Tipping Points: Cultural responses to wilding and land sharing in the North of England

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Tipping Points is envisaged as a second follow-on from the AHRC-funded Land Lines project (2017-2019), one of the principal aims of which was to use modern British nature writing to stimulate greater engagement with the natural world. The first follow-on, which recently began, plays on the nature we cannot see because it is mostly hidden from us; the second one also plays on what we cannot see, but in this case because it is no longer with us, or has yet to return. In the UK today, up to a third of mammals and a half of birds are threatened with extinction, largely because their habitats have been eroded to the point where they are no longer able to sustain themselves. Such tipping points, as they are popularly known, have potentially devastating consequences, but there are also positive examples. One such example consists of the various so-called 'wilding' or 'rewilding' initiatives through which British agricultural landscapes are being creatively managed so as to encourage the resurgence of wildlife. Such restoration processes are as much cultural as they are natural, and if nature is to bounce back in ways that are urgently needed to sustain our own as well as other, non-human animals' existences, the arts have a crucial role to play in stimulating both creative responses to the current crisis and alternative ways of imagining the natural world.Tipping Points, like its two immediate predecessors, is an arts-based project that aims to raise public awareness of the current environmental crisis, but also to intervene in contemporary conservation initiatives, such as re/wilding, that posit a more hopeful future for our increasingly diminished natural world. More specifically, the project aims to use the creative arts to show the meanings and values at work in landscape decision-making processes in which farmers, in particular, stand accused by many conservationists (and conservation-minded nature writers) of violating the biodiversity that is supposedly in their care. A more nuanced view is needed than this, and more inclusive involvement in such decision-making processes - hence the project's arts-inspired gathering together of different stakeholders and communities: those who own and/or cultivate the land; those who are dedicated to its sustainable management; and those members of the public whose experience and knowledge of it is not always adequately communicated or sufficiently shared.Tipping Points proposes a series of open-to-the-public writing and visual arts workshops organized around three sites in the North of England - Wild Ennerdale, Castle Howard Estate, and Stirley Community Farm - that represent re/wilding projects of different sizes and scales that operate in different kinds of natural and cultural environments, and that provide excellent opportunities for arts-based public engagement activities involving an equally wide range of participants that cuts across socially constructed boundaries of race, gender, and class. All three sites currently face major decisions about the use and management of land, and all are open to the integration of arts and humanities perspectives into such decision-making processes, recognizing that such perspectives and the activities they inspire may help reach people who might not otherwise engage with the countryside and/or the natural world. In staging these workshops, each led by an experienced practitioner in the field, we aim to reach out to new audiences - e.g. BAME communities in northern England - whose voices are rarely heard and whose experiences of nature are rarely accounted for. We also aim to hold a major symposium on land sharing that, in bringing together farmers, conservation experts, and humanities scholars/practitioners, will look to create common ground for land management practices in which landscapes are viewed holistically and the decisions surrounding them are opened up in accordance with the broad democratic imperatives of the creative arts.