The Wild Living - Ocean, Law, Poetry
Randi Nygård
Essay published in Leonorana, magazine, Portugal, 2019
The Norwegian author Jon Fosse writes that many people have an fundamental mood in them which comes from a situation they have repeatedly been in. In his essay The Big Fish Eyes he writes:
“I do not know how wise such a thought is, but the way the boat and I are in rhythm, from the waves, when I am in a boat on the fjord, such shall also my writing be in its rhythm.”1
«...and even where there is only a rustling of plants, in it there is always a lament. Because she is mute, nature mourns.»2 wrote Benjamin who thought nature is filled with sorrow because of its speechlessness and speechless because of its sadness.
The more fossil fuels we burn, the more carbon is absorbed into the oceans from the air. And the more carbon the water holds, the more acidic it becomes, and parts of the marine life are in danger of dissolving and disappearing.
Our urine could have fertilized much of the farmland in the world, because it contains phosphor and nitrogen. Instead, it is now entering the ocean and takes the substances out of their natural circuit and over-fertilizes and changes the ecosystems there.
While we are changing the ocean, water flows through our bodies into tubes and pipes, it runs in rivers, dwells in seas and it is moved by the currents of the ocean. It cleanses us, our homes and streets, and it hydrates our bodies, animals, plants, and forests. Water is polluted, it freezes, evaporates, drifts in clouds in the wind, falls to the ground, it drowns, floods our lands, melts, and becomes part of the oceans again.
In 2017 Karolin Tampere and I published an interdisciplinary anthology which got its title from a Norwegian law, The Wild Living Marine Resources Belong to Society as a Whole. Since I have held several lectures and talks about the project. I am often asked what artists can contribute to the discussion about laws and environmental issues.
In this text I will try to say something about changes in attention, perception and language in relation to the wild living.
The publication was part of Ensayos and the work of its group number 4, Ensayo#4, which is an international and interdisciplinary project that examines identity, history, geography, language and law in connection with the management of the coast and the ocean. 3
In Ensayo#4 Karolin Tampere and I wanted to work with questions around laws and management and the relationships we have to nature and to our environments. As we started the project I looked for laws related to the ocean in The Norwegian Laws and I found that Section 2 of The Norwegian Marine Resources Act clearly stood out. It says The Wild Living Marine Resources Belong to Society as a Whole in Norway. I found the sentence to be almost romantic in its wording, very poetic and also paradoxical.
Why does it say wild living? How can that which is wild and living be a resource and belong to society? How do we relate to the wild living, near and far?
The sentences became our point of departure for a show and series of conversations held at the artist run space Kurant in Tromsø, Norway in 2016 and later it was turned into the title of the book.
The aim of the project and the publication was to learn more about our management of natural resources and our fundamental views on nature through looking at this legislative text. We not only wanted to define and understand it as juridical terms, we also wanted to see the text and our relationships to nature in new ways, and from both critical, poetical and speculative points of view. The project is about awareness, knowledge, experience, poetry and community. The book contains
essays, scientific articles, poems, manifestos, art works, photos, excerpts from conversations, travel journals and a transcription of a dream.
Today, in our complex world, most of us are alienated and removed from nature and from how society and our use of resources function. And in our everyday life we largely overlook animals and plants in our surroundings. I think that experience, knowledge, emotions and poetry together can be necessary tools in order to reactivate both rational and emotional relationships to our surroundings, and thus to ourselves. If we do not have the ability to see how our lives relate to larger structures in society and to natural cycles it is also difficult to imagine other possible communities, social structures and lives in and with nature. I think that new stories about how our lives are entwined with the wild living can arise through meetings with the wild and meetings between various disciplines working in and with the environment. And artists can ask fundamentally naive, but good questions.
In Tromsø, as part of the exhibition, we had conversations about the different parts of the text, the wild living, marine, resources, belong to, society as a whole. We talked about management, ecosystems, consciousness and values with a Professor of Arctic and Marine Biology from the University in Tromsø, a Professor from the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, two employees of Fiskernes Agnforsyning (a major purveyor of fish bait in Norway), two local artists, a Sami author, joik singer and Associate Professor of Law, a Professor of Maritime Law, a researcher from the Center of Sami Studies, the leader of the biobank MarBank at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research, the leader of the Tromsø Chapter of Nature og Ungdom (Nature and Youth, an environmentalist youth organization) and the biologist and director of The Wildlife Conservation Society Chile.
In a conversation with professor Jahn Petter Johnsen I learned that we cannot manage, control or own the wild. We can only manage or influence society and our relationships to the wild living. At sea it is the fishermen who are influenced through technology, systems of control and report, a common understanding and a common language.
In her text The Wild Living for the book professor Solveig Bøe states that the wording of the law alienates us from the wild in ourselves, from the wild animals with whom we share the world and from our common environment. She writes: “ We can live together as different animals in a non- hierarchical way, and some must die so that others can live. We can still speak of others in a way that maintains their individuality and the thought of nature as our common ground. The community is not just a human community.”
