“In a busy, suburban place in lowland Britain, one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet…” [i] is where I was when I started reading the anthology that I have decided to respond to in whatever way comes up, page by page. This may take quite some time, it is not a short collection (the editor dissembles when he calls it modest), so I will wander off at times and talk about other things, but my hope is that I will keep coming back to the book and allowing it to make me think. My hope is that I will keep thinking enough to come back to the page and share what I come up with.
My hope is that I will learn something along the way.
My hope is that what I share will have some kind of meaning.
Because it strikes me that ‘hope’ is what it is all about. All of our search for spirit, for connection, for love, for wisdom, for whatever else it is that we might think we’re looking for, it is really all just, only, simply, about hope.
The thing I haven’t worked out (yet) is where the boundary is between hope and faith. Or if there even is a difference.
Questions for another time. For now I’m delving deeply into an anthology of writing that is grounded in the nature of the planet upon which we live and the other life we share it with. More specifically it is writing about the British Isles and Ireland.
I immediately connected with that notion of a busy suburban place in lowland Britain because I live in the same one that the book's editor, Patrick Barkham, lived in a few years back. Literally a few streets away from where he and his young ones were, I walked the same cemetery paths at the same time, saw the same outer-city wildlife and connected with it. I had not heard of him then. I did not know that the Wildlife Trust that would become so important in my personal reinvention would appoint him as its president. I did not know that a few years later he would be so generous in his support of our own anthology Language of the Land. When I read his book Wild Child [ii] I connected with a space that I know. In simple terms I felt much the same way as its writer in many respects, and in many others I was a universe away from him in terms of experience and knowledge. The similarities seemed to matter more than the differences.
So I admit that I picked up the anthology, the one that held me entranced for a week and had me wanting my own copy before I was 20 or so pages in, I picked it up purely because his name was on the cover. I would have been daunted otherwise. If I had only known the name as a journalist, as a writer (specifically a nature writer, though he says not), as “someone”, then the sheer size of the book would have had me leaving it on the shelf as being a bit beyond me.
Instead, I knew him as more ordinary than those elusive “someones” that we only know as names on books, or through the positions they hold. I’m not name-dropping here. I don’t actually know the man; I haven’t even spoken to him. But I have seen him around. I recognise some of the places he talks about. I know that he has read some of my work, though equally he has no idea who I am.
In most cases that has no relevance, but in certain types of writing it does. When people are writing about place, either directly or in the context of something else, when that place is also your place (and even more so when it is your place in your own time rather than, say, how it was a hundred years ago), then the threads of connection become visible. Not strong necessarily, but at least visible.
It is tangential. It is why I picked up the book. No more than that. Because in the nature of the anthologies, the net is cast wide. Most of the places discussed or described, I know nothing about, many I couldn't reliably place on a map (yet). Likewise the timespan takes us both backwards and forwards.
As I read the anthology, I started to understand a little more about a lot of things and I started to have questions of my own about how true some of the received wisdom about the state of things might or might not be.
One received truth is that we are all more disconnected from the natural world. I know what is meant by that statement and I don’t dispute the fact behind it. We mostly live in towns and cities, or we live elsewhere but work in towns and cities. We do not interact with the planet on a daily and life-sustainingly necessary way anymore. That level of direct relationship has definitely gone for the vast majority of people. But the degree of ‘disconnection’ – I would argue – is something entirely different.
On one level we are all still intimately connected with the planet. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the poison we’re subjected to… but even beyond that…the places we go on holiday, the plants we grow, the weeds in the streets, the clouds and the sun and the stars. Most of us still relate to wider world whenever we make time for it or when it shakes us out of time…whether that’s a Sunday in the park, an afternoon at the beach, or the sudden moment on the doorstep when we notice the clear night sky, or a river, or a wood, or even a drive down a less-frequented road, or someone else’s garden…most of us do still look, do still breathe in that latent connection to the wider world.
It is inbuilt. We know that we are part of all this. We are not separate. We are intrinsic.
The ‘education’ that has pulled us out of it, needs to shift back to pulling us in. Efforts are being made, but there is still too much posturing involved. The tricksiness of language doesn’t help: the politicising of terminology. At the time this book was published Barkham was still comfortable using the expression ‘non-human’ to describe the rest of the world that was, well, not-human. Now that is increasingly a no-no. Someone, somewhere along the line, has decided that ‘non-human’ means ‘less-than-human’ and so must not be used.
Their alternative ‘more-than-human’ is to my mind much worse. Non-human is a factual statement. More-than-human is a value judgement.
