There’s something beautiful about the simplicity of a wild camp. Fetching water from a stream, lighting the stove, making a bed and preparing food. The well-planned wild journey will include plenty of time for such camp craft – for the art of simple living.
This simplicity includes taking extreme care to minimise our impact on the landscape. All packaging must be carried out, dirty water from washing or cooking drained into a ‘cat hole’ away from water courses and – the biggest issue in minimum impact practice – all faecal matter must be dealt with according to the type of ecosystem and season that you find yourself in. These examples are acts of care that are all part of the ritual of wild living, they acknowledge the sanctity of wild places and they represent an ethic of humility and respect.
There are many lessons to be learned from living this way. We carry only what we need and are unhindered by superfluous clutter, we tidy up after ourselves, we use our bodies and minds harmoniously allowing us to experience the fullness of human being. And we have time. Time to watch the clouds, listen to the wind, feel the rain, and smell the earthy scent of wildness.
We find too, that we can live well without television, electricity, cars, central heating and computers. We meet our vital material needs simply, choosing to forfeit luxuries in order to fulfil more social, aesthetic and often spiritual needs. And, for a time, we live within the limits of the ecosystems in which we travel.
Living simply, so that we rejoice in actively nourishing the soul without being distracted by the empty frivolities of modern life, is to actually change our identity. We can come to realise that while we do need some basic material things, we certainly don’t need most of the things the majority of us have – the things we all too often use to define who we are. When we burrow down through the layers of status symbols and “labels” we meet our true selves trying to surface, a self defined not by what we own but by our relationship with the Earth.
Identifying our simple needs is very hard in a culture of hypnotic consumerism, but it can easily be done in the mountains where being away from the madness of the mall and banality of television can cut through the debris of industrial culture and bring us back to our senses.
Another way to explore these vital needs is to imagine that you must leave your home forever. You are on foot, no car and no bicycle. What would you take with you? I always end up with approximately the same list that I would write preparing for a journey into the mountains… with the addition of a book or two. I also imagine my own family and friends having to leave their homes, faced with the biting realities of global warming, polluted water, failed oil supplies or nuclear terrorism. What, I wonder, would they take with them? It’s a sobering exercise and one that cuts rapidly to the quick of vital needs. Of course, the most important things we would take with us are each other, and I for one, would head for the hills. The truth is that people and landscapes are more vital to a meaningful life than any amount of goods and services.
Working with groups in the outdoors I am always encouraged by the quasi-religious fervour of minimum impact practice. I have witnessed debates about lighting fires that have lasted a whole week; I have seen middle-aged executives on their knees scouring the tussock for discarded matchsticks, jumping up in glee when they find one. I have passed through campsites only a week after staying there with a group of ten people, to find myself unable to locate the fireplace, or where the tents were pitched. We are excellent at minimum impact, we have, after all, been practicing this nomadic art for the best part of 40,000 years.
But when we get back to the car park, it’s all over. With that matchstick tidied away in our packs, we jump – often alone – into our luxury fossil fuel guzzling cars and drive sometimes hundreds of miles home. The next day we put on the blinkers and submerge ourselves back into a culture that does more ecological damage per second than could be ameliorated by a lifetime of minimum impact practice, by every outdoor enthusiast the world over.
So why bother? Well, there are several reasons. While minimum impact practice limited only to wilderness areas may be depressingly inadequate on a global ecological scale, it still helps keep wild areas free from the wear-and-tear of human use in the short-term. More importantly though, living lightly in the wilderness provides an experience that can be taken from “out there”, back home – it is transferable and experiencing it in wild places provides a powerful opportunity for exploring the irony of failing to live lightly at home too.
But most important of all, minimum impact practice describes a life-philosophy that honours the simple vitality of living itself. It focuses us on our vital needs – which are often those concerned with our relationships with people and places, and with matters of the heart and spirit.
Practicing minimum impact can finally become a Zen-like art. At one shallow level we take care of the wild places where we recreate out of a feeling of responsibility. On another, deeper level, we perhaps learn to take the lessons of minimum impact home and to apply them to our everyday lives. But deeper still, we can realise a kind of “satori”, a kind of awakening, a sudden moment of insight where we see ourselves and the Earth as inseparable and co-dependant elements of the same massive system of life.
With this awakening, feeling “environmentally responsible” is superseded by a form of intuitive self-preservation. In the same way that we do not feel responsible for jumping out of the path of an oncoming juggernaut, we live ecologically, knowing at the deepest, instinctive level that to do otherwise is suicidal. But while we are defending ourselves on the one hand, we are also connecting with the great, all-powerful flow of life on the other. A connection of truly spiritual proportions.