Mentors on Wildness

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"When we chain and confine all our wild country, eliminate the free-roaming animal life, then there will be no space left for that last wild thing, the free human spirit."

"In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in 'Hamlet' and the 'Iliad', in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us."

"In short, all good things are wild and free…Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet."

"Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture."

"That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten."

"There are enough mild dull eyes of domestic brutes that we have bred from bird and beast to make them part alive and partly dead. A thousand generations in a cage makes a helpless thing."

"Thoreau says 'give me a wildness no civilization can endure.' That's clearly not difficult to find. It is harder to imagine a civilization that wildness can endure, yet this is just what we must try to do. Wildness is not just the 'preservation of the world,' it is the world."

"Freedom is opportunity to make choices and decisions and to formulate them into action, ---unrestricted, uncoerced, independent, sovereign. Freedom requires self-determination, whether the involved entity be an individual or social group. Freedom exists when the individual or social group has an unrestricted opportunity for self-expression, ---physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually."

"Each right is accompanied by a proportionate responsibility. Men who have a right to choose have also a duty to fulfill, and this right and this duty are inseparable."

"At the root of all war is fear."

"The most exciting breakthrough of the 21st century will occur not because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human."

"We are all human beings now, standing in the rubble of a destroyed literate society, looking at the ruins of education, family, and child protection. Technology has destroyed inter-relations in the human community that have taken centuries to develop. The breaking of human beings' connection to land has harmed everyone. We are drowning in uncontrollable floods of information. We are living among dispirited and agonized teenagers who can't find any hope. Genuine work is disappearing, and we are becoming aware of a persistent infantilizing of men and women, a process already far advanced."

"If you listen carefully enough to anything, it will talk to you."

"The infantile atmosphere of modern society---its gluttony, instant gratification, and simplistic values, its unwillingness to risk or endure, its lack of a cosmology that recognizes limits and otherness---continues to demand that living things be cartoons, warm and lively in their imagery, preferably projected by or seen as electronic and mechanical devices."

"It is a universal maxim, that the more liberty is given to everything which is in a state of growth, the more perfect it will become."

"In industrial Japan it's not that 'nothing is sacred,' it's that the sacred is sacred and that's all that's sacred."

"We are grateful for these microscopic traces of salvaged land in Japan because the rule in shrines is that (away from the buildings and paths) you never cut anything, never maintain anything, never clear or thin anything. No hunting, no fishing, no thinning, no burning, no stopping of burning; leaving us a very few stands of ancient forest right inside the cities. One can walk into a little jinja and be in the presence of an 800-year-old Cryptomeria (sugi) tree. Without the shrine we wouldn't know so well what the original Japanese forest might have been but such compartmentalization is not healthy: in this patriarchal model some land is saved, like a virgin priestess, some is overworked endlessly, like a wife, and some is brutally publicly reshaped, like an exuberant girl declared promiscuous and punished. Good, wild, and sacred couldn't be farther apart."

"The main episodes of war---cooperative murder---can be seen in caged or stressed predators of any kind. But among neither free living animals nor hunting-gathering men is war an inherent trait that was at sometime in the past a regular part of daily life. Among all carnivores, individuals occasionally kill other individuals. Sometimes it is an accident of uncontrolled rage, but usually it is the outcome of a chronic disturbance that has led to instability in group competition… when a group is threatened by disintegrating forces such as sudden mass mortality, acute deprivation, alien invasion, unusual climatic events, widespread health or nutritional disorders, or the failure of important social and religious institutions, it normally reacts with genocide and war."

"The attempt to control nature is at its heart the attempt to control other persons. Human freedom is not the freedom to control nature but the freedom to be natural…One cannot be free by opposing another. My freedom does not depend on your lack of freedom."

