Earlier this year, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution published a report entitled The Urban Environment. The official summary of this vast document begins with the following startling assertion;
For the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population lives in urban areas. Around the world, mega and super cities with tens of millions of inhabitants are rapidly expanding. In the UK, over 80% of the population already lives in urban areas, and the country is going through a new phase of urban expansion and regeneration that will affect the way we live for decades to come.
I say ‘startling’ because I doubt whether many people in the UK think of their homeland as being predominantly urban. It certainly isn’t the impression that someone travelling on an intercity train, or making a long motorway trip, will get. Once outside the main conurbations they will see many more trees than houses, and more fields than factories. In fact on a typical railway journey, say between London and Birmingham, anyone who chooses to while away their time by looking out of the window will spend much longer watching farmland scoot by than built-up areas. For mile after mile, cows and sheep graze in meadows sheltered by tattered hedges. Larger enclosures are etched with an endless variety of tones and textures by ploughing, harrowing and reaping as the seasons change. In late summer, ripe standing crops add a richness to the landscape that marks the culmination of the agricultural year. Even the apparent baron-ness of the winter months has it fascination, revealing the bare bones of fields and woodland, stripped of foliage by wind and frost, but always with the promise of rebirth at the first hint of springtime warmth. Superficially at least, Britain is still the ‘green and pleasant land’ that William Blake knew at the end of the 17th C. It therefor comes as no surprise when, turning from the summary of the report to the full text, one finds this:
Currently, urban areas cover less than 10% of the UK’s land surface (2.65 Chap 2, p27)
Generally speaking we can be proud of the way that we have preserved our countryside during a period when industry has replaced agriculture as the main driving force of the domestic economy. But why should we bother to continue to do so? Many foodstuffs can now be imported for far less than the cost of home produced equivalents. Only a fraction of the population actually lives in the countryside, where they often struggle to earn a precarious and inadequate living. Maintaining public services for rural communities is expensive, so this requires that the urban population contribute disproportionately in order to bridge the gap. Why not allow rural depopulation to progress unhindered, so that the young, the ambitious and the talented naturally gravitate to towns and cities while rural communities loose their vitality and die? As the Royal Commission report shows, there is a trend towards urbanisation that is worldwide; why attempt to stand in its way?
The rural landscape is not merely a visual treat for travellers, tourists, and the minority who are privileged to inhabit it. Our history, our culture, our idea of nationhood and even our national character are all closely bound to earlier ages when people’s wealth was measured by the acreage that they owned, rather than their salaries. These were times when poverty meant the likelihood of starvation and not social deprivation. The urbanised society that has been superimposed on a way of life that dates back into prehistory when humans first mastered the techniques of agriculture sits uneasily with such traditions. The rate of change has been astonishing, so it is inevitable that a period of confusion and re-evaluation must follow. If the countryside was once a ‘green and pleasant land’ that provided wealth and fed the nation, a new role, or at least a new national attitude towards our rural heritage, must be found if its beauty and spiritual bounty of peace and tranquillity are to be preserved for the benefit of our own and future generations.
In 1977 George Steiner, writing in The Listener, suggested that change in man’s attitude to the natural world was ‘the most important revolution of feeling since the Second World War’. Steiner is a philosopher and an authority on the use of language and the interpretation of texts, so it can be no accident that he chose to use such an emotive term as ‘revolution’ in this context.
Revolutions are abrupt changes to an established order that have dramatic consequences. The post war years saw the culmination of a process that began in the 1730s when a combination of scientific advances and improved technology spawned a process of economic and social change that was to sweep the world. An agrarian way of life, that had its roots in the distant past many millennia before, began to be displaced by industrialisation. The next two and a half centuries saw the creation of ever-larger conurbations to provide labour for the new manufacturing centres, and a large part of the population now live in these places.
If we look back to the pre-industrial age, we find that in 1700 more than three quarters of the UK population lived in the countryside, and just 13% inhabited towns with more than 5000 residents.1 The remainder were to be found in settlements that would, at that time, have been regarded as towns, but would now be considered no more than large villages. This was a population that still lived close to nature, their precarious destiny and very survival depending entirely on the vagaries of the natural world. Famine, drought, uncontrollable epidemics and untreatable diseases left no one in any doubt about their relationship with the nature. They were entirely at its mercy.
What then was this revolution in our feelings about the natural world that Steiner was concerned about in 1977? Urban settlements have grown to a size that amount to man-made habitats that provide their citizens with all that they need, and technological innovation allows them to live lives that are virtually independent of the natural world. A modern urbanite’s way of life, fears and preoccupations, have little in common with those of our ancestors in the early 18th C. The natural world has become an optional factor in the lives of four fifths of the population, something to be glimpsed at weekends or during holidays if they choose to travel beyond the limits of urbanisation. Otherwise the world of nature can be experienced vicariously while reading books or watching television.
Our apprehension of the natural world is fundamentally different to that of our forbears who shivered even in their homes during cold winters, who feared a poor harvest because they might go hungry, and who worked in the open-air in every type of weather. Such people were not mere spectators of the natural world, nor did they have the benefit of scientific explanations of natural events that are commonplace today. But what they did have was an intuitive and inbred sympathy with the world of nature and the way in which it impacts on human lives. If much that happened to them seemed mysterious and inexplicable except in terms of superstition and fatalism, there can be no doubt that our ancestors had a greater respect for nature’s vastness, intricacy, complexity and power than we do today. Above all they realised that humans were subject to natural forces of a scale far beyond any kind of control. It is the loss of such wisdom, the inability to see human existence within the context of the natural world rather than from the viewpoint of a superspecies that is independent of it, that attracted George Steiner’s attention.
Urbanisation has enabled us to create habitats that, superficially at least, mitigate some of the hardships that nature inflicted on our ancestors. But this is not a risk free process. If 80% of the population no longer have direct and daily experience of the natural world, they are in danger of being unable to make common sense judgements about what they are told about it. It is all too easy to be lulled into a complacency that allows people to believe that nature is now our servant and no longer our master. We might even begin to believe that we can control the climate.
1 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p243, para 3.
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