Unselfing
We often like to roll into ELF’s quarterly newsletter with a bit of poetry but for this summer solstice edition, we thought we would turn to a female author and sometimes philosopher and her musings on the natural world and our place in it. “Unselfing”, a term, an ethical consciousness, first coined by Iris Murdoch in her 1970 philosophical work, The Soverignty of Good, is a state of aspiration for our times. When I first learnt of it I immediately thought of unselfing as having parallels with Rights of Nature, where the more than human perspective accelerates us to less human-centric decisions. So what is unselfing…? The words, “there is nothing now but kestrel”, famously illustrate that transcendental moment where one unconsciously loses the self in the natural world and the ego falls away.
Iris Murdoch put it like this:
“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.”
I sometimes think that if our politicians spent more time unselfing they might come up with better legislation for nature. As many of you will be aware, nature groups and conservation charities, and importantly the Office of Environmental Protection, are raising alarm bells as the Planning and Infrastructure Bill makes its way through Parliament. The OEP has called the bill regressive, stating that the Government’s proposals 'would have the effect of reducing the level of environmental protection provided for by existing environmental law. As drafted, the provisions are a regression.'
The main concerns are with Part 3 of the Bill. This allows developers to pay into a central fund to be orchestrated by Natural England for nature restoration, thus allowing developers to side-step legislation such as the Habitats Regulations. As many of you know, these regulations are an absolute cornerstone, protecting the UK’s most important natural and national treasures. Having endured months of negative nature rhetoric, it was ironic that the government’s own impact assessment on the P&IB concluded that there was no evidence that nature protections were a hinderance to development. This is all pretty depressing stuff and if you haven’t written to your MP demanding amendments to the bill, you may wish to do so.
In the meantime, in my hometown the swifts are back. Only this year the swift box that we erected at the back of the house 3 years ago, has now been occupied for the first time by a pair of those wonderous birds. There is nothing now but swifts.
Emma Montlake,
ELF Co-Director
