| Some years ago, I convened a conference in Montana on the precautionary principle and conservation using grizzly bears, meso-carnivores, and salmon as case studies. Salmon are anadromous fish: they spend part of their lives in salt water and part in in fresh water. I asked the fisheries biologist how salmon coped with uncertainty. How did salmon recalibrate their activity if there had been fundamental changes to their natal rivers between hatching and returning home to spawn? At what point in their journey back to their freshwater spawning grounds did they receive information about changes that imperiled their return? What were the sources of that information? I’ve returned to that question about salmon and uncertainty since the November 2024 election installed the new president. The election coincided with major changes in my family, with an elder going into hospice in December. On top of that, climate disasters and economic instability seemed interlocking and synergistic. Everywhere I turned, the polycrisis is magnified, the uncertainty vast and unmanageable. Would the new administration finalize the CO2 pipeline regulations that the old administration had drafted? Would I be able to replace my aging cell phone? Would bird flu jump into the human population and spread rapidly as our new pandemic? Would we have any legal mechanisms for protecting water from PFAS and other forever chemicals? Will my beloved migrant friends be able to stay in the United States, or will they be hounded out of the country? Most of the work we’ve done on the precautionary principles talks about scientific uncertainty. Sometimes we can reduce that uncertainty with more data. Sometimes we already know enough to act. Sometimes the uncertainty is so systemic and so nebulous that it is difficult to know which way to turn. Sometimes no amount of data will help us navigate the novel circumstances brought about by the complexity of the polycrisis.
The new president is dismantling many of our essential sources of public health and environmental information, the very information that would help reduce the uncertainty. Whether it is cutting funding, eliminating agencies, or disbanding research centers, we will lack the compasses for getting to the future we want. In a brilliant essay entitled The Rise of End Times Fascism, writers Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein say that “we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world—on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.” Taylor and Klein propose that “we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.” I’m taken by those words, “a story of staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.” Perhaps that is the answer to coping with the vast uncertainties: “being faithful to the communities of place we find ourselves in.” I live in a windy prairie state. I know how to cope with cold, wind, long nights, tornadoes. I’d not be so good in a coastal hurricane zone. But it isn’t all coping. I revel in June fireflies and maple trees turning red in fall and the first snowfall in the winter or the flickers visiting my yard around both equinoxes. I am tuned to my neighbors, aware of who needs me to watch their house while they are visiting their ailing parents or who shows up regularly to help shovel snow from my too-long driveway. I know the local chef who can make stone soup into something fit for a feast. I know the brilliant gardeners who save seed and monitor the weather for the perfect time to plant heirloom bean seeds. I also know where the fox den is hidden, the Barred Owl nests and when the groundhog emerges from her long winter’s nap. And they know me. It is with this community that I can weather the uncertainty embedded in the polycrisis. For instance, together we can: Develop local and regional warning systems, including early warning systems. What warnings do we need? Some places need long-standing warning systems for earthquake or tsunami prone areas. When working on the long-term threats to the community in Yellow Knife, Northwest Territories from a toxic disaster called the Giant mine, I looked for all the warning systems that had survived for very long times. It turns out that tsunami rocks of Japan are some of the very few ancient warnings that I could find. The carvings say things like, “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants… Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point." Early warning systems are a bit different from warning systems that develop from long-standing experience. When dealing with systemic uncertainty we have to monitor emerging and new patterns. New and unfamiliar diseases, changes in pollinator behavior, strange weather. We are going to be more attuned to new patterns in places we know well. We will be alert to early warnings if we know this pattern is Not Normal. Newcomers to an eco-community are less likely to be aware of odd things going on in the neighborhood. Use nature as measure, model, and mentor when considering solutions to the polycrisis. 1. Nature as model. Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.
2. Nature as measure. Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate. What lasts.
3. Nature as mentor. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it. (Benyus, 1997) Again, it helps to live in a place long enough to learn how nature does things.
