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India’s foreign policy: Nehru’s enduring legacy

Any discussion or study on India’s foreign policy must inevitably come to terms with the extraordinary legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru. Even more demanding is the challenge of disentangling Nehru’s contributions from the unending current political contestations on India’s first prime minister.

Nehru’s countless admirers and critics, however, seem to agree on one thing. That Nehru was an ‘idealist’ in the conduct of India’s international relations. Breaking this consensus probably holds the key to a better appreciation of Nehru’s contributions to India’s international engagement. Andrew B. Kennedy, in his contribution to the Oxford Handbook on Indian Foreign Policy, argues that realism and idealism were joined at the hip in Nehru’s worldview.

Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

As the Congress Party’s most influential voice on foreign affairs in the run up to independence and its chief diplomat for the first 17 years of the republic, Nehru said and did things that do not fall neatly into one box. Nehru’s understanding of the world went through multiple phases and his eclectic mind struggled to reconcile competing ideas. No assessment of the policies of a statesman, who deals with so many real world challenges over an extended period, can be reduced into a single category of thought.

To be sure, idealism was a strong component of Nehru’s world view. That could be said of many leaders in the colonial world who came of age in the period between the two world wars. Nehru was critical of power politics and called for transcending them through collective security arrangements and strong international institutions. For Nehru, “One World” was an important national goal for India.

At the same time Nehru also embraced the idea of Indian primacy in the Subcontinent. He mused about an Indian “Monroe Doctrine” for Asia and the Indian Ocean. If his use of force to liberate Goa from Portuguese colonial rule drew much criticism from the West, his approach to the border dispute with China is seen in Beijing as the source of unending trouble in Sino-Indian relations.

I believe, we must see Nehru as a legatee of two very different streams of thought in the middle of 20th century. One was the inheritance from the extended Indian national movement, where the ‘idealist’ currents and ‘moralpolitik’ were rampant. The other was the diplomatic legacy of the British Raj, which was rooted in India’s geopolitical imperatives. While the Raj was not an independent actor on the world stage, it had considerable autonomy in devising India’s policies especially in dealing with the neighborhood in Asia and the Indian Ocean.

As the successor state to the Raj, Nehru incorporated many elements of its regional policy into that of India. Consider, for example, the first three bilateral treaties that Nehru signed—with Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal during 1949-50. All three reiterated the essence of the treaties that the Raj had signed with the three Himalayan kingdoms—that Calcutta (and Delhi) would protect them from external threats in return for a say on their foreign policy.

Nehru’s decision to continue the protectorate arrangements in the Himalayas also reflected the perceived need to balance the power of newly unified China that took control of Tibet. At the same time, Nehru forswore the option to simply annex these kingdoms into India, a proposition that those on his right in the Congress party might have wanted.

All this while Nehru was making friendly gestures to Beijing and championing liberal internationalist causes on the world stage. When relations with China began to break down in the late 1950s, Nehru laid the foundation for an enduring defense relationship with Soviet Russia and reached out to the United States for a security partnership.

If the Congress can’t claim exclusive ownership of Nehru, the BJP will not be able to eliminate Nehru’s impact on India’s international policies. Narendra Damodardas Modi is probably the most ‘non-Nehruvian’ Prime minister that India has had so far. Yet Modi sustains some tenets of Nehru’s international relations despite the conscious effort to differentiate himself from the first Prime Minister.

If ‘non-alignment’ and ‘strategic autonomy’ are seen as the essence of Nehru’s foreign policy tradition, Modi has refused to pay obeisance to either idea in his surprisingly intense international engagement.  Modi’s main emphasis, instead, has been on making India a ‘leading power’.

But seeking international leadership, despite India’s weak hand in the middle of the 20th century, was at the core of Nehru’s foreign policy. Nehru believed India was destined to become a handful of great powers shaping the global order.  The others on his list were America, Russia, China, Japan and a (unified) Europe.

Modi’s focus on restoring India’s South Asian dominance seems no different from Nehru’s emphasis on securing Delhi’s primacy in the region and limiting the role of other powers in the Subcontinent. Modi’s attempt to rejuvenate India’s Asian engagement, in the name of an ‘Act East’ policy, harks back to the centrality that Nehru attached to Asia in the early years of India’s foreign policy.

Modi’s new emphasis on taking a larger role in the security affairs of Asia and Indian Ocean emulates Nehru’s interest in seeking a role for Indian armed forces on the global stage. If the British Raj was the main security provider in the Indian Ocean and contributed significantly to the two world wars, Nehru sought to continue that tradition in a very interesting way.

