It snowed in February 2020 when Portland residents were first sequestered with COVID-19. The painting of Oak Trees was completed after taking a walk that day. It was a fearful time when no one understood the full extent of what the world faced. Seeing flowers pushing through the snow gave me hope and lifted my spirits. I learn a lot from nature--life continues on and seasons change. There is beauty in the snow and flowers that follow. But nature also lets me know that if damaged and not respected it can cause havoc.
Unlock Your Mind
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses how the environment drives cognitive processes. Thinking, she says, extends beyond your head and is intertwined with tools, people, environment, and your visual field. Throughout, she writes about symbiotic connections between plants, animals, earth, and human beings.
Kimmerer sees the world in a way common to indigenous peoples. Even rocks have a life force to be acknowledged. When a tree is downed for shelter or creatures used for sustenance they are thanked for having contributed to our well-being. And though people take from nature to survive, they give back by adopting practices that protect natural resources and help plants and animals increase and prosper. The process of mutual support is intertwined with respect and willingness to learn from voices in nature.
Stevie Wonder, in his 1978 film, The Secret Life of Plants, documents how plants respond to human care and nurturing. It shows how they interact with humans, their reactions to music, and their lie-detecting abilities. The plants showed pain when trimmed by people who didn't know what they were doing. Supporting their premise is a study by the Royal Horticultural Society discovering that talking to plants can help them grow faster. Though they don't hear in the same way we do, they do react to sound vibrations, preferring those of a female voice over that of a male.
As a child, my father often took me fishing. I never thought about the bass and flounders we caught on the Atlantic coast experiencing pain until I reeled in a trout as an adult. As my fish hit the air, the hook tore through its eye and I heard it scream. I shuddered to my core as I released it to return to the pond.
Was the trout's shout in pain purely my imagination? Conventional wisdom has long been that fish do not feel pain as we do. Yet, no one can define what that really means since even the way two humans experience pain differs from one another.
Scientists today say that our previous beliefs were wrong. Biologists worldwide show evidence that like mammals and birds, fish also experience pain. They have neurons called nociceptors that detect potential harm from high temperatures, intense pressure, caustic chemicals, and fish hooks. They also have innate painkillers as do mammals and react differently when injected with painkilling drugs.
When injured, nociceptors get stimulated that initiate electrical activity surging toward the brain. Studies of fish injected with acidic acid show that their lips swell, causing them to breathe more quickly. They rock back and forth on the bottom of the tank, rub their lips against the gravel and side of the tank and feed slower than a control group injected with benign saline. In other experiments, fish injected with painkillers were more willing to remain in painful environments than those untreated.
All organisms want to live--plants and animals alike. A mutualistic relationship occurs when two species work together to benefit both parties. A bee flies from flower to flower gathering nectar to make food. When they land on the next flower, some of the pollen from the first rubes off to pollinate the plant. The bees eat and the plants get to reproduce.
In humans and other animals, a certain kind of bacteria lives in the intestines. The bacteria attack food a human can't digest and partially digest it, allowing the human to finish the job. The bacteria benefit by getting food to live and the human also benefits by being able to digest the food it needs for its survival.
Humans are a biological species linked in symbiotic relationships to the natural environment. Plants, animals, rocks, and minerals dug from the ground are too often taken for granted. Human activities that affect the environment are transforming biological and cultural evolution. Our actions change relationships between species in fundamental ways. Being mindless as most of us are, produces unexpected results damaging to our health and society.
Unlocking our minds to a broader visual field will make us more cognizant of the interaction between tools, people, and the environment. It will enable an understanding of how biology, social economics, evolutionary psychology, and environmentalism are interrelated. Our thinking will change, making us better stewards of the land and more prosperous as a species.
References:
Vanderlinden, C. (2021) It's True-You really Should Talk to Your Plants, Especially If You're a Woman. The Spruce. retrieved from TALK.
Jabr, R. (2018) It's Official: Fish Feel Pain.Smithsonian Magazine. retrieved from FISH.
Website. Mutualistic Relationships. New England Complex Systems Institute. retrieved from https://necsi.edu/mutualistic-relationships
Perez,E. (2014) Humans Disrupt relationships in nature, study finds. Florida International University for Physics.org. retrieved from NATURE.
Seymour,V. (2016) The Human-Nature relationship and its impact on Health: A crucial Review. The University of London. retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2016.00260/full.
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Art is always for sale. For information contact marilynne@eichngerfineart.com.
Early Snow is a 16" by 20" framed acrylic painting part of a COVID-19 series displayed on my web site. to view all go to https://www.eichingerfineart.com/collections/142242
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