From the back cover:

Among the countless attributes that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, six stand out–our big toe, opposable thumb, oddly shaped pharynx, and our ability to laugh, kiss, and cry. Though seemingly unconnected, they are actually closely linked, each marking a fork in the evolutionary road where we went one way and the rest of the animal kingdom went another.
Drawing on complexity theory, the latest brain-scanning techniques, and new insights from fields as diverse as anthropology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears reveals a creature that was shaped as much by its social relationships and internal self-image as by its ability to walk upright, make tools, and use language.

What a headache.
It gets better in the foreword, written by Ray Kurzweil. Here are some excerpts:

The fifth epoch, which we are now initiating, is when technology-creating species (that’s us) uses its technology to understand (to reverse-engineer) its own biology, including the method of its brains, and incorporates the design ideas borrowed from biology into its own technology.
To explain the sixth epoch requires insight into the exponential nature of an evolutionary process. Evolution works through indirection: it creates a capability and then incorporates that capability when it evolves subsequent stages. For this reason, the process accelerates, and the products of the evolutionary process grow exponentially in capability. For example, it took a billion years for DNA to evolve but then biology used DNA in all of its subsequent stages.
…This exponential progression will lead us to saturate the ability to support sublimely intelligent computational processes here on Earth within a century. We will then expand into the rest of the universe to keep the exponential progress of this evolutionary process going.

Where to even begin?

Starting from the back cover– what “countless” attributes separate human from other? Who writes that? At best one can only maybe maintain a handful of these supposed attributes. Even so, the trend in biology is that science is starting to find more and more similarities between humans and other species, including the use of tools, language, complex adaptive behavior, and emotional expression. And I’d like to add that there are a lot of things that other species can do that humans can’t.

Sure, humans can change and alter their environment on an impressive scale. Is that ability necessarily an achievement of some sort? We have an ability to destroy this entire planet and all the life on it. Ok, super. When looking at evolution as progress in a specifically human direction, this is a measure of evolutionary achievement and inherent separateness. From a posthumanist (and Christian!) perspective, humans are sooooooo different and separate. But I detest this conceptual brick wall around our species! It creates more problems.

So, that’s the story from one cross-section of science. It’s a very specialized and reductionist view. We need to zoom out and getting a larger perspective….look around!

Are we really better off from all of our civilization and evolutionary advancements? No, really…..are we? What kind of insight about purpose has this brought? What are the results for life on Earth? It doesn’t work.
It. Just. Doesn’t. Work.

Chip Walter’s anthropological assumptions are wrong and outdated. And Kurzweil, DNA did not take a billion years to evolve. According to Crick, who discovered DNA, its origins are extraterrestrial. And I wish us luck when we become cyborgs and expand into the universe when we can’t even figure out how to feed ourselves.

Such a fundamental disconnect! Seriously! This demonstrates such a fragmented way of looking at things–an imbalanced phylogenetic development. Seeing development and progress in such narrow ways, and putting energy into further “developing” them makes us lopsided–personally and collectively.
We can’t get anywhere without understand our intrinsic interconnectedness. That’s why we can’t come up with systemic solutions to some serious, serious problems facing life on this planet.
If we can’t think in terms of the whole, we’ll keep acting in broken and fragmented ways.

Oh, and notice the use of the phrase “sublimely intelligent computational processes”. Is this Kurzweil’s working definition of intelligence? I sure hope not.

Oh, Chip Walter, I shall take pleasure reading this book…interesting although it might be, I already really doubt its conclusions….but I will give it a chance.

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The utilitarian undertones actually irritate me more than anything else here. At the end when he talks about mutually beneficial systems between crows and humans, I really struggle with what he means by “mutually beneficial”. He uses the example of training crows to pick up garbage after a stadium event. How is that beneficial for crows?
Another example of how humans assign value to other lives…in often perverted ways.

David Harmon takes this idea a step further: “I suppose we are waiting for a cultural analog of the biophilia hypothesis, one which does not merely claim that cultural diversity is ‘interesting’ but one that explains why contact with cultural diversity makes us fully human.”

“Until recently, bacteria were considered to live rather asocial, reclusive lives. New research shows that, in fact, bacteria have elaborate chemical signaling systems that enable them to communicate within and between species. One signal, termed AI-2, appears to be universal and facilitates interspecies communication.

Not only is AI-2 produced by a wide variety of bacteria, it is also detected by many or possibly all of them.

AI-2 has also proved important in the organization of bacteria into structures called biofilms. Bacterial biofilms can be composed of single or multiple species. In these communities, bacteria live adhered to surfaces and the biofilm inhabitants cooperate in the production of an ECM that leads to the formation of a complex architecture containing structures including “pillars” and “mushrooms.”

The discovery of species-specific as well as universal intercellular signaling molecules reveals that bacteria interact with one another using surprisingly sophisticated mechanisms of communication. In nature, bacteria are rarely found in isolation, and evolution appears to have provided a mechanism that allows them to detect when they are in heterogeneous communities, to assess the proportions of self and other in mixed-species environments, and to respond to this information by appropriately modulating gene expression.”

