Physicists tell us that spacetime is a unity, or at least a singular continuum or “manifold.” But those of us who inhabit it experience it in two distinct dimensions: extension, which we call “space,” and duration, which we call “time.” Extension enables our encounter with difference; duration, with change.
(As an aside: physicists conventionally speak of four dimensions, but this is a figure of speech that follows the understanding of space as “three-dimensional,” which isn’t borne by metaphysical scrutiny. Moving up, left, and forward at the same time is not three different movements along three dimensions, at least not dimensionally different in the ways that time is different. It is one and the same movement, with the directional coordinates merely providing a locational map across a mathematically measured space. By the same token, any movement is always movement in time, but we experience the temporal aspect differently than the spatial. So it’s really two dimensions.)
In any case, we never experience spacetime in its purity, except perhaps in mystical states. We always (otherwise) experience it as folded and enfolded, curved and pleated, rhythmed, layered, and textured.
We humans inhabit those folds and textures of spacetime in ways distinct from other creatures, and we’ve developed a variety of ways of doing that even among ourselves, incorporating sensory, technical, and cultural extensions of many kinds. But until recently our ways of inhabiting it have generally encompassed taking account of, and successfully co-inhabiting with, a lot of those other creatures.
To overgeneralize, you could say that we’ve managed to do that pretty well locally, though it may have taken a lot of trial and error over many centuries, but we have not figured out how to do it well globally.
And then there’s the rub of the “we.” You and I are likely to be among the humans who haven’t figured it out at all. But there are examples and case studies to help us, and some people who carry some of that local knowledge as well. And in this time of mass information (and mass dislocation, and all the rest), perhaps the most important thing is to seek out those people and collect those examples, learn from them, and stack them up against the challenges we face in learning to co-inhabit this entire planet with the different species that we need to learn (again) to live with well.
One of those lessons is love, or at least respect: respect for the beauty of the many ways that others of our fellow creatures inhabit this world.
Science journalist Ed Yong gets at that beauty very well in his book An Immense World, and in this article, too. I had found Yong’s perceptive and sometimes mesmerizingly interdisciplinary articles on Covid, which won him a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting, very helpful over the last couple of years. He also recently entered the “name this era” contest with the term “Pandemicene,” which describes the ways that climate change is rewiring the network of animal viruses to create a new age of infection.
The article below (click on the image) is taken from Yong’s excellent and eminently readable recent book on animal senses and “Umwelts,” or sensory worlds. An understanding of how those worlds interpenetrate with ours is perhaps the best starting point for entering the Humilocene that ecophilosopher David Abram calls us toward. And without that, and the multispecies justice it will entail, we, or our descendants, are, well, kind of screwed.
