01 Anita Roy on nature writing and making good things happen in transition towns

In a borrowed room at local Tone Dale House, author and activist Anita Roy chats to me about personal and community transformation. We are in Wellington in Somerset, winner of the national prize for best transition town, and we hear how the people did it. They created a new commons, a 65-acre woodland-orchard that all are free to use. Anita talks about the up-down down-up arc of writing and how it mirrors our own lives. She says, “I wonder what this is going to be like in 20 years; everything’s getting worse, except when I think of Fox’s Field.”

Anita recommends two books: Wild by Jay Griffiths; and The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram.

Her own books include Gifts of Gravity and Light and her children’s book about death, Gravepyres; The School for the Recently Deceased. She is a writer for The Guardian’s Country Diary.

Her recommended action: be messy, leave ecological spaces, and maybe holes are good.

See Anita’s website: https://anitaroy.net/

Transition Town Wellington: https://ttw.org.uk/ 

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery." 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Great pleasure to be with Anita Roy in a lovely home called Not my lovely home, unfortunately, but we're very lucky to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

This is Tonedale House, which was the original manor house belonging to the Fox family, still run by the descendants of the first Foxes, which was the Quaker family that basically made Wellington what it is. They set up and ran a huge textile factory, the remains of which, and many of the old buildings of which you can see all around here, huge, magnificent, kind of almost like cathedral-like. Industrial cathedrals. It's just gorgeous. Yeah. So yeah, they've let us come here and pretend to be lords and ladies. Actually, we're more like peasants.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Right, okay. We're on transition. We'll come to transition in a moment. And they've been closely involved with the transition town giving support to that. So that's the link here. So uh lovely to have you on, Anita. So um, author, editor, environmentalist, speaker, um, change agent, writer for the Guardian Country Diary. We'll come to that in a little bit. So say a bit more about yourself, Anita. Um and we're here to hear about um the transition town Wellington work that you've done, which is award-winning as well. So that is a fabulous thing. So I'm here to celebrate that as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

As your own work.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Well, the my so I've had a I've had a very um transition-y kind of life, I think. Um started in India, my dad's Indian, my mum's English, um, and I was born in Calcutta. We came to England when I was two, my brothers were four, I have twin brothers. So we grew up in England, hence the very British accent and the feeling of Britishness, I think, which stems from that childhood, um, first in London, then in Buckinghamshire. And then I went into publishing. I have always liked writing, and I've always done both kind of simultaneously. Um and I was working in Manchester for Manchester University Press, um, and up until that point in my life, when I was about 30, I've always been an academic publisher. Um, and then I went to India kind of as an experiment. It was, I got offered a job with Oxford University Press in Delhi, and I thought, I've never really wanted to live in India, it's a bit much, but it would be I've always loved visiting with my family. Um, and I wanted to see what it was like actually living and working there for maybe a year, maybe two, you know, check it out, come back with some different perspectives on the publishing industry, international sales rights, all of that kind of grown-up stuff. And I went to Delhi and I kind of fell in love with it. Um and my life became much, much more interesting, weird, challenging, funny, bizarre because India does all that sort of opened up a bit on steroids, yeah. Yes, exactly. So I ended up staying for a year and then another year, and then another year, and then another year, and then I got another job with DK India, and then I was in a relationship, and then I got pregnant, and then I had a baby, and then suddenly I woke up and it was like 20 years had gone past. And I realized that I had spent, you know, as much of my adult life in India as in England, um, rather unexpectedly. So in 2015, um I decided to come back to England for a whole variety of reasons, some of which were getting out of my own personal hole. But um there were many reasons. There were, you know, my parents were getting older, I wanted to spend time with them, helping to look after them, spending just time with them really, which I hadn't done for 20 years much. I wanted my son to be able to run around outside and breathe clean air, um, which was in very short supply recent times. Yeah. It's the most air-polluted city in the world and has one of the most challenging climates in the world. Um, and it's one of the most densely populated in the world, and it's one of the not just in terms of people, but in massively in terms of cars. Um and after 20 years of that, I found that I just couldn't do it anymore.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Interesting. Yeah. It felt like it ran out of road, literally.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

