new wild order Andy Hamilton na
When does a book start to exist?
When I look in dusty notebooks, and in old folders on long forgotten hard drives that whirr and creek and lag as I fire their long dormant processes up, I can find the origins of five of my books. All classed as“ how to” books: how to forage, be self-sufficient, ferment everything and how to brew wine and beer. New Wild Order, my sixth, is altogether different. It’ s a braver work, I wanted to push the boundaries of what I could do. To learn a whole new genre, that of the non-fiction narrative.
It started off in a different form, an altogether different book.“ Return of the Forager”, an academically researched book about how foraging shaped our civilisation, creating everything from farming, to communities and money.
It raised the eyebrows of many editors but never managed to land. The market wasn’ t ready; truth was I wasn’ t ready either. I felt I needed to grow into this new way of writing, I’ d underestimated how difficult a switch of genres was. Months of work went into the research and into writing and rewriting, but with no publishers biting, the idea was to lay dormant for a few years.
I’ m a keen recycler and knew I was onto something, I just had to find the right something to fit it into. That was back in 2016.
From the period between then and getting the book commissioned a lot happened both to me and the world. Lockdown fuelled the interest in foraging, many science journals became open source and the scientific community started to accept there may not have been a clear linear progression from hunter gathering to farming. Also, that farming is only viable when the weather is reliably consistent. The case for a farming / foraging hybrid( also known as agro-forestry) both in the past and as a possible future, was also gaining ground.
As for me, I got an arts council grant to improve my practice and joined a weekly writers group. Close reading each other’ s work on a weekly basis. I slowed, almost stopped conducting my foraging walks to be a full time author. I had‘ the bit between my teeth’ and I wanted to ensure that my next draft wouldn’ t be rejected. I also read, a lot!
Flesh was being put on the bones of what would become New Wild Order, but it still wasn’ t quite there yet. I hate to admit too – but I wasn’ t in a great place during some of those years. The usual rainfall that happens
in everyone’ s life, but it felt like I was out in a monsoon in just my swimming trunks. I just wasn’ t feeling very happy. I’ d always had a vision of who I’ d be at 50 and it wasn’ t the short tempered fat man I looked like I was becoming. At the time I wasn’ t quite sure how to make myself feel anything less than a bit depressed.
Then I picked up Isabella Tree’ s,‘ Wilding’. I read about species after species all thriving at her rewilding project at Knepp. She said,“ What we observe in nature is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefers”. That animals may just be surviving on the denuded natural world we leave behind. The wild that she could offer these animals at Knepp she saw as their“ true preferences”. The purple emperor butterfly, rare on our shores is a prime example. Experts noted that limited numbers were visiting a handful of dense woodland sites across the country and thought that was their preference. It wasn’ t, they actually prefer more open habitat. They favour a type of willow called sallow, or Goat Willow a tree which thrives on open ground. She soon had the densest population in the country visiting her land every year.
Something clicked.
I started to think, maybe we are no different. Perhaps the concrete, brick and glass we live amongst isn’ t the environment we are meant to live in – our equivalent of a dense woodland. But what was our open ground, our“ true preference”. I’ d started to experiment. I was already foraging, eating daily from the same place. I then also started going out in the early hours under each full moon. I wanted to check out biphasic sleep to see if two sleeps were better than one.( They are, but it’ s too difficult to do around a family who go to school and have jobs). I put together a big list of things that were lacking in my life, things I thought our ancestors would have had. Asking myself,“ How would we do this if we were wilder”.
I had a bunch of meetings with various different publishers. I was offered a big sum of money from Macmillan but was only given six months to write the book. It wasn’ t enough time and I knew that a book like this needed a least a year if I was going to do everything that I wanted to. Luckily, another offer came in, it was a fraction of the money but twice the amount of time. Did I make the right decision?
Each wild aspect had to highlight where we were going wrong in the western world. I gave up sitting on chairs and sleeping on a bed to see if it helped my back problems, I experimented with giving up soaps and
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