England’s tragedy was that its identity became so closely entwined with the commercial and imperial adventures of its elite that it became hard to tell them apart. The smallness of England was replaced with the bombast of Britain, and when Britain’s empire collapsed, so did England’s sense of itself. Now, as the nation is bought up by a global plutocracy and sold back to its people, questions offer themselves up: can we remember that other history? Does it still matter? In an age in which imperial adventures have been rebranded as ‘global competition’, can England make itself small again?
*
Britain’s forthcoming general election will be a curious affair. It will be fought between three big political parties, all of whom will be loudly committed to the United Kingdom but whose political writ, should they win, will run mainly in England alone. The insurgent populist party, which even has ‘UK’ in its name, will bang the drum for the union with equal bombast, whilst focusing on an issue – immigration – that affects mainly England.
At times like these, a nation needs its radicals. Unfortunately, the English left is uncomfortable with the idea of nations in general and the English nation in particular. For a long time now, it has been common in leftish circles to argue that nations are dangerous things, that connection to place and history are foreshadows of the twin bogeymen of fascism and racism, and that the future lies with a kind of internationalist humanitarianism, in which such ‘parochial’ concerns are left behind. The failure of this bloodlessly intellectual vision to capture the human imagination for over a century has still not killed it off.
The English left famously exhibits a strange national self-loathing that doesn’t seem mirrored in any comparable European country. Radicals in France, Spain or Greece seem to have no problem couching their challenges to existing authority in language that grasps the meaning of nationhood, and even exhibits pride in it. But in England it is standard for people who consider themselves in some way ‘anti-establishment’ to sneer at their national identity. This is not a new phenomenon. ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,’ wrote George Orwell in his 1941 pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn. ‘In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.’
Whatever the origins of this pathology, the English left should understand that if you’re going to take a people’s story away from them, you need a better one to replace it with. Attacking that story as the ‘parochial’ offerings of a ‘little Englander’ is not going to help your cause. Quite the opposite: this tendency to dismiss or condemn feelings of attachment to place, nation and identity simply means that those things become associated instead with the political right, and when people feel those things are threatened, it will be the right they turn to. This goes a long way to explaining the rise of UKIP. The left’s response to that rise – to mock its supporters or call them fascists, or both – shows that at least some of Orwell’s England is still with us.
Sometimes, the best way of telling new stories is to reclaim old words. The word ‘parochial’ might be a good place to start. ‘All great civilisations are built on parochialism,’ wrote the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh in 1952. ‘Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals.’ Parochialism is universal: it sounds like a contradiction, but only if you don’t fully grasp its meaning. ‘Parochial’ literally means ‘of the parish’. It denotes the small and the particular and the specific. It means knowing where you are. It can also mean insular and narrow-minded, but it doesn’t have to, any more than ‘cosmopolitan’ has to mean snobbish and rootless.
This negative meaning has attached itself to the word because contemporary globalised culture is resolutely anti-parochial. It sets out to destroy local particularity and our attachment to it, because if we remain attached to it we may not buy into the placeless nowhere civilisation that is being built around the globe in the name of money. At its best, a radical parochialism may be the most effective means of resisting this global machine. As Kavanagh implied, without a parochial culture, there can be no culture at all.
The same is true of the phrase ‘little Englander’, originally a nineteenth-century term of abuse directed at those who resisted the expansion of empire. A ‘Little Englander’ was someone who wanted England’s influence to stop at its own borders, rather than the nation throwing its weight around in the world. In that sense, a little England sounds pretty good to me. An England that pays attention to its places rather than wiping them out in the name of growth; an England that doesn’t have imperial designs; an England that doesn’t want to follow America into idiotic wars for the sake of prestige. An England that stops trying to ‘punch above its weight’, and instead asks why it is punching at all.
If nations are stories, England has a good one to tell: a long and fascinating one, with a balance of darkness and light. It’s a story that everyone becomes part of simply by being in England. The Scottish independence campaign last year did a good job of building a civic Scottish identity that people could feel part of whether or not they were ethnically Scottish. In England, which is far more ethnically diverse, it may appear harder to do this, yet the way to do it seems straightforward: just tell the story of England. Tell it from the beginning to the present day, and you will find that everyone in the country has been included in it, wherever they came from and whatever their background.
Is it possible to be a nation without nationalism? To be comfortable with your identity and history without withdrawing into them? To welcome outsiders without forgetting what you are welcoming them to? Englishness, whatever it means, is ever-changing: England today would be largely unrecognisable to someone from 1066, or even 1866. A nation is a process, not a fixed thing, but it has continuities nonetheless. It may be a story, but it is not fiction.
