Why You Should Shape Your Umwelt
It’s Your Best Way to Find Wisdom and Become an Agent of Change
Every species is endowed with a unique set of perceptual capabilities that shapes its umwelt, or way of experiencing the world. Birds use their ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, and can see millions of colors we can’t because they perceive violet and UV light. Dogs see the world in shades of grey, blue, and green, but their primary sense is not sight, it’s smell. Dolphins can use echolocation to deduce what’s inside opaque objects in ways we don’t understand, and knifefish use electrolocation to understand their environments (to learn more about these animal umwelts and more, read Ed Yong’s An Immense World).
What makes humans unique is that each of us shapes our umwelt through culture and our use of technology. In Amusing Ourselves the Death, Neil Postman argues that television has transformed us into a society where everything is designed to entertain, nothing is serious, and acting or looking the part (e.g. being from “central casting”) is more important than having the experience and competence to do the job. Writing in the 1980s, he argued that the transition from a print-based culture to a television-centric one robbed us of the ability for reasoned debate that defined our early history (can anyone imagine voluntarily sitting through a Lincoln-Douglas style debate that lasted for hours at a time today?).
To see our wildly unserious culture in action, look no farther than our reality TV President who led a violent insurrection and posts memes of Gaza as a Trump resort, or himself as the Pope, or himself as the King, and whose corruption is public and running into the billions. None of this would’ve been acceptable in a more serious culture, even the culture of the US a generation ago when Postman was writing.
Instead of Orwell’s dystopia of 1984, Postman foresaw us moving towards Huxley’s Brave New World, where Big Brother doesn’t need to control us because we’re too busy indulging our hedonistic desires to care about our lack of freedom. Though Postman wrote above television, the same observations hold for our phone-based society, only more so. With the rise of social media, it’s simple to find “content” that confirms your prior beliefs, or to make yourself part of the story by posting your own content and responding to others, bringing us closer to Huxley’s self-absorbed dystopia.
Being together (virtually) while being apart has meant that, instead of everyone being stoned and blissed out together as they are in Brave New World, many–especially young people–are more depressed and isolated than ever, as Jonathan Haidt details in depressing detail in The Anxious Generation. It’s clear that something crucial and very human is lost when a society shifts from the ancient human technology for learning, playing with friends in the real-world, to apps, “likes”, and the endless scroll of content.
Since technology shapes our perception of the world and we have the ability to choose the technologies we use, we also have the power to shape our umwelts and, with it, our life experiences. This is an amazing power that other animals don’t have, yet we too often fail to recognize it. Instead of ignoring this gift, we should spend more time interrogating how we engage with and understand the world.
There are so many ways to shape an umwelt. I’m most interested in the dance between knowing about things and knowing them to be true in your bones. In our society, knowing about things is the dominant way that knowledge is created and shared; we have statistics, metrics, and numbers for everything. We’ve all become engineers–regardless of our professions. If you can’t measure it and conduct a randomized controlled trial, then it can’t be true.
Yet so much of what matters cannot be explained by breaking problems down into ever smaller parts and bits to analyze. Things like love, ambition, and pain are learned through lived experiences. The way to augment our experiences isn’t the scientific method, it’s literature, conversation, and oral traditions.
Beyond the individual level, what matters most to all of us–life on our planet–also defies easy quantification and analysis through atomization. The critical question to ask is: are our actions increasing life and its ability to thrive, or taking away from it? Everything else is a proxy trying to get at this truth. And yet there is no way that we can–or will ever be able to–measure all of the life on our planet and the interactions between species that make life possible.
Consider soil. A teaspoon of it contains six miles of mycelia and over a billion microbes, each of which has one hundred thousand sensors in its cell walls. Add the bacteria, viruses, ants (2.5 million per person on the planet), earthworms, and nematodes (there are a hundred million species), and you quickly understand that there’s no way that we can hope to understand how soil works (all of these facts, and at least one jaw-droppingly beautiful sentence, can be found on every page of Paul Hawken’s Carbon). We cannot acquire wisdom by hoping to quantify, analyze, and understand all of these interactions, yet this truth is lost to most of us.
Because quantification is our dominant way of knowing, we try to influence others–friends, neighbors, policymakers–by blinding them with science. It’s hard to make people care about a term as lifeless as parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or the push for net zero carbon, unless they are already committed to the cause. Moreover, by going ever deeper into our analysis of each tree, we lose our ability to see the forest and understand how it operates.
Understanding the forest requires knowing about the trees, their interactions, and the role we play in the forest system. Another chapter of Carbon retells the story of a plant scientist who went into the rainforest with an indigenous youth guide. Hawken writes, “As they entered the thick and varied growth, the youth described one species after another, its history, name, and usage. His breadth of knowledge was a complete surprise to the scientists, who complimented him on his depth of understanding. The youth accepted the praise but replied with downcast eyes, ‘Yes, I have learned the names...but I have yet to learn their songs.’” (Hawken 175) In other words, the youth knew about the rainforest, but he didn’t yet know its rhythms and connections. He wasn’t yet able to intuit what needed to be done to sustain it.
These songs are what underlie indigenous knowledge systems. They are the chorus that has enabled these cultures to live and thrive across every part of the globe for countless generations. What’s fascinating is that these harmonies all rest on the same axiomatic truth: we humans are part of the family of living things and have a critical role to play on this planet as a keystone species that enables and nurtures life. It’s not just indigenous teachings that have arrived at this truth. It’s the theme you hear from Pope Leo XIV when he talks about living in a “relationship of reciprocity” with the environment, not the default and “tyrannical” position of our society today. It’s also the core of what the deep ecologists believe.
This worldview is far enough removed from our dominant societal beliefs that it requires work to internalize. The hardest part of this is getting out into nature and the world enough to be able to see its patterns, hear its songs, and move beyond the headlines. To know about the world and our role in it also requires tapping into knowledge systems that get at core truths–those ancient pursuits of philosophy, ethics, and religion. (Experiencing the world live and accessing these truths is what I’m trying to accomplish by writing a book on rewilding.)
I believe that the ability to synthesize knowing about and knowing is how we can become stewards of the world and agents of change. People who do this successfully will become the change agents who can act before the science because they can see beyond its edges. They are the ones who, across the generations, have convinced others to act because of their clarity of purpose.
Damn! You’re deep. Seriously proud and impressed!