280 pages
Published 2017
Read from May 15 to May 16
Rating: 4 out of 5
By the close of the ’00s, at the latest, it had become depressing to read ecological books from the 1990s and earlier. After a litany of losses and dire warnings for the future, such books would always close on a note of optimism — there’s still time! The worst has not yet come to pass! We just need to act now!
Living in a time when worse things have (and continued to) come to pass, we know all those optimistic codas added up to an exercise in comforting self-delusion. Capitalism would never be diverted from its consumption, its heedless self-absorption, its global destruction. No one with any real power ever acted to help. We’re all going down with the ship.
The pace of destruction, in fact, has worsened to the point that, today, even a book from 2017 feels hopelessly dated and woefully optimistic. Fiennes withholds no contempt from Britain’s Conservative government, and yet within the space of six years from this publication the Tories would unleash fresh ecological devastation and capitalistic horrors beyond anything documented here. They’re close to axing all environmental protections. Every day ancient woodlands fall, and now sewage is getting released untreated into Britain’s waterways, because deregulation, because Brexit, because capitalism. We’ve regressed to the days of industrial barons exploiting and poisoning the people and the countryside without any pretense of public safeguards. It’s a jarring reminder of the accelerating growth of fascism here in the “find out” phase of capitalism’s fuck around history.
Fascism is always the last bulwark of defense for capitalist systems in decline; now the entire world is in decline. “The authorities don’t like forests,” Fiennes writes in a chapter that began with Robin Hood, “because they don’t like places where people can hide.” Yet another layer in the long history of authoritarianism and its antipathy toward the world. Is it any wonder that capital never stepped up to curb the devastation it wreaked?
I’ve wanted to read this book since I first heard of it late in 2018. Since then, so much has changed… so much in the world has broken. I cried a few times reading this, wondering how much of the already impoverished and paved-over island ecosystem Fiennes described has been further destroyed. The very ash trees of the title, already dying when he wrote, are nearly gone.
Fiennes’ writing is often more conversational than poetic, rambling almost stream-of-consciousness through locations, literary quotations, concepts, asides. It’s no match for Helen Macdonald or Robert Macfarlane at their best, but whose prose is? I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though: this book is not lacking for beauty. The chapter where he condenses 7018 years of woodland history into 3509 words — two years for every word — is a marvel of wordcraft and structuring, offering evocative yet concise descriptions of the bygone wildwood, “a kingdom of trees” where people are outnumbered by wolves as recently as the Neolithic, and its accelerating diminution and destruction. Fiennes also excels at conveying details of atmosphere and at character sketches, the places and people from childhood rendered with a palpable sense of what has been lost, both natural and personal.
Really, this is a book of mourning more than it is a celebration of what remains or a sermon for its preservation. A note of “it’s too late, enjoy what life you can” pervades just beneath its pages. And perhaps that’s more honest, less willfully naïve, than the ecological optimism that came before it. If the powers-that-be are heedless, well… we’ll have to make them heed, any way we can, or else we all perish.
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