My post-heroic journey: Paul Powlesland

We are starting a series of interviews with those exploring “post-heroic” lives as described by Sharon Blackie as the eco-heroine’s or eco-hero’s journey. The first is Paul Powlesland, a 32-year-old barrister,  boat community builder and tree protector, who has embarked on a non-conventional, non-linear life journey leading him to connect to the land and rivers around London, and to start building an environmentally sustainable community living on a converted Dutch oil barge.

In If Women Rose Rooted, Sharon Blackie describes hearing “the call” which led her to a more fulfilling life connected to the land. Has there been a time in your life when you’ve heard “the call”?

I’ve definitely felt an urge – I’m not sure where it came from – to live differently. The first time I diverged, I was living in a rented flat in Greenwich with my then partner, and I was training to be barrister. We had this lovely lifestyle. The path was all set. In the midst of that I just felt the most depressed I’ve ever felt, commuting in on the train every day and living in this soul-less flat. So I started squatting. That took me on a whole different path. I ended up living on a boat. It’s been a consistent pattern of choosing adventure and fun and interest over ease and comfort. None of the ways that I’ve lived have been easy, but they’ve usually been very beautiful.

How has your connection and how you relate to the land informed your life/values?

I’ve been through a process of me influencing the land and the land influencing me, often quite subtly, and in ways that you can only realise looking back. I bought the riverbank because I needed a place to put my boat, and that was all I could afford.

The riverbank needed work doing to it. It was an overgrown scrubland, so it needed to be planted with trees and have hedges put in and wells dug. I ended up doing all the work myself, which was economically a stupid thing to do – I could earn a lot more money going out to work a my normal job as a lawyer and paying someone else to do hard heavy manual work.

There were times when it was bloody hard, but it was also satisfying seeing something change through your hands. I spent a lot of time down there in different seasons. I’d be working and then I’d pause and look around, hear the birdsong and feel the sun on my face. It was really special. I had afternoon sleeps in the hammock in between all the work I was doing. I was so content. I was directly connecting with the place, getting soil on my hands, swimming in the river. Seeing it gradually change over time was really amazing: the willow trees in different seasons; the hedge gradually springing to life after a couple of years now.

What’s your concept of home?

In some ways I’m part of the modern rootless existence without any grand connection to a place; it’s a very modern thing. My home is transient. I live on a boat. It moves around. But that also gives me an urge to put down deeper roots in a place, like having a riverbank. Land that I can actually change. And it’s not like a house where you sell it after twenty years and move to another house. I don’t plan to sell it. Hopefully my grandchildren will play in the trees that I planted.

I have a desire to find that rootedness, to connect more deeply with my ancestors and where they’re from, to go to those places, try to find their graves. In certain cultures they have mausoleums where all their ancestors are, whereas ours are just scattered in various places around the country. Places that most people don’t even know. Most people might know where their grandparents are buried, but probably not their great-grandparents. They’re just in some random cemetery and forgotten about. That’s kind of depressing.

Most of my ancestors pretty much grew up in the same village for hundreds of years stretching back into time – some in Devon and some in Yorkshire. That was the way it was done. In some ways there’s something quite cool about being able to choose where you live. I wouldn’t want to stay in the town I grew up in in Surrey because it’s boring, but also because I had no roots there. My family just happened to move there before I was born.

One of my life’s ambitions is to buy the farm where my name comes from and to connect back deeply with that place which was farmed by my ancestors for 800 years. I have a plan for that – but in the future. There’s something very satisfying about going back in that way to a deep rootedness with a place.

The post-heroic journey isn’t linear but often spirals. Do you have a sense of that?

I feel quite strongly that my life doesn’t seem to follow a linear pattern. I’m hoping to do wonderful things with it. A lot of people my age would have a sense of following a career path. I’m reasonably certain that the things I’m going to do with my life that will be great are not going to be to do with my career. But I don’t have any idea what it is necessarily going to be. I’ve noticed that each thing just opens out to another thing that you don’t necessarily expect. And that thing might be a failure … but it opens up to the next thing, and the next thing.