Despite the problems on the borders with Pakistan and China, Nehru chose to contribute to international peacekeeping operations. That tradition has made India, cumulatively the largest contributor to peace operations under the aegis of the United Nations. Nehru also sought to develop interesting defense partnerships with Egypt and Indonesia, India’s collaborators in shaping the politics of non-alignment.

Headline image: National Flag of India by Sanyam Bahga. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Israel’s survival amid expanding chaos

In world politics, preserving order has an understandably sacramental function. The reason is plain. Without minimum public order, planetary relations would descend rapidly and perhaps irremediably into a “profane” disharmony.

It has happened before, since time immemorial.

To be sure, generalized anarchy is not entirely new. In fact, in one form or another, it has long been an integral feature of international relations. This unsteady condition of structurally decentralized authority was even codified at the Peace of Westphalia, in1648. Nonetheless, it should be borne in mind, anarchy is always less threatening or destabilizing than true chaos.

Today, in the Middle East especially, the fully “normal” absence of supranational authority is being transformed and worsened by something unique and potentially devastating. This “something” is the palpable and simultaneous disintegration of national boundaries, classical power balances, and collective security remedies. Within this literally dreadful pattern of system-wide dissolution, tens of millions of stateless refugees now wander desperately across the earth. At the same time, presumptively sober jurisprudential limits on the spread of nuclear weapons have come to represent little more than a humiliating parody of effective legal controls.

Soon, too, a conspicuously stark juxtaposition of pre-modern ideologies with futuristic weapons could define an unprecedented challenge for dealing with chaos.

In the most uncontroversial narratives of counter-terrorist obligation, even our most industrially backward enemies will have ready recourse to advanced strategies of cyber-defense and cyber-warfare. For the United States, the implications of all this expanding access are deeply profound and predictably worrisome. For Israel a beleaguered mini-state, the implications are far greater.

For Israel, the implications are unambiguously existential.

It is time for candor. International law will not save Israel. Assorted agreement expectations notwithstanding, including those of the sordid new pact with Iran, certain of Israel’s Islamic enemies will inevitably “go nuclear.” When this happens, there will be foreseeable interactions between individual catastrophic threats, so-called “synergies.” These interactions will make the risks of an already-expanding chaos still more pressing. When this occurs, the imperiled region could slip into the primordial chaos of marooned boys in William Golding’s great novel, Lord of the Flies. Then, all cultivated expectations and ordinary protocols of civilized existence would lie in tatters, mercilessly torn to shreds by what W.B.Yeats had called a “blood-dimmed tide.” Then, prophetically, the Irish poet’s symbolic “ceremony of innocence” will finally have been “drowned.”

For Israel, the pertinent dangers of chaos are both particular and unique. Facing not only an unprecedented nuclear threat from Iran, but also the appearance of Palestine, the Jewish State could quickly find itself engulfed in mass-casualty terrorism, and/or in unconventional war.

In time, as we must now realistically expect, chaos would have its retrograde pride of place. Even together with elements of “international community,” there would then be no safety in arms, no rescues from higher political authority, and no comforting reassurances from science. New wars could rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and until all things human were leveled in a vast and more or less primal disorder.


Although counterintuitive, chaos and anarchy actually represent opposite end points of the same global continuum. Perversely, mere anarchy, or the absence of central world authority, is “normal.” Chaos, however, is sui generis. It is “abnormal.”

Since the seventeenth century and the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the last of the major religious wars sparked by the Reformation, our anarchic world can be best described as a “system.” What happens in any one part of this world, therefore, necessarily affects what will happen in some or even all of the other parts. When a particular deterioration is marked, and begins to spread from one nation to another, the corrosive effects could speedily undermine regional and/or international stability.

When deterioration is rapid and catastrophic, as it would be following the start of any unconventional war and/or act of unconventional terrorism, the corollary effects would be correspondingly immediate and overwhelming. These critical effects would be chaotic.

Aware that even an incremental collapse of remaining world authority structures will impact its few friends as well as its many enemies, leaders of the Jewish State will soon need to advance certain precise and plausible premonitions of collapse, in order to chart more durable paths to survival. Such indispensable considerations will be distasteful, of course, and are thus likely not yet underway.

Historically, Israel’s leaders have wasted precious time with purely ritualistic considerations of American “road maps” and “peace plans.” Soon, and in at least partial consequence of such misspent opportunities, they will need to consider just how to respond to international life in a global state of nature. The specific triggering mechanisms of our already-disassembling world’s descent into chaos could originate from a variety of mass-casualty attacks launched against Israel, or from similar attacks against other western democracies. Even the traditionally “powerful” United States, now suffering huge economic, demographic, and infrastructure dislocations, would not be immune to such a remorseless vulnerability.

