Ambiguity

It had been a busy day, the naturalists are getting tired and a bit loopy, hiding now in the back room escaping from the sun, wind, and salt which erodes our skin. Escaping also the tourists who, hopefully, absorbed our energy. Packed in the back room, some sprawl on the floor while others annihilate something purporting to be food. Our physical energy is low, but our minds start buzzing. Talking, laughing, commiserating - simply enjoying the opportunity to take off our professional facades and engage like friends. One eventually needs to leave, they offer a farewell “Live, Laugh, Naturalize!”. Incredulous looks were offered in return. It didn't quite catch on. “It’s like Live, Laugh, Love'' they offer, sensing a suspicious hesitation.

The swapping of ‘love’ for ‘naturalize’ foreshadowing a summer with a similar swap in several people's lives - a regular phenomena in the ecotourism world. Yet, even with the word exchange the meaning is stable. To love is to appreciate another, to care for their continued existence, tend to their wellbeing, and to find yourself deeply intertwined with another. So too is it to naturalize. The phrase didn't quite catch on, but I hope it may. 

~~~

There are several usages of the term ‘naturalize’. Each brings something to light, and in their synthesis is where I hope to work.

In ecotourism, guides are often called naturalists, those who offer natural history interpretation as a shorthand, when we are doing our thing, we would say we are naturalizing.  Our thing being discussions on what is known and unknown about the local species, their ecology, while connecting to the surrounding geography and local history. 

There is no standard of education in this world, some naturalists have little more than a few guidebooks for education, while others hold PhDs in Biology. Similarly, I would argue there is no standard of employment to be a naturalist. Employment isn't necessary for one to be a naturalist, this occupational identity comes not from what social and economic role you play in society - but from how your time is occupied. In this admiration and curiosity we join the ranks of Charles Darwin, Robin Wall-Kimmerer, kids exploring their backyards, and the legions of people on iNaturalist. 

There is, however, a standard when it comes to adoration. Naturalists have a high affinity toward those lifeforms which surround us, prime examples of what E. O. Wilson called biophilia - or in common speak ‘nature lovers’. A biological predisposition towards connecting with the rest of nature, one that Wilson and myself would argue lies in each of us. We are all naturalists.

But I want to take you past beyond a definition of nature commonly encountered, the one that shunts us off from the rest of nature. I want to discuss our tangle within nature, I want to focus on our human nature as well as the ‘more-than-human’ to borrow David Abram’s own rethinking of the nature/culture divide which lurks in our language.

The biophilic tendency is a starting point for many naturalists but there is more to the kind of attention held by naturalists: there is curiosity. A basic curiosity that says “wait.. what's this?” or “I wonder why I see this here, but not there” and is nagging enough to have you try to figure it out. This definition of a naturalist is sufficiently wide, but I think still well defined. 

Naturalizing, in legal terms, is when a foreigner is admitted to the citizenship of a country. It speaks to the newcomer’s commitment to upholding their new country's laws and values. But, being legal speak, this relates little to how one truly relates to a space. Many people obtain the citizenship of their parents or even grandparents' homeland all the while growing and learning in another country. While others may live in a country their whole life, and just never take the citizenry test - a test that many born citizens, if challenged to take, would likely fail. After all, from a geological perspective, these borders are nothing more than lines in drifting sands. 

This is not to say that the human constructs of nations are not real. They are as real as stories are, and stories have remarkable power. It is to say that we should expect nations to shift and change as the earth does, and how our identity - insofar as citizenship impacts how we see ourselves - shifts as well. We and our descendants need to naturalize perennially. While the ground beneath us shifts we can be sure of one aspect of our identity. We are all native to the Earth; we are all earthlings. But actually, let's go deeper - we are the Earth. Whether we hold it in awareness or not, we are inextricably linked to the entirety of the planet - an odd fleshy appendage of this rocky spheroid.

In biology, a species naturalizes when it establishes itself, now living wild, in a new region, a locale where it is not indigenous. Broadleaf plantain is a favourite example. Also known as white man’s footprint, this perennial plant is native to Eurasia but found in grassy lawns and roadsides across North America and beyond. In a new ecological context, plantain becomes integrated. Finding its niche in the new ecosystem, without much disturbing the interspecies connections already present. Though naturalized species are of alien origins (in fun biological terms), they should not be confused with the other free growing alien species, those referred to as invasive species. Invasives are also of distant origins, but have large and widespread negative impacts on the local ecology. 

