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Title: To Speak of Wildness Author: Kevin Tucker Date: October 2015 Language: en Topics: Black and Green Review, wildness, Species Traitor, anarcho-primitivism, green anarchy Source: Retrieved on October 25th, 2015 from http://www.blackandgreenreview.org/2015/10/bagr2-to-speak-of-wildness-kevin-tucker.html
âHe 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.â[1]
- Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature
âIt is not inherently in the nature of the world that it should consist
of things that may or may not be appropriated by people.â[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 wasnât the only time. It wasnât the first and it certainly
wouldnât 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 âit is amazing how [owls] can seem to simply not exist
until the perfect angle makes one visible.â This doesnât change the fact
that despite their invisibility, owls âare all around us.â[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 grandfatherâs 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 hadnât 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 isnât a matter of being fully integrated
into the world around you. These messengers donât 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 isnât 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, itâs not surprising to know that
something like Laurens van der Postâs account of a hunter-gatherer of
the Kalahari telling him: âWe Bushman have a wire here,â he tapped his
chest, âthat brings us newsââ[4] is interpreted as evidence of
telepathy. Anything other than pure supernatural power is unthinkable.
That the world speaks to us shouldnât be news. The Lakota-Sioux Lame
Deer echoes the word of indigenous peoples the world over with
statements like this: âYou 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.â[5]
The writing is in the thickets and the cracks in the wall, yet this
isnât 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.
âIn 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.â[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 âthe human cycleâ between
hunter-gatherers and Modernized consumers: âif 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.â[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 arenât 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 ânatureâ. 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 donât 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, doesnât arrive out of thin air. There are roots here. To
understand how weâve 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, thatâs 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 isnât 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
isnât true. All of the psychological and physical breakdowns of the
human body and mind are an indicator that as adaptive as humans are, we
canât 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 âclean slateâ, 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, itâs 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. âWildnessâ, ecologist Paul
Shepard was known to remind us, âis a genetic state.â[9]
Wildness is our genetic state.
âReification, 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 mindâs reification of its experience,
that is, an analysis into parts which, as concepts, can be manipulated
as if they were objects.â[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. Itâs an exploration of empathy, not an apathetic move to
remain enthusiastic by-standers like conservationists.
The purpose isnât 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 thereâs a degree of inescapability to that. Words
travel. As recent attempts to completely own and market rewilding have
highlighted, you canât 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: âa person can explain
how a word is used and what it refers to, but the wordâs meaning depends
on knowing a web of contexts and concealed related meanings.â[12]
That the term wildness can be written off isnât 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, itâs easier to know it when you see it.
The problem is that we arenât 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:
âthe perceptual style of any community is both reflected in, and
profoundly shaped by, the common language of the community.â For our
rooted hunting and gathering relatives, that language includes âthe
speech of birds, of wolves, and even of the windâ. Contrast that against
the world of the civilized, the world weâve all been raised in, where
âwe now experience language as an exclusively human property or
possessionâ.[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 civilizationâs foundation of hierarchy and complacency, we
externalize our frustrations to (and often beyond) the point of
self-destruction. Iâll allow an anthropologist to state it lightly:
âif 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 tendenciesâ[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] âNatureâ
as sociologist Peter Dwyer aptly points out, âis an invention, an
artifact.â [17] Not one to mince words, anthropologist Tim Ingold gets
down to it: âthe world can only be ânatureâ for a being that does not
belong thereâ.[18] As we will elaborate, this is yet another civilized
disease which hunter-gatherers have not suffered:
â[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.â[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 doesnât 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.
âThe 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 visionsâall 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.â[20]
<>-[21] Furthermore, this enacted knowledge âis 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 themâ.[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 âgenetic stateâ,
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 isnât just complacency, itâs 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 Shepardâs words: âWilderness 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.â[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 couldnât 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.
âI 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.â[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 PirahĂŁ of Brazil, missionary turned
agnostic Daniel Everett observed that the inability to âspread the wordâ
was attributed in part to the fact that PirahĂŁ âonly make statements
that are anchored to the moment when they are speaking, rather than to
any other point in time.â[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 isnât 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;
âTheirs is a world in which the interdependence of humans, animals,
plants, water, and earth â the total picture â is always immediate,
always present. And the total picture â every day, every season, every
year â 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.â[28]
The ability to externalize âthe Otherâ 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: âTheir conversations often sound like a classroom
discussion of ecology, of food chains, and trophic levels.â[29] This is
not lost on the children, whose growing knowledge of animals is
âprominently based upon familiarity with animal behavior and includes
ways of living peacefully with animals, of maintaining a discourse with
themâ.[30]
Philosophy is not an adequate replacement for proximity without
separation. Wildness here needs no interpretation, but is often subject
to exaltation. âI suggestâ, observes Mathias Guenther of the timeless
rock art of the !Kung, âthat animals are beguiling and interesting to
man prima facie, in and of themselves, without any mediation through
social structure.â[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 âforestnessâ
represented by the symbols of fire, water, air and earth, which they
âcannot 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.â[33] What
resonates further within me is that the wind is upheld as pepo nde
ndura, or, âthe breath of the forest itself.â[34] Amongst the Nayaka of
southern India, the forest is similarly referred to as âthe giving
environmentâ.[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 â 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 âthe loss of plant species, the
loss of health in ecosystems and our bodies, and the loss of the sense
of who we ourselves, are.â[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
canât 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.
