The biosphere creates the atmosphere and the atmosphere creates the biosphere. When we think about how to end the climate crisis, we rarely consider wildness as being integral. Swamps, beetles, elephants, penny bun fungi termite mounds, sand hill cranes and coral reefs fall under the rubric of biodiversity. In this way, we separate our personal well- being from the well-being of the living world in all its mystery and vastness. But we are not separate.

We damage our internal wildness when we take antibiotics, eat processed foods or over sterilize our living environment. We destroy our external wildness when we plough wetlands, set bait traps for wildlife, glyphosate our soil, overfish, acidify oceans, set fire to forests.

What is wild?

EXCERPT FROM 1491 BY CHARLES C. MANN

The Beni is a case in point: a Bolivian province about the size of the United Kingdom, but totally flat. Dappled across the grasslands is an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rises 3 or 10 or 20 meters above the floodplain, allowing trees (like cacao!) to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests are linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. Based on archaeological evidence, a number of recognized scientists believe that this entire landscape – 80,000 square kilometres of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways – was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago.