No subject

name-calling has been going on for months, in the papers and the pubs
and in the House of Commons. The people here are Luddites, Nimbies
(=93not-in-my-backyard=94 people), reactionaries, romantics. They are
standing in the way of progress. They will not be tolerated. Inside,
there is a sense of shared threat and solidarity, there are blocks of
hash and packets of Rizlas and litres of bad cider. We know what we
are here for. We know what we are doing. We can feel the reason in the
soil and in the night air. Down there, under the lights and behind the
curtains, there is no chance that they will ever understand. We are on
our own.

Someone I don=92t know suggests we dance the maze. Out beyond the
firelight, there is a maze carved into the down=92s soft, chalk turf. I
don=92t know if it=92s some ancient monument or a new creation. Either
way, it=92s the same spiral pattern that can be found carved in rocks
from millennia ago. With cans and cigarettes and spliffs in our hands,
a small group of us start to walk the maze, laughing, staggering, then
breaking into a run, singing, spluttering, stumbling together towards
the centre.

Scenes from a younger life # 3:

I am 21 years old and I=92ve just spent the most exciting two months of
my life so far in an Indonesian rainforest. I=92ve just been on one of
those organised expeditions that people of my age buy into to give
them the chance to do something useful and exciting in what used to be
called the =93third world=94. I=92ve prepared for months for this. I=92ve s=
old
double-glazing door-to-door to scrape the cash together. I have been
reading Bruce Chatwin and Redmond O=92Hanlon and Benedict Allen and my
head is full of magic and idiocy and wonder.

During my trip, there were plenty of all of these things. I still
vividly remember klotok journeys up Borneo rivers by moonlight,
watching the swarms of giant fruitbats overhead. I remember the
hooting of gibbons and the search for hornbills high up in the
rainforest canopy. I remember a four-day trek through a so-called
=93rain=94 forest that was so dry we ended up drinking filtered mud. I
remember turtle-eggs on the beaches of Java and young orangutans at
the rehabilitation centre where we worked in Kalimantan, sitting in
the high branches of trees with people=92s stolen underpants on their
heads, laughing at us. I remember the gold-miners and the loggers, and
the freshwater crocodiles in the same river we swam in every morning.
I remember my first sight of flying fish in the Java Sea.

And I remember the small islands north of Lombok where some of us
spent a few days before we came home. At night we would go down to the
moonlit beach, where the sea and the air would still be warm, and in
the sea were millions of tiny lights: phosphorescence. I had never
seen this before; never even heard of it. We would walk into the water
and immerse ourselves and rise up again and the lights would cling to
our bodies, fading away as we laughed.

Now, back home, the world seems changed. A two-month break from my
country, my upbringing, my cultural assumptions, a two-month immersion
in something far more raw and unmediated, has left me open to seeing
this place as it really is. I see the atomisation and the inward focus
and the faces of the people in a hurry on the other side of
windscreens. I see the streetlights and the asphalt as I had not quite
seen them before. What I see most of all are the adverts.

For the first time, I realise the extent and the scope and the impacts
of the billboards, the posters, the TV and radio ads. Everywhere an
image, a phrase, a demand or a recommendation is screaming for my
attention, trying to sell me something, tell me who to be, what to
desire and to need. And this is before the internet; before apples and
blackberries became indispensable to people who wouldn=92t know where to
pick the real thing; before the deep, accelerating immersion of people
in their technologies, even outdoors, even in the sunshine. Compared
to where I have been, this world is so tamed, so mediated and
commoditised, that something within it seems to have broken off and
been lost beneath the slabs. No one has noticed this, or says so if
they have. Something is missing: I can almost see the gap where it
used to be. But it is not remarked upon. Nobody says a thing.

What took hold

It is 9.30 at night in mid-December at the end of the first decade of
the 21st century. I step outside my front door into the farmyard and I
walk over to the track, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. I am lucky
enough to be living among the Cumbrian fells now, and as my pupils
widen I can see, under a clear, starlit sky, the outline of the Old
Man of Coniston, Dow Crag, Wetherlam, Helvellyn, the Fairfield
horseshoe. I stand there for ten minutes, growing colder. I see two
shooting-stars and a satellite. I suddenly wish my dad was still alive
and I wonder where the magic has gone.

