Untaming the wild

Cape Tribulation, despite its name, is a jewel – there is no other way to describe it. I had the privilege of being there recently.

Named so by 18^th-century British explorer James Cook because his ship struck a nearby reef, the cape is three hours’ drive north of Cairns in far-north Queensland. It’s a blissful place, with emerald-coloured rainforest spilling down from a backdrop of the Great Dividing Range onto a beach that looks out to the Coral Sea. The tropical forest is intensely, fiercely alive in a way that surprises and beguiles a person from the temperate south. Giant fan palms and strangler fig trees, coiling vines and ferns of all description compete in a dense profusion of life. There are the bizarre “meowing” calls of the cat bird and the hooping sound of the wompoo pigeon, and on the forest floor the scratching of brush turkeys and scuttling of goannas. It’s a bewitching, magical place and quite different from any other I have been to in Australia.  

A friend of mine was at Cape Tribulation 30 years ago. Then, she says, there was but a rough dirt road and a small number of hippies living in huts. Now, the sealed road allows a steady stream of tourists up to the cape. Cabins, hostels and bed-and-breakfasts are strung along the way, mostly tucked into the forest in “eco-tourist” fashion. Some of the nearby land has been cleared for farming and horticulture.

Beyond the consumption of “sights” and activities that is tourism, I suspect many people come to a place like Cape Tribulation to commune with nature. Though perhaps not conscious of it, they want to speak to the environment and to receive its words in whatever fashion. It’s an acknowledgement and opening to mystery and to forms of communication beyond those of the ordinary human world. Even if all you do is lie on a beach for a week and read a book, that beach somehow makes its way into you; it speaks to you; its rhythm and vibration meet yours.

We seek out nature to get in touch with our true self, our soul. Outside the well-trodden paths of the human world we meet not just our own life in depth, but the very Ground of Being. The jaggedness of our ego is somehow smoothed as it begins to find its proper place in the great scheme of Life. Perhaps we experience ourselves as in nature, not outside it. 

The difficulty, nowadays, is that humans are spreading in greater numbers across all parts of the globe and wiping out non-human nature. And as places like Cape Tribulation are cornered in national parks, cut by roads and swelled with tourists, communion with nature becomes harder. What is destroyed cannot return. In order to save nature humans have to retreat somewhat, to reign in and ultimately decrease the human population, to stop building roads, dams, mines and other major incursions into the natural world. And much more money and resources need to go to saving species and ecosystems – a global Marshall Plan devoted to nature preservation. 

The heart of the matter, though, is not one of harnessing human willpower to save nature. It requires a change in human consciousness. As many ecologically minded thinkers and activists have been saying for some time, we have to see ourselves as part of nature, not separate from it. That entails behaviour that is light on the planet, that values locality and simplicity, and that is fundamentally about relationship and connection. 

Crucially, we need to rediscover nature in ourselves and in our immediate environment. For all our faults, we are one of the expressions of life on this living planet and our actions need to be in accord with this reality. In the city, we can bring non-human nature back through the planting of native trees and shrubs wherever possible, digging up bitumen car parks and empty land. We can also cultivate food in this way and keep animals. An urban green revival has already started, with examples including community gardens and revegetation groups, green roofs and rooftop hives for beekeeping. The movement, however, is still in its infancy and has a long way to go.

Perhaps, over time, something of the communion with nature that we experience at a place like Cape Tribulation could be felt just where we are – wherever we are. Many people who garden in their backyards develop an intuitive sense of nature, as well as joy and balance, from direct connection with the earth. The more we get in touch with nature, the more we are in touch with ourselves. Then, perhaps, with spiritual development and refinement we would not need to escape so much to national parks and other wilderness for inner nourishment. The distinction between the “wild” and “domestic” will be less relevant as all life is experienced as sacred.

Limits are good

The mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms of all civilization.

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

Limits are a dirty concept in our culture. We want to get what we can whenever we can. And the logic of economic activity in our time is of ceaseless growth and expansion.

Limits are a dirty concept because our culture is thoroughly penetrated by the worldview of market economics, to the exclusion of almost everything else. The goal of life is a feast of materialism in which we want ever more.

This worldview is dominant in what has been described as the “postmodern” era, when the inner dimension of meaning and values is fluid and unshaped. Ambiguity and uncertainty, with no central meaning to anything, are its defining features. It is said the world is made up of an infinite number of “discourses”, of constantly changing forms without absolute value.

At the risk of sounding reactionary, I think limits are good. We are stuck in simplistic views of them as restrictive and oppressive; it’s time we developed a more sophisticated understanding of form and limits.

All material form has structure and therefore limits. As the form changes, so does its structure and the limits inherent in it. A seed in the earth becomes a sapling and then a mature tree, which eventually dies and goes back into the earth to nurture more growth. At each stage in the process of change there are embodied limits. A eucalypt seed will not sprout an oak, a sapling can only grow a certain amount depending on conditions, a tree is a tree and not a rhinoceros or any other form, and like all form it eventually dies and renews with its death the ground from which it emerged. Even with genetic modification, form ambiguity and fluidity, there is still form and limit, though it may be difficult to name or comprehend. All material form has limit.

Limits need not be restrictive – in fact, they are continuously changing as all form evolves. In the human world, limits are necessary for social relations. As we allow certain behaviours, so we proscribe others for everybody’s benefit. Over time our limits change as our understanding of “the good” changes – when once there was slavery, now it is banned; when once we restricted the roles of women, now those restrictions are lifted. When we chafe or buck at certain social limits, feeling them to be oppressive, we are saying that the forms to which they belong no longer affirm life in a meaningful way. This then allows human society to grow and develop, changing its laws, relationships and sense of itself. New limits are set which, in time, will also be replaced as society evolves.

Limits help us to understand ourselves and our world and encourage responsibility for our actions. Children learn by bouncing off limits – when a child touches a hot iron, it knows not to do that again. Adults also learn by making mistakes, or meeting the limits of their capabilities or actions.  

To be cavalier with limits is dangerous, and to ignore them outright invites disaster. The ancient Greek goddess Nemesis would visit retribution on anyone who broke fundamental laws or had too much of anything. In our own time, the result of greed and disregard of limits is the destruction of life on Earth, which ultimately imperils human survival. We need to urgently rediscover the importance of limits.

Our postmodern uncertainty and sense of ambiguity around limits are symptoms of a major period of transition in which the old ways of understanding are no longer helpful. We have reached an age of complexity in human material power and knowledge that requires new vision. As in times past, transition periods are chaotic, and much of the worst of human nature rises to the surface. There is a need for a realignment of values and meaning to meet the shape of current times. This will ultimately mean the creation of new forms and the setting of new limits.

Jungian author David Tacey says Western society is based on knowledge, but Indigenous cultures are grounded in wisdom. I think he has touched on something very important. Wisdom implies humility, which is recognition of oneself in relationship with others, a healthy tempering of the ego. A life-affirming society with ecological balance and respect cannot be achieved by form-breaking materialism. It will need to have wisdom at its core.