Anyone interested in nature in Ireland or Britain is now assailed by versions of the word “wild”.
Environmental professionals talk endlessly of “wilding” and “rewilding” the country. The introduction of long-absent animals – elks, bison and lynx – are hotly debated or, in the case of beavers, they are legally loosed into our rivers. Horticulturalists want to turn their gardens into mini versions of wilderness. Radical councils are trumpeting “No-mow May” and liberating the roadside verges as knee-high forests of wild flowers.
The world is going wild for “wild”, but what actually do we mean when we invoke this ancient word? It is a good question but it is also hugely complicated. Look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll find 17 interlinking uses, some deeply negative. There are entire “wild” peoples dismissed as “uncivilised or uncultured”; uninhabited places that are “desolate” or simply “desert”; individuals who are “savage, violent and cruel”. Wildness is loaded with these secondary connotations that make its use not only difficult but controversial.
[ Ireland is waging a war on trees at a time when we need more of themOpens in new window ]
Yet, simultaneously, wild appears to be something we not only want, but need. The American naturalist Henry Thoreau famously argued that: “In wildness is the preservation of the world”. Without the nourishment of “this vast, savage, howling mother of ours. Nature,” he wrote, we would descend to the condition of the English nobility: “a sort of breeding in and in”, he added, that would leave humanity “destined to die out”.
Actually, there is mounting scientific support for Thoreau’s argument. We do need versions of wildness, which is hardly surprising given our genus, Homo, has a heritage of nature immersion that is 2.75 million years old. We now call it “forest bathing” or any number of nature “therapies” but the impacts of wild places are proven. Trees release volatile organic compounds that stimulate the amygdala (the part of the brain related to emotions and memory) and boost mental wellbeing. Those same compounds stimulate our immune systems. In Japan they have found that forest bathing increases capacity to combat illness.
Forest walks reduce adrenaline and cortisol, chemical symptoms of stress and illness. Organic shapes like those found in forests are restful. Forest places allow our brains to relax, while walking in forests improves our capacity to pay attention. Canadian children brought up in forests are more developed than those who grow up amid concrete, with better communications skills, more emotional maturity as well as better general health.
Two further possible reasons why we might need wildness is that 12.5 per cent of children under 19 in all EU countries are judged to be in poor mental health. In Britain the prevalence of adolescent mental disorders is higher. The figures for mobile phone screen-time are equally compelling. The global average for adults is assumed to be six hours and 37 minutes per day. In the US, children aged 11-14 in low-income families are glued to their screens for more than nine hours, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us in 2018. And the poorer they are, the more addicted they are, with a concomitant risk of suffering lower mental or physical health.
[ Why is mental health so much worse among Irish youths than adults?Opens in new window ]
I could go on. But one after another research project is returning with incontestable proof. Yet how and where do we find this condition of wildness? I recently visited a Polish forest on the Belarusian border called Bialowieza. It is widely reputed to be a primeval place, a glimpse of what Ireland and Britain might have looked like 10,000 years ago, before our species transformed the world we live in.
It is as close to a wilderness as we can get on our continent. It is missing aurochs, the extinct wild species from which cattle are derived. Yet they were there until the 17th century. Wild horses have been recently reintroduced to Bialowieza and along with its buffer forest, it comprises 280,000 hectares. The core area of 1,500sq km holds all those animals that the rewilding communities wish to see in our islands – wolves, European bison (the largest populations anywhere in the world), lynx, elk, red and roe deer, pine martens, otters and beavers.
Yet what was more astonishing was the way the forest behaved. With us trees are almost always alive and upright. In Bialowieza, almost half of all the forest biomass is either standing deadwood or fallen trees. There were whole places that looked to have been upended by storm. Deadwood, you realise, is the very soul of this living forest. All sense of conventional order was also abolished and perhaps it is this loss of ourselves in this otherness – this “howling mother of ours”, in Thoreau’s words – that bring the recuperative power of such places?
In Ireland as in Britain, with its dismal average of 12 per cent tree cover (compared with a European figure of 38 per cent), we struggle to find such places. Yet perhaps we don’t need to. Because some version of wildness is in every place. Go to any spot – even those largely made of concrete or tarmac – and search beneath your feet. You will find a world, a volatile seethe of countless micro-organisms. For, all of life, everything, all the basic circuitry of our planet is determined by bacteria. Life is enthroned on a great and omnipresent dais of microbes.
[ The company of wolves: should large predators be reintroduced to Ireland?Opens in new window ]
At this bacterial level, there is no human order, no control, not even much knowledge. Studies of soil by a Scandinavian team found a one-gramme pinch contained 4,000–5,000 species. Our world is – or rather perhaps our worlds are – utterly mysterious, entirely beyond us in every sense. We may intervene, we may wage antibacterial wars in our homes, we may live with the delusion of control. But this world is still wild.
So the condition of being wild and our capacity to access it doesn’t rely on a single specific destination such as Bialowieza, for example. It exists as a spectrum. It is a variable quality, like temperature. And all places partake of some wildness. Because wild is partly between our ears: it depends upon a quality of loving attention to what is most immediate. And to what is not our species. It may be most abundant and easiest to recognise in great primeval forest with bison, but it is also just round the corner. At the roadside. In your garden. These are wild places too. You simply have to attend.
Mark Cocker is an English author and naturalist, who writes for the Guardian’s Country Diary. He will give a talk at the Shaking Bog Festival on Saturday, May 17th, in the Glencree Valley, Co Wicklow, followed by a public conversation with Ella McSweeney. The event will take place in St Patrick’s Church, Curtlestown. shakingbog.ie/riverscapes
