Dear Reader,
This essay holds the essence of a current enquiry about the invitation to Leave No Trace and whether leaving no trace is desirable, let alone possible, considering the depth of relationality we human creatures inhabit. It suggests that there is an ancient/new story arising in the lands and cultures I inhabit: the remembering of leaving traces as a sacred human responsibility, and something to be honoured and celebrated. Note: I sometimes utilise footnotes to share sources, expand on language and concepts that trouble me or need clarification, and offer related information. If you read these essays online, you can click on a footnote number and be wooshed straight to the corresponding note (like magic)⁀➴. However, if you find moving back and forth as you read disorientating, I hope you’ll find these essays complete without the footnotes.
We human creatures lose between 50 and 100 hairs a day, each follicle-attached hair holding traceable DNA for many years post-shed. We scatter an estimated 30,000 skin cells every single hour. For energy, we ingest food and drink water made available through soil and water and sunlight and cloud and river and rock and photosynthesis and animal dung and human hands. Garments made of wool, cotton, leather, and bamboo keep us warm or cool or dry. We tread around 2,000 steps in every mile we walk, all the while inhaling and exhaling various chemical compositions between 720 and 1200 times.
As human creatures, every moment of our aliveness is a miraculous, often unnoticed, multitude of microscopic to grand interactions, processes, and relationships.
Having recently been re-meeting the evocative appeal to Leave No Trace, the responsible human-in-the-wild invitation of hiking and wild camping, countryside toilet-going and festival attending, the more I find this appeal improbable, unappealing, and troubling.
Though many indigenous peoples1 embody cosmovisions recognising and honouring the relationality and reciprocity of being kin to a multispecies, multigenerational, multicultural world, some of us aren’t born into cultures that share these knowings. For many of us born into the cultures of the global minority and the lands of the so-called global north, we are born into a story of separation2 that holds us human creatures as rightly distinguished from the other-than-human, the more-than-human, and this Earth.
Shaped by such a story, it is easy to move through the world in self-absorption, disregard, arrogance, and intentional destruction. Sandwich wrappers, empty drink bottles, and used tissues are thrown out of car windows. Dog poop is ignored, or bagged but abandoned. Post-festival sites become oceans of discarded one-use tents. U.S.A. national parks struggle to manage the extent of human faeces and barely buried toilet paper that blights the land and leaks into surrounding ecosystems.
In the mid-1900s in the United States of America, a movement was birthed in response to a collective rediscovery of the benefits and joys of being in nature3 and the ecological impact to this rise in national park visitors: Leave No Trace4; a welcome invitation to the ecologically sensitive, and a gentle rebuke to the environmentally unattuned or intentionally careless. The Leave No Trace invitation then permeates other countries and cultures, such as the one I inhabit here in the UK, becoming part of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code,5 Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru / Natural Resources Wales,6 and Wilderness England.7
Meeting the invitation to Leave No Trace, I wonder: who would we human creatures be if it was biologically or ecologically possible to be a member of this world without making traces, whether tread, or hair, or the pressed grass of a sit spot? To not aerate soil with our steps, spread pollen as we brush past flowers, unknowingly carry fallen acorns in jacket hoods so that they might meet new ground to root into?
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
The Knepp Estate’s rewilding project is founded on the recognition that every single inhabitant plays a vital role in its vitality, in its ecosystem health, from human to animal to grassland to visiting bird.8
In the chapter ‘Recommoning’ in Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You,9 Nadia Shaikh reminds us: ‘we are as much a part of the system as sand eels are to puffins, as meadow pipit nests are to the cuckoo, and fungi to trees… For millennia our bodies have shaped the land just as beavers, wolves and dung beetles have.’
In The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasures, Katherine Rundell reminds us: ‘we have collided with living things, in both joy and destruction, delight and grandeur and folly.’
In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna J. Harraway reminds us: ‘we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.’
From all I can gather, indigenous peoples embody a living remembrance of something that the cultures I inhabit have long excluded or forgotten: we human creatures are nature; we are deeply, wonderfully, irreparably entangled in other-than-human, more-than-human, and planetary doings and beings; and, we leave traces.
As Dr Rosa Vásquez Espizona, a Peruvian and Amazonian-Andean scientist and author of The Spirit of the Rainforest: How Indigenous Wisdom and Scientific Curiosity Reconnects Us to the Natural World, shares: ‘In the Andean-Amazonian cosmovision, people see nature as a living entity, deserving of protection, respect, and nourishment - so that people, in turn, are protected, respected, and nourished. It’s a cycle of giving and receiving… promising to only take what they need and to leave enough for those who come next.’
Though well-intentioned, the concept of Leave No Trace is biologically impossible and ecologically unhelpful. In the words of the wonderful Right to Roam campaign:10 ‘We believe we’ve got the messaging on the countryside wrong. It should not be ‘leave no trace’, as though you’re a visitor with no stake in the land, but ‘leave a positive trace’, with responsibility for what takes place there.’
Perhaps it’s time to sunset the invitation to Leave No Trace and, instead, remember an ancient, sacred invitation: to honour and celebrate that it is impossible to live in this world without leaving traces. That we are not singular creatures, but multitudinous; moving through this world neither untouched and untouching. That each of us stretches out into our environments, and our environments stretch out into us, in extraordinary ways.
From the dust of the story of separation, perhaps an ancient/new story is already becoming in these lands and this culture: a remembering to celebrate and honour the traces we human creatures make, and make those traces in awareness, in gratitude, and in reciprocity.
(Image shared with this is a public domain scan of 17th-century woodcut print of a lotus plant, free to use, no copyright restrictions.)
Writing this, I meet the lack of colonial-free language I have access to refer to the peoples and cultures whose depthful and loving relationship with their ecological-location has been faithfully embodied for multiple generations. I therefore look to teachers from these peoples, as guidance.
I particularly appreciate Laura Storm’s telling of the context, aspects, and outcomes of the story of separation shared here.
Here, I meet the now painfully familiar frustration with the English language: to speak of ‘being in nature’ as though we human creatures aren’t of nature, whether in our houses, in our cars, or out for a walk in a forest, yet needing to be able to point towards the wider world. I have tried out many options: wilderness, the wild, the countryside, the great outdoors, even the exuberant wild (which my husband, W, noted sounded a little bit Oscar Wilde), and all of these fall frustratingly short.
Edited by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses.
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