Reviewed by Basak Tanulku, Independent Scholar, Istanbul, Turkey.
The English Lake District has long been an important subject of academic study. Since 2017, it has received heightened attention regarding its new status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the category of cultural landscape. Additionally, it has been the site of several controversial projects that threatened to put pressure on its natural and cultural heritage, and kindle tensions between hill farming and rewilding efforts. These developments have signaled broader issues reflecting the imbalance between nature and humans when seen as opposites; if one wins, the other loses.
Gere rejects this zero-sum game between nature and humans, taking the reader on a road trip, or in his words, a “miniature road movie” (p. 2) in a car across the Lake District, Cumbria, extending to Lancashire and North Yorkshire. The reader expecting stories about fells, lakes, tarns, or rivers, is likely to be surprised, however. Nor is this book about a less benign nature: nature’s cruelty, animals’ predations, or lethal disasters. Nor is it about how people survive against disasters like Storm Desmond (which shook the entire region in November 2015) or how they climb the not-that-high-but-still-steep-and-notorious fells. Instead, it explores unknown aspects of the Lake District, which is usually regarded as an idealized rural landscape manufactured for tourists. Behind this façade, Gere finds it is also home to nuclear facilities, terrorists, extraterrestrials and UFOs, slavery, and murder, as well as working-class people and artists seeking refuge.
In the introduction, Gere gives an account of the Picturesque and Romantic movements, which led to our well-known understanding of “nature,” as a sacred and sublime realm, usually put in sharp contrast to “humans.” After the eighteenth century, due to the Industrial Revolution, urban and rural landscapes became regarded as opposites, with the countryside becoming a refuge for those seeking solitude and to escape from depressing cities. In this context, “nature” was located above humans, regarded as benevolent and peaceful. Contemporary deep-ecologists often still valorize this view of nature.
Alternatively, Gere adopts ideas from McClellan’s nondual ecology and xenofeminism, emanating from a feminist collective named Laboria Cubonics. Using these ideas, Gere argues that there is no separation or hierarchy between natural and unnatural, human and nonhuman, dead and alive, beautiful and ugly. Gere claims that nature does not need a meaning given by humans and that it should not be defined or compared with something else. Drawing on the work of philosopher Eugene Thacker, Gere discusses three forms of the world: world-for-us, world-in-itself, and world-without-us (p. 9). Whereas the world-for-us is the world we define and live in, the world-in-itself is the world already existing before us. Finally, there is the world-without-us, which is the world that would be if or when humans ceased to exist. Gere attempts to portray the Lake District, a landscape sacred and iconic for many, if it were left to be rewilded. As he points out, in this case, we could never see the Lake District as rewilded, because it would be the Lake District-without-us, where we would be absent (p. 23).
The journey starts from the village of Eskdale Green, which has a Japanese garden, then pitstops at Sellafield, where the nuclear power station is located. From Coniston Water to Hadrian’s Wall, from Grange-over-Sands to Elterwater, the reader encounters unusual stories from past and present, and a different understanding of this famous landscape emerges. The trip is accompanied by forays into philosophy, arts, literature, and cinema, which both explain and simultaneously ask new questions of the Lake District, things associated with it, and things evoked by it. Among the famous thinkers who Gere invokes, the reader finds a large cast including Wordsworth and Ruskin, people who framed the Lake District as we tend to know it, and philosophers including Heidegger, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Deleuze, and Guattari.
An essential theme of the book involves how artists have found refuge in the Lakes, following Wordsworth’s and Ruskin’s footsteps. Some of these sites associated with artists are Brantwood, the home of Ruskin; Brigflatts, where the poet Basil Bunting is buried; Dentdale, where poets Jonathan Williams and Tom Meyer lived in Corn House; Elterwater, where Kurt Schwitters lived and worked in his workshop; Merzbarn; and Grizedale, which became the hub of Grizedale Sculpture Trust where land art was born. The reader also learns how stones and rocks were used for art, as seen in lithophone, a tool made by stones to produce sounds and music (pp. 89–91). Gere further demonstrates how dry stone walls, something famous and peculiar to the northern English landscape, became regarded as an art form (pp. 88–89). By explaining the lives and works of these artists, Gere explores relationships between language, civilization, art, and nature.
