1. Global Problems, Personal Unwilding
Bereft of contact with wildness, the human mind loses its coherence, and the human heart ceases to beat.
— DAVID ABRAM
We have conquered the biosphere and laid waste to it like no other species in the history of life. We are unique in what we have wrought.
— EDWARD O. WILSON
Humans are an unprecedented force in nature. We are all over the place, and there are far too many of us. There is hardly anywhere on Earth, in the water, or in the sky that has not been influenced by us. No need to look for mythical Bigfoot: We’re here! We leave huge footprints wherever we go, which create all sorts of urgent global problems that so far we have been rather unsuccessful at solving.
This chapter looks at some of these problems and, just as important, their emotional effect on us. Much has already been written about the messes we make, and so I will only summarize them briefly, but it’s important to describe what needs fixing. However, the main message is simply put: It is essential that we stop ignoring nature. Animals aren’t “ghosts in our machine,” invisible objects with whom we can do whatever we choose. And landscapes aren’t infinitely resistant and resilient. We must pay close attention to what we are doing and to the incredibly wide-ranging influence we have on our planet. Geologically speaking, the human species is just a blip in time, but there is no doubt that we are the most influential species, in good and bad ways, that has ever existed. Changes to our planet for which we are directly responsible are happening more rapidly and are more widespread than ever before.
Biologist Robert Berry fears we’re simply “running out of world.” Others argue that we have created a world that is so technologically and socially complex we simply cannot control it, while others claim that in our rapidly changing world concepts such as “natural” make little sense. Perhaps the same can be said about wild, wildness, and wilderness. Certainly, if we define “wilderness” by what the Earth was like even two or three thousand years ago, we’ll never see that again so long as humanity survives, and it does us no good to fantasize about what the good old “wild” days were like. What we consider “wild nature” today is largely artificial.
Then again, one suggestion has been made to create a “world park” using “the last remaining 12 percent of healthy natural areas, wilderness areas, primary ecosystems, mini parks, and hotspots.” This is the sort of idea that could be part of a global rewilding strategy. It is important to keep the wild as wild as it can be (see Keeping the Wild, edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler).
At a symposium on biodiversity, conservation, and animal rights held in March 2012 at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, ecologist and award-winning filmmaker Michael Tobias referred to the places on Earth where we have had the most devastating effects as “pain points.” He noted that there are many “pillars of pain” on Earth, some right in our own backyards. It can be very hard to acknowledge this pain and accept our responsibility for it, which leads to the alienation and denial that often undermine efforts to fix these places. Yet our omnipresence and power call for humility and responsibility; this is the attitude of rewilding. Thankfully, connecting with the natural world, and caring for it, comes naturally and feels good. It heals the Earth and us from the inside out.
Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity. . . . Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as “an act of suicide on a grand scale.”
— PAUL AND ANNE EHRLICH
While overconsumption has been a hot topic for years, many people remain hesitant to address overpopulation. But the plain fact is we are making too many babies. Until the human species stops growing, it will be virtually impossible to cut back on our overall consumption of the Earth’s resources. Both issues go hand in hand. Talking about and doing something to curb the rapid rise in human numbers is an essential part of the process of rewilding the world.
Overpopulation is the perfect example of a thorny global issue that is overwhelming for individuals to consider and that defies our ability to develop a coordinated response that everyone will like. Nevertheless, it is occasionally being addressed head on, such as in the book Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, edited by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist. We need to face the fact that there are too many of us and that we must do something about it right now. The world population is currently over seven billion people, and by 2050, we should reach about nine billion. So, over the next thirty to forty years, that’s two billion more mouths to feed and people to house. Where will they live, and how much will they consume? Where will we find the energy, timber, clothing, food, and space? It’s also well-documented that as there are more of us there are far fewer of “them,” that is, other animals. Overpopulation is a key factor in species extinction (see below), so to solve the latter, we must solve the former.
