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Faith “Makes No Sense”

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Another attempt to heal the wound of scientific materialism that condemns spirituality and so undermines faith in unconditional love:

Christianity is not about having faith in general. Christianity is about a specific faith: a faith in the presence of unconditional love that emanates from the divine source. While I have concluded from my own analysis of the scientific evidence that the existence of souls is not thereby contradicted (being that current physical theory actually contradicts itself), and even come thereby to the conclusion that this reality was designed so that love works, that is not the basis of simple Christian faith. The proposition that compels most Christians is that faith connects us to a source of psychological strength.

The most common phrase in the Bible is a variant of “fear not.” If you haven’t studied neurophysiology, fear is antagonistic to reason. The rule-based system of laws in the Old Testament was authorized by God after the story of the Flood, where he basically said “I’m tired of managing you squabbling children. It’s time for you to try to manage yourselves.” That exercise in rule-making was a demonstration of the limits of reason. Jesus came along to point this out, confronting the hypocrisy of those that used the rules to separate the people from God, and taught them “OK, you’ve learned how to reason. Now it’s time to [focus on] love.”

Looking at this program of development and the state of affairs in the world, I’d hope that you’ll be better able to recognize those Christians who write here in an attempt to facilitate the same development in those that still struggle with fear and moral confusion. Yes there are those that use “faith” (as they define it) as a way of browbeating others, [but] Christianity contains elements within itself that motivates believers to heal that wrong. IB and I are among them, and you should recognize and respect the intellectual and moral resource that we represent.

Faith and Intellect

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The atheist’s complaint against religion is frequently rooted in charges of anti-intellectualism. This is evident in Nicholas Baker’s article in this quarter’s Skeptic (Volk. 20 No. 4), Christianity’s Negative Impact on Modern American Education.

I must admit to being befuddled by these charges. Upon encountering atheists decrying intellectual incoherence in the faithful, I often invite the critic to come out and respond to the writings under the New Physics page of this blog. I have also offered the material to scientists through various forums. So far, I have received no response.

A colleague at work invited me down to the atheist Sunday Service in Santa Monica. In the event, a couple of sarcastic remarks regarding faith rankled, but for the most part I found a group of well-meaning people that seemed to have no interest in their spirituality. I confirmed this with my friend later, saying that I didn’t think that I would fit in to the community. When I offered that my experience was that my very presence forced people to confront their spirituality, he confirmed my decision.

It is the anti-spirituality of atheism that concerns me most. Until it is recognized, I am afraid that it is going to be impossible to reconcile the two communities.

An anti-spiritual emphasis is not entirely unique to atheism – I had a Kabbalist tell me that men were not to enter spiritual experience until they were forty. The violence outbursts of nationalism that rocked the world in the 20th century may be symptomatic: where once European politics was dominated by the egos of kings, public education may have facilitated the formation of gestalts that were driven by the masculine urge to power. Jung’s work on the collective unconscious may have been an attempt to understand the dynamics, and he writes in his biography of looking up at the mountains before World War II and seeing a tide of blood pouring over them. I sometimes suspect that, in the aftermath of the war, psychologists settled on denial of spiritual experience as a necessary practice of quarantine to prevent future epidemics. I have encountered some that say they diagnose schizophrenia only if the voices create fear in the patient. And when I sought counseling to deal with family-related stress, once the therapist determined that I was stable, she began asking me questions about reincarnation and process theology, with a focus on understanding why so many of us are immature spirits.

Unfortunately, any policy of denial creates a context of conspiracy that feeds a revolutionary counter-reaction. I believe that this is probably the basis of the anti-intellectualism that Mr. Baker confronts.

The illustration for Mr. Baker’s article shows Jesus whispering a test answer into the ear of a struggling student. This is a point made explicitly in the article: “When it comes to academic achievement, helping a student solve a math problem, using math and the student’s actual brain, displays better family values than does teaching the student to distrust intellect while pleading for an answer to fall from the sky.”

Mr. Baker’s attitude is rooted in the conflation of the brain and mind. While I did not force my children to read the Bible, I struggled against this prejudice with making them aware of the nature of intellect. As I perceive the operation of my mind, the brain is not a logic circuit, it is an interface that ideas use to become invested in the world, and an anchor that they use to create new forms of association. Ideas are spiritual constructs. As possessors of brains, we are their dance partners.

