by Corry Shores
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Wildness occurs in many places. It is composed of the denizens of wilderness -- eagles, moose, and their botanical coinhabitants and all of the species whose sexual assortment and genealogy have not been controlled or set adrift by human design or captivity. But it also includes those species who have been cohabitants with domestication -- house sparrows, cockroaches, and ourselves. (142c-d)
The savage mind is ours! We may be deformed by our circumstances, like obese raccoons or crowded, demented rats, but as a species we have in us the call of the wild. (143b, emphasis mine)
The loss is usually spoken of in terms of ecosystems or the beauty of the world, but for humans, spiritually and psychologically, the true loss is internal. It is our otherness within. (143c)
We discovered that our own inner otherness -- fundamentally perceived as a reflection of the outer forms of life -- when bereft of wildness was no longer infinitely mysterious and beautiful and diverse. (144bc)
Domestication is a kind of alchemy whose animals reshape the character of people who have tamed them. Remembering that the opposite of wild is not civilized but domesticated, the best in ourselves is our wildness, nourished by the wild world. To be in a community with crops is to feel like a crop, to have the edges all dulled, our diversity muted. (145b)
parcels of wilderness that restrict the random play of genes, establish a dichotomy of places, and banish wild forms to enclaves where they may be encountered by audiences while the business of domesticating and denuding the planet proceeds. The savage DNA is being isolated and protected as esthetic relics, like the vestiges of tribal peoples.My wildness, according to this agenda, can be experienced only on reservations called wilderness, but cannot be lived daily in ordinary life. (145c, emphasis mine)
To the indigenous people of the Australian outback the terrain is not a great three-dimensional space, not a landscape, but a pattern of connections lived out by walking between places and performing rites that link the individual in critical life stages to sacred places -- places that become part of an old story told, sung, and walked through over generations. To be so deeply engaged in place and myth is for most of us today a great hunger. (145d)
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