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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
From the forests of Yellowstone to the steppes of the Haut-Var, the French philosopher and environmentalist Baptiste Morizot invites us to develop a different relationship to nature: to become detectives of nature and to follow the footprints of the many wonderful and extraordinary animals with which we share the Earth. By deciphering and interpreting an animal's footprints and other signs, we gradually discover not only which animal it is, but the animal's motives too. Through this kind of 'philosophical tracking', we come to see the world from the animal's point of view, to learn to live in this world from the perspective of another species. We begin to let go of our anthropocentric point of view and to recapture the kind of perspective that our ancestors once had when they had no choice but to adopt an animal point of view if they wanted to survive. In short, by following animal trails, we learn how to pay increased attention to the living world around us and how to cohabit this world with others, thereby enriching our understanding of other species, of the world we share with them and of ourselves.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface by Vinciane Despret
‘Where are we going tomorrow?’
Forms of invisibility: ‘You cannot exist without leaving traces’
Geopolitics: ‘Tracking is the art of investigating the art of inhabiting practised by other living beings’
‘We can change metaphysics only by changing practices’
‘A possible detour to get us back home’
Notes
Preamble: Enforesting oneself
Notes
Chapter One: The signs of the wolf
Notes
Chapter Two: A single bear standing erect
On the trail of the grizzly
Giving meaning to fear
A dagger on the chest
The politeness of the wild
The lesson of fear
Piecing together a myth
In our place
Notes
Chapter Three: The patience of the panther
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 7
Intermingled days
The virtue of patience
The animal ancestralities of humans
The animal art of living
Day 12
Notes
Chapter Four: The discreet art of tracking
An art of thinking
An art of sharing signs
An art of self-transformation
An art of seeing the invisible
An art of living together
Notes
Chapter Five: Earthworm cosmology
Notes
Chapter Six: The origin of investigation
The evolution of intelligence
Seeing what is no longer there
From empathy to imagination
An exaptation of tracking skills
The origin of the existential motive of the quest
An origin of public affairs
Notes
Credits
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface by Vinciane Despret
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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On the Animal Trail
Baptiste Morizot
Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
Originally published in French as Sur la piste animale © Actes Sud, France, 2018
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
Internal animal prints: Veronika Oliinyk/iStock
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4719-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morizot, Baptiste, author. | Brown, Andrew (Literary translator), translator.Title: On the animal trail / Baptiste Morizot ; translated by Andrew Brown.
Other titles: Sur la piste animale. English.Description: English edition | Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, [2021] | “Originally published in French as Sur la piste animale © Actes Sud, France, 2018.” | Includes bibliographical references. | Contents: Preamble: Enforesting oneself -- The signs of the wolf -- A single bear standing erect -- The patience of the panther -- The discreet art of tracking -- Lombric cosmology -- The origin of investigation. | Summary: “How paying attention to the tracks of animals can change our way of relating to the world around us”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020054891 (print) | LCCN 2020054892 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509547173 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509547180 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509547197 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Human-animal relationships--Philosophy. | Tracking and trailing--Personal narratives.Classification: LCC B105.A55 M6613 2021 (print) | LCC B105.A55 (ebook) | DDC 304.2/7--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054891LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054892
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all the friends who have contributed from near or far to the expeditions which are at the origin of these texts, as well as reading and commenting on them. Thanks to Frédérique Aït-Touati and Marie Cazaban-Mazerolles for their alert reading and their generous feedback on the manuscript. Thanks to Stéphane Durand for his trust and his friendship. Thanks to Anne de Malleray for giving me the space and the freedom to experiment with these new forms of philosophical tracking narratives.
Thanks to Vinciane Despret for being Vinciane Despret.
Thanks to Estelle, finally, who shares a lot of these explorations with me, as well as sharing the adventure of writing them.
Preface
‘Where are we going tomorrow?’
