ASDA Superstore car park

What is natural or unnatural? And what does wild mean? 

Walking across the car park of my local ASDA superstore I am struck by the sheer acreage of tarmac which never becomes remotely full of cars, even though there are scores upon scores of them parked there. Apart from the surprising number of people who seem to just sit in their idling cars, the only regular inhabitants of this urban desert are the flock of feral pigeons who sit in a huddle in the middle of this expanse between their foraging for scraps. Finding this empty and lifeless tarmac a somewhat sad spectacle, I was thinking about what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ and what we mean by ‘wild’.

The great eco poet, Gary Snyder, is very helpful on this subject in his, “The Practice of the Wild’. As he says, “Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural. By these lights there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy.” 

After all, we are intrinsically part of nature, so all the products of our human activities cannot be outside of nature. However, something is clearly missing in this car park scenario.

 Snyder continues, “So we can say that New York City and Tokyo are ‘natural’ but not ‘wild.’ They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd.”

My ASDA car park is an extremely diminished ecosystem, of minute biodiversity. It may not be unnatural, but it is very severely lacking in plants and animals and is obviously very far indeed from ‘wilderness’, let alone any degree of wildness. 

From Snyder again, “When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness…….Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order.”

In the UK, we don’t have anything approaching true wilderness left, with the full assembly of plants and animals which that would entail and which existed in the past. It’s also important when thinking of wilderness, to include human beings – who have lived in relative harmony with the land for hundreds of thousands of years. The idea of wilderness as ‘pristine’ and entirely devoid of people, is a modern Western (and rather colonial) notion; it is akin to those times when aristocratic landowners in Britain enclosed the commons, forcibly excluding ordinary people from their ancestral lands, so that the land could instead be exclusively given over to deer or grouse for hunting, or sheep for grazing. 

An ever increasing proportion of the population of the world now live in urban settings and that is only going to keep increasing. In the UK, the urban proportion is 84%, and in the whole world, it is 55% and rising. The wild is never eradicated, thank goodness, and even in the most urban settings there are wild plants erupting between the paving stones, tree roots pushing up the tarmac, lichens and moss on the walls; gulls wheeling in the skies between the high rise office canyons, blackbirds and robins singing, foxes prowling, spiders’ webs festooning every crevice, and ants everywhere. 

And it’s important to be in touch with the fact that wildness is not just ‘out there.’  Our bodies are wild and respond involuntarily to all kinds of stimuli: the turn of the head at a shout, vertigo on looking over a cliff; catching our breath; these are all universal responses of our mammalian body. Our instinctive and intuitive capacities are also part of our own wildness. While the rational mind serves its function of abstraction and representation very well, the other wilder side of our being is more flowing, interconnected and more fully present in the world. Wildness is in us, and something to be recognised and cultivated in our lives. And then at another level, our own bodies contain more bacterial cells than human cells, which means that at least half our bodies are not even human. 

In England, we look to the countryside, to rural settings, for solace and nature, and yet the experience can often be rather disappointing. So much land is now covered with lurid green monocultural fields of rye grass, artificially fertilised; or in the uplands by empty, treeless, shrubless moors, from severe overgrazing by sheep or deer. So although these lands are far wilder than my carpark, and have a much greater number of creatures present in the assembly, they are a long way from whole. Of course, with ideas that have been proposed, to rewild a proportion of our poor arable land and uplands, this could all change for the better, with a large increase in wildness. 

Rainham marshes after much rain

For the majority of the human population now living in urban conurbations, very valuable havens of wildness can be found in the many brownfield sites on the edges of towns and cities. These are edgelands. Edgelands are those liminal zones between urban and rural: between the often overmanaged countryside, and the urban, which tends to be drowned in concrete.

For me, one such favourite edgelands is Rainham marshes on the eastern industrial borderland of London; this is a great example of the wildness possible within what might at first sight appear to be an unlikely setting. It’s marshy land next to the river Thames, just past Dagenham and the Ford car works and next to the main A13 road artery to the East and the high speed Eurostar rail line. Many people speeding past by car or train would doubtless not even notice this area, or if they did, might dismiss it as wasteland. Being part of the Thames floodplain, historically, people didn’t build houses here. It served for damp grazing and later became a dumping ground for sprawling and polluting industry, including in this case, an old military firing range. 

Yet we would be missing an enormous amount, were we to dismiss this large marshy and scrubby expanse as wasteland with no aesthetic value. To illustrate the rich biodiversity of this edgeland habitat, let me share a taste of a winter walk of mine across Rainham marshes, a walk I love to do regularly throughout the year. In the winter months, this place is a refuge for great numbers of wildfowl and waders escaping even colder climes further north.

Lapwings take to the air at Rainham marshes

Out on the grassland areas of the marsh, many birds feed on the rich invertebrate life, or in the case of others like geese and widgeon, graze on the grass itself. The swirl of the wide flock of lapwings against the infinite pale blue of the winter sky is a magical sight. Like a single organism, sensitive and skittish, they circle and then land with one mind on the grassy clumps of the marshes; all facing the same direction, their iridescent green plumage and extravagant head plumes flash strangely exotic. Flights of ducks, waders and starlings come and go all the time. It’s a bit like an avian Heathrow here. In terms of the presence of a good variety and numbers in the assembly of all beings in this ecosystem, this ranks surprisingly well for wildness on Gary Snyder’s scale, despite its initially unprepossessing location. Some 270 species of bird have been recorded here.

