This will make some of you really, really angry.....

A few weeks also, or maybe its months now, I happened to film part of my walk, where the council are mowing the grass a lot. This seemed to me as a bit of waste, as the particular area was near a wilder area rich in birds, plants and insects, and is a very steep slop, meaning no one does any more with it than walk down concrete paths past it. I put a reel up on IG suggesting that perhaps we could try a different approach, that letting more urban spaces go a bit more wild would have a lot more benefits than the mown grass.

I have never had a reel about anything go viral before, but when I woke up the next day I had something like 20,000 views and dozens of comments, and it kept going. I don’t really understand how IG works, in how people ever find anything to look at, mainly because I rarely if ever search it for anything and just lazily doom scroll through it when on the loo, so I don’t know how people from America, Canada or Australia found my reel about where I live in Herne Bay, but they did, and they were passionate. 

The comments were divided roughly into thirds, two thirds of which seemed quite in favour of the idea and spoke about leaving verges and roundabout to grow a bit longer too, and me about places where it had worked for them. The remaining third were furious, very furious, at me, and they did not hold back. 

To give you a little context, though I never claim to know everything about anything, I know a little bit about re-wilding. I grew up North of London on the edge of the nature reserve my father set up and managed through the second half of his life. Although I suspect that his initial motivation was to prevent the woodland and fields by his house being built on and so spoiling his view, he did dedicate the rest of his life to tending it and promoting a wide range of environments, including meadows, which are even more vanished from our country than woods. 

Part of the mind set you need when you’re looking at conservation, is to stop putting the human always at the centre of everything, because the world doesn’t work that way. We might not like nettles and brambles, but these things are hugely valuable food plants for almost countless other creatures, so sometimes what looks to us like wasteland, is intensely precious.

So, I did took many of the negative comments to point this out, because sometimes I am foolish enough to think that if you present people with a reasoned argument, drawing on your valid experience and documented research, you might be able to support your case. I pointed out that of course, every place is different and you always have to make sensible decisions to balance re-wilding with human activity, as this is the best way to ensure it’s a success. I asked people to reframe how they see the mown areas as a sterile monoculture, and celebrate the difference just a few more plants in a space can make.

In return, I was called an idiot, and insufferable do-gooder, and even a spastic - which is a pretty retro insult. I had people tell me I was trying to destroy the world, that I had no right to speak about anything, and that the world would be better off if people like me were locked up. One man kept on replying to answers to his rants with ‘I’m not going to read that, I’m not your husband,.’ Which seemed so odd after a while that I began asking if he were ok and did he need to talk about anything?

People made troll accounts - you can spot them as they often have no profile picture, followers or posts - in order to insult me and make assumptions about how I must live in a hovel, not have a family, or wash, or be a vegan - I mean, I have to say the most shocking thing about this was the effort they put into attacking a stranger about not always mowing a small piece of land often thousands of miles away from them.

Obviously, the more insults I get, the more I will continue talking about this, because I am never going to not think planting more green spaces is not a good idea, one that will help combat heat in the summer, improve bio-diversity and our collective mental health - and I am not going to be silenced by a load of keyboard warriors who really need to get a life. 

But what it does make me consider, is why this gets people so angry?

I maybe should add here, and please forgive me if this makes you angry, dear reader, but again, I do have facts to back this up - not mowing the grass seems to make well, men, an lot more angry than anyone else. You’re welcome to add in here ‘ not all’, because plenty of men also agree with me and even came to my defence, but when it comes to negative comments, there was vast imbalance that was glaringly obvious. 

Most of the landscape we think of as natural, has instead been shaped by human intervention. Even things like bluebell forests only exist because Neolithic people cultivated them as they made a glue from their bulbs to attach arrow heads to their wooden shafts. Things being as they were, and are, a lost of these changes were created through conflict, conquest and ownership, the need to cultivate to create food for a population which became an asset too protect, fight over and take by force. Eventually, some people were successful enough and killed enough other people to make everyone else work for them - so much so that they could create land as they wanted it simply to be enjoyed, usually behind a wall to keep the rest of us out of it. We talked about ‘taming’ the wild, about making it work for us, to conquer it - we killed native people and wild animals to make it serve us better, and we destroyed vast parts of it simply to satisfy the material wants of the few. 

It may seem a huge leap to connect colonialism with the mowing of grass, but the status of mown grass is all about control. If you can control a patch of land and keep it how you want it, going against its nature to be longer, set seed and to be full of other plants, then that’s a power you have in some way earned, or you can convince yourself you’ve earned - or you ‘they’ can convince yourself you’ve earned. To suggest that we very occasionally let back in some of the natural world, is clearly an affront to a that sense of control, and perhaps that’s why it gets so many people a bit hot under the collar. 

Honestly, I could write about this for pages, but I realise you’re busy and maybe not as interested in grass as I am. I would like you to perhaps take a moment to consider why you have a reaction to the idea of not always mowing the grass you have, and interrogate it a bit. Maybe have a look at what an actual meadow looks like, and think about the ones I used to walk through as a teenager. When I did, I could count over a dozen different grasses and flower during the high summer, and as for the butterflies! Its the one thing I call upon when trying to explain to people younger than me what we’ve lost  - when I used to walk through the meadows back home, there were moments where you had to stand still, because the clouds of butterflies around you at high Summer took your breath away. 

You don’t see that now, in the twenty years since that’s mostly gone. And stinging nettles, one of the best food sources for caterpillars, are all part of bringing that back - if we learn to look at the world just a little bit differently.