Walking the Land

In November 2024, I focused on an eco-philosophy exercise called “Walking the land”. It consists in immersing yourself in the care-taking of a piece of land, thus experiencing the land’s possibilities, needs and resistances. With time, you come to view yourself primarily as a caretaker of nature. Now… A month was too short to uncover all aspects of this exercise, but I have a few remarks already. The practice is very intriguing, but I found it interestingly difficult to access.

    Freya Mathews’ article “‘Walking the Land’: an Alternative to Discourse as a Path to Ecological Consciousness and Peace”¹ tackles a fascinating problem: environmental philosophers have debunked the anthropocentric ideology that underpins the systematic exploitation and destruction of nature, yet this has not resulted in society shifting towards ecological consciousness. As the article explains, this state of affairs can be explained by “historical materialism”: it is the modes of production of a given society that gives rise to the type of consciousness its members will come to have. In other words, anthropocentric ideology arises out of the incentive structure laid out by the economy of a society. If you try to persuade people that anthropocentric ideology is wrong, you tackle the level of discourse, which is a symptom of an underlying structure, but you fail to tackle the underlying structure. So it’s not going to go anywhere. The destructive ideology will spring back up as many times as you knock it down, because its source is left untouched.

    Alright, now we have an explanation for the problem of political inertia, but do we have a solution? As Freya Mathews notes, this situation is pretty dispiriting because it seems impossible to untie that knot: the values of a society come from its modes of production, so if you want to change its values you have to change those first and foremost, but how could you expect a shift towards ecological modes of production without ecological values to motivate that shift? This “vexing circularity” she calls it “the Hard Problem of environmental reform”².

    As her analysis parts ways with Marx’s analysis, Freya Mathews delineates a potential point of leverage, where individuals might engage in new practices and cultivate new values even before the current system collapses under the weight of its own contradictions (something we cannot afford, she thinks, in the context of the eco-crisis). I felt like her reasoning was reminiscent of Muhammad Velji’s reasoning when he argues that we ought to focus on the “The Meso-Level of the Political”³: between the individual level and the structural level, there is an “in-between” level, and this level is a leverage point for philosophical exercises to change society (both its practices and its values). Velji offers this research hypothesis: “The conceptual vocabulary for the meso-level are habits, skills, affordances, affect, niche construction and self-transformation. My central claim is that structural social change is not possible without people changing their habits, increasing their skills, and participating in practices of freedom and self-transformation.”⁴ This is a solution to the apparent impossibility of tackling the vicious circle between the structural and the individual.

    I do not know if Mathews would agree with all of this framing, but what is clear is that she does think we have a concrete opportunity to undo this vicious cycle. The opportunity consists in answering human beings’ deep seated need (evolutionary need) for affiliation, belonging. As is typical of a “philosophy as a way of life” thinker⁵, Mathews points out that, traditionally, this need was met by abrahamic religions in the West, but that this does not have to be this way. The influence of abrahamic religions is indicative of a need that can be met in different ways. Meeting this need in a different way is the secret to tackling the “vexing circularity” of values and practices, “the Hard Problem of environmental reform”⁶.

    1) Transforming yourself by taking care of the land

    “Walking the land” is the proposed philosophical exercise to achieve this goal. The term itself is a quote from David Mowaljarlai, an indigenous Australian traditional teacher, and the principle of the exercise similarly comes from Aboriginal tradition. Freya Mathews offers an interpretation of what it means: “By this I take him to mean that we should walk the land not merely in a literal sense but in a paradigm-shifting epistemological sense as well. Rather than stepping back from the land, as the observer and theoretician do, we have actively to enter it, address it and engage it as a collaborator that can and will join forces with us in some vital venture”⁷

In other words, we have to immerse ourselves in the care-taking of a piece of land. This is an ecological conservation effort that changes the way we look at the world:

“To walk the land in this new way, adapted to the praxical possibilities of our own time

and also to the ecological imperatives of a wounded planet, is not merely the prerogative of privileged land holders. Place-specific conservation activities are surely in principle available to everyone. Those with disposable capital might join with friends to purchase an ecologically strategic property, then safeguard its future with a conservation covenant and prepare to embark on what might become, in its quiet way, a depth-initiation that few anticipate. Those without such financial means can still commit to an ecologically strategic place, by volunteering for caring-for country type programs on public or private, urban or rural estates, or by creating such programs themselves. Undertaken collectively, via congregations of commitment to an ecological cosmology, such activities not only implicate us, through our own sweat and care, in a cherished place, but bond us to the colleagues-in-care who likewise find themselves drawn into its larger significance. Before too long we may start to feel like keepers of the place in question—the particular woodland or mountain, river or creek, rocky outcrop or arid shrubland—its interests gradually overtaking our own, our allegiance to it outgrowing our narrower, more personal perspectives.”⁸

This is not a very easy exercise to set up because it relies heavily on creating or joining a community of people who engage in this exercise, “congregations of commitment to an ecological cosmology”. I did my best to practice the exercise, but what I could do was limited by the fact that I lacked such a community. In one month, I could only get a tiny little taste of what things are like when you walk the land.

