To Experience Our Own Wildness

Charles Gill 9/23/2011

Where does our wildness come from? If you were to ask a tree it would say from the seed that sprouted it, the trunk that supports it, the leaves that feed it, and the roots that nourish it. If you asked a bird it would say from the parents that hatched it, the forest and fields that feeds it, the wind that lifts it, and the sky that holds it. If you asked a person where they get their wildness from you might get a frown, an uneasy mumble, and a shrug. Many people would look at you askance and confidently tell you that they arent wild, not like some beast of the forest. A more enlightened individual might say that they draw their wildness from the world around them, through interaction with the natural world, and a conscious effort of meditation and reciprocity with nature. The truth is all of us have wildness in us, from the smallest microbe to the largest mountain, and humans are part of this wild world whether we like it or not. It is our birthright, like the birds, our nourishment, like the trees, and our gift from the earth. As humans have evolved we have drawn farther and farther from the wilderness that gave us life. We have built cites and temples, roads and walls in our steady march towards civilization. With each step we take away from the wilderness our wildness becomes more and more difficult to discern. We write laws, organize religions, and live in communities in which it is uncouth to speak of wildness as something that is part of us. With every forest tamed and field planted we feel more justified in our battle against the wilderness, and our code of ethics has drifted farther from nature to exclude it almost entirely. There are those, however, who make up a not too insignificant minority, who feel that this path of righteous civilization is wrong, that our modern industrial system is strangling the life force of not just ourselves but all of phenomenal

nature. There are those who, like the Lorax, speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues, and write about nature as if it were a gift to be cherished rather than a wild to be subdued. It is from these people that I have drawn my inspiration to raise my voice with theirs and to speak for the trees as if they were my brothers. Henry David Thoreau, notably one of the first and greatest American philosophers on nature, states that, in wildness is the preservation of all things. This statement, written down at a time when Americas conquest of the wild was in full swing and the edges of the frontier were being pushed farther and farther back, was only heeded by a few close friends and relatives. Americans of this time did not yet see the destruction of nature as a deplorable thing, especially because if they had, as Thoreau, spent many hours a day walking through woodlands, they would still see wilderness as boundless and the wilds creeping up to their back doors. It was only years after his death that Thoreaus words rang true for certain individuals who saw America as a fully industrialized civilization-building machine. In Thoreaus time you could still look west to find buffalo herds in the prairies and wolves in the mountains. In a few short years after his death the buffalo were gone and the wolves pushed to fringes of mans borders. For a person at this time to be decrying the loss of a few hundred acres of forest land seemed incomprehensible and foolish, not to mention un-American, but proved to be wise and prophetic in the years to come. The classic Greek philosophers Plato, Socrates and Aristotle; western Judeo-Christian belief and tradition; the eastern philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism; and his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, conditioned Thoreaus view on nature. He used to say that it was Emersons essay Nature and the Bahgavad-Gita that made his mind. With these tools he was able to fully experience nature the way transcendentalists believed it should be experienced: with regular reciprocal experiencing of the natural world and ongoing meditations on the experience.

Very much a loner and recluse, Thoreau would spend hours a day walking in the woods around his home in Concord to practice these arts, and his Walden experiment was simply his attempt at becoming more fully in touch with the wilderness. To experience nature was to experience God, he believed, and therefore an intentional walk in the woods was akin to Holy Mass. These thoughts had little impact on the people of his generation but would prove to be monumental for future generations. Transition There was a man, born in Scotland and raised in the wilds of Wisconsin, who saw in Thoreaus, and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emersons, ideas of Transcendentalism a symbol of the truth and sanctity of nature. John Muir lived his life in the dedication to and enjoyment of wild places. The first widely read spokesperson for the preservation of wild places he helped found the Sierra Club, dedicated to, exploring, enjoying and rendering accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast. (Nash p.132) In Muirs eyes, if people were exposed to the beauty and wonder of nature they would be unable to miss the importance of its existence for their souls and they would fight to save it. In nature Muir saw Gods will writ large. The mountains were temples where the trees breathed psalms, and in wilderness man could realize himself as, part and parcel of nature, a line pulled directly from Emersons Nature. This energetic Scotsman went on to be one of the leading voices in the budding American conservation movement in a time when nature writing was in vogue. While Thoreau died an eccentric nature lover little know by the public, Muir quickly gained national recognition through his writings of his escapades in the Sierra Nevadas. The difference between their popularity was due in large part to the increased anxiety many Americans felt about the disappearance of their national identity, the frontier. The American West, that place that brings back to memory the tall tales of the frontiersman and the heroic

