Knowing, Not Knowing

     Mark Twain once said: It's not what you don't know that kills you.  It's what you know for sure that ain't true.  There's a lot that I don't know, and also a lot that I think I know only to discover that when  someone asks "why," or "how" or "who said that," well the answer is that I don't really "know" the full  answer.  The Marx Brothers summed it up best when their cocky boss says, "I don't think. I know!" to which Groucho quickly replies, "Well I don't think you know either."  That's me.  It's all in the details, as they say, and often I find that the things I tend to "know" are often only the highlights floating on the top.  Information comes, but what stays in my head seems to be only bits and pieces similar to how data is transmitted, "packets" of information condensed but never arriving as a whole (our eyes and brains, for example, cannot see the "flicker" between images or pixels on a screen; or depict the 90% loss of info in a song which is streamed or placed on a CD).  We sort of just fill in the blanks...and it turned out that I had (and have) a lot of blanks.  But first, let me unload a couple of my rants (and here's where you can decide whether you want to keep reading since you're likely already blitzed with too much not-so-good news)...

"Hunters' in Mozambique.  Photo: Sports Afield

     I'm back from Africa and now fully recovered, in a sense.  The "normality" of the life we left in the U.S. now back; all the routines we left, good and bad, seemingly have returned.  But much of what my wife and I encountered in Africa seems to have left a few barbs that have stayed with us, a few stingers we wre't aware of that are now fermenting into deeper questions about how little we knew about another place or culture.  We had left our political landscape only to apparently enter another one of a similar nature (who knew the Wagner group --which attempted the military disruption in Russia recently-- was so prevalent in South Africa, said The Conversation).  But overall --be it Africa or the U.S-- who or what was and is responsible for the pilfering of a people or of a nation (poachers?, the Supreme Court?); and hovering the background like a barely visible shadow, the question of why my brother came to such an unexpected end to his life while my wife and I traveled such a vast distance and came back unscathed?  As you likely noticed, catching up on my reading led me to again begin asking questions, and to think some of that came because of a cartoon and a professor.

     The cartoon came from The New Yorker and featured two fish talking, the caption reading: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day -- teach a man to fish and you unlock a new epoch of terror.  Perhaps a bit of Africa and its long history of poaching and trophy hunting still overshadowed the good conservation being done, at least in my mind.  Teach a man to hunt and, well, a quick peek at Sports Afield showed that this urge to shoot something, anything, is still "alive" and prominent in our world, albeit primarily in our culture.  That said, a well-balanced piece in the magazine noted that: Certainly, across the unimaginable vastness of Africa there are unusual areas that, by accidents of habitat, naturally host concentrations of wildlife.  Many of these special areas have been preserved as National Parks, famous places such as Etosha, Kruger, Masai Mara, Ngorongoro, Serengeti.  By long-established law and tradition, these are not hunting areas, no more than Yellowstone and Denali...If you want to see a lot of animals on a constant basis and rack up a big bag, then there are no places on Earth better than the well-manicured and often over-stocked game ranches of southern Africa.  There is nothing at all wrong with these places or this approach, but don’t delude yourself that this is wild Africa or that, having savored the amazing bounty, you have experienced wild Africa...Naturally, many non-hunters don’t know the difference, and anti-hunters don’t want to know the difference.  However, most hunting areas in wild Africa are marginal lands, often arid or swamp, unsuited for pasture and agriculture, and lacking the natural beauty and species diversity to be preserved as Parks supported by ecotourism. 

Lions raised in a canned-hunt farm.  Photo: Bloodlions

Still, my first view of three giraffes gracefully moving away from our slow-moving vehicle made it clear to me that I could no more imagine myself stepping out of the vehicle to shoot those docile-appearing animals (which we still knew to be wild) than I could picture  doing the same to a crowd of innocent people; but as of July 4th, our day of Independence,* we passed our 300th mass shooting here in the U.S....parades, schools, shopping malls, churches.  Didn't matter, apparently; just another herd of African buffalo (or humans).  Noted Hakai about a recent study: Analyzing data compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers have now found that humans kill, collect, or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species.  That’s about one-third of all vertebrate species on Earth, and it’s a breadth that’s up to 300 times more than the next top predator in any ecosystem.  And don't get me (or The Conversation) started on canned hunting...

