CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. Through our programming, we strive to amplify the voices of those who have historically been under-represented. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Laura Pustarfi: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We're here to speak about your book, Grounded:  A Journey into the Landscapes of Our Ancestors. And the book is such an exploration and deep inquiry into place, history and the natural world, as well as our human connection with something more. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. 

Dr. James Canton: Yeah, well, thanks, Laura. And thanks, CIIS for inviting me along. It's a conversation I've been looking forward to for a while. So yeah, absolutely. Good to chat. Good to chat with people from all over. I'm hoping we've got people from all over. I mean, I'm tucked away here. It's dark. It's England. It's quite cold today, actually, for an autumn day. But I'm kind of fascinated that we're able to do this kind of conversation with you guys over on the west coast of America and hopefully with an audience from I'm not quite sure where, but all over. That's always a nice connection. 

Laura: It's fascinating, especially as we're talking about land to be coming from all over. Well, I have several questions for you. And I know that you've done quite a bit of traveling in your life. And you've written about those experiences. But in Grounded, you write about specific sites that are local to you in England, a lot of them near Essex, but all across England, including churches and the ancient English stone circles. I'm curious if you could share a little bit about what your process was for finding sites to investigate for the book. 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, yeah, thanks, Laura. It's a, it's an intriguing one. I mean, I've been writing this book that became Grounded for, as often happens, I think I just spent ages kind of working ideas and writing sort of passages that eventually kind of coalesce, if you like. But I think Grounded in particular, it became known in my kind of, you know, archives as the kind of the sacred spaces book, you know, and friends of mine and colleagues would be like, Oh, yeah, you're still working on that, are you? And as much as anything, it was, it began very much with the kind of exploration of the idea of, in a way, what what the notion of the sacred is. I was, I'm kind of intrigued by this. I'm not a practicing religious person in any sense, but I'm intrigued by religion and a number of religions, if I can put it like that, you know, so I mean, and where I live is very much in rural English countryside. So if you if you were to say to anyone in the in the tiny village where I live, can you go and show me a sacred place in within a mile, say within a couple of kilometers, they would take you to the local church. And, you know, so this was definitely a kind of part of my thinking was to be going that, you know, we're very fortunate in Britain, in that we have some some remarkable churches and chapels and Christian sacred sites, if you like. And that was very much a kind of a layer that I wanted to explore in the book. What I also wanted to do in the book was to go, to go deeper into the landscape, if you like to go into some of the some of the more obvious sacred sites that were pre Christian. So I mean, I'm sure everyone will, if I say Stonehenge, everyone can kind of picture Stonehenge and and kind of imagine that and obviously, to a certain extent that there were there were these obvious sites in a place like Britain that I would talk about. And I wanted to talk about that in the context of my my kind of my time of traveling and living in other places around the world and try to say kind of aspects of commonality in what we do as humans to to turn land sacred, if we do or is all land sacred. And this kind of idea. And essentially with the book with with this specific book, I mean, obviously what I'm talking about is, is a huge project. You know, I wanted to include places like Machu Picchu or, you know, I mean, I used to live in Egypt and there are quite a few sacred sites in Egypt that I was kind of interested in exploring. But essentially what happened with as I started to sort of knuckle down and actually write the book, what happened was we had we had COVID kick in. And in many ways what it what it absolutely for, I mean, it was right at the beginning. So I'd written a certain amount of the book. And I was suddenly put in a situation where I you know, like we all were put into a kind of very powerful situation of the only places that, that we could see what those absolutely on our doorstep. And I was very lucky in that I, as I live in a rural village, and I've got a really old bicycle. And what I would do is we were allowed to go out, you know, for a journey on your own. And so I had about a five mile radius. And and so what happened with the book is that I, I started to realize that I wanted to be as much anything exploring this idea of of seeking the sacred on all of our doorsteps, because it is there. I mean, it is there. And it's just a kind of a practice of how you kind of go about this. And as I say, in my village, you've got kind of two options when you walk out of your door in terms of a kind of communal space. One is a restaurant at the end of the road. And the other one is a church. So it was pretty obvious which one I was going to find probably find more sacred ness at. So that was kind of how the book began. And then it became this idea of what is sacred? What are the what are the kind of characteristics of, of a place on the landscape that we know, humans for for a long period of time have gone to, and have seen as kind of special? And? Yeah, and if you like, there were certain words, I'd start using sacred or numinous was a word that I particularly like to use as well, which had a sense of kind of godliness to to that site. So that was kind of how my practice emerged, if you like anyway, yeah. 

