travel

After the Tyranny of the Convenient

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It started a long time ago; those first rough voyagers of speed kicking up dust in the villages. Then a tide of Model Fords and the opening up of previously hidden inroads to the country. Black and white, the early images come to us like cinematic semaphores; comedies of Keystone cops and early reels of high jinks in ever growing towns in unknown stretches of Californian dreams and burgeoning Mid West cities, while in Europe ponies and traps were suddenly old hat and a million horses in London and their every growing tides of manure were superseded by black motors to add to the smog, weirdly and infernally echoing the tides of black-clad pedestrians, the black hats and umbrellas pushing for space in a town where everyone keeps to themselves.

In many ways the motor car was one of the key innovations of the century, facilitated by an industrial model where the workers themselves were increasingly dehumanized then shunted away almost altogether. Its one great clarion call was the way in which it opened up horizons. Distant prospects were suddenly made close. Families experienced the kind of travel almost akin to teleportation in its speed and sense of ensuing displacement. It came to be seem as a kind of cornerstone of liberty, its costs not clear to many at first, like cigarettes that were considered good for the throat.

But of course it only ever accelerated. Read accounts of people walking country roads in the seventies, their dismay at the rising tide of roadkill; shocking in the sense that it was shocking at all to us and our conditioning to the sight of flattened animals. And then the great monsters, the great modern roads – marching across the land leviathan like, ripping up hillsides, tearing neighbourhoods in two, almost Stalinistic in their scale of social and literal engineering.

And now we have the reality for so many – the conditioning to life on the motorways; the dulled sense of drudgery of endless concrete, the feeling of confinement, the sense of being nowhere at all but trapped in a kind of high-speed neverworld where there is almost a sense of not moving at all; vehicles glide from side to side and distance is distorted, time itself feeling rinsed out.

But it’s a sacrifice many are willing to make – pragmatically or reluctantly. For still a huge majority in this country, cars are the transport of choice – and they are thereby locked into the economy they represent; the financial outlay for keeping a car on the road means that that choice becomes locked in – few can afford that and regular train travel as well. That many are sick to the teeth about this and that they would very willingly embrace a move to the railways were they reasonably priced is of course one of the great scandals of the age.

But for many, cars continue to hold an allure that makes motorways a cross they are willing to bear. The endless adverts, the pull of ergonomic seats and carefully molded interiors, the obsession with performance of the machine itself – it represents a kind of wedding to the machinated world, a kind of semi-cyborg state of entrapment. And all the minor roads are sport and everyone’s cushioned in steel and polished glass and all too often never seem to hear the roar of tyre on tarmac they leave in their wake – a collective endemic whereby the air conditioning and stereo surround leaves people blind to the huge irony and madness of a nation in perpetual motion, choking the roads, snarled in inability or unwillingness to find their way out.

That our towns have been built around cars for so long hardly helps this. And for anyone out in the sticks where buses are largely the preserve of pensioners and even then are being cut to the core, cars have become a kind of no brainer. The speed they represent, their flexibility, the power they give to go anywhere at once at any given time, not limited by timetables, or routes or the absence of stations or lines – none of this can be easily dismissed.

But if we are to escape their huge costs – well rehearsed in so many places – there’s surely a need to try and do better. If rural communities are not always what they once were it’s interesting to consider how a different pattern of travel may change this. If the model of private car ownership could be successfully challenged and car sharing clubs received the kind of patronage they deserved it could prove transformative for many rural and suburban areas blighted by a kind of over individualization.

Equally, if people made decisions about where they lived based on their travel options; being somewhere that has good transport links and lobbying for them to be improved where they don’t exist it could liberate many people from the serfdom car ownership can so often represent.

But a shift away from private car ownership can represent a kind of change which could be considered something of a sacrifice. Yes, you might not be able to travel exactly wherever you wanted at high speed at the drop of a hat. But such changes can bring unsuspected rewards. There’s a lot to be said about different relationship with both a sense of place and of the experience of travel itself. It might take you longer to get somewhere, but you might come to know your surroundings a little bit better in the first place. You might have to make detours but that could take you to incredible places you might never have known about otherwise, or which you’d have been more tempted to rush through without a moment’s pause. You might miss the conditioned isolation of your own vehicle but even the basic communion of being in a peopled carriage can increase your sense of connection with humanity at large.

Moving away from individualized cars might mean turning so many things we take for granted on their head, but it can lead to lives that are more dynamic, connected and enriching. If that in any way represents an inconvenience it could also mean a liberation from the vast cost of running a motor. It could mean life with a better sense of priorities that bolsters, not separates and drains communities. And just as it would shape our experiences it would have huge ramifications for planning and how we organise and give precedence to other forms of transport. It might mean we sang the praises a little more often of those other liberators – the bicycles that opened up so many rural vistas back in the eighteen hundreds, the huge terminus railway stations that each form a kind of cathedral to models of modern transport that bring people together, not to mention the sense of dependability of shouldering a bag and knowing that, with time and a sense of great adventure, your boots can take you anywhere you wish.

