My main essay from Black and Green Review no 2.
Full essay posted here: BAGR2: To Speak of Wildness
Wildness is a complicated concept.
Its critics have conflated wildness with Nature, a move that obscures intentionality with conventional shorthand. From the very start, proponents of wildness have made a decisive choice in this language. What is being lost in the shuffle is that if you hold an ecological perspective, that the presence of wildness is hardly a means to supplant god/s, but indicative of the connections that we, as wild beings, share with the world. It’s an exploration of empathy, not an apathetic move to remain enthusiastic by-standers like conservationists.
The purpose isn’t to evoke wildness as an aesthetic, but as continuity, as our baseline: this is the ground that we are standing upon and it is worth defending. That the word is indefinable speaks to its complexity, it demands engagement.
So why use it?
There are many reasons not to use a word or to avoid naming altogether. Wildness, at least how I experience and conceptualize it, is sacred: that word is an indicator, not an encapsulation. That would be a good argument for leaving it even more obscure. But the problem then comes down to intentions. If I want to discuss civilization with anyone, this is my baseline, my reference point: wildness is the attainable and lurking reminder that we were not meant to live civilized lives.
Wildness, as the term is often used, transcends space and time: unlike wilderness it is not a place and unlike nature it is not external. Wildness is reflective of a continuum. Sure enough, hippies and New Agers may have tried touching on it and self-help gurus might delve into the term,[11] but there’s a degree of inescapability to that. Words travel. As recent attempts to completely own and market rewilding have highlighted, you can’t control the usage, but you can contribute to the context.
That is not a minor point. Anthropologist Hugh Brody saw it as a more practical observation in terms of the age old question as to whether language shapes the mind or mind shapes language: “a person can explain how a word is used and what it refers to, but the word’s meaning depends on knowing a web of contexts and concealed related meanings.”[12]
That the term wildness can be written off isn’t an indication of how the word itself is reification, our abstract representation, because all words are arguably reifications. The difference is in the context. Should wildness be defined and corralled into a trap of stagnancy, then the context, that flowing, organic, struggling and ever-presence that defies reflection, would be another matter altogether.
Like domestication, it’s easier to know it when you see it.
The problem is that we aren’t seeing it.