Toward Wisdom Rather Than Mere Education

It's "fire season" here on the West Coast of the US. Currently, there are 32 active "large" fires burning, not to mention the dozens of smaller fires or the 50 or so large fires currently burning in other regions of the US.

The whole idea of a "season" during which destructive fires burn out of control is a modern invention. Up until the late 19th century, Indigenous people across the US, but especially on the West Coast, regularly engaged in prescribed or cultural burning as a tool for tending the landscape. These intentional small, low-intensity fires cleared undergrowth, encouraged grasses and other useful plants, improved forage for game, maintained open woodlands, made travel easier, stimulated plants used for basketry, and reduced insects and disease. And, of course, one of the consequences was that these small burns done during cooler, wetter months, consumed the fuels that otherwise accumulate and feed the catastrophic fires we today experience every summer.

When Europeans began colonizing North America, they thought they were "settling" pristine, untouched, wilderness, when, in fact, for thousands of years, the native population had been responsibly working cooperatively with the land, not just with fire, but in countless other ways. Europeans missed it because it simply didn't look like the sort of clear-cut and plow methods of "dominating" or "subduing" nature employed back home. They missed it so badly, that they criminalized Indigenous fire practices, creating the "fire season" that is currently destroying thousands of acres of precious forest and filling our air with toxic smoke.

Every species shapes its environment at least as much as its environment shapes it. Beavers are a famous example. They have been at work engineering and shaping the planet's surface for some 8 million years. 

And it's not just animals. Plants also "tend" their environments. "When grasses emerged between 100 and 70 million years ago," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "Rather than rely on robust and elaborate defenses (as did their plant predecessors), certain grasses negotiated a symbiosis -- an ecological partnership -- with large herbivores. These grasses offered grazers endless fields of tender green leaves that quickly regenerated when shorn (or burned). In exchange for this perpetual sustenance, mammoths and the megafauna trampled, ate, and otherwise deterred the grasses' main botanical competitors, such as shrubs and trees, and fertilized the fields with their copious dung." 

Humans seem to be unique in that we are able to be conscious about our efforts to shape ourselves and our environment, both for good and bad. 

Cultural burn practices emerged over centuries during which conscious humans observed and experimented with fire, not as a destructive force to be feared and fought, but rather an essential aspect of a thriving environment. It was an ongoing process of learning to, not manage, but live reciprocally with a fire-adapted landscape. 

This process led to a kind of collective wisdom that wasn't just passed down from generation to generation, but rather continued to grow and evolve, through the conscious practices of observation and experimentation.

In our rush to fill our children's heads with "knowledge" in the name of mere education, we continue the colonizer's practice of domination and management. So much of what passes for schooling is the intellectual process of clear-cutting and plowing in order to plant the crops we think we prefer. When a child isn't compliant, when a child is incapable of being a docile empty vessel to be filled, we treat it like an emergency, a fire to be doused or a weed to be eradicated. Many of the mental health and other challenges our children face today, are the result -- the wildfire -- of this approach.

The practice of observation and experimentation, however, causes us to ask, "What is this child telling us?" The practice of observation and experimentation leads us to explore how we can work with children rather than attempt to somehow manufacture them. When we place observation and experimentation at the center of our work, we discover that the children are likewise observing and experimenting: adapting and tending, which is the essence of all human wisdom. 

At the core of this wisdom is the awareness that there is always more to learn from observation and experimentation. It's the process of living, one that cannot be undertaken alone, but in cooperation, collaboration, and reciprocity with the other people, animals, and plants, not to mention the earth, the wind, and the fire.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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