Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World

If people are encouraged to immerse

themselves in Nature’s grammar and geometry

they are often led to acquire some remarkably

deep philosophical insights.

I was born in 1948, right in the middle of the twentieth century, which had dawned amid the gleaming Age of the Machine, the very engine of colossal change in the Western world. By the 1920s the overriding desire in every leading nation was for the new and the modern: perhaps a natural reaction as people struggled to recover amid the debris of a shattered world after the Great War. The same thing happened in the wake of the unimaginable horrors of the Second World War as, once again, industrialized nations had to find their feet, and quickly. Such was the sense of a fresh start that, by the mid-1950s, a frenzy of change was sweeping the world in a wave of post-war Modernism, and that created a new age of radical experimentation in every major field of human endeavour. By the 1960s the industrialized countries were well on their way to creating what many imagined would be a limitless Age of Convenience. For those who found themselves riding the juggernaut, life became more comfortable, less painful, and lasted longer.

I remember that period in the 1960s only too well and even as a teenager I felt deeply disturbed by what seemed to have become a dangerously short-sighted approach. I could not help feeling that in whichever field these changes were taking hold, with industrialized techniques replacing traditional practices, something very precious was being lost. In many cases it was not so much being lost as wilfully destroyed. I also recall the gleeful, fashionable cries of ‘God is dead’, perhaps the epitome of this short-sightedness. It certainly offered an early clue as to what had happened to our collective view of the natural world.

Such was the dogma of the day that when eventually, in the 1970s, I began to raise these concerns publicly, I had to face an avalanche of criticism that was nearly all based on a very basic misunderstanding. Most critics imagined that I somehow wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical Golden Age when all was a perfect rural idyll. But nothing could be further from the truth.

My concern from the very start was that Western culture was accelerating away from values and a perspective that had, up until then, been embedded in its traditional roots. The industrialization of life was becoming comprehensive and Nature had become ‘secularized’. I could see very clearly that we were growing numb to the sacred presence that all traditional societies still feel very deeply. In the West that sense of the sacred was one of the values that had stood the test of time and had helped to guide countless generations to understand the significance of Nature’s processes and to live by her cyclical economy. But, like the children who followed the Pied Piper, it was as if our beguiling machines, not to say four centuries of increasingly being dependent upon a very narrow form of scientific rationalism, had led us along a new but dangerously unknown road – and a dance that has been so merry that we failed to notice how far we were being taken from our rightful home. The net result was that our culture seemed to be paying less and less heed to what had always been understood about the way Nature worked and the limits of her benevolence, and to how, as a consequence, the subtle balance in many areas of human endeavour was being destroyed. What I could see then was that without those traditional ‘anchors’ our civilization would find itself in an increasingly difficult and exposed position. And, regrettably, that is what has happened.

This is why, ever since those disturbing days, I have expended vast amounts of energy to help save what remains of those traditional approaches. I knew they would be needed for a ‘rainy day’ which I fear is now close by. However, back then I realized that what mattered was to prove their worth. It was no use arguing about the theory or trying to persuade people that so many of these traditional ways are rooted in a deep-seated ancient, philosophical outlook. That would have to come later, when the world was more sensitive to what had so swiftly been consigned to the shadows. No, the point was to emphasize the principles of harmony that we had lost sight of. I wanted to do this in a contemporary way – to find as many ways as possible of reintegrating traditional wisdom with the best of what we can do now so as to demonstrate how we might make this age fit for a sustainable future.

It is probably inevitable that if you challenge the bastions of conventional thinking you will find yourself accused of naivety. And all the more so if you challenge the current world view in all of the important areas of human activity – in agriculture and architecture, education, healthcare, in science, business, and economics. In those early years I was described as old-fashioned, out of touch and anti-science; a dreamer in a modern world that clearly thought itself too sophisticated for ‘obsolete’ ideas and techniques, but I could see the stakes were already far too high in all of these areas. Even back at the end of the ‘swinging sixties’ the damage was showing through, and I felt it my duty to warn of the consequences of ignoring Nature’s intrinsic tendency towards harmony and balance before it was all too late. What spurred me on was an essential fact of life, an undeniable law: that if we ignore Nature, everything starts to unravel. This is why, from the very beginning, I kept pointing out that it is vital we seek ways of putting Nature back in her rightful place – that is, at the centre of things, and that includes in our imagination as well as in the way we do things.

