Harry Jenkinson
Wild Service and the Human Right to Roam (Seminar)
In this talk, Harry Jenkinson will present the concept of Wild Service: a philosophy of reciprocity with our fellow species, made possible through increased human access to nature.
Humans are a nomadic species. For over 95% of our history, we have lived as nomadic hunter gatherers, with nomadism centrally tied to understandings of ecological balance. But when we are politically and culturally restricted from nature, we become unable to take care of it. The Right to Roam movement, of which Harry is a part, calls for public access the English countryside, 92% of which is inaccessible.
Looking at mobility and ecological reciprocity among Indigenous peoples today, Harry will discuss inspirations for Wild Service and draw upon his ethnographic work among Indigenous peoples in Melanesia and the Arctic. Wild Service offers a renewal of relationships, where we recognise humanity as part of, rather than separate from nature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85gk6Ns0xz8
Good evening, everybody. We are gonna have a lovely talk tonight with Harry Jenkinson who is an author.
We’ve just had this lovely book; Wild Service, Why Nature Needs You.
He is a Land Justice and Indigenous Rights campaigner, specializing in environmental anthropology and access to nature.
Harry’s been a man after our own heart because, he was part of organizing a special action with Right to Rome, a trespass, but at nighttime, at the night of the Dark Moon, when people should have access to be able to see the Milky Way and the Stars, it was too far away for us to join it.
But Harry stood in and gave a lecture to everybody gathered there under the stars on Lunarchy, the dark, the, the, importance of the rhythm of the Dark Moon, ‘rule by the moon’. 2022, The Duke of Northumberland estate.
So I’m gonna hand over to Harry because he’s got a beautiful presentation, sit back and enjoy it.
Thank you so much, Camilla, and thank you everyone. It’s a real honor to be here and, speaking in front of, rag and I think it’s very, very exciting seeing kind of anthropological minds and, and everyone really gathering together to talk about some really wonderful, radical ideas about the human species and about our relationship with, with one another and, and with our fellow species.
So yeah, my name is Harry and I’m from the, Right to Roam campaign. We’re a national campaign calling for the right to Rome, to right to access nature, and to reconnect with nature again.
They’ve had a national rights to roam in Scotland since the year 2003, and yet here in England, we are barred from the overwhelming majority of the countryside and of nature.
So we’re trying to have access, to nature, not only because it’s good for us and because it’s fun, but also because it’s good for, for our fellow species as well.
and I feel like growing up in the English countryside, I’ve kind of, walked in two worlds, really.
I’ve always been part of the world of the English countryside, but also being an indigenous rights campaigner.
I’ve spent a lot of time with indigenous peoples around the world, and these have always been two worlds.
and now this is the time I get to kind of collide them together, which is really, really good fun and I’m gonna be talking a bit about world Service.
The, the book that we, published this April, which is all about this kind of philosophy, the, the, the philosophy that we have named World Service about a reciprocal relationship with nature that we as human beings have always had, but we are losing when we are separated from nature.
How can we break this kind of cycle of disconnection and make it a cycle of reconnection with nature? So I’m gonna be speaking about that and about some wider themes of, of the human, species in terms of our reciprocity, with nature and linking that in with the, with the right to Rome and with, indigenous rights campaigns, as well.
and before I kind of really kick off, I’m gonna show a, a clip from a short film.
this was a film, filmed by, Connor, who’s known to rag, I don’t think he’s here this evening, but he basically, filmed us at the, river roading in barking.
The river roading is London’s third largest river and earlier this year, we held a wild service action led by Paul Sland.
He also gave a speak at Rag.
You might remember, he’s part of the right to Rome campaign, where we, picked up er from the river.
We planted really red trees like black poplar, like the wild service tree.
cause there is also a tree called wild service.
And, we cleaned up pathways and stuff, and we wanted to show people that in, even in a very deprived kind of industrial, and in fact, post-industrial landscape, human beings can have a positive relationship with nature when we are connected to it.
So here’s a short clip of Nadia who helps to coordinate right to Rome.
talking about some of the themes of wild service and why all of this stuff is very important, throughout the whole presentation, I’m gonna mildly struggle with three, four screens and many cables, but we’ll see how it goes.
so this is Nadia from Right to Rome.
Humans do this amazing thing.
Intuitively, indigenous cultures around the world are still doing it, and have this long line and lineage of culture going back millennia, thousands of years of that kind of way of being in the landscape, which we’ve forgotten because we don’t have access to land, we don’t own it, and we don’t have agency to care for it.
we’ve lost that ability to intu it and that is while service, while services, rekindling what is within all of us, and loving people again as part of nature, as opposed to something separate from it that’s opposite.
Humans do a thing intuitively. We always care.
We, we are, we naturally connect with nature.
It’s an unnatural separation that is, is disconnecting, us from our fellow species.
Where does this all begin? I think it begins with us, our evolution as a species.
I don’t think there’s anything whatsoever wrong evolutionarily with human beings.
I think this has come from political systems which have separated us from nature.
So what does this really mean in terms of, humans being outside? And, and how does our kind of mobility and our time outside in have influence on this? Well, I’m gonna start by arguing.
I think human beings are a nomadic species.
Basically, for over 95% of human history or ancestors, whoever you are, have, have been nomadic hunter-gatherers.
And, we know for a fact that nomadism among hunter gatherer peoples today is centrally tied to understandings of, ecological balance, understandings of ecological reciprocity among species.
For the simple reason that if you are hunting and gathering from a landscape, if you’re not planting, fixed crops, you are going to have to migrate.
You’re going to have to have to move around in order to not exhaust the various game animals, plants, fruits, et cetera, in one particular area and Hu to gather is know this better than anyone in the migrations, the nomadism, their walking, it’s not aimless wondering.
It’s very systematic moving around their territories and understanding, the balance of nature to allow, various living species to regenerate and to regrow.
Again, it’s always been kind of part of who we are and of course, there are many hunter gatherer groups around today, many of whom are still nomadic, but the state for whatever reason, cannot, cope with, with nomadism the state.
After indigenous peoples are forcibly contacted by the state, one of the first things that generally happens, for nomadic Hunter gather, is that they are forcibly settled in one location.
Something about the idea of, of marginalized communities being outside of state power and being able to move around is really, really abhorrent to the, to the idea of this state.
but there are nomadic hunter gatherers around today who still are living nomadically and still maintaining ecological balance and they will talk about migrating in order to allow, forests in the environment and the land in which they live to regenerate and so on.
and of course, most people actually still move.
so the average British person moves eight point, seven times in their lifetime.
For Americans, it’s over 11 times in their lifetime.
We move up everything, all your belongings move house completely, entirely move and yet we wouldn’t regard them as being nomadic populations most people here would regard us ourselves as being sedentary and of course, we generally are pretty s sedentary.
But isn’t it interesting how, from a nomadic hunter gatherers are seen as backwards for never staying in one time? And of course, there’s never been more human beings on the move at any one time before.
There are, there are many, many millions of people for being forced to move the entire time, because of the crises of, of militarism war, climate change, biodiversity collapse, all of these kinds of things.
And globalization is a part of that.
But a lot of this is, is it’s a refugee crisis.
It’s not a, it’s not like this, people aren’t just moving because they want a better life and so on and again, we see that the abuse and the kind of like abuse towards people, the denial of that freedom of movement is a denial of a human right, a human right to Rome, a human right to have, be able to migrate and, and to move and I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a fundamentally interesting, again, that capitalists and, and the free movement of capital has never really faced problems.
Nigel Farage a couple of months ago gave some kind of weird talk about capitalist mobility, whatever it is, but it’s, it’s wonderful for them and another, or for the rest of us. So nomadism among the marginalized is, is discriminated against yet among the super rich.
