Eildon Hill (2017)
Glass, Acrylic, Wood, Light
15″ x 15″ x 8″
Inspired by a hill in Scotland, Eildon Hill questions ideals of conservationism and addresses our role within that framework, both as a species and as individuals.
According to folklore, within Eildon Hill is a hollow cavern where King Arthur rests, waiting to emerge one day to save the Britons. Such stories are common across Great Britain, relating the mythical king to the landscape in a way that ties the inhabitants by blood to the land in a distinctly Christ-like way.
If you were to visit the locale today, you would not see the blanket of trees suggested in this sculpture. Though the British Isles were largely forested when agricultural practices were introduced around 5000 BC, widespread deforestation followed and much of what survived was clear cut during the industrial revolution. This may seem like a case where human intervention caused significant ecological destruction of some pre-human equilibrium. However, the isles were largely grassland in the aftermath of the last Ice Age approximately 12,000 years ago when modern humans first inhabited the area, and their reforestation over the following 7,000 years of climatic change occurred in the presence of humankind.
So, we see that the ideal of a virgin land, predicated on the ideal of human exceptionalism (and often in America and the rest of the colonized world on the ideal of white European exceptionalism), is unrealistic and disrespectful to the land and the people who have lived upon it for generations. We are part of a landscape which has been shaped by biological activity, including that of humans, for millions of years.
In drawing moral judgments of our current environmental impact, it is prudent to consider this broader context. Who’s now to say in our ecological destruction that we’re any better or worse than a cyanobacterial strain which grew rampantly and extinguished most of earth’s biodiversity due to its emittance of oxygen into the atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago? That same oxygen which we have evolved to now breathe and utilize to great effect in harvesting and metabolizing that cyanobacteria’s plant descendants. We are not unique in our impact. However, that does not mean we are exempt from personal responsibility for our actions.
It is notable that it was not the mere presence of humankind which prompted environmental change, but rapid shifts of cultural and lifestyle norms prompted by revolutions in agriculture and industry. As we find ourselves now amid another significant digital revolution, we need to address the questions of what we want our world to look like, how we treat the land and organisms that surround us, whether we can afford another mass extinction, what conservatism with respect to landscape means, and whether we are setting realistic goals. Because the threat of nihilism in the wake of imminent failure threatens not both our mental sanctity, but also our physical commitment to action.
In an era where speed of transmittance of thought makes for a more globalized society than ever before, new ideas regarding the adoption of policy, cultural, and physical norms are subject to fewer temporal boundaries, making their effect on the earth more immediate. Breaking down barriers of thought won’t afford us the contrast between the highly industrialized landscape of the British Isles and other parts of the world (for better or worse). Furthermore, our continued emittance of greenhouse gases is not marked by localized ecological destruction, but global climate change.
Most people who visit Scotland are unaware of the extent to which humankind has affected the landscape. 19th-Century British thought upheld an ideal of the wild Scottish moors as a retreat for nobility and an escape to nature from the more industrial and heavily populated south. This romanticism has continued and pervaded into much of our modern American thought regarding conservationism, carried over from Scotland by such naturalists as John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club). Part of our collective conscious has conveniently forgotten the impact we have had upon the land and repainted a short-term vision of an idyllic isle with modern development as its main environmental antagonist.
Turning from the macrocosmic to the micro, we see this as a product of the human experience. We are constrained by our lifetime to a limited view of time and space. Furthermore, links between our actions as individuals and their effect upon our environment have been abstracted in our globalized capitalist society to a point where denial of culpability is commonplace and convenient. Inclusion of a single red shard within the forest of green upon the hill speaks to this individualistic outlook and its effect.
It should be remembered that the primary contributors to our current climate crisis historically have been those highly industrialized countries which laid the framework of our current global economic network. Furthermore, the impact of global climate change has not and will not be felt equally. As climate refugees flee their uninhabitable homes and nativism takes on a more prominent and blatantly exclusionary place in popular discourse, both in the UK and across the industrialized world, this problem of personal exceptionalism and othering only grows deeper. In denigrating foreign immigrants and denying their humanity, we are only furthering the gap between ourselves and the effects of our actions, turning a blind eye to people much in the same way we do to the environment. The problem is often not that we don’t nominally care (about people or the environment), but rather that we don’t see the direct effects of our actions.
There is no easy answer to our current climate crisis or local destruction of habitat. The world we live in is not one meant to be held in stasis. Equilibrium has shifted consistently throughout earth’s history. But as we find ourselves now with significant evidence that we are in the driver’s seat forcing mass extinction, it is important to envision the future world we want to inhabit and the impact we want to have upon its residents, both future and current. Because I for one I am not holding out for King Arthur’s emergence and salvation if we screw up.