The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well in the World - Hardcover

Ferguson, Gary

 
9781524743383: The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well in the World
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1524743380 ISBN 13: 9781524743383
Verlag: Dutton, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A riveting manifesto for the millions of people who long to forge a more vital, meaningful connection to the natural world to live a better, more fulfilling life
 
Looking around at the world today—a world of skyscrapers, super highways, melting ice caps, and rampant deforestation—it is easy to feel that humanity has actively severed its ties with nature. It’s no wonder that we are starving to rediscover a connection with the natural world.

With new insights into the inner workings of nature's wonders, Gary Ferguson presents a fascinating exploration into how many of the most remarkable aspects of nature are hardwired into our very DNA. What emerges is a dazzling web of connections that holds powerful clues about how to better navigate our daily lives. 

Through cutting-edge data and research, drawing on science, psychology, history, and philosophy, The Eight Master Lessons of Nature will leave readers with a feeling of hope, excitement, and joy. It is a dazzling statement about the powers of physical, mental, and spiritual wellness that come from reclaiming our relationship with Mother Nature. Lessons about mystery, loss, the fine art of rising again, how animals make us smarter, and how the planet’s elders make us better at life are unforgettable and transformative.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gary Ferguson has written for a variety of national publications, including Vanity Fair, Orion, The Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, and is the author of twenty-five books on nature and science. In March 2017 Gary's lead essay for Orion magazine--titled "A Deeper Boom"--was selected by the American Society of Journalists and Authors as the Best Essay of 2016. For the past twenty years, he has given keynote lectures on the ecological and psychological values of nature around the country. He is also a member of the National Geographic Lecture Series, and for ten years--from 2006-2016--was on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

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Lesson One Mystery: Wisdom Begins When We Embrace All That We Don’t Know As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

-Albert Schweitzer

When Albert Einstein got stuck on a problem-and truth be told, he got stuck quite a bit-he'd often go outside. Not to some remote wild landscape but to a little patch of forest on the Princeton campus, maintained especially for him, known as the Institute Woods. You might assume he was merely trying to clear his head, as a lot of us do when we step out for a quick change of scenery. But it's a more intriguing story.

Once out in those familiar woods, Einstein was said to stop and look around, taking in the trees and shrubs, the sky overhead, and the grasses underfoot. At first he'd try to imagine the workings of it all, knowing full well he couldn't do it. Consider that even today, more than sixty years after his death, we still don't fully understand everything that's happening in a square yard of dirt, let alone a patch of woods. But that was the point: He wanted to intentionally overwhelm himself. Get disoriented. Blow his mind. And thus, with his intellect brought to its knees, Einstein consistently found himself in a freer, more intuitive space.

Look deep into the mysteries of nature, he liked to say, and then you will understand better.

Einstein, like many other great scientists, knew that no problem was ever solved on the plane where it first revealed itself. So he used the woods to lift himself to a higher place, one less defined and more creative. Touching the considerable mystery afforded by that modest grove of trees allowed him to connect with what he considered "the source of all true art and science." He said as much to his students too, advising them that if they had a choice between gaining knowledge and maintaining a relationship with mystery, they should choose mystery.

That kind of choosing requires a very different kind of intelligence than the one with which the culture of Einstein's time was familiar, or even comfortable talking about. Yet he was absolutely certain that those who wouldn't or couldn't connect with mystery were "if not dead, then at least blind."

Albert Einstein isn't the only superstar with a penchant for dialing into mystery. Peering into the heavens at night, Carl Sagan claimed that science wasn't only compatible with mystery but was a profound source of it. The mystery that's revealed, he said, "when we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life . . . is surely spiritual."

Contemporary physicist Edward Witten, long a champion of string theory and arguably one of the smartest humans on the planet, sees mystery at the most fundamental layer of human existence. Meanwhile, Jane Goodall remains unwilling to explain life through truth and science alone. "There's so much mystery. There's so much awe."

