"Wildness Returning" By RedWolfReturns It's Friday afternoon and I'm doing paperwork in the office--filling out dozens of forms to prove to my boss that I'm doing the job I get paid for. In reality, all the papers show is that I spent most of the day doing paperwork in the office. Across the room, I overhear two of my co-workers discussing their retirement accounts. "Only fourteen more years and my life is mine" one of them mentions with a dark hint of sarcasm. Glancing at the clock on the wall, I notice the workday is nearly over. Another week is gone and it's time for the weekend. On the bus ride back to my apartment, I fantasize about getting out of the city and maybe going camping. My thoughts carry me away from the bump and jerk of the bus with its faint mix of diesel fumes and people smells to the last time I sat around a fire with friends, breathed fresh air and wood smoke, slept under the stars, and awoke to a sunrise heralded by birdsong. The daydream ends when I remember that tomorrow I need to take my van in for repairs. On top of that, my apartment really needs cleaning and I've got laundry piled up. I console myself with the thought that I'll still have time to catch a movie with my best friend tomorrow night, and I resolve to call another friend I haven't seen in weeks, to see if she might be free for breakfast on Sunday. On the walk from the bus stop to my apartment, I stop at the grocery store for a frozen pizza and a six-pack of beer. Later, the empty discomfort I experience in the silence of my studio is washed away by the flickering light and canned laughter coming from my TV and the buzz entering my brain as I finish my third beer. During a commercial, I hit mute on the remote control and stare blankly out the window. I find myself thinking…just what is reality? What is the truth of my life? Fast-forward several years, and I'm fishing along the shore of a glassy lake surrounded by deep green forest. I have no idea what day of the week it is and no reason to care. The sun is tracking low in the west, telling me it's time to rejoin my campmates for our evening meal. My gathering basket contains five good sized pan fish, one for each of us. Today, things have gone my way and my wild relations have been generous with their gifts. On the way back to camp, I stop at a meadow to gather a few spicy wild greens (Peppergrass and Wood Sorrel) to accompany the fish. I notice tracks in the soil telling me that Black Bear has passed by here today. My senses heighten, and I notice more signs that tell me what Bear was eating. As I continue on, I spot Porcupine lounging in an overhead Aspen, lazily munching a branch. In the distance, I hear the call of a Loon. As I approach our primitive camp the smell of wood smoke and sounds of spontaneous laughter tell me my campmates are already back from their day's activities. I join them around the fire where we share food as well as stories of another day's adventures, joys and hardships. Milkweed greens, Burdock roots, and Nettles are added to our meal by two of my campmates, one of whom used his bow-drill to provide the fire at which we sit. Another contributes some Clams gathered at a distant lake she was exploring. Our fourth campmate gifts a large basketful of Raspberries for dessert and a story of his brief, but powerful encounter with the very same Bear whose tracks I noticed earlier. We discuss the signs left in that area, and realize Bear has drawn our attention to an herb we hadn't noticed before. We kick around ideas as to what family the plant belongs to, and plan to ask our elder guide about its edibility the next time he visits. Near the end of our meal, we consider how the wind shifted toward dusk, and surmise that tomorrow is likely to bring rain. From the darkness, the distant howls of Coyote drift through our consciousness as we bed down for the night and prepare to enter the mysterious world of our dreams. I am sometimes asked--what is the difference between civilization and wildness? My most succinct answer is this; Civilizing is serious work. Wilding is serious (and by serious, I mean at times deadly serious) play. Why is this? How can this be? The answer is simple: we evolved since long before the beginning of time (and certainly long before the beginning of civilization) to enjoy doing what we needed to do to thrive in the company of our wild relations. Our feelings originated to guide and motivate us toward balance in the primal inter-play of hunting and gathering. These relationships formed us into who we are as a "species" over countless generations prior to the relatively recent development of farming, industry, and urban life. Our healthiest pleasures in life come from doing what is most natural to us. Look at many of the activities that we civilized people know as "recreation" and the connection becomes obvious; camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, gardening, canoeing, kayaking, skiing, running, walking in the park, playing games outdoors, and the list goes on. Even the mall walking & shopping impulse harkens back to the pleasure of a day gathering in the wild, and one must ask if our draw to the flickering light of television had its origins in sitting around the fire hearing the stories of our clan's elders. All the activities we enjoy were first born in the daily life of primitive hunter-gatherers. In fact, the languages of indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples rarely have words to separate the experiences of "work" and "play". When people live naturally, the daily activities of life are most often done for the pure enjoyment of living. Now the ramifications of this are profound and far-reaching. Doing work (i.e. "forced labor") requires that we subdue our deepest inclinations--that we act contrary to our own innate will. Every moment that we spend working, one part of our mind must maintain control over all the other parts of us who wish that we were playing instead. Therefore, one of the most prevalent desires in our society is to either escape work--say by winning the lottery or retiring, or to somehow reconcile work and play as our primal ancestors did--to get paid for doing what we love and feel is deeply important. Some