Walking on the East End beach at low tide with my 11-year old granddaughter, I pointed out the rivulets of groundwater streaming onto the flats. All the water in the world, I told her, eventually ends up in the ocean.
“We studied the water cycle in school,” she said. “Evaporation, transpiration, precipitation.”
Yes, I said, it is a closed system: all the water on Earth and in its atmosphere is already here. There is no more being made; it is just constantly being recycled.
“How did it get here in the first place?” she asked.
I will have to think about that, I said.
And I did. Later that day, as I thought about water, I began thinking about life itself. Is it possible that all the life on Earth is also already here, with no new net life being created? Is life just recycled from being to being throughout time, like some kind of eternal banking system?
Relax. I am not going to get all religious on you. I am not going to mention the soul — unless you allow my dear dog to have one. But what if there were a repository of life force somewhere (not up there!) that somehow delivers its essence into beings constantly? And when those beings expire, that same essence is delivered to another.
This is a complex and unformed idea. I am not talking about the actual building blocks of life — the atoms and molecules that constitute us and every other living thing. It was long ago determined that this material is also finite, constantly broken down, recycled, reconstituted, and recombined. My organic chemistry teacher persuaded me that it can be statistically determined that an atom or molecule in me once resided in Jesus, Hitler, or Marilyn Monroe. (I would prefer Marilyn.)
But if water is finite, if matter is finite, then why can’t the very spark of life itself — some state of energy — be finite and recycled as the others are? I have no idea what the mechanism or process might be; I have even less sense of the source or holding area of this energy.
And then there is the actual quality of life. I am grateful for the packet of life force that infused the sex cells that combined and, following a DNA blueprint, created Dennis Minsky and granted me my complicated existence. I am glad to be alive and to be human.
But as a naturalist I am always wondering what it’s like to be a lowly slug, crawling around in my own juices. Or a vulture, constantly looking for the dead and dying. Or a single-minded mosquito. Or an always fearful rabbit. Or a blood-lusty tiger. Can we ever really comprehend the umwelt of other beings? (That’s a German term meaning “the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.”) Thoreau once said that a muskrat was “just a different sort of man, that is all,” but did he really mean it?
Scientists are now using AI to decode the language of sperm whales, but when they’re done will we really be able to converse with them? (We should start with a profound apology.)
At any rate, it has been demonstrated that sentient thoughts and feelings exist on a spectrum from “lower” to “higher” life forms. That chicken you just consumed felt fear at the end of its short life; that pulled pork sandwich came from a being as complex as your beloved dog.
Relax again. This is not a vegetarian diatribe (although I am capable of one). I am trying to think through some of the complexities of our existence on Earth and taking you along for the ride. Perhaps, given the unknowns we are forced to live with, humility should be our default approach to life. Instead, arrogance seems to rule the day.