Jerusalem must take careful note. Any progressively chaotic disintegration of the world system would fundamentally transform the smaller Israeli system. Such a transformation of microcosm by macrocosm could sometime involve total or near-total societal destruction. In prudent anticipation, Israel will have to orient much of its core strategic planning to an assortment of worst-case prospects, now focusing much more deliberately on an expansively wide range of self-help security options.


Correspondingly, for Israel, certain once-prominent diplomatic processes of peacemaking that are conveniently but erroneously premised on “scientific” assumptions of reason and rationality will have to be reduced or even renounced.

Israel’s one-sided surrender of territories, its mistaken reluctance to accept certain vital preemption options while still timely, and its periodic terrorist releases may never bring about any direct defeat. Taken together, however, these ominously synergistic policy errors will have a cumulatively weakening effect on Israel. Whether the principal effect here will be one that “merely” impairs the Jewish State’s commitment to endure, or one that also opens it up, operationally, to a devastating missile attack, and/or to major acts of terror, is still unclear.

What remains clear is Israel’s unwavering obligation to look beyond the somnolent darkness of expanding global and regional chaos, and to acknowledge that the highest sacramental achievements of the Jewish State must inevitably lie in a triumph of mind over mind, not of mind over matter.

Featured image: “Haifa Israel – Bahai Shrine of the Báb, Port, Hadar, Krayot” by David King CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Who was on Shakespeare’s bookshelf? [infographic]

George Bernard Shaw once remarked on William Shakespeare’s “gift of telling a story (provided some one else told it to him first).” Shakespeare knew the works of many great writers, such as Raphael Holinshed, Ludovico Ariosto, and Geoffrey Chaucer. How did these men, and many others, influence Shakespeare and his work? The process of printing a book in the 16th century was demanding and expensive, and a printing house’s products were only available to a fraction of the English population. We explore the English Renaissance reading environment in the infographic below.

Download the infographic as a PDF or JPG.

Featured Image: “First Folio VA” by Andreas Praefcke. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Women in the history of philosophy

Philosophers have been happily borrowing and stealing ideas from others for centuries. We like to call it “research.”

For the most part, the practice of philosophy tends to be collective and conversational and collaborative. We enjoy reading what others have written on a given topic, and we like to hear what others have to say, because different people see things differently. Their comments and criticisms can open our minds to uncontemplated truths, or else they can encourage us to close ranks, and strengthen our arguments, in light of opposition.

Face-to-face, this practice is not always for the faint-of-heart and thin-of-skin. The argumentative nature of the discipline can be challenging for introverts and for those with a disposition toward politeness and common human civility.

But the funny thing is, despite its brutal reputation, philosophy is actually quite inclusive by nature.

For many philosophers, it doesn’t matter if their interlocutors are under-educated, under-privileged, under-aged, or even under-the-ground. (In fact, it’s often better if combatants are dead, lest they protest about misrepresentations of their views.) All that matters is that free exchange of ideas and the open spirit of inquiry.

Seventeenth-century thinker John Locke is a case in point: he went out of his way to converse with strangers, we are told, because he thought “he could learn something which was usefull, of every body.”

But here’s my problem: I think that the discipline of philosophy has been rather slow to recognise this collaborative history.

Margaret Cavendish. Via the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If an outsider were to take a quick glance at the history of philosophy—at one of the many textbooks, say, on The History of Western Philosophical Thought—the chances are that he or she would be left completely in the dark about the conversational and cooperative aspects of the discipline.

Worse still, I think, she would be left ignorant about its history of gender-inclusivity.

Until very recently, the history of philosophy has focused on those singular male geniuses who published their great treatises, and presented their startlingly original ideas like so many fully-formed Athenas bursting forth from the head of Zeus.

Descartes apparently gave us the first modern theory of the mind. Hobbes was the first to light upon the idea of negative liberty. Kant was the first to think up the idea of personal autonomy.

Descartes himself once declared that he “did not wish to consider what others have known or not known.” And Hobbes likewise asserted “that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.”

But I think these philosophers were probably touting a bit of a myth. Surely those original thoughts couldn’t have burst forth fully developed in their minds, any more than a woman could have emerged from the flip-top forehead of a Greek god?

Moreover, the surviving historical-contextual evidence shows these same men did work out their ideas in collaboration—face-to-face, in letters, in objections and replies, in tedious mind-numbingly long-winded exchanges spanning over many, many years—and sometimes, even, with women.

That’s right. The evidence suggests that women have always been doing philosophy—have always been there, writing, discussing, objecting, frowning, and flinching—alongside their male colleagues.

So why have we been so slow to recognise their participation? And what would the history of philosophy look like if women’s contributions were duly acknowledged?

