Eco Body-Mind

Lance Kinseth, How Much Does Your Mind Weigh?, 19”x33, acrylic/panel

This post is an overview of sorts—a point of entry—with  more detailed aspects such as reconciliation ecology described elsewhere.

IN EARLY HUMAN development, a sense of separation or differentiation between human and other biota and inorganic material and processes such as weather and seasons would be inconceivable.

As human populations expanded and became more reliant on culture, there was a gradual separation of human life from nature.  Origin myths shifted from a sense of coming from the Earth to a sense of coming into the Earth and exiting it in death.

In post-industrial/cybernetic times, extended sensory experience of space and time—in infinities of largeness and smallness and a sense of a geo-time of epochs and stellar birth and death—has challenged a sense of apartness.  Satellite monitory of the Earth, shared DNA across all biota, and direct experience of degrading environmental feedback to the point of threatening human health reawakens an emotional experience of inseparability.

Still, ecology is a rather new term in the popular imagination.  For all of our material sophistication, we have really yet to acknowledge that we remain quite ecologically illiterate.  We remain cultural with little sense of more fundamentally creatural, and we become our words.  And “nature” continues to largely reference something “out there,” and this is reflected in how we act.  If we can be holy but a river cannot, then we will use it or at best, with a quality of usufruct, we will steward the river as a “resource.”

If we could begin to challenge our words, we might see remarkable processes that we have overlooked.  Because of our eco-illiteracy, our most effect “interventions” in the contemporary moment likely have not been our intentional environmental activism.  It has likely been an inherent wildness, unintended but survival-driven, as with, for example, global urbanization that has erroneously appeared to be nearly the

antithesis of  “nature.”

“Stewardship” implies managing, preserving, and maintaining of a separable landscape.  A “guardian” is not necessarily the same as a “steward.”  As in the movie Avatar, the indigenous hominid inhabitants were envisioned to be an expression of the landscape and gave it first priority rights in a natural “legal standing.”  In such a view, human life is not deemed to be secondary, but rather is one reach of landscape that continues to express human life.  Giving first priority to a river and to wild grass and woodland optimizes human life, and it is the real, practical work as well as being the highest literate life rather than a reactionary step backward.

Reverence would be the first step in such guardianship.  Reverence is not worship.  Rather, reverence is an acknowledgement of the landscape as capable of caring for life. And from this perspective, human action would involve following and listening rather than possessing and managing.  If there is regulation, it would be regulation of human action to come into harmony with the landscape.

Legal standing and reverence might open the gate to an eco-literacy that still remains far beyond the inherently anthropocentric words we use to guide our actions of recycling and sustainability.  If we are to sustain for the long run of things, we will leave ourselves behind, just as our deep ancestry did to become species sapiens.  And the larger landscape will be the designer and shaper of that which we will become, as it currently is in spite of our delusion of self-direction separate and above nature.

THE MANICURED WILDERNESS: The Adaptive Nature of Urban Ecology

The posts in this blog, The Manicured Wilderness, are often excerpts from a book-length manuscript (revised August 2009) with the same title.  The manuscript argues that (1) global modern human life is a wild state rather than something that is post-wild and that (2) global urbanization is predominantly an ecologically adaptive feature rather than the antithesis of wild nature and separate from wildness.  The chapters focus on  (2) the adaptive features that far outperform intentional environmental interventions and the appendices focus on (2) a philosophy of human wildness that includes modern life.

The following Contents page sketches the book-length manuscript:

THE MANICURED WILDERNESS: The Adaptive Nature of Urban Ecology

CONTENTS

Preface                        The Living City: An Overview     11                        [11 pp, 2831 words]

Chapter One                    The Transformation Of The Nature Of The City    22

Chapter Two                    Actualizing The Great Work    63

Chapter Three                  Describing The Living City    110

Chapter Four                    Initial Approaches In Designing The Living City    140

Chapter Five                      Five Major Design Considerations For The Living City    166

Chapter Six                        Global Urbanization As Ecological Renaissance    216

Epilogue                            A Letter To The Future    254

[Word Total for Preface—Epilogue: 2831+64796= 67627]

Appendix I                        Before Taking One Step: Challenging Biases Of Separation

From Wildness    258

Appendix II                      Describing Human Wildness    285

Appendix III                    The City From Geological And Ecological Perspectives   327 

[Word Total for Preface—Appendix III: 92276+2831 = 95107]

Notes                                 Chapter One—Appendices [300+ Citations]    358-371

Sparrow & Earthrise

Lance Kinseth, “Dusky Seaside Sparrow,” detail, 1997

WINTER, 1968, A VIEW of the whole earth over moonscape: Seeing the biosphere radically transformed our sense of ecology, both as a planetary process rather than a local or regional process and as a personal process that places us inside the landscape.  And in this capstone image of the whole earth, there was a complementary sense of the smallness of the earth in interstellar space and it fragility.