It still centralises the human in its viewpoint. Well, breaking news, we are humans and however much we pretend not to or try not to, we will absolutely always and forever see the rest of the world as being not-us – and all the tangled verbiation we get into to cover that up misses the point. We are as human as a fox is a fox and a sea-cucumber is a sea-cucumber and an eagle is an eagle. We cannot help but see the world as we see it. Foxes and sea-cucumbers and eagles are non-human. Not less-than, but equally not more-than. With no apologies, I hate that expression "the more-than-human world" for the very reason that it denies us our animal place within it.
My father used to say, "there is a plague on the planet, and we’re it." If we take the view that all of the wider world, beyond humanity, is more than human, then we’re subscribing to that view. It’s a point of view – but if it is the correct one, then the solution is simple. Let the plague run its course. We will die out sooner rather than later as we make the planet uninhabitable for our own species…and then the planet will recover her own health.
Make no mistake. We are not destroying the planet. We are harming her current incarnation, shifting her into a different avatar, but she will survive and she may do so by wiping us out – or rather, by allowing us to wipe ourselves out. It is an option.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, we are trying to preserve what currently exists, because we like things to be the way we remember them to have been, and we know how much we have lost since the beginnings of our memory.
That’s another of the pieces of perceived wisdom that may not be all that it seems. A lot of the loss absolutely is self-evident. I remember flocks of house sparrows. Now I can’t remember when I saw a single one. At the same time, I remember magpies as a rarity – and jays? What is a jay, I would have asked only a few decades ago. I remember the very first one I saw, in a wood just outside Romford sometime in the 1990s. We had to drag out the books and look it up. Now they are regular visitors to my garden. We did not have swallows or swifts that I recall. But starlings swarmed. I remember adders. I remember red admiral butterflies as scarce visitors. I remember red squirrels, but not greys, not back then. I remember the things that I saw…but I saw them because of where I lived and where we went on day trips and holidays. I remember bats. I remember the things that my father could name for me. Hedgehogs. Constellations. Sea scorpion. Bladderwrack.
But the point is: just because I didn't see them, it didn't mean they weren't there. All those swifts and swallows and lapwings. They just weren't where I was.
Our writing group often talks about whether we need to be able to name things. Does it matter that I know this is a stitchwort or that is a banded demoiselle? I’m generally on the side of thinking that, no, it really doesn’t. If I know there are pretty flowers and useful plants and amazing insects and ancient trees and all the mycelium underneath and it is all interconnected, then, no, I do not need to be able to name each little thing.
Until I come up against the stories of extinction and rediscovery and I start to wonder. I wonder if it could be that we haven’t lost as much as we might think, but only that the people who pass it every day do not know what it is? If all the tiny insects and such have simply moved on – maybe into the towns like the foxes – and are no longer where they used to be, we might think we’ve lost them forever. I’m not claiming this is the case, and certainly not in a general sense, but just postulating the possibility that what we have really lost – in some cases – nowhere near all – is not the species, but the ability to recognise it. I’m not even suggesting that if so, it is even a lesser loss. It is not.
It is not lesser, but it is different. And that changes what we need to do about it.
It changes what I need to do. For a start, I may need to give up my belief that I do not need to know the names of things. Perhaps I do.
I live in one of those busy suburban places in lowland Britain. I am lucky enough to have a garden. I think you’d call it a garden. It is a half-tended space in which very little of what grows was actually planted by me. And what was planted by me, or on by behalf, tends to get left to largely to do its own thing. I do not pretend that it is a wildlife garden, but to call it tame would be equally seriously stretching our definitions.
Perhaps if I want to seriously connect, a good place to start would be to learn what is actually growing on my own plot. I suspect more on that will follow in the weeks to come.
In his introduction Barkham muses on what makes good writing (nature writing or any other kind). He says that while accepting the liberating feature of the technology in bringing writing to the fore, he feels that "there is probably too much writing, created too quickly, without a time-consuming edit." He believes that there is good and bad writing. I am less sure, not only because I'm a blogger and some-time poet while he is a professional author, but because I agree with Donna Ashworth when she says that things can be over-edited, that in the edit you can lose what was pure and original. It strikes me that in nature-writing, perhaps more than any other form except for poetry, staying as close to the original as possible is important.
Of course, I could be wrong.
In any event, I took the book back to the library and bought my own copy to breathe in over the next however long it takes, to discover a host of writers I have never heard of and return to the ones I already love. And to respond to what I find. I hope you'll come along for the ride.
