Gestalt switch: Changing our relationship with nature

The immense power and destructive forces of nature, revealed last December with the Asian tsunami, were demonstrated once again with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis have the ability to change us, change our ways of thinking about our world in dramatic ways.

When one’s perception of the world changes in a fundamental way, we sometimes speak of a “gestalt switch.” At such times one’s total perception of a phenomenon undergoes a revolutionary transformation. A veil is lifted. A previously hidden reality is revealed.

Using the famous visual examples, what was once the figure of a white goblet becomes the background to two profiles facing one another. What was once an ugly, disfigured hag is now a beautiful female face. Nothing about the object has changed. What has changed is something inside of us, our way of perceiving it.

At some point during human history, our view of our relationship to nature underwent a gestalt switch. As a consequence of this perceptual change, the human species has become extraordinarily successful in dominating the planet. This was not always the case.

Anthropologists tell us that humans lived largely at the mercy of forces of nature during roughly 99.994 percent of our time on Earth. During that time, human survival, like the survival of other life forms, was governed by such things as climate, the availability of food, disease, predators, and competition with other species for land and resources. Then, sometime around 12,000 years ago, humankind underwent a gestalt switch, a revolutionary change in our understanding of our relationship to nature.

As the last ice age drew to a close, we cleverly figured out that we could exercise some control over the forces of nature. Rather than rely upon the limited supply of edible wild plants and game animals available in nature, we could grow crops and domesticate the animals we needed for our survival. We had, to some degree, freed ourselves from subservience to the forces of nature.

But nature would not easily yield its dominion. Droughts could still deprive our crops of water, our animals and human populations of food and drink. Seasonal flooding could wipe out an entire harvest, placing our growing populations at risk for starvation, disease, destruction.

Then, around 6,000 years ago, we learned that we could assume even greater control over nature by shaping the landscape. Large scale water engineering projects, we discovered, could help reduce the risk of seasonal flooding. Reservoirs could be designed to hold large amounts of water, and make it available during times of severe draught. Populations grew. Civilizations began to form.

Around 2,500 years ago, a civilization of Greek speaking people around the Aegean Sea began a series of unique speculations about the natural world that would eventually develop into what we today call science. With the advent of science, mankind would come into possession of a powerful new tool we would use to further overcome the limitations imposed by nature.

We learned to use the discoveries of science to further increase food production, to develop vaccines and cures for disease. We further improved our technologies, our methods of waging war, and brought about an industrial revolution. We would create weapons of mass destruction, and use them against human populations.

Today, as we peer out at our vast universe using powerful radio telescopes, we get a greater sense of the destructive potential of natural processes in our universe. Although momentarily tranquil, our blue planet appears a fragile island of life within an otherwise sterile solar system. We can see the stars of our galaxy, bodies like our own sun, being born, moving through stages of development, and eventually dying as they use up their fuel, expanding outward and consuming any objects captured by their gravitational pull. Scientists predict that four or five billion years from now, our sun, too, will die, taking with it our system of planets. Earth, however, will have become inhospitable to life long before this occurs.

We humans have shown ourselves to be adept, at least over the short-term, at overcoming the limits set upon us by forces of nature in our tiny corner of the universe. The human species, like all species before us, however, is marked for extinction. Whether it will be by climate change, ecological degradation, collision with a comet or asteroid, or whether we will exterminate ourselves with chemical biological, or nuclear weapons remains to be seen.

Our control over nature is temporary. In the end, nature will undoubtedly prevail. We may, at best, hope to avoid a premature or self-inflicted demise. Perhaps our prospects to extend our survival will depend, not upon our ability to conquer nature, but rather understand it, and a determination to bring human activities into harmony with its powerful forces: a gestalt switch.