Rewilding the Commons

To gain some common sense

It’s hard to make sense of the world: a world of so much abundance, and so much senseless violence. There is so much division and hatred in this world in which its inhabitants were once all the same cell. What does meaning mean anymore when we reject the most fundamental of truths? Very little. And I fear meaninglessness and violence go hand in hand—that’s why we call it “senseless”.

We make sense of the world by being in it, by being embodied, by feeling it, touching it, tasting it, smelling it, hearing it. The world is our environment, or at least it provides the anchor to a reality from which we can safely explore the imaginary realm we have come to mistake as primary. It is so often said the economy is divorced from the biosphere, building on a long, Western tradition of rejecting the physical realm. I, like many others, believe it is making us sick—what other creature would destroy its home to accumulate socially-constructed tokens which will be meaningless when all the rivers are choked with sewage? There’s a madness in meaninglessness, because we are a symbolic species. We need symbols and meaning. But when we get the symbols wrong, or when we idolise them at the expense of flesh, salt and laughter, meaning is lost through the cracks of the world we created and the one we refuse to acknowledge. 

We can’t make sense of the world without our bodies. No wonder, after millennia of corporeal rejection—whether grasping after the eternal and bodiless afterlife, or demonising sex, or sending young men to die in someone else’s war—we have arrived in a violent hellscape in which both the most vulnerable and most privileged try to escape reality. Lives are being stamped out by genocidal regimes all over the world in a system built on domination and hierarchy, and even the children of those who stamp are zoning out and numbing out because being in this world is frightening. 

“Make it make sense,” teenagers and millennials and even boomers ask online. How can we make sense of violence when it is senseless? And how can violence be senseless when it is fundamentally sensed in the body? Is it because modernity makes no room for the body? Accepts no language of the unsayable? Rejects everything that cannot be tied up with language and placed in the imaginary realm of human intellect where everything is measurable and therefore controllable? 

Make it make sense. Activists put their body on the line because their words are ignored. Then something happens. They break through. They stop traffic and remind us all which realm we belong to, and how fragile it is. The state rears its head and jails them to remind us it is not fragile. Yet, this use of force, this violence against citizens, is deemed just because it is dressed in language; institutions make sense of their senseless violence by calling it Law and Order. No wonder all meaning has been lost. 

And we are at risk of losing even more meaning as the world reorients towards the digital sphere, with plans of putting entire communities in the metaverse or, better yet, in space. Thankfully, there are lots of reasons why going to space is harder than the billionaires make out, and our communities had enough sense to ignore Zuckerberg’s vision of a disembodied planet and tank his investment in the metaverse. Yet, transhumanism is a continuing trend of losing our sense-making capacities and perpetuating all the violence we deem senseless and meaningless. What we need is more common sense. 

It seems our bodies are the antenna for sense. Not just the five senses, but our emotional, moral and rational senses. It’s almost as if—like everything, ever—our senses are interconnected, and denigrating the physical body in turn denigrates our emotional and moral body. It’s almost like we can’t split ourselves into parts and be well, just as the earth cannot be split into nations and be well. Our bodies are an extension of the earth’s body, another diverse ecosystem within a greater ecosystem. For cultures that steward the land, that knowledge is still intact, is still sensed, and with it meaning and wellbeing. What better role could we have as a caring species than to take care? And how could anyone doubt our nature as caretakers when our young demand constant care out of the womb in order to survive? If we were a violent species, we would never have survived ourselves.

Violence is not innate in a world of meaning. It is a product of meaninglessness, of senselessness, of forgetting how to feel. It is psychopathy, the personality disorder overrepresented in boardrooms and parliaments.

It is easier to forget how to feel behind cold and dead walls than out on the land, soil bursting up between your toes, birds calling overhead, the wind curling around your wrists like a lover’s grasp. It is easier to commit violence when you are already surrounded by death, where nothing makes sense, because the bodies of the world are already valued as utterly meaningless, let alone the earth’s body.

This is why rewilding the planet is critical to mitigating our history of violence against ourselves and the earth. It is not “nature” we need to get back to, but ourselves, our own bodies, and through them a relationship to the land we live with, the earth’s body. To do so, we need to be far more careful with our language, far more particular with our symbols, and reject those which invite violence, for such symbols are only ever meaningless. I like to think of this as rewilding the commons—our land, our language and ourselves, all held in a great web of interconnectivity and wonder. A web of rooting and flourishing that defines instead of destroys. 

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