Our Place

"Certainly no gentle nature ramble, and a very disconcerting book. I found it uncomfortable to read. I’ve just sounded off to you about how I was glad that nature writers were beginning to rub people’s noses in the reality of nature. Well, when I started reading Mark Cocker’s book, I wasn’t so glad to have my own nose rubbed in the political realities. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He starts off by telling us that the natural world we like to rhapsodise about is vanishing. The figures are terrifying: 99% of our flower-rich meadows have been destroyed in the last 70 years or so. 44 million breeding birds have just vanished from our landscape. Britain is going silent: it’s going grey instead of green, and lots of us who love the natural world find that so unbearable that we don’t (and psychologically can’t) acknowledge it. So we retreat into books which tell us that it’s all alright; that the natural world of our imagination is still there. Of course it is, to some extent, but it’s retreating fast. So this book is an uncomfortable and urgently necessary wake-up call. First of all, he sets out to tell us how bad it is by citing a large number of extremely depressing statistics. He then points out that there is very little reason to suppose that things are going to get any better. We are told that we need one million new homes in this country, but the plans are to build lots of the proposed new homes on irreplaceable natural sites. There’s a proposal, for example, to build 5,000 new homes on the outskirts of Rochester, which hosts Britain’s largest single population of nightingales. Having told us how bad it is, and how much worse it’s going to get, Cocker then goes on to identify some of the factors in our national politics and our personal psyches which explain the crisis. The most telling reason he gives is that the dominant pattern in our thought processes is not the ecological circle but the straight line. We assume, for example, that we can put pesticides and herbicides on a field, that they will work, and then they will go away. Of course that’s not true. They will keep on circulating, perhaps for hundreds or thousands of years. The destruction of the natural world can all be explained in terms of our psychotic obsession with linear progress, coupled with the ludicrous notion (which all sane people, given a moment’s reflection, know to be a lie) that the important things in life can be quantified; can be bought and sold; can appear in an auditor’s spreadsheet. The delusional love of the linear is the principal axiom of Western governments. They will never be cured. Real, free, awake people are going to have to do all the work. “We’re desperate for dominion, but dominion of a really toxic kind—a kind that will eventually kill us” There are no straight lines in nature. But the artificial outdoors is often linear. Lincolnshire is an aseptic desert, defined by straight furrows cut by a GPS-driven tractor. We are pathologically comfortable with straight lines, with tidiness, with cleanliness, with predictability. Cocker talks about the inability of urban people to cope with anything that is tangled and unpredictable—with anything, in fact, that is interesting. Since men in suits fear and kill everything that they don’t understand, there’s a war against entanglement, complexity, relationality, and greenness. We have a really dangerous desire for something we can control: plastic grass is the demonic icon of the age. We’re desperate for dominion, but dominion of a really toxic kind—a kind that will eventually kill us. There is a good sort of dominion: a humble type of stewardship. It’s ethically inevitable. I also think it’s literarily inevitable. If you’re sufficiently connected to the natural world to have the authority to write about it, the natural world should matter desperately to you. If the natural world is being eaten, you must do something about it. Even if you don’t feel this, you should feel a moral duty to the thing which is giving you an income. Mere gratitude for your income, and mere self-interest, should generate this duty. Nature writing is a sort of farming, isn’t it? We farm images from the natural world. We farm pictures from the wilderness. If farmers look after their land, nature writers should do so too."