Wild
From REWILD.info Field Guide, the free Field Guide To Rewilding
Wild describes untamed, undomesticated life.
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[edit] Wild humans
Like all other animals, humans also evolved in the wild. Wild humans developed old growth cultures prior to domestication.
[edit] Wildness in political philosophy
- For main article, see State of Nature
The concept of a state of nature was first posited by the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. Hobbes described the concept in the Latin phrase bellum omnium contra omnes, meaning "the war of all against all." In this state any person has a natural right to do anything to preserve their own liberty or safety. Famously, he believed that such a condition would lead to a "war of every man against every man" and make life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau challenged Hobbes's view in the eighteenth century, claiming that Hobbes took socialized (what we might call domesticated persons and simply imagined them living outside of the society they grew up in. He affirmed instead that people had neither a good nor bad innate nature; men knew neither vice nor virtue since they had almost no dealings with each other. Their bad habits arose from civilization specifically social hierarchies, property, and markets. Another criticism put forth by Karl Marx pointed to his concept of species-being, or the unique potential of humans for dynamic, creative, and cooperative relations between each other. For Marx and others in his line of critical theory, alienated and abstracted social relations prevent the fulfillment of this potential (see anomie).
David Hume's view brings together and challenges the theories of Rousseau and Hobbes. He posits that in the natural state we have a wicked and evil nature because of, for instance, the cry of the baby that demands attention. Like Rousseau, he believes that society shapes us, but that we possess an innate evil and it is up to society to shape us into who we become.
Though all of these views remain popular in civilized imagination, none of them have held up to scrutiny in light of more recent anthropological and ethnographic evidence.
[edit] Wildness in human psychology
- For main article, see Ecopsychology
The basic idea of ecopsychology says that while the modern social world shapes the human mind, it still needs the inspiration and comfort of the more-than-human world, because that remains the arena in which it originally evolved. We cannot understand mental health or unhealth in the narrow context of only intrapsychic phenomena or social relations. One also has to include the relationship of humans to other species and ecosystems. These relations have a deep evolutionary history; reach a natural affinity within the structure of their brains and they have deep psychic significance in the present time, in spite of urbanization. Humans remain dependent on healthy nature not only for their physical sustenance, but for mental health, too. The destruction of ecosystems means that something in humans also dies.
