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Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday
Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday
Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday
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Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

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2018 Reading the West Book Awards Nonfiction Winner

Have you ever wondered about society’s desire to cultivate the perfect lawn, why we view some animals as “good” and some as “bad,” or even thought about the bits of nature inside everyday items–toothbrushes, cell phones, and coffee mugs?  In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions by seamlessly integrating personal narratives with morsels of highly digestible science and research.  Each story delves into an overlooked aspect of our relationship with nature—insects, garbage, backyards, noise, open doors, animals, and language—and how we cover our tracks.

With a keen sense of irony and humor and an awareness of the miraculous in the mundane, Julia recognizes the contradictions of contemporary life. She confronts the owner of a high-end market who insists on keeping his doors open in all temperatures. Takes us on a trip to a new mall with a replica of a trout stream that once flowed nearby.  The phrase “out of the woods” guides us through layers of meaning to a contemplation of grief, remembrance, and resilience.

Out of the Woods leads to surprising insights into the products, practices, and phrases we take for granted in our everyday encounters with nature and encourages us all to consider how we might re-value or reimagine our relationships with nature in our everyday lives.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 2018
ISBN9781943859887
Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

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    Out of the Woods - Julia Corbett

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    Prologue

    Culture and Everyday Nature

    People have been falling off cliffs, getting stuck in trees, and walking into traffic. It isn’t the zombie apocalypse but a monster-catching game that people play on their cell phones. Pokémon Go is a phone-based version of the old Nintendo Pokémon that uses your phone’s GPS to overlay pocket monsters onto real-world places. As you move around, different digital monsters appear on your phone against a cartoon rendering of where you actually are. A news columnist proclaimed that this augmented reality game was helping people get outside, which positively affected physical and mental health.

    The summer the game was released, I watched my nephew play it; he got excited when his phone told him a Pokémon was near and emitted a satisfied yes! when he caught one. The game was captivating but there wasn’t any imagination involved; you just waited for creatures to appear. We were in Grand Teton National Park, and his eyes were stuck on the phone screen.

    What’s most curious to me is how this app depicts nature. You go outside not to enjoy what’s out there, but for wild creatures to materialize on your phone (and they live only in places with cell coverage). You capture the creatures in tiny red balls, who are then tamed by Pokémon trainers, who then use them to fight (which sounds a bit dark to me). Nature is merely the backdrop for technology to augment as a stylized cartoon.

    Pokémon Go is one of innumerable ways that culture colors our perceptions of what and where nature is—ways that are often peculiar and largely unquestioned. Through words, pictures, and social cues, culture imprints our beliefs about nature from a very young age. Some animals are good (chimpanzees and butterflies), but just as many are bad (snakes, pigeons, and spiders). We know exactly what culturally acceptable greenery should grow around the house. We know what dryer product will make the laundry smell as if it were dried outdoors. And if you ask most children, culture has already taught them all these things. The backdrop of culture hangs throughout our lives and affects how we think about and experience nature. Thus, it affects how we practice our everyday existence on the planet.

    The dictionary—a true product of human culture—defines nature as the natural world that exists without or beyond humans. Nature is, the Oxford dictionary declares, the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

    So, huh, humans (and our stuff) are not nature. We breathe the same air as those chimpanzees, drink the same water as butterflies, eat plants from the land, and use elements from the earth to make absolutely all of our stuff, but we are somehow different and apart from nature? What a cultural set-up: we’re not on the same team though we share the same planet.

    That set-up includes where we think nature exists, and here, I schlep my share of cultural baggage. I live in Salt Lake City, the center of a bulging urban area that stretches north and south between two mountain ranges and supports over a million people. Though I love all the activities this city offers, I have always felt that I must escape to the nearby Wasatch Mountains to be in real nature. Somehow, the birds and greenery in my backyard seem less-than.

    Herein lies my challenge: though I know that humans are part of nature, I discount the nature where I live. Is it possible to draw back the cultural curtain and see the Oz that orchestrates my view? And, can I somehow learn to consider the urban and wilder nature as differently peopled versions of the same matter?

    One day in class at the University of Utah, where I’m a professor of communication and environmental humanities, I lined up an assortment of water containers and asked the students what each one communicated. The mountain spring water in the plastic bottle was healthier and better than tap water, they said. The glass VOSS bottle meant status; a young woman said her hairdresser gave her the bottle, and we laughed that she was paying too much for her haircut. The best PC choice was the metal bottle. The Styrofoam cup—well, that was just so yesterday. The compostable paper cup was cool, but like who really does that? Though the function of each container was to hold H20, they knew the specific cultural meaning attached to each one.

