The Case for Rewilding Our Government
This article is part of a series, in collaboration with the Civic Paths working group at the University of Southern California.
In the decades since the philosophers David Chalmers and Andrew Clark first proposed the concept of extended cognition — positing that our thought processes partially occur in the physical world outside of our heads — their ideas have enriched disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology to religion.
The implications are especially profound when cognitive ecology is considered in relation to environmental devastation. The loss of biodiversity in a warming climate and the depletion of wilderness through industrialization have resulted in a world that is progressively less hospitable to all life forms including us.
As we lose the richness of our planetary environment, we're losing our minds.
The environmental impact is compounded by the psychological impact on our species, because the psychological impact is crippling our ability to make the changes in personal behavior and socioeconomic structures that are needed for us to contend with the Anthropocene, resulting in a feedback loop of ever-growing environmental destruction.
Some have attributed this feedback loop to emotional paralysis induced by catastrophe, often referred to as "ecological grief." This may be the case, but does not take into account the incapacity of most people even to recognize a problem with our way of life (let alone get depressed about it). We need a better explanation of our inability to counteract the destructive forces we’ve set in motion — and we need to enlist this new explanation as a basis for action.
Here’s a novel proposition: The impoverishment of the environment is impoverishing our cognitive abilities.
If we are to take extended cognition seriously, and to recognize that our thinking depends on the coordination of mental models with external conditions, then we need to acknowledge a painful consequence: As we lose the richness of our planetary environment, we're losing our minds.
We can test this theory — and potentially enact real-world change — by moving politics out into the open, designing outdoor spaces where political discourse can be undertaken within a living landscape. By literally tearing down the walls of legislatures and courthouses, we can begin to think with the degree of wisdom found in pre-industrial societies whose traditional ecological knowledge is deeply situated in their habitats.
Although this architectural upheaval will not restore ruined ecosystems, it will at least remove the physical and psychological blockages that have made ruination of the environment easy for authorities. Perception of ecological phenomena can even be enhanced through landscaping techniques for focusing attention, adapting design principles from classical gardens to create living environmental observatories embedded in the landscape.
Within many traditional societies, ecology is kincentric, and divinity is omnipresent. The former concept is usually framed in terms of reciprocity, akin to familial relationships, but we should also understand it cognitively, as a way in which humans may participate in the collective cognition of all life on Earth. (Modern societies view collective cognition as an operating principle for swarming or schooling by social animals such as birds and fish. Truly collective cognition would entail the recognition that we are constantly thinking with other species and with the environment we collectively inhabit.)
Moving our thought processes outdoors can promote the cognitive biodiversity we need to address ecological crises in our time. But we need also to internalize intellectual humility in order to open ourselves up to the intellect of other beings and living systems, transcending artificial distinctions between different species and even between animate and inanimate matter.
Religion has facilitated this radically distributed cognition in traditional societies because the omnipresence of divinity — such as the manifestation of gods in mountains and trees — commands that human reverence be omnipresent. We are humbled by all beings and features of the environment, and this collapses any hierarchies we may assemble in which we deem ourselves to be special and our intellect to be superior.
Modern societies have the potential to achieve equivalent ends by stimulating reverence for the environment through new political and legal rituals that depart from ceremonies celebrating human hegemony and activate the landscape. We need to conceptualize these activations in tandem with the development of a new form of architecture without walls for future statehouses and courthouses.
Landscapes for political discourse and jurisprudence can lead us back into the natural world — or what remains of it — in order to restore the ecologically-extended intelligence we'll need to contend with the greatest crises of our time.
