Nature Boy Revisited

Me in the Late Eighties in the Pecos Wilderness

I don’t mean to harp on the reporter’s question, “Would you say you live a back to nature lifestyle.” He, appropriately, took umbrage with my Beckett-like treatment of our conversation. I did not mean to impugn his abilities as a reporter, and I’m sure the article will be very nice.

However, that question, and my reaction to it, has generated a lot of thought on my part.

To a great extent, I was much more of a back-to-nature sort when I owned a car. It was at that point in my life that I was the most immersed in Edward Abbey’s writing, and when I was exploring the Southwestern United States. I went backpacking more often. I canoed down the Gila River during its spring flood. (Luckily, the river was at just the right level that I and John Ruskey made it through without flipping. Be warned — the middle box of the Gila River looks like it could be tricky when the water level is really roaring through.) I’ve rafted on the San Juan and the Green River, and after we sold the car, we went along with friends on a raft trip on the Colorado River. I’ve backpacked through the Pecos Wilderness, Big Bend National Monument, and various places up in Utah.

There was, (and is when I get out to wild places), a certain amount of searching for meaning in all that wilderness travel. Thoreau said, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” It’s a nice sentiment, but what exactly does it mean? Surrounded by nature, perhaps, we can feel a deeper sense of our place in the bigger scheme of things, but a more articulate answer to the question of Wildness never dawned on me. I’m still waiting for that moment when I feel I’m turning easily within the greater design of the Universe.

At this point in my life, I feel this division between Wildness and Civilization is more destructive than informative. In order to get to these places to hike or boat, I traveled by car, and that travel represented a gulf between the wilderness and the scope of my own life, though certainly, the idea of “Wilderness” has been both a literary and physical reality far back into the dawn of history, but before the advent of the automobile, the wilderness was the thing at the edge of the village, and you could hear the wolves howling at night. Perhaps that is still true, though instead of Grendel savaging the mead hall, we have tornadoes and rising sea levels, and those things are still arising from our shadow-side, as our irrational activities destabilize the systems that cushion us from the Shiva-like forces inherent in the natural world. Are we turning our back on our shadow-side, when we leave the cities and suburbs to seek some sort of transcendence in wilderness "areas"? Perhaps the wildness we need to confront in order to realize a better future for ourselves is that which is still in ourselves as represented by our living arrangement. Clearly suburbia is a better manifestation of our irrational, violent, and subversive natures than the remaining areas where life is allowed to unfold unmolested, though in articles such as this one, it is clear that the wilderness is no longer a thing apart. (A nice, short essay on the human shadow is Robert Bly's "The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us." Only the first part of the essay is at the other end of that link. The full essay is in his A Little Book on the Shadow).

Be that as it may, what we now name the wilderness is the thing that you drive to, and it is a place to go to get away from the difficult conditions of the city or suburb.

Jim Kunstler points out in the article I linked to a couple of posts ago, that if we took care of our own living conditions, we would also be taking care of the Earth. Livable cities would preclude the need for suburbs. Supplying our cities with more local food from surrounding farm lands, rather than filling up those lands with housing developments, would go a long way toward putting the brakes on global warming, (at this point, I am cynically in doubt as to whether we can stop it).

If we’re going to solve the problems that face us, we’re going to have to stop being Environmentalists. There’s something puritanical in Environmentalism. We need to stop slapping people over the knuckles with a ruler saying, “you can’t do that, you’re raising the global temperature,” or maybe, “look at your room! It’s a mess!”

I would much rather hear about how I could make my life better and more enjoyable than hear how I’m shouldering part of the blame for destroying the planet.

The planet doesn’t need our help. Life will take care of itself, even if, in the process, it has to reset itself right back down to anaerobic bacteria.

Human communities are what need our attention, intelligence and sacrifice.

Our being carfree probably won’t make a dint in the world’s environmental problems. I do, however, feel that I’ve already made a positive impact on my community. Life is better on a bicycle — for human beings. By taking care of ourselves, perhaps we are also taking care of the planet, but let’s focus on taking care of our cities and farmlands. In most cases, they are probably in greater need of repair than the natural world.