"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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“Carnivores” and social destruction in “Children” and “Eland”. The poem “Old
Harbour” examines the motives behind this destructive human impulse.
The power of nature and the triumph of life are juxtaposed in “Scourings” where
human determination (but delivered through the voice of a bantam) challenges nature’s
impersonal power. Is Livingstone suggesting that this is the root of the ecological
problem? Humankind appears to view life and nature as separate forces. But can they be
separated? As previously discussed, nature is inordinately difficult to define. James
Lovelock claims that life is the most difficult concept to understand and that scientists
cannot explain what life is in scientific terms (1988: 16). Lovelock ventures into the
realms of evolutionary psychology in trying to explain why we intuitively know what life
is, but cannot define it:
I have long thought that the answer to the question “What is life?” was deemed so
important to our survival that it was classed “top secret” and kept locked up as a
secret in the automatic levels of our mind. During evolution, there was great
selection pressure for immediate action; crucial to our survival is the instant
distinction of predator from prey and kin from foe, and the recognition of a
potential mate. We cannot afford the delay of conscious thought or debate in the
committees of the mind. We must compute the imperatives of recognition at the
fastest speed and, therefore, in the earliest-evolved and unconscious recesses of
the mind. This is why we know intuitively what life is. (16)
Stephen Jay Gould writes that morality is outside the realm of nature:
The answers to moral questions cannot be found in nature’s factuality in any case,
so why not take the ‘cold bath’ of recognizing nature as nonmoral, and not
constructed to match our hopes? After all, life existed on earth for three and a half
billion years before we arrived; why should life’s causal ways match our
prescription for human meaning or decency? (in Rose 104)
Is “the joke on our youth” humanity’s simultaneous regression from and progression past
our evolutionary heritage? Or is the “joke” that we conceive ‘morally’ but appear
biologically incapable of implementing that morality? We cannot know if stone-age man
even stopped to think about life and nature, let alone whether he treated them as separate
entities. But I submit that it is this separation which is the root of the ecological mess
humans are making, and that this is Livingstone’s point. He does not pontificate, merely
demonstrates the results of humankind’s abuse of nature. As the “negatio bacillus”,
humankind is currently a destroyer of its own life-support system. Any hope of changing
this lies in humankind’s psychic sensibility. The following chapter will explore a more
hopeful separation of man and nature.