Hello and welcome to the 60th (!!) issue of Place! In today’s dispatch, Place co-editor Kylee Pedersen reflects on the unexpected connection between a global environmental movement, and a small literary valley in the British countryside. We know that trust, social bonds, and shared values or goals can incite collective movement and radical action – can our surroundings do the same thing?
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The resistance of a place
Extinction rebellion is a protest movement that has been heard around the world. In the area of London where I live, the group’s posters, both waterlogged and recently plastered up, are a ubiquitous sight on community bulletins and light posts. In its fight for environmental protections, net zero emissions, and political and civic action, the group has been supported by the likes of climate activist Greta Thurnberg, and has become a household name in the UK. But of course, it had to start somewhere.
Although I’d just begun my Masters in London at Extinction Rebellion’s (abbreviated to XR) inception – launched by a formal ‘Declaration of Rebellion’ protest outside the Houses of Parliament on 31 October, 2018 – it never really crossed my mind to find out the details of how the movement had been birthed. Or where.
Then, last week while on holiday in the Cotswolds, my partner and I found ourselves in the Slad Valley, on the recommendation of a friend. We booked a small cabin wedged under an ash tree in a farmer’s sheep field, and one afternoon, enjoyed a prolonged ramble through the valley, before ending up at a local pub called the Woolpack Inn.
The entire valley seemed to be steeped in poetic significance. Sloping green fields lined the valley like duvets, while horses grazed in the fading light of day. We criss-crossed back and forth across a bubbling stream lined with clusters of bluebells on a path devoid of other walkers. Our footprints felt as though they were the first, or the only ones, that had graced the place in days. Indeed, Slad had been the childhood home of British Writer Laurie Lee, who’s nature-imbued prose immortalized the landscape of his youth.
Perhaps it was its relative seclusion to the surrounding flatter-lands, or the lore of Lee, but there was just something about the place that made me feel not only accepted by its inhabitants, but tucked away in a bubble of reprieve from the outside world.
Chatting with our server at the Woolpack, I soon discovered that the valley is one of the most untouched areas of the Cotswolds. “There are alot of hippie types around here you know,” she said waiting for my card payment to go through. “Actually, Extinction Rebellion started just down the road.”
Hundreds of miles from London, in a tiny hamlet of a quiet valley, I’d unknowingly ended up in the place where one of the biggest modern day environmental movements had begun. Despite being decades apart, two majorly influential occurrences – a beloved body of literature by Lee, and a momentous environmental movement by XR – had been sparked in this small valley. It didn’t seem to be like it could be a mere coincidence.
“Living in our valley was like broad beans in a pod,” Laurie Lee wrote of his youth spent in the Slad Valley. “All my beginnings were hatched into this very compact series of narrow, brief valleys, which are like seed pods.”
In the rapidly changing field of geographical psychology, these ‘seed pods’ of place that Lee refers to are the primary units of analysis in exploring to what extent the places we live in influence our behaviour.
“Over the past ten years, there has been a resurgence of work looking at the links between people’s psychological characteristics and the features of the places in which they live,” wrote one recent review. “Research on cultural differences across nations has shown that geographical clustering can have a significant impact on the development of [a person or communities’] psychological processes.”
While collectivity, trust and shared values or goals – some of the backbones of political or social movements – are largely shaped by social ties and political-economic forces, they are also inherently linked to space. Worker strikes, for example, would naturally take place in areas of a city or rural place where factory workers live, which may or may not be insular or more diversified.
But past these perhaps more obvious conclusions are even more intriguing findings. A study completed in 2017 showed that the temperature in the place where a person lived could have an effect on their personal behaviour, choices, and even levels of social and political engagement.
The research showed that those individuals who lived in climates of lower temperatures and large seasonal variations in climate adopt a greater focus on the future (vs. the present), and a stronger focus on self-control. Meanwhile, people who grew up in more temperate regions were likely to be more sociable and stable, and exhibited a bigger focus on personal growth and openness to new experiences. And while these findings don’t link weather directly to the prevalence of resistance (or literary prowess) of a place, they do correlate to varying degrees of cultural tightness within communities - a prerequisite to a more radical act such as a protest.
“Lives are lived out in neighbourhoods, cities, and states, and the physical and social features of these places can affect the behaviours, thoughts, and emotions experienced,” writes Peter J. Rentfrow in his book, Geographical Psychology: Exploring the Interaction of Environment and Behaviour. Maybe, the more ‘seed-pod’ like a place is, the more likely it is to motivate collective action, at the very least to protect a space beloved by its inhabitants. Or maybe it’s just how well you can tell a story.
- Kylee Pedersen is a co-editor of Place and a writer based in London, UK. She writes about travel, food, and the natural world, among other things.
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