We want to change it
This week: birthdays, trespasses and invisible women...
Happy Friday!
And welcome to edition 266—coincidentally, I discovered this week that 26/6 is also the birthday of one of you lovely paying subscribers! 🤗
Moving chronologically backwards from 26 June, other birthdays of note include Ballon d’Or winning writer George Orwell (25 June) and anarcho-syndicalist footballer Lionel Messi (24 June).
Oh, and your humble correspondent (me). 62 sleeps, people!
🥾 Read this story on my website
We need you to trespass
We have been banned from our land for too long.
Tomorrow is the 89th anniversary of the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932, when three coordinated groups of ramblers converged on the Peak District’s highest point to protest the exclusion of the common people from the common land.
Although walkers’ right to roam on common land and uncultivated upland was not legally protected until the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in 2000, the mass trespass on Kinder Scout became a potent legend that showed avaricious landowners that they wouldn’t have it all their own way.
Today, in 2021, we need trespass more than ever.
Criminalising the countryside
As I have written about in previous newsletters (here and here), the government is currently trying to force through legislation that will make trespass a criminal instead of a civil offence.
Outside of the landowners and their cronies in government, it is hard to find anyone in favour of this new law. Not even the police are in favour of powers that would have made TS Eliot liable for a prison sentence.
My MP assures me that this will not affect white middle class ramblers (he didn’t use those exact words, but he didn’t have to) and is only designed to exclude and incarcerate poor people who choose to live their lives closer to nature: Travellers.
The key word there is ‘designed’. Laws have a nasty habit of getting used for the convenience of those in power. Designed to imprison Travellers, used to imprison protestors. Why not?
What’s so depressing about this law is that the ruling minority even feel like they need the open threat of violence to keep us in our place. The vast majority of the land—our land—is already off limits.
Law breakers are law makers
92 percent of the countryside—our countryside—is already shut away behind PRIVATE KEEP OUT signs and, when I see one of those signs, personally, I keep out. Whoever put that sign up is clearly a bit of a dick so why would I want to risk bumping into them?
But access to the countryside is an inalienable right for all. Not only for the few who can afford to buy country estates or who have inherited titles thanks to ancestors who slaughtered peasants.
White middle class ramblers should stand up to support the Travellers who are rightly fighting to defend their livelihoods, but we should also take this moment to open up on all fronts.
As we’ve all found over the last year, that last scrap of land, that 8 percent, is not enough for us. We are not only a few, we are tens of millions. We want more and, to get what we want, we are going to trespass and trespass and trespass until the law collapses under its own weight. Law breakers are law makers.
It’s not even that we ask for much. We only ask that the Countryside and Rights of Way act be extended to include the right to roam on private land. This is already the law in Scotland. Scotland!
The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 (which came into force in 2005) gives everyone rights of access over land and inland water throughout Scotland, subject to specific exclusions set out in the Act and as long as they behave responsibly.
Our land, our law
To mark tomorrow’s anniversary of the Kinder Trespass, Extinction Rebellion is calling on every citizen to trespass ‘wherever and however they can’. I hope you will join them. Whether you join the trespass or not, Right To Roam and Extinction Rebellion have created some very useful materials that I think are important for us all to read.
Many land workers report abuse from ramblers, people who are expressing frustration at the iniquity of the landownership system towards the people who also labour under it.
Everybody Welcome sign to paste over PRIVATE KEEP OUT signs
As long as you respect that this is Mother Nature’s home: feel free to wander; you have the Right to Roam.
For our environment to survive, for our society to thrive, our countryside cannot simply be the preserve of those fortunate enough to own it. We want to be a part of the countryside; we urgently need to reconnect to nature. And until we can have a conversation about how best to make this happen, respectfully, we will keep coming back.
Will I be taking part tomorrow?
In a beautiful coincidence, I’ll be spending tomorrow out in the countryside, helping a group of young people take some of their first steps in the great outdoors.
As this is a professional engagement, I certainly won’t be encouraging my students to trespass, but I will ask them to help me count the number of PRIVATE KEEP OUT signs we see that seem to bar us from land ripe for roaming.
Our young people, no less than ourselves, need the natural world for the sake of their physical and mental health, but also—I learned this week—we need access to nature for the sake of our continuing existence on planet earth.
Individuals with greater nature relatedness are more likely to adopt a sustainable lifestyle and have greater well-being. … This result implies that by nurturing nature relatedness, societies will achieve the double dividend of well-being and sustainability.
These were the findings of a Spanish study published earlier this month. Spending time in nature is the keystone of a healthy society and, in England and Wales at least, there is not enough nature to go around.
For the sake of our future and the future of our children, we need you to trespass and win back our inalienable right to nature.
Trespass with us
I think it’s fitting to end with the final words of this video posted by Nick Hayes, one of the minds behind Right To Roam:
We want a deeper relationship with nature and each other.
