Fashionably "Green"

The owl at the top of this post has nothing to do with what I've written. It's only there to encourage you to click the link, because people love owls.  

When I studied theology in my youth there was a growing movement of Christian capitalism that, with its roots in American middle class gospel respectability, leached into the spiritual lives of people in the UK.  The symptoms of this movement were an increasingly branded form of religion: the right type of cover on your Bible, the latest moody quasi-religious Jesus-is-my-girlfriend album by a young solo guitarist, the proliferation of greetings cards with a Bible reference printed in front of an inspiring sunset.  There was a huge wave of tat produced, sold in a chain of high street shops called Wesley Owen, products that demonstrated devotion to the ideal.  We called it "Christian Crap".  It was a strangely expensive collection of items that accumulated on top of an ideology like foam on water - superficially connected to the religion beneath but fundamentally not a necessary part of the faith at all.  The target market seemed to be people who wanted, genuinely, to display their faith, their belief to a sceptical world, but if it had all been taken away, it wouldn't have made an ounce of difference to their actual religion.  There was a level of expectation that a person would own some of this Christian Crap as a way of showing their faith.

I had a couple of moments of flashback to standing in Wesley Owen as a student to survey first-hand this tidal wave of devotional proofs when I went to Martin Mere and Leighton Moss recently.  The middle class produce lining every wall (£7 for 4 cookies...) was so reminiscent of that experience of people being sold the beer of religion and then encouraged to swallow the foam of tat to demonstrate their love of beer that I actually did a double take.  The amount of cheaply produced and expensively sold "nature" tat was genuinely shocking.  More cuddly toys than I've ever seen.  T-shirts.  Socks.  Pencils.  Toy binoculars, microscopes, magnifying glasses.  Bird food (despite the very clear science that says this is bad for, you know, the birds).  Branded hats, gloves, scarves.  Mugs by the million.  Are you even a bird lover if you don't have a mug with a chocolate box Blue Tit on it?  How will your friends know you're a Friend of Nature if you don't serve elevenses on small china plates covered in insipid wildflowers or a Kingfisher?  Do you even like wildlife if you don't wear a pin badge of an Avocet?  

There is a level of justification for this stuff levelled by the organisations that sell this Nature Crap: it raises money for a good cause, indeed, perhaps the best cause - preservation of the ecosystems that we literally need to live.  But I wonder.  I wonder how much damage the production of all this rubbish does to nature and I wonder how much of the money splattered in middle class devotion to Nature actually gets to the point it's needed most compared to how much of it is spent maintaining the little temple to consumerism that we're forced to walk through on our way in and out of nature reserves.  Coffee and cake at a cafe in an RSPB nature reserve is a nice treat (and at a little over a tenner is a rare one for me) but does it need to be there?  How much is spent on maintaining a cafe and staff?  Have we really fallen for the capitalist wrapping paper so hard that we can't attract people to see wildlife without offering them a latte and a branded beanie?

The best of the Christian Crap was always the books.  Some of these were genuinely useful looks at living a morally good life, philosophical and contemplative, inspiring and positive.  The majority of it though regressed to the mean. Pointless vanity projects pushed by a big name writer, faux-theology developed just to sell copies, populist beliefs wrapped up in a Christian coat and propped up by poorly understood biblical ideas.  I lost count of the number of books that were more or less a long, drawn out retelling of chapter one for 120 pages of large font text that sold for £11.99.  The "idea" in the book was often so simple and simplistic that reading the blurb on the back of the book was enough to understand the whole book as a piece.  The same names getting the high profile capitalist product deals and the same people throwing money away on keeping up with the Joneses to show just how much they loved their god.

Do the Nature-devotees have it better here? The books that we consume in our multi-motivated quest to better understand nature are, of course, a mixed bag.  I have a shelf of little-used field guides to the trees, fungi, beetles, bees and spiders of the UK and beyond - all good books for what they do, but my first call for ID help has become the Internet.  These books are largely irrelevant for the purpose for which they were intended.  It's a rare day I need to open a book to find information not freely available online.  So field guides can be good but less and less used.  How about popular science books, and the more poetic, nature-philosophical works?  These vary enormously.  There is some utterly beautiful writing out there, drawing on experiences of wildlife that evoke empathy and love for the natural world in a way that I could never imagine.  But equally there is a froth of expensive devotional foam riding the deep waters of these master works.  The kind of books that have a thin concept stretched across 130 pages of repetitive, nature-fashionable, green-middle-class-prove-my-passion-for-birds puff writing.  Famous names that get published because they're famous names guaranteed to sell to a certain demographic of well-to-do middle aged middle class fashionably green people.  The best of it is remarkable; the worst is woeful.

I'll end with this.  A few years ago my soon to be ex-wife and I went to a nature-orientated festival.  Music, cider, forest-bathing, natural arts, unspoken therapies, vegan, low-carbon earnestness for four days and three nights in the rural Home Counties.  I will never forget that festival as long as I live.  Everyone there was dressed differently the same - if it wasn't tie-die and made by indigenous people then it wasn't part of the unofficial uniform.  I stood out in my jeans and Feeder t-shirt.  Everyone clutched a £6 coffee at all times, unless they were paying £11 for a bottle of "home-made" blackberry cider (which honestly was just vile).  At the end of four days of veganism and reiki head massage, the vast majority of those well-meaning people packed their tents into their range rovers and drove away.  We followed suit, and we stopped at the first McDonald's we found in order to use the toilets.  The queue inside was made up entirely of people in tie-die kaftans, picking the accumulated forest-bathing twigs out of their hair while ordering a BigMac to go, their skin-deep veganism a sop to conscience that couldn't make it past a drive-thru.

Buying the Nature Crap is a way of making us feel more dedicated to the cause we are passionate about, being demonstrative in our beliefs, but ultimately, just as in the Christian world, the froth on top really isn't the beer underneath.  The appearance of devotion isn't the same as love.