Ecological Literacy — or What Does it Mean “To See”?
Anyone who’s spent time with a superior artist or naturalist — or read about such people — may wonder how there can be such a pronounced difference between their eyesight and ours. Even if we can read the smallest row of the eye chart, most of us have never known what the world looks like to the well trained eye. Or to what you might call the visually gifted, the visual genius. Truth is, most of us have very poor eyesight.
What does it mean “to see”? Is it simply to make out shapes? Colours? To recognise patterns? To identify by name? To remember? What, after all, is the point of seeing if we can’t describe, communicate or remember what we’ve seen?
Numerous artists and thinkers have tried to improve our vision. John Ruskin, the great essayist and art critic, comes to mind (One sees “with the soul of the eye,” he famously said). That other John — John Berger — in his book Ways of Seeing helped us see paintings and photography in new ways. Vladimir Nabokov once said that before the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol came along, Russian literature had only a handful of colours — blue sky, green tree, brown earth and so forth. It was as if the writers before Gogol were all blind.
I recall reading somewhere that Nabokov describes over 3500 different colours in his novel Ada. Sometimes, when hiking through the American wilderness, the brilliant author and lepidopterist would ask people returning from their hike if they’d seen any butterflies up the trail. He was always surprised how few people ever noticed butterflies. They’d claim not to have seen any, but when he’d hike up the trail, he’d see butterflies everywhere. Nabokov was visually brilliant. He saw colours in shadows, in letters, in sounds. (“Sounds have colors and colors have smells,” he writes in Ada).
Can technology help us see? Perhaps.
A colleague working for the Office of Environment and Heritage in Sydney described some fascinating ways in which Virtual Reality might help us see. For example, putting on some VR glasses allows us to step outside our body’s constraints. We can become microscopic, travel through a blood vessel; or very large, holding our galaxy in the palm of our hand. We can slow and speed up time. Rewind. Replay. Restore. Remember. An augmented visual cortex, so to speak. It’s as if we can suddenly visualise the world as Einstein might have done, or Monet, or Nabokov.
There’s clearly a vast spectrum of “seeing.” Somewhere in a Nabokov book, I seem to recall, the author describes a blind character who, through touch, could stimulate the mind and perceive the world with a richness beyond anything imagined by most sighted people. The novelist Ved Mehta, who lost his sight at the age of four to meningitis, always struck me as “out-seeing” most of his contemporary writers.
I think it could be argued that the ability to observe one’s natural surroundings — to name patterns, describe species, identify the life around us — is as important as the ability to read and write. It’s a kind of literacy, an “ecological literacy,” without which the environment can seem little more than colourless scribbles, dull hues: blue sky, green trees, brown earth.