I’m not sure that there are any simple answers to the first question—that might take a whole book. But the latter is a subject that myself and a number of my colleagues have been addressing over the past few decades as part of a collective Recovery Project, a project to write women philosophers back into the history books.

We have found that, often, these women do not sound too different to their male peers: they use the same terminology, they discuss the same philosophical conundrums, and they sometimes come up with similar solutions. But there’s also something else—a slight difference in emphasis, I think.

This is not surprising given the circumstances in which these women wrote.

Consider the early modern women philosophers, such as Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, and Mary Astell. These English gentlewomen found themselves in situations of financial dependence on others, they had only a limited education, and they had few paths open to them with respect to achievement and opportunity. They also had to tolerate certain oppressive gender practices of their time, and pernicious stereotypes and biases against women.

Meanwhile, the gentlemen of their era were really at the Top of the Tower, so to speak. They were well-educated; they were lawyers, physicians, diplomats, university lecturers, and political advisers. As a result, their view from the top was expansive and universal—they could see the socio-political world as a whole and this was reflected in their work.

Comparatively, their fellow women were pretty much stuck at the bottom of the tower—putting out the washing (figuratively speaking) and giving the next generation a good telling-off about the rules of common human civility.

Not surprisingly, their outlook on life is a little bit different. Their moral philosophy focuses on the other-related virtues of humility, generosity, and disinterested benevolence. Their political philosophy is opposed to the slavery of women in marriage, and they valorise an internal notion of freedom as rational self-governance. Their metaphysical views address problems arising from a strict dualism between mind and body.

It’s too early to say if these women practised philosophy “in a different voice,” i.e. with a distinctively female or feminine outlook (many of their moral views actually sound like those of the male Stoics).

But what we do get is their ‘View from the Ground’—and I think that’s a good thing. As Locke would say, it might teach us something useful.

Featured image credit: Sokrat z učencem in Diotimo, by Franz Caucig. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Archivist by day, audio enthusiast by night: an interview with Dana Gerber-Margie

This week, we’re pushing the boundaries a bit to bring you an interview with Dana Gerber-Margie, who publishes The Audio Signal, a “weekly digest about audio.” Troy and I are huge fans of the newsletter, as are Pop Up Archive and even the Wall Street Journal. The interview covers some of the nuts and bolts of sorting through massive amounts of audio, as well as Gerber-Margie’s philosophy on the importance of audio. If you’d like to discuss an innovative project you’re working on, consider submitting it for publication on this blog. — Andrew Shaffer

I suppose we should start with the most basic question: How do you regularly discover such great audio content?

I listen all day. It’s getting a little overwhelming, actually. Audio discoverability is a really hot topic in the radio world right now. Pop Up Archive is doing a lot, along with its child Audiosear.ch. They’re trying to go beyond what we call “word of mouth” discovery, which includes my newsletter and similar newsletters like The Timbre, podcast broadcast, and Adolescence is a marketing tool. I subscribe to all of the above, plus budding newsletters, to catch something new. I also often use recommendations from podcast hosts.

I use PocketCasts to listen to podcasts and Overdrive for the audiobooks I get from my library. PocketCasts offers a Discover page that features new and upcoming shows, like a recent fictional horror series called Limetown. I also use PocketCasts to follow Trending and Top podcasts, and every two weeks or so I poke around through the PocketCasts categories—Education, Science, Arts & Culture, etc.

Lastly, I made a little submission form for people to recommend things to me. As for discovering archival audio, I put out a call for audio clips a few months ago. I keep a spreadsheet of websites and catalogs to look through each week. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of time to poke around and find something each week, so I love when archivists send me recommendations from their collections. (Hint, hint)

What is your process for choosing which stories to include in the newsletter?

It sounds complicated but it’s become pretty simple to me! As of early September, I’m subscribed to 253 podcasts. Every day, I go through the updates from new episodes, and choose whether I’m personally interested in the subject. If I’m not personally interested, then I consider whether it would still be of interest to my readers. For example, I don’t usually listen to Fresh Air because interviews with famous people don’t interest me as much as they do other people, but sometimes the subject matter covered really does interest me, like when Terry Gross interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates. I don’t listen to many comedy podcasts or two-people-chatting-about-pop-culture ones, but sometimes particular episodes will make the rounds in the radio world as a “must listen.” I do this because I found myself listening to new, bad, and uninteresting-to-me content and listening was becoming a chore. I didn’t start the newsletter for it to be a chore; it’s supposed to be an outlet. That’s when I made the decision that I had to have a personal connection to it, and if people didn’t like what I was recommending, there are other options out there for them.

