or leasing, though they may not be able to find the money quickly enough and compete with commercial groups or, as increasingly happens, wealthy individuals who want to own a woodland for their own use. While local people can be enthusiastic about engaging with shared woodland ownership, this has tended to be centred on the events pro- gramme, conservation and woodland planting, rather than maintenance and harvesting, which often need expensive expertise. At Chopwell Wood, near Gateshead, a friends’ scheme provides a range of activities with Forestry Commission expertise on hand. That is the kind of thing that will be lost. There is something about smelling the damp in a pine forest, or kicking beech leaves in the autumn, or taking a close look at a bud about to burst open, that lifts the soul. Access to forestry has been shown to have a positive impact upon health, with recent research in Scotland finding that having access to wood- land enhances fitness and lowers heart rates. In 2003, a study of hospital patients found that those who had a bedside view of trees were discharged earlier. Indeed, the connection between trees and the nourishing of the soul is an ancient one. The Bible uses trees, and the need for fruit trees in the Middle East to be planted next to water channels so that their roots receive moisture, as a metaphor for abundant living and wholeness. The oaks of Mamre (Genesis,18:1ff) offered a place of rare shade where spirits could be restored and Abraham offered hospitality, realising a divine encounter with God and two angels. Our forebears were inspired to take the soaring trunks and spread- ing canopies into the designs of our great medieval cathedrals; woods and forests con- tinue to be places of divine encounter for many people. I have taken inner-city children into the forest on Teesside and seen their initial fears of the landscape slowly turn to joy as they sensed a new freedom and wonder. For me, having open access to a landscape helps strip away some of the complexity of life and enables an enjoyment of the sacrament of the present. Perhaps this was what St Bernard of Clairvaux, writing in the twelfth century, meant by: “You will find something more in woods than in books. The trees and stone teach you what you never learn from the masters.” Once our woods are sold they are forever lost to our nation as treasures in its care. In responding to the consultation, we must urge the Government to remember that forests take years to mature and seconds to be destroyed. The Forestry Commission has treated the public forest estate as a whole body where the common good and commer- cial profit form a balanced partnership. This must remain the foundation for the future so that our forests will continue to be places that are enjoyed by the many, not the few.
■The Revd Canon Graham Usher is Rector of Hexham Abbey and chairman of the Forestry Commission’s North-East England Advisory Committee. The views expressed here are entirely his own.
SARA MAITLAND
‘We have placed the idea of beauty on a different plane from justice and truth’
This week I learned a new word to describe the countryside I live in: Mamba (it is an acronym for a run of words beginning “miles and miles of …”). The word describes what I have called “The Huge Nothing” – wide, lifting moorland where there are no spectacular mountains, ancient deciduous woodland, romantic cliff faces and waterfalls or anything else; just a lot of space and few sheep; where there isn’t anything much to catch the eye and so you learn to look attentively but without specific focus. One difficulty with Mamba is that the people who love it tend to love it passionately, but there are not very many of us. For most people it is just waste space. It offers few employment opportunities, it makes little money for its owners and (I think) a surprising number of people find it scary. This makes it very vulnerable – and at the moment it is vulnerable to wind farm development. Until a few months ago, coming up the single track road to my house, I got long views of my home sitting serenely in the Mamba. Now the cottage has acquired a crown of wind turbines like a crown of thorns.
I cannot help but see two dozen
brand new turbines, ranged along the hill line; I cannot help but know there are about another 150 of them, many much closer to me, being planned. This presents me with a dilemma. It is basic justice that we in the West who use such a disproportionate amount of power should carry the aesthetic cost rather than, for example, the people of the Nigerian delta be poisoned. Our global oil use is not sustainable. (Even nuclear generation is not truly sustainable because there is not an infinite supply of uranium.) Dependence on anything that is in shortening supply leads to further suffering for the poor. Additionally, if most people find the turbines ugly then putting them on the high moor where there are not many people is both sensible and fair. Yet I find them shockingly, painfully ugly. These new
generation turbines are enormous – 145m high, taller than a 20-storey tower block. They are disproportionate to their surroundings; they catch the light in distorting ways; they break the line of the hill; they introduce new colours and sharp distinct lines; they don’t belong here, because they are very precisely not Mamba. My problem is that beauty and justice are both intrinsic to the nature of God. It is therefore impossible – since God cannot be self-contradictory – that ultimately justice and beauty can be in conflict any more than, say, truth and love can. The beauty of God has a rather
low profile at the moment; I can find hardly any contemporary theology on this relationship. Since I cannot get rid of the turbines and do believe they are just, I must learn to find them beautiful. But how? Any suggestion that one might wilfully decide to change what one thinks of as beautiful is regarded as almost pathological, although we are regularly admonished to change what we think of as “true” or “good”. We have placed the idea of beauty on a different plane from ideas about justice and truth. I sense this would have been inimical to a pre-modern theological sensibility. If God is indeed beauty then I need to shift my thinking from mere personal taste into a wider arena. Two possible ways forward seem to be increasing the amount of praise in my own prayers and reading mathematicians who believe that a beautiful, elegant proof is likely to be a good proof. This is not just about wind turbines; it is not just about our relationship to and treatment of nature, although that is a pressing issue. But, for instance, one question about the new translation of the English Missal that never seems to be asked is whether one of the intentions of the translators is to lead us to that divine beauty and, if so, whether an ugly translation can be a good translation. I need a theology of beauty. To
paraphrase David Jones … As moral beings we hunger and thirst after justice; as artists we hunger and thirst after form, and although these two are ultimately one because “the beauty of God is the cause of being of all that is” nevertheless for us they are not one, not yet, not by any means. How might I set about making them one?
■Sara Maitland is a novelist and writer.
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