This is an essay from Black and Green Review no 2.
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To Speak of Wildness
Kevin Tucker
“He
says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth.
That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing
through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this
dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this
world as a stranger.”[1]
-
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature
“It
is not inherently in the nature of the world that it should consist of things
that may or may not be appropriated by people.”[2]
-
Tim Ingold
The memory is
vivid.
It was nighttime and the sky had been
dark for hours. My wife and I were driving on a stretch of road, cars were
clustered, but it was neither busy nor desolate. There was some space between
the cars ahead of us, but a good number of cars following. And then there was a
sudden, unmistakable flash of white dotted with brown. It moved quickly and it
was gone. Had we blinked, we could have easily missed it entirely.
Neither of us blinked. We knew
immediately that what had flown feet in front of our windshield was a Great
Horned Owl. There was a stillness to it, as if it all happened in slow motion.
Even with a decent amount of traffic, that owl had flown in front of our car
only.
And this wasn’t the only time. It
wasn’t the first and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, yet this time there was
no question: the owl wanted to be seen.
Owls are often
solitary animals. As someone who has dedicated a fair amount of time to
tracking them, I can assure you of this. There are some variations to that.
Barred Owls can be downright social. We have had them swoop in over fires just
to inspect.
This, however, is far from the norm.
Owls are as excellent at camouflage as
they are hunting carried out with a nearly imperceptible hush to their flight.
Even expert owl trackers who literally wrote the book on the subject, Patricia
and Clay Sutton, observed that “it is amazing how [owls] can seem to simply not
exist until the perfect angle makes one visible.” This doesn’t change the fact
that despite their invisibility, owls “are all around us.”[3]
When an owl wants to be seen, it is
awe-inspiring. An extremely different feeling than the joy of finding Great
Horned Nestlings or catching the flash of Screech Owl eyes as light crosses
thickets at night. For us, that flood of feeling is always eclipsed by one
thought in particular: confirmation. The Great Horned Owl is our messenger of
death.
When death comes for a relative, a
friend, an acquaintance of those close to us, there can be heaviness in the air
that is inexplicable otherwise. Things feel off. My wife and I have regrettably
become accustomed to it over the years. We start doing a mental inventory of
whom we know that might be going through some turmoil or difficulty. But when
the Great Horned Owl shows themself, little doubt remains: something has
happened.
The night that stood out so clearly in
my memory stands out because it was the time when the rational, domesticated
part of my brain broke down. When the probability of coincidence was worn too
thin and the veneer cracked. There is something here. Sure enough, we found out
fairly quickly that there had been an accident. A family member had been
involved in a fatal collision. While he was revived on the scene, the driver
was not. That happened nearly 1,000 miles away and at the same time the owl
came.
This was nearly 12 years ago now.
Circumstances changed, but the Great Horned has come numerous times. As
grandparents passed, as relatives took their own lives or succumb to cancer or
diabetes, as family and their acquaintances overdosed; every time, we get the
news from this majestic winged hunter.
The silent flier speaks up.
That night
opened a door of perception that I had only casually noticed before. The Great
Horned was a messenger of death, but there were many others. There was a
distinct air of familiarity and comfort in the Mockingbird that sat on my
grandfather’s casket during his funeral and watched silently. A Rattlesnake
made themselves known to indicate that a family member had died from heroin
overdose, a fitting messenger for having injected too much venom. A calming
White Tailed Deer that stood before me as I nervously wondered about my
as-yet-unborn daughter. And there was a Flycatcher screeching outside of our
home to warn us about an instigator amongst us.
These messengers were there all along;
I just hadn’t put the pieces together. I still feel discomfort even speaking of
them openly, but I cannot deny them. And I am only scratching at the surface
here.
Seeking council from the wild isn’t a
matter of being fully integrated into the world around you. These messengers
don’t come because you seek them; it is not their purpose to serve you. They
are simply doing what they do: responding with empathy to impulses that are
more apparent to them than to us. That we are continually missing such messages
is on us, our own aloof non-presence in the world.
This isn’t meant to downplay the breach
of any civilized social contract that is happening when wild beings are
bringing news, warnings and offering direction. Considering our sanitized sense
of intellectual superiority and deadening of senses, it’s not surprising to
know that something like Laurens van der Post’s account of a hunter-gatherer of
the Kalahari telling him: “We Bushman have a wire here,’ he tapped his chest,
‘that brings us news’”[4] is
interpreted as evidence of telepathy. Anything other than pure supernatural
power is unthinkable.
That the world speaks to us shouldn’t
be news. The Lakota-Sioux Lame Deer echoes the word of indigenous peoples the
world over with statements like this: “You have to listen to all these
creatures, listen with your mind. They have secrets to tell. Even a kind of
cricket, called ptewoyake, a wingless
hopper, is used to tell us where to find buffalo.”[5]
The writing is in the thickets and the
cracks in the wall, yet this isn’t the headline. To get messages from wild
beings is tantamount to pleading insanity in this society. But those messages
are always there. What keeps us from receiving them is our own ability to
perceive that they exist.
Perception
and the Better Angles of our (Human) Nature
“In
spite of our precious rational process and in spite of our cherished scientific
objectivity, we continue to maintain an absolute and unchallengeable
distinction between man and the nonhuman. It has occurred that the firmness of
this insistence may be one measure of the need we may perceive for
justification of our overwhelmingly antibiotic actions.”[6]
-
John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife
Conservation
And here lies
the root of our problem: the process of domestication, the taming of our wild
souls through constant programming, can only exist in a dead world. The world
that makes our existence possible is flattened, dissected and reassembled as a
sum of all parts.
Our compliance is built upon an
uprooted lack of place. We are aliens in our own home. Our virtues and pride
are built around artificial replacements for community, for a sense of being,
for a sense of belonging, and an amplified sense of self. Domestication is the
process of stunting the growth and relationships that our hunter-gatherer minds
and bodies require and redirecting those impulses to productivity. Our entire
sense of identity is built upon neotony,
an incomplete process of personal development within the greater community
against a backdrop of living remembrance and myth.[7]
Psychologically speaking, we are runts.
Our senses are dulled, the instincts
that we possess as children are subdued. Our world is flattened. As the
anthropologist Colin Turnbull observed in comparing the stages of “the human
cycle” between hunter-gatherers and Modernized consumers: “if in our childhood
and adolescence we have not learned other modes of awareness, if we have not
become fully integrated beings, and if we persist in dissociating reason from
these other faculties, these other modes of knowing and understanding, then we
remain fettered by the limitations of reason and cease to grow.”[8]
We absorb the fears of the farmer,
politician, priest, and industrialist. We regurgitate them so that we can find
some solace in their hollow promises. We build cities, countrysides, nuclear
power plants, and open pit mines upon that foundation. We volunteer in the war
against our own animality.
And all the while, these wild beings
are constantly reminding, warning and telling us what our bodies and hearts
know: we are connected. There is something here. A message lost as owl
carcasses pile up on the sides of highways: we are born wild. And to our
would-be messengers, we still are. We just aren’t recognizing it.
This is wildness. Yearning. Reaching.
Crying out and carrying on.
And the blood of the messengers is on
our hands.
Our perception
of the world is fickle. Our subjective experiences can turn into
self-sustaining feedback loops that only serve our own ideological biases.
Biases crafted and sold to us by programmers, priests, and salespersons. But
the world is more than that.
The world, to put it simply, exists.
Wildness exists.
It exists in its own right, comprised
of billions upon billions of living beings. Physical separation may be real,
but the stoic independence that the domesticated uphold is a fragment of our
own fractured minds. A blinder: a limitation.
We look into a mirror of the isolated
soul of a civilized being, a consumer of life, and subject the world to the
distortions that we carry. We unload our burdens onto that barren soil, onto
“nature”. It too must feel our loneliness, our isolation. Our wanting.
There is much
to be said about the importance of critique. My short sell on
anarcho-primitivism (AP) is that it is a critique with implications. And those
implications are things that I don’t take lightly.
The AP critique is a short hand way of
saying that civilization is killing the earth and that the domestication
process is perpetually taking its toll on our lives in every sense of the word.
Most importantly, the AP critique is saying that civilization, the culture of
cities, doesn’t arrive out of thin air. There are roots here. To understand how
we’ve gotten to this point, we must dig.
And so we dig.
The crisis we face is an old crisis,
going back in some places nearly 12,000 years. That is literally to the
beginning of History. In ecological time, that’s a drop in the bucket.
Fortunately, as wild beings, our roots lie in ecological cycles, not linear
time. Our roots go deep. Infinitely deep. We, human beings, are the slow
outgrowth of millions of years of wild existence. It would be easy to
regurgitate the narrative of Progress that our presence indicates a tooth-and-nail
conquest of a world that is both Social Darwinian and Hobbesian in nature.
But we know this isn’t the case. Our
development as a species has been relatively slow and stable. Our timeline for
the antiquity of stone tools pushes back continually and is largely fogged by
the inability to admire the ingenuity of our grounded ancestors and cousins. We
want to believe that things have
gotten better, that we have improved.
Yet this isn’t true. All of the psychological and physical breakdowns of the
human body and mind are an indicator that as adaptive as humans are, we can’t
tolerate the domestication process and the reality it has created. This only
becomes more increasingly apparent.
In short, the implication here is that
we are not starting from scratch.
We are not born with the Tabula Rasa, the “clean slate”, that
Plato and his predecessors had described. Philosophy, an indicator of our
trained disconnect with the world around us, has always been a crucial tool of
programmers and specialists alike. We are wild beings: each and every one of
us. The AP critique is about understanding how changes in circumstance
(specialization, surplus orientation, agriculture and pastoralism, sedentism;
to name the primary culprits) created the vestiges of social power that have
ultimately held our world, the wild community, hostage. Our mythos is cracking.