I listen while walking home, taking the bus to work, doing chores around the house, getting ready for work, before bed, at lunch, and at work during routine tasks like barcoding or burning CDs for patrons. I can’t focus well enough when I’m doing something that needs attention to detail. I write each episode title, show, and length down into Google Sheets as I listen. If I have time or energy to write some initial comments, or mark a particular point in the episode that meant a lot to me, I have a comments tab.

On Sunday, I pick and choose my favorites. I opt for the episodes that made me especially emotional, stimulated me intellectually, or tickled my curiosity. I also aim for some variety, so that it’s not all storytelling, or economics, or history. The hardest part has been history podcasts and serialized podcasts, because it can be odd to recommend episode 37 when you might want to listen to all of the podcasts before that.

I find audio to be deeply intimate; someone’s voice is right in your ear, speaking only to you.

Aside from your weekly favorites, do you have a short list of stories you think our readers should check out first?

Ah! What a difficult question. There are a few shows that I will always, always listen to first, but let me try to suggest some specific episodes.

I always listen to Radiolab, but an episode that might be especially interesting for the oral history/archives crowd is “Mau Mau.” We get to see journalists and the “layman” come to terms with how history can be written and re-written based on who writes it, and the documents left behind.
This American Life’s  “The Giant Pool of Money” from 2008 dug deep into the housing crisis. It also is the birth of NPR’s Planet Money , which has close to 650 episodes now.
Fugitive Waves from the Kitchen Sisters will sit well with oral history lovers, especially the episode “A Man Tapes His Town: The Unrelenting Oral Histories of Eddie McCoy.”
I was actually in an episode called Your Stories from the podcast First Day Back. The podcast began as a woman documenting her journey trying to get back into the workforce after being a stay at home mom for 6 years, but she’s also expanding the scope to include all kinds of First Day Back stories from all sorts of people.
I adore the series Instaserfs from Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, a hilarious and poignant exploration of the new “sharing economy.”
And lastly, my favorite archival sound portal is The British Library’s Sounds.

As someone whose life is so immersed in audio, do you have any final thoughts to share with us?

I find audio to be deeply intimate; someone’s voice is right in your ear, speaking only to you. The podcast community is only now developing ways for listeners to share thoughts and feelings, so most of it has been consumed alone for me to ruminate over by myself. Sometimes producers expertly use sound and music to enhance the experience. In archival audio, there’s an element of time travel to it—that you are in the room listening to a conversation that never imagined it’d be overheard. And listening to oral history is so much more profound than reading transcripts, because you can hear the raw emotion coming through. Overall, oral history and audio always remind me that other people are living deeply, going through difficult times, and thinking strange or funny thoughts. I still love to read all the time, and love what my imagination conjures up. I also still really like movies, and getting the chance to see what other imaginations dream up. But audio bridges the two, and seeps into my brain in a way that I’m still imagining and feeling my own feelings but feel like I’m in the mind of the person speaking.

Image Credit: “The Audio Signal” by Dana Gerber-Margie. Used with permission. 

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How much do you know about travel medicine?

Is garlic or citronella more useful in repelling insects? Which disease is typically identified as an ‘urban’ disease? What is the most reliable way to purify water? Test your knowledge of the unique dangers and diseases faced in travel medicine.

 

Featured image: Way to Everest Base Camp by By Michelle Welsch CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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No child left inside on the Holy Earth: Liberty Hyde Bailey and the spirituality of nature study

In the United States today there is a great push to get children outside. Children stay indoors more and have less contact with nature and less knowledge of animals and plants than ever before. When children do go outside, our litigious society gives them less freedom to explore. Educators and critics such as Richard Louv and David Sobel express a concern that without a real connection to the natural world, something vital will be lost in the next generation — and that the challenges of climate change may be unsolvable.

Americans have been agonizing about this disconnect for a long time. At the turn of the twentieth century, educators around the country were already arguing that children were losing their sympathy for nature and the earth. They attributed that change largely to rapid industrialization and urbanization. The younger generation, along with waves of immigrants from overseas, was leaving the countryside and moving to cities in alarming rates, in search of better opportunities. But many of those cities were full of soot, smoke, and garbage, and many of the industrial jobs available were hazardous and exploitative.

What to do? Like today’s advocates of forest kindergartens and free-range parenting, the early twentieth-century leaders of the nature study movement believed that contact with nature was vitally important for children. By exposing schoolchildren to the natural world in a direct, hands-on way, nature study would help increase children’s sympathy for the earth and help them to become better stewards not only of nature but also of their communities.