It’s very much celebrated, which is key, which I think is very telling.
humans are good for nature.
This is something I also wanna talk about.
the idea that, that, that we’re somehow a curse upon nature that we’ve evolved wrong is, is absolutely ridiculous.
You get these bloody awful pop anthropologists, people like Jared Diamond and you, Noah Harari, he will basically argue humans are bad.
If you put human beings in one place for long enough, they’re gonna destroy the environment.
These sell loads of copies, and people read that and this is an idea very much supported and allowed by kind of capitalist pab, because they’d like us all to believe that we’re inherently selfish, that we’re inherently bad for nature, so that the ones who really are destroying nature can, can get away with it, basically.
Jared Diamond uses the example of, Nui or island as it’s, called an English, which is a Polynesian island where he says, look at these indigenous islanders.
They didn’t know how to look after themselves.
They were so obsessed with building these big statues that the ecology of the island was destroyed.
Easter Island was, was, was being destroyed because of colonialism, because of, of slavery.
And, and, and that’s, that’s what happened to the island.
You don’t destroy your own home.
No one here is gonna take a bulldozer and glyphosate and, chop down their own home, chop down their own garden.
You know, it’s just not what people do.
It’s this idea that humans beings are bad for nature needs to be dispelled and here’s a very good example of it.
This is North Sentinel Island, part of the Anderman NPO Islands in the, Indian Ocean.
Politically, it’s, part of India today, and it’s home to a people, the rest of the world cause the sentinel leaves.
But no one knows their real name because they’re an uncontacted.
people, they became especially famous in 2018 for killing a US missionary, defending themselves against the US missionary.
He was trying to forcibly contact them and convert ‘em to Christianity, and the process could have wiped them out through diseases to which they had no immunity.
So no one knows how long the sentinel leaves have been on their island before for it’s, certainly hundreds of years, very likely to be thousands of years.
We do know that their ancestors came to the Anderman Nbo Islands, tens of thousands of years ago.
It is actually very possible that they’ve been on this island and neighboring islands for over 50,000 years.
As you can see, the island, just by satellite data alone, is a hundred percent basically covered in tropical rainforest.
This idea that human beings will destroy landscape.
This isn’t because they haven’t got bulldozed.
If you gave bulldozes to the centiles, they wouldn’t wanna chop down their own rainforest, right? It’s ridiculous. we know that many hunter gatherers have strict taboos against cutting down any trees whatsoever from reports of many hunter gatherers in the region, not even cut chopping down like cutting leaves, allowing leaves to be cut.
You know? So this idea that human beings are bad for nature can be very clearly illustrated by the fact that if you’re there, even if you’re there for tens of thousands of years, you’re not gonna destroy the land that you’re part of.
In fact, quite the opposite.
I think there was a lot of evidence indeed for, enhancement of nature by indigenous communities and by enhancements of, of, of the landscape.
You know, human beings are like beavers basically.
Today, beavers embrace praise for their role as ecosystem engineers.
You know, they create wildlife ponds, they do all this kind of things.
I met a paleo ecologist when I was in studying in Greenland, and he said to me humans are like beavers.
We’re like bipedal beavers, basically.
We know how to do these things as well.
We are also ecosystem engineers.
When we are truly connected with nature, we create bio diversely rich habitats like beavers do.
I was gonna call this torque. Humans are bipedal beavers.
I’m very glad I didn’t, it would be a bit confusing, thank you, but I was tempted to, right? So what does this look like in the kind of English countryside? What did it look like in the English countryside? This is an imagined image from star car from, around 10,000 years ago.
and these are some of the, and kind of an artist impression of the, Mesolithic hunter gatherers who used to live in this lake.
This is in North Yorkshire today, basically, what did you call it? Star car is the name of the lake.
That’s what it’s known as, basically.
so when archeologists and someone have done, digs around here, they found an enormous amount of, of, tools, antlers, spears, bows and arrows, that kind of thing.
It was an inherently, incredibly rich biodiverse area.
I’ve used this example to talk about what the English conscious side last looked like when people were very, very connected.
with nature, the kind of massive collapse in, in biodiversity has happened not because of, of us as human beings.
It’s happened ‘cause of various political, systems of, of dispossession of people from the land and of the land, from and other species.
Since the year 2000, according to one study, we’ve lost over 60% of flying insects in Britain since the year 2000 insects underpin our entire ecosystem.
If you can imagine that’s happened since the year 2000 and you think though, there’s not much wildlife now compared to the year 2000.
This was 10,000 years ago, it was very, very different.
It was very rich in wildlife.
It was being stewarded very, very well by people. Indeed.
this is an example from a very nearby site near Scarborough, where the archeologists basically who’d been, digging around here, had basically found that the arrowhead, the spear points and so on, were being broken apart very systematically and placed in, in trenches along with the animal bones and so on and it’s totally, purely speculative.
But the archeologists who’ve done the dig have assumed that because this was done so deliberately, that it was likely done as associated with various taboos around animals that you do hunt animals that you don’t hunt.
Among many indigenous people today, the breaking of arrows, the breaking of spears, is done as a symbolic thing to end conflicts to around local taboos, that kind of thing.
The, one of the chief archeologists at the dig, whose name was Dr. Amy Gray Jones, said, people think of prehistoric country gatherers as living on the edge of civilization, moving from place to place in such endless, such a food.
But here we have people inhabiting a rich network of sites and habitats.
They aren’t people who were struggling to survive.
They were confident in their understanding of this landscape and their behaviors and habitats of different animals and species who lived there.
So we’re gonna shift an example of what the English countryside might have looked like when people were incredibly closely connected with land, had a very intimate understanding of land.
Indeed, I’m gonna hop around the world, quite a bit because I can do this digitally, but I can’t physically.
But, so here’s another part of the world entirely.
this is a, a map of Inuit territories in the Arctic.
This has been made by the Inuits Council who represent, indigenous init pupils affairs and as you can see very clearly, there’s no border here, right? If you ask many indigenous people who live across nations, they will say, the border crossed us.
We never actually crossed the border Inwar.
People today live from all the way from Koka in Russia to, Alaska Northwest Territories in the province and down in other parts of Canada and karate, no, it’s known in, in karate and in western inwe, but also is agreements to the outside, world.
The inner work, of course, also historically nomadic, hunter gatherer peoples, most of them are, being settled forcibly, today.
and they again have incredibly close relationships with, with the animals in which they hunt.
I’ve personally never seen more love for animals in my entire life than I have from indigenous people who hunt these animals.
It’s, it’s, it’s an incredible love that they show to these species because they rely on them and because they need them in what so mean what today still, will put snow into the mouth of a seal after killing it, and they’ll say, well, this spirit of the seal, we don’t want it to get thirsty.
You know, it is these incredible forms of love that are, that are being made.
Basically. They believe it’s like a lot of indigenous people who aren’t animals that they’re kind of giving themselves up to the, to the people is in a way that humans will give up their own lives at the end of their lives as well.
It’s very, very moving indeed and the area I was looking at for my, master’s degree, so I, my background is in anthropology and undergraduate, and, my ma for my master’s thesis, I was looking an area called big source work, which in English is known as the Northwater Paline.
It’s right in the very, very far north, one of the furthest inhabited human places in, in the world between the far north, west of Greenland and the far northeast of, Canada and NVA Province.
A pia is a kind of area which is permanently ice free in the winter.
So the rest of the Arctic freezes over in the winter, still just about, and is ice free, and mostly ice free in the summer.
A pia is kind of a natural area, which is ice free even in the winter because of various ocean currents, biological activities and so on.
P Source is regarded as the most biologically productive area in the Arctic.
It’s very, very biodiverse.