Human
nature may historically have a lot of baggage, but from an ecological and
biological perspective, it’s pretty impossible to dismiss. We are born
hunter-gatherers, everything that domesticators have sought to impose is
working against that basis. And they are failing as much now as they always
have. “Wildness”, ecologist Paul Shepard was known to remind us, “is a genetic
state.”[9]
Wildness is our genetic state.
The
Nature of Language and Language of Nature
“Reification,
the tendency to take the conceptual as the perceived and to treat concepts as
tangible, is as basic to language as it is to ideology. Language represents the
mind’s reification of its experience, that is, an analysis into parts which, as
concepts, can be manipulated as if they were objects.”[10]
-
John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal
Wildness is a
complicated concept.
Its critics have conflated wildness with Nature, a move that obscures intentionality with conventional
shorthand. From the very start, proponents of wildness have made a decisive
choice in this language. What is being lost in the shuffle is that if you hold
an ecological perspective, that the presence of wildness is hardly a means to
supplant god/s, but indicative of the connections that we, as wild beings,
share with the world. It’s an exploration of empathy, not an apathetic move to
remain enthusiastic by-standers like conservationists.
The purpose isn’t to evoke wildness as
an aesthetic, but as continuity, as our baseline: this is the ground that we
are standing upon and it is worth defending. That the word is indefinable
speaks to its complexity, it demands engagement.
So why use it?
There are many reasons not to use a
word or to avoid naming altogether. Wildness, at least how I experience and
conceptualize it, is sacred: that word is an indicator, not an encapsulation.
That would be a good argument for leaving it even more obscure. But the problem
then comes down to intentions. If I want to discuss civilization with anyone,
this is my baseline, my reference point: wildness is the attainable and lurking
reminder that we were not meant to live civilized lives.
Wildness, as the term is often used,
transcends space and time: unlike wilderness
it is not a place and unlike nature
it is not external. Wildness is reflective of a continuum. Sure enough, hippies
and New Agers may have tried touching on it and self-help gurus might delve
into the term,[11]
but there’s a degree of inescapability to that. Words travel. As recent
attempts to completely own and market rewilding
have highlighted, you can’t control the usage, but you can contribute to
the context.
That is not a minor point.
Anthropologist Hugh Brody saw it as a more practical observation in terms of
the age old question as to whether language shapes the mind or mind shapes
language: “a person can explain how a word is used and what it refers to, but
the word’s meaning depends on knowing
a web of contexts and concealed related meanings.”[12]
That the term wildness can be written off isn’t an indication of how the word
itself is reification, our abstract representation, because all words are
arguably reifications. The difference is in the context. Should wildness be defined and corralled into a trap of
stagnancy, then the context, that flowing, organic, struggling and
ever-presence that defies reflection, would be another matter altogether.
Like domestication, it’s easier to know
it when you see it.
The problem is that we aren’t seeing
it.
Ecologist
David Abram in his landmark book on perception, The Spell of the Sensuous, echoes a trajectory of philosophy in
pointing out that: “the perceptual style of any community is both reflected in,
and profoundly shaped by, the common language of the community.” For our rooted
hunting and gathering relatives, that language includes “the speech of birds,
of wolves, and even of the wind”. Contrast that against the world of the
civilized, the world we’ve all been raised in, where “we now experience
language as an exclusively human property or possession”.[13]
For all of our narcissistic obsessions
with technological development, we have completely disregarded that the
counterpoint to the self-applied badge of Progress is our increased our
dependency upon stimulation overload on one side and complete sensory
depravation on the rest.[14]
Building upon civilization’s foundation of hierarchy and complacency, we
externalize our frustrations to (and often beyond) the point of
self-destruction. I’ll allow an anthropologist to state it lightly:
“if
our species really did evolve in the context of social relationships
approximating those in current immediate-return societies, then our current
delayed-return societies may be requiring us to behave in ways that are
discordant with our natural tendencies”[15]
Put bluntly:
removed of our own wild context, we are out of balance.
Nature,
the bandage we apply on the externalized wild world that we are actively
destroying, is our counterpoint. It is our Other.[16]
“Nature” as sociologist Peter Dwyer aptly points out, “is an invention, an
artifact.” [17]
Not one to mince words, anthropologist Tim Ingold gets down to it: “the world
can only be ‘nature’ for a being that does not belong there”.[18]
As we will elaborate, this is yet another civilized disease which
hunter-gatherers have not suffered:
“[Hunter-gatherers]
do not see themselves as mindful subjects having to contend with an alien world
of physical objects; indeed, the separation of mind and nature has no place in
their thought and practice.”[19]
The obedience required by the
domesticated demands a world of binary dualisms: of innately oppositional
forces. In turn, it created those dichotomies. Nature versus civilization, wild
versus domesticated, developed versus undeveloped: there are many iterations of
an increasingly antagonized division between the individual and the world that
surrounds them. We can say this is a problem of linguistics, we can use
philosophy and theory to try to perfect the language and have an asterisk on
every word we utter, but none of this escapes the fact that the reality domestication has created is one
of binary opposition.
