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davywavyI’ve been thinking about language, and gaps within it that define English. It was really after reading a piece about the countryside alliance and I was trying to work out why what is so fundamentally a good cause has such a poor message. The theory I came up with is that English actually lacks words for a countrymans relationship with livestock and wildlife; somewhere between a resource and member of the family. That’s why it’s so easy to mock people talking passionately about the country and animals – the close relationship that people have with the land and animals is so difficult to define in words, and so easy to for the ignorant to make witty asides about bestiality and the like which undermines people fighting for what they believe in.
When people talk about the town country divide, I think the people who don’t see it are people who grew up in town. I’ve met so many people (especially in the Cam), whose view of the countryside is made up of the more twee aspects of Bambi and Enid Blyton, and just can’t comprehend the astonishing love that most country people feel for the place.
Love and passion and the like are derided emotions these days, so I’ve seen people sniggering at television reports of farmers with tears in their eyes, struggling to comprehend/accept the destruction of healthy livestock in the wake of foot & mouth (for which those selfsame farmers get the blame, even though you’d never knowingly give a loved one a fatal disease). That’s why, I think, that farmers interviewed (during say, the countryside rally a few years ago) always seems so incoherent when asked to describe their relationship to the land. It’s something that there are no words for – until relatively recently, there was no need for any such words, as everyone lived it, and everyone understood. By divorcing ourselves from nature into urbanisation, a concept has been lost to generations of people who don’t even realise that they have lost something.
It’s symptomatic of a society that still seems to think that the New Labour plan is a good thing that people whose experience of the country is a couple of day trips at school and a drive out to some standing stones to understand the mythic ancient vibes of the place once a month feel they can manage nature netter than the people who grow up surrounded by it, and understand the subtle interplay of life and the seasons. That’s because urban life has become so managed, so regulated, that people who grow up surrounded by it believe that everything can be ‘managed’. It can’t; what is can be is shared, and understood, and loved But the true way of describing that isn’t contained within the English language and as a result, I think that the country in any form that we know it is doomed to external management by people who don’t understand it, but who do write really good copy that convinces the ‘Goddess’-worshipping drones & animal liberation types in terraces that they can understand something they have no personal experience of.
Sadly, the whole Gaia/goddess movement is the best of a bad lot – at least they care, albeit in a largely ignorant way, and think that they’re doing the right thing. But they still vote for Tony Blair.
When people talk about the town country divide, I think the people who don’t see it are people who grew up in town. I’ve met so many people (especially in the Cam), whose view of the countryside is made up of the more twee aspects of Bambi and Enid Blyton, and just can’t comprehend the astonishing love that most country people feel for the place.
Love and passion and the like are derided emotions these days, so I’ve seen people sniggering at television reports of farmers with tears in their eyes, struggling to comprehend/accept the destruction of healthy livestock in the wake of foot & mouth (for which those selfsame farmers get the blame, even though you’d never knowingly give a loved one a fatal disease). That’s why, I think, that farmers interviewed (during say, the countryside rally a few years ago) always seems so incoherent when asked to describe their relationship to the land. It’s something that there are no words for – until relatively recently, there was no need for any such words, as everyone lived it, and everyone understood. By divorcing ourselves from nature into urbanisation, a concept has been lost to generations of people who don’t even realise that they have lost something.
It’s symptomatic of a society that still seems to think that the New Labour plan is a good thing that people whose experience of the country is a couple of day trips at school and a drive out to some standing stones to understand the mythic ancient vibes of the place once a month feel they can manage nature netter than the people who grow up surrounded by it, and understand the subtle interplay of life and the seasons. That’s because urban life has become so managed, so regulated, that people who grow up surrounded by it believe that everything can be ‘managed’. It can’t; what is can be is shared, and understood, and loved But the true way of describing that isn’t contained within the English language and as a result, I think that the country in any form that we know it is doomed to external management by people who don’t understand it, but who do write really good copy that convinces the ‘Goddess’-worshipping drones & animal liberation types in terraces that they can understand something they have no personal experience of.
Sadly, the whole Gaia/goddess movement is the best of a bad lot – at least they care, albeit in a largely ignorant way, and think that they’re doing the right thing. But they still vote for Tony Blair.
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Re:
Date: 2002-07-15 09:13 am (UTC)You can argue (rationally) about methods and numbers...but the damage foxes can do is indisputable.
Even in cities, foxes are vermin. Attractive vermin...but vermin.
tuppence
Date: 2002-07-15 09:44 am (UTC)Seems like a mad question, but it's actually very sensible. Pest species (almost by definition) have an exceptionally high potential population growth rate. The sort of kill rate that fox hunting achieves will have virtually no effect on overall numbers of foxes: remove one fox and another gets a chance to move in and have enough offspirng to more than replace it, because of the decreased competition.
There is a wider issue here: does the efficiency of the control method decrease with decreasing fox density (e.g. because they become harder to find), or does it remove a constant number every year? Only the latter method will ever be able to drive pests to extinction in an area, the former will just move the population density to a different, lower, equilibrium.
The problem is worse with queleas (african bird pest): there is no feasible cull rate that reduces their population size... the same probably applies to rats and mice.
Tim
Re: tuppence
Date: 2002-07-16 01:13 am (UTC)