Pomegranates, Peccaries, And Love

As a participant in the Natural History Institute's confluence on Reciprocal Healing, I was impressed by inconsistencies among nature lovers regarding human relationships with our environments. Here, these differences are considered from the perspective of a professional natural historian, using examples from the confluence in support of two propositions. First, with reference to pomegranates, I describe how ethology, ecology, and evolution provide conceptual filters that can enhance appreciation for nature, as exemplified by seed eating, plant dispersal, and domestication. Second, I use love for and consumption of peccaries to underscore how cultural legacies and individual experiences influence attitudes toward nature; in that context, I then focus on a conflict between indigenous concepts of ecological kinship and the view that deliberately killing other animals always is wrong. This tension in turn has implications for whether indigenous values are relevant to non-Native Americans and thus to prospects for environmental ethics that are at once participatory, pluralistic, pragmatic, and reverential.