On the Ecology of Compassion
A natural rock swirl on the shore of an island in Lake Champlain, VT.
Prologue
Understand that everything is connected
beyond understanding.
You see, the pain I carried here
today is the same that withers
the forget-me-nots.
The compassion to cry in your lap is
the compassion that walks the cupped spider
through the doorway and to the woodpile.
I love you, say it with me.
Dance with me, falling leaves,
twirl me to the carpet,
to detritivore sleep.
For empathy is our ecology
and ecology may be the understanding of it all.
Say it with me:
Introduction
Ask me how I feel about life—
I’ll tell you:
I have emerged from the ether in the image of god. I sat in the long-grass prairies in perennial anguish, in annual contentment. I have seen enough to believe, wholeheartedly, in the ether that streams from life. It surrounds, suffocates, glistens, holds; it is polishing the rocks in the streambed, it is the sound of flowing water. Life, as it is received by me, is unparalleled in depth and inconsequential. There is an essence that connects all life—this intertwined ecology is something I try to describe here, but I am limited to the verbiage I’m able to pull from, which, undoubtedly, will fail me.
The essence is feeling:
pain, love, despair, happiness, and most importantly, empathy. To care. I wish to say that our ecology is a guiding institution of well-being, of peacemaking—in any possible way. Yet this is not the case. The ether not only denotes feeling but demands it—and feeling is not confined to the positives. It may be easiest to think that the bad must come with the good, although in truth there is neither evil nor good in terms of feeling, there is only feeling. It is humanity that prescribes the judgment to label good and evil. In the ether, feeling prevails as feeling. To establish our definition, it is necessary to describe ecology as the guiding institution of feelings for co-existence, non-discriminatory to demarcation of good and evil.
Yes, I have emerged from the ether in the image of god, just as all life has; I feel as all life does. In reference to god, I do not mean to invoke the image of theistic power, but rather the spiritual center of creation: a shared point in the web of emerging life. Not a beginning nor an end, but a moment of purity—an idealism of compassion. All life is made in the image of god. Tap the ether as one does a sugar maple, distill it, reduce it, and be left with true empathy—pure compassion for all life. Know that all life is equal, for it is—there is no distinction between lesser and greater beings.
Humanity struggles with the internalization of ecological equality. Cursed with a form of sentience, many human cultures demand dominion over nature. Aching for control driven by righteous knowledge of good and evil, we are overly focused on humanity, ignorant to the feeling that is in all life—true empathy. Let us lie in the soils of the word as unified detritus; let us lay there till we depart.
It’s true: life walks hand in hand with death as children playing in the woods. Death, as it stands in a linear perspective, is a final point on the line of being; it is the end of individual sentience. Yet, death is not the end of feeling: we return to the ether to flow through all life again. Death will always come. Regardless of action in life, we return to the ether. If this is true, then life may be rendered meaningless. There is no promise of afterlife, glorious or otherwise. I would argue that this is true. The absurdity of life is present in every being, yet we must live for the intrinsic value within life. The absurdity of life exists to give empathy power. To be empathic in life without the hope of a promised land is approaching true empathy, true love. Realize that all life exists and feels. Be compassionate for the sake of being compassionate. Honor all life, listen to feeling. In our ecology, it is all we have.
I
As a human, I read good and evil; I can’t help it. I experience sentience in a unique way, although that is not to disqualify any other life from sentience. I listen to cicadas sing at night, they make me cry the same way I cry when listening to a recording of Bill Evans playing the piano for his brother who committed suicide. Isn’t that interesting? The trills and sweeps of sound mingle with the sentience that gives me the ability to cry. Is it the same sentience of mine that imparts tragedy to death? When Harry Evans took his life, I did not know him—but when his brother plays the piano as if to exclaim “We will meet again!” I tear up because I know my brother, Christopher. I can feel through experience: I have a brother, and I know how I would feel if I lost him. But what evokes emotion when I listen to the sound of insects? Perhaps it is because I associate their drowning cacophony with peaceful times in my life—sitting on the porch of my love, dearest Annah, on a warm Michigan night; there is a cool breeze. Yet perhaps it’s because there is a recognition of beauty—a feeling that permeates identity, leaving me forgetful of place, lost in this cool breeze. The cicada does not cry for music and does not recognize the intricacies of inter-sibling relationships, but I cannot say that they do not feel. They, like I, were made in the image of god.
