Essex: It's where the wild things are

(PhysOrg.com) -- It has been dismissed as Britain's most maligned county; widely scorned for its reputed mobs of boy racers, throngs of dumb blondes and industrial wastelands.

Now a Cambridge University academic is setting out to prove that Essex has not only been done an injustice by its stereotype, but that it is teeming with overlooked wonders which epitomise our relationship with modern nature.

In a documentary due to be shown on BBC 2 tonight, Dr. Robert Macfarlane (pictured) will tell the story of how he spent a year in the county once memorably characterised by Spitting Image as "a boil on the bum of the nation", searching for its "wild places".

It was a quest which frequently met with snorts of derision, even from Essex locals, who suggested that he stood the best chance of finding its wild side in the centre of Basildon on a Saturday night.

Undeterred, Dr. Macfarlane emerged with an account of Essex which, he suggests, should influence our attitude towards the wild in 21st-century Britain.

His film, entitled "The Wild Places Of Essex", argues that our view of nature as a remote wilderness into which we can retreat from the pressures of modern life no longer applies in a group of islands where barely a square inch of the landscape has been left untouched by human activity.

It may sound pessimistic, but Dr. Macfarlane suggests that we should be reassessing our relationship with the wild. If we want to protect our 'modern nature' in Britain, he says, we need to accept that it is no longer remote, but trying to survive on the peripheries of suburbs, motorways and industrial estates.

"The old idea of nature is that it is something non-human, pristine and untouched," he said. "That doesn't really work anymore because we have influenced, worked and farmed virtually every part of our islands."

"The question is: What does nature now mean? I'm interested in turning people's attention towards what conservationists refer to as 'nearby nature', that which exists around and within the structures of human activity. Making this film in Essex we found perfect examples, such as peregrine falcons hunting over power stations, or geese that had migrated from Siberia to Southend."

By trade, Dr. Macfarlane is a lecturer in post-Second World War literature at the University's Faculty of English and a Fellow at Emmanuel College. In addition, however, he has carved out a niche as a travel and nature writer, and his books on the subject have been widely acclaimed.

His Essex adventure picks up where the latest of these, The Wild Places, left off. Having set out in search of what remains of the British wilderness, he found himself, by the book's end, reappraising whether wildness was something separate from human life, or something "which existed unexpectedly around and within it: in cities, backyards, roadsides, hedges, field boundaries or spinnies."

To investigate this idea further, the new film sees Dr. Macfarlane heading deep into a county better known for its shopping malls, remnant heavy industry, and souped-up Ford Fiestas.

He found that people have wrongly imagined Essex as a cultural desert, uncovering numerous examples of "the undiscovered country of the nearby", where spectacular birds, creatures and wildlife were living barely a road's width away from the physical and geographical features that dictate the county's stereotype.

As well as peregrine falcons hunting near the chimney stacks of Tilbury power station, for example, he recorded deer bellowing within earshot of the M25 and a colony of seals living in the Dengie peninsula which had been turned rust-red by the iron oxide that leeches out from the mud.

He concludes that this represents "modern nature" in the British Isles, reasoning that the wild is now to be found among road networks and beneath skies scored by the vapour trails of passing aircraft.

The film also suggests that we need to learn to value and appreciate this nearby nature, instead of yearning for an unattainable arcadian idyll. Britain is still bristling with natural life, Dr. Macfarlane contends, but we cannot begin to protect it effectively if we fail to observe it in the first place.

"If we continue indiscriminately to scorn landscapes like Essex, the consequences could be severe," he added. "We have to learn to accept nature on a small scale and as something which is close at hand, rather than to fetishise the distant.

"This is a film about making do with modern nature, but also about recognising the peace we find within it, the ways we still use it as a space in which to think and the good that does us. A failure to notice essentially means a failure to care."

"The Wild Places Of Essex", written and presented by Dr. Robert Macfarlane, will be on BBC2 on Wednesday, February 10th, at 8pm.

Provided by University of Cambridge