It has huge levels of, of, biodiversity, which contribute greatly to Arctic ecology, basically and it has been guarded and looked after by the Inuit for, for an incredibly long time, for thousands of years by, indigenous peoples in the area and I was looking at this area in particular because the Inuits have an incredibly bold plan for a conservation plan for the area one, which is controlled entirely by Inuit and not by, conservationists who would seek to deprive them from hunting to deprive, from living in the ways that they would like to and know how to live.
so here’s an interesting example.
This is, these creatures are little ORs, not little arks that tree bird talks about in Lord of the Rings.
But little arks is in a little kind of seabird, basically.
the larks are believed to have arrived in the north, west Greenland, around 2000, sorry, 4,400 years ago.
Jinen al have done some really fantastic research talking about how they’ve massively helped to shape the Pia.
They’ve kind of helped to create this as a biological area.
If you take the little larks out the equation, the Pia would collapse, human beings in the iit and their ancestors arrived there 4,500 years ago.
So human beings have been there longer than the little orx.
They, they too have shaped the palya.
If you take the ina out of the area, if they are not allowed to hunt as they’ve been, hunting, and their ancestors have been hunting.
just like if you take the little orx out, then the whole system will collapse.
This idea that humans are somehow an invasive species, that we are non-native, but other species are worthy of conservation is ridiculous and in fact, even in Britain, I would argue that human beings are a native species, because we’ve been there for tens of thousands of years when the ice melted and, and animals, and plants came back to Britain.
I haven’t got the data on this, but I imagine there were many, creatures like little Larks who arrived after humans.
Did. We have to totally, change our mentality and I think decolonize our mentality of, of seeing humans as somehow invasive or invasive or non-native as a species where of just as much right to exist as the polar bearer, the naral, or the little rk or whatever it may have been.
so I can skip forward a little bit here.
so this is an example.
This is, looking across from Alate Greenland across the Pia to Canada.
These are in what people who arguing in their, plans for the p source of work.
They need to have an Inuit free travel zone.
Basically, again, they would argue that the border crossed them.
They never crossed the border between Guion and Canada, yet they are not allowed to cross anymore.
And, I’ve cited one Inuit who said, he said, I’m controlled by Southerners.
Southern is being anyone who’s not, not an Inuit.
Basically, I’m not allowed to see my relative in Canada without having a picture by which he meant passport, basically, even though traditionally the Inuit had crossed with dog sleds with, kayaks and with, boats and so on, the Inuit are arguing very, very passionately.
And I definitely think correctly that if they’re not able to have that ability to be nomadic, to be able to be mobile, to be able to travel and be out in nature, out connecting with their fellow species, the Perlin will collapse.
They have to be able to hunt, they have to be able to know when to hunt.
They have to have a guardianship style relationship with their environment in order to kick out those who are seeking to destroy it.
So one of the, demands for their conservation zone is to, A, have a, a conservation zone controlled by Inuit and b, to have it free movement around, the area controlled by, by Inuit people.
For, for Inuit people, it’s an incredibly inspiring vision.
Indeed, as we know, the Arctic is changing, to an incredible degree, not only because of accelerating climate change, but also because of geopolitics and it’s making everything very unstable.
Indeed, the Inuit are very good at predicting such things.
They’ve always lived in relative levels of instability in the Arctic.
this was a photograph I took outside the village of a tu.
It shows, an Inuit guy in a kayak.
Kayak is a Inuit word, just like an anak, and a lot of other words, it means kayak.
init people have been hunting in kayaks for, for an incredibly long time, sort an enormous iceberg.
I took this photo, and I’m gonna show it now, trans, post with a very, very different photograph.
basically, when I was there in the village that init people had hunted a bowhead whale, which I think is sometimes called a green and whale.
I can’t even imagine how many people I’ve seen in Melanesia.
I’ve seen a pig, one pig feed somewhere like 300 people.
I can’t imagine how much a whale would’ve fed, but it’s they only kill these animals rarely.
But they killed them in an incredibly sustainable way.
Indeed. very soon after, just a few days after they killed that whale, this arrived in the bay.
This is a Danish warship, and it was in a cartoon, bear in mind that European whaling ships eliminated, I think over 90% of the whale population of Greenland and the Arctic.
It was there to monitor init, whaling and, and fishing and to say, we are here to make sure that you are not overfishing and over whaling in your own village and I think this, the village had about 49 people in it.
I think this ship was pretty much big.
I’ve never seen, I’ve never been so intimidate in my entire life, is to see this bloody great massive ship with big cannons docking on, on front of it as well.
It was absolutely terrifying and I think the militarization of conservation, including in the ocean, is an incredibly intimidating, presence for indigenous people and a constant colonial reminder, Greenland is still under Danish control level of racism that I saw towards in what people by Danes when I was in Greenland was absolutely horrific and again, it’s this kind of constant, constant reminder of colonization, a constant reminder of, of fear, basically.
and I think it’s, it’s very telling that, that that’s kind of what’s happened nowadays.
even I think in colonial times, people never didn’t sometimes people would just directly kick indigenous people off the land and so you’re getting out of here, we are coming in.
It definitely undoubtedly happened in enormous amount of times.
However, there often was the excuse, right? And the excuse was often you didn’t know how to manage your land.
You’re not looking after it properly.
This is something we see increasingly and nowadays, capitalists will use terms like ecosystem services and natural capital.
You know, your area is high in natural capital.
What they really mean, it’s got enormous levels of biodiversity, which, and natural resources.
So often it means that they’ll allow logging companies to come in under the guise that they’re sustainable logging companies, sustainable fishing companies, et cetera and also they’ll allow conservation schemes to come in and increasingly now through so-called biodiversity or carbon offsetting, all of these are horrible greenwashed full solutions basically.
while these companies are allowed in indigenous peoples are routinely evicted from their own territories, not allowed to hunt, not allowed to, live in the ways that they had been and it’s incredibly brutal procedure indeed.
this is an example of Wales being just hunted massively by Europeans and very nearly eliminated.
so going over to the very fast side of the world again and talking about what this looks like, to indigenous peoples elsewhere and, and how this all links in with wider aspects of colonialism and enclosure.
this is a scene from, a Karna state in, in the south of India and a place called Naga Tiger Reserve, where, an indigenous, a DSI group called the Gen Kuba, have been living for kind of untold generations.
and now in the name of conservation, many gen kuba people are being forced outta their ancestral forest to create a tiger reserve.
The gen kuba worship tigers, they would never hurt tigers whatsoever.
They worship the tiger as a God.
The irony, now that they are being forced out, they’re being forced to trespass by conservationists who are trying to say, you dunno how to look after the environment properly.
We do it’s just a horrible kind of colonial mentality.
So this is a short clip of two Juni guys speaking about that.
I’ve shown this video previously and I’ve been told that the subtitles are quite difficult to read across the room.
so if anyone wants me to explain afterwards, just raise your hand and I can run through basically what was they were talking about.
It’s a really lovely, if anyone can understand the subtitles, so read them, let me know.
Tell Zoom in case Sure. Zoom here at all.
I dunno if people heard from Zoom, if there’s a, people can vaguely put thumbs up or something.
Say a little summary for the Zoom. Okay.
So basically, there was kind of two people speaking and the first guy Shiva, was talking about how, now to get into their territories, they have to trespass through, through under wire and under the estates, through the coffee estates and other people’s plantations and so on, just to get to their houses, the houses they used to have, which are now kind of stones on the ground.
the other guy was talking about how, the they gen Kuba can identify a plant and animal species just by looking at it and yet now, conservationists and others who had been first taught this information by the ancestors of the Living Gen Kuba are now coming and trying to explain to the gen kuba about the ecology.
They were the ones who knew it in the first place.
Where, where is this? It’s in, Karnataka state in the south of India.
Thank you. Yeah. I think it’s very interesting.
