I thought the sheep was dead. It was lying in the middle of a big grass field with its legs in the air. I wasn’t surprised; those fields are rented by a farmer who can’t afford to run his business in the way modern farming demands. He doesn’t own enough land to scale up his production by borrowing against its value. The result is not too many beasts on the farm, but too few: in this case six scraggy ewes roaming 15 acres. As I walked by, the dead one waved her legs. Alive then, but stuck on her back by her weight of wool. I trudged across to her, put my foot on her side and pushed her over away from me. She scrambled to her feet and ran off, fleece bouncing, bleating confusedly. If I hadn’t rescued her she probably would have died. No one would have noticed in time because no one passes this way.

For thousands of years, the English countryside has never been so empty of people and animals as it is now.

The part of West Dorset where I live was once a busy network of small farmsteads, most with fewer than 100 acres, keeping Red Devon cattle for meat and milk. Today, the old farm names on the Ordnance Survey map are a roll call of lost activity: Prime, Oselhay, Middlebrook, Taphouse, Lower Park, Purcombe, and Higher Sminhay. Their land has been sold and consolidated into bigger agricultural landholdings. Some of the farmhouses are second homes or holiday lets. Many more settlements have simply disappeared. The 1861 census lists Dodseye, Brickhouse, Poor House, Froghouse and Duckpool – all gone. Those that have survived are inhabited by far fewer people that at any previous point in their history. In 1861, there were eight people living in our house, these being the farmer, his wife, children and brother, plus a carter and a ten-year-old ploughboy. Today there are three of us.

That reduction – eight to three – is about average round here. Add in the lost homes as well, and you have a massive difference in the number of people who once lived in the Marshwood Vale. Villages were bigger and tattier with an astonishing array of services – shops, forges, pubs, bakeries, brewers, butchers and cobblers. Outside the villages, there was more than farming going on. For the price of two guineas, the 1830 Beerhouse Act allowed homeowners to buy a licence to make and sell home brewed ale. In the 19th century, our house used to have one of these simple pubs in the end room, an arrangement that would have been familiar to Thomas Hardy. No one in the Vale was rich and they made what they could from the natural resources the landscape had to offer, whether that was wood, building stone, brick clay, cheese, milk or meat.

Of course it wasn’t Eden. Country living was hard, especially with lots of people to feed. Farmworkers were part-paid in local cider (another product of the land), which sounds idyllic but wasn’t. The amount consumed damaged their health – a couple of pints before even starting work – and their families were stinted for money. In 1795-7 the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived at Racedown Lodge on the edge of the Vale. The Wordsworths were appalled by the poverty and primitive living conditions they found here. They too were poor and had to grow most of their own food. It was a hardscrabble existence – every poet for himself. Wordsworth built a fence to keep loose cattle out of his vegetable garden and was enraged when vagrants stole the wood for fuel.

Wood was still valuable to those in need as late as the 1950s. An older farmer I know remembers his father saying that when they cut and laid a hedge, they would leave the brash (the thinnest twigs) on the ground overnight and by morning it would all be gone, collected for firewood by the poorest. Not just as kindling to light a more solid wood fire in a house that had other sources of heat, but as one of the main fuel sources. Bigger pieces from the hedge, about the thickness of a wrist that could burn for some length of time, were even more prized. These were gathered and sold, or taken by the hedge layers as payment for their work – it would have been considered stealing to scavenge them.

Lay a hedge today and the brash is a nuisance to be burned on a bonfire when the landowner has time. Those same, slim hedge logs, the ones that could pay a working man for a full day’s hard labour, are more or less worthless. My farmer friend calls them ‘ugly sticks’. He uses them in his own stove quite happily, but the customers who buy his logs all want good-looking, split chunks from felled trees that they can stack into attractive log-piles. In the past, that kind of prime wood would have had many other uses and been too expensive to use for fuel by ordinary people.

 

It’s not only people who have gone – where are the animals? This is dairy land, not sheep pasture, but the cows spend most of the year indoors in barns – the farmers allow them access to a bit of summer grazing but the ground is deep clay and too wet to support more than a few weeks outside for the numbers of beasts needed to make dairies economically viable. So the farmers mostly use the fields to grow silage and maize fodder and keep the cows indoors milked by robots. It sounds brutal, but the irony is that the welfare standards for the cows has arguably risen over the last 30 years; they are well-fed and don’t get the foot-rot and rain scab they would suffer if they lived out all year up to their hocks in churned mud and shit. In the 1970s and 80s there were times when starving and emaciated beasts had to be literally pulled out the winter mire by tractor, some dying on their feet before they could be freed.

Back in the 1970s, the system was already out of balance. Farming methods had changed dramatically with mechanisation after the Second World War. By the late 70s, the type and size of cattle kept here had altered. Farmers had abandoned the smaller, lighter and less productive Red Devons, which were bred to cope with the local land conditions. Instead they introduced a Holstein/Friesian/Charolais/Hereford mix. These breeds were larger and heavier, churned up the soil far more and were less suited to the local conditions, hence getting stuck and scabby and perhaps being better off indoors for much of the year, if they had to be kept here. Overall, of course it would be best for both the cows’ welfare and the ecology of the Vale for them not to be here at all, and for the area to have either no cattle of any kind, or fewer numbers of the better adapted Red Devons. The Devons can do well here under a management system that doesn’t involve being incarcerated in sheds, milked by robots and separated early from their calves. But there’s not enough money any more in that way of doing things.

Even using new methods, it’s still hard to claw results from the land. To hit the milk production levels needed to stay viable, each farm must keep more cows than the land can truly support, unless the farmer changes the nature of the land. In order to feed the cows in their sheds, most of the ancient meadows have been ploughed and re-seeded with monocrop ryegrass on rotation with maize. Those lost, unimproved grass meadows supported a complex bio-system of plants, insects, animals and birds, which cannot exist in the new habitat. Some species cling on, many have gone. You never hear skylarks in the Vale any more because early and frequent grass cutting for silage has destroyed the nests and young chicks, wiping out the local breeding populations.

The full disaster goes deeper than the loss of biodiversity, tragic as that is. This is one of the wettest areas in the UK. Its micro-climate has some of the highest levels of rainfall in the country and water from the surrounding hills drains down into a bowl of clay. The soil in the old meadows was bound in place by a thick thatch of turf anchored by established root systems built up over years. The new ryegrass growing in fields frequently ploughed and re-sown, has shallow roots and does little to stop the soil washing away. Maize is even less use – it’s notorious for increasing soil erosion in any environment. It would be difficult to think of a more ecologically unsuitable crop for this place. Enormous quantities of slurry from all those indoor cows is collected in vast pits and then spread on the fields. The farmers don’t do this to fertilise the pasture, they do it to get rid of the slurry. They often (illegally) choose to spread when heavy rainfall is forecast or actually underway, so that most of the shit washes off into the streams, poisoning the waterways. There’s a recognised term for this tactic: ‘dilute and pollute’.

The truth is that modern dairying methods are fundamentally incompatible with this particular landscape. The machinery needed to produce and harvest maize and silage is too big for the network of narrow, medieval lanes. Everyone hates the massive tractors, which crush down the roadside banks with their giant tyres and push the farmers to slash back the hedges to gain an extra couple of inches width, but there is no other way to do the work now that there are so few people employed on the farms. It’s impossible to increase the labour force because the income from all this effort and destruction is not enough to pay the extra wages, especially in an area where housing is so expensive.

The lack of labour brings us round again to the emptiness of the countryside and the lack of humans, which is not a good thing in itself. The Dorset landscape around me, like all of lowland Britain, has been created by hundreds of generations of people living on and working the land. Their efforts created habitats in which many species flourished. Take the nightingales, which used to nest in the woods across the lane from us. In the 1970s, the old lady who once owned our house held annual nightingale parties. Her sophisticated London friends would sit on the damp lawn drinking cocktails, bitten by midges and showered with birdsong. Somewhere in the late 1980s the nightingales disappeared. They left because their breeding habitat was lost.

Unlike the meadows’ disappearance, the nightingales’ habitat went because of what people stopped doing rather than what they did. As the value of wood products fell and the old woodsmen died, coppicing ended and the woods were left to grow on without intervention. The scrubby lower growth and sunny glades that nightingales require disappeared and the understory became a dingy cave shadowed by tall ash, oak and alder. The forest floor was swamped with pendulous sedge, crowding out other more delicate flora such as orchids and anemones.

The idea that untended nature is always better and richer is a specifically Romantic conceit. Coppicing, long established and correctly managed, can produce stupendous ecological diversity comparable in its riches to rainforest.