Before 1968, our dominant image of the Earth was one given to us by mappists.  And if the map was transposed to a classroom globe, it was a flat grid upon which we seemed to stand.  And further, it was a cultural image that divided the earth into a patchwork of political states.  The mappist Earth was proprietary.  It was a divisive and possessive landscape.  But with Earthrise, our image of the Earth was of something that was not only integrative but also seemed to be alive or at least dynamic.  It was continually changing and starkly beautiful blue and green and brown overlaid with transparent white.  There were essentially no visible dividing lines then (until the detail of satellite photography eventually revealed some sharp discrepancies along countries’ borders, where the land might be depleted on one side). 

With Earthrise over moonscape, we saw a dramatically new condition of existence.  We lived inside a thin membrane of atmosphere rather than lived separable from the landscape.   And we lived because we were dwellers inside a sea of atmosphere rather than simply possessors of ground. 

Suddenly, local was global.   The atmosphere just above our local place today came from around the other side of the globe just days before.  And our actions in our local place were doing the same thing, having either minute or dramatic consequences over there.  There was no longer any “away,” and we began to comprehend that there never had been, and that they never would be, an “away” or an “outside.”  Local environmental degradations or improvements did impact globally as bits and pieces of larger processes such as sulfur and CO2 emissions and degraded water quality.  The personal activity of each of us such as either electrical energy consumption produced sulfur expelled into the atmosphere from coal-fired plants or food consumption produced nitrogen in fertilizer washed into the water.

Now, due to increasingly diverse and more sensitive satellites, we understand that local is the result of the global.  But the local is interconnected with the far away “local.”  For example, daily dust storms in the Central Sahara Bodele basin [an ancient mega-lake of 400,000 square kilometers] lift phosphorous and iron [from the sandy sediment comprised of shells of freshwater diatoms] into in the high atmosphere and transport it to the nutrient-poor Amazon rain forest where it downpours in abundant rainfall.  With contemporary climate change, there is the possibility of altering this process.

Winter 1968, an astonishing view of the whole earth over moonscape, but also an inseparable, sour afterimage in summer, 1987: dusky seaside sparrow, extinct.  In 1987, the ecological inseparability that continues to be opened was opened by this view of earthrise over moonscape ironically acted in one specific local place to consummate in the extinction of one obscure [by our making] species.

June 16, 1987: The last known purebred dusky seaside sparrow, Orange Band, a captive resident of Discovery Island, Disney World, died.  In March 1989, four crossbreds—part Dusky and part Scott’s seaside sparrow—disappeared in a storm.  By mid-June 1989, a lengthy search for the crossbreds engendered no response and lead to the official declaration of the extinction of the species. 

The view of Earthrise over moonscape—especially the ecological image of the biosphere—was an indirect outcome of a quest to “set foot on the moon” rather than an intended outcome of a quest for a radically new view of the Earth.  And the demise of the dusky seaside sparrow was an indirect or unintended consequence of the alternation of everyday life in a local community.  Specifically, the quest for the moon resulted in turning Cape Canaveral into a boomtown. This fostered land development of a ten square mile salt marsh near the St. John’s River, in the form of roadways, pesticides, and draining for residential and commercial development.  The purchase of a wildlife refuge to protect the species in 1972 came too late. 

The image of Earthrise over moonscape bowled us over.  The extinction of dusky seaside sparrows did not.  The first image was a news banner and the other was a back page note.  And even if we were wise enough to know ahead of time that space exploration might provoke a species’ extinction, the resistance to prevent the extinction would have had little impetus.  And even now, having accomplished the quest for the moon and the powerful impetus that the quest gave to technological advancement would likely seemed to have been well worth the tradeoff in one or even several species’ extinction.   The side outcome of enhanced satellite monitoring of the whole Earth that did improve our ecological understanding and ongoing monitoring of landscapes might be a justification for the tradeoff.

Big gains seem to offset small losses.  Big is more, and small is less.  Big and Small: This capacity to trade off one thing for another represents a measure of an important limit in our ecological literacy.  However, now in the 21^st Century, a continuation of the misunderstanding that small is really big, begins to be at least faintly acknowledged.  With the tradeoff visible in bits and pieces, it can delude us into thinking that small is less.  By giving up something small to get something bigger can be directly experienced to degrade both the ecological health of the earth and human optimal health for sure, and our sustainability across the long run of existence. 

And even within extinction, there are biases with regard to worth.  The extinction of a Tasmanian tiger or a Western Black Rhino or a Japanese Sea Lion is lamentable to many.  The extinction of a Golden Toad in Costa Rica or a Black Andean Toad is lamentable to a few, and a variety of minnows lamentable to a handful, and sustained only as long as fragile laws prevail.  Finally, there is a vary limited effort to initially identify threatened species and ecosystems or even to identify species still unrecognized, so that the growing list of threatened species is only superficial at best.

Still only vaguely glimpsed in our eco-literacy in a now peopled Earth is a growing sense that the little picture is really also a big picture.  The “extinction of species” is a phenomenon that occurs simultaneously within a larger pool of “endangered species” that occurs simultaneously within a still larger pool of “threatened species,” and they all occur simultaneously, by anyone’s measures, within a “degraded” global landscape.  

