It is the strangest doublethink. As I write, one third of Pakistan is underwater. Recently in Science, a team led by David Armstrong McKay published findings that indicate global warming has already passed the threshold for triggering five disastrous tipping points, from ice-sheet collapse to permafrost thaw. Even in temperate Britain, summer 2022 brought widespread drought and the highest temperatures the country has ever recorded. We – at least, “we progressives” – know this. Yet our default, when it comes to the natural environment, seems to be a long comfortable yawn. That stuff “out there”, the barely differentiated bird and plant life blurring beyond the car windows, isn’t really worth getting to know, is it? We seem to assume it is a cultural and political dead zone, where nothing interesting could possibly happen.
Yet we make an exception for big-scale nature. Shades of imperial heroics haunt TV expeditions to film rare, faraway species, or beautifully judged literary works in which middle-class white men go off alone to explore mountains, woods or rivers – othering even the natural environment. Of course, something is better than nothing. No one would deny that David Attenborough, or writers like Richard Deakin or Robert MacFarlane, have made a difference not only to the popularity of the natural world as entertainment, but to what we know about it. But still, this strikes a somewhat post-colonial note.
That’s not to make some insulting equivalence between the human suffering Britain and other countries have already inflicted, and the suffering being inflicted on our neighbour species today. But, while unchecked climate change will eventually destroy us all, the people who will suffer first and worst will be in the global south. And in both the recent imperial past and the near future, this damage results from a culture of othering. It is a dangerous nonsense to turn the world around us – like the people of that world – into something we don’t need to bother with because it is both, in the immortal words of Father Ted, “small: far away”.
“We’re not from London,” cry the hopelessly metropolitan protagonists of Withnail and I (1987), out of their depth in the rain-soaked Lake District. But of course they are: and the satire, rounded like all the best writing, shows their agreeable heedlessness, as they leave field gates open wide, solicit a poacher in public and prove unable even to feed themselves. The natural environment is neither tiny nor distant. Today’s intellectual and, increasingly, popular cultures take the collapse of the global biosphere seriously. But not so the fact that the quotidian, vaguely apprehended British countryside is – for all of us here on these islands, right now, in every moment – our local natural environment. The countryside is what our urban areas sit within; and it’s what sustains them.
The countryside is anything but a-political
It’s also an increasingly radicalised space, at the forefront of our collective attempts to manage the climate emergency. The Johnson administration was close to advocates of rewilding. Farming communities – particularly in the less wealthy parts of the country often selected for such projects, because land there costs less – see rewilding as a rich man’s hobby which is pricing them out of existence. Some explicitly cite parallels with the paralegal process of enclosure, which culminated in the 18th century. This saw productive agriculture, and the livelihoods of ordinary people in rural communities, cleared away to make room for the hobby parks and model farms of the wealthy. As today’s farmers point out, food comes ultimately from land, not factories; food security is an important part of biosecurity; and farming where we live slashes carbon-heavy food miles.
The connection between land and food, though, often seems to be missing from rewilders’ thinking: perhaps because the reality, which is that we need to find ways to farm sustainably, is so complex. Connected thought is also missing from the commercial strategy of buying up productive farmland for carbon offset sinks. Changing ownership of a green space does not create more of it. Meanwhile, amid political chaos at Westminster, the environment appears to be low on the agenda. The short-lived Truss government was not interested even in greenwashing; her September mini-budget was seen by environmentalists as a clear “attack on nature”. Sunak’s government reversed many of these measures – reinstating the ban on fracking and pledging more offshore wind – but ministers have repeatedly framed environmental issues as a sideshow. The early days of Sunak’s premiership were dogged by controversy over his reluctance to attend the COP27 climate summit.
So what’s gone wrong? Why can we not fix our attention on the British countryside for long enough to think and act rationally in relation to it? More than we surely realise – and leaving aside the particular shamelessness of this new governmental asset-stripping – this has to do with our culture. If we think of our natural environment as remote, it’s because it’s so often presented that way. When William Morris designed his wallpapers and fabrics, in which vines and roses become a repeating frieze, he was developing what he understood as good socialist practice. In his workshops, craftsmen and women could earn their living in ways that allowed them to further their skills, and to take ownership of the (improved) results.
