From Sycamore Trees To Human Destiny PDF

Chapter 1 4 Fr o m Sy ca m o re Tree s t o Huma n D e s t i n y : R ead in g th e W il d at t h e C r o s s r oa d s o f Globaliz ation and Apocalypse Thenceforth natural things are not only themselves but a speaking....

Chapter 1 4 Fr o m Sy ca m o re Tree s t o Huma n D e s t i n y : R ead in g th e W il d at t h e C r o s s r oa d s o f Globaliz ation and Apocalypse Thenceforth natural things are not only themselves but a speaking. —Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness The only way to begin this writing is with a form of confession. The planet is in trouble. It is not a time simply to “do theory.” The signals are unmistakable for anyone willing to look. An interlocking quater- nary of apocalyptic forces—peak oil, climate change, species extinc- tion, and population overshoot—ride in upon us relentlessly like horsemen from the end times. M. King Hubbard’s modeling of the peak production of modernity’s primary energy resource accurately predicted the decline of U.S. oil production in the mid-1970s and served notice that such a global peak was in the offing (no matter how ferocious the attempts to enter Faustian bargains of self-delusion with our zooplankton and algae ancestors whose viscous bodies are the life- blood of industrial civilization). There were only so many trillion tril- lion deaths in the planet’s oceans over the millions of years leading up to this one, and the supply of “black gold,” however tweaked by new technologies of extraction, is limited. But, as climate change denier Richard Muller (2012) has acknowledged, even if that peak is pushed out a few decades hence by tar sands fever, it will not much matter at today’s rates of CO2 emissions. Political gridlock, corporate con- stitution in the imperative of growth, and all the reigning idolatries 18 Political Spirituality of short-term gain interlocked with take-no-prisoners advertising and its consumer culture offspring, translate into a depressing scenario. The recasting of human interaction as cyborg in social media fora— granting “full metal jacket” forms of isolated connectivity devoid of organic modes of vulnerability and measurably eroding our evident capacity for empathy and self-limitation—only compounds the issue. All of this coalesces into an accelerating rush toward the tipping point of unstoppable warming that does not seem remediable in our current possibilities of self-editing. Peak oil concerns may well be eclipsed in short order by peak air and peak water realities. Planetary Extinction? Meanwhile, in the last century we have altered a long-standing balance between species extinction and new species incubation rates, which has us plundering the biosphere’s generative capacity—and shredding its ecodiversity—with rapacity. As one commentator now argues—it is like constructing an ever-ascending tower to house our species ever closer to technocracy’s vision of a high-rise heaven by ever-more furi- ously pulling out the bricks lower down to build with ever-increasing alacrity the next layer above (Quinn, 2007). The future of such an enterprise will remain “bullish” until the brick that is one too many is finally pried loose. And, slum cities of multiple millions cropping up almost overnight across the planet’s global south, skyrocketing total population numbers toward nine billion (or more)—only deepens the thickening gloom! National governments make common cause with transnational finance and privatized militance—creating ceaselessly revolving doors between boardrooms, west wings, pentagons, and bedrooms, and erecting insurmountable lifestyle buffers between pol- icy deciders and the effects of their decisions on those slum-dwelling denizens. The entire ruling apparatus appears increasingly as one car- tel, under the dollar, invisibly ensconced behind state-of-the-art secu- rity and ruthlessly secessionist on a planetary scale—until the wrong technology falls into the wrong hand of rage and a nuclear winter or biotoxic horror is visited upon everyone. In the face of such a dilemma, how might one say anything mean- ingful about “communication” that was not sheer twaddle? I do not pretend to know how to answer such a charge, except to say that the problem of secession identified here as promulgated by ruling class elites vis-à-vis everyone else, is even more radically the problem between modern humanity writ large and the rest of the biosphere. The question on the table of academic deliberation at least—if, indeed,  From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny 19 not of every other area of human endeavor—is simply this: What does it mean to be human? We have evolved a form of knowledge produc- tion that resembles a hive of worker bees tending feverishly to their respective honey holes without a clue that the entire comb has been cut loose from the tree and fallen into a north-flowing river just south of Niagara Falls, New York. The interlocking crises should push us to stop in our tracks and recognize that continuing to do the same thing over and over again in expectation of a different result is indeed, as Einstein opined, the practical definition of insanity. The logic of expansionist civilization inherited from a 10,000-year- old turn toward monocrop agriculture, driven by imperial demand for ever-greater technologies of control and ever-larger citadels