I'd I'd run out of road. I I think if there had been like half as many cars, I might even have stuck it out. But um, the combination of all those other things, and then there was also this one thing which I didn't realise was such an important thing for me. Um I just found that it and it was almost like a realization that some part of my absolute soul was simply shriveling up and it was not being watered, and it didn't have compost, and it was dying like a neglected pot plant on the mantelpiece of life, right? And I didn't realise. Um but every time I came back to England I for holidays or whatever, I would kind of go into this almost technicolor joy seeing a beech tree or feeling the breeze in the spring or smelling autumn leaves, or just the air the way the air moved or the clouds looked. It was so different from my daily life in India, and it was so ridiculously beautiful, ridiculously like fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Kind of intense almost.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Intense, intense.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Um, I remember coming home once and just like literally falling onto my parents' lawn and kissing the crowd, going, oh my god, have you seen this grass? It's so beautiful. So when I decided to move back to England, it was for all of the very understandable grown-up reasons of family and being a child of parents getting older and being the mother of a child getting older and all of those things. Um, but it was also this thing that I really, really needed to be closer to the natural world of my childhood.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Childhood, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Um, and have that sense of belongingness to the land and an kind of innate understanding of how the seasons worked, what kind of soil would be good for what kind of plant. I mean, I'm not a great horticulturalist or anything like that, but I just had a sort of sense of it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

So, where did the writing, where did your own writing come into this? So you you you know, you started in publishing other people's work, as kind of enabling others, and then you've written children's books, you've written adults' books, you've written non-fiction and fiction and edited works as well. Um uh a real, you know, fantastic range. Um, but you started writing as well for yourself. But is that beginning to kind of recognise some of this intensity of the natural world as well? Is that kind of come playing into it? Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

I think, well, when I was in India, I was writing quite a lot for newspapers, magazines, um, chapters in other people's books. It was very much to do with the social world of the humans, particularly women, particularly looking at, you know, uh female from a female perspective, um quite funny, uh, some of it, quite serious. Like I've always done this funny, serious thing. Like I don't think the two are at all um opposite. No, they should run on similar rails. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Um but when I came back to the UK, I I mean in India, Jules, I have to say, I was quite well known in as a publisher and as a writer in those kind of circles. And when I got back to the UK, I I had my little ego got quite kicking. It was great. It was very good for. Interesting. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

So it was did you know that was going to happen, or did you did you suspect that that you might because moving, those transitions also mean giving up stuff as well as taking on things. And they do. Maybe we think we're giving up one thing and actually we have to end up giving up something else. But that's that's quite hard to give up recognition, notoriety, it is um identity, but it is also weirdly liberating.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

I mean, like fantastically liberating. Yeah. So on the one hand, there was a little bit of my ego soul which was going, yeah, but you know, hello, look at my CV. I've published a lot. Why aren't you taking me more seriously? Or noticing, or how do you not know? So there was that. But simultaneously with that, there was this incredible, fantastic sense of relief and liberation. Really interesting. Like nobody knows. Yes, yes. I could be anything. Yes. How exciting. Like, I don't have and also I don't have anything to prove when I I and I think that's something that comes with age. Isn't that interesting?

SPEAKER_00 9:56

I I personally I can see echoes in having formally retired a year and a half ago from the thing called the university. I'm still associated with it, but you can just kind of swan around and not have responsibilities and so forth. But you are, you do give up. I gave up a lot of things. I gave up a lot of um people wanting stuff and wanting solutions, yeah. Um, and thinking that's kind of part of your identity. Yeah. And then after a bit, you just go, Well, this is lovely, actually. All this space, this time, yeah, you know, that the things are not going to kind of be knocking at your door, but that's great. You can provided you develop these other things, or they're nascent as you've just described, you can let them flower.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