Yet it was adoption in the nation’s gift shops that finally made these designs ubiquitous – as symbols, ironically, of middle-class Britain. We no longer hear, in their handmade origins, the echo of earlier movements seeking to afford workers self-sufficiency, such as Chartism. Instead, we fall back on thinking of workers and their rights as necessarily urban. That we do so is another consequence of enclosure because the ordinary people it displaced into cities became cheap labour for the industrial revolution’s “dark Satanic mills.”
That famous phrase comes from the Romantic poet William Blake (in “Jerusalem”). It’s something of an irony that, at the very time these upheavals were taking place, Romanticism was advancing ideas of human rights centering on the inalienable status of the self as a human. We take for granted the ideas of liberty and equality, if not fraternity, that were first linked by François Fénelon at the dawn of the Enlightenment; they took their first steps onto the political stage with the Romantic-era French Revolution. On this side of the Channel, political philosophers including William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, politicised intellectuals Thomas Jefferson Hogg and James Leigh Hunt, and writers and activists including Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, were arguing for a person-centred dismantling of traditional institutions, including monarchy and marriage, and a recourse to personal judgment rather than social and religious obedience.
Let's learn from the Romantics
So the fine-tuned Romantic “sensibility” the more conservative Jane Austen mocked in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Northanger Abbey (1817) was more than self-indulgence. It was a form of heightened awareness underpinned by political philosophy. The Tory governments of the early 19th century effectively stamped out revolutionary thought, not least by repeated suspensions of habeas corpus and the right to a fair trial. This posed a threat for those it deemed subversives: many, including the Leigh Hunts and the Shelleys, went into political exile in Europe. And it’s this, rather than mere emotion or artistic expression, that’s actually going on in those Romantic representations of the natural environment which are so often, paradoxically, co-opted to present the British countryside as picturesque, old-fashioned and unchanging. In fact, these representations were urgently new: and they were created in response to an era of rapid change.
Look again and the evidence is everywhere, as I rediscovered recently in writing and thinking about the Romantic encounter with the countryside. William Wordsworth “wandered lonely as a cloud” because the countryside was newly depopulated, and the sense you get when you’re alone in the high fells is vertiginous – like looking up into a nearly cloudless sky and wondering why you don’t fall up into it. John Constable’s Dedham Vale, away from the worker community at Flatford Mill, is empty for the same reason, as the solitary observer becomes newly aware of every rustle or squeak. J. M. W. Turner’s wide horizons record this too, as up to date in their way as his brilliant portrayal of speed on Maidenhead viaduct in Wind, Steam, Speed. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” takes a high wind in Florence as an occasion to evoke the human – and ecological – potential for change and revolution.
What I’m saying, then, is that in a time of crisis we need to pay attention to everything surrounding us. Not only our natural environment, but our culture. We should keep a particular eye on ideas so familiar we think they’re our own. Our assumptions about the countryside have held us back from paying attention to catastrophes unfolding there in plain sight. Such assumptions emerge from historical and cultural circumstance. They are the reason we shouldn’t ignore historical moments like Romanticism, which have shaped our relationship with rural life, and which therefore cannot be “over and done”.
Close up, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Wordsworths in Somerset – or Lord Byron and the Shelleys in Switzerland – probably splashed about in country mud just as helplessly as Bruce Robinson’s Withnail. But the lesson of Romanticism itself – rather than our reception of it as decorative cliché – must be its fearlessness in taking the rural environment as a site of and for radical rethinking. We too need to become unafraid of the proximity of the countryside: as the series of lived realities with which, even in town, we all relate. And if an increasingly authoritarian government claims that paying attention to such things is both uneconomic and impractical – arts and humanities, anyone? – perhaps we need to ask ourselves whose version of the natural environment, as of things in general, we are meant unquestioningly to accept.
Fiona Sampson’s “Starlight Wood: Walking Back to the Romantic Countryside” is published by Hachette
This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
