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 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 4. See Morizot, ‘Redécouvrir la terre’.
5 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 6. Akira Mizubayashi, Mélodie, chronique d’une passion (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’, 2013).
7 7. Baptiste Morizot, Les Diplomates. Cohabiter avec les loups sur une autre carte du vivant (Marseille: Wildproject, 2016), p. 149.
Preamble Enforesting 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