Terra incognita and the English garden psyche transposed on the 'American' landscape through 'wilderness'
How wilderness is connected to the English garden, the understanding of what is divinely ordained, and our feeling about wildness as it connects to anthropogenic gardens
I’m preparing for a free talk I’m doing this Sunday online called ‘The Myth of the Wilderness,’ and well, like anything I do, I tend to over prepare, and go down many wormholes to get to ‘the thing’, to weave this tendril of the web to that end of it, in order to make the whole web stronger. Much like the basket-weaving I’ve been doing lately, the more spokes, the tighter the knit, the finer the weavers, the more impenetrable the vessel becomes.
Why teach a class on such a thing? Well, it’s a theme I’ve visited with various guests and co-hosts over the years, as a word that holds a root layer that I keep feeling like we must consistency look at and hold the stories of in order to better grasp why we have the kind of relationship we have with land we do, today.
I’m looking over a lot of the resources I’ve gathered over the years in book form, audio form, essays, news articles and the like. I often feel like I start this kind of conversation, the dialogue around the ‘problem with wilderness’ with the statement of, well, ‘wilderness erases the history of the genocide of indigenous peoples that was needed to take the very created landscapes that are idealized as pristine,’ but there’s more to it than that.
I tend to get into deeper layers, into the deconstruction of the Eurocentric psyche. The older than recent Europe myths of the hermit on the edge of the woods, the lone man in the unknown land of wild things, only with himself and the birds to keep company, and our obsession, is not just an artifact of western culture (I was obsessed with the hermit Han Shan’s writings as translated by Gary Snyder entitled “Cold Mountain Poems” when I was in college, I read them over 20 times). This idea of separation of oneself from society in order to be more wise somehow, or more masculine, or more holy is also embodied in the archetypes of the ‘east’ as well. In this cultural curiosity is a notion that society is an entity that exists in one place and the wilds and nature somewhere else.
I originally started exploring this when I studied Philosophy and Religious Studies in college, where I read texts like ‘The Ecology of Eden,’ (I still carry around with me all of the time) by Evan Eisenberg which includes essays within it exploring the notions of earthly paradise, and culturally created cues of what are good and bad landscapes depending on how they invoke a somatic response within the subject, viewer, or traveler.
The disgust with barrenness or draw to a sense of beauty within a landscape that is lush has everything to do with the current social context from within that landscape or place is viewed.
This book has essays entitled:
“The Marriage of Grass and Man,’ a piece on wheat,
‘The Mountain of the Gods: Canaan: The heart of the World is Wilderness,’
‘The Tower of Babel; Mesopotamia: The heart of the world is the city,’
‘Storming the Mountain: Gilgamesh and Enki: The triumph over nature and its bitter, or salty aftertaste,’ (I promised I’d be doing some commenting on the story of Gilgamesh and the ancient art of animal entrail divination reading soon, and I will be),
‘The Walled Garden: Persia: What the garden walls out, and how its pattern soothes the divided soul,’
‘Leaping the Fence: Sun King and Ice Age; coal, capital, colonies, and the English landscape garden,’
‘Westward in Eden: The real American experiment: A direct relation, culture be damned,’
and so on.
One the pieces that has stuck out to me since 2007 when I first read it was the one on English gardens. I’m from Virginia, which is a place very much like a second yet slightly ‘wilder’ England. All is partitioned off, cultivated, pruned and preened, with some forest in between. Public land, a modern American construct of legally set aside ‘wild space’ is few and far between. At least in the Piedmont and the coast. Virginia is irredeemably, in some regards, domesticated. Sure, there’s deer, coyotes, hurricanes, even bobcats and rare black wild cats or ‘jaguars’, as my dad even swears he has seen one. There are wolves along the coast in the thick mosquito and alligator laden dark watered Cypress Swamps, where some of the only old growth lies in the region.
Despite this, the culture of the English, colonist conquerors of Turtle Island (not the only ones of course, the Dutch, Spanish, French and the Scot-Irish the English enslaved had their way all the same across the continent), especially set their psyche on Virginia. I was especially interested in the English Garden psyche because my dad was a horticulturist, so were my grandparents, and I grew up with the culture of outdoor aesthetic being hyper-focused on neatness and order. Boxes and rows. ‘Clean.’ The beds has to be mulched just so with the grass beginning and ended right here (and yes, the piece on man and grass, and in other parts of the book, also focus a ton on the obsession with the lawn as associated with fear of the wild), the Boxwoods - wood shrubs in the Buxus genus in the Buxaceae plant family, a very popularly planted, squarely pruned, and slow growing (with amazing carving wood) ornamental across Virginia. We would vacation trip to Williamsburg, one of the first settlements in Virginia created by the English laden with cobblestone streets of handmade red brick, old Live Oak trees hang low with thick evergreen leaves, neat little woven streets with handmade fence, and proper gates, you might as well be in England. My dad would love these trips, often to view the gardens. The gardens that had been there for hundreds of years.
