I have been hiking a lot recently. Mostly because I go back to the child mines on Monday, a job that precludes me from taking off into the woods for three hours on a random Tuesday morning. Partly because the local silviculture plot just opened up 700 acres for public exploration (with the caveat "do not enter unless you have orienteering and wilderness experience," because there are absolutely no signs and the trails are more suggestion than direction), and to me that's just a backyard.
Gremlin, a bona fide City Boy, loves a good hike but is a novice in the ways of Forest. He is one of the people at whom the "do not enter without wilderness experience" warning is aimed. He is always amazed, when we hike, that I can name nearly any plant he points to.
(Aside: No, I can't. I can reasonably guess the *family* of nearly any plant. Gremlin somehow thinks this is akin to knowing an individual species and its backstory, when really it's more like knowing the city someone lives in but not their neighborhood, street, or house.)
So I was out yesterday, climbing a trailless hill steeper than a flight of stairs, face to face with a whole lot of autumn olive and Japanese barberry(FN), trying to get into the head of folks like Gremlin - people who are amazed I can see the trees when they only see forest.
Because that's it, I think. Many people walk through wild places and see "tree, tree, more different tree, plant, plant, other plant, shorter plant, plant almost the size of a tree," and so on. I see "black walnut, red maple, some kind of cedar, Virginia creeper, garlic mustard, wintergreen, bindweed, spicebush."
I don't see an undifferentiated mass of plant. I see friends. Familiar "faces." Living things I know, with whom I live in some sort of relationship.
I have spent much of my life despairing at how to explain my love of, and connection to, wild places. I joined the environmental law club in law school only to be heartbroken at how many people were in it for capitalist land management reasons, not for conservation ones. How even the classmates interested in working for the Interior Department saw land as a commodity to be used, not a living thing to be protected or even cooperated with.
I couldn't articulate that heartbreak for decades, though - not until my recent hikes. It's because I see wild places as vast, interconnected, vibrant neighborhoods of beings living in community with one another - and becoming stronger for the competition they do create.
I see it in us, too. In my non-hike time I have been catching up on the last twenty years of nutrition science. Among other things(FN2), the science is confirming what I long ago embraced as a spiritual truth: Humans are not separate from the Earth and all other living things. We evolved alongside, relying upon, everything else in the ecosystem. The Earth supports an abundance of life, including us. We are neither better nor worse than the plants or the animals. We are all in this together, from the forest mycorrhizae upward.(FN3) The more we humans act like we're somehow special, above the rest of the living things, able to dispose of all else as we like, the more we imperil ourselves.
It's too easy for humans to do terrible things to anyone we deem "not a person." My deep love of wild places stems from the fact that when I go out there, I see the plants and animals (and fungi and arthropods and lichens and molds....) as people. Not human people, but not "mere things," either. I recognize them. I am among community there. It's the same reason I let so many things grow in my garden that my neighbors would call "weeds." This is our community.
Perhaps if we all had more community with wild places, we wouldn't be so quick to think we can pull them to pieces for profit.
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(FN1) Plant people In The Know are thinking "wait, those are invasives." Yes. The silviculture plot lets them invade, as much of the research there focuses on how we grow trees in the ecosystem we *have*, not the one wa *had.* There's an old-growth research forest a couple counties over where invasives are aggressively removed, because there the goal is to understand the forests we *had*.
(FN2) Things like "nutrition and exercise are still framed entirely as individual choices, yet we live in built environments, economic pressures, and marketing/propaganda traps that constrain our choices at every turn, then blame us whether or not we aggressively buck those constraints." Which is a whole nother post.
(FN3) You owe the mycorrhizae your physical existence, by the way
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