My Time in Space, page 17
No need, I hope, for me to say that this is not the only Connemara – I have written at length about beautiful and hopeful Connemaras – but there is no doubt that this Connemara exists, this calamitous backdrop to the society McDonagh shows us, fled by its young, with its brutalized law and its old church gone in the teeth. The machine of his theatre forces us to laugh even as we pity and shudder at all this, and the bare beauty of Connemara is one of his grim implicit jokes. Perhaps it is even close to the ‘crux of the matter’.
However, in case after case, there is no time for correct philosophical naming of the crux of the matter; something is under immediate threat, and action is called for. I will note some phases of two campaigns I have been conscripted into by obligations incurred through writing.
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Roundstone Bog is a terrain I became aware of through the writings of the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger even before I came to live in Roundstone itself; indeed it was one of the factors behind our settling here in 1984. A mere half-hour’s walk from the house, it lies far outside the habitual; it offers extremes, physically and mentally. I can best introduce this aspect of it through a piece I wrote for the launch of Nature in Ireland, John Wilson Foster’s study of Irish natural-history writing, in 1998:
TWO WET DAYS IN ROUNDSTONE BOG
Recently a few dozen members of the British Ecological Society visited Connemara, and I joined them one very wet morning for an expedition into Roundstone Bog.
All horizons had been dissolved by rain. Middle distances were grey on grey; lakes lay like deflated clouds on the blurry levels. But underfoot everything was intensely individuated by colour and pattern, as if the scientists’ acute attention were highlighting each plant’s characteristic features. The behaviour of water too was remarkably various once one had come to terms with the general wetness; it spilled in a rippling film over grass like combed hair, flowed in lacework channels around heathery tussocks, stood feet deep with pondweeds stretching up through it. In one pool were skinny growths of a particular sedge, like arrows frozen in the act of darting out from the margins as if to possess the water surface (and the ecologists confirmed that this was a stage in the transformation of a pond into a dry hummock). Every plant had its role in the self-creation of the bog. We scattered, leaping from tussock to tussock, splashing through shallows, balancing precariously across quaking beds of sodden vegetation. When someone, bent over a specimen, called out in puzzlement, wonder or triumph, we clustered again for discussion.
And then we came across something that gave us pause. On top of a hump of sphagnum lay a spreading or dropping or splashing of something yellow – the vividest yellow one could visualize, an artificial-chemical, mustard-gas-warning yellow. The stuff covered an irregular area a few inches across; it stuck up in flaccid peaks like stale custard. We gathered round and looked at it; I was the only one who ventured to poke at it with a finger. It was crusted, resilient. ‘A slime mould’, one of the experts decided, and added, ‘No one knows much about slime moulds, not even whether they’re plants or animals. In the textbooks they come somewhere between the fungi and the algae.’ And we left it at that.
I have since looked up slime moulds. They have a complex lifecycle. A spore germinates and produces a few cells, of what sort depends on circumstances. In a suitably moist environment they are amoeboid and equipped with whip-like organs of motion; in drought they become cysts, armoured for endurance, waiting to revert to the soft and mobile when times improve. These ‘swarm cells’ pair by fusion, multiply by hundreds of thousands to form a mass of protoplasm, not divided by cell walls but with its nuclei scattered throughout it. In some species this ‘plasmodium’ is brightly coloured or white, in others colourless. It can ingest particles of vegetable matter – hence the possibility of classifying it as an animal – and will migrate if food runs low. Finally it sprouts ‘fruiting bodies’ from which spore will be released. The only life-stage one is likely to come across casually is the plasmodium, the sluggish handful of naked protoplasm in search of what it may devour.
