I’ve lived for most of my life in Cumbria and in close proximity to Morecambe Bay. After relocating our family from the Fylde coast, my dad worked in the shipyard at Barrow. As well as helping the US to develop its nuclear fleet, he also built us a house in the market town of Ulverston, from where my brother and I used the surrounding hills as our escape from all that evolving suburbia. I can’t ever recall though, being taken to Bardsea for ice cream and a wander along the shore. Decades later, as a parent myself, I came to understand that what was almost certainly being processed in my city-loving mother’s head, was just an attempt to protect us from the things she’d hear about the bay; the lethal tidal rips or the quicksands lurking underneath a visually undisturbed surface.

My first book[i] then, was an attempt to reconnoitre the Bay, along with a degree of memoir, to dig beneath the surface and uncover some of the less well-known stories about the landscape, it's archaeology and social history, all in the company of the bay’s teaming inter-tidal avian wildlife. In my second book[ii] I spent a year focusing on the wildlife in our back garden on the edge of Kendal, but I also began to make sense of the discrepancy between the wealth of wildlife on the Bay and the almost total lack of it in the hills and valleys of the Lake District. What, I wanted to know, had led to the loss of the golden eagle from the high fells and the curlew from farmland? The answers, (which are at the same time complicated and not) led me to look more closely at the (can I say, sometimes murky?) ways in which landscape is frequently interpreted, packaged and ‘sold’.

At Lancaster I was fortunate to be awarded the FASS ‘Literature, landscape and Environment’ scholarship for my PhD in Creative Writing. The creative output of this (which will be published as a book of essays by Bloomsbury in September [iii]) began life as a vehicle for telling good news stories from the environment. Along with all the news of losses, so my thinking went, surely we also need to hear about success; the places where restoration of habitats or species is taking place, or where species are moving back under their own natural processes – once we humans got ourselves and our intrusive, damaging habits out of their way. Naturally enough, that optimistic ideal was quickly shattered. It is not possible, I soon discovered, to only tell the good news; everything has its corollary. In my PhD therefore, this manifest as a kind of weighing of abundance and loss; what has been gained, along with why it was lost in the first place. You can guess the answer. Of course, it was us humans that continually got in the way.

I went to meet and spend some time with the ‘wolf people;’ the group of nationwide volunteers and two funded conservationists from ‘Wolves in the Netherlands’ who were getting on with the job of monitoring wolves and reducing public hysteria when those pioneer animals arrived under their own steam, crossing the border from Germany. The first animal to return after an absence of more than 150 years was recorded on film one windy day as it loped past an industrial estate, a windfarm, a railway and tarmac roads. (And yes, this young wolf appeared nothing if not bewildered). The project monitored the first family of wolves to set up home and breed in the Veluwe National Park, where, early one morning; yes! I did! I saw my first wolf in the wild. This, despite me being told in no uncertain terms the previous evening, when I’d asked Ellen the co-ordinator how likely it was we’d see wolves the next day, as we’d eaten our wolf volunteer meal in a restaurant, that ‘No; we don’t go looking for wolves. It is not a zoo. The wolves must be allowed to get on with being wolves.’

In Transylvania I spent time in the Carpathian mountains with forest rangers from Fundacio Conservation Carpathia, who generously shared with my son Callum and I their deep and intimate knowledge of the animals and plants and trees of those seemingly never-ending forests that had, in fact, begun to be ripped apart in the aftermath of Communism, once the West came in with all its terrible, attendant machinery. We saw lots of evidence of bears; bear scat (content: apples, sweetcorn, plums; you can’t hide the fact that you’ve been orchard and garden raiding, if you’re a bear). We found wolf tracks and lynx tracks in the mud and pellets of mouse or black squirrel hair and bones, but soon enough we discovered it wasn’t the carnivores we should have been afraid of, what with illegal logging continuing amidst stakes as high as life and death, should you come upon loggers at work.

In Scotland I learned that if you are a ‘legal’ as opposed to an ‘illegal’ beaver, you can still be shot under licenses issued by Scottish Natural Heritage (subsequently rebranded as Nature Scot,) if you choose to reside anywhere near Prime Agricultural Land, even though you may well steer clear of that PAL because if you are a beaver, there’s not much of interest in those fields of agri-business. In the Lake District I visited a family turning traditional farming on its head, prioritising the regeneration of soils. The sheep have gone, replaced by hardy cattle whose eating and treading habits, together with the practice of allowing the ground to rest, create rich soil structures that – wait for it – absorb the rain instead of allowing it simply to slide off the fellside and cause havoc for communities further downstream. Also in the Lakes, I looked hard at what World Heritage has done to ‘rebrand’ the place as a ‘cultural landscape’ despite the acute loss of biodiversity that is officially recognised in the Glover Report[iv] and in the WH bid document itself, and yet wider still amongst a cohort of conservationists and ecologists who saw exactly what was coming. When WH slapped a ‘preservation order’ on this badly degraded landscape - a direct result of over–grazing in those traditionally farmed landscapes – along with many, many others, I really didn’t like what I saw.

