The Modern Nomad

In early June I’ll head to Newfoundland to research communities that were resettled between the 1950s and 1960s. Curious about outsider perspectives on “The Rock,” a nickname that gives you a sense of the landscape, I’ve been wading through articles from the mid to late 19th century. The description below made me smile, though I can’t say I agree.

This is from an 1878 issue of Chambers’s Journal.

[Revellers at Wilderness Festival, via wildernessfestival.com]

As the London 2012 Olympics arrive in my ‘hood of Hackney, I’m reminded of something the British-born author Jonathan Raban once wrote in Granta: The English are “born into a casual phlegmatic acceptance of astounding alterations to the landscape.” It was what he described as second nature, kind of like nature 2.0, where the old growth forests are long gone and what we think of as nature is deeded, divided and landscaped. We are not talking about, say, northern British Columbia or the wilds of Alaska, where a tree could fall in the forest and no one would hear.

There’s some nostalgia for “wilderness” right now, and I’m not talking about the foxes who follow me down the streets of London as I walk my dog. Consider Wilderness Festival, one of many (sure to be rain-soaked) festival weekends in the UK. Sharon Jones is playing. Lianne la Havas is playing.
The visual branding for the festival hints at the kind of boutiquing of wilderness that seems trendy now. Case in point: the festival comes with its own beach-side “spa” with everything from “hand-built luxurious oak hot tubs to soak and relax in to wooden saunas and a champagne bar…” I suspect that Raban would dispute the festival’s claim that it is in the “wilds of England.” There is no such thing, I can hear him argue.

But why put words in his mouth? Here’s his definition of wilderness in an interview with Granta:

“A wilderness that’s truly wild is beyond human rule, which is something I’ve always loved about the idea of the wilderness of the sea, at least before we fucked it up and made it wild no more, just one more critically endangered habitat.”

[The hyper-saturated lake at Wilderness Festival, via wildernessfestival.com]

When it comes to the Wilderness Festival, I’m only partly cynical about such branding . If I wasn’t oppressed by what seems like relentless, endless rain and put off by the hefty ticket price, I’d probably go. (See, a true outdoors person would not be deterred by weather.)

And just to link it back to The Modern Nomad and notions of community, I wonder if true wilderness is a rejection of community. The Wilderness Festival is less a way to approximate the outdoors and more of an excuse to throw a party. And who can complain about that?

+ I am getting somewhat off topic, because this is a blog first about communities shaped by mobility, but I’ve just started reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, so all definitions of wilderness are coming up. I like Macfarlane’s estimation:

“…this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.”

On cloudy winter days, a bluish-grey mist slides over Copenhagen, blurring the edges between the harbour and the flat expanse of the city. This Danish capital is slotted like a puzzle piece on a nob of land along the Øresund Strait, which connects the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Copenhagen has been called one of the most liveable cities in the world.

Copenhagen, like Paris, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver and other cities, has long wanted to be one of the greenest, aiming to become an “eco-metropole” by 2015. This is a place where you can fish for cod in the harbour and power your home with energy harvested from the 20 spiky windmills that form a half-crescent in the waters off shore. Where a bicycle commissioner has a staff of seven and a budget of $15 million. Where the rhetoric of the environmental movement was transformed into action.

I travelled to Copenhagen in December 2009 to cover the United Nations climate change talks, the ones that famously failed. Its failure became the story, but there was another story that wasn’t being reported. I found myself immersed in a sort of environmental tent city: thousands of activists descended on the city, hooking up through social media, to form instant communities. And this village was as fascinating as the political discussions at the Bella Center.

Save the environment and buy more stuff: a view of Hopenhagen, an exhibit in central Copenhagen sponsored by the International Advertising Association

The blogger-protesters ventured into areas others wouldn’t, like the communal enclave of Christiania, an autonomous Gothic compound in the middle of Copenhagen. They bird-dogged politicians. They protested in peaceful demonstrations through NGO-organized youth delegations during the day, and turned up to interviews with black eyes after late-night off-the-record protests. This transient city of activists formed a tighter community than any back home. They had chosen their neighbours and were united by cause, if not geography.

Yet no one was talking about it. No one was telling the stories of this de facto neighbourhood—one that dispersed at the end of the talks like the satellite waves that had transmitted home their missives. They were a certain breed of nomad: the politically active, media-savvy and highly educated activist who created a little greenhouse gas to come together in person. They were often young, always idealistic and well informed. They straddled the physical and electronic divide, living in two worlds at once: the one they made in Copenhagen and the one back home, whereever that might be. (To read more about the activist-bloggers in at the UN climate change conference, go to this piece I wrote about activist-journalists for PBS MediaShift.)

Found on the ground during one of the big protests through the streets of Copenhagen

If this kind of instant community seemed familiar, it was because I had found it months earlier on a smaller, local scale at a weekend at a Greenpeace training workshop in rural Alberta, Canada. (The camp, rented from a children’s group, overlooked a coal-fired power plant—a happy coincidence Greenpeace’s Mike Hudema told me.) A few old-timers turned up, but most participants were in their early twenties. I wondered where they would be in 10 or 20 years, if they would still be rallying, or if they, like many activists before them, would burn out or acquire families and mortgages and become too busy to protest.

The activists I met in Alberta were not really nomads. They were from nearby Edmonton or Calgary. So why write about them here? Because they represent the kind of community that is uncommonly close and yet disparate. A few months after the “climate action camp” they would follow the blog posts of activists in Copenhagen, newspaper coverage and tweets, part of the nomadic diaspora.

This community forms and reforms at protests and international climate change talks. Instead of spending their money on a trip to a Mexican resort they paid to travel to Denmark, in December, where they found likeminded people who have more in common than neighbours and even family. After a few days or a couple weeks they dispersed and their instant communities disappeared like the bluish-grey mist in Copenhagen that burns off with the brief, dim midwinter sun.