freedom of the pioneer, was quickly becoming something of the past, the great rivers were being damned for hydroelectric and the boundless forests cut for the ever-thirsty American industry. Hotels were being built where once you could ride for miles and not see the neighbors chimney smoke. And all across America, house wives and blue collar husbands were reading about a modern day frontiersman, a man who threw himself into the wild for the sheer joy of it and promised the same joy to any who would follow him. Among Muirs notable friends and admirers was the soon to be president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, a man who seemed to embody the very essence of wildness. Summing up a popular worry that American men, and ultimately American culture, were trending towards flabbiness and slothful ease, Roosevelt took great pains to proclaim the gifts of the wild, the hardy life in the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. (Nash p.150) These excursions, he believed, would breed manly men who could rightfully inherit a land battled for by the noble frontiersman and keep the vigor of American civilization strong. It was this predominant thinking at the time that lead to the creation of Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, along with a number of outdoor-minded clubs including the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Sierra Club, and Roosevelts own Boone and Crockett Club. These and others, Nash says, provided a chance to play the savage, accept punishment, struggle, and, hopefully, triumph over the forces of raw nature. In an age of fear of losing what was American these clubs provided a means for people to get back in touch with their wild side, experience the world as the savages did, and see first hand the majesty of nature and her works. Thoreau may have avoided these clubs like the plague, and scoffed at their mission statements as too masochistic and overbearing, but the fact remains that more and more

people, even women in long dresses, were venturing forth into the wilderness to touch, taste, and feel what it meant to be alive and wild. As proponents of conservation, and speakers for the trees, go, there was possibly none more eloquent and forceful than Aldo Leopold. A graduate of the Yale School of Forestry, Leopold brought a carefully tuned, razor sharp mind to the problem of protecting Americas wild places. His culminating piece of work, The Land Ethic, was not published until after his death in 1948, but for his entire adult life Leopold fought for the preservation of the American wilderness and the creatures that inhabit it. With the refrain, it is last call, Leopold hoped to engender a feeling of ethical duty towards a nature he saw dwindling away before his eyes. He believed that man was put on this earth not to subjugate and dominate the natural world but instead act as, plain member and citizen of it, with all that entails. We are but one part, he believed, in the vastly complex ecological web that holds this world together. If humans were to become extinct, nature would not, and should not, bemoan the loss more than extinction of the smallest microbe. To be a part of nature is to hold certain obligations towards it and Leopold saw in his land ethic a way to respectfully treat nature as we would treat ourselves for the continued health and benefit of both. As a realist Leopold knew that what was done was done. The prairies of the pioneer were gone, the great virgin pine forests of the lake states were gone, and the coastlines, which he describes as being of singular importance to American culture, were being built into cottages and tourist roads. It was not simply the loss of wilderness that Leopold detested, for he says, wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization, and so this destruction was necessary for human civilization, but rather that now, after all the hammering, we are able to, cast a philosophical eye on [the] world, that same raw stuff is

something to be loved and cherished, because it brings definition and meaning to his life, and still we see the bulldozers carving out mountainsides. That we continue to carve away at our raw material for precious small gain and tremendous loss to natural processes galled Leopold. As human civilization has become more complex, our sphere of ethics has grown larger, and now was the time in our evolution for those ethics to include the land, the soils, waters, plants, and animals. Without this code of ethics, without the understanding that each individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts, without land-use policies that place obligations to the land above economic gain, and without philosophical and religious support, humans are doomed to enact the extinction and destruction of all things natural, including themselves. Revered as the supreme elder of nature writing, Gary Snyder brought the conversation back to the immaterial, the unseen but felt, the wild. As a poet Snyder explores the nature of wildness in the human heart as he writes about his times working on logging crews in the Pacific Northwest, the oil tankers he caught jobs on to pay his way across the Pacific to Japan, his two years practicing Za-Zen Buddhism at a monastery in Japan, and his life back in North America where he now lives in the Sierra Nevada. As an essayist he writes about wildness in the hearts of all humans in The Etiquette of Freedom. By exploring the history of wildness in the course of evolution, how it has shaped our minds from the beginning of time and how, in our modern civilization, we have grown to reject or doubt the wildness that was given to us, Snyder leads us to the conclusion that we are all wild whether we like it or not. Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking over a precipice, the heart-inthe-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quite moments relaxing, staring, reflecting, all are evidence of a deeper, intrinsic wildness that has been passed down from our mammalian ancestors. Some people, he concedes, are not comfortable with equating themselves

with animals, that we are not just animals but something more. But then, other animals might feel they are something different than just animals too. The idea of a shared life force, the spirit that moves through all things, is central to Snyders Etiquette because it draws all beings in this world together as brothers and sisters, not as human and animal or mountain and tree. That life force is wildness, and it is articulated everywhere all the time. As a student of Thoreau, Snyder challenges Thoreaus statement, give me a wildness no civilization can endure, by asking is there a, civilization that wildness can endure? Conceding that throughout time civilizations have collided with wild nature, and that now those collisions are ever more powerful and destructive to wild nature, he believes that there is a chance we can build, a civilization that can live fully and creatively together with wildness, and it is here, in the New World where that civilization may arise. To live at home in nature, for nature is home, the original home, we must practice the etiquette of the wild world. This is simple, says Snyder, all you need is, good-humored toughness that cheerfully tolerates discomfort, an appreciation of everyones fragility, and a certain modesty. When we cease to believe that our knowledge is all-powerful and our will infallible, in short when we drop ourselves off the god peg and return to the animal, we may then commune peacefully with nature and our fellow travellers. This decent from conqueror to mere citizen, as Leopold put it, can be very difficult for some, but it can be achieved through human means. Snyder tells the story of Alvar Nez, a Spanish foot soldier who, with one companion, walked for eight years across Texas and New Mexico, came out transformed into a person of the New WorldHe gained a compassionate heart, a taste for self-sufficiency and simplicity, and a knack for healing. He returned from the wild, into which he went with nothing, and came back transformed, fully in control of his own wildness and at peace with the wildness of nature.