So what are these timeless ‘principles’? Fashions may change, ideologies may come and go, but what remains certain is that Nature works as she has always done, according to principles that we are all familiar with. Nutrients in soils are recycled, rain is generated by forests, and life is sustained by the annual cycles of death and rebirth. Every dead animal becomes food for other organisms. Rotting and decaying twigs and leaves enrich soils and enable plants to grow, while animal waste is processed by microbes and fungi that transform it into yet more vital nutrients. And so Nature replaces and replenishes herself in a completely efficient manner, all without creating great piles of waste.

This entire magical process is achieved through cycles. We all know how the seasons follow one another, but there are many more cycles within those overarching ones and so many of them are interrelated so that the life cycles of many animals and plants dovetail with one another to keep the bigger cycles moving. For instance, in Spring some songbirds time the hatching of their eggs to coincide with a population explosion in the caterpillars that they feed to their chicks. Built into these many cycles are self-correcting checks and balances whereby the relationships between predators and prey, the rate of tree growth, and the replenishment of soil fertility are all subject to factors that facilitate orderly change and progress through the seasons and keep everything in balance. No single aspect of the natural world runs out of proportion with the others – or at least not for long.

What is more, Nature embraces diversity. The health of each element is enhanced by there being great diversity or, as is now commonly called today, ‘biological diversity’ or ‘biodiversity’ for short. The result is a complex web made up of many forms of life. For this web to work best there is a tendency towards variety and away from uniformity and, crucially, no one element can survive for long in isolation. There is a deep mutual interdependence within the system which is active at all levels, sustaining the individual components so that the great diversity of life can flourish within the controlling limits of the whole. In this way, Nature is rooted in wholeness.

There is one other principle or quality I would draw attention to. I will refer to it a lot throughout this book because, in my view, it is extremely important. It is the quality of beauty, which has inspired countless generations of artists and craftsmen. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, it is said, but I have always felt that, because people are as much a part of the whole system of life as every other living thing and because beauty is to be found in the fabric of all that we are, the truth is the other way around. Our ability to see beauty in Nature is entirely consequential on our being a part of Nature Herself. In other words, Nature is the source, not us. In this way, if we do not value beauty then we ignore a vital ingredient in the well-being of the world. This is just as important to recognize as the other elements in my proposition because none of us can survive for very long if the underlying well-being of the planet is destroyed.

Late Spider Orchid. This rare plant flowers in England during June and July.

I find that the world view which prevails today in Western societies, and in an increasing number of others who are following its flawed logic, pursues priorities that are almost diametrically opposite to those I have just described. There is an emphasis on linear thinking rather than seeing the world in terms of cycles, loops and systems, and the intention is to master Nature and control her, rather than act in partnership. Our ambition is to seek ever more specialized knowledge rather than take a broad or ‘whole-istic’ view. Nearly all we do generates masses of waste almost as if it is an automatic consequence of how we have to live. Monocultures of crops, of brands, and ideas have come to dominate and crush diversity in our farming, in our culture – and in our business too. Instead of a large number of small actors, we have a small number of huge organizations that now dominate many parts of our economic activity. And, in all we do, we load the atmosphere with those gases that build up a kind of insulating blanket around the Earth, so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases which accumulate in entirely unnatural quantities which then makes the world ever warmer, thus disturbing the balance that the Earth seeks to maintain. We carry on doing this as if we are immune to the consequences – as if somehow we have isolated ourselves from the inevitable checks that in the end govern all life on Earth.

When I began pointing all this out in those early years when there was not quite so much scientific evidence to back up what my intuition was telling me, it proved a particularly unrewarding occupation. I am relieved to say that now the story is a little different. For one thing, I no longer have to theorize. Now I can point, not only to a vast body of evidence that describes the consequences of our behaviour, but also to an array of successful practical examples of how better to approach matters. These examples, relating to everything from farming to town-planning, are healthier, more beautiful, more human-centred and much more ‘sustainable’ – although I prefer the word ‘durable’. It is these that I plan to explain.

Having also travelled widely in those years and been fortunate to meet and discuss these issues with a large number of people, many of them leading experts in their field, from whose wisdom and knowledge I have benefitted, I also want to share the achievements I have witnessed. We will discover great work being done all over the world, from the UK and the United States to Australia and China, and my hope is that in so many vivid ways it will become clear just what goes wrong if we abandon traditional knowledge and practices and turn away from how Nature behaves.