‘Slime’, according to Sartre, ‘is the agony of water.’ This cryptic formulation occurs near the end of his Being and Nothingness, as he is working his way towards its climactic summation: ‘Man is a useless passion.’ ‘The slimy’, he says, is one of those material qualities felt to have a moral dimension, as revelations of potential relationships between conscious beings (the ‘for-itself’, in his terminology) and the inanimate (the ‘in-itself’). Whereas liquidity connotes the self-enfolding, elusive, flow of consciousness, and hardness the obstinate otherness of the in-itself, the slimy is an ambiguous, treacherous, in-between mode of being. It can be picked up, but then it cannot be relinquished; it clings, stains, corrupts. Its ultimate threat is of engulfment, losing oneself to the inert, being overwhelmed by one’s materiality. As such it is ‘antivalue’ itself, all that is to be shunned and skirted around in one’s appropriation of the world, in the human project of becoming God (which, God being a contradiction and an impossibility, is, as he says, ‘a useless passion’).
This slime mould out on Roundstone bog, this blob of protoplasm ‘tout entière à sa proie attachèe’, is Life at its most alien, repulsive, and fascinating. Are we, humankind, part of this? Is it part, or indeed all, of us? Does it represent our individual mortality, our generic potential immortality? Let me worm my way into this complex of responses to Nature through an account of another wet day in Roundstone Bog.
This day, some sixty years ago, was the occasion of a most remarkable meeting of minds. Praeger describes what he calls the ‘quaint scene’:
A number of botanists had forgathered for a kind of symposium on bogs, held in the middle of one of the wettest of them. We stood in a ring in that shelterless expanse while discussion raged on the application of the terms soligenous, topogenous and ombrogenous; the rain and wind, like the discussion, waxed in intensity, and under the unusual superincumbent weight, whether of mere flesh and bone or of intellect, the floating surface of the bog slowly sank until we were all half-way up to our knees in water.
Praeger’s anecdote, from The Way that I Went, is an attractive family snapshot of science renewing itself from generation to generation; for among those present were Knud Jessen, the Danish pioneer in the recon struction of long-ago floras from pollen grains preserved in bogs; Arthur Tansley of Oxford, the first writer on bogs as ecological units; Praeger himself, botany’s most human face in Ireland; and a then very young Frank Mitchell, who also recalls that day in his The Way that I Followed. But there is something more to our reception of this story. A nihilistic or anarchic part of us wants the scene to be continued, the assembled mighty intellects to go on sinking, until nothing is to be seen on the surface of the lonesome wetland but a few bubbles, still uttering those long words: soligenous – pop! ombrogenous – pop! What is going on in this fantasy? Mind is being reabsorbed into matter; humanity’s imposition of language, order, meaning, is being sucked down and choked off by Nature. As we well know, some future environmental Armageddon could lead to a world without mind. And that vanishing is a possibility we are not entirely reluctant to entertain, because of our guilt in the face of Nature. The joyous unproblematic stride with which Praeger traversed his forty botanical subdivisions of the country (a scientific equivalent of the revivalists’ literary, linguistic and mystical reappropriations of Ireland) is not for us; everywhere we are brought up short, for instance by the moral and physical squalor of modern farming which has reduced many of his beloved western hillsides to black mud and barbed wire. Nor can we wholeheartedly join in his delight in the ‘feeling of being akin to nature – of belonging here, just like the living creatures and the living water’. Life, understood without transcendental escape-clauses, is a tangle of dire implications. Ecology, the science of oneness-with-Nature, has acquired a spuriously benevolent tone but is not all balance, sharing, tolerance and harmony, for parasitism, territoriality, population crashes and mass extinctions are all good ecology; ‘animal rights’ are to life, liberty and the pursuit of prey.
