The Point

Friday, February 22, 2008

Brackish waters

I'M A BIG FAN OF THE WORD 'BRACKISH.' SOMETHING about it rings with this lovely connotation of water that's a little too messy, a little too churned-up to be really one thing or the other. Alexander Wilson's 1991 tome The Culture of Nature is a book that has done much to muddy my own understandings of the borders between the "natural" world and the human one.

I had the good fortune of spending my New Year's Eve this last December with friends of mine in Toronto, and while I was there I was reading this book to try to finish it off before school started up again. It was freezing that week (as my grandpa called all the way from Alberta to remind me), but I decided to go outside and try to explore a few parts of the city I'd never seen before. Some quick digging through old Now Magazine archives gave me the intriguing idea of hiking in Scarborough, and with a granola bar and some tupperwared dal in my bag and thermal underwear snugly pulled up, I decided to give it a try. I attempted to explain where I was going to my friends, but to not much avail. I admit, I was a little bewildered by the concept too - hiking in the city? Isn't that something you do up in the mountains?

The Culture of Nature is sort of a manifesto that Wilson (a Torontonian himself) made of his ideas of where North American conceptions about nature come from. I was surprised to learn how historically recent many of the ideas and expectations about what "nature" means in our collective imagination are. To my mild embarrassment (at being enough of a keener to have accidentally read recommended reading material for one of my classes), our human geography professor quoted a passage from the book in her second lecture. Wilson says:
Our experience of the natural world – whether touring the Canadian Rockies, watching an animal show on TV, or working in our own gardens – is always mediated. It is always shaped by rhetorical constructs like photography, industry, advertising, and aesthetics, as well as by institutions like religion, tourism and education.
It's a surprisingly easy read at times. Wilson teases apart the history of the nature documentary over the 20th century and its connections to the dislocation experienced by new suburbanites feeling isolated from a "natural" world in the 1950s, investigates the contradictions of using tropical plants and flowers in malls to create spaces that feel semi-natural inside but leaving this impulse almost entirely out of the design of the mostly asphalt spaces around them, and takes you on a walk through Dollywood, Dolly Parton's "homage to the mountain culture of the southern Appalachians." Who here north of the border would have imagined this ever-so-slightly bizarre village theme park even existed?

You can almost feel Wilson driving around the continent collecting stories for this book. At times it does get a bit textbook-y, but there are a lot of surprising anecdotes and not-very-well-known spaces and landscapes that crop up that give the bulk of it an almost Reader's Digest-like fun to pick up. Not to say Reader's Digest is my favourite - or least favourite - doctor's office reading material. I'm mostly just thinking of the guilty pleasure of skipping to the jokes at the back. Wilson clearly enjoyed writing about a curmudgeonly, anti-Semitic Walt Disney only partially deliberately giving an entire suburban generation their understanding of where we fit into the picture we call nature.

I'll let you read it for yourself to go through the way he pieces these preconceptions apart, because most of the experience of the book for me was having them deliberately disassembled one by one. It's a good book to leave in the bathroom or by the side of your bed to pick up and come back to.

One thing I felt I needed to do after reading this was to visit the community garden that was made in his memory after he died. Alex Wilson was a horticulturalist, a journo, and I think most of all a member of his community. He designed the Aids memorial garden downtown in Cawthra Park, and lost his own battle with Aids in 1993. After reading his ideas about the links between the ground we stand on, the places we come from, and the communities we build, I think it's a kind of pilgrimage I'll be making in the not-too distant future.

I know I fawn over books sometimes, but this one really left me with a feeling of hope after I'd set it down. Obama's not the only one who has something to say about optimism for the world we're building together.

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posted by Christopher at 4:10 p.m.

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