Fire Monkeys

Next time you’re in a social setting, pay attention to how much of the conversation is about being someplace else. 

For the global bourgeoisie, staying put has become synonymous with being stuck. It’s easy to forget how new this kind of mobility is. As a facet of modern life, the assumption in our industrialized world is that we have the ability—and perhaps the right—to move. And move we do! Vast gyrations of industrial energy have been marshaled toward the unrestricted mobility of goods and people.

Many of us now live with an assumed reality that any product we desire can be in our possession in two days or less—and, likewise, that we ourselves can stand anywhere on our planet following a convenient jet ride. This newfound unconstrained mobility—and the dislocation and deformation that has accompanied its rapid emergence—means there are fewer humans living as natives than at any other time. This idea concerns me, since I believe nativeness is a precondition for precisely the sort of care our planet needs.

We encounter at least three ways of using the word native in common discourse that confuse my thesis.

The first is the use of native simply to describe a person’s origin or a place of familiarity, as in, my friend is a native of Long Island, or this interface is intuitive for digital natives. To have been born and raised somewhere is worthy of inclusion in any biography, but it does not mean one is a native in the way I intend.

The second is the use of native to describe a thing that belongs to a place, as in native species of flora and fauna. This is used to distinguish a given species from those that may be introduced or invasive. As a matter of taste and reproductive capacity, this thinking has its merit and points us toward some deeper truth. But across any significant span of time, it comes up short.

I assume, for instance, there was a point when our planet had a single landmass—we might call it Pangea—and that our various continents and archipelagos and whatnot are the product of plate tectonics. I furthermore assume that our human ancestors enjoyed a very different sort of mobility from us. They moved, but it was a generational migration following fresh water, improving climate, and delicious animals, while fleeing war, famine, and sundry plagues. It was an incremental movement from scarcity toward abundance, and it was happening everywhere all the time. 

These two assumptions mean that to use “native” as a synonym for “appropriate” necessitates a bracketing of time. A great many species described as native today arrived here by floating down rivers and dropping out of birds’ bottoms or riding in the satchels of humans walking across land bridges and ice floes.

A third and final way I do not mean to use the word native is as a shorthand for a category of human ethnicities or nationalities. When we describe people as natives, we simultaneously homogenize diverse populations and flatten their true origins. Indigenous, I suspect, is a better term for the state of global human migration around the time of European exploration and colonization. My own ancestors were indigenous to the coastal regions around a small sea between Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland. Whether or not they qualify as natives is a matter of great interest to me.

Slightly north of my ancestral home in Yorkshire, a fellow was born in 1728 to a Scottish farm worker and his wife, the wonderfully named Grace Pace. James was the second of eight children. Early in life, his family moved to town and the boy had an opportunity to attend school for a few years. He was particularly gifted at math, astronomy, and charts, but by the time he turned sixteen, he was apprenticed to the grocer in a small fishing village. Gazing out the window between crates of turnips, young James felt the oft-romanticized pull of the sea.

Joining up with some Quaker coal traders, he was soon sailing up and down the English coast aboard the brig Freelove. From that point on, he spent far more time on a ship’s deck than on dry land. And by the time of the American Revolution, James Cook had become something of a legend in his own time.

Most modern people, unburdened by a locus, wrongly assume that a state of wilderness is something like the pinnacle of nature. Nature’s natural state. But an honest ecologist will tell you that wilderness is actually stasis—a place of balance by way of minimal productivity. Wilderness is land’s version of life support, but it is a long way from flourishing. To approach true flourishing, you need humans.

And if we weren’t all so busy thinking about being someplace else, we might eventually stumble upon an interesting question: Why do we accept the idea that human beings are fundamentally parasitic? 

Such a claim forecloses the possibility that we might situate our lives within syntropic systems that leave our various homeplaces far better than we found them. The industrial vision of perpetually metastasizing megacities slowly consuming marginal wilderness is a false choice. Maybe we should burn it down.

I suspect a more accurate name for our species than Homo sapiens (wise human) would be Homo ignis (fire human). Compared with our cousins the chimpanzees and bonobos, our ability to make, tend, and use fire is our most consequential and distinguishing ecological faculty. If you believe, as I do, that humans exist to turn wilderness into gardens, fire has always been our greatest tool. Controlled burns bring unruly lands under management: fortifying soil and radically accelerating seeding and propagation of plant life. 

The natural necessity of harvesting woody stuff to cook our food, ward off predators, and warm our children radically accelerates growth rates and expands yields of edible plants. Our centuries-long experiments melting minerals is what delineates the Stone Age from the Bronze and Iron Ages. Even our diverse food traditions are radically shaped by the availability of fuel for cooking. Ours is an anthropology of fire. We are, in a very real sense, fire monkeys.

I was taught, as perhaps you were, that many of the First Nations of North America were nomadic hunters—particularly once horses arrived with the Spaniards—who followed herds of bison all over the vast prairies. A growing number of archaeologists now think it may have been the other way around. It’s possible that the bison were actually following the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Lakota across the grasslands in a Paleolithic version of what progressive farmers now call intensively managed rotational grazing. 

