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Speakers: Vron Ware, Jim Scown and Lara Choksey
Participants
LW = Lara Choksey
VW = Vron Ware
JS = Jim Scown
Recording starts
LC: Hi everyone, this is the Sarah Parker Remond Centre podcast. I’m Lara Choksey and I’m a lecturer in Colonial and Post-colonial Literatures in the UCL English Department. I’m being joined today by Vron Ware and Jim Scown for a conversation about soil. What can soil tell us about histories of colonialism, imperialism and racism? How does a countryside’s sensibility shape what it means to be English in modern Britain and its continued connections with its former colonies?
There have been waves of resistance to globalisation but it’s often difficult to track the political coordinates of these movements and they often go beyond post-1945 configurations of Left and Right. Right now, a resurgence of ethno-nationalism around the world is sometimes tied to calls for more local ways of living on and with the land, while global monocultures exploit and exhaust soilscapes for food production. Today, we’re going to talk about the histories of learning from the land that underpin these political realities.
Vron Ware is a writer and photographer whose multifaceted career has involved, among other things, working for the magazine Searchlight from 1977 to 1983 at Kingston University and The Open University, and from 1987 at the Women’s Design Service. She’s written extensively about race, gender and ethno-nationalism, colonial history, national identity and militarism. Her books include Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History from 1992, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture, co-written with Les Back, from 2002 and Military Migrants: Fighting for Your Country from 2012. Her forthcoming co-authored book, England’s Military Heartland is an account of the military presence on the Salisbury Plain.
Her most recent book, Return of a Native, published in 2022, is a part history, part excavation and part letter to the future, written from near the Hampshire village where she grew up. It was described quite accurately by Gary Young as ‘a bungee jump into the British countryside.’ She wanted to look at this ‘nowhere special place’, as she puts it, from different angles and so the book begins as she stands next to a signpost at a crossroads with eight placenames on it. From this signpost, she introduces ecological details of the landscape, its connection to a Caribbean sugar plantation, to military history, to a local campaign to reinstate common land, and then to thinking beyond these to how it might change in the future, paying attention always to what this landscape might want to tell us.
Jim Scown is lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Exeter. His research looks at the links between soils and understandings of nature, place and belonging from the beginning of the nineteenth century. After his PhD in the English Department at Cardiff University, Jim worked for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission for two years on a project for transitioning to a socially and environmentally just agrifood system. He’s working on two books, his forthcoming monograph, Dirty Realism: Soils, Science and the Victorian Novel, which puts the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and George Eliot into dialogue with nineteenth century sciences of agriculture and sanitation, and the book makes a case for these writers’ engagements with the capacity of various soils to impact lives and environments.
Jim’s also working on another book based on a series of walks with people who live and work closely with soils – farmers, scientists, artists and writers. This book will bring together the sciences and philosophies of nature and the politics of migration and belonging through the practical details of food and farming. Jim’s writing on nineteenth century literature often comes back to the global consciousness of these writers and how their plots operate through metaphors of rift and circulation, as well as their unsettled attempts to resolve the ecological ruptures of colonial capitalism through national solutions. His 2019 article ‘World ecology among the ooze’ offers a reading of the two central romances of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend as mirrors for national and imperial processes of sewage management.
In their work on soil and land, Vron and Jim have both written on a German scientist called Justus von Liebig, the organic chemist and fertiliser expert on whose work Marx based his concept of metabolic rift. And so we’ll also be discussing Liebig’s influence on modern soilscapes, both material and imaginative.
So welcome both, it’s great to have you on the podcast. Vron, the subtitle of your book is Learning from the Land, so this is a question for both of you – why does the ground matter in your work? Why is it a good place to start?
VW: Well, thank you, Lara. I did start writing about the village where I was from about 20 years earlier and found myself sort of caught up in all the problems of trying to write about a place with real people. And it was a bit like sort of tangling with some of the nineteenth century novels that Jim writes about, that there are some people you want to mention and talk to, and some people you want to ignore and then it’s complications about what you say about each people and all that kind of thing.
So, as I say, 20 years went by and I tried various other ways of accessing this project, which I felt I really wanted to do. I ended up going to this crossroads, as you say, by the signpost because it actually wasn’t in any particular place. It was a place between places and there was indeed a crossroads with a signpost to eight different kinds of places – small towns, larger towns, hamlets, villages, in four different directions. So I thought, well, I’ll stand there because this particular patch of ground, because it’s called a heath, had always interested me because it seemed empty.
So I stood there in my imagination and often in real life visited it and began by looking at the ground under my feet. This was partly a kind of instinct of thinking, well, there’s something about this soil that interests me in the fact that it’s full of flint and flint, to me, sort of led me back to, first, the difficulties of actually farming and producing food but also the prehistoric past and the fascination of what actually lies beneath and the possibility of finding stone age flint materials and artefacts; so, all kinds of things across a huge range of time and that began my enquiry.