Our supersized brains should caution us that we cannot go on living as we have, but something doesn’t seem to click. For one thing, it is not just sheer numbers that should concern us, but the exponentially faster rate at which we are multiplying. As a species, we are expanding too fast to keep up with ourselves and establish a sustainable equilibrium. I like how Warren Hern, a local Boulder physician, puts it:
The human population continues to grow and grow and grow and grow. . . . We have added the most recent billion people to the human population in less than 12 years, [and] the human population has doubled in the past 44 years (or less). But in prehistory, it took 100,000 years or more to double. At this rate, we will reach about 13 billion by 2050 and 25 billion by the end of this century. Most population experts dismiss this possibility, but population experts in 1925 said that the human population would never reach 2.5 billion. We passed that number in 1949. My mother, who is 94, and her sister, who is 97, have seen the world population quadruple in their lifetimes. I was born in 1938, and it has tripled in my lifetime. Before now, no human being ever saw that happen. This is a unique time in human evolutionary history.
So, it’s essential that we take lessons from nature and other animals and find a way to manage our own population so that we live within our means. If we don’t regulate our population size proactively on our own, nature will eventually and surely do it for us. This is the lesson of other species that have overrun their environments. As a species, our current reproductive strategy is really insane and unsustainable and clearly spells doom for us, and it’s a prime cause of the rampant collateral damage to the Earth and other creatures. To get us to think about overpopulation and its ecological effects, the Center for Biological Diversity is now giving out condoms in colorful packages depicting endangered animals.
These are the sorts of connections that rewilding makes. Using birth control is not just a matter of practicing safe sex; it can be seen as one very personal way to save the environment. In itself, increased worldwide access to birth control for everyone would help tremendously, as it would curb unwanted pregnancies, but it’s equally important just to draw the link between having babies and environmental impacts, climate change, and species extinction. If smaller families were presented as an ecological good and even a necessity for our ultimate survival, more people might choose to have fewer or no babies. Few people want or enjoy family limits that are imposed on them by government, as China has done by enforcing one-child families. To succeed, any request of personal sacrifice needs to be seen as fulfilling an undeniable, agreed-upon social good. This is the challenge of rewilding, and perhaps of the future of our species. It’s why we must make personal rewilding all the rage.
Michael Soulé, founder of the field of conservation biology, perhaps captured our population predicament the best: “We’re certainly a dominant species, but that’s not the same as a keystone species. A keystone species is one that, when you remove it, the diversity collapses; we’re a species that when you add us, the diversity collapses. We can change everything, dictate everything and destroy everything.”
Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think.
— FRANK EGLER
Climate change, a.k.a. global warming, is a huge topic, one that is constantly in the news, and yet there are strong indications that we have seriously underestimated just how bad it really is. In November 2012, scientists in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, working at the National Snow and Ice Data Center discovered that polar ice is melting at a record high. For example, polar ice sheets are melting three times faster than in the 1990s. This means Arctic ice has hit a record low, and this carries numerous disastrous environmental implications, from rising seas to a wide range of ecological and wildlife impacts.
In The Ten Trusts, Jane Goodall relates a conversation with Angaangaq Lyberth, the then-leader of the Eskimo nation from Greenland. At a gathering of a thousand religious and spiritual leaders in the United Nations General Assembly Hall, he said: “In the north, we feel every day what you do down here. In the north the ice is melting. What will it take to melt the ice in the human heart?”
Rewilding is about melting the ice in our hearts so that we might all work together to solve the dilemmas posed by climate change. First, rewilding asks us to recognize the connection between what we do and its effect on the Earth’s changing climate. Global warming is, of course, a very complex collection of interrelated impacts, one that is almost beyond our capacity to understand in its entirety, but we can no longer deny that it is happening and that humans influence it. Those who still deny human-caused climate change are in the same camp with the very few remaining skeptics who argue we really do not know if other animals are conscious or emotional beings. Given the wealth of scientific data on both issues, this skepticism — or as some might call it, agnosticism — is antiscience and harmful to animals and to us. This attitude is “problematizing the unproblematic,” as Indiana University philosopher Colin Allen, my esteemed colleague and cycling buddy, puts it about the issue of animal consciousness. At the very least, as I’ve said many times, the precautionary principle should lead us to deal proactively with the issue of climate change, rather than wait till we’re 100 percent certain of all the causes and find it’s too late to act.
