Michael Charles Tobias

“The Problem with Meaning, the remarkable work by Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison, belongs to that small lineage of texts that shift the conditions under which the mind operates. It is not merely read—it is endured, walked through, revisited, and ultimately lived with. This book enters a moment in which humanity’s various crises—ecological, political, psychological—are often described as external forces acting upon us. Tobias and Morrison take a different view. They argue that these crises originate not from the world but from the architecture of the human mind. What we are confronting, they propose, is not simply climate change or species extinction, but the cumulative effects of millennia of conceptual errors. Our epistemology has become an ecological threat. What distinguishes this work is not only its breadth, which stretches across evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, and ethics, but its coherence. They have traced many of the filaments that connect them: the ongoing attempt of a single species to interpret its own consciousness in a world that never asked for such interpretation.” – From the Foreword by Dr. Con Slobodchikoff, Professor Emeritus of Biology, Northern Arizona University, CEO of Zoolingua, Director, Animal Language Institute, CEO of Animal Communications Ltd., Author of Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals (St. Martin’s Press 2012) and Lead Author, Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an Animal Society (Harvard University Press 2009)

This book is an in-depth examination of the long-looming crisis of ecological consciousness afflicting our species world-wide. While many have addressed the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, inequities between human nations and communities, this may well be the first work to seek out the psychoanalytic roots of that global set of debacles. By examining history, paleontology, ecosystem dynamics, the mathematical and quantum modeling utilized by biologists, biochemists, demographers and ecologists, the Authors examine with clinical and unstinting clarity the complex of self-destruction comprising ecological psychology and the natural sciences, philosophy and the humanities, to ask and answer the question: Is our species destined to survive or fail?

As a child, Michael Charles Tobias encountered a wolf caged in a zoo. Gazing upon the pacing, desperate animal, Tobias asked his Father, "Why is he in jail?" For over half a century, Tobias has roamed the earth in search of an answer. This memoir is a testimony to Tobias' field research, expeditions, deliberations, and some answers to that haunting question. Systems ecologist, philosopher, historian of ideas, anthropologist, ethicist and philanthropist, Tobias has emerged as one of the most influential and far-reaching ecological philosophers of this generation. The Earth in Fragments: A Memoir by Michael Charles Tobias chronicles many of his most incisive areas of research, activism and philosophical inflections. Much of the data, conveyed in a personal and enlightening series of recollections, lends incisive clarity to the emergence and escalating challenges of the environmental and life sciences fields. Tobias shares glimpses into many of the often ethically-harrowing research conundrums confronting him and his wife, Jane Gray Morrison, as they have effectively endeavoured throughout the globe, focusing upon animal rights and conservation biology initiatives. Their more than 50 books and 75 films have shed a powerful spotlight on many of the most pressing issues of our time. The anecdotes pour forth, from an ancient monastery in the Sinai, across the Himalayas, to the Arctic and Antarctic, where Tobias was among the first to draw global attention to the crises mounting across the Last Continent. We see him behind the scenes, directing the ambitious ten-hour drama, "Voice of the Planet" in two-dozen countries, examining the Gaia Hypothesis; conducting a project in the heart of the 1989 catastrophic oil spill in Alaska; his irrepressible quest to understand the runaway train of human overpopulation across the planet in his book and accompanying PBS film "World War III." We follow his probing philosophical meditations-in-action as an animal liberationist from California, Mali, Kenya, China, Greece and Russia. We see his appeal for a "new human nature" in cutting-edge scientific research calling for an interspecies revolution that is at once pantheistic, ethically holistic, and as imaginative and ecologically paradoxical as it is pragmatic. The reader is led through a dazzling and provocative labyrinth of deeply moving eco-science in countries like New Zealand, Madagascar, Brazil, Chile's Rapa Nui, and throughout Europe, West Africa and Asia. From the Ecuadorian Amazon to Haiti; from Mozambique, Yemen, and Namibia to Borneo, Tobias and Morrison have worked to bring critical conservation strategies and policy priorities to government leaders and scientists throughout the world. With insights from palaeontology, Renaissance art history, deep demography, and the most recent advances in biodiversity conservation and biosemiotics, Tobias leads readers on an exquisite and uplifting journey that, while describing much devastation, provides hopeful glimpses into a near future that is not only possible, but essential for the well-being of the world, as viewed, lived and chronicled by one man at the heart of the Anthropocene.