Squatting led to the boating, boating led to buying the riverbank. Boating also led to founding a boating community on the River Roding and a local environmental project, and then that led to me buying a boat that I want to use as a community centre. All those things might fail. But each one will teach me something and probably lead me on to the next thing. And I still don’t know what that will be yet.

What are your current projects?

Vriendschap community - a Dutch oil barge I’m converting as a community living and events space in Barking. I’m aiming for it to be one of the largest structures in London to be completely off-grid, which is both a challenge and an opportunity.

‘Lawyers for Trees’ is a new thing I’ve decided to do. It arose out of the work I’ve been doing in Sheffield to help with a tree protection campaign. And I realised there was no grassroots organisation for giving people legal help to save trees.

Actually, with trees there’s not a huge amount you can do within the law, because the legal protections in the UK are so poor. Someone comes in and says they’re building a house next door and they’re cutting down trees, and if it’s past planning permission there’s nothing much to be done. Loads of trees don’t have any protection at all, including some of the oldest. There are yew trees in Wales which are some of the oldest living organisms in Europe. Potentially thousands of years old. No legal protection at all. The landlord could chop them down tomorrow. That’s mad. You wouldn’t let that happen to Stonehenge, so why are old trees completely unprotected?

We’re in a position in the UK now where we can’t afford to lose any more trees given how few we have already, how little forestry there is. And none of the ones that are lost will grow back in our lifetimes.

The post-heroic journey is not about slaying dragons. How do you engage with your foes?

I try carrot and stick. If you don’t use any stick at all people will just walk all over you. You’ve got to know your legal rights and how difficult you can make things for someone else. And then at the same time just be nice!

But sometimes you have to fight. So in Sheffield they tried campaigning, they tried asking, but the council said they were not going to stop chopping trees down. And they wouldn’t even show the contract where they agreed to do it. So what choice do people have but to use direct action? And I am ultimately willing to use direct action and things that are unlawful where all other avenues are exhausted, because a lot of the time the legal system lags behind what’s right.

I believe that in a hundred years time, people will be aghast at how we chopped down ancient trees. People will be like, what the hell were you thinking? – and the law was actively encouraging that! In Sheffield the law was protecting the people chopping the trees down. To me, it’s such a basic failure of law and morality. There’s a backlash coming. The ancient tree group on Facebook has 20,000 people, and there’s a growing movement – a growing swell of people who care, and who won’t put up with it anymore.

The post-heroic journey is collaborative rather than a lone effort. Do you relate to that in your life?

Historically not; I have been quite individualistic. Mainly because those around me don’t seem interested in the same things. People are living in rented flats in London and I tell them I’m going to go and buy a riverbank and dig a well. No one else is particularly interested in that, so I’ve just gone ahead and done it. Increasingly, I am realising that doing things collaboratively is really the only way forward, and I can’t do things alone.

The eco-heroine or hero’s journey involves allies; who are the allies who have influenced you?

Other people have massively influenced my life – often in small ways that I find hard to recall, but I know they have and I wouldn’t be the same without it. And I’m sure I’ve done the same to other people. Even if you don’t feel as if you’re having an impact, living your life true to what you believe and doing what you believe in is so important, because you never know the people who you’ve inspired and the lives you’ve changed. And a lot of the time it won’t be some grand thing, it will be something small that just happens.

If I can get one more person through the Vriendschap project who gets turned on to environmentalism, or a couple of people through the Roding project who are intrigued by getting involved in the life of their river, or if I get people saving trees through Lawyers for Trees, that’s potentially a massive difference.

So you can move away from grand ideas of changing the whole world to small things that you may never even know about. You never know where living your life true to yourself and living it in a beautiful, vibrant, idealistic way is going to lead.