Coleridge was wrong when he wrote so beguilingly about the nightingales he imagined thriving in unworked, neglected woods:

And I know a grove
Of large extent, hard by a castle huge,
Which the great lord inhabits not; and so
This grove is wild with tangling underwood,
And the trim walks are broken up, and grass,
Thin grass and king-cups grow within the paths.
But never elsewhere in one place I knew
So many nightingales

In the woods across the lane there are praiseworthy efforts at regeneration by the newish, conservation-minded owners. In the last five years they have coppiced and fenced sections of the wood to protect the new growth from deer. But it’s a hugely expensive and time-consuming process and the areas involved are a small percentage of the whole. There are still no nightingales.

Give those neglected woods another 200 years without human intervention and they would probably revert to a more mixed habitat – in the meantime they are eerily quiet and wildlife poor. I don’t think we can afford to wait two centuries in the hope that nature will restore itself without us. Rewilding through the complete withdrawal of people and activity is not always the answer, especially in landscapes where people have been part of the ecosystem for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Our yearning for rewilding can run the risk of placing humans somehow outside of nature, maybe even counter to it. This gives people special status; a version of the old idea that humans occupy some kind of unique category distinct from the rest of the living world. But we are not strangers or interlopers in the wild world; we are part of it. The wildness is in us and we are in the wildness.

The truth is that farming has always been a deeply compromised activity, focusing as it inevitably does on gain and control at the expense of land and beasts. There isn’t an obvious fix and maybe our belief that we should find one and sort things out is part of the problem. We are looking into the darkness, we don’t know, all we can do is to try to listen, think and tell stories, trusting that from telling, listening and remembering many stories, we might become attuned to a certain frequency that speaks to us.

What says the land? Those who listen, know that it is undergoing profound change. This change reaches further than any individual ecological, topographical or social insults wrought by agriculture. The actual genius loci, the spirit of place, is altering. Something fundamental has shifted in the deep and tangled relationship between people and the land.

There seems less of everything, the natural variety fading and flattening. Increasingly, the English countryside is a nowhere place where, away from celebrated beauty spots and organised, marked trails, people don’t go for any length of time. No one notices the lack of wildflowers or the silent woods. It’s becoming a dull, closed waste of ploughed-out paths and cracked mud. We forget how animating and exciting it once was to those who were part of it, and it was part of them.

Here is a story about one of the old farm labourers in the Vale who died in the 1980s. He never travelled more than 30 miles from the village where he was born. One of the most exciting incidents in his entire life, which he would recount to anyone who’d listen, was the day a fierce storm came across the farm. He was convinced that the oak in the field where he was working was going to fall on him. He spent all day hiding in an old barn nearby, watching the hissing tree twisting and thrashing in the gale. It didn’t fall on him and the storm passed.

It’s hard to understand such intense, visceral excitement being conjured up from a landscape without what the modern mind sees as real justification. After all, no damage was done. And in any case, he could easily have left the field and got away from the oak. The oak was rooted in place; he was not. It was only a tree, only a storm, what would it have mattered if it fell? The answer is that he was as rooted as the oak; it was part of his life and its drama was his drama. He couldn’t leave, he was bound to the tree and had to watch and wait, sharing its groans. The time was frightening but also exhilarating – he was part of the oak and the storm and the world was alive in him and around him.

—

Images:
The Marshwood Vale from Pilsdon Pen. Photo by Kerrie Ann Gardner.
Oak on Lamberts Castle overlooking the Marshwood Vale. Photo by Sara Hudston.

—

Sara Hudston is a writer and editor living in rural West Dorset in an old house with tarpaulins on the roof. Occasional newts in the downstairs bathroom. Guardian Country Diarist.

 

The landscape of the Owens Valley, east of the California Sierras, is both vast and enclosed. The long desert valley is held by great ranges – the Sierras a white wall of granite and ice to the west, the Inyos and White Mountains a subtler but equally awesome wall to the east, all rising precipitously more than 12,000 feet above the valley floor. On the floor of the valley are the remnants of a once-vast lake – Owens Lake, now reduced to alkali flats. And beyond the Inyo Mountains, Death Valley, drier, vaster still.

My first visit to the Owens Valley was in late May 2006. I drove north from the roar of Los Angeles into an emptier, emptier, and still-emptier landscape, my heart growing happier mile by mile. When I got to the tiny town of Lone Pine and turned west into the high desert, towards the jagged 14,000-foot peaks of Mount Whitney, lit by the light of an early summer sunset, I thought I might explode with joy at the beauty there. I found a campground out on the tilted, open plateau of the upper valley, and settled in.

Over the next few days, I learned a little of the history of the place. Before 1861, it was all Paiute country – desert, mountains, and at the southern end of the valley a great alkaline lake, rich with birds and fish and tule beds. Then white settlers started moving in, and for the first few years the Paiutes and the settlers co-existed with some peacefulness. Then, as settlement continued, there was increasing concern by the new settlers about the presence of the Paiutes. After a few skirmishes, a military force was dispatched to the valley. At first the Paiutes fought back, but their resistance was broken when the military herded a group of 40 Paiute women and children into the lake, deeper and deeper, until they drowned. The remaining Paiutes were then forcibly relocated from the valley.

I sat with that story, and the almost unimaginable images it evoked, up in my campsite overlooking the lakebed where it had happened: the armed men on horseback, the children crying, the inexorable push into the water, and the end, after the struggle. I considered how this story is woven into the fabric of this place, many places; a part of the history of my own country that I can barely stand to see or know.

The history goes on. After the Paiute were removed, the valley was irrigated by the waters of the Owens River, and became known for its rich fields and orchards. And after that, in the early years of the 20th century, the city of Los Angeles showed up, quietly, and began buying land and water rights. A huge aqueduct was built, an artery from the valley to Los Angeles, and the waters of the Owens Valley were sent south. The lake was emptied, the farmers bankrupted, and the valley returned to desert. Later, there was another little boom when Hollywood discovered the rocky hills above the valley as a setting for Westerns, but even that has dried up now. The alkaline sediments that blow from the empty lakebed promise to keep the Owens Valley mostly empty for a long time to come. Now there are just a few handfuls of eccentrics, ranchers, retirees, Paiute and Shoshone (descendants of those who did not die in the lake, and who came back, years later), and tourists like me, wandering through.

As I watched the light at dusk over the dry lakebed, I was struck by the piercing ironies in its history. The lake that once nourished the original people of the valley becomes their grave. Then the water is taken to fuel the dreams of those who displaced them, before they are displaced in their turn, casualties of the continuing gold rush of Los Angeles.

A few days later, when I headed north in the mid-afternoon heat, I discovered another part of the history of the Owens Valley. A small sign on the highway pointed left towards what appeared to be a landscape much like the rest of the valley, except for one large building that was about the size of an airplane hangar. The sign said, ‘Manzanar National Historic Monument’. At the entrance was a small, beautifully constructed stone gatehouse. On both sides of the road were concrete slabs, cracked pavement, and weeds – all that is left of the most famous of the Japanese internment camps (or ‘concentration camps’, as they were known at the time): Manzanar.

In the weeks after Pearl Harbour, when the Roosevelt administration chose to round up every person of Japanese descent in the Pacific states, I imagine some bureaucrats were given the task of finding suitable places to put them for an undetermined length of time. Maybe there were requirements like ‘far from habitation’, ‘inexpensive land’, ‘easy to defend’. As is still true, when the US government needs a place to put a military installation, a prison, a nuclear waste site, or other secret and unpleasant institutions, it looks to the American deserts, otherwise mostly the abode of light and rock, jackrabbits and roadrunners. The Owens Valley hadn’t been a desert a few years before, but now land was once again inexpensive, far from habitation and easy to defend. Anyone trying to escape from Manzanar would have to cross miles of open desert, and then the highest portion of the Sierras. No-one ever tried.

Ten thousand men, women and children (two-thirds of them American citizens) were interned at Manzanar, beginning in March 1942. Most of them lived there for more than three years, in 500 hastily and poorly built barracks. The large building I’d seen from the highway was what remained of the high school gymnasium, now the National Park Service interpretive centre. The barbed wire and barracks were gone, bulldozed after the war, during the time when the Japanese internment was a largely hidden part of American history. Manzanar was made a national monument after decades of lobbying by the survivors, who were determined not to allow their history to be buried and forgotten.

I went into the small museum inside the former school gymnasium. It was hard to look at the large photos, at the shock on people’s faces (old men, old women, children) in the first days of internment, at the photos of barbed wire and armed guards in the towers. It was hard to read the hate-filled editorials in newspapers around the country, on display in glass-topped cabinets. It was hard to look at the rage in the faces of the young men in the camp. In one corner of the exhibit there was a large blank book where people could write their responses and reactions. Over and over again, sometimes in childish handwriting, sometimes in graceful cursive or in quick scrawls, visitors wrote, in various ways: never again, this should never happen again.

