The Abstract Wild

In 1964, plans were being discussed for the creation of the Canyonlands National Park, near Moab, Utah.  Some wanted to include the Maze in the park.  The Maze is a stunning network of desert canyons, and it was extremely inaccessible at that time.  Few living people had ever seen it.

Jack Turner and his buddy were young rock-climbing adventure hogs.  Their plan was to fly into the Maze, land the plane on a long-abandoned bulldozer scrape, take some cool photos, and sell them to National Geographic.  Both survived the botched landing.  While wandering around in the Maze, they found ancient pictographs of life-sized human images.  The paintings had a striking presence, and the lads were mesmerized.  They had walked into a different dimension, a place alive with a strong aura of spirit power.

Today, the aura has faded.  The Maze is mapped and tamed.  Visitors can drive in and hike around on happy trails.  The pictographs have become photo opportunities for intrepid ecotourists.  The sacred wildness of the place has become banal, like a museum exhibit.  For the wild painters, who lived several thousand years ago, this place “was their home in a sense we can no longer imagine,” said Turner.  “Whoever they were, they knew how to express and present something we have lost.”

Later, Turner worked as a philosophy professor in Chicago, a soul-killing bad trip.  One day, he read a deep ecology essay by Arne Naess, and had a great awakening.  He suddenly realized that he was on the wrong path.  He escaped from the nightmare, and spent many years travelling around the world climbing mountains.  This included at least 16 years as a guide at Grand Teton National Park.

Deep ecology helped him understand the crucial difference between ecocentric thinking (the entire ecosystem is sacred) and anthropocentric thinking (only human desires matter).  This echoes the huge gap between the wild Maze painters and the civilized ecotourists.  It’s essentially the difference between sustainable and unsustainable cultures.

Wandering around the world taught him another vital lesson.  He visited cultures that were similar to the Maze painters, cultures with a profound spiritual connection to the past, the future, their community, and their sacred home.  All of their needs were provided by the place they inhabited.  Consequently, they lived with great care, striving to remain in balance with the land.

Today, the ecosystem is being hammered.  Typically, the designated villains include capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, the evil enemy-of-the-day, and so on.  Turner rejected this.  The planet is being pummeled by a culture that is infested with absurd abstract ideas — more is better, get rich quick, grow or die.  This culture has reduced the natural world to an abstraction, a machine that must be controlled — a jumbo cookie jar for the amusement of infantile organisms.

So, Turner’s enemies are not the designated villains.  His enemies are abstractions, like the hallucinations that perceive a sacred old growth forest to be a calculable quantity of board feet, worth a calculable quantity of dollars.  Abstractions are the foundation of the madness, and they are formidable opponents.  They can make clear thinking impossible, and inspire remarkable achievements in foolishness.

In his book, The Abstract Wild, Turner describes why he has become a “belligerent ecological fundamentalist,” and why he stands on the side of the grizzly bears and mountain lions.  “Abstraction” is a word meaning mental separation, not a concrete object.  Wildness is “the relation of free, self-willed, and self-determinate ‘things’ with the harmonious order of the cosmos.”

There are eight essays in the book.  One examines wilderness management, a hotbed of professional control freaks.  This work is done under the banner of Science, a way of knowing that can understand processes and predict their activities.  What a joke!  We don’t understand friends or lovers.  We don’t understand ourselves.  Ecosystems are vastly more complex and chaotic.

Wildlife biologists have a history of making wildly incorrect predictions, often leading to embarrassing disasters.  Their clumsy conjuring is no more “science” than is astrology.  Humans should always avoid fooling around with DNA, atoms, or wilderness management.  “We are not that wise, nor can we be.”  Instead of trying to control nature by using a strategy based on hope, wishes, incomplete data, and misunderstanding, Turner recommends that we should get out of the way and leave the job to Big Mama Nature, who has a billion years of experience.  (The experts howl!)

Another essay snaps, snarls, and spits with rage.  Civilization has been brutally molesting the planet for 10,000 years, at an ever-increasing rate.  Over the centuries, we have responded to these assaults on wildness by forgiving and forgetting.  We’re now moving into the end game.  Despite being blasted by a fire hose of depressing news, we remain pathetically timid, helpless victims.  We accept a wrecked planet as normal, and refuse to utter a peep of protest.

