Writing & Wildness: Opposite Impulses?

Grandiose, moi? No-one impresses as a writer/activist, surely, more than I. As a child, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Carmel Pine Cone protesting the proposed highway through Hatton Canyon. I stated decisively: "Cars are stinky." Decades later, the pine-scented canyon remains marred only by a quail-tickled dirt trail.

My subsequent efforts resumed in earnest five years ago, when I decided to put the words "Stop Mass Extinction" in front of as many eyes as was reasonably possible for me, a mere Nobody. How? My daring technique sacrificed my privacy: gossip is underutilized as a sustainable energy source. Public exposure is my device to use sexism and other prejudices to dodge Everyman's apathy:

"What idiocy is this [female version of jerk] spouting about tigers? Who is this [word for female loser], and what does she know about huntin'?" 

My valiant warning paid off: you will notice that the world, having heeded my alert, does not yet suffer mass extinction.

Y'all seek to detect the vanity of careerists here? 
May I recommend my stylist, Mother Nature?

Wildness - not to mention full-frontal female brilliance - is a threat to many spectators in our commercially pre-packaged culture. Humans are objectified, rendered interchangeable, and then sold standardized products to adjust the object for presentation and pricing.

Competition and territorial machismo fit into business-as-usual consumer society, keeping our yearnings superficial and selfish. By contrast, femininity's inclusive boundaries ("Let's feed the poor!") can seem like weeds invading a strip mall's parking lot. Maternal instinct is nature. Writing can nurture it. Words can be a womb for our infantile cris de coeur... and sentences can structure the sanctuary of a private Amazon Basin for ladies to explore fearlessly. Ladies may access wildness through writing even when we're stuck in an office, kitchen, or (stinky) car.

Words are like animals politely paper-trained, caged from readers until unleashed. How often is a woman's originality and passion accused by the status quo of being insane or out of control? However, an untamed woman can seem safe to even the most intransigent misogynist when, say, "HYSTERIA" is described neatly in Times-New-Roman font. A marginalized woman who's sensitive to the plight of our Earth may find that writing isn't a safe outlet as much as a mental fortress from the tsunami of the acid-ocean mainstream.

 Free the captive feelings you have for endangered beasts!

Ladies, please do write about hysteria-inducing issues like Global Warming. 

(Meanwhile, men may remain steel-jawed about extreme weather; doggedly turn survivalist; or secretly welcome apocalyptic thrills as the climate goes "on steroids.")

Estrogen has a place in poetry slams, comments online, or even a letter to the editor of the Carmel Pine Cone. Like me, you may venture far from your comfort zone by sharing thoughts about pollution and extinction. Where can you turn for encouragement? Environmentalists may reject their "brand" getting contaminated by gender issues... as if women's "Half the Sky" were superfluous to the Big Picture, and we sew lace on the bottom line. Don't be surprised if the literary establishment throws back what doesn't fit their fishtrap or fill their trawlers. Even feminists may assert that it's too strident to aspire to anything more than parlor humor (ha ha) or to embroider on our God-given ability to multiply. Your creativity, idealism and chutzpah may arouse a surprising degree of hostility from folks you assumed would be supportive. How dare you care? You violate the social contract of indifference and mediocrity; you betray the conspiracy of negligence. How uptight of you to think. Wouldn't you rather buy the Consciousness™ brand of Distraction? (Your mind is nothing but ego, right? An Enlightened One just asked me, "How do you know that mass extinction is bad?") Keep writing. It's, like, one of your chakras, or something!

I hope my own story proves that not only is the challenge worthwhile, it can be a constant source of giggles. And when I measure success by the expanse of my soul, becoming an eco-feminist writer made me... 

. . . phat. (Yes, me, a squeaky lady from Carmel!) 

Okay, I admit that writing also made me FAT. Want to know my biggest secret as an author? The only way I could sit down to type out my novel Pax of Wildly Women was to bribe myself with treats. You know that equation of 10% talent and 90% perspiration? I had to fit 90% eating into there. I'd originally resolved to inspire someone else - someone qualified - to do the "Fanged Wilds" project. I presented the idea formally to appropriate academics, my feeble offers of cash leveraged with "movie magic" since I know a few people in Hollywood. [Also, movie stars owned ranches near me. Stalking is on my To-Do list.] 
My resources were not inconsiderable:

1. I grew up with kids who went to Hollywood. 
2. I had a lap-top. 

Isn't our Earth worth any ambition? I studied library books about cinema, took a college class with the obligatory prick, and wrote two screenplays about women championing the ecology of fear. The specific requirements of the film format ultimately served to overcome my literary insecurities: finishing a book seems do-able when you write it one "shot" at a time. During the process, I shared my enthusiasm with everyone I could: surely among hordes of educated tree-huggers was a single one who cared enough to lift a soft, smooth finger for such a sparkling idea (and maybe meet George Clooney!) 