The Lake District has not only been produced, created, and lived in by artists but also by working classes and serfs, a neglected feature of this landscape. Ribblesdale, for instance, is home to Ribblehead Viaduct on the Settle to Carlisle railway line built during the nineteenth century by working classes who lived in nearby shantytowns (pp. 118–119). Sunderland Point, another site of interest, has deep connections to the slave trade. Gere discusses differences between work and labor and how the Industrial Revolution left its signature in the Lake District with large country homes of the new rich who made fortunes from the Industrial Revolution (pp. 129–130). The Lake District was also home to putative extraterrestrial activity, seen in Solway Spaceman or Coniston UFOs (pp. 64–66), and a camping site of terrorists plotting the London 2005 bombings (p. 105).
Gere also engages a fundamental ambivalence regarding landscapes, which are challenging to be defined either socially, culturally, or geographically. The northern English landscape has often provided fodder for such debates, regarded as neither north nor south and as located somewhere between England and Scotland. Here, Gere explores the essential and contested role of borders in defining and distinguishing geographies. As he explains, Hadrian’s Wall was the border between the Roman Empire and the north, and northern England can still be regarded as a transition between England and Scotland (pp. 50–54).
Gere argues for a prevalence of such ambivalent sites in the Lake District, drawing on “heterotopias,” Foucault’s concept referring to places like prisons or asylums structured as exceptions to everyday life and order. Gere argues that lakes, tarn, meres, and waters can be properly regarded as heterotopic sites because they evoke death, an exception within the Lake District, a landscape of liveliness. Coniston Water, for instance, is a heterotopic site for Gere, because of its associations with several notable deaths and murders (p. 95). One was Donald Campbell’s death in BlueBird when he was trying to break the water speed record in 1967. Another is the body of Carol Park, also known as the “Lady in the lake,” a local teacher who went missing in 1976. Her body was found in Coniston Water in 1997, and her murder remains a mystery. Grange-over-Sands is offered as another ambivalent site because it always changes its shape, becoming something that is neither land nor sea (p. 107). It is also another site of death: It was the place where twenty-one Chinese undocumented migrant workers died while gathering cockles (p. 113).
Gere successfully troubles received ideas about the conflicting relationship between nature and humans. If there is no difference between nature and humans, nor between ugly and beautiful, dead and alive, natural and unnatural, good and bad; if they have equal value or no value at all, then how are we to judge the things and occurrences depicted in the book? Gere argues that they are simply all part of nature, whose meaning is not entitled by us; neither sacred, nor good, nor bad.
Gere leaves us with existential questions: Can we really talk about human nature, inherent to us and nature’s nature, inherent to it? Or, if there is no difference between nature and humans, are nature’s nature and human nature truly the same and of the same value, nothing above anything else? Are we really equal subjects in the same equation, both winning and losing simultaneously?
Perhaps we can even ask more concrete questions on the future of the Lake District now when an unseen virus has locked us in our homes, leading the way to nonhumans reinvading urban and rural landscapes once dominated by us. We can ask if the Lake District could transform into the Lake District-without-us, without second homes, buses, cars, not even drones or live cams that bring the Lakes in front of our eyes while we are sitting in our homes. When one day in the future, far or near, the Lake District becomes without us, who will be the winner and the loser?
This book demonstrates how an iconic landscape loved by millions is, in fact, the subject of a mix of love and hate. It is not for travel lovers, nor is it all about philosophy. It is more than both: The book is about the unknown history and facts of the Lake District, which also travels across concepts stemming from this landscape, although not necessarily associated with it. Although it could have photographs and maps, which would help the reader to be able to see the sites explained, the book successfully lifts the romanticized cover of the Lake District to demonstrate some of what is missing in popular representations of this famous landscape. It is recommended to those interested in a different reading of the Lake District, as well as critical landscape and geography, in general.