A student in my college writing class this semester turned his essay exploring how wolves are essential to maintaining balance in ecosystems into a fairy tale. The prompt, as part of the class’s final portfolio, was to remix something written in the class from one format to another format, thus exploring how the message both changes and stays the same from medium to medium. In the essay, the student used Yellowstone as a case study to explore the wolf as a keystone species, meaning the absence of a particular predator in an ecosystem leads to drastic changes—what are the changes and what happens when the wolf is re-introduced?
In the remixed fairy tale, the forest, absent wolves, had stopped breathing. One day a wolf named Luna arrived in the forest to find where she belonged. In her search, she simply did what was normal to her and only hunted out of necessity. Soon the forest began to transform into a healthier, breathing organism. A farmer’s daughter witnessed the forest’s change and was amazed. Her father, however, was angry at the wolf’s presence. He wanted to kill the wolf because she posed a threat. Desperate, the farmer’s daughter pleaded with her father to leave the wolf alone. She brought him to the forest and showed him how healthy the forest had become, indeed that it was whole again.
A contemporary nature writer has written about how we need to stop romanticizing off-grid living, or even rural living, because living close together in a city has less ecological impact. Urban sprawl causes more damage to the environment than living in an apartment—up instead of out. She was one who grew up perhaps on a farm or maybe had hippie parents, and then as an early adult chose to live off-grid as much as is feasible without community support (intentional community villages do exist). She found that her ecological impact was just as great, if not more so, just in different ways, because our society is not set up to support that kind of living (Michelle Nijhuis has also written about her experience of this). Thus, this contemporary nature writer chose to move to the city and find nature there.
I both admire this writer for her work of finding nature in the city (yes, it does exist and we can do more to support that) and yet have resisted her philosophy the moment I read it. I am only at the beginning stages of articulating why I resist it. I can’t disagree that urban sprawl is bad, but I also think living in places that are so unlike our natural way of being becomes deeply harmful and perpetuates the problem of distancing ourselves from ourselves. We’ve forgotten who we are.
Another student of mine this semester wrote an essay about the health benefits of being in nature, and one theory she researched was something called “biophilia,” which is a theory that our minds and bodies crave natural environments because we fit into them. They harmonize with us, we with them. When we are born, raised, and die in a city, we never get a sense of that harmony. We are the lost wolf in search of where we belong.
I’ve been thinking about how this fairytale can be read as a metaphor, this wolf as a metaphor, for our lost voices when we give in to others’ demands or expectations, when we lose ourselves to ego. We become brittle and broken, we can no longer breathe. The wolf, our voice, has been wandering alone and in need of a home. When she takes up residence in our throats, she sets the pendulum of equilibrium in motion again. We remember a little more each day who we are, we return to ourselves. When we return to ourselves, we rebuild ourselves, and thus our environment, in turn, becomes whole. This could be called rewilding.
The concept of rewilding holds the danger of romanticism, just as off-grid living does. Perceiving nature as something to escape to positions it as simply another resource to extract from, something to visit occasionally to recover from our otherwise fast-paced lives. Perceiving nature as something to visit has the benefit of reminding us what it’s like to be in harmony, but only visiting and then returning fails to make any change. When we visit then return we’ve done nothing but participated in exploitation and assumed it will just always be there to visit, (which leads to all kinds of race and class issues associated with our back to nature movement). Either way, giving up and moving to the city for ecological purposes or exploiting nature for one’s health maintains the current status quo: a forest that is not breathing.
But when we dare to let the wolf back in, when we let her lodge in our throats, with all her love and her danger, we’ll have done something far greater: taken action to make change. We won’t have just gone to visit a caged wolf at the zoo. We’ll have recognized how similar we are, and that we have similar needs. We’ll have recognized how much we need that wolf to not be caged, but out and free.
How we let the wolf back in depends on who we are and what we love, what drives us to act. For me, the wolf is my voice. Long ago my wolf was chased away. I lost her and I let her be lost. I have been fortunate enough to go through transformative experiences, several of them not easy, where I began to recognize the loss. My forest had stopped breathing. But then, one day, she appeared again. And though doing the work of protecting her is not easy, maybe it’s even harder than working through some of the experiences that ultimately led me to find her, the work is worth it. Maybe for the above-mentioned nature writer, she is doing the work of what she loves in a city, finding nature in the cracks and crannies of city sidewalks and sunny roof gardens. The more each of us finds our own wolf, the more whole our world will be.