The Dark Mountain Blog
In Patagonia, Part 2: on Nature
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
26th January, 2012
I have been meaning for many weeks to write a second blog reflecting on the time I spent at the end of last year in Patagonia. (You can read the first post here.) There is a lot I could say, perhaps too much, and this, I think, is the problem. I have wanted to write in particular about what it taught me about ‘nature’: a terrible, overused, potentially meaningless and yet also vital word, that encompasses so much of what we are concerned with here at the Dark Mountain Project. My experience in Patagonia was an immersion in wildness, and it brought bubbling up in me many thoughts, emotional responses and instinctual reactions which needed a lot of processing, particularly when I brought them back to the overdeveloped world.
I’m currently reading Gary Snyder’s book of essays The Practice of the Wild. Snyder is a fascinating writer, fully immersed in his subject, unafraid to reflect emotionally as well as analyse rationally, and mostly able to do so without coming across as a terrible old hippie.
In Uncivilisation, we rejected the whole notion of ‘nature’ in the sense in which the word is often used in this culture. We wrote:
The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Both are intimately bound up with each other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained.
The ‘myth of nature’, in this context, is the falsehood – long established in the modern world – that humanity is somehow not natural; we are apart from everything else, destined to control it, above it, or perhaps below it, but not integral to it or related to it in any sense but the scientific. While I stand by this notion, I have also more recently come to prefer the word ‘nature’ to the word ‘environment’, by which it has been largely replaced. ‘Environment’ is a technocratic, dry, pseudo-scientific word, which strips the natural world of any sensuous or living qualities, and reduces it merely to the backdrop of human activity. In Dark Mountain book two (which you can buy here, and really should) Rob Lewis, in his essay The Silence of Vanishing Things, does an incisive job of exposing the language of contemporary environmentalism as part of the reason why that movement has hit a wall. The reclamation of the word ‘nature’ by its practitioners might be a starting point if we were looking for some change there.
Snyder has another take on nature, though, which I very much like. In his essay The Etiquette of Freedom, he explains that he uses the word ‘nature’ in its broadest sense, to mean ‘the physical universe and all its properties.’ The word ‘wild’, on the other hand, he uses to denote those portions of the physical universe which remain free from the agency of humanity. Snyder writes that this definition of wild:
Come very close to being how the Chinese defined the term Dao, the way of Great Nature: eluding analysis, beyond categories, self organising, self informing, playful, surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete, orderly, unmediated, freely manifesting, self authenticating, self willed, complex, quite simple.
The undomesticated animal; the self propagating plant; the land unfarmed or unmanaged: the food crop growing unbidden rather than in forced regiments; the human societies ‘whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation’ – these are wild. In this context ‘we can say,’ writes Snyder, ‘that New York City and Tokyo are natural but not wild. They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd.’
I take you on this long etymological diversion because much of my time in Patagonia was spent in genuinely wild places, where humanity intruded only slightly. One of these places was Parque Pumalin, in northern Patagonia. Pumalin is one of the last significant areas of temperate rainforest in South America – and increasingly in the world. It is an incredible place, and it had a strange effect on me. It is around the same latitude in the southern hemisphere as Britain is in the north, so while a visit to a tropical rainforest, for me, is a truly alien experience, a visit to the temperate forests of Chile was a comforting one. I seemed to recognise much of the flora and fauna, even though it was different: the same niche was being filled, the same atmosphere was being created. Pumalin is an incredible landscape of huge old trees, steep green mountains, sea fjords full of dolphins, porpoises and sea lions. The air is clean, the galaxies can be seen at night, you hear no industry, no cars. It is what much of Britain must have been like before the Neolithic revolution. In some deep, old, primal part of myself, I felt I had come home.
The preservation of Pumalin is the work of Doug and Kris Tompkins, hugely ambitious conservationists who are pioneering a number of similar projects across South America. Their aim is to conserve, or in some cases recreate, vital natural habitats, on a scale which makes that conservation meaningful enough for the survival of threatened ecosystems and species. Both deep ecologists, they are raising a flag for the importance of preserving natural systems in an age of global ecocide. The transcript of a conversation with Doug and Kris, which I recorded in Pumalin, will appear in Dark Mountain book 3 later this year.