The most painful part of parenting my children through the prejudice of scientific materialism was when my younger son, struggling with his studies, attempted to engage me in discussion only to have his older brother come downstairs and tell him how wrong he was. For years I had attempted to open Greg’s mind to the world of ideas that Kevin had gained access to as an infant. Before Kevin’s intervention, I had felt the door finally opening, and it broke my heart to have him slam it shut. I dealt with the matter pretty harshly, telling him “If you don’t stop abusing your brother, I am not putting a single cent into your college education.” In later conversation, I told Kevin that “ideas are strongest when they are shared.”

This is known among mature scientists. Edward Teller’s office at LLNL had pictures of all the great scientists of his era, and I could feel their personalities reaching out through them. In another incident, I saw a divorced father at dinner with his son, the beautiful mother, and the wealthy man she had married. The son had asked a technical question, which the father answered after a pause. The child challenged him “How do you know that?” To which the father could only answer “I was informed.”

Personally, I had the experience in high school AP Biology of working in a classroom of collaborative students. During the AP exam, I became stuck on a couple of questions and found the answers arriving during final review. The teacher reported that to her surprise – given the brilliance of students in prior years – we had achieved the highest average score on the test in all her years of teaching. And in discussing morality at work, I have shared that when I reach a road block, I frequently open my mind and  an answer comes to me. At times that has been as explicit as having a person’s voice come into my head and say “Do it this way…”

Baker does not articulate this experience, and given his reaction to Christian values, I think that he may not be conscious of the operation of his own mind. If he was, he would understand the preconditions for sustaining such exchanges. It requires surrender of the ego (something that nature often forces upon scientists) and a genuine concern for others. This is the teaching we find in the Bible. In denigrating the value of the book’s moral teaching, Baker and his colleagues are undermining the attempts by Christian parents to open the door to the gestalt of civilized ideas known to the faithful as “The Holy Spirit.” That is no small matter.

Until they arrive at an alternative technology, Baker and others might do well to be more gentle with their public pronouncements. The emotion they attach to their crusade is going to make it extremely difficult for them to reconcile themselves to Christ when those investigations force them to confront his existence.

Arguing Toward the Middle

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As a benefit of my attendance at the Skeptic’s conference last may, I have been receiving copies of their flagship magazine. The magazine has begun to entertain the views of theists that work in the sciences. The dialog is generally pretty counterproductive, with the participants often talking past each other. Motivated by the debate between Dave Matson and Douglas Navarick (Debating the “God” Construct) in Vol. 20 No. 4, I address the issues of abiogenesis (the origin of cellular life) and the distinction between “supernatural” phenomena and those such as spirituality that lack an explanation.

You’ll find another response to Navarick’s original article here.

Dave:

As a scientist who believes that the soul is a part of the physical construction of this reality, I am dismayed by the tone of your response to Douglas Navarick.

“Supernatural” is a tendentious term

The scientist loves to ask “Why?”, and comes up with theories that propose explanatory relationships. In propagating those abstractions, an elite cognoscenti is created. As this elite solidifies its political power, funding of scientific research tends to crowd out radical ideas (I refer you to Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

So the researchers at CERN focus on the discovery of the “Higgs boson” (which looks nothing like the Higgs boson I studied in graduate school), despite the fact that the Higgs mechanism actually doesn’t explain particle masses – you still need to generate the coupling constants that determine the mass of each individual particle. The “Higgs boson”, however, has been built up as an accomplishment worthy of pursuit, and so is trumpeted as a Nobel-worthy achievement even though – with the exception of charge – no property of the simplest composites (the mesons and nucleons) can be calculated from the standard model of the fundamental forces – even given the measured properties of the quarks. Thus we have a situation in which the obvious failures of current theory are ignored to the purpose of sustaining funding for large-scale research programs with many stakeholders outside of the sciences.

Following Kuhn, I would argue that fundamental physics is ripe for a revolution. The issues as I see them are outlined here. Conceptually, it would seem that if one posited structure inside the current collection of “fundamental” particles, it actually wouldn’t be too hard to make room for the soul. I also have a far simpler picture of this reality, without the unobservable (and highly unstable) Planck-scale plasma and alternate universes. (The multiverse theory, BTW, being obviously another version of your magical hare-brained Easter Bunny.)

