Following on from the last post but one (and heavily informed by my recent reading, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert):

What might rewilding humans, rewilding ourselves, consist of?

Releasing ourselves into the wild?

Releasing the wild in ourselves and in the spaces we inhabit – re-greening the city, re-embodying movement.

But also re-rooting ourselves – re-embedding in our places – reconnecting to the material sources of our subsistence (where ‘material’ means not monetary but physical and living systems).

Globalisation and financialisation have led to negligence or ignorance of our place in the biosphere. We have come to imagine our human world as a detached (virtual?) layer, sliding like silk, weightless, frictionless, over the planet’s grittiness. We rarely need to understand or even think about the complexities that underlie our lives, except those of the getting and spending of money. Anything you might need or want is available anywhere, anytime, as long as you have the cash. And any problem is presumed to be solvable with enough money, the universal solvent, the perfect lubricant. (And anything that can’t be, that falls outwith the realm of money, is thereby ruled out – in the world of supply and demand, demand is only expressible in terms of spending; if I have no money to spare, my ‘demands’ are invisible, if the thing ‘demanded’ is not marketable, it too is invisible.) This unanchored worldview will tend to lead to oversimplistic ‘solutions’ to narrowly constrained problems, ignoring the real interconnections that cause unintended consequences.

This is not new: consider the colonial powers’ presumptions that overriding natural boundaries was harmless, indeed, desirable, that taking livestock or crops around the world for our own convenience, would not adversely affect their new environment – rabbits and cats to Australia, etc. But this disruption is ever more all-pervasive in our click-and-collect lives. Blithely, unthinkingly, we and our consumer goods travel the world, breaking links or making new ones, slicing up habitats with ‘development’ and roads or transporting invasive hitchhikers into long-established ecosystems.

Consumer society trains us in a kind of mass attention-deficit disorder – adverts, news stories, fashion – what’s the next big thing we need to see, to get, to know, to wear…? Social media exacerbate this – swipe swipe swipe – keeping your hands and eyes occupied with ever more quickly changing stimuli, changing but also more or less the same – a canalised flow of repeating images, catering to a directed and tailored gaze. And when it comes to our homes, we are supposed to strive to get on the housing ladder where, in spite of the mantra, ‘location, location, location’, the goal is always to move up, move on. Don’t put down roots, don’t plan for the long-term care of this home, this ground; it’s only a step on the way to a bigger, better, more expensive property – property, not place. That is, we don’t live in homes so much as invest in a market (if we are lucky enough to take that first step up from the rootlessness of renting).

But this unending stream of busy-ness, consumption and acquisition is paradoxically passive – we receive the products of a system we are largely oblivious of and which we do not control. Our principal form of agency is purchase/consumption of things, ideas, media. (NB, when the consumer carousel screeches to a halt because of a pandemic, it seems that some people find the time to look harder at their lives and to want a different way to be…)

When speed and convenience are the order of the day, they enable or even enforce lack of thought, lack of sustained, deep attention. Think of the difference between walking through a natural landscape – where you might need to pick a careful path or choose to stop and look at a beetle or the sky or any number of unexpected things – and driving along a motorway, where the path is smooth and stopping is only allowed in an emergency. Or the difference between ordering online with a click and going to the shops on the bus, or even growing/making what you need yourself. Between ‘just-eat’-ing a take-away, guaranteed to be the same wherever in the world you are, versus local food cooked to a recipe developed over generations to suit the particulars of soil and season.

The rooted, the slow, the repeated being in a place, the walk to school, the tending of the garden – such things allow for, or rather demand, observation of details, of changes large or small, with time of year or time of day. (Compare the ‘city break’, flitting in and out, ‘doing’ a tourist destination in a day.)

Sustainability needs to include sustainability of thought, of feeling, of attention –

So: walk – give yourself time to be in the world

Be still – give yourself time to listen

Draw – give yourself time to look

Write – give yourself time to think

Plant a seed or a tree and take time to see how it grows

Rewilding ourselves means existing actively, engaging with our places, being transported by our own limbs and moved by our experiences of the uncurated, the unedited, the unmarketed, the undomesticated, the unfiltered world. And learning from those experiences – learning how we depend on and affect the more-than-human world, how we subsist in its webs and how easily we can disrupt them if we’re not careful.

Releasing ourselves into the wild means escaping from a worldview, a technology of being, an abstraction, a myth of freedom as disconnection, as carelessness, as self-containment, as indifference, as anyplace, floating like a Sim in an artificial, domesticated nowhere; it means stepping into the reality of connection, of mutuality, of uncontrollability, in this place, on this ground, among these living others.

(PS there’s more on this chain of thought in a later post)