As I wade through my now hopelessly expanding syllabus on the subject of nature conservancy, I’m unsettled by the fact that reading about nature seems to increasingly involve reading about what no longer exists; disappearing glaciers, diminishing aquafers, degraded wetlands and wildflower meadows, species that no longer roam the earth, rivers that no longer run to the sea.
My latest read is a book by Isabelle Tree entitled, "Wilding; Returning Nature to Our Farm". Rewilding is a progressive approach to large scale ecological restoration and conservation. It's about letting nature take care of itself, allowing natural processes to shape the land, repair damaged ecosystems, and reintroduce native wildlife to restore landscapes degraded by human activity. But what immediately comes to mind is a dictionary definition of another word:
Bewilderment ( bi-ˈwil-dər-mənt ): noun
1. The quality or state of being lost, perplexed, or confused: the quality or state of being baffled, disoriented.
2. Original meaning: to head back into the wild.
The word, by either definition, might be a more apt title for Isabelle Tree’s book.
It's a sobering realization to arrive at the notion that I've not enough time left to fully comprehend, much less do anything about, the astonishing complexity of calamities that have seized the natural world and paralyzed the rest of us in existential angst. The thunderous convocation of voices raised in alarm at our environment and our diminishing world is met in equal measure with dispassionate nonchalance, obstinance, or ignorance on the part of many of our politicians and law makers, our courts, our religious and spiritual leaders, some of our neighbors, and now our president.
Conflicts, confusion, and uncertainty cloud the path forward to recovering this earth highlighting the difficulty of the science as well as the social, economic and political reforms required of such an undertaking. Even the definition of the term ‘rewilding’ is itself in question. An article in IFLScience is titled; “Rewilding; The Fine Art of Doing Nothing”. Perhaps “doing nothing” in this case is akin to the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians “First, do no harm”, but in a crisis, when your house (or a Los Angeles neighborhood ) is on fire, doing nothing seems a less than adequate response.
Rewilding is such a deceptively simple word for an unimaginably complicated process, I wonder if the language that we’ve developed over the millennium to help us understand this earth has caused us to view the world from a dangerously inappropriate perspective. Do we really believe that nature truly knows best? Is this why we've come to refer to this planet as ‘Mother Earth’?
Without language, man could never overpower nature in all its ominous power and beauty. By putting a name to the insurmountable force of nature, language allows us to simultaneously control and transcend the concept of the natural world. When we apply the feminine pronoun, we attempt to convince ourselves that we have some control over that which is beyond our comprehension, and the reference to ‘mother’ allows us to believe that nature has our best interests in mind. Nature is no longer an unpredictable and impenetrable force, it is now simply a woman who can, - and should according to our forebearers - be possessed.
Is ‘rewilding’ also a deception? It certainly sounds deceptively simple. But the notion that 'nature knows best' seems a precarious acknowledgement that there is a master plan that simply requires a surrender to an omnipotent power that will, if allowed to proceed without human interference, return the earth to its original, natural, and intended state. Rewilding then is apparently what we have dreamed about since biblical times; a return to paradise. All we need do is simply admit our mistakes and remove ourselves.
But then again, the opposite view; that rewilding requires human intervention to re-introduce a variety of flora and fauna in order to achieve the desired original earthly balance, is pretty arrogant. And to what era should we attempt to return this earth? What has been accomplished in the rewilding-test-kitchens in England’s West Sussex and West Kerry or Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, while admirable, are micro-environments that may, if left alone, return to where they were before we so rudely interrupted, but are also probably unsustainable given the current global forces of climate change which we have no idea how to rewild.
“Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm” is, above all, a hopeful book but each paragraph leaves me with more questions than answers. How does one rewild when twice as many plants have gone extinct than birds, mammals, and amphibians combined, and according to a U.N. report the number of wild animals on this earth has halved in the last 40 years? Isabelle Tree makes the case that it is possible to feed 10 billion humans on this planet while also leaving more space for the wild, but the current projection is 9.5 billion people on this earth by 2050. What then? What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year and there is no roll call on the evening news.
Rewilding is either a healing process or preparation for dealing with the aftermath of the seemingly inevitable; our supreme failure to come to terms with our own existence. The word has taken on different urgency depending on the group. While some neighbors talk about possibly rewilding their lawn, others talk about navigating converging emergencies and developing large scale cooperation strategies. To others, rewilding generates conversations about survival skills, trauma recovery, and learning to live with grief and death, and there are websites and podcasts, books and periodicals, chat groups and cafés dedicated to each - some hopeful, others dystopian.
To others rewilding, with its allusions to reincarnation and being born again, also has a religious or spiritual connotation that, in our endlessly divided world, places the concept of rewilding at the volatile and vocal intersection of science and religion. In our attempts to dominate and exploit this world instead of cultivate it, religion has too often split the world into the sacred and secular, the spiritual and physical, and has abandoned this world in favor of the next. To Henry David Thoreau, the allure of Walden Pond was that nature was a pristine refuge. Ultimately, nature was to him what it was to his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson: the Divine made visible. We have removed the divine from the world around us and sequestered it in a church. But those of us who visit wild and unfamiliar places, or even walk along the lake for a few moments of contemplation and reflection the way others might visit a church, visit because we return transformed, both exalted and humbled. As Simone Weil informs us, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
In the absence of a clear and vocal defense of the environment from each Sunday pulpit, the degradation of this world is a condemnation of many of the world's religions. Or perhaps the world’s religions got it right, perhaps eternal salvation really is all about the next life, not this one.
Rewilding, like politics, is local - an Alice Waters approach of utilizing, nurturing, and cherishing that which is within our reach, seasonally, physically, geographically, emotionally, politically - bringing into question concerns about colonialism, imperialism, travel, trade, and the global economy. For the last several thousand years the world has gotten smaller, more homogenous, more local, less diverse. And we’ve called that progress. Do we reverse that? Do we rip the rhododendrons from the Cotswolds and return them to their native East Asia and the Himalayas? What about the sika deer? The feral goats? Most animals have a certain range - for a squirrel it’s maybe 5 acres, wolves about 50 miles, wildebeests perhaps 1,800 miles. Humans are no longer even tethered to this earth, and unlike the seeds that are carried by birds and on the fur of animals to not-too-distant places, we not only carry much farther, we modify those seeds and those animals, change their very DNA so that there is no longer a natural place to which they can return. To what category of invasive species do we consign ourselves? Perhaps it’s time for Alice Waters to don her battle fatigues.
Quantum mechanics now tells us what the Buddha told us 2,500 years ago; that everything in the universe is connected to everything else in the universe. We are all woven together. Inseparable. What rewilding is telling us is what we’ve known for millennium; life as we know it is illusory. So the questions compound endlessly beginning with; “Given things as they are, how should one live one’s life?”.
There is a book by Richard Powers that posits that our epidemic of loneliness is caused by our failure to recognize the interconnectedness of all living things on this planet. Isabelle Tree’s book certainly opens the door a little to that insight as well as the wages of isolation, lack of diversity, our failure to understand the world in which we live, and the cumulative effects of our mistakes. I’m reminded of another book, “Braiding Sweetgrass”, where Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that, “All flourishing is mutual”.
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Bill Sheehan
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico - May 2024