Mark writes: Ian Carter is a frequent contributor to this blog as a writer of book reviews, a series of Guest Blogs on Wild Food (but some others on other subjects) and as a commenter. I’m pleased to share this series of Guest Blogs from one of Ian’s writing projects with you. The first five of these Guest Blogs will appear this week and then the rest will follow as a regular Saturday blog for several weeks. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have enjoyed reading them.
Ian writes: This blog is the start of a series that describes an idea and charts a period of my life that I would characterise as a mini mid-life crisis, having left long-term employment in conservation. I hope to pursue the idea in due course but the series covers the background and the way that my thinking has developed so far. It is, inevitably, rather personal and perhaps a little self-indulgent but I hope the underlying theme will resonate with enough of Mark’s readers to justify the space over the next few weeks.
The idea of living apart from the rest of humanity for a spell diffused its way into my system, uninvited and almost unnoticed. It was coming up to two years since I’d taken voluntary redundancy, having worked for twenty-five years as an ornithologist with Natural England. I’d done a bit of freelance natural history writing since then and some voluntary work but nothing more. When I met up with relatives they would ask if I was enjoying my retirement. Is that what I’d done? At fifty, I didn’t think I could possibly have retired from full-time work. And yet the idea of returning to a career in conservation was unappealing.
In truth, I was disillusioned with the nature conservation industry, as it had become. This was only fully apparent with the benefit of hindsight. Leaving a job I’d done all my working life was a big step and one I was unsure about taking. But once I was free of it, the futility of the daily grind in an organisation enfeebled by financial austerity seemed all too obvious. I was proud of my involvement in a few conservation projects and felt that some had made a real difference, but there was nothing much to be proud of in the last few years. Pared back relentlessly, and overseen by a government for whom nature conservation was an inconvenience rather than an opportunity, Natural England had become a dispiriting place to work. Attending office meetings had increasingly felt like being in a sketch show; a parody of nature conservation with the actors resorting to ever more ludicrous jargon and business speak in order to get their laughs. Sometimes I would imagine one of those fly-on-the-wall documentaries filming it all. They could have stayed for days at a time without getting many clues that nature conservation was the subject at hand. At times it was hard not to laugh out loud, if only as a way to deal with the despair of it all.
If it could seem funny it became less so when I caught myself using the jargon. It inveigled its way into my soul and my vocabulary, by osmosis. People became ‘individuals’ or ‘customers’ and projects were set up to achieve ‘quick wins’ or ‘win-wins’. In my final year one manager suggested that her new idea would result in a ‘win-win-win’ situation; a mere two wins, it seemed, were no longer enough. The final straw came when trying to explain what I’d been up to at work recently to an uncle at a family wedding. I heard myself use the words ‘going forward’, out loud, in front of people I knew. It suddenly felt like I was going anything but forward. It felt like it was time to get out and when the opportunity arose I decided to take it.
Once we knew I was leaving Natural England my wife, Hazel, and I started to think about moving away from Cambridgeshire. It is often pointed out that the United Kingdom is one of the most densely-populated countries on the planet; a place where the natural world is more effectively constrained and shackled by humanity than almost anywhere else. Within the UK, England supports the highest density of people and the most intensive land management. And within England, the fenland country of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire represents perhaps our greatest achievement in subverting the natural world to our own ends. A huge area of once impenetrable floodplain and marshland, teeming with wildlife, now serves as some of the most productive and intensively-managed arable farmland in Europe. Despite a life-long passion for wildlife and remote places, somehow I’d spent twenty-five years of my life living here, through a combination of circumstances and apathy. When I started work in 1992, I needed to live close to the head office in Peterborough. To the west of Peterborough was the pleasant rolling countryside of Northamptonshire with its patchwork fields and woodlands, honey-stoned villages, the upmarket public school at Oundle and impossibly high house prices. For a realistic first rung on the housing ladder it was necessary to look east and into the flatland fenland prairies. To be continued tomorrow…