Laura: Thank you. And I think it's interesting that you you really chose to focus on the place that you you knew well. And I'm curious how that that inquiry originally started for you. So could you maybe share something about how you came to see the land of sacred? Is that something that you felt when you were young? Or is it something that you really came to as an adult or through the process of thinking through this book? 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting one, isn't it? Because I think, you know, like, as soon as you start to think about it, in many ways, I mean, there was a, I think, when I was a child, I grew up in a kind of, in London in a very kind of suburban world. I was one of those kids that you'd always find kind of like, in the garden, sort of sitting up a pear tree, we had a pear tree in our garden, I just would spend a lot of time just sitting in a in a pear tree. It was like, it was really nice place. But in some ways, for me, I would kind of if anyone would say to me, you know, what what what were the kind of sacred spaces of your childhood, I'd have to say a pear tree. And I think, you know, this idea that a sacred place is a kind of human construct is, is something that I think, in a way I was kind of working through in the book to a certain extent. And one of the key people, one of the key people that I turned to, I mean, obviously, I turned to wiser heads to try and get a sense of this. And I think I've, you know, from reading, you know, my youth reading quite a lot of travel writing, when I was traveling a lot, say, you know, reading, I was just chatting about the book, Bruce Chatwins the stop the song lines, if anyone knows that book, for example, from the 1980s, I was talking about that last night and about the idea of, you know, native sacred spaces in in the Australian continent. And and chat when talks about these songlines that connect these places. So obviously, reading makes you recognize the kind of sacred layerings to the to the world. But it was it was it was one of America's finest living minds. The what really kind of took me into different spheres, which was Wendell Berry. And Wendell Berry, let me get the specific quote, because it's worth just just making sure that I get it right, because it's really worth chewing over this one, I think. And I chewed over it for a long time. And it's Wendell Berry says, “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.” And it takes a little while I mean, I'm still not sure if I'm, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. But I think one of the things that comes out of that is the idea that all nature is sacred, if you like, and that maybe as humans, what we do is in certain places in nature, we kind of create a kind of super sacredness to it. And you can see that because that tends to be certainly in my kind of English landscape context, that's that tends to be where the churches are. And that's not to say that that there was nothing there, pre Christian, but the churches were very much often placed on sites of pre Christian worship. So the people that were there 4000 5000, even further back, you know, beyond the early, you know, the kind of the first, those first farming communities that kind of established often places of worship, they were often on natural sites in the landscape that kind of had a certain, you know, view, they'd have a view over a river valley, or they'd, you know, often, I think, which I find fascinating, and you can you can see this with Stonehenge, for example, is that a lot of the earliest sites that were built in the English context, were built that looked out over migrating animal pathways, which is where the, the even earlier hunter gatherer people would see the sacred in the landscape. So you get this kind of mosaic, if you like this kind of like, a kind of textured layering to how you see the landscape. But yeah, I'm not sure if I'm telling you a question, but it was, you know, it's been, it's, it takes a long period of time, and I think you do have to think about it. And of course, I'm very fortunate, I have this, this, this job as director of wild writing at the University of Essex, which means I spend a certain amount of time in the classroom, in the seminar room, you know, reading books, talking about books, discussing, you know, brilliant people like Wendell Berry, or, you know, Barry Lopez is another one who always tends to crop up recently. But then we spend a lot of time actually outside in the natural world in landscape. And I think that is, is also one of the the best ways to to see the sacred in the landscape, you got to get out there, you know, and, and I'm sure you know, that if I, a question that I often kind of put to an audience is, if I was to come to your neighborhood, what you know, where would you take me to that you would consider sacred? Or, you know, where would you take me to in the landscape that you considered most special, most significant? And that's often a good tell, I think. Yeah. 

Laura: I'm curious, you can go even a little deeper into that idea that you mentioned of super sacred. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe how that feels or how someone might know that a place is super sacred? 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, it's not, it's not the greatest term, is it, I think, in some ways, but it's kind of like, how do you, how do you go to the idea that there are lots of sacred places on the landscape, without doubt. And as we say, I think what Wendell Berry is, is telling us is that it's humans that turn a place, any place in nature, into something that's desecrated, that kind of takes the natural sacredness away. But yeah, I mean, whether the super sacred, if you like, is are those sites where humans over this over the millennia, over 1000s and 1000s of years, have seen something special on that on that place, and have in some way marked that place. So you know, to use, say, an obvious obvious example in the English context, you know, something like Stonehenge, and then up the road from Stonehenge, you'd have something like West Kennet Long Barrow, which so again, these were these stone constructs that were built by the first farmers, actually built way before Stonehenge was built, but that gets complex. And they were very much formed by taking the stone that you, the larger stone, where you've cleared the land to a certain extent to create fields. And then the larger stone is used to create a monument to some extent, often to the dead, to the departed. So you know, this is then creating within the landscape, a site of special, super sacredness, if you like. And you can kind of see it, you know, I'm very, you know, it was great, being over in California back in May, which feels quite a long time ago now, but it was, it was wonderful. It was the first time I'd been out to California. And obviously, we met Laura, which was great. You took us on a great walk, or hike, as you would call it. And, you know, like that was one of the kind of super sacred sites that I managed to see, I would suggest in, in, in California, that I managed to get to was like the West Berkeley Shell Mound, which is obviously very interesting example of the way in which modernity and colonialism can, can step in, in the set, in the way that you see in that Wendell Berry quote, this idea that it's, humans can, can turn what is a kind of super sacred, you know, to the, to the indigenous Ohlone people who, who built that shell mound, this was, this was a super sacred site. You know, and as we, as we know, you know, you know, better than I did only 200 years ago, or, you know, or so, it was still a kind of functioning sacred site. And I think this is the thing, if we go back in time and we look at the way that our, our ancestors would, would see a sacred site, is they would often be very mindful, if you like, of, of not disturbing the natural sacredness there. They might want to mark a place in some way as important to themselves, but they do it in a very, very sympathetic way to the natural landscape that exists there, if you like. 