Forgive them, Lady; they know what they do. Glutted with gaming, bloated with Oneness, stuffed with trivia, or engorged with ego, were they? I was full of snacks. On the plus side, maybe my global perspective was enhanced by my becoming spherical. If you wonder why my fiction is fecund, maybe it's that other "chick lit" is by anorexics: someone should update Virginia Woolf's classic to A Belly of One's Own. But I did lose the weight from the year of endless gobbling. In retrospect, it was fun to have an excuse to pig out as if I were pregnant.

Writing lifted me from the capitalist-greed-breeder paradigm: my books are my babies, and I ultimately consume less because I produce my own meaning and delight. I soar beyond my domestic details to transnational concerns, released from a lady's unspoken vow of compliance and complacency as I give language to the mute species whose homes our commerce invades. 

Leaf-cutter Ants

In the Costa-Rican jungle, the highways of leaf-cutter ants reminded me of urban commuters industriously destroying our own habitat. How about diverting some of our energy to speaking up? It's free! Invest your life in what's whole: our ecosystem, and your integrity as an individual. Why let your dollars vote instead for mindless hedonism, more consumers, or numbing substances that substitute for genuine satisfaction?

Another example of escaping the economy is that I travel stand-by at the expense of the (polluting) airlines industry.

I visited Aida Bustamante, founder of Yaguará.org, in 
Costa Rica, where the human rights of women are 
almost as  impaired as jaguar habitat.

(Its carbon footprint reaches all the way down from the sky!)

Women all over the world protect predators, and my next book, Let Me Take a Stab at It, documents some of them... as well as genuine miracles that prove how extraordinary your life can be when you love nature with all your selfless heart.


VC Bestor
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Fanged Wilds and Women Program is a 501c3 Tax-Exempt Organization

Your curiosity is still hungry? Check this out:

Women who made Wilderness History (...that is, women who made history in this topic, not women who made wilderness a thing of the past! See how important grammar is, fellow writers?)

Tiger Hunting for Grrls

Tigers have killed seventeen people recently in Northern India. Why have authorities failed to stop the wild animals? In part because “only three of the six hunters hired for the job showed up.” Women are not present in that particular workforce. By contrast, I just got back from Gir, India's reserve for Asiatic lions, where dozens of women are employed successfully as rangers. 

The author with Kiran Pithiya,
ranger at Gir, India

We here at “Fanged Wilds” encourage India's tiger reserves to train and hire more women, to reduce human conflict with “man-eaters.” (Prime Minister Modi spearheaded the Gir training program that defies gender expectations in India... and the world.)

Sentenced to death just before I arrived in India was a human predator, Mohan Kumar. He proposed to twenty women and convinced them to collect their valuables and elope. Offering the promise of a temple ceremony the next day, he had sex with the women. Then, come the "wedding" day, gave “his intended” cyanide on the pretext that the pills were contraceptives. One woman survived who only licked a pill; the rest died immediately as the serial killer rushed off with the gold and money that each woman had brought from her “Hope Chest.”

I am one of those victims.

No, I didn't eat cyanide. I wasn't the target of a serial killer. But I went to play frisbee with a guy I'd dated, and he raped me while insisting that we be wed. A salient trait of sociopaths is the ability to manipulate others. Please look at my face and see those seemingly ignorant women who ran off with a strange man on the promise of getting a husband. I was too ashamed to tell my girlfriends that he'd raped me; on the contrary, I told them that he wanted to marry me. “What do you think?” I asked, frantic. What identity did I have? In 2004, I was just another woman aging alone. 

Right-wing politicians will agree that rape is inconsequential compared to the status of a couple, a woman partnered with a man: the building block of society. 

Thus predators are among us, and I was a casualty. 

Without Boys, Garls are Nathing...?

In my family, incest victims better not be survivors.

I can plead temporary insanity, though incest has been measured to cause actual brain damage, and the effects were not temporary when I was waist-high to my dad while he sodomized my mouth.
  
