John Locke’s Legacy, Vancouver Island, 1993

“It is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything; and let everyone consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco or sugar … and an acre of the same land lying in common with no husbandry upon it, and he will find that the improvement of labour makes the far greater part of the value.”

John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), Chapter V, Of Property, 40.

Landscapes for sale or rent

As I recall, it was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock who examined the rootlessness of modern society. In the search for “home” we find ourselves navigating inflated real estate prices and our own dreams of belonging.

The council estates of Staffordshire, England (now commonly referred to as the West Midlands) cradled my formative years. Ashmore Park Estates was typical of the cookie-cutter brick-built developments, the affordable rental housing of the 1950s, built in response to the post-war Baby Boom.

Their construction provided work for bricklayers, a trade my father practiced for a while. The streets echoed with children’s laughter and battle cries. The somewhat austere streetscapes, documented by many photographers of the day, gave way to ancient farmlands, which had, in turn, given way to suburbia.

Daryl & Ray, Contractors, Vancouver Island, 1993

“There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life; whom Nature, having furnished as liberally as any other people with the materials of plenty … yet, for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniences we enjoy ….” John Locke, ibid 41.

An “empty” land

In Canada, the “land of opportunity” to which my family emigrated in 1965, the landscape is so vast and relatively “undeveloped” that we take for granted its gifts, treating them merely as resources that must be “delivered to market.” 

During my first days in Canada, I noticed how cavalierly many people seemed to treat its wonders. If only they realized what the loss of unspoiled nature looked and felt like. Fifty years on, scarcity resulting from profligacy and waste is exacting its price on communities from Newfoundland to British Columbia, which, despite the declaration on vehicle licence plates, is not half as beautiful as it once was. We all bear responsibility, to one degree or another, for the decline. 

“It is labour, then, which puts the greatest part of value upon the land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything ….” John Locke, ibid .43

Though I’ve made plenty of portraits during my career — my first photograph was a portrait — I suspect I am a landscape photographer at heart, be that urban or wild. I have explored and photographed some of the most sublime places in my adopted country, with the mountains and the sea pulling me this way and that with the seasons and the tides.

Trailer Trash, 2019

Summits and skyscrapers

For a time in the ‘70s I lived the life of the fabled mountain man (in my mind, at least), joining trappers and prospectors, outlaws and thieves on an adventure that today seems as much like a movie as the extraordinary period of my life that moulded my character, perhaps more than any other life event. Soon after I left The Meadow and its circle of mountains, I saw in a dream a drone’s-eye view of that landscape, an inner-world topography surrounding a great, ruby-red lake named “Mere Cerebellum.” *

Back in what we call civilization, I trained my cameras on “the modified landscape” in cities, towns and suburbs where I put down roots, however shallow. 

Regular readers of this journal will have seen my Eighties Vancouver portfolio; some of you have kindly invested in this snapshot collection of a city in transition. Ironically, we pine for a kinder, gentler, human-scale environment, now swallowed in glass towers that obscure the mountains, as if to elevate our creations above “God’s finest sculpterins’.” 

“Which way you headed, Jeremiah?”

“Canada, maybe. I hear there’s land there a man’s never seen.”

Prospectors and predators

Four decades on, since my sojourn in the pioneer dream, I’ve sporadically lived and worked in the heart of Canada’s bustling trade centres — Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto — as well as lesser towns and suburbs. I’ve often said that I demand either wilderness or urban centre — I want the inspiration of nature or community, no in-betweens. Yet I denied the negative effects large cities and their harried inhabitants have increasingly had on my health.

No need, I think, to discuss the economic stresses that cities like Vancouver exact on people looking for affordable housing today. It’s simply beyond the reach of ordinary people. How can it be, in peacetime in a wealthy country, that we find ourselves in need of the kind of housing initiatives England undertook after World War II?

Nowadays, foreign speculation sees no need to wrap its intentions in virtues like “labour.” It is enough to appropriate and prosper.

Home on the range

On this Thanksgiving Day (Harvest Festival in my native England), I’m reminded of a thanksgiving feast held in a Purcell Mountain cabin, tables overflowing with fresh game, and vegetables coaxed from stony alpine soils. Eighty-two-year-old prospector Joe Blake told us youngsters, who had saved the old cabins from oblivion, how his family had felt deeply at home in that meadow when they established the remote retreat, fifty-years before. “You folks have made it a home again,” he said with a tear on his cheek.

My wife and I, having earned a modest level of comfort in our later years, have fled the ennui and stress of the city to claim our patch of paradise at the edge of the world. We find ourselves among a diaspora of sorts, refugees from overpriced real estate in increasingly crowded and unfriendly urban environments. Vancouver Island is typical of such havens, now feeling the pressure of its own building boom.

I’ve come full circle, I guess, returning or retiring to the kind of community I knew in my earliest days, albeit with the luxury of ownership. It’s near to the sea and affords a mountain view from the garden. Perhaps, I’m in the right dream after all.

Sooke Disposal Sunset, Vancouver Island 2019

“The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But ‘nowadays’? Function and use remain the same, only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of creatures among which he was born … it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down … and brought ruin on himself and his family. ‘Nowadays’ it is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the sawmill.”

Robert Graves, Forward, The White Goddess, (1948)

*I did not consciously know at the time (1977) that “mere” was the ancient Celtic word for lake. Poetic synchronicity, perhaps?