Our friend John Burnett recently returned from a trip to Japan, one of a handful of places he’d never been in a long career as a reporter for NPR. As a specialist in the American Southwest and Latin America, he was surprised to find that both Japan and its people utterly enchanted him. When I asked him what had so appealed to him, he thought for a minute and said that “random acts of gratuitous beauty” won his heart, sending me a photo (above) of a gratuitously beautiful manhole cover to explain what he meant.

That phrase rang in my mind: gratuitous beauty. As I left Madroño Ranch the other day, I saw a pair of painted buntings chasing bugs right by a lesser goldfinch perched on a purple thistle as a redwing blackbird sang its cheerily cacophonous song from a nearby walnut tree. I had already spent part of the morning walking and had spotted birds ranging from the drabbest to the showiest: from Tennessee warblers to yellow warblers, from blue-gray gnatcatchers to indigo buntings, from shy green herons to lark sparrows to summer tanagers—and these were just the beginning of the list. It was just a little show-offy. Gratuitous.

I wondered about the extravagance of this display, especially of the males with their vivid breeding plumage. Surely they become more visible to predators as well as to potential mates as they brighten up. Apparently the trade-off is worth it, evolutionarily speaking. Being bearers of such beauty trumps the risk of being eaten.

Of course, wondering if beauty has evolutionary value isn’t very scientific. We take for granted that beauty lies in the subjective, not the objective, realm; beauty is culturally conditioned, notoriously hard to measure or pin down. We tend to think of it as a value-added category, not as a necessity for life, an evolutionary necessity every bit as muscular as the competition for survival of the fittest.

There seems, however, to be a growing body of evidence suggesting that evolutionary success depends on much more than tooth and claw; it also requires cooperation and nurture. Although this may sound like a squishy sentimental left-wing sort of idea that comes out of liberal academia, there’s even a conservative who thinks the idea has merit: this week in the New York Times, David Brooks reviewed a number of recently published books about the human imperative to collaborate. The most important thing about the research, he says, is this:

For decades, people tried to devise a rigorous “scientific” system to analyze behavior that would be divorced from morality. But if cooperation permeates our nature, then so does morality, and there is no escaping ethics, emotion and religion in our quest to understand who we are and how we got this way.

I would raise Brooks’s bet on morality as a critical evolutionary component by claiming that we, individually and as a species, also need beauty in our lives only just slightly less than we need to breathe, eat, sleep, and procreate.

One of the reasons I think this is my consistent experience of finding human-created beauty in the most poverty-stricken and dire of circumstances. In the 1970s, my family lived in El Salvador, and we had the good fortune to travel extensively through Guatemala as well. Even as a young teenager in the iron grip of self-involvement, I was struck by the beauty of the textiles and artwork we encountered in the most poverty-ridden parts of those countries. I still have huipiles I bought almost forty years ago and am still enchanted by their colors and intricate designs. If survival were a matter only of competition, what could be the point of this time-consuming and ancient art? What is the point of any art? Why do we go to all that trouble when we could expend our energy in more apparently efficient survival strategies like decimating our enemies?

I think that one of the reasons we value, and even seem to require, beauty in our lives is that we long ago learned that the natural world values beauty, and we all know that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. (I don’t really understand what that means, but it has the unmistakable ring of authority, doesn’t it?) I recently found an engrossing book issued by Trinity University Press: Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson. It’s a collection of essays asserting the moral imperative to protect the corpus of the earth at least as carefully as we would care for any of the technological or financial assets around which we organize our individual and corporate lives. The essays are by poets and scientists, presidents and farmers, professors and religious leaders.

The title of one essay in particular, by Stephen R. Kellert, a professor emeritus at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, caught my attention: “For the Love and Beauty of Nature.” He contends that modern humans have “lost their bearings as biological beings, as just another animal and species in the firmament of creation.” In fact, we often measure our “progress” almost directly by our alienation from our biological roots. This is true even of many of those scientists and activists whose work is environmentally directed, says Kellert; their focus on technological, policy, and econometric issues often further exacerbates this alienation, inadvertently accelerating our rush to destruction.

We preserve what we love. When an empty home burns down, people risk their lives to save old photographs. Of course, some people will try to save objects with monetary value, but in our private lives we often value what is useless in the eyes of the world. We save the things that have meaning for us, that we think are beautiful, the things to which we have intense emotional and spiritual connections. Even if environmentalists implement all of the policy currently deemed necessary to save the world, its preservation would not be assured. We have to love the world in order to preserve it. Without that entirely subjective component in the mix, lovers of technology and objective measurement can save nothing except technology.

Our cultural devaluation of the pivotal role of subjective experience in the flourishing of culture is highly visible right now. What do we chose to cut out of federal, state, and local educational budgets? The first things to go are those that value what we deem to be training in subjectivity, in the appreciation of beauty: the arts. In the move to become more efficient and streamlined, however, we teach our children (and ourselves) to undervalue the most powerful forces that will drive their movement through the economic, technological, public world: love. We will value and save what we love, and we love what we think is beautiful. Do any preservation societies rally when big-box Wal-Marts get pulled down?

Aldo Leopold, one of the twentieth century’s most fervent and judicious conservationists, developed what he called a “land ethic,” which he considered to be a moral imperative and not a luxury to be applied only in times of economic well-being.

