Harmony in Nature

I'm taking a soil science class at the university, and while I find that I do not have the background to make scientific connections automatic for my poor arts-educated brain, I love the class. My professor is fantastic--so enthusiastic he bounces around the room, and when he gets really excited one eyebrow pops up al la Dr. "Bones" McCoy.

There is one point, however, where I found myself disagreeing with him. Near the beginning of the semester and many times since he has told us that there is no harmony in nature, no miraculous place of balance. This bothered me enough that I finally sat down and wrote a letter to him, telling him what I disagreed with and explaining my position. Here, in full is the letter I sent.

Dear Dr. -------,

I would like to challenge your assertion that there is no harmony in nature. This is an issue that is important to me as a farmer and as a human being, and my discomfort with your statement has grown until I decided to organize my thoughts into this letter.

I think that what you are objecting to is the naïve idea of natural harmony, the bucolic ideal of an abstract balance, of the land’s native people walking gently through the land “painting with all the colors of the wind” and so on. I think that this is a valid objection; I agree that a baseline of balance does not exist in this storybook sense. I understand the second law of thermodynamics that states that there must always be imbalance in order for life to exist, that organisms must continually consume energy, even to the point of their own destruction. This imbalance, I have understood you to say, rules out the existence of harmony in nature.

But this is a very literal interpretation of harmony, one that is in fact built upon the very ideal you eschew. It is a knee-jerk reaction away from the abstract balance I first described, and I think it then goes too far in the other direction. The abstract idea of harmony assumes that all earth’s creatures can live together doing harm to none. The literal interpretation says no, life on earth is in competition, and therefore no harmony of any kind exists in nature. I will argue that the unbalanced continuation of life as described in the second law of thermodynamics is in itself harmonious, and that if we consider a more holistic interpretation of the concept of harmony, then there is indeed balance in nature.

I recognize that there is a tension in trying to talk about harmony in a scientific setting, where measurable facts prevail. As Wendell Berry puts it in his essay People, Land, and Community, “In a society addicted to facts and figures, anyone trying to speak for agricultural harmony is inviting trouble….[Harmony] cannot be reduced to facts and figures—though the lack of it can.” Scientists provide numbers, while philosophers provide poetry. But while science helps us understand our world it does not hold sole sovereign sway over the way we think and talk about our world. Berry writes about the mud dauber that hums as it plasters mud onto its nest, the tone making the material easier to work with. Considering this, he says that “perhaps the hum of the mud dauber only activates that anciently perceived likeness between all creatures and the earth of which they are made…. And harmony always involves such specificities of form as in the mud dauber’s song and its nest, whereas information accumulates indiscriminately, like noise.” He, too, objects to the notion of a single, abstract harmony, and points instead to the earth’s details as the seat of nature’s balance.

One of these details you have talked about in class: the idealized percentages that we find wherever the soil has been undisturbed by humans. These percentages are what life needs to exist, and organisms will self-organize to achieve these ideal conditions. Is this not a balance? Soil can achieve this balance without becoming static; the ideal soil is still teaming with life, and there is still movement in and out. I have seen other examples of this balance, both in class and in my own experience. The land can be covered in volcanic rock, but life breaks through and continues on—is this not a balance? Plants roots attract fungi that protect against root-eating nematodes—is this not a balance? When an animal dies its body is taken back into the earth, renewing the soil—is this not a balance? If one organism consumes all of its energy source it dies back, and another takes its place—is this not a balance? When writing about the complexity of the earth’s systems, Daniel B. Botkin says that it is “an intriguing and unsolved question how this dense complexity persists and has persisted so long.” I would call this harmony: all of the independent instances of balance combining to form the vast harmony of the earth.

I will venture to guess that we disagree more about terminology than about ideals; the definition of harmony you have used in class is different from the broader definition I offer here, but I have seen some of these ideas present in your lectures.

I am pushing this issue because I agree with you that soil is essential to every human function, and as such it is an inescapable part of us. In this uncertain time of shifting climate and fleeting fertility, we must learn how to serve the soil if it is to serve us. Berry says that we “are not naturally involved in harmony. For humans, harmony is always a human product, an artifact, and if they do not know how to make it and choose to make it, then they do not have it.” Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm describes his practices as “Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale [which] insures moral and ethical boundaries to human cleverness.” Polyface Farm was founded on worn out, abused, eroded land, and Salatin has used these natural patterns to restore that land while producing food on it. It is a testament to how working with natural harmonies can be both healing and economically successful. I am pushing this issue because I believe that everyone, starting with this class, needs to understand that we can choose to use or abuse the land, that we can choose to mimic natural patterns or attempt to impose a human order on the soil, and that what we choose can have an impact on the earth and on our own lives.

I hope that we can talk about this soon. I would like to hear what you think get your input and help in refining my ideas. And I want to thank you for this class—I am learning so much and I enjoy having you as a professor.

Thanks for reading,

Alison

He was thrilled. We got together and had a long conversation, and it was one of those moments when I was very glad to be in school, to have the opportunity to talk and argue with such and intelligent and caring person. Turns out he agrees with me, as I thought he did, and said that near the end of the semester he usually brings some of these ideas up in the form of "reverence" for the earth. I just brought it up a little earlier than usual.