At the same time, there was also a sense that the kind of soil it was had actually produced this place, because some parts of it were not really agriculturally productive and had led to certain kinds of arable and farming and it was downland. And then I looked at old maps and then another trail of enquiry began, simply based on the kind of soil it was and how that had produced these different communities. This is, essentially, a fairly… downland in North West Hampshire is currently in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, funnily enough, I didn’t know that, which kind of begins just sort of north of the house where I grew up.
So the house where I grew up, I should probably say, is about a mile and a half down the road so I knew this place very well. At the same time I didn’t really know it, I didn’t know that the land had been enclosed by someone who owned a plantation in St Kitts, I had no idea until I looked it up on the UCL site because it was in a different parish. And it turned out the parish boundary ran along this line of where I was standing at the crossroads so then I was like, what is a parish? Amazingly, there’s not much written about what parishes actually are and the history of parishes. So it was a very productive starting point.
It also interrogates what it is to be from somewhere and to know it really, really well. And although I hadn’t lived in this area for many, many years, I’d obviously visited it to see my family but I had never found a way of really coming to terms with what kind of place this was.
JS: I guess I came to the soil through George Eliot, which I guess is not the normal route to come to soil from. But I was interested in why Eliot set Middlemarch, Adam Bede in Loamshire, a region named for its soil. And I sort of had a hunch that if Eliot was very interested in Darwin’s Origin of Species and that kind of Gillian Beer’s work, very famous work, on Middlemarch as a sort of novel of entanglement that draws on Darwinian plots and all of this, perhaps Eliot was just as interested in Darwin’s work on soils and earthworms.
And that kind of grew from there, really, into this fascination with the Victorian novel and its relationships to soil, I guess, at a time when, still I think, there’s a kind of general sense of the novel. The realist novel is realist in its depictions of the inner workings of the mind, I suppose. And I guess I’m interested in the materiality of the novels as well, and particularly soils which crop up repeatedly in different guises, I should say, sort of loosely defined.
And then more generally since then, thinking and noticing, Vron mentions not a lot of work on parishes and there’s not a lot of work on soil, actually, from the humanities’ perspective, really. An awful lot of work on land, of course, and the representations of land and the politics of land but soil, if it’s used at all, kind of a sort of synonym if really considered in any way that’s distinct; while, of course, there’s been a huge amount of work on soil from the sciences through the twentieth century and, indeed, earlier as well.
And then thinking with some of the really important work in the environmental humanities from people like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour around hybridism and breaking down binaries. Soils are just great at that kind of… they’re not natural, they’re not cultural, they’re a mix of the two. They’re not wild, they’re not cultivated, they’re a mix of the two. They index the local but, as Vron explains with the sugar plantation, they’re always bound up for landscapes and places and processes further afield. And they’re not inert. They’re kind of in motion and I mean that kind of literally. They’re always churning and turning and changing with the life that fills them but there are also, yes, processes of imperialism and global capital in this way connected and connecting and linking places elsewhere, I find at least in my work.
LC: Vron, the title of Return of a Native is a play on Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, published in 1878, which is set in a rural outpost in Hardy’s fictional Wessex life world called Egdon Heath. So, to connect Jim’s work on nineteenth century novels and soil science to your book, I was thinking of Raymond Williams’ chapter in The Country and the City, ‘Unknowable Communities’, where he talks about the transformation of English pastoral communities by industrial capitalism and he gets there through a comparison of Jane Austen and George Eliot’s novels. Austen’s social worlds of the early nineteenth century are comprised of face-to-face encounters, so to belong to those worlds means knowing each other by face.
But by the time Eliot published Adam Bede in 1859, the same year that Darwin published The Origin of Species, these worlds are in decline. Registering the internal alienation of these communities by the growth of industrial capitalism, Williams says, ‘Eliot sets Adam Bede in the early nineteenth century and so the country folk in Adam Bede are background characters, archetypes, who establish the standards of moral conduct in the novel.’
But Hardy isn’t nostalgic about this at all. Eustacia Vye drowns at the point she’s supposed to leave the heath and it’s unclear whether this drowning was deliberate. One of the climatic images of The Return of the Native is of a local woman, Susan Nunsuch, burning an effigy of Eustacia to counteract a spell that she assumes that Eustacia has cast and then after Eustacia’s death, the novel’s returned native of the title, Clym Yeobright, becomes a local preacher.
Vron, your book is interested in patterns of connection between distant places so why was this figure of a returned native important to conceiving these patterns?
VW: As I mentioned before, having known a place for a very long time, you’re in a privileged position of being able to know quite intimately the ways in which it has registered the patterns of transformation across many, many different scales; not just economic and land values and the kind of social classes, people who come and live there and people who have left and people who have died and the memories and all that. I was able to access people who could remember it early in the twentieth century who could then look back and tell me about what their grandparents had said about the fact that, ‘Oh, this is all changing,’ and this is like in 1900. So I had that sense of a continuity of ways of knowing this place and, in particular, around the question of the class composition of the community. That’s quite a hard thing to convey.