An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to the land presupposes the existence of some mental image of the land as a biotic mechanism. [By this I think he means “a living reality.”] We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in…. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity… and beauty of the biotic enterprise. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

We have ceased to love the natural world because so many of us no longer know it subjectively, emotionally, viscerally. Too many of us don’t know its intricacy and beauty, its drama and miraculous precision, its redundant abundance and efficiency. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: when we know—really know—the beauty of nature, we know our own beauty and thus will be saved. Teaching our children and reminding ourselves to love what is beautiful in nature is a move toward long-term survival. We love what is beautiful and preserve and nurture what we love. Gratuitous beauty as evolutionary stratagem: that’s science I can finally understand.

What we’re reading
Heather: David Orr, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry
Martin: Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur (still)

I apologize in advance if this post seems unusually grumpy; I’ve been in a lousy mood all week. The arrival of spring in Central Texas always has this effect on me. As the weather turns warm and moist and the redbuds and pear trees burst forth in clouds of colored blossoms, as the mountain laurels fill the air with the scent of grape Kool-Aid, as Heather and the rest of humanity get all goo-goo-eyed over the season of hope and rebirth, of pastel colors and eggs and baby chicks and bunnies, I grow ever gloomier, because I know what the sights and smells of spring really augur: the onset of another brutally hot summer. And in Texas, summer can last well into what would be considered fall, or even winter, in other places. To me, spring is the annual reminder that I’m about to spend six or seven months covered in a thin film of sweat. And did I mention the mosquitoes?

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cool, even chilly climate, but after almost three decades in Texas I have yet to acclimate fully to the summers here. Heather, on the other hand, loves hot weather; our personal comfort zones have only about a ten-degree overlap, as once the mercury climbs above 90° I begin to melt, and once it drops below 80° she begins to freeze. Under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve been together for thirty years and married for twenty-five.

Of course hanging over everything else this week is the dreadful news of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, and the grim aftermath, with threats of nuclear disaster. We can’t yet know the final outcome of these events, but I worry that they may be a harbinger of even more catastrophes to come. A story on Grist.org suggested that climate change might cause more seismic and volcanic activity, as melting ice masses change pressures on the earth’s crust.

That’s scary all right. Equally scary are fears of massive radiation leaks from damaged nuclear reactors. We know that coal and oil and natural gas are all finite sources of energy, and that solar and wind power have limitations; nuclear power was supposed to be a sort of panacea, although we can wonder about the wisdom of building reactors in any place prone to major seismic activity. And then there’s that pesky problem of what to do with all that radioactive waste….

These gloomy reflections fit right in with the book I’ve been reading, Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. The light-hearted title and subtitle are deceptive; the book is actually a thoughtful, and frequently depressing, contemplation of the problems of industrialization and pollution, and, most germane to the grim news from Japan, of the unintended consequences of technological advances. Reading it has not improved my mood.

It does, however, tell a fascinating tale. On January 10, 1992, south of the Aleutians and just west of the international date line, a freighter sailing across the northern Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma encountered rough weather. Somehow, as the ship rolled and plunged, two columns of containers stacked on the ship’s deck broke free and fell overboard, and at least one of them burst open as it fell, setting 7,200 packages of plastic bath toys—each containing a red beaver, green frog, and blue turtle, in addition to the yellow duck pictured on the book’s cover, but who’d buy a book titled, say, Moby-Turtle?—loose upon the waters. As the toys began washing up in unlikely places, they attracted attention from various news media—who could resist such a story?—and Hohn became obsessed with them.

The book ranges widely, both geographically and thematically: Hohn’s obsession takes him from his home in New York to (among other places) Alaska, Hawaii, South Korea, Greenland, and China’s Pearl River Delta, the industrial zone where the bath toys were manufactured, and he manages to work in reflections on the plastics industry (with a nice shout-out to my old UT Austin American studies honcho Jeff Meikle), the changing definition of childhood, the history of American environmentalism, and more. He writes well and often amusingly, but the overall message of his book is dire: we are almost literally drowning in waste, and we don’t really know what to do about it. Apparent solutions turn out merely to mask, or perhaps exacerbate, the problem; sincerely well-intentioned people disagree violently about what to do. And more and more garbage ends up in the oceans.

There was a time when all of this might have been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that spring signals the return of baseball. “Spring training”! I used to consider those the two most joyful words in the English language, other than “peach cobbler” and “tax rebate.” But that was before the steroid-fueled nightmare of the last fifteen years, in which unnaturally swollen sluggers rewrote the record book and permanently distorted the shape and balance of the National Pastime.

Now baseball is all but dead to me, and spring is when Tito and I fill out our NCAA tournament brackets, an annual exercise which makes manifest the depths of my almost complete ignorance of college basketball. (I usually pick the University of North Carolina Tar Heels to win it all, because I’ve always been a sucker for their baby-blue uniforms, but this year, in case you’re wondering, I boldly picked Duke to beat Kansas in the championship game.)

I don’t know what it will take to pull me out of my annual springtime slough of despond. Maybe the Blue Devils will actually go all the way (or, if not, maybe UNC will pull off an upset). Maybe the endorphins and tryptophan in a megadose of Easter chocolate will jolt me into a more agreeable frame of mind. Or maybe I just need to find more cheerful reading material.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them