In ‘The Ecology of Eden,’ the English garden was broken down to this: an obsession with control, keeping the wild out, neatness and order, the border between the scary unknown outside of the fence and the centrality of the known safe universe within it.
This archetype became hyper important when European settlers, varying in their garden psyches, came across the pond and started to traverse the unknown of the ‘New World.’ After all, on the outside of the fence, was a jungle. Was a landscape in disarray after disease had already swept through and majorly decimated the populations of indigenous tribes across the east setting their societies in disarray and the lands less managed (read 1491, by Charles Mann, to get this history and conversation laid out as it also related to ecology, in great detail). There were native folks out there, living in that ‘wilderness’, the land and the people both feared and revered (we’ll get more into the whole fear and revere thing in a minute, and also will go more into in the class, if time allows). The English garden, the lawn, the neat lines and boxes of the perfectly pruned hedges guaranteed that the colonists could see what was immediately around them, maintain a sense of supposed control, bring some of home with them to the new world of no-order and no-control.
We have to remind ourselves that these cultural lenses exist everywhere, out there, within us, within the institutional frameworks of the world we live in, and often go unanalyzed, unseen, and just accepted, without digging deeper into why.
Its a simply fact that the English colonists, or the Spanish, or whoever you’re talking about who came from Europe, didn’t just bring their bodies and weapons, but brought their culture, religion, traumas, orientations on land. I mean if they didn’t then why would they have been motivated to pillage the indigenious peoples on Turtle Island in the first place? If they didn’t bring their cultural understandings of what it means to be an advanced human, or what it means to tend land, then why would they have acted in good moral faith the way they did?
Manifest destiny in some ways, for many people, was God-ordained. It was God’s will to give this land to white settlers, and since they were superior, in their own eyes, then they deserved to have it at all costs. And yet, before industrialization, nature was a matter of God.
What does this have to do with wilderness? A lot. The psyche. The somatic response.
Wilderness in some ways was formed over time as a concept of ‘a place untrampled by people’ because of the creation of something that felt completely opposite: the industrial society. During the industrial revolution, people went from peasants toiling on the land, at least touching dirt, tending landscapes seasonally, with some concept of commons, to the advent of capitalism. Capitalism transformed life itself into a commodity, and also distorted time into this construct as well. For the ‘pagan peasantry’ the only choice was to go to the city, it was forced upon them in some ways, as land ownership as we understand it today was created and wielded by the rich, and then used to have power over, both the people who knew the land and also the women (The Caliban of the Witch, by Silvia Federici retells this loss of commons as it is associated with the advent of capitalism and the oppression of women’s bodies) or the animals (beasts they say). The industrial city was created. Manufacturing. Babylon in its distorted transformation of eating the earth alive (I’m telling you, Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian supposed hero, and the Heart-Eater Monster of the Nez Perce…have everything to do with all of this) took another shape.
The city became the life of the common-folk, the servitude of the masses, who toil away to make enough money to eat, to pay for the space to reside and sleep, to just work some more, while being forced to separate their daily toilings from the land directly itself.
There is a bigger conversation sure, here about the advent of agriculture, where did things go wrong, and how its not so neatly and linearly laid out (my interview on the podcast several years ago with friend Kollibri terre Sonneblume on the Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wild tending was all about this history, I recommend you listen, here).
It became a privilege to then ‘go back out’ into the wilds, into ‘nature’ which now is an entity easily divided from man, or the doings of civilized folk.
Civilization was seen as better, more evolved, and at the same time, as it translates over to Turtle island (as after all, the colonizers brought their culture, their systems and hopes and dreams over here and put it all over the land), civilization was also seen as a bore. As feminizing. And if patriarchy reigns (and it does, and has for awhile and why is another story) then anything seen as feminine according to the cultural interpretation of feminine, is well, weak. Ever heard someone use the word ‘pussy’ in a way that connotes weak? Well yeah, those people are pieces of shit. And yet, again. Culture. Lenses of normalcy. It’s also also cultural to see gender as binary or non-binary, that these archetypes of masculinity and femininity are divinely ordained and objective truths, and well they are not. They are subjective. The now created ‘nature’ as an entity, object, place that exists out there, in a binary, and is given many archetypes. It’s masculinizing in the sense that facing the unknown makes one, more tough somehow. And toughness is associated with power, masculinity, ego. It is also yet feminizing because it is a place where one inherently becomes more connected with the watery flow of the goddess, the womb, the mother. The dark earth and yet the fierce unknown. The nurtured seed and the bravery. What are these symbolizing really?
