Biodiversity after the Global. Or Airport/Wilderness

Biodiversity After the Global. Or Airport/Wilderness

In 2012 the airport authority Heathrow Holdings Limited launched a landscaping initiative it named Heathrow Biodiversity. This photo essay takes the reader to the lower Colne Valley, a stretch of landscape that lies to the west of the airport, in order to investigate the initiative, its claims and contradictions.

I take as a point of departure the search for Orchard Farm, a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) that formed part of the initiative. Though I fail to locate the farm with any certainty, I uncover much else of interest, not least layered and intersecting histories of quarrying, horticulture, waste disposal, terrorism, human habitation and eviction, as well as an exclusion zone in which thickets perform a strategic role in enforcement.

Interlaced with this account are theoretical reflections on art, biodiversity and landscape. Through cross readings between aesthetics, economics and natural history, we locate the origins of biodiversity within a tradition of 18^th century landscaping in Europe, a tradition which, on the one hand, thinks of itself as a kind of conceptual art, but on the other, displays a remarkable capacity to legitimize capital accumulation and conceal expulsions from the land. This backdrop is used to frame Heathrow Biodiversity and ultimately show that rather than putting the airport into a better relationship with the environment, as the name might suggest, the initiative facilitates the ever further extension of the airport into the landscape. The essay closes with a reflection what our discoveries contribute to discourses of art in the Anthropocene.

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

An earlier version of this photo essay took the form of an artist talk at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi, Jan. 16, 2023.