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5/5/06 02:20 pm - Property
Property Paranoia
By George Monbiot
February 12, 2006
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Cont
A few days ago, after a furious argument, I was thrown out of a wood where I have walked for over 20 years. I must admit that I did not behave very well. As I walked away I did something I haven't done for a long time: I gave the gamekeeper a one-fingered salute. In my defence I would plead that I was overcome with unhappiness and anger.
The time I have spent in that wood must amount to months. Every autumn I would spend days there, watching the turning colours or grubbing for mushrooms and beechmast and knapped flints. In the summer I would look for warblers and redstarts. I saw a nightjar there once. It was one of the few peaceful and beautiful places in my part of the world that's within a couple of miles of a station: I could escape from the traffic without the help of a car. Part of me, I feel, belongs there. Or it did.
It is not that I wasn't trespassing before. Nor has the status of the land changed: it is still owned, as far as I know, by the same private estate. No one tried to stop me in those 20-odd years because no one was there. But now there is a blue plastic barrel every 50 yards, and the surrounding fields are planted with millet and maize. The wood has been turned into a pheasant run. Having scarcely figured in the landowner's books, it must now be making him a fortune. And I am perceived as a threat.
The words that rang in my ears as I stomped away were these. "You've got your bloody right to roam now - why do you need to come here?" It struck me that this could be a perverse outcome of the legislation for which I spent years campaigning: that the right to walk in certain places is seen by landowners as consolidating their relations with the public. All that is not permitted will become forbidden.
But this, I expect, is a secondary problem. The more important one is surely the surge of money foaming through the south-east of England. A thousand woods can be filled with pheasants and still there are not enough to serve the people who have the money required - the many hundreds of pounds a day - to shoot them. We were told that the rising tide would lift all boats. But I feel I am drowning in it.
Two weeks ago, writing in the Financial Times, the economist Andrew Oswald observed that "the hippies, the Greens, the road protesters, the downshifters, the slow-food movement - all are having their quiet revenge. Routinely derided, the ideas of these down-to-earth philosophers are being confirmed by new statistical work by psychologists and economists."(1) As I qualify on most counts, I will regard this as a vindication.
Oswald's point is that the industrialised countries have not become happier as they've become richer. Rates of depression and stress have risen, and people report no greater degree of satisfaction with their lives than their poorer ancestors did. In the United States, the sense of well-being has actually declined. One of the problems is that "humans are creatures of comparison ... it is relative income that matters: when everyone in a society gets wealthier, average well-being stays the same."(2)
(more)
By George Monbiot
February 12, 2006
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Cont
A few days ago, after a furious argument, I was thrown out of a wood where I have walked for over 20 years. I must admit that I did not behave very well. As I walked away I did something I haven't done for a long time: I gave the gamekeeper a one-fingered salute. In my defence I would plead that I was overcome with unhappiness and anger.
The time I have spent in that wood must amount to months. Every autumn I would spend days there, watching the turning colours or grubbing for mushrooms and beechmast and knapped flints. In the summer I would look for warblers and redstarts. I saw a nightjar there once. It was one of the few peaceful and beautiful places in my part of the world that's within a couple of miles of a station: I could escape from the traffic without the help of a car. Part of me, I feel, belongs there. Or it did.
It is not that I wasn't trespassing before. Nor has the status of the land changed: it is still owned, as far as I know, by the same private estate. No one tried to stop me in those 20-odd years because no one was there. But now there is a blue plastic barrel every 50 yards, and the surrounding fields are planted with millet and maize. The wood has been turned into a pheasant run. Having scarcely figured in the landowner's books, it must now be making him a fortune. And I am perceived as a threat.
The words that rang in my ears as I stomped away were these. "You've got your bloody right to roam now - why do you need to come here?" It struck me that this could be a perverse outcome of the legislation for which I spent years campaigning: that the right to walk in certain places is seen by landowners as consolidating their relations with the public. All that is not permitted will become forbidden.
But this, I expect, is a secondary problem. The more important one is surely the surge of money foaming through the south-east of England. A thousand woods can be filled with pheasants and still there are not enough to serve the people who have the money required - the many hundreds of pounds a day - to shoot them. We were told that the rising tide would lift all boats. But I feel I am drowning in it.
Two weeks ago, writing in the Financial Times, the economist Andrew Oswald observed that "the hippies, the Greens, the road protesters, the downshifters, the slow-food movement - all are having their quiet revenge. Routinely derided, the ideas of these down-to-earth philosophers are being confirmed by new statistical work by psychologists and economists."(1) As I qualify on most counts, I will regard this as a vindication.
Oswald's point is that the industrialised countries have not become happier as they've become richer. Rates of depression and stress have risen, and people report no greater degree of satisfaction with their lives than their poorer ancestors did. In the United States, the sense of well-being has actually declined. One of the problems is that "humans are creatures of comparison ... it is relative income that matters: when everyone in a society gets wealthier, average well-being stays the same."(2)
(more)