Indeed, individuals of innumerable species are struggling to adapt to the changes that humans make. Climate change may already be beyond our ability to stop or manage it, and the best we can do is to halt the activities that make it worse and find ways to adapt to our changing environment. This means, of course, doing what we can to help other animals as they are impacted by changing climate. As I make clear in the next section, our success as a species depends on the Earth maintaining a sustainable biodiversity, and so it’s in our interest to care about whether other animals can adapt. Some species, perhaps many, will not. Already, American pikas and polar bears have become symbols of the devastating effects a warming climate can have on the lives of animals. It affects movement patterns, social behavior (including mating), social organization, food availability, and interactions among difference species.
Specific examples of these impacts accumulate almost daily. For instance, we know that hot weather lowers the survival of Asian elephants, and that male painted turtles are imperiled by warming temperatures. Lobsters in Maine are also larger, and there are more of them, because of climate change. The last decade was the warmest on record in the Gulf of Maine, and so the lobsters are eating one another and causing a decline in the profits for lobstermen. Starfish sacrifice an arm in order to survive in warm water, and rising seas will wipe out resting and refueling sites for migratory birds. In fact, approximately half of living bird species are threatened by climate change.
We’re just beginning to unravel how climate change influences the behavior of other animals. Two discoveries serve notice that the effects can be subtle, unpredictable, and extremely important. In one, it’s been discovered that ocean acidification can reverse the response of nerve cells of Australian damselfish, so that the scary and aversive scent of predators suddenly becomes alluring, leading damselfish to become increasingly bold. This behavioral change — a fish approaching rather than avoiding dangerous predators — certainly can’t be good. In another example, it’s been found that three-lined skinks, a type of lizard, become superintelligent when they develop in warmer temperatures because of changes in how the brain develops. This might be seen as good for three-lined skinks, but it’s a sobering indication of how little we understand about how environment affects who animals are, much less an environment that is rapidly changing before our eyes.
Thus, rewilding means we should take a “Noah’s ark” attitude toward climate change. As seas rise and the environment changes, we should each do what we can, as we can, to preserve, protect, and conserve all species, since we are all in the same boat, and we need one another.
Animals are vanishing before our eyes, and people all over the world are asking, “Where have all the animals gone?” They miss hearing, seeing, and perhaps smelling them. This issue always makes me think about Rachel Carson’s wonderful book Silent Spring, and also Will Stolzenburg’s book Where the Wild Things Were. Species extinctions are occurring at a dangerous rate, and every year more species become threatened or endangered. I consider the loss of wild animals as a form of abuse, but it rarely is understood or considered in this light. Animal losses not only put the Earth and her ecosystems in peril but they are detrimental to our own well-being and survival.
Biodiversity is what enables human life. This is such an accepted ecological fact that it doesn’t need further proof. Thus, it is imperative that all of humanity reconnects with other animals and fights for the survival of every species, for all species need one another. As an interdependent species, this is nothing less than a collective fight for our own survival. When animals die, we die, too. In this way, rewilding contains an element of selfishness: By making the world a better place for all, we are helping ourselves.
To put the larger issue of species extinctions in perspective, consider these details. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, we’re experiencing the worst loss of species since the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago. We’re losing species at around a thousand to ten thousand times what’s called the “background rate,” or the rate of extinctions that would be expected to occur naturally. Amphibians are the most endangered animals. Their current rate of extinction has been estimated to range from twenty-five to forty-five thousand times the background extinction rate. This loss influences the many habitats in which amphibians live because of changes in their consumption habits, their nutritional cycling, and their role in controlling pests, among other things. For instance, as amphibians are lost, humans might suffer from an increase in harmful insects.
In addition, the “biodiversity boom” in Madagascar — the formation of new species — has slowed, and humans cause over half of the death rates (about 52 percent) in North American populations of large and medium-sized mammals. We cause the most deaths (over 34 percent) in larger North American mammals, including those living in protected areas. There also has been a dramatic decline in suitable habitat for African great apes.
