Too Few Care for the Beauty of Nature

Ed Miliband’s decision to give the Mallard Pass a 3,000-acre-solar farm, and others like it the green light, is like forcing a baby to have tattoos for its own health. Alas we can’t expect the majority of the population to be moved by this despoilation of natural beauty because the connection between humans and nature has long been severed. This severance happened in 1851 when the majority of the population (50.2%) came to live in urban centres – now it’s a whopping 84%. For seven generations now the majority of the population has lived away from the countryside, causing our collective natural beauty memory to be thoroughly eroded. What now counts as hunter gathering is buying supermarket food for a barbeque, or watching nature documentaries with a takeaway. It is no wonder that the majority are unmoved by acres of solar or wind farms – they cannot weep for something they rarely, if ever, see.

And if you think I’m exaggerating, let me tell you about the boy who cried over leaves. We were on a London primary school trip to Epping Forest. The boy pointed in fearful panic: “What is that?” “Why are they here?” “Are they going to get me?” I twirled around trying to establish what frightened him so. It turned out he was pointing at the trees; he’d never seen so many of them before and they terrified him.

Similarly, a young mother I knew when we lived in South West London conducted a triangular life, taking a daily journey from her flat to the primary school, to the supermarket and home. She never took her sons to any of the local parks; at the weekend they played in the bath or on her husband’s calculator (he was an accountant). Of experience or folk memory of the great outdoors and nature, there was no wandering lonely as a cloud.

Neither example is unusual. There are millions of people who live in Britain who never spend any time in nature. It was reported in 2016 that 1.3 million children never visited the countryside. I can’t imagine this figure has improved.

Likewise, the majority of people who form our thinking class and Government live in towns and cities where there is a seven-generation-long acceptance of urban ugliness. Remember that image of the pig tower block in China? Oh, how we laughed until we realised we keep humans like this. If we can make human dwellings ugly, why not fields and hills?

This is all well-trodden concrete: the atomised lives of people living in cities going from tower block to office block and back again perhaps via a gym. Those who can muster up the strength to tackle the A3 or A4, A1M, or Dartford Crossing to leave the city will invariably visit a Forestry Commission wood-chipped trail with a busy café at the end selling sausage rolls for £4.50. It’s a miserable experience and they return to the city relieved the ordeal is over.

The raw countryside of mud and butterflies, brambles and nettles, jays and chalkstreams, marl and dog rose, is empty. It is left alone for those blessed 16% of us who live within its folds. After saving up for 11 years in London we were finally able to afford to move back to the countryside. I walk over an hour every day along some of the 140,000 miles of footpaths, old pilgrim routes, ancient salt paths, even a plague trail where the diseased were marched to the local pesthouses. I am most often alone. And if you don’t believe me, perhaps you will heed Will Self who has written stirringly about walking through Britain’s empty countryside. Empty of people that is, not nature. Life teems in the hedgerows and fields. This morning alone I saw a fallow doe, clouds of gnats, slugs aplenty, King Alfred cake fungus, a jenny wren and circling kites. I find it impossible to convey the pity I feel for those who will never see a smattering of early purple orchids, or a hoar frost in June or a hare the size of a deer. To have all this spoiled by solar and wind farms tears at my heart.

“You sound ghastly,” chips in my husband, “no-one will pity this sentiment.” And for once he’s right. Most people are deeply suspicious or downright hostile towards those of us who live in the countryside. We are either “posh” or “privileged” or “gammon” or farmers who do unspeakable things to animals, or Jacob Rees Mogg. No-one really cares if our views are spoilt because the majority don’t think we deserve nice views anyway. And the beautiful soon-to-be-spoiled views themselves? They don’t matter either because the majority of the population don’t see them.

How then are we to stop these horrible things? I don’t know, but stop them we must.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.