These experiences, and others like them, were what formed me. They
were what made me what I would later learn to call an
=93environmentalist=94: something which seemed rebellious and excitingly
outsiderish when I first took it up (and which successfully horrified
my social-climbing father - especially as it was partly his fault) but
which these days is almost de rigueur amongst the British bourgeoisie.
Early in my adult life, just after I came back from Twyford Down, I
vowed, self-importantly, that this would be my life=92s work: saving
nature from people. Preventing the destruction of beauty and
brilliance, speaking up for the small and the overlooked and the
things that could not speak for themselves. When I look back on this
now, I=92m quite touched by my younger self. I would like to be him
again, perhaps just for a day; someone to whom all sensations are
fiery and all answers are simple.

All of this - the downs, the woods, the rainforest, the great oceans
and, perhaps most of all, the silent isolation of the moors and
mountains, which at the time seemed so hateful and unremitting - took
hold of me somewhere unexamined. The relief I used to feel on those
long trudges with my dad when I saw the lights of a village or a
remote pub, even a minor road or a pylon; any sign of humanity - as I
grow older this is replaced by the relief of escaping from the towns
and the villages, away from the pylons and the pubs and the people, up
onto the moors again, where only the ghosts and the saucer-eyed dogs
and the old legends and the wind can possess me.

But they are harder to find now, those spirits. I look out across the
moonlit Lake District ranges and it=92s as clear as the night air that
what used to come in regular waves, pounding like the sea, comes now
only in flashes, out of the corner of my eyes, like a lighthouse in a
storm. Perhaps it=92s the way the world has changed. There are more cars
on the roads now, more satellites in the sky. The footpaths up the
fells are like stone motorways, there are turbines on the moors and
the farmers are being edged out by south-country refugees like me,
trying to escape but bringing with us the things we flee from. The new
world is online and loving it, the virtual happily edging out the
actual. The darkness is shut out and the night grows lighter and
nobody is there to see it.

It could be all that, but it probably isn=92t. It=92s probably me. I am 37
now. The world is smaller, more tired, more fragile, more horribly
complex and full of troubles. Or, rather: the world is the same as it
ever was, but I am more aware of it and of the reality of my place
within it. I have grown up, and there is nothing to be done about it.
The worst part of it is that I can=92t seem to look without thinking
anymore. And now I know far more about what we are doing. We: the
people. I know what we are doing, all over the world, to everything,
all of the time. I know why the magic is dying. It=92s me. It=92s us.

How it ended

I became an =93environmentalist=94 because of a strong emotional reaction
to wild places and the other-than-human world: to beech trees and
hedgerows and pounding waterfalls, to songbirds and sunsets, to the
flying fish in the Java Sea and the canopy of the rainforest at dusk
when the gibbons come to the waterside to feed. From that reaction
came a feeling, which became a series of thoughts: that such things
are precious for their own sake, that they are food for the human soul
and that they need people to speak for them to, and defend them from,
other people, because they cannot speak our language and we have
forgotten how to speak theirs. And because we are killing them to feed
ourselves and we know it and we care about it, sometimes, but we do it
anyway because we are hungry, or we have persuaded ourselves that we
are.

But these are not, I think, very common views today. Today=92s
environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of
utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education.
We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction
to the wild world. In this country, most of us wouldn=92t even know
where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote
something called =93sustainability=94. What does this curious, plastic
word mean? It does not mean defending the non-human world from the
ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its
adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means
sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world=92s
rich people - us - feel is their right, without destroying the
=93natural capital=94 or the =93resource base=94 which is needed to do so.

It is, in other words, an entirely human-centred piece of politicking,
disguised as concern for =93the planet=94. In a very short time - just
over a decade - this worldview has become all-pervasive. It is voiced
by the resident of the USA and the president of Anglo-Dutch Shell and
many people in-between. The success of environmentalism has been total
- at the price of its soul.

