The Anathema of Adoration: Tracking and the Possibility of Romantic Science

Naturalist interpretation & wildlife tracking is for me so much about witnessing & generating local stories and local science. It’s also about stubbornly maintaining that even though electron microscopes and genetics are amazing (and can contribute greatly to an enchanted science), we can also “still” (always? At least as long as we have bodies?) do a kind of science with our senses and with what is perceivable to our senses. This sensory science is the essence of what being a ‘naturalist’ is. We can certainly mix our sensory science (still technologically mediated with our rulers, our loupes, our tracking sticks, now our cellphone apps & cameras) with what we’ve learned from other sciences that measure with more than just a single human body—but the point is we shouldn’t ditch this embodied & local version. The ability to pay attention is an incredible gift that animals (including humans) have, and it also has been largely dispossessed from us and manipulated in contemporary industrial & post-industrial societies. Paying studious attention to the wind, the water, the birds and the animal trails, has no economic value, unless we’re funded scientists, or hunters (and subsistence hunters, foreign OR domestic, still largely get treated like trash by many people, so…).

The loss of many Indigenous peoples’ abilities to hunt on their territories (through either the legislation by settler states or of destruction of habitats and animal ranges) has been incurred by colonial processes, and the mindset that goes along with those processes often does not see oral-history based cultures as being able to do or produce science. This is very tied in with why the body, and specifically the emotional and spiritual body, is often dismissed as an interface for creating scientific knowledge.

Tracking is now an endangered skill. Settler and colonial cultures almost wholly ditched it, along with community-based natural history, & a spiritual ecology of attention that seems to be what allowed humans to survive dire evolutionary straits in the first place. Settler scientists have just started to realize in the last 20 years (thanks to the work of some very talented and visionary people including the San people of the Kalahari), that tracking is oftentimes a better ”tool for the job” of interpreting story/history than numerous recent technologies. One example is the Pech Merle cave in Southern France, the site of a fossilized series of trackways made by humans 15,000 years ago. European archaeologists invited several Indigenous Namibian trackers to interpret the trackways, and within three minutes of examining the tracks, the trackers discerned information that the archaeologists had not been able to deduce in a couple of decades of studying the prints. Previous methods had included utilizing various computer-based imaging methods to scan & analyze the substrate. However, these machines, at least at this nexus, could not produce the desired meaning. Only relationships accumulated over many hours and many generations could do that.

The Pech Merle researchers, after experiencing this incredible science firsthand, were quoted as saying in a BBC article that "Integrating indigenous knowledge of tracking into the research procedure is not a matter of romanticism.” Fair enough, but I must roll my eyes a little at how much us settler and ‘Western’ scientists are still getting triggered by the human imagination—not to mention that talking about “integrating” Indigenous people is harmful, & cringey in its exposure of deep settler biases and its inability to see that the path to genocide is and has been paved with intentions of 'integration.' It is Indigenous trackers who should be honored (in measurable ways no less) as long-time generators and stewards of science as well as the most biodiverse lands left on earth.

Cybertracker has made some steps toward this by helping create a system that gives legitimacy to the expertise of Indigenous San trackers, giving these trackers an ability to make a living off of their skills working for conservation, biodiversity, anti-poaching projects, etc. Data created by trackers through the Cybertracker system is owned by those trackers, and if it is used for scientific papers, the trackers must be named as co-authors in the paper. However, as I'm sure many readers will be able to see, questions still come up with this model because it is difficult for it to escape positioning Western/Settler technology and science as a gatekeeper on many levels—however in its defense the strategy there is to work with the forces of a powerful system to basically erode aspects of that very system, just as our bodies can release chemicals that erode our own bones when change is necessary. I wanted to mention this because people often ask about the issue of decolonising tracking, and this is a complex and rich story that we are still learning to carry, and the pressure to oversimplify and summarize such stories is great in some leftist praxis. In short, tracking is such an endangered lifeway, that it is not widely understood or known about by many people, Indigenous and Settler alike. Right now, it seems we as a human species are in triage mode with carrying forward this skill/lifeway.

‘Romantic’ when used in a negative way denotes someone who has an idealized (and ostensibly false) view of reality. However, romantic also means something conducive to or characteristic of love, of interpersonal enchantment. If there was such a thing as 21st century Romanticism—we’d rush to admit we’re firmly located within it. This is a romanticism, perhaps, of the strange & monstrous, the science-fictional, the animist, the unknown and unknowable. Indigenous, Black, Queer, Trans, Neurodivergent, or even just Deeply Sensitive naturalists, scientists, and environmentalists shouldn’t have to pass as E.O. Wilson or Carl Sagan to have their eco-mystical motivations and feelings regarded as appropriate. At Queer Nature we are a type of ‘romantic’ who know that love is anything but ideal, it’s simply the trail that glows the longest, after all the others have winked out. Unfortunately, there’s a reason that a tracker or field biologist might get scoffed at if they squeal with adoration at animals and their tracks, as Pinar, an excellent and practiced tracker & Indigenous animist, often does experience. It’s because adoring something is seen as clouding the empirical acuity of science’s steely gaze. It’s “cringey” according to the patriarchal frame of Western science. Good science has long been seen as cold and unfeeling, detached—as if that’s not an emotional response too. It’s a mindset deeply wrapped up in misogyny and the infantilizing of anything perceived as feminine or childlike. It’s also revelatory of the fear many hold of being awed themselves, because awe and wonder naturally disarm us and erode the walls we’ve naturally (and understandably) built in our psyches in the course of living in a world that often tells us that to succeed we have to be calm, serious, or cynical at all times. Many people have had their hearts opened up by awe or wonder, often a lifetime ago in their youth or young adulthood, only to conclude, after the inevitable grief, pain, or rejection came crashing down, that awe and wonder are never worth it. It’s a quandary for the ages, whether you can choose to live, as poet David Whyte writes, “with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat.” And there’s no denying it’s fucking hard.

