Recently, I’ve been reading Gary Paul Nabhan’s book Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves, detailing his journey along the pilgrimage trail to the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. One of the book’s core themes is Nabhan’s search for a ‘rugged wilderness’ akin to the landscape St. Francis himself would have experienced. A terrain teeming with the wild energies of untethered predators and untamed, ancient forests since extinguished from the Italian countryside.
This draw to the pristine, to the original biomes that once blanketed the planet, is reasonable, admirable even. But interspersed between the laments for the wolf-trodden woodlands of Europe’s deep past is an undercurrent of disdain for Nabhan’s fellow travelers. For his fellow humans.
“I could not bring myself to crowd into a darkened room with thousands of others to celebrate the life of a man who so desperately struggled to stay *outside* — outside the walls of cities and monasteries, outside the traps of static, institutionalized religion.”
“As the fog became thicker, we passed lichen-covered wooden crosses, shrines, and little stone chapels. Then, suddenly we were vaunted off the forest pathway and into a huge parking lot serving no less than fifteen buildings crouched around the original chapel of Saint Maria degli Angeli. Some of the buildings were multistoried and enormous. I began to realize that my expectations had been naive, particularly the one that the little hovels and caverns that Francis had loved would have been kept free from Catholic monument building.”
“In less than half an hour, I succumbed to something akin to claustrophobia — or was it a fear of too much sheen? All the rough edges of Francesco’s life seemed worn smooth and shiny by so many people passing by and polishing his image. I longed to sense the dark, difficult, unembellished parts.”
Look, I get the desire to experience the unhewn, untamed side of nature. To pursue something authentic in a world that is quite literally eroding away. But I’m beginning to find this vein of introversion in nature writing increasingly distasteful. On the one hand, having a place for quiet contemplation and solitude is critical for one’s relationship to the natural world. Such experiences allow us to feel connected to the world beyond what humans built and to revel in the extraordinary miracle that is the biosphere.
On the other hand, there is an individualism baked into this kind of nature ethic. Rooted in the Transcendental movement and articulated in Thoreau’s Walden and Emerson’s Self-Reliance is the notion that individual intuition and the spiritual importance of nature are inextricably linked to one another. While these ideas represented important corrections to the rigidity of both protestant conformism and Enlightenment rationalism that dominated the era, they also embedded into the environmental movement at its earliest stages the idea that one’s personal relationship to the natural world is of foremost importance. They believed that the inclusion of others in natural experiences is inherently polluting; that society is something that must be escaped, and nature is the refuge where one can enjoy a purifying solitude. This thought later informed the construction of the preservationist strain of conservation (i.e., John Muir) that sought to remove humans, namely indigenous, from the land.
These ideas also tacitly bolster Malthusian ideas in the vein of Paul Ehrlich, seeing humans as an inherent weight on the biosphere as opposed to an inextricable part of it.
Nabhan is not a Malthusian, but I do find his introverted inclinations to be anti-social and broadly objectionable. In the above passages, any contact made with other people and the infrastructure necessary to support them is framed as polluting the experience for Nabhan. He desires to experience this sacred space in a way where he doesn’t have to share the experience with others. But whether we like it or not, humans are a part of nature. It is everyone’s right to enjoy the aesthetic, recreational, and spiritual offerings of the natural world. We can design the built environment around natural spaces to try and disperse crowds to preserve an atmosphere of peaceful seclusion and create lottery systems to limit damage to sites like Mt. Everest or Machu Pichu, but there will always be places like the Basilica of San Francesco that should be widely accessible for all.
Moreover, the enjoyment of nature is heightened as a social experience, not degraded. Learning about the natural world by visiting a nature center or taking a tour with an interpretive guide are enriching ways to develop an understanding of local habitats, organisms, and ecologies. Whole cultural activities and religious ceremonies are inextricably tied to the natural world, such as the river bathing rituals of the Kumbh Mela in India. Humanity’s collective experience of the natural world is deeply social, a fact that should be celebrated, not diminished. Sure, we can and should regulate those experiences to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem functions, but maximizing participation in and access to natural experiences should still be a priority in how we manage these spaces. Doubly so if a site has some special historic, scenic, or sacred quality to it.