When we protect an endangered species, and when we move it out of endangered status and even threatened status, we make real environmental progress that once seemed impossible.  It is remarkable that we have been able to stand in the way of our own immediate interests in the form of halting or limiting construction of the built environment.  And it is not simply some profiteer’s concern that we have limited with the U. S. Endangered Species Act.  We have restricted water to farms to protect a species of minnow.  However, defense of endangered species is a defense for just a few of the niches where there happened to be an endangered species present.  The prairie skink might be “preserved” in a particular form of prairie, but only for a time if those niches are reduced to remnants that are dispersed and rare in a bioregion where unsettled prairie has largely been eradicated. 

The extinction rate may already exceed one species per hour.  In the past two decades, one million species of biota may have become extinct.  Such numbers can be appropriately debated as inaccurate, but they are reasonable metaphors for a pool of genetic diversity that is unknown. 

Even domesticated varieties of animals, currently most evident among species of poultry and pigs, are becoming extinct at an estimated 2 breeds per week, as well as plant varieties such as potatoes and apples, as we rely on fewer varieties that have fit our standard processing.  Long French fries at global fast food chains favor a few varieties and drive agricultural production.  With fewer options in the face of diseases, both the availability of our food supply as well as the increased need for pesticides places our food supply at risk and concentrates chemicals in the landscape.

One way to get a sense of the loss of a species is to try to research it enough to draw it.  While some illustrations of biota, such as Audubon’s, might said to be “ensouled” rather than simply illustrative, it is difficult to take any reproduction and hold it up to a living species and feel that its essence has been captured.  If expressive, reproduction might be said to express more our own biases of, for example, wildness. 

In winter 1987, I drew images of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow from other reproductions.  Being “small” and “drab” and limited in range had resulted in just a few images.  I was frustrated by the way that all reproductions from which I worked fell short, like my desk globe’s image of the Earth.  They were unclear, where before they had seemed to present more than enough.  The discrepancy was recently brought home to me again.  My granddaughter and I were observing a Barred Owl.  Observing it, she wanted to draw the owl as soon as we returned home.  Returning home, I gathered up various guidebooks to make clearer what has seemed somewhat obscured by the night.  None of the various guidebooks came close to matching what we saw that night, and, in the case of the Barred owl, still have an opportunity to see.

The complexity of a whole Earth, of a contiguous biosphere, is contrived of the complexity of local places.  Diminish the complexity of the local place and it is impossible to not diminish the complexity of the whole Earth.  Small extinctions are the pinnacle of large degradation.  And this degradation that was once lamentable for its impact on other species is increasingly experienced as impacting directly on human health.  It is apparent that space exploration, especially that of local surveys of the Earth, markedly enhance our monitoring of the Earth.  But it does not, in itself, make us do things differently.  For all of our astronomical and cybernetic sophistication, the bridge of ecological literacy between the local place and the global is still poorly contrived, if present at all.

In a peopled Earth, there is a popular sense that nature is receding away from local places.  However, in the post-industrial era, we are actually moving more deeply inside the natural order.  Efforts have been made to box attention to wholes and to small nuances as either faulty avant-garde, New Age postmodernism that aspires to “deconstruct” our view of the world or a Romantic nod to age-old Zen or Taoism or First Nation ethics.  But this attention to wholes is really a rational, practical, “eco-literate” transformational shift in economics and health.

Now, in a peopled Earth, both vastness and smallness are gradually coming to be understood as one contiguous terrain viewed from different-sized windows.  It is now easier to understand that a whole ocean can be in jeopardy as well as a sparrow.  But this understanding is still effusive because our eco-literacy has barely emerged.  We are likely more intuitively aware than cognitively aware.  And now our intuitive responses, while less conscious, are responses to direct loss of quality and no longer Romantic escapism.  And yet, our conscious actions tend to be less rational, and lag behind our gut sensibilities. 

To ponder the fact that we will never hear the songs of the dusky seaside sparrow—its cut-a-zheeeeee—still seems to be no more than a frivolous Romantic lament in a global ecosystem that is always changing and redesigning.

Now in the 21^st Century, in a fragile Earth rather than in previous centuries when Earth seemed to be overflowing with vast stored capitol, the renascent task for our age is one of integration with the larger Earth ecosystem rather than either exploitation or some Romantic technological escape.  As was the consequence of the large view of Earthrise, the small view might also become a provocation more than a lament.  And if we begin to focus on what is not wrong, we might being to invest in the adaptive ecological features of both unsettled and settled landscapes. 

At our highest development of our eco-literacy, we might begin to encounter ourselves as an expression of the Earth, and still young and wild.  And we might begin to amplify our eco-literacy.  We might begin to recognize an enduring shamanic vision of, for example, the objectified “tree” as a channel of energy, as aliveness, and as sensitivity and, therefore, conscious.  Such visions would transform how we interact with trees—how we use trees—perhaps with more usufruct and design sensitivity.  What if trees were a living field of something like “sensitivity”?  Energy channel, aliveness, sensitivity are subtle, knowable dimensions rather than effusive, esoteric presumptions that will be a strong measure of our advanced eco-literacy that lead to profound, practical design.  Such perceptiveness will be akin to the imaginal (i.e., deeply intuitive rather than imaginary fantasy) reaches of Einstein that have provoked profound leaps in technology and our understanding of landscape.