If we're to make friends again with mystery, we'd be smart to learn something about where it likes to show up. One place it feels totally at home, of course, is in the arms of wonder. Which is lucky, because in truth we live in a time of extraordinary "scientific wow!" Who wouldn't be a little thrilled to learn that spiders can fly by employing electrical charges in the atmosphere? Standing on their hind legs, they cast silk into the air. That silk is negatively charged and repels similar negative charges in the surrounding atmosphere, sending the spiders ballooning into the heavens. Or who wouldn't feel a twitch of bewilderment to think that 99.99999 percent of our body is comprised of the empty space that exists between the electrons, neutrons, and protons-each one of those an element of the atoms that give us form. Furthermore, if you got rid of all this space, then the actual mass of your body-your "substance"-would be so small you couldn't even see it. In fact, if we took away all the space in all the bodies of every human being on the planet, the mass that remained would be about the size of a sugar cube.

Think, too, for a minute about the fact that as you walk down the street today you won't really be making contact with the ground. Rather, the magnetic force of the electrons in your shoes will be pushing away the electrons in the pavement, which means that at a supremely close-up level you really aren't walking through your life with your feet on the ground at all. You're floating. And then of course that old favorite: the fact that you could blast off from Earth on a journey to find the end of space, travel a hundred thousand miles an hour for the next ten thousand years, and not be one inch closer.

Or how about the extraordinarily curious fact that any of us is here at all? If the gravity in the universe had been stronger by just a tiny bit, then the stars that formed because of that gravity would have been much smaller. Our own sun might have lasted for only ten or twenty thousand years, fizzling out long before we humans or any other creature had a chance at life. Likewise, if the strength of the force that binds the nucleus of an atom were just a wee bit weaker, there wouldn't be the current range of chemicals in the universe. And without that perfect array of chemical complexity: no life.

Far from disenchanting nature, as early scientists of the seventeenth century pledged to do, contemporary biology, physics, medicine, and ecology are admitting its enchantment all over again, inviting us with every passing year to perceive a more unbridled universe. In recent decades especially, scientists have found themselves looking beyond the desire to hold reality still, drawn instead to the mysterious and fluid nature of the planet and the life it sustains. Showing us with every passing day how the physical and even psychological functions of this life are vigorous, dynamic, and effervescent.

The discoveries of modern science are more than fantastic enough to explode our intellects, which is really the first order of business when it comes to befriending mystery. But you can't really see mystery face on. It takes looking sideways, like the way you can only see certain faint stars by glancing slightly off center. The trick, in other words, is to manage the tools of perception.

Our perception expands when we realize that nature is engaged in a very big game of passing things back and forth-a mysterious ebbing and flowing, an appearing and disappearing act once described by philosopher Neil Evernden as the rhythm of exchange. One thing talks while another listens. One thing touches ground while another lifts off and flies. One part of the system waxes while another wanes. One thing dies and another is born.

When we link this rhythm-of-exchange idea to the concept of nature in ancient Greece-phusis, which refers to nature as life emerging from itself-what begins to shimmer on the edges of our imaginations is an unflagging set of symphonic movements all linked together to create the vast, incomprehensible weave that both holds and extends far beyond the more obvious anchor points of daily life. In truth, your very existence depends not so much on "things" as on rhythms of relationship that transcend the boundaries of your skin. It's a mind-boggling set of interactions that renders everything inside you and around you different this day than the last, all of it shifting and emerging and passing away.

So if this is how the world is-such a grand river that you can't immerse your foot in the same place twice-how come we have such a hard time seeing it that way? For starters, consider that while Albert Einstein, Jane Goodall, and Carl Sagan were building their perception and ultimately their inspiration from what can't really be known, embracing mystery at every turn, key parts of society were preoccupied with essentially organizing...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1524743380
ISBN 13 
9781524743383
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

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Hamburg
Hamburg
Deutschland

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