That said, we really have no idea how serious the issue of species extinctions really is because we have no idea how many species there currently are. For example, a new species of bird, called the Cambodian tailorbird, was recently discovered in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Who would have thought we could overlook a species living within a city? However, life in a fast-moving city can make us unaware of the presence of other animals, not to mention other people. In 2012, among the new animal species discovered were a butterfly in Jamaica, a tarantula in Brazil, a skink in Australia, the Lesula monkey in Democratic Republic of Congo, and a meat-eating sponge in California’s Monterey Bay. One source claims that an astonishing 86 percent of all plants and animals on land and 91 percent of those in the seas have yet to be named and cataloged. Sadly, this revelation only underscores the fact that, in all likelihood, many species will become extinct before they are even discovered.
Putting aside the effects of climate change on extinctions, humans are directly responsible for many impacts. A short list includes predation by humans — such as how we go for the biggest animals and how we overfish and overhunt species. To date there has only been one detailed observation of a nonhuman animal overhunting. Chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park work together to catch prey, typically red colobus monkeys. Between 1975 and 2007, there was an 89 percent decline in the red colobus population, while the chimpanzee population rose by about 83 percent. The list of direct human impacts also includes pollution — which destroys ecosystems and causes diseases, but which also leads to species and pests becoming resistant to poisons and pollution and creating further ecological problems. It also includes introducing invasive species — which can completely overrun native populations and permanently alter environments.
At a talk I heard by Cornell University’s Christopher Clark in November 2012, he discussed “the ocean global commons” and the devastating effects of our acoustic footprint underwater, largely due to commercial exploitation. My mind was blown by how much large-scale damage we do to marine life just by the noise we make. As with many of our impacts on nonhuman animals, most people are totally unaware of this because the damage is hidden from our direct view.
Given our transformative, and often destructive, presence on Earth, some scientists now propose that “humans have become the biggest force in evolution.” They characterize this as “unnatural selection,” but I wonder how useful it is to try to distinguish “natural” and “unnatural” selection. After all, humans are an integral part of nature; we have a “natural history”; we are great apes. Using terms like “unnatural” only encourages an “us” versus “them” mentality, even though it’s meant to wake us up to our unseen, profound impacts on nonhuman animals.
For instance, in a New Scientist article entitled “Unnatural Selection,” Michael Le Page writes: “The Zoque people of Mexico hold a ceremony every year during which they grind up a poisonous plant and pour the mixture into a river running through a cave. . . .Any of the river’s molly fish that float to the surface are seen as a gift from the gods. The gods seem to be on the side of the fish, though — the fish in the poisoned parts of the river are becoming resistant to the plant’s active ingredient, rotenone. If fish can evolve in response to a small religious ceremony, just imagine the effects of all the other changes we are making to the planet.”
Given all the ways that humans negatively impact other species, Le Page concludes, “It is no secret that many — perhaps even most — species living today are likely to be wiped out over the next century or two as a result of this multiple onslaught. What is now becoming clear is that few of the species that survive will live on unchanged.”
Our effects on other species are wide-ranging and far-reaching, and we most likely understate the extent of our destructive ways. As with climate change, we often don’t know or fully understand what we’ve done or the extent of our negative impacts. Even worse, we have no idea how to fix the ecological problems confronting us, whether we are at fault for them or not.
If we did not unwild, there would be no reason to rewild, and we need to reverse this distancing and destructive devolution. If by “rewilding our hearts” I’m naming our open and compassionate connection to nature, then unwilding refers to the opposite: It’s the process by which we become alienated from nature and nonhuman animals; it’s how we deny our impacts and refuse to take responsibility for them; and it’s how we become discouraged and overwhelmed, and thus fail to act despite the problems we see.
Many, perhaps most, human animals are isolated and fragmented from nonhuman animals and other nature, and so we become alienated from them. The busy-ness of our days, the concrete and steel of our cities, the buildings in which we spend the majority of our work and school lives — all this unwilds us and erodes our natural connection with nature. German psychologist Erich Fromm called this innate connection, this love of life and living systems, “biophilia.” Renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson later defined his “biophilia hypothesis” as “the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.”
Yet our modern world undermines this constantly. It unwilds us. We experience alienation from nature when we learn about, or participate in, the wanton killing of wild species, when fields and forests are clear-cut and paved over for suburban developments, and when ecosystems are ruined by pollution or other human impacts. We experience firsthand our separation from nonhuman animals when we keep them in cages in zoos. And we instill alienation from nature in our children by teaching them primarily indoors at desks and in front of computer screens. Alienation flows from the belief that humans are superior to all other animals and that we are meant to dominate other species and use the Earth solely for our benefit.