Civilization doesn’t just oppose
nature; it created it so that it could stand against it. This is what we have
conquered. This is what we have crawled out from to stand on our feet with
pride.
Wildness
vs Wilderness
“The
idea of wilderness, both as a realm of purification outside civilization and as
a special place with beneficial qualities, has strong antecedents in the High
Culture of the Western world. The ideas that wilderness offers us solace,
naturalness, nearness to a kind of literary, spiritual esthetic, or to unspecified
metaphysical forces, escape from urban stench, access to ruminative solitude,
and locus of test, trial, and special visions—all of these extend prior
traditions. True, wilderness is something we can escape to, a departure into a
kind of therapeutic land or sea, release from our crowded and overbuilt
environment, healing to those who sense the presence of the disease of
tameness. We think of wilderness as a place, a vast uninhabited home of wild
things. It is also another kind of place. It is that genetic aspect of
ourselves that spatially occupies every body and every cell.”[20]
-
Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene.
This
realization about the limitations of nature can stupefy any attempt to use that
history as a foundation. It can be easy and, at times, soothing to get lost in
a metaphysical escape and quandary. But to look back to the observations
brought up by Brody, language isn’t our problem, context is. And our context is
a frightening one.
We live in an era of great disruption
and unprecedented change: weather patterns have destabilized, blind desperation
and a complete lack of foresight allows us to drill deeper and clear-cut
mountains, economies respond, those who have the least to gain from this
hyper-Modernized global economy stand to suffer the most impact of ecological
consequence.
Our problem ends in catastrophe if a
change in perception doesn’t turn into action on its behalf. And this is why we
speak of wildness. It is not the externalized passive matter that may
constitute nature.
It surges. It pulses.
It is your heart beating.
It is your lungs taking in air and your
throat exhaling breath.
Wildness is beyond matter. It ties and
connects. In moments of growth and destruction, beauty and carnage, wildness is
the functioning whole: in a sum-of-all-parts scientific approach, it is the
unsolvable equation. Reiterated through the worldview of rooted hunter-gatherer
and horticultural communities, what has been called traditional ecological
knowledge “goes well beyond noting the interrelatedness of specific organisms;
it embraces an all-encompassing world-view of total relationship.”[21]
Furthermore, this enacted knowledge “is generally holistic, and not easily
subject to fragmentation. To deconstruct it and arrange its features in analytic
categories, and then to discuss them cross-culturally, is to Westernize them”.[22]
Much of what
can be said of wildness in defiance of nature echoes into the discussion about wilderness.
Following up
on his observations about wildness as a “genetic state”, Paul Shepard contrasts
wilderness as the place we have dedicated for wildness to exist. An extolling
of demons, a soothing of lingering desires: the playground and museum to engage
our senses through voyeurism. But the cost of entry here isn’t just
complacency, it’s far more malicious. The narrative offered is a reiteration of
our distancing, but the trip is courtesy of your local tour agent: our leisure
is another purchase.
In Shepard’s words: “Wilderness
sanctuaries presuppose our acceptance of the corporate takeover of everything
else. Privatizing is celebrated as part of the ideal of the politics of the
state, masked as individualism and freedom.”[23]
The experience of wilderness is far from an expression of wildness. The terms
may only differ by a mere two letters, but the implications couldn’t be
greater.
That adventures in wilderness have
become a basis for actual dispossession and displacement for those
hunter-gatherers, who lacked a context for nature
as a removed place, is no coincidence. Exemplifying the point, the Hadza of
Tanzania were threatened with forced removal from ancestral lands by a hunting
safari company based out of the United Arab Emirates.[24] A
fate that resonates amongst the !Kung of Botswana and Namibia who are arrested
for poaching and trespass within reserves that bear their names.[25]
These are stories that repeat and play
out constantly throughout history, which is since civilized people began
recording time instead of living within it. These are the footnotes to the
autobiographical legacy of colonizers and conquerors. While we have been
ingrained with their perceptions and narratives, they still must constantly be
positioned to work against our own wild state: the hunter-gatherer inside your
mind, your being.
To awaken those senses, it is helpful
to understand how those rooted peoples see their world. Our world.
Perception
and the Living Earth
“I
was born in the forest. My forefathers came from here. We are the
Wanniyala-aetto and I want to live and die here. Even if I were to be reborn as
only a fly or as an ant, I would still be happy as long as I knew I would come
back to live here in the forest.”[26]
-
Kotabakinne (Veddah) chief, Uru Warige Tissahamy.
