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Wildness

7 November 2024

7 min read

It’s getting harder to be wild in this world

We’ve trapped and tamed wilderness into a commodity.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Against a night sky a lit up face is blurred by the camera movement.

Under a Dartmoor night sky.

Yousef Salhamoud on Unsplash.

Some while back, my husband rearranged the books in our house, making sure that they were grouped together by theme. We have a lot of books, and there are now themes and sub-themes. It was quite an operation. Within the nature-related books, he created a separate shelf for books that have ‘wild’ in the title. We joked about it, but it made me think about how I’d noticed ideas of ‘wild’ pop up in lots of places in recent years: on clothing and stationery (with leaves or words like ‘keep growing’ printed), in shop windows (furniture displays draped in plastic greenery and fake animal skins), on social media (there are accounts that have ‘wild’ in the title connected to farming, conservation, publishing, personal development, coaching, poetry, business, and more), and in book shops (of which we apparently have only half the stock).

A quick online search on the topic of wilderness quickly leads me to conservation initiatives and statistics on the state of nature, but it also leads me to nature connection experiences, wild swimming, wild camping, soul work, and more. Wilderness becomes a pliable and hard-to-define term. It can relate to the natural world, to wildlife and natural spaces that have avoided human domination. It can also relate to the inner world, to spiritual experiences or to isolating and challenging times. But however you approach it, wilderness – inner, outer – seems to be having a hard time.

In recent months, wild camping has come under the spotlight. Dartmoor is the only place in England where wild camping is legal, and this this access helped to form me: as a teenager I hiked and camped with friends, encountered Dartmoor ponies trying to steal our food in the night, stomped through bogs and wolfed down boil-in-the-bag meals as the sun set. As an adult I’ve camped alone in a bivvy bag, my soul singing back to the Milky Way shining above me. Now, these experiences feel as much in need of protection as the nature they depend on, since a wealthy landowner decided to try and prevent people from undertaking this ancient practice of sleeping under the stars. The court case is ongoing, but it has highlighted the fragility of our access to nature here in England. Just 8 per cent of English countryside is accessible, and 3 per cent of rivers have an uncontested right to swim. Now, the last remaining right to sleep under the stars is under threat.

It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

We live in a time of crisis not just of the state of nature, but also of how we experience the natural world. In a recent study of nature connectedness, Britain was ranked lowest of all the countries surveyed. Our biodiversity is in crisis and so is our ability to encounter the natural world. This feels heightened by a way of being in the western world that sees us all living in our individual houses, working hard to pay for them, shuttling children and selves through schedules, spending fewer and fewer hours outside and with each other.

And this is not just a problem ‘out there’, because inner and outer landscapes are linked. It is unsurprising to me that in the UK at least, levels of good mental health, biodiversity, and access to nature have all been in decline. Disintegration of one is, I think, deeply connected to disintegration of the other.

These linked crises feel further threatened by the trapping and taming of ideas of wilderness, wrapping it into trends and materialism, commodifying it. There are some brilliant and essential initiatives helping to re-wild our inner and outer worlds. But there are also offerings that use wilderness imagery and the freedom and adventure associated with it to sell products and services, or as backdrop to human endeavour, or as a destination or resource for our consumption. I think a commodified wild can get in the way of the actual wilderness we need both externally and internally. This commodification is, I think, affecting our understanding of what the wild is and why it matters. It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

If real wilderness is everywhere but where we need it right now, how might we re-find it – in the natural world, but also within ourselves and our communities? Answering that question is work that many people are focused on now in all kinds of ways, and a short essay cannot begin to offer a full response. I will write more on this topic. But the question I have in mind at the moment is, how do we invoke wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world? – a physical landscape that is being stripped of nature, but also a social landscape that can often diminish our humanity. Perhaps a simpler way to ask the same question is, how do we not just survive life but get excited about it? – How do we love ourselves, our neighbours, and creation enough to deeply and truly care for these things?

Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything.

