Every fall I teach environmental literature, a course which ranges over the terrain of environmental writers from Thoreau up to Rebecca Solnit. About halfway through we read Wendell Berry’s essay “Preserving Wildness.” Many of my students take a negative view of humanity in relation to nature. It makes sense. We’ve discussed why starting on night one, and continue to do so until finals week. Sometimes I don’t get around to an important except from Berry’s essay wherein he offers an alternate, deeper frame by which to view humans and our place in nature.

“We are creatures obviously subordinate to nature, dependent upon a wild world that we did not make. And yet we are joined to that larger nature by our own nature, a part of which is our self-interest. A common complaint nowadays is that humans think the world is “anthropocentric,” or human-centered. I understand the complaint; the assumptions of so-called anthropocentrism often result in gross and dangerous insubordination. And yet I don’t know how the human species can avoid some version of self-centeredness; I don’t know how any species can. An earthworm, I think, is living in an earthworm-centered world; the thrush how eats the earthworm is living in a thrush-centered world…” (from the American Earth anthology, p. 526). 

He goes on to argue that we differ from worms and birds by our ability to “do more” on our own behalf than is necessary for our survival. How much is enough for a happy life is both an ancient and ongoing argument. Often, he argues, the answer is less. He wants readers to remember we are sharing the world, “both with each other and with other creatures.”

Until we upload consciousness into the cloud, it appears we’re body-bound, which means our sharing this world with other living systems is complicated by the fact that we must use the world at the “expense” of those systems. “We must acknowledge both the centrality and the limits of our self interest.” As paradoxical as this might seem, Berry sees relief in the absence of false hope. Hoping that a solution is around the corner by preferring humanity over nature or vice versa leads us to a dead-end. Sidestep this dualism and you realize the “solutions we have in front of us will need to be worked for and worked out.”

They will have to be “practical solutions” that he believes will be local in practice. “There is work to do that can be done.” This is his wager against nihilistic resignation. He digs into the details in other parts of the essay and writings, but it’s the “can” that punctuates the sentence in my opinion. Because it’s true, this little word opens up worlds of possibility that anthropocentric dualism forecloses.

As Annie Dillard wrote, “The rest is gravy.”