When I think about these questions, I always find myself coming back to the place itself: the woods, the fields, the streets, the towns, the beaches. We live in an age of climate change and mass extinction, burgeoning cities, deepening immersion in technologies of distraction, the spreading ideology of mass consumption. The antidote to this global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature is the slow, messy business of getting to know a landscape. If a nation is a relationship between people and place, then a cultural identity that comes from a careful relationship with that place might be a new story worth telling.
Is there a future, I wonder, in a kind of ecological Englishness – an identity that sees everyone in England as part of its landscapes and thus its history, and that has us all paying closer attention to them: nurturing them instead of concreting them over in the name of the future, or driving past on the way to somewhere else? Could this help build an identity to compete with, and perhaps replace, both the tired pomp of establishment Britain and the deconstructed coldness of the internationalist left? Could that old, smaller England come out from behind the shadow of Britain once more?
It’s probably another romantic dream. But nations, like people, need to dream sometimes.
Guardian, 2015
The Witness
The greatest ecological crisis in the Earth’s history began with the emission of climate-changing gases by an organism that had spread widely across the planet, colonising many of its ecological niches. These gases – the waste products of its lifestyle – gradually accumulated in the atmosphere. For a long time nothing noticeably changed, but at some stage a tipping point was reached and the planet’s climate flipped rapidly from one state to another. The composition of the atmosphere changed, becoming poisonous to most life on Earth, and the planet’s mean temperature plunged, precipitating a global ice age. The resulting mass extinction killed perhaps 90 per cent of all living things on Earth.
This was 2.3 billion years ago. The climate-changing organisms were bacteria, and the poisonous gas they emitted was oxygen. Without the plane
tary catastrophe they precipitated, you, and almost everything you know about the Earth you are part of, would never have come about at all.
All told, there have so far been at least five, and perhaps as many as twenty, ‘mass-extinction events’ in the history of Earth. This first – known as the ‘great oxygen catastrophe’ – was the most far-reaching. The last, 66 million years ago, is the one we know best, because it is the most appealing to the human imagination: it wiped out the dinosaurs. Overall, it is estimated that around 98 per cent of all organisms that have ever existed are now gone for ever.
That all created things perish is one of the key teachings of Buddhism. Whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation. This, it turns out, is true of an individual, a species, an ecosystem or a planetary epoch. Whatever the Buddha saw under the bodhi tree – whatever it was that showed him the ceaselessly changing nature of all things, and convinced him of the misery caused by attempting to cling to temporary states of apparent stability – has been more than borne out by consequent studies of the Earth’s geology, ecology and biology. The nature of this Earth is change. The nature of this Earth is endings. The nature of this Earth is extinction.
*
As you read this, the Earth is currently experiencing the latest extinction event in its 4.6-billion-year history. This one, known as the Holocene Extinction, is caused not by cyanobacteria or asteroid impacts, but by human beings. Arguably, it has been going on for at least ten thousand years, since the extinctions of the great megafauna – the mammoths, the ground sloths, the sabre-toothed cats – which in all likelihood were pushed over the brink by human hunters. But it has accelerated greatly since the Industrial Revolution, and gone into overdrive in the last half-century. The current extinction rate is estimated at anything between a hundred and ten thousand times the expected rate of ‘background extinction’, and as the expansion of the human economy continues, with its associated resource extraction, soil depletion, fossil-fuel combustion, human population increase and mass destruction of ecosystems, the Holocene Extinction is accelerating beyond our ability even to measure it accurately, let alone put any kind of brake on its progress.
What does this mean for us as individuals? If it is our generation’s burden to live through this latest collapse in global ecological diversity, the knowledge that we are all complicit increases that burden. Simply being human at this time in history – and particularly being a middle-class human in one of the world’s richer nations – makes you, and me, agents of extinction. Much of the Earth’s natural wealth and beauty is disappearing, as our species treats the planet like a giant quarry or factory floor. The Earth’s climate is changing once again. Tipping points are being reached. Much of nature as we know it is dying away in order that we might have access to smartphones, takeaway coffee, private cars, aeroplane flights and Facebook.
For nearly two decades, starting in the early 1990s, I was involved in environmental activism. That is to say I worked, as did many others, to try to fend off the worst of the damage that humans are doing to the rest of life on Earth. Some of the campaigns I was involved in were successful, and others weren’t: this was always a hard battle, and mostly a losing one. But, as time went on, the losing seemed to deepen. It became clear that green campaigners were being overwhelmed on all fronts. Such was the size and the momentum of the human economy, such was its need for growth simply to keep itself functioning, such was the level of denial and demand among most human beings – who, despite our qualms (if we had any) would probably not have sacrificed most of the baubles and benefits that the economic machine was giving us – that the chances of preventing the Holocene Extinction from rolling onward came to seem essentially non-existent.