Just before I came into post, I read an article that talks about developing ‘authentic experiences’ for visitors. The authors use lingo such as ‘positive brand image,’ ‘sense of place toolkit,’ ‘clear destination identity,’ and I wonder what all this really means. I find a word I don’t know – ‘Topophilia,’ (Tuan, 1974,) which I find is intended to mean ‘love of a place.’ This in turn reminds me of Edward O. Wilson’s ‘Biophilia,’ published in 1984, in which Wilson (a highly influential American biologist and two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning author) interprets biophilia as ‘the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.’ Not merely ‘love’ then, and certainly not ‘authentic experience,’ but an affiliation. I see this as a leaning towards; an attempt to sit alongside, rather than to impose ourselves upon.

Together with the much-lauded nature writer Barry Lopez, Wilson developed a new course at Texas Tech University bringing together (affiliating), the study of Natural History and the Humanities. Their course recruited its first undergraduates in 2001. I’m very interested in this bringing together; of how our attempts to understand the world around us can usefully be informed by science but interpreted by writers into a form that can be more readily assimilated by the reading public. Much of my research took place through the generosity and authoritative voices of conservationists, volunteers, ecologists - or just keen amateurs. I could not have written without these people. They helped me to see and interpret the world around me in what I believe are more useful ways for the times we are living through. If I write anything worth reading, it is because of the ways that the people I meet see. They, and now I, see the world very differently to say, the way World Heritage in the Lake District asks us to see.

I understand that the WH inscription invites us to indulge in Lakes through the lens of the ‘topophilia’ of a ‘cultural landscape.’ This, despite the hard evidence that those traditional ways of managing the land duly enshrined in the inscription have, over decades, resulted in the loss of what we know too well are our very life-support systems. But let us not wag our fingers of shame at the farmers themselves; the systems that funded farming until now, (the Common Agricultural Policy,) paid farmers to forget how and what to see. I remind myself here of the farmer I visited to talk about curlews – a species hovering right on the edge of extinction - who said, ‘when we’re mowing, we’re not looking,’ and whose sons did not know what a curlew, even though it is a large ground-nesting bird that breeds mainly in farmed grassland pasture. Or what about those whose day jobs is to mould, or compress, or strangulate language into silos of ‘authenticity’ and god forbid, ‘toolkits’ for ‘experiences.’

In my new role as research assistant and Writer in Residence with LICA and the Future Places Centre, I want to find ways to affiliate myself with others. One of my questions is to ask what kinds of ways might be found around Morecambe Bay, the Lake District and its unsung cousin, the West Coast of Cumbria, to turn ourselves around and begin to see differently, more usefully for the times we are living through. What kinds of conversations might be had? What kinds of networks might be built to begin to hold those conversations? What kinds of communities might it be important to talk with? Villages in the Lake District beleaguered by over tourism, by litter in gargantuan proportions and blocked roads, and who are merely trying to get to work on time or come home again. Visitors who cannot get parked because under Covid, (under anything, really,) they crave beauty and peace, (and my god; don't we all need beauty and peace) but are unable to get parked when they arrive here? And who, I want to know, if anyone, speaks for the species unable to speak for themselves? The life support system of the natural world, however beleaguered, that hangs on, in all its beauty; its salve; its thrilling, restorative sanctuaries.

Part of what I want to do then, is to repurpose some of those more bland, unhelpful ways of seeing, and to use affiliations, writing and literature to get at forms of culture that allow us to see differently, here, now, in the eye of the Anthropocene. Another part is to begin work on a new book of essays exploring family memoir and environment. My paternal grandfather’ was a pit manager in the coal fields of West Cumbria; a place where miners not only went to work underground, but underneath the weight of the Irish Sea. And yes; what of coal? What does it mean to us now? A new coal-mine - here in Cumbria, amidst the chaos of climate breakdown? (Tell that to the folks underneath the heat dome in Canada!) What kinds and shapes of stories can be found amongst the layers of landscape and memory; what’s been lost; what might be brought out again into the light?

www.karenlloyd.co.uk

To read my essay ‘The Cultural Landscapes in the Anthropocene,’ click here

[i] The Gathering Tide; A Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay (Saraband, 2015).

[ii] The Blackbird Diaries; A Year with Wildlife (Saraband 2017).

[iii] Abundance: Nature in Recovery (Bloomsbury 2021).

[iv] Landscapes Review, Glover et al, (2019).

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/833726/landscapes-review-final-report.pdf

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