Kinder Abenteuer
“Children’s Adventures”
Like many, if not most children, I was very fond of animals throughout my preteen years (and still am if I’m honest). The animal toys that populated my bed were often my closest friends, providing companionship when I wanted playmates and comfort when life felt challenging and I did not yet understand my emotions. Even in the naïveté that shrouded my outlook with a not yet fully developed gratitude for the world, I was at least aware of how grateful I was to have these friends. Of course, this sensitivity naturally extended to the chipmunks that played about in the yard, the birds that gathered on the fence, the deer I saw in the forest, the ducks that my father and I would trike down to feed at the edge of the pond, and our dark-as-night pet dachshund, Guinevere.
I was born in Turkey, but moved to Germany nine months later and lived there through kindergarten. There are many magical qualities in the mythology of a children’s world in Germany, including gnomes, dwarfs, mushroom fairies, and even the nearby-relative smurfs that were born across the border in France. One of my favorite pathways into this world was through a book series called Lurchis Abenteuer (Lurchi’s Adventure). The main character, Lurchi, is a fire salamander, and he’s accompanied on his journeys by his pals, including a hedgehog, a mouse, a dwarf, a toad, and his best friend, a frog named Hopps. The books were written in German, which I was still learning, so there is much I did not understand, but the comic-style illustrations illuminated a weltanschauung (worldview and philosophy of life) that typified for me the kinder (child’s) world, which for me was set in the rivers of the Rhein Valley where I lived, the gigantic Alps to the south and the mysterious Black Forest to the east. I remember adults speaking to my friends and me with enthusiasm and belief about the aliveness and intelligence of owls, moles, bears, eagles, and even the trees, althoughI don’t believe I needed much convincing.
I also deeply remember a visit to a popular nature park near our home. I don’t recall if a fervor of anticipation had been created for me before going (I don’t know if I knew we were going anywhere at all), but I can still feel within my body the excitement as we entered into the domain of the preserve; the tall forest-covered hills that folded up toward the uniquely German light blue sky (perhaps you too have noticed that the angle and tilt of the Earth joined with the palette of local landscapes and the composition of location–particular atmospheres create a characteristic and unique blue marker to the sky. This region of Germany is particularly delicate and light).
In general, I was quite shy when I was young, and lived very much within the shelter of my body, attuned to its somatic feedback. I had a shiver of excitement, hoping to see Lurchi’s wild world with my own eyes, expectantly, as it seemed to stretch out before me toward that sky. But, instead we stood in line waiting to pay the entrance fee, and then walked through a gated fence. I remember a couple of brown bears from the Great Bear clan of bears. Excited at first, I quickly realized they were inside a second interior fence, called Bear Canyon. I felt sad inside my shelter, and wondered how they felt in theirs. There were also majestic red deer that have a mythical way of walking that would press their snouts through the square frame of their fences expecting to be fed apples, the more common fallow deer that gathered in small herds, and the curved-horned mouflons that rested on stylized mountain-scapes meant to mimic their native environment.
I want to acknowledge there were some rides which delighted my young mind and which I remember traversing with my dad including some Alpine downhill cart tracks that I can’t imagine exist any longer because of the thrill and danger they provided. But it was the approach to one particular region of the park that has left an indelible mark upon my imagination. At some point in crossing the threshold into this area, I noticed a sign that said wild boar and heard that they were quite dangerous. Later in my life, living again in Turkey, I knew some adults who would go wild boar hunting and heard stories of hunters who misfired and were seriously injured by boar attacks. But these wild boar, from the Old World clan, were, like all the other animals, fenced in. And we could buy food to feed them from a canister, like a gumball machine, for a few deutsche marks (the currency at that time). Mothers are called sows, and what I saw within their eyes was an incredible softness of spirit around which gathered several striped, still-nursing, and incredibly cute boars, which are called squeakers through their first year (or until they stop squeaking, which they did as they chased their mother around). I remember the softness of my mother’s hand as she handed me some pellets to feed into the pen and the kindness in her eyes as well.
