Biophilia, the God Pan, and a Baboon Named Scott

One of the more interesting and informative groups I follow on Facebook is Baboon Matters, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of baboons in South Africa. A big part of this conservation effort involves the finding of sustainable solutions for peaceful co-existence between humans and baboons.

In recent decades, humans have encroached upon the baboons’ natural habitat, and issues have arisen as a result. A recent message from the moderator of Baboon Matters provides an example.

This is Scott.

Scott is a young male trying to go about his business.

As a young male he can’t make up his mind – leave the family? Or stay with the unit you know so well? . . . For baboons these life decisions are exacerbated by their human neighbours and it never fails to amaze me how we chose which details to compare as we prepare “judgements.”

On the Cape Peninsula there are many primates – primates who share DNA, have similar emotional range, personalities and needs. But don’t get too anthropomorphic – a baboon is a baboon!

In all honesty, baboons don’t want to be anything but baboons; it is we humans who confuse and judge our neighbours.

Baboons are baboons and they want to go about baboon business as normal, but here on the Cape Peninsula (and in so many other areas) humans have encroached upon baboon territory to such a degree that baboon business is now very much our business.

And of course, humans get priority. Right?

I have been watching all the WhatsApp groups and posts about Scott and for the record need to establish my credentials; I lived on the baboon path into my village and had baboons coming and going regularly. I have two giant breed dogs who needed to be contained. Waste had to be managed, windows and doors closed when the baboons were in town. Sure it got hot, at times frustrating – but at the end of the day I opened everything up, took the dogs for a great walk and we all lived very well.

Those are my choices – to manage waste, manage my lifestyle and adapt – not everyone’s choices I know.

What I object to is the way other people choices are now being made the norm, the way in which the smallest percentage of resident choices are being heard the most; the “intolerants” who hate baboons, shoot baboons and complain the loudest; those are the voices most heard. It seems that the “lynch mob” mentality might easily become the norm.

Really, people? Get a grip!

Baboons are just baboons, they are not murderers, rapists or drug lords – they are primate neighbours. Wildlife neighbours. Love them or hate them, they are in our space and in our face – so how do we react?

. . . Scott is just a young male baboon, by all accounts he does not look for trouble; he may take the occasional tomato and sleep on a roof. Is that what we are going to kill him for?

These are catalytic times and our choices now will govern what sort of society we find acceptable. Will the lynch mob mentality outweigh the tolerant co-exitance?

I wish [Scott] every chance and every opportunity a baboon should have. Will residents give [him] that respect and understanding? I hope so.

Chantal Carstens-Luyt caught up with Scott as he attempted to find his way back to his home troop after having being relocated today. Chantal descibed an exhausted baboon who broke her heart as he simply does not know what is happening. Is this okay people?

This thoughtful and compassionate message from the moderator of Baboon Matters reminds me of the concept of biophilia, a concept I was recently introduced to when reading Francesco Ganzetti’s book, The God Pan, Shepherd of Empathy.

In this book, Ganzetti cites Edward Osbourne Wilson, author of The Biophilia Hypothesis (1993), in defining biophilia as the “innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” Wilson reiterates this definition in his 2002 book, The Future of Life, writing that “biophilia is our innate tendency to focus on life and life-forms, and in some instances, to affiliate with them emotionally.” Biophilia, then, is humanity’s innate affinity for the natural world.

Ganzetti contends that “the other side of biophilia is the ‘solastalgia,’ that is the sense of suffering accumulated over the years by those who see local natural landscape progressively anthropized and eroded.”

So where and how does the ancient god Pan fit into all of this?

As with the myriad of gods and goddesses throughout human history and across cultures, Pan can be seen to represent a distinct facet of the divine energy that imbues, animates, and sustains all creation.

Traditionally, Pan is the god of nature, and, as such, illuminates important truths about humanity’s relationship with nature. In The God Pan, Shepherd of Empathy, Francesco Ganzetti says that the new ecological sciences (geophysiology, or the Gaia hypothesis; sociobiology; cognitive ethology; and moral ethology) “impose a re-reading of the god Pan according to the key of interspecies empathy.” With this re-reading, “Pan . . . gives us back a fair, powerful and well-oriented biophilia.”

In ancient Arcadia, Ganzetti reminds us, Pan was the god of balance between natural environments, and we can think of him today as “ecological guardian and bridge between human and animal consciousness.” With this in both heart and mind, we can understand and experience Pan as “the widespread awareness emerging from the empathic relationships between creatures of different species endowed with gaze, with their own level of consciousness, who live and interact at the edge of the forest” – creatures like Scott, the baboon, and the humans with whom he and other baboons increasingly come into contact.

In closing, I share the following excerpt from Ganzetti’s The God Pan, Shepherd of Empathy. I dedicate this sharing to the work of Baboon Matters and all organizatons and individuals striving to cultivate and embody interspecies empathy.

When the mystic of nature, the one who immerses himself in it in serach of a direct contact with the divine, meets Pan [i.e., experiences deep love and empathy for the natural world], he can finally open his eyes. . . . After all, neuroscience today tells us how much the fair of heart know already, that is conscience is not word but vision that arises from a sensory stimulus even not purely visual, especially if very emotionally intense: each of us will recognize that there is nothing more exciting than a unexpected encounter . . . eye to eye, with another creature at the edge of the woods. It all comes down in one word: Pan, which reveals himself as eiphany in this sudden perfusion of consciousness among different species. If different species can speak to each other without words in a moment, then perhaps there is a conscious fabric of which we are a part, hidden but not entirely closed to logos [reason]. New sciences whisper to us in full voice that only by blending logos with pathos can we experience this conscious fabric directly, and perhaps protect it: Pan is also a moral god, because heart knows what is right.

. . . Myth shows us that Pan is decisive in the moment of greatest danger. What moment is more critical than today, the Anthropocene, in which the mass of human biota has swallowed up most of the othe animals capable of eye contact? Pan’s mother Driope is the spirit of every oak tree and of every tree that annually returns to vegetate giving acorns, like beech, known also as mountain oak; Pan’s father Hermes is the messenger of the gods: all this means that when we perceive the bonds between the forest and the creatures that it nourishes and protects, not least ourselves, then we sense the message of empathy and recognize the divine: Pan.

– Francesco Ganzetti
Excerpted from The God Pan, Shepherd of Empathy (2020)
pp. 3-5 and 8-9

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• Beatrice Marovich on Divinity and Animality in Life of Pi
• Pan's Labyrinth: Critiquing the Cult of Unquestioning Obedience
• The Devil We (Think We) Know
• “A Dark Timelessness and Stillness Surrounds Her Wild Abandonment”
• Mystical Participation
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• Something to Think About – February 10, 2020
• Something to Think About – October 13, 2015
• Matariki
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• The Prayer Tree
• Prayer of the Week – November 14, 2012

Related Off-site Links:
Ape Town: Living With Baboons in Cape Town – Tim Dee (The Architectual Review, February 11, 2022).
The Great God Pan Is All Things to All Men – Nina Lyon (The Spectator, November 6, 2021)

Image 1: Catherine Nelson.
Image 2: Chantal Carstens-Luyt.
Image 3: Artist unknown.
Image 4: Artist unknown.