The Edge

Editors’ note:  The following essay is part of a book in progress by wilderness advocate Glenn Parton.  We ran an earlier two-part essay by Glenn which proved controversial—some readers enthusiastic about his proposal for Walking in Wilderness, some readers skeptical. It echoes a widely-debated essay on “Island Civilization” by Roderick Frazier Nash (arguing for small islands of civilization in a vast sea of wilderness) that we ran decades ago in Wild Earth. At Rewilding Earth, we encourage respectful debate and ecologically-grounded dialog on the many complex issues surrounding protecting and restoring wild Nature. We invite responses to this essay as well as to other potentially controversial pieces we share with readers. Our species has precipitated unprecedented extinction and climate crises. How can we solve these crises and learn—or relearn?— to coexist peacefully with the millions of other species gracing Planet Earth? That is the starting point for this essay and for much of the work of rewilding. —John Davis, for the Rewilding Earth editorial team, summer 2024

I have an outlandish message for the 21st Century: Human beings must aesthetically walk in wilderness regularly, or we will perish as a species, probably eliminating most of life on Earth in the process. In this essay, I will outline what this entails and why it is the case.

First, let me explain what I mean by “aesthetically walking in wilderness.” To aesthetically walk in wilderness is to adopt a disinterested or non-violent perspective where one relates to wilderness for its beauty, in contrast to relating to it for its utilitarian value, for what one can extract from it, or for how it serves one’s interests. To aesthetically walk in wilderness is to leave it alone, not to alter it in any way, but rather to allow its harmony, which is but another word for beauty, to influence one’s senses and mind. Receptivity and contemplation are the subjective requirements for aesthetic walking. Henceforth, when I speak of walking in wilderness I mean aesthetically walking in wilderness.

In this essay, I offer a solution to the crisis of the modern world that has both an objective and subjective component. Objectively, biodiversity on all three levels (genes, species, and ecosystems) is collapsing everywhere. Subjectively, humans are becoming more lonely, stressed, angry, depressed, bored, and unable to determine what is of true value in life. These two dimensions of the present global catastrophe are inextricably connected and comprise a downward spiral in which the more mentally ill and defeated we become the more ecosystems collapse, and the more ecosystems collapse the more meaningless and lost we become. My claim is that aesthetically walking in wilderness is a necessary condition for survival and sanity, the basis of any rational society, and the most fundamental requirement for democracy, freedom, and happiness.

I do not claim that aesthetically walking in wilderness is the be-all and end-all of human life, but only that humankind will never cease its wars and destructive activities until we walk in wilderness regularly. Positively stated, my claim is that aesthetic walking in wilderness is an essential activity for a good life, for which there is no substitute.

There is enormous literature concerning the crisis of the modern age, and much of it is factual, insightful, and helpful, but no one seems to have the big solution to this two-fold problem: that both biodiversity and the human mind are crashing. Instead, we have much identification and analysis of numerous problems here and there and everywhere, and many specific recommendations and partial remedies. We are often told that no one has “the answer,” and there is reluctance to offer a total alternative to the widely recognized madness and self-destructiveness of the modern world. The crisis seems too big to fix, contributing to feelings and thoughts that we might just as well let the whole thing fall apart because there is not much we can do about it anyhow.

It seems to me that the solution to this two-fold modern crisis is actually very simple, although the facts, arguments, and ideas that produce this solution are complex and in need of articulation and clarification. That is what I propose to do in this essay: in part one I will articulate a simple solution to the crisis, and in part two I will justify this solution in terms of a theory of the human mind.

Part 1: What is the Solution?

My solution to the crisis of the modern world is a planet that is Half Wilderness and Half High Civilization, with human beings living on the Edge, so that we can walk between these two worlds on a regular basis. This solution differs radically from those who argue for some version of a middle ground, pastoral ideal, or integration of civilization and wilderness. Of course there is only one Earth, and it is impossible to completely separate it into two independent beings, substances, or realities. Water, air, insects, migrating animals, etc. will and should crisscross and circumnavigate the planet, but modern civilization, entailing advanced science and technology, can be and must be separated from wilderness, as defined by the 1964 Wilderness Act that understands wilderness as a place where the traces of humans and their activities are “substantially unnoticeable,” and where the land retains its “primeval appearance.”

