The Earth in spasm
IS WILDNESS OVER? By Paul Wapner Polity Press (2020, 147 pp.)
Wildness has a will of its own. Wildness is unpredictable, capricious, dangerous. For most people, wildness is uncomfortable, and over centuries we have taken great efforts to control it — to master it.
Many in the world, namely the affluent, possess control over their environment, such as having the ability to buy food in a grocery store, flip on a switch for energy and turn on a faucet for clean water; they have access to education and the internet. Many people, writes author Paul Wapner, a professor at the School of International Service at American University, who spends half the year in Taos, “have sent wildness into hiding. For them, wildness is over.”
But is it? We know from dire developments across the globe, like climate change, mass extinctions and loss of biological diversity, economic precariousness and public health crises, that suppressing wildness in certain pockets of privilege only displaces it horizontally, to those most vulnerable — creating what Wapner calls global wildness. Wapner emphasizes, in this slender, alarming study, that “over 7.7 billion people and countless living organisms and ecosystems” bear the brunt of man’s relentless mastery of wildness.
And in the end, even wealth and privilege cannot insulate one from wildness — as Wapner notes, “the feral now haunts everyone.”
The author moves briskly through the stages of modernity as “humans domesticated and packaged the world,” from the time of the agricultural revolution to the “capturing” of fossil fuels, mostly for the benefit of the elites. Ironically, or perversely, the more wildness was harnessed, the more it was displaced, also vertically, in the form of the buildup of greenhouse gases and the accompanying ecological catastrophe that “now threatens planetary integrity.”
In the wake of runaway climate change, humans continue to dream of mastering control of the Earth through methods of geo-engineering, for example, and de-extinction, or cloning extinct species, which Wapner walks the reader through. But these efforts only underscore how homo sapiens persist in needing to reign supreme — and it is the height of hubris.
Wapner instead urges “rewilding,” both in terms of wildlife conservation efforts (establishing cores and corridors, and reintroducing carnivores) and a literal taking the foot off the gas pedal — rethinking convenience that we all take for granted. Moreover, rewilding involves embracing a “wild ethics”: instead of depletion, aim for sustaining, instead of hierarchy and conflict, aim for compassion and common humanity.
An excellent bibliographic essay concludes his work, offering a wealth of books for further reading, from Thoreau to Aldo Leopold to Bill McKibben to Elizabeth Kolbert, especially helpful for schools and students.
Wapner, who leads summer workshops at the Lama Foundation for environmental activists and professors, gears his concise, pointed work toward the general reader. He recognizes that it is too late even for a wake-up call — we have all heard it. Only a spur to emergency action will save our Earth, because what is the alternative?
Rewilding involves embracing a ‘wild ethics’: instead of depletion, aim for sustaining, instead of hierarchy and conflict, aim for compassion and common humanity.
THE EMERGENCE OF FRANK WATERS: A CRITICAL READER Edited by Alexander Blackburn and John Nizalowski
Irie Books (2020, 311 pp.)
Frank Waters (1902-1995) was among the first wave of Anglo writers (born in Colorado Springs, his grandfather was part Cheyenne) to choose Taos, and New Mexico, as a spiritual Indigenous center that would eventually prove mankind’s redemption in the wake of worldwide war and genocide. Two scholars offer a compendium of studies on the extensive body of work
of this foundational Southwestern author, who made his home mostly in and around Taos since 1937 and whose novels, philosophy and histories explore the mystical, unknowable properties of the region and its people, from authentic Native portrayals in “The Man Who Killed the Deer” (1942) to his sojourn among the Hopi in “Book of the Hopi” (1972) to his memoir, “Of Time and Change” (1998).
An engineer by reluctant profession, Waters worked variously as a junior engineer for Pacific Bell Telephone Company in Imperial Valley, California, in the 1930s, when he wrote his first novels, and an information specialist in the 1950s with the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, where he witnessed dozens of atomic bomb tests. In one essay here, Vine Deloria, Jr., calls him a prophet and explorer. Unlike his contemporaries, Waters did not head off to become a European ex-pat writer, but found his rich vein of literary ore in the Southwest he knew and loved.
In these essays, scholars Blackburn (Colorado Springs) and Nizalowski (Colorado Mesa University) — joined by other academics — explore many facets of Waters’ life and work, from autobiographical portrayals in his trilogy “Pike’s Peak” to his geographical rootedness to ethnic portrayals (José R. Martínez asserts that Waters is “el abuelo of Hispanic literary characters”) to his mythical, Jungian perplexity. Blackburn’s superb discussion of Waters’ “The Man Who Killed the Deer” articulates how the theme of emergence, a kind of reconciliation between reason and intuition, dominates that Taos Pueblo novel.
Welcome explorations of “America’s greatest unknown writer” will surely direct readers back to Waters’ own writings.