With communication, collaboration can happen…

One aspect of this that I like to explore is how the Westerner’s notion of self may contribute to this. I think by identifying the “self” as a central entity that is separated from the rest of the world, we lose something. This separation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ creates an implied barrier. What is the barrier between self and other? Is it the skin, as the behaviorists propose? Is it our auras, 3 feet around our bodies? Or our thoughts and dreams? It’s impossible to determine where we end and the rest of the world begins, and this drives the discipline of psychology nuts. It’s because this imaginary barrier doesn’t really exist, but is arbitrarily determined given the practice or ideology one is working with. As humans, we’ve cemented the delusion of a barrier between self and other, and now roam the perimeter of these walls like an animal circling a pen. It created the difference between what Neil Evernden calls nature, the rest of the world, reality, and Nature, human’s abstraction of it. As Rilke said, “Men only began to understand Nature when they no longer understood it.”

With these abstractions and resulting civilization, we’ve built this unreality, or as Derrick Jensen would put it, a “Culture of Make Believe.” As the abstractions increase in depth and breadth, we are losing more touch with reality and are now facing major ecological consequences as a result. I think it’s because we’ve mistaken abstract conceptions for real things. We’ve created a human landscape, and the issue is that we forgot that it’s not the whole story.

Am I going too far by suggesting that modern humans inhabit a world of abstractions? Probably not. This really dawned on me early in my college career. I used to be a biochemistry major at a school in Connecticut until I started to have major beef with the premise of the entire discipline. What I noticed when we would learn laws and their associated equations is that the equations did not apply in all situations. There were always exceptions to the rules and equations we were learning. But then we would use these equations and principles to find solutions in the lab, disregarding that they are really rough approximations. It’s and example of the layers that we create between our “selves” and “the rest of the world”. So there was this created and delusionsal separation between Modern chemistry and the world it created and the real world, nature with a lowercase ‘n’, which has no straight lines, finite boundaries, or even predictability.

A couple of days ago, during a visit to my parents, I visited my friend Deb and we talked about growth, progress, and the fallacy that it’s healthy to have that be the primary focus of our lives—both individually and as a culture. I mean, look at economic growth. So many injustices are seemingly justifiable based on if they contribute to economic expansion. This is not to say I’m against “growth”, but I do think societies should be critically questioning what and how we are choosing to grow. This goes for technological growth as well.

When visit my parents, I fly across this continent and I watch how the landscape changes going eastward—specifically, how how suburban sprawl is remarkably cancer-like. Deb and I were talking about cancer, a subject she has studied for a while as a healer, and she explained to me her perspective that cancer is essentially the immune system body not recognizing itself and trying to heal. This struck me as very interesting. So I thought: Does our civilization have cancer? We don’t recognize ourselves anymore because we have such a narrowly defined view of “self”, and we’re starting to destroy ourselves.

As modern humans, for the most part we inhabit an artificial, abstract, and man-made landscape, disconnected from the larger reality. This fragmented human reality, by definition, is founded on the silencing of so many voices. It’s designed by privileged speakers with the assumed power to decide who is a person and who has a voice. For a long period of American colonial history, only white male landowners were “people” and had a voice. We’ve come a long way since then, but even today, personhood is only extended to humans (and for that matter, not even all humans).

Going back to species-level diagnosis, let’s look at sensory deprivation on a large scale and the resulting constrained human psyche. I think humans are deprived of their natural instincts and perceptions, and that this is a big factor in psychopathologies. If you don’t agree with me, think about all the ways the man-made environment differs from the real world: artificial lighting, straight lines and perfect shapes, images and television, unnatural textures, chemicals, homogenous diets (processed sugar, soy, corn, rice, etc.). What is troubling is that this such a rapid and drastic change that has occured pretty recently and suddenly in human history, creating a “psychological shock”. We inhabit bodies that have evolved in very different circumstances than what we experience today. It’s almost like a square peg trying to fit a round hole.

Everything we see, touch, taste, smell, and hear is nearly always a human artifact. There are so many layers between what we interact with and its origins, its story. There are many cultural theorists that claim that, in fact, we are overstimulated. And I agree with that to the extent that humans are overstimulated with human artifacts. On the whole, we have lost touch with the larger reality because we don’t use our senses as much as we once did. One of the common effects of sensory deprivation is hallucinations. Can we see any evidence of hallucinations in our culture? How about corporate personhood? Or celebrity obsessions and other expressions of drama and public theatre (Republican or Democrat? Pepsi or Coke? Odwalla or Minute Maid?) Or how about the worship of green printed paper? And the thing is, we still trust our senses and perceive these things as real. Thus, delusions and pathologies emerge from a state of collective isolation from what Depth psychologists term the “World Unconscious”.

