A Brave New Wild

A new report entitled ‘Count the cost of 2020: a year of climate breakdown’,  published by the charity Christian Aid, has once again highlighted the existential crisis we face from Climate Change. Unsurprisingly, the burden falls disproportionately on poor nations, like Bangladesh, where the 2020 floods covered almost a quarter of the land area of this beautiful but blighted nation.

The world’s 10 costliest weather disasters of 2020 saw insured damages of $150bn, topping the figure for 2019 and reflecting a long-term impact of global warming.

These disasters claimed at least 3,500 lives and displaced more than 13.5 million people.  In fact, the true cost of the year’s climate-enhanced calamities was far higher because most losses were uninsured.

Paul Wapner, in a brave and pithy new book called ‘Is Wildness Over?’wrestles with the question – probably the biggest question humanity faces – “what is to be done?”

It explores the three main ways of framing this question, namely the economics of dealing with mitigation and adaptation: the technical solutions and the ethical response via human rewilding. But his premise is an unusual one for many of us who situate our thoughts and lives in this knotty problem. He argues that we are living at a time when wildness increasingly encroaches and subsumes our lives – like the current impacts of the global pandemic, and the growing influence of climate change. Wildness from this perspective refers to the unwieldly or wicked character of the more than human world. As he enumerates the etymology of the word wild suggests something which is self-willed, even perverse: one which expresses itself as part of its own unique dynamics. Wildness also finds a place in human affairs like war or the social and economic complexities of Brexit. It even impacts on the chaotic behaviour of large crowds in sporting events or demonstrations. All of which are characterised by unexpected dynamics and take on a life of themselves and for most of us it spells fear, peril, and danger, which we detest and try to avoid. During the Holocene humanity sought progressively to avoid the unpredictability of wildness by immunising themselves from fluctuations in weather – in their dwellings and their food production systems and more recently using cars and aviation to travel long distances. There are many more examples in the book of our attempts to minimize wildness; one of the biggest being economic globalisation enabling manufacturing and distribution to avoid the vagaries of  localised weather and the availability of base materials. But economic globalisation  has wreaked a plague of unpredictability on the planet and its inhabitants  -as Wapner argues the feral has remerged!

So does technology have an answer along with those who promote it, the so called” Earthmasters”. They argue that by  harnessing some forms of geoengineering by disciplining the atmosphere itself  or to reverse biodiversity by genetically engineering evolution could offer a solution, but only if adopted at a global scale and in a manner analogous to how our “convenience culture” got us here. They see this as a further step in the human mastery of our planetary biogeochemical systems.  But this book argues from a hugely different perspective. It proposes a process of rewilding human experience such that we embrace more unpredictability into our lives and repurposing our pursuit of controlling everything. It offers a powerful strategy and ethical imperative for a rewilding that disconnects us from our comfort zones to live within a compassionate act of understanding with one another and all other lifeforms. This will need us to develop coping mechanisms for adapting to climate change and global pandemics along with the immense suffering they cause. Wapner sees this as a way of learning to live a more humbling form of life so that the living planet can sustain itself in partnership with a significant human presence. As he says , the Earth is in spasm so, we have the choice of either “shoving wildness from the planet itself or befriending it.”

As James Redbanks observes in his recent book- English Pastoral in developing transformative regenerative farming systems, many farmers are starting to work together to make things more nature based by fencing off river corridors and digging out adjacent ponds to provide wilderness corridors, along with wildflower meadows, liberated from artificial fertilisers. The old “us” and “them” human rewilding divide is fading now.

These are the two books that inspired this post.

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