The abolition
of nature is not an uncommon theme
amongst post-modern philosophers. Their impulse is born of Modernity and
interacts with the world as they have been trained to see it. They are correct
in their assessments that the world is constantly in flux and that stagnancy
stands in the way, but they continue on the legacy of the ungrounded, the
uprooted. Their sense of entitlement to a present without bounds neglects the
consequence of the world as we know it: the world where our actions impact life
across the planet and beyond our generation.
They carry on without context.
To see the past, present and future as
evident in all life is an ability that we should have, but that perception
comes only with living in a way that is not detrimental towards the past,
present and future. Rooted indigenous societies have notoriously lacked any
sense of linear time. Like nature,
they lack the separation necessary to create it.
In living with the hunter-gatherer
Pirahã of Brazil, missionary turned agnostic Daniel Everett observed that the
inability to “spread the word” was attributed in part to the fact that Pirahã
“only make statements that are anchored to the moment when they are speaking,
rather than to any other point in time.”[27]
Their world lacked a need to speak in historic terms and, subsequently, their
language lacks anything beyond a simple form of tense.
A world without presence was
unthinkable.
That is the world in which wildness
runs rampant. It is the place where language has never been solely attributed
to humans. This is the place where the messages of animals, plants, and weather
are taken at face value and understood. The ability to read the language of
birds is a given. The ability to read bodies and movement are not separated
from the definitiveness that we attribute only to speech. This isn’t the world
beyond nature; it is the world where it is unnecessary.
The connectivity that New Agers and
their ilk have sought to be proponents of is a by-product of our own limits to
perception. Our glass is fogged over. Those connections are within reach, but
we have to be prepared for the humility of breaking down the domesticator in
our minds.
For the hunter-gatherer, no such
obstructions exist until they have been forced upon them. Their perception
minces no words on the matter of matter. In the words of Ilarion Merculieff, an
Aluet native, speaking of the world of the hunter-gatherer;
“Theirs
is a world in which the interdependence of humans, animals, plants, water, and
earth – the total picture – is always immediate, always present. And the total
picture – every day, every season, every year – is seen as a circle. Everything
is connected: the marshlands to the beaver, the beaver dams to altered
conditions, the new conditions to the moose herd, the moose herd to the
marshlands. Each affects the other, and it is in this intimate knowledge of the
environment (all the curves in the circle) that has allowed these people to
survive for hundreds of generations.”[28]
The ability to
externalize “the Other” is demolished through proximity and familiarity. Anthropologist
William Laughlin observes a common theme amongst the development of children in
hunter-gatherer societies: the passing on of the world of the hunter as a trade
in and of itself. The wholeness of climate, growth patterns, migration movements,
the knowledge of track, sign and bird language, the detailed knowledge of
anatomy that comes from butchering and stalking; all of these elements are
integral to life in the wild.
This is not particular to humans, but
in using language to reflect upon it, Laughlin observes: “Their conversations
often sound like a classroom discussion of ecology, of food chains, and trophic
levels.”[29]
This is not lost on the children, whose growing knowledge of animals is
“prominently based upon familiarity with animal behavior and includes ways of
living peacefully with animals, of maintaining a discourse with them”.[30]
Philosophy is not an adequate
replacement for proximity without separation. Wildness here needs no
interpretation, but is often subject to exaltation. “I suggest”, observes
Mathias Guenther of the timeless rock art of the !Kung, “that animals are
beguiling and interesting to man prima facie, in and of themselves, without any
mediation through social structure.”[31]
The relationships in question bare more
resemblance to symbiosis than the symbolic. The case of the Honey Guide bird in
the Kalahari is one oft-cited example. The Honey Guide leads a more physically
able being towards beehives to harvest honey. It matters not if that being is a
human or a honey badger so long as the harvester sets honeycomb aside for the
willing and patient guide.[32]
And yet the language of wildness here
maintains a circumstantial definition. Little more is needed.
The participants in this world need no
terminology and, in light of solid context, the terms may be translated into a
placeless language like English, but without having relative experiences, the
meaning is lost. I feel the weight of the words used by the Mbuti, whom Colin
Turnbull lived amongst, as they spoke of ndura
or “forestness” represented by the symbols of fire, water, air and earth, which
they “cannot move, eat, or breathe without being conscious of one or all of
these symbols, and all are treated with respect, consciously recognized as
integral parts of the ultimate giver of life, the forest.”[33]
What resonates further within me is that the wind is upheld as pepo nde ndura, or, “the breath of the
forest itself.”[34]
Amongst the Nayaka of southern India, the forest is similarly referred to as
“the giving environment”.[35]
It is important to note that while my
emphasis so far has been on animals, the same notions and connections extend to
plants themselves. They too can serve both as messengers and healers. Herbalist
and natural veterinarian Dr. Randy Kidd shares a story of having attempted to
grow mullein in his own rock garden to no avail. He decided to ask his neighbor
about the beautiful stalks of it growing in their yard. The neighbors had paid
little to no attention to the sage-like green stalks and their tiny yellow flowers
protruding amongst the rocks, but they happened to mention that one of the
residents was currently hospitalized for asthma – a disease which mullein is
known to treat.[36]
Our ability to forget that our
connections extend beyond other animals has led equally to the facilitation and
“the loss of plant species, the loss of health in ecosystems and our bodies,
and the loss of the sense of who we ourselves, are.”[37]
The tragedy
that we face arises both from our distancing from that timeless world and the ways
in which our rooted hunter-gatherer minds are physically incapable of thinking
on a global scale.[38]
We are trapped by circumstance.