So, going back to Williams again, one of the problems I wanted to address was this question of archetypes, the archetype of the rural village, the Hampshire village, as being somehow outside of history. I don’t know about you, Jim, but having come from a place, like people say, ‘Oh, where are you from? Where did you grow up?’ and you say, ‘Oh, hmm, kind of… you wouldn’t know it, a little village, rural Hampshire, dah-de-dah.’ And it’s not a place to feel like, ‘Oh, I come from…’ I can identify with coming from Birmingham or Manchester or North London or wherever.
It’s a nowhere place but I come from there. I come from outside of the world we’re in now because, of course, in my generation, born in the fifties, there was a migration to places like London. And, in fact, I went to Birmingham to be different for a while; to see what it was like to be in a real city, actually, to feel what it was like in a real city which had all the kind of problems of 1970s Britain – racism and unemployment and all those things. I wanted to immerse myself in that.
So, somehow going back to this idea of the village, and I mentioned I’d started to write about the village, it wasn’t my place anymore. I didn’t really know it, I didn’t really… I wasn’t really interested in it in the ways in which it had changed. I was most interested in what it had been, actually, and why it was there at all. When I finished the book, I went to Repeater to publish it and the then editor, Tariq Goddard, said one incredibly helpful thing. He just said, ‘Vron, we need to know a little bit about why you care.’ And so I went back and I added in a thing about my long relationship with it and seeing that as an opportunity to understand these changes over a long period of time.
And then I came across Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age in which there was a small section in the introduction about writing history, what it is to write history now. It has this sort of wonderful reach of prehistory and sense of time stretching in all directions, because he ends up by saying the phenomenological experience of someone in a particular place at a particular time who can convey their experience of what it’s like. And I felt like, well, I can do that. So that’s the native.
This book also belongs in a longer project that I’ve had, a lifelong project, of really writing about Englishness. Britishness is one thing but actually about being English and expanding the category of Englishness to include all the people who have made this country I think is really important.
And I think the pogroms of last month have really shown why that’s so important. It’s very intractable, this sense of what it is to be English, and I see some ways in which it’s changing through things like a kind of reclaiming of folk music by Black English musicians and certain pockets where it’s kind of moving but it’s been very stuck for a long time. And these archetypes are rural, i.e. white, outside history and urban or metropolitan. Raymond Williams has said they retain their kind of persistence in a way that’s really unhelpful. So that was really my aim – to be someone from outside but to go back in and sort of muddle it all up and break down those barriers.
LC: I’d like to pick up Vron’s point about methods of writing about history in a way that pays attention to a much larger range and scale of details and events than the political, the economic and the social. Jim, could you tell us about your work with the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission? You were co-leading a project on farming transition, so what was that about? How did you get involved with it? And has your work for the Commission and on this project changed the way that you think about literary representations of rural life in Britain and its local histories?
JS: To take Raymond Williams again as a useful starting point, as he so often is, he talks about the sort of conveyor belt of a sort of idealised past and the fact that it was always better 70-80 years hence. And then you go back 70-80 years hence and it was better 70-80 years hence and etc. etc. and it just keeps going.
And at the moment in the context of farming and agriculture in Britain, there’s a lot of discussion around a transition, a transition to a more ecologically attuned agriculture that wouldn’t be using chemicals – herbicides, pesticides – but would also have a kind of social justice component, I think, at its core as well around food and access to healthy food and access to good food for everyone, rather than just those who can afford it.
And I think in this sort of discussion, there’s an implicit kind of framing and perhaps assumption that what came before, say, the 1950s and the chemical intensification of agriculture from then onwards was ecologically more sustainable. It’s a point of return, it’s a point to return to around, say, rotational cropping – we could get into the real nitty-gritty of working the land, right?
But something I’ve been, and was increasingly, interested in during my PhD and since was the ways that actually the British food system of the nineteenth century was incredibly global already. If there is a sort of ecologically more benign agriculture within Britain, it’s often co-dependent on far more exploitative and extractive agricultures elsewhere, say, the mass importation of American grains following the repeal of the Corn Laws, for example, in the 1840s. Or my colleague, Paul Young at Exeter, does a lot of work on the global meat markets of the late nineteenth century and how the appetites for meat in the industrial city were sort of satiated by meat imported from South America, from New Zealand, from Australia.
And the countryside increasingly in those years becomes part of rather than apart from fossil fuel-driven modernity. Chemical manufactured fertilisers are a multimillion pound world industry by the end of the nineteenth century, albeit exponentially increase post-World War II and with synthesisation of nitrogen via the Haber-Bosch process in the early twentieth century.
