Last year, I was approached by OneLife, the "lifestyle" magazine of Land Rover, which is sent out to Land Rover owners in more than 60 countries and is, according to its own modest marketing, "worthy of the world's best coffee tables".
OneLife had a writing commission in mind for me. I would be flown out to the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean for a three-day stay. There, I would conduct a "beach-based" interview with "the world-famous freediver Tanya Streeter": the conceit being that I, as a mountaineer, and Streeter as a diver, were both explorers of the vertical. I would stay in the best hotel on the islands. Naturally, all expenses would be covered and all transport pre-arranged. The fee for the subsequent 2,000-word article would run to a generous five-figure sum.
If only it had not been Land Rover making the offer.
How ardently I wished for it not to have been Land Rover.
Transport is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide production in Britain: transport emissions increased by 50% between 1990 and 2002.
In the main, this is due to the unsustainable growth in air travel.
It is also, however, down to the massively burgeoning 4x4 market. Sales of 4x4s grew by 12.8% in this country last year, to 179,000 vehicles: more than double the number sold 10 years ago. Only 12% of 4x4s are ever driven "off-road", 40% never leave the city.
One cost of the 4x4 boom is long-term environmental.
Big 4x4s in urban conditions manage 13 miles to the gallon; the very biggest manage four. Four miles to the gallon. To drive a 4x4, given the disastrous rapidity of climate change, is to demonstrate the same reverse-denial of the lung-cancer victim who continues to smoke cigarettes after diagnosis.
My OneLife contact sent me two issues of the magazine.
It was lavishly produced, and "landscape" was its glamour, its sales pitch. On every page, Land Rovers romped across winter hillsides, over desert dunes, along boulder-cobbled river-beds.
There were glossy centrefold spreads of eco-porn: thrusting mountains, brothel-pink sunsets. cracked mud patterns served as wallpaper between text boxes. Nature was being used to sell a product which embodies the principles by which nature must not be understood.
OneLife - what a happy holistic world the name evokes! - is of course only conforming to large-scale 4x4 advertising strategies. You will be familiar with them from television commercials: gleaming semi-militarised vehicles ploughing through a swamp, or along a cliff-top, before slewing to a rakish halt at a view-point. The vehicles' names - the "Touareg", the "Bedouin" - are repellently shameless steals from aboriginal cultures, designed to raise atavistic hairs on the backs of consumers' necks.
4x4 advertising is dedicated to manipulating landscapes into generic forms. All that it requires of a landscape is that it evoke the idea of challenge - something resistant to be conquered, something natural to be tamed. A river is valued for its difficulty of fording. A mountain for its dramatic and nameless escarpments. No landscape can be only itself: it must represent an obstacle of some sort.
The hypocrisies of 4x4 marketing are dark, multiple and pernicious. Everything about the product urges us to the wrong relationship with our environment. They expound a vision of an unspoiled and untroubled land, even as they market the tools of its further wreckage.
The massive sales growth of the 4x4 is one dismaying example among many of the gap which currently exists between knowledge and place.
Each month, it seems, that gap widens. Apocryphal stories circulate: about the schoolchildren who do not know that milk comes from cows, or who cannot identify a cucumber from a line-up of vegetables. In April of this year, the Woodland Trust published research showing that 94% of British children are unable to identify common native trees - beech, ash, birch, hazel - from their leaves, and that more than 40% of seven to 10-year-olds have never visited a wood.
