Full Monty: caring for earth and Earth

If the world’s problems feel too big to grasp, look down, says Monty. Caring for Earth’s future starts with what we hold in our hands and feel beneath our feet

Language matters. The words we choose and use have meaning and significance, both explicitly and implicitly. The English language has been my craft, trade, pleasure and solace all my life. The richness of its range and possibilities is dazzling. One of its strengths is that it has constantly evolved and adapted to the life that it articulates. There is no definitive ‘right’ way to use words. Language flows and changes and adapts – and always has done. Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Viking, Norman and immigrant words from all over the world have made a very malleable, plastic language. Shakespeare made up more than 1,500 words that are still in use and although there are some changes we all might deplore (I have dozens, pedantic old buffer that I am) change is its lifeblood.

But some words retain a directness and meaning that cannot be finessed or altered. ‘Earth’, meaning both the ground beneath our feet and the whole world, has not changed for at least 1,500 years. The Normans, with their language of the ruling class and aristocracy, have ‘terroir’ with its rather abstract sense of identity and idiosyncrasy that it brings to food, but Earth is a word of one who tills the soil, rather than the connoisseur who relishes the fruits of their employees’ labours.

But the interesting thing is how our language can easily contain the direct intimacy of the soil between your fingers, as you plant out your sweet peas or lettuces, and simultaneously mean the whole wide world and all the mountains and seas and icy continents and steaming jungles upon it. Earth is everything: the biggest thing that humans can possibly relate to and yet the most humble and direct – and neither meaning is in any way reduced or made less explicable for that duality.

Okay. That is a lot of linguistic preamble for something that has filled me with real optimism over this past year, when pessimism might seem to pervade every cranny of our lives. The point is that there is evidence that millions of people who had hitherto not taken much notice of issues like climate change, loss of species, air quality, noise and light pollution, are now engaging directly with them via their back gardens. The micro earth in their plot, however modest, however small, is the same earth that we care about in the most macro way possible.

The big issues can seem ‘out there’ – and not to do with our own seemingly insignificant lives. But the enforced constraints of the pandemic, that have meant many of us have spent so much more time in our gardens, have shown that you do not need to go to the highlands of New Guinea or the remote peaks of the Himalayas to experience nature in all its raging glory. The living, natural world is right here in our lives; on our doorsteps, and even in our gardenless skies and streets. The earth is not just under our feet, but all around us, interconnected and vibrantly present, wherever we are.

And if you think I am so land-lubberish as to ignore the constellations above, just think of the complexity of life within the soil: of the gram of soil containing a billion bacteria, yards of fungi and thousands of protozoa. It is easier to contemplate the Milky Way on a clear night (and one of the joys of living in the country is we do that often) than to really grasp the enormity of life in the soil. However, as a metaphor for life on this planet, a handful of earth will do very nicely.

As my fellow Herefordian, the mystic Thomas Traherne, wrote in the 1670s: “You never enjoy the world aright, until the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir to the world and more than so, because men [and women] are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”

Translate that to the pragmatism of 21st century living and it still carries the same weight and inspiration: this is your world and my world and everything that happens in it is connected to everything else. Your earth in your garden is as much part of the planet Earth as the tallest mountain or deepest sea. Look after it.

As a metaphor for life on this planet, a handful of earth will do very nicely