So I think it’s important then to flip your question, Lara, about how has that transition made me think about literary representations, actually to bring some of those literary skills, I guess, of close reading, and of a longer historical awareness, to the challenges of this transition. Because if we’re talking about justice and fairness as core to that, it’s unlikely to be simply a case of technoscientific used generally to refer to rotations of crops as well as shiny new technologies, as that term is often used to define solutions. It's going to be a deeper engagement with the sort of food cultures England and Britain have ingrained and depend on.
LC: It seems to me that we’re circling around soil as a place to think about conceptions of national health. So, could we move to a closer context for this conversation, and Vron already mentioned it, the pogroms in the UK earlier this summer when England flags were raised with the words, ‘Refugees not welcome’ and ‘No more mosques’ on them, while rioters attempted to destroy hotels and shops lived in and owned by migrants and migrant communities. In Southport some of these rioters were bussed in from Wales and the West Midlands.
So, there’s been a justified contextualisation of these pogroms in a longer history of de-industrialisation and then the more recent effects of austerity and privatisation over the last 14 years in these parts of the country. And this is generally set against an out of touch metropolitan liberal elite but there’s much more going on here. This history goes back much further than the 1970s or even the 1940s and both of you are getting at this. How do we understand places that don’t seem as obviously, for want of a better word, radicalised as also part of this moment?
Vron, at the end of a chapter in Return of a Native, you connect the rising popularity of the Far Right in rural communities to the decline of mental health services in those areas. You say, ‘the lure of the Far Right, the influence of online sites advocating gun violence, and the relative availability of firearms all suggest that whatever we think rural means, life in those parts remains utterly contemporaneous with the most metropolitan areas of the country, not to mention other parts of the world.’ So, this is another question for both of you – how can these continuities between rural life and larger cultural scales help us understand what is going on now?
VW: I wanted to try and say how much I appreciated Jim’s work and actually coming to some of the same issues through his reading of nineteenth century literature and had no idea that they were a resource. Obviously I understood about the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation and all those big kind of concepts, but actually the questions of agriculture and draining the land, for example, I came much more aware of that as I was writing my book.
But then reading Jim’s work I had never really met anyone outside fairly refined circles who’d written about Liebig, for example, the German organic chemist, who I’d just discovered in writing this book and thinking about soil and fertiliser. And coming to understand how absolutely incredibly important this was for understanding the history of economic transformation central to capitalism. It was incredible reading Jim’s work and having that sort of sense of, as I say, the placing Liebig, the scientist, in a different kind of context. And the idea that he’s best friends with George Eliot was really mind-blowing. And I went on to look at Liebig’s influence in the world of, for example, infant feeding formula and meat extract and Oxo cubes and all this other stuff that took me far into the sort of trenches of World War I. A phenomenal impact of thinking about food and the effects of urbanisation and the huge increase in populations and diet and hunger and metabolism and all these issues.
So, it’s quite hard to answer your question, really, about the contemporary without thinking of a more kind of historically grounded understanding of where the connections are. Stuart Hall wrote very interestingly in the turn of the century, in the Millennium, about the history of British multiculturalism as an ideology and how, for so many years, the idea of the communities who arrived in the sixties and seventies from the Caribbean and the new Commonwealth were entirely associated with cities.
So, race and immigration were seen as urban problems and urban issues and people could see on their TV screens things happening in cities that were nothing to do with what was happening in rural areas. Now, that was the world I grew up in and that was one reason I went to live in Birmingham because there was a sense that there was nothing really happening in these sort of out of the way English villages that could tell you anything about these issues and these problems, other than these kind of residual colonial attitudes that I’d been brought up with.
JS: What I love about Return of a Native is how it takes a lot of this kind of, what can feel, I think, quite abstract analysis and history of, say, Liebig’s influence on the nineteenth century and since food system, and roots it in place and shows its impacts. And not only Liebig, of course, the impacts of many other of those processes on particular landscapes which is influencing my thinking hugely.
Liebig is a fascinating, totally fascinating, figure and, interestingly, kind of not ignored exactly but certainly neglected, I think, for quite a long time. And his projects really, Vron, as you say as well, to establish chemistry not only as a foundational science for agriculture but actually as foundational to modern life. He writes on soap, he writes on meat. He kind of has all these angry confrontations with loads of physiologists because they don’t understand life in chemical terms.
But Liebig, as well as sort of establishing chemistry in these ways, also had this kind of emerging ecological sensibility which is quite hard to reconcile with some of those more techno-scientific projects, I guess, of his. He was incredibly concerned about the use and abuse of non-renewable resources – guano, sewage, bones from European battlefields being imported to make bone dust with, for example, which, Vron, you talk about in Return of a Native. So, he’s an interesting figure today for those reasons, I think, because of the way that this emerging ecological sensibility stands in such clear tension with so many of his arguments regarding the application of chemistry to agriculture, to life and as a foundational and underpinning science for industrial modernity.
