First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Issue 29, Dec. 2002
‘The human mind’, writes educator David Orr, ‘is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by a wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself’.
Wilderness and wildness are different things. One is a physical place, the other a state of being. But when the two meet, when the heart is released to soar into wild mountain skies, something like magic happens. We experience who we really are and we reconnect directly to the source of life itself, an experience that keeps us anchored to our ecological reality.
What if we should lose our wilderness conduit to that reality? What if that reality – bigger than our narrow-minded politics, older than our short-term economics and more complex than our fastest computer – should fall beyond our sensory means?
It’s happened to me twice now in six months. The first time was a few weeks back, out Canadian Canoeing with a friend on one of the Highland’s iced-tea rivers. It was lunchtime and the two of us had the river to ourselves. We had decided to spend a few minutes practicing our paddling skills by breaking in and out of the small eddies that provided respite from the churning waves of the rapid, when from out of the woods appeared a well-dressed young man with an awkward look about him. He attracted our attention from the bank and politely asked if we would “move on”. I must have looked puzzled because he felt the need to expand on his request without any verbal prompt. He explained that the Laird and his “clients” were having lunch, a break out from the days salmon fishing. Apparently, myself and by boating companion were “spoiling his view”. My face must have been a picture of astonishment as he then went on to ask for my sympathy, the Laird’s clients, he explained, had paid £800 a day to fish the pool we were currently despoiling.
We both knew, my friend and I, that there is no law of trespass in Scotland and that we had every legal right to be there. We also knew that an informal agreement had been negotiated for this particular river and that we were obliged to pass through, without spending time playing in the rapids while people were fishing. When we were there people weren’t fishing, and despite feeling aggrieved at being moved on for spoiling someone’s view, we had no issue with the Laird’s unwilling messenger, and so we continued on our way. We consoled ourselves with the childish, but non-the-less enjoyable smugness of knowing that we hadn’t paid £800 a day to enjoy the rivers gushing beauty.
Then, last week I was running a course with a group of outdoor leaders in the Scottish Highlands. Once again I found myself, and this time my whole group too, being asked to ‘move on’. We felt like fugitives caught in an illicit act of wildness. The eviction was met with a wide variety of responses from the group. Some felt anger at the obvious social injustice of being moved off a wealthy land-owners property, while others took a more accepting stance seeking to acknowledge that the contemporary land management practices employed by some of the big Highland hunting estates were to the benefit of ‘all’, the deer included.
It struck me that both these incidents opened an interesting debate in light of David Orr’s statement. There seems to be a hierarchy of rights when it comes to wild places, a hierarchy that tends to exclude not only most of the nation’s populace, but anything that isn’t human too. Amazingly, this access apartheid is achieved regardless of the law, there is a curious passivity embedded deeply in the domesticated minds of the landless amongst us.
So do some of us have more of a right to wild places than others? Do the Scots pines hold dominion over the Silver Birch? Do the Owls hoot orders to the Buzzards? How much land, landscape, wilderness does one human.
The economist Manfred Max-Neef drew up a matrix outlining 36 types of human need. Four of them are material and a further nine could be obtained through having certain material things. The rest – the majority – are needs that materialism cannot supply. Love, intimacy, friendship, meaningful work, spirituality… All these things are basic human needs and they all have the potential to be enjoyed by everyone on the planet, even at a forecast peak population of 10bn, without causing material poverty and environmental destruction. This is the wonderful possibility of our time.
Listed amongst this matrix of needs are ‘landscapes’, ‘intimate spaces’, ‘places to be alone’, ‘tranquillity’ and ‘relationships with nature’. Also listed is ‘equal rights’.
Rights of access have always been an emotive issue in the UK and land reform is in the balance, in Scotland at least. But there’s one argument you never hear in the access debate – that wilderness experience is a vital human need. It’s not just about ‘recreation’. To actively exclude others from wild places is both an act of greed and one of ecological suicide – if reconnecting with our evolutionary wildness is a necessary prerequisite to living sustainably.
As we walked away from that wide Glen, it’s heathery cloak torn with Land Rover tracks and stained with a patchwork of production forests, I realised that this place was once a human ecosystem where people lived within the limits of the land, without destroying it’s inherent character. This was during a time when the deer and salmon were part of the local food chain, not just target practice for a few well-healed men. I realised also, that the presence of humans doesn’t mean a place is not wilderness – wilderness becomes diminished only when the humans that live there seek to dominate it. Manipulating entire landscapes for single-minded, short-term human gain may seem clever at the time, but it naively dislocates us from something that we now all need very badly – our ecological sanity.