Where are you going tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe next week, once you’ve reached the last pages of this book? Perhaps you’ll be one of those readers who will have the wonderful experience of being touched, contaminated, infected by the impulses that animate it. I could have written: ‘by the adventure that impels it’, but I’m a little wary of the epic exoticism or predictable storyline which the word ‘adventure’ can convey. I could probably more accurately describe what Baptiste Morizot is proposing by the evocative term ‘initiation’. Being (or becoming) initiated involves the idea of getting to know something or, more precisely, getting to know the art which makes this knowledge possible; and this idea itself takes us back through the centuries to the experience of participating in the Mysteries as practised in ancient paganism.
Thus, this book proposes to initiate us into a very particular art, which could briefly be defined as the art of doing geopolitics by tracking down the invisible. Certainly, put like that, it might seem scary – and you might well wonder if it is really sensible to ask someone to write this preface who hesitates at the word ‘adventure’ but has no qualms about combining ‘geopolitics’ with ‘the invisible’.
Forms of invisibility: ‘You cannot exist without leaving traces’
However, nothing could be more concrete, closer to the soil and to life itself than Baptiste Morizot’s project. It is, quite literally, the most down-to-earth proposition that you could imagine, a proposition which requires putting on a good pair of shoes and walking, but which mainly impels you to learn again how to stare at the ground, to look at the earth, to read the copses, the trodden grasses and the dark thickets, to scrutinize the mud where marks and pawprints leave their trace and the rocks where they don’t, to inspect tree trunks with bits of hair sticking to them, to scrutinize paths where droppings are plentiful in one place but not another. For this is how those we call animals, and who are mostly invisible to us, manifest their presence. Deliberately sometimes, or even without paying attention. Tracking things down, in other words, means learning to detect visible traces of the invisible or, to put it another way, it means transforming the invisible into presences.
As Jean-Christophe Bailly has remarked how, for a large number of animals, their innate way of inhabiting their territory, their ‘home’, consists in concealing themselves from sight – ‘for every animal, living means crossing through the visible while hiding within it.’1 Many of us have experienced this: we can walk in the forest for hours on end and not sense the presence of animals, or even remain completely unaware of their existence. We can imagine that this world is uninhabited, believing ourselves alone. Yes – so long as we don’t pay any attention to the signs. But if we change the way we walk through different spaces, pay due attention to them and learn the rules that govern the traces, then we are on the trail of the invisible, we become readers of signs. Each trace testifies to a presence, to the sense that ‘someone has been here before’ – someone we can now get to know, without necessarily encountering them.
Geopolitics: ‘Tracking is the art of investigating the art of inhabiting practised by other living beings’
And yet an encounter does take place. But the term ‘to encounter’ here assumes a somewhat different meaning from the one that immediately comes to mind; it undergoes a shift and, as a verb, takes on an inchoative meaning,2 like those verbal forms that indicate an action that has only just begun – grammarians say of these particular verbs that they indicate the passage from nothing to something. So the type of encounter that Morizot describes falls into the realm of beginnings: tracking always has to do with the time before an encounter, a time which, in principle, will continually be played over again (as the time before is the very time of encounter); and it only ever addresses what is already slipping away (the something of the grammarians could just as easily return to nothing).
What the practice of tracking also makes palpable is that to follow is to walk with. Walking becomes an act of mediation. Neither side by side, nor at the same time: in the footsteps of another who follows his own path and whose traces are so many signs that map his desires – including the desire to escape his tracker if he has become aware of the latter’s presence. ‘Walking with’, without simultaneity and without reciprocity, relates to those experiences in which we allow ourselves to be instructed by another being, as when we let ourselves be guided, learn to feel and to think like another (who is, perhaps – like the wolf sensing that he is being followed – trying to think like whoever is following in his footsteps, as we shall see). We then abandon our own logic and learn another logic, we let ourselves be flooded by desires that are not ours. And above all, when we imagine and think on the basis of the signs left by the animal, where its intentions and habits lead it, so as not to lose its track – above all, not to lose track of it: for what we learn from the art of tracking is not to lose what we do not possess.