So rather than “supernatural”, I would prefer a term that suggested “beyond the things that scientists can yet explain.” “Spirituality” may fit. I would hope that you would admit that scientists, with their emphasis on material experience, may self-select from among those that are spiritually insensitive. As one not so insensitive, often marveling at the healing power of love, I find that “hare-brained Easter Bunny” provides no explanatory leverage. There is something to life beyond what particle physics can yet explain. I’d like to have a rational dialog on the topic.

Of course, if I am right, everyone will be confronted with the need to rethink the record of scripture that has been brought forward from many cultures. Clawing back the sarcasm is going to take a great deal of courage, I recognize, but no less than surrendering the comfort of dogmatism on the other side.

Abiogenesis

This really isn’t that hard a problem. Assume that the oceans contain distributed pools of heavy hydrocarbons in contact with various sources of heat and minerals on the ocean floor. The hydrocarbon pools will develop a skin of polarized molecules (maybe even phospholipids, as phosphor is not rare). Other fundamental components of life (nucleic acids, amino acids, etc.) may also be sourced from the complex chemistry of the pool, which could support (as we know) selective exchange of materials with the water. Agitation of the pool (through earthquakes, overflow, or venting) will result in formation of protocells. These events will  produce innumerable trials, liberated into sub-sea currents. Eventually among those trials will be cells that can scavenge materials for growth from the environment. Voila! Life.

Pools lying on different mineral strata will form protocells with different morphologies. Those with compatible membranes could merge, producing further biochemical trials. Which is what we actually know happened – cells are composed of organelles that were protocells in their own right before being absorbed.

BTW – there’s an IMAX on life around thermal vents in which the pilots of the deep sea vehicle actually interact with such a hydrocarbon pool.

Regards,

Brian Balke

Reconciling Scripture and Evolution

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Posted in a discussion of our symbiotic relationship with mites, this summarizes my position succinctly:

The biologists that rely upon strictly biochemical processes of evolution will never be able to calculate rates, because the forcing conditions have been lost in prehistory. I found it interesting to ask “why does every civilization develop the concept of a soul”, and eventually concluded that Darwin was half right: life is the co-evolution of spirit with biological form. The addition of spirit influences the choices made by living creatures, and so changes the rates.

Given this, I went back to Genesis and interpreted it as an incarnation (“The SPIRIT of God hovered over the waters” – and then became God for the rest of the book), with the “days” of creation reflecting the evolution of senses and forms that enabled Spirit to populate and explore the material conditions of its survival (photosensitivity, accommodation of hypotonic “waters above”, accommodation of arid conditions on the “land”, accommodation of seasons with sight (resolving specific sources of light), intelligent species in the waters and air, and mammals on earth (along with man)).

Couple this with the trumpets in the Book of Revelation, which pretty clearly parallel the extinction episodes identified by paleontology – including injection of the era of giant insects – and it looks like science and scripture actually support each other.

The only point of significant disagreement is spirit itself. Given my knowledge of the weaknesses of modern theories of cosmology and particle physics, I found myself considering the possibility of structure inside of the recognized “fundamental” particles. It became apparent to me that it wouldn’t be too difficult to bring spiritual experience into particle physics. To my surprise and delight, I became convinced that this reality is constructed so that love inexorably becomes the most powerful spiritual force.

Hope for Climate Healing

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California governor Jerry Brown is in Paris this week at the climate change conference. Chris Hayes had him on All In on Wednesday night to talk about California’s efforts to combat climate change. In setting the stage, Chris pulled footage from his visit to the San Joaquin Valley earlier this year.

The statistics on both sides are daunting. As the world’s eighth largest economy, California’s dispersed population consumes huge amounts of gasoline. In seeking to reduce carbon emissions, the state has opted to install a large number of natural gas electricity plants, while also pursuing an aggressive push into renewables (wind, solar and geothermal). In general, its mild climate means that CO2 emissions are low, but it appears that major reductions are still decades away.

Brown trumpeted California’s efforts, citing the state as a global leader in climate change policy. But if this is the best that we can do, how can he hope that the talks in Paris will chart a path out of a century that is projected to end with a 10 F increase in global temperatures?

