In what follows, though, I want to explore the possibility of developing a wildness that is less literal, but perhaps nonetheless real and important: a reconnection with what I will describe as ‘wild mind’, which is necessarily at the same time a reconnection with the world and with the other beings that inhabit it – and this will involve living, as well as thinking and feeling, in very different ways. Wild mind refers to a state of awareness in which humans will not want or be prepared to damage the world for our own short-term comfort and convenience.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (p. 18). PCCS Books Ltd.

This all relates to a more modern sense of ‘wild’ that has not yet made it into the dictionary, a sense that will be crucial to what follows: wild as complex. For previous eras, ‘wild’ often signified something simple, elemental, refreshingly straightforward compared with the subtleties of civilisation. To our contemporary sensibility, now that wilderness is profoundly scarce, ‘wild’ is more likely to signify the irreplaceable richness and depth of the climax forest, threatened by the crude slash of the bulldozers and the geometric grid of cities. A garden can be visually more ordered and complex than wild land, but wild land – as I will try to show in Chapters 2 and 3 – has far greater depth of organisation and complex order than a garden.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (pp. 33-34). PCCS Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

At the same time, the two categories are different in kind: domestication is a continual process of simplification (simple is safe), whereas wildness is a continual tendency towards complexity. As I have indicated, domestication shortens every food chain, always inserting human beings and their food animals and excluding as many other species – wild ‘pests’, ‘vermin’ and ‘weeds’ – as possible.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (pp. 36-37). PCCS Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Wildness is understood, not as a cure but as a much-needed corrective to the rigidities of our one-sided civilised and mature selves.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (p. 2). PCCS Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Won't you take me
As I'm meant to be
Wild, wild
Don't mistake me
For the wind when she
Howls, howls
(Away, away)

'Cause I never learned to behave
And knowing that, will you stay?

Wild Mind

I believe that psychotherapy and counselling, which I will generally refer to together as simply ‘therapy’, have a potentially important role to play in promoting and facilitating wild mind, or ecological consciousness, and this is what the book is about.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (p. 18). PCCS Books Ltd.

…wild mind can never be eliminated so long as life survives, though it can be impoverished, marginalised, reduced to a patch of scrub on a corner of waste ground, to dreams, involuntary movements and slips of the tongue. Given the slightest opportunity, wilderness always renews itself: seeds sprout in the rubble, in a few years trees will grow up through abandoned stretches of tarmac. Wilderness is, in a sense, the tendency to connect, to become more complex; it is innate in all living systems, including ourselves.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (p. 107). PCCS Books Ltd.

‘Wild therapy’ is a way of naming the intersection point of several trends in psychotherapy and counselling. Most crucially, it is a response to how human connectedness to the other-than-human and more-than-human, to all the beings with whom we share this universe, has been largely severed, with the result that we no longer take care of the world in which and through which we live, and which is increasingly damaged and destroyed. As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, ‘The world is not a machine we can use and then replace; it is our extended body. If we try to cut it away then we will die’ (Robinson, 1994, p.10).

Most therapy takes place in an imaginary world where none of this is happening: a world where politicians can boast that growth is their first priority; where flying to Australia is simply a splendid adventure, not (also) an insult to the earth’s atmosphere; where animals and plants and rivers and mountains exist not for themselves but to hold our projections and serve our material and psychological needs; where we can plan for and imagine a future in which consumption continues to grow indefinitely rather than reaching the limit point of the planet’s carrying capacity. This is very strange. How and why has therapy bought into the bubble of unreality in which most human activity now takes place?

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (pp. 14-15). PCCS Books Ltd.

To ‘rewild wildness’ is to turn it from dead language into living, which was a part of my original intention with this book. Hence, I have incorporated the word into the subtitle: ‘rewilding our inner and outer worlds’. Which raises the question: What might be the vanished keystone species, the beaver or wolf or bison, of psychotherapy? Once this question occurred to me, I hunted in all directions for plausible candidates, until I came back to the obvious: the vanished keystone is the therapist, who has been taught to remove herself from the picture, airbrush herself out like a disgraced revolutionary leader, and substitute a set of techniques for a living, breathing person.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (p. 25). PCCS Books Ltd.

