Leave Only Yurts

Today’s article about the Guardian-sponsored yurt being used for interviews at the Hay Festival got me thinking about the yurt as a structure for our times. The Turkic word “yurt” refers not to the wood-and-felt tent itself, but to the imprint left on the land once the tent is gone, packed up and relocated by its nomadic owners. By extension the term has come to mean, for its Central Asian users, not only tent or home, but kin and homeland. A connection not just to the immediate landscape but also to nationhood is indicated by the use of a stylised version of the yurt’s crown in the Kyrgyz flag. Traditionally the crown (or “tyndyk”) is passed between generations of a family, whatever the other modifications made to what is, in essence, a temporary structure.

The Turkic term “yurt” does not refer to the tent itself, then. Reference to the physical structure has accrued to the term, or its synonyms, in other cultures. The Turkic-speakers are on to something, thinking primarily of what we might today term their environmental footprint, and of the associations formed within their families and communities, inter-generationally. It is in part the nomadic lifestyle that allows a focus on the landscape and its resources, as well as bonds beyond the material – if you are forever to lose the particularity of place, and if the precise structure of your shelter has an element of contingency, your notion of home must be understood through other means.

The fashion for yurts has increased in the Western world since the 1970s, often billed as a sustainable way of living. Yurts play a crucial role in many eco holidays. We would do well to remember that the word itself reorients the yurt-dweller towards the structure’s physical (and emotional) footprint - a connection between dwelling and earth.

(Illustration: Mongolian Ger construction sketch by P.R. King)

Guilt Edges

Yesterday's Guardian prints a response from Trudie Styler (here) to accusations made by Marina Hyde (here) regarding the sincerity of her environmental campaign work. Hyde had wondered whether environmental credentials really could accrue to someone who flew to meetings and campaign events, at times by private jet. (The private jet stories have been reported extensively in the tabloids - the red tops may not be very green, but they are sniffer dogs for celebrity insincerity). Gut instinct draws me towards the thoughtful and acerbic Hyde, and away from Trudie "Seven Homes" Styler. The headline used for the latter's Guardian response is "It is not hypocritical to fly if I'm campaigning for the environment" - too glib by half at first reading. But Styler points us toward interesting questions about the ethics of travel-as-awareness-raising, particularly when that awareness typically involves recognition of plane travel's contribution to anthropogenic climate change.

Last year, Timothy Morton used videoconferencing to "appear" at an ASLE conference here at Edinburgh University (he discusses this decision here). Next week, the Ashden Trust will use similar methods to contribute to the Earth Matters on Stage Festival and Symposium in Oregon (as Robert Butler mentions in his excellent blog here). And poet and author Kathleen Jamie claims to have turned down a BBC invitation to visit the Arctic because she felt that it could not be justified as essential travel (see interview here). What questions might this raise in the minds of those artists and writers who have travelled in the region, for example with Cape Farewell? Ian McEwan's much-anticipated new novel (which will apparently feature a "background hum" of a climate change theme, as reported in The New Yorker here) was partly inspired by his Cape Farewell expedition. Richard Mabey states that in Findings (a collection of prose pieces) Jamie "has written far and away the best book in my field" (see Ashden Directory article here). What might Jamie have achieved if she had made her own journey to a polar region?

These issues must surely strike all of us who travel in order to undertake what we can loosely describe as environmental work. Can I justify my own flights to the Peruvian Amazon this summer, since the expedition I will be helping to lead (BSES Amazon 09) actively seeks to create scientists and environmental campaigners from among its young participants? Shouldn't an environmental awareness leader (my role) simply stay at home? Whatever our intentions to assist in the creation of a new mindset regarding our treatment of the environment, we must look rigorously at our own behaviour first. It seems many attempts to be green are guilt-edged.