Small and large—civilization that has seemed to have swollen to be larger than the Earth as a result of peopling the Earth also seems to shrink in our age of astronauts to something small and fragile.  Our own numbers are vast and yet we are still small. 

The local and the global: There is no longer any conversation about the “environment” that is not local and global, that is not “sparrow and Earthrise.”

  And in this modern era, so what is perception that most blocks our movement forward?

In our eco-literacy, we are willing to include our activity as a contributor to environmental degradation, but as an intruder.  We imagine ourselves to be destroying the adaptive features of the larger Earth ecosystem.  While there is a sense of truth in this observation, it is narrow.  We miss how we have always been on the inside of the larger Earth ecosystem and primarily adaptive.  We design for separation and miss the ecologically adaptive features in our own activity that we can optimize for our own benefit and for the larger Earth ecosystem.  Our global urbanization that appears to be the antithesis of nature might be envisioned as the adaptive, intuitive ecological process that it is.  Our effort to try to sustain a net of landscapes by believing that we can cease intruding has always been a delusion.  Our health lies in the net of landscapes that sustain us more than we can ever sustain them.

Today, in a peopled Earth with few remaining physical frontiers, the hero’s journey is, paradoxically, just beginning.  For all of our advancement, we are still so very young in the history of the Earth.  The hero’s activism is not as much an outbound quest as it is the capacity to find the universe(s) where we stand. In this age, the terrors are no longer wild, fearful six-headed Scylla and its counterpart Charybdis.  The terror is not in the living, vibrant, healthy things that have never been out to get us, that sustain us by their presence.  The monster in our hero’s journey is our blindness, our sleepwalking about in ongoing creation.  The terror is always where it has been, in our fear of standing alone against the universe.

We are only just beginning to imagine ourselves as a landscape, as small eco-niches that are expressions of Earth.  Even though we have imagined ourselves to be more than the Earth, our personal force will continue to emanate from self-as-place.

Small and large:  In a world of problems, we can awaken, as Ranier Maria Rilke wrote, “little things that hardly anyone sees, that so unexpectedly become big beyond measuring.”  Our personal force becomes wise and indomitable when it is ultimately larger than our own lives.  This personal force is not unlike Gandhi’s satyagraha—“soul force” or “truth force.”  To optimize our health, we attune to and express the same indomitable force that expresses the Earth.

Looking at the small can touch vastness.  The complexity of a wild grass remnant that seems so locally fitted so as to be limited on the Earth to a few square miles or at least to a region of a specific continent or part of the ocean is not local.  You cannot have a prairie without a mountain range rain shield, and you cannot have rain without a relationship to oceans.  And none of these things—mountains, oceans, prairies, or the miniscule events within any terrain—occur without interaction with a star.  Each “thing” is more an event, requiring a complex global process and processes beyond the Earth to simply come into being and sustain.  Each blossom expresses the tilt of the whole earth that tilts as an aspect of its spiraling roll in the tail of a star flowing in relation to other stars and galaxies and a beyond that know one will ever fully comprehend. 

Earthrise over moonscape has seeded a transformation in self-perception.  Since 1970, seeing a photograph of earth’s biosphere abruptly expanded our identity as having a larger reach than culture so that earth was no longer a surrounding stage-set.  Human life was deep inside, inseparable.  But the term is still infantile and effusive.   Like a fish in the ocean, we did not really “feel” the ocean or have a gut sense of being an expression of it.  We inspired more efforts toward caretaking as if we were stewards somehow inside yet still apart.  Having peopled the earth by 2000, the direct experience of degrading environmental quality further challenged out vision of apartness and added new terms such as sustainability.  And now, ecology has enlarged from a nostalgic term to a practical quest.

In a now peopled Earth, this transformation in self-perception is an economic and health sense of life as inseparable from environmental care.  “Ecology” directly affects our health and determines our economy.  And attention to it is akin to real work that needs to be done rather than an esoteric side pursuit.  To sustain, we need to look for health and act from a posture of health.  And yet our problem solving tends to bypass health and focus on illness or disease.  “Where is health” and “what is healthy” are questions that we answer poorly.  We are good at taking things apart, but health is a process of putting things together—a design process of integration.  In our traditional approach to environmental care, we try to keep things apart, and we make wild and tame, natural and artificial, culture and nature.  A longstanding rational sense of differences as either-ors is becoming the new erroneous Romanticism to which we try to cling.

SPARROW AND EARTHRISE have value for us as eoliths—as markers that enjoin large and small and, especially, enjoin events that can wear the appearance of being opposites.  A wild grass remnant and a city are like sparrow and Earthrise.  The city impacts on the remnant as Earthrise impacted the sparrow.  Surprisingly, but becoming more evident, both are ecological forces, different and yet not opposites.  And so, a strategy of aspiring to make them more alike rather than separate is the ecological way forward.