Turner screams.  Enough forgiving and forgetting!  It’s time for some healthy rage.  It’s time to raise hell against the senseless destruction.  This is spiritual business, so it takes precedence over society’s laws.  Nature is sacred, and must be defended.  Destroying the planet is evil and unacceptable, even if it’s perfectly legal and great for the economy.

There are thousands of eco-books, and most tend to focus their attention on symptoms — climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, overpopulation, and so on.  To control these symptoms, they suggest a variety of treatments, including new government policies, techno miracles, lifestyle changes, and rebellion.  Turner has lived much of his life out of doors, and he feels a profound reverence and respect for wildness.  His book is rare for presenting this perspective, which is getting dimmer with every decade.

This perspective can help us move toward healing.  “We only value what we know and love, and we no longer know and love the wild,” he says.  “What we need now is a culture that deeply loves the wild earth.”  But the inmates of modernity have little intimate experience with wild nature, and almost no comprehension of what has been lost.  Wildness is something seen on TV.

We must rejoin the natural world.  This is still possible.  Turner succeeded.  Cool books, nature documentaries, and ecotourism cannot provide us with all we need to recover our wildness.  What’s needed is direct experience with a place, over time, complete immersion — observing the bird migrations, animal mating, leafing of trees, climate patterns, and so on.  A week in the mountains is never enough.

In the end, Turner presents us with a tantalizing bittersweet enigma.  He reveals to us the one and only silver bullet solution that can actually heal us, and guide us back home to the family of life.  But this solution is impossible, as long as there are so many people, living so hard.  The shamans have much work to do, to redirect our hearts toward healthy paths.  It’s time for the clans of creative folks to seize their power, work to exorcise our culture’s terrible demons, and rekindle forgotten love.

Turner, Jack, The Abstract Wild, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1996.

The book’s first chapter, the Maze story, is online.  Click on “Read Excerpt” beneath the book cover HERE.

To view a 100-minute video of Turner, click HERE.

The Eye of the Crocodile

In February 1985, Val Plumwood was having a lovely time canoeing by herself in Australia’s Kakadu National Park.  The ranger had assured her that the saltwater crocodiles, notorious man-eaters, never attacked canoes.  It was a perfect day, gliding across the water in a beautiful land, no worries.

She was a scholar and writer who focused on feminism and environmental philosophy.  The Earth Crisis was pounding the planet, and it was obvious to eco-thinkers that this was caused by a severely dysfunctional philosophy.  Her book, The Eye of the Crocodile, is a fascinating voyage into the realm of ethics, values, and beliefs.

Plumwood understood that the ancient culture of the Aborigines was the opposite of insane, and she had tremendous respect for it.  It presented a time-proven example of an ethic that had enabled a healthy and stable way of life for more than 12,000 years.  Australia was blessed with a bipolar climate that often swung between drought and deluge, making low-tech agriculture impractical.  The land escaped the curse of cities until you-know-who washed up on shore.  (As her canoe gently drifted, a floating stick slowly moved closer.)

Plumwood grew up in a rural area.  She was home schooled, and enjoyed a fairy tale childhood outdoors, delighted by the “sensuous richness” of the forest.  She was unlike most of her generation, because “I acquired an unquenchable thirst for life, for the wisdom of the land.”  Thus, her appreciation of the Aboriginal culture was not merely intellectual — it was real and deep.  Unlike most of her generation, she enjoyed a spiritual connection to the land.  (The floating stick had two beautiful eyes.)

The stick with two eyes was a crocodile, nearly as big as the canoe, and it was five minutes to lunchtime.  Suddenly, the reptile began ramming her canoe.  She rushed toward shore, but the crocodile leaped and grabbed her between the legs.  Three times it pulled her underwater, trying to drown her.  Miraculously, she managed to escape, severely injured, and survived.

It was a mind-blowing life changing experience.  Intellectually, she had understood food chains, predators, and prey.  But this was the first time in her life that she was nothing more than a big juicy meatball — impossible!  She was far more than food!  The crocodile strongly disagreed.  Its sharp teeth drove home the message that she was not outside of nature.  She was a part of the ecosystem, an animal, and nourishing meat — no more significant than a moth or mouse.

