A World Traveler’s Year At Home: Alastair Humphreys (Transcript)

The whole of the UK is covered by this. Whatever country you’re in the world, there’s a similar sort of version, the US Topo series of maps, for example. So I thought I’d buy this and spend a year exploring this one small map, and roughly it covers 20km by 20km, quite a small area, and each map is divided up into individual 1km grid squares.

So my idea was to spend a whole year, rain or shine, winter and summer, and I would go out once a week to explore a single grid square, a 1km grid square on my map, and I’d choose those grid squares at random because I didn’t want to just pick out the seemingly interesting or beautiful parts of the map. I wanted to get a much broader perspective on things than that. So random grid square, once a week, for a year, boom, go, see what I would find. But there was one problem with this plan of mine.

I really don’t like where I live. Where I live is really boring, and I worried maybe this would feel very claustrophobic and restrictive for someone who’d love travelling off around the world. But I thought, let’s give it a try.

Using Technology to Enhance Observation

And so I found myself mooching around one damp, dreary November morning out on a grid square in the middle of nowhere with seemingly nothing going on, just thinking, what am I going to do now that I’m here?

I’m not an expert about nature at all. I wish I was, but I’m not, I don’t really know anything at all. So I used a couple of apps to help me be a bit more observant and to learn a bit more about what I was seeing. I’m going to tell you just about a couple of those.

The first app was called Seek, which is a fantastic app on your phone. You point it at a plant or an insect, if you can track one down that’s slow enough, and it tells you the name of it. And this is fantastic because suddenly you have a bit more of a connection with it. Once you know the name of something, you can, if you want, maybe learn more about it later on, and you start to connect with it and notice it in more places, and that’s great.

The other app that I really started to appreciate, which was so valuable for me, is called Merlin. And Merlin listens to birdsong and tells you the name of it. Suddenly the random little chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, tweeting away that I’d pretty much ignored all my life, I learn, hey, chiff-chaff, it’s a chiff-chaff. It’s not got a particularly exciting song, all it ever does is say chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff.

And if you look it up online, it’s a fairly boring little brown, ordinary-looking bird, not too exciting. But then, dig a little deeper, and I learn that this tiny little bird weighs as much as a coin, a tiny little thing, and yet it’s flown all the way from Africa to be here in my random little bits of parkland. And more than that, when the chiff-chaff arrives, you know that spring is on its way.

So suddenly, I’m not just walking through my park as I’ve done all my life and hearing vague birdsong now, it’s like, hey, it’s a chiff-chaff, this heroic little guy that’s flown all the way on this epic journey to say to me, hey, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, the sun is on its way again. Spring is coming, here comes the sun, everything’s going to be all right, this is wonderful.

The Power of Curiosity

And so, the curiosity was starting to seep into me now, to pay attention and be curious. And I realised that curiosity is the secret superpower that you need, whether you are an explorer of the world or an explorer of your backyard.

And so, off I went exploring all sorts of different places around my local map, and I was very much enjoying it, but I’m a bit of a hyperactive person. I tend to just zoom around all over the place, trying to do too many things at once. And what I really need to do is slow down and appreciate what I’m doing out here. And I had a couple of little tricks to help me do that.

The first one was to take a little camping stove out into the woods and to brew coffee when I was out, and just to force myself to have that little pause that really helped me settle into the day’s grid square and then start to appreciate it.

But some days I really am incorrigible, I’m ridiculous, I’m just thinking, oh, I’m far too busy sending emails, how can I possibly spend time having a lovely time out in nature, benefiting my physical and mental health, having fun, I can’t do this, I must send emails, I’m so annoying. So then I have to just force myself to sit on a log. Sit on a log for a few minutes. If you think you are too busy to sit on a log in the woods for 10 minutes, you probably need to sit on a log in the woods for 20 minutes.

And so I found this very difficult, but it was a fantastic tool for settling into the grid squares.

Confronting Local Environmental Issues

So the year was progressing on, I started to get into the habit of this now, started to learn all sorts of things, and the early phase of just becoming interested in everything and the joy that brings started to give way to a somewhat more depressing second phase of the year. Now, like everyone, I sit at home and I watch David Attenborough on television telling us in very serious tones that all the polar bears are dying and the Amazon is getting chopped down, and I feel very sad about that, but I don’t really know what to do about all the polar bears dying. So I watch the programme and then I shrug and have a cup of tea, and then I just get on with my day.

But walking around my map felt very different. I can’t deal with the global problems, but seeing week on week small local problems around my map felt much more connected to me. And my map really started to feel to me like a canary in a coal mine, and probably, in fact, that probably the problems I was seeing on a weekly basis here might be symptomatic of bigger global problems.