of accu- mulation and unleashed on a planet of finite resources, simply can- not be sustained.1 And as one scholar writing on these issues offers: “What can’t be sustained... can’t be sustained” (Jensen, 2008). We keep dodging the feedback from the biosphere in hopes that the social structures we have cantilevered over the limit of the planet’s carrying capacity (Heinberg, 2014) will somehow find new support from some unforeseen technological innovation. And thus we will not really have to stop and do something different. I have no crystal ball and so cannot infallibly gainsay that hope. I can only say that for me— and a growing host of others who are trying to look reality in the eye without blinking—the ecological blowback is stark and demands radical rethinking of our entire career on the planet as a species. It means stripping down to the pith, reimagining the root, asking the unanswerable questions all over again: Why are we here? What does it mean to be alive? “Human” Communication Communication is everywhere—a grand phenomenon of nature taking place at every level of the cosmos: from bacteria sending out chemical “shouts” to their environments in search of return signatures indicating like-configured bacterial explorers in the same neighbor- hood to quasars and microwave hum from the primordial event of big bang yet sounding across the expanding bubble of the macro- space we naively call the uni-verse. Our own particular frequency of exchange within that grand cacophony is immensely narrow and tiny, embedded within an implicate order of ever-recalibrating waves of information and energy that makes Pythagoras’s music of the spheres but a minute intuition of the whole. And yet something as human and vernacular as black church’s call-and-response or Inupiat throat 20 Political Spirituality singing turns out to be a rough imitation of the ultimate conversation, both a riff upon and a model of what is going on intergalactically. Perhaps more to the point, we need to attend to the researches of E. T. Hall and William Condon from early in the history of the discipline of communication studies to the effect that the call and the response are actually happening simultaneously with each other, as the ever- emergent phenomenon of entrainment, and not as a cause-effect pro- gression of linear events, threaded onto a line of time like beads on an abacus (Leonard, 1978, 14–22). There is indeed a temporal priority that invigorates our own genesis on the planet. But it is one in which we are the dependent beneficiaries of the grand concert of life forms who have distilled tested and true survival strategies in syncopated interactions with local ecologies for a millennial millennia of centuries before we arrived, late and now lost, on the many-layered scene. As a recent twist in the shape and thrust of spiraling strands of DNA coating the planet in strobing signals of photon exchanges and elec- tromagnetic pulsations, we are “bathed” in communication. We find ourselves awaking on a stage not only set for, but composed by and of, an unfathomable quadrillion of others, whose very existence is lived literally through us, as indeed we live through them. The fundamental structure of what “is”—and the primordial communication echoing forth from and as that structure—is the metabolism of everything by and with everything else. It is “eating and being eaten” all the way up and down the phylum. It is our destiny to become food for other life forms and our voca- tion to compost other life forms into the peculiar beauty and singu- lar significance we mysteriously embody. But our mystery is no more than that of any other composite of this writhing codification of infor- mation called life. And that seems to be the great forgotten import that our strange eco-autistic affliction of self-reflection has somehow effaced from our otherwise quite formidable consciousness. We have incarcerated ourselves in the markings of our minds and the languages of our lips—like some huge Alcatraz of the imagination fogged in with words upon words upon words—forgetting that we are far more than a mere ocular substrate for the products of Maybelline and its parent corporation or the advertising orgasm that finds its most cov- eted stimulation in that part of our anatomy. Indeed, the 65 to 92 percent of our “being” that is communicating other than through our voice box is coparticipant in a nuanced and throbbing dance at every level. These range from the atomic and molecular inside our own bodies, where we ricochet around as minorities in the ecodiversity of bacteria living there, to the balletic stages of New York City and the  From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny 21 robotic streets of South Central, whence we turn for relief and healing from our automaton-existence inside the corporate state, on out to the moon tides and sun flares that choreograph our blood beats and punctuate our body rhythm with novelty. Just where we should be directing our attention, inside this living vibraphone of communica- tion as a species priding itself on some measure of self-consciousness, is no mean question. I would argue for something quite prosaic and yet disturbingly profound in what I take to be an apocalyptic situation. Journalism scholar Robert Jensen suggests that we are today a species “out of place,” trying to occupy a niche for which we are