The major impact of that increase will be desertification. As in the Middle East, California is seeing the consequences of glacial retreat. At the edge of the glacial range, we still had large snow packs on the Sierras, and it was this store of water that allowed the $50 billion agricultural economy to operate through the dry summer months. As the climate warms, farmers have pumped our aquifers down by nearly fifty get. Drip irrigation systems are now being adopted to maintain production with reduced water resources, but if temperatures continue to rise, snow packs will continue to decrease. The survival of agriculture in California is tied to our depleted aquifers, which are not a renewable resource.

The consequences to the nation as a whole are daunting. The San Joaquin Valley produces 40% of America’s food.

When I rediscovered Cat Steven’s Moonshadow a few years ago, upon hearing Morning Has Broken for the first time in two decades, I found  myself filled with grief as the opening piano meditation unrolled. It climaxed with a vision as the man now called Yusuf sang these words:

Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass.

In the vision, I stood on the edge of the Sierra foothills in the Central Valley. The desiccated land, scoured by wind and rain, gave no purchase to life. A pair of naked feet waited, and then began to pace across the ground. Behind them, water and life flowed.

As a student at UC Berkeley, I was compelled by the confusion I experienced in interpreting political discourse to establish my own definitions for moral dialog. When I got around to “hope”, I settled on “a connection to a future in which love is at work for you.” There is two parts to that – one is accepting love, and the other is honoring it. The first requires that we recognize our need, the second requires that we respect the needs of others.

In his conversation with Chris, Governor Brown offered this subtle piece of insight: “Modernity is individualism plus oil.” Individualism implicitly violates the first requirement for hope – it holds that we do not need others. That is sustained by oil, which allows us to consume two hundred times as much energy as we can produce with our bodies. With mechanization, we all live as though we have two hundred slaves.

But the conventions of individualism also allow us to ignore the needs of others, not least the needs of the voiceless flora and fauna that sustain ecological stability. Our fossil fuel consumption has destabilized the biosphere that some know as Gaia.

In reading the Book of Revelation, in the golden bowls I see prophesied with exactitude the climate disasters that threaten our civilization. Obviously the feet in my dream are those of the savior. But in assessing the gap between individualism and the surrender to love, I find myself recalling the experience of Jesus upon his return to Nazareth. Mark summarized it as follows [NIV Mark 6:4-6]:

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

How far will we fall before choosing to open our hearts to allow love to re-enter the world?

And you, Christians, the family he created: will you recognize him when he comes? Will you open your hearts and minds to him and – if not partaking of his burden – at least apprehend and so honor the strain and sorrow he bears as he heals with his flesh the great wound in the Tree of Life we have created in our monomaniacal pursuit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Or will you sit back in your seats, thrilling to the amplified harmonies of your bards, consoled by the airy myths they unfold, and say with offense [NIV Mark 6:2]:

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him?“

The Middle East as a Model for Climate Crisis

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As the Ice Age ended, the Middle East was the cradle of Western civilization. The “four rivers” mentioned in the Bible met in the Persian Gulf. The Euphrates River Valley, cultivated with a sophisticated irrigation system, was a breadbasket for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the mountain waters coated the soil with clay long before iron and steel plows were invented. The climate warmed, and the introduction of sheep in the Central Asian steppes caused the grass to loose its purchase. The soil washed away in the rain. The carrying capacity of the land plummeted.

Today, much of the region is dessicated. Population levels are sustained by imports financed by oil revenues. Unfortunately, those revenues are not distributed uniformly. Both ethic and class prejudice allow a small minority to capture most of the wealth, while the less fortunate scrabble for bread and shelter.

What will happen when the oil is gone?

This is a significant factor in the rise of ISIS: the Sunni/Baath minority in Iraq lost control of oil revenues to the northern Kurds and southern Shias. While IS also uses extortion and sales of archaeological treasures to finance its operations, sale of oil from captured Iraqi and Syrian facilities is a mainstay.

The brutality of the regime is intense. As in failed African states, many of its fighters are locals without any other means of support.

Is there any means for external actors to control the downward spiral in such situations? Obviously the oil economy allowed the Sunni/Baath community to amass enormous wealth, and given the focus on capturing territory over sustaining a viable economy, an investment in guns and bullets reaps huge gains for the violent few. The material left by the US for use by Iraqi government forces was also a boon to IS. But is it reasonable to expect that we can keep weapons out of the region?