Firstly, what the first guy at the beginning Shiva was, was talking about in terms of, he said, this is the same what the, the British were doing to, to in India.
Now the same kind of colonial pattern is, is happening to us, basically and what the other guy was saying about we, we know about nature just by being in it.
This is a very central theme of what I wanna be talking about tonight.
Human beings know how to connect with, with our fellow species because we all rely on nature.
Whether you forage your feed, food from trees, whether you harvest it from fields or whether you buy it from the supermarket, all of us depend on an ex, intact ecosystem.
It’s just that we’ve been severed.
We can’t see that when you’re buying your food from, the co-op or whatever it is.
But if you rely directly on nature whatever tree or animal species might be far more than any kind of corporate or mercenary ecologist as I would call them, who’s trying to come in and tell you what’s what’s happening.
So how does this link to, to what’s happening in the English countryside and the separation of people here from nature as well? Well, I’ll briefly talk about, I’ll go into that in a second.
I’ll briefly talk about how bad this can get.
this is in a, karnataka, sorry, CAS Oranga National Park in, in India, where, the authorities basically impose a kind of shoot on site policy, towards, indigenous peoples, towards anyone they’re accused of trespassing or being in, into the, national park.
from a, it’s been brilliant, campaigning, some of this is violence has been reduced.
But, I think if my figures not wrong, between 2014 and 2017, 50 people were extra killed by anti-poaching squads in Kanga, where WWF has backed rangers with supplies and arranged combat and ambush training.
MK Ava, he was at one point, the director of Qar Oranga National Park, said, and I quote, never allow any unauthorized entry bracket kill the unwanted.
If a question arises as to which rights will get higher priority, it shall not be human rights.
you, again, tourists are allowed into Kas Oranga National Park.
The the British Royal family has, has been there filmmakers go there and so, and a ass’s indigenous people, the one who’ve been looking after nature and the park for so long, the ones who’ve maintained the biodiversity, they are being shot, they are being tortured, arrested and we see this pattern as we know repeated throughout indigenous territories around the world.
the origins of national parks have come from, from game reserves.
Basically, Europeans hunters have been coming there and killing animals in the name of trophy hunting, exploiting resources.
National parks began through shooting animals through guns.
They ended shooting them through, photographs.
But the effects are the same.
The, it’s a place for Europeans and for capitalists to have fun and to do what they want while making the ecology get worse.
The indigenous peoples and local communities are, are kicked out and are meant to suffer as a result.
Again. How does all this link to what’s happening in the English countryside? Well, this is, Kettlestone Hall in again, using the wrong blem and mouse.
so I’m getting very pleased. Keston Hall in Drb.
and, this is, a massive estate, which the ecology is pretty bloody awful, allowed sheep to go and graze and it’s basically been done through the enclosure and kind of taking away people’s land in, in, Darbyshire and all of this.
mansion was basically built up through colonial wealth.
the bloke in charge of this Lord kan, I don’t need to say too much about him ‘cause he really speaks for himself.
Anyone who wears that kind of thing.
I mean, it’s just actually beyond belief.
Sometimes the aristocracy really shoot themselves in the foot, and it’s so hilarious.
Lord Kan was at one point the Vice Roy of India.
He was also leader of the House of Lords.
He directly connects the suffering of indigenous Hebrew India to the suffering of the rural rapport.
in England, not only, was he the Vice Roy of, of colonial India, he also had the idea of setting up Kanga National Park.
he actually said, and I quote the reason bearing of mind, he was a big game hunter.
He destroyed enormous amounts of, of wildlife in India.
He said, including in Kaaren, the decline of wildlife in India is to blame for this is the unchecked depredations of native hunters and poachers basically.
So again, it’s just incredible irony.
The double think that we’ve been told the inversion of the truth that the guardians of nature are to blame for its destruction and though so clearly destroys the nature who, and destroying the indigenous peoples and local communities as well, they are now praised as, as heroes.
This doesn’t look heroic to me.
It looks like a pride k******d, basically.
But, and another such professional language.
from 1700 onwards, colonial merchants acquired around 780 country estates, in the English countryside.
So the wealth that was, was built directly from, from colonialism and from slavery was, was used to enclose more land, to take away more land from the peasantry and the rural working class in England.
So there was a kind of solidarity in nature separation.
The enclosure of the commons was, basically a very, very systematic way of taking away land, common land from people in England.
They’ll talk about that now and what that kind of means.
so at the time of Shakespeare, 30% of England was common land.
A common land is where the public have rights to access land.
You can graze your castle, you can forage, you can pick up firewood.
There was also a kind of open field system, where you can kind of, every peasant, every farmer had some, lamb to which they could feed themselves.
This is really good for biodiversity because you’re growing food in order to be able to feed yourself rather than just for maximizing profit.
This is an example of this.
This is a place called, the violin Glen Morgan in, south Wales, where they’ve kind of resurrected and preserved some of this open field system, common system, et cetera.
It’s incredibly good for, for local biodiversity.
It’s a kind of early example of what we would call in the English context, wild service, having a reciprocal relationship with, with nature.
and yet through enclosure.
Now, less than 3% of England is common land and land was systematically forced.
people were taken away from the land and this process of which it happened, there was a feedback loop, right? So land was taken away from the poor in England, and it was then exported overseas.
The idea was, this is so great, we’re making so much money rather than letting the rural poor just have their land.
We can use this land, we can fill it with sheep, we can plow it into monocultures, we can use that for profit.
This was taken overseas and used through enclosure in places like India and around the world and the process was then taken back and blamed upon the real rapport became increasingly blamed and kind of likened to indigenous peoples who were already being dehumanized and again, you can see some quotes about that from the proponents of the enclosure.
John Bellas 1714, our forests and great commons make the poor that are upon them too much like the Indians, for which she meant indigenous Americans being a hindrance to industry and a nurseries of idleness and insense.
True? Yes. Oh, maybe not.
John, John Middleton, 1807 Stonewalls, best of all for enclosure as exclude hunters who were another species of destroyers.
Those imitators of the life of savages, by again, which he means indigenous peoples are as destructive and a well cultivated country and foxes and wolves would be in a Henry store, sheep fold.
they speak for themselves.
Again, these words are just you couldn’t make it up their pan mine villains.
These people, another quote here, Charles Vancouver in the Commons labor has become in a manner independent of the country gentleman, and they’re therefore prone to creating difficulties.
There are endless quotes like this, probably the proponents of enclosure they were describing, the rural rapport as being like nettles and a dung heap and it kind of, there was a kind of almost like a racialization they were trying to impose upon poor people.
So I learned this quote from the 19th century.
They were describing, rural people in Norfolk being like a darker specimens of peasant and stuff and they were trying to basically show that the rural rapport had to be like savages.
They had to be like less than human again, as a kind of excuse to, to kick them out of their, of their lands and so on.
and they also had an obsession with, with plowing these things into monarch cultures, right? So along with preserving their own monarch culture of the rich with the hobs called music and their fancy estates and their received pronunciation and so on and so on, they, they also plowed our our fields into monocultures as well, and got rid of the biodiversity of the, of the commons.
So Charles Vancouver would talk about how we need to get rid of all of these types of flowers.
Everything is a weed.
Everything is a weed unless it’s looks particularly pretty for me, a nice type of rose, or unless it’s useful for profit, get rid of it and the common is, again, get rid of them.
It’s a kind of systematic plowing of the land and also of, of, of people’s culture and, and livelihoods, as well.
the rural population of England and Wales, because of this fell by 42%.
from 1801 to 1901, people were effectively forced out of their lands and into, into factories and so on into work houses.
If you’re wondering why we haven’t got much of a good food culture in, in England today, they seem to have done in rest of Europe.
We were the first country to industrialize people had the basis of an independent livelihood, taken away from them and they were forced into, cities where they were kind of fed kind of early versions of processed food and really bad food.
