Considering the Fens of Cambridgeshire, their eventual reflooding, and what resistance that could provoke, from Greg Frey
Photo by Rui Chamberlain on Unsplash
We think Greg Frey is one of the most thoughtful and stylish essayists, on the themes of eco-civilisation, around at the moment. We’re always happy to cross-post his pieces, and very pleased to do so again below. An epic of feeling and eco-analysis (which we’ve categorised here as “Alter Natives”)
“If power break loose’: Feeling, women, history or The Fens - hold them back at your peril
By Greg Frey
Speaking of trains, one thing that really put the wind up me is that ride between King’s Lynn and Cambridge. I see all that flat land what were once underwater and you know I can’t for the life of me see what’s to prevent that being flooded again. All that water shut back in them dykes, that make me think of power shut in a cage. That make me think of Rhodesian N——-, or Trade Unions, or the IRA, and if power break loose that ain’t no good talking softly to it, and saying ‘get you back in your cage’.
— Fred Rooke, folk singer, 1975
After a predictably brutal return to our old family roles I’m back home walking the dogs with my mum and my younger brother. We pass another man. Our dogs sense my brother’s distracted and lurch towards the man and towards his greyhound. It’s quiet out here, they get territorial.
The man says something like ‘keep your dogs under control’ and my brother snaps. He puffs up. He says you don’t know what you’re talking about. They are under control. Who the hell are you and so on.
Afterwards, air sizzling, I explain that I’m totally dismayed by this reaction to a stranger, that he lost control, that this is no way to handle conflict. He knows all this of course, and he starts to cry. I love him so much. I tell him this, and he cries more.
When we get to where the drainage canal meets the river Great Ouse, and the path climbs the bank up 15 feet or so, and the vast, flat Fens stretches out for miles, we begin to talk about the tensions of the last few days, and my mum starts to cry too. Floods of feeling bottled up inside, find their space out here. Now, writing this, the symmetry between the outer landscape and our inner worlds seems to hold something worth exploring.
For people who live close to the land, the fact that our bodies are shaped by the living world around us is a given. For people like me (and let’s be real most of us) for whom colonialism has shredded our relationships with the rest of the living world, we need reminding.
Scientists predict The Fens—four thousand square kilometres of peat and accumulated marine silt from the North Sea, carved up by dykes, ditches and straightened-out rivers—will be almost entirely underwater by 2050. The Environment Agency says it will need £1.6 billion to build even higher banks, and even more pumps to keep it dry over the next few years.
The poet Rebecca Tamás’s questions are apt:
Can anyone really deny that thought and thinking comes from the outside as well as the inside? That when the outside is terribly damaged, the inside will be also?
With all the gratitude in the world to my parents for a loving childhood, I was bored growing up here. I roamed the fields alone, making up stories, imagining hidden secrets under the flatness.
My landmarks were the pumphouse at the end of the lane, an automated brick block to occasionally fish from, and the great cathedral of Ely on the horizon, a lone monolith in which to invest my young, unformed longings for meaning.
If you’ve got any sort of pastoral England image in your head, get it out. The fields were sad. They smelled acrid with fertiliser and pesticides from the megafarm that owned them. The buzz of drainage pumps and irrigation broke any peace.
The sight of migrant workers breaking their backs to grow food for people who’d only ever think of them as ‘fucking Poles’ made this place sinister. “Gain mars the landscape every day,“ said John Clare, the 19th-century poet who spent his life between asylums after watching his beloved Fen village destroyed by industrial agriculture.
If you want to understand the significance of this moment in the history, not just of human civilisation, but of our planet, there are lots of other places you could look. The Fens, known mostly for its emptiness (“a place where there’s nothing”, that is “nowhere for miles”, as one author put it recently) isn’t an obvious candidate.
But this is the point: I’m from a boring nowhere. And paying attention to this land and its history has essential lessons for navigating the Anthropocene. There are surprises everywhere; what happens when we open to them?
Qamishli streets in Rojava More details
When my friend Natalia Szarek returned from Rojava (the beaming light of hope for a democratic, ecological civilisation in Northern Syria) she wrote that “the ability to know, love, and defend the place you call home is non-negotiable if you want to build revolution”.
If you know anything about the Rojava revolution, you might find this a surprising conclusion. Theirs is a deeply inclusive society, fundamentally antifascist and opposed to nationalism. But, as Natalia explains in Worth Fighting For: Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home, their connection to the stories of their land feeds an endless desire to protect it.
