Paul Kingsnorth: "why can't we imagine how the land feels?"

Just wanted to share this article from Paul Kingsnorth from last year. It really spoke to me; I think this disconnection from place and nature is one of our biggest sources of pain today. This is what I'm striving towards mending and bringing to light in my own writing. I'm not familiar with the books he mentions - I think I now have my summer reading list!

A few excerpts:

"To the Lani, I learned later, the forest lived. This was no metaphor. The place itself, in which their people had lived for millennia, was not an inanimate “environment”, a mere backdrop for human activity. It was part of that activity. It was a great being, and to live as part of it was to be in a constant exchange with it. And so they sang to it; sometimes, it sang back.

When European minds experience this kind of thing, they are never quite sure what to do with it. It’s been so long since we had a sense that we dwelled in a living landscape that we don’t have the words to frame what we see. Too often, we go in one of two directions, either sentimentalising the experience or dismissing it as superstition.

To us, the wild places around us (if there are any left) are “resources” to be utilised. We argue constantly about how best to use them – should we log this forest, or turn it into a national park? – but only the bravest or the most foolish would suggest that this might not be our decision to make. To modern people, the world we walk through is not an animal, a being, a living presence; it is a machine, and our task is to learn how it works, the better to use it for our own ends.

The notion that the non-human world is largely inanimate is often represented as scientific or rational, but it is really more like a modern superstition. “It is just like Man’s vanity and impertinence,” wrote Mark Twain, “to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.” We might say the same about a forest; and science, interestingly, might turn out to be on our side."

"I wonder what our writing would look like if we took this notion seriously; in particular, what our fiction would look like. That the world is a machine is one story; that the world is alive and aware is another. The latter story has probably been taken for granted by the majority of human societies throughout history. The former has only really taken root in ours: post-Enlightenment, industrial western culture. The results of it – climate change, mass extinction, factory farming – should be enough to make us wonder if this story is badly constructed, badly told, or just plain wrong."

"The ecological crisis we have spawned will “unhumanise” our views for us, whether we like it or not. The notions that only humans matter, or that humans are in control, even of themselves, are unlikely to outlast this century. It seems a good time for writers to begin writing about the rock and ocean as if they had a part to play. The novel looks pretty exhausted these days. Could this be its new frontier?"

Read the whole piece here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/23/paul-kingsnorth-imagine-how-land-feels