In a thick forest, it is the combination of both life and death that order the possibilities of passage and traversal for the living. One honors the fallen trees that serve as foot bridges over ravines and running and standing water, and which clear the path of various thickets and prickly plants that may get in one's way. One honors the dead leaves and decomposing plants which blanket the forest floor and suppress the dense foliage which makes travel more difficult.
And other living things affect the landscape as well. Elk and deer make excellent trail blazers themselves. They follow the rivers and climb uphill to safety, trampling down undergrowth and eating away the thickets of fern and other bushes, forming ready-made trails and clearings to travel more easily through. And the elk and deer are all too happy to utilize human-cleared pathways and human-engineered landscapes, such as by eating planted vegetation.
On the other hand, fallen trees can also block pathways and make certain terrain impassable if they are a large enough size. And living plants that may block certain passages may hold together soil on slopes and keep one from slipping. And then there is the very simple reality that it is life itself which keeps other living things consuming and moving. And further, life can easily present an obstacle in this way too. You won't get very far after surprising a bear on the trail for instance, or being stalked by a hungry mountain lion.
Here one is surrounded by living things that carry on with a logic completely independent of one's care or control. Where there is a vitality and flourishing of life, there is a dense field of suffocating claims to being, constantly being contested in some regions, and then remaining stable and nurturing in others.
Will scents and sudden loud sounds change the eating and movement patterns of elk in the area, for instance? What of the plants that I've just trampled down, or the scurrying insects as I scrape the earth scrambling up a steep hill? Nature is plenty resilient of course, but such an environment does evoke new sets of considerations.
It is the contestations, and these sets of considerations, which are completely swept aside in the industrial built environment, and it is meant to be this way. The strong and durable materials which are used to build all manner of infrastructure and habitation, and to establish security and constancy in this environment are intended to shape and mold the forces of nature and hold them in place where desired, and neutralize their threatening aspects, and insulate against their many effects, and so on.
As an extreme example, the gated community or even the average suburb can appear as a stable and quiet oasis of peace at its endpoint, its finished point of development, but which masks the massive interconnected processes of rending and crushing - not only on material levels, but also social, economic, political, spiritual, etc. - that were required to produce it. And so a phenomenal distance opens up between the experience of this fabricated peace and the turbulence that was required to produce and maintain it.
For someone like me, upon becoming lost in the wilderness, this distance can appear in a clap of thunder. Lost and bewildered in a field teeming with life and opportunity, and faced with the prospect of not getting out of it, the sight of a road can bring forth overwhelming feelings of joy and relief. It is a testament to the sheer advancement of this civilizing process that one looks upon this plane of relative destruction - of the clearing of trees and understory, the mining of rock and the production of asphalt, and the pulverizing of the earth's surface - and sees some sort of savior.