The harsh climate and conditions also make it difficult to secure borders. IS is now spreading eastwards into Afghanistan, the source of much of the world’s opium, a cash crop that has moved for decades into the Western world in spite of efforts to suppress it.

The response of much of the Syrian population has been to flee. Is it possible to supply them in the region, or must they relocate to more stable societies? The Palestinian refuge camps in the ’70s and ’80s were not successful. Do we have the wisdom and skills to do better now?

My concern is that if we do not set about applying ourselves to understanding how to manage this kind of chaos, we are going to be facing the same situation all over the world in the next eighty years. Although driven initially by natural glacial cycles, the Middle East and Central Asia are archetypes for the ecological collapse and social instability that comes with global warming.

They’re All Crazy

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In explaining my difficulty of focus yesterday at work, I mentioned San Bernardino and a friend averred that his vote for president would go to the first candidate to stand up and take mental illness seriously.

This while the Republicans in the Senate vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. Spear-headed by the segment of the insurance industry that made money by excluding coverage for sick people (I was denied coverage because I was once prescribed anti-depressants for situational depression).

This while we had the Bureau of Land Management faced down in Nevada a couple of years ago by a rancher who used “state’s rights” theories to justify non-payment of land use fees. Not that Nevada didn’t cede land to the federal government because they couldn’t afford to secure the desert occupied by the Native Americans.

It’s not about crazy people – follow the money. It’s that people that are emotionally unstable are easy to sell nonsense to – like the idea that you’ll be safer if you and everyone else buy more guns.

Is ‘God’ Low-Entropy?

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When I was in college, my professor in Introductory Physics rebutted an argument for God that touted life as a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. The devout claimed that life preserved order against the inevitable tide of entropy. My professor responded by asking us to consider the poop vs. net body weight ratio for babies. Life does increase entropy – (male) physicists just tend to hide from the fact.

Now researchers are discovering that “funny” words, such as those invented by Dr. Seuss, have a “low” entropy – they use combinations of unusual letters. It strikes me that ‘God’ may be one of those combinations. There’s the old atheist snipe “‘God’ is ‘dog’ spelled backwards.” And of course we have Sam Beckett’s intellectual tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” Are these funny simply because the letter combinations in ‘god’, ‘dog’ and ‘Godot’ are risible?

Maybe there was something in the old convention: “Elohim”, which became “Allah.” As “‘Allah’ Akbar!”, I may be allowed to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens: as a designation, “‘God’ is not great!”

Or maybe the low-entropy proof for God has simply eluded us. Maybe a low-entropy name is just what God would want – you know, bring smiles to our faces?

Welcoming the Light of Love

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Stephen Harrod Buhner closes The Lost Language of Plants just as I would have hoped. After recounting a healing session with a young lady, the book closes with four autobiographic sketches, each by a herbologist recounting immersion in biophilia. Left behind are the recriminations and the tone of moral superiority that marred the preceding chapters. Each of the writers focuses on the opportunity before us now – an opportunity to call into being relationships built around affirmations of love shared with the world around us.

As the book progressed, lunging between the yin and yang of natural and industrial chemistry, I found myself remembering my experiences of being stalked by predators. One was at a Webelos overnighter, of all things, at Camp Whitsett in the Southern Sierras. A Native American elder inducted a number of the senior scouts in a fire ceremony. As the ceremony progressed, I had a strong sense of the bear in the man, and felt the fire of predation building in the camp as the boys settled in to sleep. Rather than hiding from it, I let it enter into my heart, sent my will into the forest to demonstrate that no bears were present, and then breathed peace into the space I had cleared. The fear resided, and the camp settled into slumber. Several years later, I was driving home from work on Friday night, knowing that my youngest son had been sent to the Sierras on a camping trip, and felt the bear again in his presence. I sent the warning “Wake up, Gregory! Get Mr. Povah!” When he returned that Sunday, I learned that on Saturday morning, he had woken early, and heard a noise as Mr. Povah’s son Braden was dragged away from the camp by a black bear. The onrush of shouting campers scared the bear off, and Braden survived with only a bruised ankle.

Given his immersion in the natural world, I doubt that Buhner has not had similar experiences. But perhaps not – he has been chosen by the world of chlorophyll, the deep, patient source of renewal. That touches the animal realm through the herbivores, an intimate co-creative process that Buhner documents in loving detail. But the animal kingdom has another dimension as well: in Love Works, I enumerate the rites of blood – sex, maternity, the hunt and sacrifice. Each of these has its unique pathologies, and the fragility of animal existence means that those pressures are often driven into fear and rage.

