Experiences of Urban Rewilding
“These days I don’t think of myself as a gardener, birdwatcher, or even a nature lover – it seems more that I’m just inextricably part of it all, and that is its own fulfilment.”
Many people, especially those of us living in urban environments, can feel pretty unconnected with nature or a sense of wildness. Yet it doesn’t have to be like this, and we don’t have to seek out wilderness in order to experience a different kind of relationship. Wildness can be found in urban environments, always ready to emerge, given the slightest chance. City or rural, we are in the elements, part of the elements and the land is not inert or dead; we’re part of a living world. Right in the concrete urban environment, nature permeates and persists, and its rhythms are all around us, if we tune in to our senses. That’s why I like the notion of ‘coming to our senses’. You could call it rewilding ourselves.
In truth, we actually are Nature, though for many of us of course, it may not feel like it. Yet how could we not be? Born of the earth, the elements, and the long lineage of our fellow mammals, our very nature is Nature. With just a slight shift of habitual attention, we can begin to feel the touch of stirrings and seasons. I love wandering outdoors, urban or rural, not particularly looking, just gazing: the scudding clouds above, enlivening breeze on my face, a dead leaf displayed in golden perfection in a pavement puddle, Buddleia growing in impossible cracks on walls, mosses and lichens colonising brick walls with intricate patterns and textures. I like to be here for all that is constantly unfolding. The street pigeons, so at home on precarious ledges of buildings, echo their forebears’ lives as rock doves; the gulls wheeling on fixed wings high up among the city skyscrapers that stand in for their ancestral coastal cliffs; they revel in effortlessly riding the blustery winds, and their cries evoke the ocean in me.
When I walk out of my front door, is it really into an inert landscape full of ‘stuff’, or rather, isn’t the whole landscape alive, though in very different and perhaps unfamiliar ways? We say going ‘out’ but it’s more like going ‘in’, as John Muir famously said. We spend our modern lives looking at flatland representations of reality on the screens which occupy so much of our time; so much so that we have unwittingly become disembodied observers, and the landscape and life itself seem to be ‘out there’, as if they were extensions of a David Attenborugh TV nature documentary. Except that they aren’t: we’re inextricably ‘in’ it, and it’s only our hyper-educated rational projections which keep it ‘out there’. The shame is that we can then feel estranged and even while out walking in nature, we often see it as a pleasant backdrop or nice scenery, instead of that we are at home. There’s a sense of ease and wellbeing from being in the landscape rather than observing it.
I never wear headphones when I’m out walking and I don’t go walking to think over anything; there’s already so much going on, a deluge of impressions and life. The ever changing light through the day and seasons; the magic of dusk on summer evenings, beckoning us to relax the grip on our rigid mental rational framework, allowing in other possibilities. The limitlessness of a cerulean blue sky and the grand wonder of cumulonimbus clouds, especially when backlit by the sun. I never tire of watching the sun set and the moon rise. I feel the interplay between my body and the elements: the breeze on my tingling skin, the warmth and power of sunlight, the solidity of the ground rooting and communicating with my feet. In truth we are beautifully and inseparably entwined through the ‘more-than-human world’ – the wonderful inclusive term coined by radical environmentalist, David Abram.
The mind isn’t really ‘in’ here – in our head or brain – but is much more of an interaction between the environment and our body, which is porous and responsive. Our senses can extend through fellow inhabitants with keener senses, who often call my attention to more of what is happening around; the crows high in the ether mobbing a bird of prey, that otherwise I would never have seen by myself; the alarm calls of song birds telling me that my local fox is nearby. After all, my fellow animals are completely interconnected and aware of each other and always listening; we are never alone.
As soon as I enter my local urban patch of greenery, I feel something dropping in my body; my centre of gravity becomes lower and my feet reclaim their groundedness in the earth. Then I often become aware that there was tension I didn’t realise I had been holding. Greenery has a magical effect on our mood and physiology; as do blue spaces – the healing, easeful effect of expanses of water; we are literally in our element.