So what, then, do we do? My proposal is that direct experience and authentic engagement with our communities will reconnect us with the ebbs, flows, rhythms, and turnings of our home planet. And the awareness of our infinite connections—who grows our food, where our water comes from, what plant grows on my sidewalk—expands our sense of self to include the rich tapestry of the totality of life on this planet. Anchoring our selves as beneficial members of both our human and ecological communities plugs us back into this circuit, and gets us flowing again. I mean, who are we, really? How do we construct our identities? Are we defined by our respective subcultures or ideologies? Or defining who we are based on what we are not? Why do we try to construct an identity based on how we are different from others? Our identities are our relationships and our connections. By redirection our focus to our connections, we take a bold step in establishing beneficial and respectful relationships with our neighbors and our place.

I’ll wrap up with something Matthew Fox said: “We’re part of something larger than ourselves. If we don’t learn that, we’re set up for greed.” Paul Hawken calls the current environmental and social justice movements the largest movement in history, because at the core they all address one common issue—that of mistreatment of our neighbors and habitat. It’s a cycle of abuse, of inappropriate relationships. And that dynamic has its roots within every one of us. I believe the answers lie in looking at the big picture and understanding the interconnectedness of all of these issues.

We have the ability and therefore the ethical responsibility to change this. Let’s honor our connections, and dive deeper into this ecology.

“How does the wind speak to us? A biting wind on a winter’s day tells the person of harshness and the challenge of existence. It wants to make a person strong. And the softness of a summer breeze tells us of the compassionate dimension of the universe.

“People say,’Oh, that’s poetic. That’s romantic’. But that’s the most scientific thing there is. If someone says to me, ‘I don’t hear the voice of the wind,’ I say, ‘You better learn.’

By paying attention to how we communication and interact with other-than-human persons around us, we are helping to create emergent co-intelligent system in our bioregions–and ultimately, globally.

A natural system evolves and merges with larger supersystem when information or intelligence on that level is integrated. It then becomes an emergent system, functioning as a dynamic organism capable of intelligent self-regulation and adaptation.

As a society, we view the world around us through an anthropocentric lens. Our economic, social, and political systems only honor and act on the human perspective.

By focusing on our interactions with other-than-human persons, we challenge this perspective and our own notions of the human self. We can go beyond our anthropocentric constructs.

What we’re talking about is enriching our identities.

Over thousands of years, as a species, we’ve created many barriers for ourselves: race, nationality, institutions, disciplines, etc. These are human constructs. We’ve honored these walls and acted as if they are reality.

But we are embarking on a journey of reconnection. Our boundaries are illusions. The reality is that we are all a part of a dynamic, complex, and organized whole. By paying attention to what’s going on outside the human realm, we are creating channels of reconnection with the larger whole. That’s why this matters.

I, for one, will drink to that.

The Council of All Beings is a ritual that grew out of the Despair and Empowerment work and the philosophy of deep ecology of Joanna Macy, Jonathon Seed and others. The purpose of this ritual is to look at the world through another species’ eyes and share this perspective with others in the circle. Some participants will play the role of humans and listen to what the other species have to say. Through sharing our concerns for the planet we are able to get in touch with the interconnectedness of all beings. Through that interconnectedness we find the power and strength to work toward healing the planet. For more understanding about the Council of All Beings, I recommend a book called “Thinking Like a Mountain” by Joanna Macy, John Seed and others. As John Seed explains in the introduction to “Thinking Like a Mountain”,

“Working with the Council of All Beings, we have found that people experience a deepening identification with the Earth, a renewal of energy to struggle for the protection of wild Nature, and to work for peace.”

This year, the Council will begin with the All Species Parade, which will start at the F & M Park and travel down to the Civic Center where the Council will take place. We are offering several costume and mask-making workshops (see schedule on the Earth Day flyer) directed by local artists Penny Krebiehl and Hughthir White with the help of a grant from the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation. It is helpful to discern which species you will represent prior to attending the workshop. Take some time to meditate and let a life-form “choose” you. In addition to all the many species to choose from, we can also represent land forms, such as rivers or mountains.

We invite you to join us in this process of deepening our connection to the Earth and its inhabitants. If you aren’t able to attend one of the costume-making workshops, make your costume at home or with a group of friends. At the ritual if you are hesitant to speak up, there is no pressure to do so. You can simply be a witness. And, if dressing in a costume or mask isn’t your bag, please come anyway to watch and listen. You can be the humans. Hope you’ll join us as a turtle, butterfly, tree or another species on Earth Day!

Purpose of the Council of All Beings

The main purpose of The Council of All Beings is to enhance human commitment and resources for preserving life upon our planet home. There are other objectives that flow from this main purpose. Some of these are:• to strengthen our feeling of interconnectedness with the Earth and all life.

• to foster compassion for all our fellow beings and to sharpen awareness of the dangers and difficulties they face.

• to become more conscious of the commonality of our fate.

• to motivate sustained action on behalf of all beings

• to remember and appropriate our larger lifestory through the long evolution of life upon this planet.

• to open ourselves to the resources of courage, endurance and creativity which are available to us in the web of life.

• to become whole again, healing splits between mind and body, reason and intuition, human and nature.

• to play together, giving permission and scope to our imagination and to the child within

• to build trust and a deeper sense of community with our fellow humans.

•to prepare together for joint actions in defense of the Earth and future generations.