ill-equipped geneti- cally (Jensen, 2008). Thus far relatively “hard-wired” by our Pleis- tocene inheritance to value morally and pay attention emotionally to what is about 100 yards around us in any direction, and bearing a cra- nial size capable of dealing with fewer than 150 relationships socially with any kind of complexity and nuance (what anthropologists are now calling the “rule of 150”; Wells, 2010, 118–119; 205), we are in trouble. Our wet dream of representative democracy among 300 million political actors in this country alone, or equitable living and sustainable dwelling among seven billion co-tenants of a militantly globalized economy, seems patently delusional in its ceaseless projec- tions of progressive attainment. If we just try a bit harder. Run a little faster. Consume more rampantly. Kill a bit more efficiently. Grow more exponentially—we’ll get there! Technology will indeed save us!? Dialectical Identification Maybe. But I find my deepest responses evoked by a range of voices insisting the only way forward is by taking deep stock of where we have already been—and that by way of radical apprenticeship to where we still remain: as one animal species among millions of spe- cies of other life forms. We are not yet able to eat our computers or drink our motor oil. And the research continues to indicate that our mental health declines in inverse proportion to the layers of machine we introduce between our bodies and those of our photosynthetic cousins outside our windows, whose green-producing miracles as the lone “self-feeders” (“autotrophs”) of the planet—creating living mat- ter out of hard rock and sunlight—literally creates the envelope of oxygen and animation upon which we all depend (Rasmussen, 214). (Seeing living plants outside one’s window has measurable effects on health beyond that of observing a Screensaver depiction of foli- age, according to recent research; Williams, 2012). All flesh is finally 22 Political Spirituality grass, as the Hebrew prophet Isaiah once raged, and thus it is no great wonder that for indigenous cultures the globe over, “grass” itself is the great primal godess to which all the rest of the pantheon offers homage. And thus begins to re-emerge a perhaps strange suggestion in the face of collapse. Learn the language of an animal. Talk to a plant. Recover a sense of one’s destiny as irretrievably intertwined with other life forms, whose communication and commensality is the very mate- rial and meaning of “being” alive. If I were “God,” I’m not sure I would have arranged it that way. Warped as I am by my schooling in industrial culture, my lifestyle trajectory is more that of the “Borg” of Star Trek fame than the blue-skinned hunter-gatherer creatures Ava- tar names as “Na’vi.” At least that would have to be the assessment if one judged by how and where I actually live, as compared with how I might fantasize or speak. But the returns today on industrial culture and its agricultural fore-parent are so far dismal. “Civilization,” in spite of its vaunted achievements, has never not been built on coerced labor and violent exploitation, and has almost nowhere proven dura- ble on the face of the planet in a 10,000-year career (Rasmussen, 1995, 41). The environmental “communication” of our time—really a compound form of feedback from... fish, and fungi—is at the very least the word, “Stop!” Ventrioloquized through a human imagina- tion such as mine it sounds thus: “Halt and listen! You are not the only being present here. We have something to say. Indeed, we have been talking all the way along the time line and you used to be able to hear. In fact, you cannot be you if you cannot hear us. If our very pheromones are to your anemic postmodern nostrils only so much stench, as Agent Smith snorted over the sweating head of Morpheus, then indeed Matrix is right. You have already become merely a Smith- clone; your organic metabolism of other organic bodies merely the fat and grease and calories of the great corporate machine whose algo- rithms have effectively ‘eaten’ you.” If human identity is fundamentally dialectical, gradually construct- ing itself in a crucible of negotiation with its quintessential others, then we could track human development as having “progressed” over its time on the planet through three gradually shifting moments: 1. a primordial indigenous identity as living animal worked out in our varied ecologies of origin (African savannah, Gobi desert, Amazonian rainforest, etc.) in languages populated by immense vocabularies of the flora and fauna regularly encountered and known in reciprocal modes of exchange in those ecologies;  From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny 23 2. a recent (10,000-year-old) agricultural experiment in which iden- tity is increasingly fabricated by elites, sequestered away from plant and animal encounters in moat-protected “castles,” as an ideo- logical bribe and hollow palliative foisted on their laboring popu- lations who create the wealth they hoard and consume, in which violent contact with other human cultures, encountered in the relentless project of expansion, becomes dialectically decisive for one’s own sense of self, offering images of the despised and racial- ized “stranger” as the negative foil for identification, the savage sign of what one supposedly is not; 3. our current fetishization of the