Restorying the Earth

Friday Findings: Summer vacation round-up

My two favourite beach reads, both children’s books, both with non-human and human point of view characters:

The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge, a book first published in 1946 that still holds up to being read today
The Magician’s Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo, 2011, which I read on a whim and fell in love with

Favourite castle visited this summer: Bamburgh Castle (mostly for it’s position in the landscape and the wide mostly empty beaches beneath it)

Most inspiring read of the summer vacation season: Charles Eisenstein’s keynote article in Resurgence, which argues that we need to find more livable alternatives to the “standard climate change narrative”. This standard narrative draws on and feeds the same discourses that underly our damaging relationship with the rest of the more-than-human world.

Favourite foodie find: Swallow Fish Traditional Smokehouse in Sea Houses, established 1843. They do mail orders!

The excursion I’m most bummed about missing out on: Farne Island Tour

Drink of the summer: Raspberry Cider from Thistly Cross

Restorying Dogs: Rewriting a Myth of Origins

It’s been an emotional rollercoaster of a year dog-wise. After months of failing health, we lost our beloved 13-year old standard poodle, Japhur, to bone cancer in the spring. Even though he lived to a ripe old age for his breed, it was heartbreaking. We planned on waiting before getting another dog, but a month ago as we were walking up Corstorphine Hill we met a beautiful, happy-go-lucky puppy named Poppy. One thing led to another at extremely high speeds and just over two weeks later, we drove down to Preston to pick up Poppy’s younger cousin Piper and found ourselves in the midst of puppy chaos…Over the last 13 years I’d managed to forget just how much work a young puppy can be. Of course, he’s worth every minute of it.

In his book, In Defense of Dogs, anthrozoologist John Bradshaw summarises recent research into dog biology and behaviour for the general audience. His overall point: the stories we’ve been telling about our canine companions are not supported by the latest research and are damaging dogs through the training and breeding programmes they perpetuate. His book sets out to get our stories about dogs back on track for the good of us all.

Genetically speaking, it has been confirmed that dogs are descended from the gray wolf (Canis lupus). This part of the story is nothing new. People have been treating dogs like domesticated wolves since well before DNA could be tested. However, the lines and lives of wolves and dogs diverged tens of thousands of years ago. Also, the stories that behaviourists tell about wolves and their social behaviour have changed a lot since the flawed studies of the 1950s. Scientists used to be believed that wolf packs were rigidly hierarchical and that individual wolves were obsessed with social position. These stories arose out of observations of wolves in captivity or under stress from human persecution. More recent observations of wolves in more stable environments show that wolf packs tend to be organised around family groupings and are oriented much more towards cooperation than dominance. Dogs see their adoptive human homes as family units, not military ones.

Origin stories are key ways in which people understand themselves and their place in the world. That goes for society as much as for individuals. The story of dogs as descended from wolves is, of course, part of an origin myth about dogs. Things get even more mythical when researchers start postulating about the “domestication” of dogs. Exactly how dogs and people came to cohabitate is lost in the murky realm of prehistory. Did we domesticate them or did they domesticate us? All we know is that they are the first species to become an integral part of human society. However, an inability to find a certain truth has never stopped anyone from telling stories. In the more recent narrative that Bradshaw presents, what makes dogs special isn’t their keen sense of smell or their ability to be trained up to do a range of things, but rather their affability. Quite simply, he says that dogs have been successful because they are really good at getting along with people and with each other.

As Donna Haraway so convincingly demonstrates in her collected writings about studies of monkeys and apes, Primate Visions, the stories that science tells about other species actually reveal much more about how we humans see ourselves than they do about the animal others we dwell with on this planet. That mainstream science now stories gray wolves (arguably a cross-cultural icon of wildness and danger) as loving collections of cooperating members has got to be a sign that our culture is beginning to value getting along over dominant hierarchies. Bradshaw hopes that these alternative storylines will help improve the lives of the dogs we live with. They certainly resonate with my experience of living with dogs. As it became more difficult and painful for Japhur to walk and his world shrank to a couple of rooms and short outings to the garden, he could have become grumpy and vicious. According to stories of dominance, he should have felt vulnerable and defensive. However, as his illness progressed he actually became more and more affectionate, kind and loving.

As I go through the daily challenges of convincing 12-week old Piper to follow all the silly rules humans have around where to pee and poo what to eat and what not to chew, I like to imagine a distant ancestor inviting a puppy in from the cold for the very first time. I imagine she coaxes him in with a piece of roast meat off the fire, not because she imagines he might help her to hunt, but because he is cute and cuddly and full of affection and she can’t say no to his hungry pleading. Maybe he was orphaned and she had lost her children. Perhaps it was an act of kindness that rescued both of them from the hardships of loneliness. Who would we be as a human society if we could imagine that dogs were first domesticated not because they helped with killing and defence, as the old stories go, but because they helped us to feel love and companionship?

Interview with Storytelling Daniel Allison on Initiation and Getting Outdoors

ME You recently went on a walk across Scotland telling stories along the way, what that was like and what did you learn from your journey?

DANIEL It was hard. Very hard. I was on a tight schedule which on some days required over twenty miles walking with hardly a break. It rained torrentially during the first week and I developed enormous blisters. The paths were boggy and sometimes submerged.

The second half was far easier – the sun shone, my gear dried out and I had only one one very long day, over the Lammermuirs on the final stretch home. The performances went well, without exception. The children loved learning that I had just come down from spending a night in the woods or on the hills and when I told them I had a story about a ghost who lived up in those hills they took what i said very seriously! I was aiming to re-story the earth for them, fill the lands around them and their imaginations with wonders, and I apparently succeeded. What the long term effects will be, I can only hope.

