Post by Rabbi Neil on May 8, 2019 16:29:31 GMT
By Janie Chodosh
In the public schools, New Mexico history is taught no less than three times in three separate grades. Students come away with a knowledge of Onate, the Pueblo revolt, the date New Mexico became a state. But nowhere in this curriculum is New Mexico natural history taught. In no standard or benchmark is a teacher asked to go outside and show their students the land. They are not asked to teach their students the trees, the soil, or anything about the local ecology and ecosystem around which human culture is built. One might argue that teaching natural history falls under the discipline of science. It is the science teacher's job to take their students outside, to teach them about the natural world and the landscape. But again, no. In the study of life science, yes, ecology is taught. A student is supposed to know a food chain. They are supposed to learn about communities and populations, predator-prey relationships and species' interactions, but the work more often than not stays theoretical. There are petri dishes and text books, labs and slide shows, diagrams and flow charts. Certainly the motivated, brave, or just foolish, teacher takes their class of twenty plus students tromping around to try and conduct a meaningful lesson, but even then, from what I've seen, most teachers are not teaching the specifics of our landscape. How can they when most people, not just to pick on teachers-- I am one-- know hardly anything about the local ecology themselves. Not many people can name a single native tree, moreover a bird or a butterfly. Here is an example. Not long ago I was sitting at dinner with some very educated people. It was summer. The people whose home we were at had a bird feeder. A lovely goldfinch came to the feeder and one of the guests, startled by the bright yellow beauty of the bird, asked if it was a parrot.
It's no wonder she mistook a gold finch for a parrot. Unless someone specifically seeks to learn these things, in no place in their education are they taught the difference between a pinon and a ponderosa, a juniper and a cedar. They don't learn why fire is a keystone process in ponderosa pine forests. They don't learn the miracles of migration. This migration that happens every spring when hummingbirds, tanagers and warblers take their evolutionary journey, flying over the Gulf of Mexico, and falling out of the sky exhausted and depleted at the first land they see. These birds, some weighing no more than a few ounces, fly thousands of miles and then remember and return to the exact spot where last spring, a whole year ago, there was food. There is no cultural value placed on knowing these things as there is in knowing dates in history, names of wars, famous buildings and works of art and other designs of the human imagination.
This lack of natural history in the curriculum, I believe, reflects a larger issue in society. We don't see the natural world. As a culture, we don't tend to think much about it. Birds are nice. There are some around our yards. Trees are cool. They give us oxygen. Insects are mostly annoying, unless we happen to identify them as beautiful or beneficial. But what about the rest of the natural world? What is the effect of not knowing, and of not seeing? The writer Richard Louv argues that most children are experiencing what he has coined nature deficit disorder. I would add to this that most of society is suffering from the same. And without nature, I truly believe that a piece of our soul, of who we are, is lost. The evolutionary biologist, E.O Wilson argues that we need to connect with nature to be happy. He calls this need biophilia.
So why don't we see? Emerson said that if the stars appeared in the night sky only once in a thousand years, we would “preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God.”
But the stars come out every night, and as it is, many of us scarcely look up. And speaking of stars, George Schaeller, arguably the world's preeminent field biologist and a founding father in the field of wildlife conservation, whom I was lucky enough to interview and write about, says, “As we reach for the stars, we neglect the flowers at our feet.”
So you could ask yourself so what? What difference does it make if I can tell a mountain chickadee from a kinglet, a cooper's hawk from a red tail? My answer to this is that seeing leads to connection and connection leads to caring and compassionate coexistence. The phrase compassionate coexistence in the conservation field refers to the ethic of ranchers coexisting compassionately with predators. For me it means how we view, interact with and value the family of life with whom we share this planet. It is the choices we make daily that spark our own inner revolutions.
And I think we need a revolution. We hear all the status reports and numbers. The decline of species. The sixth mass extinction. Anyone can read and hear about how much we are losing. I believe that if we feel and we know, as best we can, the lives of others, perhaps we will then feel why they must live. As the writer and conservationist Carl Safina says, “We must turn our attention to the next step beyond human civilization: humane civilization. Justice for all.”
Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet and novelist, describes a ceremony in a sweat lodge from her tradition. Before and after the ceremony they pray with the words: All my relations. “These words,” she says, “create a relationship with other people, with animals, with the land.” She writes that, “To have health, it is necessary to keep all these relationships in mind, our place in the community of all things.” She goes on to say, “ The real ceremony begins when the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world.”
