Simon Barnes offers 23 chapters of simple activities to draw your attention back to the natural world, from learning a couple of common moths, to waking up to hear the dawn chorus in May.
This is the essence of our practice of Walking – a call to just spend more time out of doors and aimless, noticing, sitting, ambling and rambling – but for reasons I can’t put my finger on, I disliked this book very much, and cannot quite put my finger on why.
Barnes name-checks the concept of magic throughout with a fatuous air – as if to say, you and I are adults now and know that the “real magic” is in becoming a better ecologist. There’s no strangeness – no Stellar – no awe or disquiet to it. The book is woven through with quotations from Narnia and Harry Potter, two book series which to me emphasise this attitude written by adults who think they know what children like – too precious, too jolly, too detached. He suggests people criticise the Narnia series because it is “fashionable” to do so on grounds of “Christian Allegory”, which means he does not understand the critiques: the problem is that it feels like a make-believe book filled with talking animals, which fails to create a real Secondary World which its author takes seriously, to paraphrase Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories. It’s not that the allegory is Christian, but that the allegory is a barrier for both the writer and reader to temporarily believe that this world is real – a fatal flaw for any tale of Faerie; and because of it, despite being quite literally about Jesus the lion in an otherworld Heaven where non-slutty children go on their deaths, and yet somehow works out thinner than the deep-rooted mysticism of Middle Earth, no kind of intended allegory but filled with Tolkien’s spirit, faith, sense of awe, and whom we understand through his lesser writings ultimately seemed to truly believe he would travel to Valinor on his death.
And this book makes the same, fatal error. Though experiencing nature as a kind of magic appeals to me, he’s got a twee way of expressing it – a kind of wink which says, “but we are cleverer than this” – one which neither communicates the ecstasy of nature or of magic. Barnes does not have to concede the reality of the supernatural, for there are no shortage of tedious books by Pagan authors – but he does have to convey a sincerity for the spiritual which transcends any tradition. Being a Beast, H is for Hawk, the poems of Ted Hughes, Watership Down, the album Chanctonbury Rings, the new Worzel Gummidge all do this. In short, I just don’t think his writing is that good.
The chapter which recommends 10 books of nature writing is very revealing: Rudyard Kipling, another author who comes in for a drubbing in On Fairy Stories, Gerald Durrel’s jolly family travelogues, and a handful of books on evolution. He trots out his literary quotations with all the bloodlessness of a corporate motivational seminar; no mystic strangeness. Reading books, he says, is just like a doorway to many magical worlds; footprints and paths made by the ancient tracks of animals is exactly like Harry Potter‘s Maurauders Map; and you can travel in Doctor Who‘s TARDIS just by setting an alarm clock for 3:45am. The vision of nature is one that is shallow, discoverable, and unstrange.
This book is nicely organised, with each chapter offering beginners tidbits on different topics – identifying poop, spotting seabirds. It would be nice as a way of structuring a wilderness practice, perhaps taking one per month; it’s not an in-one-go sit down book, but has a coffee-table lightness – something you might pick up to pass a mellow, unchallenging half hour. Easy to read, it might be a nice choice for the kind of older child (12-15) who likes books and has an burgeoning interest in the outdoors.
But it has a middle class biliousness of which the author is totally unaware. The activities return frequently on “learning the names of things”. Naming is a formalisation of noticing, something to “program” your brain to pay more attention – but also a recapturing of the sensory the verbal and intellectual, and an emotional crutch for former little boys who read encyclopedias for fun and always got full marks in class. There’s no blood in this book, no dirt; the second project recommends you buy waterproof trousers, so as not to feel the weather. Banes is disdainful of people who go out to jog, and while I believe I have written things similar in intention, I hope I avoided expressing this level of contempt for the very concept of exercising (quite courageously, I might add, where others can see).
Chapters I would have added? Anything physical, like wild swimming or hiking a mountain – or jogging, or dancing. Anything involving other people, like camping over an open fire. Foraging, fishing, exploring taste, texture and scent. A tactile craft, like learning to whittle, making pots from bank-clay or building a woodland shelter, using our hands and the applications of nature to gain a deeper appreciation of it. His focus is all on animals and birds, never on plants, on trees, on weather systems, on types of rock, nor heritage farming/industrial/woodcraft evidence which have shaped the natural world – all of which could be understood as routes to the wild. As a teacher, you learn the importance of seeing children’s unique styles of learning and being. Not all of them will sit quietly with a book, learning off the names of birds; most need to run, play sports, get mucky, learn to drum, make believe, or be doing something physical – and this follows us into adulthood. As much as middle class social norms would have us believe (and the lives of working journalist-authors seem to prove), sitting and thinking is not a normal or default human behaviour. He talks a big game about rewilding, but his frame of experience seems fatally narrow.