Our escape demands a realization of the
world as it has been and will be, but remains hindered by the obstructions, the
sheer physicality and devastation that civilization has created. The urge is
there to delve completely into the world of the hunter-gatherer, a place both
rooted and unbound. It is the place where we belong and it lurks within us and
struggles to stand its ground on the periphery. But ignorance is not our path
there.
Empathy is.
By seeking to immerse ourselves in the
wildness that surrounds us, we can’t expect the spiritual salvation offered by
Gurus on weekend retreats. This place is sacred, but it is not a safe place. It
is under assault. As are we. As are all living beings.
It is through connection, through
grounding, that we understand what is at stake, what is lost and forgotten,
buried and removed. When we begin to prod our constant process of pains
inflicted upon our being, when the Self and Other fade, when we identify that
source of agony: only then will we fight with passion and meaning for what is known.
Wild
Existence, Passionate Resistance
“An-archic
and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its linear His-Story
as All, but merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth
wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises.”[39]
-
Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against
Leviathan.
The term rewilding has had its share of false
Gurus and snake oil salespersons attempting to derail the process and turn it
into consumable fodder.[40]
False hopes and rewilding “Ninja Camps”[41] aside,
the rewilding process, like the anarcho-primitivist critique, carries with it
an innate understanding of human nature as rooted in nomadic hunter-gatherer
life. To re-wild is to acknowledge
that wildness is our baseline.
Rewilding, to put it simply, is about
stopping and undoing the separation
created through the domestication process. As programs may try to sway towards
a singular emphasis on primal skills or may tiptoe around with the voyeuristic
tourism of a hiker, this underlying principle remains. As the consequences of
domestication continue to unfold and assault the world we live in, the
radicalism of that sentiment stands.
What separates rewilding from any other
form of naturalist and ecophilosophical inquiry is that the end point is integration.
The path overlaps in terms of observation, but the “leave only footprints”
Nature fan has no interest in undoing the dichotomy that civilization requires.
Their quest is one of indulgence, not subsistence and substance. It is akin to
meditation.
To embrace the wild, we have to undergo
the process of allowing wildness to help us evaluate our baggage. To remove our
separation requires a transformation of thought that erodes the scientific
taxonomy that seeks to understand the world through a microscope. As naturalist
Jon Young points out, native knowledge and scientific knowledge are “two ways
of paying supremely close attention.”[42]
Native knowledge, or “science without all of the trappings”, is riddled with
empathy, itself “a dangerous word in science” as it stands in complete
opposition to the necessary removal implicit in the intent cloak of
objectivity.[43]
Young argues that his primary focuses, bird language/communication and
tracking, rooted at first in observation inevitably lead those who take the
time to “not just show up, but really tune in”, to build relationships and
experience the community of wildness on its own terms will experience what can
only be called a primal awakening.[44]
That is a spiritual awakening.
Echoed by tracking instructor Paul
Rezendes, what I call the “radical humility” of having your ass handed to you
by the wild in terms of thought and physicality is no easy process. As having
been raised with the redirected impulses of a wild being towards consumable
traits, we have much work to do. It is only “when the self becomes tired and
weak and pride languishes can the awareness that is wildness step in.”[45]
The salvaging of scientifically
understood connections through biology, ecology, psychology, as well as
anthropology and sociology, requires a difference in perception. That the
methods used to gain knowledge are flawed doesn’t change that they can still
glean elements of reality; they just took the long way there. The pride of
achievement domestication awards us can quickly fade in light of, as Young
states, “what the robin already knows.”
The teachings of the robin are not far
off from those of our hunter-gatherer relatives. They remind us of the timeless
place where history is lived rather than charted. “Both humans and non-humans,
in short,” Tim Ingold observes, “figure as fellow-participants in an ongoing
process of remembering.”[46]
Wildness is within us. Wildness surrounds us. It suffers alongside and through
us, its wounds still being inflicted.
Yet it does not give up.
No amount of concrete, steel, ideology,
or distancing has succeeded in its conquest. None will. Civilization measures
its victories in temporal measures that within a historic timeline appear
significant. Removed of linear time, removed of our forgetting, our disconnect,
their significance wanes into collections of dusty books and obsolete
technology.
Civilization
is both a complex and volatile target. Its ideology and mechanics are built
upon regurgitated narratives built upon the false belief that our future, as
humans, will take us from the dreaded earth. That our history will show a
gruesome conquest of animality, ours included, moving from the reflection of
gods to a god status.
