ozone layer is safe despite aerosols, and we read other studies by scientists which say the ozone layer is in danger. We wonder which is true? Which scientists are correct? But this wondering signifies that we have sold out our instinctive knowledge. Obviously, any artificial alteration of the ozone layer changes the volume of radiation which reaches the planet, and is harmful.