This idea of a naturalized species invokes the idea of an endpoint, one where the species finally becomes naturalized. But it is much more an ongoing process of adaptation, punctuated by periods of relative stability. This process of naturalizing is ongoing and as it persists in a genetic lineage over long enough time we may just as well call it evolution! Environments change, species evolve, and on it goes. 

Physical and chemical changes alter the abiotic factors in an environment. A new species comes on scene causing ripples through the network of relationships, impacting an ecosystem's biotic factors. Then of course there’s us, the complicated ways our cultures and their ideas affect both factors. With a plethora of different factors, perfect balance seems an impossibility - and it is. Yet even through constant change, systems can perpetuate a certain dynamic equilibrium. Yet this equilibrium, too, is subject to shifting.

In ecology, a niche is an organism's ecological role. The place where an organism fits into the ecological context - one which none other can fill, a role which it is specially adapted for. For example, in intertidal zones, barnacles exist in the highest (and therefore driest) zones, they have certain adaptations that help them live here where others cannot - a protective shell which helps prevent them drying out. 

Us humans are not exempt of course, we are biological beings living in environments subject to change - unprecedented rates of change to boot. We are a global species living even in parched deserts under a hard sun and in the frozen worlds at earth’s poles. Finding ourselves in environments vastly different from those thought to be our origins - we are masters of adaptability. Finding our niche wherever we go. Much of our ability to survive and thrive in different ecological contexts comes from our superpower of a brain and the cultures that emerge from them. 

You and I, as creatures capable of learning, take in information and integrate it - somehow - to aid in our survival. After some time of deliberate practice and rehearsal, procedures or thought patterns develop into habits. They become habituated, and this becomes a part of us if only for our identification with our abilities. A special trick we humans embody is the ability to think about our habits. Evaluating which we like or dislike, are helpful or harmful. The second special trick, which can be is whether or not we can act to build helpful and dismantle harmful habits. 

Aristotle claimed that we are the ‘rational animal’ - but this might be too far. Examples of intelligence, and sophisticated behaviours abound in the web of life. Our difference might not be a matter of kind, but of degree. Our specialty is what Steven Pinker refers to as the cognitive niche. 

We reason about our environments, seek to understand the patterns of association in order to predict the behaviors of our prey as well as our predators - keeping us alive. Yet it also goes further, being applied to our relationships with disease and injury, and with members of our communities. We need to naturalize to survive. 

There are also spiritual-, religious-, and philosophical-naturalisms. Each espousing meaning from the words root in Latin - ‘natura’ - meaning "essential qualities, innate disposition". Each in their own way investigating the core of phenomena and promoting the sentiment that nature is where we should focus.

While etymological play is good fun, it may also be a helpful tool to understand our own minds. Under the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language has an influence on our worldviews. What different worlds might we see in verb- compared to noun-framings? Latin, like English, is a synthetic, noun based language. On the other hand Greek is a verb based, polysynthetic language. Interestingly, ‘natura’ is considered the translation of ‘physis” in Greek. Physis meaning "growing, becoming". The noun framings in Latin appear static and, as stated, essential. However, in Greek, the equivalent term takes on the appearance of a process.

The theologian and 'philosophical entertainer' Alan Watts mused that there are several conceptual models of the Universe at work in cultures around the world. One of which is the ceramic model, where the Universe is like an object that has been molded and shaped. Watts attributed this model to with a heritage of monotheism - like so called 'Western Culture'. The automatic model claims the universe works mechanically in the likeness of a clock. Another model focuses on the undying processes of change, viewing the Universe more as a organisms - the organic model has connections to Ancient Greek philosophy as well as Taoism and Buddhism and is re-emerging in contemporary process philosophy.

This is the sort of synthesis I have in mind. One that connects being and becoming, that links existence and essence. As I begin to equate my definitions living and naturalizing the phrase from my opening begins to shift into ‘naturalize, laugh, naturalize’. Almost saying nothing at all, getting close to semantic satiation - the loss of meaning when you over repeat a word.

It's funny how language breaks down in the absence of context, pressing against the limit of its utility.  Is it that in trying to say everything we wind up saying nothing? Or in saying nothing, have we said it all?

What perplexes me most is why ‘laugh’ can't seem to be subsumed as easily as the others - we're naturalizing and just sort of laugh in the middle of it all. Regardless, I am here to play the word game, I invite you to play it with me and see what may come of it. :)

~Derek Zandvliet

P.S. For the utmost clarity, I should note one final idea sometimes confused with naturalism - naturism. According to wikipedia naturism is "a lifestyle of practicing non-sexual social nudity in private and in public". Although there are many naturalist naturists, not all naturalists are naturists!