For example, every single week I was astonished walking around my map by the amount of litter and rubbish and fly tipping everywhere. I was walking around dodging through dangling poo bag hanging off trees throughout the nation, just wondering what’s happened? How have we got so disconnected from our country that we care so little to treat it like this? And every single river on my map was dirty and polluted, although a little shout out to the fly tipper here who had perfectly matched his lurid green sofa with the bright green eutrophication of algae runoff from fertiliser or manure from fields. But rivers everywhere that are just dirty.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome

Now probably the most important and useful phrase I learned in the whole year, it’s a bit geeky, but it’s called shifting baseline syndrome. And once you start to learn about shifting baseline syndrome, the way you see the world starts to change. Because this is the way that little by little by little, year on year, generation on generation, we allow small changes to happen and we don’t really notice them. So that the baseline of what we accept as normal nature or normal countryside gets worse and worse and worse, year on year, generation on generation, but so slowly that you don’t really notice it until suddenly I open my eyes for the first time in my life and I’m walking around my map thinking, where are all the trees?

We’ve got no trees. We’ve got one of the worst amounts of tree cover in Europe. We chopped down all the trees. And this started to really shock me because I’ve always, in all my travels around the world, I’ve always had very fond nostalgic thoughts for England’s green and pleasant land.

And I love England’s green and pleasant countryside, but I was learning now that this is very much a green desert. There’s nothing here. We have destroyed pretty much all our nature. We have one of the least biodiverse countries on the planet.

And the choices of food we make every single day mean that we use insane amounts of farmland. So there’s no space for nature and wildlife left anymore.

The Importance of Access

One day I was walking down a public footpath through a farmer’s field and suddenly the farmer started yelling at me. He was really, really angry that I was walking down this footpath. So I walked over to him and politely had a chat with him saying, look, I’m on a public footpath. I’m allowed to walk here. And he acknowledged that I was technically allowed to be there, but it really annoyed him to have people disturbing his land. And I could kind of see that viewpoint.

I guess it’s a bit like working in your office and just having random people walking back and forth whilst you’re emailing everybody. So I could see his viewpoint, but I profoundly disagreed. I feel that getting access for more people to the countryside is so important. So we argued back and forth ineffectively, but satisfyingly for a while until somehow in our conversation it came out that we both had a very close mutual friend.

And suddenly his demeanour completely changed. The farmer was very apologetic now. “I’m so sorry for being angry at you. Do you want to come and see the cows? Would you like to come into the farmhouse for a cup of tea? I’m really sorry.” And what struck me about this was that suddenly I wasn’t just some random person out in the countryside. I was like him. I was one of him, whereas before I’d been an other.

And this realisation that the countryside is not equally accessible to everybody really sank deep into my awareness of what was going on in this year. Going around the countryside is pretty easy for me. I’m a six foot tall, white man, very muscular. That wasn’t a joke. I’m a six foot tall bloke, wandering around the countryside. If someone tells me off, it’s probably not too intimidating. I’ve spent my whole life navigating around the countryside. I feel quite comfortable and familiar and welcome with this sort of landscape.

But I realised that for so many groups of society, the countryside is not equally accessible for everyone.

Finding Hope and Solutions

But I don’t really like seeing things in a negative kind of way. So I actually started to see a lot of hopeful solutions here. The solutions to some of these problems, they’re not easy, but they are simple and they’re very much interconnected. For example, if we can open up more access to more people and get more people engaged with exploring their own neighbourhood, people are going to care more about the land they live on, be much less likely to litter it, to notice how our land is being used so wastefully and causing so much pollution. That might change some lifestyle decisions, which then frees up farmland that can be used for rewilding, for nature. Suddenly then there’s more scope for more people to access that land and round and round the solutions go in a really positive upward spiral.

So the second half of the year then became a really hopeful, uplifting journey around my map, exploring the towns around where I live, going up and down the streets, getting out into nature and trying to pay attention to huge nature and tiny nature and to value them both the same with similar amounts of attention.

Week on week I was discovering quiet country lanes and bridleways and footpaths that I’d never been down before. In all my years of running and exploring and cycling where I live, quiet little churches, hundreds of years of silent ancient history to sit in for a little while. Quiet cafes to enjoy. Even occasionally a tiny little chalk stream, clear and cool on a hot summer’s day, just out of sight beyond the reeds there is the massive motorway bridge hammering along. I’ve hammered down that road so many times and never noticed this lovely cool stream just waiting down below it.

Because it was random I often went to bits that I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen, where nature and mankind were butting up against each other, the forgotten parts of my map falling down, broken concrete, ignored, round the back of beyond wasteland things, but where now through the concrete shrubs were starting to break through the tarmac and start to rewild the area. And a sense of peace and discovery and exploration.

And actually these edge land parts of my map felt much more wild and filled with nature than the manicured so-called countryside bits of my map did. So these were the surprise delight of my year exploring my local map.

Conclusion

So please, I would urge you to get hold of your local map, to buy your map, to download it from the internet, to borrow it from the local library and to go explore your own neighbourhood. It’s cheap, it’s accessible, there’s no such thing as a better place to go or a better person to do this. You with your unique observations and curiosities will find things on your unique map that nobody else will. And isn’t that a wonderful spirit of exploration and adventure?

And so I really feel then after this year of exploring such a tight small map, I realise just how enormous that is. And I’ve realised that if you go out to explore with enough curiosity to pay attention and to be astonished, then perhaps a single map can be enough exploration for an entire lifetime.

Thank you very much.

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