    So where did you learn all this? I asked them. They could not pinpoint one source; they said it all kinda mushed together. That’s cultural influence: a mushy amalgamation of cues from innumerable sources: friends and family, advertising, social media, what others do or say, entertainment, celebrities, politics, children’s books, geography, and on and on. Much of what we perceive nature to be is as much—maybe more—about cultural influences and social norms as it is about our experiences with it.

    This matters because it is difficult to strip away the well-worn cultural meanings from a singular encounter and your immediate reaction. Instead of thinking, oh, here is a colorful insect in my yard, the cultural default reminds you that OMG there’s a bug in my yard, kill it! At the zoo, kids call animals by their Disney character’s name, unable to see the creature in front of them. I feel that I know wolves—even though I have never had an up-close encounter—because they are so imbued with cultural meanings. No matter the animal and my experience with it—skunk, ladybug, whale, worm—I carry cultural expectations and stereotypes with me, and I know whether to feel afraid, happy, in awe, or grossed out.

    The snowy summits of the Teton Mountains pierce a brilliant blue sky on the calendar in my kitchen; there is not a person in sight. On the milk carton, black-and-white cows graze in a verdant pasture. Fridge magnets cling to last summer’s pictures of a moose, a cluster of fairy slipper orchids, and girlfriends posing at a mountain vista in Oregon. Over the fireplace hangs a pen-and-ink drawing of owl chicks. In the magazine on my coffee table, a man leaps across a house-sized boulder against an azure sky (and recommends a granola bar), and an ad for laundry detergent splashes across a lush green, flower-rich meadow. A bright green toucanet with big dark eyes perched on a mossy branch stares from the screen of my laptop.

    These items tell me that nature is out there, far beyond my everyday life. Here, nature is pristine and largely peopleless and looks great—the birds and animals are fine, the air and water are pure, the landscapes lush, and the vistas unbroken.

    This is not the nature I live in. The magnificent encircling mountains are often blurred by air pollution. I hear the everlasting roar of the interstate in my backyard, as well as dogs, all manner of yard equipment, sirens, and construction. At night, the house is never dark. Cement, buildings, roads—all run and rise in hard straight lines and crowd, confine, and conceal patches of earth. This is where I live and work, and I want and need nature to feel more present in my life here.

    In contrast, the wild nature in the nearby mountains seems free of contamination by human desires and actions. Historian William Cronon calls wilderness a moral baseline that we use to measure ourselves against, for it tells us what the world might look like in our absence or how we can (or should) try and erase our presence. Historically and culturally we have become accustomed to seeing and valuing nature in some places and not others: To the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. . . . By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.

    The city I inhabit has much to teach me about my imagined tale of these two natures and how my fingerprints and footprints blanket them both, all the way up to the atmosphere. When cultural beliefs (from the dictionary or in my head) partition these two natures in separate boxes, it conceals the spillover: how my living-large actions in everyday nature are pick-axes on the wilder nature—the very places that help me step back from human domination and touch precious pieces of myself, pieces I want present in my city life.

    If it is possible to put cultural valuations of nature aside even for a minute, on a purely physical level, there is just one intertwined, vibrant nature. We tend to think of inanimate things (shoes, a book, a glass of water) as passive and inert, just sitting there being, well, things. Yet, such things are just as vital and vibrant as animate beings, argues Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter. If you view vitality as the capacity of things to affect us humans and to act as forces with their own propensities and tendencies, a glass of water exudes vitality. The propensity of the glass is to hold liquid, and the liquid affects me, hydrates me, when I drink it. All kinds of matter produce effects and alter how things happen—carrots, rainstorms, rocks. The nature/culture divide we cling to is both inaccurate and unhelpful, for humans are embedded in a tangled web of acting and being acted upon. For Bennett, the fantasy that we humans are somehow in charge of all those things prevents us from seeing our connection to all matter, which all emanates from the earth.

    Your cell phone with the Pokémon app has vibrant thing power, or the curious ability of inanimate objects to produce effects both dramatic and subtle; falling off a cliff or walking into traffic certainly qualify as dramatic effects. Even though a cell phone may seem like dead nature, the yttrium, scandium, copper, gold, and platinum are vital to the phone’s operation and are just as vibrant as when they lay underground in far-flung planetary places. And if your search for a Pokémon takes you to a landfill, you undoubtedly will see cell phones there, where they are still producing effects. About 140 million cell phones are tossed in dumps every year, where their lead, cadmium, and mercury leak into the environment. That’s monstrous.

    In the video Out of Yellowstone, a film I watched at an environmental education center in Montana, a rancher and his wife raised children and cattle in Montana’s rugged, expansive Centennial Valley just west of Yellowstone. The rancher said, The dollar begins in the earth; after that, it’s all just traded. He recognized that there is no other place to get stuff and to make a living. Although there is much in nature to which we don’t attach a dollar value (for starters, air, daylight, precipitation, pollinators, photosynthesis), the rancher and I agree: nature is in absolutely everything you touch.

