December 2023

Always, for me, this question makes me think about land. Who owns it, who lives on it, how we listen to the stories it tells. How we stop imposing our own will upon the Earth. I’ll acknowledge this is my own obsession, born of a childhood love of plants, frogs, newts, grass snakes and hares; of a fascination with yellowhammers on the edges of wheat fields and of the shifting seasonal wonder of redwings and swallows. A child, I was drawn to the washed up sadness of starfish and I still search rock pools for anemones, opening their scarlet tentacles at the point where the tides change. Questions about the future make me think of rock and soil, forest, mountain, river and farm. Part of my answer is an understanding that those who control the land govern so many aspects of our lives.

As an ecologist, I have spent years surveying wildlife, reading a place through its plants: nettles and docks tell of rich and once-disturbed soil; harebells, delicate as bees’ wings and the colour of a high, summer sky, speak of dry, sandy soils and maybe, once, grazing by sheep. On mountainsides, bracken and bluebells are the shadows of where woodlands once grew. All of these I map and photograph and note down. Back at my desk, I check what I have found against old maps of tithes and the enclosures of common land. Aerial images taken just after the Second World War show where, not long ago, there were small fields divided by hedges and trees. Now there may be houses or roads and hedgeless acres of crops. Every place has a story and often it is one of loss. A slow, quiet, genocide of the wild.

Set against this past, the future seems straightforward: put back the woods and the hedges and meadows, let the wildness back into rivers and mountains. Return least some of the commons, so that people can supplement their incomes with food or fuel, willows for making baskets, nettle for string or strong, green fabric. Grow food to feed people not profits, without spreading poisons or wastes on the land, in the air and into water. It’s the old dream that William Cobbett wrote of, after his rides across Georgian England. A vision picked up by John Seymour in the 1970s. I bought my copy of his ‘Complete Guide to Self Sufficiency’ in the 1980s, when I was twenty. Friends and I took a train from London to Machynlleth and walked three miles out of town to the Centre for Alternative Technology. I came away thinking of wind turbines and raised vegetable beds, of shared bread and rhubarb wine, horses on the land, hens in the yard and dark soil beneath my nails.

I don’t know how to get there from here. Working for a world with a future has been so much harder than I imagined at twenty. Especially today, writing in a library at dusk, as the festive lights come on beyond the windows. It’s busy out there, despite the rain. All that shopping, I think, and the belief it brings happiness, when it is part of what is killing the lives of this world. This winter, as so often before, I turn in on myself to survive. I have been taking long walks alone in quiet places, avoiding towns and social situations, writing while wrapped in a blanket, hearing the hens calling from my garden. As a friend of mine says ‘that which does not kill you gives you terrible coping mechanisms’.

With thanks to Rebecca Stonehill & Norwich Writer’s Rebel