In the jungle without a field guide
Discovering the freedom in curiosity
In Nayarit, Mexico, last week, I was in the jungle without a field guide. I considered buying one before I left, but instead opted to surrender to my lack of knowledge.
I couldn’t name most of the birds. There were whales far out to sea, the shape of whose spouts I couldn’t discern to make a species ID. Once I got over the frustration of this, it left room for the miracle that I had just seen a whale—regardless of species.
I walked the trails, stopping to watch the lime-green parrots boisterously land in the trees above. Bright orange butterflies overtook me like sports cars in the passing lane.
While the urge to want to know the names of these species was strong, it was also fun to let myself off the hook—a hook I’ve been on since I learned how to use binoculars.
Ignorance is bliss?
The tropics are extremely biodiverse. Unless you’ve worked in a particular tropical region for years, you’re unlikely to be able to identify everything you encounter.
Fourteen years ago, when my partner and I were exploring our options for where to go on our honeymoon, I suggested Hawaii.
“Nah—too depressing. Too many invasives,” he said.
The funny thing about this is that neither of us would likely have been able to identify most of the invasive species we encountered—especially the plants.
We went to Costa Rica for our honeymoon, and if we encountered any invasives1, we didn’t know it. We enjoyed our adventures in the jungles of the Osa Peninsula immensely, marveling at the tree frogs and the howler monkeys, the macaws and the sloths.
Bliss.
The curse of knowledge
The counterbalance to this blissful ignorance is the burden of ecological knowledge, as Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac2:
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
This sentiment has been my experience, and partial impetus for my starting Hopecology—because not only does this knowledge impart the burden of its pain, but the responsibility for educating the greater community.
For ecologists, to know the “marks of death” is to be able to do something about them. Without this knowledge, ignorance is just…ignorance.
But what about when ignorance is not just ignorance?
Technically, ignorance is simply the lack of knowledge or information; there is no inherent value placed on it. This comes later, as culture adds a layer of judgment to not-knowing as bad, perverse, or somehow…stupid. This judgment is a symptom of addiction to knowledge, of putting it on a pedestal above all other ways of knowing.
Knowledge in the Information Age
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
- T.S. Eliot, from The Rock, 1934
In the Information Age—when the answer to nearly any question is as close as our pocket—curiosity takes work. To refrain from indulging in instant information can feel like a kind of fast, something that increases the hunger pangs for knowledge.
Knowing stuff is great. It’s led to an increasingly equitable society—where anyone with a smartphone or internet connection can access the same information as everyone else. No longer do the halls of academia hold the keys to the library of humanity’s knowledge for a privileged few.
And yet there are times that knowing stuff may hold us back from our full potential.
I wrote recently about what happened when I abandoned my phone, all media, and speech for four days on silent retreat. By not having answers and stimulation at my fingertips, my brain got to rest, which led to a mind-blowingly direct experience of reality.
At the same time, learning how to recognize and name species can be a revolutionary experience in itself.
The transformative power of natural history
If there is a naturalist’s analog to the idiom, “up a creek without a paddle,” it might be “in the jungle without a field guide”.
Naturalists and ecologists generally love to identify everything in the natural world. For me, it offers a sense of belonging, akin to knowing my neighbors, even if I’m a visitor to a place for the first time.
One of the most profound instructor evaluations I ever received was at the end of the Vertebrate Zoology laboratory that I taught in graduate school. In this course—which consumed an entire day each week—I would take the students birding at local parks and beaches in the morning, and in the afternoon we would study specimens.
Most of the students had never used binoculars before, so we started there on day 1. I had been birding for quite some time at that point, so I took the ability to find and identify local birds somewhat for granted.
Then, one day at the end of the quarter, the evaluations came in. One student wrote: “This has been my number one favorite class of all time. It’s so strange to think that birds have always been around me, but I never had the ability to really see them. Thanks, so much, Andrea, for opening up a whole new world! This class changed my life.”
That is the power of natural history—to learn to see our world in new ways, to open up to the nature that is always around us by relating to it differently.
In this sense, knowledge is bliss—and it mirrors my own experience of natural history: that new pair of glasses offered by curiosity; being able to know what is around me by the power to name it.
Welcome to the jungle
Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
I thought for a moment before I left for my trip to Nayarit last week that I should purchase a field guide. If I don’t identify the spectacular species that will be all around me, I wondered, will I have experienced them at all?
I wondered if choosing to remain ignorant about the biodiversity of the place I was about to visit would make me a bad ecologist. It is, after all, my job to know stuff.
But I wasn’t going on this trip for work: I was going in part to unplug from my everyday responsibilities.
I was surprised that I didn’t want the field guide. Had I lost my curiosity for nature? My edge?