VW: There’s also a connection with war as well because the extract of beef that he pioneered, which he did in 1848, I think, if you boil lots of beef down, you get this extract which, at some point, he felt would be useful for women who were stuck in the kitchen cooking but actually they were just putting this in their food and it was very nutritious and then that would all be fine. But it was very uneconomic.
And then by 1878, he was agreeing to be the scientific advisor for a project to set up a beef production factory in Uruguay and actually now in Uruguay there’s a sort of national museum of industrialisation. So, that era is over but, in the meantime, all this equipment and machinery and stuff was shipped out to Uruguay. This young German engineer, who’d been working on the railways, realised the economic possibilities of using the cattle there to produce beef products that could then be sent back to Europe.
So, for example, the armies in the Franco-Prussian War were using these beef products to stay alive, and this food was seen to be something that soldiers could take while they were marching around and based somewhere where there was no other food to be had. And this all came from the kind of work that Liebig was doing and the idea that mass production of beef products, for example, using the beef grown in other parts of the world, was both economic and also nutritionally desirable which, of course, have led to horrible outcomes. So, it’s a very important kind of thread to start unpicking our current global food systems, not to forget his connection to Marx, of course, and Marx’s understanding also of what was at stake in industrial agriculture and capitalism itself.
LC: You’re both talking about metabolism and circulation as metaphor and material process concomitantly. So, another big national scandal, that I wanted to talk about, over the last few years has been the dumped sewage on Britain’s coast. This has become another example of national decline, again as a result of austerity and raw profiteering. And in news stories and first-hand accounts of this crisis, sewage management is always envisioned as a closed system where waste is treated at a national level and the breakdown of this system equates to, and I’m quoting from a Guardian article, ‘a state service not being provided’.
Jim, your work traces this back to the nineteenth century and to waste management and then outwards to the forms of circulation made possible by imperial roots and you track these themes in Dickens and Gaskell. So, what does the modern sewage system have to do with national identity and imperialism?
JS: Obviously in the mid-nineteenth century, the collection of huge numbers of people together in rapidly growing cities presents a huge ecological problem – what do you do with all their waste? And this is quite immediately grasped as a health issue, obviously, to do with epidemics – typhus, cholera and various epidemics that sewage matter ferments in the city. But also as a kind of ecological problem before the term, in terms of what do you do with this fertile matter that would have once being going back onto the land?
And Liebig gets very involved in this and is very vocal in his arguments that this should be put back onto the land. But, of course, what actually happens is the construction of what we really have today as the modern sewerage system which is very much a solution to the health part of the equation – how do you get this matter away quickly from sites of population, but does nothing for the ecological side of the problem, i.e. how do you return it to the land?
The parallels around degeneration I just find fascinating because for the Victorians, the stakes are really high because it’s not only a case of how can we stop these epidemics in the city but what if the city itself is a model of design that isn’t providentially ordained? If this matter can’t be somehow kept in circulation, surely it goes against God’s plan for progress and wellbeing.
At the same time, while the solution is conceived of in this closed way, in terms of a national problem that requires a national solution and can, of course, then secure sort of something akin to national self-sufficiency, there is an awareness and a bizarre kind of argument that this sewage is the best in the world because it contains all of the fertilising elements not only of good old Britain but all the lands across the world that send their goods to Britain through Empire and through capitalism and what have you. And this tension is always there and it’s very ripe for, I think, reading in terms of today, the kind of symbolic nature of rivers and coastlines polluted with loads of sewage in terms of national decline, which was an issue for the Victorians in terms of degeneration, as I say.
LC: Yes, let’s continue on this theme of closed systems and national degeneration. I’d like to talk about one of Nigel Farage’s favourite topics – the invaded English village. Vron, your book introduced me to Farage Investigates, which is a series of YouTube videos he produced, and he stars in them as well, on little villages around England being overrun by young foreign men staying in hotels.
And you talk about one of these videos in your book, the horror of locals at asylum seekers who are living in portacabins in a village in Hampshire. So I had a look for some other videos and I found another one with the title ‘Who is really staying at this four star hotel?’ which is set in a little village near Wolverhampton and people are saying when we try to book a room at this hotel, there are no rooms because 147 young blokes are staying there. So there’s a kind of familiar spectre of sexual invasion, miscegenation, so-called reverse colonisation going on.
But I was also really struck by the camera work in this four star hotel video and it directs the viewer’s gaze straight towards a British obsession with gardening. So, Nigel is interviewing a woman in her conservatory that looks out onto her long private, clearly very well kept, garden while she’s talking about not being able to get rooms at this hotel. And as she’s speaking, the camera zooms in on some perfect purple flowers, I don’t know the name, as if to communicate that these disgruntled concerned citizens are good people who tend to their plants and gardens and who know how to take care of things. So, Vron, what do these videos tell us about the places and imagined communities of the Far Right in modern Britain?
