Article
Comment
Wildness
7 min read

It’s getting harder to be wild in this world

We’ve trapped and tamed wilderness into a commodity.

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Against a night sky a lit up face is blurred by the camera movement.
Under a Dartmoor night sky.
Yousef Salhamoud on Unsplash.

Some while back, my husband rearranged the books in our house, making sure that they were grouped together by theme. We have a lot of books, and there are now themes and sub-themes. It was quite an operation. Within the nature-related books, he created a separate shelf for books that have ‘wild’ in the title. We joked about it, but it made me think about how I’d noticed ideas of ‘wild’ pop up in lots of places in recent years: on clothing and stationery (with leaves or words like ‘keep growing’ printed), in shop windows (furniture displays draped in plastic greenery and fake animal skins), on social media (there are accounts that have ‘wild’ in the title connected to farming, conservation, publishing, personal development, coaching, poetry, business, and more), and in book shops (of which we apparently have only half the stock).  

A quick online search on the topic of wilderness quickly leads me to conservation initiatives and statistics on the state of nature, but it also leads me to nature connection experiences, wild swimming, wild camping, soul work, and more. Wilderness becomes a pliable and hard-to-define term. It can relate to the natural world, to wildlife and natural spaces that have avoided human domination. It can also relate to the inner world, to spiritual experiences or to isolating and challenging times. But however you approach it, wilderness – inner, outer – seems to be having a hard time.  

In recent months, wild camping has come under the spotlight. Dartmoor is the only place in England where wild camping is legal, and this this access helped to form me: as a teenager I hiked and camped with friends, encountered Dartmoor ponies trying to steal our food in the night, stomped through bogs and wolfed down boil-in-the-bag meals as the sun set. As an adult I’ve camped alone in a bivvy bag, my soul singing back to the Milky Way shining above me. Now, these experiences feel as much in need of protection as the nature they depend on, since a wealthy landowner decided to try and prevent people from undertaking this ancient practice of sleeping under the stars. The court case is ongoing, but it has highlighted the fragility of our access to nature here in England. Just 8 per cent of English countryside is accessible, and 3 per cent of rivers have an uncontested right to swim. Now, the last remaining right to sleep under the stars is under threat.  

It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

We live in a time of crisis not just of the state of nature, but also of how we experience the natural world. In a recent study of nature connectedness, Britain was ranked lowest of all the countries surveyed. Our biodiversity is in crisis and so is our ability to encounter the natural world. This feels heightened by a way of being in the western world that sees us all living in our individual houses, working hard to pay for them, shuttling children and selves through schedules, spending fewer and fewer hours outside and with each other.  

And this is not just a problem ‘out there’, because inner and outer landscapes are linked. It is unsurprising to me that in the UK at least, levels of good mental health, biodiversity, and access to nature have all been in decline. Disintegration of one is, I think, deeply connected to disintegration of the other. 

These linked crises feel further threatened by the trapping and taming of ideas of wilderness, wrapping it into trends and materialism, commodifying it. There are some brilliant and essential initiatives helping to re-wild our inner and outer worlds. But there are also offerings that use wilderness imagery and the freedom and adventure associated with it to sell products and services, or as backdrop to human endeavour, or as a destination or resource for our consumption. I think a commodified wild can get in the way of the actual wilderness we need both externally and internally. This commodification is, I think, affecting our understanding of what the wild is and why it matters. It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.  

If real wilderness is everywhere but where we need it right now, how might we re-find it – in the natural world, but also within ourselves and our communities? Answering that question is work that many people are focused on now in all kinds of ways, and a short essay cannot begin to offer a full response. I will write more on this topic. But the question I have in mind at the moment is, how do we invoke wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world? – a physical landscape that is being stripped of nature, but also a social landscape that can often diminish our humanity. Perhaps a simpler way to ask the same question is, how do we not just survive life but get excited about it? – How do we love ourselves, our neighbours, and creation enough to deeply and truly care for these things? 

Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything

There are of course structures, systems, and powers that need to change so that people can move out of mere survival, and so that the wild world is restored. I am not exploring those things here. Here, I want to simply share three things that lately, have energised my ability to feel the love, the excitement, and the desire to cherish and protect our hearts, our relationships, and the generous world that hosts us all. Perhaps by reawakening these things, we might find motivation and sustenance for tackling structures and systems.   

First, I have been noticing what my young daughter notices. The light shining off a puddle; the way an ant crawls on her hand; the bright silver moon in the sky. I have never struggled to access the exhilaration of the natural world, but seeing through her eyes, I am doing so again. Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything. The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich saw the wonder of the world, and God’s love for it, in a single hazelnut. She recounts her visions in her book Revelations of Divine Love. Sometimes connecting with the specific can help us see and face the global.  

Second, there are authors who help me summon wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world, and in a future Seen & Unseen piece I’ll take us on a tour of some of those I love the most. Some of the authors are ancient. In Psalm 78, I read “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them”, and “…they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.” If sin is a kind of disconnection, perhaps our disconnection from creation might lead our gaze to turn inward, and to land on things that do not call forth the best of humanity, rather than the wonder of each other and the world around us. That we are able to forget wonder is something we must remember and work to counter.  

Third, I have been thinking through the encounters that have most exposed me to wilderness of the world and of my soul and of relationship – both the uplifting and the challenging. Encountering the vastness of that shining and vertigo-inducing Dartmoor night sky; encountering others in relationships that have helped me slip my skin and enter their unknowability and fragility and beauty; encountering contexts that seem too broken for repair and yet still light enters in. It is in these encounters that I first found God dwelling, and when I followed his trail, I noticed that throughout the Bible there are many people who experience the challenges, joy, and lessons of the wilderness. Wilderness is not just beauty – it can also be unknowable, disorienting, scary. For 40 days in the wilderness, but also in the beauty of the lily of the field and birds of the air, Jesus is right there with us, showing that God can meet us in beauty and barrenness, in wonder and in despair. Again and again in the Bible I see how God loves the world, how he calls it constantly to life through resurrection, through re-creation, through that three-in-oneness of father/son/holy spirit, of self/other/world, of body/encounter/mystery.  

Now, I think our souls and societies might benefit from investing in relationships first conjured in Eden: with a garden, with a human, with God and the mystery he points us to. These things feed each other; when one suffers so do the others. As we face a disintegrating and increasingly commodified natural world, a mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness, I think we are being called back to that garden, and to the kinds of wildness it made possible. I’ll look forward to exploring these themes more.  

Article
Assisted dying
Comment
Freedom of Belief
Politics
5 min read

Holding an opposing view is not 'imposing' belief on the assisted dying debate

Opposing interventions from believers on dishonesty grounds is a sinister development in public debate

Nick is an author and Senior Fellow at Theos,a think tank.

A graphic shows a gallery of people with religious symbols on their clothing.

“There are some who oppose this crucial reform,” Esther Rantzen wrote recently of MPs who dared to opposed Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life private member’s bill. “Many of them have undeclared personal religious beliefs…  [do] they have the right to impose them on patients like me, who do not share them?” 

This is a peculiarly common argument for those who support the right to Assisted Dying, which is surprising as it would be hard to come up with a less coherent case against religion in public life. The idea that elected MPs engaged in parliamentary debate are “imposing” their will on other people is odd. The idea that MPs have undeclared personal religious beliefs is strange too. I think it’s fair to say that most people know that Shabana Mahmood is a Muslim or Tim Farron is a Christian, and for those that don’t know that but do have access to Google, it takes less than five seconds to find out the religious beliefs of an MP. 

Perhaps most tellingly, however, why is it that we should be alert to – read wary of – MPs religious beliefs? Do the non-religious not have beliefs of which we should be cognizant? If my MP is motivated by a philosophy of relentless, Peter Singer-like utilitarianism or vague, incoherent secular humanism I’d like to know. 