The architect of the nature study movement was an academic horticulturalist named Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954). A largely forgotten figure today, Bailey’s star has dropped except in horticultural circles, where he is remembered as an inveterate plant collector and inaugural dean of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Yet in his day Bailey was the very definition of a public intellectual, widely renowned and beloved, whose expertise and public commentary ranged over a huge variety of topics, from plant science and agriculture to weather, poetry, and the promise of global democracy.

Liberty Hyde Bailey. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

“If education has any value it is to make a man’s life deeper and richer,” wrote Bailey in 1903, “and this can be more readily secured by giving him a better hold on the common things with which he lives.” Nature study, as Bailey saw it, began with the local and the commonplace and worked outward toward larger principles. During school lessons, children were expected to observe the nature that was closest at hand — insects, apples, tree twigs, toads — and learn everything they could from their observations. “Object lessons” put plants and animals directly into children’s hands, asking them to learn not only facts but an appreciation of organisms as living beings. What are the veins on a leaf for? Why do grasshoppers have longer back legs? How does a crayfish walk? Where do snakes go in the winter?

Nature study advocates believed that whether children lived in the country or the city, they would benefit from developing sympathy for the natural world around them. More than anything, “sympathy” meant to Bailey something deeply spiritual. He reiterated in a 1903 book that contact with nature would broaden children’s horizons and help them to appreciate their surroundings: “Nature-love tends toward simplicity of living. It tends country-ward. ‘God made the country.’….One sleeps in the woods or fields not because these are the most comfortable places in which to spend the night, but that he may have communion and freedom.”

(President Harding) Pointing out an owls nest in the White House grounds to members of the nature study class of John Buroughs [sic] School whom he invited to the White House. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

Bailey expanded upon these ideas in his 1915 book The Holy Earth, which sets forth a deeply ecological vision of life on earth. The earth was holy ground, Bailey believed, “because man did not make it. We are here, part in the creation.” To call the earth holy was not a metaphor for Bailey; it was literal truth. The earth was sacred and could not be abused. “If the earth is holy,” he wrote, “then the things that grow out of the earth are also holy. They do not belong to man to do with them as he will. Dominion does not carry personal ownership.”

For Bailey, the ultimate goal of nature study was to teach children about the holy earth. By training the nation’s youth to feel at one with the natural landscape and its creatures, nature study would help bring forth what Bailey called the “new hold”—the “philosophy of the oneness in nature and the unity in living things.” The spirituality of nature study would root children more deeply in the landscape and teach them about their surroundings, in order that they might more fully make the holy earth their home.

Today, many religious traditions are talking quite a lot about the responsibility of stewardship that humans bear toward the rest of the earth. Pope Francis’s recent encyclical Laudato si is only the most recent example. But nature study went a step beyond stewardship. As we encourage our children to put down the smartphones and go outside, are we willing, like Bailey, to take that step and see the earth as holy?

Image credit: Children in nature study class, drawing from memory and object, Bermerside School. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. 

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Effective communications for conservation

From conserving endangered species to confronting climate change, natural resource management and conservation requires effective education and communication to achieve long-term results in our complex world. Research can help natural resource managers understand how to strategically use different outreach techniques and to promote new behaviors by involving and targeting their diverse audiences.

In addition to addressing traditional constituents, such as hunters and anglers, natural resource agencies must now communicate effectively with new stakeholders, from birdwatchers to animal welfare groups and the general public. Scientists must be able to communicate the need for renewable energy, for example, among stakeholder groups with different political backgrounds and understanding of the science of climate change. The toolbox for communications includes traditional methods such as interpretive walks in national parks, as well as social media campaigns using Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Survey research conducted by The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication revealed six different segments in the US, characterized by their views on climate change: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive, with the largest number of citizens falling in the concerned and cautious categories. Conservation organizations can harness such findings in the design of outreach campaigns that resonate with the values of different groups.

Black Bear by Pat Gaines. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

With such understanding, effective education and communication programs can increase people’s support for resource management with cost-effective outcomes. In New Hampshire (U.S.), a ‘Learn to Live with Bears’ communication campaign used messages about bears and proper food storage, that resulted in reduced nuisance bear problems. In Japan, an education program helped rural residents change agricultural practices to reduce wildlife conflicts. In Brazil, an education program helped protect endangered tamarin monkeys.

What about the majority of the people on the planet who live in urban areas? Many urban residents have little direct knowledge of the ecosystems on which they depend on or even the value of nature to their own mental and physical health. They may be fearful of nearby natural areas and may not choose to protect them from development or visit them for fun. Yet these residents vote, pay taxes, and need nature as much as anyone. And nature needs them. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recently launched a national Urban Wildlife Conservation Program to encourage refuge staff near urban areas to engage their surrounding communities with new programs and services. This program helps staff learn about their nearby communities, develop relationships, meet community needs, and assess the refuge activities.