Knowledge is power’ is a dictum behind much science and experimentation, but is there value in widening the scope of science teaching so that it seeks a deeper understanding of the wholeness of Nature?

The contrast between the way these more harmonious approaches work and the way things are done in the mainstream will, I hope, reveal the many deep cracks in the veneer of our Age of Convenience. These are already becoming more obvious, exposing just how flimsy its foundations really are. We may still enjoy plenty of convenience for now and, of course, it would be marvellous if we could somehow maintain the whole edifice without suffering the eventual consequences of deliberately excluding Nature from the equation in every field known to humankind, but the costs to both the natural world and our own inner world are very severe. We are beginning to recognize the outline of what we have really engineered for ourselves. Not an age of limitless convenience after all, but a much more disturbing ‘Age of Disconnection’. That is to say, we have systematically severed ourselves from Nature and the importance to us, as to everything else on Earth, of her processes and cyclical economy. As a result, we are beginning to fall seriously out of joint with the natural order. And there is order. Whether we choose to be part of the process or not, everything in truth depends upon everything else. Whether it is the bee to the flower, the bird to the fruit tree, or the man to the soil, we depend upon them all – and we neglect this simple principle at our peril. It stands to reason: take away the bee and there can be no flower; without the bird there will be less fruit; deplete the soil and very soon people will begin to starve.

Such obvious relationships are taught in these simple terms to small children in primary schools and yet, by the time they reach adulthood, a strange transformation appears to have taken place. It is almost as if they have gone through a subtle brainwashing that encourages them to follow the rest of the merry throng and dance without question to the Pied Piper’s tune. Like everyone else they become persuaded to think that we can do without everything else and that we can ignore the essential rhythms and patterns of Nature; that, indeed, nothing is sacred any more, not even that mysterious ordered harmony which ultimately sustains us.

There is little question in my mind now that this is a dangerous course. And that we no longer have a choice. If we could exist independently of Nature and her underlying principles, that would be splendid, but we can’t – certainly not if we retain a modicum of interest in our children’s and grandchildren’s future on this threatened planet. The thought of them has been, for me, the main driving force for this book, regardless of how it may be greeted, and if it moves others to reflection, then let this book be a means of exploring what has caused us to think that we can abandon Nature’s rhythmic patterns. We have done so, not just in the mechanized processes we use to grow our food and treat our farm animals, or the way in which we design and build our homes, towns and cities, or the way in which we deny the crucial relationship between mind, body and spirit in healthcare. We have also done so in the way we fail in our systems of economics to measure and put a proper value on Nature’s vital services, and even in the manner we teach out a proper whole-istic understanding of the fact that we are a part of Nature not apart from Her when it comes to our children’s education. For they all follow an approach to life that places the greatest value on a mechanistic way of thinking and a linear kind of logic. But carrying on in this way as if, fundamentally, it is ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option. We cannot solve the problems of the twenty-first century with the world view of the twentieth century.

Terms used in this book

Before we begin our journey there are a number of key words and terms that I will use throughout that I feel I should explain. One of these terms is ‘mechanistic thinking’. This stems from what happened in Western thought from the seventeenth century onwards, after the great pioneers of empirical discovery like Descartes and Francis Bacon laid down the principles of the Scientific Revolution. Nature began to be understood in the more clinical terms of its mechanics, as we shall see. This is because, in the main, our science has been based on a ‘reductionist’ approach. Organisms are broken down and their separate parts are studied in mechanical terms. Hence in schools today children are generally taught to see the human heart as nothing more than a pump, the lungs as a set of bellows, and the brain as some sort of very clever computer with the human mind conveniently explained away as the product of an electromagnetic effect of brain function. Despite the incredible leaps that Quantum Mechanics and Particle Physics and the lessons on the interconnectivity of matter they so readily offer us, it still appears odd that many people seem not to have a knowledge of these things. Is this, perhaps, why things start to get a bit fuzzy in the schoolroom when it comes to defining consciousness in mechanistic terms or, for that matter, the imagination. Quite where the resonance we feel for the beauty of things or, ultimately, love is anybody’s guess. The consequence of this outlook is that we have amassed an extensive database of how the world works that has enabled us to increase the speed and adaptability of many elements of the natural world, but in doing so we have lost a valuable and ancient perspective.

