the road home

Nine Miles is the story of resistance taken to the great car culture. But, as with the campaigns it describes, it encompasses more than this seemingly narrow, albiet gargantuan task entails. What happened in Newbury and other protests like it around the country was as much a story of how it felt to come home to a life on the land; something made possible for the first time in decades, generations perhaps, for many living in cities. And it was made possible thanks to the tactic of squatting woodland and meadows and hillsides, a tactic which was a defining feature of the anti-roads movement and an experience that left a mark both wonderful and searing on the people who were a part of it.

In a sense it was madness; to become attached to places we knew did not have long left. But a life out of doors is one of thinner membranes between you and the world that you're in - when your immediate surroundings are, by anyone's standards, exquistely beautiful, then it can prove impossible not to fall in love with them. And it felt on many levels that this was where we belonged and that the simple lifestyle we had adopted was a return to some truth that we as a society had long forgotten and which seemed as urgent and as neccessary as ever to get back to.

It had of course never really gone away, not completely, and had certainly been a strong part of the subculture since at least the sixties. The tensions that arose when large numbers of people attempted to live nomadically in a country where every square inch of land is sewn up in property deeds and where common rights are all but non-existent, came to a head with the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985. A decade later, the protest camps were something of a flipside of the same coin; we knew that founding them would lead to some kind of confrontation - whether we liked it or not - but here, it seemed, the game was on our terms.

And it was like coming home, not just to that way of life, to those places, but as a community of like minded souls, determined to prove their respect for the land in every action, determined to help lead the way back to a more balanced way of doing things. And perhaps that can help point the way forward today; so many of us are bemused and disempowered as world events roar on with seemingly little we can do to alter them. Our government seems ineffectual or insincere, we have precious few opportunties to come together, to hear each other speak and work out some way forward - as a people, not some cowed population run rings around by those who claim to know best. We are shut away in boxes, communicate tangentially via machines, our common ground normally provided by a media that can so often enforce the sense of the mundane that comes when we seek only to be informed, not inform our need for action or responsibility.

Life lived with greater human contact, one defined and enriched by community gives us new perspective, lets us know we're not alone. At Newbury, if nothing else, we had some chance to come together, to act in unity. It's that sense that perhaps we need to foster now, not simply as a political subculture, however charged, not simply as one town or neighbourhood, however they define our interactions; we need again to 'make the circle bigger', to foster the reality and sense of an ever growing community defined by shared intention, working together through our acts both large and small to somehow leave a world still fit for living in.

In seeking this, in a world where regular and widespread rapid long distance travel looks soon to be the stuff of history, our localities, the people and places we have around us will take on a new vitality. But we know now that we're bound in fate with every other community in the world. To come home to each other is to know that humanity is reflected in our every interaction, that what we do to each other we do to the world and what we do to the world we ultimately do to ourselves.

Copyright all Text and Images J.A. Hindle 2008