‘Stitching the threads’: UK book offers radical vision of a grassroots ecology

www.theguardian.com ‘Stitching the threads’: UK book offers radical vision of a grassroots ecology

On the banks of the River Roding, authors explain how they are putting the concept of ‘wild service’ into practice

It is a call to action that might just be the founding text for a new environmentalism. A forthcoming book by a diverse band of right to roam campaigners offers a radical new vision of how people can repair both the natural world and their broken relationship to it.

Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, inspired by the rare wild service tree, calls on communities to develop new relationships with the natural world, combining the hard graft of conservation science with the ceremony, gratitude and fun bound up in festivals, Indigenous traditions and even church services.

The campaign group Right to Roam also argues that the first step to enjoying, caring and acting for the natural world must be access reform to end citizens’ exclusion from the vast majority of land in England and Wales. Right to Roam has 110,000 followers on social media, the largest of any access organisation in Britain. Its Dartmoor protest last year attracted 3,500 people.

1 comments

“All around the country we’re already seeing wild service – a huge flowering of grassroots ecology in the last 10 years,” says Jon Moses, a co-author of the book. “But there hasn’t been a narrative binding all that energy. The idea of this book is to stitch the threads together.”
...
But wild service, which one contributor suggests could become a voluntary national service, is not just hard labour for nature. As the folk singer singer Sam Lee writes in his chapter, it encompasses paying homage through poetry and song, sparking a new culture that will return wild species to the heart of human life.
“We know that people are disconnected from nature and we know that the restoration of nature is the work of this century,” says Powlesland. “So we must put them together. I’ve found that hippy ceremonies are often ungrounded in action but equally a lot of action is ungrounded in ceremony. Nature restoration days are sometimes a complete slog. We’re trying to give people a bit more joy rather than just, ‘Here’s a bag, a muddy river and seven hours hard labour collecting rubbish.’
“If regarding nature as sacred happens in the UK, it’s not going to come from the politicians saying, ‘Oh, we now believe in this’; it’s going to come from a grassroots movement of people who are connected with a specific local nature, who then demand rights for nature on a national level.”
I like this idea - you often need a "story" to inspire people.