My experience as an archaeologist in the Southwest was primarily with the Puebloans of the desert Southwest. Those rich and vibrant cultures had lived in their place for thousands of years. They were what I call morally mature because “they have a code for how to relate to each other as humans and how to relate to the land based on the limits and nature of the world around them.” They used the parameters of nature to shape their ethics and behavior. We are likely to survive better over the long haul if we use nature as our guide for how to live in that place. Create and choose information systems with high signal to noise ratios. Fox News or the New York Times are one thing and you can judge what the noise levels are in them. But they are unlikely to give you useful information about your community and how the polycrisis is going to affect your ability to weather storms, have fresh water, or be exposed to a new virus. But consider the local birders, or biologists, the midwives, the amateur bug experts, the citizen science water quality testers. What are they describing about your neighborhood? What do you learn when you combine the signals coming from ecologists and public health experts? Some of the most important public health discoveries in the past 30 years came from astute observers combining insights from wildlife and how they related to the human population. Katsi Cook, a Mohawk midwife, observed that the Indigenous babies she was delivering had numerous health problems. She became concerned about the safety of breastfeeding babies born in the area. “Cook launched the Mothers’ Milk Project in 1983 to monitor the environmental impact of industrial development promoted by the St. Lawrence Seaway Project of the 1950s.” The Mother’s Milk Project was part of a collaboration between wildlife biologists who were observing the impacts of the PCBs in the water and fisheries and Katsi Cook, who was observing the problems of Mohawk babies. “As a result of Cook’s efforts, Akwesasne became the first community to include human health research in the Superfund Basic Research Program.” Similarly, Theo Colborn, investigating the impact of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the Great Lakes on birds, influenced doctors in Chicago who were dealing with birth defects in children. At the time of Colborn’s discoveries, my father, Dr. John Raffensperger, was surgeon-in-chief at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He became convinced that some of the childhood cancers and birth defects he treated were linked to toxic chemicals, in large part because of Colborn’s work and his own observations of clusters of those childhood ills. All of that is to say, that getting your information from credible sources like ecologists and midwives will provide clear, actionable signals about your community. Choose beauty. Finally, when all else fails and you are wading through the muck of uncertainty and every path looks troublesome, choose the most beautiful. Avoid the ugly. Some years ago when I was trying to unpack the deep archetypal strata of the precautionary principle, I wrote to the great psychologist, James Hillman. I asked for help understanding ways to interpret the precautionary principle, so it didn’t seem like some idea dreamed up by a bunch of sissies who were scared of their own shadows. Following our weekend long conversation, Hillman wrote an essay on the precautionary principle and beauty. He said,
Our noses too, and our eyes and ears, are political instruments, protesters. An aesthetic response is a political action. Like the daimon of Socrates who indicates only what not to do, we too know instinctively, aesthetically when a fish stinks, when the sense of beauty is offended. Standing for these moments — and these moments occur each day, within every airless office building, seated in each crippling chair, inundated by senseless noise and fattened on industrial food — standing for our responses, these aesthetic reverberations of truth in the soul, may be the primary civic act of the citizen, the origin of caution and of the precautionary principle itself with its warnings to stop, look and listen.
Hillman added “… beauty is permanently given, inherent to the world in its data, there on display always, a display that evokes an aesthetic response.” I close with the words of Nancy Myers who was commenting on the Hillman essay,
Aesthetics is not simply a matter of response. It can point us toward health and wellbeing. Beauty can be a guide to how we make places for ourselves in the world, what work we do, how we shape that work, the very art of our living. Aesthetics and ethics, the exercise of moral duty, are not far apart. But we activists, scientists, and healers would do well to experiment, now and then, with starting with beauty and trusting beauty to lead us to, and show us, the good. We may even learn to trust beauty to make good.
In this month’s newsletter, you’ll find two pieces that—while acknowledging the daunting challenges we face—find inspiration both close-to-home and in international voices of wisdom and leadership. Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director |