Laura: I'm glad you brought this up because I was also wanting to bring this, this to the floor. And, and as I understand the West Berkeley Shell Mound still very much an active sacred site and, and contested. And, and as you kind of mentioned, I'm here in North America, in California, and the, the colonial histories and desecration of indigenous sacred sites is very, very real, often with a lot of trauma and pain. And, and so I, I've, I've, as someone from European descent myself, I've thought that you can respectfully engaging with the local landscape is very dependent on someone's personal history and situation. So how, how do you see groundedness, the way that your, your book discusses it working in landscape, like those in the United States, or would it be different? 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, it's very, it's very interesting, isn't it? To compare sites, if you like, as in continents, even, and, and the, the often the one absolutely startling important fact that you must not ignore is the presence of colonialism as a kind of destructive power to, to, if you like, to, to sacred landscapes. I mean, you cannot, you cannot deny that. I mean, it's, it's so central, it's so central. And I think, you know, I come very much, and I've been, you know, working with the idea of grounded, very much as on that kind of idea of my local landscape, because I wanted to be encouraging everyone to be going to their local landscapes and exploring the local sites. But it is more difficult in some ways in, you know, if you are living in a downtown urban area, where are your sacred sites? Where are your indigenous sacred places that, you know, if there's no markers on the land, how are you meant to know them? Well, okay, to a certain extent, you, you, you research, you go online, you, you try and find, I mean, you know, I turned up with my partner, we were staying in in Berkeley, and I, I'd heard about this, this, you know, this, this site, this, this, this shell mound, and but the, what's, what's wonderful in that example, and I'm, we're using that example, because we both know it, obviously. But what's wonderful there is, is the people that have actively put, you know, put protests, I mean, it's beautiful when you go down there, there's still signs from from the most recent protest there, you know, when that, when the whole landscape was kind of, kind of reinvigorated, if you like, with its historical layering, and even online, you see this, this idea that if you go online, what I thought was wonderful for me coming from a kind of English context was I was able to explore the historical maps that the people have put up on the, on the Save West Berkeley Shell Mound site, that show, even as, you know, 1850, you know, when you, when the development of the Bay Area, these sites are clearly marked on the map. And unfortunately, what's happened is, is they just haven't been protected over over the, you know, the previous 200 years or something. So, I mean, obviously, that's not to say that hasn't happened in in England as well. But we haven't suffered from colonialism on that, on that brutal layering that, that other places have, you know, and that's, it's kind of harsh to see, but, you know, like one of the, one of the other sites that I went and traveled to when I was in California was, was in a place called Volcano, sort of, it's, it's Miwok land. And there's an amazing grinding stone there, and in fact, quite a bit of land around that, and just beautifully set up, protected land. And, and I found that very powerful, because that, that was very much, there was a sense, I mean, there was, there was a sense to the landscape, that the natural beauty, the natural sacredness was there as well. And what it did was it got me really reading up about, you know, Miwok culture, and the way in which, particularly, I was fascinated because one of the key kind of food sources was, was acorns. And an acorn— and my previous book that I spent quite a lot of time writing, because I will spend ages writing a book, was called The Oak Papers, and was all about the relationship between humans and oak trees around the globe. So I was particularly fascinated with this idea that, you know, you could go to this beautiful landscape. And yes, unfortunately, there were, there were still, you know, scars from, from mining, you know, from gold mining there, but, but there was that still this sense that you could feel in the landscape of this, of this connection to, to how people have lived there for thousands and thousands, and yet lived harmoniously on this landscape. There was sacredness there. And I'd really, I'd really, if you haven't been there, I'd really recommend going there. It's a fantastic trip. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's, you, as we say, Laura, you know, you, these brutal aspects like colonialism, they, they tend to, they have tended to not respect indigenous sacred sites. And, and so there's a great project for everybody to be seeking them out in their local landscapes. I really do. I think that's such an important part. 

Laura: Yeah, and what I hear you saying in what you're sharing of your experiences, that it's really about learning and learning from, from the people who, who are from that particular place. And I'm feeling compelled to just encourage anyone who wants to learn more. 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, yeah, that's right. 

