The Kingdom of Fences

As many of you might know, I'm not a very girly girl. My best friend (who, in this case as in many others is the complete opposite from me) is always complaining about that – when she's taking a lot of pictures and I make a face or can't stand nice, when I refuse to wear skirts and dresses or when her 5 years old sister asks me to put some lipstick on her lips, and I do it worse than she would have done it herself, as I have used lipstick exactly three times in my life and don't even own one. What I do like to do though is spend as much time as possible in nature, often hiking. I feel best when I'm there, I feel like I have my freedom. I’ve read somewhere the other day that when we walk, we don’t find ourselves, but lose ourselves in the routine of the steps. In a way, I agree with this statement. When I hike I lose my external identity somehow, I don’t have to care any more that I’m a girl and have to behave that way and look nice, I don’t have to show my status of a well-educated individual by behaving nicely and sounding smart. By losing those tags that are definitely an important part of my identity in the society, the inner, truer me can really come out.

The view on Triglav from my room after sunset

One of the things I love the most about my country is definitely the nature, which, as anyone who's visited it will agree, is simply stunning. When I'm sat at home in my room, my view opens towards the west, where the Alps, including Triglav, our highest mountain, lie. In good weather, they simply call me, Živa, come and explore us, conquer the peaks and enjoy the unseen beautiful views there. What mountains promise to me is freedom – a vast place to roam around, enjoy and explore our Earth, the land that was given to all of us and for which we should be grateful. At the same time, each peak is a challenge – climbing up is tough, but we're rewarded with the gorgeous view and the feeling of a little victory in the end.

Mountains are the main area in Slovenia, as well as the majority of the world, where humans aren't dominating yet. Yes, we're there, admiring them for their untameability (this word doesn’t exist, does it? Help me out on this in comments, please :) ) and magnificence compared to our smallness. But the mountains are largely unsettled, with the exception of a few mountain pastures where shepherds live in summer and the mountain huts that provide refuge for the hikers. Other than that, the mountains are free of any human influence. What’s best about that is that they are truly no one’s land. What I mean by that is that no person owns it, no one can say, this is my land, you can’t walk there. No one’s land becomes everyone’s land, common property which we all use and enjoy, as well as take care of by not picking flowers or taking the trash back to the civilisation.

Mountains are therefore a place that are still the way the entire Earth was thousands of years ago, before humans started to modify it. There are, of course, other places like that as well, to different extents of course, even for example the forest next to my house in which I am currently sitting. However, without any human obstructions, such as farms, houses, streets and what have you not, it’s possible to move more freely there than anywhere else. The only limits to where one can go are those posed by nature – steep walls or rapid rivers that cannot be crossed.

Humans, or at least Europeans, seem to have something against this idea of roaming around freely – we make fences and build walls around ourselves anywhere we go. Even cities and houses in which we live limit us – we sleep in only a single place, we can enter only some buildings, we can walk only on public land, it's all full of restrictions and barriers. The trend continues on the country level with borders that cannot be crossed, and if geopolitical borders aren’t strong enough, we build walls and fences, like the one Trump wants to build or the one we have in Slovenia on our border with Croatia. All of these are meant to keep the intruders or anything else that could potentially harm us out, but they are also keeping us in, living in a cage that limits everyone.

For now, the mountains and nature in general were mostly kept open to everyone, a common property, but this is also not always the case. Many nature reserves are closed to people to prevent any kind of potential damage that they could cause. This is not the case only in some very biodiverse and sensitive areas in the tropics, but also in developed world where, let’s be honest, there isn’t that much to preserve, and where almost all areas were already influenced by humans at one point or another in the past.

What I really miss when I’m in England are forests, so last year I decided to make a cycling trip to this nature reserve Little Wittenham Woods in the south of Oxfordshire. Although it was quite far (had to cycle there for over two hours in 30°C) it was, except for Oxford University’s Wytham Woods (for which you need a special permit) the closest woodland to Oxford (in my opinion, way too far). When I got there, it was a nice little woods, like any other, except that it was probably the smallest, or at least the second smallest woodland that I had ever been to. There was a fence all around it, which I did not find very necessary, but at least there were some gates through which I could enter. There was another part of woodland a few hundred metres away that I wanted to visit, but when I went there I was completely shocked to discover that it was fenced all around and that thus there was no way of entering.

I had never seen a forest fenced before and it did not make much sense to me. Firstly, as it was such a small patch of a forest it can’t really have such an importance for conservation of whatever they were conserving. Secondly, I always considered forests a public good where anyone can go to relax, recreate, pick forest fruits or do anything else they wanted (in my case, often to study). Do humans only with their presence really make such a huge damage to the environment that they should be completely excluded from it? Of course some regulations in terms of trashing etc are just fine and necessary, but putting fences around forests makes us even more separated from nature and caught in our own artificial world, which can’t be good neither for our mental health nor the least for conservation, as to support it, people need to recognise the importance of nature from their personal experience.

Without even really being aware of it, the land that once belonged to all of us is being taken away – we are not allowed to walk on a lot of pastures, fields and other agricultural land any more, the more preserved nature such as forests are closed for conservation reasons. Where do we go then, to roam around and really be free, when there are so many barriers for walking? For now, mountains are still a place we can go to, because nature there is stronger than man. Let’s hope it stays that way.