So, what happened with with all this sudden space that opened up was a my I mean my income just fell off a cliff because I had been earning in rupees for 20 years, so I had no money. But I had fantastic parents who were and they were here in Wellington. They weren't, no, they were they were living in Buckinghamshire in our old um in the house where I grew up, you know. Um, but they were they have always been, they have always had my back. They've always sort of been like, it's okay, you can always come back home, kind of thing. Immensely privileged position to be in. I do realise that. Um so Wellington wasn't a place that I knew at all. My brother and sister-in-law had just moved here, and I was fully prepared to move back to mum and dad's house and live in my bedroom and bring up my son in our house and all of that. Um, and then my mum, bless her, she died about this time last year. Sorry to do that. Yeah. Rang me up and said, do not do that. In fact, I will stand at the door and not let you in. I was like, what, really? She said, Yeah, you'll you'll get bored, you'll resent us. Um, you should go to live in Wellington, be near your brother, have an adventure, explore a new place, and if it all works out, which it will, we will come and join you.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

That's brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Which was the best thing she'd ever. I mean, she was just amazing.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

What wisdom to see that. Totally. Especially as she's probably thinking, wouldn't it be lovely to have a daughter come back? Yes. And grandsons come back. Yes. And yet she knows that that's the road to ruin as well. I know.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

And she also said, Don't tell your dad I'm saying this.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Anyway, um, so let's hear a bit about Wellington then, kind of life here.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Um is just uh so Wellington, as soon as I moved here, um I mean, A, I was in this post, so my memoir to be written um will be called From Delhi to Welly. Yes. Because obviously. But my in the in the years after I first moved here, I was just uh kind of, it felt like I was on ecstasy most of the time. I was just like, everything is so pretty and so clean. And these English people are so quaint. They go around saying things like, Oh, isn't the litter terrible? Terrible litter. I was like, literally, there is no litter.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

Let me just show you a picture of the main roads in Delhi.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Isn't the traffic awful? Oh, God, the traffic is awful. I was like, there literally is no traffic. What's wrong with you people? How dare you complain about anything? Yes. Like ever.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Isn't that lovely? So um But that kind of gives I I mean, it does strike me that those insights are very creative. I mean, they're kind of reactive as you've described them, but they're also creative in as much as that you've got these two viewpoints of the world. Of course, we've got more than that, but two those two sharp ones you've just described, actually kind of open up a way of seeing the world that is becomes kind of unique because others haven't been through the life that you've just described. Yeah. Being childhood, then going away for 20 years, coming back to the same country but a different place, and then kind of tying that all together in the writing. That's very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Well, the so the writing, um I uh I I I was um I for for various reasons, I I I ended up doing this MA in travel and nature writing at Bathspa University with a fantastic writer and birder called Stephen Moss. Now he had just set up that MA, so I think I was in the second year, second cohort. And I remember saying to my son, who was like 12, 13 at the time, I don't know if I should do this. I mean, I don't need an MA, I'm already a writer, and it's quite expensive. And I don't, you know, I don't need to do this. It's not like I need a qualification at my time in life, blah blah blah. He said, No, no, no, I think you should. I said, Oh, okay then. Um, he said, you need some action in your life. So I was like, okay. Okay. And I did, and what happened with that, and and one of the main reasons for doing that was because being a writer, you can only really be an interesting writer if you do interesting things and have an interesting life to write about.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Yes, right. Yes, exactly. Or at least that's well if you're if you're beginning with nature and the environment and the outside world and the social world as you've described as well, then it has to be out would it has to happen outside to come inside. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Exactly. I went outside to come inside of it or that John Muir, is that John Muir? Might be. I went for a walk and found myself, something like that, anyway. Um and doing nature writing or becoming a nature writer um was a way for me to um be attentive to the natural world and to the outside, and to go into it with an openness and a a sense of kind of um not exactly mindfulness, but something like that where you're attentiveness, in uh you know, sort of immersion, they kind of come together, don't they? And there's a sense that I I want to come back with some gold, you know. I want to I want to find something precious out there that I can share. Because for me, one of the kind of um golden rules of writing is like don't bore your readers. Yeah, just don't be boring. There's they a reader is giving you the preciousest thing ever, which is their time and their attention. Make it worth their while, you know, come up with something tasty.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Yes, you know, yeah, universal truth, so they can go away with in some sort of way. Something yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Um so so that was that was the impulse, like to do the course as a way of being in the world that was more enriching. Um, and then from that I started to become more and more a nature writer, I think. Um and simultaneously with all of that, I just became more and more and more involved in Transition Town Wellington because that again is a way of bringing all of the all of the everything really, the intellectual, the emotional, the physical engagement with um the outside world or with the world, with the world, with the world, with the social world, with the people, with the other people in the community.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

