Tag: Extinction rebellion

A bit of wonder

So this isn’t anything special, as photos go – it was a bit of a studio set-up (if my desk counts as a studio) with a lightbox background and a bit of fill from a lamp and taken on a Pixel 3 phone camera.

Warts and all, then, this picture of a couple of globe artichokes from the allotment, with a fair bit of insect frass and whitefly remains thrown in to add gritty realism. These plants were among our first imports to the allotment but we value them far more for their architectural beauty than for their food content, Sure they taste good, but you’d need to harvest a whole row for a decent feed, and the wastage would be truly shocking. For us they’re a great boundary plant, being horribly prickly and tremendous insect attractors in addition to being stunning to look at. The true harvest is in Madame’s room where they have been the subject of many drawings and paintings over the years.

I’m really interested in the rather messy conjunction between the natural, the aesthetic and the spiritual ‘frames’ within which we try to understand the sense of wonder which grips us, if we’re lucky enough, when we pause to contemplate something as simple as an artichoke, or a dragonfly or even the tiniest detail of a plant. I remember one memorable walk I shared during a pilgrimage with a friend who’d spent most of his life buying and selling grain. It was the day I learned the way to identify cereal crops early in the year, simply by examining their leaves. The day that I first heard the terms ‘ligule’ and ‘auricle’ not from a naturalist but a salesman, and I remember the sense of excitement, approaching awe, at the way the natural world somehow makes sense if you know, or are taught, how to look.

That sense of awe transforms our inner lives in a way that little else can. We can read disturbing stories illustrated with statistics about the state of the earth and push them to the back of our minds, and yet when we try to describe matters of the most profound importance to us we instinctively reach for the imagery of nature.

Our days are like the grass;

We flourish like a flower of the field;

when the wind goes over it, it is gone

and its place will know it no more.

Psalm 103

I’ve long since lost my copy of Raymond Williams’ book “Keywords” but I can remember that he wrote at length on the complexity and ambiguity that surrounds the word natural. I can understand perfectly well – intellectually – that we are a part of nature and I could write at length about the way that changing our understanding of our place as a part of the whole creation is a prerequisite for our return to wholeness, but nothing quite expresses the fragility of life than to observe the brief life of a flower. Nothing quite expresses our grief better than the memory of the wind passing over moorland grass in winter. Our lives are measured in seasons, our passions in roses, our personalities in creatures – we are tigers and sloths, owls and larks, rats and cats. So much of our interior lives is furnished with natural imagery it’s amazing that we treat the natural world as badly as we do; but without being the least religious about it I can understand the way that the fictional story of Adam and Eve embraces the profound sense that we have, through our perverse belief that we are the sole purpose of creation, been cast out from paradise. The story isn’t about sex – it never was – it was about getting too big for our boots. But that’s not a soapbox I want to climb on right now. Religion has done so much damage to the creation myths they’re no longer useable.

Natural history stands as a kind of bridge between nature and science. It’s driven to science by wonder and fascination. But human language is also saturated with natural history and, as I’ve already said, furnishes our sense of the numinous with images from the natural world. So the inner language we use when we think about the global environmental crisis is bound to be expressed in ways that some scientists and almost all economists and politicians would rather dismiss. Talk of God or Gaia or even nature can’t be measured in degrees centigrade or gross domestic product; you can’t quantify wonder and it would be difficult to bring paintings, drawings, poems and drama; music and all the variety of human artifacts as evidence because in thinking about the global crisis we are both the accusers and the accused. Francis Schaeffer, the founder of L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, described human beings as “glorious ruins”

A recent piece in The Ecologist magazine takes a well known paper by Jem Bendell to task for using bad science to back up a cataclysmic view of climate change which, the authors say, is more likely to lead to fear and paralysis than action to stem catastrophic climate change. Within the article there’s a section that deserves repeating –

One reason for its popularity is that Deep Adaptation does a couple of things effectively that other works do not. First, it talks in stark emotional terms about something that is undoubtedly very scary. It does not shy away from describing feelings that all people concerned with the climate crisis feel on a regular basis.

This emotional expression is something that scientific writing and reporting rarely employs, as scientists strive for detached objectivity in presenting facts. While frank discussion of the psychological and emotional impacts of the climate crisis is sorely needed, it must still be a discussion grounded in reality. “

Thomas Nicholas
 Galen Hall
 Colleen Schmidt
 | 15th July 2020

I absolutely agree with that whole sentiment – bad science is a curse , but as long as science, creative language and spirituality continue to eye each other suspiciously and refuse to engage seriously with each others strengths, we’ll never be able to muster the forces we really need to change the world. All great paradigm changes need their novelists and poets and their spiritual leaders as well as their chemists, engineers and sociologists.