We can therefore ‘encounter’ in the sense of starting to know, without necessarily being in the same place at the same time – getting to know each other. ‘Walking with’, at a later time and at a certain distance, in order to be better instructed. Summoning the imagination in order to stay connected to a fragile reality. This is what the American philosopher Donna Haraway beautifully defined as ‘intimacy without proximity.’3
To encounter an animal by means of intervening signs then means drawing up an inventory of habits which gradually shape a way of living, a way of being, a way of thinking, of desiring, of being affected.
The form of investigation proposed by Morizot points, first and foremost, to a profound change in our relations with non-human beings. More and more of us want to find a different way of living with animals, to dream of renewing old relationships, of catching up with them, as the saying goes. But how? What do we need to do? What should we learn? How can we live with other beings who are, for the most part, totally foreign to us? In this regard, Morizot has noted, with a touch of humour, that ever since the 1960s ‘we have been seeking intelligent life in the universe, while it exists in prodigious forms on Earth, among us, before our very eyes, but discreet in its muteness.’4 We send probes and even messages to the four corners of the universe, and we walk through the forest as noisy as a troop of baboons on the razzle, which can only confirm our strange conviction that we are alone in this world. It’s time to come back down to earth.5
That’s where this investigation comes in. As a geopolitical inquiry, it attempts to find answers to the question of how to live together with non-human beings, no longer as a rather abstract dream of returning to nature, but concretely and practically. Of course – and Morizot does not forget this – tracking reconnects us with the oldest practices of hunters. Nor does he neglect the ethology which is itself inspired by those practices, an ethology which he can now draw on for his project. These practices are arts of attention. However, unlike tracking, they do not involve knowing as a prelude to appropriating; and unlike ethology, they do not involve knowing for the sake of knowing, but ‘knowing in order to live together in shared territories’. By tracking, we attempt to rekindle the possibility of forging social relationships with non-human beings.
‘We can change metaphysics only by changing practices’
Tracking, therefore, is an art of seeing the invisible so as to frame an authentic geopolitics. As we have mentioned, there is nothing supernatural in these invisible things even if each discovery involves a certain magic, that of tracking ‘which flushes signs’. There is nothing natural about them, either: there can be no serious geopolitics based on Nature. For the term ‘Nature’, even when used in such trivial circumstances as those which make us say ‘we’re going out for a walk to get a bit of nature’, isn’t innocent. As Morizot writes, with reference to Philippe Descola, this term is ‘the marker of a civilization’ (not a very likeable one, he adds) ‘devoted to exploiting territories on a massive scale as if they were just inert matter.’ And even if we decided to move away from this ‘heritage’ dimension and asserted our desire to protect nature, for example, we would not escape the tacit implications of this term – that there is, in front of us or around us, a passive nature, in short, an object of action – or, even worse, a leisure spot or place for spiritual renewal.
So Morizot’s project asks us to dispense with a metaphysics that has caused definite and palpable damage and that we cannot hope to patch up with a few good intentions. The first thing that needs to be revised is the old idea that we humans are the only political animals. (Indeed, we should be concerned about the fact that when we declare ourselves to be animals, this is often a way of laying claim to a quality that simply confirms our exceptionalism.) But wolves are political animals too: they know all about rules, the boundaries of territories, ways of organizing themselves in space, codes of conduct and precedence. And the same applies to many social animals. Morizot takes up, and extends to other living beings – for example, to the worms in the worm composter, whose habits are similar to our own – the idea that what we need to relearn are truly social relationships with them. Tracking, as a geopolitical practice, then becomes the art of asking everyday questions. The answers to those questions will form habits, prepare alliances or anticipate possible conflicts, in an attempt to find a more civilized, more diplomatic solution: ‘Who inhabits this place? And how do they live? How do they establish their territory in this world? At what points does their action impact on my life, and vice versa? What are our points of friction, our possible alliances and the rules of cohabitation to be invented in order to live in harmony?’