Cecil the lion at Hwange National Park in 2010 by Daughter#3. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

New technologies also allow agencies to develop citizen science projects to harness data collected by stakeholders to help advance scientific knowledge. Citizen science programs can inform the public about specific wildlife or processes they are observing while helping scientists implement projects that yield both scientific and educational outcomes. Developing effective programs to attract new constituents to natural resource conservation requires training and collaboration to address issues of concern to citizens as well as scientists. Participating citizen scientists in the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s  Great Backyard Bird Count have gathered more than 100,000 checklists that included 623 bird species and provided critical information for scientists about avian migration patterns and climate change in North America.

In addition to engaging various publics in the outdoors, communication tools can harness the power of social media. An iPhone app for reporting different mammal species killed on Britain’s roads was developed by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. The social media presence of environmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy helps to direct viewers to its website, increase awareness of its work, and generate members. The power of social media can be seen in the global outcry against the man who admitted to killing Cecil, Zimbabwe’s most famous lion. The hashtag #CecilTheLion appeared almost 250,000 times in one day on Twitter as the topic trended worldwide in July 2015. Resource agencies must determine how they want a message to be received, and understand how the message is spread by social media, encoded by media gatekeepers, or decoded and interpreted by the receiver.

From wilderness parks to urban refuges, natural resource managers must engage a variety of publics in understanding and practicing conservation actions. The tools for effective communication depend on the audience and information needs, but the resources are available to identify a strategic approach to education and outreach for conservation.

Featured image credit: Rakaposhi and Diran, Pakistan, by Waqas.usman. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Mentalizing in groups

‘Mentalizing’ is the new word for making sense of oneself, others, and intersubjective transactions in terms of inner motivations. It can be fast and intuitive (implicit mentalizing), as in most informal and routine interactions, or slow and elaborate (explicit mentalizing), when one steps back to indulge in reflective thinking. “Why did she say that?” The thought is such an integral part of being human that it is most often taken for granted. Yet it is an evolutionary achievement.

Mentalization stands at the shoulder of primary emotions. Mammals are equipped with seven primary emotions: seeking/interest, fear, rage, (sexual) lust, care, separation distress, and play/joy. These emotions inform the subject about the qualities of their surroundings: Is the other out there a stranger, a group mate, or a family member? Is he or she an enemy, a potential sexual partner, or a sufferer to be taken care of? Primary emotional responses are the forerunners of the human faculty of interpretation. Archaic forms of interpretation become all the more important when primates come to live in complex social groups. The Other has to be understood in social contexts. Reasons for behavior may be manifold. Certain mental capabilities become selected during evolution and these mental resources shape the very environment (e.g. group complexity) that subjects must adapt to. A spiral loop is set in motion.

Explicit mentalizing presupposes language abilities; it can be seen as a kind of “inner speech”. The very ability to speak presupposes certain brain resources that most probably evolved around 200,000 years before present time (e.g. the FOXP2 gene). However, language as a set of grammatical conventions is a group achievement. It depends most probably on a fruitful interplay of human (Homo sapiens) development and climatic and fauna conditions. Stable and very large groups of humans became possible due to the agriculture revolution around 12,000 years BPT. However, archeological data indicates that stable and large group livings have taken place earlier, most notably in the Ukraine region around 35,000 years BPT. Complicated large group living calls for language as a means for understanding social affairs and for more sophisticated communication and cooperation. Explicit mentalizing most probably developed as a means to understand others, and thereafter was turned towards oneself. Self-understanding is therefore a way of understanding oneself “as another,” as Paul Ricoeur phrased it.

The different timetable for the evolution of primary emotions and the faculty of mentalizing is displayed by their respective brain localization. The sources of primary emotions are to be found deeply subcortical, as interplay between the upper brainstem and the limbic part of the brain (e.g. amygdala, hippocampus). Mentalizing, in a more narrow sense, depends on cortical structures, particularly in the frontal region. Almost literally, mentalizing resides on top of primary emotions. This helps to explain why the capacity for mentalizing shrinks when emotions get high, which is a pity, and a bit paradoxical. Our capacity for sound social and interpersonal judgment disappears when we need it the most (as in emotional turmoil).

Emotions can overflow in any situation, but two arenas stand out: close relationships and groups. Many scholars have tried to explain why humans are so easily triggered and can become so “primitive” in groups. In recent years the (old) idea of contagion has gained momentum. Human brains (also) seem to have so-called mirror neurons. We mirror each other’s emotions. Your pain might easily become my pain. With many people around me displaying the same kind of emotions, my own emotion brain sites start firing quite intensely and the emotion control parts of my cortex have a hard job if I want to resist the temptation to adopt the feelings of my group-mates. Imagine being in the midst of the Manchester United fans in a match against Chelsea. Soon you will be part of the chorus shouting against the referee.

