Place of the Wild

A Wildlands Anthology

David Clarke Burks

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781559633420
  9781559633413
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610912983
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

FRAMEWORKS

Except possibly his soul, man prizes his mind above all else. His mind is a product of his ecology as much as the rest of him. Every human mind is a product of its ecology—the same ecology. Nothing that evolves persists unless sustained by those same creative forces. Like a ball at the top of a fountain, the human head pivots on its animal backbone, the mind a turning knot of thought and dream on the end of a liquid spear of living animals.

—Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals

A distinguishing trait of our species is the desire to construct frameworks. These are the clotheslines upon which we arrange the apparel of our understandings of place and our place in the order of things. On the one hand, frameworks are constructs that attempt to incorporate and mimic strands of the natural world; on the other, they are particularly human forms of architecture precipitated from the streambed of logos.

Frameworks explore how we attach meaning to things—how culture informs those meanings and steeps them in metaphor. Analytic discourse is a means of resolving a whole into parts, a way of looking back, and out, and over the broad terrain and discovering the relations which hold things together. The contributions to this section explore many of the diverse ways humans conceive of wildness and wilderness and the consequences of those varied perceptions.

It is always useful to keep Wallace Stegner’s admonition in mind (an advisory which bears a close resemblance to one issued by Aldo Leopold when he suggested the need to keep all the parts): “The dreams of man,” Stegner said, “will not accept what nature hands us. We have to tinker with it, trying to give it purpose, direction and meaning—or, if we are of another turn of mind, trying to demonstrate it has no purpose, direction, or meaning. Either way, we can’t let it alone.”

Each time we attempt to reconstruct nature we end up creating “products” of our own invention and have a difficult time seeing our way out of the epistemological boxes we have constructed. Living in a human-invented environment, reacting solely to our own creations, leaves us living entirely within our own minds. Restraint and humility must always temper our presumed knowledge of natural systems. In an essay called “Sanctity and Adaptation,” Roy Rappaport has written: “It is perhaps the case that knowledge will never be able to replace respect in man’s dealings with ecological systems, for . . . the ecological systems in which man participates are likely to be so complex that he may never have sufficient comprehension of their content and structure to permit him to predict the outcome of many of his own acts.”

Scattered Notes on the Relation Between Language and the Land

DAVID ABRAM

For some time I have been working on a book exploring the ecology of perception and language, analyzing the manner in which these two dimensions modulate the relation between human culture and the living land. One of several intertwined themes in this project concerns the influence of writing—and, in particular, the alphabet—upon the experience of language and, consequently, upon our sensory experience of the earth around us. How has writing altered our awareness of time, of space, of earthly place? Here, in keeping with the focus of an anthology on culture and wildness, I have gathered from that project some scattered notes concerning the forgotten intimacy between language and the animate earth.

A living language is continually made and remade, woven out of the silence by those who speak. And this silence is that of our wordless participations, of our perceptual immersion in the depths of an animate, expressive, more-than-human world.

Expressive, living speech is a gesture—a vocal gesticulation wherein the meanings are inseparable from the sound, the shape, and the rhythm of the words. Communicative meaning is always, in its depths, affective; it remains rooted in the sensorial and bodily dimension of experience, born of the body’s native capacity to resonate with other bodies and with the landscape as a whole. Linguistic meaning is not some ideal and bodiless essence that we arbitrarily assign to a physical sound or word and then toss out into the “external” world. Rather, meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world—in the heat of meeting, encounter, participation. We do not, as children, first enter into language by consciously studying the formalities of syntax and grammar or by memorizing the dictionary definitions of words, but rather by actively making sounds—by crying in pain and laughing in joy, by squealing and babbling and playfully mimicking the surrounding soundscape, gradually entering through such mimicry into the specific melodies of the local language, our resonant bodies slowly coming to echo the inflections and accents common to our locale and community.

We thus learn our native language not mentally but bodily. We appropriate new words and phrases first through their affective tonality and texture, through the way they feel in the mouth or roll off the tongue, and it is this direct, felt significance—the taste of a word or phrase, the way it affects or modulates the body—that provides the fertile, polyvalent source for all the more refined and rarefied meanings which that term may come to have for us. Linguistic meaning remains rooted in the sensory life of the body—it cannot be completely cut off from the soil of direct, sensuous experience without withering and dying.