The broad humanistic span from the arts to the sciences affords little comfort in an age of conservation biology where, in spite of the best intentions, humanity finds itself lured by engineering chimeras. The outgrowth of millennia of farming methods targeting tastier breeds has resulted in a new age of hybridization of animals and plants that has, for decades and centuries (actually going well back before the Near Easter Neolithic, circa 6000 BCE), invaded the very genomes of life. With the patenting of organisms and the mechanization of Being in the form of assembly lines of death, our devaluation of individualism is nothing less than an existential crisis in which scientific investment grows more conspiratorial by the day. Poets and legislators have grasped this crisis. But can science find its way clear to reinvigorate the true worth of an individual?

There are well over 705 species and subspecies of primates known throughout the world (an increase of nearly 15% during the second decade of the twenty-first century). But 99% of those taxa cannot successfully – or want to engage in – reproductive activities with each other. Mammals in general are confined, sexually speaking. And this leads to the obvious question: Do humans have options outside conventional evolution that might guarantee their future? This theme dominates not only this chapter but the rest of this treatise. It is an overwhelmingly critical line of thought given that humanity’s destructive predilections – leading to a vastly premature obituary if recent trends continue – have shown zero latitude for viable genetic alternatives, unlike, for example, coyotes, one of the most successful quadrupeds in biological history. But there is an ongoing debate about the extent of our self-destructive impulses, one that leads directly into theoretical speculation.

In acknowledging humanity’s persistent betrayal of its better instincts, what kind of baseline might we establish to better gauge our species’ future potential? We are particularly concerned with that potential as it relates to other species, to what we term the Others (that living constellation of biodiversity at the core of biophilia). We examine certain philosophical questions, particularly those situated in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others, to fashion a framework in which to explore natural history and human psychology as it applies to our relationship to other species and to the prospects of formulating a theory of biospheric coherence to which humanity is an aid, not an interloper.

Ultimately, the questions posed by those of us seeking to better grasp the potential of individualism against the vast realities of human communities gone awry hinge upon the moral compass we feel in the presence of so many other interdependent species. Our love and celebration of the Others is all that can be predicted about our behavioral latitude should and when we choose that day to enter into a communion with individuals of other species and with those within our own.This basic tenet of collaboration in the biosphere is the single most pressing reality of the twenty-first century. The words fly off the page and sound glib but, in fact, are nothing less than the modern guide for the perplexed. Perplexity which, as with the twelfthcentury Moses Maimonides, invokes choices, both in the brain – where there has been considerable research into the matter, notwithstanding the fact the word “brain” is not once used in the Old Testament – and also the heart, where research necessarily translates into action, because that’s its only behavioral truth, a muscle sustaining a life, but also, we presume some kind of ethic. Interestingly, the history of science has provided not one single window on corollaries linking the heart with human emotion, altruism, or the conscience. Ancient Egyptian heart scarabs –implements assisting the soul’s immortal afterlife – were also placed upon the chest or throat of a corpse. We don’t truly know of what we speak with regard to the heart, in terms of perceiving, thinking about, or remembering an individual, except to say that every living organism somehow affects choices that matter to themselves. We tend toward a dramatic insistence on a dialectical view of the individual in terms of his/her heart and brain (and/or mind), two illimitable sources of identity by dint of specific behavioral associations (the right and left brain, but no right and left heart) that result in critical choices (as well as the two primary locations for every death, the brain and the heart). We are referring to all those choices made every day of a person’s life. Cultures doesn’t make choices. Rather, they affect the cumulative will of personages, which is why the private lives of individuals are extraordinarily difficult to exhume from cultural histories.Viewed ecologically, these same ultimate choices exerted with a time-sensitive traction –statistically or in some dimension as yet ungrasped, beyond the 10, 11, even 26 presently deciphered dimensions – may well offer the best guarantee we have of survival, for however long.

Within the past 10 years, archaeological discoveries in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas have opened up a vast philosophical and zoological quest to understand what happened 4000–5000 years ago across northern Mexico and how several tribes, heretofore unknown to history, came upon the scene and then vanished with no apparent intermixing with any groups outside their own. Their artistic legacy invites deep perplexity mirroring the condition of all human existence and the biological sciences which seek to define that existence within the confines of evolutionary theories.

