Wilderness

FCA

4/24/01

Another cool trend is the development of the idea of wilderness. Back in the day, there was no wilderness as we think of it today. 10,000 years ago, everything was what we would call wilderness, just the way it was. Nature ruled more than humanity. The beginning of the seeds of the idea probably came when people got agriculture, and started to fortify themselves against wild animals and crop raiders, when people developed domesticated plants and animals, which could be seen in comparison with their wild progenitors. As this process of civilization progressed, people became more and more separated from nature until we arrive at the 21^st century, where we have environmentalism, wilderness ethics, low impact camping techniques, wilderness adventure programs etc. What a fascinating process! Humanity comes to rule nature and divisions crop up, between the ones who want to steward, the ones who believe it is a birth right to exploit, the ones who have no choice but to abuse nature just to survive, the ones who don’t care one way or the other.

The steward message makes a lot of sense, you can’t keep intensively dividing, planting and grazing the back forty, it just won’t last. It’s Thomas Malthus, John Muir, the Sierra Club, mathematical, mystical, practical. The exploiters harken back to God, or to Darwin, to justify all out exploitation of resources, either God justified it and animals have no souls, the earth is only like school for heaven, in which case, the here and now doesn’t really matter in terms of the consequences for the stage or it can be survival of the fittest, no morals, only success matters, to hoard resources and reproduce. The people with no choice, like many Mexicans, must thrash the land with overgrazing and too much cultivation, too much ground water pumping, cutting too much timber, killing all the predators, mining pollution, just so they can get by. Food isn’t going to fall out of the sky, the government can’t help more than just a little every now and then, and so a degradation of the land occurs; conservation is a bourgeois luxury. This same stuff happened in the now First World, over the last 400 years, to take out resources and develop, and the rest of the world wants to do the same. That’s how the big boys do it.  They who don’t care, well, what is to say about them?

The steward message is backed up in the Bible by the Noah story. God did not command Noah to leave off wolves or lions or bears or any other animal from the ark. These animals had/ have value to God and God justified this through his actions. All animals, of every kind were to be taken on the ark and God made a covenant with all animals and people at the end of the flood. All would be fruitful and multiply and people were the stewards.  Into our hands is delivered all of creation and the moral imperative is to not violate this creation. “The earth is the Lord’s.” That is why God caused the flood in the first place, because of man’s corruption and insolence.

After the flood, God said, “go forth, you and your family and every living thing of all flesh”, “...that they may breed abundantly on the earth and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth.” God also said  “I will not again curse the ground anymore for man’s sake: for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.” So here, God explicitly states that all species shall be fruitful and multiply and that he himself will not smite them. If that is God’s will, it is just more ego on people’s part to think that we can run the show better in our own way. There is as much a stewardship message here as there is one of total license.

God also said “...the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea: into your hand they are delivered.” And God then said, “And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you and with your seed after you; and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.” God made an everlasting covenant with every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

God laid out the covenant and he demonstrated many times that he intended for ALL species to be saved in the flood and that afterwards, they ALL should be fruitful, under the stewardship of man. God will not destroy all species ever again. If He won’t, why should we? “Wisdom is proved right by her actions.” Matthew 11:19  If we are the stewards of the creation, then it is incumbent on us to manage the whole package wisely. You don’t mess with the creation without becoming like pre-flood people or Sodom and Gomorrah. You don’t get so caught up in your own power and insight as to lose perspective, like Solomon.

Nature is drying up all around us now, with small pristine patches  left in isolated areas, which may be called wilderness areas, where the value is to preserve nature and not have people dominate with their usual accouterments. That is wilderness, whatever is left of the nature from 10,000 years ago, when man was not running the show, nature as it flows along in it’s own time. Now people world-wide are fucking like rabbits at a geometric rate, so that the very success of our species will be our own undoing. The biological imperative to reproduce becomes counter productive if the population begins to out-strip the resource base. The destiny of earth seems to be that nature will become completely over run by the needs of people, people just like me, who don’t want anything really extravagant, just a roof, some food and a little quality. What a mess! And the more of a mess it gets, the more “wilderness” will stand out as something unique, and perhaps the more pressure to use up those resources, as in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.  Bush is probably thinking, shit, why lets these Arabs stick us up the ass with higher prices when we’ve got our own oil and California is having power blackouts? Let’s get a drillin’ baby. Indeed, why despoil other countries that we can’t see, for gas for our cars and then whine when our own soil suffers the same consequences? It would only be morally right that we drill in the arctic or else melt down all the SUVs and make bicycles.

As a corollary, we get comparisons to wild nature in phrases like “urban jungle”, that people’s folly is a metaphor for the dynamic processes of untamed life.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting, this idea of wilderness and that there are probably some connections with the notion of the individual intertwined, wilderness as an opportunity to be inspired, as an individual, to reflect back on the ground of our being, as a species, as life. For what it’s worth, here is another essay.