There are questions that I have as a consequence of my sentience, many of which stem from my continued observations of the treatment of the living. The distilled essence is as follows: how do we face destruction when destruction is required for peace? This question is ever-present in the realm I live in: I am an evolutionary biologist and ecologist—I have intimate exposure to the processes of life and death—killing included. Killing for the cause is a requirement of my work, but it also colors the way we treat our introduced species as a society, which we will address later. To rephrase our question: how do we treat life when death is required? Further, we must think critically about the paradoxical nature of our inquisition: is destruction a vital function of peace? Is bringing death an essential agent of protecting life? I do not mean to submerge you, the reader, in the waters of unanswerable questions; the answers to these have been postulated since the first hand left pigment on the walls of a cave. There are none. Yet, this does not mean that these questions do not convey meaning.
Human prescription of meaning to the metaphysical is the substance on which it embeds and becomes the truth. The metaphysical permeates all, even the quantitative. Impartial observation, a pillar of science, is quite unobtainable; we may try to divert biases—but all human thought is cursed with asymptotes: to yearn the impossible tangle, to mistake closeness for contact. Icarus—the champion of humanity—not confined by the asymptotes of man, tangled. Yes, this was his demise, his fall—yet Icarus found freedom, if only for a moment. And imagine the view! Maybe it was all worth it. With no wings of wax or otherwise, humanity is made to imagine: we are bound by the barriers at the edge of understanding. It is in this captivity that we may never be impartial—we were put on Earth to partially observe. I was put on this Earth to partially observe. It is in these preferences that beauty is held. Beauty is not a trait of object nor scene, nor is beauty a fact; beauty is placed as a ceramic dish on the dinner table next to the bread—brought by humanity, given by humanity to humanity. Beauty, in this sense, is metaphysical. The modern age of science has disregarded the metaphysical, perhaps rightly so (at least nobly so). Yet, if science is to disregard beauty, then life is too beautiful for me to be a scientist.
As an evolutionary biologist and a writer, I see pattern and process. There are deep threads—the cicadas, a piano, the sugar maple, a suicide—pulling feeling from the Ether, feeding it back. I have lived; I have killed. The insects pinned, the reptiles euthanized—I have done this willingly, with purpose. I will continue to do this, with purpose—yet with empathy. Recently, after killing a milksnake with an injection, I sat and watched the blood flow from bite marks in my fingers—retaliation, the last attempts for life, teeth tapping the blood that flows through my capillaries as sap in our maple, a recognition of unfairness. I went home and my syrup tears felt thick on my cheeks. It is to this that I return: death as a cost of life. Is it to protect, to progress? To move? Perhaps, to confess: to sin and beg forgiveness, for knowing sin is knowing life? The death of the milksnake is not biblical vengeance, for science is ignorant of providence. Rather, the death of the milksnake brings information: data on evolution, on population dynamics, and this information can inform conservation efforts if needed. It is sacrifice. This is not a unique predicament. This is a trial of life: isolate the action and you find grief; isolate the results and you have protection; view the whole and realize it is love.
Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife)
II
There are purple flowers that bloom in the Michigan summer; they grow high and thick, covering the wetlands in deep color, contrasting with the green of pickerelweed, wapato, and water lily. Although the scene is natural and poetic, it is a result of unavoidable human globalization. The loosestrife is not native to this land. Many have waged war against loosestrife in the name of native wildlife, some have given up. Like many others, the purple loosestrife’s story in America is one of the painful, the beautiful, the prolific; the unfortunate and the unlucky. The purple loosestrife’s American success is no fault of its own. Lythrum salicaria has evolved to elope in wet meadows, to reach towards the sky, to distribute seeds, to survive and reproduce. It is doing what it is meant to do. The story of purple loosestrife in America is not overly unique; biological ‘invasions’ occur on a global scale. The sentient human—cursed to demarcate good and evil—bares moral responsibility because we assign morality. Left to dealt with the consequential presence of the purple loosestrife, we direct our anger towards it. Hear this: the loosestrife is not to blame. If there is something to be at fault, it is I. If there is someone who is to take blame, it is I. Say it with me.
There are purple flowers that bloom in the Swedish summer; they grow high and thick, covering wetlands in deep color, contrasting with the green of the Nordic landscape. In its native range of Europe and North Africa, long purple has evolved into an ecosystem, slipping between the threads that fabric the meadows and the wetlands, roots fill familiar soils as old feet fill a known pair of slippers. To evolve into an ecosystem, as an ecosystem, is the purest form of acceptance. Yes, there is still pain, of course, there is still pain. Pain from predation, from disaster, be it drought or fire. This pain is central to harmonious existence—a limiting factor of prosperity, necessary for equity, for peace. Natural, necessary pain. In America, the purple loosestrife has found a land without pain, with limitless prosperity. It has also found a land unwelcoming; its prosperity is the cause of its fatalistic perception, its downfall. Escaping from the coevolutionary arms race with native predators, American soils offered unchecked growth. Yet this prosperity came at the cost of out-competing indigenous wildlife, contributing to the native biodiversity loss of already struggling ecosystems.
We recognize the loss of native biodiversity is a tragedy—each indigenous plant that wilts beneath loosestrife is a martyr, yet we deflect responsibility. As a country defined in monoculture, where the most watered crop is the grass lining suburban lawns, we are quick to pin all of the North American wildlife decline on the impact of outsiders. As children we understand this: break an action figure ourselves, we are sad; broken by someone else, we are not only sad but angry. Violent, even. Native flora and fauna are the action figures standing tall in meadows and forests, magnanimous. We are breaking them. See them when you close your eyes.
The North American wildlife model, the premier model of wildlife conservation, places the American wildlife into a public trust to be utilized as a resource. Ownership of wildlife does not coincide with property lines but in equal parts to everyone. Despite its successes, there is a tension that exists between preservation and conservation, between the intrinsic rights of wildlife as beings and the management of wildlife for use as a public resource. I am not here to argue over the use of wildlife as a resource. I am a supporter of conservation—and the conservation in the United States is driven and funded by utilization. The North American wildlife model provides context for the protectiveness of the American people over native wildlife and the infuriation towards non-native invaders. It is ours; we must protect it. However, we must tread carefully—often the framing of biological invasions in America tends to allow, disseminate, and even promote xenophobia under the guise of nationalism and protection, particularly in the language directed at such “foreign invaders”. Of the treatment of biologic foreigners, I can only speak towards sentiments held in the American perspective. It is one of the values we hold as bundled flowers, one of the stems in a bouquet of good, of necessary evils. We stand nervously on the porch of the rest of the world, ready for homecoming. In Brooklyn, a third-generation American steps on a lantern fly.
All in all, there is an overflowing protectiveness over native wildlife. It is hard to understand that there are no ill intentions from non-native introduced species. It is easier to blame than to accept blame. We have put ourselves in these situations time and time again. Should we allow purple loosestrife to grow and outcompete native plants until a new balance is struck? Do we kill purple loosestrife to maintain an already decreasing suite of biodiversity, once again killing for a cause? If so, how should we treat life when death is required? I have no answers, except to feel; to be aware. We were all made in the image of god—the loosestrife, too. Recognize and remember that all life is equal. In a time marked by globalization, we will be defined by our treatment of those who cannot protect themselves, by our humanity. How do we walk the line between persecution and surrender? Would this be the beginning of acceptance? Could this be empathy?