RIGHT: Animals kept in crates, reared all their lives in sheds and fed on a diet of corn and growth hormones disconnects even the creatures we rely upon for our food from the natural world. Factory farming is said to be the only way to feed the world, but this ignores the massive hidden costs and the need to give back to Nature as much as we take. There are better ways to produce food than this.

The eighteenth–century agenda of the Enlightenment, based predominantly on the pursuit of progress through science and technology, is so much a part of the furniture today that we do not even question it as an ideology. And yet it is as if we peer at the world through a letterbox, believing that what our science reveals to us is the whole picture even though science does not itself deal with the meaning of things, nor does it encourage a very joined-up way of working. As a result, time and again one problem is solved, but in its wake many others are created, often far worse than the one we set out to resolve.

To see this in action we only have to consider the way water companies in the UK have to spend around £100 million a year removing pesticides and other chemicals from the water supply. These chemicals are the fallout of a supposedly efficient form of industrialized agriculture – an agriculture that works according to mechanistic thinking. The same mechanistic response is applied in the US, where every year many more millions of dollars are spent blasting fresh meat with ammonia in enormous, gasguzzling chemical plants to cleanse it of the fatal E. coli bug that has blighted the food industry for decades. This bug is only there because of the intensive way in which cattle are reared on a diet of corn on vast ‘feed lots’ which are, to all intents and purposes, like concentration camps for cattle. Much of the E. coli bug could easily be removed from the gut of cattle simply by giving them what they are designed by Nature to eat, which is grass, but that does not automatically follow when mechanistic thinking is at work. The knee-jerk reaction is to use more and very costly technology to solve any problems that arise from the solution to an original problem, and so we spawn yet more problems, each one solved in the same isolated way. Nature has the simpler remedy, but she is excluded from the process. She is no longer involved in the cure.

This fragmented view of the world extends to the way people are expected to behave. I come across many instances when the absence of this understanding of how we really fit within the great scheme of things forces people to censor what their intuition might be telling them, to the point where I sometimes wonder if there are a considerable number of people living an almost schizophrenic-like existence. The pressure can be enormous on individuals to draw a very clear line between their private feelings and their public, professional occupation. I have lost count of the number of people I have spoken with who tell me quietly of how, even though privately they may feel deeply anxious inside themselves about the consequences of this whole mechanistic approach, when at work they are expected to lock those feelings away and follow the corporate diktat, which so often reflects the mechanistic mindset that can be so destructive of Nature and her systems.

If we continue to engineer the extinction

of the last remaining indigenous, traditional

societies, we eliminate one of the last remaining

sources of that wisdom.

This bizarre denial has far-reaching and serious consequences for the lives of millions of people, and all the more so if it manifests itself in those who effectively run the world. I intend to give graphic details of the ultimate price some of the poorest farmers in India have had to pay because of it. But it is not just the lives of those in developing countries. Many small-scale farmers in the US also find themselves up against the same might of a globalized system that allows only a few giant corporations to control more or less the whole food production and distribution system across an increasing proportion of the world.

I find it revealing that a substantial number of the people who work for such organizations can often feel instinctively anxious about what this current world view expects of them, but they dare not express their disquiet for fear of being considered old-fashioned, not ‘on message’ or anti-science. They can see quite clearly the long-term implications of what they are being asked to do in their professional lives, but even so, I suspect that if I asked them whether they have any sense of the inner value of things when it comes to the decisions they take, or whether they look beyond the mechanics of Nature to obtain a true sense of what life consists of, the chances are they would feel obliged to accuse me of relying on ‘superstition’. They would most certainly fight shy of agreeing that there may be such a thing as an invisible ‘pattern’ in which all manifestations of life take place. But if they were to realize how many people in the same situation felt the same way about the consequences of what they are doing, I wonder whether they would think again, or even have the confidence to stick their heads above the parapet. I would certainly welcome the company!

Even if words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘sacred’ are a step too far for some, anyone who stands back and considers what has been done to Nature by what is now the dominant approach could be forgiven for thinking that simple common sense has been abandoned. How else could we have embarked upon such a singular and self-destructive enterprise to prove beyond doubt that we can, indeed, do without the rest of the natural world? For that is what we are doing. We are testing the world to destruction and the tragedy – no, the stupidity – is that we will only discover the real truth when we have finally succeeded in completely denuding the world of its complex life-giving forces and eradicating traditional human wisdom.