I was hugely impressed with the work that the Tompkins’ are doing – it is one of the few truly inspiring things I have seen in a very long time. Regular readers will know that I have long come to the conclusion that it is now going to be impossible to prevent serious climate change, more destruction of habitats and species or the continued expansion of the human Empire. That Empire currently affects 93% of the Earth’s surface. The environmental movement, despite a huge amount of work and passion, and despite being right about most of the big picture for forty years, is failing to prevent the ongoing destruction. I don’t believe that anything will prevent much more of it now, bar the collapse or winding down of the industrial system or the running dry of the sources of fuel on which that system operates.
This is a bleak view to hold, but despite wanting to find it, I haven’t found anything which convinces me it’s not the correct one. On the other hand, thinking like this does not lead me to believe that ‘nothing can be done.’ Plenty can be done, to try and protect what we have left; but we need to do it in the context of the unravelling of the wild, and not in the context – common up to this point – of a ‘campaign’ to put all the pieces back together again when so many of them have already been washed away by the sea.
It seems to me that if we value the wild, as Snyder defines it, the most important task on our hands now is to preserve whatever aspect of it we can. Most of us will never be able to do anything like the work that the Tompkins’ do, but all of us can do something, whether it be physically preserving land that we own, or spreading the word, or learning useful skills to teach others, or working to keep safe what remaining wild things and places can be kept safe from the gathering storm.
There is something of a fashion, currently, for predicting the end of the wild – or for suggesting that it has already ended. The first shot was fired nearly 25 years ago by Bill McKibben in his pioneering book The End of Nature, in which he suggested, correctly of course, that globalised impacts of the human Empire such as chemical pollution and climate change meant that there was no genuine wildness left, in the pre-human, pristine sense. Recently, there has been a new slew of books and websites proposing that we are entering the ‘Anthropocene’ era, and that we must now take our rightful place in the pantheon of gods, pulling the levers of the natural world in order to to preserve a living planet.
This dubious neo-Wellsianism is, I suspect, simply a manifestation of a growing panic in a culture which feels it is losing control. While we are, in one sense, clearly facing the end of the wild world we have known, we are not going to be taking control of it any time soon. Given that we can’t even control our own economies, or plan our transport systems effectively, or indeed manage our individual lives in most cases, it takes a strange kind of blind optimism to imagine we can ‘manage’ an entire planet.
But, fantasies aside, we are in any case still left with very large areas of the Earth – such as that preserved by Pumalin – which are still effectively primordial. Will they survive climate change and the growing human appetite for more shiny things? We don’t know. But we have to hold on to them as if they will, because there is, at this stage, nothing else to do.
I suspect that the best hope we have now – hope for a living planet, hope for the continuation of beauty and wildness and ecological diversity and our own sanity as a species – is to protect as much of the world’s wildness as we can, try and carry it through the coming storm and just hope that on the other side we will have found some accommodation with ourselves and with the wild. Any such accommodation, if it ever comes, won’t happen in our lifetime. But we have a flame to keep, in case it ever does.
In the first Dark Mountain book, I wrote a long essay entitled Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, in which I tried to analyse my reasons for falling out of love with green activism. This essay has been reproduced this month in the US-based Orion magazine, and last week I had an hour-long online discussion about it with the American writers Lierre Keith and David Abram. David Abram has been a friend of the Dark Mountain Project for some time, and I find him one of the wisest thinkers on the nature of wildness and humanity.
In this conversation, David said two things that struck me in particular. Firstly, he talked about the ‘metamorphosis’ which our civilisation needed to go through if we were to have any hope of understanding the real meaning of the wild world – and he didn’t suggest that this would be easy, or even possible in our lifetimes. The second thing he said took me right back to the temperate forests of Chile, and to the passion and determination that I felt when I walked in them. ‘The way that nature exceeds us,’ he said, ‘is so necessary.’
The way that nature exceeds us: I find a kind of dark hope in this thought. Somehow, in whatever form, nature will always exceed us; this is the fact that our culture cannot face but is going to have to. I came back from Patagonia with a new determination to do what I could to carry something wild and precious through this storm. I don’t see that there is a better or more important project than that right now.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 26 January, 12
Posted in: Blog, Featured, Key Posts
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I follow the trail of this article with great interest – there is much to chew on regarding language and human-quiet places. However something that leaps out as an omission and which I think needs acknowledgement, is the diversity of cultures that inhabit our ‘modern’ world.
I am fortunate to be born in the great land down under – home to the oldest cultures on earth – Aboriginal Australia. In respect of language, Aborigines don’t make the distinction between human and nature and the wild doesn’t exist separate to self. I have also observed this in Maori language and culture.
