I think of community as a circle. When we draw the circle too small, excluding others on the basis of race, nationality, or religious preference, our attempts to build community suffer. Our efforts also fall short when we exclude others on the basis of species or divide the Earth community into good and bad species and include only those we deem as good. Those divisions violate the fundamental unity of life and create artificial barriers that can only impede community-making.
Including the entire Earth community in our circle of care and concern presents other problems, particularly when we fear or despise certain species. If we are to be nurtured by our community, we have to feel at home in it. Fear and mistrust prevent us from feeling at ease. So does animosity. Anxiety levels elevated, we risk becoming increasingly isolated, pitted against the imagined ill-will of the Earth community. Unless we work to examine and dispel those kinds of negative feelings, we are destined to keep the circle small, and inadvertently limit our own potential and capacity to experience and respond to the grand diversity of life.
Few would argue that in Western society the most limited and distorted relationship we have is with the insect kingdom. Our beliefs about insects and our readiness to think the worst of them color our experiences with real insects and transform the natural world into an alien landscape populated by robotic and malevolent specks of life. And although many believe that it is natural to dislike insects, there is a great deal of evidence that demonstrates that our feelings are learned, not innate--a subject I have written about elsewhere. So how do we include and re-connect with these unjustly neglected, feared, and largely despised creatures? Thinking about them as our relations is a good first step. Another approach is to see them as part of ourselves.
Deep ecologists tell us that our individual identities do not stop at our skin but encompass the natural world. This means that each of us has an "ecological self," rooted and grounded in the natural world. It is this self that recognizes all other species as being aspects of itself and members of its true community--not just the small number that we have embraced as a culture.
I have long suspected that our ecological selves must have a deep and abiding affinity for insects. Judging from the vast number of insect species in the world and their importance to the functioning of all life on Earth, how could our deepened and extended identities not reflect that fact? I like the idea of having multi-legged roots and multi-legged relations. It means we don't have to work at connection. We are already connected. It also means we have places inside ourselves the right shape for insects and affinities for specific species that, if we were more open, would push us to seek their counterparts in the natural world. Given our ties to insects, it is easier to see (although no less disturbing considering our continued pesticide use and biological warfare) that the current alienation from these creatures in the culture is merely a false overlay on a deep and life-serving connection.
Much of my current work centers on reminding people that insects and related creatures are part of our community and that we can cultivate a positive relationship with them if our intentions are clear. I don't buy the popular notion that says we can't identify with insects or feel empathy for them or their situation because they are structurally different from us. As those of us who have embraced the natural world and view other species as part of our community already know, seeing the world through another creature's eyes does not require structural similarity. It requires only a willingness to blur the boundaries that separate and distinguish one from another and participate in another's worldview. From that place natural empathy and compassion flow forth.
Identifying with insects isn't much different from identifying with any other species--including our fellow human beings. When we are open to them, the identification is simply there, and we readily see ourselves in them and their situation. In his essay "Self Realization," philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term "deep ecology," tells of the time he was looking under a microscope at two chemicals interacting when a flea jumped off a nearby animal and landed in the acid pool. Unable to save it, Naess watched it die. "Its movements were dreadfully expressive. What I felt was, naturally, a painful compassion and empathy."[1] Later he realized that if he was alienated from the flea and not seeing anything in the flea that was like himself, the flea's plight would have left him indifferent. Compassion and empathy always arise from identifying with the other.
Contrast his experience with those of a modern "flea circus master" who has drawn her circle of community too small and is deeply alienated from the creatures she uses in her show. The woman, a former artist, recently brought her fleas to "perform" at the prestigious San Francisco Exploratorium, a museum of science, art, and human perception. As did the flea circus master of three hundred years ago, she glues costumes to the bodies of every flea in her sideshow. Once they are attired, she gets the insects to perform feats of strength, such as pulling a toy train thousands of times their own weight by gluing ropes to their bodies and then to the train and then subjecting the insects to light, something she learned that they greatly dislike. The shackled fleas pull the vehicle in their desperate effort to get out of the light.
In the flea orchestra, the fleas are not only glued into chairs, they have tiny instruments glued to their legs. As they struggle in vain to escape, the movement of their legs gives the impression that they are playing the instruments. In another act, two fleas with formal attire glued to their bodies are then glued together--back to back. Their panic and frantic attempts to escape make them whirl in a circle like two dancers.