I was moved by the responses, but I also thought: some of us remember, and some of us forget, and even now there are innocent people waiting in our immigration prisons and secret overseas interrogation rooms. It seems to be so tempting to do what was done here – to the Paiute, to the Japanese – and to think, ‘This time it’s justified.

This time these people really need to be treated this way, for our protection, or for theirs.’ Only afterwards is there some larger realisation of going astray. I thought, what a world it would be if we could all remember and truly put into practice, never again.

There was an auditorium where a film was being shown: footage from the time of the camp, and interviews with internees still alive today. That’s where I first heard shikataganai. An old man was trying to explain how he had survived the experience of being an internee. ‘Shikataganai,’ he said. ‘What is, is.’ His expression was powerful and clear and his eyes looked straight at the camera. Later, I found that the usual meaning of this Japanese phrase carries a strong sense of resignation, even of fatalism, the Japanese equivalent of a shrug: ‘Can’t be helped. Nothing to be done.’ But what I saw in the eyes of the old man was something far beyond fatalism. I felt that he was saying to me, to all of us, ‘What is, is. Now how will you respond?’

The footage in the documentary began with the camp in its desolate first days, when the barracks had been put up in the empty fields and the people struggled to survive the dust and the heat and the cold. Then, as the footage went on through the months and years, something miraculous began to unfold. Gardens appeared everywhere, springing up from the desert floor like mushrooms after rain. There were pleasure gardens, flowering trees, stone bridges, pools. There were ladies strolling with parasols, couples laughing on the grass, artists painting, poets writing, and students dancing in the high school gym. In an extraordinarily short period of time, and with virtually no resources other than their hands and hearts, inside a prison in the middle of a desert in the middle of a war, a people that had had everything taken away created culture. They invited life to flower behind the barbed wire.

I walked out of the documentary filled with outrage, amazement, and a kind of piercing, poignant sorrow. It was quiet in the Park Service bookstore, and I wasn’t ready to leave. I started chatting with the blond woman behind the counter. I asked her about the gardens, and whether anything was left. She said, ‘You know, there were gardens in many places here, but most of them are gone. Even what you can see now, all the plants are gone, and most of the stonework is gone too, but there’s one place … ’ – and I could see that she loved this place – ‘there’s one place that all of us who work here love to visit. There’s something about it.’ And she pulled out a map of the site and drew directions for me. I would have to walk through the empty, weed-filled fields, along what was once a road between lines of barracks, to a particular spot. I would know it when I got there.

Then I noticed small, carved stones in a basket on the counter. Each was carved with one of two sayings: ‘Never forget’ and ‘Shikataganai’.

I went back into the heat and sun and the empty Manzanar National Historic Monument. I was the only person there, it seemed. Map in hand, I drove the straight roads now leading nowhere at all, bisected by the remains of other roads. The map showed the names and numbers of the blocks of barracks, but nothing was visible except the flat valley floor, weeds, broken concrete, and the distant wall of the Sierras.

It reminded me, eerily, of another place built at nearly the same time, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the desert of eastern Washington, where I spent three summers as a field biologist. There you can (if you have the proper security clearance) drive the roads of the Hanford Town Site, where more than 50,000 people lived, secretly, while they built the reactors that would eventually produce the plutonium for the bomb that destroyed the city of Nagasaki – surely the home of relatives and friends of the people who were behind the barbed wire at Manzanar. Now, just like Manzanar, there’s nothing at the Hanford Town Site but straight roads leading nowhere at all, weeds, and broken concrete. The physical and historical resonance of the two places was eerie: both once a home for thousands of people during a time whose terrors I can barely imagine, each now just this, descending back into the desert’s silence.

Following the map and directions, I left the car and headed off the paved road onto the eroded remnants of a smaller road. It was spooky to walk out into the heat and emptiness, and improbable that there would be a garden anywhere in this place. I kept walking, stumbling over broken asphalt, past the merest outlines of foundations. Finally I saw a grove of trees ahead of me: tough, scruffy locust trees from the steppes of Eurasia, survivors of 60 years with no water. I knew that someone must have tenderly planted them at a time when barbed wire and guard towers separated the man or woman who tended them from the outside world.

Under the trees it was abruptly cooler, like stepping from one world to another. My eyes adjusted to the quieter light, and I saw a network of paths and stones. It took a moment to realise what I was seeing. Beneath the trees was a small but exquisitely intricate construction, no more than 15 feet wide and 30 feet long. Winding through the grove of trees was a series of empty concrete pools and channels, sensuously curved. It seemed as if someone had shaped the concrete like a potter working clay, with a deep assurance, a kind of joy in shaping. A stone bridge arched over one of the channels, flat stones placed just so for the walker’s feet, everything still solid and strong.

Along each side there were paths beneath the trees, outlined in stone. Larger boulders were placed here and there, inviting the walker to sit, to look. Everywhere the shadows of leaves were dancing.

And carved, carefully, into the wall of the largest pool, was a date: ‘August, 1942’. Only five months after the camp was begun.

I sat down at the base of one of the trees, near the stone bridge. I folded my legs and sat zazen, the joyful ‘just sitting’ that has been central to my life for 20 years, transmitted to my country by Japanese Zen Buddhist priests. The quiet was very deep, except for the sound of a very small breeze in the trees above me. I felt held by this garden and the long-gone hands that had made it, safe like a child hidden beneath a bower.

After a while I began thinking of the spirit of the person who had imagined this place, perhaps only a few weeks after arriving in the camp, carrying all the pain of dislocation, dispossession and uncertainty. Someone leant over and began to gather stones, chose boulders from the desert, poured the pools, planted trees, brought water and made a simple place of peace, inside a prison in the middle of a war, not knowing what lay ahead. I considered what a gift the teachings of Japanese Zen have been in my life, and how Zen carries within it the same spirit that was so tangible here in this garden – generosity, simplicity and courage. I considered shikataganai, that ineffable Japanese expression: nothing to be done. What is, is.

I came to Zen when I was in my early 20s, like a thirsty person finding water. The path that leads towards anything is always mysterious, but for as long as I could remember, I’d been struggling with a koan, a deep question, and I think that it was this question, in part, that brought me to Zen. I’d spent portions of my childhood in Italy. The Second World War had only been over for 25 years or so, and the scars of that time were tangible. Most of us in America grow up shielded from the sufferings of great violence and disaster, but I walked streets where battles had been fought and saw ancient buildings still not yet rebuilt from the Allied bombings. My mother’s closest friend had been attacked as a young girl by an American soldier. My father is Jewish, and I had an inkling of what would have happened to me if I’d been living in Italy during the time when the fascists came to power.

At the time I was quite sure that I would be utterly broken by … well, by almost anything, but particularly by the brutalities of war and violence. I felt the presence of disaster close beside me, as it is beside all of us. My koan was: how does a person’s spirit survive when life becomes seemingly unendurable, as it can at any moment? How will my spirit survive? And how do I live with this fear?

In Zen, I learned to sit still with my life, whatever my life was at the moment: joy or sorrow, grief or fear. And gradually I discovered that something holds all of the dramas of being human, something larger and quieter, and gradually it’s gotten easier and less frightening to be alive. Disasters of various proportions have happened, and I’ve learned that life comes back after great fires.

But in Manzanar, sitting in the shade of those trees planted 60 years before, surrounded by a deep silence, I saw another, more radical possibility. Someone chose those stones and planted those trees in the midst of all that they wished was not occurring. They used what they knew to make a place of peace, for themselves and for those around them, even as they were powerless and without recourse. Right there, where loss and fear were in every heart, and where there was truly nothing to be done, shikataganai.

I thought of the cellist in Sarajevo, who played on the street corner day after day as the bombs rained down, asserting, with every note, that music cannot be destroyed. Or the Paiutes who watched their children die in the waters of Owens Lake, and who somehow survived to come back to their homeland and keep the flame of their people burning in the midst of those who wanted them gone. The power of the human heart rising up in the middle of darkness – this suddenly seemed as beautiful to me as anything in this whole world. As a child in Italy I remember hearing the nightingales singing in the middle of the night: there’s nothing like that song.

