At some point during Wednesday night last week, when Britain was being battered by Storm Agnes, a person – or perhaps more than one – walked up to one of the country’s most famous and beloved trees, fired up a two-metre chainsaw and began to cut.
In as little as half an hour, the Sycamore Gap had been reduced to a gap. The tree that filled that little U-shaped dell in Hadrian’s Wall and was thought to be up to 300 years old was gone. What was left was a gaping, empty hole. Not only in that sweep of tree-scarce Northumberland landscape that once demarked the Roman empire’s northern limits, but in the lives of the many people from all over the world who had taken that lone tree, defiantly clinging on to those windy northern moors, to heart. People who grew up, as I did, wrapping arms around it on long walks along the wall in waterproofs and who later returned with their own children to do the same. People who scattered the ashes of their loved ones around its roots. People who visited it religiously through the seasons and sought shelter from sun and showers under its canopy; who saw its leaves fire in the autumn and its stark silhouette scratched black into a cold, winter sky.
Trees can mean an awful lot to us. They are deep-rooted, for want of a better phrase, in our culture and mythology. And the outpouring of grief and anger over the destruction of that single sycamore has been widespread, from environmentalists and nature charities to politicians and celebrities. The absence of it in that dip in the wall is devastating for many reasons, but on reading the news last week that a 16-year-old lad was one of those arrested in connection with the incident (and subsequently released on bail pending further inquiries), I felt another kind of sadness and grief.
The fate of the Sycamore Gap tree is tragically symbolic of a society that has become utterly disconnected from, and uninterested in, the natural and non-human world. There is a bitter irony to the fact that on the same day the tree was cut down, the National Trust unveiled its own grim news: a report on the state of nature in Britain. This showed our country as one of the most nature-depleted on the planet, with a 19% decline in the abundance of species studied since 1970, when things were – to put it mildly – already beyond bleak, after centuries of consistent degradation and persecution of nature and decades of the mass usage of insecticides such as DDTs in farming. It says something that this deeply troubling report garnered far fewer headlines than the sole act of vandalism at Sycamore Gap.
We exist in a climate and biodiversity emergency; we are apathetic overseers of the sixth great mass extinction on Earth. When confronted with the reality of this, the question asked by most reasonably minded individuals is: how the hell do we stop this? But that is, all too often, as far as it ever goes. Life gets in the way. The systems of existence, the necessities and difficulties of earning a living, paying bills, feeding and clothing our children, are all-consuming and appear more urgent. We offset these existential crises and challenges to those in charge; those supposedly tasked to do the best for the country, for the world. And what do they do? We live in what purports to be a progressive, civilised and “nature-loving” nation that is one of the wealthiest on the planet and yet we have a government that has just proudly and systematically backtracked on its commitments to meet climate imperatives and torn up its environmental policies and promises.
During a summer that saw a spate of extreme wildfires, including the burning of 13.8m hectares (34m acres) of land in Canada and catastrophic floods around the globe, both as a result of the climate crisis, Rishi Sunak announced the granting of new licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. He has subsequently pushed back some of the government’s net zero commitments. He did this with a smile on his face, maintaining he was on the side of the ordinary worker against the elite, attempting to drive a new wedge through the issue of climate to win votes. This sickens me as surely as the sycamore’s end. He knows the data. He has the facts at his fingertips. He has children. The impact of such decisions will be enormous and the knock-on effects disastrous in the long term. It raises the question: which is the greater crime? To cut down a tree, or to fail to take action while the forest burns?
Sadly, Labour’s response has hardly been the bold move it should have been: the launch of a counter-policy undoing this madness. The truth is that we have politicians on every side that regard taking the essential steps to ensure future generations can live in a habitable world as too unpopular a move among the electorate to stand behind. We kick the can down the ever-shortening road.
And where does this start? Well, in addition to the usual political and corporate suspects locked in the death-dance of terminal-stage capitalism, we might look, too, at decades of other fellings, and failings. The erosion of nature and the natural world from curriculums and classrooms; the fact that much of England’s countryside is off-limits (only 8% is classified as open access, on which the right to roam exists); that our rivers can often not be accessed or swum in safely, thanks to water company pollution, or our moors or mountains slept on legally. The fact that most of our fields and woodlands cannot be walked through without threat of arrest. How can we expect people to form the kind of connections with this living world that might stop a tree-cutter’s saw or force a change in habits if they cannot be in it? How can we ask people to protect something they have no sense of belonging in, or to?
I grieve deeply for that tree, for that Celtic maple of the wall, which has stood there through all the phases of my children’s lives, my life, my parents’ lives, my grandparents’ lives and further back even than any photograph goes. But I also grieve for whoever set out last Wednesday into that storm with a chainsaw, because we have failed them just as surely as we have failed nature. That whoever it was couldn’t see the beauty and magnificence of that sycamore framed in that ancient fold of hill is down to a long series of cuts that are deeper and more destructive than the actions of that one person.
And if you’re asking what I hope might rise from that poor stump, it is change. More than a new sculpture, a stone circle or commemorative bench, it is root-and-branch change.
Rob Cowen is a writer and author
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