Ancient Woodland, Modern Minds

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So we live in a world where existence for so many species we happen to share this planet with is in jeopardy, or has already been denied. And here at home our ancient woodland – supporting at least twice the amount of rare or threatened species than any other UK habitat – is being wiped out at a rate faster than that in evidence in the Amazon itself. So here at least, in knowing this, we’re given something like a greater clarity, that if we can get beyond the myth that the world was made solely for our benefit we surely have a duty to protect those whose lives rest in our hands, in our ability and willingness to speak and act on their behalf.

So where do we start in such a monumental mission? There are the obvious candidates of course – the HS2 line that threatens twenty one ancient woodlands for a scheme whose money would be better spent on improving and maintaining our existing railway tracks and which, if built, would scar a wider Chilterns landscape that has so far through accident or luck escaped too much encroachment by the infrastructural outrider that so often heralds more and more development. The protests against this particular project seem set to run and run.

Then we have the sorry story down in Kent of Oaken Woods – 81.5 acres of ancient woodland due to be swept aside for a ragstone quarry, a decision which goes against not only the county council’s minerals plan but also policy of central government towards ancient woodland. And there are no shortage of other threats – road widening programmes, pylons, new houses, even oil extraction.

There is no doubt these woods need all our help and that campaigning in all its forms is now as necessary as ever. But perhaps the greatest threat to our old woodlands – and everything else – is simply the mentality that lets us think that their removal is ok, that they and the species they support are somehow secondary to our own human concerns. They are not, in our common culture, in any sense inviolable. They are, or so the logic goes, the pretty chattels that adorn a landscape loved by sentimentalists and precious few besides. There is simply no room for such pleasant irrelevancies if we want a modern and functioning nation. So the roads are ushered in, high speed lines are laid out as some kind of sleek and greener future and the end justifies any means because industry and commerce must win out, because these are the wheels that keep our world turning even when such cogs drive our own end as much as the scraps of habitat that happen to be in the way.

We can fight any number of projects and – where they threaten precious ecosystems, protected by laws that are routinely deemed fit to be overridden – it is right that people should do so. But if we are serious about preserving them for good, if we are serious about somehow grappling with the underlying assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and even that most unmodern of mindsets: the stories we tell ourselves, we have to see more clearly the ancient change in attitude – what you might even call the original sin – that let us think this world was ours to do with as we please. Without the shift in perspective such insight would hopefully bring, we will ultimately still be simply pushing at revolving doors, or banging our heads against walls. If we do not change the state of mind that underpins each push then even immediate success in any campaign will be rendered temporary because the beast would still live that breathes life into yet another threat and then another.

A long time ago there was no need to sweep aside the plants and animals that did not appear to matter to our immediate concerns. The day such acts became permissible was perhaps the inception for the sorry times we face today. The more we can all recognise that and struggle to imagine a way beyond it is perhaps the greatest and most important challenge we face. Until then nature will remain apparently expendable as will our own lifelines that she carries, a reminder if one was still needed that there is no boundary between us and the world around us except that which we have created in our minds. Demolishing that arbitrary and hitherto all too powerful border has never been more urgent or more vital.

A Very Basic Thing

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961 partly out of the heightened awareness of the region’s people and wildlife brought about by Laurens van der Post’s descriptions in ‘The Lost World of The Kalahari.’ Today, his name has been invoked by those very people he described – the Gana, Ghi and Tsila Bushmen – whose continued existence in that place is still very much under threat. Partly evicted in the nineties, the process was completed in 2002 as the entire population was forcibly removed to settlement camps at the edge of the park where the depression so common with people removed from their lands was compounded by alcoholism and the spread of HIV.

Restored to their territory by a ruling of the Botswana High Court in 2006, their one borehole – that was capped upon their expulsion four years previously – remains sealed and the government seem determined for this state of affairs to continue. A second court case has just taken place to assert this most basic human right of the Bushmen of access to water. The region is one of the planet’s driest and the Bushmen are having to take an arduous 300 mile trip to gather water from the nearest available source. At least one woman has died of dehydration and the conditions in general are described as harsh and dangerous. Hundreds of the tribe are languishing in the resettlement camps, too afraid to return to their ancestral lands without such a vital resource. Meanwhile numerous boreholes have been drilled for the reserve’s wildlife and a Safari Lodge within the reserve has been allowed to build a swimming pool. Many Bushmen, especially the old and young, are sufferring from lack of water. In an effort at intimidation, the government sent in truckloads of troops to the region in the run up to the court case. When it came to it, the Court reserved judgement. It is not clear when the final decision will be made. “It pains us that the animals and tourists on our land can drink our water to their heart’s content yet we go thirsty” said Jumanda Gakelebone, a Bushman in the reserve.

That Botswana’s government wants the Bushmen off the land, there can be no doubt. One very obvious reason is the diamonds found within the reserves – a further deposit of which is supposed to be under a Bushman settlement. It is perhaps convenient then that there are those who claim there can be no place for people – any people – within a wildlife reserve. Chief among such exponents is John Terbough, author of ‘Requiem for Nature’, an advocate of ‘fortress’ conservation. His feeling that “a park should be a park and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it” is echoed by Botswana’s Director of Wildlife and National Parks, Trevor Mmopelwa, who claims that allowing people to live in the reserve would “make the management of CKGR extremely difficult in that there will be two conflicting rights existing side by side.”