Today, we know that in order to sustain about 90% of biological diversity in something like its prehistoric patterns of abundance and distribution it requires that at least 50% of land (and water) be restored and protected as wilderness. This figure is not set in stone, and may, as the science of conservation develops, be adjusted a bit, but according to the best available science right now, real wilderness requires a Half Wild. Satellite-mapping of the entire planet toward this goal is already extensive, and nearly complete in many areas. In North America, for example, the Wildlands Network, under the visionary leadership of Dave Foreman and Reed Noss, provided a lot of the early mapping for this purpose, and the Rewilding Institute, under the direction John Davis, has acquired much on-the-ground knowledge in the US East and Rocky Mountains toward this goal.

According to the best available science, the first and most fundamental requirement for a solution to the extinction of life on Earth is the establishment of a world wilderness system that is large enough, connected enough, and diverse enough to sustain all (or almost all) biodiversity on Earth because, as E. O. Wilson said: “The only proven method for sustaining biodiversity on Earth is wilderness.” All other attempts are “risky” at best, and have, in fact, failed to stop the accelerating biodiversity crisis. Objectively stated, the proven and prudent solution to the Sixth Extinction is a Half Wild Earth.^[1]

The subjective solution, or what we might call the psycho-social solution, concerns the internal nature of civilization itself. How must civilization be organized to achieve human freedom and happiness once we accept the external requirement of Half Wild?  The internal guiding principle or prime directive for High Civilization is the development of beautiful human associations of work and leisure. A civilization is “higher” or qualitatively better to the degree that it builds and produces according to the laws of harmony, symmetry, proportion, and reciprocity, not endless material growth.

No one has better articulated the purpose and end of civilization than Herbert Marcuse, who envisioned a utopian society in which advancing science and technology are re-organized and subordinated to the regulative ideal of “society as a work of art,”^[2] in which the satisfaction of basic needs, and the satisfaction of new and emerging needs and desires, develop harmoniously and joyfully in friendship and community. According to Marcuse, this socio-economic potentiality has been realizable at least since the end of WW2, and it is only “utopian” insofar as the powers-that-be prevent it from becoming reality.

“Art as the form of society”^[3] means for Marcuse the subordination of the economy to the laws of beauty, which is his understanding of qualitative socialism. Beyond the conquest of scarcity and the struggle for existence, the ultimate goal is a Beautiful Civilization, where harmony governs all spheres of human existence. This does not mean that human relationships will be without tension and conflict, for no perfect society can be achieved (or should be achieved), but tensions and conflicts can be addressed and reconciled according to demands of the “aesthetic form,” representing a constellation of men and women living in accordance with the potential of the species, where daily life “tends” toward art. It is because Beauty is an objective quality, not only of the natural world but of civilization, that it can serve as the standard of genuine progress.

Although Marcuse did not envision a Half Wild Earth, he did advocate for nature as a “Subject in its own right,” and as a “cosmos with its own potentialities,” and beyond all forms of utilization and appropriation he spoke of “surrender, letting-be, and acceptance.”^[4] We must complement and complete Marcuse’s ideal of an artistic civilization with the wilderness ideal of a Half Wild planet. Wild Socialism would be an appropriate description of an Alternative.

It would be unwise to speculate too much about the characteristics or qualities of a future free society. No blueprint or greenprint can be or should be provided for the future, but the collective ownership and control of the forces of production (science and technology) is a minimum requirement because the Earth is not private property in any significant sense, and we should use only half of the Earth, at most, for the creation of a non-repressive social order that is calm, quiet, gentle, pleasing, and integrated. Half High Civilization is an aesthetic whole, where balance and beauty govern everyday life, which is radically other than our current civilization of noise, crowding, sterility, traffic, frustration, conflict, control, and coercion.