However, perhaps the opposite scenario will be enacted, that is, of Nature entirely absorbed into mind. As our knowledge of Roundstone Bog piles up in thesis after thesis, the thing in itself disappears. Overgrazing, turfcutting, forestry, draining, fencing; and on the other hand, Rural Environment Protection Schemes, Special Areas of Conservation, National Heritage Areas, Environmental Impact Statements: intensive and extensive ordering of the wild and the wet by bureaucracy. In centuries to come perhaps only a few last sods of turf will be preserved, in the form of holograms. By then humanity, if it could still be so called, will be existing without Nature, almost without reality. Our consciousnesses will have been amalgamated, compressed and downloaded onto the galactic internet. Every atomic particle will ultimately be pressed into service for our databank, until there is nothing in the universe but information. We will then not merely ‘know the mind of God’, as Stephen Hawking puts it, but will have reconstituted the Cosmos as mind; we will be the mind of God. A melancholy prospect. One could imagine such a mind pulling the plug on itself, flickering out, saying to reality: Goodbye, better luck next time.
The material world either purged of mind by ecological catastrophe, or reduced to a hallucination by technological progress – these are two forms of universalized insanity, apocalyptic exaggerations of the dismal alternatives that face us in actuality if we don’t change course, change ethos, reduce our numbers, reduce our environmental footprints, etc. Whatever its outcome, we are presently living on the cusp of this history. An unheard-of rate of destruction of the natural world is twinned with an unprecedented effort to record it. So, as a happy side-effect, ours is a golden age of natural historiography; and whether the gold is of sunrise or sunset we can’t tell. Nowadays there is so much worthwhile publication in the field that we might think there is more nature around than formerly. One reason for this, as John Wilson Foster ironically notes, is ‘our increasingly modest redefinition of what constitutes nature’. Another factor is the power of the instruments, both technical and conceptual, that we train upon the ever dwindling object. So, for example, 92 per cent of our bogs are gone, and we have John Feehan and Grace O’Donoghue‘s magnificent production, The Bogs of Ireland, to sharpen our sense of loss. But Foster’s Nature in Ireland is not at all despairing. I read in it this quote from René Dubos:
Ecosystems possess several mechanisms for self-healing … they undergo adaptive changes of a creative nature that transcend the mere correction of damage; the ultimate result is then the activation of certain potentialities of the ecosystem that had not been expressed before the disturbance.
If that is so, and if the process of readjustment does not involve removing us, the originators of the disturbance, then the proliferation of fine nature-books can be seen as potentialities of the ecosystem we inhabit. If indeed we can bring our regretful new awarenesses to bear in assisting this transformation, we will not need to become God in order to prevent Nature doing away with us. In that case our wonderful new natural histories will be our readmission tickets to Paradise.
*
So Roundstone Bog is for me an occasion, a locus, of wild speculation. It is, as they say, ‘far out’. But when it comes to defending it against the great wrecking-machine of commerce, such values have to be kept hidden; the State is not likely to declare it a Place of Philosophical Importance. One has to join battle on what for me are uncongenial grounds: small print of European and national legislation on the environment; bureaucracy of governmental and non-governmental bodies concerned with conservation; calculations of the tourism market and the economic worth of landscape.
In 1981 a large proportion of Roundstone Bog was designated as an Area of Scientific Importance (ASI), and while the designation in itself had no legal effect the County Council took note of it in their County Plan, making it difficult to obtain planning permissions for developments within it. In 1987 scientists from the Wildlife Service redrew the boundaries of the ASI, extending it a mile or so north-westwards towards Clifden, the little town that thinks of itself as the capital of Connemara. A year’s delay then ensued, during which the updated maps of the ASI lay in the Office of Public Works and no one, not even the Galway County Council, was informed of the change. By mischance it was during this interregnum that a group of Clifden hoteliers decided that Connemara’s tourist industry needed an airport and that the ideal site for it would be on the part of the bog nearest to Clifden, in a townland called Ardagh which, so far as anyone not privy to the OPW’s in-tray knew, was not part of the ASI. Their plans were quite ambitious: a three-quarter-mile strip that could take planes as large as the Fokker 50; upgrading of an almost untraceable old bridlepath across the bog into an approach road; a terminal building tastefully thatched to placate the environmentalists. A number of local businesspeople were seduced by this image of an up-to-the-minute Connemara, and put money into the scheme.