Wild Mercy Is In Our Hands

TO TRY TO FIND wildness in urbanization can seem like an overreaching quest when more important work, such as the preservation of unsettled landscapes, cries out for our attention.  However, with urbanization as the now-predominant human habitat, our “established” concepts may misread the world as it is, and be potentially destructive to both human and non-human life on Earth.  Our concept of wildness has never been fixed, but rather has evolved from being a threatening terrain to be avoided, and then to a wasteland in need of human exploitation to be activated, and then to a Romantic Eden that has now become an archaic remnant to be preserved, to a now still effusive, ecological vision of wildness as a vast cosmic dynamic of an ongoing cosmic creation process that is inside our identity and at the heart of our core economics.  As our sense of wildness has changed, so has our sense of human nature.

The explicit sense of wildness in the post-industrial era is still that of a quality found in unsettled nonhuman landscapes.  There is an emerging implicit sense of wildness as a quality that is not limited to a specific place,[i] and that is inherent throughout the universe as a central dynamic, that “can be seen as a property of the body or mind,”[ii] and that can be found in the city and suburb as well as the rainforest.[iii]  The emphasis upon nature and wildness being separate from human life—as “out there”—is beginning to be challenged as a misperception.  Our predominant sense of wildness may be a beautiful belief in an idealized pristine nature.  Further, there is new concern that continuing to describe a pristine wildness creates a distorted image of a nature that has been free of human influence that is reinforced in a post-industrial mass culture of nature shows and stores and zoos.  And this image of pristine nature as external can avoid addressing societal and economic problems rather than highlight environmental problems as integral.[iv]

Despite the “gray….man-made desert”[v] of the city, there is a new sense of nature as including the post-industrial rather than as “other” or “out there” or as external to civilization.  The very new, emerging “literacy” of ecology challenges our longstanding dialectic of self and other, creating a continuum of being so that self is transpersonal, making self-as-landscape a more authentic description of life.  Like all other life forms, human beings are continual, inseparable rivers of respiration and digestion with eloquent, shared macromolecular structures.  The word “ecology” is so very new and, as a result, effusive rather than explicit in its meaning, yet to be filled out in ways that will profoundly challenge our understanding of not ony the city but also of human nature. 

John Tallmadge offers a rare first step into the possibility of an authentic “practice of the wild” that includes “going in” urban life itself rather than a quest that is external to human settlements.[vi]  While disconcerting to his longstanding sense of wildness, Tallmadge writes that there is “more to this matter of wildness than I had ever imagined” and that “To practice the wild meant to step off the trail of received ideas about people and nature, to embrace learning and metamorphosis.”[vii]  Tallmadge suggests there is a new very effusive sense of the possibility that even wilderness—the epitome of wildness—might continue to be created, and that wilderness and civilization might not be opposed to each other.[viii]  In the future, such self-questioning might seem laughable in the same way that past wondering if mountaintops might have once been seabeds now seems humorous to post-industrial life.

“Going in” urban nature, the traditional sense of the presence of wildness in the city continues to focus on the presence of nonhuman species in human habitation, overriding weathers, and acknowledgement of geological formations and ecosystems such as forest and coastline.  Rarely does a sense of going into urban nature, “go into” either human activity itself or the built landscape to experience wildness.  Going in post-industrial life to taste wildness is a new frontier.  As Tallmadge writes, “None of the nature writers had offered much wisdom for living in cities.”  And he speculates further, “Perhaps urban nature remains largely invisible because we lack an appropriate philosophy and vocabulary.” [ix]  Writing about the broader dimensions and subtlety of wildness and pondering the possibility that wildness remains an enduring aspect of human life that we have failed to articulate, Terry Tempest Williams lyrically comments,

Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats,

the silent space that says we live only by grace.  Wilderness lives by this

same grace.  Wild mercy is in our hands.[x]

---

[i] Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996, pp. 83-84.

[ii] John Knott, Imagining Wild America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, p.7

[iii] There is a longstanding natural history literature identify nonhuman species in urban environments.  For examples of more contemporary statements that also begin to challenge the sense of wildness as completely separable from human life see: Peter Friderici, The Suburban Wild. Athens: University of Georgia, 1999, p.6; John Tallmadge,

“Resistance to urban nature,” in Robert Grese and John Knott (eds.) Reimagining Place. Michigan Quarterly Review, 40 (Winter, 2001, special edition), pp. 178-189, and John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning From Nature in the City. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004; and John Knott, Imagining Wild America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, p.7.

[iv] Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

[v] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, pp. 12-13.

[vi] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, pp. 123 and 35 respectively fro quotes.

[vii] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, pp. 35 and161 respectively for quotes.

[viii] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, p. 40.

[ix] John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch, p. 42.

[x] Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. New York, Pantheon, 2001, p. 229

Challenging Longstanding Sacred And Profane Biases Of Separation

THERE ARE TWO MAJOR sacred and profane impetuses driving the popular sense of wildness as non-human: faith-based beliefs and rational beliefs.