I walk through the head high reed beds, their pale beige at this season imbuing them with an unbounded depth and stillness in the calm air. Nothing stirs in the emptiness which at first seem deserted and then every so often a powerful invisible burst of song erupts from the reeds; unseen cetti’s warblers the very essence of the mid winter reeds. Stunning marsh harriers quarter the reed beds hunting for prey, sometimes putting up clouds of lapwings and other birds. When I was young, there was only a single breeding pair of marsh harriers in the whole country; now I rarely visit Rainham marshes without seeing more than one of these majestic birds. 

Reedbeds with pylons behind

I stand silent in the reeds when suddenly, with a low thunder rising within seconds to a roar, there’s a gleaming flash and the Eurostar has passed and the noise has vanished as swiftly as it arose; just like the warblers’ explosion of song. Then another rumble and the gleaming navy blue flash of HS1 hurtles past in the opposite direction, the shiny and aptly named ‘Javelin’, the high speed train to the channel coast.

The lapwings and warblers seem oblivious to Eurostar and HS1. Rainham marshes has been sensitively nurtured by the RSPB as a nature reserve on the Thames estuary. Marshes have been seen in the past as barren places of miasma only suitable for draining, fly tipping, or unpalatable industry which was unwelcome elsewhere. Yet we now know that these marginal areas between zones are the richest for biodiversity and are also crucial  feeding stage oases for migrating wildfowl and waders. In the spring and summer when I walk here, it has the backdrop of the chorus of marsh frogs, bright green and numerous in all the water channels, and a cacophony of warblers singing unseen from the reedbeds.

Factories bordering the marshes

Electricity pylons straddle the marshes like spindly Ents and the low hum of traffic from the M25, a constant distant background like the drone in Indian music. Being previously used as a firing range by the army, saved the marsh here from industrial development; the rusty metal targets left on the marsh are now seen as the archaeological heritage of the site and provide a good lookout for perching kestrels.

A vast landfill site borders the reserve on one side, the dump trucks ceaselessly coming and going, a low background murmur; the gulls pillage the rubbish for edible items; an old vehicle breakers graveyard is on another side. At first I used to be a little taken aback by the high speed trains passing so close to the reed beds. But I eased into a larger appreciation of the whole palette. The wildlife seems unfazed by it all. This is a beautiful mind expanding place; a place that ultra urban Londoners like myself especially need. I’m used to stunted horizons of barely a few yards. My spirit expands with the endless flat vista.

On the open marshes stepping elegantly through the ditches is a stately little egret, a recent species to our shores from warmer climes. And there are great white egrets and cattle egrets too (a likely result of climate chaos), impossibly snow white against the grassy hummocks. 

And curiously these marshes are actually ancient. The water meadows are strewn with strange humps like moguls on a ski slope, betraying their history; the lumpy grassy tussocks being the result of the industry of yellow meadow ants protecting their homes from the ever threatening water, creating these ant conurbations over centuries. Ant nest islands rising from the mire. Are the earthen mounds lining the banks of the Thames here to prevent floods so very different from the ants’ mounds keeping their cities free from flooding?

Yellow meadow ant mounds in the grassland

Walking along the river wall, a flock of elegant black and white avocets probe the muddy Thames foreshore with their long delicate upturned bills. A huge container ship plies its way upstream with its cargo of new cars bound for Dagenham car works.

Landscape constantly evolves, mutates, a combination of all the influences shaping it. Our capacity to appreciate landscape has to develop and move on too. What a beautiful expression of nature is Rainham Marshes and it lies within sight of the financial district of Canary Wharf just upriver, which glints in the winter sun like some fantasy El Dorado. 

This is the Britain we live in, like it or not, if we don’t mentally airbrush out the offending elements. This is increasingly the sort of borderland regions which of necessity will typify more of our countryside. Wildlife documentaries convey a sanitised and censored view of nature, with no trace of humanity or our artefacts. Much of the world is not like that. Animals and plants don’t have the same aesthetic prejudices as we do. I’m not praising the trash and flotsam of derelict industry as if it were somehow cool. As we care more and more for our surroundings (= our home), that care will translate into making our environment more attractive, removing pollution and plastics. There doesn’t have to be anything inherently ugly per se about industrial building; it just depends how it’s done. Care and attention stemming from an outlook which sees ourselves as inseparably part of Nature creates a different result. 

It’s pointless for us to try to insist on an idealised primaeval past unaffected by humankind – one which never existed anyway. And being such a huge presence on this planet means we humans play a considerable, if not the major part in shaping the unfolding of nature at this point. Yes, certainly we have unwittingly grievously damaged and polluted our precious planet, and we have to do everything we can to remedy this degradation, not least because this is our home too. And there is hope and beauty to be found in the resilience of nature, the way life rewilds and regenerates when given half a chance.

Thames foreshore with QE2 bridge carrying M25 motorway behind

 “Wilderness may temporarily dwindle, but wildness won’t go away.”

Gary Snyder