I don't precisely know...

The photograph shows a rather cool sundial at the Battle of Bosworth Heritage Centre. I went there for a Woodland Trust event. We had a guided walk - which was not about trees at all but about the whole history of the Wars of the Roses leading up to the Battle of Bosworth and it'd repercussions. The tour guide, Harry, was excellent. Earlier in the week I'd been to a Woodland Trust training day, which was all about trees.

On both occasions, I met volunteers with vast amounts of experience, or none, or in between, and a lot of love for trees.

But always, I feel there's something missing. There's all this data and facts involved and the people surely act out of passion... but the passion, the emotion, the deep meaningfulness never seems to come across. I have felt that working with some of the Wildlife Trust Reserves Officers, but often, the what-really-matters seems to be... taken for granted... unspoken... unacknowledged.

This is a problem, because those of us who get involved are the choir. For the unconverted, it's not lists of facts and data that'll get them singing from the same hymn sheet, to stretch this analogy to its limits, but inspiring that fire in the soul, the fast beating of the heart in the presence of a robin, an oak, a crow, a poplar, a hare, an ash, a squirrel, fox, badger, hedgehog.

Brief segue... The baby squirrel that scares the crows has mange and I am most upset.

Poor little thing. I don't think Three and Four care, though.

Back to the topic.

We have made nature not just something "out there that's not us", that we have to "visit", but something abstract, made up of numbers and theories and regulations and practices and ecosystem services and separate habitats and data and maps and graphs and monetary value and recreational benefits.

I've recently read two books that make similar points - Dave Foreman's Take Back Conservation and Jack Turner's The Abstract Wild. Foreman is against seeing nature as a resource, Turner wants an appreciation of wildness, rather than wilderness. He believes that to truly have epiphanic moments, one needs months in untraveled, unmapped country - but that we should all do this, or have the opportunity to do this. I have much sympathy with both views, particularly Turner's ideas about how our sense of "nature' is mediated by expectation and how our experience of it ends up being artificial.

He writes:

We treat the natural world according to our experience of it. Without aura, wildness, magic, spirit, holiness, the sacred, and soul, we treat flora, fauna, art, and landscape as resources and amusement. Fun. Their importance is merely a function of current fashions in hobbies. Virtually all of southern Utah is now photographed and exhibited to the public, so much so that looking at photographs of arches or pictographs, reading a guide book, examining maps, receiving instructions on where to go, where to camp, what to expect, how to act—and being watched over the entire time by a cadre of rangers—is now the normal mode of experience. Most people know no other.

How can we be struck by wonder when nothing is new to us? When everything has been seen before, whether in person or remotely?

In another of the essays, he says:

Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” The conservation movement has put much thought, time, effort, and money into public policy and science, and far too little into direct personal experience and the arts. There is nothing wrong with public policy and science, but since they will not produce love, they must remain secondary in the cause of preservation.

I wonder if Forest Schools even inspire love? Familiarity, yes, and knowledge, but that rich caring appreciation for some place that is a part of you, an extension of you? We are always tourists in nature, not even travelers, let alone inhabitants. And even those who spend much time in it are fixated on improving it, controlling it, knowing so much that they can have "it", the whole rich complexity and uniqueness of that place that is not, in fact, any other place, reduced to a data sheet of numbers of species.

Turner puts this better:

As Anthony Giddens says in discussing the consequences of modernity, “The ‘end of nature’ means that the natural world has become in large part a ‘created environment’ consisting of humanly structured systems whose motive power and dynamics derive from socially organized knowledge-claims rather than from influences exogenous to human activity.” This is just as true of national parks and designer wilderness as it is of Disneyland. Created environments have that aura of hyperreality so common in modern life. They “are all updated forms of Cain’s desire to return home by remaking the original creation. The tragedy is that in attempting to recover paradise we accelerate the murder of nature.” Nature “ends” because it loses its own self- ordering structure, hence its autonomy, hence its wildness.

His solution, well, I'm not sure it's a solution, but it's something, is about being in a place, staying in a place, feeling into a place:

Phenology requires a complete immersion in place over time so that the attention, the senses, and the mind can scrutinize and discern widely—the dates of arrivals and departures, the births, the flourishings, the decays, and the deaths of wild things, their successions, synchronicities, dependencies, reciprocities, and cycles—the lived life of the earth. To be absorbed in this life is to merge with larger patterns. Here ecology is not studied, but felt, so that truths become known in the same way a child learns hot from cold—truths that are immune from doubt and argument and, most important, can never be taken away. Here is the common wisdom of indigenous peoples, a wisdom that cannot emerge from tourism in a relic wilderness.

We can get that: the garden, the park with the crows, the copse. We can return and return and return and know they generations and start to sense the communities, the dynamic, the jizz or a place. Through that, it becomes precious. Sacred. Not through controlling it.

My final quote from Turner, or, rather, from Walter Benjamin (whom I quoted when I "told a story"), relates to something I have been thinking about, the need to be enraptured by story not bombarded by facts:

As Walter Benjamin remarks in his essay “The Storyteller,” “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. . . . It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day".