Is this really then a story of the contrasting needs of people and the animals they happen to share land with? Are efforts to defend the Bushmen placing human rights over that of the local wildlife? The issue has certainly been divisive but attempts to override the rights of people living on the land are at best simplistic and at worst fall victim to a mindset that is seeing indigenous people evicted from their lands across the globe at an unprecedented rate.

Their power boosted by various sponsors, no small proportion of them corporate, various big international nongovernmental conservation organisations (or BINGOs) have embarked on a huge global push to increase the number of ‘protected areas’. In 1962 there were some 1000 official such ‘PA’s’ worldwide. By 2005 there were 108,000 with more being added every day. A land mass the size of Africa itself – more than 12% of all land globally – has been ringfenced in this way.

And all too often, if these PA’s have happened to have been occupied by indigenous people, they have been moved on, either through force, through ‘soft evictions’ or the contestably phrased ‘voluntary resettlement.’ In Chad, a tenfold increase in protected land resulted in an estimated 600,000 conservation refugees during the nineties. India, the only other country even bothering to count, admitted to 1.6 million five years ago. Globally the figure could be anywhere from five to tens of millions. The figure in Africa alone may well exceed 14 million.

What should be obvious but which flies in the face of the logic of the various BINGOs is that many of the places deemed worthy of protection are so valuable precisely because of the knowledge and practices of the people living there. In Africa, where indigenous evictions from protected areas are highest, 90% of biodiversity now lies outside their boundaries. History is showing us that, for the sake of biodiversity alone, where indigenous people live in ways that are ecologically sustainable (and for that, read the vast majority), their eviction is the most counterproductive thing we can do.

Perhaps the real nub of the issue is our conception of wilderness, of the wild and our place upon it. A very real problem is our notion of nature as separate, as ‘out there’, a thing which can be visited but which sits apart from our modern lives, from the ever mounting effects of our daily actions. Tribal peoples here are seen as throwbacks, ‘archaic fantasists’ as Botswana’s President Khama has said, removed from the realities of 21st Century life, a people to be educated and absorbed.

But in reality of course they hold so much that we can learn from; often enhancing their environments through a sophisticated knowledge of biological diversity without any formal schooling in ecology, botany or zoology. The world that they inhabit holds the key to how life – far from the environmentally dystopic state of affairs most of us have grown accustomed to – can be far less intrusive on the natural world and, at its best, can approach something genuinely harmonious. How tragic then that the Bushmen and others like them should be brushed aside while we are still allowed to visit what has become a semi-artificial, pristine natural world we only ever tend to reach by jetting through the skies our planes have wounded.

The aims of international conservation are wholly noble but suffer from this trap of dual realities. Its sponsors include the World Bank as well as a host of bilateral and multilateral banks and transnational corporations. The Nature Conservancy has around 2000 corporate sponsors while Conservation International has 250 corporate ‘partners’. Often, there is a ‘debt for nature’ swap, with PAs created in return for annulment of part of that country’s national debt. So perhaps there is a kind of logic as well as more than a hint of the perverse at President Khama’s membership of Conservation International.

Perhaps, in contemplating the Kalahari, we could do worse than remember the creation of the first nature reserve ever created – Yellowstone Park – which was ‘set aside’ at the expense of the Miwok, Shosone, Lakota, Bannock, Crow, Nez Perce, Flathead and Blackfeet peoples who had all existed there benignly for so long. Laurens van der Post bought the Bushmen’s existence to a global audience and it was explicitly for their benefit – as well as that of the wildlife around them – that the Kalahari Game Reserve was created. Today the Bushmen call out to van der Post’s godson – Prince William – who is visiting the country this month. His response will perhaps indicate the kind of figureheads we can expect in the years ahead of us, it will determine whether, as a culture, we have in any way moved on from the days of evicting whole peoples whose outlook can teach us so much.

Botswana’s government’s actions are undoubtedly driven by money, by a complete disregard for both their own constitution and the basic human rights of their countrymen. At their root these actions stem perhaps from a contempt for a way of life they think we should move on from. And it is the messages we all send out, deliberately or otherwise, than help determine such perceptions. We cherish our lifestyles, the thousand little things that make them easier and often let ourselves forget our sense of what is really vital. A certain level of development undoubtedly has served us well, but perhaps we have for too long lost the very precious thing which is so vital; the sense of being part of that which lies beneath our feet. Without it we are all at sea and seek to plug the gap with things which only compound our feelings of emptiness; we are often like ghosts or children pushing at a wheel we cannot see nor understand. There has to be a greater balance, some sense of what is valid and what we need to get beyond. The Bushmen here can help to lead us back, remind us that when we live in greater harmony with the land we are all the richer for it. Don’t let us forget them and their right to such a very basic thing.