Wild To The Heart
Contextualising Rossie Moor – What IS Wild Land? (a)
In the same vein I came across an article in the Journal of the John Muir Trust, the supposed protectors of wild land in the UK, particularly Scotland. The JMT seems a bit lily livered to me over the philosophy of what it would mean to have truly wild land in the country, Nature left to re-colonise itself in its flora and fauna.
There was also an article about wind turbines in that issue, and I couldn’t help but conflate the two ideas, turbines and wild land.
I also read an article in the Granta magazine at the same time, by Jonathan Raban , about this very issue, about conservation activities in America, so different to the gentlemanly tone of the JMT. So many related things in obscure places.
Raban is another issue for me – I have all his books, I believe, and am haunted by his example, not because I necessarily believe in his prose, but that he can take a life and turn it into events that you can write books about.
His travels down the Mississippi, and through The Inside Passage, are journeys I would love to do myself, and write about them differently.
Anyway, I fired off an email to the JMT. Its tone was aggrieved, passionate, and engaged, but may be not.
Email to the John Muir Trust Newsletter editor (b)
I got a nice reply back, as I might have expected, saying there were too many ideas in it to make an article.
It was pretty spontaneous, and I guess that I could have gone back over it, and turned it into an article but, hey, it sits here, as follows, and I guess I leave others to judge:
“Dear Mike,
For the first time I feel very moved to comment on the work of the Trust. This may or may not qualify for publication in the next Journal, and may indeed be out of date by then.
The two articles, “The Return Of The Native”, and “Saving Energy:saving wild land” by Helen McDade (and the outline of the Trust’s policy on the same page) both struck an interlinked chord with me, and I would like to comment on the tenor of the articles, and make what become some polemical points further on.
Regarding Helen’s article (and that picture of the scale of the turbine is truly terrifying!) first, and as an example, a planning enquiry will take place on the 4th November 2008, which will finally determine whether or not 3 wind turbines will be built on Rossie Moor in Angus, adjacent to our house. This will also encompass another 14 on Montreathmont Moor in the local area. There are two local groups opposed to these turbines which are making common cause.
While I think that we need to consume less energy, and not buy so many power hungry digital gadgets, as a start, we do need to consider the means by which we generate this electricity.
My personal objection to the development at hand is more or less as Helen puts it, that foreign operators (in this case Australian) are coming here for the subsidies put up by the Government, and taken from us via our electricity bills.
There is no plan as to where to site them strategically, the company just needs an obliging farmer to provide a large field, and off you go. No real rhyme or reason.
This has been complemented for me personally because every winter, around 30,000 Pink Footed Geese make a stopover at the Montrose Basin.
Having just moved here I was amazed when they began to land in their thousands in the field adjacent to my house.
The geese have only just recovered their numbers from the last bout of persecution in the 1970s, and they are quite a sight as they fly over.
I was further amazed when tractors began bringing hunters in on a daily basis to blast these geese.
The efforts built up, until the geese have gone. It can be no coincidence that the landowner also owns the adjacent field where the turbines are to be built (though I keep that as a personal opinion).
According to Trust policy the land here would be an “intensively managed landscape”, so not really subject to Trust support.
You could not say that Angus is wild land. It has been a humanised landscape since the dawn of anybody in Scotland, and the point around which the Scottish nation coalesced.
However, I began to find the views expressed in “The Return of the Native” germane to the situation in Angus, as an example of a place where the JMT is very unlikely to look to buy “wild land”, and would like to explore this.
Reading the views expressed therein, which I presume are all from JMT members, there seems to be a variety of views as to just what is “Wild Land”, and what should happen to, and on it. Widening this discussion out a bit, to make my point I hope, I wonder if anyone read Jonathan Raban’s article in Granta 102, “The New Nature Writing” issue, the article entitled “Second Nature: The de-landscaping of the American West”?
I believe this is a useful feed in to the views expressed in the relevant Journal article.
Raban is contrasting the British and the American approaches to conservation (given the philosophical origins of the JMT this is almost “Bringing It All Back Home”!).
To paraphrase him, he says that each time he comes ‘home’ to England (he lives in Seattle) he sees a fresh blot on the landscape, a new petrol station, shopping mall, wind turbines, in the case of Rossie Moor.
But, in the British mind there is an arbitrary line between what is considered modern, and that which is antique; between “the undesirably modern and the immemorial”, so that old stuff, however junky or ugly, “takes on value because of its age alone:…..so I take indiscriminate pleasure in the packhorse bridge over the canal, the drystone wall, the field still marked by the medieval ridge and furrow system…the straight line Roman road, the Neolithic tumulus….all equally immemorial”.
There is plenty of this to savour in Angus. Each hill seems to be cluttered with a furniture of Radio mast, TV aerial and Mobile phone rig, with arterial road built in. The festooning with lights has a certain attractiveness at night, before I gladly turn my eye to the line of Scots pines on the nearer horizon, right next to the anemometer measuring the weather for The Turbine Builders (perhaps history will know them thus, a new Beaker People).
What difference would 3 turbines, as a start (and that could be part of the problem, this is not that big an area), make?
