Professor John Holmes (University of Birmingham): Hello, my name’s John Holmes. I'm Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham, and Deputy Director of the Institute for Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Maths in Culture and Society.
I'm here at Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, about 20 miles from the University of Birmingham. At universities, we do a lot of research into the science of our changing environments. At the University of Birmingham, we have the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research for example, which is running one of the biggest climate change experiments in the world. But we've also realised that we need the arts and the humanities as well as the science to help us to understand climate change and how to respond to climate change. We need, for instance, to understand the history of our relationship to the natural world. We need to learn from other cultures and other societies that have different ways of existing in nature. And we need to be able to imagine alternative futures where we can live sustainably with the rest of the planet.
It's because we're interested in pursuing that work, that we're keen to work with Ruskin Land and the Guild of St George in a forest site, thinking through how those questions of the humanities and the arts can help us to engage with climate change.
John Iles (Guild of St George): We were looking to partner with an academic institution that would give a real time-depth to the work here. The Guild is an educational charity, and we feel we've got a fantastic asset here that really would benefit from more involvement with an organisation such as Birmingham University, you know, where you've got this multi-disciplinary team bringing in literature as well as the more scientific aspects of the study.
Jenny Robbins (Guild of St George): The Guild of St George own Ruskin Land. This area of woodland was given by George Baker to Ruskin's Guild of St George in the 1870s.
John Iles: Ruskin Land has been a bit of a sleepy hollow for most of the 20th century, and when my wife and I moved here in 2004, we set to about regenerating Uncllys Farm by replanting orchards, getting the house sorted, and then building the Ruskin Studio. And we then started to turn our attention with Jenny Robbins to looking at the woodland, which again had basically been through a policy of laissez-faire—just leave it, let nature take its course.
Dion Dobrzynski (University of Birmingham): Hello, I'm Dion Dobrzynski, and my research project combines two of my great loves—literature and the natural environment—and it uses the literary imagination and thinks about the literary imagination in a way that addresses the greatest challenges of our century. I've been working collaboratively in partnership with Ruskin Land, running immersive woodland walks and interactive workshops with a group of undergraduate students. My doctoral research is investigating the way forests and forest ecology is represented in fantasy literature. And what I've found fascinating is the way these imaginary forests are sharpening the students' perception and enriching their understanding of the real forest environment around them here at Ruskin Land. Here in the Dragons Nest, which is a sculpture built out of found dead wood here in the forest and it's slowly going to decay and fall back into the forest floor, but it's a wonderful space because it opens your eyes up into the canopy, and then we've been having some stimulating discussions and doing the readings from the fantasy texts.
Jenny Robbins: We've worked with various different architecture schools and so on. I think the new aspect to all this is that, rather than just working with the materials as we have been, [we are] working through people like Dion coming here as PhD students and working much more through the arts.
Professor John Holmes: We're starting work now, building up a new project on John Ruskin himself, reconnecting Ruskin Land as a site with the city of Birmingham. John Ruskin was one of the most influential Victorians. He was an artist and intimately drew the natural world. He was a writer, he was a social critic, and, above all, he was a teacher. Through looking closely at nature, John Ruskin came to realise that it was essential to all of us to have that intimate connection with the natural world, that social justice depended as much as anything on environmental justice. Ruskin saw the damage that the industrial revolution was wreaking, he saw the pollution—but he also, way back in the 1870s, realised that climate change was happening, realised that animals and birds and plants were going extinct.
Jenny Robbins: Ruskin's idea was that the working man should have access to beautiful things, to art and nature, and that the workers would be able to come out into this beautiful place and see beautiful things.
Dion Dobrzynski: In my lifetime, I will likely witness radical changes in the way we live.
Professor John Holmes: So what we're doing in this project is trying to remobilise Ruskin's insights, trying to return to his books, but also trying to build up that connection between Ruskin Land and the city of Birmingham, which is at the origin of this site, because Ruskin Land was first given to Ruskin by the Mayor of Birmingham. So to build up that connection again, we're going to be working with artists from Birmingham, with inner-city schools from Birmingham. We're going to bring them to Ruskin Land, we're going to think through how a site like this, a forest like this, can enable you to think about and respond to environmental justice. And those artworks and those educational materials that we're going to create together with these artists and with these schools, are going to go back to Birmingham and we're going to put them into the school curriculum, we're going to put them into galleries, and reconnect Ruskin Land with Birmingham itself.
Jenny Robbins: It's a slightly scary place for those who live in an urban environment, who are from different backgrounds. So encouraging more people to come here to enjoy this natural beauty is very important to us.
Dion Dobrzynski: We're not just reading about forests and seeking to understand ecological issues associated with forests in the library, we're bringing the texts out into a real forest environment.
Jenny Robbins: So the value added from people coming here and learning about things, writing about things, that's really important to the Guild of St George.
Professor John Holmes: We're standing at a crossroads in our history around our relationship to the environment. The choices we've been making over the last 100 years, 150 years since Ruskin himself was alive, have put us in a perilous position in relation to climate change and environmental destruction. We now need to think about how we're going to address that problem, and the arts and humanities are crucial to doing that—and Ruskin himself is crucial too. And I want to share with you just a few words from Ruskin on that predicament, which stand today on a testimony to where we are. Ruskin wrote: "Change must come. But it ours to determine whether change of growth or change of death".
Those are the predicaments that we're facing. Those are the questions that we're trying to answer, here at Ruskin Land, in the University of Birmingham.