It's a way for me it it it made my being in the world feel infinitely more useful to the world and infinitely more enriched in that to and fro relationship with the world, human and more than human, um that has only really, for me, yielded riches, riches and riches. I mean, so many friends, so many connections, and we have now got this incredible landscape which is engaging with humans, and humans are engaging with it in a way that is creative and abundant and nourishing on every level, and it has now involved the entire town. It's not just Transition Town Wellington looking after a few community gardens. That has done what the thing that I've called the green snowball effect has happened, where it has snowballed over the last five or six years into what we now have right here outside Totendale House, which is a national award-winning forest garden that's been made by the community entirely by volunteers and is uh just like paradise. Um, but it's also that has that project in itself has given rise to the situation of the town council buying or leasing from the district council who bought from a private owner 65 acres of land, which are now protected for 150 years as a green corridor for Wellington, for biodiversity, for um community, for outdoor activity, for um the benefit of the wildlife and the people. And last year the Woodland Trust um and our team of volunteers here planted over three and a half thousand trees. So we're making new woodland areas, we're restoring hedgerows, we're now able to look after the waterways and the mill ponds because they've just been gifted to us. So there's another there's another 40 acres of local nature reserve which is being planned. So this green corridor is just kind of spreading out.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

It's fantastic. So this is actually in the middle, I mean, it's almost the middle of Wellington. You've got the mill, you mentioned the mill earlier on. That's we're in the territory of the old industrial quarter here, and the land has started there, orchard trees as well, um uh not just, as it were, forest trees. So so much of um modern, modernist life has been the loss of the commons to the private domains um in all sorts of ways. I mean, not just land, but but um utilities and all sorts of other things. But here, here you've created, you've turned it around. You've created, you've helped to create a common, which out, you know, the everyone it doesn't lock up at night, presumably, allow anybody can go there, anybody can get engage.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

And anyone can harvest the fruit, nuts, herbs, flowers that we are growing there. And I I had the this wonderful um conversation with someone fairly recently, and I was describing all this, and he was going, Yeah, well, hang on, but so what I mean, like but the any what you mean anyone can come and just pick stuff, not just the people who've grown it. And I was like, Yeah, that's the whole point. And he said, But but you've done all the hard work, and someone else is getting the benefit. And I was like, that's what we're for. Exactly. That is literally why we are here, is to be is to be here for others, whether they're human others, whether they're non-human others. That's the point of us. Like, what else is the point?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

And isn't that fantastic? Because that if you were to try to explain that to somebody, that would be quite hard, perhaps. If you've taken the the person who asked the question. I mean, sometimes people ask questions because they're coming from a place that hasn't quite understood it yet, but they once they get it, they may be real strong supporters. Of a new way of thinking and new way of acting. But you need to have the thing for them to ask that question, for him to kind of look at the fruits or the herbs or whatever and to say, you mean I can just take it? And actually that opens up all kinds of other questions. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

And about who owns what? Yes. And and how much should you take? Yes, yes. And how who else? What could you give back? What could you give back?

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

How does that connect you to the tree? And what does the tree need to live? What other things depend on that bush? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

What about the birds? What about the if you're putting in wetlands? What happens to those as well? Exactly. So I'm looking at the at the the queue just to your right here. So and skills as well. What kind of skills might be developed? So this is your object for the for the pod. What a lovely side. Look at the lovely wood.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

I'm going to keep the guard on because it's ever so sharp.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Yes. Fantastic. So describe what's happened here.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

So one of the one of the amazing, amazing things about Wellington, which I don't I cannot explain, is that it is full of people with incredible skills. Like you think that they're ordinary, and then you have five minutes of conversation with them. You go, what you doing?

