Rage and the Sycamore Gap Tree

Photo credit: WikiMedia Commons/Gordon Leggett

Why was the national response to the felling of a single tree in Northumberland so passionate when trees are being cut down in their thousands every day? Lewes writer and activist Mark Engineer explores the root cause of our sense of loss…and what it might also tell us about our deeper sense of guilt about the world we’ve created.

Warning: This piece contains amateur psychology.

On 15th July, Adam Carruthers and Daniel Graham were sent to jail for the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree. No one knows quite why they did what they did. Explanations range from bravado to a desire for notoriety, to some weird grudge against the tree, to drunken stupidity (though the prosecution disputed that). This piece isn’t a rehash of the facts of the case. It isn’t an exploration of their motivations. Instead, I’d like to explore the fallout.

The story went viral. Properly, globally viral. The levels of rage matched only by the outpouring of grief. “It was just a tree,” a bemused Carruthers told a jury. “It was almost as if someone had been murdered.” He clearly misunderstood the feeling for this particular tree. The Guardian’s North of England correspondent put it thus: “It was a beautiful, life-enhancing place for countless photographs, declarations of love, engagements, birthdays and ash scatterings – but it was also more than that. Many considered it part of the DNA of north-east England. Its felling was seen as a symbol of humanity’s wider war on nature.”

The tree might be all those things. And all the rage and grief will be part of a societal process of mourning for a vanishing world (perhaps a form of societal solastalgia, which I’ve written about before.) No doubts on that score. But I think, as so often with this stuff, it’s more complicated. This thoughtful piece on the BBC website talks about the UK’s weird relationship with trees, and put me in mind of Auden’s famous quote: “A culture is no better than its woods”. But I’d like try and go even deeper and broader than this.

Let’s start by examining my own feelings as the story broke and the backlash began. Like others, I felt sad and angry. But my feelings weren’t so much about this tree and these men. Where, I thought, was the rage and grief for all the other trees we’ve killed? The ancient forests destroyed for the HS2 vanity project? The trees felled for the egregious, government-subsidised Drax power station? The rainforests torn down, year upon year, decade after decade, to swell the coffers of the giants of logging, food, and agribusiness? We know it’s going on. We allow it. We collude in it. We elect the Trumps and Johnsons and Bolsonaros, and let them and their business pals continue to make war on nature, and live our comfortable, convenient lives, knowing very well that somewhere else in the present and in the future, a price is being paid. And yet here we are, getting angry with two idiots from Cumbria! So I raged at the time.

Let’s drill down into this. We all know, at some level, that what we’re doing is terribly wrong. And we cannot bear that knowledge. So we create straw men, convenient scapegoats like Carruthers and Graham, and we project our feelings of guilt onto them. And it helps us feel temporarily better. For just a little while, we can feel morally superior in our collective Othering. But the guilt doesn’t go away. We know in a sense that we’re all Carruthers and Graham. And we can’t bear it.

This projection, again, is surely part of it. But not, I think, all of it. Our feelings around environmental destruction are a hot mess. I read a quote from a woman from Northumberland, who attended the trial. “Why do they need to come here and cut our trees down?” she said. “There’s plenty of trees in Cumbria.” Unpack that, if you like.

And what about me, with my understanding of this societal guilt and appreciation of complexity? My rarified, oh-so-enlightened eco-brain? Am I somehow above it all? Well…no.

As an environmentalist, you bear the brunt of a lot of people’s anger. The eye-rolls. The snark. Oh, here he comes! Time to stop talking about flying! The occasional outright abuse. Oh, you bleeding heart, banging on about dead dolphins or whatever! You snowflake hypocrite, driving to that protest and waving a cardboard sign! It goes with the territory, and you accept it, but it hurts. “Why are they all so mad at us?” a friend once said to me while we were at a protest. “Why aren’t they mad with what’s going on?” The reason I gave was that in that particular moment, we were the straw men. But is this distinction I’ve drawn between us and them not simply another Othering? Because I know, as every environmentalist knows, that I’m as compromised and culpable as everyone else? Uncomfortable questions. But essential ones.

Maybe the greatest tragedy in this sad story lies in what it tells us about the world we’ve created. A world where a Carruthers can scratch his head and wonder why the fuss over “just a tree.” Where we can see that tree as something we in some way own – as a happy memory, an icon, an opportunity for a good selfie, a source of regional pride – rather than a living, flourishing thing. Where we’re apart from nature, above it, owners of it, rather than part of a wonderful, living, pulsating, breathing world.

Green shoots are growing from the stump of the tree. Again, this is held to be a Good Thing. And in itself, it of course is. But I think it’s also too convenient. Because the story comforts us. It lets us believe that nature is somehow indestructible. And this perpetuates the greatest self-deception of all – that we can both love nature and destroy it. That we can carry on as we are, and somehow, magically, everything will be OK.