This article is a preview from the Summer 2018 edition of New Humanist
There is a snake in our Eden. Or rather, our Eden is the snake – subtle, tempting, full of false promises, beckoning us on to ruin. The land in which we live is no longer a green and pleasant one, but as we fumble for a way back into paradise we risk opening a door on to dystopia. The landscape of modern writing on nature is haunted by the ghosts of fascism.
In her hugely influential book H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald describes watching a herd of deer on chalkland near her mother’s home. A middle-aged man, passing by, remarks: “Doesn’t it give you hope?”
“Hope?”
“Yes,” he says. “Isn’t it a relief that there’re still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these
immigrants coming in?”
Old England: a green land, but also, of course, a white one.
In February this year, a public poll aimed at identifying “the UK’s favourite nature book” gave second place to Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson’s 1927 countryside tale. Never mind, for now, the reactionary class panic of co-shortlistee The Wind in the Willows, or the gender politics of Rob Cowen’s third-placed Common Ground. Williamson was a Nazi – a ruralist, a naturalist, naïve and solitary, but a Nazi too, a fervent admirer of “the great man across the Rhine” and an adherent of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. This isn’t new information: Williamson’s post-Tarka career was dogged by publishers’ pleas to drop “the political stuff” and return to the Devon riverside. What’s worth mentioning now is the relative silence regarding his fascism, at a time when the intensity of political scrutiny across the arts and entertainment is at a generational high. Tarka gets a free pass. The rectitude of nature writing is taken as read.
Williamson was by no means the only fascist active in the post-war back-to-the-land organicist movement: leading lights included Jorian Jenks (“In every country where the Fascist banner has been carried to triumph the men on the land have regained the rights stolen from them in an era of national degeneration”) and Viscount Lymington (“in every great city there is a scum of subhuman population . . . Many are alien . . . these immigrants have invaded the slums and the high places as well”). It would be nice to be able to write off this wing of English environmentalism as an aberration – but even if it were, that would be to ignore the persistence of its key tropes within certain elements of the modern nature scene.
“There is a very unpleasant strand in the whole new folklore / landscape / Wicker Man / Witchfinder General / lost Albion / 1970s England movement,” argues writer and journalist Owen Booth. “It’s very male, very white, very straight and more than vaguely fascist.”
Consider, for instance, the Twitter account @Sherwode_Forest (“the true spirit of England”), whose 1000-plus followers are hosed daily with a venomous stream of neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism and alt-right memes, intercut with tweets about climate change and the loss of hedgerows. It’s important to note that the juxtaposition is not incidental: the emotive vision here is of a green England concreted over to build homes for immigrants, and of an English “race” under existential threat from non-whites (@Sherwode_Forest was extremely exercised by the news in February that a DNA analysis of Cheddar Man, Britain’s oldest complete skeleton, had found that the first modern Britons – who lived around 10,000 years ago – had “dark to black” skin).
While a majority of the account’s followers are far-right windbags of one stripe or another, some are respectable green-leaning campaigners or writers. One imagines that this is down to complacency and inattention (“No one who ‘fights for the wildwood’ can be bad, surely?” someone might think, as they click the follow button). It’s that free-pass mindset again. The wildwood furnishes a fig-leaf for the foulest far-right canards; fascists, no less than corporations, are adept at applying greenwash.
* * *
You can trace a lot of this sort of stuff back to the right-wing ruralism of Williamson and Co – but it’s in the nature of environmental politics to be messy, and there are various other routes you can follow through environmentalist history to arrive in much the same dark place. From the misanthropic fringe of the 1980s Deep Ecology scene, for instance, Edward Abbey wrote Trumpishly of “culturally-morally-genetically impoverished” immigrants hampering his hopes for a “spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful – yes, beautiful! – society” in the US.
In his essay “The Limits Of Utopia”, the fantasy fiction writer and activist China Miéville writes:
Start with heuristics like rural versus urban, nature versus the social, and in the face of oppressive power you easily become complicit, or worse, in environmental injustice, in racism. Such simplistic urbophobic utopianism can unite the most nostalgic conservative seeking solace in a national park with the most extropian post-hippy touting an eco-start-up.
It might sometimes seem that nature writing as a genre has overcome or transcended the sort of nostalgic urbophobia with which it has long been associated (with good reason – here’s Williamson again, on visiting London: “Civilisation is chromium fittings, radio, love with pessary, rubber girdles, perms . . . Civilisation is white sepulchral bread, gin, and homosexual jokes in the Shaftesbury Avenue theatres. Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition”).
What with edgelands and the unofficial countryside, the new nature writers mooning over power station hulks and dead foxes on railway sidings, hasn’t the genre moved decisively to own the urban as well as the rural space, to occupy Babylon as well as Eden? Well, up to a point. The urban is valid where it is seen to comply with the sublime aesthetic; where it doesn’t – where it produces smartphones (nature writers hate a smartphone) or airports (“non-places”, declares Tim Dee, a doyen of modern nature writing), televisions or tourists, it’s more often than not considered surplus to requirements. And sometimes it’s not easy to distinguish urbophobia from misanthropy. Cities are, after all, largely defined by populousness – by people. When an eco-nihilist like Paul Kingsnorth, writing in the Guardian, can quote these lines from Norman Lewis –
I’m looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.
– without raising eyebrows, I think it’s valid to be concerned about how and why such normalisation of people-hating has come about, and where such a position might lead. Writing on assumed privilege in the work of the late “new nature writing” godfather Roger Deakin, Gary Budden, a writer, anti-fascist and astute observer of modern British fascism, has noted that Deakin “never once consider[s] perhaps people don’t choose to live in polluted urban environments and be disengaged with nature . . . It’s not too far from there to thinking ill of working-class or immigrant communities for not understanding or appreciating the natural world ‘properly’.”
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While I’d maintain – in common with many and perhaps most writers on nature – that joined-up thinking on environmentalism necessitates a progressive slant in one’s politics (towards industrial regulation, land reform and internationalism, for instance), it’s equally true to say that there are live themes in the green debate – beyond simple-minded volkish notions of the white English yeoman – to which reactionary ideas can be readily attached. Urbanisation can be framed as above all an immigration issue, global population pressure used as a stick with which to beat non-majority-white nations; local problems with invasive species like mink encourage parallels with “illegals” (a wildlife warden once spoke knowingly to me of “unwelcome immigrants” as we discussed squirrels).
Fascism is a resourceful parasite. There are few fields of modern life into which it can’t find a way. It might not be that nature writing, or environmentalism more broadly, is in itself uniquely or even unusually vulnerable; what is concerning is that, where nature is concerned, where we write and talk and think about our relationships with wild things and wild landscapes, our guard tends to come down. We forget to be vigilant.
“In the current political climate,” Budden says, “stuff that can seem harmless and a bit woolly can end up lending itself to some very dangerous narratives about belonging and national identity, all too relevant in the Brexit era with the far-right on the move again and being taken seriously in a way that would have seemed unthinkable 20 years ago.”
Perhaps, drunk on birdsong, drowsy among the wildflowers, we half-imagine that Old England, that green and pleasant land, was real after all, and not, as Helen Macdonald has said, “an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings”.
“We take solace in pictures,” Macdonald writes, “and wipe the hills of history.” We lose ourselves in reveries of Eden. The snake whispers to us, and we listen.
A reference to an academic paper by Kate Oakley that discussed Rob Cowen's "Common Ground" has been removed from this article, because it has subsequently emerged that the paper contained errors and is being rewritten. We are happy to make this clear.