Is it wise then to place patients with emotionally unstable personality disorders (borderline) in groups, for therapeutic purposes? These patients are known to have mentalizing difficulties. They often misunderstand social interaction and, when emotionally aroused, which they often become, resort to black-and-white thinking. It is disputed whether group therapy is good for these patients, but anyhow, they represent a challenge. The good news is that these challenges have stimulated a rethinking of old dogmas, and experimentation with new ways of doing group therapy.

Featured Image: The Conversation. US National Archives and Records Administration. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Evolution: Some difficult problems

As the theory of evolution has become increasingly developed and tested by biologists, new questions have arisen. Not all problems have been solved, and there is still fresh debate around the old questions. In this extract from Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, Brian and Deborah Charlesworth describe some examples of biological phenomena that are difficult to explain. Some of these were dealt with by Darwin himself, others have been the subject of later research. Below are two problems which evolutionary research has left largely unsolved.

Two other major and largely unsolved problems in evolution, at the opposite extremes of the history of life, are the origin of the basic features of living cells and the origin of human consciousness. In contrast to the questions we have just been discussing, these are unique events in the history of life. Their uniqueness means that we cannot use comparisons among living species to make firm inferences about how they might have occurred. In addition, the lack of any fossil record for the very early history of life or for human behaviour means that we have no direct information about the sequences of events involved. This does not, of course, prevent us from making guesses about what these might have been, but such guesses cannot be tested in the ways we have described for ideas about other evolutionary problems.

In the case of the origin of life, the aim of much current research is to find conditions resembling those which prevailed early in the Earth’s history, which allow the purely chemical assembly of molecules that can then replicate themselves, just as the DNA of our own cells is copied during cell division. Once such self-replicating molecules have been formed, it is easy to imagine how competition between different types of molecule could result in the evolution of more accurate and faster replicating molecules, that is natural selection would act to improve them. Chemists have been very successful in showing that the basic chemical building blocks of life (sugars, fats, amino acids, and the constituents of DNA and RNA) can be formed by subjecting solutions of simpler molecules (of the type that are likely to have been present in the oceans of the early Earth) to electric sparks and ultra-violet irradiation. There has been limited progress in showing how these can be assembled into still more complex molecules that resemble RNA or DNA, and even more limited success in getting such molecules to self-replicate, so we are still far from achieving the desired goals (but progress is constantly being made). Furthermore, once this goal is achieved, the question of how to evolve a primitive genetic code that allows a short RNA or DNA sequence to determine the sequence of a simple protein chain must be solved. There are many ideas, but as yet no definitive solutions to this problem.

Image: ‘Darwin’, by WikiImages. Public domain via Pixabay.

Similarly, we can only make guesses about the evolution of human consciousness. It is even difficult to state the nature of the problem clearly, since consciousness is notoriously hard to define precisely. Most people would not regard a newborn baby as conscious; few would dispute that a two-year-old child is conscious. The extent to which animals are conscious is fiercely debated, but pet-lovers are well aware of the ability of dogs and cats to react to the wishes and moods of their owners. Pets even seem to be able to manipulate their owners into doing what they want. Consciousness is thus probably a matter of degree, not kind, so that in principle there is little difficulty in imagining a gradual intensification of selfawareness and ability to communicate during the evolution of our ancestors. Some would regard language ability as the strongest criterion for possession of true consciousness; even this develops gradually with age in infants, albeit with astonishing speed. Furthermore, there are clear indications of rudimentary language abilities in animals such as parrots and chimpanzees, who can be taught to communicate simple pieces of information. The gap between ourselves and higher animals is more apparent than real.

Although we know nothing of the details of the selective forces driving the evolution of human mental and language abilities, which evidently far exceed those of any other animals, there is nothing particularly mysterious in explaining them in evolutionary terms. Biologists are making rapid progress in understanding the functioning of the brain, and there is little doubt that all forms of mental activity are explicable in terms of the activities of nerve cells in the brain. These activities must be subject to control by genes that specify the development and functioning of the brain; like any other genes, these will be liable to mutation, leading to variation on which selection can act. This is no longer pure hypothesis: mutations have been found which lead to deficiencies in specific aspects of grammar in the speech of their carriers, leading to identification of a gene involved in the control of some aspects of grammar. Even the mutation in its DNA sequence that causes the difference from normal is known.

Featured image credit: Cygnus Loop Nebula, by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.

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