Bass Boats, Gun Racks And The Real Call Of The Wild - Demystifying Nature

'Getting back to nature' has been a nostrum forever, a cure for the patent ills of the city, a remove to a more pure, spiritually healthy respite from the pressures of modern life. People of every era have sought solace, peace, and enlightenment in nature.  They have fled the noxious, morally polluted environment of the city and found calm in forest, glade, meadow, and mountain. 

It hasn't been just poets and philosophers like Thoreau, Wordsworth, Byon, and Shelley who have found the allure of nature irresistible, but entrepreneurs. Environmentalists, speaking of virgin forests as sanctuaries and places of unique beauty and epiphanic power, have generated an enthusiastic demand for the wilderness satisfied by businessmen who see unlimited financial opportunity there.

 

The Ecotherapy Movement - a brilliant scheme developed by canny investors who saw market potential in creating a refuge from the debilitating, corrupting, and destructive urban environment - promised the improvement or restoration of the ‘human-nature’ relationship, aiming to rebalance human lives.  Cities had distorted the psychological, spiritual, and physical balance we once had in an earlier, more pastoral age.

“Ecotherapy” refers to healing and growth nurtured by healthy interaction with the earth…Ecopsychology, the study of our psychological relations with the rest of nature, provides a solid theoretical, cultural, and critical foundation for Eco-therapeutic practice. This perspective reveals the critical fact that people are intimately connected with, embedded in, and inseparable from the rest of nature. Grasping this fact deeply shifts our understanding of how to heal the human psyche and the currently dysfunctional and even lethal human-nature relationship.

Advocates of Ecotherapy recommend the following:

• Inreach: receiving and being nurtured by the healing presence of nature, place, Earth.
• Upreach: the actual experience of this more-than-human vitality as we relocate our place within the natural world.
• Outreach: activities with other people that care for the planet

The movement became wildly popular because it unified spiritual longing, psychological health, and commitment to the environment.  Environmentalists are too outward-directed, and religious ascetics too inward-looking said advocates while Ecotherapy fully integrates the spiritual nature of man with the spiritual nature of the Earth.  

In marketing terms, Ecotherapy found a vacant consumer niche; created a strong brand image which signifies commitment, idealism, and purpose; and developed a sales strategy which includes products, services, and technical support. Perhaps most importantly, like all New Age movements before it, it taps into vast reservoirs of personal insecurity, providing an institutional home which is both alternative and strong.

Early testimonials were elegiac, suggesting an existential transformation, a new lease on life, a serenity and inner peace travelers had only dreamed of.  The cash registers of the movement headquarters in Bayonne, New Jersey - an unlikely place for such a forest enterprise - were ringing. Young and old were signing up for excursions in the Piedmont, the Blue Ridge, Appalachia, the Adirondacks, and the Catskills. 

 

The company could not hire enough docents to meet the demand; yet given the already strong belief in the transformative power of nature, even the most inexperienced guide, if he spoke earnestly about the healing properties of the forest, would satisfy the seekers in his care.  

There is another wilderness however, one populated with game to be hunted, and fish to be caught.  There is no romance in this wilderness, no epiphanic moments, no elegiac poems about spirituality or the Earth. The wild is a practical place, a philosophically neutral place where trails led to nests, dens, and habitat not to enlightenment. This wilderness - the veldt, the savannah, the great plains, and the jungle - has always been there; but only in the recent romantic era has it been revealed as something more than survival. 

Coyote Johnson took a bead on the buck he had tracked through Big Cypress Swamp in northern  Arkansas, fired just as the deer caught his scent, turned, and jumped into the dense trees behind.  'Goddamn it', said Coyote who had stood for an hour in Idle Creek bayou up to the top of his hip boots waiting for a six-point to take the bait, and he could haul home a prize. 

Coyote was frustrated, that was all; for this was what hunting was all about - tracking, baiting, patience, and a true shot.  He made his way to the mossy outcropping where the deer had stood, mapped out his way back to the truck (he knew this part of the swamp like the back of his hand, knew where the alligators liked to sun themselves and where the water moccasins nested) and started back.  If he was lucky he might spot a baby 'gator and have swamp steaks for dinner. 

