Calling all 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 stasis – the same relative stasis that nurtured human civilization from its infancy.
In the decades since then, tumultuous weather and galloping environmental mayhem have become the new status quo and uncertainty our common lot.
Like it or not, 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.
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 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. How? There are all kinds of ways. We could learn to craft new 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 pursue it in time of consequences. Or else we could achieve all of these – and more – by simply opening some career space for the born naturalists among us – put our shoulders to that wheel.
Born naturalists – those curious individuals who everyone has met but few in our culture fathom. 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 in the only Living World we’ll ever know; the ones whose centre of gravity teeters far beyond the limits of immediate human self-interest; the ones who grieve and grieve will happily tell you, if you ask, that only in wildness is the salvation of the world.
It’s not for nothing that born naturalists live 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, located in south-central British Columbia on four hectares of woodland, meadow, wetland, pond, garden, grounds, and a house with a red, red roof – all concentrically cradled by 56 ha of protected wildlands and, beyond that, 540,000 ha of wilderness parkland stretching away to the skyline in three compass directions: north, west and east.
Lodging and (if you like) catered meals are 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
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 the newly imposed Pandoracenean imperatives. Most of the remaining ones introduce talking points for trailside chats and campfire conversations.