Paradise Wild by David Oates

Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature by David Oates. Oregon State University Press, February 2003. (Order from Amazon.com or direct from the publisher at http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press).

Wildness Is Your Birthright

Please explore around this website. You'll find some poetry, some pictures...descriptions of my teaching and speaking and other books...current projects in re-creating our urban and natural places...

If you like what you see, (or feel the need to set me straight...), or would like to buy a book, or arrange a speaking engagement... don't hesitate to send me an email. Thanks for giving me this opportunity to connect with you.

My mission is responsibility and lovingkindness toward ourselves and the natural world. At the same time. Despite our habit of seeing "nature" and "people" as having opposite interests, we are equally wild--and equally tame. This human/natural world is a co-evolved reality which we share. The "wilderness" over the next ridge may be getting logged--or getting saved--but wildness is a quality you cannot lose. Wildness is your birthright, like God's love or the act of breathing: A wholly different kind of Paradise.

Because I'd like to challenge the way we misapply the "myth of Eden" to the natural world, especially here in North America.. You know the story: how the pristine, untouched, virgin Eden got ruined when Europeans showed up: and now it's all been lost. Eden-grief and nostalgia become the primary feelings we attach to nature.

Except that this Paradise-continent was already rather heavily "touched" when Columbus got here, and had been for thousands of years. The "virgin land" idea is a weird imposition on a complex, heavily managed human and natural landscape. Nature and human intermixed, layered, strata upon strata.

Once we recognize that Eden is not "lost"--that we are not trapped on the wrong side of Paradise--that nature is not "ended"--then we can get to work fixing our mistakes. Doing a better job of living as part of the wild, amazing natural world.

In Paradise Wild, I have drawn from my own life, and tried to reflect on what nature means to me--to other nature writers and scholars--and to American culture as a whole. So it's partly a personal story, a funny/sad tale of how I took myself into the mountains for refuge, a gay boy raised in a Fundamentalist household, trying to establish myself in the macho world of mountaineering.

The ways we use nature to define gender; the ways we misunderstand each other and the natural world; the ways we keep reading into "nature" exactly what our culture projects there... these are the subjects I explore. I find that others were there before me, adding to the layering: my long-lost great-great Uncle William Bartram; John Muir; Edward Abbey; Terry Tempest Williams--their works are as much of what we mean by "nature" as are the mountains and plains themselves.

Somehow, all of it layers together, and makes a rich palimpsest, a trail, a wild patterning we never get to the bottom of.

Read the opening chapter, "The Practice of the Presence of the Wild."

Read other excerpts from Paradise Wild.