FURTHERMORE
Why liking nature is unnatural
PETRONELLA WYATT
The late Lord Arran introduced two Bills in the House of Lords. One was the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which legalised homosexuality. The other was for the protection of badgers. Lord Arran later complained that whilst the chamber had been full during the reading of the first Bill, few had taken an interest in the second. To which someone is alleged to have replied, `There aren't any badgers in the House of Lords.'
Things have changed. There are still no badgers in the House of Lords — though who knows what will happen under Mr Blair's proposals for that chamber? — but they appear to enjoy more support than in the era of Lord Arran. According to one of the Sunday newspapers, work has been sus- pended on sites on the Newbury bypass because badgers are using two setts on the line of the new road.
This Newbury bypass furore is an odd business. The same Sunday newspaper alleged that the Newbury protesters, or `tree people' as they are sometimes styled, have issued a handbook for the enlighten- ment of their supporters, It is called Brief- ing Sheet for On-Site Tactics. There have traditionally been handbooks on roads, but this must be the first on how to stop people from building them.
The booklet includes advice on how to `disable' machinery. Protesters, it says, should 'attach themselves by the neck to an immovable part of the machine'. It is heart- ening to know that these people have their heads screwed on. But this curious docu- ment offers a less encouraging insight into their views on the humble road-builder. It runs thus: 'Encircle his machine. He'll soon get bored and start to read the Sun.'
As far as I know, there have been no sur- veys on the reading habits of road-builders. There is nothing to suggest that they do not read the Daily Telegraph, or even the TLS, but the Newbury protesters have them reading the Sun. There is something rather sneering and unpleasant in this. It confirms what I have always thought about natural- ists of this type, particularly their militant wing. Their greatest fault is the contempt in which they hold the rest of mankind.
One has the feeling that most of the Newbury people would like to chuck it all and live on a pig farm in the Andes. But they cannot, so they make the lives of oth- ers as uncomfortable as possible. Accord- ingly, the protesters make a feature of insisting that the cultural habits of man should make way for the sacredness of nature. Often, this is on the grounds of the superior virtue of beauty. Nature becomes a panacea for the evil wrought by the vile town. Man is Bad and Nature is Good. Hippy days are here again.
Old ideas are not necessarily the best. Naturalists may quote in their support such varied and weighty sources as Ralegh, Poussin, Walpole, Ruskin and Arminius. Then there are writers such as Rousseau, Goethe, Shelley and d'Holbach, all of whom were members of the late 18th- and early 19th-century Romantic movement. The Romantic movement was really a rehearsal for Flower Power. Rousseau and d'Holbach had long hair and resembled members of one of those Sixties pop groups like the Byrds. d'Holbach may actually have been the inventor of Flower Power. Some- one once pointed to a passage in his Sys- teme de la Nature, published in 1770: 'Come back, runaway child, come back to nature. She will console you, she will drive from your heart the fears that confound you, the anxiety that torments you. Restored to nature, to yourself, scatter flowers along the road of life.'
No sensible person would wish to be restored to nature. Much of nature, until refined and moulded by the artifice of man, is not a very pretty sight. Deprived of the veneer of a Poussin or Fragonard idyll, it can be deeply unpleasant. More false claims are made for the country than are `Someone's written a dirty word on this wall.' made by a pimp for an unpromising whore. It is said to be restful. In fact, nothing brings on insomnia more effectively than birdsong. It is alleged to be healthy: it is the opposite. The body gradually becomes rid- dled with fresh air.
One may ask, what is wrong with cities? The word 'civilised', after all, comes from the Latin civilis, which means pertaining to a city. 'Urbane' is derived from urbs, a town. The countryside makes idiots out of its proponents, and unsavoury idiots at that. Friends of the Earth, the ecological pressure group supporting the tree people, has referred to 'earth rapists'. What of the rapists of women? In the protesters' strange order of priorities one has to assume that they no longer matter.
The most fervent supporters of nature have held dubious moral views. Rousseau, for example, believed that men only became free when alone and humbled by the countryside. He came up with the idea of the noble savage. But there is nothing noble about savagery. Rousseau fathered a series of illegitimate children and gave them away as foundlings. He was also an early communist who believed in the aboli- tion of private property.
It is views like these that have given intel- lectual credibility to bloody revolutions. The young who were to make Hitler's Ger- many lit their camp fires and communed with nature. Hitler was entranced by Wag- nerian landscapes. Goering would have been a hero to the Newbury protesters. Conserving trees was his obsession. It is surely indicative of something that the most horrific murders often take place in the country. Sherlock Holmes told Dr Watson, `It is my belief, founded upon experience, that the lowest and vilest London alleys do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful coun- tryside.' We should not forget, moreover, that the most beneficial human developments have resulted from urban settlements, from the temples of Christianity to the telephone. The only things worth having in the country have been crafted by men battling to bend nature to their will Chatsworth House, West Wycombe, Syon. The Duke of Richmond once remarked of rivers, 'All they ever do is flow, flow, flow.' Pace the Newbury bypass protesters, one might say of trees that all they ever do is grow, grow, grow.
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