![]() ![]() Religious people might say, It’s like a soul. It’s a matter of size and function and gloriously unpredictable complexity, as well as a matter of the greenness of the green leaves, the redness of tooth and claw. ![]() ![]() Wildness is intangible, maybe even ineffable, but not imaginary. Put them together, and you have a quality that can go by the word “wildness.” Foremost among those ecological features are scale, connectivity, diversity, and certain processes. The heartbeat of great natural ecosystems can be seen as a combination of features crucial to preserving the viability of the whole, just as auricles and ventricles and valves and innervation are crucial to maintaining the beat of a heart. ![]() I am belaboring this obvious biological fact for the sake of analogy. The heart can survive without a right hand attached to the body in which it beats, or without a left eye, or even without one of the two kidneys but the kidney or the eyeball or the hand can’t survive without the heart. Without the continuing, impelling action of that pump, the rest dies. What pushes it is an elaborately engineered muscle (or muscular organ) that serves as a pump: the heart. Blood doesn’t flow through our arteries and veins by gravity or magic or the force of our personalities. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |