I’ve just popped outside hugged a tree. It was a long and unexpectedly emotional embrace. I’ve admired this beech from afar since moving house last year but had, until now, neglected to get to know it properly.
I was reminded to do so by 30 Days Wild this week, a month-long campaign led by the Wildlife Trusts in which 11,000 people (and counting) have signed up to do something wild every day. Hugging a tree is probably the least original act among 101 ideas, such as discarding shoes and socks to feel grass beneath your feet or recording birdsong to make a wild ringtone. Those tweeting #randomactsofwildness have been watching tadpoles swimming through a cattle trough, or swerving the mower around buttercups in their lawn, or taking direct action – from liberating a trapped woodlouse to writing to their MP about an environmental issue.
This campaign follows Project Wild Thing and the National Trust’s 50 Things to Do Before You’re 11 and 3/4 in seeking to re-establish our connection with the natural world. Some cynics might cringe at the breezy, upbeat tone but they are an energising, positive response to the deep gloom over our failure to halt the steady degradation of the natural world. We have to touch wildlife for it to touch us, and as long as we live in a country where a disorientated heron can find its way into No 10 Downing Street – as occurred last week (sadly the prime minister was away on business) – then there must be hope. As I stretched my arms around the beech tree’s ample girth, I discovered tiny things I’d never noticed before: silver snail trails meandering over its greeny-grey bark, a minuscule lime-green spider, the wind singing in its leaves. I also felt an unexpected sense of dependance: I needed this tree more than it needed me.
You … badger vaccinator
For anyone seeking to leaven wild pleasures with more political acts, the badger cull offers plenty of opportunities. The approach of the third badger culling season in parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset has been met with a new wave of anti-cull activism. After pressure from campaigners, Caffe Nero has said it won’t source milk from farms participating in the cull. Protesters are now targeting Sainsbury’s, raising money to buy shares to voice their opposition to its sourcing of milk from badger cull farms at its AGM on July 8th. Other people are becoming badger vaccinators – the “big society” solution to the problem of bovine TB. There are now more than a dozen volunteer-led vaccination programmes, helping farmers as well as wildlife. Derbyshire Wildlife Trust last year raised more than £54,000 to begin the latest in Peak District national park; it is supported by a £98,600 grant from Defra and even the National Farmers Union has joined in. These programmes prove one indisputable fact: vaccinating badgers is cheaper than shooting them.
Mini me
My new home village of Wroxham venerates the miniature. Two narrow-gauge railways have been joined by Miniature Worlds, which I visited with my children for the first time last weekend. This is a warehouse containing several astonishing model railways built by three generations of local men who run a coach company when not placing, say, a tiny Tardis in a pastoral scene. Watching trains trundle through Alpine meadows and past a Lilliputian Lidl in “Europa” was mind-bending. I was transported into these places, seeing myself in miniature. Such shifts in perspective remind us how inconsequential we truly are, which can be profoundly comforting. Or perhaps it was just typically English fun: small in stature and stupendously strange.