We are in need of new ways of organizing society, where the wild is not only resources but seen as integral parts of our common and living environments. Our ways of life have far reaching consequences for other lives, and these are often invisible and/or abstract to us. Can we change behavior through experiencing the consequences our lives have on our common environment? How to do that when many of the consequences are too complex to directly grasp? Can poetry and art play a role?
Should everyone's usage of resources and nature be managed to be made much more sustainable? Can we manage all use of resources through common languages with new sets of ideas, models and laws?
I see including poetic approaches as highly relevant if we seek to represent animals and plants better in our legislation. They need to be seen and understood as more than mere resources and we need to integrate them into our societies and ourselves into nature. Our rational language is most of the time not shared by animals and plants, and it might not be the most sufficient tool for representing them either. Derrida writes that thinking about the animal, if there is such a possibility, must derive from poetry. 4
The experience of the poetic cannot be grasped and held still. Art and poetry at its best does
precisely this, it approaches the ungraspable. Art says that which cannot be said, and in this way it is another knowledge about the world.
Artists need not make the world poetic, I find that relations in the world are fundamentally poetic. And so is also our relation to nature, mystic in its deepest sense.
When I interviewed professor Arne Johan Vetlesen for our publication, we sat by a window at the University of Oslo. Outside some trees moved in the wind. I asked the professor a question about language and expression in nature and Arne Johan then asked me to watch the trees. He then said that we normally perceive the wind to be moving the tree. According to our mechanistic worldview inanimate things are moved by outer forces. And I too experienced the trees like that, moved by the wind. Even if we say that the trees are moving in the wind. I suddenly understood through experience what a mechanistic worldview leads to. Vetlesen went on to say that it is not likely that the wind is the only force here, since we know trees are alive and able to move, for example turn to the sun.
What is life? In the book The Biology of Wonder scientist Andreas Weber reframes this fundamental enigma by arguing that all living beings, like humans, are not biological machines, but living, creative agents fueled by meaning and expression. Weber argues that feelings and emotions, far from being superfluous to the study of organisms in biology, are the very foundation of life.
Climate change and the environmental crisis makes us pay more attention to our natural surroundings. There are fundamental changes going on in our perception of nature and our place within it. I find that a much needed enlivenment is taking place.
Even if our thoughts are connected to the material world we do not experience meaning and thought as material. Nobody can explain how thought arose and still arises. What our minds are and what life in itself is, are still open questions.
In the same way there might be a form of consciousness or an inner life in all material things, as one thinks in panpsychism. And doesn’t everything then have a self-expression? Some think that it is precisely these self-expressions that make us able to sense our environments. The materials present themselves to the world through their interiority.
What happens today if we study nature with a curious attention, a playful attitude and seek emotional and direct contact?
One day when I was out walking among some big trees I thought «what if they intend to make me feel something powerful when I see them?» I was very baffled by my feelings and this thought. Could my feelings be produced by something outside of me and arise from nature? I had never before thought that a seemingly inanimate tree could intend something, or that my feelings were not created in me. But now as the trees do not seem that inanimate to me anymore, but rather are living, creative agents fueled by meaning and expression, in Webers words, I started wondering what happens between us as we sense one another.
What if all life is sentient and guided by feeling, as Weber thinks?
In humans one thing feelings do is to keep memories alive. The works of art we remember are those that make us feel something.
As a child I marveled in nature, and one of my strongest childhood memories is from when I suddenly realized I will never become somebody else, not my friend nor the mountain in front of me. Now as a grownup I understand that parts of the air I breath out can in fact become a leaf on a tree, through the carbon.
I am not the only one taking part in my breathing. What if the air also breathes me? Grasping and dragging my lungs mildly in and out.
Notes:
1 My translation, from the book Når ein engel går gjennom scenen og andre essay by Jon Fosse, Samlaget, 2014
2 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1913-1926, edited by Bullock and Jennings, The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press
3 Ensayo#4 is one out of four parts of Ensayos, which was founded in 2011 when Camila Marambio travelled to
Tierra del Fuego, far south in Chile, and met Barbara Saavedra, ecologist and leader of the Karukinka Natural Park. In the project artists, scientists, and locals study and engage with different topics tied to political ecology and issues pertaining to the park and its surrounding areas. For example, Ensayo#2 considers what could be done about the beaver, who is considered an invading species in Tierra del Fuego. The participants examine whether smell can influence where the beaver chooses to reside. And Ensayo#3 deals with how the geography of the group of islands and its populations have developed together, among other things by making a web-series where the landscape is one of the main actors. In Norway, Karolin Tampere, Søssa Jørgensen, Geir Tore Holm and Randi Nygård are members of Ensayo # 4.
https://ensayostierradelfuego.net
4 The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida, Fordham University Press, 2008