There are of course structures, systems, and powers that need to change so that people can move out of mere survival, and so that the wild world is restored. I am not exploring those things here. Here, I want to simply share three things that lately, have energised my ability to feel the love, the excitement, and the desire to cherish and protect our hearts, our relationships, and the generous world that hosts us all. Perhaps by reawakening these things, we might find motivation and sustenance for tackling structures and systems.

First, I have been noticing what my young daughter notices. The light shining off a puddle; the way an ant crawls on her hand; the bright silver moon in the sky. I have never struggled to access the exhilaration of the natural world, but seeing through her eyes, I am doing so again. Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything. The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich saw the wonder of the world, and God’s love for it, in a single hazelnut. She recounts her visions in her book Revelations of Divine Love. Sometimes connecting with the specific can help us see and face the global.

Second, there are authors who help me summon wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world, and in a future Seen & Unseen piece I’ll take us on a tour of some of those I love the most. Some of the authors are ancient. In Psalm 78, I read “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them”, and “…they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.” If sin is a kind of disconnection, perhaps our disconnection from creation might lead our gaze to turn inward, and to land on things that do not call forth the best of humanity, rather than the wonder of each other and the world around us. That we are able to forget wonder is something we must remember and work to counter.

Third, I have been thinking through the encounters that have most exposed me to wilderness of the world and of my soul and of relationship – both the uplifting and the challenging. Encountering the vastness of that shining and vertigo-inducing Dartmoor night sky; encountering others in relationships that have helped me slip my skin and enter their unknowability and fragility and beauty; encountering contexts that seem too broken for repair and yet still light enters in. It is in these encounters that I first found God dwelling, and when I followed his trail, I noticed that throughout the Bible there are many people who experience the challenges, joy, and lessons of the wilderness. Wilderness is not just beauty – it can also be unknowable, disorienting, scary. For 40 days in the wilderness, but also in the beauty of the lily of the field and birds of the air, Jesus is right there with us, showing that God can meet us in beauty and barrenness, in wonder and in despair. Again and again in the Bible I see how God loves the world, how he calls it constantly to life through resurrection, through re-creation, through that three-in-oneness of father/son/holy spirit, of self/other/world, of body/encounter/mystery.

Now, I think our souls and societies might benefit from investing in relationships first conjured in Eden: with a garden, with a human, with God and the mystery he points us to. These things feed each other; when one suffers so do the others. As we face a disintegrating and increasingly commodified natural world, a mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness, I think we are being called back to that garden, and to the kinds of wildness it made possible. I’ll look forward to exploring these themes more.

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

9 July 2024

6 min read

When America presses in on you

A returning American feels the heat generated by contesting ‘realities'.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A runner passes a church and a flag in an America suburb, under billowing clouds.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

There’s a man. Running. My eyes snap into focus. Time slows - I catch his pace. Then, my eyes start widening. An odd feeling. Being forced into it. Seconds stretched out into minutes. Taking in more, looking for more, looking down that sidewalk, on a street corner in New Jersey.

Before? I was sitting there. In the backseat of my Uber. Winding our way through New Jersey. And I’m sitting there, tired, mindlessly scrolling my phone until that moment. He’s there running.

And I see him. T-shirt. Running shorts. And I’m sitting. And—a nervous flash—he’s running. Why?

And my eyes adjust, widening, scanning, checking detail, and I’m almost seized. My mind shaking itself, coming online, no more automation. My consciousness catches up: “you’re in America,” I tell myself.

Right. I’m not in Scotland. And that man is running. Here in New Jersey. In America. And I’m talking back to myself in this silent car. I’m watching him run. I’m asking why am I slowing this down? And—it flashes—“running from what?”

And I catch up to myself. To what I was trying to say, that people in America run from shooters, too. A wave crashing, sitting in the back of the Uber, and look. Now I’m really looking. Not forced. But naming. There’s other pedestrians passing him, walking. Slowing. On the other side of the street— no fast movement. No screaming. No pops.

