THE SCARE

An air of moral outrage hangs over Gathering.

No year passes without lurid press reports of gangs ripping up precious bogland mosses and wildwood flower corms.
The assumption is that gathering is wrong. –is yet more proof of the heinous activities of irresponsible rural people.

This justifies the need for an educated elite to oversee and curtail activities in the countryside, so for a start appreciate these stories as ’ propaganda. Conservation is big business.

Gathering is a timeless activity, both for staples like berries, fungi, and firewood, and for gain.
Like every human gesture it can be done well or badly.
Unlike many human activities its effects are temporary.
The plunder of a rare sphagnum bog or bluebell wood is best understood as a commentary on the loss of such habitats.
Bad gathering can degrade an ecology, but it is bad farming and forestry and development that destroys them.

cultural defaults

I think it’s worth checking how much your response is socially engrained.
Urban dwellers have always had a confused attitude to the ‘Countryside’.
You can see this just looking for any word to describe ‘non-urban’ space that is not steeped in sentiment.

Alongside a sense of urbane superiority has run a wistful yearning for lost innocence.
Courtly and intellectual circles fantasised a Garden of Eden and peopled it with nymphs and shepherds . Noble Savages, buxom milkmaids and wending weary ploughmen.

Our Contemporary imagery is essentially more of the same.

Cultural superiority now is expressed as sensitive awareness of the ravages of Man upon the Planet, seen alongside myriad images of a threatened and wonderful Paradise in wild-life footage.

This cocktail of remorse, envy and romantic longing is a heady potion, but may stop you doing any serious, original thinking about non-urban issues..

The ultimate human imposition upon the planet is the city

Another deep cultural bias I detect against ‘gathering’ is that of the ‘landed’ suspicion of itinerants..
Cultivation versus wayfaring.
This could go right back to the hostility between early farmers and nomadic hunters & gatherers; to Western settlers versus Asiatic hordes.
Our attitude to gypsies and New Age travellers epitomises this.

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