Live In Agreement With Nature

Cleanthes was the Greek philosopher who took the Stoic principle from Zenos’s “to live in agreement” and added “nature,” summarizing the guiding principle of life as being “to live in agreement with Nature.” The Stoics took this philosophy seriously. They thought of this as a cosmic law.

Our current society—which a Cambridge researcher by the name of Luke Kemp told me came about after the advent of grain storage—is mostly dominated by an aggression to extract driven by individuals he terms as ‘goliaths.’ This is a serious problem.

I had a conversation with a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Khatijah Rahmat. She studies elephant temporality (the ability to experience time). They put this conversation on their website here if you want to check it out. Or you can listen to the player I’ve embedded here.

Elephants, like us, experience time. How we measure or observe this is a tricky process. Clocks don’t measure time; they only track the ticking of a pendulum, digital or otherwise. Albert Einstein was able to show that time can bend based on gravity and speed. But you cannot take a ball of time and put it on a scale. Time is a background.

So, how do we know elephants experience time? This is the very thing her research is about. One of those ways is through what Rahmat calls human-impacted time. Or rather, the way in which a human influences the time that elephants experience through deforestation (for agriculture, for multinational corporations producing timber)  and other means. 

This doesn’t just kill elephants. It potentially interrupts the life and the lived experience of elephant societies for generations. What I found most interesting about our conversation is this: the fact that we cause this generational trauma to elephants that they remember, and then pass on to their children, is almost entirely absent from our current proposed solutions to helping conserve elephants. In that our conservation measures are mostly spatial or economic, and largely don’t take into account the social devastation and suffering we are causing to elephant communities. Just like us, elephants teach their children. If we slaughter a matriarch, she cannot pass on key knowledge to her children necessary to survive. Female elephants are often the guardians of knowledge in elephant culture.

By thinking mostly in terms of numbers and outputs—the way the financial world functions—we are ignoring the Stoic imperative of life. To live in agreement with nature. 

Our patriarchal society oversimplifies animal suffering, or masks it entirely. We often think of animal suffering from the perspective of raw carnage or killing because that is easy to spot. But we rarely think about it from the perspective of the unseen pain we cause nature. 

Rahmaht told me a story about a notable elephant researcher who was conducting a test on elephant poo. One of the elephants who reacted badly to the laxative threw a pineapple at the researcher every time he was on-site. He was able to figure out why. She knew that before he arrived on the scene, she didn’t have any issues, and after he arrived, her troubles began.

This anecdote made me laugh when I first heard it, and now it disturbs me. It’s a microcosm of a larger conversation we are engaging in with nature right now. Or rather, nature is trying to engage us in.

This elephant directly communicating with humanity that it was in pain—in a language we can understand—I feel, should provoke you to analyze all the ways in which we do not see the impacts our society has. Both to animals and to ourselves. Animals are far more sentient than we give them credit for. Even ones as cognitively gifted as elephants. 

The older I get, the more I realize that the relationship we have with nature, and the space we occupy, is a fundamental responsibility whether we choose to accept it or not. It’s a courtesy, actually, when non-human beings let us know when we are doing something that is breaking the pact we have with them. That helps us as well. It helps us not hurt something we entirely rely upon.

Patriarchal society often holds up humans and nature in two different baskets as if they are not connected with or impact each other, and this is physically and mentally not true. Even ancient philosophers knew this. The Stoics cared about it so much that it was the foundation of their philosophy “to live in agreement with nature.” Humans are a part of nature, and what we do impacts nature. Pushing it past a limit it cannot sustain itself under is going to hurt humans too, and in very many ways already does.

I write this because modern society (or patriarchal systems) make this very difficult for us to see clearly. It functions at a speed where we are not encouraged (or allowed) to slow down and stop and see what we are doing. And to listen. We have deadlines, jobs to get to, people to see. We think of queuing up in traffic as being something everybody does to get to work without questioning whether we should have to. And the answer is that we don’t. It is simply the option we’ve chosen for only the past 100 years of the over 300,000 years that humans are known to have existed. And at the same time, the amount of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere keeps ticking up every single day. And it has only been doing this mostly because of the amount of fossil fuels we are burning.

Nature itself is keeping score even if many of us aren’t. Nature itself is talking to us every single day, even if we aren’t listening.

Most of us did not choose the current infrastructure we were handed, or the system we are currently mandated to function in.

Questioning that system, I believe, is essential. It is essential to question the world view that nature is this infinite or separate thing that is just always there, that we can use endlessly. It’s none of those things. While the fundamentals of life can't be destroyed, the presence of life is not guaranteed to remain where it is; it is actually the opposite. It is not infinite either; it can be extracted and never return. And to some extent, we also have the power to control/impact aspects of it quite negatively. 

Viewing all life as something that we are in constant relationship with should alter how you think about your own life, the choices you make, the things you support and value, and perhaps most importantly, the people you trust with leadership positions. If someone is constantly telling you that we must grow our economies endlessly, ask how you can grow something endlessly when there is a finite amount of land and resources that we all share?

If a leader sees this cliff edge, and not only doesn’t do anything about it, but steps on the pedal harder, should we trust that leader?

The fact that elephants can experience time, remember, and tell us about it is a good thing. Because if we are listening, that means we can change what we are doing.

Photo Credit: The famous rock-breaking cherry tree, known as Ishiwarizakura. Morioka, Japan. Photo by Mike DiGirolamo