machine, emerging as the second and third and fourth skin of the human organism, the hardened carapace of urban concrete and suburban steel whose belly we inhabit like futuristic Jonahs without a beach in sight, the plastic and glass and vinyl cocoons in which we eat and sleep and watch our manifold screens, the molded alloys we drive, the silicon and plasma through which we communicate, the titanium and chemis- try we splice into our ailing bodies, the GMO foods we wittingly or not eat, the whole spectral mass of re-engineered biosphere now rising up before us as messianic cyborg whose indestructibility is sold as a secret religion to our children through their wide-eyed con- sumption of “Transformer” toys and “Terminator” stars, against whose overwhelming engulfment we can barely find momentary escapist relief in recreation with a re-engineered “goofy” called a “pet” or visitation with an enslaved anomaly in a “zoo.” I increas- ingly encounter students now who confess to closing their blinds at home because they are actually afraid of trees and grass. The cyborg is here. The question now is where is the human? Personal Intimation My own life trajectory has been one of continuous pilgrimage into deep encounters with cultures and people different from myself. I am a white male middle class heterosexual by background and condition- ing who has lived the majority of his life in the inner city—mostly in Detroit. Without question my most profound educational formation has been “ghetto” street life over the course of four decades. There, low-income neighbors checked, challenged, embraced, rebuffed, and taught me, in what has amounted to an ongoing rite of initiation into another way of being a body, under protocols of rhythm and percus- sion, signifying and rhyme-spitting, dozens-playing and “jiving,” that broke down the codes of bourgeois morality and presuppositions of 24 Political Spirituality supremacy I had internalized growing up, and opened a way to exper- iment with being “something else.” The process continues today. Most of my academic work has entailed theorizing in both religious studies and communication studies discourses about race and racism animated by that personal trek across the boundaries separating black from white. And then late in the day, I married a Filipina and found myself confronted all over again with the need to undergo yet another regime of border crossing. This time it was into a culture structured in what one Filipino ethnomusicologist called a curvilinear tonality of communicating—both strangely similar to and yet confoundingly different from the percussive sensibility I had slowly internalized in inner-city Detroit. And yet again I have had to embrace a recurrent experience of awkward failure and apologetic chagrin as I seek to sub- mit to a new protocol of embodiment in service of expanding my capacity for radical joy and the sweet tang of intimacy. But now, even later in life, yet a third demand for journey has emerged with a vengeance. And that is an inverse climb back down the phylogenetic tree—in relationship to all of those plant and animal and fungi ancestors whose prowess and potencies have recombined in sexual and metabolic processes over multiple millions of years to produce “me.” More specifically, such a trek requires entertaining the nurture and pedagogy of nonhuman genealogy. In encounter with indigenous cultures here and in the Philippines, and through wide- ranging reading in a newly emerging literature going by the name of anarcho-primitivism—asking deep questions about the impossible viability of civilization as we have thus far known it—I become more and more aware that “human emergence” over the vast reaches of our time on the planet has typically entailed profound apprentice- ship to a given plant or animal “relative” in relationship to an intact local ecology. That relationship effectively became our earliest (and continuing) sensorium, in which “identity” was learned dialectically through symbiotic communication and reciprocal commensality. And given that evolutionary history, I must now confess that I am so far in my own life’s unfolding a “not yet human” human being. Rather, I face in the mirror each morning, an immature configuration of cells, fizzed up in a thousand commercialized discourses to hanker after books and french fries, lattes, and hot showers. I have attained middle age without yet having been “initiated” into the living matter which is our living mater, and cracked open to the vital insurrection of wild- spirited animation that is simply the way things are in nature. And I stumble now toward old age with inconsolable longing and incho- ate aching for that early boyhood level of awakening that first caught  From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny 25 sight of the stunning magnificence and intolerable beauty of life and loss in this world. My first real inkling of what it might mean to be alive outside the womb came when I was but five years old. On a summer late after- noon in an open acre behind our house a towering sycamore suddenly breathed on me with its ever so subtle pungency of dry-heat scent. A looming solidity hovered in the cicada-keened shaft of light, cutting through its leaves and my skin with a vast Something, indefinable as taste, insoluble as hunger. I suddenly knew the strange touch of beauty and grief that haunts