Biodiversity after the Global. Or Airport/Wilderness

Biodiversity After the Global. Or Airport/Wilderness

This photo essay takes the reader to the lower Colne Valley where I camp the night in scrubland to the west of Heathrow Airport. I am in search of Orchard Farm, a site of special scientific interest and one part of a conservation initiative Heathrow Biodiversity. Though I fail to locate the farm with any certainty, I uncover its broader context: layered and intersecting histories of quarrying, horticulture, waste disposal, terrorism, human habitation and eviction; an exclusion zone in which thickets perform a strategic role in enforcement.

Interlaced with my travelogue is a theoretical framing of biodiversity and landscape. Via cross readings between aesthetics, economics and natural history, I locate the origins of biodiversity within a tradition of 18th century English landscaping that was always politically conflicted. On the one hand, it foregrounded the emancipatory possibilities of wilderness via its beauty. On the other, it displayed a remarkable capacity to legitimize capital accumulation and conceal expulsions from the land.

Returning to the present context, I infer that Heathrow Biodiversity, rather than putting the airport into a better relationship with the environment, as the name might suggest, ultimately facilitates ever further extension of the airport into the landscape. I close with a reflection on the contribution of this walk to discourses of art in the Anthropocene.

Keywords: aesthetics; border ecologies; Colne Valley; decolonising landscape; Heathrow Biodiversity; botany; urban nature.

This photo essay was given as talk at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi, Jan. 16, 2023.