âAn-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.â[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 âNinja Campsâ[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 âleave only footprintsâ 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 âtwo ways of
paying supremely close attention.â[42] Native knowledge, or âscience
without all of the trappingsâ, is riddled with empathy, itself âa
dangerous word in scienceâ 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 ânot just show up, but really tune inâ, 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 âradical
humilityâ 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 âwhen the self becomes tired and weak
and pride languishes can the awareness that is wildness step in.â[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 doesnât 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,
âwhat the robin already knows.â
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. âBoth humans and non-humans, in
short,â Tim Ingold observes, âfigure as fellow-participants in an
ongoing process of remembering.â[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 ânever learned to employ our whole being as
a tool of awarenessâ has kept us from âthat essence of life which cannot
be learned except through direct awareness, which is total, not merely
rational.â Encounters with the Spirit, the wildness, in âour 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.â[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 wasnât 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
doesnât 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, âTime, Memory, and Propertyâ 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 âlanguage older
than wordsâ 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 âconversationsâ 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 âThe Suffocating Voidâ in Black and
Green Review number 1. Black and Green Press: Ephrata, PA, 2015.
[15] Leonard Martin and Steven Shirk, âImmediate-Return Societies: What
Can They Tell Us About the Self and Social Relationships in Our Societyâ
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 âEgocideâ in Kevin Tucker,
For Wildness and Anarchy. Black and Green Press: Greensburg, PA, 2009.
Also pretty widely available online.
[17] Peter Dwyer, âThe Invention of Natureâ in Ellen and Fukui (eds),
Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication. Berg: Oxford,
1996. Pg 157.
[18] Tim Ingold, âHunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the
Environmentâ in Ellen and Fukui, 1996. Pg 117.
[19] Ibid, pg 120.
[20] Shepard, 1998. Pg 132.
[21] Catherine Fowler and Nancy Turner, âEcological/cosmological
knowledge and land management among hunter-gatherersâ 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, âSafari concession threatens Hadza tribeâ,
June 28, 2007. Online: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/2467.
Accessed July 8, 2015.
[25] See Rupert Isaacson, The Healing Land. Grove Press: New York, 2001.
[26] Cited in Lee and Daly, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and
Gatherers. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1999. Pg 271.
[27] Daniel Everett, Donât Sleep, There are Snakes. Pantheon Books: New
York, 2008. Pg 132.
[28] Ilarion Merculieff, âWeston Societyâs Linear Systems and Aboriginal
Cultures: The Need for Two-Way Exchanges for the Sake of Survivalâ in
Burch and Ellanna, Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research. Berg: Oxford,
1994. Pg 409.
[29] William Laughlin âHunting: An Integrating Biobehavior System and
Its Evolutionary Importanceâ in Lee and Devore (eds), Man the Hunter.
Aldine De Gruyter: New York, 1968. Pg 314.
[30] Ibid, pg 305.
[31] Mathias Guenther, âAnimals in Bushman Thought, Myth and Artâ 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, âThe Giving Environment: Another Perspective on
the Economic System of Gatherer-Huntersâ. Current Anthropology, Vol. 31,
No. 2 (Apr., 1990), pgs 189-196.
[36] Randy Kidd, DVM, Dr. Kiddâs 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.
[38] For more discussion of this, see âEverywhere and Nowhereâ in
Tucker, 2009.
[39] Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan. Detroit: Black
and Red, 1983. Pg 302.
[40] See Four Legged Human, âThe Commodification of Wildness and Its
Consequencesâ in Black and Green Review no 1, spring 2015.
[41] This joke is sadly true. Brought to you by the douche bags of
âReWild Universityâ 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 canât
recommend it enough to reiterate and elaborate points Iâve made
throughout this essay.
[45] Paul Rezendes, The Wild Within. Berkeley Books: New York, 1999. Pg
204.
[46] Tim Ingold, âTime, Memory, and Propertyâ in Widlok and Tadesse,
Property and Equality Volume 1: Ritualisation, Sharing, Egalitarianism.
Berghahn: New York, 2007. Pg 166.
[47] Turnbull, 1983. Pg 77.