The world is porous. Our bodies: skin, breath, mouth, senses, inguinal—in a perpetual inflow and outflow that ceases only in death. This permeability and exchange are essential to life. A body, to persist as a bounded entity, must do so in such reciprocal relations to its surroundings. The nation: people, goods, species, dust, water, air, disease—perpetually move across borders. Concepts blur into one another: race, gender, species, emotion, color. Yet we can pick out archetypes and exemplars. Difference is meaningful at the extremes. Bodies cannot live without some checks and controls on what enters and exits. A radiated body whose cells disintegrate in indistinguishable liquidity is doomed. Taste, smell, consent, immune system, gag reflex, equip us with mechanisms of distinction to protect ourselves by controlling our ingestion and inhalation of distasteful or toxic substances, or counteract those already absorbed.
 
Boundaries and borders are often helpful or essential, until they aren’t. Racism, transgender exclusion, and other discriminatory isms can so result from border construction and unwarranted imposition. Nationalism can be a blessing or a horror depending on its historical context and degree of imposition. Anticolonial independence movements and genocidal Naziism each partake in forms of nationalism. Just as we have reached an apex of potential global interconnectedness through rapid transportation, information flows, and shared threats and collaborative opportunities arising from climate change, biodiversity loss, global epidemics, artificial intelligence, nuclear proliferation, and the continued relevance of a shared realization of our presence on a “pale blue dot” in the empty depths of space, xenophobic nationalism is ascendent globally. Demagogues twist the truth, scapegoat the vulnerable, and exploit information for their own corrupt ends.
 
Climate change is exacerbating conflict and migration in altering weather patterns, shifting the timing and distribution of rain, amplifying drought and storms, and drowning coasts. Greenhouse gases disproportionately emitted from one region alter the global climate, imposing costs on others far less historically culpable. These challenges in turn spur migration, leading to increased nationalism and demagoguery.
 
Conservation biology reveals the limitations of severe boundaries around protected areas. Parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness are typically far too small to maintain species populations, particularly of large and migratory animals. Corridors and interconnected ecosystems, across public and private lands, are thus critical. Likewise, hardened national borders hewn by walls or oblivious to the life cycle and migration patterns of birds and insects may be a death sentence to some species. Climate change exacerbates these constraints as wild creatures move in response to warming and changing weather, while others become stranded or are simply unable to migrate fast enough.
 
On the other hand, parks and wilderness are, in most cases, a boon resulting in far greater conservation outcomes than in their absence. These areas’ stricter rules regarding development, transportation, hunting, and extraction are critical. Likewise, national and protected area boundaries help to impede the movement of invasive species, which can have profound and destructive consequences for ecosystems and economies. Yet, novel ecosystems proliferate.
 
Invasive species and climate change each invite or require assisted migration or heavy-handed mitigation efforts like herbicide use, trapping, and extermination. Simultaneously, ecology presents a radical challenge to the practical limits of our control, while an ethic of restraint, respecting evolutionary and nonhuman autonomy, presents a moral challenge to such interventions.
 
A common theme shared by many of the world’s wisdom traditions is the virtue of accepting necessity, recognizing the limits of one’s power and control. These traditions, ranging from Stoicism, Taoism, or Abrahamic faiths, appeal to some independent order, whether God, Tao, or Nature, that exceeds our own wills. Yet there is a modern strain of thought that offers the promise of overcoming or transcending nature through remaking or controlling it, from Enlightenment through today, from Bacon to Kurzweil, Musk, and ecomodernism.
 
This belief, this temptation, remains powerful, despite the increasing recognition, particularly since the post-war period, of the deep and inseparable dependence—functionally and ontologically—of humans and nonhuman nature, often rendered in the strong claim that “humans are a part of nature”. This acknowledgement includes, for instance, the recognition that political history is inseparable from natural history.
 