I start breathing. I didn’t know I stopped. He’s out jogging. The automated safety check ends. The tranquility of tyranny resumes. I’m sitting in the back of an Uber. I make a note. Be more alert at the train station.

—

People ask me how the relocation back to America has been. And I don’t know what to tell them. There’s a wide gap between the visceral sense of it all pressing in on you, and more common—but also abstract—analysis.

The experience of coming back has been oddly particular. I lived in Scotland for three years, and most of it was spent studying America. From that distance, the broad strokes of American life, the larger trajectories and dangers of our shared political decisions and religious extremism, well, they’re a bit clearer.

But coming back, America presses in on you. And the only way of talking about that, maybe, is specificity. Kerouac was always good at articulating this. His America wasn’t the rise of the military industrial complex in the 50s. It was the road, the gas station on the way from Denver, it was jazz, the dim doorways of San Francisco bars. I’m thinking of Kerouac, but also Langston Hughes. Poets and artists who in their own time, held a mirror up to America, helped us move from the “I” to the “we” as Steinbeck said.

We’re all asking a version of “what’s wrong in America?” (And, do keep asking.) But to ask that question often assumes the broadest strokes, the ones that are most clear from a distance. Which means they are, in one at the same time, the most abstract.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.”

Asking after democracy, after the election, and the increasingly nebulous “the church” — I’m convinced that answering “what’s wrong in America?” in the biggest of terms is leading me to (wrongly) believe that responsibility lies among the gargantuan free-floating concepts which we use to narrate our world. As if solving the “crisis of democracy” is a conceptual problem. When in reality, it is concrete, and involves more than coalition building or political activism.

Why more? Because the choices Americans have made over the last 10 years originate from imaginations which limits the scope and scale of what is possible. This is what I mean by “America presses in on you.”

Coming back to America has made this clear. I’m more aware than ever that we can produce good answers and generate compelling analysis about America without ever asking in what way these answers or analysis are sharp enough, concrete enough to puncture the bubbles of social reality in which people choose to live and in some cases are forced to live.

These realities are everywhere, and no where. They are the air we breathe. They appear to the privileged as “logical” and to the powerless as “inevitable.” They press in on us all in their own way.

In some cases, they dull our senses. We say, “as long as our Amazon deliveries continue, as long as the streaming services work.” In some cases, they don’t just press in on us, but press down and perpetuate injustice. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, “where are the responsible ones?”

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes.

Do I care about democratic machinery? Yes. Am I concerned about whether or not the church is, in fact, the church, and not a gear in a partisan machine? Yes. But I’m increasingly convinced that responsible living in the American situation becomes most clear, most evident as we consider the large in terms of the small.

Responsibility emerges with attention paid to the concrete and intimate. January 6 is the subject of my dissertation. But before that, in the months leading up to January 6, I was a pastor just 40 miles from DC. For me, January 6 was a local event. That particularity, that specificity, is a window into a concrete responsibility.

And now, back in this same community, I found myself distracted in a church this weekend. The man in front of me raised his hands in worship, revealing a revolver hanging on his belt. What America is this? But also, what Christianity is this?

The visceral shock of return is ongoing. And it hits me in strange ways, on Uber rides and in worship. American life is everywhere and I’m seeing it with different eyes. And I wonder what it will take to break the spell of our most cherished illusions, of a certain type of freedom — one that tells us it is Christian to raise our hand in surrender to a god who we say is loving enough to save the world, but seemingly not strong enough to deliver us from our evil.

In the end, perhaps it’s best to say that it’s been proof of a good ruining. After all, we’ve experienced nothing short of a conversion, a move closer towards peace, towards hope, that unsettles all our strategies of security and comfort underwritten by violence and oppression. This is the kingdom of Heaven. Something Jesus announced that continues to unsettle and disrupt the likes of T.S. Eliot who put it well in Journey of the Magi:

We returned to our places, these

Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old

dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods

I should be glad of another death.