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I convinced a friend not to move a family of picnic from his field. I seriously talked about access to natureHow we only understand what we live, how 1% of the population has half of the earth, how we are all guards. How can we have a river anyway! My friend is a black American married to a farmer. “I don't understand how some of you think you can walk wherever you want,” he said, disconcerted. “If I was going to someone else's field at home, I would be shot”.
We forget that our English sensitivities on earth are special to us and our history. For the right to go, which wants the Scottish model of “responsible access” to be extended through the United Kingdom, that history is mainly adapted to a poster. Some high level books – Guy Shrubsole's Who owns England? (2019) and Nick Hayes' The intrusion book (2021) were the two bestsellers – and the commitment of the informed media means that the movement has one time.
A nuanced look at this debate with a white and the often indisputable voices affected by it were late. In Unusualjournalist Patrick GalbraithSuperb second book, we have it.
It took Galbraith three years of work in the field England And Scotland to research. The result is as much a trip as a book, traveling a path through the clichés because it checks the arguments of access to the facts that the author declares constructed “on fragile foundations”. It is not the pedantic; Galbraith sees a real harm in romanticizing a Gainsborough before “no more real than the campaign as mentioned by certain militants of land access holding megaphones during rallies”.
Voices often reduced to caricature – hill farmers, travelers, guards, poachers and the Gentry landed – offer surprises. By checking the account in force for itself, Galbraith discovers more the aristocratic domain, the better is access. Like most conversations on earth, it deduces, it is less on nature and more on our national obsession: the class. The real enemy is not “man” but “a lack of understanding, a lack of experience and a lack of opportunities to engage” with the campaign.
An impatient parent of right to the perceived ergion of the soul, Galbraith is funny in a way, the writing on nature rarely manages and not above the graduate sarcasm. Empathetic for those who want people to know and love the natural world, he finds the frustration of rural people: “I think most of the right to move is just a bunch of rich Londonians trying to tell us what to do.” Examples of uncontrolled access removing fragile habitats and conservation efforts are numerous. He (heaven protects him) stops in the cult of wild swimming, suggesting that many are looking for communion with water, but forgetting communion requires a reverence, not a conquest.
The Nub of Galbraith is that focusing on our access to nature lacks reciprocity. Suspend the pants of trees and make “large puppets and large complaints” risks access to become less a commitment with land, and more performance.
Is he right to be so scathing? In the contemporary Turner of Margate, hung a photo taken in April 1932 men and women who challenged the laws prohibiting public access to Kinder Scout in the Pointe district (smiling and not a sign or a drum between them). Galbraith opens his book with the anniversary of this cornerstone mythologist of the access campaign, but refuses credit for the creation of national parks and access to the Campaign Act, except that it “undoubtedly noted the profile”. Isn't that the point? Do the campaigns manage to move the needle because they push it?
The question is whether all noisy boys have attracted enough attention to move the argument to a balanced resolution. There are signs. The right to Roamer Amy-Jane Beer has formed a group of landowners and activists to debate arguments (I am a member). Meanwhile, as the case is built for a criminal law of the eco -friendly and civil courts grants rivers, forests and mountains legal personality, nature can eventually be granted access by us, not vice versa.
Time will tell us, but this condemned and passionate book is sure to help us get there.
Ground Inhalmon: rethink our relationship with the campaign by Patrick Galbraith William Collins £ 22, 368 pages
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