Haunted (Tree) House

Something to file under "interesting ideas" is the upcoming project Ghost Forest by artist Angela Palmer who, having grubbed up the stumps of mature trees felled for commercial logging in the forests of Ghana, will install those stumps in Trafalgar Square, and thence in Copenhagen (just in time for the COP15 climate talks). The project's aesthetic value and effect upon the viewer can only really be assessed once it's in situ, but that fact itself gets to the heart of what is being depicted here. To feel, to really respond, you have to "be there." And if "there" is a distant tropical forest then, much as you are told deforestation is a Very Bad Thing, your distance from the denuded forests themselves (assuming you live in the non-tropical regions) can assuage the feelings of compulsion to do anything to prevent the loss. There's a spatial contraction in "Ghost Forest" that puts you where the arboreal carnage is. But also - as the title hints - there's a temporal contraction here too, as the past is summoned up through individual acts of imagination, which will inevitably attempt to reinstate the missing trees. The ghosts will, as ever, be the result of human imagination, a painful reminder of a loss experienced in the past, now felt once again in the present, and perhaps also (as in the prophecies of ghostly figures) hinting at a forest-free future.

Wood, once its origin in a living entity is reiterated, seems at once more beautiful, but also more unsettling - it is hard to resist the anthropomorphic inclination to associate wood with flesh. This move is deftly achieved in Kathleen Jamie's poem "The Tree House," from the prize-winning collection of the same name. As a careful observer of the natural world and, not least, as the wife of a carpenter, Jamie is alert to the beauty of wood. But her poem also addresses the sacrifice of other living things that goes into the human effort to dwell:

[...]

Would we still be driven here,

our small town Ithacas, our settlements

hitched tight beside the river

where we're best played out

in gardens of dockens

and lady's mantel, kids' bikes

stranded on the grass;

where we've knocked together

of planks and packing chests

a dwelling of sorts; a gall

we've asked the tree to carry

of its own dead, and every spring

to drape in leaf and blossom, like a pall.

Image: Associated Press / BBC

"Love. Art. Gardening."

The May 2009 edition of fashion and lifestyle magazine Harper's Bazaar bears the headline "Fashion Gets Natural." An edition inspired by the natural world, it features a fashion spread entitled "Primal Passions," promising that "A hint of evolutionary theory adds a powerful edge to summer's nature-inspired looks," a claim that appears to have something to do with "fossil-inspired textures." A page devoted to "Natural Facials" requires a visit to a London salon and an outlay of between £50 and £575. It is easy to laugh at the "greening up" of fashion magazines (see also Vanity Fair's Environment section), but such obvious attempts to tap into the marketability of ideas of nature are a useful reminder that, as understood by human beings, "nature" has always been subject to fashions. It is impossible to step outside of trends of thinking and commune with nature, although our language is filled with the husks of such attempts - back to nature, in touch with nature, in tune, in harmony, at one with nature. Is there any way out of this impasse?

Much as so-called "wilderness travel" is on the rise, it remains beyond the resources of many people. But one encounter which we might have with nature on a day to day basis is the activity of gardening (I use the term loosely, writing as I am from my own "garden" - a series of plants in pots on the common stair of a block of flats). The garden is of course a regulated and circumscribed space, often seen in contrast to the "true wild" (although I am short of examples of the utterly "natural" and free from human intervention). But as a place where anyone can interact with soil, weather and cycles of growth and decay, the garden offers a great place to think through human understandings of nature, and the language we use to describe it. Gardener poets such as Alice Oswald, Sarah Maguire, Kathleen Jamie and Stanley Kunitz (discussed by Jamie at the National Library of Scotland, write-up here) have made this connection.

In Harper's Bazaar, Jeanette Winterson muses on the joy of gardening, under the title "Earthly Pleasures." After the obligatory reference to her own childhood, and a nod to the gardening talents of Vita Sackville-West (whose Sissinghurst garden is pictured), Winterson writes convincingly about the useful meeting points of garden-tending and storytellling:
"Gardening, like storytelling, is a continuing narrative. One thing leads to another. Like stories, there is always something going on in the garden long after the gardener has gone to bed. [...] Love. Art. Gardening. Each is about relationship; our relationship to one another, and to the mythic narrative of our lives, and to our one and only real home: planet Earth. [...] It seems to me that to be in relationship to the soil is at once vigorous and robust, peasant-like in its obviousness, and also strangely metaphysical. It embodies so much of what we are - the food we eat, the land we walk upon, our final end."

Perhaps stepping outside of fashion means stepping into the garden? While the eternal connection between man and earth has been re-thought according to ideological fashions (most notably Nazism's "blood and soil"), and while getting one's hands dirty is a Harper's-approved fashionable move, tender care for plants and animals might also be the most accesible way for many of us to move beyond the faddish and find an unencumbered pleasure in the natural world.

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.