More damning, perhaps, is a lack of self-awareness about his budget for unmediated encounters with nature’s divine. About half the chapters recommend you buy something “not too expensive”, which is a phrase I learn means “about £100”: a moth box, a canoe, a bat sonar, waterproof trousers, trains to the coast, a garden pond (a garden), a buddleia bush, binoculars, snorkles, a bathyscope. “Anyone can buy a chunk of corrigated metal easily enough,” with the confidence of a man who has never watched his spouse become ill with dust because he cannot replace a broken vacuum cleaner. “When I was in Zambia” or “on my last trip to the Savannah” pepper the book, without embarrassment. He scoffs at the idea that travelling to see wildlife is an impossible thing, just like the Hobbit who only needed the courage to step out of his front door and find out that adventure was within him all along; forgetting that Bilbo Baggins was, of course, upper middle class gentry, with no real bills or work to take responsibility for, for whom the weekend is a time of relaxation rather than recovery.
This may seem a petty complaint, but it’s the key to the failure of the book.
Firstly, the natural world is one of the cheapest hobbies you can have, and awareness of the wild is a secret many working class people have never needed to rediscover – from shepherds and farmers who work in the fields, to unemployed mums who hang out in front of their houses while the neighbourhood kids are encouraged to go off and wander and come back at teatime. Privilege is rarely based in hate, but a lack of awareness, and the subsequent alienation caused. I’d actually really like a pair of waterproof trousers – or any wet-weather gear. We got caught in the in the rain and wind for a couple of hours today – I wore a hoodie, and my husband was in a t-shirt – off for a ramble while we waited for our second-hand car to be fixed. We saved up for a year to buy his hiking boots. Barnes’ vision is – quite unintentionally – an exclusionary one, in which rewilding is a nice consumer hobby for those whose primary frame of reference is the world of the office, and who spend £8.99 on nice-paper books on how to get back to the land. I’m not sure the word or concept of localism is discussed, and nature is frequently something you “go to see”, rather than indivisible from daily life – a necessity for those whose financial/energetic confidence is too fragile to take trips.
As part of this middle class certainty, there’s nothing in his life’s horizon that might scare or unsettle; and this makes it wrong for Fencraft, for we seek the terror as well as the awe of nature. He namechecks the concept of decentering the human but does not, I think, believe it. His eye is the eye of the zoo visitor or the collector. This book misses too many adjectives for what the wild can be: strange, gross, eerie, bizarre, disturbing. There’s no chapter here that might kill you, and without restoring that power to the natural world, you’re still a tourist.
Finally, there’s this:
“In looking for what humans want it’s always instructive to see what rich people actually get: and so often, that’s a large country house set in a park full of stout trees with an open sward grazed by deer and a lake running right through the middle. That’s the human idea of the good life, and it’s why rich people have created it again and again. It just happens to be a reasonable imitation of the wooded savannahs of Africa: the places where we first learned to be human…”
Rewilding does not necessarily imply a primitivist, socialist or alternative take on economics and ownership; but it does, I think, require a touch more curiosity than this about ancient ways of being and relating. For example, whether the peak of human aspiration looks something like a nice National Trust property, and whether a 19th century slave owner with more money than sense had the secret to happiness and communion with the sacred wild. Not to mention that the artificial large, flat lawns of the stately home set trends in gardening which were fatal for biodiversity and which we are still struggling to reverse. I’m not sure climate change is mentioned at any stage, unconsciable in a book written in 2018, nor the impact of human society on both nature and our alienation from it. The sacred practice of Disconnection points at ways that reconnecting with the wild may need to be a little bigger than buying some binoculars. This book’s modest scope is to encourage the outdoor-shy to “have the time to stand and stare”, rather than proposing some radical ecology; but my question is, can they be divided? For it is everything about human life which divides us from nature, and to save it we’ll need more than the occasional hobbyist who buys nice-looking books.
In short: Rewild Yourself is what we’d call very “Solar” – loving the natural world, but from a place of human safety and confidence, in which the wild is a robin on your spade-handle and fox-paw prints across your snowy lawn. But in Fencraft, the term “rewilding” is inherently a Stellar one – associated with the awe and terror of the untamed. There’s no fear here that the fox might kill the chickens and the snows the crops, nor any insight into why that fear might be central to any true process of rewilding. Both politically and individually unambitious, and stopping short of risk and sensory immersion – it’s focus on learning the names of beasts is too narrow, and the written style lacks mysticism, dread, or the inspiration which calls man to go wandering.
I agree wholeheartedly with Chris Packham’s pull-quote: ‘Such a good idea’
Fencraft: Seekers of the Landweird 