In Dune, the great science-fiction author Frank Herbert advances the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

It was this discipline that I exercised in Camp Whitsett. It is the discipline of the rational mind, a discipline that safeguards our ability to perceive clearly and so to exercise our intelligence when facing circumstances that our natural talents could never hope to overcome. It is to perceive the forces in play with the aim of negotiating a win-win outcome when the predator’s zero-sum mentality holds sway.

As I finished the life sketches that close The Lost Language of Plants, I was filled with the desire to find these people and join forces with them. A great barrier arose, followed by a vision and memory. Buhner shares the plant kingdom’s experience of light, that great source of love that originates from the sun and desires to merge with us through them. But when discussing with my sister the ecological disasters that will confront our children, I told her,

This is how we heal the world: by teaching the plants not simply to receive passively the light, but to reach up to the sun and guide its power to rebuild the devastated forests and savannahs.

This may seem like a little thing, but to accomplish it we have to convince them to surrender the conventions of the chemistry that Buhner celebrates so tenderly. It is to recognize that it is not the plant that is important, but the spiritual transformation that gives courage to the fearful through its physical manifestations.

Buhner touches on this metaphorically in describing his healing work. He testifies that he meets people that are missing parts, and is guided by visions of plants that can fill those voids. It is in establishing those relationships that healing arrives, through an expansion of spirit that occurs when our hollowness is filled.

I spent the rest of the day struggling with the grief that filled me then.

It has two parts. The first is that the plant is only an intermediary – it is a reservoir in which love gathers, but it is not the source itself. It was the source that disciplined me, forcing me stand apart until people realize that all intermediaries are imperfect. Secondly: in that place apart we are beset by those that would ravage the gardens that Buhner and his peers create. We plant the seeds of knowledge, and watch as they are corrupted by the predators. We heal the wounded, and set them again into the world, hoping that each time the light of love reaches more deeply into them.

It is hard to be told that our path has led us into evil. I wish that Buhner could see that scientific reductionism is a means of removing the primitive triggers of predation from the world. Yes, it has gone too far, but it has also created the field in which he and his friends plant their garden.

Lest we wish to repeat the experience of Eden, we must leave recrimination behind. I take solace that in his closing Buhner celebrates the light of love that will ultimately unite us all.

A Species of Thinking

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When I stepped to the counter with The Lost Language of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner, I broke in on a conversation between the proprietress and a customer hawking her capabilities as a spirit healer. Unaware that I was incubating a serious respiratory infection, I went looking for a juice bar hoping to restore the energy expended earlier in the day while dancing in Culver City. It was kind of a random walk up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, trying to orient myself to the addresses provided by Cortana, but as I waited to cross Fifth Street I was accosted by the customer, who broke in hopefully “I saw that book you bought, too.” Without turning my head, I observed “Yeah, I bought it because I realized that I am paying too much attention to people,” and stepped into the crosswalk as the signal changed.

The first chapter of the book was a balm to my soul. Buhner writes of being introduced to “wild water” by his grandfather, a man that maneuvered through brush as though guiding a lady across a crowded dance floor (my image, not Buhner’s). Like Buhner, I feared the consequences to my sons of the lack of access to wild places, and lugged 50-pound backpacks up and down the Sierras to be where I could share my affinity with them. In reading how trees will irrigate the soil by pulling water to the surface while their stoma are closed at night, I remembered walking by a reservoir surrounded by parched stands of oak, and trying to tell the trees closest to the water to lift some to their brothers further up the hill. In celebrating the mystical insights of tribal peoples, Buhner reveals the richness and suggestiveness of their taxonomic terminology, and exposes again and again how their myths reflect the biochemical dependencies between species. The book also dwells lovingly on the transformations that occur as life propagates into a receptive environment. This poetical celebration of the tenacity and interdependence of the lower orders of life is one thread of Buhner’s exposition.

