Lessons from the Sycamore Gap

There’s lots to learn from outpouring of emotion over Sycamore Gap tree’s felling and it’s not “the public are stupid”

The felling of the Sycamore Gap tree has been in the news again recently as Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were found guilty two counts of criminal damage relating to the tree and the Roman wall. And with the trial’s conclusion has come an absolutely vast amount of news coverage and social media commentary.

But I’ve also noticed some people — including ecologists and rewilders — getting grumpy, even cross, about the highly emotional response that the tree’s felling has elicited from the media and the public. These arguments often have similarities: The sycamore is a non-native, invasive species that grows like a weed and many are rightly cut down each year. That particular sycamore was a lone tree in a denuded landscape that should be wooded. Millions of native tree saplings are killed each year by livestock. There are genuine ecological disasters unfolding and yet no one seems to care about them.

This response is wrongheaded.

Whilst those things are all true, we’d be better off looking at the reasons why so many people engaged with the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, and see if there’s something there we can use to engage them with other ecological stories.

It’s very clear that the Sycamore Gap tree was beloved. For many, it was part of an iconic view – a lone tree, perfectly situated in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall, a single point of bloody-minded life in a barren landscape. It’s a vista that came to prominence in 1991’s Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves when the titular Mr Hood, played by Kevin Costner, rescues a boy who has been chased up the tree by the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men.

For others, it was part of a more personal story, like writer Andrew Hankinson who proposed to his wife there.

[…] in 2009, when my girlfriend and I walked the length of Hadrian’s Wall on holiday, we paused at Sycamore Gap. I waited for some other hikers to shove off, then got down on my knee and asked her to marry me. She said yes. We had kids, who we took to the tree many times. When friends came to visit, we took them and their kids. It gathered meaning.

Meaning doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s based on our memories of a place and the connections that we forge with it. It’s based on locations that stand out to us as particularly picturesque, unusual or beautiful. Or that hold a special place in our heart because they are where we went on holiday, or celebrated a birthday or decided to get married.

And when a place is freighted with meaning, we respond emotionally to the things that happen there.

The question then becomes, how can be build meaning for people for other places that would benefit from some attention?

It all begins with story

Any of you who know me from my other newsletters might remember that I am a huge fan of Welcome to Wrexham, the documentary following the journey of the north Wales football club from the National League all the way up to the Championship.

I didn’t used to be interested in football, but I have just renewed my Wrexham AFC membership for the third year, and it’s not because I had a sudden hankering to watch 11 grown men kicking a ball around a field. It’s because I came to care about the club, the players, the town, the people and the other fans. And that happened because I watched this random documentary that I’d heard someone recommend and became invested in the story. I became familiar with some of the players, the fans, and the new owners, developing parasocial connections with them that then evolved into a genuine love for the club.

With the Sycamore Gap tree, those stories were made not through a TV documentary but individually, one person, family or group at a time, as people walked Hadrian’s Wall and stumbled on a view striking enough that they stopped to take it in, to take a picture, to celebrate or even to mourn a loved one and scatter their ashes.

Over time, those experiences accreted as people shared them online or in person, with friends, with strangers. People wove that tree into their personal histories and built meaning around it through the stories they told themselves and others. They came to care.

So of course it was a shock when Graham and Carruthers mindlessly chopped it down. Of course people cared that something they had strong memories of had been vandalised in such a brutal, meaningless way. And of course the media then glommed on to that and ratcheted up the emotion all the way to 11 (because that’s how they get clicks and sell papers).

But the stories came first.

Without those stories, there’s nothing to care about. And if you don’t care about it, then it’s just a tree. And if it’s just a tree, then that outpouring of emotion is mystifying.

If people don’t care about a particular thing that you care about, then the chances are that they just don’t feel a connection to it. They have no meaningful stories about it. They don’t care not because they’re not capable of caring but because they’ve no reason to.

Good science communications focuses on telling stories in such a way that people come to care, but science journalists largely concentrate on stories that are novel or exciting, because they have clicks to garner and magazines to sell. When it comes to less glamorous issues, I’m afraid it’s up to us to find the story that resonates with the public.

That’s what Fieldwork is all about – searching for a way to get people invested in ecology and the environment in a positive, constructive way. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s really hard. It’s coming up to three years since we first had the idea to write an eco-sitcom, and exactly two years since I started background interviews. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get where we are, with only the first year of work funded, and I’ve still got a long way to go, (which is why I am running this fundraiser to support not just my work with Ada Lovelace Day, but Fieldwork as well).

Sci-comms is hard. Getting people to care is hard. But we certainly won’t get anywhere chastising people when they do care.