Integrative Natural History of Amnicon Falls State Park, Part 23: Knitting It All Together | Wisconsin, USA
Das Schaudern ist der Menscheit bestes Teil.
- Goethe, Faust II
Looking southeastward, one more time, at the Upper Falls. Taken, as I recall, from the Horton Covered Bridge.
Here's a Western naturalist's description of this scene. We're at the Douglas Fault, where the Amnicon River spills over the upthrust block of late-Mesoproterozoic Chengwatana Volcanic Group basalt, erupted 1.1 Ga ago into the Midcontinent Rift. The stream, tinted brown by high tannic-acid content derived from groundwater leaching through fallen conifer foliage, is flowing at a sufficiently high rate to form a standing splash wave at its base.
Above all this geology and hydrology, and indeed growing on it as well, is the biology. Lichens have staked out a claim on vertical basalt surfaces. Above them rise a North Woods plant community: Beaked Hazel (Corylus cornuta), Canoe Birch (Betula papyrifera), Red Pine (Pinus resinosa), Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus), and other species highlighted in this series. And so on and so forth.
If this tick list of seemingly separate items sounds a trifle academic to you, it's because I, as a compulsively autodidactic sort of person, have never hesitated to mine academic sources like a sapper digging under a highly fortified city.
But what I always try to keep in mind is that while a place like this does not reject academic analyses of it, it does transcend them. And to an extent we can hardly imagine.
In my career I have come across so many scientists, manufactured like automobiles in almost identical graduate-program assembly lines, who actually believe—and they are indeed buying into a system of belief—that their one highly specialized type of consciousness somehow maps reality to a striking degree.
It does not. In fact, when we just use the analytical-scientific-academic sides of ourselves, we're looking at the world through one particular peephole, and we register the tiniest quantum of the greater reality. Our ape brains have evolved to recognize a few things only, and yet in our hubris we think we are demigods.
There are two emotional states that can help us see a little more clearly. One is humility. The other is awe.
Humility not of the fawning, Uriah Heep variety peddled by certain institutional religions, but rather the type that gives us that wonderful, edifying sense of smallness next to the system of nature. After all, we are newly and imperfectly evolved. There is no god that looks or acts like us.
Further, we should not regard our species as separate from nature, because nothing actually is. We should be humbled by the vast diversity of matter and life in which we're one single element. Our species is not better than others in any grand sense. Of course we have special capabilities; so do other organisms. We must put the science on a shelf long enough to frankly admit there is a certain ineffable something that not only will always elude us; it must for our own sake.
And that's where the awe comes in. In a previous post in another album I noted that "there are times in the study of nature when one must drop one's jaw in awe or be nothing more than a farmer of details." Without that spine-tingling sense of being overwhelmed by something greater than oneself, the door to reality most certainly slams shut.
So perhaps the best way to look at a lava flow, a waterfall, or a forest is to simultaneously exercise intellect, humility, and awe in a synergistic sort of way. Taken together they enrich life. But if you remove any one of that triad, you're consigning yourself to one kind of desolation or another.
You'll find the other photos and descriptions of this series in my Integrative Natural History of Amnicon Falls State Park album.
Integrative Natural History of Amnicon Falls State Park, Part 23: Knitting It All Together | Wisconsin, USA
Das Schaudern ist der Menscheit bestes Teil.
- Goethe, Faust II
Looking southeastward, one more time, at the Upper Falls. Taken, as I recall, from the Horton Covered Bridge.
Here's a Western naturalist's description of this scene. We're at the Douglas Fault, where the Amnicon River spills over the upthrust block of late-Mesoproterozoic Chengwatana Volcanic Group basalt, erupted 1.1 Ga ago into the Midcontinent Rift. The stream, tinted brown by high tannic-acid content derived from groundwater leaching through fallen conifer foliage, is flowing at a sufficiently high rate to form a standing splash wave at its base.
Above all this geology and hydrology, and indeed growing on it as well, is the biology. Lichens have staked out a claim on vertical basalt surfaces. Above them rise a North Woods plant community: Beaked Hazel (Corylus cornuta), Canoe Birch (Betula papyrifera), Red Pine (Pinus resinosa), Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus), and other species highlighted in this series. And so on and so forth.
If this tick list of seemingly separate items sounds a trifle academic to you, it's because I, as a compulsively autodidactic sort of person, have never hesitated to mine academic sources like a sapper digging under a highly fortified city.
But what I always try to keep in mind is that while a place like this does not reject academic analyses of it, it does transcend them. And to an extent we can hardly imagine.
In my career I have come across so many scientists, manufactured like automobiles in almost identical graduate-program assembly lines, who actually believe—and they are indeed buying into a system of belief—that their one highly specialized type of consciousness somehow maps reality to a striking degree.
It does not. In fact, when we just use the analytical-scientific-academic sides of ourselves, we're looking at the world through one particular peephole, and we register the tiniest quantum of the greater reality. Our ape brains have evolved to recognize a few things only, and yet in our hubris we think we are demigods.
There are two emotional states that can help us see a little more clearly. One is humility. The other is awe.
Humility not of the fawning, Uriah Heep variety peddled by certain institutional religions, but rather the type that gives us that wonderful, edifying sense of smallness next to the system of nature. After all, we are newly and imperfectly evolved. There is no god that looks or acts like us.
Further, we should not regard our species as separate from nature, because nothing actually is. We should be humbled by the vast diversity of matter and life in which we're one single element. Our species is not better than others in any grand sense. Of course we have special capabilities; so do other organisms. We must put the science on a shelf long enough to frankly admit there is a certain ineffable something that not only will always elude us; it must for our own sake.
And that's where the awe comes in. In a previous post in another album I noted that "there are times in the study of nature when one must drop one's jaw in awe or be nothing more than a farmer of details." Without that spine-tingling sense of being overwhelmed by something greater than oneself, the door to reality most certainly slams shut.
So perhaps the best way to look at a lava flow, a waterfall, or a forest is to simultaneously exercise intellect, humility, and awe in a synergistic sort of way. Taken together they enrich life. But if you remove any one of that triad, you're consigning yourself to one kind of desolation or another.
You'll find the other photos and descriptions of this series in my Integrative Natural History of Amnicon Falls State Park album.