According to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, there are eight different types of intelligence. To say that one of them is more important than the others, or that one should define us all, would be a disservice to those whose strengths don’t lie in that singular intelligence. While not everyone can identify with “naturalistic intelligence,” there are many things we can learn from someone who does. Today, author Kem Luther explains how he came to explore his naturalistic intelligence and how he has applied it to his new book Boundary Layer.
(Photo Credits: Left by Moralea Milne; Right by Andy MacKinnon) ______________________________________________________________________________
Writers write what they know. Until I began to write non-academic books, however, I did not know what I knew.
In particular, I did not really know how much my experience with the natural world was a part of my take on life. My writing has always ranged over a variety of topics, but for some reason I have found myself returning, time and time again, to an interior spring of fascination with the natural environment.
I’m not sure where this interest came from. I can point to certain early experiences with outdoor life (boy scouting, gardening, working on a western ranch), but these could be effects rather than causes. I have wondered at times whether I might be in the grip of a deep programming, perhaps even a genetic one.
Howard Gardner’s book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, when it came out in the early 1980s, was an intellectual revelation. My generation learned from Gardner that we brought to our experiences profoundly programmed ways of interacting and understanding. Gardner, wanting to battle the tendency to identify thinking with the narrow set of skills assessed by IQ tests, called them intelligences, but they are much broader approaches than his term suggests. They are the modalities of the mind, the toolkits we bring to the task of interpreting the world, and they embrace intuition and feeling as well as overt thinking. In his first publication, Gardner outlined seven of these modalities, adding five new modes to the verbal and logical skills tested in schools. These became his musical–rhythmic, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, visual-spatial, and intrapersonal intelligences. In the 1990s, Gardner admitted that he had overlooked an important modality. “If I were to rewrite Frames of Mind today,” he said, “I would probably add an eighth intelligence—the intelligence of the naturalist. It seems to me that the individual who is able readily to recognize flora and fauna, to make other consequential distinctions in the natural world, and to use this ability productively (in hunting, in farming, in biological science) is exercising an important intelligence and one that is not adequately encompassed in the current list.”
When I heard about Gardner’s correction, I wondered whether his new modality might be part of my own makeup. It might explain, for example, my own drive to place myself in the frame of the natural world when I write. It is an explanation, of course, that does not explain—it just kicks the explanation into a place where I don’t feel the need to explain it. It’s a part of who I am, for reasons that I can’t fully grasp with the other modalities that I bring to my understanding of life.
Boundary Layer is my most recent venture into this naturalist pre-self. Though it is all about the lands and ecosystems of BC and the Pacific Northwest, the approach I use in the book took shape some fifteen years ago, while I was still living in Central Canada. Queen’s Quarterly, a literary journal based in Kingston, Ontario, published an article with the title “Boundary Layer.” In this essay, I narrated my explorations of local biotic life just above and below the soil line. The article’s name was a play on words. A boundary layer is a technical term for a transition zone. To muck about in the terrestrial boundary layer, I had to physically lay myself down in this narrow region, to get face to face with the soil and what grows there.
When I moved to the Pacific Northwest nine years ago, I found myself drawn once again to the overlooked biological zones along the ground. The boundary layers in British Columbia, however, were quite different from the ones I had known in Central Canada. The mosses, fungi, lichens, and small plants of the West Coast boundary layers were more bold, more lush. They had a commanding presence in their ecological networks. Intrigued by this new environment, I wrote several articles about the denizens of this lower region for Pacific Northwest magazines. I also started giving talks to natural history organizations and taking groups on guided walks. In 2008, when I finished the social history volume that had occupied me for several years, I decided it was time to get book-serious about my interest in the denizens of the boundary layer. By 2012, I had the first draft of the book largely complete.
The narrations in Boundary Layer owe a great debt to the army of biologists who spend their lives investigating the humble inhabitants of the regions just above the soil line. Without their research, all would be speculation. But the solemnities of their science did not always satisfy my questions. Vocabularies honed on macroflora and macrofauna had a tendency, I discovered, to carve away several of the most interesting issues posed by borderland organisms. Some of these less-than-orthodox questions, I found, were already being asked by a few of those who were immersed in detailed research on boundary layer organisms, so brought the lives and words of these inquisitive people into the text as a way to explore such questions. Ten Pacific Northwest naturalists agreed to let me expose in print the experiences that brought them to their unique perspectives on a neglected segment of the region’s biotic life.
As most writers admit, the end of the process of writing a book, the place where the writer stands back and the role of the reader begins, is a time of uncertainty. Who will be the readers who follow them into the journeys they have taken? In writing Boundary Layer, I have reached into an inborn perspective, one that refuses to reduce itself to other ways of understanding the world. While readers do not have to possess Gardner’s naturalist modality to follow the book’s journey, those who do have it may perhaps find a message in the book that others miss. We will see.