Science provides a fairly successful way of “listening” to ecosystems. After all, most creatures in the diminishing wilderness, just like a sad pet or an abused child, don’t really know that something is not right — they just grow up accepting it as normal. They can’t, or they won’t dare, tell us that they are unhappy.
Science allows us to measure landscapes, to calculate the interconnectedness of biomass, and to make judgments about the health of an ecosystem. So we can listen.
However, science is trapped by its own, linear, cause and effect logic, and such discursive thinking separates observer from observed, leaving out the human connection to ecosystems.
Yes, of course, the human connection to nature has been well documented in all its dire destructiveness. But one need do no more than open one’s eyes to have seen that. It is through the heart, which listens to landscapes, that we really feel our connection to ecosystems.
Ecosystems speak through landscapes, and when the heart tunes in to the plants, the animals, the water, the wind, and the earth, the mind is filled with qualia. An open heart leads to a self-determined mind, a mind that sees beyond landscapes and into ecosystems.
Together, science and compassion, brain and heart, make for local consciousness, which allows us to see beyond our own, narrow, selfish landscapes. Local consciousness provides us with a sensitivity to when ecosystems must strain to do accomplish what they generally do with ease: harmonize landscapes.
Local consciousness provides us, then, with purpose — the imperative to help — to give back, rather than to take from, landscapes.
Listen, and we can show our gratitude toward ecosystems.