This description of her tradition reminds me of an experience I had not long ago during Shabbat. We had just finished saying the Shama when I turned to my husband, Callum, and told him about a robin I had seen earlier that day. He laughed, but he understood. To me, I see the presence of God in the miracle of creation. In the color of feathers. The beauty of song. The grace of flight. The instinct and art in weaving together grass into a nest. I see each seemingly same members of a species as an individual, which more and more behavioral ecologists confirm to be the case. Even in a flock of birds in which every member, to the human eye, appears to look and act the same, we now know that some members are shy and hesitant. Others are bold and aggressive. They act as a cohesive unit, moving together to find food and avoid predators, yet within this cohesive whole, they are individuals. Even fruit flies, it turns out have individuality. I won't get into the genetics of this “discovery,” which has to do with something cool sounding called jumping genes, but suffice it to say, geneticists have found that due to a bit of genetic shuffling in nerve cells, every fly brain is unique. “The extensive variation between fly brains that this mechanism (jumping genes) could generate,” I read in one study, “might demystify why some flies behave while others misbehave.” Misbehaving flies! Who would have thought?
I'm not suggesting we fall in love with flies and mosquitoes. But I do think that such discoveries unlock ethical, intellectual and spiritual questions about what it means to live among, what Mary Oliver, my poetess heroine, calls, “The family of Things.” The different species in this family are like people who knew each other in high school but have since gone on to different lives and livelihoods. We have a lot in common. We have common roots. A bond, though one we've perhaps neglected.
Again, quoting Mary Oliver, she says “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” The way I personally have entered this magical and mysterious world of attention, and thus devotion, is through birds. Birds shuttle between what is wild in us and what is urban. Jonathan Rosen, author of “The Talmud and the Internet” and several works of fictions, wrote a book about birds called, “The Life of the Skies.” “Birding for me” Rosen says, “is a place where poets and naturalists, scientific seekers and religious seekers converge. Looking at birds, I feel, for lack of a better word, whole.”
In a class I am currently teaching at the community college called Birds and Words, I am attempting to merge attention with devotion. Attention through learning to look for birds. Devotion through putting our experiences to words. An experience I had with this class stands out for me. After a cloudy and wet morning of watching birds, we returned to the class to write. When it was time to share, one student, a woman I am guessing is in her eighties, teared up. She said she'd never paid much attention to the natural world. It was only now that she realized how much she wanted to see it. But now, she said, her eyes were failing and she feared it was too late. I urge everyone not to wait. Not to walk sightless among miracles. To pay attention. To see. To connect. To care and to lead a life of compassionate coexistence.
I would like to end with a few lines of poetry, again by Mary Oliver. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/ the world offers itself to your imagination,/ calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- / over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.”
In the public schools, New Mexico history is taught no less than three times in three separate grades. Students come away with a knowledge of Onate, the Pueblo revolt, the date New Mexico became a state. But nowhere in this curriculum is New Mexico natural history taught. In no standard or benchmark is a teacher asked to go outside and show their students the land. They are not asked to teach their students the trees, the soil, or anything about the local ecology and ecosystem around which human culture is built. One might argue that teaching natural history falls under the discipline of science. It is the science teacher's job to take their students outside, to teach them about the natural world and the landscape. But again, no. In the study of life science, yes, ecology is taught. A student is supposed to know a food chain. They are supposed to learn about communities and populations, predator-prey relationships and species' interactions, but the work more often than not stays theoretical. There are petri dishes and text books, labs and slide shows, diagrams and flow charts. Certainly the motivated, brave, or just foolish, teacher takes their class of twenty plus students tromping around to try and conduct a meaningful lesson, but even then, from what I've seen, most teachers are not teaching the specifics of our landscape. How can they when most people, not just to pick on teachers-- I am one-- know hardly anything about the local ecology themselves. Not many people can name a single native tree, moreover a bird or a butterfly. Here is an example. Not long ago I was sitting at dinner with some very educated people. It was summer. The people whose home we were at had a bird feeder. A lovely goldfinch came to the feeder and one of the guests, startled by the bright yellow beauty of the bird, asked if it was a parrot.
It's no wonder she mistook a gold finch for a parrot. Unless someone specifically seeks to learn these things, in no place in their education are they taught the difference between a pinon and a ponderosa, a juniper and a cedar. They don't learn why fire is a keystone process in ponderosa pine forests. They don't learn the miracles of migration. This migration that happens every spring when hummingbirds, tanagers and warblers take their evolutionary journey, flying over the Gulf of Mexico, and falling out of the sky exhausted and depleted at the first land they see. These birds, some weighing no more than a few ounces, fly thousands of miles and then remember and return to the exact spot where last spring, a whole year ago, there was food. There is no cultural value placed on knowing these things as there is in knowing dates in history, names of wars, famous buildings and works of art and other designs of the human imagination.