First, faith-based beliefs of literate societies generally argue that human life is not really of the Earth.  Kim Stafford, in Having Everything Right, writes that since the Middle Ages, “The Earth itself was corrupt, and ultimately doomed, along with those too devoted to it.  Home was in heaven, and Earth was only a perilous stopover on the soul’s pilgrimage.”[i]  Human beings are described as children of God who were placed on Earth with an everlasting afterlife beyond the Earth.  From this perspective, humans may inhabit biological bodies that even share key aspects such as DNA with all flora and fauna, but true human essence is described as spiritist.  Wildness is the stage-set for entry into a spiritual afterlife, a test ground of sorts, rather than an aspect of human identity.  And wild behavior or a desire to affiliate with wildness can be a measure of spiritual dysfunction.

When human life appears to be outside nature, this perception reflects our limits rather than reality, or anything that our scientific measures tell us.  Gary Snyder suggests, “We need a religious view that embraces nature and does not fear science…”.[ii]  This is not unlike Benedictine monk and Zen adept, Willigis Jager, who states “…the most sacred dogmas were formulated when the earth was still considered to be flat and the stars were holes in the firmament.”  Jager goes on to state,“…humanity is not the center of the universe.  Our earth is a grain of dust in a relatively small galaxy that itself is among nearly 125 billion other galaxies, at last count.”[iii]  Beyond Jager, it is generally accepted that ninety percent of the universe remains unknown as well as ninety percent of the human genome remains unknown due to the “dark” quality of the infinities of both largeness and smallness.

Jager suggests that our models must aspire to portray reality rather than become “postulates that, over time, are simply repeated without question.”  Jager continues, “scientific models change as life changes,” and that “religions should have the courage to rearticulate religious experience and create new models or interpret old ones in new ways.”[iv]  Jager cites C.G Jung’s observation that belief tends to trump knowledge in order to avert despair, which leads to a tendency to sustain beliefs rather than challenge them.  And yet, Jager suggests that people may also “despair at not knowing who they are” if “the old paradigm no longer supports reality,…”[v]  

In contemporary life, the primary impact of any belief or model upon our actions is not simply psychological discomfort.  If psychological discomfort was the primary issue, the debate over tradition or change might go on ad infinitum.  The ongoing re-articulation of all of our models is important because we apply these models to our daily life and they affect us in a very real, concrete way.  In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity,[vi] anthropologist Roy Rappaport stresses the importance of reconciliation between religion and science both because religion creates consensus, and because religion sustains when it fits life.  He does not suggest the need for a new theology because it provokes argument rather than consensus.  Rappaport encourages a focus on ritual because he feels that ritual constructs the concepts that become our beliefs.  Now, as we become residents of a peopled Earth, our rituals—our routine actions—are gradually transforming. 

Whether religious or non-religious, we have beliefs about origins and destiny.

Our beliefs affect every action and are not simply esoteric or aesthetic or theoretical or psychological or philosophical inquiry.  Whether our models place human life outside the Earth or place it within the Earth dramatically affects our environmental actions toward not only the nonhuman landscape but also, first, the quality and, second, potentially the sustainability of human life.  Beliefs about creation may have seemed secondary to everyday life when we were pioneers in a vast uninhabited Earth that could sustain us regardless of our actions.  Now, in “peopled” the Earth with no vast physical frontiers to absorb our billions of daily uses, our beliefs affect every action that form everyday “rituals” and profoundly impact not only the local place but also global process. 

Continuing with Willigis Jager as one representative example of self-critical theological inquiry with regard to theology and nature, Jager suggests that in Aristotelian philosophy, “God is the ruler above all things: the pinnacle of creation but not in creation.  In other words, the Aristotelian God is not an overflowing fullness revealing itself as creation.”  Envisioning a transcendent and personal God “can lead to a dualistic view of the world, resulting in a wider gap between God and creation.”[vii] 

In examining possible directives for transforming faith-based beliefs, Jager suggests that if “the cosmos is the meaningful manifestation of God,”[viii] then we might encounter “the inherent religiosity in many of our everyday activities.”[ix]  Then “everyday life is prayer,”[x] and “living our lives is the actual content of religiosity.”[xi]  In this context, our identity becomes transpersonal or extends beyond ego, and our mysticism becomes directly experienced in the events of the world.  Then actions in behalf of self may extend into a longer reach of self and these actions are supported by both science and religion. 

Envisioning human life as wild and as an expression of the Earth does not require either an abandonment of a theologically based religion for either a pantheistic place-based spirituality or a secular rejection of religion.  It simply recognizes human life as an expression of nature rather than an exception to nature.  It recognizes human life as occurring within an evolutionary process.  It does not deny a sense of divinity and mystery and grace in human life but extends this into the world, and this brings the world inside our identity.  We encounter mystery and vastness and complexity to a degree that exceeds our knowledge in both the micro-ecology of a fish scale or a mosquito’s ear and the astro-ecological interactions of stars.  And this encounter admonishes our cultural traditions to do as they always do, that is, to enhance our languages to meet the changing conditions of existence rather than abandon the richness of the tradition.  

The problem lies in the conflict with our contemporary information, especially in describing human life as separate from nature and center stage, and as an intrusion.  The integration of the human into the larger Earth simply fits observation.  And the perspective of the universe helps us overcome our limited view and locate ourselves in space and time.  The new task is really not something radically new, but rather is the enduring one found in all traditions of challenging the beliefs that tend to lag but slowly modify as a form of cultural progress. 