We have thus far fronted the query, can one individual affect the many? It is a pre-Socratic conundrum that has, suffice it to say, been taken up as crucial to every avenue of human experience. In the case of one individual in particular, Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952), there is no question that he made a tremendous spiritual difference borne of clarity, truth, and integrity and continues to do so through his legacy of art, exploration, and the co-creative impulse to revere diverse biocultural heritage throughout much of his home that is North America. In Curtis we have a window on the emblematic individualism indebted to communities that may well be one of the keys to survival.

As we come closer to intimate Being, we gaze across evolutionary boundaries and open water, verging toward independence and also a certain terror that is mortality amid a species – like all species – doomed to extinction, toward a form of selfhood that conflates into ego or adjusts in due course to the multiplicities of the biological world without hesitation. In spite of our love of nature, there remains the irresistible charge toward a signature and the crossing of a critical mind boundary: from Everyman to the Self. There is evidence to suggest that only by renouncing this reflex may we hope to see some future for biodiversity. But who takes that first step if not the individual?

From the contradictions inherent to society’s view of a pastoral, Arcadian wilderness to that of an opposite brutal, indifferent biosphere, the evolution of Homo sapiens looks to be dynamically challenged in future generations. What kinds of moral and scientific imperatives are sufficiently robust to engender social contracts among our kind that have the staying power and qualities of mind and of heart to enact meaningful protective measures that go far beyond anything in our past histories? Can we and will we transcend the genetic and ethical convolutions that have given us to believe that the Anthropocene is our one and only destiny? Numerous examples across a broad suite of biology, history, and the humanities are examined in an effort to draw conclusions about the future of humankind.

We examine some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views on vegetarianism as a prelude to the post-Cartesian rejection of the concept of animals as mechanisms. This, in turn, segues into the essential revisitation of a mechanistic modality in contemporary de-extinction and re-wilding scenarios by dint of their genetic and landscape-level human intrusiveness. While the ethics espoused by these manipulations are clearly redemptive and oriented toward ideals of biological integrity and its reconstitution, other evolutionary variables are discussed in light of data revealing a near universality of hybridization occurring throughout the biosphere. All of these cumulative realizations may, indeed, alter our perceptions as to what strategies humans might best adapt in their endeavor to become better conservation stewards.

Discussing contradictions in the history of ornithology and taxonomic literature, as well as the myriad populartion vogues of natural history and pictorial adventures, we examine Darwin’s own personal evolution and its likely impact on his views regarding natural selection. Compounding that legacy of dualism, the idea of natural selection working upon societal ideals takes various historic turns, leading toward a multiple of assertions linking the individual’s rapid ethical choices (e.g., non-violence) with that of his/her species.

Rethinking natural selection, the blurred components of twenty-first-century taxonomy, and the ever-escalating stakes (economic, ethical, legal) applied to hybrid biology and even entire ecosystems, the anthropic principle enters the fray like never before. We consider new types of measurement to reconcile mystery individuals with the reality historically of there having been quite literally trillions of unsung heroes who were all biological individuals. What can their cumulative evolutionary sacrifices, unisons, and divergences mean, in the current Anthropocenic Epoch? What have we learned from plant pollens, the trajectories of flies, Einstein, the Van Eycks, and Cephalopods that give us some insight into the concept of offset biological communities (“OBCs”) which may well be the transitional, post-Homo sapiens?

In this chapter we examine the goal of confronting and elaborating upon the outlines of evolutionary theory within a framework that collaborates in the invention of an all-inclusive construct, namely, the survival of a compassionate, sustainable humanity. Examples of its neural network and biological infrastructure are taken from some fundamental ecological case studies, such as the primordial mutualisms displayed by the tiny wasps and fig trees, as well as numbers theories and probability distribution concepts.