Counterintuitively, I found that it was the curiosity that kept me from buying the field guide. I wanted to really see things without the pressure to name them.
Reflecting back, I wonder how many fascinating creature behaviors I’ve missed because I had my nose in a field guide instead of looking up and watching. In the drive to name them, and check them off a list, I had actually lost the spirit of curiosity.
Can knowledge be worse than ignorance?
Can knowing the name of something actually hinder us from experiencing it? Jiddu Krishnamurti seems to have thought so. He said,
The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.
At the surface level, this sentiment could be seen as the worship of ignorance. But there was nothing surface-level about Krishnamurti.
The Upanishads—sacred treatises that originate from 800-200 BCE—mirror a similar sentiment and point to something much deeper:
Into great darkness they enter,
those who worship ignorance.
Into still greater darkness enter those
who are addicted to their knowledge.
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.10 and Isha Upanishad 9
This isn’t to be against knowledge; rather, it’s to highlight knowledge as just one way to understand the world, when there are many other levels of understanding at our disposal—including direct experience and observation.
It seems to be an invitation to go beyond open-mindedness to a kind of expansive-mindedness, which cultivates opportunity for curiosity, creativity—and, perhaps most importantly, problem solving.
Over-identification with knowledge makes it increasingly difficult to admit we are wrong, with potentially disastrous consequences.
Curiosity for the win – in practice
There is a way to have both: to remain in curiosity and not-knowing for a time, to obtain value from that experience, and then to satiate the quest for knowledge.
It’s about understanding the world in two different ways: first, by direct experience; and then, to know something more shared in common about it—for example, its agreed-upon name.
In
, recently wrote about this in practice:When Heather leads nature walks and someone asks about a particular plant, she prefers not to name the species – white pine, sphagnum moss, ghost pipe, for example – until she has had the participants touch, smell, and look closely at the plant. Then she describes some details of how the plant lives or who it lives in relationship with. Names, in our fading relationship with the living world, can be invitations to know more or mere boxes to check off. Heather has learned to personalize the invitation.
To have knowledge without being too attached to it as the end game, to have it but to also leave room for the mystery of the species that goes beyond its name—this is the both-and.
Knowledge can provide freedom, a new lens on the world. It can also cause suffering.
That doesn’t make it bad. But an addiction to knowledge can limit the ability to experience the wisdom that is beyond knowledge.
To be in the jungle without a field guide is, perhaps, more like being up a creek without a paddle than I originally imagined.
Instead of being really hopeless—which the creek idiom suggests—it’s an opportunity. After all, if you’re up a creek, then the creek is flowing down—you don’t need a paddle.
It’s easy to find your way home: it actually takes less effort, not more. Just surrender to the flow of the water.
On the morning of my departure from Nayarit, two little, familiar-looking birds caught my eye: one, blue with a heavy beak; the other, with lemony yellow on its breast starkly contrasting the blue-grey on its back.
I knew their names—they are neotropical migrants that spend their winters in the tropics and their summers in temperate forests. Like me, they were on their way north.3
I recently discovered an interesting Substack—Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They’re From—which is a critical exploration of the concept of invasive plants in general. The author,
, dives into the peer-reviewed literature to support his claims. I appreciate how it delves into the differences between intellectual dogma and what the data actually show. In addition, the realities of the Anthropocene mean these clear distinctions between native and non-native are becoming less useful in many cases from an ecosystems perspective. For example, check out this article by Emma Marris in the Atlantic: Nature Doesn’t Care Where a Species is From, which covers a recent article in Science about the negligible differences between native and nonnative herbivores on native plants.The links to books in this post go to the Hopecology Bookshop storefront, where a small portion of the proceeds from each book sold go to independent bookstores and to supporting Hopecology.
I would like to say “home”, because it would make the ending more poignant here, but who am I to say whether their winter or summer grounds are “home” to them? My guess is it’s both.
Thanks for including me in a footnote!
The T.S. Eliot quotation is one of my all-time favorite quotations. These days, I wonder if he would add the line, "Where is the information we have lost in data?"
I appreciated this: "The funny thing about this is that neither of us would likely have been able to identify most of the invasive species we encountered—especially the plants." This is a point rarely made that I'd like to help make more widespread: In a place we don't know, we would not be able to identify what is native or "invasive" because "invasives" don't have unique traits that set them apart. I think a lot of people might be surprised to learn this.
Thank you, Andrea, for threading my work into this excellent essay. You do a great job of exploring the nuances between knowledge and experience as we reintroduce ourselves to the living world. As with so many things, there are students' learning styles and teachers' intuition at play here. And then those of us figuring it out as we go need to be both student and teacher, toggling between embracing and learning. Happy to have found your work.