Laura: I mean, 

Dr. Canton: I think one of the, one of the real insights that are kind of reminders I had, in fact, is how the outsider can often make you re-see your local landscape. And I'm not saying, but in my local landscape, for example, I have a good friend, Abdul, who's actually, you know, from, from Syria, originally, and, you know, I know from university, and I had him, he was over in my, in my kind of home territory here. And we were walking in the Essex countryside, and it was he that said, said to me, oh, yeah, of course, all in, we walked past my local church, which is, is quite a very considered church about 800 years old, is actually what's called a round church, in that there were only, so they were built by the Crusaders, a particular kind of order called the Order of the Knights Hospitallers. When they returned from Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, they were often given land, and they built these churches. So you get a lot of visitors to my village to see this church. Abdul and I were walking past there, you know, a few years ago, as I say, when I was starting to write Grounded. And he said, isn't it isn't it true that all churches in England are built on, on pagan sites, on pre-Christian sacred sites? And I was kind of, yeah, yeah, you know, you're, you're, you're pretty much there, Abdul, yeah, I mean, that's, that's true. And then I thought about it, and we continued to walk, and we walked around, you know, a few more walks. And I suddenly realized that, in fact, even though my local village, you know, was a very considered church in, in, you know, in the English context, in fact, unusually, that land was given, would have been given just as no, no, there would be no previous, that probably, I mean, I've done a lot of research to try and find, but there's probably nothing there before. It's just that the local landowner was benevolently giving it to these, these good crusaders that are just returned from their, their holy tasks. And so in fact, even though it was seen in the modern context, it's quite an important church, there is no sacredness beneath it. Whereas you go two miles or mile and a half down the road to, and I'm in Little Maplestead, if you go to Great Maplestead, much more kind of less considered church, much more standard, if you like. But I know from my research that in, in mid Victorian times, one of the local gardeners dug up a whole series of bronze age burial urns, right next to the church. And this church is, so these dates, sorry, these date from like 4000 years ago. The church is probably seven, 800 years old, but the whole site, and this, again, it's, as we say, it's, it's on a very nice high point looking out over some streams and little valleys that run down to the river. And, and so perfectly situated, but actually has been a sacred site for way beyond Christian worship in this lands. So, you know, exploring your local landscapes is great, but often if you can do it just with, with someone from, from outside those places, often that's, that's really good because then you do also, do you just see the difference, if you like, you get a different look at your own place. So yeah, that can be really good. 

Laura: Yeah. And that's fascinating, the different histories between locations near you that are so close together. I'm kind of curious to talk a little bit more about place, because you, you really engage place through those specific landscapes and sites that you talk about, So can you say a little bit more about how you understand place and in relation to the sacred and also to ancestral lineages? 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, it's, it's, I think, I think, I mean, one of the modules that I teach is, is called, is called psychogeography. And I don't know if this is a term that many of you might have come across, but it's essentially a way of understanding human practice on landscape, on place, if you like. And often the, the way to understand, I think, place or to explore it, I think, is this idea, this notion of the palimpsest, this idea of layer upon layer upon one thing being there previous and then going. And very much, I think if you see this in terms of, you know, sort of human urban context, it can be fascinating to see the, the layering of human practice there. But as we're saying, even with this, even in a kind of very rural place like this, it can be fascinating to see what happens in a rural churchyard over thousands of years. I mean, another, a good example of my kind of local landscapes, and I talk about them, as I say, because I've researched them more. So you, I'm able to talk about place in depth in the specifics of that context. And there's, so again, during COVID lockdown, had my very tired bicycle, but it will get me about four miles. That was about as far as I could manage pretty much to a little village, two villages over. And this is a village, very interesting village, it's called Alfam Stone. And what, what there is there on this place is you have a church, seventh century church, a beautiful old church, very old church as well. And then around it are these series of very large, what we call Sarsen stones. So they're stones that have been dropped there by glaciers a long time ago during the Ice Age. But they weren't all dropped collectively around this churchyard. So what we know is that is that in some way, at some point in human history, people have moved them there. Now, there's various then then arguments as to like, what's what's been going on here? Did the Christians move them here? No, the Christians did, you know, the early Christians who set up this site, they didn't move them there. So what's happened on this place is again, this idea of the palimpsest. So through time, so the argument is probably these were moved by the early farming community. So as I said earlier about the idea of West Kennet, this idea of long barrows, where farmers will gather large stone to create a kind of monument on the landscape on the place to kind of mark the place as as vitally important. And where I live in East Anglia, there is no natural stone apart from what they can find. So these large Sarsens appear to have been gathered on this on this particular site. And then again, if you if you if you dig into the records, you see that this place was also so was also used by the Bronze Age. And we have again, a series of burial urns that seem to mark this the place as sacred 4000 years ago. So what you potentially have is you have, you know, 6000 years ago, perhaps even the early farmers moving these stones, you then have 4000 years ago ish people using this site in the Bronze Age as a sacred place. And then in the Christian era, you have sort of seventh century Christians taking the site because it has already sacred elements to it to the local people to the people around and the incoming religion marks the site. And again, you know, we're talking about place. This place is is it's beautiful. And again, it's it's a raised bit of land that looks out over a big river valley, the store valley that marks the difference between the counties of Essex and Suffolk. And we know that in that in that valley landscape, there are even earlier markings of of of what we call curses or the strange mark marks on the landscape that no one's quite sure what they're about, but they could well be to do with the migration pathways of of ancient creatures like oryx, which were the the the pre domesticated cattle that would roam Britain, you know, kind of six foot to the shoulder. And our our earliest ancestors would would kind of certainly kind of relate to but they would also hunt. In that sense, they were the large herbivores of the landscape. So again, delving as much as possible into the layers of history in place, I think is is one of the ways in which we can see human activity over time. And in my case, what I tend to do is I tend to do that to do with archaeology and to do with the kind of patterns of human existence in place over 1000s of years, if you like. 

