The Transformative Power of Harvesting Wild Plants
Art by Roots_n_Wings.
Il n'est pas bon d'aller troubler dans son sommeil
La nature, ce dieu féroce et taciturne.
–
It is not good to go disturbing the slumber
Of Nature, that god so fierce and yet so taciturn.
–
Paul Verlaine
(Translation : Hayden Pendergrass)
As a kid, I was taught that the outside world was dangerous.
You must not climb trees, leave the garden, put your head under the river water or your knees on the ground.
What came from outside was dirty, would give you diseases. When we came back inside, we would first have to wash our hands with soap. Rub them! Don’t forget your wrists!
Don’t touch feathers, because of the avian flu. Anyway, you should not pick up anything from the ground, we don’t know where it comes from. Don’t put your fingers to your mouth after playing around with all that stuff earlier!
As kids the food we ate came from the shop, and we were suspicious about it.
You should leave fruit at least one minute under running water... Are you sure you rinsed it well? Do it again...
When I became an adult, I made some friends who prepared salads from wild plants. I was amazed by the idea: To have free access to food wherever I was, nevermind the opportunity to introduce myself to botanics. To reclaim a relationship to plants without needing to own a piece of land to grow veggies! That did resonate with my urban, anti-capitalist heart. Down with supermarkets, long live the roadsides!
The only cloud in the sky of my enthusiasm: I was scared to death of putting it in my mouth, this bloody salad! The fear passed on to me during my childhood resurfaced when faced with the threatening outdoors, the wild world ready to devour me...
Each little leaf triggered a wave of anxiety inside me: I trusted my friends, but well, they didn’t have a diploma in botany either! They had taken part in a workshop or read a few books, but was it really enough to avoid making any mistakes? Maybe a deadly leaf had slipped into the salad by mistake! Most of the time I managed to overcome my fears enough to taste it, but I still went to bed watching out for the first signs of intoxication...
As the idea was still really attractive to me, I took part in some workshops myself and bought my first edible wild plant guide. Of course, I also started to harvest.
To be honest, I still get knots in my stomach when I eat wild plants at a dinner, sometimes even when I’ve picked them myself. A little voice in my head still asks me, “are you really sure?”
Where does this anxiety come from exactly? Why does eating wild plants, despite my fear, still belong to my political struggle and my personal transformation?
Well, even if they are sometimes the site of a real internal struggle, each single bite of wild flower is a victory of mine over my western education. An education arising from centuries of Christianity, the enlightenment and the hence prevailing ideologies in Europe.
The transgression that the ingestion of non-domesticated, non-traceable, non-controllable food represents is a transgression of these anthropocentric, mechanist and deadly ideologies.
These ideologies have at their core the separation between oneself and the rest of the world. Or said in another way, between oneself and nature. This is what the very existence of the word nature in our language tells us. We have a word to express what does not belong to us. This meaning of the word nature is visible in the opposition of natural/artificial, the natural being what exists outside or before us, and the artificial being what is being produced by our action or our presence. When we speak about a natural area for example, we refer to an area untouched by man.
That we need a word to name everything which is not human or under our influence shows a dualist world vision, organised around the separation between humanity and non-humanity. This vision is of course an especially western one! Up until the 19th century for example, Chinese civilisation reflected humanity in a comprehensive order that included both nature and humankind[1]. Many indigenous languages don’t have an equivalent to the word nature, as their world vision includes humankind within a cosmos. The fascinating anthropologist Philippe Descola describes different indigenous world views “where most plants and animals are included in a community of persons sharing all or some abilities, behaviors and moral codes usually assigned to mankind”[2] by modern western society. This tells us much about the anthropocentric mindset of the latter..!
It was when the white man started to consider himself an outsider to the world that he required a word to name between the lines what was not (yet) under his control.
At which point did europeans feel so foreign to the world that they began to use a word to split – amputate – the human animal from the rest of the world?
In antiquity, the word naturae in latin or physis in ancient greek, originally referred to that which is intrinsic to something (the nature of a grape is to be round and to grow on a vine). It was the pre-socratic philosophers that later invented the idea of nature as a whole, the Nature, which they defined as all that could be explained by purely physical causes. Herewith, they began to convey the idea that there would be an entire part of the world which would be desacralised, no longer inhabited by divinities but by rational phenomenons.
The desacralisation of nature continued with the emergence of the judeo-christian religion. From the first book of the Old Testament we read:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28.
Through this world view, the holy, the deity, is no longer intrinsic to nature. Nature becomes a mere object of god’s creation, a material that one can use and dominate.
Thinkers of the enlightenment, with René Descartes at the forefront, had at the core of their ideology that mankind exists outside of nature. In their mindset, man has been created in the image of god, that is, above nature. Man’s body may be material, but his immaterial soul should give him the ability to escape his organic condition in order to dissect it, decrypt it and finally dominate it and the rest of nature along with it.
The importance that the dualism which natural/civilised took at this time is connected to the development of the colonial empires, which used civilisationist arguments to justify their crimes: The expropriation and looting of resources, the eradication of other cultures by extremely violent means including enslavement, torture and massacre. This would all supposedly be conducted for the good of those whom they called savages. People who they considered as natural beings had to be civilized in order to save them, bringing them onto the side of humanity. This concept was also used to subdue women, supposedly driven by their impulses as opposed to men who were supposedly driven by reason. A concept through which fools were locked away from those of sound mind...
Nature is that which is unmanageable by the white man, anything that resists his will. It is the earthquake destroying his region without a warning, the cockroach living in his wall unwittingly, the witch squatting the outskirts of his city, the wolf devouring his sheep, the sickness for which he can’t find a cure, the jungle swallowing him, the forest close by when night falls and he cant find his way back home...
If we refuse to coexist with nature, if we eradicate her, distance her, civilize her, if we take everything other than ourselves as an object, then we are able to fantasize our almighty power. We are able – from our control room – to play the masters of the world and of its fate.
This of course implies standing outside of the world, out of nature, just like the judeo-christian god. To fit his image, we attempt to step outside of the cycle of life and death. And to ignore the reality of death, we hold ourselves in an out-of-life state. The truth is that we are scared of nature because nature brings us back to cycles, to phenomenons which are out of our control. In short, to our finitude. We would rather stay high on our ego-trip of omnipotence, even if it means not really living in order to not really have to die. We survive in an artificial place, living like aliens on our own planet, disconnected from what surrounds us to the point that we don’t understand that we are killing it and that we are surely agonizing along with it.
So, yes, eating dandelion leaves will not be enough to wake us up from this zombie-like torpor. But every act that reduces the distance between our ego and the world counts. We have to learn not to be afraid of our own body, our subconscious, creatures swarming under stones, women, trans-people, foreigners, corners of our garden on a dark night. We have to find a connection back to our world, because it is ours, and we have to exit the prison of reason, because it is killing us.
So, yes, let’s eat dandelions, let’s learn the names of the birds flying above our cities, let’s start a friendship with the tree on the other side of our window, let’s learn from the wisdom of indigenous cultures, let’s kick all the prejudices that cut ourselves off from one another, let’s get to know the body in which we, despite it all, live and die.
Footnotes
[1]Augustin Berque, Review of “Concepts of nature. A Chinese-European cross cultural perspective”, 8.11.2011
[2]Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Gallimard, 2005
Djann Asmund
is a feminist and anarchist pagan staying in France and Germany. She is trying to take part into the fight against white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy and into the birth of a post-cartesian world conception in Europe. She is sometimes a fox and sometimes a whale, but remains most of the time a human being.