Extract from ‘The Nature Delusion’ by Professor Tom Oliver

Part 2- Superficial ‘solutions’ from a sense of separation

Have you ever looked into the eyes of another animal and felt a sense of shared understanding? Perhaps think of a particular family pet– a dog or cat, a horse, or any other animal you’ve interacted with. Can you remember a moment making eye contact with that animal and feeling a sense of connection? Some people will explain this is because those creatures are ‘sentient’– they have a conscious mind able to feel and perceive, somewhat like us. Yet, think back again to that moment of connection and challenge whether it really was two completely independent minds gazing at each other. This would be the case if animal brains generate atomised states of consciousness, which are discrete and isolated. Or, instead, could it have been a spark of mutual recognition, a flash of shared consciousness; might consciousness be a shared phenomenon that permeates all life? The metaphysical jury is still out^[i].

Neuroscientists and philosophers are still scratching their heads about the processes inside those crania, but the study of biology lends itself to a clearer narrative. It begins by considering that all life on earth evolved from inorganic molecules, eventually forming more complex structures able to self-regulate internal conditions, adapt to internal and external stimuli and metabolise in order to grow and reproduce. Building these living bodies is the same DNA information code that builds all life on earth, coiled up in long double-spiralled chains^[ii].

Imagine a giant pot of these chains that has the code for all life on earth. Each creature –from frogs and foxes, to whales and wallabies– dips in to use some of this information to build a body. Actually, it’s often mostly the same information: we are 99.9% similar in protein coding DNA regions to other humans, 99% similar to chimpanzees, 90% to cats, 60% to fruit flies, and even share a third of our genes with simple bacteria^[iii]. We are all a cut and paste from the pangenome of Life.

So, the information in your body right now isn’t really yours alone. It’s nearly all information you got from your parents, and they got it from their parents, who in turn got it from your great-grandparents, and so on. This information has been flowing through animal bodies like a river for more than 500 million years. Before that, it was flowing through other creatures that existed before animals, right back to the first lifeform (probably somewhere in the oceans around 4 billion years ago). Seen from this perspective, we can argue there is actually just one giant connected lifeform on earth that is changing and evolving all the time; and we are not separate from it– we are all part of it– joined together with all the other animals, plants and fungi and even tiny microscopic creatures like bacteria^[iv].

Our bodies are even home to some of these. Micro-organisms, like bacteria and fungi, are found in our brains, blood, skin and guts. They form an essential part of how our body functions. And even inside our human cells are small structures called mitochondria that produce the energy for us to survive. They were once free-living bacteria, before they were engulfed by the progenitor of animal cells. So, we are actually a chimera– a complex symbiotic collaboration– of human and non-human cells^[v].

Given the interwoven nature of life on planet Earth, it’s not so outlandish to conclude that when we look in the eyes of a horse, for example, we recognise an intrinsic kinship. We are all part of the same lifeform and that felt sense of connection reflects a genuine union.  This of course is not the mainstream view of humanity’s relationship to nature that we’re taught in school. We are told directly, or infer from implicit messaging from our social institutions that humans are separate and superior to other species. Yet, this exceptionalism is only something that has taken hold of the minds of humans relatively recently.

The problem is that it is a delusion. Our sense of separation and superiority makes us think we can control nature and manage the planet like a giant machine; it makes us think we can create a functional economy that treats the nature that is essential for our entire civilization as an asset that can be traded and sold. When these approaches fail, it makes us think we can escape the Earth’s ailing ecological systems simply by moving to another planet. These superficial ‘solutions’ are not only ineffective for addressing the planetary environmental crisis, they actually make things worse.

We will explore the cure for this set of problems caused by what I call the ‘nature delusion’ later in this book, but first we need to understand what is so wrong about these approaches and why we doggedly pursue them.

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