Rewilding

Now that I live in the state that's home to the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, I revisited his famous A Sand County Almanac (which is not a county here in New Mexico, but that's not important). In the foreword, Leopold writes,

"A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese. I once knew a lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well-insulated roof. Is education possibly trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers."

There's a view within the broader modern environmental movement called "rewilding": in the effort to restore ecosystems, rewilding seeks to reduce human influence on those ecosystems. In other words, keep humans out. This is not uncontroversial. In fact some argue that separating humans from some ecosystems will damage both those ecosystems and the humans, that they are both essential to one another.

I think this: the critics are right, they are essential to one another but, unfortunately, humans no longer seem to know how to cohabit, to be merely a part of rather than take and use and despoil. Example: I rode my bicycle just five miles west of my place toward the Rio Puerco and discovered that for over four miles north to south and as far west as I could see is completely denuded. Obliterated. A big solar farm is going in, and, according to a new crazy neighbor, the Department of Defense is building or has built an underground surveillance "city" (his words, not mine, and I did mention he's crazy so who knows) for which this solar farm is just a clever cover. I don't know about the underground thing, but the desert's surface was definitely destroyed. This happened quickly, like over just a couple of months, and I'm sure many in the world of development and captains of industry are celebrating. Good riddance to the good-for-nothing desert.

Until humans can submit to the process of rewilding themselves, until such time as we can prove our ability to be "fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution" instead of captain of the ship, I'm for keeping us out of more of these ecosystems. I rather like the idea of rewilding myself. I know for too long I've traded awareness for things of lesser worth; I've been too enamored of civilization. These days, I think "rewilding myself" is essential to and part of the work I'm doing with attention or, using Leopold's word, awareness. To notice and be in kinship with fellow creatures and the place, "a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude of and duration of the biotic enterprise," and to understand the necessity and urgency in this. I guess it's easy for people to believe awareness isn't important, to think ourselves somehow beyond the consequences of the trades we've made.

Time to get a little rewilded, I say, before we're all just a pile of feathers.