Thursday, February 10, 2011

A Post-Industrial Definition Of Wildness


This presentation is a very brief selection from three lengthy appendices
exploring traditional definitions of wildness as biased and counterproductive for designing for the integration of human life into the larger Earth ecosystem.

IN THE GREAT WORK, Thomas Berry offers a dramatic shift in perspective.  It is one that enlarges the context in which we define our terms.  It is a perspective that challenges our longstanding beliefs by looking at phenomena from the very real current state of our knowledge.  Thomas Berry looks at the contemporary moment from the broad perspective of the universe.  And from this perspective, the “great work” of the contemporary moment involves the integration of post-modern life into the larger Earth ecosystem.

From our longstanding tradition, we look at wildness diminishing down to remnants while Berry finds the universe to be a wild context.  The universe tends to be imagined as too distant to be influential in daily life.  And yet, in a very real way, every event in our experience is a direct expression of the universe.  Still, it is a perspective that can seem impossible to fit to everyday life. 

Whatever perspective we choose sets the fundamental stage for our actions.  Finding the over-old universe to still be in creation, we suddenly find post-industrial life to be emergent and fresh, lost and not central, and inside an ongoing creation.  Finding ourselves orbiting a dust speck sun in an obscure arm of an obscure galaxy, we begin to face our distorted sense of being at center-point and above nature and apart.  Lost in vast wildness, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue to believe that we are not wild.  All life on Earth can be seen as a fragile expression in the outer rim of a star. In the context of the history of the Earth, we find the city to be infantile rather than “established,” and just beginning in an ongoing creation.

Creativity can be seen to be the ongoing key dynamic of the universe.  And creativity demands the primary element in wildness, that of remaining alert to the changing conditions of existence.  With this universal perspective, Thomas Berry defines “wild” as
that which is uncontrolled by human dominance[i]
and “wildness” as
the ultimate creative modality of any form of earthly being.[ii]
Berry continues,
Wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneity of any being.  It is that wellspring of creativity whence come the instinctive activities that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young; to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea.  This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist, and the power of the shaman.[iii]

At first, “that which is uncontrolled by human dominance” can seem to reinforce
a traditional sense of wildness as present only in those events that are separate from human control.  However, in both our degrading environmental feedback and even within our human actions, we begin to understand that much of our experience is either separate from our control or not well controlled.  And now with a still rather new awareness of profoundly vaster context of the space-time—the universe and the dramatic shifts of the conditions of existence as evidenced in geological timeframes, we begin to understand that we are an expression of a still emergent, creative universe and subject to it, and deep within it rather than looking out at it.  There is a new sense that there is something inherent in human life that is never subject to human dominance, and that is creatural rather than cultural.  And there is a sense of cultural expression as capable of being a natural adaptive response that expresses the creatural rather than something largely separate.

But the heart of Berry’s definition looks at wildness as the creative mode of any earthly being inside a vast ongoing creative context.  Wildness is a flow of change or ongoing creation.  Nothing in the biosphere is preserved across the long run.  Human life in any era is creatural, and culture is an expression of the creatural—as a response to the changing conditions of existence--rather than a departure from it.  Like an eagle or a sparrow, we focus on our immanent needs rather than on the needs of other events or on total alertness to our landscape.  But our immanent needs cannot ignore changing conditions such as depletion of material resources. And so in the contemporary moment, there is a shift toward global urbanization as residency that begins intuitively, while continuing to consciously attend to immediate needs.  And human beings, we have an additional wild capacity to become aware of our immanent everyday reality as having very real, non-ordinary longer reach in which our activity extends into events beyond ourselves.  This gives us at chance at optimizing rather than either subsisting or disappearing. 

Optimizing wildness requires intentional attentiveness or alertness to a larger identity.  Wildness is fundamentally optimal, because as Thomas Berry notes, authentic spontaneity, which is at the heart of wildness, needs to be optimal to sharpen our ability to adapt.  Optimal health will always involve an expanded circle of attentiveness and identity to allow us to recognize resources.  Our new eco-literacy is not simply a cultural product.  It is a consequence of our experience of changing conditions of existence that demand integration rather than exploitation.  This new eco-literacy is brings this process of integration to consciousness to allow us to optimize activities that favor integration to intentionally replace our once successful exploitation that no longer optimizes our experience in a peopled Earth and can be self-destructive and clearly non-optimal.

While we seem to live largely inside culture, we remain fundamentally more creatural than cultural, which is to say that we are an aspect of a vast wildness.  Try to stop respiration and digestion.  We are so much wilder than we have allowed ourselves to imagine.  Our most contemporary culture serves larger processes such as species continuation and cooperation to access basic needs that we tend to not acknowledge.  And like other species, we aspire to flourish and not simply exist or survive.  We aspire toward influencing the places that we inhabit to be optimal.  Berry’s sense of relating wildness to all living beings is captured in Michael Hough’s design orientation to build habitats that aspire to create “conditions that permit a species to survive and flourish.”[iv]  Hough suggests that the same rules apply everywhere, but the habitats will vary in expression.

In Islands, The Universe, Home, Gretel Ehrlich offers a broader vision of wildness than we tend to use.  Her description is lyrical and metaphorical and not as concrete or as specified as we are used to seeking, but this is its grace, and this grace is its strength in the way that it is opening and expansive.  Ehrlich describes wildness as a dynamic action when she writes that it is “all present tense,” [v] rather than a specific set of fixed conditions.  She suggests that perception of wildness requires us “to see the open dimensions of form—to move through, not against.”[vi]  Aspiring to move through the appearance of an object such as a tree, for example, we might encounter “the flickering universe of a cottonwood tree.” [vii]  Gretel Ehrlich almost “un-defines” wildness when she writes,
Wildness has no conditions, no sure route, no peaks or goals, no source that is not instantly becoming something more than itself, then letting go of that, always becoming.  It cannot be stripped to its complexity by CAT scan or telescope.  Rather, it is a many-pointed truth, almost bluntness, a sudden essence like the wild strawberries strung on scarlet runners under my feet.[viii]

Berry’s definition of wildness has Gretel Ehrlich’s sense of wildness being an inescapable dynamic that is creatively open.  This openness is not bounded, so that each event is more an event or current than an object.  We, for example, are currents of metabolism rather than separable objects, and we are connected moment by moment to hydrologic and atmospheric and material substance and radiant energy.  Every activity in the universe is both intimately interpenetrating the other and authentically wild.  And wildness is the central or “heart path” for all events in the universe.  Berry’s definition is in congruence with Thoreau’s sense that “ In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”  While wildness tends to be so open and creative as to be undisciplined and therefore crude, Berry notes that wildness involves creative and destructive aspects that ultimately conform to “a discipline that holds the energies of the universe in the creative pattern of their activities.” [ix]  This discipline of the universe is not a crude process but rather a subtlety beyond our capacity to either imagine or replicate.

In The Universe as a Green Dragon, Brian Swimme explores the perspective of Thomas Berry.  He begins with the perspective of the universe rather than the Earth or the local place, and describes humanity as a creation of the universe.[x]  He concentrates on the essential unit of focus as the Earth “community” as a whole.[xi]  He suggests that language, including presumably the written word that seems to separate modern human life from wildness, belongs to the Earth as the Cascade Mountains belong to the Earth.[xii] 

In North America, Swimme sees a collision between European (science, technology, masculine and individual orientation) and Native American perspectives (ecological, animistic, feminine, communal—spiritual) and no effort by European traditions to blend perspectives of this new landscape.[xiii]  However, this values conflict has been an ongoing one within Western culture between the rational and Romantic traditions as highlighted by Robert Bly in News of the Universe.  The new eco-literacy is bringing a sense of enduring wildness and naturalness to awareness in an important new way.  It is no longer a clash between economy and aesthetics, but rather it is now an economic necessity and an economic opportunity that can also be optimized to increase the quality of human life. 

In successful societies, whether they are primal First Societies or a post-industrial megalopolis, values change as population increases place new demands on the society.
Societal success in the form of population growth has favored pioneering exploitation for all societies, including primal “first societies.”  The success of “modern life” has dramatically improved survivability and favored pioneering to sustain the rapidly expanding population.   However, in post-industrial life, the value of a strategy exploitation decreases, but it opens a new opportunity.  In a peopled Earth the continuing population pressures favor something new—that of integration rather than exploitation—because of the absence of material resources.