‘A possible detour to get us back home’
I have just referred, as does Morizot, to the worm composter and its worms as a site for social exchange. A site that also requires a detailed knowledge of habits, attention, alliances and compromises. This example is important because it tells us that becoming a ‘tracker’, ‘becoming a diplomat’ with animals, actually involves a transformation in ways of thinking, of reading signs and of attuning (recognizing and creating harmony between) habits and intentions. Tracking may involve travelling great distances or through forests, but it doesn’t always require it.
After all, as Morizot says, tracking is above all ‘an art of finding our way back home’. Or rather, he implies, it is an art of finding ourselves at home: but this ‘at home’ is not the same as before, just as the ‘self’ which finally finds itself at home has itself become different.
Tracking means learning to rediscover a habitable and more hospitable world where feeling ‘at home’ no longer makes us stingy and jealous little proprietors (the ‘masters and possessors of nature’, as seemed so obvious to Descartes), but cohabitants marvelling at the quality of life in the presence of other beings.
Tracking means enriching our habits. It is a form of becoming, of self-metamorphosis: ‘activating in oneself the powers of a different body’, as the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes. It means finding in ourselves the crow’s leaping curiosity, the worm’s way of being alive – perhaps even, like the worm, feeling ourselves breathing through our skins – the bear’s desiring patience, or the panther’s replete patience, or the very different patience of the wolf parents of a turbulent pup. It means gaining access, as Morizot says, ‘to the prompts specific to another body’.
But ‘all this,’ he adds, ‘is very difficult to formulate, we have to circle round it.’
In the wonderful book in which he recounts his long friendship with a bitch called Mélodie, the Japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi discusses the difficulties that his adopted language imposes on his way of describing the relationship between him and his animal companion. He writes:
The French language, which I have embraced and made my own over a long apprenticeship, stems from the age of Descartes. It carries with it, in one sense, the trace of this fundamental break that means it becomes possible to classify non-human living beings as machines to be exploited. It is sad to note that the language of the time since Descartes somewhat obscures my sight when I contemplate the animal world, so abundant, so generous, so benevolent, described by Montaigne.6
We inherit, then, a language which in certain respects accentuates the tendency to de-animate the world around us – as evidenced by the simple fact (to take just one example as highlighted by Bruno Latour) that we only have at our disposal the grammatical categories of passivity and activity.
To narrate the activity of tracking, as Morizot does, to narrate the effects of this ‘finding our way back home’, involved learning to get rid of certain words, playing tricks with syntax so as to account for presences or, more precisely, effects of presence, so as to evoke affects that flood through the body (joy, desire, surprise, uncertainty, patience, fear sometimes), to use the writing of the investigation in order to touch on what goes beyond this writing, as Morizot himself was touched while writing. He had to twist the language of philosophy, to defamiliarize himself from it, to poetically force the grammar, sometimes forge terms or divert their meaning (what he has elsewhere called a semantic wilding),7 because none of the terms we have inherited could express the event of the encounter or the grace of awaiting it. To create, in other words, a poetics of inhabiting, an experimental poetics, out in the open air, with plural bodies.
Beyond all that this book teaches us about what animals can do, as well as the humans who go out to encounter them, beyond the concrete and highly innovative political proposals for another way of inhabiting the earth with others, Morizot invites us to explore not only the close confines of our world, but the very limits of our language. To express the event of life.
Where are you going tomorrow? Actually, from the very first words, you will already be on your way.
Vinciane Despret
Notes
1.
Jean-Christophe Bailly,
Le Parti pris des animaux
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2013).
2.