But when I say it was hard I’m not talking about blisters or about putting up a sodden tent in the rain. It was hard because I had to face up to the state of Scotland. I walked two hundred miles coast to coast across the country, on an official and well-run walking trail, and saw only one significant area of land that could be called natural. The rest of what I saw was what is sometimes referred to as the ‘wet desert’ – barren hillsides where nothing grows beneath the hooves of sheep. Conifer plantations made up the rest.

The most depressing day was the second-to-last, when I crossed the Lammermuirs, the stretch of hills between East Lothian and the Borders which I grew up on the edge of. Here I encountered another desert – a vast wasteland managed to maximise the production of small birds so that rich people can shoot them.

What really got under my skin was the sign at the edge of the moor. It described the moor as a rare habitat, and said that as it was such a rare and special habitat ‘it is important that we manage it carefully’. Moors like this are rare because they are a man-made habitat, made for profit at the expense of the wildlife that belongs there. The sign then went on to encourage me to look out for merlins, golden eagles and hen harriers that lived there. Funnily enough I didn’t see any, as all such birds are routinely shot and poisoned by game keepers. I didn’t see anything save for grouse and heather. The place felt like a concentration camp.

That our land is manipulated and abused in this way, and then sold to us as rare natural habitats which must be managed by the good-hearted estate owners who know so much better than the rest of us, made me very angry. It spurred me on to do a lot of reading and research as to how things ended up this way and what can be done about it. I believe that a combination of rewilding – bringing back apex predators, replanting native trees then allowing ecosystems to run themselves – is one of the answers, combined with big changes in land ownership and a move from a rural economy based on subsidised meat farming and bloodsports tourism to one based on ecotourism. It’s also made me fiercely pro-independence, as I believe we have a better chance of achieving all this with a government closer to us and elected by us.

ME What do stories and storytelling contribute to environmental education/social change/connecting people to nature/to the land (pick as many or as few as you’d like to address)?

DANIEL For children to grow up caring about nature they need to have, and deserve to have, awe-inspiring encounters with it. When the majority of us lived in rural locations and before the wolves and bears had been shot, these wouldn’t have been difficult to arrange. Nowadays we have an urban youth who see nature as something ‘other’ that they are not part of.

We tend to think the answer to this is to round up some animals – decimating wild populations in the process – and stick them in zoos and theme parks. Children can and will fall in love with the animals they see in these places, but all the time they are being fed a message – it is okay to imprison and harm animals for our entertainment.

Advocates of zoos and marine parks will say that such places make children grow up caring for these animals and their environments. I see storytelling as alternative to this. I recently toured Edinburgh schools telling stories about Scotland’s ‘Big 5’ animals – the red deer, red squirrel, golden eagle, harbour seal and otter. Simply through listening to stories the pupils entered into the worlds of these animals, leaving the sessions exhilarated and full of new-found appreciation of and respect for them. We don’t need to have caged animals paraded in front of us to connect us to nature – we need our imaginations and the stories that our ancestors have left for us.

ME Where do you find the stories you tell? (If you have any web-links that would be great)?

DANIEL Though I tell a good few stories that i have learned from our tellers and people I have met on my travels, the majority have come from books. I think this is because it is such a rare thing to find a story that is just right for you – the ratio is probably less than one in a hundred. This necessitates buying and searching through a lot of books! But there’s nothing like the satisfaction you get when you find one and just know that it will be with you for the rest of your life.

I tell a lot of Siberian stories – I love the animistic worldview they portray and that they have managed to retain the purity of this worldview where so many other cultures have succumbed to the homogenising effects of the western story-model. I am hugely indebted to the work of Kira Van Deusen, a Canadian storyteller and researcher who has done an incredible amount of work in gathering the stories of the tribes and who has been very generous in hearing her knowledge and work with me.

ME What is your favourite story for telling in relation to environmental education and why?

DANIEL Tough one… it might change tomorrow, but today I’ll say ‘The Maiden of the Deep Forest’, a story I learned from Martin Shaw. In it, a young prince is sent out on a quest to the far reaches of the kingdom to bring back something that shows he is fit to be king. When he finds and accepts something both hideous and beautiful, life-taking and life-giving, then he is ready to become king. I love the story as it contains such a wealth of knowledge and transmits it through one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve ever encountered in a story! Which, of course, never fails to engage teenagers.

I’d always seen it as a metaphor for the creative process – reaching down into the depths of the psyche to find the hidden jewels – and for the initiation process, where one becomes whole by uncovering and learning to love one’s inner darkness and demons. However, I have recently come to see it as reflecting the need we have for kingdoms here in the physical world that have wild, untamed, shadowy places where meeting creatures of the night is a distinct possibility.

Through such encounters we are renewed and our souls set on fire. When we come back to the centre of the kingdom, eyes wide with wonder and speaking wild tales of what we have seen, the kingdom is renewed. This is the kind of country I want children to grow up in and the kind of wild love of nature and its mysteries, danger and beauty that should come out of environmental education. It is not going to happen so long as the countryside is a barren playground where millionaires hurt animals for fun.

Storytelling populates and enriches the wild places of the psyche. Environmental education must recognise that our wild places ‘out there’ are as desperately impoverished as our housing estates before it can seek to do the same.

Links

Read more about Daniel’s storywalk on his blog: Among the Wild Deer