SPEAKER_00 23:19

They play the trombone or something. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Exactly. So we are incredibly lucky here to have, as a Wellington resident and active member of Transition Town Wellington and a big supporter of ours, a wonderful lady called Andy Rickard, who is the UK world scything champion. Oh. Oh yeah, baby. I didn't even know there was a scything. I know, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Now I do.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

I did not either.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Well, it's a scything champion. She is the UK scything champion has won the So is that speed and quality?

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Is it both? Is it everything?

SPEAKER_01 23:55

It's everything. Style. Style, speed, quality.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

I bet it's style. I can just imagine.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

And there are lay, you know, she there's ladies and there's gents.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

She's won the ladies' UK scything championship like ten times in a row and then did it in the men's qual. I mean, like beat the men as well.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Let's come to a couple of let's come to a book or two. Let's talk about uh Gifts of Gravity and Light. So this is a book that you co-edited recently. Gorgeous book, beautiful writing in there. Some really fabulous writing, actually. Um and um uh a stunning piece that you wrote about Equinox, uh called Equinox. Uh it's set in well, not set, but I mean it's a it's a thing that happens during COVID, which we which which is like super recently ago, actually, in terms of years, but feels like it probably happened about a hundred years ago now because we kind of want to forget it. Um it strikes me. But the story is about the open gate. So there's a there's a thing that happens where you're going to up into the back lanes into a particular place where somebody has lived there for a long time and it's been light on the land in the way that you've described. So just tell us a little bit about what happens with that that open gate and um the key, your own key to the field, which I which I remember you say, this is a very big deal in capital letters. That was a lovely way of saying the gate is a threshold, it's a kind of opening. Um you described lots of those things in in your life, and you know, the life here is opening up to new kind of opportunities. I thought that that piece was very much more than what it was writing about.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

It was. I mean, I I think I there was uh at that point in my life, and particularly, and I think that this is probably true, I don't know, probably for you as well and for many people, that there are certain periods in your life where coincidences and confluences seem to just it there seems to be this almost like a sort of sense of imminence, something about to be said, like the trees in the spring. Um and at that point in my life, uh when I just started doing the MA and I was really reconnecting to the landscape and the seasons of England in a big way. Um, and then COVID happened and lockdown, and everyone suddenly went very, they started to pay a lot of attention to their locality because you literally had nowhere else to be. And everything suddenly seemed even more precious, even more essential. You realized how much of your well-being depended on your immediate surroundings. Um, and at that point of time, for various reasons, I got access to this very amazing field up in the Black Downs where the owner, who didn't describe himself as the owner, he says he calls himself the guardian. Yeah. In much the same way, really, as Transition Town feels like the guardians of the Forest Garden. You know, we don't own it. We we don't own any land, but we belong to it and we have responsibility for it, and it gives us joy, and we want to give it joy. We want it to be as happy and healthy as it can be, and and loved and looked after and appreciated.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Um and Mary Oliver in one of her poems talks about trees with happy leaves.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

You know, isn't that and that's a kind of thing, isn't it? It's I I do. It talks about that dual journey of the place and us.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Um wandering through time and landscape in that kind of sense.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

Yeah, and that thing of um it it kind of gets back to like what really are what really are we for? What what is consciousness for? What's so special about human the human mind or or the consciousness itself? And I keep coming back to the sort of like almost visceral um feeling. It's not even a thought, it's more like a feeling that we're here with this incredible blessing of the mind. Surely, in order to appreciate and enjoy and simply notice this incredible planet that we are on. And if if there is, I mean, if there is a spiritual part of me, which I think there is, that is what it is to do with. It's that sense of this is why we are here, and it's such a blessing. Do not ignore it, do not fuck it up. It's a temporary and amazing miracle that we're you and I Jules are here at all, breathing, being embodied, all of that stuff. It's an absolute miracle, and we should uh give thanks for it, appreciate it, rejoice in it, and protect it and defend it with our lives. It's like, oh, what else is there really?