For those of us from countries built on a myth of superiority to other, darker-skinned people, this is a tough one. But look closely and we can see that the British Empire is not the only story of this land.
The Fens, for example, has the Fennish, a mostly forgotten people (bar one excellent recent history). As landowning elites and state builders attempted to drain millions of litres of water from the vast lakes and floodplains that made up The Fens, the Fennish rose up to defend their lifeways. After two hundred years of resistance from the 17th to the 19th century, they lost.
The draining of The Fens has been called one of the greatest ecological disasters of this island. In a trial run of tactics deployed at scale by the British Empire, the Fennish were cast as backward savages, the land as underused “wastes” and the women as witches.
We now call this process ‘the enclosures’, the domestic colonisation of the British Empire. Marx called it ‘primitive accumulation’ the period after feudalism where collective resources were stolen to jumpstart capitalism. Recently, anthropologists have deepened this story.
Sylvia Federici has shown that it wasn’t just the plunder of the commons but was also the systematic subjugation of women, and their ability to regulate the number of children they would have, that led to the population boom that fed the industrialising machine.
The most explicit and violent part of this subjugation was this: putting any woman who held a close relationship to the land or knowledge about herbalism (read contraception) on trial as a witch and, often, brutally murdering them.
The more covert violence was the way certain types of knowledge -that which was embodied, collective and emotional- were designated feminine and therefore worthless. Audre Lorde identified the effects of this in modern culture, calling it the suppression of ‘the erotic’: our inner life, sensual knowledge, “our deepest cravings”, “the yes within ourselves”: “self connection shared”, it has all been forced down.
So we find ourselves in a present where “the greatest danger of our times”, as Joanna Macy says, is not the climate catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, or genocidal imperialism, but “the deadening of our response”.
Today (ostensibly) beyond the age of designating this power ‘hysteria’, the common sense awareness of this historical tragedy is found in off-the-cuff remarks about women being more emotionally in tune than men. As true as this might be in general, it disguises a deeper tragedy and a more thrilling possibility.
“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives,” Lorde says “can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.” A powerful ideology has severed us from the world of feeling. Women and nonbinary folks, as a whole, carry a tattered thread which can guide us all back, and this return to feeling promises a life-changing power.
Bizarrely, a few years ago, the head of the farming outfit that owns all the land round here, (selling £500 million of crops every year and employing 900 people), invited me (a squatter with a negative bank balance and a criminal record) to come and chat with him.
My mum had met him at the funeral of someone in our village, and he was interested in my involvement with Extinction Rebellion. I went and we had tea in his eco-office hidden in the fields, and for the first half hour, he talked at me about their work protecting peat for the climate and doing regenerative agriculture.
I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doing there, and I had zero stake in the meeting, so when I got a minute I explained that I, and most of the people I know, can’t sleep because we’re terrified about what’s happening to our life support systems and because the chances of a liveable, let alone pleasant, future are dwindling. ‘How do you really feel about that?’ I asked, as open as possible. ‘Do you connect with that on an emotional level?’
He blinked at me. Our meeting ended soon after.
How do we avoid the urge to disconnect from reality? Especially when reality is painful?
I’m struck by how writer Noreen Masud, a young woman with complex PTSD, experiences The Fens. The open, uninterrupted view calms her like few other places. The lack of visual stimuli sucks out all of the stress she feels trying to make sense of the rest of the world.
This calm, facilitated by this land, allows her access to parts of herself she otherwise wouldn’t have. Her book A Flat Place is a journey through how the Fens and places like it have qualities that can nurture us numb (or benumbed) ones into being able to feel again.
If nothing else, the lack of visual information in The Fens is at odds with the onslaught of images on our eyes most of the time. Our era is one of scenes torn from their contexts preceding one after another endlessly. Context and depth have been drained. It is impossible to know where to look. Nowhere seems worth stopping. There is too much ground to cover.
The Fens has a specific counterproposal. It’s a land which prompts you to endure boredom. It’s a lesson told in a unique way by this place. But it’s also a lesson that all of our supposedly empty and story-free places, temporarily in forced servitude to an idiotic economic system, have to teach us.
What rises up from nothing? What stories? What hope for the world?
I’ve been on SSRIs—antidepressants—for nearly two years. The choice to start them came from months of failing to feel within tolerable bounds. They are a lifeline. But my trust in the world of feeling that chewed me up and spat me out is broken. I sense I need to repair this.