As science writer Carol Yoon points out in her book “Naming Nature,” European science, despite what it thought of itself a couple hundred years ago, didn’t invent taxonomy—differentiating and relating to living forms is a pan-human instinct that is expressed in every culture. The end result of taxonomy might have been the “naming” of the living world, which brings with a religiously-rooted entitlement. But really, any cultural system of ‘ordering’ or ‘naming’ actually begins in ‘relating,’ and some systems are much MUCH better at honoring that than others. These days, the business of classification can be enigmatic to most non-scientists, especially with the unseen realms of DNA feeding in to the endeavor. This makes good sense, and we love that people look at DNA (please carry on), but what we lose in the notion that “experts somewhere” are the only valid knowledge keepers about the gophers in our backyard, is we lose something rather simple but important, which is just the permission to get to know those particular beings intimately, the permission to “behold” (as Martin Shaw says,) which is different than just “looking,” it’s paying attention to something as a love language. “Well, I won’t ever publish a paper on it so it doesn’t matter” we may grumble to ourselves. We counter, yes, it does matter a lot, even if we can’t quantify it now, or ever. Paying attention to our multi-species habitats should be a source of science, but it should also be a source of stories, because stories are memetic and outlive us. Ideally, the two endeavors would be more entangled.

And if we do find space to behold, our observations seem to get funneled into poetry. Which they should be, but the problem that creates is somehow people think then that the attention of the poet lacks rigor, credibility even. It bothers me that we don’t think of Mary Oliver as a scientist. Though, if she was a scientist, I’d probably be bothered that she wasn’t called a poet. Yes, I get that we like our systems of doing science to be certain ways, with funding, peer review. It makes some sense. But for crying out loud, the lady literally spent her whole life paying attention to ecology and to her place within it. “When it’s over” she wrote, “I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” I have very little doubt that many scientists do feel this way about the world, but it's just become culturally taboo to talk about, due to an idealization of rationality and the pervasive anti-myth that science is disenchanting the world.

Naturalist studies occurring outside recognized scientific institutions are not just about our own human spiritual development either. No denying that spirituality and deep emotional need is involved—we try to overcorrect for the fact that the legacy of European/settler science often was in the closet about its own relationship with ghosts and enchantment… so we DO talk about spirit, soul, emotion, a lot. But purpose doesn’t end there either, it trails into the horizon of Mystery.

Witnessing matters, as the Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar regions have tried to tell us as they are able to track sensitive ecosystems shifting dramatically over generations of time. This society has not been good at valuing the stories about the land that people gather inside themselves just through the course of living. Conservationists call what they do “Ecological monitoring,” with its echoes of surveillance—and maybe there’s an honesty to that. But what, too, of witnessing, of paying attention—that cognitive act that poet Mary Oliver identified with the very nature of the Soul.

The ‘natural history’ of an area is only limited by what we choose to pay attention to. The bear that turned over hundred-pound chunks of granite a few years ago to forage for insects is but one example of an intimate and mundane event that still is ‘transcribed’ into (from?) the landscape, in the traces of the aged sockets of soil from which the heavy rocks were displaced. However, crucially, what we pay attention to shifts when our cosmologies, world-views, and habits shift. If we consider animals to have personhood, consciousness, even sentience, how do we look at their tracks and trails (and ours) on the landscape differently? What if we consider them to even have something like spirituality—to be animists themselves? If we have realized that 'wilderness' is a human social construct, and these lands have been tended for tens of thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, how differently might we look at forest ecology? Or, for that matter, Indigenous lifeways & those who tend them?

In an age of post-truth, what perhaps 'pathological skepticism' has revealed is the core tenet that is at the center of the little-known field of historiography: the writing of history is never neutral. The writing of history is an art, a craft, a science, a vocation. And also what it perhaps reveals is that many humans are traumatized by the disembedding of stories from place. This leads us to mistrust any stories, and even story as a technology itself. However, the deconstruction of stories is not the endgame. It is a stepping stone to reclaiming our ability to bear witness and orient to events in our literal physical environment. As is evident in the basic workings of EMDR therapy (creator: Dr. Francine Shapiro), locating and orienting to stimuli that occur unpredictably all around our bodies (in this case, relatively neutral stimuli like vibrations or beeps) is a method of healing the nervous system as we realize that these stimuli are not threats. However, we would also say that during EMDR therapy, a patient is 'tracking' and storying signals that they perceive.

There are a lot of threads here, but one that is sticking with me is around returning stories to place, and seeing stories that occur on very small scales as important. So, let us not be neutral. Let us imagine what would be possible if more of us considered the possibility that we could be natural historians—which is really another word for 'tracker'. Natural historians who don't see culture as separate from nature. Natural historians who track trauma in the body and trauma on the land too. Natural historians who know that multi-species and transbiological relationships are a normative part of human social and emotional worlds. Natural historians who learn from living beings and our adoration of them as much as, or even more than from books, and who know that without variation and diversity, life would not go on.

(Cross posted on the Queer Nature blog & adapted from an essay on our Patreon written several months ago)

Photo of a bear cub burned in a wildfire from Colorado Parks & Wildlife