Irreplaceable: The fight to save our wild places

Condemning such terms as ‘Sites of Special Scientific Interest’, ‘no-catch zones’, ‘reference areas’ and ‘natural capital’ for a lack of vision when describing the remarkable vitality and richness of the planet we inhabit, he went on to write, ‘Had you set out to estrange people from the living world, you could scarcely have done better.’ The

lacked the cultural affirmation of downs, dales and lochs in the national imagination.

‘because to some people it looks like a big empty space with nothing in it, but for us, it’s a really important place filled with wildlife and lovely, wonderful communities, and we wanted to protect them.’ She’d appealed to the critical difference between ‘space’ and ‘place’ – one a malleable territory largely

of the beauties of place is that it has the ability to imprint itself upon us in an instant. Many will have known that immediate, electrifying symmetry upon arriving somewhere that seems to fit so perfectly with your life as to be predetermined, the place you were always meant to find.

they are for their woodlands, not against progress. They are guardians, ordinary citizens compelled to speak out on behalf of the nation’s natural and cultural heritage in the absence of the political will to do so. The ongoing case around Smithy Wood has been framed as an issue of small-scale

misplaced sense of rightful dominion over local communities, landscapes and wildlife. Reading their proposal in the same

highlighting the environmental protections purportedly shielding

‘Protestor’ just doesn’t have the same responsive resonance as ‘dissident’, or even ‘activist’, lacking the sense of social justice

opportunity from the wider landscape to encounter Rackham’s ‘exquisite beauty of the small and complex and unexpected’.