Popular folk psychology says the more feelings are forced down, the more they need to find expression. And it’s more than likely that (on top of post-covid syndrome and active colitis) the uncontrollable floodings of feelings that overwhelmed me were the accumulated effect of thousands of small failures to allow feeling to flow freely.
Disconnection produced the flooding, which has necessitated more disconnection.
The same is true of this land. The struggle to drain The Fens caused the freshly exposed peat to shrink and disappear in the wind, and caused the land to flood even more. The thing the landlords wanted—total control of the land—constantly slipped through their fingers, as they denied a reality of ecological need.
And now, in a giant twist of Gaian logic, peat’s erosion and the export of capitalism have released so much carbon dioxide that the atmosphere is heating, ice caps thousands of miles away are melting, and rising water levels promise to restore The Fens to a wetland again.
The insurgent return of feeling and water are accompanied by the return of something else too. As the peat is exposed and whittled away by the wind, old things, perfectly preserved by its airless conditions, are creeping out of the past.
Yew forests 4,000 years old; Neolithic walkways: traces of Hereward the Wake and the legendary Green Men who resisted the Norman aristocracy a thousand years ago (immortalised in countless church engravings the country over). Stories of Fen Tigers, the women-led rebellion against the enclosures. Even Cromwell’s fortresses in the English Revolution.
It reminds me of the ending of Jordi Rosenberg’s glorious novel Confessions of The Fox. Jack Sheppard, hero of London’s rebellious 17th-century underclass, beaten down by the burgeoning police state, longs for a revolutionary plan to put his hope in. His partner Bess, a sex worker from a family of Fen Tigers, gives him one:
We will fight in the fens while the ghost ships clog the Thames, spearing their brave bows through the Hearts of the slave ships, the trading vessels and the Royal Navy gunners. Until the imperial ships splinter in a thousand Clouds on Britain’s imperial shores, Jack added.
And, he asks...
—if we die there? If there are no Fen-Tigers left? If the Surveyors shoot us dead? Then we will Haunt the Fen, Bess said. Something between an exhortation and a prayer they would perish, and they would wait. History would find them—all the underwater dead, all the Family of Love, the Inmates, and all those who had died in the fens—the centuries-long dead, too; the ones who died when the Norman invaders came steaming over the moorland from the north. Robbers, Rebels, Lovers. Wait. Wait under waters, she said. History will find us. History will avenge us all. It was as good a plan as any.
This is of course a fictional story about what history might mean to historical people. But the certainty resonates with the resurgent character of this land. The holding back of so much water can only ever be temporary. There is no way round it. The pain of the past is coming.
Without vengeance or lust, History is here again, knocking on the door like a wild thing. History is our inextricability, our emotional lives webbed to our ecological lives. The age of feeling returns while the performance of separation comes to a close with relief. If this all sounds too prophetic then I’m in good company.
From Ousewashes, the site of Menea Fen, the Owenite oommune
In 1838, only a few years after the date which historians say is the end of Fennish resistance, a commune was founded in The Fens, just a few miles from where I grew up. It was a community devoted to realising the utopian socialist ideas of Robert Owen.
There’s lots to explore about this strange community. But, the punchline is, it fell apart. Owen’s beliefs famously dovetailed with a strand of millenarianism—the eschatological conviction of an imminent, permanent transformation—in British radical thought. The revolution was an almost guaranteed biblical promise.
It is fairly well documented that this psychic orientation towards social transformation produced both unrivalled commitment to the cause… and set its advocates up for profound disappointment.
So far the myth of the Garden of Eden has been lurking at the edges of this tale. But you more attentive readers might have noticed the other one: The Great Flood. Where the Garden of Eden speaks to a backward-looking anxiety about what has been lost, The Flood speaks to the urge for a sacred, redeeming Event.
The Great Flood, found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, is older than the bible. Some suspect it can be traced back to people experiencing the end of the last ice age when enormous quantities of water unfroze and flooded vast parts of the world. Some trace the origins of patriarchal society to this neolithic environmental disaster.
When I think of what Fred Rooke saw, Bess’s promise to haunt it and the weight of its history piling up, something feels inevitable to this landscape. A certainty almost assured—that something, one day, will give. The details are yet to be worked out. Our task is to figure out a relationship of acceptance and graceful confrontation.
More from Greg Fray.