Cohabitating With the Wild
Citation
Kahn, P. H. (2009). Cohabitating with the wild. Ecopsychology, 1(1), 38-46. doi.org/10.1089/eco.2009.0001
This narrative offers a reflection on what it means for people to live with wild nature. Written by someone living on 670 acres of remote mountain land—far from towns, roads, and the internet—it explores how humans once lived closely with wild places and what aspects of that relationship still matter today.
The author considers what “wildness” really is, how it shaped human evolution, and how it might fit into modern life. The article suggests that a connection to wild nature is still built into the way our minds and bodies work. To live well, both individually and as a species, we may need to find ways to stay connected to the wild world rather than becoming completely separated from it.
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.