Nature Knowledge and the Nature of Knowledge

In her well known book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, Robin Wall Kimmerer reflects on being a newcomer to the Pacific Northwest and shares the story of Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe “personification of life forces … and great teacher of how to be human”. As the first person, a newcomer himself with no one to teach him, Nanabozho’s focus turned to the cohabiting plants and animals.  While paying attention to these beings, Nanabozho was tasked with giving each of them names and to understand the gifts each offers. 

Time in this conception, Kimmerer describes, is circular rather than linear. With the life of Nanabozho exhibiting “both history and prophecy”. There is a recursive feature here. An enriching cyclic process; iterations of learning and relearning.

Each human community, indeed every developing child, is confronted with the same problems, set in different contexts. Problems such as what is edible, what is not, what might eat you, when and why these problems and opportunities arise, and how we can mitigate or enhance them. Answers to such problems are a matter of life and death, as such the transmission of this ecological knowledge across generations is vital. Traditional Ecological Knowledges may be considered the first instantiation of natural history - of science. Thomas Fleischner calls natural history “the oldest continuous human endeavour”. To Steven Pinker, this is the origins of our rationality and the birth of the cognitive niche. 

Kimmerer wonders if American settlers could “learn to live here as if we were staying”, could we follow in the footsteps of Nanabozho? But of course settlers should steer well away from appropriating indigenous cultures - study your own indigeneity instead. As Kimmerer explains, “Immigrants cannot, by definition, be indigenous. Indigenous is a birthright word.” 

Reaching for an alternative, Kimmerer mused about settlers becoming naturalized to place. 

“Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all of our relatives depend on it. Because they do.” 

I shall leave you to consider what the other possible establishment varieties might look like, without my spelling it out.

This all sounds pretty good! Kimmerer describes a way of living we could all admirably and with increasing urgency need to follow. We find ourselves amidst an ecological catastrophe of our own making - Wakefully. The way of living that Kimmerer has proposed for American settlers in specific might well be applied to cultures captured by a globalizing capitalism generally. With avenues of change of tangible impact already identified (reductions of fossil fuel use for example), there is still little action. Why can’t the ‘rational animal’ seem to take appropriate steps?

With time scale mismatches and incentive structures aside, perhaps it’s that our rationality is not exactly what we thought it is. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions” as David Hume realized in the 1700s. The centuries old statement could be reworded, but the main feature, that reason is not free to act on its own accord, should hold. Rationality, while it can investigate abstract notions and help us contend with distant places and times, serves our emotions, desires, and needs first and foremost. Rationality is put to work in support of our deep seeded biological, social, even spiritual motivations, as noble or grotesque as they may be. 

Yet further, if we observe closely, our passions are rather fickle and vulnerable to manipulation. A feature chronically exacerbated by the bombardment of information many of us contend with in today's world. Our passions are like gusty winds tossing an inexperienced sailor in all manners of directions until, at last, a solid strike from the boom sends the sailor unconscious or flailing off their vessel. Meanwhile, those with the power to do so swoop in to take control of the helm, even altering the winds, as they see fit.

A bit of a bind we find ourselves in.

Studies investigating human rationality often seem to paint a pessimistic picture. Pointing to how often and how dramatically our rationality fails us. One instance is the so-called Linda problem as outlined in Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow”.

“Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.” Amidst other possible descriptions of Linda, researchers asked participants to assess the odds that:

1. Linda is a bank teller.

2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

One test group assessed the statement “Linda is a bank teller”; the other “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement”. The second statement was rated as more likely, on average. The problem is that this is not true. Statement 1 is objectively more likely. Since the set of people who are ‘just’ lawyers is bigger than the subset of people who are lawyers and feminists - imagine the smaller overlapping area of a Venn diagram. There are more people who are lawyers than there are people that are feminist lawyers (unless, that is, “lawyer” was synonymous with “feminist” or feminism was a requirement for being a lawyer).

Steven Pinker, in “Rationality”, points out that these apparent failures come up when we assume rationality is equivalent to logical abstract reasoning.  We respond to cues that appear to be relevant, contextual information. Linda couldn’t ‘just’ be a lawyer. We take the question to be who do you think Linda is, arguably the more useful question in a social setting. The label ‘feminist lawyer’, is more descriptive of the person we think Linda to be. Thus, this label is more salient and we rate it as more likely. Human rationality to Pinker is broader and context dependent. We don't always enact perfect algorithmic logic, and when we do we can only take a few steps. This is why computers beat us in games like chess; they are scary, perhaps apocalyptically, good at this kind of reasoning. 

Pinker does some work to rescue human rationality, but also re-embodies it. As a product of meandering natural selection, rationality is brought to light as an imperfect yet workable adaptation suited to the cognitive niche. 

My own conception is that we are not rational, rather we are adept rationalizers. Coming up with plausible explanations, not necessarily accurate or causal stories. But something happens when you or others reflect on these rationales. They can enter into a process of analysis and reworking. Through loops of positive and negative feedback, what kinds of thought could emerge? Could a ‘true’ rationality develop from throw away rationalizations?

We are not solitary creatures. We can’t survive (at least not for very long or in comparable standards) on our own. Why then are we expected to reason alone? Perhaps like the phenomena of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’, rationality is emergent through human societies. To keep with a process orientation, rationality might be better thought of as a direction rather than an end point. We can, in this perspective, get more rational without ever achieving some final fully formed rationality. Placing the locus of rationality within each individual may be a mistake. What might a world look like where we see ourselves not as originators or rationality but nonetheless essential to the cocreation of it?  Might we be more inclined to put our minds together?

Kimmerer, delights in imagining Lineus, originator of the binomial nomenclature at use in modern biology, and Nanabozho walking side by side discussing the various beings, sharing their own names for each. Two naturalists in communion. Such ‘two eyed seeing’ is integral to understanding knowledge as a unified project. With disparate fields and sub disciplines making up branches and reticulations within a coral of knowledge. 

Here then, perhaps overzealously, learning could be subsumed into naturalizing. There are many intelligences, naturalistic being one of several. But in a holistic education our skills develop in tandem bolstering one another through transferable skills and co association. I agree with David Orr who said “all education is environmental education”. We can't escape teaching about environments, even ignoring environmental contexts informs a certain mindset. We teach the wee ones how to relate to each other, themselves, and the rest of the world. The environments we learn to navigate are complex, multiple, and strange. Including corporations, nation states, ecosystems and the ecology of their relations. 

Naturalizing has been integral to the survival and success of our species, and it continues to be. Have we forgotten this? A culture which has entrained in itself a divide between nature and culture might have. 

For further engagement:

Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, The Availability Heuristic.

David Orr, “What is Education For?”

David Hume, "A Treatise of Human Nature”, Book II, Part III, Section III.

Robin Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass”, In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place.

Steven Pinker, “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters”, How Rational an Animal?

Thomas Fleischner, “The Enduring and Elemental Importance of Natural History”.