[diggers350] Peak District / The mass trespass

[mark fefifofun]

Hi Massimo

 

"Unless the urban majority has a sense of entitlement to the land, they're
hardly going to become the eco-consumers we all need"

 

"eco-consumers sounds like a bit of an oxy-moron" .  ( Not just thinking of
the sweatshop produced cotton bags nor the organic veg from Italy nor the
idiot down our street with his Chelsea Tractor carbon neutral stickers ). It
also implies the capitalist market that I would strongly argue is
unsustainable.

 

A part of the reason 'we' are in this mess could be seen as the reinvention
of the working class as a consumer class ( in sweatshop trainers ). This can
only be made ( arguably ) possible as there has been a steady de-skilling of
the English working class as well are landless.

 

We no longer teach our kids the skills in growing food, plant identification
( inc. medicine ), cooking skills, clothes-making skills, trad. tool skills.


This seems to be unlearnt- through  indoctrination of our  kids in schools (
hence the violent backlash ) and in the newspapers etc etc. etc.This is
Class war. :)

 

This is very potted and there are more strands to this, obviously and I
could go into this in detail  but this is an email list and you'd have to
write a book. And critical mass is happening in a bit. Still, it all goes
back to land. Campaign against CH4 property programmes anyone? 

 

Mark 

 

PS You could check out cotters and squatters.

PPS Look Tony, no swearing guvnor :-)

 

  _____  

From: diggers350 at yahoogroups.com [mailto:diggers350 at yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of Massimo.A. Allamandola
Sent: 23 April 2007 03:15
To: diggers350 at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [diggers350] Peak District / The mass trespass

 

Rifling through 20th-century history, there are plenty of points where 
the urban working class sought access to the English countryside. The 
most fascinating is the plotlands movement of the 30s and 40s, when 
people took on small plots of land in areas such as Canvey Island and 
parts of Essex. Bit by bit they developed huts into modest bungalows. 
But the development horrified middle-class conservationists, and was 
brought to a halt in the late 40s. Greenbelts were created to prevent 
its reoccurrence.

The middle class have hijacked the English countryside for themselves
http://www.guardian
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2063199,00.html>
.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2063199,00.html



Madeleine Bunting
Monday April 23, 2007
The Guardian

On April 24 1932, a crowd walked on to the Duke of Devonshire's moorland 
at Kinder Scout in the Peak District. The mass trespass and subsequent 
prison sentences became a cause celebre, a defining battle of the 20th 
century between city and country over the question of who the land of 
England was for. The 75th anniversary tomorrow will rightly be an 
occasion to remember and celebrate the achievement of the ramblers' 
movement of right-to-roam legislation nearly seven decades later. But it 
needs to be more than that because the question at the heart of the 
struggle of those northern ramblers is more pertinent than ever.

The Kinder Scout trespass was a battle over physical access and the 
nature of ownership of land; 75 years on, the issue is as much about an 
urban population's emotional and cultural access to land. Do people feel 
a connection to the land? Do they feel it belongs to them, that they 
belong to it? Can they identify the land's characteristics - soil, 
water, air and how it sustains life? Do they have access to the 
knowledge of wildlife and plants that was once common? Does the urban 
working class have the sense of entitlement to their land that those 
pioneering ramblers did in 1932?

For large parts of urban Britain, the answer to most of these questions 
is no. Cheap flights make Ibiza a more familiar place than 
Herefordshire. Only 25% of city dwellers have access to space such as a 
garden or a windowbox in which to grow something. The result is a 
pervasive environmental illiteracy. Kids grow up believing chicken is 
manufactured in polystyrene boxes, water is made in a metal tap, and 
that soil has no other property than being dirty.

This illiteracy is reflected in the shocking lag in public perception of 
the significance of the environmental crisis - an astonishing 32% of 
people in Britain still know little or nothing about climate change, it 
was reported last week. Increasingly, the concern among 
environmentalists is that any attempt to shift personal behaviour to 
being more sustainable will be crippled by this urban constituency's 
ignorance and indifference.

The urban disconnect is not an inevitable consequence of urbanisation 
and industrialisation. It is a peculiarly English story of the power of 
the middle/upper classes. While the Kinder Scout trespass launched us on 
the path to the right to roam - eventually - and the creation of the 
national parks, there was a parallel process running through the 20th 
century in which large swathes of the countryside, particularly in the 
south, became progressively less accessible. You may be able to walk now 
across the Downs, but you certainly won't be able to live there unless 
you can fork out half a million for a former farm-worker's cottage.

