From within a modern Western framework, we understand life as gradually developing from simple cells to multi-cellular organisms and then to ever more differentiated beings, ultimately including ourselves.  At times natural catastrophes have set back the abundance of earthly life through mass extinctions, but life has always picked itself up and returned with renewed abundance. Life is an emergent process gradually unfolding in variety so long as conditions permit it.

Using the concept of emergence, I want to suggest that life is the means by which qualities emerge in the physical world that depend on duality to exist.  

Natural Disasters and Hardships

Life requires certain conditions to manifest and develop, particularly life that eventuates in beings such as ourselves.  These conditions include a geology of moving continents, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and the like.  What appear to be disasters or imperfections from a narrow perspective of a particular time and place, and of organisms at that time and place, play different roles when viewed from a larger context. As we learn more about our world seemingly unrelated phenomena turn out to be closely linked.

For example, deserts and ice age glaciers  create mineral dust that apparently enriches forests and other regions thousands of miles away and for thousands of years after the creation of those nutrients.  Earth’s greatest forest, the Amazon rain forest, benefits  disproportionately from one valley in the Sahara desert.  No Sahara no Amazon forest.

Volcanoes create rich soils and a more varied environment within which a greater abundance of life forms can emerge and flourish.  Those places geologically most quiet for the longest times have the poorest soils.  It has been a long time since Australia had serious volcanism or massive tectonic activity.  Its soils are among the world’s poorest, with unique lifeforms that have adapted to this environment.

Processes that cause suffering in one context on balance enrich life’s abundance and diversity. If life has to develop richly within a physical realm, a world like our own, including one with earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and deluges, seems necessary.

Predators

A being that is self-aware in our sense of the term can arise only at the end of a long chain of development of life forms that are less aware in our sense but have adapted to such a world.  All along the path, life takes advantage of opportunities it encounters to diversify and flourish – and it often does so at the expense of other life.  Predators, parasites, and disease are all examples of this process.  I will include them all as “predators” for all live at the expense of other life.

Beginning with single celled ones, predators set evolution in motion, or at least massively increased the rate of adaptation. If predation had never entered the world it would almost certainly still be a place filled with blue-green algae, and perhaps nothing more.

Predators needed the senses to find prey, and prey required developing the senses to avoid becoming a meal. One strategy developed by prey species was to reproduce massively, so that a few would survive to carry on the next generation.  But this meant that without predation they would rapidly overpopulate their environment, degrade it, and starve. Today our world depends on predators to maintain itself.

Plants have it no easier than animals, and also depend on being eaten in order to flourish.  They have developed delicious fruits as part of an evolutionary quid pro quo with animals, such that in return for a fine meal they spread its seeds.   Today plants that required being eaten by ice age megafauna are having a difficult time surviving in a world where these animals no longer exist.  Plants also produce far more seeds than their environment could manage to support.  They need to do this even if nothing ate their seeds, because there is no guarantee a seed will end up in a place conducive to its flourishing. And while the plant benefits from having its fruit eaten, can the same be said so confidently about the living cells that make up the fruit?

And let us not forget that from the standpoint of a plant, a cow is a predator.

As poet Gary Snyder observed wisely

”‘What a big potlatch we are all members of!’ To acknowledge that each of

us at the table will eventually be part of the meal is not just being ‘realistic.’

It is allowing the sacred to enter and accepting the sacramental aspect of our

shaky personal being.” The Practice of the Wild

Any spiritual analysis of the world that accepts the world as good needs to come to terms with the universality of predation and the living world’s dependence on it.

Predators that care

Predators are apparently the most likely beings to develop the capacity to enter into caring relationships with other beings.  I know of only one case where interspecies friendships spontaneously developed among wild herbivores – a 130 year old tortoise and a orphaned baby hippo in an animal sanctuary. These kinds of interspecies relationships are far more common among predators. I suspect one reason may be that predators are more likely to develop the capacity to enter into awareness of another’s thought processes. In a nonpredatory context that can enable relations of animal friendship developing. (But I do not want to diss the herbivores, some are clearly very intelligent and also able to enter into interspecies friendships, such as an elephant and a dog.) But again, these herbivores are themselves the product of a long evolutionary process.

And for all I know karma explains some of this as well.

So far as we can tell, humans were the first predators to become concerned with the meaning of their predation. Again, so far as we know, hunting and gathering cultures have always been concerned with the significance of causing death, and of its ultimate mystery. Other predators do not appear to be so concerned, although many are concerned with the deaths of members of their own group. But in this respect we appear to be unique: we kill, know that we kill, and are concerned with the ethical complexity involved in killing another.

In other words, a long evolutionary path appears to have been required for embodied life to develop an awareness of death and the profound issues of value and meaning it raises.  Without predation there can be no appreciation of life!  I think we might be able to expand this point to the broader “Without loss there can be no appreciation of what we have.”

Of course this argument so far does not prove that Spirit is good, or even that it exists.  An atheist could agree with me to this point.  But I hope this first part of my argument makes the case that beings such as ourselves had to arise in a world where natural catastrophes, predation, and disease exists.