Considering recent works by Robert Macfarlane and Patrick Galbraith, Karen Lloyd poses the question: what would nature itself ask for, if given a voice?
From ‘The birds of New England and adjacent states’, Boston :Noyes, Holmes,1870 [c1867], via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
I was on the fourth floor looking out through plate glass windows when I noticed the heat-seeking missile of a red-tailed hawk, circling elegantly overhead. It so happens that one of my favourite albums of all time is Steve Earle’s Washington Square Serenade, in which in the song ‘Down Here Below’ Earle sings of a red-tailed hawk wheeling above this exact same square – Washington Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Earle’s hawk performs ‘wingstands’ high above Manhattan with a ‘penthouse view/from the tip top of the food chain’ but down here below, he writes, we mortals struggle so. It was my first day in New York, and there I was, watching life imitate art imitate life.
I was in the city with my friend and colleague Ian Convery to speak at the MOTH (More Than Human) Festival of Ideas. 80 of us including lawyers, activists, artists, theatre practitioners, writers, ecologists, poets and more had been invited to consider the rights of nature in our areas of expertise, including oceans, rivers, farming, forests, indigenous culture and much else besides. Ian and I were speaking about the English Lake District, questioning the human-centric right to roam and asking what right nature has in such a heavily roamed landscape which is visited by (a conservative estimate) 18 million tourists each year. Like me, a significant number of those millions like walking in the mountains or being on or in the rivers and lakes. Being in nature is good for us; we know this, but what if us being in nature isn’t what nature itself would ask for, if given a voice, especially in a place where wild species have haemorrhaged away to alarmingly little?
In a discussion group at the conference we were joined one afternoon by a young woman wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her cheeks skewered with tribal piercings. From the Brazilian Amazon, aided by an interpreter, the woman listened attentively.
“We have been trying to understand how you in the West are only just beginning to realise that a river or a tree is a someone,” she eventually said. “We have been watching you for a long time and trying to work out how best to help you.” At first her ideas were met by a stupefied silence, then, by slow nods of agreement. Of course! We dumb Westerners have been asleep, struggling down here below, only now beginning to contemplate how natural systems are alive, our blindness to this certainty entirely the product of industrialisation, Colonialism and Capitalism.
The publication of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? will no doubt bring the notion of rights of nature into more mainstream parlance. Famously, in 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to include ‘Rights of Nature’ in its Constitution, and it is to the Ecuadorian cloud forest and the Los Cedros River that Macfarlane travels in the first part of the book, accompanied amongst others by the social and environmental rights lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito, who also happens to be the founder of MOTH. One evening in the forest, the talk is of the price paid by locals for attempting to enact the rights of nature against gold miners. A pregnant 24-year old ‘water defender’ is shot and killed. In Junín, villagers ‘in wellies and armed with sticks’ face men with bulletproof vests, pepper-spray and pump-action shotguns. It’s deeply sobering stuff.
From a UK perspective, the violence such communities face when defending their right to water and healthy ecosystems feels very far removed. Despite this, it’s a depressing thought that even those whose livelihoods are made in protecting and enhancing nature make little demonstrable difference. Measurably, my pal who runs an RSPB site said to me recently, nationally, we’re not saving nature. There’s plenty of evidence for why this is, from the industrialisation of farming to successive governments proving themselves incapable of resourcing policies for nature recovery, even against the horrific backdrop of a 70% loss in wild species since the Second World War. Despite this, all the evidence shows that nature bounces back when given what it needs, so why have we failed so spectacularly to make progress? Under the Labour government, neglect has morphed into ideological warfare, nature excoriated as a subversive, dangerous blocker to growth. Ideological this may be, but make no mistake: violence against nature is the implicit message. And it’s not only a distortion of the truth on Labour’s part, but a U-turn on promises made to restore nature during the election campaign. The RSPB and Wildlife Trusts have challenged the government’s plan to remove essential nature protection clauses from the forthcoming planning bill, so against the government’s Orwellian distortion of truth and opposition to facts, posing the question of whether a river or a tree or a forest is alive feels urgent and necessary. At the MOTH Festival our Amazonian friend would have rolled her eyes and exclaimed, Well of course they’re alive!
