The rail is a bird species that migrated by air from Madagascar to the coral atoll Aldabra, subsequently lost its ability to fly, and then helplessly awaited drowning when seas rose 136,000 years ago during an interglacial epoch.
From the perspective of a high-flying bird or astronauts on the space station, coral atolls look like rings floating in the sea, but regardless of their apparently serene beauty, all atolls are ephemeral features undergoing attack. They form as volcanoes build and breach the surface, and corals grow on their flanks. Like all surface features, all volcanoes eventually wear down by weathering and erosion, and those volcanoes that form in oceans are also subject to the constant attack of eroding waves and subsidence. The newly formed mass of rock weighs heavily on its sea floor base, pushing it downward. Subsidence actually begins as the volcano rises and continues into its dormancy. In tropical waters, the corals that build a ring around subsiding and weathering volcanoes eventually become the only part of the structure that stands above sea level—just barely so. They form a dry rim above a sunken vent.
You can’t blame the birds for not understanding the nature of their new-found home. Flying rails had no way of knowing that volcanoes weather and subside. In their migration, they landed on a pleasant rest stop and found life good there, eventually losing their ability to fly. Of course, they also had no way of knowing that thousands of miles away massive amounts of ice were melting and raising sea level thousands of years after their initial landing. They lived their simple, predator-free lives, walking around on their somewhat circular landscape.
In one way, we’re like the rail. We move to a place, get comfortable, and become unaware that a changing world is filled with interconnections. In another way, we’re not like them. We can be blamed when our lives are inundated by influences from afar and by natural and inevitable changes in situ. The rail became flightless by natural adaptation. We become flightless by choice.
What I’m saying is that just as the rails went through a physical adaptation that made them incapable of surviving a specific threat by subsidence or inundation, so we seem individually to undergo a psychological adaptation that makes us complacent in our views and lifestyles. In general, most of us aren’t really very restless when we find a place to rest. We find our little coral atolls, make a nest, and say, “This is nice; think I’ll live here—for a long time.”
No, I’m not talking about the physical place—though that seems to apply to many of us. Rather, I’m writing about settling on an intellectual atoll that not only subsides, but could also at any time be inundated by perspectives for which we don’t prepare. Granted, I’ll certainly say, we can’t predict all the distant perspectives that come our way from around the world and from generations that precede and follow us. There could be some big “ice-melt-movement” occurring right now for which we are unprepared—and, no, I’m not talking about climate change. Rather, there might be some collapse of some way of thinking that sends its influence our way or some rise of perspective that can affect our little islands and our intellectual security.
Complacency makes all adaptations dangerous. None of us can afford the luxury of flightlessness when it comes to our thinking. What appears to be a substantial base for our perspective is always under some kind of threat. Get up little birdie; exercise those mental wings. Your island is slowly sinking, and somewhere over Earth’s curvature, possibly more distant than you can imagine, another perspective is gaining mass. It will, regardless of your feeling of intellectual security, threaten the way you think. You might need to do some intellectual migrating to keep yourself above water.
From the perspective of a high-flying bird or astronauts on the space station, coral atolls look like rings floating in the sea, but regardless of their apparently serene beauty, all atolls are ephemeral features undergoing attack. They form as volcanoes build and breach the surface, and corals grow on their flanks. Like all surface features, all volcanoes eventually wear down by weathering and erosion, and those volcanoes that form in oceans are also subject to the constant attack of eroding waves and subsidence. The newly formed mass of rock weighs heavily on its sea floor base, pushing it downward. Subsidence actually begins as the volcano rises and continues into its dormancy. In tropical waters, the corals that build a ring around subsiding and weathering volcanoes eventually become the only part of the structure that stands above sea level—just barely so. They form a dry rim above a sunken vent.
You can’t blame the birds for not understanding the nature of their new-found home. Flying rails had no way of knowing that volcanoes weather and subside. In their migration, they landed on a pleasant rest stop and found life good there, eventually losing their ability to fly. Of course, they also had no way of knowing that thousands of miles away massive amounts of ice were melting and raising sea level thousands of years after their initial landing. They lived their simple, predator-free lives, walking around on their somewhat circular landscape.
In one way, we’re like the rail. We move to a place, get comfortable, and become unaware that a changing world is filled with interconnections. In another way, we’re not like them. We can be blamed when our lives are inundated by influences from afar and by natural and inevitable changes in situ. The rail became flightless by natural adaptation. We become flightless by choice.
What I’m saying is that just as the rails went through a physical adaptation that made them incapable of surviving a specific threat by subsidence or inundation, so we seem individually to undergo a psychological adaptation that makes us complacent in our views and lifestyles. In general, most of us aren’t really very restless when we find a place to rest. We find our little coral atolls, make a nest, and say, “This is nice; think I’ll live here—for a long time.”
No, I’m not talking about the physical place—though that seems to apply to many of us. Rather, I’m writing about settling on an intellectual atoll that not only subsides, but could also at any time be inundated by perspectives for which we don’t prepare. Granted, I’ll certainly say, we can’t predict all the distant perspectives that come our way from around the world and from generations that precede and follow us. There could be some big “ice-melt-movement” occurring right now for which we are unprepared—and, no, I’m not talking about climate change. Rather, there might be some collapse of some way of thinking that sends its influence our way or some rise of perspective that can affect our little islands and our intellectual security.
Complacency makes all adaptations dangerous. None of us can afford the luxury of flightlessness when it comes to our thinking. What appears to be a substantial base for our perspective is always under some kind of threat. Get up little birdie; exercise those mental wings. Your island is slowly sinking, and somewhere over Earth’s curvature, possibly more distant than you can imagine, another perspective is gaining mass. It will, regardless of your feeling of intellectual security, threaten the way you think. You might need to do some intellectual migrating to keep yourself above water.
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