The idea of thinking about the relationships with living things in an inchoate sense is formulated by Baptiste Morizot in an interview with Pierre Charbonnier and Bruno Latour: ‘Redécouvrir la terre’,
Tracés. Revue de sciences sociales
[online], 33, 2017, posted on 19 September 2017, accessed 14 December 2017. URL:
http://journals.openedition.org/traces/7071
; DOI: 10.4000/traces.7071.
3.
A very good example of this intimacy without proximity can be found in Jacob Metcalf’s article on human–grizzly encounters: ‘Intimacy without Proximity: Encountering Grizzlies as a Companion Species,’
Environmental Philosophy
, vol. 5, no. 2, autumn 2008.
4.
See Morizot, ‘Redécouvrir la terre’.
5.
My own work is to some extent a response, at once speculative and pragmatic, to the richly suggestive remarks made in Bruno Latour,
Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique
(Paris: La Découverte, ‘Cahiers Libres’, 2017).
6.
Akira Mizubayashi,
Mélodie, chronique d’une passion
(Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’, 2013).
7.
Baptiste Morizot,
Les Diplomates. Cohabiter avec les loups sur une autre carte du vivant
(Marseille: Wildproject, 2016), p. 149.
PreambleEnforesting oneself
‘Where are we going tomorrow?’
‘Into nature.’1
Among our group of friends, for a long time the answer was obvious, with no risks and no problems, unquestioned. And then the anthropologist Philippe Descola came along with his book Beyond Nature and Culture,2 and taught us that the idea of nature was a strange belief of Westerners, a fetish of the very same civilization which has a problematic, conflictual and destructive relation with the living world they call ‘nature’.
So we could no longer say to each other, when organizing our outings: ‘Tomorrow, we’re going into nature.’ We were speechless, mute, unable to formulate the simplest things. The banal problem of formulating ‘where are we going tomorrow?’ with other people has become a philosophical stutter: What formula can we use to express another way of going outside? How can we name where we are going, on the days when we head off with friends, family, or alone, ‘into nature’?
The word ‘nature’ is not innocent: it is the marker of a civilization devoted to exploiting territories on a massive scale as if they were just inert matter, and to sanctifying small spaces dedicated to recreation, sporting activities or spiritual replenishment – all more impoverished attitudes towards the living world than one would have liked. Naturalism, in Descola’s view, is our conception of the world: a Western cosmology which postulates that there are on the one side human beings living in a closed society, facing an objective nature made up of matter on the other side, a mere passive backdrop for human activities. This cosmology takes it for granted that nature ‘exists’; it’s everything that’s out there, it’s that place that we exploit or that we tramp through as hikers, but it’s 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 of permaculture vegetable gardens on a balcony. It means wondering where this tomato came from so that I can smell the sun and the portion of earth from which it was born, and see that earth with my own eyes. It means activating mutualist alliances with the worms of the worm composter to which we donate the leftovers from our kitchen and the shreds of our hair, so as to see and circulate solar energy in dynamic ecological processes rather than hiding them in lifeless rubbish bins. It’s more difficult, but even in the city you can get a breath of fresh air. With a little eco-sensitive vigilance, the living land reminds us of itself. It’s fascinating to feel how much we are connected to spring, how much it rises up in us, reaching into the very heart of the big cities, something we can see from a thousand little invigorating signs.
Being in the fresh air means simultaneously being enlarged by the living space around us when we take up room within it, and with our feet in the soil, lying on it as on a fantastic animal which bears us, a gigantic animal come back to life, rich in signs, in subtle relationships, a donor environment whose generosity is finally recognized, far removed from the myths that tell us we need to tyrannize the earth if it is to nourish us.
Being in the fresh air means being in the living atmosphere produced by the respiration of plants, since what they reject is what makes us. It means recognizing that the breath of fresh air and the earth are one and the same fabric, immersive, alive, made by living things in which we are caught up, mutually vulnerable – and thus forced into more diplomatic relations?
Being in the fresh air is, at one and the same time, an invigorating opening and a way of finding our way back to the earth.