Basically, they were severed from that connection they’d had of, of growing food for themselves.
millions of people had custom and legal access to lands and the basis of an independent livelihood taken away from them, the highland clearances of Scotland.
They were remembered for being a truly traumatic and terrible experience.
The English clearances, which incredibly similar, basically the same process, are not remembered at all.
and even though it happened, it happens more earlier, it happened earlier ago, basically, and it seems to have been pretty much forgotten, but as we can call it enclosure or you can call it the English clearances, but it was the same principle, so, well, a lot of them were shipped abroad.
Yeah, that also happened as well.
so you can see this kind of very quaint, lovely English countryside scene, this lovely dry stone walls.
Isn’t it pretty? This is directly from Enclosure, right? It’s, it’s the idea that you are fencing off people, you are parceling off land so that it can be controlled by large landowners, by early capitalists, that kind of thing.
Basically. it’s a systematic, withdrawal in cutting off of, of people, from the land basically.
right.
So, enclosure is colonialism.
Colonialism is enclosure. So again, this led to a kind of feedback loop.
Land was, common land in England was enclosed and the practice was exported overseas.
so you can have a kind of similar process with overseas, enclo common land or land, which was owned by indigenous peoples and local communities was enclosed and then the practice was re-imported to England.
The wealth that was generated from these estates, the practices were, was re-imported to England, and it led to a kind of positive feedback loop.
So I think there is a kind of sometimes unspoken solidarity between the suffering of peoples at this time.
Capitalism, colonialism went hand in hand, through the destruction of nature, the separation of people from nature in order for big capital to continue to make profit and, tear us, tear us as human beings away from our natural connections with our fellow species.
Basically, in terms of the effects of mobility on the, the rapport, this is John Clare, wonderful peasant poet of the 19th century, who, wrote beautiful poems about life before enclosure in the Northampton shear, countryside and life after enclosure.
This is a couple of short extracts from a poem of his called the mos Unbounded Freedom ruled the wandering scene, the offensive ownership crept in between.
Now its little tyrant with his little sign shows where man claims earth close, no mor divine, but passed to freedom and to child, to deer.
The bo sticks up to notice No road here and on the tree with Ivy Overhung.
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung as though the very birds should learn to know where they go there, they must know further go.
Beautiful words from, from John Cla and again, John CLA was not scientifically trained whatsoever.
He hated famously the IC system of naming animals.
He named animals whatever the hell he wanted to and scientists who could, have now studied his words for like blind me, John Cla could identify an enormous amount of species.
It’s just because he had time in nature.
He spent his entire life running around looking at flowers and skipping and, and gambling around the fields and just really loving nature and really understanding it and it’s a kind of really lovely, wholesome way.
He ended his life in a mental asylum, basically and he was absolutely traumatized by what had happened to his countryside.
Of course, this was at the time when the state was locking up anyone in a mental asylum that they didn’t like and to some extent, some of that kind of stuff still happens, but at the same time, I think it’s very likely indeed that John Clare and many other rural people were pushed Asper.
I’m absolutely convinced. I think independent, livelihoods, taken away from them is a very traumatizing experience and psychologists and others have done incredibly good work on this and talked about how intergenerational trauma has scarred people living in the UK today.
Processes of enclosure. It’s not natural for human beings to be without land.
You don’t necessarily want to, you might not want to graze your cattle on the common or forage for food or whatever, but just having rights to access nature, being cooped up in a house all day to look at phone screens and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, not having the right to be outside is a human rights abuse, and it should never have happened.
So it’s understandable that this trauma has been passed down from people like John Claire and, and so on.
How violent was this process? Well, I took this photograph.
This is a man trap, as it’s called.
This is taken in my village museum.
It’s designed to break someone’s leg.
If you’re trespassing, you’re poaching.
It’s designed to break your leg or, or maim you and others, some kind of kind of way.
In the nineties about the time that I was born, there was an old kind of village, and he remembered when he and his mate, were little children.
They used to run across a meadow, just to go and play with each other and one of the landowners from the Fordham family said, if I see you guys messing up in my land, I’ll set the man trap for you when you’re not looking.
That was the man trap that he was gonna set for these little children.
This is the kind of levels of fear, I think, among every person that didn’t grow up with the right to Rome like they young people have today in Scotland, we have this incredible fear.
I mean, I work for the Rights Rome campaign.
I trespass the entire time.
If I, I still get scared when I’m in the countryside seeing a sign saying no trespassing, seeing signs seeing four by fours coming and chasing me, seeing Barb wire.
It’s a huge fear.
There are fences in our minds as well as on the actual physical shape of the countryside.
yeah, really, really kind of awful things.
looking at the notes here.
and yeah, so we never really think about enclosure in the UK really, except, and this was sent to me secondhand or thirdhand by a mate.
this is from a year nine textbook.
And, you are being told basically here how to convince, farmers that they should enclose their land.
They said that enclosure was a good thing.
You’re improving the land. So as you can see here, we argue about how to use land in common fields.
You can’t just have people sharing the land.
They won’t get on with it. You can’t trust people.
the common land is a waste of soil.
Um the farmers only grow enough for themselves.
You know, they, why aren’t they growing enough so they can sell? So again, if we’re taught about enclosure, anything about enclosure at all, we’re taught, well, it was probably a good thing.
You’re making the land more productive. It’s a good thing and again, similarly, when I was at secondary school in 2009, I was in year nine, and I remember that we had one hour on colonialism and one hour on slavery and the teacher during the one hour on colonialism literally said, I think the empire was basically a good thing and it’s this kind of total horrific separation of the truth.
This inversion again, of the truth that colonialism was good, that enclosure was good, that these things were somehow good for, for nature and this total double thing, this total inversion of, of the truth, again, from my own village, it was interesting.
It’s easy to see how we got into this mess on Sunday.
I went to our museum archives, and I had a look through some of the quotes of what the aristocracy was saying around this kind of time.
There’s a wonderful quote, from the relative of the blo who set the man trap.
he wrote, he boast used to boast about how many animals he killed.
He said, in my traps, I’ve caught this year, this August, 878 young birds and 107 old birds.
But I imagine that this relatively low number is because of the insects and seeds of not weed must be scar at this time of year.
again, it’s just absolutely incredible that the kind of levels of thinking.
Why do you think the the, the wildlife is going down and house barriers, most of which he was catching a lot of house barriers.
They’ve declined by 77, 70% since 1977.
Like the levels of biodiversity now have just been totally ripped to shreds and again, the rich and powerful, they’re allowed to go hunting.
They’re allowed to do whatever on earth.
They want the rural poor and, and, and regular common people that are not allowed.
This. It’s a total inversion of separation of, of us from nature.
What effect does this have on us now in the countryside? Well, this is a wonderful study done by the University of Sheffield, showing just one family.
So, shows, great-grandfather George, aged eight.
In 1919, he was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing.
if you look at now, his son Jack, aged eight in 1950, he could walk about one mile on his own to the woods.
his daughter, Vicki, aged eight in 1979, could walk around to the swimming pool alone about half a mile away and her son, ed, ed is now eight, is only allowed to walk on his own to the end of his street, 300 yards and there’s a brilliant author, Jay Griffiths, who’s actually, part of the Right to Rome campaign.
He’s written a great book on this called K, which talks about, indigenous people’s, relationship with, with the land and how they allow their children to have levels of freedom and so on.
Of course, this isn’t only to do with enclosure land being taken away from us.
A lot of this is the fact that, I think part of this is to blame on the media.
We’re being told constantly, if you let the children run outside, they’re gonna be killed and, and maimed and all the rest of it.
