(Re-)Wilding

Well that was fun yesterday in Environmental Ethics, heading out again into the shade and shadow of Peck Hall and the Walnut Grove to talk about trees and seaforestation. "The seas can turn carbon into forests at a rate exceeding that of the lushest parts of the Amazon," if (as Abby reported) industrial agriculture doesn't deplete the kelp forests first. "It would take an enormous, civilization-defining effort to achieve" the sea forest transformation we need, but "it is an alluring vision"...  

So is this, and a mesmerizing sound as well:  

(Thanks, Ed.)

This arboreal distancing, crown shyness, canopy disengagement, whatever you want to call it, sure looks like a form of cooperative and inter-communicative natural intelligence. A civilized people will not ignore, discount, or plunder it. Are we smart enough to respect its wildness?

And that's our next topic. Wilding.

Whatever that song meant, for humans and the planet generally it means getting and staying out of the way of nature's own capacity for restoration and preservation. Thoreau said it well:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society... westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon... The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind... Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him... Walking (1862)

The point is not to reject civilization but to naturalize it, not to lose intimacy with our natural inheritance and identity or to civilize the nature out of us and thus imperil not only our own form of life but life on earth as such. Individuals can imagine a sharp distinction between nature and culture, between the wild and civilization. But "from the perspective of the living world" the boundaries are blurry. Paul Hawken says it well too:

Wildness grows in the cracks of sidewalks. The human body is suffused with a vast system of microbiota, known and unknown organisms that outnumber our human cells. You could say that we are mostly bactreria learning to be human. Each of us is a culture... [we] exchange microbes and create a web of interconnectedness said to harmonize interactions with our family and the environment.

But in aggregate we've not been harmonizing very well. Do they still introduce the literary arts to grade-schoolers by asserting the dramatic appeal of stories that feature "man against nature"? That's dissonant in the extreme. We've got to restore the balance, or as the growing re-wilding movement has it, to "bring together Indigenous peoples, local communities, influential leaders, nongovernmental organizations, governments, companies and the public to protect and rewild" at great scale and speed." Can we do it?

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, as with seaforestation and many other initiatives we'll be discussing, it's a vision "worth trying our hardest to achieve."