Setting places apart out of the deepest respect for nature

I am standing in a place I love. Behind me are mature oak and ash trees towering over the path. They border an old drove road now densely wooded and a remarkable space for wildlife on our suburban estate. To my left is a semi-wild area of our local park. The earth was sculpted around thirty years ago to turn a farmer’s field into a series of ponds and other features that allow flooding during extreme rainfall. Some of it is wetland with sedge grasses. Other parts are now replete with wildflowers and insects rise around your feet as you walk through it in summertime. To my right is an orchard which some of us began to plant about ten years ago. It has the usual selection of top fruit like apples and pears and plums, with some more experimental features, like a peach tree and grapes and kiwi fruit growing up green alder. It is underplanted by berries of all sorts, from the conventional and massively popular raspberries, through to the more unusual purple chokeberry and pink thimbleberry. And it is semi-wild. In the summer thin paths are mown through it so the community can get access to the fruit, but much of it is left to grow as it will.

This place is home to me and many others from our community who pass through it regularly and appreciate it. It is also home to bats and moths, to foxes and badgers, moles and shrews, jays, robins, blackbirds, goldcrest, chiff chaff and long tailed tits. A kingfisher and little egret have been seen at times and this year we even caught some otters on film.

I have come to realise that tending a place like this changes you inside. You come to feel for it, to respect its life. You notice when threats loom, like the badger cull or ash dieback. It becomes part of you and part of what makes you feel good about life itself. To paint a bigger picture, one might say that the place becomes a microcosm of the Earth, and the way that it is treated becomes a sign of the way that human beings are behaving, or could behave, in relation to the Earth.

In this article I propose that the setting apart of such places out of the deepest respect for nature, if replicated across the UK and the world, could change our culture, transforming us within and creating a shared imagination of our relationship with the Earth that would allow us to respond deeply and radically to the environmental crisis.

I don’t want to pretend that such culture change is easy. For many of us it will be a journey. Our modern age has taught us to fix things and, living in a built environment ourselves, it is hardly surprising that our first response to nature is to try to fix it. We immediately want to build things like hedgehog ‘houses’ and bug ‘hotels’ and, sure enough, these things can be useful, but this response may also reveal something about our relationship with nature. We may not yet respect it in the way it deserves to be respected. 

When my family moved into this area twenty years ago, it felt at first just like any other suburban estate under construction with vast expanses of red mud and bricks. One of my sons called it Noddy Land because it felt such a manufactured environment, but the planners had been wise and they left many of the old hedgerows and lanes, the common and the Drove Road. In time these natural elements reasserted their place, allowing foxes, badgers and hedgehogs to survive the transition. And many of the residents, like me, have grown to value the nature all around us, especially as seen in the wild side of our park described here.

Yet this interaction with nature presents us with a challenge deep within. Is it there for us to fix? Or is it something we need to respect for its own sake? Do we try to make the local foxes into pets, or do we respect their wildness? There is one word that sums up this challenge that we face today. It is ‘wilding’. Isabella Tree’s popular book of the same name tells how she, and her partner Charlie Burrell, converted a massive 3500 acre farm over to a wilded space by taking down the hedges, lightly restocking with hardy breeds of deer, cattle, pigs and ponies and generally leaving nature to do its thing. It was untidy, of course, and some local farmers decried their efforts. But the fruit is already apparent, with rare creatures reasserting themselves on the land, like purple emperor butterflies and turtle doves. As a result, the idea of rewilding nature has spread like wildfire. There are now thousands of practitioners across the UK and beyond. Large landowners like the Royal Estates, the Church Commissioners and the National Trust are all considering what they can do. Details of what constitutes good practice are still being discovered, but the principle is simple, it is about working with the regenerative power of nature.

Wilding runs contra to our modern presumptions because it is mainly about letting nature be, rather than designing and dominating it. It is also highly scientific, drawing on the expertise of ecologists, monitoring the health and diversity of wildlife, and trying to be as wise as possible in any interventions we might make. At heart it is about respect. In some senses our past attitudes to nature have been rather like the colonial age, when we unthinkingly imposed our ways of thinking and being on others. We now know that was wrong and try to behave differently. We need a similar change of mind in relation to nature, not imposing our way, but respecting what is, working hard to appreciate the wisdom manifest in all the ecological networks around us, intervening only where necessary and with as much wisdom as we can muster.

Much of the work of wilding has to be done at the big scale. It has been so exciting to hear of the reintroduction of beavers, whose dams can help our own flood protection and the storks which have bred in England in 2021 for the first time for four hundred years. Many of these initiatives need space. Ecological networks are complex and many creatures need to travel, but there is still something meaningful that can be done in our neighbourhoods.

Gardens can be an important resource for wild creatures. My house was built with a certain sort of roof tile, which allows access to sparrows at the sides. As a result we have a whole posse of sparrows regularly in our garden. They are no trouble to us, never coming into the loft space, but they play around our pond daily. They seem to positively enjoy its waterfall and are delightful to watch as they wash, fluttering their wings and splashing around. Another neighbour has starlings, probably around twenty of them, in their tall hedge. They take their turn in our pond too. Their chatter is sometimes almost deafening as you walk down the old lane that borders our houses. They have probably been there since before the estate was built, living in a hedgerow that is hundreds of years old. You never quite know what will happen when you open a place to nature. A friend of mine made a small hole in her fence for hedgehogs and was surprised when a whole family of badgers came into her garden!

So, it might be our own gardens. It could be a local woodland or meadow. Or it could be a place where we are doing something for our needs as well, like an orchard, or a community food growing space, but the key is that this place should become special in our minds, dedicated to the utmost respect for nature, a place where we will be nourished inwardly and the plants and creatures of the world will experience freedom to live. It may be appropriate to mark some of these places, perhaps with a living willow sculpture or suchlike natural symbol, and let it be a sign of our intention to seek harmony between people and nature.

Scale remains important, even at neighbourhood level. Plants and creatures need space to live in. The isolated patch of land, however wisely it might be cared for, is not actually a solution. We need to be aware of the need for wildlife corridors, those thick hedges, those streams, those odd bits of scrub, which are nature’s lifelines. Some creatures have been essentially obliterated from the countryside and their only hope is to move through our residential areas. The hedgehog, the fox and many insects are now found mainly in suburbia. Occasionally round our way residents have thought, ‘We could move our fence a few yards into that bit of ‘wasteland’, bigger garden, no harm done.’ Yet, they may actually be taking away a vital wildlife corridor, severing something akin to an artery in the natural world and, if councils are on their toes, they will act to enforce the original boundary.

Here in the UK, our local councils are encouraging people in neighbourhoods to map nature in their locality and come up with ‘local nature action plans’. The aim is to counter the steep decline in biodiversity that has made the UK one of the most nature-depleted nations of the world. It feels like an important practical step in the right direction, not only for wildlife, but also because it opens the way to reform of our imagination. Mapping nature in our neighbourhood will help us see the importance of the spaces that are currently available, while planning our actions will allow us to develop our respect for nature and monitor its flourishing.

Some of us local people may be concerned that we don’t know enough to make an action plan, and it is true that the advice of ecologists is vital in this process, but we also need to remember that our aim is primarily to create space for nature to do its own thing. It does not need us as much as we think.

We can also learn. Last year some of us were trained in how to do an ecological survey of our park. Such citizen science is a great new opportunity. We can all learn to identify birds and wildflowers. We can monitor them in our special places. What is happening? Is this place becoming more diverse? Are the insects proliferating, the birds breeding, the large creatures thriving? It is fun to do and helps to make sure we are acting wisely.

There are two distinct outcomes to setting places apart out of the deepest respect for nature. The first is that wildlife should thrive and the second is that people should be drawn together with a new attitude to the natural world. The deep aim for human society has to be a change in our culture.

The modern era has assumed that the Earth is just ‘there’ for us to use as we will. It has failed to appreciate that the Earth is a great and powerful living system on which all life depends. The respect that we need hinges around this. We need to recognise the power of the Earth over our lives. If climate change and ecological loss continue as they are at present, then there is no doubt that we shall come to feel the power of the Earth in our daily lives, but in a truly dreadful way. How much better it would be if we could find it within ourselves to respond to these challenges now instead of waiting for disaster to strike. That is the sort of respect that we need.

The struggles over climate change also reveal the need to feel our relationship with the natural world not just know about it. The information about climate change simply does not cut it. We have been pounded with information and we find it all very difficult. Hope for change depends on learning to feel these things. I sometimes liken the particular set of feelings we need to those experienced by people in traditional cultures who were approaching something they valued as sacred. That is, we need to approach places that are set aside for nature, not only with the deepest respect, but with a certain type of awe and wonder and, at times, even dread. This does not mean we let go of science. No, we need science more than ever, but we need to become aware of our relationship with the natural world, as described by science, but felt with our emotions. We need to know that we too are creatures. We need to experience our frailty and sense the magnificence of the Earth as a living planet.

In summary, I am proposing that the setting apart of places out of the deepest respect for nature could, if multiplied across the world, not only restore our wildlife, but could change us inside. Such places could become, for us, a microcosm of the Earth and a sign of our intention to work for harmony between people and nature. They could become a focus for neighbourhoods, a means of drawing people together and renewing community life, especially if combined with festivals, as in the preceding article. Most of all they could help create the deep and lasting culture change that we so desperately need in order to respond to the environmental crisis.

This is the second of two articles describing simple practices that could change the world.

You can find more about the foundations of these practices in the ebook Imagination is the key – to unlock the environmental crisis available here