The wild boar is quite small compared to the brown bear and the red deer, but is advertised as one of the largest animals that still lives wild in central Europe. But that was just it, the sense of wild and of adventure that I was expecting from my early childhood translations of Lurchi’s adventures didn’t appear reflected in the reality of the entry fees, lines, feeding machines, and fences. I felt a lot of love for my mother, and her fighting spirit, for the comfort and calm of my father, and the spirit of all the animals I saw. But I also felt a compression in the atmosphere, where I had expected expansion; deflation, where I had expected elevation.
In “If Only I had Petals, My Situation Would be Different: The Curious Case of Nature Reserves and Shelters for Battered Women,” Edna Gorney describes how patriarchal (and by extension anthropocentric) cultural processes produce the construction of “Others” considered by “Western patriarchy as being wild and dangerous, and yet, also weak and helpless, and therefore in need of taming and protecting” (Vakoch and Mickey 77).
These “others” according to Gorney, and many ecofeminist writers, include nature and native, in the first case, but extend to include, not exclusively, indigenous, black, Latinx, Asian, LGBTQ, an array of religious identities, and women. Summarily, these “others” are considered closer to nature, whereas through the eyes of the oppressors, “men are perceived as closer to culture” (Vakoch and Mickey 78).
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The cultural tradition of anthropologists and even Western science has had to work hard through often contested dialogue (and protest) to transform the positionality of their disciplines to initiate the transition out of these oppressive-by-privilege worldviews. In some ways, we can document this as the transition from the Newtonian world into the quantum field, or as Jean Gebser would describe, from the archaic, mythical and subsequent mental [or modern] world into the integrative, holistic and honoring.
It is, specifically, Gorney’s language around “the wild and dangerous that needs to be both tamed and protected” that has struck my consciousness with such clarity. The field of ecofeminism is often defined by the publication of Karen Warren’s synthesizing analysis in 2000, entitled Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. She identifies the “domination” of groups including “women, people of color, children… the poor and… nature” as “Others” which is “intended to highlight the status of those subordinate groups in unjustifiable relationships and systems of domination and subordination” (1). And she asks why “‘nature is a feminist issue?’” to which she replies that:
According to ecofeminists, trees, water, food production, animals, toxins, and, more generally, naturism (i.e, the unjustified domination of nonhuman nature) are feminist issues because understanding them helps one understand the interconnections among the dominations of women and other subordinated groups of humans (“other human Others”), on the one hand, and the domination of nonhuman nature, on the other hand. I call these interconnections women-other human Others-nature interconnections. (1–2)
When we consider this framework of systemic oppression with Gorney’s way of naming of the justification (of unjustifiable) oppression in terms of “needing to tame and protect what is both wild and weak,” we might invoke the rhetoric of tension in Portland between unmarked and militarized police forces dressed in black standing opposite the “Wall of Moms” dressed in white or yellow as a line of protection for groups of “Others” protesting systemic oppression and systemic violence under the call that Black Lives Matter. Or we might invoke the black armored all terrain vehicles and attack dogs encircling the rolling hills of North Dakota in which Lakota youth from the Standing Rock Reservation organized with “Others” in opposition to the lining and fencing of pipelines across wild and open plains.
Marion Hourdequin notes the common refrain that the field of ecofeminism is incredibly diverse and representative of many different voices and often differing opinions, but that ecofeminists have more or less universally criticized the fact that “too little attention [is paid] to the way in which oppressive and exploitative social relations are tied to an oppressive and exploitative relationship to nature” (89). Hourdequin adds that:
The fundamental shared conviction of ecofeminists is that in order to establish a positive, nondominating relationship with nature, we need to address the problematic patterns of domination that exist within society. The many forms of oppression and domination common to contemporary societies — sexism, racism, classicism, and so on — are all intimately linked. (89)
The small felt and compressed realization of my childhood excursion, accordingly, is strung in knots throughout the world in visible headline news and vast hidden ways we too often ignore or have not developed the capacity to see with our eyes or our hearts.