Laura: I'm curious if you can can say a little bit more about in in engaging with those different timescales that you've mentioned and how in your work you found that that it was possible to to engage with those different timescales that as you were writing the book and you so easily move move between stories and and information about those different timescales. I'm curious if you could you could talk about that thinking 6000 years ago, or 4000 years ago, or 1000 years ago into the present. 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, it's fun, isn't it? It's really fun. I think I think I well, I think one of the things is that in the, you know, in the US context, for example, you can go to you can go to the native peoples, if you like, of your lands 300 years ago. And in Britain, to go to the the native peoples, you have to go, well, probably 6000 years back to get to that same kind of people of people hunting, gathering, tending the wild, you know, living, it appears in a way that's a lot more harmonious with the landscape than we seem to have ever existed in England. And I'm talking now, in the thousands of years since and in the American context, in the last sort of 300 years or something, if you look at the way in which we tend to treat a lot of other living beings in the landscape, other, you know, the landscape itself, we don't we don't tend to treat it with that kind of sacred eyes that the indigenous native people often do often, you know, I mean, largely did. And I find it in the English context, the difficulties that you have to go back 6000 years, but what's fascinating when you do is you see the landscape and the context of it really transform. So, so again, just to give the example, for example, of Stonehenge, and I use that because I imagine everyone can think, Oh, yeah, that's that's such a mark on the on the English landscape, it's, you know, everyone can kind of picture it. But the truth is that obviously that that there were this on the Stonehenge, why Stonehenge was placed there was because of what had happened there before. So if we, if we can then examine what was going on before Stonehenge, I man, Stonehenge was built by the farming communities to mark this this land and before the stones were put there, that there was a wooden structure there. But then if you go, I mean, what I found fascinating is, you can go just sort of literally two miles up the hill from Stonehenge to a place called Coneybury, a little hill, you won't see you won't see much there anymore. But some archaeologists did some work there and they found what was now known as the Coneybury anomaly. And this is, it's a feasting pit that the archaeologists dug out. And it's absolutely fascinating because it shows us the pre Stonehenge landscape. So it's from around 3800 BC, which in Britain is the time where you had the first farming communities moving in from Europe. And what you have at Coneybury is you have this, you have this evidence of a feast, big feast, possibly like, you know, midsummer, this kind of idea that quite potentially it could well be, you know, marking the highest apex of the sun, etc. It could be in winter, we're not quite sure. It's very difficult to tell exactly. But what they've what the archaeologists have done, and it's absolutely fascinating, is that they've done DNA analysis on all the bones of the of the animals that were brought to this feast. And they've established that there were essentially four groups of people that came to this feast that met up from around in a maximum of 20 kilometers away. And they think three of these groups of people were brought what would have been domesticated cattle, early domesticated cattle. So they were kind of essentially three groups of the earliest farming communities on that Stonehenge landscape. Stonehenge doesn't exist at this point, if you know what I mean, you've got to wait another what 1500 years or something before Stonehenge is built. But what you have there is these three groups meeting. And then this is the majesty of this, of this fourth group that, that they identify there are whole deer that were brought to this feast. And even fascinatingly, a beaver's tail, they discovered a bit of beaver tail was brought to this feast. And they say this fourth group are the last remnants of the indigenous hunter gatherer communities that lived on that landscape. Up until around what 3800 BC. So you know, quite a long six, let's just say 6000 years ago or something. And what was was beautiful about this appears to be beautiful about this meeting is that you had a meeting up for a kind of for a feast. There's no evidence of violence between them. There's no evidence of the farming communities coming in and taking over the land violently from these hunter gatherer communities. But you have this meeting over a couple of miles from Stonehenge. And what will what will evolve over time is that these these farming communities will see this landscape as as they recognize it as sacred to the people that came before. And they will market and what they eventually market with is Stonehenge. So it's fascinating, again, this idea. I think it's fascinating if you go into the depths of human history, you get these incredible I mean, archaeologists are brilliant for kind of the scientists and the DNA and the isotopic analysis and this, this process of our, you know, aspects of our modern world that they're able to delineate what was going on in the deep past is, is really fascinating. And actually one of the one of the sites that I talk about in the book is alongside Coneybury is is is really just down the road from Stonehenge. And it's called Blick Mead. And they've been, I was working with an amazing archaeologist there, David Jacks, and he's, he's, he's uncovered this site that is, again, way pre Stonehenge. So dates right from the last stages of the Ice Ages. So the last sort of 10,000 years or so, this has been, it's a sacred, it's a spring. So it's, you know, it's where you get fresh water. And you get fresh water. And what seems to have happened there is that you had the pre domesticated cattle, these oryx, these huge animals will go and water there. And that you have, he's uncovered something like 100,000 and, and rising Mesolithic flints, these tiny little flint splinters that shows that people were going there, and spending a lot of time there. And what he's also uncovered, which is very, very rare, that it seems to be a platform that seemed to be constructed to make it easier for the animals to drink from the spring. So you know, and again, this all, this all dates right through from, as I say, from 10,000 years, right the way through, you have evidence all the way through of people, humans going there, up until the period of Stonehenge, people going there and treating the site as sacred in some way. And, and the importance of water, as we know, in, to all people is absolutely vital. And this, this idea often you find this, if you, if you delve back into the deeper, in deeper time, that humans were far more appreciative of the value of, of, you know, fresh drinking water, and how, how sacred that could be, you know, the idea of the sacred spring, the sacred stream, I think, I think should run deep and often think that perhaps in our modern way. I mean, I like, as you say, I like, I like playing with the idea of stepping into the mindset of what it would have been like to live as human on a landscape 6000 years ago, say, but it's often very good to bring it back to our current existence, if you like, and the climate emergency, and, you know, what we can do as individuals and I think if you do start to recognise the sacredness of place and of landscape, you do treat it different, you treat everything differently. I mean, Laura, you know, from your work with the plants and trees, once you start to see them in a different context, not just as wood or as something to eat, then you do start to have a very different relationship with the landscape, I think, and that can only be for good, can only be for good and probably quite vital that we do. 