Let me offer up just one example of how this pact has worked. If
=93sustainability=94 is about anything, it is about carbon. Carbon and
climate change. To listen to most environmentalists today, you would
think that these were the only things in the word worth talking about.
The business of =93sustainability=94 is the business of preventing
carbon-emissions. Carbon-emissions threaten a potentially massive
downgrading of our prospects for material advancement as a species.
They threaten to unacceptably erode our resource-base and put at risk
our vital hoards of natural capital. If we cannot sort this out
quickly, we are going to end up darning our socks again and growing
our own carrots and holidaying in Weston-super-Mare and other such
unthinkable things. All of the horrors our grandparents left behind
will return like deathless legends. Carbon-emissions must be =93tackled=94
like a drunk with a broken bottle: quickly, and with maximum force.

Don=92t get me wrong: I don=92t doubt the potency of climate change to
undermine the human machine. It looks to me as if it is already
beginning to do so, and that it is too late to do anything but attempt
to mitigate the worst effects. But what I am also convinced of is that
the fear of losing both the comfort and the meaning that our
civilisation gifts us has gone to the heads of environmentalists to
such a degree that they have forgotten everything else. The carbon
must be stopped, like the Umayyad at Tours, or all will be lost.

This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to
an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then =93zero-carbon=94 is
the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing
the stuff out. It needs to do this quickly, and by any means
necessary. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies,
quickly enough, to generate the power we =93need=94 without producing
greenhouse-gases and there will be no need to ever turn the lights
off; no need to ever slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet=92s
ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new
conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where
this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide
with some of the world=92s wildest, most beautiful and most untouched
landscapes. The sort of places which environmentalism came into being
to protect.

And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to
permanent human conquest, are to be colonised by vast =93solar arrays=94,
glass and steel and aluminium, the size of small countries. The
mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like
vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of 500-foot
wind-turbines and associated access-roads, masts, pylons and wires.
The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying
of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine-ranges and
hundreds of wave-machines strung around the coastlines like Victorian
necklaces. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by
industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests, the
richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly
profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide
guilt-free car-fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America.

What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who
should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual:
the expansive, colonising, progressive human narrative, shorn only of
the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed,
ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted and the
non-human. It is the mass destruction of the world=92s remaining wild
places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of
irony, people are calling this =93environmentalism=94.

A while back I wrote an article in a newspaper highlighting the impact
of industrial wind-power stations (which are usually referred to, in a
nice Orwellian touch, as wind =93farms=94) on the uplands of Britain. I
was emailed the next day by an environmentalist friend who told me he
hoped I was feeling ashamed of myself. I was wrong; worse, I was
dangerous. What was I doing giving succour to the fossil-fuel
industry? Didn=92t I know that climate change would do far more damage
to upland landscapes than turbines? Didn=92t I know that this was the
only way to meet our urgent carbon targets? Didn=92t I see how beautiful
turbines were? So much more beautiful than nuclear-power stations. I
might think that a =93view=94 was more important than the future of the
entire world, but this was because I was a middle-class escapist who
needed to get real.

It became apparent at that point that what I saw as the next phase of
the human attack on the non-human world, a lot of my environmentalist
friends saw as =93progressive=94, =93sustainable=94 and =93green=94. What I=
 called
destruction they called =93large-scale solutions=94. This stuff was
realistic, necessarily urgent. It went with the grain of human nature
and the market, which as we now know are the same thing. We didn=92t
have time to =93romanticise=94 the woods and the hills. There were
emissions to reduce, and the end justified the means.

It took me a while to realise where this kind of talk took me back to:
the maze and the moonlit hilltop. This desperate scrabble for
=93sustainable development=94 - in reality it was the same old same old.
People I had thought were on my side were arguing aggressively for the
industrialising of wild places in the name of human desire. This was
the same rootless, distant destruction that had led me to the top of
Twyford Down. Only now there seemed to be some kind of crude equation
at work that allowed them to believe this was something entirely
different. Motorway through downland: bad. Wind-power station on
downland: good. Container-port wiping out estuary mudflats: bad.
Renewable hydro-power barrage wiping out estuary mudflats: good.
Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.