My friend Jo Tito http://www.handpaintedrocks.com/ explains: “The Maori word for water is ‘wai’ and ‘Ko wai au?’ translates as ‘Who am I?’ So water is very much the central part of who am I. This word, this concept, this part of nature which is deeply embedded in our beautiful language and who we are. Waiata is song, music… waiora is life giving waters and because our language is so conceptual, every word tells a story and is not exclusive to itself, always connected to something else somewhere.”
While all the cultures of our species are affected by and often indirectly contribute to our global environmental crises – I think Western people need to work extra consciously to untangle ourselves from damaging binary habits (both biological and cultural)that can inadvertently sweep complexity in to an earnest but romantic and dismissive gesture.
It is our task to remember.
Hi Ilka,
Thanks for the comment. I agree, and I don’t agree. It is obviously the case that some cultures are far less damaging than others. But it is also the case that those cultures which are almost perfectly adapted to living within wild systems (Snyder would call them wild cultures; aboriginal culture in Australia is an excellent example) have been destroyed or marginalised. The two cultures you mention are clinging on as distressed minorities in industrialised nations.
We have a global culture now, in effect, and it’s not ‘Western’, though it did originate in the West. It’s modernity, and it’s got a powerful grip on Chile, India, China, Australia and just about everywhere else. It’s fossil-fuel powered, accumulative, growth-focused and frighteningly good at enveloping different cultural norms within its consumer embrace.
Bear in mind also that ‘Western’ people were the first victims of this culture, and its first beneficiaries and creators. We have our own indigenous cultures and ways of knowing land and place, which have been all but destroyed (you won’t see this so much in Australia, which is a settler nation, but in England and other places the echoes can still be heard.)
Modernity now reaches across all cultures and brings most people into its fold. There’s no denying this. I think our challenge is to work out if it is possible for all of us to come out of the other side intact.
I take on your points, especially around indigenous ways of knowing in Europe – it’s a strange reality to walk in a land not of my Ancestors, one feels disconnected from the beginning and those stories, the ones about place that are passed from generation to generation, they are invaluable at this time but in a dissected world they are lost.
I’m in agreeance that modernity has blanketed the globe and it has proven to be a sinister and seductive adversary. And it is also true as Derrick Jensen states that many Indigenous cultures who practiced ‘sustainability’ have been ‘slaughtered’ and/or marginalised.
At the heart of what I’m expressing is the critical need to remember. Perhaps it’s possible that every time we stake a ‘truth’ in our language that does not feed modernity – we are re-patterning our reality – we become the offensive not the defensive. We need all the tools we can wield to empower our shift and I believe direct action and language are vital areas of work.
And because I see so many people clamoring to find solutions, I feel reconnecting and deep listening are instrumental; to place, to old cultures, to each other.
Thanks for your time Paul, it’s great to engage questions of strategy.
A fascinating post and discussion, leaving alot to think about.
It’s interesting how your time in wildness has so inspired you toward it’s care and protectection, Paul. This seems to me the classic arc of the, I hate to say it–”environmental journey.” We encounter that which so surpasses us that we are naturally taken over by an overriding inner need to try and protect it. It seems almost archetypal of the spiritual quest. Seeker encounters that which is greater, the sacred Origen, and falls in love and devotion to it.
Yet what the public sees and hears is science and “environmentalism” trying to protect “biodiversity.” The story, which is really an heroic story, perhaps the first heroic story, is lost. Our technocratic language can neither contain nor convey it. Yet it can be reclaimed. “To carry something wild and precious through the storm” is the sort of language that does that kind or reclamation.
And as Ilka said so well, when we speak the truth of nature “we are repatterning our reality.”
In terms of language, a great source is Uwe Poerksen’s “Plastic Words: The Tyranny of Modular Language.” At the behest of Ivan Illich, Poerksen set out to confront and understand modern industrial language. In the process he came up with his theory of “plastic words.” Plastic words are general concept words and terms that have overtaken the common vernacular in a way that ultimatley “disables language.” This language all has a technical. quasi-scientific aspect which lends to the speaker a sheen of expertise and technical authority. They are words that mean nothing yet bahave as if they know everything. “Communication, transportation and development” are all prime examples.” I sent a cd recording of a BBC interview with Dr. Poerksen to Dougald some time back. Maybe he can provide a link as part of the post.
One thing Poerksen points out, is the way these words colonize other languages. Like invasive species, they overwhelm local, indigenous ways of speaking, and soon take over the linguistic landscape. Ilka’s report of the Maori word for water meaning “Who am I” brings this to mind. What an amazing relationship with water such language must engender for the people who speak it. I wonder if the Maori people have since succombed to the pressure for a more detached and scientific relationship with nature, and have been forced to conjure up a Maori translation for “aquatic resources.”
