This post was written for a forthcoming publication by New Enclosure Landscape Consultants, run by my friend Richard Connell, and I thought I would share it here too. The brief was to write something on our involvement with the work of nature connection, which is a subject that I feel characteristically antagonistic about.
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Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Four Quartets - T.S. Elliot
I live a life which is fairly connected to the natural world. As a farmer and forester,
and as a community member, and as a host, I find myself often supporting others in
this connection. Yet I find the discourse around our human-nature relationship often
to be fairly shallow and self-limiting. When we think of hopeful human-nature
relationships, we tend to think in idealised images, and situate this relationship inside
an antho-centric worldview. Sometimes it can be helpful to conjure up these ideas and
leverage the sense of possibility they can give for a healthier humanity. Maybe it is
Stags bellowing on a misty re-wilded estate, or vertical cities festooned with vines and
rooftop gardens, or the re-calibration of psyche that forest bathing can offer. But any
image or idea obscures more than it reveals, and I enjoy poking around in these
obscurations to find what it is that we don’t want to see.
To do the kind of interrogation of culture that I want to carry out, we need words that
can disrupt us and point us to something edgier than ‘nature connection’ implies. Re-
wilding has been one of those words, but now seems fairly comfortably situated inside
of modernity, where estate land and charitable trusts can continue the long-established
British tradition of using money to exclude people from land. Or we design-in our ‘re-
wilded’ garden for our next prize-winning architectural offering, flattening our sense
of Wild to a 25m2 area of shrubs.
The word I have been landing on recently has been embeddedness. I live in 40 acres
of Somerset woodland and pasture, in a community where we grow much of our own
food and build our own houses without using fossil fuels. I don’t often experience this
as being ‘connected to nature’, although I undoubtedly am by modern Western
standards. What I do experience is a kind of embeddedness – a situatedness of myself
and the people around me in a landscape that we work. And the odd thing is; here as
with anywhere, a lot of our human efforting is directed towards avoiding the raw
experience of that. Living here hasn’t ‘fixed’ me or the humans around me. We are
still ungenerous and blind to our power and privileges, we still struggle with our
personal demons, and we are still ineffectual and clumsy and opinionated. We are still
thoroughly human, products of the cultures that we have been shaped by and that we
are now responsible for shaping.
This is not a comfortable place to find ourselves. As living creatures embedded in a
living world we are beholden to the same natural processes as any other. The looming
spectre of embeddedness that keeps occurring to me is the shadow of Covid-19 and
our panicked response. We discover ourselves to be habitat, and our frailty is the
breeding ground for life: disease is also life. Unintuitively, it is in death that life is
most generous in its further life-giving: it is the Stag’s dead body which will birth
forth a myriad new forms of living thing, unimaginable and undesired by the Stag.
Life in its abundance is profligate and wasteful in ways that create the conditions for
further life. A stomach and a forest both exist in the ongoing transmutation of life into
life – these complex ecologies surround and inhabit us and excel at the mad creative
complexity that decay enables.
It is important to re-habilite ourselves as disease-ridden and mortal beings, but I want
to go a step further. Just as it is natural to find ourselves vulnerable, it is also natural
to fight against that, to shore ourselves up into prolonged lives, seeking comfort and
security where we may. The creatures around us do the same, and it is only when the
collective action of many of them outgrows the carrying capacity of their ecosystem
that we start to notice it as an issue – that we see the parallels with our own lives.
So paradoxically, my re-habilition of myself is one in which I come to terms with my
self-serving individuality in the face of this wash of life. But it is not enough to stop
there: we still are in a time of mass-extinction and intensifying social problems. The
societial promises we grew up with are untenable and we are waking to find ourselves
perpetuators of abuse. The answers that we reach for must come from bodies which
are re-calibrated to a participatory life, and not from a voyeuristically connected
nature. We find ourselves entangled, compromised, and chthonic. It is from this
imperative of contact, with which we are in conflict and utterly dependant, that we
can build honest and equitable relationships with the world around us.
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Follow-up note: Richard's comments in response included the observation that embeddedness in other aspects of life may appropriately take us away from this kind of relating with the natural world. In his case he was specifically referencing his experience as a father. I think it is a good prompt from the piece: both to ask 'where could my relationship with nature be more embedded rather than just connected' and also 'what forms of embeddedness are appropriate to my life now'
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