A radical British politics rooted in nature is spreading – and the establishment doesn’t like it | John Harris

Now, it suddenly seems to be blurring over from the cultural sphere into our politics, with one obvious consequence – the belated entry into the national conversation of issues that have long been pushed to the margins, from land access and ownership to the shocking condition of our rivers.

Our understanding of the changing of the seasons seems all about the superficialities of heat and light, rather than the much deeper cycles of flora and fauna; to distinguish between different bird calls or spot particular wild flowers would require a level of folk knowledge that now seems almost magical.

At about the same time, ancient and exclusionary cliches about green spaces were being undermined by such inspirational organisations as Muslim Hikers and Black Girls Hike (last week, the latter’s Mancunian founder, Rhiane Fatinikun, received an MBE for “services to nature and diversity”).

Photograph: Muslim HikersThey also involve a mounting interest in the kind of enchanting, magical aspects of life that we will only find if we connect with nature – and the traces of much older ways of living that pepper our landscape.

These struggles – against such feats of tarmac-based official vandalism as the Newbury bypass and the M3 extension on Twyford Down, near Winchester – fused radical and creative action with a sense of history and mysticism: for their participants and many observers, they represented an inspirational rejection of a money-driven absolutism (one infamous legislative document from that time was titled Roads for Prosperity) that a lot of people thought was too powerful to fight.

Next week brings the publication of Wild Service, co-edited by Nick Hayes, who wrote The Book of Trespass, the 2020 travelogue that shone glaring light on the absurdities of land ownership.