What's funny is that the restraining-order judge Locke Williams literally chuckled (I have the court recording) when I used incest as the reason why I hadn't reported the "date" rape till months after it occurred. 

 

Even the female police detective said I was just a “jilted lover.” In her defense, I wasn't at my best: I was hysterical with fear to be reporting the rapist. He was stalking me and had showed off the huge Glock pistol he carried in his truck. While the restraining-order judge looks like a big, overgrown frat boy, one can also defend the judge's ridicule of me: I'd explained to him that the rapist Brian Sarni (who looks like a bald Giovanni Gambino) bragged about being in the Mafia. 
Being threatened by Mafia is apparently a joke.

And if, say, I got pregnant by him and didn't take the cyanide pill, right-wing Americans would say I should bring the child to term and maybe even share custody with the rapist. 

[The Dalai Lama said abortion is violence. 
A monk sticking his moral judgments inside a woman is not non-violent.]

Not long before, they'd killed a sacred cow just a block away: lions roared outside my hotel for two nights at Gir. In the breakfast room there, I enjoyed morning chai tea with a Hindu guest. I explained to her that I had traveled solo from America to see the women wildlife rangers. The lady excused herself to her room and soon returned with freshly applied bindi on her forehead. “The little dot on the bottom represents me,” she said, “And the big dot above is my husband, for he is above me. The mark at my hairline shows I'm married.” You can see her expression here.

That day, I asked a Gir wildlife guard if she camped overnight in the forest. She shook her head. I have to report that she sounded a little defensive as she rushed to mention that she was married. 



That forest-guard job defies cultural convention for women but don't forget that, in India, it's illegal to be gay.

So the next day I was having lunch at a wealthy herdsmen's hacienda (or whatever you call it in Gujarat), and the tween girl (the only person there who spoke English) wasn't allowed to talk to me because she had to help granny fix the lunch.

Then they didn't eat with the men and me because they had to wait to eat the left-overs outside.

What could turn that little girl into a first-class citizen? Marriage? In her dreams. In her “Hope Chest.”

I did get a chance to ask that girl if she was going to become a “van raksha sahayak” lion ranger. She looked shocked and said, “No.” But my eyes said Yes.

(Then her dad showed off his equestrian skills. Perhaps you can detect from the photo that it was not horse whispering.)

A few days later in Delhi, I was hanging out in the living room of our AirBNB appartment with some other tourists. The French woman there (who looked like Cameron Diaz, with a boyfriend out of GQ) asked if I was scared, traveling alone. I replied that before dawn one morning I walked from my hotel to the Ahmedabad train station, the street was dark and empty, and a man spat at me. Contradicting that I was a target, La Mademoiselle scoffed at me and said, “They spit all the time. What makes you think -?” 

For some reason I was at long last mentally prepared for challenges to my credibility and character. I suggested, “The eyes.” In fact, on my way to Ahmedabad train station, I had barely glanced to make sure that the three wads of phlegm I heard aimed at me were not prelude to assault: 

I just kept walking as confidently as the fearless tiger hunter I may someday be.


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Fanged Wilds and Women Program is a 501c3 Tax-Exempt Organization

"Anonymous" historically was a Woman

At the risk of getting on the wrong side of the law and/or of dangerous vigilantes, I'm wondering aloud if the hackers from "Anonymous" are eco-feminists (whether they know it or not). "Anonymous" helped get the Steubenville rapists convicted. And now they've hacked private information about executives who profit from the dolphin and whaling industries.

I admit, the saddest thing I ever saw was a dolphin alone in a swimming pool in Florida, an inflatable toy his only companion. Then I saw one in a holding tank at the Hilton in Kona, salve on his head because the regular pool wasn't deep enough for him to avoid a sunburn.


At the very least, pack animals need to be together.

Some humans are loners. What about hackers? I know almost nothing about "Anonymous." In a world clammering for fame and celebrities, they usually remain nameless... yet are willing to go to prison to bring a little more justice to victims. This is the sort of selflessness usually contained to mothering. As Virginia Woolf said, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” It is quintessentially feminine to sacrifice yourself for the good of others, especially when you don't even know who benefits. Yes, Saint Francis was a man. But you know what I'm talking about. (Hi, Mom!)

The Fanged Wilds and Women Program empowers women to tap into that urge to do good, even when it puts you at risk. You dislike attention? Let's offer each other moral support to be brave and escape all confinement.

