‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.’
“A recent study reported by The Guardian found that our connection to nature, as measured by the presence of nature-related words in literature, has declined by more than 60% over the last 200 years.”
The researchers call this the “extinction of experience.” The less we encounter nature, the less we notice it; the less we notice it, the less we value and protect it.
Coming to our Animal Senses
at the heart of it is the deep question of how we became so distanced from our surroundings, so unaware of ourselves as animals in a living world, as to become capable of rationalising the destruction which surrounds us?
We are born into a civilisation that straightaway tells us that the world we experience with our unaided senses is not really to be trusted, that the senses are deceptive…
Uncivilised writing is as writing which comes from or goes beyond the city limits, which negotiates with the world beyond the human Pale.
[a natural place is]…a community composed first of the particular geological structures and rocks of our locale. The stones and minerals of each place give rise to certain qualities in the soil, and that soil invites a specific array of plants to seed themselves and take root there. Those shrubs and trees, in turn, provoke particular animals to linger and sometimes settle in that terrain, or at least to feast on their leaves and fruits as they migrate through that landscape. Those animals, plants, and landforms are our real neighbours, the folks with whom we need to be practicing real community, if we want to be living well in any place.
in the absence of intervening technologies, we feel ourselves inhabiting a terrain that is shot through with sensitivity and sentience (albeit a sentience curiously different, in many ways, from our own).
I suspect that much of the real meaning that arises in any genuine, human dialogue originates in this inchoate layer, far below the dictionary meanings of our words, where our bodies are simply singing with one another.
the foundation of modern economics, which is bounded in the same assumption that the measurable is the real and that the fundamental character of reality is scarcity.
there’s no way through the onrushing instability of climate change and global weirding without at least beginning to recouple our senses into the larger body of the sensuous, without beginning to tune ourselves and our intelligence back into these larger turnings and rhythms, even as the seasonal cycles, in many places, are beginning to shift.
Sensory perception is like a silken thread that binds our separate nervous systems into the wider ecosystem. Perception, beginning to attend to the shifting nuances around us, taking the time to slow down, rather than speeding up to meet the urgency – slowing down to notice what is actually happening in the local terrain,
But as soon as we allow that things have their own agency, their own interior animation – their own pulse, so to speak – it becomes possible to notice how oddly different these various beings are from one another and from ourselves. If I insist that rocks have no life or agency whatsoever, then I can’t easily notice or account for the way that a slab of granite affects me very differently than does a sandstone boulder, or the manner in which each influences the space around it in a distinct way. But as soon as I allow that that rock is not entirely inert, then I can begin to feel into the very different style and activity of that sandstone relative to the granite’s way of being, or to that of a piece of marble. So this is really a way of beginning to access the irreducible plurality of styles, or velocities, or rhythms of being, of waking up to the manifold otherness that surrounds us, rather than reducing all this multiplicity to one flattened-out thing, ‘the environment’.
Animism:
The assumption and the knee-jerk objection that comes toward us, over and again, is that such a participatory way of speaking involves merely a projection of human consciousness onto otherwise inanimate, insentient materials or beings. This reaction often seems (at least to me) a kind of wilful blindness and deafness to anything that does not speak in words; a resolute refusal to hear these other voices as anything other than meaningless sounds. Humans alone have meaningful speech; the sounds of birds and humpback whales and crickets (to say nothing of the whoosh of the wind in the willows, or even the night-time hiss of tires rolling along the rain-drenched pavement) cannot possibly carry their own meanings! There is no openness to the likelihood that these other sounds are genuinely expressive, and communicative, although they carry meanings that we humans cannot necessarily interpret or translate. Certainly we cannot know, in any clear way, what these other utterances – of redwing blackbirds, for instance, or of an elk bugling on an autumn evening – are saying. But nonetheless, if we listen with our own animal ears, uncluttered with assumptions, then these other voices do move us as they reverberate through our flesh. And if we listen year after year, watching closely the patterned movements of elk, perhaps apprenticing ourselves to the ways of the herd as it migrates with the seasons, then one day we may find ourselves spontaneously hearing, like an audible glimpse, some new edge of the meaning embodied in that bugling call.
