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Place of the Wild: A Wildlands Anthology
Where and what is the place of the wild? Is the goal of preserving biodiversity across the landscape of North America compatible with contemporary Western culture?
Place of the Wild brings together original essays from an exceptional array of contemporary writers and activists to present in a single volume the most current thinking on the relationship between humans and wilderness. A common thread running through the volume is the conviction that everyone concerned with the natural world - academics and activists, philosophers and poets - must join forces to reestablish cultural narratives and shared visions that sustain life on this planet.
The contributors apply the insights of conservation biology to the importance of wilderness in the 21st century, raising questions and stimulating thought. The volume begins with a series of personal narratives that present portraits of wildlands and humans. Following those narratives are more-analytical discourses that examine conceptions and perceptions of the wild and of the place of humanity in it. The concluding section features clear and resonant activist voices that consider the importance of wildlands and what can be done to reconcile the needs of wilderness with the needs of human culture.
Place of the Wild brings together original essays from an exceptional array of contemporary writers and activists to present in a single volume the most current thinking on the relationship between humans and wilderness. A common thread running through the volume is the conviction that everyone concerned with the natural world - academics and activists, philosophers and poets - must join forces to reestablish cultural narratives and shared visions that sustain life on this planet.
The contributors apply the insights of conservation biology to the importance of wilderness in the 21st century, raising questions and stimulating thought. The volume begins with a series of personal narratives that present portraits of wildlands and humans. Following those narratives are more-analytical discourses that examine conceptions and perceptions of the wild and of the place of humanity in it. The concluding section features clear and resonant activist voices that consider the importance of wildlands and what can be done to reconcile the needs of wilderness with the needs of human culture.
340 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1994
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January 18, 2025
In the O’odham language, the words for curing, wildness, and health come from the same root. This is where "inner" and "outer" become not a duality but a dynamic-like every breath we take. We are inspired by what surrounds us; we take it into our bodies, and after some rumination we respond with expression. What we have inside us is, ultimately, always of the larger, wilder world. Nature is not just "out there," beyond the individual. GARY PAUL NABHAN
20 years later, some things from the book seem outdated, and some predictive of our current conditions. I listened to the What If We Get It Right podcast that accompanies the book by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and Bill McKibben was on, as well as writing an essay in this book, and I marvel at his life’s work and wonder how he maintains his determination, it is so beautiful. His analogy from 20 years ago:
I want to attempt an analogy here, not a perfect analogy but perhaps a useful one. The least wild places on earth-that is to say, the places most altered by inappropriate variables, the places tending least toward some ideal expression of their nature-are strip-mined hillsides, plantation forests, shopping center parking lots, and the insides of human heads. Our minds, buzzed every waking second by jingle-newscast-nature documentary-music video-college football score-board-magazine article-radio talk show-investment advice-weather forecast-hamburger commercial-mail order catalog-environmental anthology-video rental-Walkman, turn into paved-over sacrifice zones where exotics choke the few native species trying gamely to push on up.
There was a lot of density to the essays meant for an audience who hasn’t been alive the past 20 years, perhaps new in 1994, and part of the podcast interviewed Jade Begay, Indigenous rights and climate policy strategist, and Colette Pichon Battle, attorney and climate justice organizer, both of whom I have heard in other forums and admire hugely. They were asked what the environmental movement had done or was doing wrong, and I was happy to see that Begay’s answer, that they ignored indigenous wisdom that could help, was not completely true in this book; there was a lot of indigenous ideas and teachings sprinkled throughout. However, there was only on indigenous author included in the book, Jay Hansford C. Vest, Ph.D., an enrolled member in the Monacan Indian Nation, and so the voices are mainly male and overwhelmingly white.
Pichon Battle said to the question,
”Much of it is rooted in domination and control. Put the fence up around the thing to protect it. and have it and use it when you need it. That's not made up. That's how the conservation movement began.
And it didn't really pay attention to life that can be lived with nature, that people are a part of a thing, not put on Earth to dominate a thing, as many of us are taught very, very early on. I think the mainstream environmental movement really kept that going.
And in fact, I think it hurt the climate justice movement. And I think that's why there is a climate justice movement, because we began to talk about climate, climate change as invisible emissions of something that's going to harm us in the future.
And all we need to do is reduce carbon and recycle our trash and then we'll be OK. But really what we lost was an analysis that says we have lost our connection to the very thing that sustains us. And if we do not get that connection back, we will not survive.”
These are really smart, philosophical-minded people, so there is value in the essays, and I loved the ideas that weren’t embraced at the time, but perhaps could be. I am supportive of people who need turning inward in a therapeutic way, but it is possible it has only made us more narcissistic, and as Gary Paul Nabhan writes, ”Robinson Jeffers suggested over a half century ago, it may be just as valid to turn outward: The whole human race spends too much emotion on itself. The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature or the artist admiring it, the person who is interested in things that are not human. Or if he is interested in human beings, let him regard them objectively as a small part of the great music."
