The Renewal Movement: Loving the Whole Spectrum from Wilderness to Wildness Justice In the late 1960s, several “Big Ten” environmental organizations passed up an important opportunity to connect with social justice movements. As civil rights hero Cesar Chavez and his United Farmworkers (UFW) fought to ban DDT in California, environmental organizations such as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club chose not to join the farmworkers’ struggle against the human rights and ecological dangers of pesticides. Moreover, both the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club chapters in California’s central valley included chemical industry executives on their boards. As the UFW reached out in solidarity, major environmental organizations focused instead on more landbased issues, such as challenging excessive mining and logging in desired wilderness areas (Pulido, 1998). In that moment, environmentalist missed the chance to build coalitions across class and cultural boundaries. Now, as the United States quickly approaches the culturally wonderful moment of being a country with over 50% people of color by 2050, the American environmental movement can no longer afford the luxury of overlooking social justice and human rights issues. Today, how might we avoid the mistakes of earlier environmental movements who overlooked social justice connections? What common values merge wilderness and social justice movements? I suggest, at least in the US, that a shift from “wilderness” to “wildness” is the key. But what is the difference between “wilderness” and “wildness”? First, what is wilderness? The United States enjoys over 44 million hectares of designated wilderness areas. “Wilderness,” in the United States, refers to “self-willed land” on which landscapes are zoned to keep industrial activity and motorized vehicles out. Such zoning policies enhance the core habitat necessary for biodiversity and provide space for spiritual transformation. These spaces are vital to a just and healthy world, and should be protected and expanded with rigor. But how do we also find and fight for “wildness” in all of the places in which all kinds of people live, work, play, and pray? What is “wildness,” if not synonymous with “wilderness”? “Wildness” captures more than the “selfwilled” hectares of wilderness zoning. “Wildness” is, as Aldo Leopold put it, “the capacity for selfrenewal” of any being, system, or community. In his famous Sand County Almanac he stated that “the weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cowpasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.” As early as 1925, he asserted that wilderness “exists in all degrees, from the little accidental wild spot at the head of a ravine in a Corn Belt woodlot to vast expanses of virgin country. . . . Wilderness is a relative condition.” Here Leopold speaks of what the poet Gary Snyder called “wild process.” Rather than focusing on the type and character of land that constitutes “wilderness,” he focuses on the process by which all places renew themselves. The wildness of a being, system, or community, including the whole spectrum from a wilderness area to “a city lot” can be found to the extent that each place can renew itself. Wilderness is “self-willed” land. Wildness is the basic ability of anything living to renew itself. If wildness can be enhanced, found, and fought for anywhere, then what would a “wildness movement” look like? A better way of putting it: what would a “renewal” movement look like, since “wildness” is defined by “the capacity for self-renewal”? And how might such a renewal movement
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connect social justice and wilderness movements in a way that avoids the failures of the Sierra Club to do so with Cesar Chavez fifty years ago? In my recent book Wildness: Relations of People and Place, co-edited with Gavin Van Horn from humansandnature.org/wildness, I observed the exciting diversity of a “renewal movement” based on the process of wildness. It showed the potential of wildness-as-renewal for uniting previously divided causes. Wildness brought together leaders and thinkers from wilderness movements, as well as sustainable food and environmental justice movements: •
In terms of “wilderness,” reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone enables the land to renew itself without excess human control to keep deer populations from overgrazing flora vital to biodiversity and soil stability. Moreover, wilderness enhances human renewal. Leading thinkers such as Roderick Frazier Nash and Robert Michael Pyle speak to the humbling and elevating power of experiencing “self-willed land” for its own sake. Nash, in particular, speaks to this in a video we made in conjunction with the book: https://youtu.be/bw2zS7p_wrE • In terms of sustainable food movements, authors such as Devon Pena and Laura Watt speak to the human place in co-producing biodiversity (ecological renewal) through continuing with traditional food practices on the land (cultural renewal). Both speak to this “keystone species” capacity of deeply rooted cultural food practices in Wildness videos: o Pena: https://youtu.be/rw4YmUFS5G4 o Watt: https://youtu.be/WGHpe1kfFPE • In terms of environmental justice movements, which challenge the disproportionate impact of environmental exploitation on the poor, people of color, women, and the developing world, leaders such as Michael Howard and Mistinguette Smith discuss ways in which social equality leads to greater environmental conservation, and vice versa. For example, when Michael Howard restores lead contaminated soil in a predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago, he renews prairie habitat for hawks and coyotes in the city. Just as importantly, this restoration project also renews the capacity of people in that place to drink clean water and reconnect their spirit with the healing effects of natural systems. Both Howard and Smith discuss the renewal of cultural life through renewing ecological health in their Wildness interviews: o Howard: https://youtu.be/2ub0PI_IF7w o Smith: https://youtu.be/p3Ao44lnFIU Renewal, renewal, renewal! Whether it be new predators renewing the balance of prey populations and diverse vegetation, or cultures sustaining traditional diets in a way that renews biodiversity, or leaders in the inner city renewing habitat in a way that renews the vitality and dignity of inhabiting a home, social, cultural, economic, and ecological renewal everywhere is the future of wildness, and the future of a culturally diverse environmental movement. When the European Wilderness Society inspires us all to declare “Let’s Get Wild!” we must immediately ask ourselves, “which cultures and places are included in our definition of ‘let’s’? How do we expand who is included in our vision of ‘let’s’?” Let’s, all of “us” and in all places, get wild!
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