Oh, The Humanity: THE NEW WILDERNESS Lays Bare How We Fail Each Other
I often remember the place I was when I read a given book more than the characters within it or the exact machinations of its plot.
I can recall with near-perfect clarity re[ading Naomi Alderman’s The Power laying on a cold stone bench in a quiet park behind an art museum in Concepción, Chile. Turning the pages of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara sat in one of the scratchy, too-firm seats of the company bus with my head leaning against the cool glass as we crawled along I-95. Curled up with Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce on the dusty off-white couch in the sun porch of the first home I can remember.
My sensory memories from reading during the COVID-19 pandemic feel a bit muted in comparison. I think I was pacing across the basement—but I could’ve been tucked up on the couch or in bed—when I finished Rumaan Alam’s Leave The World Behind, which was slightly terrifying to read during a pandemic that the NYT was soon to report is causing teeth to fall out in ways similar to the mysterious global crisis at the heart of that book. Now, with my life having become a serious of slow, quiet days spent inside four walls, slow, quiet time spent within the even-smaller confines of a book is not quite as distinctively memorable. But it’s never been more important.
In Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, a group of nomads traveling and camping through the last bit of unruined nature as part of an experiment looking at whether humans can coexist with the natural world without destroying it, carry very few things with them: the Cast Iron they cook in, the Manual of rules and regulations enforced by the Rangers who control their movement, and the Book Bag.
When the nomads absorb a group of Newcomers, one asks, “Why do you carry all these books? Haven’t you read them by now?”
“Yes,” answers the man on whose stiff, bent-over back rests their last connections to the City they came from and the civilization they left there.
“Why keep them?” asks the interloper.
“So we can read them again,” responds another nomad.
The New Wilderness is structured around two narrators. At first, Bea tells the story. She’s an interior designer who left a stable life in the City in order to join the experiment to save the life of her daughter, whose lungs and life were in danger from the toxic air of the City, and who finds the Wilderness to be a hard, dangerous place full of selfish, stupid people but puts up with it for her daughter. Then we hear from her daughter Agnes, who’s spent her adolescence outside and barely remembers a life where she didn’t sleep on the ground under hides she’d helped tan herself.
Bea and Agnes are only in the experiment because of Bea’s partner and Agnes’s stepfather Glen, a scientist who volunteered his family in order to save them; while he had been a good researcher, he’s a subpar hunter, hiker, and politician out in the wild.
No one in the Wilderness Zone has a set job. The specializations and studies that occupied their days when they lived in tiny apartments in the City, near one of the ten trees left standing in the overcrowded, polluted metropolis, are largely useless in the wild, where their chief responsibility is to survive. Not all of them do: one gets swept away by rapids; another, mauled by a cougar. The ones who’ve made it three years into the experiment, when the novel picks up, are lucky.
They’ve escaped the City, where “schools were training grounds for jobs that needed filling” and where “rooftops didn’t have paths, flowers, gardens of vegetables” but rather “water-collection tanks, solar grids, cell towers, and barbed wire to guard it all”; where “no one was ever outside unless they were going from one building to another”; where preschool was in the basement of an apartment building and where melees broke out over a head of broccoli in the supermarket. And they’ve avoided the indentured servitude of the workers in the Greenhouses and the Meat™ factories and the Server Farms and the Flotilla and the Mines and the Manufacturing Zone, who live in “barracks or low-cost apartment complexes for their indebted lives” and do the few jobs that haven’t been automated.
Based on the tech landscape and allusions to politics, it seems like Cook has set The New Wilderness in the not-so-distant future. Just a few decades separate her readers from the characters she’s sent out into the last remaining natural space to see if humanity can start over, can create a version of civilization that doesn’t coalesce into hyper-capitalism and destroy the environment that sustains them.
As it turns out, they can’t.
It becomes abundantly clear that the experiment Bea and Agnes are a part of is a failure when Glen hurts his leg in a fall and is left to die.
He lays on the ground, blood pooling inside of his ear from a gash sustained during his fall, his leg “twisted at the hip” with “the knee almost pointing behind.”
His wife and stepdaughter go to check on him; he’d already been left behind by the man he’d set out with, Carl. When they arrive, “none of them mentio[n] trying to get him back to camp. There was nothing to be done. They all knew it.” Agnes slinks back into camp and mourns him there, remembering the deerskin and the extra rations he gave to her and lamenting not being able to do more for him. Bea, whose thoughts are hidden from us at this point, walks back into camp the next day, smeared with Glen’s blood.
The scene feels like the perfect dystopian anecdote to go along with a lecture purported to have been given by Margaret Mead in the 1980s, when the cultural anthropologists is said to have asked her audience, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” Per surgeon Paul Brand’s account, Mead shook her head at their initial answers: no, not a clay pot, nor iron, nor tools, nor agriculture. “To her,” writes Brand, “evidence of the earliest true civilization was a healed femur, a leg bone, which she held up before us in the lecture hall…The healed femur showed that someone must have cared for the injured person—hunted on his behalf, brought him food, and served him at personal sacrifice.”
Civilization has no one widely-accepted definition. National Geographic’s encyclopedia entry for the term recognizes a few factors commonly understood to apply: a group of people who have built permanent urban settlement and aren’t just nomadic; divisions of labor where not everyone has to work towards feeding themselves and can instead specialize in artistic, cultural, religious, and architectural pursuits; a surplus of food.
Bea and Agnes and Glen and their not-so-merry band of nomads would have had a hard time reaching civilization status, but it wasn’t impossible. At one point near the end of the novel, they manage to stop moving from meadow to prairie to mountain to meadow again and to instead build a more permanent camp, with a new smoking tent and dedicated chores. They enjoy their burgeoning industry until they’re displaced by Rangers who destroy their camp and send them off to be rounded up and disappeared.
The experiment, Cook alludes to as she ends the book, was never an experiment at all. No one went into it with open minds about the future relationship between humans and nature. Humanity had already failed to prioritize the betterment of the whole over the interests of the few. Even the City, with all its development, had long regressed to not treating emergencies or protecting life: “[Agnes] thought of the way children were viewed in the City. There were simply too many people already. Making more wasn’t encouraged. No one became an ob-gyn anymore…No one specialized in new life. No one specializes in old life either, she reminded herself.”
Humans in the City and the Wilderness zone are caught in the same spiral: fighting over an ever-decreasing set of depleting resources for the chance to survive in a world that has ever-decreasing opportunities for joy, meaning, and community.
The New Wilderness shows that we, its readers, are in that same world.
How could we not be? Just look at our headlines: an essential worker has to take on two additional jobs during a pandemic because she doesn’t make a living wage; 54 million Americans are struggling with hunger this year and are shoplifting baby formula and pasta to survive as the billionaire owner of national grocery chain Whole Foods sees his net worth increase by nearly 80%; workers are expected to put in longer hours in more dangerous conditions without extra pay; $1 billion of taxpayer money earmarked to provide medical equipment to Americans was siphoned off and spent on body armor so that our military can continue in endless wars abroad and at home; politicians implore older Americans to sacrifice themselves in order to save the economy.
And perhaps most damning: 300,000 Americans have died from a virus that other countries have managed to contain through citizens who will make sacrifices for people they do not personally know and will not personally benefit from and governments that support them as they do so.
We may not be explicitly discouraging people from having kids or advocating to abandon hurt family members in the forest, but we are leaving people behind. They may not be broken-legged, but they are broken.
The New Wilderness asks what we lose when we look only for what we can gain, and offers an answer: everything.
We, Americans having barely survived 2020 and staring down a too-same 2021, are asking the same question and getting the same answer.