Café dialogue at Vendome on Wednesday April 24 and a book synopsis

Hello Dialogue Artists,

We'll meet again at Vendome on Wednesday April 24 at 6 PM. Amal has encouraged each of us to contribute at least one item of good news from recent events on Planet Earth. David Swann plans to join us for a discussion of a creative and constructive response to the recent elections. Janice Fraser, who ran on the Green Party ticket, also plans to be there. So this should be an inspiring evening of envisioning how to transform culture and society in our city.

Last Wednesday, with a dozen participants and Amal facilitating, we heard from Zoe about a way we can connect with nature https://www.inaturalist.org/ and it turned out that Robert had been using this website for quite some time. Other topics we discussed included how to build a successful marital relationship, the cultural contexts within which marriages take place, and ways to create healthy connections with our neighbors. We talked about ways we might respond to the recent Alberta election results, and the significance of those election results within the context of a drift toward right-wing governments in many parts of the world. We also discussed a series of recent world news headlines.

We missed Don Harris and look forward to his return.

I’ve appended my synopsis of a good book below this message.

Arthur

Book: (Peter Wohlleben) The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things (2017)

The author “spent over twenty years working for the forestry commission in Germany before leaving to put his ideas about ecology into practice. Today he runs a forest academy and an environmentally friendly woodland in Germany, where he is working for the return of primeval forests.” - from the book jacket

In a previous book I'd shared (Lost Connections by Johann Hari), the author emphasizes that we human beings have lost connections important to our well-being, including our connection with nature. If you have ever seen a picture of the Milky Way galaxy, with that sign “You Are Here” indicating a dot that represents our own solar system (planet Earth being too miniscule to get its own dot), you’ll probably (at least for a moment) have put all your troubles in perspective. We’re part of something much larger than the little self.

The book by Peter Wohlleben helps the reader understand the richness of our connections with the natural world. You can begin to look at the extraordinary balance of all living things right here on Earth. And you can begin to understand even more deeply: Yes, that something larger is really quite something!

Most of you know at least a little of how richly connected the natural world is. You’ll have heard about the effect of cutting down trees and ploughing the previously forested ground: Extremely fertile soil at first, then progressive loss of the soil’s fertility as the years go by. But did you know about the vast ecosystem extending deep beneath that ploughed surface and how it changes? Did you know how killing all the wolves in Yellowstone National Park many decades ago caused the rivers to change course? Did you know how studying the tree rings along an ancient river can reveal when the salmon last came up that river to spawn? Or why the effect that wood ants have on the health of a forest gets mixed reviews, depending on whether you look at the ants’ relationship with bark beetles or with aphids? Or why moths are drawn to a flame? Or why a resurgence of Eurasian crane populations might have had an effect on the production of ham in the Iberian peninsula? Or how a spruce forest increases rainfall? Or how trees have an influence on climate change?

As I read this book and became more and more aware of these connections, something remarkable happened to me. The connections shifted from “out there” in “nature” to “in here” in human society and within myself. Each of us is an ecosystem, our organs and the bacteria in our intestinal tract working in harmony to support our well-being. Our society is also an ecosystem and can aspire to a similar harmony (as emphasized by our friends at Folk Tree Lodge).

The author praises empathy: “Empathy is one of the strongest forces in conservation and can achieve more than any number of rules and regulations. Think of the campaigns against whaling or against the slaughter of seal pups – public outcry was so loud only because we all empathized with the animals. And the closer the animals are to us, the greater our empathy.” (page 125) And yet human empathy when it lacks understanding can lead to outcomes contrary to the good intentions. For example when a mother roe deer goes foraging for food, she leaves her newborn fawn alone in a secluded spot. Humans on a nature walk may chance upon the fawn and mistakenly think it’s an orphan and take it home with them to try to save it – instead causing its death by starvation because the fawn will not take milk from a bottle (pages 56-57). It’s an unforgettable lesson on the importance of both having empathy and understanding the context. It's equally true of the empathy we have for other human beings.

The human interactions with nature described in the book include expressions of gratitude from a crow that was being fed by a child; the re-discovery of a species that had been thought long extinct; and many more. Each connection enriches us.

A person’s ego serves a protective function but can also become a prison – a cause of so much depression and even suicide. As I read Peter Wohlleben’s book, I felt more and more clearly my own integral relationship with the natural world. I had known it in an abstract way of course but now it really came home. And as it did so, “I” began to dissolve.

So I’m convinced we should take that advice about re-connecting with nature seriously. We’ve been encouraged to start using a naturalist website https://www.inaturalist.org/ and there are countless ways to re-connect with nature here in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. With the fourth annual Calgary Social Transformation Tournament approaching, it seems timely to imagine some simple projects and even enter one or two of them as team projects in the Tournament. Let’s do it.