Through the practical activities of burning, foraging, and barrier-building, millions of large herbivores—providing dwellings, clothing, medicine, nutrition, and fuel—might have been choreographed via verdant perennial forage and water access. This makes the most humongous ranches in Australia or Texas look downright amateurish. 

Perhaps a fuller understanding of the trials and triumphs of Homo ignis over the millennia could provide new insights for becoming native. After all, it is our unique capacity for taming flame—from campfires to coal-fired forges; internal combustion to nuclear reactors—that makes all of this civilizational stuff possible. The way we wield this capacity through various agricultural and industrial revolutions over time has meant the difference between extractive destruction and sustainable participation.

At the far edge of the South Pacific, a lush island paradise had been spotted in 1642 by a Dutch navigator seeking trade routes for the East India Company. Abel Tasman (the namesake of Tasmania, incidentally) and his crew landed on the South Island of what is now called New Zealand (after the Dutch province). It had not gone especially well. The Māori people killed four of Tasman’s men in a violent confrontation.

More than a century later, Europeans caught sight of New Zealand for the second time on October 6, 1769. Their leader, Captain Cook, was my age and already quite famous around the British Empire. Two days later, his crew landed at Poverty Bay and made contact with the Māori. We know quite a bit about their adventures because Cook drew maps and made notes about everything he found. Several indigenous people were killed in skirmishes with Cook’s men during this encounter, but entries in the captain’s journals depict a sophisticated and highly integrated civilization.

For their part, the Māori correctly acknowledge neither the Dutchman nor the Englishman as the rightful discoverer of New Zealand—or Aotearoa in their language. Instead, they tell the tale of Kupe, a chieftain and fisherman from Hawaiki who was being harassed by a rival chief called Muturangi. Muturangi had trained his pet, an enormous octopus, to eat the bait of all of Kupe’s hooks. When diplomatic overtures failed, Kupe swore to slay the eight-legged monster. He set out from his island home in a small craft and chased the giant octopus all over the Pacific Ocean. Seeking fresh water and supplies, he landed on an uninhabited island, discovering New Zealand in the process. 

Not only was Kupe the first fire monkey to set foot on this land, he found his elusive aquatic adversary at the same time. An epic battle ensued at the mouth of Te Moana-o-Raukawa (now known as Cook Strait) and the mighty Kupe triumphed over his octo-nemesis. By boldly discovering soil, water, and protected territory for hunting, fishing, and foraging, Kupe is an archetypical founder within traditional mythology. He explored both islands before returning home. The first scout families arrived sometime between 1230 and 1280 and a great fleet of Polynesians arrived around 1300.

Remarkably, this means that at the time of Tasman’s voyage, there had been a significant human population in New Zealand for less than 350 years. What knowledge did the Polynesians bring with them when they sailed across the sea that caused them to be characterized as native? How did these elaborate gardens appear to Europeans looking to establish trade routes, extend empire, extract resources, and ensnare slaves? More urgently, do we now—in this age of unrestricted mobility—have any ability to imagine this scale of nativeness? Can a society still become so thoroughly integrated within its context that it is unrecognizable to those conditioned to believe civilization is an imposition on nature?

Empires never recognize wholeness and mistakenly call it wild.

The actualized fire monkey participates in its habitat in ways that continually add fertility and diversity. Hybrid vigor is the norm. They introduce new species of plants and animals. They domesticate and cultivate. As they walk down a trail, they place their steps to land on obnoxious plants and gently prune the snacks and medicine. They become native, in other words, by declining to bracket time in some arbitrary academic way but by exerting the minimal effort required to participate in producing a life for themselves.

As Europeans made hotter and hotter fires, smelted ores mined in my ancestral home, and built bigger and bigger ships with which to circumnavigate the globe in search of spices and gold, they encountered places inhabited for centuries by indigenous peoples. Invariably, their diaries recount complex social structures that center pregnant women, elders, and young children. They observed high levels of physical fitness (with the notable exception of a complete lack of immunity to continental diseases) and astonishingly dense biodiversity.

They describe walking across polyculture prairies with grasses swaying high overhead and easily maneuvering through “park like” forests. They found well-designed springs, streams, and pools and were astonished at the “naturally occurring” ports of harbor. By the 18th century, these colonial scouts had a strong incentive to apply a sort of anti-Locke lens to their various discoveries. After all, if it were actually natives who were responsible for the abundance in these places, they had some right to claim them by the emerging idea of natural law. Far better for the recent arrivals to assume that God himself made these gardens, and the lucky savages had simply found them first.

But deep in their heart, every fire monkey knows better. The untended landscape becomes wilderness and the overused landscape becomes wasteland. The American prophet Wendell Berry writes with no small hint of despair: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

We know this. We’ve always known this. 