In Biophilia, biologist Edmund O. Wilson envisions reality as a “chaotic richness.”  He suggests that human experience imposes a selection of biases upon reality [101]. [xiv]  Wilson sees modern life as having flawed biases that lead us to act destructively toward both the non-human and ourselves.  While Wilson sees habitats such as cities as superficial when compared to the complexity of a forest, he sees human life as a species that has an urge to affiliate with other forms of life, and he terms this drive toward affiliation, biophilia.[xv]  He suggests that while an absence of contact with the non-human such as occurs in the city can seem real or all that we believe we require, it masks an enduring natural essence.  He writes,
People can grow up with the outward appearance of normality in an environment largely stripped of plants and animals, in the same way that passable monkeys can be raised in laboratory cages and cattle can be fattened in feeding bins.  Asked if they were happy, these people would probably say yes. Yet something vitally important would be missing, not merely the knowledge and pleasure that can be imagined and might have been, but a wide array of experiences that the human brain is peculiarly equipped to receive.[xvi]   

Berry’s description of wildness allows us to address Edward O. Wilson’s cultural biases by
·      looking at wildness from a broader scale, from a posture of inclusion rather than separation, that inescapably includes human life and makes wildness the key operational dynamic of the universe that every activity in the universe must express to be authentic rather than a secondary dynamic, and
·      sensing wildness as a sublime state with on going creative and destructive elements that challenge our more facile [i.e., too easy] descriptors of wildness rather than wildness as an archaic stage that can be well-described.

Wildness can describe human life rather than be something describing that which we are not.  It is remarkable that we have come to imagine contemporary human life as separate from wildness when we are so deeply lost in the cosmos.  Contemporary human life is destructive to nature to such a degree that human actions seem superficial rather than fundamental because of the way that they overlook dramatically changing conditions of existence—in particular, diminishing material resources in a peopled Earth.  This superficial response can still be a natural one, but a response that is no longer successful.  It is natural in that it is more like that of a new species that is unfitted to its landscape.  Global urbanization is a new response that is environmentally adaptive in the sense of trying to provide habitation for a human population of billions.  And while the longstanding belief of separation from wildness continues as a dominant conscious belief, the conditions for life in a peopled Earth are driving intuitive adaptive responses in global urbanization such as a reduction in the rate of population growth.  Gradually, degrading environmental quality is challenging a sense of boundary between culture and nature.  There is an emerging sense of culture and nature being described in terms of differences rather than mutually exclusive opposites, as well as events that occur on a continuum.

When all human activity falls inside wildness, wildness moves from being a dialect opposite to being a point on a continuum, and wildness opens and expands.  When wildness includes human life, the intrinsic value of complex unsettled landscapes is amplified rather than diminished, because they are experienced as no longer distanced and as inherently optimizing health and, therefore, essential to our optimal health as they are. 

Thomas Berry’s “authentic spontaneity of any being” provokes an expansion of wildness to all species—a general condition of living and of being alive.  Making this leap provokes a more profound leap in defining wildness that is present yet understated in efforts to define wildness.  Wildness is the universal response to changing conditions of existence by all phenomena, including not only biota, but also processes such as weathers, stellar evolution.  Wildness can be deconstructive or integrative.  Thoreau’s “preservation of the world” is, paradoxically, a process of response, transformation, succession, and change. 

To see everything as wild would seem both to diffuse the meaning of the term “wildness” to the point of being meaningless as well as to absolve human activity that results in severe ecological destruction.  And yet, to not see everything as wild ultimately distorts natural process.  As with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, there is a simple, integrative and practical eloquence in the observation of a universal wildness that is not separate from any human activity regardless of how tame or domestic or artificial he activity or product may appear to be. 

To not see the city as wild with both deconstructive and integrative expressions misses real, concrete processes that are essential for integration into the larger Earth ecosystem.  To see the city as wild opens a threshold to cross over from a disordering problem to an opportunity for health, and to amplify processes that are already more effective than “green” technological designing for a machine.



[i] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 48.
[ii] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 48.
[iii] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 51.
[iv] Michael Hough, City Form and Natural Process: Towards A New Urban Vernacular. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1984, p. 24.
[v] Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991, p. 37.
[vi] Gretel Ehrlich, 1991, p. 55.
[vii] Gretel Ehrlich, 1991, p. 71.
[viii] Gretel Ehrlich, 1991, p. 30.
[ix] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 51..
[x] Brian Swimme, The Universe as a Green Dragon: a Cosmic Creation Story. Santa Fe: Bear & Company, 1984, p. 35.
[xi] Brian Swimme, p. 34.
[xii] Brian Swimme, p. 166.
[xiii] Brian Swimme, p. 159.
[xiv] Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 101.
[xv] E. O. Wilson, p. 85.
[xvi] E. O. Wilson, p. 118

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