Many people run within very narrow worlds, so that they never feel and can’t imagine that all people are connected and that human life is inherently dependent on nature’s health. It can seem ludicrous to claim that what happens in New York City or Boulder, Colorado, really does influence what happens in other parts of the world. After all, from our perspective where we live, other parts of the world don’t seem to influence or impact us. Particularly in America, though this is true everywhere, some people are fortunate enough to live very comfortably, and they face few (or fewer) problems in how they live, and so the serious problems that exist elsewhere can seem distant. They aren’t experienced immediately and directly, and they are easy to ignore. The welfare of faraway places we’ve never visited, and of creatures we’ve never seen, doesn’t seem to concern us.
As we unwild, we lose compassion and empathy for other beings and for nature as a whole. We do not understand that landscapes are alive, vibrant, dynamic, magical, magnificent, and interconnected. Nevertheless, unwilding can often lead us to experience a deep sense of loss for the connections to nature we are missing, even if the sense of what we’re missing is vague. Glenn Albrecht, professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, has coined the word “solastalgia” to describe “the distress caused by the lived experience of the transformation of one’s home and sense of belonging and is experienced through the feeling of desolation about its change.” We experience solastalgia when we erode our relationships with nature and other beings.
If alienation from nature is perhaps an unintended consequence of modern life, people also engage in a more deliberate form of unwilding: denial. As Homo denialus, we readily “see no evil, hear no evil, or smell no evil.” If we open our senses even a little bit to our surroundings, it is impossible to miss what’s happening and the dire consequences of our actions, but we can get mired in “magnificent delusions” (to quote political scientist Husain Haqqani). We ignore and redecorate nature in incredibly self-serving ways, as if we are the only species that matters, and we turn a blind eye to the suffering this causes.
An old Chinese proverb warns us that closing our eyes does not ease another’s pain. Claiming ignorance and denying what is happening do not make the destruction stop. When did we begin ignoring nature? Why did we start ignoring our need for untainted and healthy food, clean water, clean air, and reasonable shelter? How did we become so disconnected from nature and an understanding of basic ecological processes? What allows us to tolerate human-induced losses in biodiversity? There can be many reasons for denial. Some hide behind the claim of human exceptionalism, and so they ignore the suffering of other animals because they think those animals are less than us and don’t matter. Some deny the destruction that humans cause in the natural world in order to avoid having to take responsibility for it.
Also, in the hustle and bustle of modern life, it is easy to simply become too distracted and to ignore nature as we run here and there, not even knowing why we’re doing what we’re doing. We are removed from the larger impacts of our own daily lives, and so we lack any meaningful appreciation of our destructive ways and their wide-ranging consequences. To a degree, this distraction is self-inflicted and self-serving; we ignore nature because it’s convenient to do so. We choose to live in oblivion and deliberately not know and not feel what we’re doing. We prefer detachment and ignorance rather than to feel and share the pain experienced by other animals and nature.
However, denial is hard to maintain when the evidence of trouble exists all around us. Some persist anyway. They deny solid science and what is happening right in front of our eyes. This has real consequences, which Michael Specter makes clear in his book Denialism and Richard Oppenlander in Comfortably Unaware. Renowned conservation biologist Michael Soulé calls the climate change deniers “morbidly ignorant.” These are strong words from a world-famous scientist, one who is often called the founder of conservation biology. I agree with him, and it’s one reason why I have written this book — to help undo these unwilding mechanisms so we can start to rewild our hearts before it’s too late.
Most readers of this book probably already recognize and acknowledge the very serious ecological problems facing us. What’s harder is actually doing something. Particularly when we are faced with unrelenting bad news about global issues like climate change, which make our individual efforts seem inconsequential and useless, it is easy to throw up our hands and give in to despair and inaction.
But everyone must do whatever they can. We cannot be slacktivists. Many people talk about making the world a more compassionate place for all beings and “living green,” but one recent US survey found that “fewer than 10 percent use any environmentally friendly products or curb household consumption.” This is slacktivism: talking about an urgent problem that needs to be fixed without walking the talk and actually doing something about it.
