First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Oct. 2002.
Last week I found myself 200 miles off the coast of Lands Ends in a small boat. A curious situation to be in and certainly one that was new to me. It’s a big place, the Atlantic Ocean, and I felt infinitesimally small.
It struck me, as I steered faithfully into the fog and twilight toward Spain, that there isn’t much wilderness left in Britain. By that I mean areas where human dominance is absent. In fact, is there any left at all? Even in the far North of Scotland, where I am lucky enough to live, the high mountaintops are sheep-nibbled and deer-stalked. The wolves have gone, along with the blanket of pine and birch that once afforded them a home. All these changes put down to the progress of man.
So out there in the Bay of Biscay I became aware that Britain’s last great wilderness is the sea that surrounds it. Yes, there are fishing boats and super-tankers and the sea’s polluted – lifeless in places. Even miles off the continental shelf, floating on the surface of 4000 metres of water, there are the occasional rubber glove, washing-up bottle, fish box, plastic bag. But it still has the essential ingredient of any wild place – humans are “visitors who do not remain”.
In the seventeenth century, political philosopher John Locke suggested that land becomes owned when an individual “mixes his labour” with it. Locke’s view of land ownership assumes that its value is tied directly to its usefulness to human beings. Later, in the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed the ‘Utilitarian Tradition’ that resulted in the famous notion of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ – still heard to this day as the battle cry of the ‘Civilised World’. But who is to decide what is ‘good’? And to the greatest number of whom, or what for that matter?
For most Westerners, the value of land and our rights to it, are still based on these philosophies – land must yield some kind of utility for human beings. Even today, we value wild places primarily for their recreational use, realised through rights of access. But what of the other species that dwell in those places, what rights do they have? I have often found myself standing in awe of some great tree wondering if it has a sense of owning the land it is rooted in. I wonder if the red squirrels that commute past my window, believe they own the branch along which they travel. I have certainly seen them defend this territory in no uncertain terms.
But we own it all don’t we? Not just the land, everything – the air, the rain, the sea, the fish. Either privately or in common, it’s all ours. We are capable of cutting the tree down, shooting the squirrel, catching the fish – that gives us dominion, makes us superior… the most ‘intelligent’ species on Earth. But this sense of cleverness is ill informed. We sit today amongst the debris of the greatest extinction cycle that our science has ever recorded, and it’s largely our own work… How clever is that? The way we treat our habitat ought to be informed by a more mature kind of intelligence, one that extends beyond the narrow human perspective, one that acknowledges our interconnection with all living things, and the systems that keep them alive. An ecological intelligence based on an ecological sense of value.
In his essay, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, ecologist Garret Hardin suggests that when access to common resources, like air, water, wild food and pasture, are treated as an individual right, they tend to get consumed in ever more efficient, selfish and ingenious ways. The outcome, once the short-term success of the most aggressive actors has been exhausted, is that eventually there is nothing left for anyone.
The same is true of our wild places. We consume them, each of us taking what we want, each believing they have a right to do so. The net effect is that the wildness of those places is diminished. They become threadbare, human-worn, dominated. Time spent out there has the power to change us, it has the power to change the way we value the Earth. To go out there simply for entertainment, to bag a summit, to push a grade, to meet a challenge, to conquer, is ultimately a Tragedy of the Commons. What wilderness is left should be ‘used’ only to educate us to value it properly – to change our definition of value altogether.
Out at sea I watched, with a race of excitement, as two dolphins curved toward our little boat from the early morning mist. I was so focussed on these two that it took several minutes to realise that we were surrounded by, what we later estimated to be, a pod of around 1000 creatures. After several hours of company, I started to wonder if these dolphins thought they owned the salty liquid they were gliding through, if they felt they had ‘rights’ to the fish they were catching. Were they outraged by the presence of our vessel trespassing on ‘their’ territory? I don’t think so. They played in the wake and surfed the bow wave; they squeaked and rolled onto their sides to look up at us. They churned the rich blue water with their tales, and flicked themselves high into the air. Then they went, these playful relatives of ours, and I was left with an uneasy feeling that we humans had missed something important somewhere along the way.
The sea, like the land, the tree, the squirrel, the dolphin, they all have value in and of themselves – they have intrinsic value – regardless of their ‘use’ to us humans. For me, the guiding principle of this way of thinking can be found in Aldo Leopold’s’ ‘Land Ethic’ that: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”. This ethic is both morally robust and in the long-term, essential to our survival.
First the birds arrived, and then the bees, next a smell of warm honey on dry air. Eight hours later the shadowy outline of the Galician coast of Spain, tantalisingly vague. And finally, the definitive crest of Cape Finisterre.
Six days at sea moving at the speed of the wind, carried on canvas wings. Travelling with the Earth, not against it.
Only by experiencing the Earth on its’ own terms will we learn to value it in ours and eventually come to understand that, ultimately, we have no choice but to make these two compatible.