An Elastic Love Story

Hitching out on the road as a young man, I loved the sense of wandering free, with all I needed on my back. Standing on the roadside waiting, sometimes for ages, shivering in the cold, I would sing aloud to myself. One lyric comes back to me as capturing that sense of being at home wherever I might find myself:

“And every place shall be my native home” 

It’s a line from the psych/folk sixties band, The Incredible String Band, from a song called Maya, combining eastern and western influences very originally. (though it must be said that they were always a ‘marmite’ band). 

This lyric captures a certain relationship to place in its youthful universalism, but I’ve come to see over the years that there is very much more to being grounded in the belonging of place. 

For most of human times, people ‘lived in place’. Nowadays, very few of us live our lives anywhere remotely close to the place where we were born. We move around widely throughout our lives, often residing in towns and especially cities, where any sense of place can fade into insignificance. 

Yet you don’t have to live in the same village or street all one’s life to feel a deep connection with place. The heart of a place is the home and although most of us don’t now have hearths to sit around and warm ourselves, we still value our apartment, our favourite armchair, our garden, our balcony, our village or town; here we feel most at home, and value this space. 

And I’ve found that my sense of home can also be elastic. I live in an apartment where I feel very much at home. At the same time, I am deeply at home in my local allotment surrounded by the vegetables which I tend and the wild plants and creatures that I assist in making a welcoming home for too. I am also at home in the marshlands of the Thames estuary where I regularly walk, and where I am intimately acquainted with all the trees, creeks and wildlife throughout the changing seasons. I know each wild rose bush along the marsh path, and time is marked in my natural clock by the pale pink rose flowers in Spring, and the rich red hips on bare winter days. And home for me is also the off road mill cottage next to a millpond where we have visited for years. 

In past times nomads wandered yet still followed definite elastic routes where they knew their extended homelands, which they revisited periodically.

Gary Snyder, poet, sage and environmental activist, has for many decades been the great mentor in all things place based: what has been termed as bioregionalism. As he famously said, 

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

Yet these days, who even knows a place, unless it means locating it on Google maps by which train or subway line it’s on? Gary Snyder emphasises the importance of knowing where you live: knowing the natural characteristics, local climate, soil and trees. This might sound rather abstract for many urban dwellers like myself who live in a rather concrete-coated biotope. But the concrete for me is but a thin carapace over parts of the floodplain of the river Thames where I reside: a place where the river runs brackish from tidal ebbs and flows, and the smell of seaweed reaches this far upriver, many miles from the ocean.

Again, from Gary Snyder, who I’m drawing on liberally for his long lived experience and wisdom.

You should really know what the complete natural world of your region is and know what all its interactions are and how you are interacting with it yourself. This is just part of the work of becoming who you are, where you are.

I live in the confluence of two rivers, being also in the joint floodplain of the river Lea, where this chalk stream tributary joins the larger river Thames. My home is on the Isle of Dogs, an area very nearly enclosed as an island in a loop of the Thames, and known locally as ‘The Island’ with large expanses of water in the old docks built on this marshy land below sea level, with silty and clay soil.

My surrounding area is called Poplar, which takes its name from the Black Poplar trees which once flourished in the area, a large cottonwood species which loves the marshy conditions of the floodplain. A local friend of mine, Bob Gilbert, wrote Ghost Trees, a book centred on the original Poplar trees, which have now vanished from Poplar and most other areas. The culmination of his book was a ceremonial replanting of a Black Poplar tree in Poplar churchyard. Across the south side of the river, the rising hills demarcate the edge of the floodplain. 

As a keen gardener attempting to be self-sufficient in vegetables, in spite of the land originally being marsh, I know from my  own experience how little it rains locally, especially in the summer, since I’m forever having to water my seedlings. Annual rainfall is surprisingly low in this eastern corner of the country – less than in Rome – with the prevailing westerly winds from the Atlantic dropping most of the rain on the western side of England and leaving the East dry for most of the summer. 

Gary Snyder points out how recollecting how we once lived in places is part of our modern self rediscovery. It grounds what it means to be human.

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place and must be grounded in information and experience

Then a place becomes “home.” Walking is the best way to get to know and feel a place while other transport modes are just too fast for facilitating a deep connection with the land. I know all my local streets, alleyways, trees and flowers intimately from walking around the area year round and just being interested.

If I may sound a little academic and observational, let me say that I also get my hands dirty and get involved in caring for and protecting my home. Bioregionalism is not just a rural project; it is equally about urban neighbourhoods, restoring community, greening the cities, making them a better home for all beings, all inhabitants. As “bioregion” literally means “territory of life,” it is about defining, connecting with and caring for a place based on its life-forms. 

Wildflowers sown in my street

I walk daily round the local docks and am intimately connected with life here through the year: the gulls and cormorants coming here in winter to escape the arctic cold; the swans and grebes gracing us all year round. Data centres keep getting planned and built around the docks, using dock water to cool the energy-hungry servers and then to discharge heated water back into the docks. This excess heat poses a serious risk of causing algal blooms in summer, killing all other life, while official eco-surveys in support of these developments declare the docks virtually devoid of life. I know otherwise, since I watch large shoals of fish and see the grebes fishing every day, and am awed by the flights of swans coming and going with their thrumming rhythmic wingbeats. I give the swans supplemental food in wintertime. So I feel duty bound to present detailed formal objections to such plans. Can I stop them? – maybe not, but I must do all I can to defend the land, my body, my home.

My local area is a poor, deprived and rather unloved part of London. It has the lowest recycling rate in the whole country. Rubbish is often just chucked out in the street. I clear the local rubbish outside our block, place ornamental small trees in pots at the doorway and care for them; I tend our communal backyard, planting ivy up the walls to cover bare concrete and provide habitat for nesting birds. I sow wildflowers in bare patches in the street;  many local people love them, though so far I haven’t managed to get others to do similar in their street. People say, “Why doesn’t the Council do this in our street?”. Many folks unfortunately feel disempowered, lacking a sense of agency.

Urban streets could be veritable nirvanas, full of life, and beneficial for mental health.

Meanwhile, my local Council sprays weeds with Roundup (Glyphosate), a pesticide acutely toxic to fish, birds and insects, as well as plants and humans. I talked with the local contractor working in my street, who had a huge pack of this carcinogenic poison on his back. He was spraying around the base of the swings in the kids’ playground opposite my block with no mask. He did seem to know that it was carcinogenic but then added that, “It’s a job and I need the money”. I understood his predicament.

Mock die-in at local Town Hall to protest Glyphosate poison spraying

This pervasive poison, which, due to its overuse is now found in most of our bodies, led to my taking action with a ‘die-in’ in the foyer of the Town hall with local XR (Extinction Rebellion) members, with a mock spraying to protest the continued use of glyphosate. The Council is now not spraying in parks though still refusing to stop street spraying (it’s cheaper than non toxic methods of weed control).

If you love a place and all its myriad inhabitants, then you naturally feel the need to fight for it and protect it in whatever way you can.

In past times, the creatures and fauna and landforms were seen as part of the local culture, and today this kind of culture needs restoring. If we are in tune with the plants, the weather and the birds, we come to be truly at home as we feel the spirit of our particular place, which we are inherently part of. Coming to feel that we belong and love our local home world, is an impetus to passionately care for and protect that home. It’s also part of connecting in a visceral, non-cerebral way with the uncountable other homes in this precious  world we all share.