Abstract

A wrong turning is never where you start from, but it can stop you in your tracks. It unfolds into an assemblage of forces that cannot be woven neatly into any predictability. It is never where you meant to go (or maybe it was).

Since the Coalition Government’s attempts in October 2010 to sell off up to 100% of Britain’s Public Forestry Estate, I have taken ‘wrong turnings’ into public and private woodland to explore, trespass and register the flows of privatisation as they impact my experience of publicly-owned forest. In particular my work attempts to place the body in ‘threatened landscape’ in moving towards an understanding of how pivotal is affect in the forging of environmentally-responsible public cultures; how, for example, the love of walking in the woods can shape a political force. This paper uses Jane Bennett’s ideas of vital materialism to explore forests in their public and private states, and ask: does ownership, barrier, fence, change that something that can lead to political and personal effects, sometimes big, usually small?

Following David Crouch and John Wylie, this paper also asks how one manoeuvres, politically and bodily, through ‘threatened landscape’? Alone, or together? When a private tributary meets other intimacies to form a flood of words and acts, its trajectory is not certain, never sure. As Kathleen Stewart says, intensity does not offer answers. ‘Wrong turnings’, she might say, are “not exactly ‘personal’ but they sure can pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go.”