The issue shared by conservation, nationalism and immigration, is control, specifically of borders and of constituents contained within them. In an era of tremendous and accelerating change, borders and control demand deep reflection. What are they? Why are they? How are they related? When does a natural or constructed border become harmfully sclerotic?
 
 Wildness is one way of theorizing contingency and that which exceeds human control (whether by choice or necessity). Wildness includes among other things an element of autonomy. A border is an instrument of control, of flows of exits and entries. In the context of the nation state and protected areas, each presumes the primacy of the sovereignty of the state, as opposed to that of the human person or wild animal.

I rarely watch television, and if I do, I make a superhuman effort to avoid advertisements. I happened though to catch a few of the recent Stanley Cup games in a Denver restaurant in which I controlled neither the channel nor the volume, and one commercial for a Toyota 4Runner stood out to me. It featured said machine (shiny and new of course) blasting up roads in a natural setting, with a deep male voice narrating something or other, and generic guitar riffs in the background.
 
It culminated with the 4Runner at a scenic view with the massive words “Keep it Wild” plastered across the screen overtop the vehicle and scenery. After some internet searching, I discovered that Toyota has been running this campaign for around 10 years, if not more.
 
I have no specific beef with Toyota (well, besides their financing of Big Lie supporting politicians and mixed environmental record). I actually own a Toyota—a 2000 Tacoma to be exact—a real truck if there ever was one. It’s less than ideal in terms of gas mileage and for city driving (I try to drive it as little as possible, choosing to bike, bus, and carpool instead), but it delivers for camping and getting into the mountains. I suppose that is the point of the ad campaign.
 
Nevertheless, Toyota’s slogan sits somewhere between irresponsible and insulting. If the wild is anything, it is beyond the limits of motorized access. To be clear, the wild is in a sense everywhere—the weeds in your driveway, the moon looming above a city skyline, the hummingbird flitting by your window—each are wild things that all of us experience every day.
 
But the real stuff—intact landscapes where a variety of creatures, large and small (including predators), can live their lives more or less as they have for eons with minimal human interference and influence—and, once entered by humans on their own two legs or with paddle in hand or on horseback, know that this is a realm apart from their usual world—a place that commands respect in part because it is dangerous and is not theirs to command—a place that overwhelms sense and sensibility with an order apart.
 
More practically speaking, wilderness means in part a specific form of land designation that legally bars road development and mechanized and motorized intrusion. The 1964 Wilderness Act was motivated largely by the threats that these created to the last remaining undeveloped federal lands—usually in the most rugged mountains or most remote deserts.
 
I for one am bounteously grateful for the foresight of those over 50 years ago to leave some places protected as such—a respite from the noise, emissions, and consumptive ease of the everyday. Presently, around 2% of all the land in the “lower 48” is protected as wilderness. The rest is within striking distance of a road and otherwise converted for human uses.
 
But even with a variety of protections in place against motorized incursion, it is often regarded by land management professionals as an ongoing threat to Wilderness and other public lands, though not among the largest threats to Wilderness.
 
The late environmentalist and author Edward Abbey famously railed against “Industrial Tourism” in the National Parks in his best-known work, Desert Solitaire, arguing among other things that the experience is diminished by being confined to an automobile:
 
“A man [or you know whoever] on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles...Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from experience that this is true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves.”
 
More important than the quality of the experience of nature is the pressing need to increase the size and interconnectedness of protected landscapes to stymie and reverse biodiversity loss. This will certainly entail decreasing road access in some areas. While slowing climate change (including its profound impacts on wild nature) requires decreasing fossil fuel consumption, which will necessitate—among many other things—slowing the production and dissemination of personal vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine.
 
It is therefore more than a little Orwellian that an automobile company in an SUV ad should help itself to language to which it is totally unentitled.
 
Toyota’s slogan undoubtedly sells 4Runners, but it certainly doesn’t “Keep it Wild.”

#wild #wilderness #TOYOTA #keepitwild