When Bill McKibben penned “The End of Nature,” in which he proposed that Earth no longer contained raw wilderness, uninfluenced by man, I thought It was a distressingly insightful, landmark book. Now, many years later, I think it’s just reality: wilderness is a doomed concept, and most of us must work to find nature, or at least the good parts.
Of course, any discussion of finding nature invokes the question: what is Nature? Forgive me as I fly past this ideological canyon and simply assume that all items provided by natural processes (i.e. animal, vegetable, mineral) - and not by humans - comprise Nature. Are humans a part of Nature? We are natural beings, yes, but the gifts of consciousness and opposable thumbs set us apart, so...no. Synthetics are our stock-in-trade, and in that way we’ve contributed more that is manufactured than natural. Human communities in the twenty-first century are essentially unnatural.
So where, then, is nature? Where do the concepts of wilderness survive? How do we experience it? Increasingly, we have to either work to find it or find ways to recreate it within the natural laws that still govern all of us beneath the skins of technology.
I recall my most authentic glimpse of the natural world. I was far down east in Maine many years ago on an uninhabited private island that had been designated as conservation land. We were given special access, and on a late August night our group of 4 huddled around a small campfire just above high tide’s watermark. The sky was moonless, the stars were magnificent, and the chilly embrace of salty marine air hung above us. The intertidal rockiness at the low tide hour of our gathering seemed to stretch forever into the night, and I adjourned from the group’s warmth and wandered into its invitation. Slowly a wilderness I’ve not known before or since enveloped me. I tripped and stumbled a long way out, too far certainly than common sense would consent, but the grip of this mysterious place was unrelenting. With thrilling and terrifying abruptness, I suddenly realized I could no longer see any direction clearly, and the rolling sounds of waves were now close beside me. There was no shore, there was no fire, there was no Maine, there was no light. There was elemental earth, and my own exhilaration for having brought myself there. I was strangely unafraid, and I let that place run through me as best I could. For me, in retrospect, it’s the closest I’ve come to glimpsing nature’s soul.
Thankfully I reoriented properly and returned to a smaller yet somehow warmer fire. I had no tales to tell, and in fact any phrases would have only told a false one. The truth is no words can explain that feeling, and by extension no arguments to maintain such places can justifiably enforce their urgency. The vanishing wildernesses around us will simply lose their soul, slowly, and silently, from one life to the next.
But that doesn’t mean our passions for the natural world should whither alongside. In fact, they should grow and be fueled by these losses. I never tire of hearing the perspectives and translations of nature that clients share with me as we work together framing and sometimes creating natural processes on their properties. I’ve yet to reproduce the unrelenting grip of that August night long ago, but I’ve nudged against it, often with others, and sometimes only vicariously through their experiences. Finding the ground to find your nature is occasionally a frustrating fail, but almost always worth the effort, certainly its own reward, and, without a doubt, forever exhilarating.
DJ