I can always avert my gaze upon the Caterthuns near Brechin, or the Aberlemno stones. However, even this “Intensively managed landscape” has a value. To insert turbines into it is to insert the industrial estate into it, and that is a whole different category. They are out of sight to most people, but to the intensive inhabitants in this small corner they bring a different set of values, along with the closing of old Rights of Way.
Maybe it would be a good idea to take that logic to its conclusion – build them on an industrial park on the town ring road. Can’t be any worse than the out of town retail development, and the ones on the outskirts of Dundee don’t really look out of place there.
Anyway, back to Raban. He then says that, in America, “the lust for the antique is no less keen…[but]…the true antiquity is wilderness. Old mining towns chasing tourist dollars, deck themselves out with false storefronts, wooden boardwalks, faux shoot-em-up saloons, but nobody’s fooled. The real thing – the pricelessly antique antique – is deep forest, the river running wild, the open prairie. There is no second nature here to fall back on, only an either/or choice between nature as it was before we came and the dreck we’ve piled on it in the recent past.”
Such Americans dare not just to dream of the return of the buffalo, or the wolf, the dynamiting of the dams on the Columbia River, they take action.
They get organised, go to court, prove a need. By contrast we British, and the JMT, are a bit more polite, but I believe that we can learn something from this attitude.
We can learn that wild land is not a list of rising categories, it either is or it isn’t. It is Nature trying to come back, whatever it puts there, or however humans want to give it a hand. And if you read Rick Bass’s book “Wild To The Heart” you could see why I could cherish Ladywell Fields in south east London when I lived there).
The British landscape is owned by only a few, and judging by some of the responses in “The Return of The Native”, this mentality runs deep.
Not giving beaver a chance is pathetic, we wiped them out, otherwise they would still be here.
But it reflects the landowners view that the “salmon fishings” would be affected. Who is the salmon fishing for? Not for me and thee chums – but for a self perpetuating group who don’t see beyond their “ownership” of a tract of land, and their right not to have anything done to it that they don’t approve of in their “time immemorial” ways..
The JMT has been sucked into this mentality, and I supported it when I joined, and still do, up to a point.
Volunteering is a different thing, put your principles into practice.
To bring the threads herein together perhaps, instead of a hierarchy of landscapes, we need to see all land as potentially wild. Rossie Moor itself is a case in point.
It seems a much degraded landscape, under the action of generations of farmers, but has been turned into an SSSI with lots of heathery scrub now making a comeback over the (small) area allocated to it.
This probably is not what it was when the Neolithic farmers started on it, but who cares. It is daring to be wild, and we humans need to be more confident that we too are “Born To Be Wild” – else why join the JMT?
Perhaps, as an organisation, we need to be looking at potential wildness, that which can be made “wild to the heart” within areas other than the Trust’s estates.
What follows from this that if a landowner is given something, say 3 wind turbines, then they have to give something back. Campaigning efforts could thus be directed there.
Something which can be made wild, even here in Angus – a field for a community woodland, or the re-wetting of a Loch long drained (like Nicholls Loch on Rossie Moor, an area managed for the pink footed geese to be safe in.
By a drip, drip, drip effect we get across the concept of what the wild is. It is not an absolute, but something that wants to be itself, and can be either left to become it, or managed to work towards it, and which would include the Trust’s policy on wild land acquisition up to now.
As the British landscape has been so intensively worked for so long, and the Trust mindset is a small one in the general sea of attitudes to “the countryside” I think the old slogan “Think Global, Act Local” is germane still.
We should not be too feart to proclaim ourselves in The American Way, too attached to our sense of locality, and our right to be there, and so let be done to it as is liked by the powers that be.
It is not a question of money, or priorities, it is a belief in the innate, more Paleolithic, relationship of human to the land.
That we are in it and of it, but not masters of it. Look where that masterly mindset has got us. And, I guess, for me, that was the existential pull to (continuing to) be a JMT member.
You could always say I am in the wrong organisation, burst my bubble!
In America, says Raban, “One’s local patch of soil is rarely an ancestral tenancy, going back through the generations, but rather a perch from which one may at almost any moment flit. That the demolition of four dams on the lower Snake – an issue that’s now being fought through the courts – would drive many farmers from their land is of no great concern to the conservation groups that have brought suit, because upping sticks and moving on has always been the way of the West. Let them be compensated, and go farm – if they must- somewhere else. Get over it”.
That’s how I increasingly feel about my own country. There is nothing left for the native soil to give, without huge chemical infusions year on year.
Unless you are a big landowner it is not even viable to be a farmer, the capital inputs are enormous and therefore they have a lot that they perceive to protect. My heart goes out to those who make £3000 a year and live on benefits. That is a mindset that deserves respect.
But, in between the interstices of farming land there are wild pockets, which can be made more so. We don’t always need big estates in the Highlands,as the Founding Father foresaw, we can do it right here, right now. Let Nature take its course in your own backyard. that is what wilderness is.
Nature coming back, bit by incremental bit, whether or not it was there in the first place (and whenever that might have been).
That is that Mike. It took a long time to write. Feel free to bin it, but thank you for the consideration.”
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