Doomsday thinking is another form of unwilding. It fosters alienation and isolation, from nature, nonhuman animals, and one another. Feeling overwhelmed, we may retreat into our individual lives, never realizing how keenly this disconnection is felt by others. What we do does make a difference, and rewilding our hearts is about fostering and honoring our connections to one another and all life. We don’t need to have all the answers to the world’s problems in order to make the world a better place where we live right now. But we do need the determination to push aside the excuses and rationalizations for inaction whenever they come up.
There are dozens of excuses for negativity: thinking that there’s nothing we can do to turn the tide; failing to consider future generations, who rely on our goodwill and efforts, even if we ourselves might not live to see the benefits of our actions; preferring our own immediate gratification or comfort rather than making sacrifices for another’s benefit; outright laziness; and hierarchical speciesistic thinking that we are “higher, better, or more valuable” than other animals. Some might also cite religious beliefs or proclivities, or appeal to economics — that it’s too expensive or time-consuming to care and make the necessary changes. Of course, politics gets in the way all the time: We know what’s “right,” but what’s right isn’t always politically expedient or in alignment with our faction’s dogma.
Fear of and unfamiliarity with the outdoors can also get in the way. These are other forms of unwilding. We can be reluctant to embrace or connect with something that makes us uncomfortable, and some might fear that animals are dangerous or that they are dirty or carry diseases. People may avoid the rugged outdoors because they are afraid to get dirty, afraid of falling and being injured, afraid of insects and of encountering wild animals. However, whatever one’s personal comfort level with nature, we can all work on nature’s behalf, for nature is a common good we can all recognize. Rewilding our hearts doesn’t mean becoming an “off-the-grid” survivalist, a radical “back-to-the-land” activist, or a hard-core outdoorsperson. It means, simply, acting with compassion and love for nonhuman animals and for the natural world that is our shared home.
We are also inconsistent in our caring. People are often outraged over specific incidents of animal cruelty — such as the massacre of forty-nine captive wild animals in Ohio in October 2011—but they remain unmoved by the slaughter of billions of animals for food and research, or the horrific and ongoing abuse of animals used for entertainment in zoos, aquariums, circuses, and rodeos. While not every situation is equivalent, rewilding means not selectively picking and choosing who to care for based on our own whims. As a comparison, it has been estimated that, each year, 37 to 120 billion farmed fish, 970 to 2,700 billion wild fish, and 63 billion farmed mammals and birds are killed for food.
Excuses for inaction are a dime a dozen: Life is too demanding, there’s too much to do, money is tight, individuals really don’t make a difference, someone else will take care of it, I’m not at fault . . . the list goes on and on. Clearly, bettering the lives of animals and healing our ecosystems are truly daunting tasks, and relatively few people in the world have the ability to make it their full-time job. Most people in the world are already doing all they can just to survive. Those of us blessed with good fortune often forget that the vast majority of people in the world, despite all their efforts, barely make it from day to day. And no one is completely free from the need to take care of their own welfare and that of their family. But that makes it all the more important that each of us do something and that we push ourselves to do as much as we can for as long as we can. Indeed, whatever our circumstances, rewilding is really a lifelong effort. We should think of it not as series of one-time actions that “do our part” for the environment but as a lens for viewing and remaking our life from here on.
Science and common sense tell us that we have made some egregious errors that have created numerous lasting or long-term problems and that we need to change our ways. But science alone won’t convince us to change. Science alone will not add compassion to the world or get people to do something positive for animals and their homes. Only rewilding our hearts will do that. Only by embracing rewilding will we avoid the alienation, denial, and complacency that undermines our efforts. Rewilding is a process that begins in each person’s heart and expands outward, one that heals our own connection to nature even as it heals the wounds of our one and only planet. Rewilding can give legs to a new social movement and paradigm shift for much-needed change.
Over the past few years I have had the pleasure of talking with the renowned psychologist Aubrey Fine, who is keenly interested in the nature of human-animal relationships. He once asked me a simple question, “What do we need to do to get people to stop and smell the roses?”