every moment of actually seeing into a thing, without explaining either it or oneself, of stumbling across an invisible line into an immensity of presence that simultaneously pro- vokes immense melancholy because it cannot be possessed or kept from sliding into the eclipse of night, any more than my own being could be. The moment was one of abrupt voluptuousness and galactic sadness all at once, a huge, wild beast of response that broke surface in my young body like an unsuspected whale from the depths, carry- ing me over into the body of the world around me as if there was no barrier between. Today in my adult voice, I would argue that such experience is simply what it means to be a child and suddenly “see” into the sheer magic of the natural world—a quality of experience every one of us is designed for, in some version or another, but which becomes increasingly remote or even impossible as machine culture gathers us into itself relentlessly. Indeed, many adults I know today would say, “Oh come on, Jim, cut the New Age crap, it was just a tree, not a snort of cocaine!” But that is the entire point: there is no such thing as “just a tree.” That is “just a concept.” The real thing is... !? What is a tree? Do we really see it? Can you make one? In any case, it was a moment I would never recover from, however much it might be covered over as the years rolled on. Rather, it was something I would grope for—usually unknowingly when late afternoon sunlight takes on a particular cast. In all the seasonal drifts to follow—lurched by my various choices into a living concatenation of such seeing and its losses—I remain irrecoverably aware, before and beyond words, that life is an uncloseable hole of grief and beauty into which one falls incessantly. Or else runs from and dies coldly. But that suddenly sentient tree of my boyhood would also show its terroristic side—the terribleness of its wildness—only a year or so later, when during a thunderstorm, it would just as suddenly drop an arm on the head of a seven-year-old friend of mine, running home from the rain straight into the path of the descending branch. The falling limb caused a concussion and shattered any illusions of deference to 26 Political Spirituality things human that such a newborn lover as myself might be tempted to predicate of its majesty. The tree was, after all, committed merely to being a sycamore, surging up in infinite slow motion in its own great photon love, hosting the million-fold drama of life and death composting within and composing its own bark and branches and roots and shade, without favoring any. And I was merely a human being, suddenly awake to what was so much bigger than me, trying to walk forward in this little sliver of reality called my body, without a society or community around me to give orientation or meaning to that experience. I could hardly tell anyone, as the moment did not come contained in the thin coin of words and grammar. It came as an entire world, pouring in through my pores, without fanfare or busi- ness cards. Communal Privation But the ghosting of the experience remains a “ghost,” a haunting— questing for a body worthy of its intensity. I now recognize its real subject—the only interpretive body capable of giving “human” tex- ture to its significance—is what anthropology would call a band com- munity, small enough to know all of its members, tempered and tuned to a given ecology over multiple generations by its own locally born mythology and ritual practices. The culture of such a community his- torically encoded all such immensities of touch and smell and sight and sound in a shared fabric of meaning. Its carefully tended root was the other life forms providing the second womb of existence in that particular place in the world. Its imagined destiny was literally the overhead canopy of observed infinity whose night-revealed face we can no longer grasp as light-blinded, machine-bound urbanites. And while the reality of such communities is rapidly being extinguished today, intimation of this kind of ancient hunter-gatherer existence still lives inchoate and writhing-with-longing in our cyborg-saturated psyches. But the best we can do is Facebook. Or Twitter, as we head to the mall, trying to reproduce in mere sound bites that longed-for connec- tion in all the intimacy of its richly sensate detail, transacting through smell and sound and feel with a local living ensemble of kindred living beings who really are “all our relations” (mitaquwe oyasin, according to the Lakota). And the resulting absurdity of trying to erect deep meaning on top of displaced matter, ripped from its living context and incarcerated in commodified paper and price tags, leaves us numb with boredom. We grow desperate with emptiness in the midnight  From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny 27 hours when we can no longer fend off the whispering demons of our loneliness with whatever happens to be our latest addiction. We have become an autistic species, imprisoned in the machinery of our own image and making, wailing in fevered silences and deadened satieties for something whose loss we do not even know to grieve any longer, much less how. I am a wild child of an animal locked inside a tamed and terrorized adult, uninitiated in the body of my ecology and ances- try. I look helplessly to a machine-surround of enslaved matter—a house in a city, navigated by a car, flooded with neon, covered with cement, coded in digits—to provide what only wild nature can give. I am made for a living texture that matches my own, as stunningly beautiful and ferociously mortal as my own heart and flesh. A tree!