As mean egotism fades during wild awe, do we “return to reason”? Do brief doses of wild awe enable us to see our lives and worlds more clearly? In the most general sense, this is true: experiences of awe lead us to a greater awareness of the gaps in our knowledge and to consider more rigorously arguments and evidence. Consider the following study focused on wild awe and reasoning in backpackers out in the backcountry. Some backpackers completed a reasoning task prior to hitting the trails in the wilds of Alaska, Colorado, Washington, and Maine; others did the same reasoning task on the fourth day of the trip. The measure of reasoning was ten items from the Remote Associates Test, in which participants are given sets of three words—e.g., “age,” “mile,” and “sand”—and asked to generate one word that relates to all three. The answer in the example is “stone.” This requires that people find solutions based on diverse kinds of reasoning—noting synonyms, creating compounds of words, and tracking semantic associations. Backpackers on their fourth day out in the backcountry performed 50 percent better on this reasoning task than those hikers just setting out.
Perhaps the most perilous flight from reason today, outside of the denial of human-caused climate crises, is the trend toward polarization in politics. It’s a kind of collective mean egotism. Polarization—viewing ideological and moral issues as matters of a culture war between good and evil people—has risen in the past twenty years as the result of biases in reasoning. We assume that we are reasonable judges of the world, and when we encounter people who have different views than our own, we attribute their views to ideological bias, concluding that they are nothing but wild-eyed, fanatical extremists.
My Berkeley collaborator Daniel Stancato and I wondered whether experiences of wild awe might defuse such polarization. In our study, participants watched either BBC’s Planet Earth or a control video. They then were asked to indicate their own views on one of the most polarizing issues of the times—police brutality. Following this, they placed other U.S. citizens into different camps on the issue and offered estimates of those partisans’ views. Awe led participants to perceive the issue in a less-polarized fashion, meaning that they believed that the gap between their views and those of their opponents to be less vast.
Natural Divine
As we have returned to the outdoors in the spirit of Romanticism, many have found more than the quieting of the default self, healthy body and mind, and sound reason. In-depth interviews reveal that Americans often sense the Divine in nature, and feel that they are near that which is primary, all-encompassing, and good. When looking at the movement of a river, or hearing birdsong, or watching clouds, or sitting quietly amid a stand of trees, people feel as though a benevolent force is animating the life around them, which they are part of. In other research, people reported spiritual experiences in backpacking, birding, rock climbing, and surfing.
Still other evidence suggests that nature may be its own kind of temple, offering innumerable spaces where we might experience what we perceive to be the Divine. In one study, sociologists assessed the natural beauty of each of the 3,100 counties in the United States, in terms of the sun, weather, water, and topographical diversity that the county offered. As a county’s natural wonders rose in abundance, its denizens were less likely to attend church or adhere to a religion’s dogmas. Getting outdoors is its own form of religion, though one that takes people away from the buildings, gatherings, ceremonies, and dogmas of a formalized church.
Getting outdoors is returning us to what Indigenous scholars call traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. TEK is an Indigenous science of our relationship to the natural world, taking varying and local forms in the five thousand or so Indigenous cultures around the world. It has evolved into a cultural belief system, or way of knowing, or science, through tens of thousands of hours of observing flora and fauna, weather systems, the powers of plants, migration patterns of animals, and life cycles; compiling the data; testing hypotheses with empirical evidence and cultural input from elders; and the transmission of knowledge through oral, religious, and pictorial traditions.
Within TEK, species are recognized as interdependent; they are interconnected and collaborating within ecosystems.
All things are animated by a vital life force, spirit, or shared substance. During experiences of wild awe, we may sense that we share a form of consciousness with other species, a thesis tested in studies showing how plants, fungi, flowers, and trees communicate with one another, and even show forms of intentionality, awareness, and, dare one say, kindness toward others.
Within TEK, impermanence is assumed: all living forms are in flux, always changing, being born and dying, from the first moment of life to its end. We sense this principle in the cycles around us, of the light of the day and night, seasons, the growth and decay of plant life, and life and death itself.
Finally, the natural world is to be revered. And indeed, awe promotes the reverential treatment of nature. In one study, after brief experiences of awe, people in China reported being more committed to using less, recycling more, buying fewer things, and eating less meat (former U.S. secretary of energy Steven Chu observed that the carbon emissions of the world’s cows alone, if considered a country, would rank right behind China and the United States).
Wild awe awakens us to this ancient way of relating to the natural environment. And in this awakening, we find solutions to the inflaming crises of the times, from overstressed children to overheated rhetoric to our burning of fossil fuels. Wild awe returns us to a big idea: that we are part of something much larger than the self, one member of many species in an interdependent, collaborating natural world. These benefits of wild awe will help us meet the climate crises of today should our flight from reason not destroy this most pervasive wonder of life.
In the summer after my brother’s passing, I planned a number of high-altitude hikes, hoping in some way that Rolf would be by my side. The first was a one-hundred-mile route around Mont Blanc, which Jacques Balmat first summited in 1786 after fifteen tries. Mountaineer Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who summited Mont Blanc shortly after, heard the voice of the natural Divine there:
The soul ascends, the vision of the spirit tends to expand, and in the midst of this majestic silence one seems to hear the voice of nature and to become certain of its most secret operations.
Moved by this ascent, poet William Wordsworth walked seven hundred miles from Cambridge, England, to see the mountain with his sister, Dorothy. Book 6 of his epic poem, The Prelude, is devoted to that journey. In wandering the valleys, villages, ridges, and passes toward Mont Blanc in search of “Supreme Existence,” Wordsworth found “life’s morning radiance” on the hills and “benevolence and blessedness.” And the vanishing self in leaving behind “life’s treacherous vanities.”
The poem’s first line would return to me many times in my search for awe:
O there is a blessing in this gentle breeze.
In grief, I felt my brother to be touching me, speaking to me, in breezes.
A few lines later, Wordsworth observes:
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
This sentence oriented me to everyday awe: look to the ordinary, like the twig floating in the currents of the river, to find new wonders of life and, for me in grief, new directions my life will take now lacking my younger brother.
After I landed in Geneva and located my hiking group, we took a bus to Chamonix, France. The Prelude was in my backpack, a gift from my mom from her decades of teaching this archive of awe. On our ascent into the Alps, I saw a wind move through a stand of aspen trees, flickering leaves into alternating patterns of light and dark in the midday sun. I heard Rolf’s sigh moving the leaves. A previous summer—on our last annual mountain hike together—he and I had stood amid a group of aspens in the eastern Sierras that flickered in the same way, laughing at this arboreal show of interdependence and impermanence.