Tipping Points: Cultural responses to wilding and land sharing in the North of England

Tipping Points is envisaged as a second follow-on from the AHRC-funded Land Lines project (2017-2019), one of the principal aims of which was to use modern British nature writing to stimulate greater engagement with the natural world. The first follow-on, which recently began, plays on the nature we cannot see because it is mostly hidden from us; the second one also plays on what we cannot see, but in this case because it is no longer with us, or has yet to return. In the UK today, up to a third of mammals and a half of birds are threatened with extinction, largely because their habitats have been eroded to the point where they are no longer able to sustain themselves. Such tipping points, as they are popularly known, have potentially devastating consequences, but there are also positive examples. One such example consists of the various so-called 'wilding' or 'rewilding' initiatives through which British agricultural landscapes are being creatively managed so as to encourage the resurgence of wildlife. Such restoration processes are as much cultural as they are natural, and if nature is to bounce back in ways that are urgently needed to sustain our own as well as other, non-human animals' existences, the arts have a crucial role to play in stimulating both creative responses to the current crisis and alternative ways of imagining the natural world.

Tipping Points, like its two immediate predecessors, is an arts-based project that aims to raise public awareness of the current environmental crisis, but also to intervene in contemporary conservation initiatives, such as re/wilding, that posit a more hopeful future for our increasingly diminished natural world. More specifically, the project aims to use the creative arts to show the meanings and values at work in landscape decision-making processes in which farmers, in particular, stand accused by many conservationists (and conservation-minded nature writers) of violating the biodiversity that is supposedly in their care. A more nuanced view is needed than this, and more inclusive involvement in such decision-making processes - hence the project's arts-inspired gathering together of different stakeholders and communities: those who own and/or cultivate the land; those who are dedicated to its sustainable management; and those members of the public whose experience and knowledge of it is not always adequately communicated or sufficiently shared.

Tipping Points proposes a series of open-to-the-public writing and visual arts workshops organized around three sites in the North of England - Wild Ennerdale, Castle Howard Estate, and Stirley Community Farm - that represent re/wilding projects of different sizes and scales that operate in different kinds of natural and cultural environments, and that provide excellent opportunities for arts-based public engagement activities involving an equally wide range of participants that cuts across socially constructed boundaries of race, gender, and class. All three sites currently face major decisions about the use and management of land, and all are open to the integration of arts and humanities perspectives into such decision-making processes, recognizing that such perspectives and the activities they inspire may help reach people who might not otherwise engage with the countryside and/or the natural world. In staging these workshops, each led by an experienced practitioner in the field, we aim to reach out to new audiences - e.g. BAME communities in northern England - whose voices are rarely heard and whose experiences of nature are rarely accounted for. We also aim to hold a major symposium on land sharing that, in bringing together farmers, conservation experts, and humanities scholars/practitioners, will look to create common ground for land management practices in which landscapes are viewed holistically and the decisions surrounding them are opened up in accordance with the broad democratic imperatives of the creative arts.

Impacts associated with the project will be both social, in terms of democratizing landscape decisions and raising public awareness of the issues bound up in them; and economic, in terms of widening access to (and participation in) British natural and cultural heritage sites.

In terms of social impact, the project's emphasis on engagement events aims explicitly to open up current debates around land management to a variety of individuals and communities who have rarely seen themselves as stakeholders in such debates or, if they have, have not necessarily been listened to. BAME communities, for example, are often mistakenly seen as purely city-based or uninterested in 'nature' at large, while conservation advocates in the UK - including nature writers and other creative practitioners - are still (with some notable exceptions) predominantly white and middle class. Other voices are needed in conservation debates, and the arts - and the imagination more generally - can play an important role in attracting new participants. These participants also stand to benefit both individually by (1) taking pride in their own achievements, and (2) taking stock of their attitudes to a natural world that it is in their own interests - in everyone's interests - to appreciate and conserve.

The project's creative workshops, as well as providing the inspiration to try out new ideas, are designed to encourage new or historically under-represented communities to access 'wilded' sites and develop understandings of their changes over time. While it is too early to tell what impact these workshops and the artwork produced by them might have for other stakeholders involved in landscape decisions (landowners, farmers and others who work the land, government agencies, etc.), the basic idea is to extend the range of people potentially involved in such decision-making processes while also emphasizing the different meanings and values bound up in them - and the different meanings and values bound up in such concepts as 'nature' and 'natural heritage'; 'the countryside' and 'the wild'.

One set of meanings and values is primarily economic, and while the project will look to go beyond narrowly instrumental views of what nature is worth, it recognizes at the same time that Britain's natural/cultural landscapes require collective investment if they are to remain profitable for those whose lives and livelihoods depend on them. Consequently, one aim of the project is to raise awareness of the benefits of the countryside for collective well-being and health as well as the commercial advantages it brings to those who live and work there.

Last but not least, the project will look to effect change in the ways in which particular landscapes are seen and acted upon, especially within a re/wilding context in which land is seen beyond its usefulness to those who own it, and possibilities - both material and symbolic - are explored for it to be shared. One possible change will be for farmers and conservationists - so often at loggerheads with one another - to come to a greater understanding of the need to work together in the interest of protecting natural assets; another will be for private landowners to come to a greater realization of the importance of involving the public in the decisions that affect their property.

Our symposium at Castle Howard, in particular, will bring these different stakeholders together as the first step in developing a sustainable supportive network. In this and other ways, the project will seek to respond to a time - a tipping point - when more people need to be involved in landscape decisions that directly affect their own sense of well-being, and more habitats must be restored to those at risk of losing them forever - those animals, both domestic and wild, on whose lives we often depend far more than we know.