She wrote, “In the vivid intensity of those last moments, when great, toothed jaws descend upon you, it can hit you like a thunderclap that you were completely wrong about it all — not only about what your own personal life meant, but about what life and death themselves actually mean.”

She was blindsided by the realization that an entire highly educated civilization could be wrong about subjects so basic — animality, food, and the dance of life and death.  The crocodile painfully drove home the point that the entire modern culture was living in a fantasy.  Our highly contagious culture was ravaging the planet, and we didn’t understand why.  Each new generation was trained to live and think like imperial space aliens.

Plumwood was educated by the space alien culture, but the crocodile was a powerful teacher from the real world, the ecosystem.  Darwin revealed that humans are animals, but this essential truth harmlessly bounced off a long tradition of human supremacist illusions.  It was easy to see that those who were demolishing the planet were radicalized space aliens who believed that human society was completely outside of nature, and far above it.

The Aboriginal people inhabited the real world.  They were wild two-legged animals who had learned the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint.  For them, the entire land was alive, intelligent, and sacred; even the plants, streams, and rocks — everything.  Nobody owned it.  Mindfully inhabiting a sacred place required a profound sense of respect.

Space aliens drove them crazy.  Colonists in spandex jogged mindlessly across sacred land, listening to electronic pop music.  Reverence was absent.  They did not belong to the land, and were unaware of its incredible power.  Some of the traditional folks wanted to ban these disrespectful intrusions.  The colonial era had been a disaster.

The colonial worldview had many layers of hierarchy.  At the summit were the elites.  Below them were women, peasants, slaves, and the colonized.  Beneath the humans were animals.  Some critters, like dogs, cats, and horses, had special status.  If they obediently submitted to human domination, they were not meat.  Below them were meat class animals that had no consciousness.  Especially despised were man-eating animals, and critters that molested human property.  They were mercilessly exterminated.  Beneath animals was the plant world, a far older realm.

The foundation of the dominant worldview was human supremacy, and this mode of thinking had been the driving force behind a growing tsunami of ecological devastation.  Plumwood saw two alternatives to supremacist thinking.

(1) Ecological animalism was the realm of crocodiles, Aborigines, our wild ancestors, and the rest of the natural world.  All life was food, including humans.  In an ecosystem, “we live the other’s death, die the other’s life.”  Our bodies belonged to the ecosystem, not to ourselves.  The spirits of animate and inanimate beings had equal significance.

(2) Ontological veganism did not believe in using animals or eating animal foods.  This ethic was an offshoot of human supremacy.  It did not condemn the dogma of human/nature dualism.  It denied that humans were meat, despite the fact that a number of large predators have been dining on us for countless centuries.  It believed that animals were worthy of moral consideration, but the plant people were not.

Ontological veganism was queasy about predation; it would prefer a predator-free world.  It believed that human hunting was cultural (animal abuse), while animal predation was natural (instinctive).  But every newborn human has a body carefully designed by evolution for a life of hunting.  We are capable of smoothly running for hours on two legs, and we have hands, arms, and shoulders that are fine-tuned for accurately throwing projectiles in a forceful manner.  What you see in the mirror is a hunter.

Plumwood was a vegetarian because she believed that the production of meat on factory farms was ethically wrong.  She had no problems with Aborigines hunting for dinner.  All of the world’s sustainable wild cultures consumed animal foods.  She was well aware that her plant food diet was not ecologically harmless.

Cultures rooted in human supremacy have achieved remarkable success at rubbishing entire ecosystems.  This is not about flawed genes.  It’s about a bunch of screwy ideas that we’ve been taught.  Sustainable cultures perceive reality in a radically different way.  Luckily, software is editable.  Plumwood recommended that creative communicators bring new ideas to our dying culture; stories that help us find our way home to the family of life.  This is an enormous challenge.

Plumwood also wrote an essay, Prey to a Crocodile, which is not in the book.  It provides a detailed discussion of the attack.  The rangers wanted to go back the next day, and kill the crocodile.  She strongly objected.  The crocodile had done nothing wrong.  Predation is normal and healthy.  She had been an intruder.

A free PDF of the entire contents of The Eye of the Crocodile is available online.  It’s just 111 pages.  A paperback edition is still in print.

Plumwood, Val, The Eye of the Crocodile, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2012, ed. Lorraine Shannon.