VW: I think you’ve answered your own question with the vision of the purple flowers in the garden. What happened was, if you stand in one place and just wait for things to happen, they do happen and one of the things that happened was that in the year, eighteen months, in which I was figuratively standing in this same place was a murder, which you referred to, which was the result of a tragic neglect of mental health.
Then there was an application to construct what they call a holding centre, which is horrible in itself, for 500 young men, asylum seekers, on a disused army base. There’s a lot of army bases around the area which is in North Hampshire, it’s very near the army base on Salisbury Plain, the training area there, to construct a holding centre for 500 young men next to the A303, which is a busy road that goes from the M3 down to Exeter, or Honiton rather, and to Devon past Stonehenge, the famous road that is always blocked because of people ogling at Stonehenge.
There was outrage but, actually I was re-reading this again, not outrage because they were asylum seekers so much as they were 500 people who would be in a basically, as you say, series of portacabins next to a busy main road with absolutely nowhere to go, nothing to do, other than the garage and M&S petrol station on the other side of the road where there’s no crossing. And the nearest village was an old village called Barton Stacey and Farage took it upon himself to film himself in the car travelling down this road to go to the village, to visit the head of the Parish Council who was an ex-Brigadier, to note the church which had been there since before the Normans, i.e. it was sort of indigenous, and then to go to a trout fishing facility, of which there are a large number round there and to find personal connections with the place.
He also went to the village shop and bought some honey, so he was doing exactly what you describe, was kind of showing himself within the milieu of the idyllic rural setting which was about to be disrupted and polluted and defiled by these young men from other parts of the world. What was interesting, actually, as far as I could understand in what was reported, was that people resented his intrusion and some of the comments that people made were like, ‘there used to be an army base near here and there were too many men there at the time and it didn’t really work. It was threatening, we didn’t really like it.’
People who could remember far back when there were lots of men in the fifties, National Service, a lot more soldiers in those days, and they were hanging around and it was kind of intimidating. They had those kinds of memories which were very different from the purely racist, oh my God, we can’t have these young men from Africa mooching around with nothing to do, getting run over on the road because they don’t understand our road rules. It was a very jarring kind of juxtaposition of opinions that were expressed in the local media which, of course, is another topic as well which is really important – how these things are represented.
You were very brave to then pursue these same kinds of tropes in Farage’s other work which was published on Breitbart and Twitter. To me, it was an opportunity to show how he was utilising that kind of archetype of the rural village about to be disturbed, that England, the heart of England, was being spoiled and threatened by these intrusions.
A lot of this does come down to, as you know, no longer used military facilities – the sort of housing that’s just not liveable in, for example, like in Wethersfield in Essex and certainly the Napier Barracks in Folkestone. These kinds of blocks of buildings that are really derelict – okay, we’ll shove them in there because the hotels are expensive. But these places are absolutely not fit to live in and there have been huge issues around mental health and physical health and disease, not just Covid but other things, which is something else that is important to track.
But there was a village in Yorkshire where they were proposing to redo the houses and make a separate facility that they were going to launch the same month as they were going to start the Rwanda flights. But, again, the kinds of things people did and said on what was then Twitter were much more pernicious. Somebody made a map showing the distance between the facility where the asylum seekers would be housed and the nearest primary school. Farage, he revels in this kind of thing and channelling these kinds of fears which aren’t necessarily… aren’t necessarily but often are addressed to the people who live in those kinds of places but are also addressed to a wider audience.
And this was linked to the representation of the murder that I mentioned before. The national media represented this murder as happening in a very sleepy isolated village which was complete rubbish. They obviously never went there. So, there’s this construct in the national media all the time of this sleepy England, sleepy villages. I just felt it was important to connect the two.
LC: Yes, the fear about proximity to primary schools is really revealing, isn’t it, because it suggests a welfare infrastructure, education and housing, healthcare and that this infrastructure is not only being usurped, which is the traditional complaint but it’s also being prevented from reaching its target beneficiaries, so white Britons, those who have earned their national rights to state services. So, what you’ve said, Vron, makes me think that Farage’s productions are also organised around the idea of a life course that would otherwise unfold without interruptions or without perceived threats to its survival.
So, Jim, shall we go back to the soil? These dramatizations seem to invoke the post-’45 moment – welfare for British subjects as the holistic ground for national development and reconstruction after World War II.
JS: During World War II and after, it’s not as if chemical agriculture, I suppose, is the only game in town, right? And there’s a lot of people advocating for what would come to be known as organic agriculture, basically farming without pesticides, herbicides and all of that. Very much at the heart of the ideas of the transition today, I think, like a sort of adoption of those sort of practices, although many people wouldn’t necessarily label them as organic, maybe agroecological.
But it goes back to people like Eve Balfour, a founding member of The Soil Association, who was writing about the living soil and the health of soil, plants, animals and people being one and indivisible was a slight misquoting of what she said, but that was the general tenor. And for Balfour that was a very strong message and a very important message around the dangers of chemical interference in the soil.
