One vineyard, many worlds

Not long ago I ran into Peter Bernhard again, who was my philosophy professor at the University of Erlangen some twenty years back. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time. He had gotten older in the meantime; I had become a winemaker. A development neither of us, I suspect, had on our minds back then.

We talked about wine and philosophy, and at some point Peter brought up a name: Jakob von Uexküll, who gave the German word Umwelt — literally “environment” — a scientific meaning that has surprisingly little to do with how we use the word today. From here on I’ll leave it in German, the way biologists and philosophers working with Uexküll still do.

Environment. A word we use constantly. We talk about environmental protection, environmental pollution, environmental awareness. We farm our vineyards as sustainably as we can, support biodiversity, and try to preserve habitats. In doing so, we usually picture the environment as something that surrounds us: soil, water, air, plants, animals. One shared world, on which we humans exert more or less influence.

Uexküll would have objected to that picture already.

For him, Umwelt wasn’t simply an organism’s surroundings. It was the world that becomes accessible to that organism through what it perceives and what it does. And because different organisms can perceive and do different things, they don’t simply live in the same Umwelt.

That sounds like one of those ideas philosophers love to spread across several hundred pages. Uexküll needed, to begin with, only a tick.

A Tick’s World

The tick sits on a branch and waits. What we perceive as a forest — trees, leaves, birds, light and shadow — is largely meaningless to it. It reacts to a handful of very specific stimuli. A chemical signal indicating a passing mammal makes it drop. Contact with that animal’s fur, and the warmth of its skin, set the next steps in motion.

Uexküll describes all this in his book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. The tick lives in a world that strikes us as shockingly poor. Out of the forest’s overwhelming variety, only a few properties matter to it. But those few are enough for it to live and reproduce.

Uexküll distinguished between the Merkwelt — what an organism can perceive — and the Wirkwelt — what it can act upon. The two are connected. The tick doesn’t simply perceive a small slice of our world. Its Umwelt arises from the relationship between its capacities and whatever, in its surroundings, can become meaningful to it.

That’s more than just saying animals have different sense organs than we do. Uexküll challenges the seemingly obvious idea of one single world, equally given to every living thing.

Once you’ve understood that, you don’t walk through a vineyard quite so innocently anymore.

What a Bat Perceives

We have a vineyard right in the middle of Kitzingen that we call Fledermaus — Bat. Not on a whim. Fifteen bat species have been recorded in its surroundings. To us, the plot is a specific parcel with vines, cover crop, soil, and a history. We know its rows, its quirks, the spots where the vines grow worse. We know where the tractor gives us trouble.

A bat couldn’t care less about most of that.

It navigates partly by echolocation, hunts insects, and uses structures to orient itself. What’s an open row for us might be part of its hunting space. A tree that gets in our way when we’re working the vineyard might serve it as a landmark. It moves through a space whose important features our own senses can barely register.

In 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel asked a related, harder question in his famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?: we can study how bats perceive their Umwelt, but can we know what it feels like to be a bat? Imagining yourself hanging upside down in a cave doesn’t help much — that only tells us what it would be like for a human to behave like a bat.

Back to our vineyard.

We like to say that we support biodiversity in our vineyards. That’s not wrong. But it gives away a very human assumption: we see other living things as inhabitants of a space that we shape. We’re the hosts, and the others are welcome to join in.

Uexküll turns that around. To the bat, our vineyard isn’t a winery that generously tolerates wildlife. It’s part of its Umwelt. And in that Umwelt, we’re mostly the ones who occasionally show up with large, loud machines and rearrange things.

Whose Environment Are We Actually Protecting?

This gets practical the moment you start making decisions.

Take the cover crop. For us, a flowering mix can make sense because it protects the soil, feeds insects, or improves soil structure. We watch which plants come up, how tall they grow, how much they compete with the vines for water. We judge their success by criteria we know and can partly measure.

An insect cares nothing for our soil structure or our good intentions. For some species a particular plant is food, for others a place to lay eggs, for others entirely useless. What looks like a nice mix on our cover-crop plan isn’t necessarily a good deal ecologically.

And when we mow, it isn’t just the look of the row that changes.

The problem isn’t that we know too little about our vineyards. We know far more today than we did ten years ago, and we’re working to understand more still. But almost everything we know is, to begin with, gathered from our own point of view. We see nutrient supply, water balance, yield, grape health. Other organisms have other concerns entirely.

That doesn’t make our view wrong. It makes it incomplete.

When we say we want to protect the environment, that sounds, at first, like a fairly clear intention. We want to destroy less, preserve more, give other living things room.

Uexküll complicates things. There isn’t simply one environment whose condition we could improve. There are many Umwelten, overlapping, interlocking, and occasionally in conflict with each other.

A flowering cover crop is, to us, a pleasant sight and possibly an important contribution to soil development. To some insects it’s food, to others entirely irrelevant. To a vine, in a dry spell, it can become competition. And when we mow, one single decision changes the living conditions of countless organisms whose needs we only partly understand.

None of this means, by Uexküll’s logic, that we should stop mowing. Doing nothing changes the conditions too. It doesn’t hand you a ready-made instruction either way.

But one uncomfortable question becomes impossible to avoid: by whose standards do we actually judge whether our vineyard is functioning well, ecologically speaking?

We can tune a vineyard perfectly to the needs of the vine and to our own production goals. Even canopies, healthy fruit, good access for machinery, decent yields. Agriculturally, that can work beautifully. For other organisms, that same vineyard can still be a fairly impoverished place.

Conversely, a vineyard left to grow as wild as possible isn’t automatically an ecological paradise. Species have different, sometimes conflicting needs. What helps one can hurt another. A state in which everyone is happy doesn’t exist outside human societies either.

That doesn’t make the decisions easier. But it makes them more precise.

More Than a Vineyard

In my own philosophical work, I’m interested in whether relationships only arise between things that already exist, finished and separate — or whether they’re involved in making those things what they are in the first place. Uexküll offers an important starting point for that question. An organism can’t be understood apart from the relationships in which it perceives and acts.

My interest doesn’t stop at his theory of Umwelt, though. Uexküll describes, above all, how a meaningful world opens up for an organism. What interests me beyond that is how the parties involved change through their relationship to each other — how an encounter produces something that neither one would have produced alone.

In a vineyard, this question is hard to avoid. A plant changes the soil it grows in. Microorganisms change the conditions for other organisms. We change the vines through pruning and cultivation, and the vines change our decisions, sometimes over decades.

This isn’t a peaceful community in which everyone wants the same thing. There’s competition, predation, displacement, and occasional death. That’s part of it too. Nature isn’t a better society just because it doesn’t need humans to be fairly ruthless.

But it isn’t made up of isolated individuals who happen to share the same space, either.

When I walk through our Fledermaus vineyard today, I still see the vines, the work ahead, and the things I’d rather have differently. I am, after all, a winemaker, not a nocturnal hunting mammal. But I know that my description of this place is only one among many.

And that every decision I make here reaches into worlds I don’t even know the shape of.