THE NEED.

I was brought up in a city.
I found a space by the shore where I felt at ease and then found things to do there so I could stay.
There are thousands of others like me.
- People who want to relate to a place that is ruled by non-human forces.

My first mistress was the Tide, as I picked winkles at low-water.
I suspect l still know every local rock-pool better than the most enthusiastic local marine-biologist.
I bought a small boat and made and set some lobster-pots.
The shore is a fantastic place to pit your upbringing against your instincts.

I then got engrossed by forests and bogs, in search at first for moss..
The best bogs are heaven, with a sense of unlimited space and sky, the worst plantations an impersonal and claustropbic hell.

[I didn’t realise it at the time but I was witness to the last throes of a mad human incursion into our last wetland wilderness as I thrashed about amongst young sitka spruce looking for moss.]

The damage I saw as a gatherer was INDUSTRIAL in origin. Callous mechanical interventions into the remotest places.
-Plastic flotsam and ring-pulls on the beach; spruces & rhododendron and Japanese knotweed on the bogland.

the task

My assumption is that our main efforts now are going to be how to restore some of the biodiversity to our post-industrial rural eco-systems and our context in them..

I contend that this task is best done by peopling a landscape.

My own romantic hypothesis is that peasant activities created some our richest habitats.
Environmental degradation came relatively recently, and was the result of farming/fishing & forestry practices being compromised by the headlong pursuit of greater yields at lower costs. Farms became in effect large industrial units, managed by outside considerations. Their distinct topographies and soil-types were chemically and mechanically neutralised.
Forests became anything that grew to volume fast.

How do we re-create a low-input patchwork of holdings and activities in this post-war desert?

The other ecological oases were big estates, such as those remnant jewels ,the royal hunting forests.
These are relatively simple to control, as occupants’ activities were usually limited by ancient feudal strictures.
Land management organisations like the Forestry Commission and Conservation Trusts all too readily adopted the authority of a similar mantle of lordship over lands in their care and feel no compunction about excluding access and working activity in their domain.

You can’t put an old peasant- cropped eco-system on hold.
Somebody tell them.

How do we integrate people and their economies of care into these derelict parklands?

The care works both ways.
The main human loss in the industrialisation of the countryside was context.
Context implies a scale to things where your labours have positive effect.
As you walked in for supper, you looked back at what you had done.that day.

Surely the best thing we can do now is to create the conditions for a mutual therapy between us and our battered landscapes.
This implies an act of faith, as it implies wrestling large swathes of land from centralised control and returning it to local human use.

I found a way to relate intimately to different places by gathering..
Others are adept at cultivation and husbandry.

I used to think the sons left working on farms were the ones without the initiative to escape, but there are people who get so struck by fealty to a place or a flock or stand of trees so that they see no reason to leave.
Not all farmers are money-grabbing bastards, and the ones who are were encouraged to be so by the government for the last 50 years.

Huge depopulated estates of maize or sitka spruce or stagnant heritage have no place anymore on this island of dreamers.

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