Monday, September 23, 2013

Wild? I was absolutely livid...

Wildness... lately I've been thinking about (and trying to write about) the many meanings of this word. Here's a sampler from the OED:
WILD:
4a. Of a place or region: Uncultivated or uninhabited; hence, waste, desert, desolate.
6. Not under, or not submitting to, control or restraint; taking, or disposed to take, one's own way; uncontrolled.
7b. Giving way to sexual passion; also, more widely, licentious, dissolute, loose.
There's a huge amount of interesting cultural baggage just in these few definitions. I'm not going to try and write a well shaped, progressive argument here, or a cohesive theory of everything, just a few observations: Why, if a landscape has no human presence, is it then terra nullius, a terrible blank, "waste, desert, desolate"? I think this is evidence of a world view that only defines wild spaces in terms of what human value they might hold. I was at a workshop a few weekends ago and one woman told a story about a fellow mother waiting after school for their kids. The woman telling the story was speaking about the proposed mine on the Denniston plateau and the destruction it would wreak. The other mother's response was "but there's nothing there!". Woah! I'm not saying this other mother is a horrible human, just that she's deeply inside some cultural norms and values that can only perceive the world in terms of human use. This is what worries me about rhetoric saying "look after the world for future generations" (the implication being, so there's something left for them to use too). What about looking after the world for its own sake, recognising that the non-human sphere has an intentionality and purpose in its own right? Saying "it's there for us" (thanks Genesis) seems like egotism on a species level, and it's not fair to say its a natural human tendency: there are plenty of cultures that didn't/don't indulge in this specific brand of egotistic utilitarianism ("things are only good in terms of usefulness to ME"). This is a western contruct, from a legacy of self-involved, dualistic thinking. It's the macro version of only being interested in other people in terms of how useful they can be to you – networking at its worst.

Which really relates to the second definition, about control. If a wilderness is a self-willed land, one that we allow to do its own thing, then ecological destruction is about control. Geo-engineering and sci-fi dreams of technological determinism saving us from ourselves are still obsessed with controlling and shaping the world – the "thinking that caused the problem". Most utopian dreams are inherently controlling, because they suffer from an absence of doubt. Kindness doesn't know the outcome. It acts in the moment, without trying to make everything come out exactly how it wants it to. "Letting go' might seem like the last thing we need to do in relation to biospheric destruction, but it just means releasing our personal notion of how things 'should' be, in the future, in our minds, and instead working with how things are, and listening to their own intentionality.

Rebranding nature as 'ecosystem services' make everything subservient to how it serves human interest. And even that's not fair, to universalise. Because environmental destruction is characterised by how it doesn't serve everyone's interest, and in the long run, doesn't serve human interest at all! Certain, specific groups benefit from environmental damage, and they benefit in the extreme short term. Saying "humans are a plague on the planet" universalises what is very culturally specific. Saying population growth is our biggest problem tries to make the most innocent responsible for the selfishness of one culturally specific group. Not fair!



There's a long history of connecting women with nature, in order to relegate both to a sub-rational, lower sphere of life. Traditionally (in a western cultural idiom), women were contradictorily seen as both sexually ravenous and insatiable (needing constant control), and passive and incomplete (crying out for dominance). The non-human sphere was similarly defined by its 'need' for dominance and control – think about the language of 'virgin' soil, becoming a 'cultivated' young lady, not 'running wild'.
Here's a poem from a super popular conduct book in the 18th Century:
Ours be the task alone
to check her rude excresences; to prune
Her wanton undergrowth; and where she sports
In shapes too wild, to lead her gently back,
With prudent hand, to better form and use
John Armstrong The Economy of Love (1736/8th ed. 1791)

(How might this relate to current pressures on women to "prune their wanton undergrowth"? How is our obsession with hygiene an obsession with control, a fear of the wild?)
It's easy to fall into dodgy essentialism here: to start claiming that women are biologically closer to nature, that women's ways of doing things will save the world, etc etc. This is recycled Victorian moralism gone wrong: 'the angel in the house' becomes 'the angel in the ecosystem', and it's just a relative of the same old biological essentialism that has been used to subjugate women for centuries. It's pretty much the antithesis of feminism. Being female doesn't automatically give you some sort of ecological consciousness. I only need to think of my own experience of people's actual lives to see that. That doesn't mean that the nature/culture dualism hasn't been gendered by Western cultural tradition. It just reinforces the realisation that gender is constructed, and that the way we understand and construct what is 'masculine' is kind of gross and harmful, and operates in a similar way in relation to everything it perceives as "other". Which brings things nicely back to the beginning: it's the sense of seperateness that makes us see everything only as reflections of ourselves, as expressions of usefulness, mediated through our hunger. We have called this specific kind of 'confidence' and 'assertiveness' (read: egotism, domination and self-involvement) 'masculine', but increasingly we live in a culture that encourages everyone to be like that, and it is to their credit that I know plenty of women and men who choose not to be. The end (for now).

(Inspiration for the title comes from Rowan Atkinson in a gorilla suit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beCYGm1vMJ0) AND the artwork is by Yellena James :)