tracking wilderness: the architecture of inscapes 28
T Paul Carter is Professor of Design (Urbanism) in the Design Research Institute at RMIT University, Australia. He is the author of 15 books on history, art, and design including The Road to Botany Bay: An essay in spatial history (1987), Material Thinking (2004) and Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (2008). As an artist he has been involved in the design of a number of public spaces in Australia, including Federation Square (Melbourne). He visited the Lupunaluz site in December 2012.
ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL STUDIES
he paradox of connection informs every aspect of wildness. Wilderness, at least as Richard Weller documents elsewhere in this issue, is redefined in terms of connected linear regions. Connectivity is understood ecologically as a management technique for the maintenance of biodiversity across habitats and climes. In terms of frontier-mentality land settlement practices, the development of new wild corridors implies a limit to connectivity. A network of biodiversity greenways represents a clear obstacle to the plan to reduce the world to a uniform grid of agricultural, industrial, and residential functions. But how can such global reconnections—with their politically perilous attempt to redefine connecting as relating—be absorbed into local initiatives? How, in the other direction, does a project, inevitably defined by the colonial survey, reach out to this larger scale of reintegration? The following notes reflect on this challenge in the context of Lupunaluz, a nature retreat, healing center, and educational program in development in the Peruvian rainforest southeast of Iquitos, at the headwaters of the Amazon basin. Like many cultural and biodiversity initiatives, Lupunaluz understands the importance of developing a network of rainforest corridors. Its Australian-US founders are highly conscious of the complexities of developing sustainable and equable business arrangements with local communities. They readily embrace holistic understandings of the relationship between body, spirit, and place—and accept the regional Shipibo view that human–nonhuman communication is both possible and desirable—but are acutely alive to the challenge of terminological fatigue. Besides, it is naïve to envisage a post-wildness community of interests emerging (through creative residencies, through shamanic healing rituals, through various forms of knowledge transfer and cross-cultural education) when the Shipibo themselves cannot be stereotyped; as displaced, postcolonial people whose worldview is markedly Manichean1 and who, until recently, performed initiation rituals that outsiders found difficult to rationalize, they are bearers of privileged insight into the interconnectedness of sentient life forms profoundly embedded in the twinned traumas of economic and cultural despoliation. However, cultural relativism apart, the Shipibo peoples do in one profoundly challenging way dissolve the nature–culture divide. In contrast with western cultures, they derive human consciousness from plant consciousness. This radical inversion of what we in the west might call a landscape sensibility goes in some ways beyond traditional animistic understandings of human–nonhuman linkages. Through the conduit of the ayahuasca ceremony, and the mediation of the shaman, the trees speak, or at least make manifest their will. The rainforest trees communicate directly with the brain; indeed activate the tree within human consciousness. The visions that mediate this information are of designs, mandala-like diagrams that can be construed as energy materializations flowing throughout the body-spirit-environment and binding all parts together. The implication the Lupunaluz project draws from this is that the design of the proposed center (the building morphologies, locations, and arrangements, together with the associated gardens, tracks, meeting places, and public–private zones) is critical to the affective qualities of care and balance that it wants to communicate. But how is this to be done? An intensive examination of the site is occurring as this article is written. It is iterative as different sensory, customary, and technical knowledges of the environment and its human uses are amalgamated into spatial patterns suggestive of energy distributions scientifically measurable on the ground. However, the key point in our context is that any and all of this activity is sheeted back to the advice of the trees. The northeast Peruvian Shipibo notion of plantas con madre dissolves the nature–culture divide in a way that dramatically transcends the restless dialectic inherent in the term landscape.2 Access to the evidence for the idea that plants have a mother or spirit that can speak directly to human beings comes for most non-Amazonian people through the ingestion of the psychotropic