Laura: I would agree and seeing, seeing the landscape a little differently and I was just thinking as well in terms of the different timescales that you were mentioning in the different sacred sites, I had the opportunity to go to Stonehenge myself and just recognising how it's still very much an ongoing sacred site for a lot of people, people come from all over the world to see it and I appreciate how you're bringing in that those kinds of experiences of connecting with the landscape and seeing landscape differently can feed into different actions that could help with climate change and some of the environmental concerns. 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, I think that's right, isn't it? I mean, let's say even with water, you know, if you, if you appreciate, I mean, it's amazing if you, you go traveling to somewhere where just turning your tap on, your faucet on and you have boiling hot water coming out is, that's not a standard. You so appreciate it when you have hot water coming out of a tap, you know, and if you have, if you haven't got drinking water and then you come back to your kind of, you know, wherever you live, if you suddenly appreciate drinking water, you don't, you don't leave your taps on, you don't leave it wasting away kind of thing. And I think that, again, I mean, it's slightly stepping away from this idea of place, but in some ways it's not, in that if you go back to our ancestors, one of the things that I found particularly fascinating that came into this book, Grounded as well, was this idea of how humans often mark place. And one of the key things they often mark is streams, rivers, you know, as I say, sacred springs, sacred sites of water are often pretty key to what's going on if you go back, you know, a few thousand years, because it's, the humans are living in a far more connected space with the natural world. Whereas, I mean, in some ways, you could argue, we have it easy now, but perhaps that's coming back to bite us because, you know, we're creating this disastrous consequence, unfortunately. You know, and I think one of the things, interestingly, is the idea that if you go back into the, say, I mean, one of the sites, one of the beautiful monuments that I went to see is a small wooden figurine carved in pine, about 4000 years old, that is, that comes from East London, a little figure, human figure, stylized human figure, and that was found by workmen when they, when they were digging a brook, a small stream, digging up in, just in East London, really, on the edges of East London. And again, it was, it was clearly placed there 4000 years ago, as some sort of human marker on that landscape that seems to be, that's, that's what all the archaeologists would say. And I went down to, it's now in a beautiful little museum, and I went down to see this figure, it's known as the Dagenham Idol, comes from an area called Dagenham in East London, and I went down and I said to the curator, I said, would it be possible, could you, could you tell me where, could you mark on a map exactly where that, that figure was placed in the landscape? And he said, where that, that figure was placed in the landscape, because I'd like to go and see it, you know, I'd like to go and see that place, this is kind of what I do. And she's a lovely woman, and she said, she said, yeah, and she said, but you won't see much, because it's in like aisle three of the local massive supermarket just off the motorway. So, you know, this is, this is how we as modern humans have seen that same sacred space, if you like. And obviously, it's a kind of simple example, but it shows how, in so many ways, I think the the simplicity of connection with aspects of the natural world that were marked in the past, we just don't, we just, we struggle to find that connection now. And we have to kind of work harder to make those connections, if you like. 