The Half Wild/Half Highly Civilized Ideal divides the planet into 50% wilderness and 50% High Civilization in contrast to any attempt to substitute one for the other, or to blend, fuse, or integrate them. All suggestions and arguments, from the Left or the Right, in favor of ecological sustainability, or peace on Earth, that do not acknowledge and accept the need for a Half Wild planet are one-sided attempts to solve the present world crisis.

We are told that the indigenous lifestyle is a better future, but this lifestyle, as it is developing around the world, is neither compatible with wilderness nor interested in returning to the wilderness as Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Instead, the indigenous lifestyle, as it is promoted today in theory and practice, terminates wilderness just like industrial civilization, even if the scale and speed of this destruction is less, which is questionable, given the number of people engaged in this way of life. The solution to the modern crisis is not an indigenous lifestyle that mixes wilderness and modern civilization because this is an impossible ideal. You cannot mix the domestication of plants and animals, urbanization, and machine technologies with wilderness without terminating wilderness.

The indigenous lifestyle was a Golden Mean only in the sense that it had not yet succeeded in terminating wilderness everywhere, but it has always, at least since the Neolithic revolution, been going in the wrong direction with regard to wilderness, expanding and developing against wilderness, and it will continue to do so until the limits of a Half Wild Earth are firmly established and respected by all people regardless of their economic lifestyle. The indigenous lifestyle will not save us, or the Earth, because it is part of the humanization of the Earth, just another civilization project from which we are suffering-until-death.

The solution to the crisis of the modern world is found in the co-existence of wilderness and civilization, rather than the misguided and failed attempts at sharing ground between them. Of course, there is nothing wrong with gardening, landscaping, simple living, and some aspects of the pastoral ideal, but they are forms of civilization that cannot substitute for wilderness. Ranching, livestock grazing, and most of what comprises the rural lifestyle or country living are obsolete with regard to the true ends of human existence that are to be found in the extremes of wilderness and high civilization, not some middle way or middle ground, which in many ways comprises the worst of both worlds.

The entire pattern of development in the modern world over millennia, in which urban areas are surrounded by farms, ranches, and semi-wild land, has been a disaster. Organic farming insofar as it is desirable at all in the face of viable protein-production alternatives now being developed^[5] should be done completely on the civilization-side of the solution. We need, first, to secure a Half Wild Earth in order to establish a healthy and good civilization on the other half. It is not a question of one or the other, of wilderness or high civilization, but of both, because this is what the solution to the modern crisis requires.

To solve the crisis of the modern world human beings must inhabit a sharply divided world, where the Edge is the proper dwelling place of human beings on Earth. Physically speaking, the Edge is part of civilization, but it is that special human place where civilization ends and wilderness begins. To dwell on the Edge is to live in a place where wilderness is out the front door and civilization is out the back door, or vice versa, so that it is possible to walk from home into wilderness easily and readily, as well as to walk from home (in the opposite direction) to work, stores, clinics, and to advanced transportation systems that move us through high civilization dependably and enjoyably.

I offer a vision of human life as the passage between two worlds, real wilderness and high civilization, which is possible by humans dwelling on the Edge. I have made no attempt to argue for this worldview yet, but only to paint a picture of human life as a journey between what I regard as the twin-poles of human fulfillment. We can and should live on the Edge and experience (on foot) the best of both worlds by walking back-and-forth between them, which is not a mere going back-and-forth, but a dialectical journey^[6] in which the contrast and contradiction between the human experiences of wilderness, on the one side, and the human experiences of civilization, on the other side, generates progress that leads to human health and happiness, as well as sustains and respects non-human lives.