I think part of it is also coming from a general political system and, and hundreds of years of general disconnect from, from nature, right? And taking away, people’s trust in the land and so on and also the fact that there’s nothing to do if you don’t own the land anymore and if all around you was fields, even if you had the right to Rome, you can walk around the field edges.
People don’t have the right to, to grow crops, to, to kind of do whatever they want to go fishing it’s to go swimming.
All of these kinds of things are banned.
There are fences in our minds as well as out there.
the level of disconnect and the level of, of kind of, mental health effects of this has been really devastating.
So what does it mean in terms of the right to Rome, in terms of access to nature? So, bear in mind that Scotland, since 2003 has had a national right to Rome.
You can go basically wherever you want in Scotland.
You can world camp, you can swim in the rivers, you can walk, you can do what you want, not, you can’t trample over crops.
You can’t walk in someone’s, school playing field.
You can’t walk in someone’s back garden.
But if your back garden isn’t 50,000 acre estate, it’s not your back garden public should have right to access it, basically.
So in Scotland, you can basically go where you want over 95%.
This is the situation in England.
we are barred from 92% of the countryside.
We have a right to roam of 8% of the English countryside today.
And, large landowners, conservatives and ensembles, so well, we have a great traditional footpaths in this country.
It makes up less than n 0.2% of land in England.
They will also point to Dartmore, where you have the right to a world camp.
Again, less than 4% of land in England is world comparable on, and the Dartmore landowner, Alexander Daral, really nasty guy, is trying to take that right away from us.
Again, it’s a totally different, system.
This, this total restriction from nature.
If you were to parachute someone from the sky and drop them randomly on England, 92% chance, they basically, you’re landing on proper property, which you’re not allowed to be on.
You know, and again, this isn’t people’s back gardens.
People will tell you England is full of space.
Scotland’s very different Scottish rights are Roma brought access to people in the lowlands of Scotland.
The Highlands were already basically defacto access.
the very little of England is actually built upon a tool.
They say that this country is full, if England’s full, it’s, it’s full of green and blue space, but it’s hidden behind barbed wire and fences and so on.
so I think the crisis of nature is a crisis of, of biodiversity, basically crisis of access to nature.
We are one of the most nature depleted countries in Europe, but study after 30 has shown, we also ranked bottom in terms of nature connectedness.
half of British children surveyed recently couldn’t identify symbol species like bluebells or stinging nettles.
83% couldn’t recognize a bundle bee.
There was a study recently done by a level biology students, a level biology students on average couldn’t recognize more than three native British flower species.
Most concerningly, neither could the A level biology teachers recognize over three species of British wild flowers.
Yeah, but I don’t think it’s the fault of the children, nor is it the fault of their parents, nor is it the fault of their teachers.
It’s the fault of a systematic, trauma and like messing up and, and total severance of people from nature.
This removing words from, from dictionaries that of like daffodil and, bumblebee and replacing with words like selfie and things like that and in TikTok and that kind of stuff.
It’s, Robert McFarland’s written a brilliant book on this called The Lost Spells, A total systematic disconnection of, of people from nature, basically and in terms of biodiversity, as I say, since 2000, according to one, study, there have been many others.
Flying insect numbers in Britain have decreased by 60%.
Bearing in mind they underpin our entire ecosystem.
Since the 1930s, we’ve lost over 97% of wildflower meadows.
These were not destroyed by, people walking, going for a walk.
They were not the, grouse mos which are being burned, which are full of carbon.
Were not destroyed by, people going for a walk in the countryside.
The people who release, over 50 million pheasants and non-native game bird, and then line them with lead shot in the countryside, the people who chopped down our forest, the people who, fill our rivers with excrement, they are not us.
They are not the public. We are not responsible for.
This is the rich and powerful who are responsible for it and this goes hand in hand.
It’s the two sides of the same leaf.
I like to use that analogy rather than coin because it’s just a nicer, less capitalistic analogy.
Two sides of the same leaf.
The, the styles which our grandparents climbed over are literally now covered in barb wire in many places in England.
You can literally see where there was a footpath, where there was access to land and I will tell the landowners sometimes when I’m trespassing around my village, you there was a footpath here.
You just, you don’t know about it.
You know, we know, we know what happened.
We know, I know for a fact that my forebears had rights to access this land, but you are now denying it.
Basically, it’s, it is a total crisis.
It’s getting worse and worse. As biodiversity decreased, our access to nature has been decreased, and this noose is tightening again and again and more and more basically.
so nowadays you’ll see signs like this, danger keep out, private property, no public access.
97% of our rivers, we have no kind of uncontested, right, of navigation.
It’s nothing to do with our safety.
It’s to do with, it’s nothing to do with protecting the rivers.
It’s to stop us, the public from noticing that river companies are polluting our rivers are treating them terribly.
The landowners have access to these rivers.
We the public do not.
Basically next time you see a sign like this in the English countryside, a feel free to ignore it in most cases, and to hop the fence thoroughly encourage you to do so.
if you go to the right to room website, we can give more advice on how to do so and so on.
But also question, why are these signs really there? Is it really to do with safety? What’s going on behind it? Very considerable chance that it’s not just a landowner having a nice picnic, but it’s something’s going wrong.
They’re releasing pheasants in next to SSSI woodlands.
They are burning grass malls, they’re pumping rivers full of crap, et cetera, et cetera.
There’s all kinds of horrible, processes happening to nature.
Literally behind closed gates.
The vast majority of destruction to nature does not happen in the public eye.
When it does happen in the public eye on places like the River y, which is a very rare river in that we do have some access to it, the public are now taking action.
The public are acting as its guardians because we have connection to it, right? so nature is not something out there.
This can be best explained by this wonderful guy.
This is Davi K Yami.
this is a Brazilian indigenous leader from the Amazon, leader of the Yami.
people Davi visited the UK in, the first time in 1998, sorry, 1989.
It was part of his people’s campaign to stop illegal gold mining on Yami, territories and he went to the, English countryside with his friends and it was really fascinating.
Davi again, he is not been trained in science.
He doesn’t know the history of the right to Rome just by being in the English countryside.
He saw it as being like an apocalyptic wasteland.
He says the white people’s ancestors did not take care of the forest with which they came into being the way s did first.
They started all over their own forest.
They keep only a few patches of forests left now, which they have enclosed in fences.
Now, there are a few trees left on their sick land, and they can no longer drink the water of their rivers.
This is why they want to do the same thing again, where we live again, so much land is being destroyed here.
You have to go all the way to, Brazil to, to chop down more land and for, for capital to, to continue increasing.
Davi also hated the idea of humans being separate from nature and he says, when they speak about the forest, these white people use another word.
They call it the environment.
It is what remains of everything they have destroyed so far.
I don’t like this word.
The earth cannot be split apart as if the forest were just the left over bit, bit.
he says, I told the white people you often claim to love what you call nature.
Do not settle for making speeches, truly defend it all.
Its inhabitants already speak to us with the fear of disappearing.
You do not see their images dance, you do not hear their songs in your dreams.
Yet we shame and know how to listen to the bees distress.
They are asking us to please speak to you as your people, to make you stop eating the forest and it’s really interesting when Davi talks about such things, he’s not just saying Davi and other indigenous leaders that I’ve spoken to as well, if not just saying, look, we want solidarity.
They’re also saying, you have to sort out this mess that you started basically and when I’ve spoken to indigenous peoples from West Papua, they’re saying, we want support for our freedom.
But we also want you to sort out the mess that started here, that kind of it’s the nature has to be, has to be protected in solidarity with human beings.
We have to have this as a unified, cohesive strategy to stop this crisis of biodiversity collapse and, and colonialism.
This has to be approached holistically, right? this is a lovely image of Davi in front of Stonehenge Davi.
basically, he had a huge impact on him going through Stonehenge and Avery, other neolithic stone sites.