The mid nineteenth century was fortunate to have Joseph Rowntree to highlight the horrors of the industrial revolution, Charles Dickens to bring them to the attention of a huge public, Joseph Bazalgette to build the sewers that ended cholera epidemics, Charles Booth to take Christian spirituality to the poorest areas in the country and Charles Darwin finally to put us in our place, not as the purpose, the telos of creation but as a rather gloriously interesting part of it. I could add many more; what about Marx for instance? We’d have to have a space for write-ins, and I can’t imagine them getting on very well, but that’s not the point.

There’s a lovely interview with James Lovelock in the Guardian today in which he speaks about the divisions between scientific orthodoxies as being every bit as damaging to science (and the earth) as sectarian religious disputes.

I realize my argument could easily be parodied as a kind of hippy dippy “why can’t we all be nice to each other?” indulgence, but I’m totally serious. Couldn’t our headlong rush into environmental catastrophe be said to be in need of redemption without invoking the whole ghastly apparatus of religious belief? It makes perfect sense to me that if you want someone to end their self-destructive behaviour you have to present a more powerful image of a possible future for them (that’s the bit that artists and writers are best at) and you also have to embrace some means of relieving the burden of guilt about past behaviour (that’s the spiritual) before you can help them over the threshold into a new lifestyle, that must necessarily be guided by the best science we have. Why try to invent an entirely new way of leading that process when we have all the tools we need at hand?

“We have met the enemy, and they are us.”

The updated version was first used in the comic strip “Pogo,” by Walt Kelly, in the 1960s and referred to the turmoil caused by the Vietnam War.

Dealing with drought (?)

IMG_2164

I know, it makes me feel a bit premature too, since we’re probably about to break the record for the wettest February since records began – but if climate change means anything at all it’s the fact that our weather is becoming less and less predictable. The swings are wilder; feast and famine come together in the weather cycle and ironic though it might seem, we’re investing heavily in water storage at the moment at the Potwell Inn because it’s raining. Starting to wonder what to do after it’s been dry for six weeks and the government is planning a hosepipe ban will be too late. We’ve been storing 1000 litres for a year and I’ve been busy planning and building a new storage layout, connecting the butts and increasing our capacity to 1250 Litres immediately and later perhaps adding another 500 Litres to take the water running off the compost storage bins.  It seems all wrong to use pure drinking water for the allotment, but for the most part we’re all very inexperienced when it comes to efficient watering. I’m quite sure we water too much – in my case because I actually enjoy it on a summer evening – but much of it will be wasted. So one of our climate change lessons for the next few years is to learn how to water just enough and not too much.

We’ll also need to be looking at the plants we grow; the varieties that work and a whole range of new horticultural skills. There will be things that can’t survive the new weather regime and I’m sure the seed catalogues will be offering lots of expensive new varieties.  On the other hand, open pollinated varieties using the best seed gathered on our own allotment year on year might do even better.  I’ve read that it’s surprising how quickly adaptations happen. There’s a good case for looking again at some of the trad varieties that could bring useful genes into play. I once had a micro-variety of cherry tomato that had been treasured since the war by a retired firefighter.  It had no name – just ‘Tim’s tomatoes’ and the fruit was absolutely delicious.  Sadly they died with him but whatever they were, they loved life exactly the way Tim grew them.

There are so many things we can do as growers to mitigate climate change.  That’s not an excuse for not doing all the things we know about in our personal lives, the way we shop and travel and dress. But change, when it comes, will come slowly and we need to prepare for the extremes in the meantime. We’ve done some trials with windbreaks and frostbreaks (hardly needed this winter);  I’ve written often about drainage and improving soil condition – all these things can add resilience to an allotment. Our allotment is sheltered from the prevailing southwesterly winds by a line of tall trees, but the northwesterlies, northerlies and northeasterlies can be incredibly cold and destructive and so we’ve put all our structures – greenhouse, shed and compost bins on the North side, and we’ve built a strong windbreak to the east. We’re not allowed to have fences or hedges but there’s nothing in the rules about training vines and growing vigorous soft fruit along wires.

The hotbed, although it’s quite small has also given us flexibility during the early months of the year.  It’s surprising what you can grow on 12 square feet of fertile soil, kept at a steady 20C. Climate change is a real challenge, but it’s one we can rise to.  I’ve just spent the happiest couple of days sourcing exactly the right kinds of pipes and connectors and one additional water butt that fell into my hands when I walked into a local garden centre and saw the very thing I was looking for next to the till waiting to be returned to the wholesaler. I did a deal with the boss on the spot and got it at a reduced price. So that’s in the back of the car along with a pile of connectors and pipes that I can’t wait to assemble.  For the first time we’ll have a free (OK it cost a bit) but a sustainable source of rainwater that flows freely to a convenient tap at watering can height. It’s been a logistical challenge but by a bit of judicious juggling I’ll have preserved all bar a couple of gallons of the water that we’d already stored. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it.  That’s one bit of infrastructure to cross off the list, and then I’ll turn to putting a roof over the compost bins and harvesting the rain off another 60 square feet. Further down the line I want to try out an idea for solar heating using an old radiator that I saw at the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth years ago and I might even have a go at an irrigation scheme run off a 12V battery and a solar panel on the shed, used to operate a solenoid valve and ……….

