Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:
The means of survival is land. Peasants do not see land like we do. We see land in terms of ‘nature’ , something separated from the artificiality of humankind’s creations, or, if these creations are included, then the natural, the supernatural and the unnatural are distinguished one from another. ‘Nature' does not convey peasant reality, though we like to think it does. It is for peasants a semantically empty category, and there is little iconic or verbal representation of it in what records peasants have left (although educated peasants writing for an audience of non-peasants do embrace the idea sometimes). From the point of view of the vast majority of peasants, there are, on the other hand, meadows, a river, the sky. For peasants the land is useless without their own work upon it, it will not be domesticated, ‘It will not open and it will not close', as is said in Poland. Marcin Brocki cites peasant words collected by the anthropologist Jacek Olędzki in the Poland of the 1960s: ‘I like it where the plain is; when I was in America I saw a mountain, and this was an awful view. And when it’s flat wherever you look, so that you could roll an apple, that is beautiful. Where you are perfectly flat, a lake, that’s beautiful. And when there are mountains, sands, forests, you don’t even want to come back.’ There is fear and even hatred of the wild, so unlike our veneration of wildness and the wilderness. The wild as our sublime makes no sense to the peasant.
The ideal of “nature” as a landscape untouched by humans is a legacy of twentieth century environmentalism that is best left behind. For one thing, what we have often thought to be “untamed wilderness” was, in fact, a vast garden tended by generations of native peoples. The Amazon, for example.
Another reason to leave that ideal behind is that ecological thinking desperately needs an animist turn. I am truly thankful for every effort to preserve land from development. The Sycamore Land Trust does work like this locally and I’ve walked their trails enough over the years to see the great value in it. At the same time, that cannot be the only strategy. We need to bring in something of that peasant view of the land as the locus of work. We need a land that is thoroughly peopled with human and non-human persons, working together in mutual flourishing.