Wilderness, Alienation, and Belonging

 The sense of human alienation from nature, so prevalent in contemporary American culture, is in some ways the shadow-side of the Edenic wilderness myth. In light of the obvious damage we have done to the nonhuman environment, it is tempting to adopt a hands-off attitude and entertain the fantasy of nature's returning to a pristine state. The idea of "letting nature be nature" arises, however, from secondhand knowledge and nature-romanticism; it does no work in practice. Ultimately, we are all implicated, for better and for worse, in the fate of the natural world of which humanity is, in fact, very much a part. As native and traditional cultures help to show, hunter-awareness provides a crucial way of coming to terms with the extent to which each individual life is founded upon the deaths of vibrantly alive others. 

Consider the following excerpt from an obituary of a suicide, published not long ago in a radical environmental journal "Tony was a passionate man who felt the earth's distress acutely. In a letter he left to some of his friends he explained his reason for departing. He stated his life had never been better personally. He didn't want people to be sad for him. He checked out as a response to the overwhelming toll we humans are extracting from the planet. His strategy was to lighten the load....

It's hard to imagine more graphic, in some ways chilling, depictions of the alienation of humans from the rest of nature....some revolutionary activists see the eradication of humanity from the "earth-organism" as the only cure to the global environmental crisis....the popular fiction is of a "balance of nature" in which the non-human world, left to its own wisdom and devices, reverts to equilibrium and harmony. It is a fiction that more than once has masqueraded as science in the shaping of wildlife management. 

From Mary Zeiss Strange's Woman The Hunter, which does an awesome job of laying bare the true anti-humanistic nature of ecoveganism. Humans ARE nature and many animals we hunt have evolved with us as predators. It is very sad how some parts of the environmental movement see the need to denigrate us as a species and deny that we are worth much. 

Recently a vegan blog I read for the recipes did a post equating women's rights movement with the animal right's movement. It brought to mind this quote by Peter Staudenmaier:

The central analogy to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf. Both movements were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, “We’re sentient beings too!” They argued, “We’re fully human too!” Animal liberation doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it.