Consciousness is the distinctive quality that allows humans see the world. However, it can sometimes get in our way when we try to understand the ecosystems in which we live. This paradox can hinder our ability to live sustainably. Michael Dove, the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Sociology at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE).
Dove’s latest book asserts that to overcome the curses of consciousness, one must escape conscious self-awareness, and disengage ourselves from narrow, goal-oriented thinking which drives many western approaches towards the environment. Bitter Shade: The Ecological Challenges to Human Consciousness(Yale University Press). Dove’s book, which was cited by Library Journal as the best-selling title on environmental science, explores traditional societies of South and Southeast Asia to provide insights into how to build sustainable environmental relations.
Dove is also a professor at the Faculty of Anthropology, a curator at Peabody Museum, and a member of Yale MacMillan Center’s Southeast Asian Studies Council. He spoke to Yale News recently about what industrialized countries can learn by studying the environmental relations in the societies that he has studied. The interview has been edited.
Where did the book idea come from?
Michael Dove: My first half of my career was spent working with non-governmental organizations, foundations and government agencies in South and Southeast Asia. I noticed a pattern we could call serial brilliance. Scientists and planners from other countries would often find a solution to a conservation or development problem, but it would fail. Then they would find another. This is what led to the Green Revolution in agricultural. The miracle variety of rice would eventually be released. Then, a devastating pest would emerge. Despite the obvious pattern of recurrent failure, systemic insights and wisdom seemed to be impossible.
The work of an anthropologist Gregory BatesonThis phenomenon is illuminated by him. He claimed that humans are prone to think in a linear, purposeful way that is often out of sync with natural processes. This is what he called the curse of human consciousness. This was his belief that the ecological crisis was caused by this. He called it a crisis of ecology of the mind. He suggested that what we needed was the ability to conceptually distance ourselves daily from our everyday lives.
What could this perspective do to improve the environment?
Dove: The book aims to explore what non-western, human-ecological systems could have to say about sustainable environmental relations. How might their study help to imagine alternative environmental relations that are not dependent on fossil fuels, or industrial farming to name two examples? How can the study and analysis of these societies help us to rethink our place in the world?
What was your research?
Dove: I used traditional societies from South and Southeast Asia as examples of how to achieve the Bateson perspective. Over the course of many decades, I used ethnographic and participant observation techniques, analysis of royal chronicles and scrutiny of ancient religious text, as well study of tribal myths and rituals, as well as modern media.
The title of the book is a result of a conversation with a farmer from Pakistan about shade, in this instance the shade of the Persian Lilac tree. He explained that tree shade is an emission with density, temperature, taste and size. It is bitter shade in the case of the Persian Lilac. This was my unifying metaphor for the project to denaturalize western worldviews and scientific views on the natural world.
What is an example of a perspective from the societies you studied that could help us to rethink the human-ecological system in the industrialized world?
Dayak tribespeople from Indonesian Borneo are an example of Dayak, who use root crops and other non-rice grains in their rituals. They have had their diet completely replaced by rice. Rice is a dominant crop today, but it wasn’t always so. The paradox of rice in Asia is that it isn’t very well suited agronomically to most of the region. But it spread historically because it suited central states that wanted control over agrarian peoples to extract surplus product. Non-rice cultigens are preserved in ritual to remind us that other agricultural regimes and other relationships with the state were once possible and may again be.
The book examines a variety of principles that were common to local resource management practices. These principles help them sidestep human consciousness. Can you talk more about that?
Dove: The idea of seeing humanity through the eyes nonhumans, or animals, is a common image from South and Southeast Asia as well as other parts of the world. We have always imagined the possibility for human-nonhuman transformation. This idea has been present in many stories, including Ovid’s Ovid, King Arthur’s Metamorphosis, and current efforts by scholars to live in the bodies of different animals. It is a way to see ourselves beyond ourselves. This subject is also a hot topic today due to the animal rights movement as well as new scientific interest in sentience in animals, and possibly plants. In order to better address environmental crises today, there is a general interest in decentering the human perspective and giving more weight to the priorities and places of the nonhuman.
You mentioned that Bitter Shade was inspired in part by Gregory Bateson’s work as an anthropologist. What would Gregory Bateson think of modern relationships with nature?
Dove: Bateson would not be surprised to see that the ecological crisis has only gotten worse over the 50 years since he first predicted it. I believe he would still attribute the current crisis to our inability to see the larger implications of our worldview, and our science. The recent criticisms of the science and technology of evolution, climate change, and pandemics are all examples of how science must be viewed in society. These critiques represent one of the most severe attacks on reason and retreats from it in the last half-millennium. Modern science was taken by surprise by these critiques. They have had a huge and negative impact on policy. We are still trying to figure out why.
While the criticism of evolution was annoying, it didn’t seem like it threatened our everyday reality. The same is true for the criticism of climate change, which has had a detrimental impact on policy. The pandemic has been made worse by the criticism of science.
What kind of support were you given by the YSE community during research and writing the book
Dove: My work in this volume was greatly aided by the fact that my base is at the School of the Environment. Although we are not immune to the challenges that interdisciplinary research presents today in academia, our team is constantly striving to overcome them. I have many amazing students, including those who read Bitter Shade as manuscript in the combined YSE/Anthropology doctoral programme. I also work at Yale University Press with Jean Thompson Black, a legendary editor. My students are invited to submit jacket designs for my books. The winner receives a jacket credit, a monetary award, and a copy of my book. Javier RomnNieves 19 M.E.M. designed the jacket for Bitter Shade.
What are your current projects?
Dove: My next book will be a history of natural science, focusing on four key figures from 17ThCentury to the Present: Georg Eberhard Rumphius, 17ThCentury, Carl Linnaeus starting in the 18ThCentury, Alfred Russel Wallace since the 19Thcentury, and, beginning in the 20Thcentury, the late-Harold C. Conklin (a Yale professor of Anthropology and one of my mentors).
My thesis is that the historical discipline known as natural history provided a holistic view of the universe that has greatly diminished. It began to fade in the late-19ThEarly-20ThAs scientific disciplines grew and disciplinary boundaries were established, it was a process that lasted centuries. This has not been a good thing, I think. It has created a compartmentalized view both of human society as well as the natural world. This has made it more difficult for us to address environmental crises like climate changes, which transcend not only geographical but also disciplinary boundaries.