| Ideology and Biases of the Dispatches |
| I make no distinction between cultural and
natural Dispatches because I believe that man and his works, however vile
or wondrous, are also part of nature. New York City is as “natural” as
the Amazon or the Adirondacks. I have, you could say, a more Shakespearean
view of what “nature” is than a Thoreauvian one. In a book called
“L’Art de l’Afrique Noir,” I recently came across a quote by an anthropologist
called Herskowitz (anyone know his first name?) that immediately grabbed
my attention: “Culture is the man-made part of the environment.”
This is the first ideological premise of the Dispatches. The separation
of man and nature has been a dominant orthodoxy of the American conservation
movement, but in my opinion it is a completely artificial dichotomy, which
has done a lot of harm in places like Africa, where local people were driven
out to create game parks, and where you have to deal with the guerillas
before you can save the gorillas. In the Adirondack Park, the oldest experiment
in a “park with people,” the concerns and needs of the local Adirondackers
have not been sufficiently factored into the initiatives to protect the
largest chunk of “wilderness” in the east, and in fact much of this “wilderness”
is second- or third-growth forest that has returned after being clearcut
a hundred years ago or more recently. In most of the world you are not
going to find the pure wilderness experience any more, but nature that
has been significantly modified by man-- but is still nature. This is the
nature that people are going to be experiencing and that they must learn
to live with. Wilderness is not a natural state, but an idea that started
with Thoreau and found its greatest proponent in John Muir. The definition
of nature changed in the 19th century, as the negative efIfects of industrialization
and settlement became apparent. See Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden.
But the separation of man from nature begins with the Enlightenment, when
the spirits, which still exist in places like Amazonia and Madagascar and
in many cases are believed to be reincarnated humans, were taken out of
the plants and animals and scientists began to dissect and catalogue the
flora and the fauna and the human anatomy. One of the great taxonomists
was Buffon. He was one of the French encyclopedists, who after producing
produced an exhaustive, multi-volume systema naturalis, had the wisdom
to declare, “There exist in nature neither orders nor genera, only individuals.”
This is another premise of the Dispatches. The same applies to the various
racial categorizations of humans. The boundary between man and nature is
artificial. All boundaries are artificial. David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist,
is finding that the boundary between the forest and the sea in the Pacific
Northwest is not really real, as I will be reporting. I intend to do more
research on how the meaning of nature has changed over time. Any leads
or thoughts on the subject would be most welcome.
Here is another premise,
by the late Bruce Chatwin who was a friend and with whose wavelength I
am on perhaps more than any other writer: “Travel does not merely broaden
the mind. It makes the mind. Our early explorations are the raw materials
of our intelligence… Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on
the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearing on familiar
landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths
first, things and people second.”
As for biases, I belong to the tradition of what I call “the modern fugitive,” to which I devote a chapter in my book on the Southwest, Legends of the American Desert. Its adherents include Rousseau, Thoreau, Pierre Loti, Arthur Rimbaud, Wilfred Thesiger, D.H.Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Everett Ruess, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac. This means that I have reservations about mainstream Western culture, and always will. I am a technophobe, but a mycophile. The latter I think has an ethnic
component.
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