Cohabitating With the Wild

Abstract

There is long-standing recognition that while an environmental-human discipline must do much else as well, it must ground its speculation ever anew in seeing. There is also recognition that there is as much merit to narrative as to argument. It is in this sense that this article seeks to see and to narrate, while its author is living on 670 acres of mountain land, an hour up a dirt road from the nearest town, off-line and off grid. The article focuses on what it means for an entity to be wild, how in our evolutionary past humans lived with wildness, and what of wildness might make sense in modern times. The central argument, more implied than stated, is that still today wildness remains part of the architecture of the human mind and body, and that to thrive as individuals and as a species we need to cohabitate with it.