Second, and far more influential than faith-based belief in post-industrial societies, material technologies that developed into the Industrial Revolution and post-industrial culture produced a broader popular rational, almost anti-spiritist, rational profane orientation.  In this profane orientation, contemporary human life is sensed to have evolved to the point of being predominantly cultural rather than creatural.  Contemporary human life is described as domesticated and incapable of returning to a stage of human wildness that is defined as a trait of preliterate cultures. 

In the predominant profane beliefs, wildness is, at best, envisioned as an archaic human stage of development and not an ongoing post-industrial, human action state.  Further, contemporary human life increasingly occurs in a built environment that is artificial in the sense of being synthetic and cybernetic.  The “house” of human life is envisioned as culture, and culture is described as a qualitatively different state of being from nature, and distanced from nature if not an opposite of nature especially in post-industrial civilization.  Even if human beings are biological creatures, they are sensed to no longer demonstrate traits that one would associate with wildness, except as remnant qualities.  Further, there is no solution in an association with wildness.

Solutions to “modern” dilemmas tend to be viewed as only capable of being resolved by further refinement of sophisticated material technologies.  With mechanization and industrialization, the universe, and especially the built environment, was objectified and approached as a machine.  Earth and cosmos were envisioned as ordered.  Science became a way of discovering both grand and minute expressions of  order.  Wildness became perceived as archaic behavior that was no longer functional in literate societies, and that remained present only to a minor extent as ignorance and irrational superstition or even disorder.

With increasing centralization of human life, cultural linkages to wildness were proscribed.  “Freedom” and other characteristics that may be attributed to wildness are, in fact, envisioned as being created by cultural development.  For example, Paul Gruchow describes an industrial agricultural perspective that “Science had brought farming…freedom from wildness.”[xii]   Modern freedom is popularly sensed to result from expanding technology to enhance material comfort and dependability.  Modern rational freedom aspires to foster independence rather than dependency.

Whether sacred or profane, the popular or public perception of wildness in modern life is one of human life having clearly moved beyond wildness as a primary dimension of contemporary human identity, and this transformation judged to be a fair trade.  While modern life can seem domestic to the point of restricting freedom and create an isolating anomie or “half-life,” it is sensed to offer the possibility of reliable comfort and improved health and less dominion by superstition and a freedom of alternatives.  Human survival now seems primarily cultural, requiring cultural skills to meet needs.  And landscape exists as a material resource, not realizing its potential, either as a resource to be activated or as an active no cost “recycler.”

Throughout human development, there has always been a secondary tradition that has envisioned human life as inseparable from the broader landscape.  For example, in News of the Universe, Robert Bly offers an anthology of verse that challenges the “smugness of reason.” [xiii]  Coming to consciousness of human life as an expression of the cosmos has been a quality associated at times with high spiritual and psychological development.  But such an effort is popularly viewed as an aesthetic intellectual pursuit rather than a fundamental human directive, and nearly proscribed as something of primary value.  This secondary tradition that has intuitively viewed human life as inseparable from the broader landscape is now being reinforced by ecology, which looks broadly at ecosystems and monitors rates of energy exchange.  Increasingly, it attends to human activity as an element in ecosystems.  Unlike the dominant tradition that envisions human activity an intrusion, this secondary tradition envisions human activity as a natural expression of the Earth. 

Now, very contemporary scientific efforts that look at the extreme infinities of largeness and smallness, such as quantum mechanics and cosmology, challenge the fundamental concepts such as the “order” of nature.  At first, these new perspectives that challenged a sense of objects in relationship to each other and that described an inseparability between events were felt to be limited to distant cosmic processes such as the interior of stars.  Now, there is a sense of quantum process occurring moment-by-moment in the most fundamental daily processes such as photosynthesis.  A strong part of this unseeing of a different reality was due to pre-existing beliefs about the nature of reality.  Now, uncertainty is a real, concrete everyday reality that has mathematical form in chaos theory that describes the everyday landscape and that is observed in “chaotic patterns, for example, in bird flight and weathers, in the flow of water, and in erosion that make uncertainty into “order.”   There is pattern, but there is also wildness as a central dynamic of a vast nature in which human life is deeply immersed.  And to a very real degree, there is this uncertainty in the formation and ongoing development of human habitation as it adapts to the changing conditions of existence in the very frail “certainty” of post-industrial life.

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[i] Kim Stafford, Having Everything Right. Confluence Press, 1986, p. 11 [Penguin edition].

[ii] Gary Snyder, “Writers and the war against nature,” p. 9.

[iii] Willigis Jager, in Christoph Quarch, Ed., [trans. Paul Shepard], Mysticism for Modern Times, Conversations with Willigis Jager. Liguori, Missouri: Liguori/Triumph, 2006, p. xiii.

[iv] Willigis Jager, p. ix.

[v] Willigis Jager, p. xiv.

[vi] Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

[vii] Willigis Jager, p. xx.

[viii] Willigis Jager, p. 56.

[ix] Willigis Jager, p. xxix.