A few weeks after I’d been to Manzanar I went walking in the hills of Northern California with a friend, a man who happens also to be a creator of gardens. His grandfather had been born in Japan, and was a community benefactor in San Francisco. Because he was seen as a leader, he was separated from his family and sent to fearsome military prisons in the Arizona desert and in New Mexico, reserved for those who were considered particularly dangerous. When we arrived at the trail, my friend pulled out three walking sticks that had belonged to his grandfather, each carved from a different desert wood. One was made from a dark, hard wood, highly polished, with a curved head. One had a head that was a sort of latticework – an ocotillo plant, whose red flowers draw hummingbirds in the early spring. And the third came from the stalk of a century plant – the great candelabras of white flowers that rise from the desert floor. This one was light and strong, and on the upper portion were a series of beautifully carved Japanese characters, carefully filled with red ink. The calligraphy is so exquisite and sophisticated that no-one now is able to read them.

A few months later there was an exhibit in San Francisco of craft and art from the internment camps. There were watercolours and sketches, delicate carved wooden birds, flower pins made from hundreds of shells, inlaid Buddhist and Shinto altars made from packing crates, children’s toys made from crushed cans, and weavings made from the threads of onion sacks. I wondered how many were made as gifts, to cheer a friend or family member when things were hard. It seemed that each object, no matter how humble, had a quiet radiance, born from the care and love with which it was made. On the wall was a quote from Delphine Hirasuna, who had been an internee: ‘Everything was lost, except the courage to create’.

Wherever you are in your life, whatever lies ahead of you, I offer you this story and this word, like a small, carved stone you can hold in your pocket, to be taken out when needed. Shikataganai. What is, is. Not resignation or passivity, but perhaps the beginning, the first step, when faced with great difficulty: to admit and accept the place where you are, no matter how grim. And then to have the courage to turn and begin your garden, one stone at a time, one tree gently planted into the yielding earth.

—

Image

Bruce Hooke, ‘Emerging’, from ‘The Immersion Project’, Paria Canyon, Arizona, USA

What does it feel like to physically immerse myself in nature and what can I learn from doing so? It is easy to use nature as a place to challenge ourselves; a place to get an adrenaline fix. I want something else. I want to slow down and feel nature more fully, more deeply and more physically; to rediscover the relationship between my body and the natural world. We come from mature and we will return to nature. In between we seem to have lost our connection. We wander in a human-made wilderness.

The images in this series were made on medium-format film, using a Hasselblad 503CW camera. I created a remote-control system that allows me to trigger the shutter once I am in position.

—

Florence Caplow is a Unitarian Universalist minister, Soto Zen priest, former conservation biologist, activist, writer, and editor. She edited and contributed to Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental and Place-Based writing, and The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Woman. Her essays can also be read online at Slipping Glimpser: Zen Wanderings and Wonderings.

Bruce Hooke is a photographer and performance artist residing in the small, western Massachusetts town of Plainfield. His work focuses on the evolving human relationship to nature. He heard about Dark Mountain from a friend and felt an immediate connection between his work and the mission of the project. bghooke.com

—

 

It was in the grass. He thought it was dead. It seemed as if it had been there for a while, like the grass had grown around its body. But it wasn’t dead. It quivered as he drew near.

‘Go climb a tree,’ he said to it.

He nudged it with the edge of his flip-flop. It sprung up as if shocked and landed on the top of his foot. As he tried to shake it off, it bit. Then it fell from his foot and ran across the yard. It pressed itself against the fence.

He reached down to touch the bite and then thought better of it. It was more of a pinch.

He went inside.

‘A squirrel just bit me,’ he announced.

‘What?’ his wife said. She sounded sceptical and accusatory at once.

Dolly looked up from the table.

‘Maybe it has rabies,’ Dolly said.

His daughter was a sullen and frightened girl. She perked up at any suggestion that the world wasn’t as safe as her parents assured her it was.

His wife dried her hands on a towel. ‘Maybe you should call someone,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Animal control,’ said Dolly. She was the authority on disasters. She ordered preparedness pamphlets from government websites.

‘Is it bad?’ his wife said. She folded the towel and put it on the counter. She patted it.

‘It’s more of a pinch.’

‘Let me see,’ Dolly said. She came around the table and looked at his foot. ‘It’s bleeding a little. If there’s blood it isn’t a pinch. It broke the skin.’

His wife squeezed the bridge of her nose with her thumbs.

‘I’ve got to get ready,’ she said. ‘I’m showing a house in a half hour.’

‘Go on,’ he told her. ‘I can handle this.’

She walked out of the kitchen, testing her hair with her fingers.

He took a waffle out of the freezer and slotted it into the toaster.

‘Aren’t you going to call?’ Dolly asked.

‘I’m going to eat this waffle first,’ he said.

When his wife came back into the kitchen he was eating.

‘There’s coffee,’ she said. She took some earrings out of the junk drawer. She kept her favourite pairs in there, for some reason.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve got juice.’

‘I’m going now,’ she said.

‘You should go around the front,’ he said.

‘Why?’

She became so easily annoyed.

‘It’s still out there,’ he said. ‘In the yard.’

‘What?’

‘The squirrel. He was sitting near the fence.’

Dolly rushed to the glass doors.

‘God,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something wrong with it.’

‘It looked OK to me,’ he said.

‘You’d better call someone,’ said his wife. Then she left, using the front door. It hadn’t been opened in a while. It made a crackling sound. It had warped in its frame and needed sanding.

‘Do you need the number?’ said Dolly.

‘I’ll call information,’ he said.

*

‘It bit you,’ said the man from animal control, reviewing a fact. The man had a sweater on over his coveralls. It was the kind of colourful sweater that men of a certain age receive as gifts from their families.

‘Right here,’ he told the man, pointing down at his foot.

The man didn’t look. His concerns were animals.

‘Was it doing anything strange before the attack?’

He thought that was a strange word for the man to use, but he supposed it was the right word.

‘It was just in the grass,’ he told the man.

‘And afterwards?’

‘It ran away, but only to the fence. See it over there?’

‘I see it,’ said the man. ‘Can you remain in the domicile while I fetch a few things from the van?’

The man came back with a long net.

‘Where’s the other thing?’ he asked the man.

The man looked at him quizzically.

‘You said you were going to get a few things from the van.’

‘I meant one thing,’ the man said.

Then the man went out through the glass doors and put the net over the squirrel. He flipped the net and bounced it to make sure the squirrel went into the bottom. It seemed easy.

*

It was Saturday, so he’d be alone with Dolly all day. He asked her what she wanted to do.

‘Don’t you want to wait for the results?’ she said.

‘I doubt they’ll be in today,’ he said. ‘The animal control guy said he’d never heard of a squirrel getting rabies.’

‘They’ll have to cut its brain out to be sure,’ said Dolly. ‘And a tetanus shot. You’ll need one of those.’

‘I had one last year,’ he said. ‘The thing with the pruning shears.’

‘Oh, right,’ Dolly said. She turned back to the TV.

‘We’re leaving this house today,’ he told her.

‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go to the cupcake shop and I’d like to drive down and see the whale.’

Her mother wouldn’t like the cupcake idea. Dolly was getting doughy around the middle. ‘She can be weird or she can be chubby,’ his wife had said more than once. ‘But she can’t be weird and chubby.’

He told Dolly OK and to get ready.

‘I am ready,’ she said.

*

A small whale had been attempting to beach itself near Sandy Hook for the last three days. It was on the news. When the whale got close to shore, groups of volunteers would coax it back out with their hands and gentle chanting.

On the half-hour drive he stole glances at his daughter. She had chocolate frosting in the corner of her mouth. A few years ago he would have reached over and wiped at her lip with the pad of his thumb, but she was old enough now to keep her own face clean. Thirteen was a hard age, he understood, though it hadn’t been particularly difficult for him. The drudgery of school, yes, but mostly he remembered the bright summers, the smell of chlorine, the snap of a ball in a glove. It was easier, maybe, for boys. If you had an interest in sports and could throw and catch, it wasn’t hard to get by.

‘Do you know we’re in the middle of a major age of extinction?’ Dolly said. ‘Bigger than when the dinosaurs died, even.’

‘That’s interesting,’ he said.

He meant it. He himself often thought along those lines. For example, was evolution still happening to human beings, and if so what would they look like in a million years? He recognised that, at the rate things were going, it might be a moot question. It wasn’t something he was going to discuss with Dolly, who worried enough as it was.

‘People always tell you something bad is interesting when they don’t intend to do anything about it,’ she said.

‘I don’t think there’s much I could do,’ he told her.

If only his daughter’s disappointment was bred by smaller things. He wanted to make her happy.

*

The wind whipped off the ocean and tugged at their jackets. He pulled his collar up. A gust lifted the hair off his forehead. He felt vaguely heroic, approaching the beach under a sky of steel. Like someone out of a World War Two novel. The sand was coarse and grey, littered with twisted pieces of black wood. It was winter sand. But winter was still a few months off.