Environmental campaigning, like any form of politics, is predicated on control. It is about preventing negative things from happening and trying to channel society towards what you regard as more positive values and systems. It took me a long time to admit to myself that the level of control I wanted and desired simply couldn’t exist. Governments had been promising to act on climate change for twenty years, and precisely nothing had happened. All of the trends, from extinction to soil erosion to ocean acidification to rainforest destruction, were going in the wrong direction, fast. We – the greens – knew what needed to be done, but had no power to make it happen. It wasn’t working. I looked around me, at the diminishing natural beauty and its accelerating destruction, and I despaired.
*
A few things saved me, eventually, from this despair. One of them was a geological, or even universal, perspective. We tend to look at the world through an anthropocentric lens: human concerns are foremost in our vision, bounded by our short lives and our everyday needs and desires. Among those desires is a concern that what we have always known as ‘nature’ should continue as we have always known it. But nature has taken many forms. For the vast majority of its existence, ‘nature’ here on Earth consisted only of single-celled organisms. The brief period of climatic stability in which human civilisations have evolved is just that: a brief period. It is not any kind of norm, for there is no norm. Had it not been for the great oxygen catastrophe or the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs or who knows how many other such episodes, none of us would be here to agonise about the latest turbulent episode in the history of this planet. Why should the state of the planet to which we have adapted survive for ever? Nothing does. The Earth is a process as much as a thing: it is constantly changing. At this period in its history, we are the force tipping it into a new state. Now we are going to have to live with that state, whatever it brings – if we can.
All of which brings me, by a long and winding road, to Buddhism. Having skulked around on the edges of Buddhist thinking for many years, mostly unknowingly, it was only last year that I attended my first retreat. I didn’t have any expectations: there was just a draw. But something was opened up to me during that five days of silence and contemplation and self-questioning. I realised, as I had never realised before, that the world and my perception of the world were not the same thing.
As I write it down now, it seems embarrassingly obvious, but there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it at this deeper level. I look at a forest. You look at a forest. We see different things. Perhaps one of us sees planking or sawdust or biological diversity or spiritual retreat or silence or rare insect life or certain mosses or a quality of light. Yet none of what we see has any relevance to the forest itself, or any of the organisms that make up its whole. It is just what it is. It is just there.
What does this mean? What it has meant for me is that I am now able to begin – only to begin, mind – separating reality from my view of it, and to understand the emotional projections that I overlay onto the world I walk through. One of those projections is a sense of what ‘nature’ is and should be, and how I should be able to help maintain it in a certain state. Nature itself, meanwhile, has no sense of that state. It has no sense that it is ‘nature’ at all. ‘Nature’ is made up of a vast and detailed complex of living beings doing what they do. Our self-consciousness, and our needs, are part of that complex. But nature doesn’t need us, and ‘extinction’ as a concept is something that only humans worry about.
It is hard for us to take in the reality that Earth is an extinction machine, and it has been here before. It doesn’t need us, and we cannot control it. The ‘ecological crisis’ we hear so much about, and that I have written so much about and worked to stave off – well, who says it is a ‘crisis’? Humans do – and educated, socially concerned humans at that. For the Earth itself, the Holocene Extinction is not a ‘crisis’ – it is just another shift. Who determined that the planet should remain in the state which humans need and prefer? Is this not a form of clinging to mutable things, and one that is destined to make us unhappy? When we campaign to ‘save the Earth’ what are we really trying to save? And which Earth?
And yet. And yet, something I have come to understand slo
wly over my lifetime is that nature, Earth, the world – whatever you call it – is not simply something I am on but something I am. It is not outside of me, it is me, and I am it. There is no outside. ‘Nature’ as a concept has always been flawed. Many traditional societies had no word for ‘nature’ as something separate from humanity, because there was no obvious reason to separate humans from everything else that lived. There still isn’t. Felt experiences of deep connection with all life are a central part of virtually all spiritual traditions, and with good reason: nature is us, and we are nature. The poet Robinson Jeffers described one of these epiphanic experiences powerfully in his verse drama The Tower Beyond Tragedy:
… I entered the life of the brown forest
And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have our own time, not yours; and I was the stream
Draining the mountain woods; and I the stag drinking, and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit; and I was the darkness
Outside the stars I included them, they were part of me …
… how can I express the excellence I have found, that has no color but clearness;
No honey but ecstasy …
I can understand and be awed by the ever-changing nature of this ever-changing Earth. I can appreciate my own smallness and know the importance of not clinging to temporary states. I can sometimes chide myself for my arrogance in assuming that what I appreciate as ‘nature’ is some unchanging state that should be preserved for my benefit, or even that of my species. Every extinction, after all, is also an opportunity. If the dinosaurs had survived, there would have been no humans. Everything changes, and the changes are not always pretty. Who said they had to be pretty?
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Page 18
