The onus is on us who love the natural world to treat it right. We cannot go and smash it up, damage it carelessly, waste it in our selfish pursuit. For many years the principles of Leave No Trace have guided us, taking us beyond the Countryside Code. The principles seem obvious:
- Plan Ahead & Prepare
- Be Considerate of Others
- Respect Farm Animals and Wildlife
- Travel and Camp on Durable Ground
- Leave What You Find
- Dispose of waste properly
- Minimise the effects of fire.
Life is however not simple.
The principle of travelling on durable ground tells us to steer away from delicate ecological margins. Those liminal spaces where the forest meet the heath, or the sea the dune. These are the spaces which are often most interesting to us. Where pioneer species stretch beyond their home terrain. It’s these very spaces that draw, as bushcrafters, our delight.
Consider also, ‘dispose of waste properly’. This is often viewed as shipping all rubbish out. Indeed, in the US national parks, where these principles were devised, this often means shopping out our faeces. If it means choosing to cook on tinned gas so that we can minimise fire damage and then ship out the empty gas cans without regard for how they will be disposed of, or indeed without regard for the carbon footprint of their production, this simply cannot be good enough.
Our impact on the earth must be viewed with a wider perspective than these principles, as usually interpreted, would suggest. If we are to travel lightly across those ever decreasing sections of un-urbanised landscape, then we must travel more lightly across it all. In Britain, the temptation to protect ever smaller, and ever more precious sections with SSSI designations has become overwhelming. The effect is the same if we are banning foraging from the New Forest or enclosing the highlands for stalking or chasing the Tharu out of Chitwan. In outlawing traditional interactions with the landscape we have forced people into more urbanised and poorer lifestyles. There, the inevitable pollution of our lives becomes unmanageable and places an indirect impact on the protected environments. It is a negative feedback loop. This social manipulation is based on a particular colonialist perspective. Nature was once terrifying; something deeply dangerous to be conquered. Now it is delicate, needing people to be removed or at least their behaviour to be tightly controlled. There is something absent from this view and that is the role that people have had and continue to have within the natural landscape. We are not observers to natural processes, we are active agents. The land has developed and evolved with people in it. We have changed deliberately or unintentionally just about every aspect by planting and cutting, by hunting and protecting. We have dug gravel pits and flooded them and filled them with fish. We are part of the story of nature, we are nature. When we hurt the environment we harm that big picture of which we are just one small part. Like a cancerous tumour that grows on a person’s skin, greedy men have lost all sense of relationship with the land and have burned and cleared and poisoned in their blind pursuit of temporary riches and power over others. This is a failing not just of land management and economics but of spirituality. To live in a sustainable world, many many aspects of modern life will need to be redressed. I have no doubt that this will be done. I have total confidence in the ingenuity of our species. Unfortunately, change is unlikely to come until we are up to our waists in sea water.
DNB Jan 2025
the Crows Nest 
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