Do cetaceans have anything to do with sexism? SeaWorld executives blamed the ponytail of the trainer, Dawn Brancheau, when the orca pulled her to her death. Sexism is a ready dodge for the guilty: anything girlish - like a ponytail - implies incompetence, right? (Wink, wink.) Just like a rape victim asked for it.

I called them "dangerous vigilantes" above; but, in truth, Anonymous hackers are only a danger to themselves. The wealthy SeaWorld corporate lackies are inconvenienced by a data breech. They may deserve jail, but won't get it. And they won't have their children taken from them, enslaved, and made to jump on cue.

Helpless creatures exploited for our entertainment and greed are similar to rape survivors. What makes animals less important than humans is that they can't sign a petition or hack computers. Animals are not even good at hacking each other.

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Fangs Look Good on a Woman

"Vampire V" was my favorite nickname when I was five. My next-door best friend Elizabeth ("Smashed Lizard Guts" Liz) would watch Creature Features on TV with me and imitate Bela Lugosi. (This was before Buffy and Twilight.) Lizard and I would create dramas with our troll dolls in the dirt between our houses, enacting warfare under the shrubbery, triumphing over Gumby, and humiliating the Barbies with their grotesquely long legs.

My big sister's nickname for me was "The Little Pest." I lost my Vampire status when my mom took me to the dentist and had him pull the canines that protruded above my more "normal" teeth. Perhaps orthodontia saved me from looking like a freak. But I felt something had been lost... and not just because "Lizard" moved away.

I was learning how to be standard and fit in.

"Smashed Lizard Guts" Liz would make me laugh so hard, I'd pee all over the floor. I learned that laughing was dangerous, as was any wild behavior. Paradoxically, anything pretty and girlish was stupid, yet it was clearly my safest choice. I grew civilized. And there's no question I was one of the luckiest girls in the world.

Now I'm asking all the other lucky people in the world to join me in saving wildness. The "Fanged Wilds and Women Program" harnesses laughter, ladylike behavior, and grotesquely long legs to celebrate our love of the wilds.


Climate Change will increasingly put everything out of balance. Few things can repair that. A woman's touch is one thing. And vicious fangs are another. So many Pollyannas nowadays are influenced by "The Secret" and the "Power of Attraction," they ignore human accountability and negate anything scary like wild predators. Yet predators are 'keystone species" that keep forests and grasslands healthy so we can all tiptoe through the tulips.

Speaking out means that sometimes people look at me as if I'm Bela Lugosi. Words can feel too sharp when they challenge our comfort. 

Yet the rewards are legion. 

Fangs may save civilization.



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Women & Extinction

We must choose which animals to save: National Geographic says 20,000 species are near extinction. All grrls like me care about cute fuzzy things. How best to select the survivors on Earth Island? 
People are passionate about charismatic megafauna. My vote:

Lions, tigers and bears!  I'm choosing predators, and here's why: post-Climate civilization will need women to keep the peace. Women can learn leadership by identifying with predators and -- like the rangers at Gir, India -- training to be intermediaries between humans and animals who would kill them.  

Women have unique qualities to defuse situations otherwise fatal to fanged beasts. Ranchers, loggers and farmers worldwide may kill predators that escape poachers and bush-meat hunters. A woman who takes a stand for a lion or cheetah transforms preconceptions.

"Fanged Wilds and Women Program" aims to engage ladies with the "ecology of fear" for the good of ALL species. Climate crises may snowball into civic chaos. We can prevent mayhem. And we'll have fun in the process! How? Mimic the 'ecology of fear' by associating women with wild predators.

Woman Ranger in Kenya

Fear not. Fashion can be a first step. Leopard-spot apparel can empower even the most disadvantaged girl, and it's already everywhere. "Fanged Wilds" garb - leopard spots given meaning - can inspire teens to protect wilderness. Ultimately, ladies may enlist to patrol and prevent clashes between citizens and, say, snow leopards in Nepal... cougars in Santa Monica... bears in Switzerland... and wolves in Montana.

Can females really confront poachers? Or even lions, tigers and bears? All-female ranger teams are found throughout the world. Respect for femininity grows just at the idea of it. Respect can only strengthen social bonds when civilization faces climate collapse.

"Charismatic megafauna" are the most cherished wild animals in the world. Could our love for them be what saves humanity? A leopard can't change his spots... but his spots can change us! Fanged Wilds can tame the future.


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Fanged Wilds and Women Program is a 501c3 Tax-Exempt Organization