Laura: Yeah, I agree. And one of the ways that we both have made that connection, or that we work towards that, those relationships with, I would say, non-human beings is through trees. And your previous book, the oak papers, you connected with a particular tree, the honeywood oak there in Essex. And you also talk in this book about trees almost as keepers of the place-based sacredness. So the trees as holding something of that sacredness in the landscape, maybe if there's a possibility of conserving or protecting those trees, that the landscape could remain rather than the supermarket, potentially. Yeah, yeah. But I'm curious how your relationship with trees, well, maybe if you could tell, tell everyone a little bit about your relationship with trees, and then if it's changed in writing this book. 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, thanks, Laura. I think that's very sweet of you. Yeah, for the book, Oak Papers, I spent quite a lot of time, not permanently, but kind of almost daily, beside a very fortunate to have an 800 year old oak tree quite near between where I live and where I worked at that time. And I'd spend a lot of time by this tree and it became a thing that I did. It's on a small English estate. So I was able to go there when there were no other humans around. And that kind of creates a very different relationship in some ways. I was there in all seasons, you know, days and nights. And as you very well know, Laura, from your work, that the sense of recognising that that tree, if you like, in this case, but many other, you know, living beings, that it is an individual living being. And the point about trees, which I think you make very well really, with that idea of marker, is that they don't move. You know, whereas we as humans, we spend all our time kind of wandering around all over this landscape, whereas trees, they're born and they die on that same spot. And there's something extremely powerful when you think about place and that idea of sacredness in that simple fact. And I think, as you say, in terms of that idea of kind of relationship with trees, I think I still very much spend a lot of time when I can kind of trying to remind myself to notice the trees, if you like, if you go to somewhere new, you kind of you keep you keeping an eye for where they are, and to return to old favorites, if you like. And I think that's something that I do, even in Grounded, I can't keep the trees out, I had a, I was very fortunate, I got a fantastic local illustrator to do some of the illustrations for the book. And without spoiling some of the context of the book, there's a particular tree that I went to in the O ak Papers that I write about in the Oak Papers, that's an oak tree that you can climb into quite easily, that's just about a mile or so from my house. And it's on a place called Two Oak Hill, or I call it Two Oak Hill. And it's this beautiful, this beautiful tree. And there's, there's, I used to spend quite a lot of time in the tree. And I'd have these moments where I would write about it and I call, I'd kind of write about it, I'd spend a lot of time there, I felt very connected with this tree. Occasionally I'd have to, I kind of got slightly freaked out that I was this kind of grown up adult that was sitting in a tree and you'd have dog walkers walking there. And I think, oh my goodness, what are they going to think of me, you know, and so I'd sort of scumper down. But it's, yeah, it was cool, I'd always call it the stag-headed oak. And because it's an old oak, and it had this kind of stag-horned effect on the roof of it. And it's always been one of the marker points on the landscape, as you say, that I would, that I would walk to. And I think that becomes very interesting that in terms of this discussion of sacred landscape, in that you start to see trees as markers of another landscape of sacredness that's not being created by humans. And in a way, it kind of links to this idea that if you go far enough back in time, and depending on where you live, it doesn't have to be too far, that there was a far closer kind of empathy to a kind of a sacred natural landscape. And I think trees are great, kind of remind them of us that, you know, when I, if you take people to a tree, they, and you kind of introduce them to a tree, if that doesn't sound too odd. They love it, but everyone loves a tree that you just got to kind of introduce them to it. And then I did this recently, I had a couple of friends over from Tasmania. And I walked, you know, we went for a walk to the stag-headed oak on Two Oak Hill, and we all went and kind of said hi to this tree. We didn't actually climb up into it, I have to say. But yeah, that could have got messy. But it was really good. It was really nice. And, you know, and so yeah, as you know, Laura so well, humans and trees and humans and plants have a close and an integral relationship. And I think they've, it's enough, we could do another hour perhaps talking about the, the kind of sacred layering that the natural world give us, alongside those that the human context gives us. And often there's a there's a nice knit between them, as you say, if you look to most indigenous peoples, there's a far tighter knit between those two. 

