2023.11.15 by Jack Magai

Hello. Thanks to those of you who joined me earlier on my outing. I will lead another one tomorrow at noon. I’m going to speak now about the ideas that have been driving me to set them up. 

Here is my hypothesis: The obstacles to having exhilarating nature experiences in urban and industrial situations are huge, but they consist mostly of our preconceptions. The better we can recognize these, the happier we will be. And as happier animals we may be better suited to solving the environmental challenges we face.

Here’s a bit about how I come to this: I am the product of a midwestern, suburban, second-wave feminist household of engineers. In college I studied epic poetry and post-modern dance. I make money as an arborist, and I lose money making art. 

About 35 years ago I organized a backpacking trip through the city of San Francisco. It was a goofy idea, enacted just because it seemed ridiculous. But the experience was strangely compelling, more of an intense adventure, in some ways, than trips in the wilderness. I kept thinking about it, so twenty years later I started planning to reenact it, and began reading about psychogeography and the history of ideas of wilderness. 

But what made me really care about this topic has been my work as an arborist. Over the last thirty years I have talked with thousands of people seeking guidance in managing the trees they are responsible for. Most of them experience some form of tension between the urge to care for nature and the urge to keep it from harming them. This tension strikes me as fundamental to the human condition, though perhaps more to western society than elsewhere. And so I kept reading about conceptions of nature and, about 5 years ago, began writing scripts to guide people on adventures – in airports, on city streets, in abandoned parts of cities – to explicate this tension. The outings I’m offering here at the Symposium are a form of research for this script-writing effort. I call them Eco-Dérives after the Situationists’ urban walks, which they called Derives. When an arborist colleague told me about the Urban Soils Institute I discovered the Art Extension, and ended up spending 2 weeks at SWALE House this summer to try to figure out where this exploration of mine should go. I’m getting closer. But I still haven’t done any more urban backpacking.

For the longest time Western Culture was wilderness-phobic. RThen, roughly 200 years ago we began to see what had been confusing wasteland as a palliative for the ills of life lived in this emerging setting — industry. The biblical mandate to subdue nature began to be replaced with a social mandateone to preserve pristine wilderness. Wild character was designed into cemeteries and parks and small urban spaces. About 100 years ago, as the realization grew that wilderness was disappearing, efforts were made to preserve it, such as with National Parks. We began to love the woods and to hate the sidewalk. In the past 50 years another turn in this ideological slalom can be seen in our renewed appreciation for urban life, and in celebrations of the departure of industry such as the Highline. This flip-flopping between loving and hating civilization is like anlike an an Epic Rap Battle between John Muir and Jane Jacobs.

Nature itself, of course, is more stable than our ideas towards it.

Those who can afford to, now use the products of our industry (cars, planes, highways) to get to prescribed wilderness areas, these museums of pre-industrial nature. I do it too. I get a lot out of immersing myself in the woodsit, but I want to know why I do. I can findThere’s lots of evidence from social science, brain science and epidemiology that these experiences make us happier, more relaxed, even more productive.

But is nature just a vitamin we have to take? Wwhat are we actually responding to on wilderness trips? Let me break down this question into a few parts:

1. Are we responding to the sensations – sights, smells, sounds, movement and touch?
2. Are we responding to the revelation of natural processes new to us? And
3. Are we responding to ideas – of wilderness itself, obviously, but also ideas of what we are getting away from, ideas of vacations and adventures, for instance?

In the Eco-Dérives,.  I look to see which of these responses happen in urban or industrial sites, and which are limited by setting. 

As for sensations, surely aesthetic experiences are the traditional gateway to achieving the transformations we look for in nature – cold air on the cheek, birdsong, the crunch of leaves, the howling of wind in the trees, etc. And out of these sensations we can craft for ourselves a sort of healing process. But these sensations, taken individually, are not unique to wilderness. So it must be their combination, and our understanding of that combination as valuable, which conveys benefit. I suspect that this recognition of the value of some places is the same process which eliminates other, less desirable places as sites of healing.

As William Cronoan wrote in The Trouble with  Wilderness: “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home.”

As an arborist it’s my job to notice the effects of microscopic natural processes in and around trees, both above and below ground, both in wild and urban sites. I find that attending closely to them is as captivating as to larger-scale phenomena such as grand vistas, waterfalls and animal sightings. This may be the hardest part of my argument to sell to the uninitiated, but as people in this room well know, these small actors are at work everywhere, including in the soil, and they are fascinating.  In our industrial wastelands, which I seek out as new wildernesses, it’s a bonus that these actors are at work deconstructing our earlier efforts to assert dominion over them!

Is it possible that my pleasure in wilderness is due to my beliefs about its value, and that a more direct connection to natural forces is possible? To begin to see natural forces everywhere, and to understand the processes as worthy of attention, may be a way to undermine this stubborn ideological chauvinism.

Preparing for a wilderness outing is to set aside normal activities and prepare for the unknown. The resulting mental state readies a person for unusual experiences. The collected memories register as important, the sensations more vibrant. These same factors should affect any outing.

People look in urban landscapes for bits of nature. They hold up a lovely garden, park, even a tree growing on the edge of a parking lot, as the natural within an unnatural setting. I am making a more radical proposal than these: to view the urban landscape as a natural whole, a true wilderness, garbage and all. And so the preparation must be important.

OK, so how might we do this? I have some experiences to share.

The goal of the Situationists was to have an altered view of society. In their Dérives, participantswe are to achieve distance from normal engagement with the city by rapidly trekking across it. I try to use a related approach to gain an altered view of nature. 

In our normal lives, being surrounded by human creations interferes with our perception of natural processes in the same way that loud sounds drown-out quiet ones: we cannot perceive them with so much else competing for our attention. I try to find ways around this problem, ways of focusing our attention on the minutiae of natural processes that are happening all around us. The first step is to deny the impossibility of nature in these places by going looking for it. The next step is to attend to the senses we need to find it, giving these stimuli a bigger presence in our conscious minds than usual. I try to achieve this effect through a meditative process in which I ask participants to focus on individual senses. Finally, making the outing special, even mysterious or transgressive, seems to heighten the experience. That’s why I incorporate different elements in some of the related work, such as inviting participants to be a part of a play, or to dig with forks in an untended area of a park — to jar the plain, seemingly predictable surroundings into something else, something as deserving of attention. Like a waterfall. As I keep working on this, I hope to add to the preparations what I have shared with you today – an understanding of the fickleness of our ideas about nature.

I think this project is a potential celebration of our fundamental sensorial connection to landscape: by looking for nature in spaces which we think of as having been stripped of it, the residual, fundamental connections can appear in relief.

Thanks very much for your attention. If you are interested in experiencing an Eco-Dérive, but can’t make tomorrow’s, please come find me and I’ll get you on a list of future outings.