PERSONAL STORY
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Another route to ecocentrism
I
grew up in Huddersfield in the industrial conurbation of West Yorkshire, living for eighteen years in a council house there. My parents both worked in local factories, my father a lathe operator in an engineering works and mother sewing in a textile mill. Many of my father’s relatives, however, lived in Scotland and indeed further north. My father had grown up in the Shetland Isles before World War Two took him into the army. The contrast between the crowded towns of industrial England and the open spaces around the family croft on Shetland made a big impression on me when we visited there. In retrospect, I now see that the land there, as across most of the British uplands, is a man-made wet desert, thanks to massive deforestation followed by overgrazing of sheep and deer herds as well as grouse moors. On the croft itself, fertilizer applications to enrich the grass have produced extensive eutrophication in the nearby loch. Those first experiences made me very aware that industrial conurbations were not the only environments in which people could live. The sinking of the oil tanker Torrey Canyon in 1967 (still the worst oil spill in the history of the UK) also added to my growing awareness of the human impact and its negative sides. The then-raging Vietnam War spotlighted another side to the world’s ills. In my last year at school, I thought that better land-use management might be one way forward, so I went to study a Town and Country planning degree course at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1968. However, I soon saw the error of my choice, since planning seemed to be all about facilitating more growth, with, if lucky, a few cosmetics to hide its worst features. We were taken on many visits, such as to a motorway
The Ecological Citizen Vol 2 Suppl A 2019
construction site, dam building (we were some of the last people to walk along the North Tyne before it was flooded by Kielder Dam, creating the biggest artificial lake in Britain), ‘exotic’ conifer plantations (again the biggest in Britain), and a heavily mechanized and monocultural farm. All were presented as ‘progress’. A particular turning point for me was a visit to a big new housing scheme that quickly turned into a social disaster. I also read articles and books by The Observer’s planning correspondent Ian Nairn, who criticized what he called “subtopia” – drab urban sprawl (Nairn, 1957; Darley, 2019). Britain’s towns and cities were indeed being torn apart by developments that Newcastle city planner Wilfred Burn called “new towns for old” (Burns, 1963). It was a wrecking ball on a scale greater than the destruction caused by the Luftwaffe in the war (Stamp, 2010). As a teenager, I had seen the process first hand, with fine old Victorian buildings demolished to make way for glass and concrete blocks across the towns and cities of West Yorkshire. My politics were partly shaped by a great uncle, a former coal miner who had an extensive Left Book Club collection, which I worked my way through. I joined in the Labour Party Young Socialists in time for the 1966 General Election, my first experience of campaigning. In 1968, I joined the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party). It regarded the Soviet Union, China and the satellite states of Eastern Europe as ‘state capitalist’, in no way socialist. For a period, I worked as the full-time district organizer. Following my eviction, along with many others, from that organisation in the mid1970s for opposing its ‘Leninization’, I became involved in various ‘solidarity’
Sandy Irvine About the author Sandy is a political activist based in Newcastle-uponTyne, UK.
Citation Irvine S (2019) Another route to ecocentrism. The Ecological Citizen 2(Suppl A): 23–6.
Keywords Becoming ecocentric
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