Place of the Wild: A Wildlands Anthology

By David Clarke Burks, Max Oelschlaeger, John Davis and 27 more

Where and what is the place of the wild? Is the goal of preserving biodiversity across the landscape of North America compatible with contemporary Western culture?

Place of the Wild brings together original essays from an exceptional array of contemporary writers and activists to present in a single volume the most current thinking on the relationship between humans and wilderness. A common thread running through the volume is the conviction that everyone concerned with the natural world -- academics and activists, philosophers and poets -- must join forces to re-establish cultural narratives and shared visions that sustain life on this planet.

The contributors apply the insights of conservation biology to the importance of wilderness in the 21st century, raising questions and stimulating thought. The volume begins with a series of personal narratives that present portraits of wildlands and humans. Following those narratives are more-analytical discourses that examine conceptions and perceptions of the wild, and of the place of humanity in it. The concluding section features clear and resonant activist voices that consider the importance of wildlands, and what can be done to reconcile the needs of wilderness with the needs of human culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610912983

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NARRATIVES

This we know. The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

—Attributed to Chief Sealth (Seattle)

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There is a search going on, some would call it a ricourso, for the old themes—the old stories which are once again becoming the new themes of discovery. Interpreting texts and myths, attempting to understand ritual and ceremony, imbibing the nectar of rich oral histories, all these and still other expressions are finding their way into contemporary narratives on wildlands and wilderness.

In this section you will find a variety of essays and narratives that portray connections between humans and place and speak to the palpable presence of the wild. Through narrative and direct experience of wildness we connect with the earth, not as resource, but as source. Learning the local vernacular is singing the songs of our own place, living within limits imposed by natural boundaries, and developing reciprocal relationships with other-than-human life.

These writings draw deeply on the contributors’ personal faculties of observation and intuition. They are soundings, testing the depths of new/old waters, in territories beyond the reach of conventional dashboard knowledge. These explorations of place do not rely on traditional, anthropocentric values which place human needs at the top of the pyramid. Rather, through narrative lenses, the writers suggest that life’s meaning and purpose flow through indigenous, unmediated relationships with the contents of home. For them, wildness is nature’s authentic voice.

Years ago, Henry Beston wrote in his provocative book The Outermost House:

We need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals.... We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the Earth.

The Far Outside

GARY PAUL NABHAN

Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world; and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.

EDWARD ABBEY, The Journey Home

I was in a small room in Alaska when I heard it. That was part of the trouble. I was supposed to be paying attention to what was being said in the room; after all, this was a nature writing symposium. But from where I sat I could hear ravens coming in to roost in the spruce trees above us, and wondered how their calls were different from those of the Chihuahuan ravens down where I live. I could look out the windows and see bald eagles swooping over the waters of the sound. Worse yet, I already had the stain and smell of salmonberries on my hands, and had been perplexed all morning as to why the ripe berries on two adjacent bushes were entirely different colors.

It was then that I heard it. A familiar warble came out of the well-educated, widely read humanist a few chairs away from me. She asserted a truism I had heard in one form or another for nearly thirty years:

"Each of us has to go inside before we can go outside! How can we give any meaning to the natural world until each individual finds out who he or she is as a human being, until each of us finds our own internal source of peace?"

Queasy, I immediately felt nauseous, indisposed. Something she said had stuck in my craw. Instantly, I was so out of sorts I had to leave the room. Our moderator followed me out to the porch, where I gasped for air.

"Are you okay? she asked earnestly. You looked green all of a sudden."

I dunno. I breathed deeply and looked up at the crisp blue sky. I must be ... uh ... under the weather a little. Let me see if some fresh air will help.... If you don’t mind, I had better go for a walk.

As I ambled along, I wondered what had set me off. I wandered around on a rainforest trail, trying to spiral in on what in that room had disoriented me. First, I felt uncomfortable with the notion that we can give the natural world its meaning. The plants and animals which I have observed most diligently over twenty years as a field biologist hardly seem to be waiting for me to give them meaning. Instead, most humans want to feel as though we are meaningful, and so we project our meanings upon the rest of the world. We read meaning into other species’ behavior, but with few exceptions they are unlikely to do the same toward us.

Humans may, in fact, be rare even among primates in the attention we give to a wide range of other species’ tracks, calls, and movements. To paraphrase one prominent primatologist: If their inattention to their neighbors other than predators is any indication, most monkeys are extremely poor naturalists. The same can be said of many other wild animals which live in sight of, and in spite of, human habitations.

While it may somehow be good for us to think and write about plants and animals, I am reminded of John Daniel’s humbling insight while hopping through a snake-laden boulder field: the snakes were not fazed by his thoughts, fears, or needs. As Daniel writes in The Trail Home: The rattlesnakes beneath the boulders instructed me, in a way no book could have, that the natural world did not exist entirely for my comfort and pleasure; indeed, that it did not particularly care whether my small human life continued to exist at all.

Walking along, my restlessness increased as I considered the premise put forth in that room: the shortest road to wisdom and peace with the world is that which turns inward. I will not argue that meditation, psychotherapy, and philosophical reflection are unproductive, but I simply can’t accept that inward is the only or best way for everyone to turn. The more disciplined practitioners of contemplative traditions can turn inward and still get beyond the self, but many others simply stumble into self-indulgence.

As Robinson Jeffers suggested over a half century ago, it may be just as valid to turn outward: The whole human race spends too much emotion on itself. The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature or the artist admiring it, the person who is interested in things that are not human. Or if he is interested in human beings, let him regard them objectively as a small part of the great music.

Finishing my walk among the great music of crashing waves and hermit thrushes, I conceded that the wisest, most inspired people I knew had all taken this second path, heading for what I call the Far Outside. It is the path found when one falls into the naturalist’s trance, the hunter’s pursuit of wild game, the curandera’s search for hidden roots, the fisherman’s casting of the net into the current, the water-witcher’s trust of the forked willow branch, the rock climber’s fixation on the slightest details of a cliff face. Oddly, it is hanging onto that cliff, beyond the reach of the safety net of civilization, where one may gain the deepest sense of what it is to be alive. As arctic writer and ethnographer Hugh Brody says of his predilection for working in the most remote human communities and wildest places he can find, it is at the periphery that I can come to understand the central issues of living.

Unlike conditions within the metropolitan grid where it seems we have got nature surrounded, the Far Outside still offers the comic juxtapositions, the ones worthy of a Gary Larson cartoon. The flood suddenly looms large before Noah can get his family onto the ark full of animals; the bugs in the test tube have the last say about the entire