"If the world's air is clean for humans to breathe but supports no birds or butterflies, if the world's waters are pure for humans to drink but contain no fish or crustaceans or diatoms, have we solved our environmental problems? Well, I suppose so, at least as environmentalism is commonly construed. That clumsy, confused, and presumptuous formulation 'the environment' implies viewing air, water, soil, forests, rivers, swamps, deserts, and oceans as merely a milieu within which something important is set: human life, human history. But what's at issue in fact is not an environment; it's a living world."

"The spiritual gift on the inner journey is to know that creation comes out of chaos, and that even what has been created needs to be returned to chaos every now and then to get recreated in a more vital form. The spiritual gift on this inner journey is the knowledge that in chaos I can not only survive, but I can thrive, that there is vitality in that chaotic field of energy."

"Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions. The reason is that the people who create those things cannot--even for a moment--free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness."

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world…as in being able to remake ourselves."

"We were talking about the possibility of a coming transformation, which in many ways is already in motion. But I don't believe this new transformation can harmoniously proceed without integrating the Big Three." (Plato's the good, the true, and the beautiful; or morals, science, and art) "The dissociation of the Big Three was the gaping wound left in our awareness by the failures of modernity, and the new postmodern transformation will have to integrate those fragments or it will not meet the demands of the twenty tenets--it will not transcend and include; it will not differentiate and integrate; it will not be able to evolve further; it will be a false start; evolution will erase it."

"Sitting quietly doing nothing spring comes and the grass grows by itself."

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, we greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complex than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

"When Adam finally passed on, he left humankind his legacy of mapmaking and boundary drawing. And since every boundary carries with it political and technological power, Adam's bounding, classifying, and naming of nature marked the first beginnings of technological power and control over nature. As a matter of fact, Hebrew tradition has it that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge actually harbored knowledge not of good and evil but of the useful and the useless--that is, technological knowledge. But if every boundary carries technological and political power, it also carries alienation, fragmentation, and conflict--because when you establish a boundary so as to gain control over something, at the same time you separate and alienate yourself from that which you attempt to control. Hence the Fall of Adam into fragmentation, known as original sin."

"The study of chaos has provided a seemingly paradoxical insight: that rich kinds of order, as well as chaos, can arise - arise spontaneously - from the unplanned interaction of many simple things."

"Early in his career Paul Shepard gave up writing and thinking about wilderness landscapes as a key to our sense of nature. He felt we had been corrupted not only by domestication but also by the conventions of nature aesthetics, where we had been steered by Freud's psychology depicting us as creatures destined to suppress sexual or combative urges. Nature, Paul asserted, has been oversold for four centuries as an aesthetic as opposed to a religious experience--even the spiritual uplift of wilderness is burdened with our egocentric human purposes. When wilderness became a subject matter in art, the criteria of excellence became technique. In such a context the real landscape is objectified and distanced through photography or landscape painting or, for that matter, through nature writing. As a consequence of this abstraction of nature as art, masses of people who are not interested in art analysis regard the extinction of animals, destruction of old-growth forests, pollution of the sea, and the whole range of environmentalists angst as 'elitist'."

"Here is the constant danger we face in domesticating any species: We extinguish traits without any foreknowledge of what those traits are likely to be. In our arrogance, we think we can control nature, but in fact we begin a haphazard and often unpredictable course of events that can have dire consequences even for humans - as we are learning to our peril when it comes to disease and parasites in genetically altered animals."

"The word wild is like a gray fox trotting off through the forest, ducking behind bushes, going in and out of sight. Up close, first glance, it is 'wild' - then farther into the woods next glance it's 'wyld' and it recedes via Old Norse villr and Old Teutonic wilthijaz into a faint pre-Teutonic ghweltijos which means, still, wild and maybe wooded (wald) and lurks back there with possible connections to will, to Latin silva (forest, sauvage), and to the Indo-European root ghwer, base of Latin ferus (feral, fierce), which swings us around to Thoreau's 'awful ferity' shared by virtuous people and lovers."

"There's a land where the mountains are nameless, and the rivers all run god knows where."