Sitting outside a cafe here in Witney, a market town in Oxfordshire, a retired couple at the table next to mine talks sympathetically about people in France suffering from the heat. “It’s only going to get worse,” he says, sadly. She talks of fires and floods. “ … which is only going to make the situation worse, isn’t it?”
I write this brief post on a day when the headlines are filled with stories of heat–heat in Italy, heat in Arizona, heat across the world, making life miserable for most but potentially deadly for the houseless and the poor. Meanwhile, John Kerry, the US climate envoy has rejected the idea of the world’s greatest historical emitter of Greenhouse Gasses paying reparations to poor nations its pollution has harmed. Kerry doesn’t appear to object to a Loss and Damage fund, but, as a representative of the US, he refuses to accept any agreement that signals a liability on the part of the rich nations. In other words, voluntary charity rather than justice is the organizing principle we will follow.
This brings to mind some words George Manbiot has written lately in the Guradian: “The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them.” More evidence can be found in the UK government’s decision to offer new licenses for oil and gas drilling at the end of July. How can ordinary people like me have faith that the few with power will use it with the future in mind?
So often I return to this worried place: feeling defeated but trying to generate hope. In recent years I have tried to offer my students a strategy I came to with the help of John Barry, Professor, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, at Queen’s University, in Belfast. He calls this mindset “radical hope”: “Radical hope for [Barry] is not the same as optimism. As Vaclav Havel so perceptively put it ‘Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out’.
“In this way,” Barry continues, “‘radical hope’ is a clear eyed recognition of the problems we face, a courageous and explicit disavowal of the temptations of a naïve (and at times dangerous) assumption that ‘all will be well’, but nevertheless a belief in the capacity of human agency. Hope, as Emily Dickinson, put it “is the thing with feathers”. Or as [Radical Hope author Jonathon] Lear notes, ‘What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.’
“This is the sense of hope as an antidote to the dangers (or comforting temptations) of what can be a debilitating negativity in forensically detailing all the problems of the current time. Hope here is a virtue guarding against the political and intellectual vice of dwelling in a self-righteous negativity, to ‘curse the dark’ but without also ‘lighting a candle’ for fear of being seen (or self-regarded) as naïve, politically or ideologically motivated or even ‘utopian’. Here what makes this hope radical is in the sense that Raymond Williams so aptly put it: ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.’”
I felt this kind of hope in the response to the Tiny Forest at Catlin Gabel. I encountered hopefulness in contributing to the education of the young. I could feel it when the students in my honors course gave Tiny Forest guides they’d made guides to second graders. The guides, and the interaction between students ten years apart in age, led to a deeper connection to our school, our environment, and each other. The ease with which good feelings arose made hope possible, even natural.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield at the Foxwell Drive Tiny Forest, Oxford
My trip to six Tiny Forests these past two weeks has given rise to thoughts about our relationship with human-made natural spaces and to “radical hope.” I see good, smart people dedicating their careers to work that sometimes feels merely symbolic, yet which also creates joy, community, and hope. In Oxford, I met Nagma Manoharan, a graduate student at the University of Sheffield, who is conducting research on how people interact with Tiny Forests and how design influences that interaction. Do they invite the visitor in? Is there a place in the Tiny Forest at which a person might pause and take in everything they are seeing? Our conversation was so fun because we were talking about how to maximize the good these wonderful pocket-sized places can do.
The Tiny Forest at William Torbitt Primary School, Ilford
The Tiny Forest I visited in Ilford, east London, was a place of learning, excitement, and welcome. Below are a few snapshots showing some of the many ways students could develop a meaningful relationship with the natural world there.
In a gazebo adjacent to the forest: a board for news, lessons, and challenges
Karen Dunston, my host at William Torbitt Primary School in Ilford, had thought about her students when she designed her Tiny Forest. As a fellow teacher, I appreciated her decision to make the forest a non-symmetrical shape (it roughly matches the boundaries of the field it’s in), to put a path through the middle but leave the classroom space outside, and her decision to have a fence but no gates on the forest. Sometimes I feel like being a teacher means thinking constantly about everything that could go wrong (distractions, non-sequiturs) and about tricks for keeping students pointed toward a lesson’s main point.
Yet at the same time, Karen recognizes that her students need to wander and explore, and they are invited to explore the natural spaces she has created surrounding her school’s Tiny Forest. (there are clear rules: “no picking, no licking.”) Karen has a cool idea for connecting her students (who are between nine and eleven years old) to the forest. At the beginning of the school year, she had each student in the environmental club find a tree that matched thjem in height. Now, at the end of the school year, the ids went back to their trees: both of them had grown, but many of the trees were now a couple of feet taller than their students!
Carl at the edge of the dense and healthy Tychwood, planted in 2020.
The Tiny Forest in Witney, called “Tychwood” after the nearby ancient forest that some have tried to restore in recent years, isn’t associated with a school but has become a public symbol of hope and the ability of ordinary people to make change when they band together. Speaking with my wonderful hosts in Witney–Forestkeeper Mark Aitman and town ranger Carl Whitehead–I could easily sense the pride they had in their first-in-the-UK Tiny Forest. They had chosen the species carefully and laid them out in such a way to create a kind of bell-shaped profile. Coverage of the Tiny Forest in the spring of 2020, as the world sank in the pandemic, inspired people all over the world, including me! Mark told me that the week after they planted, they went into lockdown. They barely missed a two-year wait!
The Witney Forest is the flagship of the some 200 Tiny Forests Earthwatch has planted in the UK. I first heard about it early during lockdown and it inspired me to try to initiate a Tiny Forest at my own school. Now over three-years old, the trees of the forest have created a dark thicket and shot up some 20-25 feet!
Tychwood, 2020 (source)
Mark at Tychwood, July 2023
I had also had the good fortune to meet Witney Mayor Owen Collins, who came to the Tiny Forest to welcome me and talk about what it has meant to him and the town. In addition to his political position and a second (paying) day job, Owen is a poet. I wonder if he might consider sponsoring a Tiny Forest poetry contest for children, culminating with a reading at the Tiny Forest? It wasn’t clear that there was any curriculum associated with their wildly successful Tiny Forest. I hope there is because the growth has been so phenomenal, so swift, that the school kids who helped plant it in 2020 must appreciate the difference.
This is a key attribute of Tiny Forests: they grow so fast that within a child’s elementary school years they might soar thirty or forty feet! They are places of biodiversity, of cooling shade, and of carbon storage, albeit mostly symbolic. But as symbols, they have great power. They show us the regenerative power of Nature, and the reward that will come once we choose the living and the native over public spaces that center on shopping, on lawns, or on pretty flowers that can’t be touched. Native plants are hardy. I have seen this myself, after many visits by a deer to our Tiny Forest. Where the deer eats, new growth sprouts soon after, seemingly in defiance of munching animal.
Tiny Forests also remind us that it is not “too late.” We need to change our priorities at pretty much every level, but “rewilding” with native plants isn’t difficult. And the reaction of visitors to Tiny Forests, whether scientists, school kids, city officials, or educators, gives me hope that we can make the transformations that we need to.
THE BIGGER PICTURE: Educating Students for the Globalized Present 