[x] Willigis Jager, p. xxx.

[xi] Willigis Jager, p. xxxi.

[xii] Paul Gruchow, The Necessity of Empty Places. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981, p. 217.

[xiii] Robert Bly, News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980. p.3

A Cultural Shift: Dealing With 21st Century Eco-Reality

What is needed:

• an understanding of the reality of global warming and the profound impact of modern human activity on global warming;

• an overall understanding of methods to achieve sustainability;

For a concise overview of global warming and sustainability, find Earth: The Operator’s Manual (Google title for an annotated note source, also see video and book), and

• a reframing our understanding of urbanization: as both the predominant global human habitat in the 21^st Century and as a wild, adaptive event [being an expression of the ongoing evolution of the Earth and as a habitat that can be integrated into the larger Earth ecosystem].

Review The Manicured Wilderness posts.

A Letter To The Future

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Where Is The True Jewel, 20"x24, 2006

DEAR SIRS AND MADAMES

            You have found these pages, perhaps yellowed and tattered.

  

Just now as I write, cardinals feed by the window at dusk and cinnamon squirrels dolphin through the snow inside a silence contrived of no perceptible wind and the horizontal and fading Western light of the sun.  A moment such as this seems to me to be that for which we are likely living in any culture in any era.  I pray that such a moment has endured for you.  This seems to me to be the very best of human life, free for the taking, from which we unendingly find the true directive forward.

In my brief turn in time, in my “post-industrial” era that is dissolving dichotomies of opposites, human life has imagined itself to be separate and above the landscape.   Perhaps our era will seem to you to be as shrouded in a veil of ignorance as the pre-literate era that preceded our era had seemed to us.  I suspect that if you continue to exist, your era has perhaps have activated and optimized a wildness that is now only vaguely present in my mine.  It is my belief that you will have continued to carry forward wildness as the enduring preservation of the world.

In my era, we have just begun to discover our first words that say how we are still deep within a landscape that extends into infinities of smallness and largeness, that human life is still very young in the life of the Earth, that this planetary landscape seamlessly includes human life, and that human life remains enduringly wild.  Perhaps this point seems so obvious to you from your pinnacle of the far future.  In my era, such a stance is seen as a delusion.

 

In my age, we have only just begun to dream that the city is a gift from the Earth, and that it is capable of infolding into the Earth.  We have only begun to dream that the city is moving toward peace with the universe, and that to flower it must open widely to the Earth and to the stars like the wave opens to the longer reach of itself, the ocean.

There are a few among us who are beginning to see the city-form as a prayer that we are making, and not as desolate machine apart.  There are a few among us who are just beginning to see city as a chrysalis that is gathering human life, forming the wings that can carry it into the far future.  Still, we are beginning to comprehend that like a butterfly, the city is not here to endure.  To continue to exist and wildly flourish, it must enduringly become the beyond of itself.  Our task is to flower and to wither and to seed again, to open more than stop, and to be a gate rather than a wall.  The city is a seed, alive, an oasis in the universe and not a reliquary.

 

The true architecture of human habitation in my era, and perhaps in any era, is cloud-like, effusive—cloud-hidden.  Any city is still a young storm of schemes, a jungle-form of shapes and speech, with seedlings sprouting in concrete cracks and rivers and rivulets, beetles under humus and chickens braising on the grill, children scrawling on paper in kindergartens, a car accident and a nest of birds, and rising energy prices and corroding water lines.  There is no end to the subtlety of any one of its moments and no end to its tale whether it continues in your life to wear the name “city” or not.

A half millennium before me, the exquisite fabric of the late Italian Renaissance seemed to be the top of the mountain of human development.  This sense of being at the pinnacle has plagued human life through the ages.  Each age has presumed itself to be at least the penultimate if not the ultimate of human development.   But the human perspective is narrow and not exclusively unique and apart.  In any era, all of the events of the present moment—the weathers, the words, the exquisite architectures of uninhabited and built landscapes-- are just the wave crest of an underlying oceanus of nature.

Still, I expect that there is an enduring sensitivity that continues to lead human life to imagine that it perches on a pinnacle of sorts, separate and above the world, that makes us genuinely feel as poet, Mark Strand writes, “In a field/ I am the absence of the field.”[i]  And so I presume that whoever reads this letter will have gravitated to it by a “bothered sense” that I have in my “primal” post-industrial age.  I presume that I am talking to someone who has experienced this natural confusion of apartness and inclusion, just as I do when I enter the written words of my predecessors whom I read in my era as brothers’ and sisters’ in arms.

It is my greatest hope that the crow is still with you, and red rock, and especially “tricksters” such as the dandelion that are radical expressions of the sun as well as radical expressions of stars that are, in turn, radical expressions of a galaxy that is lost among galaxies that are, in turn, lost among universes.

Thank you for giving over a few moments of your precious time to these
pages.

My very best to you,

Your brother-in-arms,

Lance

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[i] Mark Strand, from “Keeping Things Whole,” in Sleeping With One Eye Open. Iowa City, Stone Wall Press, 1964; reprinted in Mark Stand, Selected Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, p. 11.