    The professor piece that influenced these recent thoughts was Dr. Roland Griffiths, a neuroscientist who was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer; as he told the NY Times: When I first got that diagnosis, because I work out regularly, I watch my diet, I sleep well, this came out of left field.  There was this period in which it felt like I was going to wake up and say, “Boy, that was”--to put it in psychedelic language-- “a bummer, a bad dream.”  But soon after that I started to contemplate the different psychological states that would be naturally forthcoming with a diagnosis like mine: depression, anxiety, denial, anger, or adopting some belief system of religious outcomes, which as a scientist I was not cut out to do.  I have a long-term meditation practice and the focus there is on the nature of mind, of consciousness, and one comes to see that thoughts, emotions, are transient.  They’re appearances of mind that you needn’t identify with.  That practice --and some experience with psychedelics--  was incredibly useful because what I recognized is that the best way to be with this diagnosis was to practice gratitude for the preciousness of our lives...So I asked the cancer: “What are you doing here?...This process, is it going to kill me?” The answer was, “Yes, you will die, but everything is absolutely perfect; there’s meaning and purpose to this that goes beyond your understanding, but how you’re managing that is exactly how you should manage it.” 

     Absolutely perfect.  Hmm, not so for one of the many victims of last year's 4th of July celebration in Highland Park, Illinois.  Here's how Bloomberg Prognosis put it: Sheila Gutman, 63, was shot just below her ankle bone while trying to usher her family to safety.  (The rest were physically unharmed.) “My days are still completely consumed with caring for this,” she said.  The bullet blew out half of her heel bone and part of her Achilles tendon, according to her doctors.  Repairing the damage has not been easy.  The technique used to repair Gutman’s heel had never before been described in medical literature, says Jason Ko, one of the Northwestern Medicine surgeons that performed the reconstructive surgery.  Ko and his colleague Anish Kadakia rebuilt Gutman’s heel with a cadaver bone, using healthy skin and fat from other parts of her body to cover it.  The first tissue transfer didn’t hold and the doctors had to try again. “We needed this to be 100% perfect or we’d have to amputate her foot,” Ko told me.  The initial surgeries and recovery kept her hospitalized for 52 days last summer.  She’s had eight surgeries in the last year and likely still needs another.  A year later, Prognosis wrote about the occupants of the Titan submersible whose occupants included a known Titanic explorer and 3 billionaires, one of whom had brought his son.  The search was massive and involved the US Coast Guard and Navy, as well as rescue companies, each operating outside their jurisdiction (and budgets).  Yet as the July 4th Prognosis noted:  On Independence Day, many Americans will think of the Statue of Liberty and its neighboring Ellis Island, where so many immigrants got their first sight of the US.  But for today’s refugees, the world isn’t prepared to mobilize and come to the rescue when their lives are in danger.  More than 1,200 people died on the Mediterranean Sea last year, according to Human Rights Watch, many of them migrants trying to reach Europe.  Just last month, scores of people died when a trawler capsized off of southern Greece, according to reports.  Even so, no European ships patrol the areas where boats run into trouble and the European Union’s border and coast guard conducts aerial surveillance in service of interceptions and returns, not rescues.  Everything is perfect?  As field vet Peter Rogers told us, a rhino sheds tears and emits a crying sound when it's shot and knows it is dying.  How can that be perfect?  So yes, beyond my understanding is putting it mildly...

     Can you tell that I'm back in the U.S., back to endless speculative (and often negative) news, back to rising prices and to other factors seemingly meant to keep us an arm's distance from what is good in the world?  Speaking of the world, National Geographic featured a cover that said 8 BILLION...are we nearing peak population?  In 25 years, Nigeria will surpass the United States in population (Nigeria is 1/10th the size of the U.S.).  Jam that many people into a small area and where DO the animals go?  Picture your own home; a weed or spider or other thing appears and your reaction is to get rid of it somehow -- this is MY area now and you don't belong here.  How would an elephant or scorpion know that?  But eight BILLION of us!  Eight billion people needing to eat and drink and poop.  It all brought to mind a campaign many years ago which Coca Cola used to explain just how large a figure of ONE billion was; the advert said: A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth.  A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged.  A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music.  A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning.  That was some years ago (as it was for our population).  Today Coca Cola serves nearly double that number...1.9 billion Coca Cola drinks each day.