in our society are able to realize such dreams, but most are never able to do so--instead, they live lives of "quiet desperation" under the yoke of their daily forced labors. Their spirits die slowly as the years pass toward retirement, and once retirement finally comes, most are already too worn out to enjoy it. The same principle exists in the dynamics between us and every other creature we relate to through domestication. Every moment that we labor to subdue the earth, one part of the ecosystem (us) must maintain control of everyone else (animals, plants, insects, bacteria) who prefer to play their own games instead. If we cease our constant effort to maintain control over our environment, then life goes back to playing. What this all means for the big picture is that the domesticating process is akin to rowing upstream, whereas the re-wilding process is akin to flowing downstream. Just like water, nature flows into open space--and industrial / agricultural civilization destroys far more than it creates, which is to say, it opens space. So, just as water always naturally flows downstream, rewilding is always happening--even if at only the most subtle levels. Ants, cockroaches, mice and rats begin re-invading suburban homes as soon as the exterminator leaves. Weeds spring up in lawns immediately once herbicides and lawnmowers are no longer applied. Mono-cropped farm fields sprout weeds just as quickly as do suburban lawns and attract "vermin" even quicker than suburban houses. At this moment, wild animals are invading farms and cities all across North America. Clear-cut forests re-grow themselves with equal tenacity--in fact, the North Woods of Wisconsin (where I live surrounded by wilderness even as I write this) was almost completely clear-cut to build the city of Chicago just over a century ago. Grey wolves are now returning to areas from which they were once exterminated--new sightings are occurring in both northern Colorado and northern Wisconsin as wild populations extend their ranges further and further south. Red Wolves are returning to small enclaves in the south-eastern forests after enduring more than two decades when their only surviving members were doing so in captivity. Now my point is obviously not to say that all is fine and well here on planet Earth--because of course, it isn't. The environmental devastation wrought by modern industrial civilization is readily observable and should be obvious to anyone who has honestly looked into the matter. My point here is merely that despite the industrial machine's relentless holocaust, wildness has not surrendered nor is it on the retreat--in fact, it has never been on the retreat (being beaten back is not the same thing as retreating). Wild-Life continually springs from the cracks and fills every void available to it because it is essentially at play. And so similarly, human re-wilding can, and should be an essentially playful and joyful process. Wildness returns because it is the way of Joy, the way of Kinship, and the way of Spirit. Wildness returns because it IS the Circle of Life and death--it is life worth living and death worth dying--and more life springing from each death. In a land of domesticated, stagnant & wasting spirits, wildness returns because it is Life at its most essential and vital--it is Life in the Raw. It returns because in a land dominated by make-believe and illusion, it is Real. It returns because it is always here and it is always now. Wildness returns because it is inside us. It is the core of our being. And I believe the signs of the times are that wildness is getting ready to return BIG TIME and IN FORCE. The Mayan calendar indicates that the age of corn will come to an end in 2012. What is the age of corn in the Mayan version of history? The age of corn is the age in which the Mayans live by their staple agricultural crop. So what could possibly bring an end to the age of Mayan agriculture? Three words: abrupt climate change. The Mayans have already watched their kings & cities fall once due to changes in the weather. The end of the classical period of powerful kings and city-states collapsed during one of the more significant climatic abnormalities of the last 10,000 years. It would stand to reason then, that the old Mayan sages may have had particularly good insight into how climate is capable of undermining civilization. Recent developments in the field of paleoclimatology have given scientists a radically new picture of our Earth's climate history. The orthodox view until recently was that the Earth's climate had always been and would continue to be characterized by stability. This was based on the (now outdated) understanding that past climatic change had happened slowly, with minor blips taking thousands of years and major changes taking tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Discoveries in the last decade however, have revealed that stability has only characterized the last 10,000 or so years of Earth's history (the period in which agriculture developed). For the 100,000 years prior to that, the Earth's climate continually underwent wild swings, often on a time-scale of mere decades (for more on this, read Richard B. Alley's "The Two-mile Time Machine"). Such a climate made the development of agriculture impossible, and a return to such a climate would seriously undermine the practice of agriculture worldwide (for more on this, read Brian Fagan's "The Long Summer" and "Floods, Famines, & Emperors"). In other words, the last 10,000 years of Mother Earth's "domesticity" have been a relatively brief interlude in the life of THE archetypal "wild woman". If the Earth's climate goes wild again, it will very likely take us with it. In fact, the Mayan practice of farming is far more stable and climate-change-resilient (due to the use of a diverse blend of hardy heirloom varieties of corn) than what is being practiced by countries dominated by modern industrial agri-business. Modern hybridization and mono-cropping have seriously undermined the genetic diversity of mainstream global food crops to the extent that all of our agricultural staples are now endangered species from a genetic diversity perspective (see chapter seven of "Earth in the