Dwelling on the Edge cannot be achieved by turning the northern half of the planet into wilderness and the southern half of the planet into high civilization, or vice versa, because most people would then live so far from wilderness that they would not be able to walk in wilderness easily and regularly. Instead, we must establish more national parks, designated wilderness areas, and strictly protected areas all over the planet, then completely re-wild them and connect them into a World Wilderness System that extends everywhere, forming one continuous world wilderness system to which civilization conforms and adapts.

Building a world wilderness system by preserving and rewilding large tracts of land and linking them together with large corridors and wildways is already underway around the planet, however slow and weak it is at this point, and by continuing in this very practical and desirable direction it is possible to complete such a system (in the not-too-distant future), and then to build a beautiful civilization that co-exists with world-wilderness. We can live on the Edge in reasonable numbers of perhaps around 2 billion people worldwide, if we first lay down the necessary boundaries of real wilderness, according to the advancing science of conservation biology, then design a civilization that limits human activities to aesthetically walking (or cross-country skiing and snowshoeing) within these boundaries.

In the United States, which is the place I know best, there are no major impediments to establishing Half Wild because almost 40% of the US landmass is public land, which could and should be returned to wilderness. In addition, removing and re-wilding many unnecessary roads, farms, ranches, mining and drilling operations, vacation homes, resorts, and numerous human artifacts and activities that do not belong where they are—as determined by the science of conservation biology for the purpose of creating a National Wilderness System—would easily exceed Half Wild. It is a lack of imagination, scientific knowledge, and political will on the part of citizens, many wildlife professionals, and the billionaire oligarchs who block the realization of this goal.

In the Midwest of the United States, where there is not a lot of public land, there are numerous unproductive and abandoned farms, ranches, and towns that can be rewilded, using already existing federal subsidies. In the eastern United States, cities take up a relatively small percentage of the land surface, and it is, again, the farms, ranches, second homes, urban sprawl, and a great deal of unnecessary commercialization and development that prevent the creation of a real national wilderness preservation system. Getting rid of animal farming alone, and rewilding the land, would take us beyond the goal of Half Wild.

Whenever people—especially environmentalists and social and justice activists—say that the goal of Half Wild/Half High Civilization is unrealistic and impractical, they play into the hands of the powers-that-be and reveal their own self-defeatism, cynicism, and fatalism. Not only in North America, but all over the world, Half Wild is a realistic and practical goal, as is the construction of a Beautiful Civilization, and it is way past time to embrace this ideal, and in fact not to do so is cowardice and callousness because everything depends on it.

At the present time, in the lower 48 States of America, for example, we have less than 10% of the land that can be considered wilderness in any meaningful sense, and within these areas there are so many human intrusions and disruptions that the percentage of wild land is actually much smaller, and there is no wilderness at all in the sense of enough protected land to support viable populations of native wildlife, especially apex predators. If 50% of the contiguous US was returned to real wilderness, where the influence of human beings is “substantially unnoticeable,” and the other 50% becomes artistically beautiful, then this would be a solution to the modern crisis of American society (on the regional level at least).

Of one thing I am sure, it is far better to have 50% wilderness and 50% high civilization, than it is to have 10% wilderness and 90% non-wilderness (with a mix of urban and rural environments spread across 90% of the land) because the former ideal will secure nearly a full spectrum of biodiversity, according to the latest science of conservation, and it will also solve the psychological crisis of human beings, while the second alternative will do neither. Another option is 90% wilderness and 10% high civilization, but the goal of Half Wild/Half High Civilization is, I suggest, enough to secure a good life for all living creatures on Earth for the foreseeable future.

Much of the joy in human life is rooted in the difference and tension between wilderness and civilization, and any flattening of this difference—for example, Wendell Berry’s vision of the world as a giant garden—will gravely lessen the freedom and happiness of human beings. Utopia, as I conceive it, is much closer to Roderick Nash’s “Island Civilization,” than it is to any human-managed or sustainability ideal. If human beings preserve half the Earth as wilderness and decide to turn the other half into a garden-civilization, then is this something we may all live with? What we cannot live with is an ideal that seeks to substitute peaceful, productive, and pretty humanscapes for real wilderness. A major problem that needs identifying and fixing “now” is not the machine in the garden, but the garden in the wilderness.

