Driving north on the Glenn Highway on a rare sunny day in Alaskan February, the light broke through the occasional cloud and illuminated the Talkeetna Mountains in bright white and shadowy blue. The variance in the way that the sunlight hit the mountains creates a discordant patchwork of color that added even more depth and sweeping distance to the already intimidating size of the vista cresting the last hill before The Valley.
The show that the sunlight put on reminded me of an often forgotten and startling fact: everything we see has been touched by the same photons that touch our eyes. The constant ticking of particles of light through the rods and cones of these strange orbs in our heads tells us a lot about forms that are unimaginably far away. The sense of sight is so crucial to our perception of the world that visual signals in the brain are able to override other processes like when smell or taste or the unspoken logic of how the world works are disrupted by optical or psychological illusions.
Perhaps this intense power of sight over other senses is why it is hard to recognize one of the most fundamental attributes of our world: it is highly interactive and connected. So many of the incredible phenomena that take place in the world are not clear to the naked eye. One of my college roommates pointed out one of these basic-yet-unseen truths: you are what you eat. It is a terrible, ear-grating cliché that actually has an important meaning. I believe his phrasing was “humans are machines that turn food into humans.” The food that you eat literally becomes part of your body. This is most noticeable when humans are growing up from babies to adults because there is a drastic increase in size and shape. But even after growth has ceased, the cells of the body are replaced on a regular basis. This varies wildly depending on the part of the body but the average is about eight years for a structure to be fully replaced— all the while the body is taking in material like bananas and carrots and beer, processing them into building blocks, and manufacturing human organs.
This principle can be applied to any living and many nonliving things. A bear is a machine that turns berries and bucks into bears. Physarum polycephalum is a machine that turns oats and sugars into physarum polycephalum. The most concise summary of this idea and its implications that I have seen is that the world is a series of stories about things eating and being eaten. This certainly has some startling implication when we think about the food we put into our bodies that will become our hair skin and bones, but it is just as important when applied to nonliving things. An ecosystem is a complex system of eaters and food and although there is not a specific thing or things that an ecosystem eats, it does utilize natural processes to transform the materials it has available into different forms. This is why arctic foxes are white and baobab trees grow fat in the hot equatorial sun.
Just as important as being mindful of what we eat, given this information, is what we are feeding the world that we are a part of, never forgetting the other end of the bargain of eating is being eaten.
Mistreatment of the environment is not a plight of modernity. The issue with modernity is the scale of the mistreatment. I believe the Earth is resilient and can handle whatever we feed it, but trash that fills an ocean takes a long time to digest and exploded mountains take a long time to rebuild.
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When I was in Kenya in 2013 I spent part of my time living in a Maasai boma (a semipermanent, multi-home enclosure with animal pens) in Samburu in the North. My home stay family talked about dry weather and the need to take the animals long distances to find food. City folk came and took sand from the rivers and now they hold less water. The plants stood stoic in the arid plains of dirt, craving the nutrients of the cattle feces piled a foot high in the boma’s animal pens. In the afternoon, after taking the animals to the river for water, we sat in the shade of one of the small homes and played bao, a game we know as mancala. The other students and I were new to the game and slowly learned the strategies necessary to win. One of the Maasai spectators, a friend of our host family, was impatient with us for not seeing all the right moves immediately and he would try to show us what to do or even make the moves for us.
Later, one of us lamented the intrusion into the competition, recalling the frustration of not being able to figure out the game for himself. All I could recall was the scratching of small stones on the wooden board. The soft tick tick ticking of the pebbles.
That evening it was quite warm long after sunset. I looked up at the moon. It was as bright and big as I had ever seen it. Shining down on me were photons from the sun bouncing off the surface of the moon into my eyes, so white and so cold.
Enter Wilderness 