SPEAKER_00 29:56

I think what's what's just gorgeous about the way that you've put that is that um we're facing big crises. Okay, but you can talk about what we want to do and how we're going to uh live in the world and act in it without reference to the bad stuff.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

So we know there's lots of bad stuff: climate, nature, destruction, waterways polluted, you know, all social inequality. We can kind of list them, but we don't have to do that now. Those are mostly part understood and part of the territory. We have to kind of nudge and remind from time to time. But the bit that people often don't quite know what to do, or that they can do something, is how you create something new. And the description of the forest garden. Um, was anybody thinking 10 years ago in Wellington about having a forest garden? Probably maybe, maybe one or two were dreaming. Maybe, maybe you were dreaming about you know, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

So Helen Gillingham, who's our uh gardening lead, I think she dreamed it into existence.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Very fantastic, lovely, great. So you write for the Guardian Diary as well, the country diary. That's a lovely institution, I think we can call it that. Um piece, little pieces. So not not, I mean, a challenge. It's difficult to write a short piece, isn't it? Um my goodness. Um, what do you written about? A spider's web, the taste of an apple, um, we're sailing, um scything. Scything, yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Yeah, I've just sent in my new piece today, um, which is about waterways and rivers and the non-human world and being a salmon or being an otter. Um, I've been doing quite a lot of getting into the skins of the non-human. Kind of literally. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, which is a fascinating thing. I'm all for um demoting or sidestepping the human in favor of the more than human world. Yes, because I think that that is also the key to our the key to our everything, really.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

I mean, um I think calling it more than human is a lovely way, also a lovely way of saying, I mean, the we we we're faced with all kinds of it's sometimes it's just an easy kind of uh rhetorical device, the binaries, good, bad, you know, past, future, modernist, traditional, um, environment, growth, you know, whatever. That these things are often set in opposition to each other. And quite a lot of the work that one has to do is to say, no, look, the you can you can navigate between these. And actually, if you lean into the thing that looks bad, you might find that the emergence of the good kind of comes out of that. That that that those binaries are are um difficulties put in the way. Um, and it's quite clear that that formal models of economic growth uh don't have to exclude the environment. In fact, if they did include it, that'd be much better.

SPEAKER_01 33:15

Um as we know, but I mean not including it is just nuts. Of course. Of course it is.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

It's so talking about a more than idiocy. Yes, it is. It is. And we still work at it, so maybe the message will get through. But the talking about the more than human world is also a way to say it's not humans versus animals or nature, it is put them together, put us together, put put the kind of active animate world together, and something different happens.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

Well, we we are we are them. There's Ed Young's fantastic book on microbes, uh, you know, I contain multitudes. I mean Walt Whitman said that, but it's also literally true. Yes. Um and there's Jay Griffith's new book, How Animals uh How Animals Heal Us, which is uh a hymn to human-animal interconnection and dependency and and and enrichment and you know the nourishment and the awful things that happen when that is severed. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 34:25

And she wrote a lovely piece in the book as well, in the Gravity and Light book.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Lovely chapter in there.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:31

Common friend of both of us, and some other gorgeous pieces in there. I really recommend. Um, let let's let's come to a kind of couple of thoughts about um uh sometimes the words heroine and hero like may be troubling because we've talked about a kind of uh uh a collective vision for changing, that togetherness is part of this. But but people you might have looked up to um or a person who what who would you might you might you focus on somebody name someone?

