Ecosystems have rights

I have a bone to pick with the Dalai Lama. In thinking about how to bridge the gap between science and other worldviews, I've been reading the Dalai Lama’s recent book, The Universe In a Single Atom. It's fascinating to read how someone who started with no exposure to science, in a medieval monastic worldview, took the journey to try to explore and understand science. But, this is very different from an encounter between indigenous knowledge and science. Indigenous culture in Tibet had been pushed underground thousands of years ago beneath the reign of hierarchical monastic religions. I hear Michael's point that everything and everyone has indigenous knowledge, but...Buddhism was from India, not indigenous to Tibet, not any more than Christianity was indigenous to Europe. It was imposed on Europe. The particular hierarchical form of Buddhism in Tibet was not the original form of Buddhism, either. A hierarchical system with wealth concentrated in the hands of a few was not Siddartha Gautama's vision, nor is it Tibet's indigenous form of social organization. Colonial incursions from India and Mongolia had an influence on Tibet's form of government and religion.

On the flip side, of course, Tibetan Buddhism owes its distinctive form to Tibet's indigenous heritage. This is, as I learned it, why Buddhist teachers in Tibet used vivid imagery of spirits and deities to symbolize aspects of mind – by grounding the new religion in images the people of Tibet were already familiar with, by linking it to Tibet's indigenous knowledge. The Bön form of Tibetan Buddhism is said to be closer to Tibet's indigenous form of spirituality, and it is also the form of Tibetan Buddhism most at odds with the Dalai Lama (though recent controversies within Tibetan Buddhism have also been fueled by the colonizing Chinese government). Anyway, the basic point is that the Dalai Lama's encounter with science is quite different from an encounter between science and indigenous knowledge. It's more similar to an encounter between a medieval monk and science.

That's all just a preamble to my main point, which is that the Dalai Lama's obsession in this book with defining which beings are sentient and which are not bothers me. It seems very Catholic. The Catholic church was obsessed for years with defining the differences between humans and animals, all to the purpose of saying that humans were special, particularly blessed by God, unique in our spiritual status. Our special status also meant that ethical considerations applied to humans only, not to animals. Now, Buddhism is a good bit more inclusive in its ethical considerations than the Catholic church was – they include animals in the class of sentient beings, and believe that the ethical injunction to prevent suffering should apply to animals as well. But really, they're just drawing the same line, in a different place.
(This is my journey, from someone who has practiced Tibetan Buddhism in the past and revered the Dalai Lama as the head of those lineages of Buddhism, to being someone who says, "You know what? The Dalai Lama pisses me off!" I can only imagine what my teacher, Lama Lodru, would say!)

Science now provides clear empirical evidence of animal and plant intelligence. Why draw the boundary only around animals? Obviously plant intelligence is of a very different sort, not being based on brains and neurons, but plants do behave and respond and process information about the world around them. A lot of their behaviour is aimed at reproducing and avoiding being eaten, just like animal behaviour. It seems to me that science is much closer to indigenous knowledge on this point than to either Catholicism or Buddhism. Indigenous knowledge comes from the perspective that sentience is certainly not limited to humans, nor to animals, but that plants, forests, rivers, land – all have sentience, all have knowledge. I don't know about rocks being sentient – I'm still having trouble with that one – and I don't even know about individual plants and animals being highly intelligent, but it certainly seems to make sense to think of ecosystems themselves as sentient. Ecosystems are large, complex systems of interacting units, as are brains, that respond to the world around them in adaptive ways. I think science can accommodate the idea of ecosystem sentience.

So what would the world be like if, instead of having debates about animal rights, we had debates about ecosystem rights? Suppose we treated ecosystems as legal entities, as entities to whom ethical consideration must be extended: it is unethical to cause unnecessary harm to ecosystems. Not only unethical, but dangerous. Ecosystems bite back. Indigenous knowledge, I think, contains this insight.

A dream I had about a year and a half ago comes back to me very strongly when I think about this. It was a dream about Brisbane, and I think about Kurilpa, where I was living last year. But mostly, it was about ecosystems. Here's how I wrote the dream down the next day after I had it:
"I had a dream that there was a hillside covered with rainforest. In the dream, Americans came in and cut down the rainforest to make room for new modern apartment buildings. They did it overnight, so suddenly, and then in the morning the forest was gone. I was overwhelmed with grief that something so precious had been destroyed beyond repair, and was gone forever. It's the same way I have felt when someone close to me has died, the feeling that something irreversible has happened. In the dream, I wandered through the stumps on the hillside, and finally found a few scattered old growth trees - huge old eucalypts more than an armspan wide. This did nothing for my grief, though, because the forest, the living system they had been a part of, was still dead. If someone wonderful had died, and someone said, no, look, the rest of the body is gone, but we've still preserved some lung tissue in a Petri dish, it wouldn't comfort me. The point was that the forest was gone, irrevocably. I woke up still feeling the grief."

And here's what I wrote in my other blog last year about that:
"An ecosystem cannot be brought back. Individual species can find new ways to survive, as peregrine falcons have done in the "canyons" of modern cities, but the complex interdependence of an ecosystem, once destroyed, cannot be put back together. What took hundreds of thousands or millions of years to develop, with its intricate web of interrelationships, cannot be put back together by human action, it can only be destroyed by it. This now seems to be our species' role in the ecosystems of the world. But we are also a species who can grieve these losses, foresee them, and try to stop them. Where I live [Kurilpa] used to be covered with rainforest or dry eucalypt forest a century ago, and though there are many trees around, there is no more forest. My dream was a dream of this place, where I live. So what can I do now to stop this from happening in other parts of Queensland? Conservation shouldn't be about individual species, it should be about ecosystems. Can we develop an ethos in which ecosystems have as much right to exist and live as do people?"

Isn't that indigenous knowledge?