What seems to me to be absolutely critical at this historical moment is that we recognize that there is no solution to the biodiversity and wilderness crisis without a solution to our psychological crisis, and there is no solution to our psychological crisis without a real wilderness system (within which we can walk and regain our mental health and well-being) so we need a comprehensive solution to the two-fold crisis of the modern world. An exclusive focus on one or the other is insufficient to meet the challenge of Exterminism, so I offer the Half Wild/Half Highly Civilized Ideal.

Part 2: Why Wilderness? 

Why Wilderness? One reason is that wilderness has an intrinsic right to exist. It was here first, and it does not need to be justified in human terms. This idea of intrinsic value is the core of an Environmental Ethic that I wholeheartedly support, but it is important to show that humans need wilderness because it may be that no environmental ethic is sufficient to motivate people to do the right thing. I will argue that unless we do the right thing with regard to wilderness, we will perish along with the wildlife that depends on it, so it is important to provide an existential argument, showing that humans vitally need wilderness, and not just provide an ethical argument for Why Wilderness?

Moreover, many people, including a lot of wildlife professionals, contend that it is possible to sustain biodiversity without wilderness, but even if we could sustain some biodiversity in a mosaic of various kinds of land protection other than wilderness it is still the case, I will argue, that humans need wilderness to avoid collective self-destruction, which will surely wipe out a lot of biodiversity.  In other words, we need wilderness to save ourselves from ourselves, and if we do not save ourselves, then we will not save much biodiversity either. We need wilderness not only for the sake of biodiversity (which has intrinsic value) but also for the sake of human life and well-being.

My argument for why humans need wilderness is, simply put, that we need to engage the original/primitive part of the human mind, what Freud called the Id, in order to determine what is of true value in life, and the only way we can do this is to walk in wilderness regularly. If there is no wilderness, then we cannot walk in wilderness, and if we do not walk in wilderness to stimulate and strengthen the primitive part of the human mind, then we cannot think deeply, and we cannot solve the crisis of modern civilization.

Freud saw the human mind (basically) as a two-dimensional entity, ego and id, in which wisdom, or knowledge of what is of true value in life, is the result of the open communication between these two structures and functions of the human psyche. The id is the primitive dimension of the mind that contains everything that is inherited at birth. It is the gift of our evolutionary development over millions and billions of years of evolving on Earth, none of which has been lost, although most of it is unconscious. The ego, on the other hand, is the coherent organization of mental processes, which concerns itself primarily with self-preservation, according to Freud, and it is only through open contact and communication between these two parts or dimensions of the human mind that “reason” in the sense of “wisdom” arises.

I contend that the subjective crisis of the modern world is too much ego and not enough id, that is to say, we have overdeveloped the ego to the point where it has become an instrument that dominates the id such that wild nature within us is hardly heard or felt. The impulses, intuitions, feelings, dispositions, and ideas contained in the id are growing weaker and weaker, less effective in modern everyday life, and walking in wilderness can stimulate and strengthen the unconscious id because the id was born in the wilderness. The wilderness is familiar to the id, and awakens its distant experiences, much like a visit to the hometown of childhood awakens old memories, feelings, and thoughts. We evolved on a land free from domestication of plants and animals, and we need to walk across such wild places again to activate the id, not in a garden, farm, park, city, or tame and managed environment.

The id is the wilderness within us, a primal reservoir of the great achievements of the distant past, and insofar as we deny or minimize what it knows (unconsciously) about successfully living on planet Earth we are doomed because the ego is a mere branch on the great tree of evolution, and this ego cannot possibly figure out, by itself, what is of true value in life. We need the assistance and guidance of the id to find our way out of the crisis and to arrive at a good life and a good society, and the id needs to re-visit the wilderness frequently to be stimulated and strong.

