As I write this I am sat in the woods on top of Clent Hills. Just behind me are four standing stones – whether they are ancient or not I do not know but they certainly hold ancient resonances. They are a reminder that people have stood on these hills for many centuries and looked out at the view, just as I have been doing today.
The trees around me – I can see Oak, Hawthorn, Beech, Holly, Hazel, Elder from where I sit – these are not ancient, but again the woods have an ancient resonance. It feels like those ancestors who stood and looked out at the view could themselves have come and found shade from the summer sun in these same woods, even if not under these exact trees.
On my way up to the top of the hill I passed a fallen Beech tree. She was over 250 years old according to the sign warning me not to climb on her slowly decomposing branches. She fell in a storm a couple of years ago and has now entered a new phase of her life providing a new kind of shelter and nourishment to the many creatures who are making their habitat within her fallen branches.
I love visiting places like this. Places that make me feel small and new in a big and ancient world. Places that make me feel connected to the past and to the future. Places that remind me what it is that we are fighting for when we try to hold back the tsunami of a changing climate with our little teaspoons.
I can hear a bird singing through the trees – a Blackbird I think, though identifying birdsong has never been my strong suit. The more I listen the more I can hear, now that I am lifted away from the steady drone of combustion engines that provides the background soundscape of everyday life in the Anthropocene.
I am aware of the incongruity of sitting under an Oak tree writing about nature on a laptop that by rights has no place in this scene, but I also know that without it I would not be writing this. My ancestors – poet-priests of days gone by – would perhaps have done this in little notebooks with their copperplate handwriting, but I am a child of the computer age and if I tried to write this by hand I would have given up by now and just been sat listening to the birds and the rustle of the leaves.
But then perhaps that would be better. Perhaps, in our efforts to record and preserve moments like this, places like this, we remain part of the problem. There are components of this laptop that will far outlast any of the trees that surround me, perhaps even the standing stones behind me. How do we live with such contradictions?
In this place of ancient resonance, what resonances do I leave for those who come after me? As a child of the Anthropocene, what will my descendents think of me? Will they sit in this same place in centuries to come and think I should have done more to protect it? Or will they be glad that I at least tried?
I do not know. But for now I think I will turn the laptop off, put it back in my bag, and sit and listen to the birds and the trees and remind myself what this is all for.
Rev’d Rich Clarkson is the chair of JRI