Thanks for another wonderful blog post, Paul.
Very much looking forward to listening to the audio with David Abram and Lierre Keith. What a great panel that Orion put together..
Regarding that odd concept of nature, you might be interested in this interview with Tim Morton:
http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/490/id/442328/tues-11-01-11-rethinking-ecology
Hi Paul,
Lots of interesting stuff in here, thank you. This in particular struck me as very true and well-expressed:
Maybe I’ll have to finally get my hands on your manifesto!
I’ve come to understand the use of the word ‘nature’ in terms of war propaganda. A culture that subsists mainly from agriculture spends a good deal of time fighting against the tendency of plant and animal communities to grow towards the ‘climax ecology’ (which would be forest/woodland on a large percentage of the landmass of this planet). It would be adaptive within that context for a mythology of separateness and mutual antagonism to emerge, even if the ‘war’ was only ever declared and fought by the one ‘side’ of farmers & their domesticates vs. everybody else. Thus the trees always encroach on ‘our land’, the weeds always set seed and outcompete ‘our crops’, the vermin birds and mammals always come and steal from ‘our harvests’, and if we don’t engage in a perpetual struggle ‘they’ will rush in and swamp ‘us’ totally.
Needless to say it doesn’t have to be this way – there are plenty of ways for humans to subsist in climax ecology contexts (though some degree of disturbance may be necessary, as with other mammals who take an active role in shaping ecosystems to suit their needs) and while it might make sense to interpret Nature’s frustration of our designs as a retaliation in a pitched battle, another way of looking at it would be a supreme, unfailing generosity in extending the invitation for the rebel to grow up and rejoin the community of life.
I have to wonder about the role of conservation in this process though. Isn’t the attempt to preserve ecosystems in a ‘pristine’ condition (defined by an absence of humans) doomed to failure? As I’ve been asking about the remnant British woodland and government attempts to sell them off to the highest bidder, what hope is there of ‘saving’ them if we don’t depend on them for any aspect of our immediate survival; if in fact our subsistence methods and subjective notions of value demand that we cut them down? I don’t know about the situation in Chile, but I’m conversant with the theory that much of the Amazon ‘jungle’ was shaped over millennia by indigenous people as a huge food forest, and that the ecology actually benefited from ‘management’ by humans. Just the other day I was surprised to see BBC4 running a documentary about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park which came to the conclusion that, just as the land missed the beneficial activities of the wolves once they were exterminated, it missed the activities of the Indians who lived there too. Thus a full spectrum conservation plan there would involve the reintroduction of human beings as wild animals in their own right.
So oughtn’t our attempts to ‘protect as much of the world’s wildness as we can’ by trying to ‘carry it through the coming storm’ involve a gods-honest attempt to embed ourselves in those same places on the most basic, fundamental levels and thus tie our fates together – fostering the growth of the wild things outside and inside of us at the same time, past the point where we can’t tell the difference between the two? As Kat Anderson wrote after spending time with surviving California Indians:
As for ‘the end of the wild’, what a load of crap! It only makes sense if you view it as a thing (wilderness) rather than a quality of behaviour (wildness); a steady state of what ‘is’ rather than something that you, and others do (as the rewild people point out); a noun rather than a verb. Kids still act like wild creatures, requiring enormous amounts of effort to socialise (ie: domesticate) them to life in agrarian/industrial societies. Also foxes, pigeons and innumerable insects, bacteria and fungi often prefer to live in cities than the countryside in its current state. Do they not deserve to be called ‘wildlife’? How about on the sub-atomic level? Is there any difference between an electron in a water molecule in a city bathtub compared to one in the ‘wild’ clouds or the ‘wild’ ocean? I read some of McKibben’s ‘End of Nature’ a few years ago and couldn’t help wondering if millions of years ago newly-evolved ants were busy torturing themselves with guilt feelings because their actions had in some way Ended Nature. After all, the globalised impacts of the ant Empire such as leaf destruction and aphid farming meant that there was no genuine wildness left, in the pre-ant, pristine sense ;)
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I enjoyed the Orion discussion – you came across as very ‘English’ in a no-nonsense, calm & measured kind of way. The other two seemed more interested in regurgitating their various talking points than engaging in much of a productive conversation. Although I didn’t particularly mind as I’ve gained a great deal insight from both parties over the years and it was nice to hear them aired out and examined to some degree.
best wishes,
Ian