Wilderness embodied in the American psyche affected by the colonizers that stole land that was never really owned by anyone in the begin with, who came from Europe with their English gardens fleeing from industrial society and religious persecution, just created their own version of the same thing, right on Turtle Island and beyond.
In a short period of time, the westward ho of ‘manifest destiny and ultimate demise’ (words I have often used together in poetry over the years) made for some time of mythmaking. The frontiersmen who ‘founded this country’ were gloried for their heroic conquering of the wild, the tough fur trapping, the brave loneliness and self-sufficiency. This time, was romantic, and romantic as a word that can mean lots of things, but in this case, a fantasy. The continent seemed endless. This is talked a lot about in The Ecology of Eden as well, this sense in the minds of colonizers that the ‘resources on the land’ were endless and therefore they need not have any sense of control. And while we know know these things are not endless, we still operate in the psyche we inhabited when we were trying to discover the west. The frontiersmen went bravely west in droves up the Missouri River on their canoes into a seemingly endless maze of wild chaos, and were revered for their fulfilling of an amorphous archetype, the lone man in the wilderness.
Wilderness was vast. Supposedly unpeopled lands in the minds of those approaching them, were spaces that had potential, for both heroic ego boasts, self-reflection, but also extraction, exploitation, and the potential for making infinite dreams of possibility come through. The existence of possibility embodied in wild land, was taken for granted. The journey itself, ate itself. The mapping of the Missouri, the discovery of so-called untouched lands, imploded the very fantasy of their existence. Even Lewis and Clark, who’s whole journey was about bringing information from the new world back to St. Louis and Virginia, came back, and were never able to fully adapt back to society, back to the city, to the world of the fences and hedgerows, the pruned boxwoods and English gardens.
This psyche thing expanded as Europeans encountered deserts and didn’t know what to think of these barren and worthless landscapes in their eyes— as filtered by the English garden, so the weren’t even worthy of God, or respect, or the people on them any sense of humanity. Well, we still mine the fuck out of places in the desert, in part because this meme still exists: these wild places are not worthy. They are sacrifice zones.
I see this written about and broken down in two books that speak to it through the lens of maps, and the inherent cultural distortion that comes with mapmaking: ‘Mapping and the Imagination in the Great Basin’ by Richard V. Francaviglia, and ‘The Void, the Grid and the Sign’ by William Fox. Both document the psychological process as it translates into collective culture, the group-think involved in how we completely conceptualize place as meaningful, beautiful, tended, valuable or even comprehendible and especially through cartography. The ‘wilderness’ of the void, the vastness, the inability to comprehend the speciality of the openness, the Great Basin, one of the vastest and loneliest deserts on Turtle Island, is seen as both a place of utter destitute and also romanized as the last place one can truly be alone and unbothered by the ills of society, full of beauty and awe.
And well, I’m guilty of feeling and experiencing both of these somatic embodiments in relation to this landscape, and I’m actually aware I’m doing it. This is what is happening with wilderness.
Wilderness is both the romantic ideal of a pristine place unbothered by society, unpoisoned. And, also a place to fear. Fear and revere. And yet, instead of merging the two, of joining human and nature, we actually reinforece it even deeper by creating a divide that doesnt neeed to exist, between land that is sacrifical and not. Between good land and bad. And the bad land being places that human, modern European humans, have imposed industrial society on or don’t see as valuable or worthy of care.
So, we know it is wrong, yet we do it anyway, and we guilt our peers, our children, our kin, when they question the commodification of nature.
Of ourselves, our own bodes.
Our own relationships with one another.
What do you have to offer me? A child?
Another human to bring in the world to be a cog in the wheel? breeder? a mechanized machine?
A career that gives you clout?
An ability to hustle within a framework imposed on us to survive?
What is the forest thinking, the spirits of Humbaba’s Cedar grove, that Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut down despite many options to build the phallic palaces of greed, ego, power and control.
The forest spirits cry.
Enkidu after being ‘tamed,’ was depressed, and longed for his wild kin again.
For his feral nature.
More on this story and how it translated into the story of our greater society, and how it perhaps can also parallel coyote stories that go back over thousands of years— in another post.
The thing is, the wilderness never existed.
There’s not much land that isn’t influenced by people. Because, we are nature.
Many things are happening at once with this concept. A longing for a world that didn’t get fucked up. Longing for a fantasy world that never existed. An erasure through the Eurocentric lens of the English garden of the intricate anthropogenic and co-created landscapes of Turtle Island. The entire continent was filled with landscapes that humans, who are animals and intelligent beings, co-managed to create the realities they wanted. To meet the needs of a living being. Fire was wielded, roots were dug, seeds were gathered and moved, bulbs and tubers tended and transplanted. In fact, it doesn’t really make sense that this didn’t happen. This kind of tending, this kind of understanding of land management was almost invisible in the psyche of those worshipping the English garden. The land seemed unkept. The indigenous people doing nothing. This land was God ordained, given to good Christians, apparently. They deserved it, because they thought they knew best.
