Culture Making is now archived. Enjoy five years of reflections on culture worth celebrating.
For more about the book and Andy Crouch, please visit andy-crouch.com.

Posts tagged wilderness

excerpt Marginalia
Nate:
from "Preserving Wildness" (1985), by Wendell Berry, collected in Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987

Looking at the monocultures of industrial civilization, we yearn with a kind of homesickness for the humanness and the naturalness of a highly diversified, multipurpose landscape, democratically divided, with many margins. The margins are of the utmost importance. They are the divisions between holdings, as well as between kinds of work and kinds of land. These margins—lanes, streamsides, wooded fencerows, and the like—are always freeholds of wildness, where limits are set on human intention. Such places are hospitable to the wild lives of plants and animals and the wild play of human children. They enact, within the bounds of human domesticity itself, a human courtesy towards the world that is one of the best safeguards of designated tracts of true wilderness.

image
from "Where The Buffalo Roamed," Weather Sealed, 22 September 2009 :: via information aesthetics
Andy:
excerpt Child-proof
Nate:

The endangerment of children—that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go.

image
" Wild Turkey," by John James Audubon, 1830 :: via The State Library of Massachusetts
Nate:
image
"City and Forest," by Katy Wu, from the Totoro Forest Project benefit auction, on exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, September 2008–February 2009 :: thanks Shu Ming!
Nate:
photo
"Gourdon's Garden," Provence, France, by Flickr user Feuillu, 8 August 2003 :: via Intelligent Travel
Nate:
photo
"Red Earth," by Erika Larsen, Women in Photography
Nate: