Grounding Knowledge: Environmental Philosophy, Epistemology, and Place

1. Unnatural Knowledge

1 Unnatural Knowledge Places are important because all we really have are our particular places, our localities. We do not live in the universal, only in our small portions of the universe. Sherman Paul, “From Here/Now: Mostly on Place” Twenty years ago, Paul Shepard broke new ground by publishing a number of provocative books exploring the links between the natural environments in which humans evolved and the social, cultural, and intellectual structures that make balanced and creative thought possible. In Nature and Madness, Shepard claimed that the important formative relationship between the infant and primary caregiver is itself situated relative to another equally important series of relationships. He observed that over evolutionary time, caregiving had taken place in the middle of “a surround of living plants, rich in texture, smell, and motion. The unfiltered, unpolluted air, the flicker of wild birds, real sunshine and rain, mud to be tasted and tree bark to grasp, the sounds of wind and water, the calls of animals and insects as well as human voices—all these are not vague and pleasant amenities for the infant, but the stuff out of which its second grounding, even while in its mother’s arms, has begun. The outdoors is also in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of that fetal landscape. . . . The surroundings are also that-which-willbe -swallowed, internalized, incorporated as the self.”1 Shepard believed that the physical geography and the biological diversity accompanying early child1 hood supplied a critical grounding for the development of mind. He worried that contemporary alienation from traditional childhood experiences in nature risked causing us various sorts of cognitive harm. Our systems of thought had emerged out of particular kinds of landscapes and the activities we historically practiced there. Dissociating ourselves from those familiar places in nature would yield a certain kind of madness. Although it was certainly provocative, Shepard’s thesis about nature and madness always hovered around the fringes of respectability. Despite a significant number of readers who admired the breadth and daring of his vision, others rejected the idea that anything about environment could possibly be important to matters of mind. His work remained a little too controversial, a little too interdisciplinary, and, frankly, a little too difficult to read—moving at breathtaking speed between biology, anthropology, theology, poetics, and psychology—ever to pass wide critical muster. Shepard frequently inspired, but his work remained marginal. An additional barrier to the broad acceptance of his work was that when Shepard was at the peak of his productivity there were no suitable disciplines available to house his odd-sounding remarks about the intertwining of place and mind. Neither epistemology nor empirical studies of mind nor the philosophy of science had prepared any such ground. Environmental philosophy barely existed, ecopsychology still lay some years in the future, and only a few environmental studies programs were up and running. His suggestions about how thought and mind were tied into the physical environment often read like a form of slightly misfitted, paleolithic romanticism. Nobody in academic circles wanted to claim them as their own. But pioneers cut paths that others can follow. Two decades later, the situation has significantly changed. There is now considerably more ground prepared to house those provocative claims about the relationship between place and mind. In this first chapter, I begin to explore some of that ground. Unlike Shepard, my own claims are not directed toward any conception of human mental health. I have nothing at all to suggest about the causes of madness, but what I have to say has a strong resonance with Shepard’s view that mind and world coexist in a much tighter relationship than has been appreciated in the past. My position is that the physical world offers irreplaceable assistance to mind in the work it does. Thought, knowledge, and belief are not products of mind alone but expressions of its integration and participation with the physical world that lies around it. Recognition of this cooperative relationship brings human knowledge firmly back down to earth. To make such radical claims flies in the face of most of the history of Western philosophy. It challenges one of our most entrenched dogmas about there 2 Unnatural Knowledge being a clear separation between the products of reason and the products of nature. In order to set the scene for the argument for grounding knowledge, it is...