Land=Body

Audio version available here.

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

[Image description: photograph featuring a landscape of grassy moors with clouds and mist drifting down from a patchy blue sky onto the hills in the background. There is a narrow road that cuts through the moors and hills.]

By Rowan Hyde

Published on 8th May 2021

I live on an island surrounded by sea, with a spine made of mountains, with lakes and rolling moors, estuaries and wetlands, fields and fields of grass, and a few remaining woodlands. 

As I write this, bulldozers and chainsaws are busy carving a path through the countryside in readiness for a high speed railway; a railway no-one needs and very few want. Whilst the majority of people shelter at home from a deadly pandemic that is sweeping the globe, a few are sheltering in make-shift tents and treetop structures, trying to slow the destruction. Comprehensive studies indicate that the railway, if completed, will damage or destroy five internationally protected wildlife sites, 693 local wildlife sites, 108 ancient woodlands and 33 legally protected sites of special scientific interest. All this at a time when wildlife across the world is estimated to have declined an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016, and the island where I live has been described as one of the most nature-depleted places on the planet. 

It is no coincidence to me that this island, the UK, also birthed the industrial revolution, twinned with a colonial empire that destroyed and degraded ecosystems and human cultures the world over. 

I love where I live; I love the non-human species that live here, I love how varied the landscape is, and I love being surrounded by water. It is the love I feel that makes being here all the harder, because where I live also has a human culture long indoctrinated with the belief that nature is a commodity, with no spirit or sentience of its own. My white British ancestors were able to view other human beings as resources to be exploited, and the lands they colonised as empty vessels waiting for the civilising touch of white western supremacy. It is the same beliefs, the same ideology, that have led to this island becoming privately owned by people with power, sliced into sections, fenced off, built over, chopped down, slowly poisoned and maimed over centuries. 

The more I fall in love with the more-than-human world, the more I feel the presence of grief and rage at what has been and is being done to it, and done to me in the process. 

The links between land and human bodies go deep. Colonial violence started at home with the enclosure of land and the oppression of rural folk. The rights of common folk to access land were brutally stripped away, a history marked with peasant uprisings and bloody suppression from wealthy land-owners. Some of the settlers that arrived on Turtle Island (Canada) from 1760 onwards, were highland folk from Scotland, removed against their will during the highland clearances ordered by English land-owners. The English wanted the highlands for sheep grazing and game shooting, so forcibly removed the many communities that lived there. The pain and trauma was repeated by the settlers against the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The cycle of abuse goes around again. At its height, the British Empire repeated the same violence over 25% of the world’s land. People displaced, enslaved, degraded, cultures and ecosystems destroyed or altered beyond recognition. It is hard to fathom the scale of it, or the mindset that allowed such incredible atrocities to take place. 

Today I walk around my local fields and woods, sit by the river, listen to the trees and observe the birds. I notice the ways we repeat the colonial mindset in our behaviour and actions towards the land around us, and towards each other. My local river has large fenced off sections that are privately owned angling clubs. I snuck into one of them through a gap, and found an enclosure surrounded with high metal walls and barbed wire. On the far side of the fence, an England flag hung limp and ragged. There was a pond in the middle, vegetation chopped back around it and a well-maintained path with fishing spots around the perimeter. On the gates were signs demanding that they be kept closed, in case otters get in and eat the fish that had been stocked specifically to be caught and thrown back, caught and thrown back, by anglers paying a club subscription. There was a photo of a fish lying prone and stupid on the grass, bite marks visible in its flesh. I wondered why we assume the fish deserves to be a plaything for anglers, a sport, any more than food for a hungry otter- a species that was nearly wiped out in the UK fifty years ago. That we make such distinctions between our human right to control nature for our own (limited) benefit, and the rights of non-human creatures to find ways to survive, says it all. 

A few days later I was walking along a ridge-line, one of the most well-known footpaths in my local area, when I caught the sound of chainsaws. My heart dropped as I came closer to a small patch of woods bordering a golf course - a place I often went to sit and be alone with the birds, squirrels and plants. Sure enough, two men were steadily chopping down the maturing oaks, piling up the brash to burn it in the undergrowth. When I walk close to the centre of the town I see rubbish everywhere, clogging up the banks of the river, in drifts and piles amongst the brambles. These are the discarded places where people do not care to go. The brambles are high and tangled fortresses of thorns - it is no surprise that here is where I find the presence of sparrows and dunnocks. In these forgotten corners I find all kinds of creatures; goosanders gliding gracefully along the river, bullfinches, blackcaps, nuthatches, long-tailed tits, chaffinches flitting in and out of my peripheral vision. What we view as desirable and beautiful in nature; the manicured lawns and carefully planted gardens, the mono-cropped or grazed fields, the tree plantations, is often not where creatures choose to go.

Diversity seems to thrive most in the margins; the untended and messy areas that we leave alone, the bramble patches and waste-lands.

These are the places that are trying to heal themselves, slowly. The progressive movement of plants and animals may be beyond our understanding or perception, but there is a deliberation, an intent. And if we are able to hear it, perhaps the key to our own healing can also be found there. 

The supremacist ideology that facilitates colonisation and capitalism re-enforces our separation from all of the other life on this planet. It cultivates a loneliness that eats at us. It makes the more-than-human world appear dead, and so kills part of us in the process. When I witness and feel the actions of people trying to contain and subjugate the land and our non-human relatives, it feels like parts of my soul are also being fenced off, cut down, burnt, and littered with rubbish. It is a soul wounding. My culture does not see the world as alive or as sacred, does not marvel at the protective nature of brambles that provide shelter for small animals and young saplings- only sees them as a nuisance.

My (white supremacist) culture tries to control and divide people into rigid categories, just as it does the non-human world. As a queer and gender-diverse person I have felt the on-going attempt to subdue my spirit and being, to make me feel less worthy and valued based on my identities. It is a particular kind of cruelty that erases my inner felt sense of being, my inner experience, and evaluates me based on an arbitrary standard. The same cruelty in essence, that cuts down an oak grove to make way for a golf course, or views entire peoples as less-than human. It would be inconvenient to those wielding the chainsaws to consider that the oak grove might have its own purpose, sense of being and inner experience.

The fight for my own whole-ness is an echo of the fight for the whole-ness of everyone, and the sentience, complexity and beauty of the non-human world that surrounds me. It is worth noting that the cultural values around gender and sexuality present in white supremacist culture, are colonial values, exported and enforced around the world. 

I am curious about the psychological processes behind white supremacy, colonisation, capitalism and reductive linear thinking. Behind all of them there is a kind of dissociation and disembodiment, a marginalisation of our own capacity to deeply feel and perceive ourselves and the world. It allows us to separate from and numb out empathy and feelings of grief and pain, so much so that we can commit genocide, destroy ecosystems and wipe out species and cultures. Surely we must override our body sensations, feelings, reactions, dreams - override parts of ourselves in order to commit such abuse. It is the fragmentation and splitting of the self, mirrored in the fragmentation and splitting of the world and people around us. The truth is our world is more complex, and the timelines of the earth longer, than we can ever truly grasp. Cooperation and competition co-exist in diverse relationships and entanglements, everything is interdependent, and nothing is more or less important than the whole. Diversity is an indication of health within every system, it is a way for a system to stabilise and maintain resilience. This is true in ecosystems, in our gut flora, and in our human communities. Our earth is alive, in the truest meaning of the word. Humans are but a blip in the earth’s history, and we have existed in many, many ways, capitalism and colonialism being only a tiny fraction of that ancestral knowledge. We can unlearn and learn again what it means to be human on this earth, and an integral part of that path is to learn how to feel and perceive deeply. It takes humility to understand that we are not and have never been the centre of the universe, or the only beings gifted with sentience and intelligence. Yet, once we begin to understand, the world becomes full of vitality again, begins to speak to us again. 

We cannot see our own humanity whilst denying the humanity of others. We cannot see our own wildness whilst denying the wildness of the world. We cannot see our own sentience and sacred-ness, whilst we deny the sentience and sacred-ness of the earth and all its life forms.

About Rowan

Rowan Hyde (they/them) is a trainee facilitator and Psychotherapist with Processwork UK, based in Derbyshire in the UK. They are interested in links between land justice, social justice, therapy and deep ecology, with a focus on decolonisation and anti-capitalism. They are also a musician, writer and artist. 

[Image description; A photograph of Rowan, a white non-binary person with short dark hair and glasses. They are wearing a white and yellow top with a black hoodie and jacket. They are standing in a garden full of colourful flowers and plants, that reach above Rowan’s head. They are looking down, smiling and admiring the blossoms.]

Contact

Email: rowanhyde1@gmail.com 

Website: www.dandelionfacilitation.com 

Instagram: @dandelion_facilitation