Age of Men

Whether it be Aldo Leopold with his practiced professionalism or Wendell Berry with his trial-and-error approach to conservative land use, the conservationist is defined by his devotion to proper land use, to exacting every possible advantage from the land without depleting it. This is the inevitable definition of conservationism implied by McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid. Frankly, it is the only way to maintain the earth as it is today, capable of sustaining intelligent life.

We stand at the cusp of a new era in which man shapes the world around him as he never has before, to such a degree that nature can no longer impose its limits. Man, though, does not know where these limits used to lie, what they meant, or what he stands to lose. Long has he distinguished between the lives of his fellow men and the life of the world around him. We are reaching a point though, when they must be looked on as one and the same, when “if I cannot help, I will at least do no harm” must apply not only to man, but to the world around him. Else, we risk our own demise.

But nature does not care. She has birthed and lost far too many children to care for one so young and reckless as man. The Earth will live on and continue to be a beautiful place regardless of whether we live there. I have, however, grown rather partial to living.

So, sex.

So, here’s the deal. We have seen Axe commercials on the television, advertisements on the internet, in the paper, and in magazines, even on billboards. We have tolerated the constant display of human hormones at their most *puts on punglasses* fragrant, and we have laughed. There is nothing remotely sexual about sex in hyperbole; yet we get the point and Unilever exacts several hundred million euros (from their //sales report) a year from American consumers alone.

Do we view axe as sexy, though? Or is everyone who purchases an axe product out to get laughed at, hoping to evoke our memories of the commercial in satire of an artificial stereotype? The problem here is that humans take themselves too seriously to spend ten dollars a bottle on comedy. So then their claim must be legitimate, axe must get you laid. Otherwise, in the twenty-six years since the product’s initial release, somebody must have debunked it and announced their findings to the world. This ignores the root of the publication. Commercials are not discussion fori for making and supporting a causal claim. They are the shrapnel of an argument’s shell meant solely to catch your attention, and what better way to do so than with giant breasts held aloft by pushup bras on a thirty inch screen. The average axe consumer may have in the back of his testosterone-infested processor the idea of sex, but his intent is clear: buy what he knows. And, if that fails to open the legs of every woman he passes on the street, at least he is normal.

Unwanted

Foreign and despised, they creep in on boats, on trucks, and in planes. Are they necessary? Beautiful? Interesting? Transplants in inhospitable soil, they haphazardly borrow our forests, our fields, and our yards. Fascination tears them from their homes, but to what end? To be burned out to make room for oaks? To be massacred in their new grove?

So we call them invasive. We rip them out of our yards and our forests vengefully, regretfully. These species cannot live with our local flora, so these plants cannot live. But they have no opinion either way and for the sake of botanical interest and historical accuracy, they must be removed. So, conscious of collective guilt, the arboretum runs controlled burns, pulls up hundreds of unwelcome immigrants, and plants the seed for new life in the old way, oak and prairies.

I welcome the change. The arboretum presents dazzling displays of biological diversity in its most unnatural splendor at its front, but secretly houses a true gem of analysis and a massive historical research potential deep in its wooded acres. I yearn for the recuperation of the Pennsylvanian pre-European biome. I want to see, to walk through, to feel. I want to know what must have been so obvious to its natives three hundred years ago.

Ignoring the agricultural echoes of its roots, Penn State is isolated, a world apart from the farms and forests that surround it. Our arboretum is different, a modern fantasy of a deprecated age. The world has changed. Yards must be full of bright flowering trees and vibrant brush. I welcome the dream.

Nature in Stereo

The quiet crept in slowly as the boat sped away, first through the trees, then over the small cliff of Carolina clay we knelt beside. I stood up and hefted my heavy pack on my soft shoulder, the first to do so. Words unnecessary, we started. Silence consumed us for a mile or so, a new environment with rich and diverse background noise, enough to get lost in.

So we came to a waterfall. Kaboom. Explosive torrents of water poured over moss-worn rocks cascading to the lake we came from. Glorious. Trees overhung the rocks, making a ladder for anyone willing to use it, to get wet, and to risk falling on the wet wood. So I climbed down. Near the bottom of the waterfall, it absorbed my friends’ voices and only the pounding water remained.

Five miles in, we sang. The modal four-part harmonies of the Fleet Foxes eclipsed our minds at once and we soon arrived on our own arrangements. Nature hid. Exhaustion hid. We thought only of the melodies and our pace quickened as we passed one campsite, two, ten miles. We at last reached our campsite and rested.

Morning brought in a reverent fog. The bugs from the night and the birds from the day made no sound. In awed silence, we progressed from our valley campsite by the river into the much less traveled portions of our trail.

That day we would pass hikers equally lost in the fog and we would split into the groups that were destined to develop. Three of us, strong-willed best friends who had lived together for months would lead by a mile or two to be trailed by our three last-minute invites. We would sing, they would walk. We would swim in the river, they would lay on the rocks. We would hike down sidings to waterfalls, they would keep moving. We took the trail at a jog, but we stopped and watched and listened when we wanted.

We never completed the planned hike; our friends held us back at a road-crossing as we waited for them there to avoid confusion. We listened to a Fleet Foxes song in our first hour of the car-ride home, but the sound was harsh and foreign, somehow incomplete.

Man is Ambition

It once was my habit to take bored meandering walks through the underside of Raleigh, the stomping grounds of my youth. It is a Southern city pockmarked with varicose railroad tracks that have long since faded from passenger use. The occasional freight train making a poor deterrent, they have since become footpaths, tree and kudzu-covered as those of the North Carolina mountains and at least as overgrown. Wandering through them is a form of relaxation and rebellion besmirched only by the quiet background hubbub of city traffic. It is a common aspiration of city life to have a destination in mind, and a worthy one, necessary to ambition and the construction of the city in the first place, but my own walks rarely had one.

It is this preoccupation that defines wilderness. The wild exists without pretext and without any intent; it simply is. An owl hunting at night has no intention beyond the needs of the day, the satisfaction of a base desire. In this sense, it is superfluous to say that nature seems stuck in time; rather, it has no time. Why then, does man seek? Why do we need to be somewhere and doing something? Why are we restless?

Historically, man was a predator. Like the owl, he would seek his prey, hunt, kill, eat, make a nest, and survive, whether the prey was plant or animal. There was no consideration of place or of consistency. This was a necessity that proved adequate to sustain him for thousands of years. Slowly and surely, man began to feel stillness, a desire for more regular crops and meals, a need of equilibrium. Soon he began to plant, both literally and in metaphor, himself into the earth, building his foundations and farms, and eventually his cities. In his stillness, his mind became restless and greedy.

This distinguished him from the world around him; he was now rooted. Ambition thrived. Man became obsessed with efficiency, wanting more, with greater consistency, and for less work. He sowed his crops in rotation; he began to incorporate other animals in his plot. Slowly he became addicted, incapable of simply knowing and being, of surviving the day. He was no longer an owl. He was new and unique. And, he was proud.

This ambition and this pride is what sets man apart from wilderness, and his addiction makes him incapable of being in a wild state. We can see glimpses of what we once were in the consistent instability of living for the moment, but come back to our evolutionary drive to do more for our children than our parents did for us. We have invented contradictions that outline this clearly: “Seek the wild” or “Call of the wild.” We do not obey some hidden power when we go into the wilderness, though: we bring man into the wild.

Also look at this.

What

If you found your way here, either by accident or as part of our English 030 class, you are probably curious about this blog’s sub-domain and title. At least one of these is explained //here.