So here I was again: a Luddite, a Nimby, a reactionary, a romantic;
standing in the way of progress. I realised that I was dealing with
environmentalists with no attachment to any actual environment. Their
talk was of parts-per-million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers,
sustainable technologies, renewable supergrids, green growth and the
fifteenth conference of the parties. There were campaigns about =93the
planet=94 and =93the Earth=94, but there was no specificity: no sign of any
real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.

The place of nature

Back at university, in love with my newfound radicalism, as students
tend to be, I started to read things. Not the stuff I was supposed to
be reading about Lollards and John Wycliffe and pre-reformation
Europe, but green political thought: wild ideas I had never come
across before. I could literally feel my mind levering itself open.
Most exciting to me were the implications of a new word I stumbled
across: ecocentrism. This word crystallised everything I had been
feeling for years. I had no idea there were words for it or that other
people felt it too, or had written intimidating books about it. The
nearest I had come to such a realisation thus far was reading
Wordsworth in the sixth form and feeling an excited tingling sensation
as I began to understand what he was getting at amongst all those
poems about shepherds and girls called Lucy. Here was a kindred
spirit! Here was a man moved to love and fear by mountains, who
believed rocks had souls, that =93Nature never did betray the heart that
loved her=94 (though even then that sounded a little optimistic to me).
Pantheism was my new word that year.

Now I declared, to myself if no one else, that I was =93ecocentric=94 too.
This was not the same as being egocentric, though some disagreed, and
though it sounded a bit too much like =93eccentric=94 this was also a
distraction. I was ecocentric because I did not believe - had never
believed, I didn=92t think - that humans were the centre of the world,
that the Earth was their playground, that they had the right to do
what they liked or even that what they did was that important. I
thought we were part of something bigger, which had as much to right
to the world as we did and which we were stomping on for our own
benefit. I had always been haunted by shameful thoughts like this. It
had always seemed to me that the beauty to be found on the trunk of a
birch tree was worth any number of Mona Lisas, and that a
Saturday-night sunset was better than Saturday-night telly. It had
always seemed that most of what mattered to me could not be counted or
corralled by the kind of people who thought, and still think, that I
just needed to grow up.

It had been made clear to me for a long time that these feelings were
at best charmingly na=EFve and at worst backwards and dangerous. Later,
the dismissals became encrusted with familiar words, designed to keep
the ship of human destiny afloat: Romantic, Luddite, Nimby and the
like. For now, though, I had found my place. I was a young, fiery,
radical, ecocentric environmentalist and I was going to save the
world.

When I look back on the road protests of the mid-1990s, which I often
do, it is with nostalgia and fondness and a sense of gratitude that I
was able to be there, to see what I saw and do what I did. But I
realise now that it is more than this that makes me think and talk and
write about Twyford Down and Newbury and Solsbury Hill to an extent
which bores even my patient friends. This, I think, was the last time
I was part of an environmental movement that was genuinely
environmental. The people involved were, like me, ecocentric: they
didn=92t see =93the environment=94 as something =93out there=94; separate f=
rom
people, to be utilised or destroyed or protected according to human
whim. They saw themselves as part of it, within it, of it.

There was a Wordsworthian feel to the whole thing: the defence of the
trees simply because they were trees. Living under the stars and in
the rain, in the oaks and in the chaotic, miraculous tunnels beneath
them, in the soil itself like the rabbits and the badgers. We were
connected to a place; a real place that we loved and had made a choice
to belong to, if only for a short time. There was little theory, much
action but even more simple being. Being in a place, knowing it,
standing up for it. It was environmentalism at its rawest, and the
people who came to be part of it were those who loved the land, in
their hearts as well as their heads.

In years to come, this was worn away. It took a while before I started
to notice what was happening, but when I did it was all around me. The
ecocentrism - in simple language, the love of place, the humility, the
sense of belonging, the feelings - was absent from most of the
=93environmentalist=94 talk I heard around me. Replacing it were two other
kinds of talk. One was the save-the-world-with-windfarms narrative;
the same old face in new makeup. The other was a distant, sombre
sound: the marching boots and rattling swords of an approaching
fifth-column.

Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the
encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, offering instead a
worldview which saw the growth economy and the industrialist mentality
beloved by both as the problem in itself, was being sucked into the
yawning, bottomless chasm of the =93progressive=94 left. Suddenly people
like me, talking about birch trees and hilltops and sunsets, were
politely, or less politely, elbowed to one side by people who were
bringing a =93class analysis=94 to green politics.

All this talk of nature, it turned out, was bourgeois, western and
unproductive. It was a middle-class conceit, and there was nothing
worse than a middle-class conceit. The workers had no time for
thoughts like this (though no one bothered to notify the workers
themselves that they were simply clodhopping, nature-loathing
cannon-fodder in a political flame-war). It was terribly, objectively
rightwing. Hitler liked nature after all. He was a vegetarian too. It
was all deeply =93problematic=94.

More problematic for me was what this kind of talk represented. With
the near global failure of the leftwing project over the past few
decades, green politics was fast becoming a refuge for disillusioned
socialists, Trots, Marxists and a ragbag of fellow-travellers who
could no longer believe in communism or the Labour Party or even
George Galloway, and who saw in green politics a promising bolthole.
In they all trooped, with their Stop-the-War banners and their
Palestinian-solidarity scarves, and with them they brought a new
sensibility.

Now it seemed that environmentalism was not about wildness or
ecocentrism or the other-than-human world and our relationship to it.
Instead it was about (human) social justice and (human) equality and
(human) progress and ensuring that all these things could be realised
without degrading the (human) resource-base which we used to call
nature back when we were being na=EFve and problematic. Suddenly,
never-ending economic growth was a good thing after all: the poor
needed it to get rich, which was their right. To square the circle,
for those who still realised there was a circle, we were told that
=93(human) social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand=94 - a
suggestion of such bizarre inaccuracy that it could surely only be
wishful thinking.

Suddenly, sustaining a global human population of 10 billion people
was not a problem at all, and anyone who suggested otherwise was not
highlighting any obvious ecological crunch points but was giving
succour to fascism or racism or gender discrimination or orientalism
or essentialism or some other such hip and largely unexamined concept.
The =93real issue=94, it seemed, was not the human relationship with the
non-human world; it was fat cats and bankers and cap=92lism. These
things must be destroyed, by way of marches, protests and votes for
fringe political parties, to make way for something known as
=93eco-socialism=94: a conflation of concepts that pretty much guarantees
the instant hostility of 95% of the population.

I didn=92t object to this because I thought that environmentalism should
occupy the right rather than the left wing, or because I was rightwing
myself, which I wasn=92t (these days I tend to consider the entire bird
with a kind of frustrated detachment). And I understood that there was
at least a partial reason for the success of this colonisation of the
greens by the reds. Modern environmentalism sprung partly from the
early 20th-century conservation movement, and that movement had often
been about preserving supposedly pristine landscapes at the expense of
people. Forcing tribal people from their ancestral lands which had
been newly designated as national parks, for example, in order to
create a fictional =93untouched nature=94 had once been fairly common,
from Africa to the USA. And actually, Hitler had been something of an
environmentalist, and the wellsprings which nourished some green
thought nourished the thought of some other unsavoury characters too
(a fact which some ideologues love to point to when witch-hunting the
greens, as if it wouldn=92t be just as easy to point out that ideas of
equality and justice fuelled Stalin and Pol Pot).

In this context it was fair enough to make it clear that
environmentalism allied itself with ideas of justice and decency, and
that it was about people as well as everything else on the planet. Of
course it was, for =93nature=94 as something separate from people has
never existed. We are nature, and the environmentalist project was
always supposed to be about how we are to be part of it, to live well
as part of it, to understand and respect it, to understand our place
within it and to feel it as part of ourselves.

So there was a reason for environmentalism=92s shift to the left, just
as there was a reason for its blinding obsession with carbon.
Meanwhile, the fact of what humans are doing to the world had become
so obvious, even to those who were doing very well out of it, that it
became hard not to listen to the greens. Success duly arrived. You
can=92t open a newspaper now or visit a corporate website or listen to a
politician or read the label on a packet of biscuits without being
bombarded with propaganda about the importance of =93saving the planet=94.
But there is a terrible hollowness to it all; a sense that society is
going through the motions without understanding why. The shift, the
pact, has come at a probably fatal price.