We don’t want to break the law. We want to change it.
Books Make Books
Invisible Women / Caroline Criado Perez
Exposing data bias in a world designed for men
Although Invisible Women supplies women with an enormous cache of ammunition to use to fight for justice at home and at work, the people who really need this book are men.
I say this after a conversation about the book with a female friend who said that she found the book rather repetitive: each chapter—excellent in isolation—drills home the same central idea over and over and over again: that there is a systematic gender data gap that not only inconveniences women, but actually kills them.
I observed that repetition into submission is exactly what men will need before they’ll get the message.
I imagine that a lot of women will find Perez’s barrage of statistics tremendously validating, but I don’t think many women will be surprised to learn that, globally, females do twice the unpaid childcare work and four times the unpaid housework compared to their male counterparts.
Nor will it comes as a surprise to women that this unpaid care work, irrefutably essential for the smooth running of society, is not accounted for when designing transport systems, workplaces and public services. Bus routes that don’t connect the places women need to go, insufficient and poorly paid care leave, a tax regime that penalises women’s economic activity.
None of this will come as a surprise to any human woman—and that’s kind of the point of the book.
The gender data gap is there because fifty percent of data isn’t collected and fifty percent of stories aren’t told. The pervasive ‘default male’ approach scientific research, product design, news media and the arts means that, most often, women simply aren’t consulted.
I could rant on, but I’ll leave you with one powerful contrast that nimbly demonstrates the yawning gap between women’s experience and the design of our societies.
‘Staring, touching, groping, ejaculation, exposing genitalia and full rape’: women get sexually harassed on public transport. A lot. A 2016 survey of 6,000 French women found that 90 percent had been victims of sexual harassment while travelling on public transport.
From conversations with female friends, I knew that men had a serious problem with sexual violence on public transport, but I had never truly grasped the extent of our problem. I’m beginning to now.
The powerful contrast that Perez draws is this: although I’m better informed about sexual violence against women on public transport, I still have no idea how to go about reporting this criminal behaviour. For a violation so serious and affecting so many people, I have never once seen any public information posters or heard any announcements telling victims and witnesses what to do.
This lack of clear information goes part way to explaining why, according to Transport for London’s estimates, ‘90% of unwanted sexual behaviour on London transport goes unreported’.
On the other hand, as Perez points out:
Most authorities seem to have managed to install clear signage about what to do in the event of spotting a suspicious package.
In the case of the UK’s ‘See it, say it, sort it’ anti-terrorism campaign, with its frequent loud announcements at every train station and on every train, it’s almost impossible to evade knowledge of what to do.
I would love to compare the number of victims of sexual violence with the number of victims of terrorist attacks on public transport over the past ten years. But I can’t because one of those statistics only affects women and thus isn’t properly collected.
Rather than terrifying the populace about the occasional abandoned backpack, our society would be much better served by public information campaigns that aim to eliminate the constant daily abuse suffered by half our population.
Tonight is World Book Night. Men: do yourself a favour and buy Invisible Women.
~
Thanks to G.C. and N.C. for the inspiration.
Any more for any more?
Cleaner teeth for £3.64
I’ve been wanting to try using a ‘magic eraser’ to clean my teeth for ages. The appearance of black veins on my two front teeth gave me the perfect excuse. The good news is that it works! The bad news is that, on closer inspection, I really need to go to the dentist.
Thanks to M and B.G. for first telling me about this cunning life hack.
All the trees
Series ‘Tree’ of Trees A Crowd, the spin-off podcast of Foiled alumnus David Oakes, is uprooting the secrets and stories of the fifty-six (ish) native trees of the British Isles.
The first three episodes, covering our native conifers (meaning ‘cone-bearing’, although two of them don’t bear cones), are already out and our broad-leafed friends will follow in instalments every Tuesday—in, we are promised, taxonomical order. David Oakes, you poser!
Thanks and welcome
Thanks to everyone who shared and commented on the last email—and welcome to all you lovely new readers.
If today’s newsletter made your inbox a better place, then I’d be honoured if you clicked one of these soothing lavender-coloured buttons:
Have a great weekend!
Big love,
dc:
CREDITS
Hello, I’m David Charles and I’m a UK-based writer and outdoor instructor. Say hello by replying to this email, or delve into 500+ other articles on davidcharles.info.
11.58 percent funded ▲▲△△△△△△△△△△△△△△△△△△
This email took me three hours to write, work that is entirely supported by lovely readers like you 😁 ‘100 percent funded’ means I’ll be earning £50 a week. You can join my little gang of paying subscribers for £30 a year—less than 60p per newsletter.
Half marathon training totaliser ▲▲▲▲△△△△△△△△△△△△△△△△
Back in 2015, at my first ever half marathon, I set a personal best of 1:29:12. Six years later, I’d quite like to be able to run that far again. Target time: sub 100 minutes.