Jungian psychotherapist Clarissa Pinkola Estés is noted for her attempt to reclaim and validate the intrinsic freedom and strength of the oppressed Earth and oppressed peoples in her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves. She writes that:
Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species.
Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others… (10)
Of course, we now know that this feminine instinctive nature is an “othered” identity that is interconnected to others including indigenous, native, black, Latinx, LGBTQ, various religious communities, the poor, etc., each of which is not mutually exclusive, meaning that the bonds of interconnectedness are also mutually supportive. Clarissa Pinkola Estés goes on to share some of her personal intersectionalities:
The wild nature passed through my spirit twice, once by my birth to a passionate Mexican-Spanish bloodline, and later, through adoption by a family of fiery Hungarians. I was raised up near the Michigan state line, surrounded by woodlands, orchards, and farmland and near the Great Lakes. There, thunder and lightning were my main nutrition. Cornfields creaked and spoke aloud at night. Far up in the north, wolves came to the 11 clearings in moonlight, prancing and praying. We could all drink from the same streams without fear. (10–11)
To drink from the same streams, from the same Earth; to bask in the same sun and breathe in the same unbroken atmosphere invites us to recognize our shared liberation, our shared unfettering of knots, and powerfully inclusive of, as Paulo Freire points out, both oppressed and oppressor alike. We may also look carefully to the corporate-funded Ethiopian dam being built in “Mother” Nile at this time, and recognize the challenges of such a project as voiced by delegations from Egypt and Sudan (which are both immediately affected), but also the unheard voices of the wild animals, the migration patterns, the natural flooding cycles, the children that have played on its banks, and the many not fully known “others” whose experiences are not calculated in the corporate projections of cost-benefit analysis.
We might also consider the upcoming fire season in California and the current man-made causes of the “threat” in contrast to the natural tendencies of the region to support itself. Gorney notes the paradoxical perplexion of park authorities upon the establishment of Yosemite National park when “naturally” open grassy landscapes became “‘invaded’ by bushes and trees” not recognizing that the evicted Native Miwoks Indians had participated in practices that supported edible plants with regular fires.
Gorney similarly points out how British authorities had evicted local people from newly established preserves in Africa “in the name of the ideal of ‘pure nature,’ as well as preserving hunting grounds for the colonial elite’” (84). We’ve seen the challenges of those practices in terms of the sixth mass extinction (Kolbert), and the devastating and continuing loss of lions, rhinos, elephants, etc…
Ironically, Lurchi’s adventures, from the books I loved as a kid, featured recurring pairs of shoes that his pals always seemed to be looking for or to be graciously providing to other animals. In my inability to fully read the text, I missed at the time that these books were written as marketing material targeted at children for the German Salamander leather shoe company. I still feel grateful for the many blessings, stories and childlike “senses of wonder” (Carson 54) which created a foundation of support throughout my life, but I can also now look more carefully (and critically) at the dynamics of ethical oppression and the opportunities for transformation and leadership in each “wild” spirit, human and otherwise.
Questions
- As human beings, all of us have had our own experience of feeling a sense of compression, a sense of tightening, closing and dis-ease, in a time, or place in which we expected to feel expansion, ease, freedom, or welcome. How might we create a world more characterized by ease of community, and by a spirit of welcoming, honoring and shared belonging?
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks about her experience of being raised near the Michigan state line, near woodlands, orchards, farms, and lakes. She says, “There, thunder and lightning were my main nutrition.” What of the natural world has nourished you in your life?
- To move the world “into the integrative, holistic and honoring,” we need new stories and metaphors that help us to perceive and experience the communion and the inherent dignity of all things. What for you represents the feeling you get when you imagine a human community respectful of each individual, and also of the Earth?
Works Cited
Carson, Rachel, The Sense of Wonder (originally published 1965). New York: Harper Collins, 1998.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves. Ballantine Books, 1996.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Ohio University Press, 1986.
Hourdequin, Marion. Environmental Ethics. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: an unnatural history. Henry Holt and Company, 2014.
Vakoch, Douglas and Sam Mickey, editors. Ecofeminism in Dialogue. Lexington Books, 2018.
Warren, Karen. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