Laura: Thank you for that. And I think the way that you talk about going back to the same tree, again, the stag-headed oak and the Honeywood oak and continuing to connect, introducing others to the tree, that's somewhat of the way that I've related to trees as well, in terms of building that connection and getting to know that that tree and that place. And I think that's a really good connection and getting to know that that tree in that place over time, over different seasons, and and seeing it in different moods of my own and different aspects of that particular place. So I'm curious. Yeah. I'm curious, thinking about how some of the book is on the English landscape and the English countryside, since that's your home and where you've been. And the title of the book mentions our ancestors. I'm curious how your work applies to those outside of England or those not of English descent. 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I think I wanted to get across was this idea of it's a healthy pursuit, I think, to explore what the landscapes that we live in were like for not just us and our immediate kind of kin, but for our kind of more distant ancestors. And that's I think the idea of our is just a sense of kind of unifying the search, if you like, because we you know, we've we've talked we've talked a little bit today about, you know, the the impact of of of colonialism, of imperialism. I could spend far longer talking about that, but we wouldn't be able to give it we'd need another hour, wouldn't we, you know? But I think if you if you do, if you do go to landscapes where you have, I mean in you know, in some ways, I could talk about the English landscape as being a colonial landscape, and then other landscapes as being colonized landscapes. And that, you know, it's it's the kind of brutalizing aspect of that is often clear once you do the work. And that, as I say, West Berkeley, Shell Mound, for example, the research that people have done there, for example, brings the truth out of how important that site is, and and how much, as you say, in today's context, it is still an important integral sacred site. And you could you can, if you get in the British context, say going to the local church up the road that is just a kind of local village church, you can see there that yes, okay, it's it's a Christian site, and it's a colonial, if you like, site as well, in that it's it's a crusader site. And and as I say, again, that that tension of recognizing the importance of that, I know, you know, particularly when I was, say, walking there with my friend Abdul, who comes from from Syria from from the Near East, and this idea that this is a site that was given to the those people that had returned from the colonial action of going to others lands on kind of religious war footing, it becomes complex, it becomes really complex. But I think what you can do, and that's perhaps why I like going to 6000 years ago, is that in some ways, I feel that there's a there's a connection that I want to make I want I want there the relationship with with those people with with our ancestors of that period, to be more present to be more immediate, and to recognize perhaps the way in which those hunter gatherer communities lived in their landscapes, in our landscapes was was was a kind of, you know, a template for how perhaps we can live a little better today. 

Laura: I appreciate how you're bringing in the complexities of the landscape and the land and and the beautiful, the terrible, the and really learning those things and bringing them forward as a way to connect to the sacredness with the land. So I'm curious if you would be willing to share, if you don't mind sharing a little bit about what you're working on now, or what what's exciting you now and your and your next project. 

Dr. Canton: Yeah, no, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I've actually since I moved from from London, 20 years ago now, which feels like amazing. And when I moved here with my partner, we, there was a small field for sale at the back. And if you come from London, the idea of a field, what like a field we can like, so we bought, we bought this small, some two acre field. And I've been working with kind of for years really writing about this, this field, because what I've been doing is I've been kind of bringing nature back and kind of a kind of nature restoration project, particularly over the last few years, last 10-15 years. So it's now what was once just a kind of barren green desert, if you like, that you would have to mow constantly to kind of keep it is now it's it's got kind of, yeah, 20 foot high oak trees, it's got a big pond in it. It's got meadows that I sort of sythe by hand. And so I've been writing about this project and that book's now, yeah, it's working towards completion. Actually, we've got, we've got kind of contracts in place. And it's just, I'm trying not to call it Rewilding, because the term rewilding is being kind of banded around quite a lot. But at the moment, I think I'm calling it Renaturing. And I kind of quite like that. So it's not my term, it's a friend's term, but I think we're going with that. So that's what I'm working on at the moment. And in a slightly more distant future, if you like, what I really want to do is you probably got from from our discussion today, is I want to write a book that goes back into hunter gatherer existence on on the planet, and the idea of tending the wild, because we tend to see hunter gatherers in very kind of stark imagery that they are have really kind of short, brutish lives, and that they're living very poor lives. But you know, anyone who does any research into into the the native peoples that lived on landscapes, they they tended to hunt and gather and they'd look after the land, they tend it, they tend the wild, this beautiful phrase, and that a lot of time as well to do other things. So it's that's a book that I'm kind of looking to work on. But it will probably be knowing me at least three years before that one gets to the page. 

Laura: Exciting, and I appreciate the way that that it's like you're narrowing in further and further on, on the local place that you're at that that your next book is about your

Dr. Canton: yeah, that's very true. That's very true. Yeah, very much. And did that thing of kind of looking really closely and they go “Bing”, you know, like seeing the wider like, why we need to rewild, you know, half of the globe, that kind of idea. Why or bring nature back, let's say, you know, allow nature its space. So yeah, absolutely. It's a really good way of going. But I mean, as I say, someone like Wendell Berry shows us that perfectly, you know, focus on the local, do what you can there. See global. 

Laura: Well, James, thank you so much. That's about the end of our time and I just want to say thank you so much for this fascinating conversation, for talking with me and so excited for your upcoming work as well. I really enjoyed the book, Grounded. Thank you. 

Dr. Canton: Well, thank you, Laura. It's been, I've really enjoyed it. It's been absolutely fascinating. 

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