How exactly do we begin to reframe our relationship with wildlife and the wider natural world so that both nature and humans can endure into the future? To answer this question, we could do worse than begin in Curridabat, a municipality of Costa Rica’s capital city. I spent some time in Curridabat last year with the team delivering Cuidad Dulce, or the Sweet City programme, through which the notion of citizenship has been extended to pollinators, trees and plants. Cuidad Dulce is the brainchild of former major Edgar Mora Altamirano, and when we spoke, he offered an important lesson in why the language we use matters. Keen to share my efforts at boosting nature in my own community, I talked about asking my local authority to stop cutting grass verges so they could be reinvented as wildflower corridors. Mora’s response brought be me up short. “We never talk about ‘stop doing;’ instead we ask, how do we reimagine the city through the eyes of a bee?” He continued, “What does a bee need to see in order to survive? The answer is ‘corridors of beauty,’ which means planting corridors of native trees and plants to facilitate the lives of pollinators, but equally importantly, as green corridors that can impact positively on the health of residents.” In Curridabat, the Cuidad Dulce logo is everywhere, on the shirts of council workers, on taxis and buses, in parks and on the sign above the door of the municipal building. Imagine that in the UK; our local authority’s going large and loud on the benefits of nature.
With project workers Laura and Michael, we set off to visit community gardens where, in return for helping out, locals take home bundles of fresh, locally grown food. It sounds like common sense; that what’s good for the bee is also good for humans, but even in Curridabat, progress is limited to the better-off parts of town. When I asked about this, Laura explained. “For two years we tried to run gardens in less well-off areas, but we got nowhere. When people need to put food on the table, clothe their kids, get them to school and go to work, initiatives like this, trying to acknowledge that the rights of nature are aligned with the rights of communities, is always going to come last.” Questions could be asked about how government support for such left-behind communities might help foster a greater sense of care for nature, but I don’t want to presume, me being an outsider — and a Westerner to boot. We visited the plant nursery where seedlings are grown ready for distributing to parks and gardens, but also to householders for planting in their own gardens or back yards, under the precedent that native plants contribute to climate amelioration and the lives of pollinators, amphibians and birds, underpinned by the concept that pollinators and plants have as much right to exist as we do. The higher ground of the nursery afforded views over red roofs and greenery to the surrounding ring of mountains. Closer in, I was delighted to come across a hive of tiny, Mariola bees, Tetragonisca angustula, each shorter in length than my little fingernail. The Mariola is one of around 60 species of stingless bees in Costa Rica, and the honey they produce is known as ‘little angel’ honey because the bees are understood to be beneficent. “Pollinators are the consultants of the natural world,” Edgar Mora said, “They are agents of prosperity; supreme reproducers, and they don’t charge a penny for it.”
My own journey towards the rights of nature paradigm begins with the deeply flawed 2017 World Heritage inscription of the Lake District, in which the practice of sheep farming in the uplands was considered of such cultural importance that it should be preserved for ever. But despite what the folks from World Heritage and the Lake District National Park will have you believe, the Lakes is one of the least ecologically diverse places in the country, much of which is a direct result of over-grazing, although there’s another, far less acknowledged problem, which is us. With such hyper-inflated tourist numbers, and increasing numbers of people in the hills and woodlands, on or in the water, what little wildlife remains has very few places left in which to live undisturbed by humans. Promoted as England’s adventure capital, almost nowhere here is off limits, and there are certainly no limits on how many tourists the place can realistically accommodate. Human disturbance impacts on habitats, on breeding outcomes and pushes wild species to the margins. Take the dabchick I have loved watching for over 40 years at Low Wood Bay, Windermere, all gone; pushed out by the sheer increase in people standing on water, boating, swimming. Do dabchick have a right to exist in the places they have lived for centuries? Consider too the rights of the golden eagle. The territory of the last pair of golden eagles in England was at Haweswater, but by 2004, they were locally extinct because, as a mostly failed ecosystem, there was little food in the Lakes for goldies which are also highly susceptible to human disturbance. (Mind you, if it were white tailed eagles we were talking about, you could have an ‘80s disco under a nest and they’d probably join in). Do we have an appetite to exclude ourselves from certain places so that eagles and other enigmatic or even unenigmatic species can exist? It’s complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s a subject we should gloss over. Back at the MOTH Festival meanwhile, Columbian Human and Social Science researcher Daniel Marín-López talked about past catastrophes of social and environmental injustices in his native Columbia, on the rights of the country’s rivers not to be dammed and the rights of people caught up in drug wars murdered at dam building-sites, buried forever underneath mountains of concrete. Against this, being concerned with an eagle’s right to exist in the Lake District or a human’s right to roam sound like first world problems. Despite this, each one is entirely valid, and they’re all to do with historic, social, cultural and political relationships with place.