    I toured my house to see its contents through a vibrant matter lens: my bed pillow, the nightstand, my coffee mug, tomatoes, the kitchen radio, paper everywhere, the wheelbarrow, my cell phone. These vital objects did affect and alter me, and I could envision bits of nature within, though in most cases, I was utterly ignorant about what earth elements comprised them, where those came from, and how they were transformed. And energy (utterly vibrant matter) was involved in each transformation and each delivery into my life. It sparked many questions I knew I would never answer: where did the oil to make the plastic come from, on what far-flung lands were the metals mined, and who manufactured them and how? In nature transformation comes distancing. And with distancing, comes a dramatic change in valuation. I value my cell phone more than the anonymous distant pieces of nature that formed it. How ironic that my phone shrunk and compromised the very wild nature I seem to value most—the same phone I use to take pictures of it.

    Even if I succeed in seeing nature inside my stuff and I wholeheartedly agree that I and everything in my life are vibrant matter and part of nature, I do not always feel connected to the still-living nature in my regular, everyday life. There are days I arrive home on the bus and don’t remember if I looked up at the Wasatch Mountains, or listened to birds, or noted the direction of the wind. It’s hard to push aside the civilized city-ness and to connect the water from my faucet to mountain snowmelt, or to note yet another record temperature when I can just turn on the AC. Will I be able to know what is regular about the nature in my everyday life—and to recognize when it no longer is? Such disconnection is to my detriment.

    A survey about fifteen years ago found that 51 percent of the American public spent no time outside in a normal day (excluding walking from the house to car to office). Another 30 percent spent less than an hour outside each day. It is ironic that the purpose of these studies was to measure people’s exposure to outdoor environmental pollutants—not exposure to sunshine and birdsong. These percentages are likely worse now with the steady march of technology into our lives.

    For many, outside nature is an abstract environ. French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour says the modern, urban self feels more and more removed from nature. Yet at the same time, the modern self is increasingly entangled with nature—from biotech and pharmaceuticals to a changing climate. The result, Latour concludes, is unresolved tension between everyday experiences that comingle us with nature, and with a cultural worldview that believes we control and direct nonhuman nature from afar.

    Whatever the reason, the lack of time in and daily connection with nature is unhealthy. Nature is, quite literally, healing. In a famous 1984 study in Science, patients recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban Pennsylvania hospital whose hospital beds had a view of a leafy tree healed faster (and needed less pain medication) than those who saw a brick wall. Just a view of a tree.

    Besides physical healing, time in nature—even wee bits of it—restores brain functions, such as ability to pay attention, perform various tasks, and be creative, all documented in a mounting number of scientific studies. Natural environments (meaning environments not dominated by human structures or pavement) are soothing because they allow for a gentle fascination and soft attention to objects and stimuli, in contrast to the sudden, switching, and demanding stimuli of our modern lives (ding, I just received a text). A key characteristic of healing nature is the ability to engage all of our senses, for which we need quiet places without cars, buildings, or other human trappings. Scientific American found that Just three to five minutes spent looking at views dominated by trees, flowers, or water can begin to reduce anger, anxiety, and pain and to induce relaxation, according to various studies of healthy people that measured physiological changes in blood pressure, muscle tension, or heart and brain electrical activity. Imagine if city planners, schools, workplaces, and developers designed our living spaces with this in mind.

    If getting outside is the first challenge for connecting with the everyday nature around us, the second is pulling back the cultural curtain, which is part of the aim of this book. We don’t see nature as it is; we see nature as we are. It’s why we believe there is an away to which we send our garbage and why a yard’s shorn green grass expresses civic duty. The crescendo of city noise comes with a cultural belief that somehow we get used to it, even when it’s collectively making us sick. People use the phrase out of the woods as though woods are dangerous, even though many believe this is where real nature lies. Some malls and restaurants are wrapped in culture, complete with nature features designed to make us feel good and buy more, well, nature.

    Another challenge (for me and for most people) is to see all nature as connected and not partitioned into wild and tame boxes. At its core, the ecological crisis on this planet is a crisis of how I and my fellow humans use nature in our everyday lives. Those all natural snack chips involved industrial agriculture and palm oil deforestation. The water from the faucet represents a global hydrological system that is under great stress. My furnace symbolizes the heat of fracking deep in the earth in a faraway place. My laptop is a travelogue of metals and minerals mined in remote corners of the wild globe with cheap fossil fuels. How I consume and value these brought-to-you-by-nature products ultimately has more tangible impact on wild places than efforts to save wild

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