A few huddled groups were scattered on the beach. Primarily they wore parkas but a few were in full-body wet suits. There was only one person in the water, a surfer straddling his board about a hundred yards from shore.

A young woman jogged towards them purposefully. Her jeans were soaked up to her thighs. She had a red eager face. She squinted as if she were visualising her ideals.

‘He came in, but now he’s back out,’ the young woman said. She shouted to be heard over the wind. ‘This is my third day.’

‘Do you sleep here?’ Dolly asked. His daughter was hugging herself against the cold.

‘Sure,’ said the young woman. ‘We take turns combing the beach with flashlights. Twice last night we had to push him back from shore. Nobody’s helping. The Coast Guard was here, and then a guy from the aquarium, but they gave up. We’re the only ones who believe he doesn’t really want to die.’

The flush was dissolving from the young woman’s cheeks, a blossoming played backwards. He thought the worst part of being grown was realising how inevitable everything is. He thought how astonishing it would be if he grabbed the young woman and kissed her. He pictured his daughter’s astonishment.

The surfer came up from the beach, carrying his board. He was bearded and thin, with wet ropes of silver hair down his back. He stuck his surfboard into the sand near them. On the bottom of the board was written, ‘This machine kills fascists.’ The surfer put his arm around the young woman, who shivered into his embrace.

‘He’s out there,’ said the surfer, pointing at where he had been. ‘He’s right out there, waiting.’

They peered at all the grey water. Something broke the surface. It looked like an inflated plastic garbage bag bobbing up. There was a spray, like a sneeze, and then it went under. Along the beach other groups were pointing and calling out.

‘You’ve seen a whale,’ he said to his daughter.

You could divide your life this way, he thought. I have not seen. And now I have. This must be what bird-watching was all about. Or maybe everything.

‘He’s not really a whale anymore,’ said the surfer. ‘He’s been touched by man. A whale’s one of those things not meant to be touched by human hands.’

‘He’s like a dog, then?’ said Dolly.

‘Something sadder than that,’ said the surfer.

‘Michael teaches economics,’ the young woman said.

The whale bobbed up and blew again.

*

By the time they got back it was dark. His wife had come home while they were gone, but left again. There was a note on the kitchen table that she was meeting with her memoir group and wouldn’t be back until late. She’d drawn a sad face, which meant she hadn’t made a sale. Along with the note, she’d left take-out menus from Angelo’s and the Chinese place. Dolly said she wasn’t hungry and went to her room. She kept several bags of chips in her closet and candy bars in her nightstand. He didn’t know how she came by these things. She never asked him for a dime.

He heard her settling into her bed, and then the growls and percussive gunfire of the zombie game she played whenever her mother was out. He took a jar of pickles out of the refrigerator and fished inside with two fingers. There was only one left, and it evaded him. He thought of Dolly as a baby, how he’d been the one who could rock her to sleep in his arms with a pattern his wife could never master. One, two, dip, bob. One, two, dip, bob. The deep reward of her eyelids beginning to flutter and relax, like the feathers of a settling bird. He remembered the squirrel and rolled down his sock. The skin around the bite was inflamed and tender. But he felt the same.

At the beach a single tent was luminous against the night. Inside, the young woman and the surfer made blunt love. The whale, within shouting distance but forgotten for the moment, turned seaward.

On the other side of the world, a tiger padded into an encampment. She bore the smell of shit and meat. In her teeth were strands of lung, liver and intestine, offal of her own young. She entered the light cast by the fire. The tiger’s muscles slid beneath her stripes like prisoners behind bars. The three men warming themselves, poachers, stood with shock and fear. This was the very beast they’d stalked for days, whose cubs they had found in a hole beneath the roots of a fallen baobab and eviscerated on the spot, taking what they needed and leaving a small pile of wet guts where each had slept. Now the tiger had come to rip them down and tear out their throats. They found themselves unable to run. Their rifles, leaning against a tree fifteen feet from where they stood, were like distant things in a dream. The fire popped loudly and they heard the heavy shuffling of their elephants in the woods.

And then the tiger, like a house cat, rolled onto her back and offered her heart to her hunters.

—

Image

Emily Laurens, ‘Remembrance Day for Lost Species 2014, Memorial to the Passenger Pigeon’, Llangrannog Beach, Wales.
We need to find new ways to commemorate the passing of places, ecosystems and species. One hundred years ago and 4000 miles away, the passenger pigeon became extinct. From billions to none in the blink of an eye. With that in mind, I went to where the civilised, farmed, human-dominated land meets the wild untameable ocean to draw passenger pigeons with my friends in that liminal space. Within those fragments of rock that sea and time have crumbled to near dust, I trace their shapes with my garden rake. In the blond brown sands I draw a small flock of pigeons, like shadows passing overhead. And then I watch them disappear. Photograph by Keely Clarke

—

David Schuman grew up in a New Jersey suburb about 30 miles from Manhattan. His parents, both teachers, told him he could do anything he wanted in life as long as it wasn’t teaching. So, of course, that is what he does now. He lives in St Louis, at the nexus of many aspects of America’s present cultural moment. Discovering Dark Mountain through the New York Times, he found the story ‘Squirrel’, which he had written months earlier, made sense in a way that it hadn’t before. So he submitted it for publication.

Emily Laurens is one of Feral Theatre’s co-founders and co-directors and lives and works in rural West Wales. Her work uses and utilises myth, clown, ritual, mask, puppets and movement to explore loss, transformation and our connection to the Earth and its non-human inhabitants.

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Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times is published by Chelsea Green, and brings together essays, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork selected from the first ten issues of Dark Mountain. It’s available from all good bookshops, but if you want to support our work then we’d encourage you to order it direct from the Dark Mountain online shop.

The stakes are in the meadow … the fields are overgrown
The winds of change are blowin’ through the place I’ve called home
They’re digging at the edges to build the power line
Same old story … but now the story’s mine […]
It all began 300 years before
What story is beginning
If this one is no more?

– Railroad Earth, ‘Lone Croft Farewell’

This story is nothing special, nothing new. It is a story of time, my home, my family, and how this story continues to consume our time and space to be human, creating existential crises in individuals (myself). Environmental writers write about childhood because, it seems, this is the only place where, if lucky, we are now afforded the habitat to be human for a short while before we’re forced into the fold. This is not one of those articles. It is a recounting, in my words and my grandparents’, of how things have changed and of the unfolding discontentment across generations. Out of this arises a patient hope – for what, I still cannot say – but it is not for what we have now.

This place, Western Pennsylvania, the western foothills of Appalachia, has produced a lot of coal, gas and steel (and a lot of broken backs, broken families and cancer) but also Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey and Rachel Carson, though most of us around here have never heard of them. What abides are strong family ties and proud gardeners, a connection to the land (what is left of it), and a stubborn independence, although for how long I do not know. It is a place I will continue to call home until I die or it is taken from me.

I left here as an eager teenager and returned a decade later married with kids and a mortgage on a four-acre plot. A curious thing happens after spending time away. Aesthetics and idiosyncrasies of time and space – a workday commute, a weed or ambient sound – become more pronounced, as the difference between the present and memories of the past reveals the quality of relationships, change and often injustice. Discontent and love arise hand in hand as objects and experiences resurrect these memories, revealing something new and something old and a living story which lies in between.

Some of these objects and experiences are products of civilised life. Civilisation goes about its business condensing the raw elements of life (including people) into capital and products, and in the process condenses the experience of time and space into things like gasoline, trucks, p-values, and phones – potent mediators to the experience of life and reality. This business permeates even my thoughts, behaviours and sometimes desires. In the process, stories fragment and memories fade. It’s the ‘same old story’ once again.

But there is always room to rewrite, re-create, and be reborn. I’m still just as eager for something different, something new – perhaps because I was born of this place which has been in constant flux since my farmer ancestors immigrated here from Germany, Ireland, Scotland and Denmark over 200 years ago.

This eagerness is not for what most would think. I’ve travelled enough of the world to find that the best things in life come from my garden, kitchen and bed. And an adventure away from it all, a solitary place to get lost and lose myself, I can often find within my garden or the local woods. I spent most of my time away living in Boston. I do miss its diverse and witty people, the White Mountains nearby, and a walk to the Atlantic for a dip. But I wouldn’t call it home. This will be – probably until I die. This will be the place where I’ll always return after getting lost, after losing myself. After many generations of being pushed aside, something within me has decided that it is time to remain still and quiet, at least for now.

Much of this place has changed. The fields are now dotted with giant houses and gas wells. Gas lines vein and artery the land, ever-vascularising new territory and depths, varicosing to the surface for stations, valves and utilities. Churches have water ministries (not to be confused with baptism) helping families with contaminated or lost water. People seem richer and poorer, which is nothing new to this business. Once non-existent or seldom-seen, smartphones, stink bugs and drugs are now ubiquitous – luxury and its victims reinvented.¹

The woods are posted. When I was little I used to be able walk miles in most directions from home without bothering anybody except Mom who would, having exhausted her voice, wail on her hefty iron triangle bell to call us in after we were gone too long. Impossible now without breaking some law, namely trespassing, as the countryside is increasingly owned by businesses or individuals who live far away. I remember her heaving the antique from its nail on the wall, a symbol of a time when kin worked within earshot – although in her case she slept alone every night; still does, with Dad working night shift at the plant.

We boys roamed the countryside, pretending to be trappers and homesteaders like Daniel Boone, but found someone had already beat us to it and then disappeared, leaving behind ploughs, animal traps and trash. Those relics became our rusty treasure, shifting our ambitions from rocks, plants and animals to more neurotic, civilised pursuits: archaeology, anthropology, and something else – for those rusty relics became something like Yorick’s skull, leading to various questions of existence:

‘Who were they? Where did they come from? Where did they go? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Who am I? And if all the Daniel Boones are gone – their tools, land, and dreams absconded – where is this fantasy taking me?’

When I was 12 my brother, a year younger, wept when we learned that someone was planning to build in the woods behind our house where the old sawmill used to be – where we played like giants along the stream, shot, trapped and caught countless helpless critters. We booby-trapped the place with animal skulls and snakes to dissuade them – it worked, so we thought. That place was sacred to us. We still pause each time we pass there, now with our little ones, in awe of how tall the sycamores have grown, how little we now feel. We stand mouths-agape peering at the ivory heights, wondering if sycamore fruit is edible, eyeing a viable avenue to the top.

‘I wonder what those taste like … Hey, where are the kids?’

When I was a child, time was absent, but now everything is moving and accelerating, especially those little ones. My great-grandparents’ world was no less chaotic, but for several generations prior to theirs there was a relative homeostasis, a sameness from one time to the next (they would have disagreed). Change has been constant, bulldozing the past, yet still dictated by the same intensifying powers – powers that as I grow older I find all around me and even within my own conscience; and sometimes, to my annoyance, my unconsciousness.

I try to pluck such infiltrates from my soul just as I do the stink bugs (an Asian insect who stole away on Chinese imports during my decade away) from every nook and cranny of my home, or as I once plucked them from my toddler’s shoulder. As for my children, I just can’t say what time will be or bring for them. Will they stay? Will they return? How will the pressures of time and these powers form them?

The mining frenzy hasn’t changed, even since the first Drake oil well was drilled just north of here in 1859. We’re always moving and being moved by the energy industry, which powers what William Cobbett² called ‘The Thing’, and others have called progress, GDP, revenue, industrial warfare (‘the War effort’), democratic capitalism, The Machine, The Man, development, growth. Grandpap recently shook his head in disgust – shocked that they all-at-once strip-mined and fracked the vast rolling fields across from his childhood home:

‘That was still good land! Been farmed long before I was around – a lot of people took care of those fields.’

The Thing has given us much, though. Compared with my great-grandparents we live like royalty – more convenience and luxury; however, less freedom and less time. If they saw us now they would quietly nod and politely say, ‘That’s nice,’ then gratefully, skilfully return to their work. I romanticise, but these were folks who lived life abundantly, and without electricity or indoor plumbing. My brothers and I have careers now, and if you’ve got one around here you are likely tied to mining or the energy industry, and invariably tied (or perhaps noosed, knotted, lassoed or wedded) to The Thing.

One of us counts and recounts the surplus, one ensures it is safely acquired, and I manage the side effects – as a psychiatric nurse. I say manage, for true prevention would be anathema to growth, to luxury – to the noose. At work I see the double edge of our way of life: the rich man who feels alone and empty, and the poor single mother who is exhausted from working three jobs, neither of whom have time for their children. Cobbett protested against this onslaught, for fairness, longing for the nation of his childhood. But turning back the clock is futile, and with only three weeks of holiday a year, there’s no time left for dealing with ‘hucksters, governments, or favourable representatives.³ The soul needs daily restoration: at home I have my children’s youth and my wife’s love to enjoy, there are beans and berries to pick and preserve, someone needs help with a shovel, the winter wren offers a song and dance, there’s food to cook and share.

*

Dozers and trucks, symbolic and steel, can become deeply personal. Grandma had the noisy, dusty coal processing plant nearby, their dairy farm razed for progress, which is now Moraine State Park. My childhood home (the actual house) had been relocated from its hilltop farm to the edge of the woods in order to make way for strip mines. I have peered and peed into more than one open mine pit. Stepping from a wet vernal paradise teeming with life to a silent dusty pit the size of a small village, I found myself asking then, as I do now, ‘Is all this really necessary?’

My friend lived in the trailer park down the road – his father was a drag-line crane mechanic, always reeking of diesel, piss, tobacco and sweat from sleeping in a rig or his pickup. They would operate those draglines 24/7: one was a mile away, lighting the horizon and drumming the earth. You didn’t notice its constant racket until it suddenly broke down, sometimes with a thunderous echoing boom as the house-sized bucket fell to the ground. Right then, an etheric, proverbial breath was released: silence wind birds breath heart and mind quickly settled to the fore of consciousness. The land and I exhaled, and for a brief moment possibility opened her door.

Equanimity restored.

*

For as long as I can recall I have been awakened by the drone of early-morning coal trucks on nearby Routes 19, I 79 and 422. As a teen I spent the night at my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) parents’ house. The road lay parallel, just a few yards away, to a couch in the foyer where I slept – once. Jake-brakers! The noise of slowing trucks is loud enough to shake houses, make dogs bark, babies cry, throw china from cupboard shelves, and unhinge windows and your mind.

Today the morning drone is accompanied by cavalcades of frack water and rigging trucks. On my morning commute I share the highway with the trucks carrying coal, water, pipes and rigging, and also windmill wings hundreds of feet long on their way to the Appalachian mountaintops east of here. There are pillars of fire on every horizon, which always lend images of a biblical Israelite camp and tabernacle, like the posters on a Sunday school wall.

At work, many of my patients are coal miners, roughneckers, truck drivers and their wives and children – the children I worry for the most (and what of their children’s children, including my own?). Too many of those young people look at their exhausted, indebted, irritable, unhealthy, addicted and divorced forebears and ask me the question: ‘What’s the point?’ without a story to tell or fulfil. I have no answer that will satisfy their soul and I almost appreciate their protest: sitting idly, already disillusioned, without ambition or hope.

The miners come with bent backs and spirits, fearing they are no longer useful. The roughneckers always find a way to gaol: heroin, fights, more heroin. The truckers, anxious and paranoid: running against time, traffic and debt. There are also surveyors, land grabbers, rich well owners, poor pipe welders and an arrogant rookie accountant setting up some kind of hedge fund for the drilling companies. Many, though, are jobless, clinically poor, and by the time they see me are beyond their wits’ end with their struggle. People around here (myself included) aren’t apt to ask for help, particularly from a stranger, and more particularly from a shrink. During our lunch conversation my co-worker tearfully shares the news: ‘It’s a malignancy’. She’s the fourth in our office diagnosed with cancer this year. My boss complains that ‘They’re dumping in the stream again’ behind her house. She isn’t sure how to stop them or clean it up.

The daily 10am and 2pm trains rumble and screech outside my office window, a mile of coal, oil and chemicals in tow. I drive home with the trucks and need to use my windshield wipers when following the frack water salvage trucks as they leak an oily, briny residue onto my car (destined to be dumped in old wells in Ohio). On the car radio, I listen to a politician argue that in order to save the future existence of Pennsylvania farming we need more gas operations on farmland.

I arrive home and my daughters and I wander into the garden where dull bituminous and shiny anthracite lie on the ground, dropped from previous mining operations. We pick tomatoes, flicking off confident stink bugs, while the Haliburton pickup drives by and the Shell helicopter flies overhead – every day at 5.45pm.

Entering through the basement door, I’m greeted by my radon detector beeping: the level is still above the EPA ‘safe’ level, even after the expensive mitigation system whose constant hum drives me mad. Some wondered if radon had contributed to my aunt’s early death since she lived in an underground house near gas wells and mining. We’ll never know.