The show, which was featured in a prominent alternative magazine, played to an appreciative audience and was considered a great success--which means that those watching were as disconnected from fleas as the circus master. Fleas were simply outside their circle of concern, not part of their community, and so they did not feel their plight. A learned dislike for these creatures and a vague anxiety about their disease-carrying potential (for the record, the flea that likes to feed on people rarely carries the plague bacteria) suppressed what might under other circumstances have invoked a response of distress and outrage to such acts of cruelty.
The disconnect is also evident in the magazine interviewer who presented the show as artistic. She said that the artist has "brilliantly melded science, ecology, aesthetics, and humor into her current body of work" and that "there's something refreshingly honest in her act--something primal, raw, and unedited."[2] But if there is humor in such a show, it is the dark ridicule that emerges when we are disconnected from the other and have excluded them from the circle of our concern. And what is primal is not abuse of other life-forms, but our genuine connection to all other species, an affinity characterized in native societies by wonder and respect.
Including fleas in our circle of community may mean finding our voices and protesting this kind of exploitation that passes for entertainment. It may also mean setting boundaries without hating fleas for living as they were created to do, and seeking balance instead of total eradication.
I like to think that by understanding the ways in which we are taught not to like or identify with insects, most of us would, in time, reorient ourselves and be able to view all insects heartfully and as part of our community. Doing so puts us on a direct pathway toward the maturity necessary to reach our own potential, for we must entertain all kinds of "otherness" to discover our essential selves. Howard Thurman would agree. This philosopher, poet, and mystic believed that when there is deliberate acceptance between people and other species, "the potential of each life undergoes a radical expansion."[3]
I suspect that we may already have guides and helpers to help us in this redemption process. Consider those insect species zealous in their efforts to remain close to us. When we moved away from the natural world into artificial living environments, they are the ones who followed us, moving into the cracks and crevices we couldn't plug. Perhaps it is these insect species, the ones that insist on sharing our living space and carry the heaviest burden of our ill-will, that are the messengers of our ecological self telling us that they will not be excluded from our community. How many then are we in conflict with? How many parts of ourselves have we condemned, and at what point do we see their appearance not as something unpleasant to deal with, but as a remarkable opportunity to stop the war and make peace?
Community-building will always suffer when in arrogance, ignorance, and fear we draw our circle too small. Redrawing it now to include the natural world will not only free us from countless battles with others we have insisted are "not us" and "not kin," but it will enlarge our sense of self and well-being. Forsaking our fugitive status and returning to the embrace of our true community promises to enrich our lives beyond measure, firmly connecting us to the larger pattern and purpose that informs all life.
What heartens me is that I believe that the idea of including insects and other previously excluded species in our circle of concern is one that our modern culture is finally ready to receive. I note how insects still come to us in our homes and gardens, and in our dreams. Indigenous people regarded them as messengers of the creative and numinous forces operating in the universe. We would do well to adopt their view, for it has been my observation that insects do seem to be devoted in their attempts to get our attention and stay with us. We might pray that our job is as straightforward as relinquishing any misgivings we have about them and letting the lens through which we see them clear. When we do, all possibilities for identification, and the gifts of community, are once again present in the moment, and we will be reunited with our ecological selves and infused with its vital energies to work, as the insects work, on behalf of the Earth.
Notes:
[1] Arne Naess, "Self Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World," in Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings, John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, Arne Naess. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1988, p. 22.
[2] Marilyn Berlin Snell, "Little Big Top: Maria Fernanda Cardosa Reinvents the Flea Circus." Utne Reader, May-June 1996, p. 68.
[3] Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground: An Inquiry into the Basis of Man's Experience of Community. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986, p. 63.
Joanne Lauck is an environmental educator and the author of a new book called The Voice of the Infinite in the Small: Revisioning the Insect-Human Connection (SwanRaven & Co., August 1998). To order call 1-800-366-0264. To contact the author write her at 1724 Alberta Ave., San Jose, CA 95125 or e-mail her at [email protected]. She is looking for stories of positive interactions between people and creeping creatures for possible inclusion in a second book.
�1999 Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 1999
Volume 9, Number 1
Cultivating Community
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