Where do you draw the line?

Bird and golf ball

The expression 'to draw and line' between one thing and another is something we often use to distinguish things from each other. Things like animals and humans, plants and birds or rocks and trees. But what if this line drawing is a falsity and that every line has two sides and an edge.  
So what do I mean? I'm increasingly worried about the way we are educated to see the world as being composed of discrete, separate things. This it would seem to me to be the product of the way language is taught. 

Take this seemingly innocuous image of A is for Apple. Nothing wrong with this I hear you think, but let's explore the implications of what we are looking at here. The first and most important implication is that the apple has been separated from everything else in the world. There is a tree and a human and an indication of sky and ground cover, but no attempt to link these together or show that there are processes involved here. For instance this is a red apple, therefore it is ripe and ripeness is part of a reproductive cycle, one that has implications for the way that humans interact with apples, but which also has implications for how the apple tree interacts with the wider environment that it grows within. Apple trees grow best in habitats where they are exposed to bright sunlight. Early morning sun is especially important, as it will quickly dry the dew from the leaves. Water left sitting on the leaves of apple trees can lead to fungal diseases such as leaf spot. Apple trees that are overshadowed and shaded by other trees or large structures will grow stunted and may not flower very well or even at all. Ideally an apple tree should be planted in well drained, rich, sandy loam or clay soil with a ph level of around 6.5. Most importantly the apple tree is at the heart of an eco system, a community of living and non living things. An acre of apple trees in an orchard, will extract about 15 tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year and produce six tons of oxygen. It will interact with the soil sending complex chemical messages out so that fungi and other soil inhabitants can become more attuned to its requirements and over time a community of other living things such as earthworms and pollinating insects will find themselves in some sort of ecological balance with the demands of the apple trees. From birds to squirrels and wild boar, the apple tree provides rich source of vital food substances and at every moment of the yearly cycle of growth something is happening that ensures that the sustainable interactivity and co-operative ecology of apple trees with their environment is maintained. So going back to our 'A is for Apple' perhaps we can begin to see where our problem as human beings lies. Language tends towards an atomisation of experience. It works to chop experience into easily identifiable chunks or bits. Think about how a different embodied experience of an apple might be like. First of all it would be experienced as part of an extension of an apple tree's life cycle. First of all as a flower, then as a flower's replacement as a growing nodule, colour would be vital, first of all a certain white or pink, then as a browning fading blossom that would fall and be replaced by a green nodule that would eventually grow larger and larger and turn red. This in its turn would be blown off the tree when it was ready to fall and then as it softened and was eaten by insects or whatever else encountered it, the seeds would be revealed and distributed out into the landscape of the eating. Smells would be vital, from those associated with blossom to those associated with ripening fruit, the differing creatures in the area all responding to these chemical changes. Without the word 'apple' we find ourselves more able to experience a process and in doing this we become more aware of the interconnectedness of everything. Hopefully this awareness would lead in a greater degree of caring of all the different aspects of the apple's eco cycle, it being too easy to simply buy an apple wrapped in plastic from a local supermarket, an apple that looks so like the one in the illustration. 

So where do you draw the line? 

Eco system related to a tree

Drawing diagrams can help, an awareness of other projects can too, such as this one that concerns itself with agro-ecosystem management, orchard design and associated practices. 

The bird and the golf ball video that opens this post is a timely reminder that we are not so different from other animals, the bird getting as much fun and entertainment out of a bouncing ball as any excitable human would. As soon as we take away the names, 'humans' and 'birds', we become more aware of similarities and connections between things and less focused on the boundaries and differences between things. 

When I was a boy we would occasionally get a drawing session from one of our junior school teachers. This would consist of him doing a drawing on the blackboard and then we would copy it. He was obviously bored with this and when making a drawing of a log cabin for us to follow he began to play with the 'logs' as he realised that it was very easy to make 'Escher' type 'mistakes' by rubbing out some log ends. He sort of discovered this as he was making the drawing. This was the only drawing lesson I ever remembered from junior school. The drawing was doing several things at once, it wasn't just a log cabin any more. This memory just welled up from nowhere and is probably not the best example of a drawing being less 'atomistic' than a word but it will do for now.

Picasso

Perhaps all I'm doing is thinking about the implications of Cubism. One thing becomes another as we move our point of view. Its just that bit more interesting if the point of view becomes that of a table or another creature that isn't me. 

See also:

John Ruskin and our relationship with nature
Sustainability
The pencil and sustainability