For others in The Soil Association, it kind of leant itself also to more mystical links between the health of the soil and the health of the nation. Jorian Jenks was another important member in the early years of The Soil Association. He’d been in prison during the war as a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and he argued that such was this mystical link between the health of the soil and the health of the nation, that he was incredibly concerned about the prospect of Jewish refugees, wartime refugees, finding work on British farms for what it would do to the strength of this mystically conceived nation somehow rooted in an English soil, and this idea of an authentic white English countryside as…
LC: Even the proximity of Jewish bodies to the land is considered to be a possibility of contaminating, corrupting the soil, is that what you mean?
JS: That’s what he is… His arguments are around the associations he has of Jewish people with high finance, the city, urban spaces and a sort of statelessness as well. He’s very, very interested in protecting authentic England, authentic English countryside and culture, which is, by implication, white. And he’s by far not the only person for whom the ecological regulation of the soil tips over very easily into the political regulation of the land. And it’s why the discourse around invasive species and non-native species is so concerning now, because it so quickly draws on and supports the rhetoric around immigration that we’re seeing used by the Far Right.
LC: Vron, you say in the Afterword of A Return of a Native that it’s been a 20-year project. You began working on it in 1998 and completed the first draft in 2005. This was after the US and Britain had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and it was published in 2022 after Black Lives Matter. So, did your approach to the global and the local change over this time?
VW: So, I began researching the book in ’98, ’99 when I moved to live in the United States. And then 9/11 happened and then we were trying to make a new home. So, I began thinking about what it is to have a home, make a home. The project became distracted by these other questions and I began to weave a kind of diary into my reflections on the interviews and the things I wanted to talk about. So it kind of got me through that very difficult time.
Then in 2002 I was very involved in anti-war work, both in my teaching and in just mentally kind of caught up in outrage and dismay about what was happening around Iraq. The final book I did have kind of themes bubble through when I’d sort of, okay, you’ve got to finish this thing. Obviously I was doing other kinds of writing as well. It’s always been there and I sort of was living with these ideas of these connections.
For example, in one of the ways of my responsibilities for caring for our mother was to handle the energy stuff. So, she had to have an oil delivery for her cooking stove and so I joined the parish cartel, that was a guy would find the cheapest oil and then everybody would order that that month. And in it he would always comment on geopolitics to see where the oil was… what was making the oil prices go up and down. And I got very entertained by that in a rather dismal way, realising how much these things are connected with a sort of hyper-awareness of how our worlds are made through these really important economies around energy.
And then to skip to the more recent project, the question of war and military organisation, the institution of organised violence, if I can call it that, was always something that was a question mark. On the horizon, there were sounds of guns at night growing up; the presence of the huge army base on Salisbury Plain was just a fact of life. Of course, growing up in the fifties, people’s relationship, people’s parents’ relationship, to their military service that they had done in the war, those who had retired, those who hadn’t retired, attitudes towards military work and so on was always very present.
So, this question of war is incredibly important to me, questions of militarism and how that seeps into everyday life. So, that’s why in Return of a Native there are lots of references to helicopters going overhead as a kind of reminder of how much our lives are imprecated with, infused with, reminders of military power and in the present, in the present in ways that are also not seen.
And just to say that the book I’ve just finished, with a number of co-authors who worked with me on it over, again, a number of years, looking at the kind of costs and consequences of having this kind of permanent military presence in a particular place which is completely invisible. I wanted to call the book Behind God’s Back and it’s just like… it’s just behind Stonehenge, it’s literally a mile and a half from Stonehenge it begins. There’s never any discussion about it in terms of road widening or tunnels. They’d rather spend £2 billion on making a tunnel rather than say, do you mind if we have a bit of your land? and make another carriageway.
And this goes back to 1897, back to the South African war, to the Boer War, and the need for military technology to be experimented with and practised with. Now, there are young Ukrainian men being trained on the Plain. And for me, the global has always been there and it’s just how to make it visible, how to make those connections and how to… The military is something very, very hard to write about; it’s hard enough to read about but it’s very hard to write about in a way that’s compelling, that’s serious, to try and show people what is at stake putting so much of our resources into this institution. What’s at stake on many, many different levels?
LC: I’d like to end with militarism and connect it to habitability. My final question is about localism, which seems to me to be the big problem question of the Left; whether it’s possible to foster local approaches to living off the land without defending borders. And over the 21st century, this is already happening. Those who are living in more habitable places are going to have to adjust to larger and larger numbers of people migrating from places that are becoming uninhabitable. So, it does make sense that the idea of an indigenous population under threat has become such a powerful, imaginative and also practical defence against these flows.
So, my final question is, can small-scale agrarianism offer models of new social practices, of sharing resources and space in ways that can address this? What might be salvaged from rural life for a future after capitalism?