Nabhan, a write of Lebanese and Syrian descent, calls it the Far Outside, the “naturalist’s trance”, the flow state, the state of mindlessness that is also the most alert and alive state we can find, where we lose our ego and are immersed in the landscape, or the sounds of water, or the water. I have read more about our hunter-gatherer instincts fueling, say, my desire to photograph all the beauty I see, label it and share it with others. But we are so brainwashed by the culture that we see that as reverting to primitive selves instead of returning to what our bodies and minds were designed for, to give that part of us freedom to be, and we can be both a computer typer like I am now, and a part of nature fully and wholeheartedly.
Jay Hansford C. Vest is Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia and he can trace his lineage to the 17th century Pamunkey leader Opechancanough. He elegantly links Plato to the sacred knowledge of indigenous people of Montana, “In a cautionary note to the planners of cities, Plato declared that certain locations possess ecological and spiritual qualities which markedly affect development of human character. This advice echoes through time with an essential wisdom for contemporary land-use planners. The area known as the Badger-Two Medicine, located along the east slopes of the Continental Divide just south of Glacier National Park, is a place that deserves the sagacious consideration urged by Plato.”
Stephanie Mills has been a proponent of bioregionalism since before this book, and the recent writing I could find was of her work in Michigan in local activities and events, like an article about a conservancy for the wild orchid Showy Lady’s Slippers. I think there is a lot of movement towards local action when we can’t rely on consistency in the federal government on protections. She writes, ” When we engage in wilderness journeying free of conquistadorial aims, we enter a wild context as pilgrims, as wanderers, as guests who pass through almost unnoticed, not as rogue intruders or imperial rogue conquerors. The spiritual dimension of wilderness journeying opens us to the spontaneous, creative power of nature.” This is the precursor to Pichon Battle’s words, and I am not sure why Mills and other authors in this anthology weren’t listened to in their time. I imagine it is our brainwashing again, that we can use anything on the planet anyway and it will absorb it.
In the midst of Colorado’s initiative to reintroduce wolves to the mountains, Mollie Yoneko Matteson writes, “In their journals, Lewis and Clark reported a great abundance of wildlife on the Montana plains, including wolves. Accurate estimates of the pre-white settlement population of wolves appear to be nonexistent. I have seen figures such as "in 1800 [wolves] exceed 350,000 individuals" and not known whether to gasp or laugh. One historian suggests that trappers and bounty hunters took 100,000 wolves per year between 1870 and 1877. Today in all of Canada, where wolves still occupy about 85 percent of their former range, the wolf population is put at 50,000 to 65,000.” Urban voters were the majority that voted the initiative in, and it has created such animosity towards the Colorado Parks and Wildlife teams from local ranchers and farmers, and of course, towards those of us in urban areas. I decided to vote no, since I have no right to decide things for their region, and so watch the unfolding with worry. We are talking about single digit releases, for a minimum of 30 wolves over 3 years. Part of me does dream of what it was like to live in a place of 350,000. A local resident did encounter a pack of wolf puppies playing in a puddle along a dirt road and the video was a thrill to him, formerly opposed to the idea, and to the general population.
The last essay that resonated with me was by Jack Turner, a mountain guide and parttime teacher of philosophy, one of the people that defined hermit, staying in a of the grid cabin for whole seasons and inhabiting nature like we inhabit our living spaces. He writes about Thoreau’s famous quote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” as other authors have, and the idea that it doesn’t mean we have to preserve wildness, it is wildness that is our preservation and savior. Not the other way around, and neatly ties Thoreau to Edward Abbey’s quote to “let being be,” inspired by Heidegger’s ideas about human beings and their place in the world, and finally to Lao Tzu who wrote:
Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way.
and my contribution to what the wild means to me:
20 years later, some things from the book seem outdated, and some predictive of our current conditions. I listened to the What If We Get It Right podcast that accompanies the book by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and Bill McKibben was on, as well as writing an essay in this book, and I marvel at his life’s work and wonder how he maintains his determination, it is so beautiful. His analogy from 20 years ago:
I want to attempt an analogy here, not a perfect analogy but perhaps a useful one. The least wild places on earth-that is to say, the places most altered by inappropriate variables, the places tending least toward some ideal expression of their nature-are strip-mined hillsides, plantation forests, shopping center parking lots, and the insides of human heads. Our minds, buzzed every waking second by jingle-newscast-nature documentary-music video-college football score-board-magazine article-radio talk show-investment advice-weather forecast-hamburger commercial-mail order catalog-environmental anthology-video rental-Walkman, turn into paved-over sacrifice zones where exotics choke the few native species trying gamely to push on up.
There was a lot of density to the essays meant for an audience who hasn’t been alive the past 20 years, perhaps new in 1994, and part of the podcast interviewed Jade Begay, Indigenous rights and climate policy strategist, and Colette Pichon Battle, attorney and climate justice organizer, both of whom I have heard in other forums and admire hugely. They were asked what the environmental movement had done or was doing wrong, and I was happy to see that Begay’s answer, that they ignored indigenous wisdom that could help, was not completely true in this book; there was a lot of indigenous ideas and teachings sprinkled throughout. However, there was only on indigenous author included in the book, Jay Hansford C. Vest, Ph.D., an enrolled member in the Monacan Indian Nation, and so the voices are mainly male and overwhelmingly white.
