unevenly-distributed

There is a place, comfortably settled on the top of a hill near Matlock, where the seeds of a renaissance in our relationship to land are being sown.

High Leas Farm is home to Woven Earth, a project seeking to re-embed humans in the landscape. It’s a holistic restoration project that weaves together Regenerative Production, Wilding and Nature Connection.

“Holistic Restoration seeks to reunite people and the more-than-human world.  It acknowledges that we are a part of nature and that by engaging in our forgotten ecological roles we can heal ecosystems as well as supporting ourselves and others to be happier and healthier.”

This is super exciting to me. So much talk of rewilding implies that we humans are separate from nature, and often directly dangerous to it. What’s exciting to me in the approach at Woven Earth is the recognition that humans are actually a keystone species in the landscape, and that therefore we are part of the future of the land, not just its past.

I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of a group that met at the farm at the beginning of July, exploring what it would mean to re-learn interdependence with the land. There was a real range of people there, from academics to agricultural specialists to psychologists to eco-linguists, and it felt like everyone was hungry for some real in-depth conversations with what it might really mean to belong to the land.

I hope there’s more of this to come, but for now, some of my key reflections are:

• There’s a real sense of being in partnership with the land – of using science, observation and intuition to work out what the land wants and needs. There are purple thistles springing up on the site would usually be considered weeds, but here are welcomed as soil decompactors, and a delicacy for the sheep. Close observation of grazing habits shows that the sheep are enjoying the thistle flowers, which apparently is not seen as normal. Turns out the sheep know what they want too.
• The plans for the site are all about creating a mosaic of dynamic land use, with hubs and nodes of activity moving throughout the site. There are plans to move some of the grassland into woodland, and bring some of the woodland back into grassland, creating a dynamism. This mosaic approach makes me think of how we can create more mosaic lives and livelihoods. Rob and Mim, the wonderful team behind the project, are clear that they are unlikely to make a living solely from the land use, but the projects that spring from it can create sustainable livelihoods. What other kinds of patchwork lives could we build that include a relationship with the land but aren’t totally dependent on extracting from it?
• So many of the ideas we talked about feel new, but are actually very ancient knowledge (or intuition). Mim mentioned that sometimes they talk about the farm being “on world” and everything else being “off world”, and in the midst of these ancient connections I really began to feel like I was in the future.

A bubble of possibility, up a hill, regenerating and restoring much more than the land.