Column: Stuart Maconie
Nature is reclaiming our abandoned structures. But it’s not a conflict; it’s a healing.
Why the human and the natural can combine to make the most moving scenes to walk in.
THE ‘WELLNESS’ AND ‘healing’ industry is reckoned to be worth some £4.2 trillion globally. That’s a lot of scented candles, colouring-in books and whalesong CDs. Some awful pan pipe music too. If I sound a little cynical, forgive me. I actually love much New Age and healing music (hit me up on Twitter and I’ll do you a playlist of Alice Coltrane, Laraaji, Eno, Fripp etc). But, like Crib Goch in winter, it is a thin and perilous line that must be trod between the beautiful and the banal, the soothing and the sickly, be it music, prose or scented candle.
The good stuff is really worth seeking out. Melissa Harrison is a nature writer and novelist who produced a podcast series called The Stubborn Light of Things. In it, Melissa, relocated from South London to rural Suffolk, records her walks and in a memorable one, visits an old World War II air base now abandoned and overgrown. Unlike some nature writers who bemoan the human imprint and want it erased forever, Melissa absorbs and enjoys the quiet melancholy of the echoes of history in the disused chapel, and the young lives that were carried from this overgrown and weed-choked runway into eternity.
During lockdown, when trips to the moors, coast and high places have been out of bounds, I’ve been exploring more and more what are fashionably and poetically referred to as ‘liminal spaces’: the transitional zones where ‘country’ and ‘town’ meet. Parks, urban woods, canals. In all of these, you’ll find a strange juxtaposition of manmade and natural, and you can usually trace the ebb and flow of human history, and the dance between them down the years.
I’ve been walking the Leeds and Liverpool Canal most weekends of late. Again and again, nature and industry perform a grave pas de deux through time. At Appley Bridge outside Wigan, where they made lino, paint, and bitumen, the disused works are now a small wildlife reserve. The walls and machinery remain but the benzene ponds and mercury sludge
are gone. The living things are colonising again and the passing trains no longer slam their windows shut.
Much of the conversation about nature and civilisation is framed in terms of the former being ‘healed’ after the ‘scarring’ and ‘disfigurement’ inflicted by human incursion. Often it’s presented as a conflict, of a war between one and the other, and the justifiable notion that a victory for nature is the most edifying outcome. The History Channel’s website has a timeline devoted to ‘Life After People’, which claims that “nature would take our places fairly quickly. Many cities would be recolonised within a year or two, and many of our buildings would begin crumbling soon after without human maintenance.”
Even more compelling, the website Bored Panda has an amazing, eerie, brilliant collection titled 21 Photos of Nature Winning the Battle Against
Civilisation. A flooded hotel taken over by fish in Bangkok. A French railway tunnel that has become a meadow. A Namibian mining town choked with sand.
These images are beautiful and mesmerising. But I don’t find them ‘triumphant’. It’s a stranger and more nuanced sensation than that, freighted with human memories and experiences. There’s a definite beauty in an entirely human-free landscape, a vista of nature in its enormous solemnity like Rannoch Moor or the Grand Canyon or Lowry’s haunting seascapes. But Rannoch Moor has a railway station, and the Grand Canyon a tiny ranch, and the occasional lonely boat drifts on Lowry’s empty seas. Each of the details adds a certain poignancy to the already beautiful scene.
Perhaps one day nature really will ‘recolonise’ everything of the human world. But until that day, there’s a certain peculiar, quiet peace and contemplation in seeing and walking in places where engineering and structures make way for nature. Here it doesn’t feel like a battle. Here it feels like healing, and it’s a healing that is deeper and more complicated than you might at first suspect.