Environment
Biology, Buddhism and our Interconnected "Selves"
Ecology provides a perfect example of how things aren't separate
Posted April 27, 2019
To see beyond the paradigm that insists on separateness of self is not to deny the obvious truth that we perceive ourselves as separate, independent beings, but to understand that this separateness is an illusion. It is a useful one, to be sure, enabling people to conceptualize how their own superficially distinct “me” or “I” navigates its many interconnections. It also enables biologists to perform their research, distinguishing an elk from a wolf, and separating each from, say, a beaver or a maple tree. And there is much to be learned about how a wolf goes about hunting elk, or how beavers go about constructing dams and building their lodges.
But wolves don’t just depend on elk and other species as prey; they literally contain elk and their ilk within themselves, just as a piece of paper contains the whole world. In 1926, the last wolf was killed in Yellowstone National Park, in what we now know was a foolish effort to “improve” the environment for – among other species – elk. As a result, the elk population soared, but lots of other things happened, too. The increased numbers of elk, no longer alert to possible predators, congregated especially along streams and rivers, where in the past they could be ambushed. There they over-browsed trees such as cottonwoods, aspen and willows, whose presence had restrained riverbank erosion. With these plants diminished, waterways became broader and therefore shallower, which as a result grew less shaded and warmer.
The leaves of aspen in particular were consumed when just beginning to sprout and so the trees rarely attained their full height. Songbirds were accordingly deprived of nesting sites and their number diminished. Beavers, which depend on healthy trees as well as deep water, became increasingly rare until there was just one beaver colony left in the entire park. And trout, which require cold water (largely because higher temperature reduces water’s ability to hold dissolved oxygen), began to decline in those wider, shallower, warmer rivers and streams.
Meanwhile, coyote numbers increased, because wolves were no longer competing with (and eating) them. Those abundant coyotes, although too small to have a significant effect on the exploding elk population, chowed down on small mammals such as ground squirrels, voles, mice and pocket gophers, whose populations crashed, bringing with them the numbers of foxes, badgers, owls, hawks, and falcons, all of whom depended on an abundance of small mammals in order to prosper.
Then, beginning in 1995, wolves were reintroduced into the park, and its entire life-fabric changed. Park rangers had been forced to cull (i.e., kill) increasing numbers of elk, but now the wolves took over this task. Not only did the elk population decline, approaching its pre-wolf holocaust numbers, but their behavior reverted as well: they became more vigilant, especially around watercourses, also spending more time on knolls and ridges where they could spot predators. The severely overgrazed stream-side vegetation quickly recovered, and the water became deeper, cooler and healthier for its inhabitants. Aquatic insects such as mayflies and stoneflies returned, and with them, the trout population. Wildflowers came back in great abundance, and in their wake, an array of terrestrial and airborne insects, upon which songbirds began feasting once again, just as they returned to nesting in the larger, healthier trees.
Coyote numbers declined, since they were not only out-competed by the reintroduced wolves, but also, on occasion, hunted by them. This was a tribulation for the coyotes, but a benefit to pronghorns, which were always too fast to be threatened by wolves, but whose calves were hunted by coyotes. Not only that, but with fewer coyotes - and since the wolves were concentrating on larger prey such as deer and elk – the population of once abundant small mammals (those ground squirrels, mice, voles, and so forth who were a preferred food of coyotes), returned to their previous levels, enabling foxes, badgers and raptorial birds to make a living once again.[i]
One way of looking at this, which is only a small subset of all the interactions occurring in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem following the reintroduction of wolves, is that wolves, elk, coyotes, beaver, fish, birds, insects, trees, rivers and so forth are mutually interacting and interdependent, such that impacting one component sets off reverberations in all the others. English poet Francis Thompson put it this way:
“All things ... near and far/ hiddenly to each other connect are,/ that one cannot touch a flower without the troubling of a star.”
Another and more biologically accurate way is to expand our perceptions and acknowledge that the reason you cannot touch a flower without troubling a star, or exterminate wolves without troubling, for example, badgers (which rely, among other things, on ground squirrels, which had become rare because of the increase in coyotes, which themselves had increased in abundance because of the elimination of wolves, is that there literally is no meaningful distinction between the former and the latter.
The “fact” that individuals are separate seems so obvious as to allow no refutation, but bear in mind that many seemingly obvious natural facts are not as they appear: the Earth looks flat, but it isn’t. The sun appears to move around the Earth, but it doesn’t. That computer or ipad r on which you are reading this certainly looks solid, but physics tells us with equal certainty that it is made almost entirely of empty space, with a comparatively infinitesimal amount of solid stuff sprinkled here and – mostly – there.
Individual plants and animals may seem to be in fact, individuals, but upon deeper reflection, they are revealed to be part of a larger, almost unlimited whole, whose “individuality” is more a matter of convenience and cognitive deception than meaningful reality. More troublesome is that insofar as we fail to recognize our connectedness, we risk doing harm – not only to ourselves but unavoidably, to the entire fabric on which all depend. "It really boils down to this,” according to Martin Luther King, Jr., “all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly."
Most people nonetheless find it easier (more convenient, perhaps, to their psychic comfort) to accept a lack of boundaries between animals and their environment than when considering human creatures. But people are as immersed in this boundary-lessness as are all other beings. Homo sapiens occupying a modern city might appear less connected to each other and to their surroundings than are wolves occupying the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park, but they are no more disconnected than were our Australopithecine ancestors occupying a Pleistocene era African savannah.
Although our wolf-ecosystem example focused on food, this was simply because the eat-and-being-eaten linkage is more immediately apparent and thus easier to, well, digest than are the myriad other interpenetrations. Food webs constitute just one case in which distinctions between self and not-self melt away upon deeper examination. Moreover, this array of interconnectedness isn’t only true of ecological networks and linkages.
In my next post I’ll look into other ways in which biology and Buddhism converge when it comes to recognizing the shared unity of all things.
David P. Barash is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. Among his recent books is Through a Glass Brightly: using science to see our species as it really is (Oxford University Press, 2018),
[i] Ripple, W. J., & Beschta, R. L. 2012. Trophic cascades in Yellowstone: The first 15years after wolf reintroduction. Biological Conservation, 145(1), 205-213.