For Love of the Feral
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There is always something so feral about the end of summer in the city; well-worn summer dresses falling apart at the seams, silt-coated swimmers walking back from the Heath and the bodies of dead foxes at the side of the road, where fast cars and Lime bikes go by. These foxes always play on my mind – wild things gradually domesticating themselves, picking at meals and perhaps dreaming of full ones, not realising that stolen food is tastier for a fox than that which is plainly given. Darting around as if the streets are quieter than they are, prowling the trash, they inspire a fondness in me, as they tread a line between urban and country life just as people often do.
Nietzsche insists that we are all feral, by nature of being human. ‘Man, in his highest and noblest capacities,’ he writes, ‘is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.’ Should we try to repress our feral sides, resentment festers and grows; Nietzsche insisted that we would be better off integrating our feral sides, to live fully, and embracing the wilderness within.
And yet he warned again romanticising nature, too, of being too idealistic. Nature is not comforting; it is ‘wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time.’ Living according to nature, he insisted, meant living within the wild force of life itself, rather than sampling a romanticised, pastoral version. It meant being a fox in the city, but never becoming a dog. It meant picking at scraps desperately, and dying from the force of a car, if not a storm.
When we have been driven from nature, there is a lingering need to reconcile with that disconnection in a pragmatic and meaningful way.
Over the past few months, I read two new books about the dissonance between humans and the countryside, and our attempts to marry the two. Both focused on recent disagreements in the land access movement – the degree to which we should be allowed to be in the countryside, roaming more freely than currently allowed – and perhaps more to the point, who should have this freedom, and how.
In Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance, a new book of essays and images by Leah Wood, Stephen Ellcock and Annabel Edwards, the authors provide a cultural and historic record of the land access movement in the UK. To begin with, Woods writes about the forced eviction of 70,000 people in the Islands and Highlands of Scotland in the nineteenth century (including some of my own ancestors) – sent off to Australia, Canada and America to be replaced by grazing sheep. In their ‘New World’, evicted Scots often took over the land of indigenous people there, replicating their own evictions with new settlements. Similar patterns play out globally, in ever more crushing ways, and the more pain is harvested from these endeavours, so are the stories and myths – we dream of a place before everything went wrong, where we might imagine we could be free. Whether it’s a new world or an old world, it is not this world. And yet we live only in this world.
While in Scotland, people were evicted from the land and sent off abroad; in England, as Leah Woods writes in her opening essay, workers were more gradually moved off the land, and often settled in the cities. ‘Common people’, the peasants, lost access and rights to common land ‘through the enforcement of laws, extreme brutality and suffering that benefited English landowners’; between 1604 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, 5,200 enclosure bills were enacted in this manner.
In England, through this process, working class people were systematically banned from hunting fish and animals on land they had once had access to; such hunting was labelled as illegal poaching, and various forms of small-scale farming were also made economically unviable. Those who had once worked the land became city-dwellers and factory workers, sometimes labelled as ‘vagabonds’ if they drifted. Driven from nature, some became feral in new ways, seeking the lost connection in urban places, or finding novel ways back to a sense of wilderness. But they were criminalised for this behaviour; their journeys back to nature were damned as trespassing, their sustenance ‘poaching’.
When people were driven from their land, they and future generations also lost their connection to nature, which had been not merely sentimental or material, but also spiritual. The battle over land rights, in Scotland, England and elsewhere, is not just about class dynamics and injustices in a material sense, but also about the deprivation of an emotional connection to our ancestors.
To have no land of one’s own, or be limited in accessing the countryside, emerges for many as a painful existential crisis; when we have been driven from nature, or never experienced it freely, there is a lingering need to reconcile with that disconnection in a pragmatic and meaningful way, and finding ways to access nature otherwise closed off seems an obvious route, leading to movements like the grassroots political movement campaigning for greater land access in England, Right to Roam. Or we may commune with nature in more spiritual ways; at raves, pilgrimages and rituals, seeking to expand our feral selves beyond the confines of urban life, whether specifically aligned with a political movement or not. In these ways, people are given the freedom to reconcile with the inherently feral side of human nature that they may have been otherwise disconnected from.
To love the natural world is to take care of it, to allow it to be free.
Perhaps because land is so important to people, it can be easy to overlook the responsibility we all have to protect land for its own sake, however, and for the wildlife that depends on it; to restrain aspects of our potentially feral side for the good of other feral things. As Patrick Galbraith has written in his new book Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Countryside, a love of nature can inadvertently lead to environmental degradation through tourism, regardless of the idealistic reasons for traveling. It is important, therefore, to question the assumption that a love or affinity with nature, or historical injustice, automatically means we should have access to it, and what being responsible to the land we love really entails. Perhaps the question to ask if not ‘what land are we owed?’ but also ‘what do we owe the land?’
To love the natural world is to take care of it, to allow it to be free, just as we often wish to be ourselves, and to carefully manage the downsides and difficulties of human exploration. We know that being in nature is important for us, Galbraith writes, but we also need to make sure that the harms of casual interactions are guarded against for our connection with it to be a lasting and defensible one. We need to be free, but we need to let the natural world be free and feral, too. This is the strange paradox of being human, and indeed of countryside politics.
