Freedom in nature

I looked forward to meeting professor Kalevi Kull on our visit to Estonia in 2023, and ahead of that tried to bone up on his specialist field, “biosemiotics”. This word joins biology with “meanings in signs", and is not easy to understand.

On the face of it, living things do stuff either because their brains are so programmed, or because chemical or physical changes make them do it. Shorter days in autumn cause male deer to start rutting, to attract mates and to challenge rivals. A chemical hitting an amoeba in water impels it to move to potential food.

That’s all there is to it, isn’t it? Not according to biosemioticians.

My notes on meeting Kalevi say, “Semiosis is an emergent property of life that involves some form of choice on the part of living beings, even down to some functions of plants.”

Wearing old jeans and a white peasant shirt, Kalevi holds the leaf of a sapling under canopy trees between his fingers, and speaks. This particular leaf could have grown to the right or the left; it could choose – that’s an example of freedom in nature. 

An audience of ecologists, other biosemioticians, a Green politician and conservationist, and artists and linguists had gathered at a Tartu University retreat in western Estonia in August to discuss this topic. We were invited.   

“Freedom in nature provides for semiotics to operate,” my notes continue. “An ecosystem that has freedom grows towards aesthetics, in and by itself.”

Letting nature do its thing uninterrupted is nothing new, of course; it’s the basis of nature conservation. What’s different here is a view on how this comes about.

Kalevi leads the group to a grassy area, and talks about energy flows; humans today are using far more than the natural environment can provide by channelling the sun’s energy. He talks in watts per square metre of ground, and per person.

“A sustainable, green future. Many people would think it would be very dull - therefore, restricts people to be free.” Kalevi urges us to learn about our own freedoms, and to learn about others’ worlds.

Freedom in nature is another way of understanding the elusive concept of “intrinsic value”, I think to myself.    

We had come to the end of a lively exchange of views on the concept of freedom.

Freedom means different things in different languages, one person said, and another, that it has a political dimension.

“Freedom of choice is related to our identity,” says Riste, a former university lecturer. “We as humans are capable of limiting our options, and thereby, our choices.”

Peeter, a photographer and artist, says he once got lost in New York. “Took a subway, and wandered freely; this allows us to experience totally new, strange and different things.”

He then moved to Kütiorg, in the southeast of Estonia, “how to get lost in one’s own forest - it’s still possible.” He used his cat to explore the forest by turning off his own will, and letting the cat go where it wanted to go.

Kalevi brought the discussion back to practical matters: what restrictions to place on human activity to preserve freedom in nature? He thinks of people as part of nature, and gestures around him.

“The wooded meadow has been managed for 300 years, the ecosystem is in a balance, high biodiversity, a relationship of recognition, a semiotic process, any one thing is connected with everything.”

As I write these lines, I recall a unique experience in life, spending two days with utterly wonderful people, at Kalevi’s symposium.

I gave a talk on whether mining could be sustainable – my field of professional interest - and a very polite group asked lots of questions. The overall theme was can the world do more with less extraction of resources.

After mumbling something about renewable electricity generation needing nine times as much minerals as coal-fired, the discussion felt empty, given the profound topics we had run through.

Riste had led an early session on how to be alive to reality around us (as I understood it); Margus, a linguist, spoke on Zhuang Zu, an early Chinese Taoist and his meditations on nature; Greg spoke very well on how nature conservation is done in New Zealand; and Siiri shared an incident in which an otter and an alligator played with each other, a show of creative behaviour, in contrast to the less creative possibility of the alligator eating the otter.  

The next morning Kalevi and his partner, Katia, prepared a delicious breakfast of buckwheat porridge, boiled eggs, rye bread, pancakes and coffee. My notes say, “A study into traditional food in Estonia; the context decided was the kitchen in the 1930s, and local ingredients.”

Kalevi accompanied us on an old bicycle for a distance as we continued our journey, smiling as he waved goodbye. We rode past fields of stubble full of hundreds of grey cranes readying themselves for autumn migration, and I found myself thinking on an early Estonian biosemiotician, Jakob von Uexküll, whose house we had just stayed at in Puhtu, who wrote in 1920, “The real thing is that there is no real world, but as many worlds as there are species.”