This anti-social thread in Nabhan’s travels continues.
“Saturated, I impulsively walked up to the first door I saw and opened it, hoping to find a way out, perhaps a stairwell back to the trail. But that is not what I found. There in front of me was a moss-covered grotto, luminous with the diffuse daylight that had filtered through the fog and rustling with a breeze that shook all the leaves in the trees above. . . . It was simply a room with no walls other than the mountainside, no ceiling other than the canopies of beeches, and no floor except the moss and decaying leaves. ‘If Francesco were alive today, he would make this his quarters,’ I chuckled to myself. Then, another double take: when I had turned in a semicircle to scan the entire grotto, something caught my eye. Steps led down to a cave with a small sign beside its opening: ‘Letto de San Francesco.’ These *were* his quarters, the Sasso Spicco, his refuge during forty-day fasts and his inner sanctum where he fully faced his fears, doubts, and vagrant dreams.”
This accidental encroachment quickly turned into purposeful trespassing as Nabhan brushes past a fence and lingers in the sacred grotto. There are obvious reasons why the public is blocked from visiting this sacred space. But, in following the Transcendental inclination towards denigrating social institutions, Nabhan ignores the rules protecting one of the most important monuments in all of Catholicism to advance his personal self-actualization. I don’t want to call it selfish, as it was a spur-of-the-moment decision made amidst wonderment in a sacred space, but it was certainly self-serving.
Later, his anti-social rhetoric continues.
“In other words, we need something more than rigorously protected forests and pristine parklands to keep us whole. We need not dispense with the formalities of parks and refuges, but we must recognize something else that is vital: the essential forms of nature, the underlying variety, are more complex than our capability to appreciate or circumscribe, and are fundamental to our welfare. We should turn our attention toward rough country, unmanaged and unmapped except in the minds of truffle grubbers and mating larks. We need land where we can be truant and not have to pay to get in or be inspected on the way out. Each of us needs to sneak into country still unvisited by the masses, even if that means waking up at five before most people get out of bed” (bolding mine, italics his).
In this passage, Nabhan reveals a hierarchy of deserving. That a subgroup of enlightened environmentalists has a certain sense of authority over the natural world. That by virtue of their level of effort, their recreative preferences, or their aesthetic sensibilities, certain people are empowered above “the masses” to enjoy the beauty and peace of nature. Framing the pursuit of nature as an escape from humanity reveals, at least in part, a strain of anti-humanism that would be best abandoned by the environmental and nature studies movements.
While I critique this aspect of Nabhan’s writing, I believe he makes several insightful observations in the book. His examination of the repackaging of St. Francis’ legacy in the Catholic tradition that removed some of his more untamed and unabashedly wild characteristics was incredibly interesting. I also appreciated his laments regarding the changes of the Italian landscape, including the decline of predator and songbird populations and the fraying of traditional foodways. Other works of his also show me that he cares deeply about human communities (his writings on seed saving and local food attest to that fact) and that the problems I have with this book are more an issue of frame and focus than with Nabhan’s personal ethics. He seems like a good dude overall. While the book is still a valuable read, I hope that future pilgrims — be they those following the Way of St. Francis or pursuing other natural places — can do so while appreciating that humans and our communities all belong in nature, alongside the wolves, songbirds, and truffles.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to
The Gummification of Food – The Dark Side of Supplements: I’ve been bingeing this food science Youtuber a lot recently and really enjoyed this video about why every supplement company manufactures their products as gummies, and what the implication of this is for us consumers.
Picky: Children used to be adventurous eaters. This book chronicles the social forces that made picky eating a ubiquitous behavior today.