Balance" by Al Gore for more on this). Since it is the genetic diversity of a species' population that enables it to adapt to and survive changes in its environment, modern mono-crop farming practices are a sure recipe for disaster when set against the possibility of an unstable future climate. Industrial agriculture is already beginning to see diminished returns in its ability to control disease through antibiotics, bugs with chemical insecticide, and weeds with chemical herbicide. This is happening at the same time that chemical fertilizers have become less and less capable of replenishing the soil. Soil depletion as well as plagues of resistant weeds, bugs, and disease are all on the near horizon for modern agriculture, just as they have plagued farmers in the late stages of every civilization throughout history (for more on this, see "A Green History of the World" by Clive Ponting). Genetic engineering and chemicals can only forestall the inevitable and will ultimately make the return to balance that much more violent & traumatic for all those involved. In other words, if Mayan agriculture goes down, you can bet Con-Agra™ is going down. On top of this, we add the looming problem of peak oil. The modern industrial economy basically turns oil into food--in fact, it turns oil into nearly everything we need for life--food, transportation, clothing, shelter, heat, etc.. The growth of our global economy is contingent on pumping more and more cheap oil out of the ground year after year. However, growth does not continue forever when it is based on the availability of a non-renewable resource. Global oil extraction is near the verge of peaking, and once that happens the growth of the global industrial economy will begin to reverse itself into precipitous decline (read "The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies" by Richard Heinberg for more on this). Put together the three factors of; #1 the onset once again of a radically unstable climate, #2 industrial mono-crop agriculture's precarious lack of genetic diversity and inherent unsustainability relative to soils, disease, insects, and weeds, and #3 peak oil, and you get a recipe for not only the end of the "age of corn", but the end of modern industrial agriculture worldwide. Certainly such a collapse is not going to happen overnight--in fact it will likely take a few decades, perhaps even a century, to fully play itself out. However, the beginning of such an end is certain to be right around the corner--and if any credence is given to prophetic Mayan sages, the date for entering that turn may very well be right around the year 2012. So what do we do with the knowledge that civilization cannot deliver on the future it promises? The future it tells us we must sell our present for? Quite simply, we opt out of the rat-race and its false 401K promises. We start living our wildest dreams now. We get together, cut out the middle-man (i.e. work-for-pay) and learn to live directly from the land. We begin to align ourselves with the playful forces of nature and the returning flow of wildness. We enable this wildness to return in ourselves, in our communities, and throughout the earth--both in small cracks within civilization and in larger tracks on the edge of civilization. We then create opportunities for others to follow with us as the spirit of our authenticity and wildness becomes contagious. How do we do this? First of all, we begin coming together to learn how to live in direct and primal ways. We re-learn the circle way of the clan. We learn to hunt and fish and forage and scavenge. We learn to make our own clothing, shelter & tools directly from what Mother Earth provides. We give ourselves the chance to acquire a taste for the experience of an authentic, intimate & sharing relationship with each other, the land, and its wild life. (For a few examples of people coming together to do this, see: www.teachingdrum.org or www.wildroots.org) We can do this in National Forests, Wilderness areas, BLM lands, State Parks, and private lands. We can do this on the ocean and along the coast (using kayaks or sailboats). We can do this anywhere there is a blank space on the map or a dandelion growing between the cracks. As we come together, we respectfully ask the spirits of the land to re-create our character as people once again. Our primary teachers will be our wild relations, the earth, and our own deepest instincts and intuitions. Of course, we can also learn from indigenous people in this process, but we need to keep in mind that our purpose is to live practical lives close to the earth. Appropriating cultural symbols that we likely don't properly understand is not only hurtful to indigenous people, it is also a waste of our time. (For a good example of how to connect in solidarity with indigenous people see: www.survival-international.org) In addition, we can help to facilitate the same process on the Land itself through support for visions similar to the Wildlands Project (see www.twp.org, pick up the magazine "Wild Earth", and read the book "Rewilding North America" written by Dave Foreman). Then as more wild land opens up, more space is created for wild living. In this way, re-wilding the people can support re-wilding the land and re-wilding the land can support re-wilding the people. This is true solidarity with the wild, to be wild ourselves. Now is the time for us "working people" to learn to play again-to learn how to play with our fellow humans and all our wild relations. Right now wildness is playfully returning everywhere…will you come outside and play? Generations have seen centuries pass, perhaps millennia, since the particular Friday that opened this story. The People live wild as they seem always to have done--indeed, as all Life seems always to have done. But the elders occasionally tell stories (usually when a youth is about to embark on the passage into adulthood) of how some of the ancestors once got caught in a trap set by their own minds and briefly fell from balance. They tell of how much suffering and confusion this all caused, how Mother Earth purged herself of the imbalance, and how their wild kin led those first few seekers back into the fellowship of their Relations.