Are natives those of us who accept our given limits and define the good life within them? Do we imagine the incremental expansion of flourishing for our children but only that which our homeplaces can naturally sustain? If so, what opportunities does this present to interrogate the settled sciences of conservation and development? What would it look like to become natives of the place we find ourselves today?

It haunts me that my own ancestors did not grow into natives as I so wish they had. From what we can tell, they had all made the voyage from the shores of the Celtic Sea to the fledgling Virginia Colony in what they called the New World before 1650. I am descended from the high and rocky places where Merlin built a round table for Arthur and dragons hid treasure in caves along the cliffs. If you know any history of the United Kingdom, the Norsemen and the English are the Muturangi to my ancestors’ Kupe.

First, the raiders came for women and to fish our waters. Later, they came for mineral rights and to conscript boys to fight for the empire. Whatever nativeness existed in the primeval mists of the first millennium BC—lost to the druids’ strict forbiddance of written language and a dark ages version of erasure—had been severely degraded by the time desperate farmers boarded colony-bound ships six centuries later.

Consider John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas and the first successful English farmer in the Americas. Evidently unconcerned with protecting native species, Rolfe carried the seeds of a very popular—and very illegal—strain of tobacco from Spanish-controlled Trinidad in his vest pocket. He quickly adapted the hearty plant to the conditions around the Jamestown settlement and unleashed the economic engine that would power Virginia for hundreds of years. In fact, I grew up fifty miles west of Jamestown not far from Mr. Big Tobacco himself: Philip Morris.

Once in the colony, my paternal forebears made their way down the Atlantic coast—ranging small herds of creole cattle as far south as Florida and almost certainly displacing far better indigenous ranchers and megafauna as they went. For their part, my mother’s side headed west into the Appalachian highlands to do the same thing they’d done in Wales and Ireland: try to scratch food from the rocks.

A series of increasingly industrial wars, from the guerrilla militias of the revolution to a proxy war between great powers—brought our nation and my still-here family to a place where we had become far worse than any Muturangi of Māori lore. We didn’t simply destroy the fishing grounds of the Chesapeake Bay (which had been literally teeming with fish under native management) but the soil and air as well. As much as four feet of topsoil eroded from the Shenandoah Valley because of greedy and ignorant plowing for grain crops. And by the 1970s, we were all too happy to applaud U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl “Rusty” Butz when he pronounced the five dumbest words in agricultural history: “Get big or get out.”

We believed the same science that had defeated the fascists and communists could override natural limits and end hunger by transforming the world into a global supermarket. Mission accomplished, but we are only now beginning to count the costs.

Now my family lives and farms another fifty miles west of Big Tobacco and the deepwater port at Richmond, deep in Monacan territory. These Siouxan clans laid claim to the territory we seek to steward for over a thousand years in a model that likely resembled the agrarian arrangements found in the horn of Africa, the Scottish highlands, and among the twelve tribes of Israel. They lived so lightly on the land and so successfully avoided Europeans that we actually know very little about them. The Monacan Nation had a few cities and many small, distributed seasonal settlements. They raised trout and other fish and also hunted deer and small game within clan territories. Monacans grew and stored annual crops and foraged extensively. It’s possible bison and elk were used in maintaining mature food forests.

When landholders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison gushed about the Edenic paradise they inherited in the foothills of the Southwest Mountains—characterized by deep loamy soils and abundant springs—they were effectively praising a thousand years of Monacan land management.

The Greek origin of the word ecological means something like “making sense of the house.” 

This has resonance with what I think native really means. It is a word that describes one who lives ecologically—learning and adapting traditional knowledge about a place to its collective flourishing. A native species is simply one that has done so for long enough that its ways have become integrated into the land itself. This is, in many respects, the agrarian ideal.

Could it be that the 21st century represents peak mobility? Two-day shipping becomes, what, same-hour delivery? Everything is pizza. It is difficult to imagine the frenzy of connection and dislocation growing beyond where it is now. The small epiphany for me was realizing my family has been in Virginia for longer than the Māori were in New Zealand when Europeans first found them there. That means if staying put for a long time were the only requirement for nativeness, we’d be eligible. I’m embarrassed to acknowledge just how far short we fall.

A charitable naturalist might record my family in their field journal as an introduced species, with a rate of adaptation still out of sync with our context and still possessing needs that create untenable stresses to fulfill. And that’s after four centuries of residence. A more honest view, I’m afraid, would judge us as invasive: in competition with the other life around us, dominating and subjugating systems we don’t understand; committed to the ridiculous project of a fixed climate, year-round global cuisine, and unfettered access to, well, everything.

For my part, I simply wish to be a good little fire monkey happily turning wilderness into gardens. Snapping off low branches to light my evening fire as I tread the path back from the stream with a few fish I’ve been raising for supper. I wish to speak the secret language of mushrooms and honeybees and to know individual birds by their song.

I no longer wish to settle for being invasive or even introduced. My wildest dream is to become native at last.