    2) A preliminary report on the practice of Walking the Land

    It’s too soon for me to draw too many conclusions given how little I’ve walked the land. Here’s my preliminary report: very hands-on, very concrete activities, do work to make me feel like a care-taker of the land (so they work as intended, as philosophical exercises). In contrast, the effort to find people involved in clear ecological missions made me feel like my usual entrepreneurial self, which felt pretty miserable.

Let me present two examples to explain this contrast.

a) A very hands-on activity: picking up trash outside.

I started to pick up trash laying outside when I went out for a walk. I came up with rules for it to be actually helpful. I reasoned that a lot of the trash I saw would be taken care of by the clean up crew that works for the city. So my rule was this: pick up trash if you think there is a reasonable chance that the piece of trash won’t be spotted by the usual clean-up patrol (if it’s hidden in bushes or out of the way), and especially if there is a reasonable chance that the piece of trash will be blown by the wind soon and fall into the local river or park (and maybe I should have thought of sewer drains, I don’t know). I cannot tell you how much this rule helped change my perspective. I went from “surely, it’s someone’s job to take care of this” to “even if it’s someone’s job to take care of this, there is still a part of this duty that I can make mine, and where I can make a difference.” There is this weird feeling that volunteering to pick up trash like this, as part of your normal day, is a waste of time and that you are a dofus for doing it. But near the end of the month, it got windy and rainy, and some sort of dam or “traffic jam” made of all the trash that had fallen into the water formed in the local river, near a bridge. Seeing all this accumulated litter, I felt pretty vindicated that every piece of trash I had picked up was a problem I had removed from the equation.

b) A cooperation-heavy activity: sending emails to make stuff happen

So I was picking up trash outside, right? But then I hit an impasse. There are these pieces of red and white caution tape stuck in the trees in my city. Violent winds put them there, and it’s too high to access them easily. The only thing I could do to try to get rid of them was to write a couple of emails to people, to try to make a solution happen. I wrote to the cleaning services of my city. They said they would do something about it, but they didn’t. It’s quite the humbling experience to be faced with a problem so small, so low-priority looking compared to other stuff, and to be unable to do anything about it.

The red and white tape still taunts me to this day whenever I walk around here. In itself, this is a very unremarkable event, but it illustrates something that happened several times during my month of walking the land: any sufficiently difficult ecological activity devolved into writing emails and/or looking stuff up on the internet. The thing is: emails & online searches did not feel at all like the philosophical exercise I was aiming for. It felt lonely.

As we saw, Freya Mathews makes the case that there is an “identity & affiliation”-shaped hole where traditional religions are losing influence. Capitalism cannot fill that hole because “the forms of identity and consciousness that emanate from capitalist-industrial modes of praxis” give us an atomized sense of self⁹. The point of “walking the land” is to lose that atomized sense of self and gain another sense of self, cosmological and communal. As a philosopher who is forced to be an entrepreneur because of how capitalist society is organized, I can really relate to that way of framing things. I was very eager to lose myself in this exercise. So when I suddenly had to shift from very hands-on & satisfying activities to my usual - almost “entrepreneurial” - way of acting (writing emails, doing online searches), it did not feel good at all. I was back to my usual unsatisfying way of being. It would have felt less bad if people had responded to my emails (they didn’t!!) but it still wouldn’t have been much of a philosophical exercise.

    3) Walking the Dry Land

    At some point, I was doing online searches to find ecology groups in my city. It was fairly productive. I found a group called “Biens Communs” (or “Common Goods”) who is dedicated to protecting a (formerly green) town square from being transformed into a new shopping center. I was already emotionally invested in this town square of my city, so it felt good to find a group who was protecting it. I will monitor their activity and try to help. However, in the middle of doing this online search, I became mindful of the quality of my current experience. I was trying hard to be “productive”, I was trying to be altruistic in the most “effective” of ways. In other words, I was behaving the same way that I behave when I am volunteering for the French chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a wonderful ecology group who lobbies politicians to change laws for the environment (quick plug: if you are wondering what to do for the environment, and/or if you are experiencing a lot of eco-anxiety that you want relief from, this is my number one recommendation: you can volunteer for Citizens’ Climate Lobby; it has an extensive network and might have a chapter in your country).