SPEAKER_01 35:03

You know, I I have been giving this some thought, and there are some obvious um heroes of the environmental movement, but actually I kind of the person that I really, really admire um is uh an a land artist called David Nash, who back in the 70s planted a ring of ash trees and has been training them into what's now called the ash dome.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Um and these are the ones that were cut at an angle? Yes, they were sort of woven into each other.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

Fletched and woven.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

That's right, yeah, fletched. Yes, they weren't cut, they were yes, exactly. Yeah, like a hedge roll, hedge laying kind of technique. Yeah, okay, that's right. Um David Nash did that, yes, David Nash, brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

Um is an absolute hero icon of mine. Um the artwork that he has produced over the course of a lifetime is so profoundly um moving and so engaged in natural processes. Uh the way that he uses wood, it's like someone speaks the language of trees. He knows how to have a conversation with a tree because he speaks their language. He has such a facility with um shaping and it's it's such a two-way collaboration. Like all of his artwork really feels like this thing, whatever it might be, living or in a museum, is an intense collaboration between a human and a more-than-human thing. Um, whether that's fire or water or erosion or organic growth, it's it feels like they're in a dance with each other. It's absolutely beautiful. And I am just a huge fan of his. I think he's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

It struck me when you were talking about the size earlier on and the kind of slowness of that, there's also a thing about time as well. It's it's not just that you're acting slowly, it's you're expanding time. And if if he's working with trees that some trees will, you know, in our landscapes, will live for a thousand years. So that's there's a kind of deep time kind of component to this. But the sculpture he does with the ash trees, this isn't a piece of work that's going to be finished by five o'clock in the afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

Um, you know, you're thinking about time in a very different way.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

It's much slower. Yeah. And the patience behind that and the lack of hurry to say, um uh, maybe he did think this, I'm gonna assume not, but like it's not ready. Yeah. You know, it's gonna take it's gonna take quite a few years to look like a thing. Yeah and then it will continue to develop as the thing over time.

SPEAKER_01 38:12

This is one of the reasons why I love this whole forest garden project, because five years ago there was nothing in that field but grass and nettles. Now there are trees that are well above my head. At the moment they're full of blossom. In a few months' time, they're going to be full of plums and apricots and apples and pears and blackcurrants and gooseberries and raspberries, and there's, you know, there's there's five different kinds of mint, and there's chives, and there's lavender, and there's herbs, and there's flowers, and the place in the summer you can hear the insects. Yes. It sort of hums in a way that it was silent before. You can see birds coming in from the hedgerows because they have places to forage and feed and things to feed on. The soil is full of earthworms, and that's because we've been mulching and not ploughing and putting stuff on.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

Not using not using chemicals. Chemicals, pesticides, herbicides. That is such a big deal for insects.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

Absolutely. And it's a place where you can go with a kid and say, Oh my god, can you imagine what this is gonna be in 20 years' time? You know, when you're my age. And that for a child, it's like that is an unbelievably big amount of time to be as old as you. And and for myself and for my own mental health, there's almost nothing. I mean, can you think of any other thing in your life where you're thinking, I wonder what this is gonna be like in 20 years' time? And in almost every other sphere, you know, your health is gonna go, you're gonna be decrepit, you're gonna people are gonna die, you're gonna lose loved ones, the world is gonna be worse, the climate's gonna be fucked. It's just really depressing. Except when I think of Fox's Field, I'm actively looking forward to what it's gonna be like in 20 years' time.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

It'll be maturing. The arc of history is is changing.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

And that's uh that is a different time.

SPEAKER_00 40:19

It is lovely, well put. Uh uh a book to recommend? Um someone else's book?

SPEAKER_01 40:26

Well, one of yours, one of the well, two books. I I I David Abram, The Spell of the Senses is a book that I reread about once every couple of years because it's just there's so much in there. It's language, it's history, it's neurology, it's philosophy, it is beautiful nature writing. It is just fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

The spider at the beginning is the his opening piece, isn't it? The spider dropping down when he's in the rain.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

Bloody amazing.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Yeah, very good choice, lovely.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

David Abraham Spell of the Sensuous. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:59

Um, Jay's book.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

Jay Griffiths Wild, which was another, I mean, it's it is like the the the literary equivalent of a rich fruit cake. Yes. You can have a little nibble of a chapter and just go away really satisfied of so delicious.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

It is that is she is a beautiful writer. I think that is a towering piece of work. Yeah. Um saying it's brave is not quite fair, but there's a form of writing which is to say, look, I this needs to be the thing that it is in order for that to kind of connect to this idea of wild, yeah, wildness, yeah, um, which is in us and in the places that we're going.

