The nature of the countryside

The peatdigger

It’s summertime. Many people go on holiday and many people visit the countryside. Or it’s just a beautiful day, and people decide to leave the city and to go for a stroll in nature or to take their bikes. It’s nice to be outdoors and to enjoy the sunshine and to feel the wind blowing through your hair. And so you took your bike and made a ride. You hear the birds singing, especially if it is yet early summer. Later in the season, you’ll see birds gathering together in the fields, preparing their soon to come long flights to southern countries, where they’ll stay in winter. By nightfall, huge flocks of thousands, no tens of thousands of starlings are looking for their sleeping places, moving as black clouds through the sky in spectacular movements. You hear a cow mooing. Other cows follow the sound with theirs. The bleating of sheep completes the choir. In the distance, a boy is singing a sad song. A dog barks. Other people enjoy the landscape as such: The woods they are walking through; a rippling stream; fields enclosed by hedges. The world around is wonderful and they enjoy its peace and its beauty. You feel yourself in nature and so do many with you.
Nature? Sometimes I wonder whether nature yet exists, for a deeper awareness will tell you that, especially around the cities, but not only there, most of the countryside is human-made. Even, where it isn’t, the human impact is inescapable. Some countries – mine, the Netherlands, in the first place – are completely human-made. There is a saying that “God created the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands”, but I think that it applies to many parts of the world in its own context. However, many people don’t realize it when walking in the countryside; or they don’t know it. As Henri Lefebvre makes clear in its Critique de la vie quotidienne (p. 163): when looking at the countryside and at much that we call “nature”, we confuse the facts of nature with human facts. When we walk through the countryside and see it as nature, we look at it in the way as “we look at the sea or the sky, in which each human trace is wiped out.” In the countryside “the human facts escape us.” We even don’t know anymore where to see them, where to look at them, where to find them, namely in the simple, familiar everyday objects, like the forms of the fields, the courses of the streams, the routes of the roads, the positions of the houses, the places of the forests. They are not simply there, guided by the will of nature. Everything in the countryside is human-made; even each grain of sand and clump of soil is, so to speak. The simple facts of human construction and artificiality are everywhere. And – what also many people don’t know – there is often much human misery and suffering behind these human facts; behind this human-made landscape. The work to make it often has been done by people enforced to work there, by direct force or enforced to take work because of the misery of their living conditions. People got meagre wages, too much to die from, too little to live on, and they lived as slaves or were enslaved. A plunge in history will make this clear to everybody who is interested in it and wants to know it. Enjoy your walk!