Now that price is being paid. The weird and unintentional
pincer-movement of the failed left, with its class analysis of
waterfalls and fresh air, and the managerial, carbon-=FCber-alles
brigade has infiltrated, ironed out and reworked environmentalism for
its own ends. Now it is not about the ridiculous beauty of coral, the
mist over the fields at dawn. It is not about ecocentrism. It is not
about reforging a connection between over-civilised people and the
world outside their windows. It is not about living close to the land
or valuing the world for the sake of the world. It is not about
attacking the self-absorbed conceits of the bubble that our
civilisation has become.

Today=92s environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize
for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and at the same time, with an amusing
irony, it is an adjunct to hyper-capitalism; the catalytic converter
on the silver SUV of the global economy. It is an engineering
challenge; a problem-solving device for people to whom the sight of a
wild Pennine hilltop on a clear winter day brings not feelings of
transcendence but thoughts about the wasted potential for renewable
energy. It is about saving civilisation from the results of its own
actions; a desperate attempt to prevent Gaia from hiccupping and
wiping out our coffee shops and broadband connections. It is our last
hope.

The open land

I generalise, of course. Environmentalism=92s chancel is as
accommodating as that of socialism, anarchism or conservatism, and
just as capable of generating poisonous internal bickering that will
last until the death of the sun. Many who call themselves green have
little time for the mainstream line I am attacking here. But it is the
mainstream line. It is how most people see environmentalism today,
even if it is not how all environmentalists intend it to be seen.
These are the arguments and the positions that popular
environmentalism - now a global force - offers up in its quest for
redemption. There are reasons; there are always reasons. But whatever
they are, they have led the greens down a dark, litter-strewn dead end
street, where the bins overflow, the lightbulbs have blown and the
stray dogs are very hungry indeed.

What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was perhaps
inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian
environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able
to last for long outside the established political bunkers. But for
me, now - well, this is no longer mine, that=92s all. I can=92t make my
peace with people who cannibalise the land in the name of saving it. I
can=92t speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry. I
can=92t speak with a straight face about saving the planet when what I
really mean is saving myself from what is coming.

Like all of us, I am a footsoldier of empire. It is the empire of Homo
sapiens sapiens and it stretches from Tasmania to Baffin Island. Like
all empires it is built on expropriation and exploitation, and like
all empires it dresses these things up in the language of morality and
duty. When we turn wilderness over to agriculture we speak of our duty
to feed the poor. When we industrialise the wild places we speak of
our duty to stop the climate from changing. When we spear whales we
speak of our duty to science. When we raze forests we speak of our
duty to develop. We alter the atmospheric makeup of the entire world:
half of us pretends it=92s not happening, the other half immediately
starts looking for new machines that will reverse it. This is how
empires work, particularly when they have started to decay. Denial,
displacement, anger, fear.

The environment is the victim of this empire. But =93the environment=94 -
that distancing word, that empty concept - does not exist. It is the
air, the waters, the creatures we make homeless or lifeless in flocks
and legions, and it is us too. We are it; we are in it and of it, we
make it and live it, we are fruit and soil and tree, and the things
done to the roots and the leaves come back to us. We make ourselves
slaves to make ourselves free, and when the shackles start to rub we
confidently predict the emergence of new, more comfortable designs.

I don=92t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems,
better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in
consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those
feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern
England and the rivers of southern Borneo - that something big is
being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we
will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out and if outside
the dining-room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity,
then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never
to blame, because we are the humans.

What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world
in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of
utility. Feelings like this provide no =93solutions=94. They build no new
eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is
head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the
new moon or the date of Lughnasadh. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss,
like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the
bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes
beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.

But this is fine; the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on
of the grown-ups. It=92s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from
the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the
talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from
the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.

I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles
and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart
that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting
the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am
going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it
tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time
than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to
me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky
I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales which I can scatter
like apple seeds across this tired and angry continent.