All looked hopeful for them until the boundary change came to light and it appeared likely that permission would not be granted. A furious row broke out in the local press; property values were being affected by faceless bureaucrats who could arrive out of the blue and draw a red line around your land that prevented you profiting from it, without even informing you of the fact. The Clifden Airport Group launched an energetic campaign against such oppressions, drawing on the support of farmers who were incensed to discover that they were no longer eligible for grant aid towards the afforestation of their ‘waste land’ if it lay in an ASI. Eventually the question went to the High Court and the ASI procedure was found to be unconstitutional – quite rightly, from the point of view of commonsense and justice, but at some cost to the environment throughout Ireland, which is still awaiting the implementation of the revised scheme of designations, the ‘Special Areas of Conservation’. The outcome in Connemara – largely the fault of the OPW – has been an anti-environmentalist backlash, which is only now fading as another thoroughly commercial reality makes itself felt; the tourist’s liking for unspoiled scenery.
At the height of the dispute Leo Hallissey, a schoolteacher in north Connemara who also runs annual courses for adults on the environment, asked me to participate in a series of public meetings with the aim of explaining to the public why Roundstone Bog was worth conserving. (To those who had scraped a laborious living off it by sheep-rearing, and who were just discovering the financial delights of forestry and machine turf-cutting, this was by no means obvious.) Hastily Leo and I, and a few people we could count on for effectual support in the neighbourhood, named ourselves as ‘Save Roundstone Bog’ (which, we explained, in a phrase that became wearisome to me, was ‘an ad hoc group of concerned residents’). SRB’s first public meeting, in Roundstone, was fairly well received; the Roundstone people had not been much infected by the Clifden enthusiasm for aeronautics, which they rightly suspected would benefit principally a few hotels in Clifden itself and the golf course nearby. But our second meeting, boldly staged in a hotel lounge in Clifden itself, was eventful; in fact I found it most disturbing and exciting. The Clifden business interest was there en masse – in fact ‘mass’ was the impression given by their bulky black overcoats filling the back of the rather cramped and overcrowded room. After three or four brief talks (on the wildlife of the Bog, on its scenic values and the artists it had attracted, and – my echospheric contribution – on its placenames and folklore), there was a general discussion which rapidly became extremely contentious. A populist Connemara politician with whom I had had one or two previous disputes over environmental matters worked himself up into a fury over a letter to the Irish Times from David Bellamy, the respected conservationist, eccentric presenter of TV wildlife programmes and eminent Professor of Botany, whom we had canvassed for his support in this controversy. Professor Bellamy had written, tactlessly enough, that
Yes, the tourist potential of the key areas of the Irish heritage must be opened up, but it must be done in a totally environmentally friendly way. To even consider siting an airport, or any other development, within the Roundstone Bog catchment area is an act of pure stupidity and vandalism.
Here we have, roared the politician, brandishing the newspaper, someone with an address in London saying that Connemara men are vandals! – and he continued with such rage against this Englishman, as he insisted on calling him, that one of the Airport Group’s more physicalist supporters suddenly leaped out of their ranks at me with fist clenched, roaring, ‘And here’s another … Englishman we should throw out!’ Fortunately he was some distance from me and his impetus spent itself on empty air. For a while there was uproar. I was shocked, and at the same time exhilarated. Obviously the interruption could only be to our advantage. I stalked up and down with a long face while Leo, who was in the Chair, tried to quell a shouting match. Then I solemnly demanded silence, emphasized that something extraordinary had just occurred and that such a remark had never been made to me in all my twenty years of living and working in the west of Ireland, and I called on the meeting to repudiate it. Our supporters in the audience all rallied round with paeans of praise for my contributions to Irish culture; there was a formal motion condemning the intervention, which the opposition party had to support; and we returned home the moral victors.
