The land

When I moved into my apartment, one of the things I started doing was looking for wild patches of forest nearest to where I live. I struggled to find much more than small public walks within walking distance, and a small park with forest paths that takes maybe 15 minutes to drive to. Somehow I had different expectations of what is still rural life. But then again I live in Wales, and every drive I make reminds me of the real state of modern Wales. I see such greenery in the spring and summer, I see clusters of trees either surrounding me or off in the distance, but then I remember that these are not really forests, and the grassland surrounding me is agricultural enclosure, not wild fields or meadows. I feel a small bout of sadness from that fact every time.

Whatever romantic image you might have of Wales and its countryside, the truth of the matter is that very little of Welsh land is actually wild. 90% of Welsh land is farm land. By comparison, England and Scotland both have 69% of their respective land held as agricultural land. The majority of Welsh farm land, a solid 63%, is not even used to grow crops, but is instead held as “permanent grassland”. These are grasslands that are agriculturally cultivated by humans, but they aren’t grazed by sheep or cattle, and they exist mostly just to grow grass, herbs, and wildflowers that aren’t necessarily cropped. It is extremely difficult to get a precise figure for how much Welsh land is wild land, but apparently only 1.5% of Welsh land consists of national nature reserves. In the UK, a national nature reserve is a “protected” area of uncultivated natural land which is managed by a public bodies of the British government and several charity organisations. In Wales, these areas are managed predominantly by the Welsh government, which in turn means that they are presided over by the state. Although this might mean that these lands are protected from destructive interference, whether that makes these lands “wild” is entirely questionable. Then there’s village greens, which are essentially open areas of grass that are owned either by community councils, local parishes, or private owners. They are not wild grasslands, they’re often surrounded by human settlement, and the right to roam does not apply to them. 8.4% of Welsh land consists of these greens or “common land”.

So, if you think about it, while factoring in land populated for urban and rural settlement, there’s almost no Welsh land that you can call wild, in the sense that it does not belong to humans, is not vested with human interest, exists only for itself and its own natural growth (the real meaning of “belonging to nature”). I find this to be pretty depressing, because it means Wales is a land in which human spirit can find little means of overcoming its alienation from the natural world, and thus the absolute possibility of a world not ruled by civilisation.

Let me ask you this: what good is Welsh nationalism if it only means giving freedom to a nation of farmers? The cause of Welsh independence is undeniably growing, it is undeniably strong even if still lacking representation (and in this sense Plaid Cymru are less than worthless), and I will be one of the first people to celebrate when we are finally emancipated from that last vestige of the British Empire and the House of Windsor that is the United Kingdom. But what does independence mean if the land itself is not free from the grasp of Man? If the land of a newly independent Wales is not free to go back to the wild, then Welsh independence will mean nothing other than freedom for the abstract nation state, and the sad bovine-human way of life that seems to be taken as our cultural identity.

In fact, you only has to look in your local candidates in Wales for the upcoming election to get a decent picture of the status quo. For example, in my local hustings, someone asked a question about sustainable farming schemes in which they mentioned the fact that 90% of Welsh land is farm land in the context of the larger climate emergency. None of the candidates who attended (all four of them) seemed even remotely interested in the subject. In fact, the Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrat candidates practically supported farmers in never giving any iota of land back to the wild.

That this disgusts me is really something of a convenient understatement. It tells me that Welsh politics in general is almost completely invested in the oppression of the land by agricultural dominion, that the horizons of our future, either within or outside of the union, is to dependent on maintaining a land buried beneath enclosure, and with it our own most basic alienation from the world; that is, a world not exclusively defined by the commerce of human “civilisation”.

A Pagan, being “true to the earth” to borrow Nietzsche’s words, does not set aside or postpone the importance of the land as a matter of politics. Quite the opposite, any political approach to Paganism inevitably concerns itself with the land, and thus ecology. And in this respect whatever eco-modernism is propped up by the establishments of both mainstream and supposedly radical politics will simply not suffice, because this still supposes ecology as included in human interest. Paganism is innately concerned with a natural world whose existence is not solely or even primarily the property and domicile of human beings, and not principally defined by the task of human stewardship. That’s part of how I relate to the way I see the land every time I drive through it and see small clusters of trees or even of forestry surrounded endless farms, and the way that’s tied to the climate emergenct deepens the significance of that. And in my opinion, land is absolutely relevant to the political dimensions of Paganism for the same reason as it is relevant to the proper religious core of it: it is home to lifeforms other than human beings, and, as far as our most ancient ancestors were concerned, it was also some to gods, and/or demons, long before we started drawing those magic circles we call civilisation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I genuinely feel that we rewilding huge chunks of land has a spiritual or religious meaning. The land that is handed back (or indeed “surrendered” if it must be) to the natural world, unowned by Man, is, or was, also land in which the gods lived. Handing it back to the wild is the same thing as giving it back to the gods or the demons, and that goes some way healing the alienationg suffered by the whole human species. If any political movement should stand in the way of that for any reason, then all they want is to keep us in chains leading lives of bovine consumption that are then presented as peace, prosperity, and progress. As Pagans, we ought to fight this more aggressively and consciously, especially in tandem with the realities that man-made climate change presents us with. That means, if we want to be serious, we should be invested in the idea that the natural world, the land and the sea, form their own space, not merely as a source of exploitable resources or as the garden properties of the government.

For instance, 30% of the land and sea being given back to the wild wouldn’t be so radical, but it would be nice to get started on that. We should also emphasize that the wild is a place where we can simply wander freely. The “right to roam” in this sense is simply the name our system gives to the simple freedom explore uncivilised wild nature, and it is important to assert that freedom in order to re-establish communion the wild, and the divine presence of the wild. The conversation about the “rights” of nature would be interesting to pursue as well, although it is really an obsequious service to the rights framework, which supposes the need for the state to grant protections. As well-meaning as the idea sounds, nature should not be dependent on us to recognise it as a democratic subject so that we might respect: on the contrary, that we should be seeing ourselves as “subjects” within “nature” makes more sense.

There is a war, or a struggle, in which so many people are simply fighting on the wrong side. If human beings wish to save themselves from the spiral of their own mass dying, perhaps they might want to consider the cause of the land. Then, perhaps, they might attain the dream of harmony being themselves and nature that they have long imagined to be possible.