Another gleaning from Kinship, a piece by eco-phenomenologist David Abram, based on a longer earlier piece ruminating on the wonder that is migration: "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." How cranes, monarch butterflies and salmon manage their long migrations (over five generations each time, in the case of the monarchs!), is beyond our understanding. In efforts to make sense of it, we suppose they must have analogs to our navigation tools - internal calendars and compasses and clocks of some sort. Abram won't have it:
Clocks, compasses, and calendars … are by definition external contrivances, ingeniously built tools that we deploy at will. Metaphorically attributing such instrumentation to other animals has confounding implications, suggesting a curious doubleness in the other creatures – a separated sentience or self that regularly steps back, within its body or brain, to consult the map or the calendar. [¶] It seems unlikely, however, that organisms interact with an internal representation of the land in any manner resembling our own engagement with maps….
What's going on, then? Abram dares us to think differently:
Instead of hypothesizing more metaphorical gadgets, adding further accessories to a crane’s or a salmon’s interior array of tools, what if we were to allow that the animal’s migratory skill arises from a felt rapport between its body and the breathing Earth? That a crane’s two-thousand-mile journey across the span of a continent is propelled by the felt unison between its flexing muscles and the sensitive flesh of this planet (this huge curved expanse, roiling with air currents and rippling with electromagnetic pulses), and so is enacted as much by Earth’s vitality as by the bird that flies within it? ...
By adding new gadgets to an animal’s neurological and genetic endowment, we tacitly induce ourselves to focus on relationships interior to the organism (how, for example, does the animal bring its biological clock and it internal map to bear on its compass readings), deflecting our curiosity and attention from the more mysterious relationship that calls such interactions into being.
What is this dynamic alliance between an animal and the animate orb that gives it breath? What seasonal tensions and relaxations in the atmosphere, what subtle torsions in the geosphere help to draw half a million cranes so precisely across the continent? What rolling sequence or succession of blossomings helps summon these millions of butterflies across the belly of the land? What alterations in the olfactory medium, what bursts of solar exuberance through the magnetosphere, what attractions and repulsions, and on and on? …
[P]erhaps it would be useful now and then to consider the large, collective migrations of various creatures as active expressions of the Earth itself. To consider them as slow gestures of a living geology, improvisational experiments that gradually stabilized into habits now necessary to the ongoing metabolism of the sphere. For truly, are not these cyclical pilgrimages – each a huge, creaturely hajj – also pulsations within the broad body of Earth? Are they not ways that divergent places or ecosystems communicate with one another, trading vital qualities essential to their continued flourishing?
While there's something intoxicating in this Gaian vision - and I certainly have no other insight into the marvel of migrations, a marvel Abram makes even more marvelous in his appreciation! - I'm not sure I can quite go there. At least not from an urban modernized living in which connection to place and the community of life is always attenuated by thought and, well, a cosmos of place-unmaking gadgets. But - in thought, at least - I can trace the outline of an understanding, as I consider distant forebears who themselves migrated, or circulated among places, reading wind and sun, the movements of other animals and the dispositions of plants and soils to know where they needed to be.
Or maybe not so distant. As I notice days or nights lengthening and the sun setting farther and farther along a horizon - and especially when skeins of geese fly overhead, or I spot a whale spout far out at sea - I wonder why it is we should stay put when everything else cycles and swirls. Knowing that the delicate monarchs who seem contentedly absorbed in the plants here and now when I spot them should be part of such an epic story cracks everything open.
"Becoming Earthlings," in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (Libertyville, IL: Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021) , 5 vols, vol 1, Planet, 50-62