— not a computer—has been the source of the most profound commu- nication of my life. But I have had no school capable of educating me into the nuances and epiphany of all its subtleties. I have no community ready to intro- duce me into a lifespan of reciprocity—in a local human-tree symbiot- ics of community and communication—that would grant over time, to my entire sensing anatomy, the knowledge of what it means to live and die in such a place, as part of all of the other living and dying going on in that place. A computer can give me information about all of that living. But it cannot give any sense to all of the dying, including my own. Computers don’t die; they just freeze up and are thrown away, to bleed the toxins of their recombinatory chemistry and metallurgy into somebody else’s environment. And thus it is that they teach me about myself—silently intimating that my destiny is a huge warehouse called Florida, where I will be stacked up with 10 million other fail- ing flesh machines, whose entire significance of slowly disappearing is keeping Nike and Callaway in profits. To the real question mark of existence, there is no textbook answer, no longitudinal data gathering and academic shifting of communica- tion theories, capable of rousing the sensitivity and passion adequate to what is actually going on. There is only the possibility of shiv- ering before the unutterable eloquence of what is alive, and keen- ing before its inevitable destruction and loss. Living grief continues to throb—un-honored and without a mythological idiom or ritual forum adequate to its communication—under our machine skin. Our ancestry calls, the bear calls, the loon cries, the moon woos... But we just open another Budweiser, flick the channel-changer, and settle into our couch—sure the only message worthy of our attention is the electronic face appearing there, speaking imperial English. There is no word left inside this machine for what we actually are. But if that is the 28 Political Spirituality only place we can now look for the communication that does matter, because we no longer know how to communicate in any other way, with any other living intelligences, it doesn’t matter. We have already become extinct. The rest is just history. Theoretical Reexamination But there remain a few communities on the planet that some scholars would actually esteem—rather than lament as Hegel did—for their ability to exist “outside” history, as we know it. History of religions legend Mircea Eliade (however we might evaluate his politics) is one who queried our Western certainty that historical discourse and nar- ratives of linear “progress” are evidence of advancement, in favor of folk around the globe living closer to the ground and more inti- mately involved with natural cycles and seasonal rhythms (Eliade, ix, 95, 153–154). The late Yankton Sioux lawyer/activist/ theologian Vina Deloria argued that Native Americans lived not “in” history, but inside mythologies, pursuing not “clear and distinct ideas” as Europe- ans have fetishized ever since Descartes, but “visions” (Deloria, 1999, 105, 119, 126, 143, 157). These wide-angle “pictures” were quested for in wild settings, carried for a lifetime, interpreted in a community. They were lived as a gestalt of meaning, ritualized and elaborated through generations inside an ecology of shared being. There, the lines of demarcation between humans, animals, plants, spirits, ances- tors, rocks, mountains, trees, rivers, stars, and Earth itself were under- stood as permeable and temporary, admitting both intercourse and communication. Such relations demanded both respect and the risk of crossing. Indeed, indigenous cultures the world over bear similar witness—to the degree they remain conversant with their respective habitats and resistive to Western epistemologies and the penetrations of globalized capital. They insist human being is contingent upon and constituted by interaction and communication with the living enve- lope of “otherkind” that is its larger “body” and real community, into which ancestors transform and from which new generations arise. And in many ways today, science and theory are now beginning to confirm the intuition, pushing us moderns to face the degree to which we inhabit a paradox. At once physically intimate with our surround- ings while profoundly alienated psychically and culturally—many of us today find it at least mildly shocking that we remain vulnerable to the waters we drink and become, the soils we absorb in our greens and metabolize as muscle, the air we transfigure into both flesh and spirit, even as such exchanges fade from our ritual appreciation or conscious  From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny 29 attention. Lacanian feminist Marxist Theresa Brennan, for instance, takes on the continuing Enlightenment predilection for autonomous understandings of humanity by working to return a calculation of nature’s immense efforts to Marx’s “labor theory of value” (Brennan, 1993, 124 ff, 210 ff). One of her books focuses on the role of pheromones in human consciousness, going so far as to argue that we will not fully grasp the latter until we comprehend the effects of the former in galvanizing our repertoire of attractions and repulsions and inflecting our agency (Brennan, 2004, 9–11, 68–69, 112). Cultural critic Norbert Elias diagnoses modern experience as mal- ady. He offers a kaleidoscopic history of embodiment, tracking the degree to which—as I hinted in many of my comments above—we are incarcerated in an entire somatic habitus, increasingly closing us off from more organic transactions with each other and with “animal- ity” in general. For Elias, this modern habituation reconstitutes us as what he calls homo clausus. We emerge in history as the great enclosed ones—increasingly walled off from the Bakhtinian “grotesque body” of the Middle Ages, which was routinized and licensed to exchange substance with other open bodies in regular ritual happenings like the Feast of Fools or May Day celebrations (Mennell and J. Goudsblom, 1998, 269; Bakhtin, 1984, 11, 27, 32, 84). Instead we stake our lives on a huddled existence inside an “individualized” identity. This indi- vidualized body is largely unexercised in intense emotional expres- sion. Schooled in bourgeois niceties and decorum, “civilized” into a cosmetic appearance and a physiognomy of politesse, the modern individual seems capable only of the momentary “intensities” Lyotard might theorize, but devoid of the durable ferocities of grand passions and fierce living (Lyotard, 194). (Extreme sports might indeed be theorized as a postmodern reaction to such.) And especially suggestive for this line of argument is the Spanish colonial trope of reducciones. The vaunted Jesuit communities called “Reductions” (in centuries-long missions in South America) com- mitted their pastoral energies to pulling natives out of their jungle habitats and “reducing” them into “civilized” morality under priestly surveillance and Inquisitorial torture. Within such a disciplinary enterprise, native body and psyche alike were ramified as the quality- control products of the well-oiled machine of Euro-domination (Dussel, 1995, 68–69). But inevitably, the discipline cut both ways. The “reduction” of indigenous identity to a dark and disfigured shad- owing of Euro-whiteness, as black theologian Willie James Jennings argues, worked the topside of the colonial divide as well (Jennings, 2010, 58–62, 78, 82–83, 96). 30 Political Spirituality On the other hand, techno-feminist Donna Haraway gains con- temporary fame as the diva of postmodernist cyborg thinking, explod- ing modernist fictions of individualistic agency and autonomous dwelling. Her work constructs a comprehensive re-visioning of reality as thoroughly hybrid across multiple borders of technology, metabo- lism, fecundation, cross-pollination, defecation, and organo-mineral exchanges writ large (Haraway, 1992, 298–99, 313, 331). Rather than the supposedly autonomous individual, her “unit” of analysis reveals itself as a caterwauling tricksterism of interpenetrations under no one’s ultimate control and direction, untheorizable under a single sign, eluding in extent and complexity alike, the regime of human thought beholden to scientific experimentation. Indigenous Recapitulation All of these theoretical initiatives offer insight relevant to the argu- ment being constructed here. But it is especially to the cogitations of anarcho-primitivist pioneer Paul Shepard that this particular slant of challenge owes much of its heat. Shepard—intrepid interdisciplinary voyageur that he is—is deeply unimpressed with modern humanity. Where we continuously (and now ever more desperately) hum the mantra of progress, he sees profound immaturity and pathology, a cul- ture as self-harming and autodestructive as it is lethal for its planetary home. But while the evidence of civilizational dysfunction piles up exponentially over the course of his life, Shepard never waxes pontifi- cally strident about its “original sin.” He rather traces a slowly gener- ating aberration—an animal, wired into a two-decades-long process of epigenesis2 as necessary to arriving at mature ontogenesis at age 20 or so, that gradually stumbles away from what would educate and rouse its robust flourishing. Ranging across biology, genetics, zool- ogy, anthropology, psychology, ethology, history, theology, poetics, and myth, Shepard begins his academics with works like Environ/ Mental: Essays on the Planet as a Home, treks through The Tender Car- nivore and the Sacred Game, ruminates Nature and Madness and The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, to end with Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Traces of an Omnivore and The Only World We’ve Got. These wildly synthetic achievements—whose reach and depth at once astonish and provoke—defy easy summary. Here we will settle for a focus on Nature and Madness to convey the flavor. In that work, Shepard outlines the trajectory. We began, he muses, as a species living in “stable harmony” with nature not merely out of reverence or incapacity to do otherwise, but for a “deeper reason still”  From Sycamore Trees to Human Destiny 31 (Shepard, 1982, 4). The change that began 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, Shepard reads as “madness,” a failure or mistakenness that is not easily accounted for. Neither the result of necessity nor the eclipse of old gods—this creeping irrationality