Davi recognized an inherent wisdom that was here from the, the hunter garden of people who used to live here, who he basically said that these stones are holding up the sky, is the word that he used, which is some very important yami philosophy.
The idea that they were kind of maintaining, the ecology of the place.
The people who had erected them, David reason, were very knowledgeable.
They had understood the environment as the yami do, but their descendants had not taken care of them.
They’d not taken care of the forest.
So the English side has a really huge impact on, on Davi.
And, Davi actually has had a huge impact on the, on the right to Rome campaign and we’ve been just so fascinated by this and it’s been a huge inspiration for the concept that we have named World Service about a kind of reciprocal relationship with, with nature.
I know we’ve managed to get Davi a copy of the book, and, I think he was happy to, to see it and doesn’t speak English, but it was lovely to see a photo of Davi with, with the book.
And, with that illustration of him, which is in the book.
this really got me thinking as a guy from the English conscious side.
I thought to myself, can I, am I ever gonna get to the stage where I understand nature enough that I can almost like listen to the bees and I can really know what nature needs? And I thought, well see, I’m, I’m not indigenous and I’ve not come from a kind of conservationist background.
I kind of thought, no, there’s no way this could, could happen and again, I think it’s very important the term indigeneity and the term being indigenous, the far right claim they are, or we are indigenous English people or this kind of nonsense.
It’s done in a really horrible way.
Unfortunately, some people in the among hippies and among so many environmental movement also say, well, great, if indigenous peoples are close to nature, we can be indigenous.
You know, we, we will just claim that we’re indigenous as well and it’s all gonna be okay.
It’s not the right solution.
It’s not appropriate or right at all.
Indigeneity is not something you can claim.
You know, it’s like if you’re white, you shouldn’t try to claim blackness.
If you’re not indigenous, you shouldn’t try and claim indigeneity just because it’s a social construct.
These charact terms carry pain and, and pride and a history of suffering and exploitation behind them.
It’s not for others to claim.
But I think what we’re trying to argue in the right to Rome campaign is you don’t need to be indigenous to care for nature.
You don’t have to have a degree in biology.
You don’t have to have anything. All you need is connection with nature.
So our concept of world service, we said from the get go, we were never gonna define it as one specific term.
This is not a to-do list.
Well, all it’s saying is, if you get out into nature, you will know, you will be able to take care of nature and that’s what we found. So this is a personal story from me.
This is a wildflower meadow next to my, house.
it’s, it’s a really beautiful meadow.
It may have been there for over a thousand years.
and it used to be a community orchard.
So the villages there had planted fruit trees and the flowers had grown and it was a kind of wonderful act of wild service.
It was, there was reciprocity.
The bees were giving, helping to pollinate the flowers and the trees.
The fruit was falling from the trees.
The humans were harvesting.
The fruit was a wonderful, reciprocal arrangement.
in the 1950s, the area was bought by, big landowners.
And, they, basically have done messed up the meadow a little bit.
They chopped on some of the trees.
They did a few other bad things.
So it’s not as rich as nowadays as it would’ve been, but it’s still pretty rich in biodiversity.
again, 97% of all wildflower mowers have been lost.
This is one of the only ones we have left.
in 2023, a massive development agency came and said, we are gonna destroy this meadow and build grotesquely unaffordable houses.
Obviously, they didn’t say grotesquely unaffordable, but they were, and obviously we cut up a massive out uproar.
We said, look, this is how dare you do that.
This is an area of high biodiversity and they said, oh, well that’s a problem.
We’ve got a solution for that.
We are gonna bring in, again, what I would call mercenary ecologists.
So they hire the corporate consulting ec ecological firm who went there.
The landowner cut the flowers and the grass down.
It was a cold January day or something and these mercenary ecologists were there for a few hours and they said, well, I haven’t seen many species.
I haven’t seen much. They said, they wrote in their official report, which one environmental scientist described to me is not worth the paper it was printed on.
They said, it’s of low ecological value and the best bit of all, they said, we recommend a stringent offsetting program and we think by your offsetting program that you’ve proposed to us, you will increase biodiversity by 8000%.
So you can destroy the entire meadow.
You can build those, it, you can cover it in concrete.
It’s okay, as long as you plant some Roman trees somewhere else, or you invest in some dodgy project overseas, that will probably displace indigenous peoples biodiversity overall will have increased by 8000% and the meadow be dam, there’s nothing of value in it Anyway.
So it absolutely broke my heart.
I remember literally getting on a zoom call with a developer and crying eyes out and shouting at him.
cause I knew this was wrong, and I didn’t have the ecology to explain it.
cause I’ve just seen this official document, which is what the government’s gonna see, the local council’s gonna see.
It really broke my heart. I’ve got two books of wildlife of like, British insects, British wildlife, that kind of thing, which I’ve been reading, and I’ve been playing in this meadow my whole life.
It’s private property. It’s fenced off.
They haven’t, they never fenced off the minds of wayward children.
I’ve been trespassing and climbing the gate in here since I was a child and I began to realize that I knew the species here.
I knew what the flowers were.
I didn’t know the names of them. I a bit like John, Clara.
I don’t particularly like the over scientification.
I dunno much about science or biology, whatever.
But I looked at the names and I’d been able to, I was able to kind of name all the flowers and species and it soon became apparent to me that there were far more than the very few species the ecologist has named.
This is the list that I’ve got so far.
There’s over a hundred species again, I’ve clicked the wrong thing on the computer.
There’s over a hundred species living in this meadow.
Everything from grass, snakes to, lords and ladies yellow rattle.
There’s, pigment shreve that live there.
There’s, every kind of red kite and barns and everything.
The most beautiful, wonderful things.
Hazel and a white brinny and bramble, just the most incredible plants and, and animal species.
I haven’t even, I unlike a lot of my generation, I dunno much about mushrooms, but I, I haven’t looked at the, fungi, but I’m sure there’s an enormous amount of it there as well.
Just by being in the meadow, I’ve been able to learn these kind of things.
I don’t have any kind of biological training, but it, to me, it brought back the idea that this natural human severance from nature, this un unnatural severance, this can be regrown.
We can learn to reconnect with nature, and when we do so we can use it to great effect and because of this, kind of citizen science as they call it, we were able to mo mobilize much of the community, and eventually we managed to stop the development from happening and, and save the meadow.
we haven’t is safe. The meadow is safe for now.
We haven’t yet. Got it. So thank you.
so I wrote about that in the book and then, just before it went to publishing, and then we saved them leaving it in a very kind of cliffhanger, what’s gonna happen? I don’t know. And then, just before the book was published, I found out that the meta had saved and I said to Nick, who edit the book, great, I, I’ll add it into the book.
He said, blooms, people have a fit.
You can’t add it to the book, do it in the reprint.
So for the hard back edition, it’s ambiguous, but in the new edition you’ll learn that I did, we did Save the meadow.
which is lovely. So the plan is to open it up.
What we wanna do is to open it up for the public.
I’ve got two little nephews in the village who would never have been able to enjoy that meadow had we not saved it.
I want them to be able to frolic and Meadow Meadow and have fun and build little dens and stuff and, um and, and, and just really enjoy themselves like I did, but not have to have that fear of trespassing with them.
I want ‘em to have fun and to really enjoy it.
That’s the dream, for us here in our village.
so how do we fight back? What does this actually look like? How do we reverse this feedback loop? And how do we, properly regrowth things? Enter the right to own campaign.
right to Room was formed in, 2020, during, lockdown.
basically we were kind of trying to push back against this idea.
This was at the time when you were allowed like a short bit of exercise a day, right? And everyone was going out and really enjoying themselves, going around local footpaths, going around local areas and enjoying themselves.
They were finding these footpaths being cut off.
There was a huge backlash by landowners.
People here remember it, right? And farmers and so on were saying we don’t like this.