The swamp, the bayou, and Harper Lake was all the nature he needed - game was plentiful, all places were far from Fish and Wildlife agents, so he could use his own well-practiced judgment on limits, and the weather in this part of Arkansas was never too cold.  His best hunting had been in late November when the wild turkeys and swamp partridges were foraging.  

He had no feeling one way or another about the swamps, the Ozarks, or the Delta of the state - no particular sentiments of spirituality, inner peace, or divine presence.  The blast of his twelve-gauge sent swamp birds flying in flocks above the trees but did not break some holy pact of silence.  Quiet was the essence of the hunt, and the blast from his Herstal Browning meant success or failure, nothing else. 

As he made his way back to his truck, the swamp changed character a number of times - from large, almost lake size open water, to boggy underbrush, briars, and tangles to solid ground and grasses.  Each venue meant different prey - squirrels, swamp rabbits, bobcats, mink, and muskrat. 

Coyote was as at home on the lakes in his district as  on the bayous and in the swamps, and when he was off work he would take his outboard and fish for bass or noodle for catfish.  He hunted and fished alone, not to be more attuned to the mystery of the environment, but for simplicity and practicality.  He had never gotten lost, capsized, bitten, or marooned. 

Nature was never more than this - neither human sanctuary, nor spiritual refuge, nor place of enlightenment. The magical realists, the Shelleys who are in awe of the clouds parting and the snowcapped peak of Mt. Blanc appearing in the morning sunlight; the Thoreaus who find peace and spiritual harmony on their Walden ponds, are dreamers, fantasists, fabulists who if born in a later, modern, urbanized world would more than likely have written of the electronic wizardry of the times, the excitement, the passion of numbers. 

The Ecotherapy entrepreneurs tapped into this particular empathy - Romantic lines of verse, magical insights, and fantastical transformations - and made millions.

A young follower of Ecotherapy from San Francisco had left the city to live in Mendocino County, had been trained in Ecotherapy, and was working as a therapist at a local Nature Wellness Center. She quickly became active in the Environmental Movement, contributing and then volunteering in campaigns to protect the redwoods, estuaries, sea lions, and the deserts.  

When she first heard of Ecotherapy, she knew it was for her.  She was particularly taken with the ideas of a particularly well-known advocate who said:

I am a flower person, a water nymph, a sprite, and a butterfly. I caress and embrace trees.  I taste the waters of springs and brooks. I smell the perfumed scent of meadows and forests. I was once reticent – ashamed in fact – about my desire to express my feeling of intimacy with the natural world; but Ecotherapy changed my life.  Practicing the profession has allowed me to share my experience with others – to guide fellow travelers along the path which for so long was hidden from me. I have become one with nature.

Not only did the Movement extend its reach and influence through canny publicity and media use, but through the evangelism of  its growing staff of engaged and committed therapists. They set the style and tone, and were so convincing in their appeal to both environmentalism and spiritual evolution that the clientele grew by leaps and bounds.

The marketing vision of the founders of the movement was truly canny.  Amidst the hundreds of New Age, alternative therapies in the country, they found the perfect niche – nature-spiritualism-environmentalism.  

The Ecotherapy movement, like most fads in America had its halcyon years then disappeared as though it had never happened; but its offspring are alive and well, and thousands of Americans head off to the woods looking for solace, emotional respite, and peace.  The allure of Nature is persistent, although waning in the days of AI and virtual reality.  When one can pick and choose from any one of an unlimited virtual landscapes in which to travel with an untold number of ideal partners, the real thing - Nature - will quickly lose its cachet. 

For the time being, money is still there for the asking.  National parks, mountain resorts, forest lodges, and lakeside cabins are doing a land office business. 

As for Coyote Johnson, the whole thing passed him by - the Ecotherapy thing, the Nature thing, and the AI virtual thing. He worked hard at his day job, hunted and fished in the swamps on the weekend, and was a very happy camper.