“This tendency to delineate—that is, literally draw solid lines around—something whose edges are not really stationary is characteristic of the cartography of western exploration. Drawing these lines empowers not only the mapmaker, but also the sponsors and the readers of the map. Lines delineate a feature for posterity by fixing its position. Moreover, by fixing its position we not only indicate it as if it were permanent; we also claim knowledge of the feature and this position ourselves as claimants. This in turn may lead to a taking or control of that feature in both a scientific and a political sense. In actuality, one should regard lines on maps with considerable suspicion. Lines do not really exist as fixed in nature, yet cartographers, by their simply applications, portray a stationary world that awaits exploration and ultimate conquest.”
— quote from “Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin” by Richard V. Francaviglia
Private land, is indeed, a cultural construct, and a harmful one, ultimately when wielded like an imposition of the other side we’ve created: nature.
Wilderness is on one side of the white picket fence, and the places of people, Babylon and industry are on this other side of the fence.
The English garden set in between as almost a space of liminal reality, a portal of Forsythia, Boxwood, Bradford Pear and cultivated Rose, growing just right, just prunable, cleanable, seeable, manable to the anxious European psyche.
And yet, we crave the wild unknown.
Again, I’m guilty of all of this. When I go back to Virginia, where my ancestors have been for many many generations, the English garden is ripe in my psyche, a space that feels suffocating and yet orderly, known and certain. Easy. Understandable. Yet boring and bland, without vibrancy, connection, feral diversity. There’s no color anywhere. No sex bleeding on everything. Skirts below the knee. Tea sets and ‘weed-less’ lawns. It is familiar, yet, I feel, not myself. Not really alive. The Virginia countryside is like the English garden between the cobblestoned cities of manufacture and the wildness that lay west, just past where the hills turns to mountains and where the culture became about living how you want, without the government hovering. The sense of understanding of where the ‘government’ lives is also interesting in all of this, as in the west, it is seen as… it lives somewhere over there in vague space of the east, in the cultivated lands, in the urban sprawl, with the men who know nothing of the rugged resilience in the west and who are ‘feminine’ and ‘weak’ and who also know nothing of what it means to wrangle coyotes and trample in the rattlesnaked dust of the wilderness.
The understanding of wildness as ‘self-willed’ is also fraught with complicated layers.
What makes a living being self-willed and truly wild? Is the dandelion in the controlled garden wild or not? How do we see it, truly better and more nutritious than what is grown in the garden, or a nuisance we can’t seem to get rid of?
All of this to say, I’m teaching a one hour free class on this Sunday, introducing folks who come out to these ideas at least some of them to a certain level, and will continue to be having ongoing conversations on the podcast about how ‘wilderness’ and ‘wildness’ as we understand them today, in the culture on Turtle Island and also now across the world, affects how we conserve land, advocate for land, connect with land, and see ourselves in urban environments. It affects how we see our medicine, food and beauty. Words do matter, and each word and its story is a universe holding multitudes of cultural transformation. What would our world look like without cell phones? Without private land, or the enclosure of the commons? Drawing lines to create wilderness is just a curious as the lines drawn to fence in the English garden. The physical constructs that wilderness creates, literally directly affects the maps of our everyday lives. The maps we draw, affect how we see land. (Read a piece I wrote many years ago on Maps and Names that got cited by some bigger journals during that time)
I’m closing the chance for folks to sign up tonight or tomorrow morning, as I’m already a little overwhelmed by how many people are on board (almost 60 as I type this!) and I think any bigger might be a riot, especially over a convo like this. I’ve gotten used to teaching on my own at this point, or with various collaborators, but that many people still is a little nerve wracking.
I am also offering a 3 part study group though, where we will get a chance to dive a little deeper into this and related topics, through Terratalks - folks can sign up here. I’m trying to limit the group to 12 folks. Some of the readings I cited here I may be including in the course, as well as reference to other resources that will guide our exploration together in this set of meetups.
Here are the three readings for the free class I sent out to folks who signed up thus far ( and if you sign up right now, you’ll get these linked in your inbox) if you wanted to look further and not attend the free gathering:
William Cronon - The Trouble with Wilderness
Claudia Geib - How 'Wilderness' was Invented Without Indigenous Peoples
Dina Gilio-Whitaker - The Problem with Wilderness
Enjoy. and I’ll see ya there if you signed up. Probably a little nervous. There’s so much to all of this. But it’s ok.
How do you conceptualize wilderness?
Do you feel there is good nature where you live, or a lack of it?
Do you feel free or hemmed in on the landscapes where you live? Why?
Comment if you want.