This lack of natural history in the curriculum, I believe, reflects a larger issue in society. We don't see the natural world. As a culture, we don't tend to think much about it. Birds are nice. There are some around our yards. Trees are cool. They give us oxygen. Insects are mostly annoying, unless we happen to identify them as beautiful or beneficial. But what about the rest of the natural world? What is the effect of not knowing, and of not seeing? The writer Richard Louv argues that most children are experiencing what he has coined nature deficit disorder. I would add to this that most of society is suffering from the same. And without nature, I truly believe that a piece of our soul, of who we are, is lost. The evolutionary biologist, E.O Wilson argues that we need to connect with nature to be happy. He calls this need biophilia.
So why don't we see? Emerson said that if the stars appeared in the night sky only once in a thousand years, we would “preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God.”
But the stars come out every night, and as it is, many of us scarcely look up. And speaking of stars, George Schaeller, arguably the world's preeminent field biologist and a founding father in the field of wildlife conservation, whom I was lucky enough to interview and write about, says, “As we reach for the stars, we neglect the flowers at our feet.”
So you could ask yourself so what? What difference does it make if I can tell a mountain chickadee from a kinglet, a cooper's hawk from a red tail? My answer to this is that seeing leads to connection and connection leads to caring and compassionate coexistence. The phrase compassionate coexistence in the conservation field refers to the ethic of ranchers coexisting compassionately with predators. For me it means how we view, interact with and value the family of life with whom we share this planet. It is the choices we make daily that spark our own inner revolutions.
And I think we need a revolution. We hear all the status reports and numbers. The decline of species. The sixth mass extinction. Anyone can read and hear about how much we are losing. I believe that if we feel and we know, as best we can, the lives of others, perhaps we will then feel why they must live. As the writer and conservationist Carl Safina says, “We must turn our attention to the next step beyond human civilization: humane civilization. Justice for all.”
Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet and novelist, describes a ceremony in a sweat lodge from her tradition. Before and after the ceremony they pray with the words: All my relations. “These words,” she says, “create a relationship with other people, with animals, with the land.” She writes that, “To have health, it is necessary to keep all these relationships in mind, our place in the community of all things.” She goes on to say, “ The real ceremony begins when the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world.”
This description of her tradition reminds me of an experience I had not long ago during Shabbat. We had just finished saying the Shama when I turned to my husband, Callum, and told him about a robin I had seen earlier that day. He laughed, but he understood. To me, I see the presence of God in the miracle of creation. In the color of feathers. The beauty of song. The grace of flight. The instinct and art in weaving together grass into a nest. I see each seemingly same members of a species as an individual, which more and more behavioral ecologists confirm to be the case. Even in a flock of birds in which every member, to the human eye, appears to look and act the same, we now know that some members are shy and hesitant. Others are bold and aggressive. They act as a cohesive unit, moving together to find food and avoid predators, yet within this cohesive whole, they are individuals. Even fruit flies, it turns out have individuality. I won't get into the genetics of this “discovery,” which has to do with something cool sounding called jumping genes, but suffice it to say, geneticists have found that due to a bit of genetic shuffling in nerve cells, every fly brain is unique. “The extensive variation between fly brains that this mechanism (jumping genes) could generate,” I read in one study, “might demystify why some flies behave while others misbehave.” Misbehaving flies! Who would have thought?
I'm not suggesting we fall in love with flies and mosquitoes. But I do think that such discoveries unlock ethical, intellectual and spiritual questions about what it means to live among, what Mary Oliver, my poetess heroine, calls, “The family of Things.” The different species in this family are like people who knew each other in high school but have since gone on to different lives and livelihoods. We have a lot in common. We have common roots. A bond, though one we've perhaps neglected.
Again, quoting Mary Oliver, she says “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” The way I personally have entered this magical and mysterious world of attention, and thus devotion, is through birds. Birds shuttle between what is wild in us and what is urban. Jonathan Rosen, author of “The Talmud and the Internet” and several works of fictions, wrote a book about birds called, “The Life of the Skies.” “Birding for me” Rosen says, “is a place where poets and naturalists, scientific seekers and religious seekers converge. Looking at birds, I feel, for lack of a better word, whole.”
In a class I am currently teaching at the community college called Birds and Words, I am attempting to merge attention with devotion. Attention through learning to look for birds. Devotion through putting our experiences to words. An experience I had with this class stands out for me. After a cloudy and wet morning of watching birds, we returned to the class to write. When it was time to share, one student, a woman I am guessing is in her eighties, teared up. She said she'd never paid much attention to the natural world. It was only now that she realized how much she wanted to see it. But now, she said, her eyes were failing and she feared it was too late. I urge everyone not to wait. Not to walk sightless among miracles. To pay attention. To see. To connect. To care and to lead a life of compassionate coexistence.
I would like to end with a few lines of poetry, again by Mary Oliver. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/ the world offers itself to your imagination,/ calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- / over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.”