not where we live, that’s for sure, because it only appears ‘out there’ in distinction with the human world inside.
With Descola, we realize that to speak of ‘nature’, to use the word, to activate the fetish, is already strangely a form of violence towards those living territories which are the basis of our subsistence, those thousands of forms of life which inhabit the Earth with us, and which we would like to treat as something other than just resources, pests, indifferent entities, or pretty specimens that we scrutinize with binoculars. It is quite telling that Descola refers to naturalism as the ‘least likeable’ cosmology.3 It is exhausting, in the long run, for an individual as for a civilization, to live in the least likeable cosmology.
In his book Histoire des coureurs de bois (The History of the Coureurs des Bois), Gilles Havard writes that the Amerindian Algonquin people spontaneously maintain ‘social relationships with the forest’.4 It’s a strange idea, one that might shock us, and yet this is the direction this book wants to take: it’s a matter of following this lead. In a roundabout way, it is through accounts of philosophical tracking, accounts of practices involving the adoption of other dispositions towards the living world, that we will seek to advance towards this idea. Why not try to piece together a more likeable cosmology, through practices: by weaving together practices, sensibilities and ideas (because ideas alone do not change life so easily)?
But before setting this course on our compass, we first need to find another word for expressing ‘where we are going tomorrow’, and where we are also going to live, for all those who want to move out of the cities.
For several years, among friends who shared the practices of ‘nature’, this question raised itself. To formulate our projects, we could no longer say: we are going ‘into nature’. Words had to be found that would help us break with language habits, words that would burst from within the seams of our cosmology – the cosmology that turns donor environments into reserves of resources or places of healing, and which sets at a distance, out there, the living territories which are in fact beneath our feet, comprising our foundation.
The first idea we came up with to describe the project of expressing ‘where we are going tomorrow’ in different terms was: ‘outside’. Tomorrow we are going outside – ‘to eat and sleep with the earth’, as Walt Whitman says.5 It was a stopgap solution, but at least the old habit was gone, and dissatisfaction with the new formula prompted us to look for others.
Then, the formula that imposed itself on our group of friends, due to the oddity of our practices, was: ‘into the bush’. Tomorrow we’re going into the bush. Where, precisely, there are no marked trails. Where, when there are marked trails, they do not force us to change our route. Because we are going out tracking (we are Sunday trackers). As a result, we walk through the undergrowth, passing from wild boar paths to deer tracks: human trails do not interest us, except when they attract the geopolitical desire of carnivores to mark their territory (foxes, wolves, lynx or martens, etc.). Carnivores are fond of human paths, and these paths are used by many animals, because their markings, those pennants and coats of arms, are more visible there.
To track, in this sense, is to decipher and interpret traces and pawprints so as to reconstruct animal perspectives: to investigate this world of clues that reveal the habits of wildlife, its way of living among us, intertwined with others. Our eyes, accustomed to breath-taking perspectives, to open horizons, initially find it difficult to get used to the way the landscape slips by: from being in front of us, it has now moved beneath our feet. The ground is the new panorama, rich in signs – the place which now calls for our attention. Tracking, in this new sense, also means investigating the art of dwelling of other living beings, the society of plants, the cosmopolitan microfauna which comprise the life of the soil, and their relations with each other and with us: their conflicts and alliances with the human uses of territory. It means focusing attention not on entities, but on relationships.
Going into the bush is not the same as going into nature: it means focusing on the landscape not as the peak for our performance, or as a pictorial panorama for our eyes, but as the crest which attracts the passing of the wolf, the river where we will certainly find the tracks of the deer, the fir forest where we will find the claws of the lynx on a trunk, the blueberry field where we will find the bear, the rocky ledge where the white droppings of the eagle betray the presence of its nest . . .
Before even going out, we try to locate on maps and on the Internet the forest track by which the lynx can reach those two massifs to which it is drawn, the cliff where the peregrine falcons can nest, the mountain road which is shared by humans and wolves at different times of the day or night.
We no longer look for walks to go on, or signs of hiking trails that we come across by chance, surprised that they exist, no longer really understanding their signage. We are slowed down: we no longer gobble up the miles, we go round in circles to find the traces, it sometimes takes an hour to cover two hundred metres, as on the tracks of that moose in Ontario which was going round and round a river: an hour of tracking, losing and then finding its trail again, speculating on where its next traces would be, finding ourselves right back where we had started, next to the fir forest where, as an animal with night vision, it was probably taking its daytime nap, if we are to judge from its very fresh droppings. We are going ‘into the bush’ – and that’s already another way of saying and doing things.
It’s not, of course, a question of finding a new word to impose on everyone as a replacement for ‘nature’: we just wanted to piece together multiple and complementary alternatives, to find different ways of expressing and practising our most everyday relationships to living things.
The third phrase that suggests an alternative to ‘getting a bit of nature’ occurred to me one morning while reading a poem. It’s the phrase ‘to get a breath of fresh air.’ Tomorrow we’ll get a breath of fresh air. What fascinates me about this formulation is how the constraints of language poetically suggest something quite different from what you mean – how the phrase almost makes you hear the element most opposite to, and most complementary to, air, namely the ‘earth’ which the ear can almost hear hidden in the word ‘breath’.
To ‘get a breath of fresh air’ is also to be back on earth, earthly, or ‘terrestrial’ as Bruno Latour puts it. The fresh air that we breathe and that surrounds us, by the ancient miracle of photosynthesis, is the product of the breathing forces of the meadows and forests that we walk through, and which are themselves the gift of the living soils that we tread upon: the breath of fresh air is the metabolic activity of the earth. The atmospheric environment is living in the literal sense: it is the effect of living things and the environment that living beings maintain for themselves, and for us.
To get a breath of fresh air: the earth is disguised in the word ‘breath’, but still perceptible – and once you are aware of it, you can’t ignore it. And the magic formula then invokes another world where there is no longer any separation between the celestial and the terrestrial, because the open air is the breath of the green earth. There’s no more opposition between the ethereal and the material, no more sky above us to ascend to, for we are already in the sky, which is none other than the earth inasmuch as it is alive – that is, built by the metabolic activity of living things, creating conditions that make our life possible.6 Getting a breath of fresh air is not about being in nature and far from civilization, because there is nature everywhere (apart from in shopping centres . . .). Nor does it mean being outside, but rather being everywhere at home on the living territories that are the basis of our subsistence and where each living thing inhabits the woven web of other living things.
To get a breath of fresh air, however, is a bit demanding: urban life as such, disconnected from the circuits that convey biomass to us, disconnected from the elements and other forms of life, makes it very difficult to access fresh air. In the heart of cities, this means tracking migrating birds or practising the geopolitics