In truth, Rantzen’s intervention in this debate, like that of a number of others – Lord Falconer, Simon Jenkins, Humanists UK, etc. – is part of a recent and rather dispiriting attempt to de facto exclude religious contribution to public debates by accusing them of being dishonest. 

To be clear, secular voices have long tried to exclude religious ones, but the tactics change. Back in the New Atheist heyday of the early twenty first century, all you needed to do was splutter something about sky fairies or Bronze Age beliefs or mind viruses to close down any sort of religious intervention. If, as Richard Dawkins famously put it, faith was one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate, no sensible parliament could possibly want to heed what faith had to say. 

Even back then, however, there were subtler arguments against faith, which usually came in the form of semi-digested Rawslian political liberalism, and demanded the religious participation in public debate had to obey the strictures of “public reasoning”, using logic and language that “all reasonable people” will understand. 

There are quite a few holes in this particular away of thinking (who are “reasonable people” anyway?) but as a rule of thumb, it’s not a bad one to follow. It is quite right and proper, if only as a matter of pragmatism, to speak in terms that your opponents will get, just as it is right and proper, as a matter of courtesy, to be open about what ultimately motivates you. 

And so that is what religious figures – MPs, leaders, institutions – do. Having read through pretty much all their contributions to the assisted dying debate, in parliament and beyond, I can testify that not many people, on either side of the debate, quote scripture or invoke papal teaching as a way of persuading, let alone commanding, others. (As it happens, parliamentarians haven’t really done that since the 1650s, but that’s another story).  

Rather, they argue in terms of policy and principles. They talk about the risk of legislative slippage, of changing attitudes to the vulnerable, of the need for better palliative care, of existing pressures on the NHS, etc. This is quite right and proper. As James Cleverly remarked in the Common debate in November, “We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill”. And so that is what they did. 

Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak? 

In effect, religious public figures, whether or not their beliefs are “declared”, do what they have (rightly) been asked to do by those who have appointed themselves as gatekeepers for our public debate. And so this has forced the usual suspects to pivot in their argument. No longer able to dismiss religious contributions for what they say (“don’t quote the Bible at me!”) they are now compelled to dismiss them for what they don’t say. Hence, the trope that has become popular among such campaigners – “you are not being honest about your real motivations”. 

A new report from the think tank Theos, entitled, How much have your religious views influenced your decision?”: religion and the assisted dying debate, unpacks the various objections that have been levelled at the religious contribution to the debate, and then systematically dismantles them.

Some of these objections are old school in the extreme.  

Religious belief is too intellectually inadequate or disfiguring for debates of this nature. 

Religion is insufficiently willing to adapt and compromise for politics.  

Faith is ill-fitted or even inadmissible in a secular polity or culture.  

But the report majors on the newer objection, so clearly displayed by Esther Rantzen, what we might call “dishonesty” objection, that religious contributors are fundamentally dishonest about their motivations and objectives. 

In truth, this is no stronger than the more tried and tested objections, and it displays a serious, possibly intentional, misunderstanding of what a religious argument actually is. To quote the political philosopher Jeremy Waldron, such secular campaigners “present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation, and they contrast it with the elegant simplicity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin [and] with this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life.” 

Contemporary arguments against religion in public life are slightly more sophisticated than Waldron’s caricature here, but not much. The idea that religio should be “declared” as a competing interest, so as to stop religious participants in debate from being “dishonest” is every bit as sinister, against both the letter and the spirit of plural, liberal democracy. Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak?  

As the assisted dying debate returns to parliament for the final push, there will be much animated debate. That is quite right and proper. A democracy needs vigorous and honest argument. But part of that honesty involves opening the doors of debate to everyone, and not subtly trying to exclude those with whom you disagree on the spurious grounds that they are being dishonest.

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