Photo of hippo: Jean Jacques Alcalay

    Okay, that ends my rants (for now, at least).  What I have learned is that I somehow struggle to see the big picture since things are not always what they seem, such as the photo on the left.  When writing about the brutality of the Spanish in their quest to conquer the Americas, Barry Lopez wrote: It is perilous, of course, to think that we would have behaved differently...And if we say, yes, all right, that was us, and the pattern continues, then how are we to understand it?  How can we clarify for ourselves what went wrong?  How can we claim not that we are different but we wish, seeing what has come in the wake of our acts, to set off now in a different direction?...We're anxious now to know what the land has to say to us, how it responds to our use of it.  And we are curious, too, about indigenous systems of natural philosophy, how our ow Western proposals might be answered by some bit of this local wisdom, an insight into how to conduct our life here so that it might be richer.  And so that what is left of what we have subjugated might determine it own life.  A similar view was written by Editor Jason Mark of Sierra: The most exciting thing about the pivot from conservation to restoration is that while the former is (mostly) passive, the latter is active.  Conservation draws lines on a map to keep our the bulldozers and chainsaws; rewilding is about coloring those lines in.  Ecological recvoery will take a lot of work -- and that's a good thing.  Just as we'll need people to manufacture solar panels and get them onto roofs, we'll need people to help replant burned forests, restore stream banks, and rewild the range.  This effort of ecological repair can be labor of millions, the work of a generation.  Our task today is not simply to leave no trace, but rather to make a virtuous mark and ensure that we leave this wounded planet better than we found it.

     And here's what I do know...there is a lot of kindness and goodness in the world.  Kevin Kelly wrote a book about advice he wished he'd taken to heart earlier, one of which was that when a person dies...The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.  But a quick glance at a site such as Global Giving gives you an insight how many people and animals need help, and how many more people are stepping up to the plate to give help.  Since 2002, this non-profit service that links people to other non-profits, has passed on $837 million from nearly 2 million people, all of which has helped to fund nearly 35,000 projects in over 170 countries (on July 12th, the endangered species center we attended will have a chance to increase their own donations from Global Giving by 30-50%, helping both their cheetah and rhino projects).

     Another bit of advice editor Kelly offered was this: Don't reserve your kindest praise for a person until their eulogy.  Tell them while they are alive, when it makes a difference to them.  Write it in a letter they keep.  Last year I had written to my brother on his birthday, telling him how fortunate I felt to have him as a brother...to always laugh when we talk, to share stories and books, to gain your family and historical perspectives, to rely on your wisdom and advice...but mainly to share the love we've had over the decades.  No one has what we have in our lives as brothers; no one is as lucky.  After he passed, I was helping to go through some of the things in his desk and found that he had kept the card, perhaps just as I had kept his when he wrote: It is an honor having you as a friend.  The card my brother sent was a beautiful one which said: The most visible creators I know of are those artists whose medium is life itself, the ones who express the inexpressible -- without brush, hammer, clay or guitar.  They neither paint not sculpt -- their medium is being.  Whatever their presence touches has increased life.  They see and don't have to draw.  They are the artists of being alive...My brother added at the end: A perfect description of how you live your life.

     So yes, if I had my own bit of advice to give myself it would be that there will always be things we won't know or will know pieces of but not understand.  Perhaps we made it back from Africa for a reason, just as many of us make it back from shopping or going to a 4th of July parade without getting shot or killed.  It may all be random, or perhaps it is indeed all "perfect" in the big scheme of things.  Who knows?  I certainly have come to realize that I not only don't know why, but perhaps shouldn't expect to.  Why do so many people shoot other things?  Why do so many countries produce weapons?  Why isn't the world a perfect place?  Or perhaps it is and it's just that we can't see it.  Professor Griffiths (mentioned above, the neuroscientist with stage 4 colon cancer) told an interviewer this: I want everyone to appreciate the joy and wonder of every single moment of their lives. We should be astonished that we are here when we look around at the exquisite wonder and beauty of everything. I think everyone has a sense of that already.  It’s leaning into that more fully. There is a reason every day to celebrate that we’re alive, that we have another day to explore whatever this gift is of being conscious, of being aware, of being aware that we are aware.  That’s the deep mystery that I keep talking about.  That’s to be celebrated!

Note: The photo of the hippo is an example of things not being what they seem -- the hippo is merely yawning and not concerned or after the bird (who seems equally unconcerned)

*July 2nd was the day the U.S. notified Britain of its independence, said The National Archives.  But July 2nd was also the signing of the Civil Rights Act by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, a declaration which gave every citizen independence, said CBS News.  Said the article: In a deeply-divided America, where faith in government has ebbed, and affirmative action is under siege, it's worth reflecting on the fruition of the Civil Rights Act as a snapshot of our country at its best...when a President put the weight of his office behind racial justice, dismissing adverse political consequences by responding, "What the hell's the presidency for?"