Now comes poet, rambler and philosopher of the commons, Robert Macfarlane, with a few choice remarks following the senseless felling of the iconic tree at Sycamore Gap along Hadrian’s Wall:
I just see this as part of a piece with a much broader hostile environment towards the living world in this country. Our focus really shouldn’t be on the offender here. I think it’s on the culture. Nature is under attack in these islands and has been for a long time.
There’s a line by [the poet] WH Auden written 70 years ago. He says: ‘A culture is no better than its woods.’ Well, we have not looked after our woods well. This is part of the broader war on nature.
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[That Sycamore] was a film star – it starred in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. It was a tree that ashes were scattered under, marriages were made under, and it was a shelter for tired walkers. It stood in that gap in the wall, and it survived the winds that howl through that notch. It stood in a wall that was a symbol of repression really, but it flourished there. It was a landmark in the region.
The best way to remember the loss of the tree, I would say, is with the gain of the forest. We are drastically deforested, we have the second lowest forest cover in Europe. Let us reforest the uplands. Let us see a Sycamore Gap forest rise for the loss of a tree.
As for the Auden poem, here is the quote in the context of the stanza:
A small grove massacred to the last ash,
An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:
This great society is going to smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.
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Desperado Philosophy 