Where
We Belong is a collection of Paul Shepard essays that discuss how
we perceive the natural world, and how this influences the way we treat
it. Most of the essays were written
between the 1950s and 1970s. They
include some ideas that evolved into major components of his classics. Almost half of this book is devoted to
provocative discussions of pioneer diaries, a special treat.
Humans evolved as hunters and scavengers on tropical
savannahs. Today, our genes are still
those of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers — not Anthropocene cell phone zombies. Shepard believed that the process of normal
human development depended on experiences best provided by living close to wild
nature. Children need to be surrounded
by a variety of wild species, to observe them, and learn from them. They need to be outdoors, and experience how
everything in their land is alive.
They need a culture that guides them through the transition from
adolescence to adulthood, via rituals of initiation. When this is not provided, “Self-generated
substitutes created by adolescents are a virtual catalog of delinquency and
neurosis … adolescents cannot discover their maturity in a city.” They don’t understand that the all-natural
dance of creatures eating creatures is normal and good. They think that food comes from stores. They are space aliens, as most of society is.
Some of the damage can be healed by spending more time with
nature. Emotionally impoverished city
folks can “recover elements of human ecology warped by millennia of immersion
in domesticated landscapes. Paramount
among these is the opportunity to be free of domestic animals both as social
partners and as models of the nonhuman.”
We have a powerful desire to live in a wild landscape that is inhabited
by wild animals — and parks and pets are a poor substitute.
Shepard was never a cheerleader for the domestication of plants
and animals, because it spawned a way of living that was harmful to everything. The relationship between the human and
non-human shifted from one of freedom to one of human domination and
control. This led to profound changes in
the way we perceived the world, and to destructive changes in behavior.
From the first civilizations, growing population fueled
ongoing deforestation. Sheep, goats, and
cattle were then turned loose on the former forest. These “hoofed locusts” gobbled up young
seedlings, and ensured that the forest would never recover. The exposed soil was then washed away by the
rains, creating vast wastelands that modern visitors now perceive as natural
and picturesque. This resulted in a “lobotomy
on the land, done not with a scalpel but with teeth and hooves.”
The Minoan community of Jerash, a dusty village of 3,000, was
once home to 250,000. “No wonder Western
consciousness is an overheated drama of God’s vengeance and catastrophe,
preoccupation with sacrifice, portents and omens of punishment by a
heavy-handed Jehovah. Like the
dinosaurs, which are known mainly for their vanishing, the ancestors we know
best, and from whom we take our style, are those who seem to have lived mainly
to call down calamity upon themselves.”
Much of the book is devoted to Shepard’s discussion of
pioneer diaries from New Zealand and the Oregon Trail. These essays are illuminating and
disturbing. In New Zealand, the English
observed a gloomy, desolate, terrifying wildness, like “Caesar’s Britain,” that
was dreadfully unimproved. To their
fundamentalist minds, wilderness was immoral and sinful. The solution, of course, was to erase the
existing ecosystem, and turn the land into a proper English countryside. Settler Richard Taylor wrote, “The fern is
like the savage; both are going down before civilization.”
On the Oregon Trail, early travelers from New England and the
Midwest experienced landscapes that were beyond their imagination — vast wide-open
spaces, and dark skies with billions of twinkling stars. Their wagons were prairie schooners, sailing
across the seas of waving grass. At
night, they sat around fires, fiddling and singing, listening to the hoots of
owls, bellowing bison, and the music of the wind. They were serenaded by enthusiastic choirs of
wolves, howling and shrieking their ancient wild music.
Folks used to existing in the bowels of civilization were
jarred by feelings of isolation, solitude, and emptiness. At times, the land was absolutely
silent. Then there were deluges, prairie
fires, and tornados. Humming clouds of the
native mosquitoes were exceedingly friendly to the smelly travelers in funny
attire. “Everyone was deeply moved by
the immense herds of buffalo as they roamed beside, toward, and even through
the wagon trains.”
In hotter and drier regions, travelers found buffalo trails
that looked like old roads, because of frequent use. They saw rock formations that resembled
castles, lighthouses, churches, palaces, and so on. From a distance, they looked like manmade
ancient ruins, ghost towns. They
wondered if the treeless landscape had once been cleared.
It was spooky to experience a vast region showing no signs of
being beaten and molested by civilization, except along the trail, which was
strewn with litter. Many began the
pilgrimage overloaded with stuff, dumping ballast along the way, to make the
journey less challenging. Everywhere
along the trail, people carved their names on rocks, stumps, skulls, and trees.
Readers get two impressions from these pioneer stories. One is that the experience was precious and
sacred, a very long trek through a healthy wild land. Imagine how much people would pay today to
experience a wild Nebraska where there were far more buffalo and wolves than
humans — no highways, beer cans, motels, or fences. The tales call up deep ancestral memories of
how we all once lived, pleasant memories.
The other impression was that these travelers had not come to
abandon civilization and return to wildness and freedom. If the western plains had water, good soil,
and forests, the travelers on the Oregon Trail would have stopped in their
tracks, built cabins, and destroyed it.
But they knew that they could not survive on the plains, so they kept
moving toward the promised land of salmon and forests, where their descendants
would build Portland and Eugene, and create the ancient ruins of the future —
enduring monuments to our experiment in civilization, warning signs to the
distant generations yet-to-be-born.
The essays in this book discuss aspects of how civilized
Western people interpret the natural world.
Their perspective is strongly influenced by our culture of wealth,
alienation, and destruction. What’s
missing in this book is the perspective of people rooted in place, who have
reverence and respect for the land they inhabit.
Okanagan elder Jeanette
Armstrong is one of many who eloquently discuss the vital importance on
having a healthy connection to place, community, and family. She sees that our world is being disemboweled
by alienated people who have no connection to place, people who have no hearts,
because they are “dis-placed.” Shepard
put it like this, “Knowing who you are is impossible without knowing where you
are.”
Shepard, Paul, Where
We Belong — Beyond Abstraction in Perceiving Nature, University of Georgia
Press, Atlanta, 2003.
Books that describe cultures connected to the land
include: The Forest People, Wisdom
Sits in Places, The
Harmless People, The Ohlone Way,
Make
Prayers to the Raven, The
Wayfinders, The
Continuum Concept.
Reviews of other Shepard books: Coming
Home to the Pleistocene, Nature
and Madness, The Others, Thinking
Animals.
2 comments:
“No wonder Western consciousness is an overheated drama of God’s vengeance and catastrophe."
This is why, unlike indigenous spirituality which venerates the sacred in all things because the world births and nurtures and then reclaims us, western religion worships God to keep Him from punishing us.
In Nature and Madness, Shepard devotes a lot of attention to the Sky Father, and the three traditions he fathered — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The desert is a harsh and unforgiving place, and it influenced the spirituality of those who lived there. There was a time when the arid lands of the Middle East were far more alive, before the overgrazing. If there were cultural memories of the era of “milk and honey,” they must have added to the bitter feelings.
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