Field Notes on the Compassionate Life

The following is an excerpt from the book Field Notes on the Compassionate Life by Marc Ian Barasch

I recently saw a local news story about a boy who became lost in the Colorado woods in the dead of winter. As hypothermia set in and he began to freeze to death, he saw emerging ghostlike out of the swirling snow two large elk. Feebly, he threw stones at them, shouting until his voice gave way, then lost consciousness. Early the next morning, he awoke to find himself sandwiched between the two great beasts, who had laid their warm bodies next to his through what would have been a fatal night.

Or so he told the search team when he staggered into a clearing and was rescued. They were skeptical - hallucinations are a side effect of extreme duress - until he led them back to his sleeping spot. There, in the snow, they saw the concavities made by two enormous animals, the imprint of a small boy in between.

Why would the animals bother? Why not just curl up with each other for some languorous elk-frolic through the wintry night? (Three 's a crowd, and besides, in these parts people shoot them.) There are a million stories of our fellow creatures being kind to us for no good reason - from dogs who, with no rescue training and at risk to their own lives, rush into the flames of burning buildings to drag strangers to safety; or dolphins who nose drowning swimmers to the surface, wait for human help to arrive, then take off with an errant tip of their fin. There are inexplicable ways compassion radiates through the world; some spirit of sympathy drawn toward any distress like white cells to a pathogen. When Wordsworth spoke of “a motion and a spirit that impels all living things,” was he talking about the systole and diastole of some universal heartbeat?

Mitakuye oyasin, say the Lakota: “All beings are my relatives.” We are just starting to get the implications. Recently the Tumbling Creek Cave Snail, a creature so tiny it 's invisible to the untrained eye, was put on the federal list of endangered species. Scientists had noticed the snails dying off in large numbers. They finally realized that not only was the Missouri cave stream where they lived polluted, but also the aquifer that supplied the stream on which animals and people depended. All of Nature is now the canary in the coal mine.

But is it enough to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of 'preserving the environment '? Given our shaky collective plight, knowing Nature 's 'value ' may not be enough; we may need to love it (that, or start looking for an evolutionary niche that 's not already occupied).

Julia Butterfly Hill, notorious for the two sentinel years she spent camping atop the redwood tree she named Luna, is intimate with nature. When she lectures - pacing the stage barefoot, weeping, laughing, doing uncanny imitations of a chainsaw 's splutter and the crashing of great trees onto the forest floor - she is appealing not just for the preservation of the wild, but a blind passion for it. Her over- the-top antics get on some people 's nerves. Environmental activists are one thing, actual nature-lovers quite another. We don 't entirely trust them: Like all lovers, they seem prone to exaggerate.

Besides, love is for people, not for plants. We know the stories of people who can open their hearts to their prize rosebush and lavish their love on Fifi but have a heart hewn of granite toward the people next door. But why should we think it 's mutually exclusive? Sociologist Kristin Monroe observed that many of those who rescued Jews from the Nazis seemed to have altruistic feelings that extended “beyond the world of human beings to include all living things. Margot talked about the humanity of dogs. Lucille spoke of not harming any living thing, even spiders. Others spoke of 'the good earth ' itself (Knud) or the animal and vegetable kingdoms (Tony). Life itself was something to be valued for these altruists.”

Perhaps our ultimate human assignment is to extend our sense of kinship beyond family and clan and strangers to all other creatures. (We turn out to share a surprising percentage of our genome with everything from trees to fleas to manatees.) I believe Hill when she says, “I 'd come to value Luna as myself, my own body. When she was cut, I felt that a loved one had been attacked.” The emotion we feel toward those we love - wonderment at their uniqueness, desire to foster their complete unfolding, appreciation not for their uses and benefits but their inviolate worthiness - might be the only force potent enough, tender enough, to save the world.

Marc Ian Barasch 's other books include the award-winning classic The Healing Path, and the national bestseller Remarkable Recovery. He is a former editor at Psychology Today, Natural Health, and New Age Journal. He is also an Emmy Award-nominated documentary film producer. Email at info@compassionatelife.com.