When I work for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, personally, there is a clear sense that I am doing this because of a utilitarian perspective (an effective altruist perspective with a clear utilitarian bent, let’s say) and a stoic sense of responsibility (by this I only mean the part of Stoicism where you do not shy away from politics). Those perspectives are great but they are limited. They tend to make us very optimization-minded, at the expense of fully taking into account our own flourishing and how this flourishing itself may benefit the world. So utilitarianism needs the assistance of virtue ethics, and the stoic sense of responsibility needs the assistance of stoic spirituality: we might easily forget that the Stoics had a deep connection with & appreciation of the beauty of the Cosmos, which they viewed as this great intelligent living god. In the same vein, I think that Walking the Land might be a grounding perspective that counterbalances those other, very productive-minded perspectives, which might easily lead to burn-out.

I spent a lot of this month feeling like I wasn’t so much “Walking the Land” but “Walking to the Land”. Like I wasn’t there yet. Like I wasn’t where I needed to be for the exercise to get started. I had to rush quickly to get there. Obviously, one month is too short for the kind of immersion that the exercise is going after. Community is hard to pull off in that time-frame. But what if it’s not just a matter of time, but also a matter of attitude? I have heard (from psychology research on loneliness, I think?) of people who join associations, go to one or two meetings, and then never come back. And the problem here is that these people expect to feel an immediate sense of connection with the members of the group, and an immediate feeling of meaningfulness when it comes to the activities offered by the group. This unrealistic expectation prevents patience, which prevents relationships and social impact from being possible. If we crave an immediate sense of relationship and meaningfulness, we won’t be patient enough to eventually get it. I think there was something about my “productivist”, “entrepreneurial” attitude that was not helping at all.

I wonder if there is some way of using the spirit of this exercise to tackle that aspect I found so challenging. We have this phrase in French, “la traversée du désert”. It literally means “crossing the desert” but it’s a metaphor for a difficult passage of your life where you feel abandoned, or like things are generally not working out for you. It’s kind of like “the dark night of the soul”. We also say “un passage à vide”, to designate this period of lack of motivation, and I believe this image describes the crossing of an empty space where you can find no support. A bad patch. I wonder if there could be such an exercise as “Walking the Dry Land” or “Empty Land”, or perhaps even “Waste Land”. It would be the same exercise as the one Mathews describes, but instead of emphasizing community, we emphasize the challenges of loneliness and/or alone-ness. Thus, we invite people to cultivate patience, while acknowledging the loneliness that makes impatience so very tempting.

    5) Conclusion

In any case, it seems that patience is the name of the game. Patience, with a good view of the aim, brings immersion, which itself brings relief and joy. “Once we have discovered this way of knowing, there will be no question of remaining ethically indifferent to the living world, marooned inside a plastic bubble of anthropocentrism. To care for it—and seek solace in its presence—will be as natural as doing so is for Aboriginal people, because caring for it will be what makes us feel attuned and alive ourselves.”¹⁰ (Emphasis mine.)

(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. In the previous episode, we experimented with Intuitive Action, and before that, we made friends with dead philosophers. Take a look around the blog for more experiments!)

(16/12/2024)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1 MATHEWS Freya, “’Walking the Land’: an Alternative to Discourse as a Path to Ecological Consciousness and Peace” Published in Joseph Camilleri and Deborah Guess (eds), Towards a Just and Ecologically Sustainable Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

2p.6. of MATHEWS Freya, “’Walking the Land’: an Alternative to Discourse as a Path

to Ecological Consciousness and Peace” Published in Joseph Camilleri and Deborah Guess (eds), Towards a Just and

Ecologically Sustainable Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

3See Muhammad VELJI’s book project: Mundane Yet Powerful:

The Meso-Level of the Political, Transformative Justice and Rethinking Social Change https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b6e0e32506fbe3586b0c01e/t/6563afb5517d747aa628c4ed/1701031861529/Velji+APT+paper+Mundane+Yet+Powerful.pdf and https://muhammadvelji.com/short-research-statement

4https://muhammadvelji.com/short-research-statement VELJI Muhammad Short Research Statement

5See also “Ecophilosophy as a Way of Life” by Freya Mathews

6p.6. of MATHEWS Freya, “’Walking the Land’: an Alternative to Discourse as a Path

to Ecological Consciousness and Peace” Published in Joseph Camilleri and Deborah Guess (eds), Towards a Just and

Ecologically Sustainable Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

7p.9 of MATHEWS Freya, “Walking the Land”

8p.10 of MATHEWS Freya, “Walking the Land”

9p.7. of MATHEWS Freya, “Walking the Land”

10p.10 of MATHEWS Freya, “Walking the Land”