In Uncommon Ground, Patrick Galbraith travels complicated terrain segueing back and forth between landowners, gamekeepers, the Right to Roam movement and more to consider access rights and nature. I was surprised (oh lordy, lordy!) to find myself agreeing with a previous editor of the Shooting Times, who is also a proponent of fox hunting, but then I thought, this is exactly the quagmire the rights of nature discourse gets you into; step in at the edge, and before you know it, you’re way over your wellies in shit. If, as a respecter of nature, and someone who time and time again notices some of the negative impacts of human disturbance, I put my head above the parapet (the shooting butt?) and suggest that actually, no; we should not be everywhere, then on past records at least no doubt I’ll be open to criticism from some quarters. Like it or not, what Galbraith has to say is significant. Coasteering, kayaking and windsurfing, he writes, ‘aren’t really about engaging with nature. They put people in the presence of it, in often genuinely wild spaces, but the nature we disturb is just collateral whilst we have fun.’ Hallelujah, I think, whilst at the same time wondering when I can next get away to the woods.
In the post-Covid era we’re waking up at last to the health benefits of being ‘in nature,’ but how exactly do we work out a system that is equitable to all? My pal Ian would probably say it like this. Under the rights of nature, the default assumption would be that all Earth beings and not only humans have intrinsic value, are morally and politically considerable, and that our institutions need to operate in ways that enable them all to function and flourish. ‘A river is not a human person, nor vice versa’ writes Macfarlane, ‘…to call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life.’’ The philosopher Stefano Mancuso encodes a bill of rights for the Nation of Plants; plants being the most overlooked genus of more-than-human life, or certainly in the West they are. Article One proposes ‘The Earth shall be the common home of life. Sovereignty shall pertain to every living being.’ I’m minded to agree, but what about the carpet moths discovered recently in every room of the house, and whose right to exist conflicts with my bank balance if I allow said moths to dine with impunity? Or what about the rights of the mouse who, chewing through electrical wiring, instigated the fire that burned my friend’s wooden house to the ground? What about the rights of rats, mosquitoes, mould, viruses? And all this is without beginning to get into how business has been expertly colonising (exploiting niches?) to prove their ‘green’ credentials. Consider the well-known bathing products company declaring itself the first in the world to give nature a seat on the board, where before every decision is made, they ask, what would nature want? Well, if you ask me, what nature would want is for them to stop selling products in single use plastics, which are decimating natural systems across the world. Nature on the board? It’s a nice enough idea, but for me it just doesn’t wash. (Sorry!)
Macfarlane and Galbraith occupy very different niches in the nature-writing ecosystem, but like it or not, both provide important ways to think about wildlife and ecosystems. We need to know about the rights of rivers and peoples elsewhere in the world but we also need to acknowledge that in our overcrowded island, some of our behaviours and even our very presence is a significant part of the problem. I recall all those voices at the MOTH Festival, so many ways to think about what nature needs, about our complicity and the prerogative of imagination to put things right. Fail to engage with the implications of our own behaviours, and as Earle writes, here we are, left struggling down below. Nobody suggested this stuff was easy, but that doesn’t mean we abandon the project before it has properly begun. Love it we might, but nature isn’t there for our convenience; not at this juncture in our proven inability to protect and enhance what precious little of it remains. Nature needs our awe. It needs our respect, but most of all, it needs us to understand what it needs.
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Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Is a River Alive?’ (Hamish Hamilton) was the Caught by the River Book of the Month for May. Read Michael Malay’s review here / buy a copy here.
Patrick Galbraith’s ‘Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship to the Countryside’ is out now and available here, published by William Collins.
Karen Lloyd is the editor of ‘North Country: An Anthology of Landscape and Nature’ (Saraband, 2022) and author of the James Cropper Wainwright Prize longlisted ‘Abundance: Nature in Recovery’ (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is a senior researcher and writer in residence with Lancaster University’s Future Places Centre.