No Longer With the Eyes to See the Land

The art of seeing is sadly being lost - and our landscapes are suffering as a result

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

To be able to truly see is a rare and precious skill¹. Everyone can glance at a bird, a flower, or a tree. Everyone can look at something briefly enough to register its existence and to infer if it will be of use to them. But few are those who can truly see a tree, a bird, or a flower, for this involves the act of perceiving it, knowing it, beholding it — and enjoying it. Although we can all, in theory, “see”, too often we have no idea of what we are looking at beyond the bare rudimentaries. To most people, the tree on the street corner is just that — a tree. Its species, history, ecology, health, and condition are all invisible and unknowable to the casual or uninformed observer. Even if the average person desired to know more they often wouldn’t know where to start, and even if they do begin this journey of discovery towards the art of seeing, it may not be them that does the seeing, but an app on their smartphone looks on their behalf and tells them what they are looking at. The art of truly seeing is not developed and nurtured. Instead, the art of mediated seeing through technology is fostered and our dependence upon technology to enhance our lives and ‘field of vision’ intensifies.

For most of us though, this desire to know more, to see more clearly and knowingly, and to slow down long enough to try, is not high on our agendas. Our hectic-paced days are filled with casual glances at nameless objects, unknown species, or homogenous landscapes. Everything seems the same or not worth our “precious” attention (but the vibrating screen in our pockets — now that does warrant our attention!). Rarely do we get the chance to stop and admire what is out of our windows. Thus we rarely truly see and behold what is in front of our eyes.

It is a tragedy of our modern world that this all isn’t really much of a tragedy. We rest content with our ‘seeingless vision’ mostly because we are content to avert our gaze and attention to the little glowing screens in front of us. While all around us the world goes by, and beautiful moments are missed, the “real and exciting world” (as we tell ourselves) goes on inside the pixels and processors of our man-made meta-worlds. And we are content to live our days there — in these places which don’t even exist!

The trouble is these virtual worlds is they are but that — virtual. They cannot give us anything truly of substance. Yes, they may give us dopamine every time the notification ‘pings’, but that is as fleeting and ephemeral as it gets. That which is weighty, of substance, of meaning, and of life is to be found in the created natural world around us and in the human relationships that should envelop us. This is a world that was designed to satisfy us, to provide us with endless beauty to fill our gaze and time, and cherished moments that we will carry with us to our dying day stored and protected inside the confines of our memories.

This world is a joy to behold to those who can truly see. It is a world saturated with beauty and consists of rich dramas and stories both to behold and to be told — dramas that are performed constantly around us in Creation. It is truly an amazing world, but it is ever increasingly a world that is in trouble. In great part, this is a result of our lack of attention and care — and crucially, because we do not see that which is in front of us.

What we do not see, we do not know, and what we do not know we do not care for (or know how to). If we are unable to perceive something, we are unable to understand it and deeply know it. Crucially, we remain ignorant of the condition and health of what we are beholding. Questions such as “Is this a good representation?” “Is this in need of improvement?” “Is this in trouble?” “Is this healthy?” are not asked. And for want of these questions, our natural world is in dire straights.

The art of good medicine is to notice symptoms that lead to a cause, diagnosis, and treatment. Symptoms left unnoticed can lead to incurable diseases down the line. Only when we notice something is wrong will we be able to do something about it. Our landscapes, fauna, and flora have been changing for centuries, heading towards degradation, and in many cases already have. However, generations of people who have lost the art of seeing have failed to notice — and failed to care. The ecologists, agrarians, anthropologists and conservationists who have been crying out for us to see, struggle to get us to look up from our screens long enough to hear their prophetic warnings.

Indeed, what many today call our green and pleasant land is a poor representation of the abundance and beauty that came before. The dawn chorus of today is considerably quieter than in years gone by and fewer species make up its orchestra. A stroll along a farm hedgerow will yield far fewer birds, mammals and insects than the same transact walked 50 years ago, and even the presence of a hedgerow is a much rarer sight. However, for many of us, this is the only landscape we know and we judge what we currently have as the baseline for naturalness and biodiversity. Those who knew something different have long since passed this world, their stories of a different age, of hedgerows teeming with life, of diverse fields and meadows, of clear rivers teeming with fish and of beautiful and abundant farmland birds are all we have left of a world that is now gone — and even these stories are threatened from becoming out of print or lost in the course of time. What these men and women of old would tell us is that what we judge as natural has already been significantly degraded — we suffer from what ecologists term a shifting baseline syndrome. If we don’t realise this we will never try and restore what we have lost — which would be a monumental tragedy.

As a side note, this shifting baseline is reflected in the stories we tell, the images we take and importantly the children's picture books we produce. Although happily the majority of children's books still portray farms as being small, mixed, free-ranged and family-based, the industrial agricultural paradigm is still reflected in them. From big fields to heavy machinery to deep ploughing to bare soil — our children's books form in the minds of the young that this is what farming is supposed to look like, even though agrarians will tell you that some aspects on display are fundamentally unsustainable. Yet when a child looks at a field in the winter, with endless bare soil, or deep plough lines, they won’t be seeing anything unusual, the picture book has conditioned them to think this is normal.