This elegant treatise examines the nature of kindness through the fascinating lenses and contexts of ancient, medieval and contemporary philosophy, natural history, theories of mind, of natural selection, eco-psychology and sociobiology. It challenges the reader to consider the myriad potential consequences of human behavior, examining various iconographic moments from the history of art and science as a precursor to the concept and vital potentials for ecological conversion. Focusing on the fundamental mechanisms of reciprocity among humans, other species, communities and nations, Tobias and Morrison lead readers on a remarkable journey whose itinerary, and the provocative questions explored, seek to affirm a pattern in evolution and in human thought that is emphatically oriented towards benevolence, not tyranny. Prosociality in all species - making others happy, kind gestures at any and every juncture of life - has, as a discipline of enquiry, enjoyed a social scientific renaissance during the last decade. Can natural selection move rapidly enough to meet that ultimate challenge? Can our species re-evolve in real time, moving from the ideas, to the ideals, to their applied engineering in a real world that is ecologically hemorrhaging? Which all the critical moral and cognitive changes in social communion such new human nature, as the Authors suggest, clearly requires? This groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy, with its roots in ancient Greek thought, represents a radical break with nearly every traditional scientific paradigm, in exploring the intuitive geography and dramatic questions of ourselves - each and every one of us - that will prove crucial to the survival of our species, and all those we co-habit this miraculous planet with.

This staggering work of erudition and passion -Terminal Philosophy Syndrome: Ecology and the Imponderable - points the finger to the human as catalyst for countless ways of self-destruction and devastation of innumerable forms of non-humans. What can be done? How can we even recognize our complicity in so many tragedies, from the Holocaust and the many events before and since including the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing slaughter of billions of animals each year to slake unquenched human hunger? Tobias and Morrison call for a mind shift, a radical move from passivity to bold changes in thinking and lifestyle. By itemizing the scope and scale of our current global emergency in the context of a long and brutal history, this book serves as a powerful incentive to stand up and be counted, and to commit oneself personally to be part of the needed solutions. Tobias and Morrison's encounter with Putin underlines the fragility and limits and urgency of human agency. The question remains: will the examples of Jain austere living and Bhutan's good government be enough to provide a roadmap into an uncertain future?

This book is a provocative and invigorating real-time exploration of the future of human evolution by two of the world’s leading interdisciplinary ecologists – Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison. Steeped in a rich multitude of the sciences and humanities, the book enshrines an elegant narrative that is highly empathetic, personal, scientifically wide-ranging and original. It focuses on the geo-positioning of the human Self and its corresponding species. The book's overarching viewpoints and poignant through-story examine and powerfully challenge concepts associated historically with assertions of human superiority over all other life forms. Ultimately, The Hypothetical Species: Variables of Human Evolution is a deeply considered treatise on the ecological and psychological state of humanity and her options – both within, and outside the rubrics of evolutionary research – for survival. This important work is beautifully presented with nearly 200 diverse illustrations, and is introduced with a foreword by famed paleobiologist, Dr. Melanie DeVore.

How can the one influence the many? From posing seminal questions about what comprises a human individual, to asking whether human evolution is alive and well, favoring individuals or the species, this work is a daring, up-to-the-minute overview of an urgent, multidisciplinary premise. It explores the extent to which human history provides empirical evidence for the capacity of an individual to exert meaningful suasion over their species, and asks: Can an individual influence the survival of the human species and the planet? If there are to be cultures of transformation dedicated to seeing us all through the Sixth Extinction Spasm, the Anthropocene, inflicting as little biological havoc as possible, what might such orientations—a collective, widespread biophilia, or reverence for nature—look like? In this powerful work, with a combination of data and direct observation, the authors invite readers to explore how such transformations might resonate throughout the human community; in what ways a person might overcome the seemingly insurmountable environmental tumult our species has unleashed; the clear and salient motives, ethics, aspirations and pragmatic idealism he/she might mirror and embrace in order to effect a profound difference—at the individual level—for all of life and life’s myriad habitats. Chapters illuminate an ambitiously broad digest of research from two-dozen disciplines. Those include ecodynamics, biosemiotics, neural plasticity, anthropology, paleontology and the history of science, among others. All converge upon a set of ethics-based scenarios for mitigating ecological damage to ourselves and other life forms. This highly readable and tightly woven treatise speaks to scientists, students and all those who are concerned about ethical activism and the future of the biosphere. Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison are ecological philosophers and animal liberation activists who have worked for decades to help enrich our understanding of ecosystem dynamics and humanity’s ambiguous presence amid that great orchestra that is nature.

Tobias examines the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, the ascetics of Sinai and Tibet, and the Pure Land Buddhists. He introduces the reader to the Jains of India, whose lifestyle is one of the most ecologically balanced in all of human history. In profiling various artists of 19th-century Europe and America, Tobias discovers incisive continuities among such luminaries as British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Austrian impressionist Emilie Mediz-Pelikan, and American intimist painters Ralph Blakelock and George Inness.