The second thread warns of the disaster that looms due to humanity’s disruption of the chemical balance of the natural world. This takes many forms: replacement of complex biomes with industrial monocultures such as wheat and corn; dispersal of long-lived cosmetics and pharmaceuticals that disrupt natural endocrine responses and breed superpests; replacement or suppression of wildlife that served to cycle nutrients through soil; and mass harvesting of plant life that releases natural chemicals to soil in amounts that overwhelm the bacteria and fungi that process them for reuse. Each of these factors contributes to the impending extinction of many plant species.

As a reader, both threads serve to illuminate the reality experienced by the plant kingdom, so I cannot complain about this book in the same way that I complained about A Global History of Christians. But, confronting the loss of so much that he holds dear, Buhner beats a straw man: scientific reductionism. In the rush of each discipline to grasp the mechanisms that determine that characteristics of its subject, science has ignored the systemic interactions that ensure the fertility and robustness of natural biomes. This includes our symbiotic relationships: the bacteria, fungi and nematodes that live within and on us in a balance that medicines disrupt, sometimes irrecoverably.

But I find that Buhner goes too far in asserting the wisdom of the natural world. His claims are disproven by the impact of invasive species. If nature always kept balance, how do:

  • cane toads run amok in Australia,
  • kudzu and Spanish moss infest the forests of the American South,
  • European songbirds wipe out the smaller songbirds of the New World, and
  • European grasses choke out the sagebrush of the West?

Such imbalances are only restored through extinction and restoration of diversity through exploitation of new opportunities in the devastated habitats. While human transportation serves to facilitate such traumas, in the modern era it is only the pace of disruption that is unnatural, not the phenomenon itself.

This extends, of course, to the most invasive species of all: homo sapiens sapiens. While Buhner decries scientific reductionism, yet its terminology and tools provide the insights that he uses to cast his poetic glamour over the reader. In describing the formation of humus (p. 165) he identifies “flavonoids, degraded lignin, terpenes, lignans, and tannins,” then continues:

Humus is mostly two substances, humic acid and a combination of polysaccharides or sugar molecules. No one knows how humic acid forms, but once formed it acts like a living substance and possesses a number of unique characteristics. It forms crystals, much like snowflakes in a sense, and, like snowflakes, no identical ones have ever been found.

While humus is a biochemical reservoir that facilitates growth, the virtue of plant medicine also reflects strategies used by plants to destroy competitors and parasites.

As Buhner documents, this natural biochemical productivity dwarfs human activity. The difference is that the products of natural biochemistry are introduced slowly enough that bacteria learn to process them. Sometimes that adaptation requires millions of years – lignin, for example, is the substance that trees use to form wood. When it first evolved, trees did not decompose after falling, but accumulated on the forest floor until burning. Oxygen content in the atmosphere soared to 30%, and the giant insects displaced other land animals. When bacteria finally learned to digest lignin, conditions reverted, triggering another jarring disruption to the global ecology.

How is the human incursion different in kind from these events? To Buhner, it seems to boil down to “once we knew better.” This is not to say that we understood. In contrast to the reductionist scientific epistemology of a mechanistic reality, Buhner celebrates the epistemology of “pre-industrial” cultures. Their medical practitioners universally ascribe their wisdom to (page 33):

“nonordinary” experiences, specifically: dreams, visions, direct communications from the plant, or sacred beings.

Was this good enough? Did Life make a mistake in creating humanity? Or do we exist because Life sought for solutions to problems that could be solved no other way?

Consider our agriculture: corn, wheat and rice are not naturally occurring varieties. Their utility as foodstuffs reflects the pressure of human selection, and is manifested in both the quantity and chemical stability of their output. As a result, humanity invests far less mental effort gathering food than it did, liberating a privileged class to the pursuit of understanding.

Buhner decries the regimentation of scientific disciplines which is accompanied by the growth of intellectual barriers that impede systems thinking. But is this not just as in the natural world? Buhner describes the intermingling of distinct species in the soil layer, each contributing to the survival of the others. Is that not the situation in the sciences?

As each natural species can be traced back to bacteria, yet is considered distinct from it, could we not celebrate the emergence of distinct disciplines from the common root of humanity? Perhaps, over the long run, what Life is interested in is a liberation from random evolutionary pressures punctuated by traumatic extinctions. In the short term, humanity was bound to make a mess before mastering our practice, and our pride and myopia is certainly exacerbating our difficulties. In the end, though, I believe that we will enter into a golden era of thoughtful evolution, empowered by the human capacity to evolve new species of thought.

Continued…