The calm of the evening is periodically interrupted by the wobbly fan blades of my new electric ultra-efficient heat pump, my attempt to warm and cool my house ‘sustainably’. I listen with indignation and vengeful pleasure. I dare not fix it. The blade might one day let loose and destroy its innards, but that is fine. My beloved winter wren couple (and since, a host of other birds, chipmunks, squirrels, a wild kitten and a baby crow) recently nosed around inside looking for a place to build their nest when the fan kicked on. You can’t kill pure spirits like theirs without damage. Winter evenings are warmed by my pellet stove: an insane contraption, always needing fixing, and relying on wood for sawdust, volumes of natural gas to dry and press the pellets, oil to haul and package the pellets, and coal-fired electric to power the thing – all for a simple warm fire. We’re burning even the dust and selling it as an ‘ecological’ heat source, referring to sawdust as waste. Not even the dust is allowed to fall as an offering to future forests, fungi, termites and dirt.

But The Thing is there, so I use it. I’m as patient as a snake, but sooner than later, in a maniacal fit of rage and flurry of pellets, The Thing will be speeding to the scrap yard.

‘Mommy, where’d Daddy go?’

‘He’ll be back, babe. Let’s clean up these pellets.’

I later turn out the lights, burned at the local coal (soon to be gas) plant, just west of here, which I’m told may have contributed to the asthma that nearly killed me when I was three and now suffocates my toddler. I fall asleep to the drone of the trucks.

—

Notes

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson frequently explored the karmic idea that for every material excess, there is a double-sided, moral/material victim or ‘defect’, e.g. the modern guilt over our excess, and our pitiful attempts at finding ‘sustainable’ methods of having more of the same story. See RWE’s essay ‘Compensation’.
2. See Dark Mountain: Issue 2, ‘The Shuttle Exchanged for the Sword’ by Warren Draper. The Luddites’ ‘same old story’ is what drove Cobbett to stoop to his political endeavours and my ancestors to seek a place in America where they could farm unbothered. That Jeffersonian dream remained a dream for almost 150 years until the story quickly caught up with them.
3. From Robinson Jeffers’ ‘Soul’s Desert’.

—

Image

Ron Hagg, ‘Adobe Farmhouse’, New Mexico, USA
This is an abandoned adobe farmhouse in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico. It is sad to see a family’s dream abandoned where once there was hope. Today in the United States we are run by a corporate state — small family farms are disappearing at an alarming rate., only to be taken over by huge factory farms. In this photograph I try to capture not only a devastating case of a single family no longer farming, but also a reflection of the state of affairs in our society. Before the arrival of the Europeans in 1700 this area was populated by members of the Taos Pueblo.

—

Jason Benton has been following a rabbit trail that began with woods and fields and creek-bottomed hills, then cities and oceans, airplanes and theology, mountains and jungles, horses and psychiatric nursing, and now goats and gardens. Presently, he is back home in Western Pennsylvania, with children and homeschooling, work, a very small farm and a large garden.

Ron Hagg is an exhibited photographer, based in Taos, New Mexico, and has worked in the field of education for most of his adult life. His first job was helping migrant farm labour families. When he worked at Hoopa Valley High School in Humboldt County, California, he initiated and coordinated the effort to teach the languages of three of the areas’s Native American tribes, Karuk, Yurok and Hupa. He has written four novels: Jesus of Kneeland, To Keep from Drowning, Dreams of a New Day and Escape in Time. The last of these was turned into a full-length motion picture. haggmedia.com

—

Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times is published by Chelsea Green, and brings together essays, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork selected from the first ten issues of Dark Mountain. It’s available from all good bookshops, but if you want to support our work then we’d encourage you to order it direct from the Dark Mountain online shop.

Uncivilisation, the manifesto that launched the Dark Mountain Project, was written in the autumn of 2008, at a time of global crisis and collapse. A firestorm was blowing through the world’s financial system, and for a while it was unclear how much of the world would be left standing when it ended. This book was assembled eight years later, at the end of 2016 – a year in which it was the turn of the West’s political systems to feel the force of a storm blowing through history, upending expectations as it passed through.

The timing, in both cases, seems fitting. Dark Mountain was created by two English writers who felt that writing was not doing its job. In a world in which the climate itself was being changed by human activities; in which global ecosystems were dying back before the human advance; and in which the dominant economic and cultural assumptions of the West were clearly beginning to crumble, that little manifesto – 20 pages long, hand-stitched, bound in red paper – asked a simple question: where are the writers, and the artists? Why were the novels, the films, the music, the cultural forms that passed for ‘mainstream’ in our society still behaving as if it were the 20th century – or even the 19th?

Something else, we thought, was needed. Writers and artists, thinkers and doers, needed to own up to the crises enfolding us, instead of pretending they weren’t happening, or that they were just glitches which could be ironed out by technology or politics. An abyss was opening up before us, and the very basis of our civilisation was in question. It was, declared the manifesto, ‘time to look down.’ If we did, might we be surprised by what we saw?

Uncivilisation, like the modernist manifestos it was inspired by, which had appeared a century before at another time of upheaval, asked these questions to shake people up, to challenge them, to throw cats among pigeons. We wanted writing and art that reflected the dark times we were living in. We wanted writers as prophets, artists who spoke with honest tongues, who might not pretend to have answers but who didn’t hide from the questions. We had no idea what this meant, really, or what it would look like, or where to find it, or whether, indeed, it was already out there and we just didn’t know about it. The whole thing, like all manifestos, was presumptuous, loud, and arrogant. But it worked.

Nearly ten years on, a tiny initiative launched in the back room of a pub to about 40 slightly confused people has become an international network of writers, artists, musicians, thinkers, activists and many others without labels, who believe, as we believed, that honesty about the state of the world is not only necessary but is also a source of energy, and even hope. Once false hopes are shrugged off, once we stare into the darkness that surrounds us, we can see new paths opening up; new forms; new words. The question our manifesto raised – where are all the ‘uncivilised’ writers and artists – began to be answered almost immediately. They were out there, but they hadn’t been able to find each other. What Dark Mountain did – one of the things it did – was to raise a flag around which they could gather.

The results of this gathering have taken many forms. We have run festivals and college courses, worked with national theatres and led mountain expeditions. We have appeared in a strange assortment of media outlets, from radio to TV, from Resilience.org to the New York Times. We run a website which reaches hundreds of thousands of people each year. We host concerts and lectures, storytellers and performers, poets and magicians.

At the core of all this activity, though, we are doing what we intended to do all along: publishing books. Since 2010, Dark Mountain has published a series of beautifully crafted hardback journals, featuring writing and art from around the world. Each book is packed with contrasting voices and genres: poetry, photography, long essays, flash fiction, paintings, reportage and much else, all brought together by a team of editors many of whom first came to Dark Mountain as unknown voices published in the early books.

All of this has been an attempt to bring together the kind of writing we called for back in 2009:

It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own – a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare – might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation – and us – into perspective.

Have we succeeded? That’s for others to say. What we can say is that the years which separate the writing of our manifesto from the publishing of this book have seen a widening awareness of the instability of our civilisation and the seriousness of the threats which face it. The kind of arguments which saw us attacked as ‘doomers’ when we published them in 2010 can be found today on the comment pages of international newspapers. It is becoming harder and harder to deny that what we used to think of as ‘progress’ is faltering badly. What happens next is the interesting part.

What can writing do about this? What problems can art solve? In one sense, the answers are: nothing, and none. But in another sense, these are the wrong questions. ‘All civilisations’, we wrote in the manifesto, ‘are built on stories.’ When the stories fail, we need to know how to tell different ones. We need to have the perspective to understand the failure, and the imagination to offer up new ways of seeing. This is what Dark Mountain set out to do: to play host to voices seeking honest engagement with questions which might be intractable. How else does art get made?

Walking on Lava contains words and images selected from the ten books that the Dark Mountain Project has so far published. It will take you from the mountains of Bolivia to the tribal areas of India and from rural California to the coast of Greenland, in the company of passenger pigeons, squirrels, horses, roe deer and wolves. It will whisk you through time, from medieval Florence to 18th century England to prehistoric India to the Younger Dryas. It will introduce you to the history of the future, walk you through the Mahabharata, teach you to think differently about space travel and give you a recipe for pheasant stew.

As we started work on this collection, we wondered how to select from such a diversity of work: what structure could help a newcomer find their way into the territory of Dark Mountain? Then we remembered what we had written at the end of the manifesto. On its last pages, we offered ‘eight principles of Uncivilisation’: a first attempt to define, point by point, what we stood for and what we wanted to achieve.