Freud discovered the two-dimensional mind and revealed the dialogue between the conscious ego and the unconscious id, but unfortunately, he too much conceived of the id as something threatening to the ego, a realm of unruly passions, needs, and ideas that have to be controlled, postponed, and excluded from effectiveness and activity (by the ego) to the point where individual health and happiness, insofar as it is achievable at all within civilization, according to Freud, requires that “where id was there shall ego be.” In this way, Freud showed himself to be a figure of the Enlightenment in which, as the Frankfurt School argued, “reason” becomes an instrument, and a deeper kind of “reason,” (non-egoic reason or two-dimensional reason or dialectical reason) as the capacity to determine what is of true value in life is lost or eclipsed.

Freud arrived at his idea of the unconscious mind by way of the repressed unconscious mind, that is to say, he argued that the repressed unconscious mind consists of feelings and ideas that have been pushed out of conscious awareness and banished into unconsciousness, but now we know that the unconscious mind contains a great deal more than just repressed material, that it also contains the wisdom of evolution going back to the beginning of life on Earth (and even earlier). In his later theory, Freud acknowledged this larger function and purpose of the unconscious mind (that he called the id), but he stuck to his earlier view: “Psycho-analysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id.”^[7]

Correcting Freud in the light of the science of evolutionary biology we can say that the primitive or wild human mind is an ally and friend in discovering our true needs and desires, if it is allowed to play its necessary part in the reasoning process. The subjective crisis of the modern world is that we are thinking one-dimensionally, egoistically, not two-dimensionally or dynamically, and it is only by walking in wilderness that we can stimulate and strengthen the id, not in opposition to the ego, but in communication and cooperation with it. After all, the ego grew out of the id in its evolutionary development, and this ego (deep down at its roots) still remains in secret alliance with the id, concerning the ultimate goal of human life on Earth, which is to find and secure human freedom and happiness, not just survival.

It is the ego, uninformed and uninfluenced by the id, that has run amuck, giving rise to technological reason that sees everything as a means to self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, while the true ends of human life fall further and further into unconsciousness. We cannot know truth or goodness unless we think with our whole psychical apparatus. The humanized reality that imprisons us was built by an ego without enough information and influence from the id. In order to solve the present crisis, which can be described subjectively as a collapsing and crashing human mind that is not responding to the id, we need an injection from the depths of human experience, from the id or primitive mind that still functions beneath the secondary mental processes of the ego. The distant past, stored in the id, cannot tell us everything about a better future, but it can and must help us to determine a better future by way of an open and free internal dialogue with the ego.

In sum, the id or wild mind must be directly satisfied in wilderness on a regular basis to stay actively engaged in our thinking processes. The id cannot be entirely successfully sublimated, and the attempt to do so will only produce more mental illness.

Author note: The November 2024 ballot in Colorado will include a measure to stop the trophy hunting of mountain lions, so I wish to dedicate my essay to the freedom and majesty of the Mountain Lion!

References

^[1] Organizations that support the ideal of Half Wild Earth are Biodiversity Foundation (inspired by EO Wilson), Half-Earth Project; Harvey Locke’s Nature Need Half (launched by Harvie Locke), and The Rewilding Institute (founded by Dave Foreman). See also E.O Wilson’s book, Half Earth, as well as the scientific work of Michael Soulé and Reed Noss.

^[2] Marcuse, Herbert, An Essay on Liberation, (Beacon Press, Boston, 1969), p.4

^[3] Marcuse, Herbert, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, (Beacon Press, Boston, 1972), p. 108

^[4] Ibid., p.64

^[5] Monbiot, George, Regenesis, (Penguin Random House, NY, 2022)

^[6] The term “dialectics” is borrowed from Hegel in order to acknowledge that human progress proceeds by way of contradictory experiences. I give it a new and modern context in the light of evolutionary and ecological discoveries that is clarified in the course of this essay.

^[7] Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and The Id, (Norton and Company, NY, 1960), p. 46