A gift, a curse
They track and hurt
Say, can you dream
In nightmares seems?
A million voices, silent dreams
Where hope is left so incomplete

I'm running with the wolves tonight
I'm running with the wolves
I'm running with the wolves tonight

Wildness is Complexity

Every niche in that ecosystem must be occupied for the whole to function with full richness and complexity. The grazing range is a monoculture imposed by humans, who tend to shorten and simplify every food chain by eliminating competitors (De Landa, 2000, pp.108, 153; Simmons, 1979, pp.192–193); the complex, multiply connected ‘food web’ (Elton, 1927/2001) of a full ecology is transformed into a ‘food pyramid’ where every path leads to human mouths.

The main characteristic of an urban ecosystem is its homogeneity: human beings shorten all food chains in the web, eliminate most intermediaries and focus all biomass flows on themselves. Whenever an outside species tries to insert itself into one of these chains, to start the process of complexification again, it is ruthlessly expunged as a ‘weed’… [Humans and their domesticated species] transformed a heterogeneous meshwork of species (a temperate forest) into a homogeneous hierarchy, since all biomass now flowed towards a single point at the top. In a sense, a complex food web was replaced by a simplified food pyramid. (De Landa, 2000, p.108)

This is not what a ‘food pyramid’ technically means to ecologists, where the term refers to the decreasing number of individuals at each level of consumption, with large predators having the smallest populations. For humans, in fact, the opposite applies; in this sense we are operating a ‘food mushroom’, rather than a pyramid, using the stored solar energy of fossil fuel to reshape ecological relationships (Paul Maiteny, personal communication). But what is pyramidal about this situation is the decreasing number of species at each level – the simplified flow towards humanity at the apex. The more an environment tends to simplicity, the more it tends to end up, literally, as dust on the wind – as happened in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, or happens in the Amazon jungle when it is cleared for cattle, leaving a thin, unstable soil.

This all relates to a more modern sense of ‘wild’ that has not yet made it into the dictionary, a sense that will be crucial to what follows: wild as complex. For previous eras, ‘wild’ often signified something simple, elemental, refreshingly straightforward compared with the subtleties of civilisation. To our contemporary sensibility, now that wilderness is profoundly scarce, ‘wild’ is more likely to signify the irreplaceable richness and depth of the climax forest, threatened by the crude slash of the bulldozers and the geometric grid of cities. A garden can be visually more ordered and complex than wild land, but wild land – as I will try to show in Chapters 2 and 3 – has far greater depth of organisation and complex order than a garden.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (pp. 32-34). PCCS Books Ltd.

Instead, I want to argue that wildness and domestication are an example, like nature and culture, of a true vertical pair: the domesticated depends on and is rooted in the wild, whereas the same is not true in reverse (Wilden, 1987a, p.16; see Chapter 6, this volume). At the same time, the two categories are different in kind: domestication is a continual process of simplification (simple is safe), whereas wildness is a continual tendency towards complexity. As I have indicated, domestication shortens every food chain, always inserting human beings and their food animals and excluding as many other species – wild ‘pests’, ‘vermin’ and ‘weeds’ – as possible. Both domestication and wildness – the household and the forest – are essential aspects of human culture; but when domestication becomes dominant, as it is in our modern society, this puts the world out of balance. Many indigenous societies have been doing their best to warn us of the consequences of this imbalance – consequences that we now see all around us. I am arguing for redressing the balance by recognising the value and the fundamental character of wildness. Wildness is the First Nation of human culture; it is the ground of our being. Denying and suppressing it can only be disastrous.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (pp. 36-37). PCCS Books Ltd.

A shift from a global monoculture to ecosystems of human scale groups reduces the spurious complexity needed to support a monoculture, and it retains and even grows adaptive cultural complexity, i.e. the diversity that emerges when the human ecological footprint is aligned with bioregional ecosystem functions. Spurious complexity wastes energy – is the result of humans working against biological evolution, whereas adaptive complexity saves energy – it is the result of humans engaging in collaborative niche construction as a part of biological ecosystems.

