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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.
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.
Nate
: ?Before Audubon could paint any of his famous North American birds, he had to shoot them first. At least with the case of this one, such "destruction for the sake of preservation" seems a little less tragic, or at least more tasty.?
Nate
: ?A blog reader sent me this link: "A collection of artworks inspired by the animated film My Neighbour Totoro, celebrating reverence for nature. The artworks were auctioned off to help preserve the ancient Japanese forest that, in turn, inspired the movie." Most of the art from the site wears its Anime inspirations quite prominently, but I found this paper cut out illustration, by a young illustrator who works at Pixar, to be particularly evocative. I think it gets at the delicate tension between nature and culture—the city and the garden, both with their own needs for creative cultivation.?
Nate
: ?From the flickr caption: "The Castle of Gourdon is close by Saint Paul de Vence, Provence, on the top of a mountain. Its gardens were designed by Le Notre, Louix XIV's gardener who also did Versailles park." I love the perspective—looking down from the cultivated area into the wilderness of the canyon—and how it shows the gardeners hard at work on the hedges (and careful enough to use a drop-cloth for the clippings). Cultivation indeed.?
Nate
: ?From Larsen's series of photos of child hunters. She writes, "[f]or them, the thrill is learning to follow their instincts and being immersed in nature. All these children have something in common, they are at home in nature." And yet hunting is, as ever, a deeply cultural activity, full of specialized equipment, specific rituals, and purposeful tradition.?