Dear Artists, Educators, Environmentalists, Naturalists, Philosophers, Poets, Writers and Young People:
Edgewood Wild is dedicated to the Secwécpemc People, on whose traditional lands it took root, and from whose traditional ways it takes inspiration.
We have entered a new era of the world, THE PANDORACENE, the time of consequences.
The Pandoracene began a few decades back when deepening climate change finally upended 11,000 years of relative environmental stability – the same relative stability that underwrote human agriculture and, through this, permitted the advancement of human civilization itself across the millennia.
In the Pandoracene, this has changed. Tumultuous weather and galloping environmental mayhem have become the new norm and deepening uncertainty our common lot – a change both quantitative in the exchange of background stability for endless instability, and qualitative in the existential stressors now coming into place for a great majority of multicellular organisms, ourselves not least of all.
Like it or not, pervasive Western assumptions about human dominion over a finite world have lately catalyzed its transformation from staid backdrop to the status of an angry god. Gaia if you prefer. Or the biosphere if you don’t.
Gone, effectively forever, is the benign, turn-the-other-cheek world that used to serenely absorb whatever insults we cared to throw at it.
In its place looms a volatile, eye-for-an-eye world of deepening storm and strife and grief. A world that makes headline news almost daily. A world that bangs at the gate of human exceptionalism louder each year. A world that could one day, so it is said, upend human civilization itself.
Admittedly this last statement runs afoul of the techno-optimist doctrine that advanced technology is our salvation. While nobody doubts the importance of technology in mitigating the socioeconomic impacts of environmental chaos, yet we should take care not to confuse our ability to disrupt the Living World with our ability to control it – especially now, as it goes precisely out of control.
Environmental chaos is the great threat multiplier. Fire. Famine. Forced migration. Climate wars. Human thriving in the Pandoracene needs technology, yes, but it also desperately needs something else: reconciliation with the Living World that sustains us.
Gaian reconciliation is no pipe dream or fairy tale. We live in time of rising crescendo. Let us once get a proper fix on the midnight of the human soul awaiting us in the coming Climate Climacteric – mass migrations and seismic social upheaval among them – and the possibility of Gaian reconciliation will look feasible enough. Desperation will drive the affair.
But that’s for tomorrow. For today, the task at hand is surely to help young people gird their loins and terraform their minds against a time of reckoning now unlikely to be averted. There are all kinds of ways to effect this. We could teach ourselves new, scientifically grounded stories about the Living World, learn to mirror its essential aliveness in our habits of speech, weave Gaian literacy into the common social fabric, give serious attention to the societal implications of the Pandoracene, enquire about the good life, what it actually looks like, and how best to achieve it in time of consequences. Or else we could clinch all of these modalities – and more – by simply opening some career space for the born naturalists among us.
Born naturalists are those curious individuals who everyone has met but few in our culture really understand. They’re the ones – Indigenous and otherwise – who sustain into adulthood a childlike sense of life’s essential mystery; the ones who spend a lifetime chasing down a sense of belonging not only to their culture, but also to the Living World; the ones whose focal length falls somewhere beyond the limits of immediate human self-interest; the ones who grieve and grieve for all the dying going on around us.
It’s not for nothing that born naturalists move among us. Such people have always been humanity’s ambassadors of the Wild. In tribal times – almost the entirety of human history – they performed crucial gaiacentric functions within their cultures, whether as knowledge keepers, way finders, story tellers, visionaries or even shamans. In modern times, born naturalists are sometimes called nature lovers but rarely are they called to vocation; and while tolerated in Western society, they are seldom much heeded, much less widely celebrated.
This must now change. Ask yourself. Who better than the born naturalist to break trail to a situated, Pandoracenean understanding of human self-interest? Who better than the naturalist artist, educator and writer to sustain the societal conversation that must set the stage for Gaian reconciliation? And come to that, who better than the naturalist philosopher and poet to feel their way to the life-affirming story that must sooner or later supplant our current toxic narrative now coming to an end?
For its part, Edgewood Wild draws inspiration from traditional Indigenous reverence toward the Living World. It asks about the possibility of buttressing Western culture with a similar ethic – an ethic rooted, say, in the revolutionary stories lately being told about Gaia, as about life in general, by Western science itself.
At the same time, Edgewood Wild also seeks to explore, in Gaian-literate perspective, that other perennial discourse of our time: how our hopes and dreams are to be reconciled with our dwindling options in time of deepening uncertainty.
Be welcome. I’m your host and sometime-provocateur, Trevor Goward.
Edgewood Wild: about Trevor Goward
Coming out of the blue, as this website does, it may be well to say a few words about the person who dreamed it up.
There’s not much to say, really. At one level, I’m a born naturalist with a naturalist’s passion for finding patterns in the living world. At another level, I’m a field scientist with a scientist’s determination to fit those patterns into ecological/Gaian understandings of expanding depth and reach. At a third level, I’m a life-long student of lichens which, relational in their essence, provide a kind of backdrop against which to contemplate many of the paradoxes and conundrums that are the hallmark of our time. At a fourth level, I’m author/coauthor of 130 scientific papers, scores of popular writings, and four books. Finally, at a fifth level, I’m the more or less reluctant host of three websites: http://www.waysofenlichenment, http://1000clearcuts.ca and the one you’re reading.
When not writing, gardening, wandering or pondering, I can usually be found in pursuit of various thought experiments including Gaian apprenticeship, Gaian mentorship, poetic ecology, “bewillderment,” the myth worlds of H.D. Thoreau, R.M. Pirsig, D.J. Trump, R. Powers and J.R.R. Tolkien, and (through this last) a stewardship practice I call elvenwork, cutesy or not.
Edgewood Wild: the Project
Edgewood Wild is invitation to gather in community for wild immersion and wide-ranging conversation. Day to day, its currency is insight, inspiration and wayfinding in troubled times. Long-term, its aim is to help catalyze a paradigm shift toward knowing and reverencing the Living World.
Programmes are built around interpretive walks and focus sessions, supplemented by the themes explored in the essay links at bottom of this page. The preferred format is show-and-tell, question-and-answer, and group sharing and comparing trending, serendipitously, to epiphany.
Why Edgewood Wild? That’s easy. Getting on in years, I’d like to give a leg up, if I could, to the next generation of humans and wild relations whose prospects have been tragically and, one might say, unnecessarily dimmed in my lifetime. What else is there to do?
Sister Initiatives
Edgewood Wild: the Place
The venue is home, my home, Edgewood Blue, a small back-eddy in the great dangerous river of our time: four hectares of woodland, meadow, wetland, pond, garden, grounds, and a house with a red, red roof – all concentrically cradled by 56 ha of wildlands and, beyond that, 540,000 ha of parklands stretching to the skyline in three compass directions – north, west and east – and set in a deep valley amid the highlands and mountains of south-central British Columbia.
Lodging is available nearby.
Edgewood Wild: How to find out more?
Terms & Concepts summarizes the big ideas advanced by Edgewood Wild, while You Brew provides details on group visits: how to arrange them and what to expect.
Edgewood Wild: About this Website
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things – Lewis Carroll
This website consists, for now, of about 70 first-approximation “windows” on the Living World, each a short essay. Forty-five of these re-examine western cultural assumptions in light of newly imposed Pandoracenean imperatives. Most of the remaining ones introduce talking points for trailside chats and campfire conversations.