And yet each of us, every single one of
us, is falling apart along the way.
We are testaments to the failures of
domestication. Our bodies, built to withstand the extremes of climate,
movement, famine and feast, succumb to diseases of the sedentary, the
undernourished, the overfed, the toxins, and the meaningless wanderings. Blind
to the catastrophe unfolding through us, we miss the connectivity hiding in
plain sight: the wildness creeping through the cracks. Turnbull, contrasting
the emptiness of civilization against the grounded life exhibited amongst the
Mbuti, noted that having “never learned to employ our whole being as a tool of
awareness” has kept us from “that essence of life which cannot be learned
except through direct awareness, which is total, not merely rational.”
Encounters with the Spirit, the wildness, in “our form of social organization
merely allows it to happen as an accident, if at all, whereas the Mbuti writes
it into the charter from the outset, at conception.”[47]
The structure of Mbuti life embraces
the pepo nde ndura, the breath of the
forest, whereas the structure of our world is built around avoiding or
diverting it at all costs. If another way of being were seen as possible, the
sanctity of the Freedom to Consume would fade. The burden of work would
collapse.
And it is through the reconnection with
the wild, through the erosion of our stagnant sense of removal, that the
weaknesses of civilization become apparent. The struggle of the wild becomes
real. The impact of climate instability and ecological devastation become our
battle cry. The exacerbated feedback loops of drought and flood, the fires of
thirsty and embattled forests ignite our animalistic urges.
When we remove the distance between the
destruction of the earth and bear the scars of wildness, we will know not only
what the robin has told us, but what our indigenous and lost relatives and
ancestors have told us: when you know what it means to be wild, you will know
what it means to fight.
To struggle.
To resist.
Around the
time that I began to acknowledge the messages I had been getting from wild
messengers, I began to push myself further into the woods. I tried to escape
the sounds of the designed world. But valleys carried the echo of distant
engines. Power lines and radio towers carried the news of conquest.
There was much to be found in those
forests, but perhaps what I found the most was within myself. I had much to
learn. I have much to learn. As my love and empathy grew, my rage burned
deeper. The sheer simplicity of symbiosis tears at my soul. How many messages
had I missed? Why, in light of my own complicity with ecocide, were the wild
ones willing to recognize me, a descendent of colonizers walking on stolen
land?
But it wasn’t me they were after.
Just as hunter-gatherers lack a
conceptual basis for nature or wilderness, the wild lacks the framework for
vengeance. The language of birds will immediately ring the alarm over our
indifferent, yet aloof demeanor whether we chose to recognize that or not.
Their communication has nothing to hide and they share their trepidations
widely. Hunter-gatherers and anyone willing to acknowledge this can act
accordingly. Strange though our behaviors might be, the birds recognize what we
have been trained not to see: the wildness that we carry in our being.
We belong here.
Their songs, their alarms, these
messages; all of these are an unquestioned part of their world. Of our world.
And they await our return.
I often wish that Nature was real. That
vengeance was within her. That she would undo civilization. No doubt she
possesses the might. But it doesn’t work that way: the sheer weight of
inevitability errs on her side, yet I am left with nothing to transpose my own
helplessness onto. There is no escape.
Wild beings under attack simply
respond. They bite. They claw. They tear. It is instinctual and instant, not
prolonged and devoid of responsibility. Our playing field is not level.
Planners and programmers play chess with our fates. The potential of our own
demise is the footnote to blueprints for a Future that will never come on a
planet that was never meant to support it.
There is no easy salvation here.
Wildness is not a retreat.
When we overcome our rational minds and
embrace it in our souls, we will do as our wild relatives, human and nonhuman,
have done: stand our ground.
Bite, claw, and tear.
And we will fight until the wound is no
longer inflicted.
The power of the known, the meaning of
context, the power of wildness lies in their ambiguity. The inability to define
wildness attests to its enduring strength. It refuses constraint.
You will simply know it when you feel
it.
And I can think of no greater end to
aspire to.
[1]
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature.
Harper and Row: New York, 1978. Pg. 1
[2]
Tim Ingold, ‘Time, Memory, and Property’ in Widlok and Tadesse, Property and Equality Volume 1:
Ritualisation, Sharing, Egalitarianism. Berghahn: New York, 2007. Pg 165.
[3]
Patricia and Clay Sutton, How to Spot an
Owl. Chapters Publishing: Shelburne, VT, 1994. Pg. 18.
[4]
Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of
the Kalahari. Harvest: San Diego, 1958. Pg 260.
[5]
John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erodes, Lame
Deer: Seeker of Visions. Washington Square Press: New York, 1994. Pg. 136.
[6]
John Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife
Conservation in The John A. Livingston
Reader. McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 2007. Pg 89.
[7]
This is a point Paul Shepard did not miss. It is a common theme amongst his
work, but most notable in Nature and
Madness. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, 1982.