It was once told to me that the best means of noticing something is wrong is to be greatly acquainted with it in its best condition and the best way to spot a forgery is to know the ‘real deal’ intimately. Taking this further, the best way to spot a landscape under the domain of abuse, neglect, and ill health is to be well acquainted with what a healthy landscape looks like. However, for most of us, a good farm is a rare occurrence in our industrial agricultural landscapes. They are like diamonds in the landscape², beautiful when we find them, but most are hidden away and are few and far between. Most of us don’t have the pleasure of living near one or having access to them. In the absence of good farms to rely upon as a stark comparison, we rely on developing our perceptions of what healthy individual elements of our rural landscapes look like so that we can spot landscapes undergoing degradation where these healthy features are absent. We need to become adept at noticing when soils look unstable when hedges are shorn to an inch of their life, and when the margins are devoid of bird song.

It was Wendell Berry who alerted me to the tragedy of the lack of perception in our farmed landscapes. In a section from his essay, Nature as Measure, Berry decries:

“There is no longer a considerable number of people knowledgeable enough to look at the country and see that it is not properly cared for — though the face of the country is now everywhere marked by the agony of our enterprise of self-destruction.”

It is an excellent quote, well worth us meditating on. And Berry is surely right. The average person passing our fields today may not perceive there is anything wrong in the landscape. However, our landscape bears the marks of a food system deeply ill. Soils are lost, and hedges are gone. The land is asked to bear more than it should to feed a food system built on profiligation, greed, and waste. Traditions and cultures are erased from the land, and wildlife no longer finds a home. But the class of people able to read the landscape, and notice and mourn for what is lost is lessening by the year.

Primarily we would expect this class to include farmers, and thankfully many are waking up and noticing that our agricultural landscapes are in deep trouble. But too many have been blinded, and still are, by the siren calls of the salesmen of Big-Agri and what Paul Kingsnorth terms the Machine. These are the alluring calls of profits and productivity, of bigger and better, of greater horsepower, and greater speed, of technology and efficiency. The wise and good farmers who see behind the mask of industrial agriculture for the violent, destructive force that it is are sadly few — lambasted in the past as old fuddy-duddies, traditionalists who don’t want to move with the times.

It would do some of our industrial-minded farmers well to get down off their tractors and to work in and with their soils, following the practice of the wise farmers of old. It is much harder to notice the condition of the soil or the effect one’s practices are having when you are sitting high up in a tractor than when you are working down on the ground with a plough or hoe. Proximity matters greatly when seeing. There is a reason why we get up close to many objects when we want to see them well — it is only up close that the details, intricacies, and peculiarities become clear and visible — and spectacular. Our vision is enriched even as we focus in on a small area. The same for the farmer, while each field may look the same, the good farmer will notice the subtle (and not so subtle) variations in soil quality, type, gradient, and land health that can be present even across one field. But to do so, the farmer will need to get up close and personal to his soil, take it in his hands, and get dirt underneath his fingertips.

Not all farmers are at fault — and this must be stressed. It is encouraging to see regenerative and agroecological practices becoming popular, and more farmers are reading and following the advice of sages such as Wendell Berry, James Rebanks, and Adrian Bell. Indeed, many farmers earnestly wish they could do more for their land, for they know that the land cares for those who treat it well. However, their already tight budgets constrain their ability to be the stewards they desire to be. Our governments have tried to avert the problem with numerous stewardship schemes, grants, and policies, but the whole system needs changing rather than just tinkering with the edges³. Until our farmers are paid well and share the prosperity of the food system (and not just the monetary offcuts) then the health of our lands as a whole will not improve (barring tremendous personal sacrifice from our farmers).

But more so the fault lies with the consumer and the economy who demand low prices from our farmers and fail to value properly our natural spaces. Our countryside is becoming more inaccessible. Our natural history and agricultural literacy is shameful. And our infatuation with technology means we rarely look up to notice our surroundings let alone take the time to learn the names of the trees, birds, and flowers around us. What we do not cherish, we lose, and what we do not see, we do not cherish. It is time we learnt this lesson.

So ultimately, the sorry condition of our landscape lies at our feet. We the consumer have backed farmers into an impossible and perilous corner with our demands for ever cheaper goods leaving them with no margin left to farm their land well. Moreover, having done so, we fail to notice the legacy of our demands, unable to perceive the damage done to our wild spaces on our behalf. When we look at agricultural landscapes that are depleted of biodiversity, with their soils wrecked, hedgerows stripped, and rivers loaded brown with sediment, what we are seeing is the visual representation of our collective desires for cheap and convenient food. Our agricultural landscapes bear scars that we are responsible for as it is our desires that the farmers are catering to. They have to make a living from the land — and as prices for their produce fall even further, that means scrapping ever closer to the bottom of the barrel of our once-rich agricultural soils.

If enough of us were to open our eyes and see the devastation that marks many of our rural landscapes, and then realise that in part, we are responsible for what we see, perhaps through a sense of warranted guilt enough of us would change our consumptive patterns and start paying the proper price for our food, giving farmers the money and time they to heal the land that bears the scars of our demands. Our land can become green and pleasant once again, full of hedges and woods teeming with birds and butterflies and rivers running clear. But for this to become reality will require us to open our eyes, to see what is diseased and unhealthy, and take responsibility for the lands we all as citizens have been entrusted with. Ultimately we will need to provide our farmers with sufficient funds so they are able to steward their land well, while at the same time providing bread for their own tables.

Our farmers want to create landscapes full of beautiful things to see and behold — let’s give them the chance to.

1. Norman Wirzba alludes to this fact in his book, Agrarian Spirit.

2. Wendell Berry, Nature as Measure.

3. Jake Fiennes, Land Healer.