“WE ARE JUST ONE MEMBER OF  A GREAT COMMUNITY OF LIVING BEINGS.”  
– Aldo Leopold, American Conservationist 

How might our view of the Earth crisis change if we were to remember that the world is not solely what humans perceive it to be?  How might it shift our own perceptions of the world to realize that the entire planet comes alive through the perceptions and experiences of all life here, not just human life?  And that all of this life – human and other-than-human – is in danger of being lost due to climate change and environmental collapse.   

“ABSOLUTE, UNMIXED ATTENTION IS THE PUREST FORM OF PRAYER.” 
– Simone Weil, French Writer and Philosopher 

If you were to look out your window right now, you’d see an entire world paying absolute, unmixed attention: the bee to the flower; a spider to its web; a bird to its nestlings. Every species on the planet experiences its world through its senses, a concept German biologist Jakob von Uexküll called “the umwelt”.  The bee outside your window sees ultraviolet light; the bird has four color cones where we have three and can, by extension, perceive colors we literally can’t imagine. The spider, who has no ears, can nevertheless “hear” with its legs.  And far outside your window somewhere, whales are singing songs we can’t understand and diving toward depths we can’t fathom, let alone survive.  In other words, every species – including humans – bears witness to the world in its own unique way, constantly attuned and paying attention to aspects of its environment that are most material to its survival and, by extension, to the survival of the entire planet as well.  It is a vast communal effort of paying attention. 

“I’M SO GRATEFUL TO BE ALIVE AT TIME WHEN THERE IS SO MUCH WORTH SAVING.” 
– Ethan Tapper, American Forester, Author 

So, if each species brings the planet to life and plays its own part in the survival of the whole, might we then ask:  What about us? What part do humans play in this stewardship and what is our uniquely human “umwelt”? How are we meant to pay attention and bear witness to the world? 

Among our many capacities, from creativity to reason, we seem to have been gifted with an umwelt that also enables us to not just survive in the world, but to perceive – with all our senses – the beauty of the world.  We have the ability to be swept away, stunned, stopped short in our busy tracks, bowled over and moved to tears by the sights and sounds and smells of this world.  We have the capacity to feel wonder. We can be awed by the world.  Surely, this human superpower to not just perceive the world with our senses, but to behold it with our entire being, is itself a profound and beautiful gift.  Because it means that we – each one of us – has been blessed with the extraordinary ability to fall in love with the world.   

If this loving way of paying attention to the world is fundamental to our humanity, then how is it we’ve lost our way and brought our planet to this dangerous tipping point?  What else are we losing by losing sight of our own gifts, our own humanity?  What have we forgotten about ourselves?  And how do we bear witness to it all – to the joy and the beauty as well as the sorrow and the suffering? Because this is also part of our humanity, this ability to not just rejoice, but to grieve.  

“ONE WAY TO OPEN YOUR EYES IS TO ASK YOURSELF: WHAT IF I HAD NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE? WHAT IF I KNEW I WOULD NEVER SEE IT AGAIN?” 
 – Rachel Carson, “The Sense of Wonder” 

As far as science can tell, humans are the only species that can cry emotional tears. We have the astonishing ability to lament the loss of a river, an ocean or an ecosystem, a planet.  We can mourn the loss of a species other than our own. We have the capacity to realize that this loss means there is now one less way of perceiving the world, one less way of paying attention to the world – and if poet J.D. McClatchy is right, if love is the “quality of attention we pay to things”, then there is also one less way of loving the world.  Since we have this ability to pay attention not only to the parts of the environment that directly affect us, but to the whole, shouldn’t we ask: what is our responsibility to that whole?  

Please please join us for the next Earth Crisis Forum, where we will ask these questions in an effort to discover how our shifts in attention have contributed to the problem and in what ways we can pay better attention to what is happening around us – so we might remember that our uniquely human way of paying attention is one of our most beautiful gifts to the world.