Empathy for An Immense World
Environmental systems are complex to understand. Even the most prolific scientists and authors struggle to enlighten their audience with their findings. Climate change is bringing an urgency to humanity in understanding the planet earth as a whole, and the need for systemic thinking has never been so necessary.
Although hard to understand, complex systems become beautiful and exciting when you connect even the smallest dots. For example, authors like E. O. Wilson are artists in turning complicated themes like ecological webs into beautiful and actionable insights. In one of his latest books, "Half-Earth", Wilson turns most of the complexity learned in his lifetime of our biosphere into a robust plan to protect our precious planet.
However, does all the paints equally defined as beautiful among people? Definitely not. How we value a piece of art is often related to our intrinsic values. Environment systems face the same challenge that artists often do. Many are at risk of dying and becoming appreciated only after that.
Humanity must act systematically to overcome 21st-century challenges. Authors like Emma Marris, Mark Carney, Jonh Elkington, and Ed Young, to name a few, are all reaching similar conclusions. We must change our values and make them aim at what really matters. Changes will come with the cohesion of values.
Shifting values through empathy
Imagine what is it like to be a bat.
At the beginning of her book Wild Souls, Emma Marris discusses how our biological differences with that animal create a barrier to developing empathy towards it.
It turns out that humans will never fully understand how it would be to be a bat. And even if we try hard to imagine, we will probably be wrong. In his book, An Immense World, Ed Yong explains how limited we can imagine other animals' feelings since our natural formation to perceive the environment differs.
Yong shows how unaware we are of our limitations in sensing the world and how it impacts our actions and feelings. Humans and other species are locked in their sensory bubble, which is their Umwelt. The world Umwelt is used by Yong throughout the entire book to mention the "surroundings that an animal can sense and experience - its perceptual world".
Humans' Umwelt moulds our way of thinking and our empathy toward the world. Merriam-Webster defines empathy as:
the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner
So how can humans be empathetic with animals, such as bats, when our perceptual worlds are entirely different? The straight answer: is through knowledge and trust in the scientific method. Long answer: through philosophical debates on how far we can go.
Complete comprehension of how other animals feel will only be possible with an expansion of humans Umwelt until our minds can also expand. Yong advocates that "delving into other Umwelten allows us to see further and think more deeply".
And this is what Ed Yong does in his book. Through a deep scientific journey, the author explores how dogs, bats, elephants and other animals might perceive the world. Yong profoundly explores each kind of stimuli that animals seem to perceive and makes their Umwelt reverberate in our minds.
Dr Jennie Warmouth goes in the same line of thought. In her post Teaching Empathy: From Me to We at the National Geographic Educational Blog, she explains how to enhance students' "empathy for and connection with people, animals, and the environmental systems".
Well, isn't it a value that we and future generations need?
