Re-wilding

Re-wilding is an appealing project: Let's step back from our domination of the world and invite the non-human other, the Wild, to step forward and meet us. It feels like an act of mature self-restraint, humbly acknowledging value beyond current human concerns. Many conservationists work hard to defend, or recreate, wild spaces: checking non-native invaders; reintroducing departed natives from nearby populations; preserving and recreating precious habitats.

I am much in sympathy with this work, but it is not re-wilding. It is gardening. Wise, wonderful, gardening. Gardening which appeals to me morally and politically, and usually aesthetically. But still just gardening. Because the wild is what happens all by itself.

The wild is not any particular species, not even wolves. It's not any particular ecosystem, not even old-growth forest. Wild is the state of being unmanaged. We confuse Wild - the unmanaged, with New or Untouched - the un-interacted-with, which is something quite different. And it's a dangerous mistake.

When we identify wild as untouched-by-humans, it becomes distant and loses relevance to our lives. It subsides into fodder for documentaries - awesome, but not our world.

But unmanaged wildness is an intimate part of our daily lives. It's the familiar buddleia scrub alongside the railway track, moss on your roof and nettles in the park. It the microbes in your body and the pigeon which hops onto the circle line train.

We have set up a false opposition between the everyday things and the marvellous ones. The more we share with each other images of the exceptional, the distant and the fantastical, the more we need to cultivate appreciation of the familiar beauties which are beside us all the time. Let's attend to the wonder of valerian blossoming out of a wall; the sun-warmed skins of a garden harvest; the companionable calling of a skein of geese travelling across the autumn skies, living in a bigger world than most humans, for all our petrol engines.

This small, familiar wild may not have the majesty of virgin rainforest, but it has wonder. And it has something the virgin rainforest doesn't: it has touchability. We can live here and it doesn't crumble. It is our ecosystem. It tells us that we really belong in the world, living alongside other species, doing our human things. And our human things include gardening, doing science and otherwise managing our environment, even making documentaries about the precarious virgin ecosystems that remain.

Maybe, too, if we more clearly experience our inescapable involvement in our own ecosystems, we'll find it easier to find a way to live both joyfully and respectfully in the world. 

Starting something

In our joined up world of communications, it's easy to feel swamped and powerless. But, no matter how much we turn off the news, it doesn't go away. National and international is the stage on which we all live now. And in truth, it's the stage on which we have all, always, lived.

In the past we didn't know it so vividly. The impact of and knowledge of actions propagated more slowly through the world. The here and now was better insulated by time from elsewheres, and from futures.

But.

A simple increase in speed has changed the nature of communication. If word of mouth is the principal mode of communication, then some context naturally adheres. You knew something of the actors, of the places, of the meanings - and as the message travelled further and the context dropped away, so did the message's power. Now our messages can be picked up and whirled away on a tide of social media. They can end up far from their context without losing their freshness and the power that comes with it. They can have real effects in places, and ways, that were never intended.

An apparently powerful person or act rides on a tide of other acts, attitudes, and people. Other acts, unsupported by such a tide, seem futile. Yet the apparently futile act may start start something instead of being lost in the noise. The apparently powerful one may be nothing more than a random piece of flotsam: prominent but passive.

We cannot comfort ourselves that it doesn't matter what we do. It might not, but then again, it really might. And it really might not be what we meant to do. The world has become precarious; how can we dare to act at all, in this unwieldy, enormous, joined up world?

We cannot get out of it. Disengagement from politics, from communication is also an act. Even disengagement from life by suicide is an act, and one not available for any fine-tuning afterwards.

One thing I am certain of is that we cannot tell in advance what acts will make a difference, and what the difference is they will make. Contexts and perspectives on any single issue expand in all directions and we cannot appreciate them all, even in hindsight.

We're left with guesswork - about both the likely effects and the likely effectiveness of our actions. But guesswork is what people are good at. We struggle when we have too much clarity, we get bored, we get miserable. We are much better when we don't quite know: then we get curious, we try things out, learn from experience, imagine possibilities and use a blend of thought and intuition to decide what to try next.

Every day, make your best guess about what to do. And then do it. You may be part of a tide, or lost in the noise, that's not the point. The point is to make your response, to your context. Whatever it is: participate in the world. There's actually nothing else you can do.