Cherishing the peace of wild things

Seeing the natural places we love being destroyed may be the most potent catalyst we have for environmental action. But will ‘gentle stewardship’ of the earth ever recognised as the key to joy and hope for all of us? asks Mark Engineer.

There are many, many challenges with the climate and ecological emergency. How best to write about it isn’t one that gets much airtime. To be fair, it’s pretty far from being the most pressing. Still, it’s what is exercising me as I sit here on an April morning, struggling to finish this piece.

Putting it into words

Take the phrase itself. The climate and ecological emergency. Bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? Not exactly catchy. So, what’s a writer to do? Abbreviate it to the CEE? Call it simply the climate emergency, and by implication ignore the whole ecological bit? Neither really works for me. So do we need a whole new phrase? If so, what? How best to sum up a meta-crisis?

How about solastalgia? The distress one feels when a place you know changes. Often linked with environmental destruction. Different from the general anxiety we feel when we see the damage being wreaked on the world, in that it’s about somewhere specific. Somewhere we associate with home.

The word itself I don’t much care for. It seems rather dry and technical-sounding – the man who invented it, Glen Albrecht, was a philosopher – for something so visceral and instinctive. Still, let’s stick with it. I don’t have the time, brain power or word count to invent a new word today.

I felt solastalgia recently, while out walking in Barcombe. As one enters the village from the west, passes the sign and crosses the bridge, there are now mounds of earth and machines where once a field stood. Soon, there will be new housing. And as I passed it that day, I felt an almost overwhelming sadness. A tremendous sense of something lost.

It wasn’t a particularly unusual or beautiful field. Grass. Horses grazing. But passing it when coming home was a reminder of the life we chose when we moved here. The decision we made to be out in the countryside, to be surrounded by fields, woods and trees. It’s a move that has brought us great joy. And that field was a place I associated with coming home, to somewhere I’ve always felt happy. Now it’s gone and will never come back. How best to describe that feeling?

Newness, nowness, helplessness

Poets, always to the vanguard, are finding ways to explore this. I can think of none better than the wonderful Jorie Graham for writing about the rawness, the newness, the nowness and the helplessness of it. But many poets of a bygone era would have recognised the feeling, if not the word. John Clare lived through the Agricultural Revolution. He wrote of the heartbreak of seeing his beloved Northamptonshire landscape changed irrevocably; pastures ploughed, fens drained, the Commons enclosed, trees and hedges torn down. Edward Thomas is another. He saw the world he knew torn apart by war. The ushering in of modernity, and the move away from villages to towns and cities. His work, suffused with an almost uncanny sense of place and time, convey these changes like none other.

Our feelings around all this stuff aren’t just about what we’ve already lost, but also about what else we might lose. The natural world Clare moved through would have been far richer in nature than the one experienced by Thomas. He, in turn, would have seen our current landscape as an ecological desert. And what of the world that our children will walk through?

I have to tell myself that nothing is predetermined. That the future is not set in stone. I have to remind myself of the words of Albrecht himself: “I am an optimistic person and I do a lot to reverse the push for development that will create more climate change and by implication, more solastalgia.”

Part of it all

About ten minutes’ walk from my house is Knowlands Wood. Carefully managed by the same family for generations, it teems with life. In springtime, wildflowers abound and Cuckoos call out. Nightingales sing in the thickets. Even Purple Emperors can sometimes be spotted.

I walked there yesterday, in the morning. The rain had brought out the birds, and the noise was like a rainforest. I paused to take it in. A Blackcap landed on a branch not ten feet away, opened its beak, and sang. And sang. And sang.

To walk through this place brings me great joy, and also hope. It helps me believe that maybe – just maybe – we’ll get ourselves together, and apply this sort of thoughtful, gentle stewardship at scale. That when my kids are my age, the world will have changed for the better. That they’ll walk in landscapes like this all the time. And they’ll have the awareness and understanding to feel a part of it all, rather than above or separate from, or just passing through it.

I’d like to leave you with a poem by farmer, environmentalist, activist and all-round good egg Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”. To my mind it sums up all I’ve just tried to say, but far more beautifully, and in far fewer words. Enough said.

You can read it on the wonderful Scottish Poetry Library website here

Mark Engineer is an author, a nature lover and an environmental activist living with his family in Barcombe