[8]
Colin Turnbull, The Human Cycle.
Simon and Schuster: New York, 1983. Pg 129.
[9]
Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the
Pleistocene. Island Press: Washington DC, 1998. Pg 138.
[10]
John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (2nd
Edition). CAL Press: Columbia, MO, 1999. Pg 34.
[11]
Radicals are not to be dismissed from this as well. The prime example being
Derrick Jensen who tried appropriating the “language older than words” as he
believed indigenous peoples have reiterated it. This, however, ends tragically
after he began calling himself Tecumseh, talking about domestic animals
offering their bodies to his axe, having his dogs eat feces from his source, or
having sex with trees. Needless to say, his “conversations” with nature,
lacking in any and all humility, bare little resemblance to those reiterated
otherwise here.
[12]
Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden.
North Point Press: New York, 2000. Pg 47.
[13]
David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous.
Vintage: New York, 1997. Pg 91.
[14]
For more on this see my essay ‘The Suffocating Void’ in Black and Green Review number 1. Black and Green Press: Ephrata,
PA, 2015.
[15]
Leonard Martin and Steven Shirk, “Immediate-Return Societies: What Can They
Tell Us About the Self and Social Relationships in Our Society” in Wood,
Tesser, and Holmes (eds), The Self and Social
Relationships. Psychology Press: New York, 2008. Pg 178.
[16]
For more on this subject, see my essay “Egocide” in Kevin Tucker, For Wildness and Anarchy. Black and
Green Press: Greensburg, PA, 2009. Also pretty widely available online.
[17]
Peter Dwyer, “The Invention of Nature” in Ellen and Fukui (eds), Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and
Domestication. Berg: Oxford, 1996. Pg 157.
[18]
Tim Ingold, “Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment” in
Ellen and Fukui, 1996. Pg 117.
[19]
Ibid, pg 120.
[20]
Shepard, 1998. Pg 132.
[21]
Catherine Fowler and Nancy Turner, “Ecological/cosmological knowledge and land
management among hunter-gatherers” in Lee and Daly, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge UP:
Cambridge, 1999. Pg 421.
[22]
Ibid, 419.
[23]
Shepard, 1998. Pg 138.
[24]
Survival International, “Safari concession threatens Hadza tribe”, June 28,
2007. Online: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/2467. Accessed July 8,
2015.
[26]
Cited in Lee and Daly, The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1999. Pg
271.
[27]
Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There are
Snakes. Pantheon Books: New York, 2008. Pg 132.
[28]
Ilarion Merculieff, “Weston Society’s Linear Systems and Aboriginal Cultures:
The Need for Two-Way Exchanges for the Sake of Survival” in Burch and Ellanna, Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research.
Berg: Oxford, 1994. Pg 409.
[29]
William Laughlin “Hunting: An Integrating Biobehavior System and Its
Evolutionary Importance” in Lee and Devore (eds), Man the Hunter. Aldine De Gruyter: New York, 1968. Pg 314.
[30]
Ibid, pg 305.
[31]
Mathias Guenther, “Animals in Bushman Thought, Myth and Art” in Ingold, Riches,
and Woodburn, Hunters and Gatherers Volume
2: Property, Power and Ideology. Berg: Oxford, 1988. Pg 202.
[32]
Just one great reason to look into Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way. Sarah Crichton Books: New
York, 2006. Pg 167.
[33]
Colin Turnbull, The Human Cycle. Simon
and Schuster: New York, 1983. Pgs 50-51.
[34]
Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants.
Natural History Press: New York, 1965. Pg 249.
[35]
Nurit Bird-David, “The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic
System of Gatherer-Hunters”. Current Anthropology,
Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), pgs 189-196.
[36]
Randy Kidd, DVM, Dr. Kidd’s Guide to
Herbal Dog Care. Storey: Pownal, VT, 2000. Pg 32.
[37]
Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language
of Plants. Chelsea Green: White River Junction, VT, 2002. Pg 229.
[39]
Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against
Leviathan. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983. Pg 302.
[40]
See Four Legged Human, “The Commodification of Wildness and Its Consequences”
in Black and Green Review no 1,
spring 2015.
[41]
This joke is sadly true. Brought to you by the douche bags of “ReWild
University” at rewildu.com.
[42]
Jon Young, What the Robin Knows.
Mariner Books: Boston, 2012. Pg xxi.
[43]
Ibid, Pg xxvi.
[44]
Ibid, Pg xxviii. This point is really driven home in his excellent 8 CD set
with the underwhelming title of Advanced
Bird Language. I can’t recommend it enough to reiterate and elaborate
points I’ve made throughout this essay.
[45]
Paul Rezendes, The Wild Within.
Berkeley Books: New York, 1999. Pg 204.
[46]
Tim Ingold, ‘Time, Memory, and Property’ in Widlok and Tadesse, Property and Equality Volume 1:
Ritualisation, Sharing, Egalitarianism. Berghahn: New York, 2007. Pg 166.
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