Wilder Lives by Duncan Brown

A Book Review by Ian Cox

Wildness is traditionally defined in the negative as not domesticated. However, this distinction is becoming fraught as our planet becomes increasingly domesticated and wildness becomes the exception rather than the rule. Duncan Brown takes us on a personal journey where he examines what this means to him as a human being, as an academic working in the arts and as a trout angler.

I found this to be an intriguing and elusive read even though I have thought deeply on many of the issues he deals with. Being a lawyer, probably does not help. We are trained to reach conclusions based on our assessment of fact and principle. But this is not that type of book.

Duncan Brown does not advance an argument. He reaches no conclusion save to say that we need to think more about wildness and that doing so has enriched his understanding of what wildness means to him. This book describes a journey of the mind and while it is elusive at times it is also refreshingly nonjudgmental.

This is a serious academic work that benefits Duncan’s occupation as a Professor of the Arts. However, this is not an academic tome either. Duncan has broken his journey down into bit size chunks with each chapter dealing with a different aspect of the journey. But what makes the book even more accessible are the frequent breakaways to how this journey impacts upon his real life as a trout angler. Thus when looking at Wilder Lives he recounts his forays into wild trout territory in Rhodes and Somerset East. He uses these experiences to interrogate what he has learnt about wild.

This resonated for me as I have fished the places he writes about and have had the same experience, especially when fishing in Somerset East. In these trout based interactions with wildness he suggests that wildness is not so much a case of wilderness, as a place unimpacted by mankind, but rather one where human impacts such as the introduction of trout, are respected and celebrated because they can survive in the wild.

In this Duncan deftly crafts a subtle distinction that both celebrates wildness while turning traditional South African beliefs of the superior merits of biotic nativeness on iheir heads. It is an important distinction that speaks to a gentler more natural interaction ecosystems and the human environment. And, that in many ways is the joy of this book.

It is not an easy read, but it will sneak up on you if you keep at it. By sharing Duncan’s journey and thinking about it, your perception of the wild and wildness and our place in the wild will also “be invigorated, expanded, reoriented” by thinking through, about, into ‘the wild’ and ‘wildness'.