The felling of the Sycamore Gap tree hurts because it symbolises our lost relationship with the land; but hope can be found in the growing movement to reclaim it, says Amy-Jane Beer
THE TREE THAT STOOD for almost three centuries in Sycamore Gap was more than a landmark. It was an icon. A celebrity, a friend, a sentinel, a memorial, a shrine, a secret keeper, a witness.
The shock of loss has been felt far and wide. Many people, me included, lamented the ecological and social disconnection that we imagined must have contributed to such wanton destruction. I’m not so sure now. Without speculating too much, if the perpetrator was local, it is almost impossible to believe this was an act of mindless vandalism. Whoever wielded the saw, that tree meant something to them. The assault on it reads now more as an act of desperation or defiance. Is it possible such violence could have seemed some way proportionate to a pain someone needed the world to notice?
We need nature
The wider anguish is both genuine and disproportionate. Other trees are felled daily by the thousand in England, often entirely unremarked. Somewhere close to where we all live will be a tree of comparable stature and grace – or if not a tree, then a crag; a river; a view of huge sky; a wooded hollow; a cave; a spring. Such places of everyday wonder exist all over England; but getting to them is another matter, given that we have access to just 8% of land, and 15% of our woodlands. So we saved collective devotion for this one tree – accessible as it was, and so celebrated, filmed and photographed we could connect with it vicariously. It became an avatar for the kind of relationship with place we crave, but losing it opened a much bigger wound.
The UK is, says a study by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, Europe’s most naturedisconnected nation . We also ranked lowest in wellbeing; and the Biodiversity Intactness Index compiled by the Natural History Museum put England 12th from bottom out of all 240 nations and territories in the world. These grim statistics are linked. We don’t just need access to nature, we need a revolution in our relationship with it. We’re starting to see what happens when people care, in the wave of public outrage over river health led by wild swimmers, paddleboarders and anglers – people for whom the damage is personal.
Enclosure and exclusion
For the Romans, Hadrian’s Wall marked the edge of civilisation. But their civilising mission involved the slaughter and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Britons and made client tribes of others. They torched the sacred groves of the druids, whose close bond with the land presented a clear threat. It was a conquest that gave northern European peoples, and most especially the mixed bag who became the British, a blueprint for empire-
