The idea for this column began, strangely enough, not in a woodland but with photographs taken after Reading Festival. The music had finished, the crowds had gone home and across parts of the site were the remains of a temporary community that only days earlier had been filled with people. There were tents, air beds, camping chairs, clothing, food packaging and all the other bits and pieces that accumulate when thousands of us gather together for a few days and then leave.
I don’t mention this to have a go at Reading Festival, nor do I think pointing a finger at the people who attended gets us very far. Festivals simply concentrate human behaviour into a small area, which means they can sometimes show us things about ourselves that are harder to see elsewhere. What caught my attention wasn’t really the litter. It was the objects. Things that somebody had wanted enough to buy only a few days earlier had already reached the end of their usefulness to that person.
A tent is an interesting example because when we look at one lying abandoned in a field, we see a cheap tent. But that isn’t really what it is. It is fabric, plastics, metals, chemicals, energy and human labour. Materials had to be produced, processed and manufactured. The finished tent was packaged, transported and eventually bought. An extraordinary chain of resources and human activity came together to create something whose useful life, in that particular instance, may have amounted to a long weekend.
The same is true of the air bed, chair and clothing. None of these things appeared magically in a shop, and none disappears magically when we have finished with it. Yet modern life makes it remarkably easy to experience both illusions. We encounter objects near the end of their journey towards us and lose sight of them almost immediately after they leave our hands.
Looking at those photographs, I found myself thinking about the woodland.
Spend enough time watching nature and you notice that it consumes constantly
A caterpillar eats a leaf, a deer browses vegetation, fungi consume fallen timber and an oak draws enormous quantities of water and nutrients from its surroundings. Nature is not some gentle world in which nothing takes anything from anything else. Life depends upon consumption.
But there is another half to the process. The leaf eventually falls. The animal produces waste and eventually dies. The branch breaks from the tree. Fungi, bacteria, insects and countless other organisms begin dismantling what remains. Materials move through bodies, soil, water and atmosphere and become available for other relationships. Nature does not literally balance every transaction, giving back precisely what each organism took, but healthy ecosystems are overwhelmingly built around cycles of taking, transforming and returning.
There is no bin lorry coming to collect the woodland and no landfill beyond the hedge. What one process leaves behind becomes part of another. Perhaps that is what disturbed me about those festival photographs. They were not really photographs of rubbish. They were photographs of a broken circle.
Most of our economy still follows a remarkably straight line. We extract something from the Earth, manufacture it into something desirable, transport it, buy it, use it and eventually discard it. Then we return to the beginning and extract some more. A mobile phone appears to come from a shop, but somewhere behind that polished screen are mines, metals, minerals, plastics, water, factories, energy, ships, roads and human hands. A cotton shirt begins with soil, sunlight and water. A wooden table begins with a tree. Everything we own has a landscape somewhere behind it.
Yet modern consumer life has become remarkably good at hiding both ends of the journey. The shop conceals the mine, forest and factory, while the bin conceals the landfill, incinerator or recycling plant. We say we have thrown something “away”, as though somewhere beyond the edge of town there is a mysterious place called ‘Away’ where unwanted matter ceases to exist.
Nature has no such place.
That raises a bigger question about the economic system we have created
Consumer capitalism depends upon movement. Businesses need customers, customers need income and income usually comes from employment. Governments depend upon taxation generated through economic activity, investments are expected to produce returns and companies borrow against future earnings. Growth gradually becomes more than something we would quite like to have. Much of the structure begins to depend upon it.
We therefore find ourselves in a curious position. As individuals we are encouraged to consume less, reduce waste, repair things, recycle and think carefully about the resources we use. At exactly the same time, governments become worried when consumers stop spending.
Imagine if millions of us kept our phones for twice as long, bought fewer clothes, repaired appliances, shared equipment with neighbours and stopped replacing perfectly serviceable furniture. Ecologically it might be considered an extraordinary success. Economically it could become a serious problem. Sales would fall, production could decline, jobs could disappear and governments would start looking for ways to stimulate spending again.
There is something deeply contradictory about an economy that needs us to want more while living on a planet that cannot indefinitely provide more.
This isn’t an argument that capitalism has achieved nothing, nor that there is some wonderfully simple alternative waiting to replace it. Markets, trade and enterprise have produced extraordinary innovation, medicines, technologies and improvements in living standards. But perhaps we should be willing to ask whether endless growth and human flourishing are actually the same thing.
The woodland suggests they might not be.
An oak grows rapidly when it is young, but it does not continue increasing in size at the same rate forever. Eventually it reaches maturity, yet that does not mean it has failed. A mature oak can become more valuable to the community of life around it with every passing decade. Its branches provide nesting places, its bark becomes habitat, its roots interact with fungi, its leaves feed the soil and its acorns feed animals. Eventually limbs fall and the deadwood itself becomes home and food.
Woodland does not enter recession because the oak has stopped growing upwards
Perhaps the lesson isn’t that humanity must stop consuming. That would be impossible. We are animals, and every animal consumes. Perhaps what we have forgotten is the second half of the relationship: return.
What would an economy look like if the manufacturer retained some responsibility for the materials within what it made? What if washing machines were designed to last twenty or thirty years and to be repaired rather than replaced? What if metals, glass and components were regarded not as rubbish at the end of a product’s life but as valuable materials temporarily arranged into that particular object? What if success included durability rather than simply the number of new things sold?
There is an uncomfortable problem hidden inside those questions. A company that makes a washing machine lasting forty years may have produced a magnificent piece of engineering and granted the planet a considerable favour, while simultaneously reducing the likelihood that its customer will buy another washing machine. Somewhere within the system, durability can become bad for business.
That does not mean abandoning technology or returning to some imagined simpler age. Eight billion human beings cannot live exactly as our distant ancestors did. But we can ask whether the line can gradually become a circle. We can design things to be repaired, recover materials, share what does not need to be individually owned and restore landscapes from which resources have been taken. We can begin asking whether prosperity must always mean possessing more and whether an economy can mature without believing that maturity is failure.
Most importantly, we might remember that we never actually escaped nature’s cycles. The water inside us has travelled through countless other bodies and landscapes. The food we eat was assembled from sunlight, soil, water and other lives. The atoms making up our bodies existed long before us and will continue their journey long after we have gone. Whatever stories our economy tells us, physically we remain participants in the same ancient circulation as the oak, fungus and falling leaf.
Perhaps that is why those photographs from Reading stayed with me. Eventually the field will recover. Grass will grow again, rain will fall, worms will move through the soil and another season will turn. But the nylon tent does not understand autumn. The plastic chair cannot become soil simply because we have finished sitting on it.
Maybe our problem is not that we take from nature. Everything does. Maybe it is that somewhere along the way we became very good at taking, extraordinarily clever at turning what we take into things, and remarkably poor at remembering what should happen when we have finished with them.
Nature completes the circle. The question is whether we still can.
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