In this vein, Galbraith explores the disconnect between the Romantic idealism of the land access movement and the complex reality of the countryside it wants access to. Considering the politics of the countryside from various perspectives, he points out the need to protect nature from people, whether they are landowners, folk artists, ravers or dog walkers, and however well-intentioned they may be. He also explores the uneasy relationship between big business, smaller farmers, the rural working class and visitors to the countryside. Those who access the land walk into these existing ecological and social systems, which hang in a delicate balance.
In Scotland, which is often held up as a great model of civic freedom, there have also been some unforeseen negative consequences. While the tourism enabled by the Land Reform Act often benefits rural communities financially, there have been downsides. In Uncommon Ground, Galbraith describes many concerning scenes: campers turning on one another, dogs killing livestock, biking groups tearing through capercaillie leks (the congregation of very rare, large birds as part of courtship rituals) and contributing to their near extinction; waste strewn over remote beaches and woods. ‘Scotland should be looked at as an example of both the benefits and the harm that more access can bring,’ he writes, ‘and a big part of that is listening to those on the ground about their lives.’
Speaking with those people, Galbraith uncovers the nuanced issues facing rural communities and the wider environment, from managing deer populations, to encouraging systems where local communities can, to a degree, be sustained by the land and its animals and produce – what he terms ‘the creation of a very visceral connection with the land’. Often the rural working class, who also have a significant connection to the land, are erased in these discussions, as if only landowners and hikers exist, and yet they are the ones doing all the work to keep everything running, and the knowledge to innovate where necessary. They also have rights to privacy and respect; they live there all year round.
On the Hebridean islands off the West Coast of Scotland, for instance, inhabitants are often caught between the demands of catering for hordes of tourists and the companies that control the fishing and farming industries, all of which take a toll on the land and coast itself. While the dream of community-held islands persists, the costs of sustaining life on remote islands remains difficult to meet, regardless of who owns the land. More widely in Scotland, local farms are routinely bought up by huge companies, and old estates often run at a loss, usually propped up by other sources of wealth. It is perhaps inevitable that there is a strange disconnect between those tasked with managing and working the land, whether landowners or those working for them, and those who visit and enjoy the countryside and islands but are always passing through. They understand and know the land and its wildlife very differently.
Our enjoyment of nature is important, but there are other crucial issues too; nature is not there merely for our leisure, just as it’s not just there for our business. The natural world, and the land it is on, should not just be seen as a commodity that serves humans; rather we should be serving it. As Galbraith writes, ‘It’s only humans that feel we deserve to be able to walk uncontested across the land. And what does that mean for non-human life? It means fire, it means disease, and it means endangered species becoming even more endangered.’
The Right to Roam movement published a response to Galbraith’s book, in which they state that they support an ‘adaptation of the Scottish model of access but this is a qualified right, not a “free for all”: it is contingent on responsible conduct and contains exemptions to protect things like privacy, livelihoods and public safety,’ as well as conservation.
What remains, then, is how to manage the application of this idea, considering how to ensure that people access land responsibly as well as freely, and how access fits into preexisting countryside problems and structures. We need to bridge the gap between our ideals and the reality of the countryside, and also to consider what it might need from us.
If the land access movement is rooted in a love of nature and heritage, then it follows that protecting the natural habitat should be aligned with that cause. This may in time lead to a much more powerful movement that goes beyond access, and prioritises the natural world itself and our greater connection with it in the longer term. Concerns about access and leisure are clearly only one part of a much greater problem; those who manage farming and development bear the most responsibility for conservation given they do the most damage. But there must be more engagement all round; people can strengthen their own connection to the natural world as well as advocating for its long-term survival, which is exactly why Common People‘s documenting of the movement so far is so important and inspiring.
Romantic ideas about nature and rebellion have always galvanised the land access movement, but the challenge now is to be even more ambitious in scope of that vision – to be more radical. This is the only way that future generations will also have a connection with the land, and for the land itself to flourish long after our individual memories of it. The natural world requires more from us than rituals and roaming; it needs us to reframe our interaction with nature entirely and to help protect it as well as pass through.
As for being feral, we cannot avoid it, and perhaps it is the key, not the challenge, when it comes to taking care of the natural world. It is a mistake to fetishise the countryside too much, as Nietzsche warned; but to be aligned with our human selves is to better grasp the vast power of nature, the way in which it will consume us before long, especially if we insist on meddling with it. To love the feral, and to be feral, is to surrender to its force and our very small place in the world; it is to delight in that state rather than fear it.
We cannot conquer nature or even order it particularly well; we can ravage it, but it will ravage us back. The only sensible thing, which is also the only truly idealistic thing, is to respect it, to care for it, to love it. To swerve oncoming cars.
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Christiana Spens is the author of several books including The Fear (2023) and forthcoming novel, The Colony (2026).
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