emerges largely unconsciously. Observably, it fosters a sense of mastery, a growing willingness to extirpate nonhuman life, a wrenching apart of the “ancient social machinery that had limited human births” (Shepard, 1982, 4). The expansion of material demands—covering the land with the destructive “progress” of civilization—he comprehends not as cause but conse- quence of the change. But he also insists that what once was, yet germinates within us, as what should be. The capacity of “relic, tribal peoples” to live at peace within a given local world, treading lightly as guests rather than masters, Shepard chalks up to an ontogeny “more normal” than our own and does so precisely in the face of charges of sentimentality and romanticism (Shepard, 1982, 6). He judges such a lifeway the product of natu- ral selection. Group members proceed through an entire calendar of stages, outfitting them with an orientation toward the world as mys- terious and beautiful, imbuing everyday life with spiritual significance, and mapping passage by means of ritual celebration experienced as integral participation in “the first creation.” Played out along an individual life, those stages find their first moment in the “infant as person-to-be” nestled in the arms of a nur- turing mother. From the very beginning, this newborn experiences the surround of plants and animals as the “stuff of a second ground- ing... in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of that fetal landscape which is not so constant as once supposed” (Shepard, 1982, 7). Here, in this bright new world of texture, smell, and motion, says Shepard, “there are as yet few mythical beasts, but real creatures to watch and to mimic in play,” each of which “seems to embody some impulse, reaction, or movement that is ‘like me’” and by which, when enacted in play, “comes a gradual mastery of the personal inner zool- ogy of fears, joys, and relationships” (Shepard, 1982, 7). At puberty, however, the immediate givenness of that original tax- onomy of living forms is cracked open in the ordeals and testing of ini- tiation. Under wise guidance of elders, this primal and originary world is reentered at a new point of ingress as disclosing a kind of infinity of meaning and possibility. Here the ones coming of age will learn that those early experiences were effectively a language. In myth and ritual, these natural things are revealed as “not only themselves, but a speaking” (Shepard, 1982, 9). This is a world from which there is no graduation. Adolescent initiation opens a lifelong process of study 32 Political Spirituality and quest into an ever-expanding dimension of significance and cre- ativity. The beloved world of childhood is not left behind as illusion or mere metaphor, but is deepened as a tangible domain of poetics— numinous, analogical, endless as thought itself (Shepard, 1982, 9). And this then is the basic claim of Shepard, repeated and reinforced throughout his life’s work. Within its compass, modern society is read as an anomalous achievement. It tends to reproduce human beings at one very deep level as children in adult bodies, stuck between worlds, grafting infant impulses and childhood fears and adolescent grandios- ity onto adult projects, outfitted with ideology and armies leading to all the destructive consequences we’ve witnessed growing up around us over the last 5,000 years. But in tracing such, Shepard is far from hopeless himself. All of his work is an attempt to outline a possibility. He ends Nature and Madness with an article of natural faith. Beneath civilization’s facade lies a primal impulse. Not an animal or barbarian as humanism would have it, but a human birthed into a sense of reciprocal validity waiting to happen. This “secret person” knows the rightness of dwelling in a setting of natural rhythm, play with living creatures, the schooling of the wild as a discipline, the joy of simple tools, food as gift received with art and gratitude, the plen- titude of natural phenomenon as living metaphor, the relief of life in face-to-face community, ritual initiation and lifelong mentorship in moving from neophyte to elder through carefully crafted and tended stages (Shepard, 1982, 130). The spontaneous response to these is immediate—even in the broken forms they assume in contemporary society: animal fascination twisted into pet-love and zoos and car- toons; body poetics reduced to machine algorithms; pubertal idealism subverted into the perverse logics of national or racial or religious fun- damentalisms rather than ecophilosophic flowering (Shepard, 1982, 130). The task is not one of creating something new, but recovery of what is very much alive and waiting. Its advent does not require a strained metaphysics of reconciliation with the earth, but of some- thing “much more direct and simple.” That directness may be as simple as the smell of a tree and late afternoon light. The deep demand of a humane response to the state of the planet today may in part hinge on what most would consider an oblique and archaic consideration: a return to ancestries human and other. What if there really is no other way to achieve health and a viable future than to do so at the level of a local ecosystem, with its teachings of skin and feather, soil and weather? The writings to follow here will explore this intimation from multiple angles across various disciplines.