On Friday 8^th April 2022, as Team Doncaster Council, we set out on an exciting fieldtrip down to The Great Fen, in Cambridgeshire.  All together on a mini bus, people talked over seats and across aisles. New connections being made, ideas being born, energies synethizing. All connected by our passions in ecology.

It had been over 2 years since I had done this; gone somewhere new with lots of people I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure exactly why I had been invited along, but I was glad to be there.

We arrived at The Great Fen and the learning began, all being led by our brilliant hosts. I had the biggest urge as the presentation started to make notes and decided I’d do what I do best. Document the journey and use drawing to break open my thinking and listening. As we began our physical tour of the vast and beautiful landscapes, I started to write questions in the margins of my notebook.

I loved taking the photos, especially because of how the light created all these endless vistas and atmospheres. The sky and the land touched in the distance.  But there was something significant in the drawing. I love how drawing intervenes in the reckoning of reality in ways that writing and photography do not. As John Berger, writer & thinker, noted: A photograph is a taking, but the drawing a making[1]. He notes how a photo stops time, while a drawing encompasses time.

I like how the act of drawing our tour, led by Brian Eversham, encompasses this moment. A mirroring of the peatland process, how it encompasses years and years of carbon in it. How the whole Great Fen project encompasses hundreds of stories and partners to bring it back to life. To grow it. To save it. Like a time capsule.

Always straddling behind the team (my default in life), I stand still whilst the others walk ahead. Take a photograph. Listen to the birdsong. Feel the heat from the soil below and the sun above; feel alive, feel the life! Hear the wind through the wild fluffy plants. And do a little run to catch up with everyone. And repeat.  

Drawing the landscape made it feel like an intimate conversation with what was being drawn. What is the land saying? What can we learn from it? What has it seen? What does it say about us humans?

I think a lot about peat and time as we walk over very spongey & warm soil.  About the past, the present and the future. About how much history is stored in it? And the answers it can hold for us now.

On the walk back to lunch, Brian tells me about his personal connection to peat. We realize that we are connected by geography, a hometown. We’re both originally from North Doncaster! A heritage that lays in the land that we are both bound by. By the lay of the land, we share a collective history and consciousness – even if we’re separated by a decade of time in that experience, we still know it & understand it, because the our place-collective-consciousness is that strong. I love how Brian is getting to follow is passion, started in Doncaster, and saving and creating peat & wildlife in Cambridgeshire. This story alone is regenerative and connective.  It brings home this fact that this world, the land and community of which we are born and take our being, is alive. It is not our supply house; but it is our larger body.

The idea that we can stand back and behold nature at a distance, as something discrete from our identities and actions, is an illusion[2]. Being a new councillor on this journey, I’m starting to learn that being able to see ourselves and futures, grounded in place and heritage together is regenerative. But we must design sustainability into our communities' lands, voices and places. And this is exactly what we saw on our trip.

Some of those questions, reflections and an almost manifesto-like of learning came out through my notebook that was inspired from the learning shared on our Great Fen journey, which I hope we can apply, in some way, in the near future in Doncaster. Those thoughts are:

1. What is valuable?

We were here at The Great Fen to learn from the process, the planning, to see the way the lands are being restored. But ultimately it is all about: Collaboration. Connectivity. Carbon. Water. New and Old ways of working. Together. Trust. Listening. Regrowing. Revitalizing.  We talk about how rewilding isn’t the right term. I agree.

2. Allowing things to change you.

We have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to us. We produce it. We live it.  Whenever growth happens, we need to allow it to emerge.[3] Learn to follow – or lead - when it makes sense. We need growth here. In many ways, as I draw and embody the landscape, it mirrors the challenge of it all right back at me.

3. Love your experiments.

It was clear that none of The Great Fen would be possible without experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. It takes trust, ambition, playfulness and risk. Like the landscape itself, we need to take the long view and allow ourselves the fun of (potential) failure. Conservation is more than just protecting.

4. S-l-o-w d-o-w-n. 
Drawing not only encompasses time, but it slows it right down. Here on this tour, we had time to do a ‘Slow looking’.  The ability to see is not innate. It grows, and it grows only in looking. To keep attending to something/someone is a form of care. Slow looking is a type of care. In order for this to work, here or in Doncaster, we need (ecological) care.

 Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves. The Great Fen, it seems is both a project that grows as fast (or as slow) as it needs to. With patience - the right partnerships, land, tools, techniques, research, funding, and people emerge.

5. LISTEN CAREFULLY.

Every living thing that enters our orbit brings with them a world more different and complex than any we ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or hopes, we fold their world onto our own. A recipe for care and success.

6. Memory and reflection.
I spent a lot of my time here trying to envision what it was like in the past where water and peatlands were much higher and plentiful, before we drained it all. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself. The land is always telling us things about it and ourselves. There’s often trauma in the land that seeps out into our communities. But it’s about noticing it and making people matter with matter.

7. Just add water.

These images come across as fragments that are suggestive of a world beyond, a world that is a reflection of every human hope and the land we all walk on and share.  In my deep thoughts on what it meant to be alive, I looked for patterns and turning points to wonder and see if any of it is significant. Time was a reoccurring theme, and I see this here at The Great Fen. This significance always feels the strongest when I am close to – or - paying attention to nature. I can’t help but feel the weight of its value each day. That awareness itself feels like a gift. This visit helped to solidify why The Fen is indeed Great, in more ways than one. We saw paths forward for us to learn from, to help us to begin to put the love back into the land and  in turn into its people.

I’ve been carrying the awareness of a finite amount of time we have in our lives, and in the land, if we don’t do something different. But The Great Fen showed us that we have some time, and if we use it well, it will be more than enough to encompass time and to then truly live.

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Sarah (Smizz) Smith is a Doncaster elected councillor for Adwick & Carcroft, who is also an artist, designer and therapeutic radiographer.

[1] John Berger, A Seventh Man (New York, 1975), and John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Boston; Penguin, 1990).

[2] Bruno Latour (2014) Bruno Latour: The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe https://www.artandeducation.net/classroom/video/66319/bruno-latour-the-…

[3] BM Manifesto for growth (2010)