Walking through my local supermarket car park, I hear the resounding calls of geese flying high above in formation and stand enthralled; it stirs ancestral memories in my body. Throughout history people have hearkened to the seasonal passage of geese which marked their lives, as did the sun, moon and planets. It seems that no one except me looks up, but never mind, this could easily change. These days I don’t think of myself as a gardener, birdwatcher, or even a nature lover – it seems more that I’m just inextricably part of it all, and that is its own fulfilment.
The year ends with the shortest day towards the end of December; the light ebbing to a nadir and then rebirth follows the Winter Solstice. It’s very tangible and significant if you are tuned into the seasons. These days I don’t relate so much to the brouhaha of New Year’s Eve; it just seems an arbitrary calendar date. If you grow anything, you can’t help but be drawn into the cycle of the seasons and to notice every nuance of the weather. The more veg you grow, the more you are connected to the seasonality of food; you sometimes are eating kale or beetroot or courgettes non stop for weeks. The light starts changing as we get to the end of January; it’s still mid winter but light lingers longer in the afternoon. By the middle of February, we start to have a proper dusk again. Cherry plum, the first of the new season’s blossom, starts to unfold in early February – pure white stars on bare boughs, before we get to blackthorn and then all the luxurious later blossoms of April and May. Every mild hint of spring elicits bursts of song from robins, wrens and the clear bell notes of the great tit; the thrill of hearing the first chiffchaff back from Africa. I love the changing air, its moisture, chill and movement; the scent of damp vegetation, of leaves mouldering, of rain splattering on parched earth in summer.
And not that it’s necessarily always pleasant: the biting wind stinging and numbing my face and extremities in winter can force me to seek shelter out of the wind when I’m pained with cold, but it’s not alien or attacking; it’s just the raw invigorating reality. There’s still a sense of belonging, of being at home.
And wildness is in us too, honed for untold millennia as our mammalian instincts. As poet Gary Snyder says,
“Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting — all universal responses of this mammal body.”
Darwin was thought to have demoted humankind from our exceptionalist position, by implying that we are animals too. Yet in reality, this was reasserting our connection to every other being, as a thousand generations of people in the past from all over the world have always known. There’s a natural bodily intelligence which responds to nature; millions of years of our evolution and attunement to the natural world; it lies largely unlistened to, in our jaded modern lives, yet can begin to be awakened with a shift in attention. Being present; seeing, hearing and smelling afresh, can allow a sense as if dropping into everything, with the simultaneous knowing that this is how it always is anyway, just that we had been distracted.
Living near the Thames in Docklands, I love to wander the Thames river path. I never tire of the ebb and flow of the great tidal river where freshwater meets brackish seaweedy water in a turbulent muddy swirl of currents. I feel the Ocean breathing in and out, reaching right up into the very heart of the city with its colossal power; connected to the ocean flows and the moon cycles in the middle of the city. The occasional sight of a wild seal in the docks or river is always a thrill, looking curiously like a big friendly labrador as it pokes its head out of the water. If I happen to meet the gaze of the seal, it’s a profound moment; an intelligent being is contemplating me.
We often arrogantly assume that the entirety of creation is dumb apart from us, the sole creators and masters of languages. Yet that is such a narrow and speciesist view of language. All of Nature is communicating; that’s what language is all about. Every gesture, bodily posture, sound, call, mood and behaviour from every being is language, if we are able to notice. I talk with my local allotment birds who don’t see me as a threat. I’m sure they don’t understand my English, but my tone and demeanour seems to communicate in a way which must be fairly universal. These days I feel it is much more me who is inarticulate and taking baby steps in learning some basic human skills, which our ancestors would likely have taken for granted. I’m rewilding or rather, being rewilded in the city.
One final point: You might ask, Is all this indulgent musing, while we destroy our environment, create climate chaos and exterminate much of our wildlife?
I passionately believe otherwise. As eco theologian Thomas Berry said,
“We will not save what we do not love. And we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.”
The action which can follow in service of that which we love, can be more deeply rooted and passionate. I believe that coming to our senses can really help.
