Green and pleasant land?

Returning to blog again after a long break whilst I sat my finals I will start with a late blog regarding the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.

It was recently revealed that Danny Boyle has designed a huge British ‘countryside’ set to celebrate the ‘green and pleasant land’ of the UK.  His notion of the countryside and the implication that he is celebrating (fairly) wild nature is an indictment of our relationship with nature in my opinion. 

Firstly it is worth considering the phrase ‘green and pleasant land’, first penned by William Blake in the verse

‘And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!’

Here Blake used the phrase to complain that England’s ‘green and pleasant lands’ had been lost to the industrial revolution at the start of the 19^th century.  So when Blake used the phrase he was complaining about the state of wild nature in the UK.  Since then agriculture has been revolutionised such that the farms are now struggling to support wild ‘farmland’ birds.  Yet somehow Danny Boyle is celebrating the current state of English wild nature, using the term ‘the green and pleasant land’, which has been largely lost to industrialised agriculture since Blake used the term to complain that the industrial revolution had damaged nature.

Essentially, our concept of wild nature has shifted over time as cities and industrial farms have replaced more wild landscapes.  Hence it is hugely important that people are aware of what is wild and just what nature looks like when people don’t interfere too much.  Otherwise, successive generations grow up believing that the farmlands they see represent ‘nature’.  This problem has been termed the ‘falling baseline syndrome’ and has been neatly demonstrated with respect to fish stocks by showing that successive generations of sport fishermen have considered successively smaller fish to constitute a ‘big catch’.

If Danny Boyle is aware of the changes which have occurred to the English landscape over the past 200 years and still wishes to celebrate the British countryside then that is fine but I believe that he has a responsibility to communicate that to his audience.  I believe that there is still a lot to be celebrated in our dramatic coastline and protected areas however I do not agree that we should romanticise ignorantly over a countryside which largely doesn’t exist.

Moreover, the whole set strikes a chord with me in the way in which it aims to take control of nature by selecting a certain number of sheep and other animals, bringing them into the stadium and showing them off to the rest of the world.  If Danny Boyle wanted to celebrate our landscapes then I would far prefer it if he sent everyone to walk along the Welsh coastal path or the London WWT so that they could experience nature as people instead of spectators.  Nature should not be paraded we should be encouraged to go and explore it for ourselves.

Therefore I am sad that a largely false and romantic idea of the British countryside will be paraded in front of a stadium of spectators in the Olympic ceremony.  Yet perhaps some publicity is better than none.  I just wonder what Blake would say?