We don’t like the public, the regular people, the poor being out in nature.
This is terrible. And then we got the simultaneous idea because the, the overwhelming majority of the public, we were, we were taking lockdown really seriously.
We understood the science, we understood it was very important to be covid safe and yet the super rich, and, and, were, were having a lovely time with these massive estates that they had.
Boris Johnson was having bloody parties and Downing Street, the public were being blamed for, for gathering together and so on.
But the problem was, was land.
The big problem with this was the fact that 92% of land was off limits to the public.
we weren’t doing mass TPA during lockdown.
This was a photograph taken, last year.
but it, we, the kind of, we formed the idea and we set up the website knowing that after lockdown we were gonna deliberately have these mass trespasses.
So we’ve reignited the great tradition of mass trespasses in the spirit of the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, where, hundreds of working class, communists from, Manchester and Sheffield deliberately trespassed up in the mos and kind of helped to establish the peak district.
Really, they were beaten up by Gamekeepers and the, obvious it might be of interest to know that the National Ramblers Federation, such as it existed, said, well you shouldn’t have been trespassing anyway.
It’s kind of your fault. And the Ramblers Association to this day, unfortunately, are still saying, oh, there shouldn’t be a right to Rome.
We should just ask the Lando politely to have a little bit more act.
Please. It’s not the way it’s not the way, stuff happens.
You can’t ask the rich and the powerful for things nicely.
We have to demand it. We have to fight for our rights.
We have to take direct action and mass trespass to us is, is an act of what we call extremely nonviolent direct action.
We have a lot of fun when we go for mass trespassing.
We have picnics. We do a lot of fun things.
I’ll just briefly go through some of that now.
so these are some examples of some of the mass trespasses we’ve done in badminton estate near Bristol.
We got hundreds of people trespassing led by wonderful botanists led by professional forages and people like that who could tell us all about the wonderful plant medicine and, and foods that, natural foods that we could eat.
Well, that on here, the, dock leaves don’t cure.
Stinging nettle stings. It’s actually a myth.
The one thing we know about nature and it’s wrong, as a, plant called, rib, a rib war plantain, which actually does cure stinging Ethel stings.
amazingly, my great grandma, who was a cockney woman from, east London, she had folklore about plants that barely even grew there anymore.
But she could remember that somehow and some of these things that we call old wife cells, they might be called, that’s the knowledge is true, the knowledge that we have lost and on this trespass, we were kind of guided by experts on the plant life and, even to the wonderful areas of, of wildlife.
we did the wonderful trespass in the river dough went in, Yorkshire where we went litter picking along river banks.
The landowner came up to us and said, what are we doing? We said, we’re cleaning up your mess.
He didn’t have an answer. So he scarpered.
we’ve kind of done some of this along with like folk traditions.
We did a wonderful Morris dancing trespass on the estate of Barron Richard Bean.
So by telling you his name, you can tell he was the Tory Lord.
he was the Tory minister in charge of access to nature, and he had a 5,000 acre estate and we went Morris dancing on it and it was incredibly good fun.
we’ve, we wanna, one thing we want to do in this campaign is bring back a kind of sense of, of fun and of pencil lime.
So we’ve got the slogan, peasants, not pheasants, and we want to be kind of bringing back this and just like talking about this in a kind of fun kind of cheeky way and just basically just making fun of the aristocracy.
He really don’t like to be made fun of, but they call themselves things like the Marcos of iff and they give these some the names.
It’s like a kind of pantomime.
So we’ve made it into a kind of pantomime and connecting with nature is fun and it should be fun, right? and there’s also a very serious side to it.
We wanna talk about justice, about intersectional justice as well.
The very first action we did, the, the story, the very, the second action we ever did in terms of the big directions, was an event called Kinder in Color and it was to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Must Trespass and we walked the same route that the Kinder Scout must trespasses had done in 1932.
Many of these trespasses, the leaders were, were Jewish and faced terrible antisemitism and discrimination and racism, from the judges and when they were arrested and kinder in color was, was led entirely by people of color.
It was hundreds of people of color walking the same route to highlight the levels of racism, in the countryside.
Less than 1% of visitors to national parks, black people and people in color.
and people in color, people of color are like much more likely to, live in areas with very little green space and face horrific levels of racism and discrimination in the countryside.
So it was just a wonderful opportunity to take up space and to just, just organize with these incredible, groups fighting for racial justice for us, the right to Rome.
We don’t just wanna write for middle class white people to have more access to nature than they already do.
It’s about, racial justice.
It’s about class justice, it’s about gender justice, it’s about queer justice, and it’s about linking these things together in a kind of holistic way.
the Right to Rome is just a, a kind of very, we want it to be a cohesive movement for, for nature and for people and to kind of bring these, things, together and as Chris mentioned earlier, we also did one of the most wonderful events we’ve ever, ever had.
The honor of taking part in is called The Dark Skies Trespass, or I think we called it The Night Skies Belongs to Everyone.
It’s now being called The Stars Is for everyone, is I think the kind of new naming of the, world Camping Campaign.
So we decided it’s great doing this at daytime, why don’t we do it at night? And Nick Hay said to me, what does that look like? I said, I dunno, but it sounds fun.
so I, and I said, there’s something, there’s stuff around, ‘cause this is just me.
I’m interested in indigenous peoples and I’m interested in anthropology.
I said, there’s something to do with indigenous peoples and anthropology and I didn’t really know. So I reached out to the Radical Anthropology Group, which is why I’m here tonight, really and I reached out to, Chris and Camilla and I said, I’ve learned a little bit through reading some of you guys’ stuff, and also through living with indigenous peoples about the importance of the moon and of, of being able to see the night sky in, in human history.
What does it really mean? And Kristen Kamilla were just so fantastic and really broke down things from all the way from the myths of the hadza in East Africa and some of the stuff we know about our hunter gatherer ancestors of all of us, and also some of the English folklore on the moon in the dark skies.
So we led a trespass in the Duke of Northlands estate.
He owns over 120,000 acres of land, about over four times the size of Newcastle and we got, people from more marginalized communities, refugees, working class people from inner city in Newcastle out trespassing on a place called Lord and Shore, which is incredibly enough, was a neolithic, rock art site where people who’d built the site had and they’ve made these wonderful cup and ring marks, which some people think may possibly in representations of the stars.
Certainly the people who made these carvings had access to the night sky.
We went, on the dark moon night of, September.
We were led by wonderful guy called Neil from Ghost Star gazing a kind of, citizen astronomy organization.
And, it was, the most terrible, bloody awful, rainy day and I was convinced it was gonna be a failure and I was literally seconds away from canceling the event and Nadia said leave it, even if it’s raining, we’ll just get people outside.
Anyway, we went there and just as it was starting, the clouds cleared entirely and Neil said it was quite possibly the, the brightest until like the most starry night he’d seen in the entire year ever.
It was so beautiful. We saw the Milky way above our heads.
We saw the Andromeda Galaxy far away, and Neil put a telescope in my face and I could see Saturn covered in rings and I said, that looks like a image of Saturn, thinking it was like a slide and he said, that’s literally Saturn that you’re looking at and I couldn’t believe it. It was the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen.
And, and, and, some of the people there, we we’d taken were, there was a couple of people who were refugees from Eritrea who said, I remembered sleeping under the stars in Eritrea, but I’ve never seen them in the uk I’ve been living in, in a city in Newcastle.
It was the most truly, truly wonderful night and we had, I talked about some of the anthropology and some of this kind of stuff that I learned through, rag and I, we had folk singers and stargaze as it was the most really, really wonderful evening and right through him right now is organizing something called stary, story Fortnite.
I believe it’s happening until the 11th of November.
If you go on our link Tree and the stars of Everyone, link Tree, you can find more about it.