VW: To try and tackle that question you asked, Lara, about the movement of people across the globe away from places where life is no longer supportable, and to sharing spaces that have been aggressively defended against incomers, clearly that is something that is already happening and is something that we should all be very concerned about. And thinking parochially and locally, there are obviously very intense debates, really, about what we’re all going to eat. Now, there’s the question of the small-scale regenerative farming as one solution and then the kind of riposte that there is not enough land. There just simply isn’t enough land to make that sustainable, to feed growing populations. So what are we going to eat?
So, the question of what we’re going to eat and what that’s going to be made of, and made from, and how it’s going to be produced on industrial quantities, I think, is something we should all be thinking about. There are these kind of low-rumbling debates about plant-based food and food made from… I don’t quite understand the science, but basically made in factories from single cells that are then… look like chicken and look like different kinds of meat.
Those questions have to be addressed and what that does for human bodies and the metabolism of the human body, actually. This goes back to things that Jim is very kind of centrally concerned with, to do with the period from the 1840s about the metabolism, the metabolic rift, about if we’re no longer eating food, if all the human waste is going away, then how do we then… what happens to that broken circular digestive and productive process? What does it do to human bodies? Do we eat food that’s been basically grown through things fertilised with bits of silver?
When you see, for example, reports this week of migrant labourers who earn nothing, who are dying in the fields in Italy picking our tomatoes, that we then go and buy in Morrisons and Waitrose for tuppence. We have to address these questions, we can’t just kind of coast.
To contain the discussion to farmers, actually, like this way of farming is better than that way of farming and then the George Monbiot ‘no farming is better than any farming’ spats is not… Their ideas and their concepts, we have to really do the education and thinking and research, really, to try and shift the ways people understand these things.
Now, I think, for example, eating food in cities, I was walking along the road yesterday and there was a board on somebody’s house saying that you could get box deliveries from Kentish Town. I was thinking where on earth do they grow food in Kentish Town that’s enough to put boxes? I know people have been doing it in Hackney. There’s all kinds of initiatives in cities where people can grow food. I have an allotment, I know how hard it is, actually, to grow absolutely anything. We’re very out of time with our sense of what it is to produce our own food.
And all these debates, all these kind of protests and things around that farmers are staging, in the EU and in this country as well, around what is happening to the farming industry is just because it’s all being shoved under the carpet. Well, we’ll give them bits of money to keep them going, but actually there’s a huge crisis brewing about how we produce enough food and on what terms it’s produced and so much of that does go back to the question of soil and space, really.
JS: Vron, you mentioned George Monbiot’s book and Regenesis does a remarkable job of analysing the issues with the food system and it’s some of the most incredible writing on soil, actually, that I’ve ever read as well, regarding the complexity of soil as a system. Then it’s almost as if the techno-scientific solutions that come in the second half of the book just don’t quite meet the challenge that was laid down in the first half of the book around the sort of complexity of the issues in play.
For me, I come back to this as a question of ecological belonging and a lot of work around soil care and soil humanities. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, principally among them, thinks about this as a question of ecological belonging and reinventing what it means to belong ecologically in a place so as to care for it and so as to value that act of care and actually find that as an important thing to do rather than a side project, while also opening space for other people to belong and care for the very same landscape, often in very different ways, coming from totally different knowledges and ways of understanding a place.
The politics of conservation and the conservative nature of conservation, with a small c, around keeping things as they are is a massive barrier to that, as is nationalism around not only the sort of nationalistic framing of the issues but also our sort of nationalistic understandings of the problems to be addressed. The way that so much policy happens at a national scale and it can’t possibly think about these issues in the sort of transnational, transcontinental state that they need to.
I always come back to poultry production. Vron, you mentioned where the food is coming from and so much of the protein that is consumed in Britain is now from chicken and that chicken, a lot of it, is grown incredibly intensively in vast chicken sheds. The River Wye, particularly, is particularly badly affected with that.
And in some quarters, that’s seen as a domestic success story, a sort of great home-grown production story when, in reality, a vast amount of the food, certainly all the soya, which makes up about 20% of the food that would be fed in the cakes that are fed to these chickens, is coming from elsewhere of course. It’s not grown in this country, South America principally. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has done some wonderful work on the actual sites where that’s come from in the Cerrado in Brazil and linked to deforestation.
So, to think about what that rural life might look like after capitalism and the kinds of issues and the kind of research that needs to be engaged on there, it’s clearly far deeper than looking for the silver bullets that might save us and take us into that Utopian-ish future, whatever that looks like.
LC: Thank you Vron and Jim for this really rich conversation. We’ve covered a lot of ground. I hope that those listening to the podcast will be able to take away some of the nitty-gritty historical details of soil science and global food production alongside your warnings on the surprising, sometimes invisible, places where we can find militarism and nationalism operating right now. Thank you both again.
Thank you for listening. For more information about UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre find us at ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation.
Recording ends 49:10 minute