As an extreme example this clearly shows that from nothingness a person can be refilled with energy, a life force that exists within all of us. A simpler, less demanding way of tapping into this energy is to travel, day after day on foot over snowfields, rockslides, passes, torrents, and valley floor forests, by putting ourselves out there. I tend towards this method namely because it is what is accepted, and encouraged, by my parents, family and friends, and it allows me to experience wild nature in wild places while feeling wild myself. I have spent time in the wilds of New Zealand and Australia, New England and western Montana. I have walked, hiked canoed and ridden horseback through places where the touch of humans had been barley felt, and I have experienced the sense of joy, wonder, quietude, and power of these places. I have also travelled through the Old World in Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Spain and Italy. Here I saw the strong hands of ancient civilizations at work but I found them no less wild or wonderful. Like stumbling across a stonewall in the New England forest, these places were the artifacts of civilizations past, and I saw no less beauty in the careful architecture of the Alhambra than in the wild magnificence of the glacier-forming mountains of New Zealand. I do not fully agree with Thoreau when he says, all good things are wild and free, because I see much good in the wonders humans have created, the art with which we have built our cities and domes and the careful execution with which the foundation stones must be laid. I do believe that Americas whole-scale destruction, but for the two percent, of primeval lands was a sad blow to the collective body of wilderness, and like Leopold, believe that it will be impossible to create new wilderness to replace that which we have lost, but I hope that as we continue our march of civilization we learn to step a little more softly and look out for even the smallest plants and animals that lie in our path.

After spending seventy-five days sleeping in a tent in the New Zealand bush, my companions and I my companions were understandably overwhelmed by our re-entry into civilized society. With hair washed, beards cut, legs and armpits shaved, the men and women I had spent this time with were shinny and new. Big smiles covered every face and the reflection of alpine-glow till shone from every eye. We made our way confidently down the busy street knowing that we held something the other city dwellers around us didnt, freedom. If it came down to it, any one of us could have slung on their pack and walked right back the way wed come, from the prehistoric rainforests to the raging rivers to the highest peak we were free to wander. This exuberance of wildness faded slowly as the strong hands of civilization and culture demanded that we not build fires for our meals and that we not pitch our tents on the sidewalks. Stoves and hostels provided these comforts, but they were comforts seemingly new to us and the first couple of nights sleeping under sheets were restless and weary. Humans have an extraordinary ability to adapt to almost any situation. From outer space to the deepest ocean we have pushed our limit and come back to tell the tale. It is a gift to be able to transition ones thinking enough to settle the difference between extreme wild and extreme civilization. I know of one creature for whom this transition is impossible, he is either wild, or not. New Zealands alpine parrot the Kia lives its life far above the bustle of cities. As humans have pushed into its territory it has found in them a useful source of food. The tragedy lies in the fact that if this bird, just once, associates humans with food it will never go back to eating wild food and hunting for itself. Some might say it is a sign of its extreme intelligence that after only one experience it learns where the find the easy food. Others might say it is a curse from God to make such a creature so steadfast in its habits that it would rather starve than return to hunting. I think it is a little of both, with some mystery thrown in, for the creatures intelligence is

undeniable as he watches you put food to mouth, and instead of a curse I believe we see the majesty of evolution for a being whos species knew no human, nor mammal, touch until the Maori pulled their canoes ashore and began to worship the Kias high peaks. Humans have the power to work great evil on the natural land and we have seen it happen time and time again in bigger and more destructive ways. While we pull gold and oil from her breast, Mother Earth weeps for our foolishness and frailty. She knows that time heals all wounds and that the works of man are but dust to the eternity of her existence. Wilderness will retake our cities, pull down our walls, and cover our roads with vines. The wilderness is on the wind, always waiting. We as humans must spend our time here in recognition of our own impermanence and in praise of that which is eternal, time and change. For in the mortal words of Alexandere Dumas, man who, like Satan, momentarily thought himself the equal of God, and who, with all the humility of a Christian, came to realize that in Gods hands alone reside supreme power and infinite wisdomSo, do live and be happy, children dear to my heart, and never forget that, until the day when God deigns to unveil the future to mankind, all human wisdom is contained in these two words: wait and hope!