I have a reputation for spoiling landscapes for people. That’s the trouble with being an ecologist, and particularly a human ecologist. You get taken somewhere by somebody, and then you read the landscape in such a way as to spoil it for them!
For example, my French wife took me to one of her family’s favourite spots in the Alps. She asked me what I thought of this place that she’d loved since childhood, and I said: ‘Well, it’s beautiful. But it’s a fossilised landscape. It was created by pastoral practices now discontinued and so, sadly, it’s dying.’
Saddened
and a little doubtful, she took me to see a local farmer. True enough, he
confirmed, very few people are still following the old grazing practices. Why
make hay when you can import it so much more easily from further down the
valley? To make matters worse, it’s getting ever more difficult for the few
traditional farmers who remain to make a living. Without a certain critical
mass, there just isn’t enough networking to share labour and resources. As a
result, both a way of life and, more slowly, the landscape that it created over
many generations are under transition. As the human ecology of place unravels,
so does its natural ecology.
The
same is true all over Europe. I see it every time I go back to my home island,
Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. At one time, the blown-sand machair
coastal grasslands were covered with raised beds (‘lazybeds’), which were the
arable mainstay of the community. Today, it’s cheaper to buy potatoes from the
shop. In consequence, the machairs don’t get fertilised with seaweed,
dung and soot the way they used to. It’s thought that this causes them to
suffer gradual nutrient reduction and so the vegetation cover becomes less
resilient. When winter storms come, the wind can more easily get in underneath
the turf and cause massive sand blow-outs.
The
lesson, again, is that people in the past have substantially made many of the
landscapes we most know and love. I find this particularly evident as you leave
Scotland and fly across the Irish Sea. On reaching Ireland you immediately
experience the sense not just of a different country, but a different history
and attitude to landscape.
The power of
place
In
Britain, the countryside has been sanitised of its people since the 18th
century Enclosures
and Highland
Clearances. Left behind is a landscape in which, too often, ‘everyone who
ever mattered is dead and gone.’
Thanks
to landlords, and the planning systems that their social class in political
power constructed, rural life tends to be the preserve of the rich and their
servants. The poor more often live up an urban high-rise with a TV as their
only window on nature.
In
contrast, Ireland’s countryside is still alive with human settlement. It’s a
cultural landscape where people and nature have co-evolved into communities of
place.
Place
matters in Celtic
identity. This sees the social realm as being much more than a mere
community of interests, but rather, a holistic community of place. It’s a very
powerful thing that goes right to the soul. It enters our bones and even the
smell of who we are.
Genesis
27 has the poetry to name what the sterilised modern world misses. ‘See,’
said the aged and blind Isaac, reaching out, as he thought, to confirm the
identity of his son Esau. ‘The smell of my son is as the smell of a field
which the Lord hath blessed.’
Even the vexed problem of incomers can be reconciled by
the power of place. No less an arch-colonist than Edmund Spenser
lamented of Ireland back in 1589: ‘I heard that any English there should bee
worse then the Irish: Lord, how quickely doth that countrey alter mens
natures!’ If you stay in a place long enough, you eventually start to partake
of the qualities of that place.
At least, that was true then. In those days people were
far less mobile. You couldn’t buy corn from America or chicken from Thailand.
You had to stand the ground on which you stood. And that way the ground could
work its magic. It could heal and sustain the culture.
Today, if we want to keep a grip on culture as well as
conserve the environment, we must plan, consciously, to maximise what the
experts call ‘linkages and multipliers’ with our local place. We must do so not
just at the economic level, but also the psychological, spiritual and cultural
levels of what it means to be a human being.
Planning for community
In June 2002, I was invited to North Cork in Ireland to
speak at an event called A Rural
Planning Symposium for Duhallow. The organisers had read my book called, for reasons that will by now
be evident, Soil and Soul, and they wanted to share with their county
planners ideas about the relationship between community, spirit and place.
I knew that Ireland was in the middle of a major debate
about rural strategy focused round a policy document called the National Spatial Strategy.
I accessed it via the Internet before going there, and was both fascinated and
disturbed to find very little awareness in the Dublin-based planners’ minds of
what place is really about.
Yes, the strategy claims to be ‘about people and
places’, but nowhere does it mention co-operation upon which community
is built. Instead, it emphasises ‘the enhancement of national competitiveness’.
Maintaining the cultural heritage is actually listed last
in the Strategy’s guiding vision. One is reminded only too poignantly of
Ireland’s great scholar, Daniel Corkery who, in his 1924 masterpiece, The Hidden Ireland,
laments: ‘And how soon we became aware that what the writers in English omitted
concerned the mind and the soul – the hidden world!’
Of
course, to Corkery ‘the writers in English’ meant those ‘improvers’ and
colonisers who saw no value in a place other than its capacity for economic production.
Gaelic culture, by contrast, understood place not just for what it could grow,
but also for its mythology, its stories, and the poetry and song that flowed
from every rock, flower, and river. As writers such as William Blake and
Shakespeare show, Anglo-British culture too is capable of such understanding,
but sadly, it has lost much of it as English has become the language first of
colonisation and now of its corporate equivalent – globalisation.
Ireland’s
National Spatial Strategy is seen by many grassroots folk as bearing too
much of the hallmark of planners trained in British university departments.
Yes, it contains admirable proposals for shifting population growth away from
Dublin, but it suggests building up regional urban centres rather than making
it easy for local people to continue living in their local rural
neighbourhoods.
Whether
in Britain or in Ireland, I think this is a mistake. It may be cheaper, as the
County Cork planners told the conference, to have people living in towns. But
how do they calculate these sums? Do they look only at infrastructure
provision, or do they cost in such ‘externalities’ as social work and policing
costs?
I
think it is vital that people can, if they wish to, continue living with the
land even if not directly from it. Planning
policy should favour locals wanting to maintain their roots. But how can
that be achieved without ripping up more and more of the countryside in the way
that’s been blighting Ireland in recent years?
The spirit of
settlement