As I told Dr. Fine, to me it should be easy. We are born biophiliacs who are inherently drawn to the natural world. This attraction is in our genes. People don’t need convincing to enjoy nature. When we take a walk outside, we notice immediately how much better we feel. I would love to see brain scans of people as they rewild and reconnect with other animals and nature. I would not be at all surprised to see their reward and pleasure centers firing wildly.
In the next chapter, I describe rewilding in more detail, but at the very least this is what rewilding is all about: encouraging, honoring, and growing our inherent connection to nature and nonhuman animals. After this chapter’s difficult summary of the problems we face, I want to end on a positive note by emphasizing that the solution, connecting with nature and interacting with compassion, is based on who we are.
For instance, the distractions of daily life can make it very easy and convenient to unwild. We become, in some sense, out of balance and disconnected within ourselves. As we rewild, we restore balance and our sense of connection. We achieve a sort of homeostasis and feel good once again — it’s like coming home to a comfortable place. From this place of connection, it’s easy to see and do “what’s right.” I love something that Ernest Hemingway wrote years ago in Death in the Afternoon: “About morals I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” I don’t see Hemingway’s view as simplistic at all. Rewilding is the same: You know it by how much better it makes you feel.
The challenge, of course, is to maintain rewilding and these feelings as a daily routine. But all sorts of evidence continues to emerge that kindness, compassion, caring, and cooperation are part of our evolutionary inheritance. For instance, research has shown that the roots of fairness and cooperation can be found in infants as young as fifteen months of age and that egalitarian instincts emerge in early childhood. Mounting research in evolutionary biology shows that groups comprising individuals who work together do better than groups comprising individuals who do not. This supports an evolutionary theory called “group selection,” in which cooperative groups provide an evolutionary advantage, in contrast to the more well-accepted theory of evolution that argues that natural selection operates on individuals. Group selection as a driving force in the evolution of social behavior has generated more support over recent years, including that of renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson, who for many years strongly opposed it.
I’ve often said that, across cultures, humans are really much nicer than we ever give them credit for. It’s a relative few who wage wars, kill people, and harm children, and they get in the news. This is true for nonhuman animals as well. Kindness is seen in a wide variety of species. I tell more stories of animal compassion later, but I love this story about Gus, a dog, which was shared with me in an email:
Gus, as most dogs are, was fiercely territorial about his yard. Any animal that showed up would be promptly and definitively chased off . . . except for one day: It was a scorcher of a day in Northern Alberta, and Dad and the family were sitting at the kitchen table with the door open, hoping for a bit of a breeze to cool things off. Suddenly, at the door appears a stray, starving dog. Right behind is Gus, who gives the stray a gentle nudge forward. He then walks in front of the stray animal and leads it to his food dish. Gus put his paw in his dish and looks at his owners as a sign to please fill this with food, which they did. They watched in awe as Gus stepped back and let the dog empty his food bowl. After Gus was confident the animal had a full belly, he then chased the dog out of the yard.
For Gus, and for all of us, there is always room for compassion. And there’s mounting evidence that being compassionate is good for our health and longevity. Further, studies show that people are willing to pay to enjoy all sorts of nature. Conservation psychologist Susan Clayton at the College of Wooster reports that people value and are willing to pay “for scenic beauty; for diversity of animal species; to protect habitat for the giant panda; to reduce invasive plant species; to protect biodiversity in urban areas,” and more. She continues, “Perhaps the most striking finding is that people are willing to pay for aspects of the landscape that they would never be able to benefit from personally. This idea has been described as ‘existence value’: We value the mere existence of things like the Grand Canyon, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and many other instances of nature that remain relatively unaffected by human activity.”
Rewilding only asks us to do what comes naturally and what feels right. And despite our current problems, we have an incredible amount of global momentum. More and more people realize that they too can make a positive difference in the lives of other animals, other humans, and in the health and integrity of our landscapes. The rewards for this work are felt immediately, and the effects ripple in all directions, influencing others to do the same. Each time we nurture the seeds of compassion, empathy, and love, we deepen our respect for and kinship with the universe. All people, other animals, human communities, and environments benefit greatly when we develop and maintain a heartfelt compassion that is as reflexive as breathing. Compassion begets compassion.