The hijacking of the countryside by the middle class, who used both 
conservationist and environmentalist arguments to defend their 
self-interest, is an untold story of the past century. They have used 
the planning system and, latterly, the housing market to create the kind 
of picture-book zones that cover large areas of Hampshire, Sussex, 
Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. They have become gated communities in all 
but name.

In the process, the middle class captured the idea of the countryside in 
the national imagination for themselves. They scored major victories in 
the 80s as travellers were hounded and the Country Diary of an Edwardian 
Lady hit the bestseller lists. Now, they police their borders not just 
with exorbitant house prices but with a code of belonging - green 
wellies and Barbour jackets - and the message to visiting outsiders is 
clear: you don't belong here. The result is that the countryside becomes 
foreign territory for an urban working-class population - intimidating 
and unfamiliar. London inner-city children equate country with posh. 
This is most sharply evident among ethnic minority communities, many of 
whom have recent close experience with farming and rural life, but their 
children grow up to regard the countryside as alien.

It doesn't have to be that way. Other countries have managed to 
facilitate the growth of cities but carefully maintained the connection 
to the land. Look at Denmark's forest kindergartens where 
three-year-olds are bussed out, come rain or shine, to local forests for 
six hours a day to play with sticks and mud. Weekending is not the 
privilege of a tiny minority in Scandinavia but part of a mass 
democratic engagement with the principles of living on the land - 
chopping wood, drawing water. It can't be dismissed as romanticism; it's 
no accident these are countries that developed environmental movements 
earlier and which now demonstrate a much greater degree of commitment. 
Norway became the first country in the world last week to announce a 
target of zero-carbon by 2050.

Rifling through 20th-century history, there are plenty of points where 
the urban working class sought access to the English countryside. The 
most fascinating is the plotlands movement of the 30s and 40s, when 
people took on small plots of land in areas such as Canvey Island and 
parts of Essex. Bit by bit they developed huts into modest bungalows. 
But the development horrified middle-class conservationists, and was 
brought to a halt in the late 40s. Greenbelts were created to prevent 
its reoccurrence.

The consequences of this 20th-century middle-class hijack are finally 
coming home to roost. The conservationists who spent a half-century 
trying to keep people out of the countryside now have to reckon with the 
challenge that unless England's largely urban population develops a much 
stronger connection to the environmental resources that sustain them, 
such as soil and water, they're hardly likely to become the 
eco-consumers we all need to be for the 21st century.

Environmental awareness powerful enough to shift ingrained consumer 
habits is not something triggered by a government report or even a film: 
fear prompts people to switch off, as environmental campaigners are 
increasingly aware. Our best bet is the encouragement of a mass 
emotional engagement with, and experience of, the land, opening up 
access for urban populations to wildlife areas within cities - and 
outside them - places that are accessible and free, and part of every 
school curriculum. One of the most interesting ideas is how we could 
make the greenbelt green in more than name - re-wilding, creating 
woodlands and heathlands within easy access of cities. Imagine cities 
ringed by vast, accessible nature reserves instead of nondescript 
farmland and litter-strewn scrubland.

Already a debate about who the countryside is for has begun in key 
organisations like the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural 
England - and David Miliband gave a thoughtful speech on it last month. 
Their members may not much like the direction this may take them in, but 
it's true to the original vision of Octavia Hill, one of the founders of 
the National Trust, whose first purchases of land were on the edges of 
cities, to provide "open-air sitting rooms for the poor". You could 
argue that we've been successful at creating open-air gyms for hikers, 
mountain-bike riders and the like, but Hill was describing another kind 
of access to land, which offers familiarity and comfort - a far more 
demanding and prescient ambition than even she could ever have imagined.

. m.bunting at guardian. <mailto:m.bunting%40guardian.co.uk> co.uk

Comments
marksa

April 23, 2007 1:59 AM

"Norway became the first country in the world last week to announce a 
target of zero-carbon by 2050."

about the time when their oil runs out maybe. You do realise Norway is 
an oil exporting country right now? They will probably start tapping 
geothermal sources by then.

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