Ecosystem Intelligence in the Back Country

By Kelly Moody

We hiked 5 miles into backcountry wilderness. Though it was an Indian Summer, the leaves were turning anyway. Firstly, the outer geometric rims of the leaves changed and the centers, the veins--stayed green. It was supposed to be a short weekend trip to fall into Fall, to get away from lines and the advertising chaotic fast paced world of civilization. It worked mostly. School wasn't on anyone's mind. The one thing that reminded us in our Trip that we were still on this planet was the occasional plane flying overhead. Seeing blue sky breaks in the fingertips of the trees, one could notice that the same sky here in this chaotic linear 'civilized' world is the same sky that hovers over miles of open (almost) untouched wilderness. There was a lack of water out there, so dry and void of that element, the drought had sucked it all up. The trees and low plants had devoured all they could to survive the unusual heat of this time of year. The trail crossed over many dry rocky riverbeds, all of us signing at the image of stagnet pools of water rather than flowing fresh life-filled water wonder. We finally got to a place that we all found pretty sufficient. it was directly inbetween the trail and the almost dry riverbed. It provided us two different paths to journey back up river to different spots we remembered, to different portions of the trail. You really realize HOW you oriente yourself when you are thrown into a place like that, you orient by plasiticity, by technological creations and additives. we dont often enough look at the lay of the land to understand where we are in a setting like newport news. We look at the streets, the lines. When your in the wilderness you understand that you are in a chaotic world, simply because your civilization has put their own 'order' on the earth in the form of a urban world and you have adapted to that. Its good to be put back in place, to reanalyzed how you constitute location and reality. The next day we lost our minds. Our maybe we found them. Either way, we journeyed into another sense of this brain of an ecosystem, The flowing and intertwining, and we were merely prancing ants fighting between our bodies and the bigger thing around us. In terms of ecosystem intelligence, we generally think of the vertical distance and space between things. But do we ever stop and notice how one branch of one tree will intelligibly flow around or under, over or inbetween the neighbooring branches, tocreate a linear balance as well. there are layers up and down as well as across. In this state, you can tell the difference between one trees limbs and another, they flow into one another, they coexist, both surviving, yet competing. In time they make more 'decisions' to grow this way, or that way, or to produce this portion of themselves or reduce this portion of themselves according to the decisions made by all of the other living organisms around them. Were crazy human beings for thinking we are the most intelligible living things on earth. We just refuse to think outside of our frame of reference or perspective, to consider other realities as being just as real as the next.