Yet to affirm that linguistic meaning is primarily gestural, and poetic, and that conventional and denotative meanings are inherently secondary, and derivative, is to renounce the claim that language is an exclusively human property. If language is always, in its depths, essentially carnal, and expressive, then it can never be definitively separated from the expressiveness of birdsong or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night. The chorus of frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wildcat as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of Canadian geese vee-ing south for the winter—all reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our own conversations and soliloquies, moving us at times to tears, or to anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated. Language as a bodily phenomenon accrues to all expressive bodies, not just the human. Our own speaking, then, does not set us apart from the animate landscape but—whether or not we are aware of it—inscribes us more fully in its chattering, whispering, soundful depths.

If, for instance, one comes upon two human friends meeting for the first time in many months and chances to hear their initial words of surprise, greeting, and pleasure, one may readily notice, if one pays close attention, a tonal, melodic layer of communication beneath the explicit denotative meaning of the words—a rippling rise and fall of the voices in a sort of musical duet, rather like two birds singing to each other. Each voice, each side of the duet, mimes a bit of the other’s melody while adding its own inflection and style and then is echoed by the other in turn—the two singing bodies thus tuning and attuning to each other, rediscovering a common register, remembering each other. It requires only a slight shift of focus to realize that this melodic singing is carrying the bulk of communication in this encounter. The explicit meanings of the actual words ride on the surface of this depth like waves on the surface of the sea.

It is by a complementary shift of attention that one may suddenly come to hear the familiar song of a blackbird or a thrush in a new manner—not just as a pleasant melody repeated mechanically, as on a tape player in the background, but as active, meaningful speech. Subtle variations in the tone and rhythm of those whistling phrases suddenly seem laden with expressive intention, and the two birds singing to each other across the field appear for the first time as attentive, conscious beings, earnestly engaged in the same world that we ourselves engage, yet from an astonishingly different angle and perspective.

As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to civilization’s destruction of their habitat and the tropical forests where many of them winter, it is likely that our own speaking is losing some of its melodic resonance and power. For if our speech no longer echoes and responds to the voices of the warbler and wren, it can no longer be informed by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own words become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of expressive meaning.

ON ORAL CULTURE

To oral peoples, nature itself is articulate: it speaks. The human voice in an oral culture is always to some extent participant with the voices of wolves, wind, and waves—participant, that is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth. There is no element of the landscape that is definitively void of expressive resonance and power: any movement may be a gesture, any sound may be a voice, a meaningful utterance.

In the oral, animistic world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe, all things—animals, forests, rivers, and caves—had the power of expressive speech, and the primary medium of this collective discourse was the invisible air. In the absence of writing, human utterance, whether embodied in songs, stories, or spontaneous sounds, was inseparable from the exhaled breath. (Try speaking a phrase without exhaling.) Spoken words, it was assumed, are formed breath and take their communicative power from the breath and the air. Hence the enveloping atmosphere was an implicit intermediary in all communication—a zone of subtle influences crossing, mingling, and metamorphosing. This invisible dimension of whiffs and scents, of vegetative emanations and animal exhalations, was also the deep repository of ancestral voices and intentions, the home of stories yet to be spoken, of ghosts and spirited intelligences—a kind of collective field of meaning from whence individual awareness continually emerged, and into which it continually receded, with every inbreath and outbreath.

We might say that the air, as the invisible wellspring of the present, yielded an awareness of transformation and transcendence very different from that total transcendence expounded by the church. The experiential interplay between the visible and the invisible—this duality entirely proper to the sensuous lifeworld—was far more real, for oral peoples, than an abstract dualism between sensuous reality as a whole and some other, utterly nonsensuous heaven.

Whenever we seek to engage the discourse of oral cultures, we must free ourselves from our habitual impulse to visualize any language as a static structure that can be diagrammed or a set of rules that can be listed. Without a formal writing system, the language of an oral culture simply cannot be objectified as a distinct entity by those who speak it. And this lack of objectification influences not only the way in which oral cultures experience the field of discursive meanings but also the very character and structure of that field. In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural landscape remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the visible accompaniment of all spoken meaning. The land, in other words, is the sensible site or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. We are situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape—the two matrices are not separable—and we can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land.

If we listen, first, to the sounds of an oral language, to the rhythms, tones, and inflections that play through the speech of an oral culture, we are likely to find that these elements are attuned, in multiple and subtle ways, to the contour and scale of the local landscape, to the depth of its valleys o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Praise
• INTRODUCTION
• Contours of the Wild - DAVID CLARKE BURKS
• NARRATIVES
• FRAMEWORKS
• DISPATCHES
• The Contributors
• Index