SPEAKER_01 41:44

Um so those those are my two hot recommendations. I have it's one of my most favourite things in the world to recommend books to people.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

So it's really hard to like narrow it down, but I think those two are and uh yeah, and maybe two next week might be slightly different, but but actually maybe not. Maybe these are ones that kind of stand.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

These are kind of keepers. Yes, yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Yeah, yeah, brilliant. Um, your own. Uh you've we've we've talked about gifts of gravity and light, and you've written novels and you've written for children.

SPEAKER_01 42:15

Well, my the fave my favorite thing is my children's novel, Grave Pyre's School for the Recently Deceased, because it's such an odd little book. I wanted to write a book about death in a way that would engage children and that was not morbid, but was not um soft soaping the fact of our own mortality, right? Um, I think it's the most important thing that we have is our relationship to our transience.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Um and to deny that and to live in a kind of almost death phobic culture that we seem to have constructed for ourselves where you mustn't talk about that, and it is hospitalized and hidden, and we live with this fantasy that somehow things last forever is, I think, at the very heart of the environmental and climate crisis that we find ourselves in. Um we do not live lightly on the earth, and we should because we're only here very temporarily. Um so grief, death, loss these are life-enhancing facts that we will all face.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

And trying that transience is is a way of finding a way through that. Yes. A way to use that positively, as you've described.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

So the the the story is set in the afterlife, where a a young boy who's recently deceased finds himself in a school where he's learning how to be dead properly. Um, and that involves going On a quest to find a seed of hope. He needs to enlist the help of the school vultures to help him find. And in the it's a it's a is in many ways a traditional kind of quest story. Like he really wants to get back to the land of the living, to his family, to life in Delhi, to his school, his friends. They're all destroyed with the loss of this young life. And through that journey, he encounters many um difficult and many joyful things. There are the there are creatures in the mountains called the not yetis who sort of slightly.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

I like that. And there's a river of time. I can see what you mean about having joy in the story as well.

SPEAKER_01 44:50

There's the river of time, and there's um yeah, the vultures. There are a lot of there are a lot of fun. I mean, I had a I had a lot of fun writing that book, and a lot of people have found a lot of joy in it. But also what's been really fantastic for me as a writer is to hear people when people say I cried at the end, because it it made me cry. It's really, really sad and profound and really funny at the same time, in like what we were saying at the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Exactly. They're not different. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Um and they're both really important to being fully human.

SPEAKER_00 45:30

Fabulous. Last thought then, recommendation for people, something that they should do, um, listeners and viewers. Uh what what should, could they do, what small thing?

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Um would you say there's a fantastic term that a writer called Benedict MacDonald came up with in a book in his book Rebirding. Um, and he totally nails what's wrong. He says, in this, particularly in this country, he says, in this country, what we suffer from is ecological tidiness disorder. So if there's one thing that you can do that will make a positive difference, is just be more messy. Yes. Leave stuff alone. Let it get on with itself, let it get on with itself. Make sure that your garden isn't hermetically sealed. In fact, we go back to the one of the questions in the podcast is about holes and whether holes are good. I I actually I mean, the way that you had set it up was like, what hole have you got out of? I would say embrace the hole, put holes in stuff, make things more permeable. Um if you want a resilient and uh an abundant and a dynamic landscape, that is a landscape that is full of holes, it's permeable, it's not set in stone. And that's also what you need to do with yourself is is is be open um and take risks. You know, um that's where relationship happens, that's where that's where love gets in. That's the you know, the chink where the light comes in. Um it's in those moments of vulnerability. Thank you very much. Perfect. Um, yeah, so so I would say, you know, holes are holes and messiness.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

Holes are good, messy is good.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

We need more mess.

SPEAKER_00 47:34

Yeah, fantastic. Anita Roy, thank you so much indeed. Lovely to have a chat. Thanks a lot. That's been simply gorgeous.

SPEAKER_01 47:42

My pleasure.