Understanding power and de-powering | Autistic Collaboration

What's to come - when the siren calls you go, yeah
To run with the wolf
Run with the wolf

Like a beast in a field
He knows his fate is sealed
He runs with the wolf, oh oooh
Run with the wolf
See the break, you know it's late
Now he goes
To run, run, run
Run, run, run, run

Run with the wolf
Run with the wolf
Run with the wolf
Run with the wolf
Run, run, run

Rewilding

In a technical sense, rewilding covers a range of approaches to restoring, rather than conserving, whole complex ecosystems: at one end of the spectrum, simply getting out of the way and leaving the land (or water) to restore itself; towards the other end, reintroducing keystone species like beavers or, more ambitiously, lynx or wolves, creating corridors to link existing areas of relative wilderness, and allowing a complex process of enrichment to ripple out from there. (A ‘keystone species’ is one whose presence has a knock-on or ‘cascade’ effect in facilitating the return of other species (Jepson & Blythe, 2020, p.73)) I discuss rewilding further in Chapter 3.

Nick Totton. Wild Therapy (second edition): Rewilding our inner and outer worlds (pp. 24-25). PCCS Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Particularly in the post-modern, Western world, most people live lifestyles increasingly alienated from the natural world, to devastating effect. Our socio-economic systems are designed from a worldview of ecological disconnection, effecting all spheres of our lives – our lifestyles, resource use, buildings and urban design, transport, economic, education and health systems. Research shows that disconnection from nature is linked to mental and physical problems in individuals, and increased conflict, violence and crime in communities. On a societal level, an exploitative, objectifying relationship with nature fuels the ongoing destruction of the natural world upon which we depend for life.

Why rewilding? – Rewild Everything!

They tumble and fight
And they're beautiful
On the hilltops at night
They are beautiful
Blazing with light
Is the whitest and the tallest and the biggest one
She's muscled and fine
When she runs

Rewilding Ourselves

But, as key parts of the ecosystems we dominate, humans must be part of the rewilding. The concept of rewilding is usually used in an ecological sense – as a restoration of ecosystems and natural processes. But the concept interpreted in its broadest sense offers a holistic framework for regenerating not only healthy ecosystems, but also healthy human society and ourselves. A rewilding of the self, of the heart and soul, is a re-enchantment with the natural world, a re-awakening of our senses and intuition, a dissolving of the false boundaries between our atomised selves and our Earthly home. It is a restoration of meaningful connections with nature, our selves and each other.

The emerging field of ecopsychology is discovering that it is not only our relationships with our family and society that fundamentally effect our well-being and inform patterns of behaviour, but also our relationship with nature. Crucially, our relationships with nature, ourselves and each other all shape each other – so as long as we continue having an exploitative, objectifying relationship with the natural world, we will not be able to eradicate exploitation in our societies and vice versa. As long as white people dominate people of colour, men dominate women, the straight and cis-gendered dominate the queer and humans dominate nature, domination will poison all of our relationships and lead us ultimately to our ruin. To begin to heal the broken relationship with the natural world and each other we must reclaim and regenerate meaningful, healthy connections.

Why rewilding? – Rewild Everything!

Rewilding Society

A rewilding of society is a restoration of healthy cultures and social structures that honour our connection to the natural world. Our socio-economic systems are designed from a worldview of ecological disconnection. This affects our whole human world – our daily lifestyles, resource use, buildings and urban design, transport, economic, education and health systems. Imagine what buildings, hospitals, cities and schools would look like if they included nature rather than marginalised it, embraced nature’s intelligence and worked with it rather than against it?

Why rewilding? – Rewild Everything!

Wolf moon, thank you for rising
Big sky I'm grateful for your parting clouds
I know some hearts were broken
Big crows still fly in your sky

Herds of elk roam upon your meadows
And your eagle soars across my eyes
While you withstand the thoughtless plundering

Wolf moon, keep on shining
Your days rolling by and timeless grace
Your heart just keeps on beating
Inside the beauty, of this place

Less fish swimming in your ocean
Old ice floating in your sea
Still you hold against the constant plundering
Wolf moon

Wolf moon, thank you for rising
Big sky I'm grateful for your parting clouds

Seeds of life, your golden fields of wings
Windy fields of barley, at your feet
While you endure the thoughtless plundering

When I run through the deep dark forest long after this begun
Where the sun would set, the trees were dead and the rivers were none
And I hope for a trace to lead me back home from this place
But there was no sound, there was only me and my disgrace

Wolf mother, where you been?
You look so worn, so thin
You're a taker, devil's maker
Let me hear you sing, hey-ya, hey-ya
Wolf father, at the door
You don't smile anymore
You're a drifter, a shapeshifter
Let me see you run, hey-ya, hey-ya

Wayward winds, the voice that sings
Of a forgotten land
See it fall, child of woe, oh
Lend a mending hand

Further Reading