Wild Assumptions

The human tendency to insist that animals or other non-human parts of the environment lack some trait or ability happens so frequently that even people who have challenged it sometimes end up doing it.

Our assumptions about what is human and what is wild or wilderness have deep roots. Consequently, they can guide our reasoning no matter how much we try to overcome them. In addition, they tend to result more from our own limits in perceiving the world around us than from the shortcomings of non-humans. This creates major problems for the conclusions we reach because flawed assumptions constrain our ability to assess questions about non-humans and the environment sufficiently. Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-human World, a new book by Emma Marris, provides an example of this.

Marris makes an admirable and good-faith effort to challenge dominant ideas about the relationships between humans, other species, and the environment. However, the discussion presented in the book about the idea of intrinsic value contains some arguments that require further examination. They are limited by the same constraints about the traits and abilities of non-human entities that Marris works so hard to challenge.

Those who support the idea of intrinsic value argue that the value of something exists independent of the valuation of a valuer. For example, a tree has value in and of itself regardless of what value humans might put on it. This idea is used to support arguments that non-humans have the right to exist and that human activity jeopardizing that right is unethical.

While allowing that individual non-humans have intrinsic value, Marris questions whether species as a whole and entire ecosystems have it. This argument centers on the assumption that species and ecosystems are not conscious agents trying to survive. At this point, Marris begins to exhibit that old human tendency to discount the capabilities and characteristics of the non-human.

According to Marris, "The individual living things alive today are here because their ancestors survived and reproduced. And thus each one has inherited many ways of surviving and reproducing. Their goal-directed nature is a product of the brute force of evolution. Individuals that don't try to live and reproduce don't have babies. Those that do, do, and pass on their 'trying' genes. Sometimes selection can act on tightly coordinated groups, like ant colonies, when the whole colony survives or dies together. But 'species are too diffuse and their individual members too uncoordinated and independent from each other for them to constitute an entity on which selection might operate,' (Ronald) Sandler says. They have no goals. If they have no goals, they can't be helped or hindered." Then, Marris applies the same logic to ecosystems, arguing that they lack goals, including the desire to persist.

With regard to species, these claims, especially the quote from Sandler, are incredible. It is difficult to accept the assumptions that species are not "coordinated" and "have no goals" after watching geese migrate, European starlings fly as one big mass, insects mate over streams in the tiny window of time in which they live, or salmon return together from the ocean to spawn. In fact, when the Elwha River was dammed, the individual salmon would constantly bump into the base of the dam in an attempt to follow their instincts to continue upstream. This behavior continued for decades until the dam was finally removed. Clearly, the salmon had a goal in mind. This goal could not have been the result of uncoordinated, individual decisions because the individuals that returned to the river decades after the dam was put in place had no personal knowledge of what was past the structure. Rather, the goal was the product of a species coordinating itself through collective instincts in its drive to survive, a drive that propelled individuals to the point that they would repeatedly throw themselves against solid concrete in vain. The quote from Sandler also seems to disregard the research showing that dolphins possess a social intelligence that allows them to experience each other's experiences, a degree of connection that humans can hardly imagine. And therein lies the central problem of these claims from Marris and Sandler about intrinsic value: They are limited by the human ability to perceive and imagine what is happening in the non-human world. These limitations constrain the conclusions the two writers make.

Demonstrating how assumptions can lead to flawed logic and questionable conclusions, Marris seems to use the claims about intrinsic value to invert the process of evolution. Positioning reproduction as the "product" of evolution, which the writer refers to at other points as a "selector," creates the impressions that evolution is (1) the driving force (rather than a result of reproduction and adaptation to environmental conditions) and (2) an omnipotent agent with the ability to decided the fate of species. In other words, Marris, who is reluctant to grant agency and consciousness to species and ecosystems, apparently has no problem granting these things to evolution. First, evolution is a human concept that is used to explain how species develop and adapt within their environment. It is not an agent of that environment. Second, evolution is the product, not the driver. As life adapts to the planet's different parameters through reproduction, species evolve. No omnipotent "selector" determines this process. Instead, it's a continuous interaction between life and environmental parameters. I would further argue that species play a central role in this process by supplying the drives that organize migrations, mating, and other social interactions. The species are trying to survive. Otherwise, their individual members would be so uncoordinated that life on this planet would have likely been dead on arrival.

Proving intrinsic value in ecosystems presents stronger challenges. Because of human limitations, it is quite difficult to see how entire landscapes might be coordinated and trying to survive. This is why Marris can say ecosystems do not move as units. On this issue, the work of Suzanne Simard, which can be read in Finding the Mother Tree, proves useful yet again. (I previously blogged about that book here.) In showing how entire forests are linked in consciousness and communication through fungal networks, Simard provides strong evidence for the kinds of agency, coordination, and desire to survive that Marris denies to ecosystems. The connections Simard describes go beyond a particular species and far beyond individual members of those species. Furthermore, they show how entire ecosystems respond to environmental signals, sharing resources and information that allow for decisions meant to facilitate survival. As Simard demonstrates, these decisions can even include the ecosystem moving as a unit as changes in the climate make one area unsatisfactory or turn other areas more favorable. Trees moving beyond what once was the tree line represents one such example, and of course, the species linked to those trees follow. In addition, dying trees will share their accumulated knowledge of how to survive with other trees before they die, and such sharing can involve more than one species. These phenomena sound a lot like coordination and a desire to survive that extend to the level of ecosystems.

In Wild Souls, Marris raises important points about animal rights and human attempts to control the entire environment. However, the arguments the book presents about intrinsic value are central to its overall message and need further attention and development before they can be accepted.

All told, it is always worth keeping in mind how human assumptions about the non-human world influence our perception of and perspectives on it.