The writers, thinkers and artists we have met along this journey have taken us to places that were not marked on our maps, but as we retrace the routes we’ve explored together, what is striking is how far they have deepened our understanding of each of those principles. So as you follow our footsteps, you will find Walking on Lava is organised according to those early categories, with each section of writing introduced by a primal image. This selection is far from a full picture of what we do, but it offers one path across the landscape which Dark Mountain continues to explore. We hope to see you somewhere along the way.

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Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times is published by Chelsea Green, and brings together essays, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork selected from the first ten issues of Dark Mountain. It’s available from all good bookshops, but if you want to support our work then we’d encourage you to order it direct from the Dark Mountain online shop.

And if you’re in London on 5th September, join us for the book launch at Brick Lane’s Old Truman Brewery. The evening will feature readings and performances from contributors and editors, and of course a chance to buy the book. You can reserve your (free) ticket here.

I have sat back without comment as the onslaught of ‘eco-art’ has burgeoned, all of it well-intentioned but much of it ill-informed and based on poor (or non-existent) science. So much of this work has no nuance, no greys, and very little by way of cogent argument. In an era where ‘truth’ is often placed in inverted commas, because as a society we seem to have lost any sense of what the word means, factoids and opinions based on little more than gut responses or intuition abound as absolute truth.

I suppose I’m bothered by these simplifications of the functioning of the natural world – all meat-eating is bad, we were never meant to consume cow’s milk, fox hunting is a plaything for the upper classes (‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible’ according to Oscar Wilde) – because for much of my adult life I’ve been a rural dweller. Increasingly, we tend to reflect the knowledge of our tribe, and tribal knowledge is often narrowly defined and bucks little in the way of opposition. And I’m very much of a tribe of the non-mainstream where rejection of received (or lazy) wisdom is the common cause. I’m absolutely with the tribe in my views on Trump and American neo-colonialism, on GM foods, on Brexit, on recycling and re-using and shopping local and well… I suspect you know the rest.

But my tribal instincts are blurred by my neighbours and by the places and communities in which I’ve lived and the friends I’ve had and the people I’ve interacted with. I know that grass-fed pasture-fed beef is not the same as grain-fed feed-lot hormone-laced beef; I understand that both place a burden on the planet, but that the environmental cost of the former is so much less than the latter. And yet, when the tribe spews the accepted knowledge about meat, it is only the story of the worst practices that are reflected. I know that fox hunting as it was traditionally practiced in the UK (and still is, to a large extent) had little to do with class (perhaps plenty to do with feudal structures, but that is not the same thing) but had a great deal to do with keeping horses and the horse-stock healthy, fit and strong, and ridding the land of less-than-healthy foxes and others who are considered to be vermin (unlike many others who attack livestock and crops, foxes kill far more than they will ever consume and are therefore inherently ecologically wasteful, rather like Homo sapiens, many of whose activities could also be classed as verminous in this sense of the word).

Just as I had found myself becoming increasingly irritated and lacking in patience with the contemporary art world, finding so much of the work empty, vacuous, and plain silly, so I found myself becoming increasingly irritated with a great deal of so-called ‘eco-art’ which seems to be neither particularly ‘eco’ (in the sense that it is all too often based on ‘intuitive’ tribal knowledge rather than on ecological fact, and rigid in its thinking rather than fluid and open) nor good art.

art.earth grew out of a simple imperative: I felt the need to create a vessel for artists and organisations whose work focuses, or reflects, glories in, worries about, or dwells in this glorious troubled planet on which we live. This vessel is leaky, a bit porous, and probably not very seaworthy, but is nevertheless here to facilitate and support, to encourage and to cheer-lead those who wish to experiment and be bold and acknowledge and revel in the complexity of the questions at hand.

Above all, my original intent was to provide support for work that wasn’t about single-issue environmental tales: not about climate change, not about pollution, not about food.

It’s an attempt, in some way, to redress a balance, to create places where art and the environment can be talked about in forums where sloppy thinking could be challenged or interrogated, where scientists and philosophers could be as much at home as artists. I’m not sure we’ve achieved this yet, but we have gone part of the way and when designing our events or curating our exhibitions we do at least weed out sloppy thinking and ‘intuitive facts’ at an early stage.

In Other Tongues (June 2017) was our third symposium and came from a place that was entirely intuitive on my part: that the languages and knowledges of other-than-human were rich, meaningful and poorly understood by us. I worked with Mat Osmond and with a committee of artists and academics who brought rigour to what was originally quite a flabby idea. They also brought clear thinking and a degree of ruthlessness to the selection of presenters and others who shared their idea at the symposium.

This opening keynote from Prof. Wendy Wheeler exposed many of the themes of the conference: that animals, plants, fungi, bacteria – the stuff of life – are far from being mere living machines, but are semiotic, interpretative systems. ‘It turns out not to be so strange that humans have made art and song, because the nonhuman living systems from which humans have evolved are organised via structuring principles that are much more like art, music and poetry’ she told us. Prof. Wheeler introduced this new world of biological, cultural, human and more-than-human living meanings that biosemiotics uncovers and explores – Wordsworth’s ‘mighty sum of things for ever speaking’.

Our other keynote speaker was poet Alyson Hallett who explored the relationship between the human body and stones: how we interact and how we communicate with one another.  ‘At many times in my life,’ Alyson says, ‘a stone has acted as a compass and pointed me in a direction I might not have taken if I hadn’t listened to it.  What did this listening entail?  What did I hear when I listened?  Was it a stone language?  Or was something in my own imagination drawn out by the stone?’ Instead of seeking to identify answers, she instead meandered along probable and improbable pathways in search of a door that we can slip through and, if we’re lucky, find something we didn’t know we were looking for. And all of this coming from a place where the boundary between the physical and the metaphysical became ever more porous and ever more delicious.

These two approaches were in every sense bookends: as an academic theorist, Wendy Wheeler’s paper was challenging, deeply researched, and the result of a lifetime of thought. Alyson Hallett’s paper also reflected a lifetime of practice, but was utterly unafraid to talk about relationships and communication with objects other tribes would view as inert and inherently devoid not perhaps of meaning but of any ability to communicate or have agency.

Others explored sonic worlds, the penumbral, our animal selves, animal language, and material worlds of field, water, fungi. A number of presentations talked about the prevalence of animals in our myths and stories and their relevance today. Many explored animal being.

Surely all this was ripe for slippery truths, for the ill-expressed and ill-conceived – a factual void. Certainly at the first stage there was a great number of proposals that arguably fell into these categories, but what ultimately emerged was a collection of papers and other presentations, workshops and performances that provided opportunities for new physical and metaphysical explorations without any loss of connection to ground or intellectual rigour.

And for me this is redressing yet another balance. In a life that has embraced far too many academic conferences, I generally found them reflective of the academic world in general: competitive, point-scoring, bitchy, and rather depressing. I so desperately wanted art.earth events to have a different flavour than this rather bitter-tasting one. And so, it turned out, did everyone who became involved.

I’m struck, bowled-over, really, by the openness and generosity of spirit that accompanies these symposia – and our leaky vessel in general. I feel a huge debt of gratitude towards all those who take part and somewhat fearful that the magic will one day dissipate. Thus far, it has held as we have transitioned and grown. Perhaps some of this is due to remaining very open to styles and forms of presentation while not accepting obfuscation and language that has little meaning other than for the fully-initiate. Perhaps it is the setting and the fact that we roam across the ecological richness of the rural Dartington Hall estate. Perhaps it’s because England’s southwest peninsula is something of an edgeland – getting to us is hard and arduous and exhausting and the arriving a reward in itself. Perhaps it comes from selection, and self-selection and the openness of the participants. Perhaps it’s to do with ensuring that there are many ways of attending the event without necessarily paying the full registration rate. Perhaps it’s about tone. Perhaps it’s about flavour. There’s no bitterness here.

But perhaps it’s also it’s about ecology. When I use this word, I’m talking about ways of being, ways of paying attention and ways of interacting. I’m not speaking of ecology as a single truth or a set of scientific understandings but as an openness to knowledge, to organic process, to blurred edges and porous boundaries. I believe the events we create are ecological experiments, tickling the edges between rigorous thought and tribal knowledge. And above all they are about how we live here, on our planet, with our friends, family and cohorts, with our shared and separate knowledges and ways of being.

For more information: art.earth, In Other Tongues.

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Richard Povall is a sound artist, researcher and educator and the founding director of art.earth. His practice and research centre around the natural world and ecological systems and art practices. Previously he co-directed dance-theatre company half/angel (UK/IRL) and was a founding Director of Aune Head Arts (UK); he has taught in a variety of Universities and Conservatories in the UK and US and was formerly Director of Contemporary Music at Oberlin Conservatory in the UK and held Senior Research Fellowships at Middlesex University and Dartington College of Arts. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2010.