printable versionMany views of the environment expressed at conference
BY CLARA MOSKOWITZ
Panelist Michael Pollan, a journalism professor at UC-Berkeley, spoke last week on campus about the biases in humans’ perspectives of the natural world.
We have many ways to depict the natural world. An artist might paint a landscape; a biologist might plot a graph of the nutrients in the soil.
During a Nov. 8-10 conference, "Imaging Environment: Maps, Models, Metaphors," scholars from disciplines as diverse as biology, history, architecture and geology shared their unique ways of representing the environment around us.
"The basic goal of the conference is to have people who are interested in environmental questions, from the humanities, from the social sciences and from the natural sciences, really talk to each other and learn from each other," said Matthew Tiews, associate director of the Stanford Humanities Center, which sponsored the conference jointly with the Woods Institute for the Environment.
The conference included several panel discussions and a final roundtable, along with a musical performance, a visual art exhibit and presentation of a film, 10,000 Shovels, by Karen Seto, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences at Stanford. Her film offers a glimpse through satellite images of the environmental changes that have occurred in China's Pearl River Delta over the last 30 years.
One panelist, Michael Pollan, spoke about the biases in humans' perspective of the natural world. In his talk, "The Human Bumblebee: A Plant's Eye View of Us," the professor of journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and author of the book The Botany of Desire raised the question, Are humans using animals or are we being used?
We humans think that we control nature, but maybe it's the other way around, Pollan argued. For example, we assume that we're using bees for our own purposes, such as collecting honey, but perhaps bees think that they've orchestrated the whole relationship to their benefit. After all, we do provide them food and shelter. Other domesticated animals and even plants might look at all of the care we give them and think, those humans are doing just what I want them to.
Science and spiritualityAnother speaker, Candace Slater, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC-Berkeley, compared the different ways that two groups of people view one piece of land. In her talk, "Geoparks and Geo-Stories: The UNESCO Araripe Basin Geopark Proposal and Other Transformation Narratives from Northeast Brazil," Slater juxtaposed the perspective of scientists trying to get approval for a nature reserve with that of religious pilgrims who revere the same site. The scientists, she said, value the region because it contains a 70-million-year-old fossil record of early plants and animals. But the pilgrims flock to the site because of a miracle that is said to have happened there. To illustrate the common ground between the two seemingly disparate viewpoints, Slater pointed to a location in the park where a religious statue lies atop the oldest granite in Brazil. Here, she said, scientists experience scientific beauty, pilgrims experience spiritual beauty and both extract profound meaning from the natural landscape.
By examining the biases of our own views of the environment, we may be able to transcend them, added Tiews, which could lead to more effective environmental policy in the end. "The ultimate result … is that there will be these productive interactions and ways for people to move forward in their own work using the multiple perspectives that they've gotten today," he said.
"We brought together nine different people who come from very different backgrounds, plus an audience with very different backgrounds, and challenged them to transcend their own knowledge base and see if we could find some common ground that would allow us to share what we know and also to find new paths forward," added conference co-organizer Jeff Koseff, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and co-director of the Woods Institute.
"I think this is the best interdisciplinary symposium I've ever been to," said panelist Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Some brains were working away on putting together this marvelous cross-section of sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts."
Clara Moskowitz is a science-writing intern with the Stanford News Service.