I read something somewhere I can’t remember about how being an environmentalist and having a passion for nature can make you feel more content in life but also it can be full of grief.
It’s true.
The more you learn the more you realise the world really isn’t okay. The more you realise there is a huge gap in our collective memories about what the world could/would look like.
We go back to our childhoods to measure the demise of now.
We often don’t consider the generations before our own childhoods, and so we cling to those childhood images and impose them on the rest of the world.
‘Here is what the land should look like according to my memory of being a child…’
But there was damage done way before then, generations of animals already lost.
It’s not that we shouldn’t try to salvage what we’ve lost from childhood, I wouldn’t suggest that. But I’m just pointing out it’s a narrow part of time, it’s a blink in the eye of the damage that has already been done and is being done.
Yet it’s these little snippets of childhood wonder, of some semblance of ‘balance’ that we must hold onto, including trying to enlarge those areas in the first place.
Take the little wooded land next to where I live, I call it ‘The pathetic wood,’ because it’s stupidly small, not enough people pick up their dog’s turds, yet as pathetic as that ‘park’ is I am attached to it, it’s small but life exists on it.
The ‘pathetic wood’ ends in a huge dip to a much better-looking wood not accessible to us humans. Well, I suppose a human could get down there and back up if she was healthy and used to that kind of exercise and used to trailing through hedges and nettles etc.
Much to my disappointment though one summer when a rough pathway appeared I saw below me a ditch of wooded land that could be a haven only to be full of rubbish at the bottom. I couldn’t get down the rough path, it was too steep and it has since grown over again hiding the rubbish.
‘The pathetic wood,’ pathetic as it is is a place I go to often, I especially like to go to a particular bit not often walked on by dog walkers so I can be away from humans, or at least it gives the illusion I am.
The ditch of wooded land that could be a haven, and the pathetic wood attached perfectly capture our attempt at separating worlds. We keep the ‘pathetic wood’ or ‘park’ as others call it (I don’t like calling it a park for some reason), reasonably tidy, I mean compared to all the rubbish I saw down in the wooded haven! It still has rubbish in it and I swear most of the dog walkers don’t pick up their dogs shit unless someone else is there to witness them do it. Still, since people do attempt half-assedly to keep it somewhat ‘tidy’ (by tidy I simply mean rubbish and dog shit being picked up) the humans here have shown how alienated they are from the land that birthed us.
The park is made for us, with a path and the sudden drop to a wooded haven is separate to us something we can push aside and keep for the ‘animals’ as if we too weren’t animals. Some feel they can throw their rubbish there and who will see it? The wildlife surely won’t care, they have no concept of a bin.
I’d argue they do care because it damages their lives as well ours.
That ‘pathetic wood’ though is under threat. The council want to sell it off as it is apparently ‘surplus to requirements.’ Surplus to requirements for what? For humans? Because it certainly isn’t that, since plenty of humans walks their dog daily there and I use it often too and I’m apparently human too!
And even if humans weren’t using it plenty of non-human life uses it.
But we have cast an illusion over ourselves that we are separate and the little sudden drop into a wood no human can touch but with their rubbish, is for ‘them’ the ‘others’ aka the wildlife and so the land attached to it is deemed ‘useless,’ we could apparently put it to ‘better use.’
And so I grieve for ‘the patheic wood’ A place that I feel I have earthed myself with because I live right next to it and as a man who doesn’t get out as much as some, as pathetic as it is it’s become something bigger to me.
It’s a place where I feel like I ‘commune’ with the ‘others’ not because I talk to them (though I do sometimes) but because I sit there long enough and I am accepted into the landscape by the Jays and to my surprise once or twice now some woodpeckers and other birds.
The living things that don’t accept me as part of the landscape that looks at me oddly, they’re the humans.
SpaceTyrannosaur 