Pichon Battle said to the question,
”Much of it is rooted in domination and control. Put the fence up around the thing to protect it. and have it and use it when you need it. That's not made up. That's how the conservation movement began.
And it didn't really pay attention to life that can be lived with nature, that people are a part of a thing, not put on Earth to dominate a thing, as many of us are taught very, very early on. I think the mainstream environmental movement really kept that going.
And in fact, I think it hurt the climate justice movement. And I think that's why there is a climate justice movement, because we began to talk about climate, climate change as invisible emissions of something that's going to harm us in the future.
And all we need to do is reduce carbon and recycle our trash and then we'll be OK. But really what we lost was an analysis that says we have lost our connection to the very thing that sustains us. And if we do not get that connection back, we will not survive.”
These are really smart, philosophical-minded people, so there is value in the essays, and I loved the ideas that weren’t embraced at the time, but perhaps could be. I am supportive of people who need turning inward in a therapeutic way, but it is possible it has only made us more narcissistic, and as Gary Paul Nabhan writes, ”Robinson Jeffers suggested over a half century ago, it may be just as valid to turn outward: The whole human race spends too much emotion on itself. The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature or the artist admiring it, the person who is interested in things that are not human. Or if he is interested in human beings, let him regard them objectively as a small part of the great music."
Nabhan, a write of Lebanese and Syrian descent, calls it the Far Outside, the “naturalist’s trance”, the flow state, the state of mindlessness that is also the most alert and alive state we can find, where we lose our ego and are immersed in the landscape, or the sounds of water, or the water. I have read more about our hunter-gatherer instincts fueling, say, my desire to photograph all the beauty I see, label it and share it with others. But we are so brainwashed by the culture that we see that as reverting to primitive selves instead of returning to what our bodies and minds were designed for, to give that part of us freedom to be, and we can be both a computer typer like I am now, and a part of nature fully and wholeheartedly.
Jay Hansford C. Vest is Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia and he can trace his lineage to the 17th century Pamunkey leader Opechancanough. He elegantly links Plato to the sacred knowledge of indigenous people of Montana, “In a cautionary note to the planners of cities, Plato declared that certain locations possess ecological and spiritual qualities which markedly affect development of human character. This advice echoes through time with an essential wisdom for contemporary land-use planners. The area known as the Badger-Two Medicine, located along the east slopes of the Continental Divide just south of Glacier National Park, is a place that deserves the sagacious consideration urged by Plato.”
Stephanie Mills has been a proponent of bioregionalism since before this book, and the recent writing I could find was of her work in Michigan in local activities and events, like an article about a conservancy for the wild orchid Showy Lady’s Slippers. I think there is a lot of movement towards local action when we can’t rely on consistency in the federal government on protections. She writes, ” When we engage in wilderness journeying free of conquistadorial aims, we enter a wild context as pilgrims, as wanderers, as guests who pass through almost unnoticed, not as rogue intruders or imperial rogue conquerors. The spiritual dimension of wilderness journeying opens us to the spontaneous, creative power of nature.” This is the precursor to Pichon Battle’s words, and I am not sure why Mills and other authors in this anthology weren’t listened to in their time. I imagine it is our brainwashing again, that we can use anything on the planet anyway and it will absorb it.
In the midst of Colorado’s initiative to reintroduce wolves to the mountains, Mollie Yoneko Matteson writes, “In their journals, Lewis and Clark reported a great abundance of wildlife on the Montana plains, including wolves. Accurate estimates of the pre-white settlement population of wolves appear to be nonexistent. I have seen figures such as "in 1800 [wolves] exceed 350,000 individuals" and not known whether to gasp or laugh. One historian suggests that trappers and bounty hunters took 100,000 wolves per year between 1870 and 1877. Today in all of Canada, where wolves still occupy about 85 percent of their former range, the wolf population is put at 50,000 to 65,000.” Urban voters were the majority that voted the initiative in, and it has created such animosity towards the Colorado Parks and Wildlife teams from local ranchers and farmers, and of course, towards those of us in urban areas. I decided to vote no, since I have no right to decide things for their region, and so watch the unfolding with worry. We are talking about single digit releases, for a minimum of 30 wolves over 3 years. Part of me does dream of what it was like to live in a place of 350,000. A local resident did encounter a pack of wolf puppies playing in a puddle along a dirt road and the video was a thrill to him, formerly opposed to the idea, and to the general population.
The last essay that resonated with me was by Jack Turner, a mountain guide and parttime teacher of philosophy, one of the people that defined hermit, staying in a of the grid cabin for whole seasons and inhabiting nature like we inhabit our living spaces. He writes about Thoreau’s famous quote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” as other authors have, and the idea that it doesn’t mean we have to preserve wildness, it is wildness that is our preservation and savior. Not the other way around, and neatly ties Thoreau to Edward Abbey’s quote to “let being be,” inspired by Heidegger’s ideas about human beings and their place in the world, and finally to Lao Tzu who wrote:
Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way.
and my contribution to what the wild means to me:
Displaying 1 of 1 review