[wordup] Confessions of a recovering environmentalist

[Adam Shand]

Beautiful ...

Via: http://twitter.com/glynmoody/status/21298116008
Source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-kingsnorth/confessions-of-recovering-environmentalist

Confessions of a recovering environmentalist
Paul Kingsnorth, 16 August 2010

Scenes from a younger life # 1:

I am 12 years old. I am alone, I am scared, I am cold and I am crying
my eyes out. I can’t see more than six feet in either direction. I am
on some godforsaken moor high up on the dark, ancient, poisonous spine
of England. The black bog-juice I have been trudging through for hours
has long since crept over the tops of my boots and down into my socks.
My rucksack is too heavy, I am unloved and lost and I will never find
my way home. It is raining and the cloud is punishing me; clinging to
me, laughing at me. Twenty-five years later, I still have a felt
memory of that experience and its emotions: a real despair and a
terrible loneliness.

I do find my way home; I manage to keep to the path and eventually
catch up with my father, who has the map and the compass and the mini
Mars-bars. He was always there, somewhere up ahead, but he had decided
it would be good for me to “learn to keep up” with him. All of this,
he tells me, will make me into a man. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Only later do I realise the complexity of the emotions summoned by a
childhood laced with experiences like this. My father was a compulsive
long-distance walker. Every year, throughout my most formative decade,
he would take me away to Cumbria or Northumberland or Yorkshire or
Cornwall or Pembrokeshire or the Welsh marches, and we would walk, for
weeks. We would follow ancient tracks or new trails, across mountains
and moors and ivory-black cliffs. Much of the time we would be alone
with each other and with our thoughts and our conversations, and we
would be alone with the oyster-catchers, the gannets, the curlews, the
skylarks and the owls. With the gale and the breeze, with our maps and
compasses and emergency-rations and bivvy-bags and plastic bottles of
water. We would camp in the heather, by cairns and old mine-shafts,
hundreds of feet above the orange lights of civilisation, and I would
dream. And in the morning, with dew on the tent and cold air in my
face as I opened the zip, the wild elements of life, all of the real
things, would all seem to be there, waiting for me with the sunrise.

Scenes from a younger life # 2:

I am 19 years old. It is around midnight and I am on the summit of a
low, chalk down, the last of the long chain that wind their way
through through the crowded, peopled, fractious south country. There
are maybe fifty or sixty people there with me. There is a fire going,
there are guitars, there is singing and weird and unnerving whooping
noises from some of the ragged travellers who have made this place
their home.

This is Twyford Down, a hilltop east of Winchester. There is something
powerful about this place; something ancient and unanswering. Soon it
is to be destroyed: a six-lane motorway will be driven through it in a
deep chalk cutting. It is vital that this should happen in order to
reduce the journey time of travellers between London and Southampton
by a full thirteen minutes. The people up here have made it their home
in a doomed attempt to stop this happening.