Madame gets exhausted by my enthusiasms so I’d better shut up. The flat is full of seedlings. Greta Thunberg came to Bristol today.  Bristol – for the benefit of the political commentariat who never leave London (the Great Wen as William Cobbett would have it) – Bristol is a large city near the confluence of the Wye, the Severn and the Bristol Avon where people speak with a funny accent and around which the electrification of the railway was diverted because too many people voted Labour. George Ferguson the previous Mayor was very involved in Green Politics and the present Labour Mayor has continued in the same vein. There were about 30,000 people there at the demonstration and the march passed off completely peacefully as everyone except the police and the media expected.  The local evening news reported that ‘thousands’ of demonstrators turned up and probably by 10.00 pm the BBC will be reporting that ‘quite a few’ people came and ruined the grass on College Green. It’s a good job, then, that these wicked demonstrators have already started raising money to repair the damage to the grass caused by 30,000 pairs of feet. Meanwhile the police were busy filming these nascent terrorists – some of them at primary school – are we living in la la land?

Rhubarb rhubarb ….

OK so blogging can be so much rhubarb if you’re not careful, but this is the real deal – a gift from our neighbour who, unlike us, didn’t move his huge plant last autumn. We’ll return the compliment next year because he was busy splitting his today as it’s got so big.  It’s had a good life, sitting next to a leaky water tank and has grown so much it could feed a small army.  I think it’s probably Timperly Early – such a rich colour. If you squint hard enough at the photo through our kitchen window you’ll see it’s raining, so no surprise there, but we managed to get a few dry hours in on the allotment – enough to check the grease-bands on the apples and sow the hotbed with carrots, lettuce, radish, beetroot, spring onions and spinach. We were also going to install some carefully prepared traps for the flea beetles that have been busy on the broad beans.  This was an idea off the internet – of putting tree grease on white backgrounds and pinning the little strips to the ground.  The designer was insistent that the sheets needed to be white to attract the beetles, but sadly the grease we had in the shed was black, which rather defeated the whole idea. The storm winds have played havoc with one of the patches of broad beans but – as always – they’ve just tillered anyway and so there are four stems where there was just one before.  Clever things happen in nature and it’s often worth waiting for a week or two before uprooting plants that seem to have gone wrong. The leeks that looked almost dead a month ago are now looking perfectly healthy again.  Luckily the almost continuous rain had prevented us from digging them up.

Back in my study all the chillies are busy germinating, and the kitchen propagator is on its second load.  All systems go then – we just need these endless Atlantic storms to ease off. I finished off the afternoon trucking six or seven loads of wood chip down to build up the paths while Madame cleared the last but one bed. The soil is wet but with all the organic matter we’ve added it’s perfectly manageable.  The paths which separate the beds are dug 18″ deep to act as drains to the beds, and they simply eat the woodchip. Goodness knows where it all goes, but I seem to be constantly topping them up. They’re exactly the width of my wellies, so if the level between the boards drops my feet get stuck in the ruts.  I suppose I could have made them wider but that would have cost us growing space.

IMG-20200222-WA0000On the reading front, I’ve been busy juggling a number of books, finishing off Adam Nicholson’s “The Seabird’s cry” – quite brilliant. I’ve also been dipping into Richard Mabey’s “A brush with nature” which is scarily prescient when it comes to the present crisis; re-reading Gary Sneider’s “The practice of the wild” and finally Simon Fairlie’s “Meat – a benign extravagance” recommended by George Monbiot when it was first published and which is a forensic takedown of some of the ‘written in stone’ arguments advanced both by the vegan and the food industry lobbies.  You couldn’t call it an easy read – it’s very densely argued, but it makes the case for greatly reducing our overall meat production while still farming in the traditional and small scale way.  If you’re opposed to any consumption of animals on ethical grounds you probably won’t change your mind after reading this book, but if you’re like me – struggling to make sense of the propaganda war of opposing numbers – then it’s well worth the effort.

On an entirely different chain of thought, our recent walk in the Malverns provoked me to read a number of reports on the management of the habitats there, and I was intrigued by repeated references to NVC (National Vegetation Classification) communities. This has become the standard way of describing botanical communities and I found it fascinating because – and this is just a thought – I could use the data to look for specific plants that I’m trying to find. If you know what you’re looking for and you’ve got a good idea what sort of habitat and area you’re most likely to find it in, the process of looking for especially interesting plants becomes much less of a lottery – more of a pilgrimage. This is one of the great perils of being self-taught in any field and especially with botany.  The pronunciation of plant names becomes a fear filled exercise of avoiding humiliation. Best to own up and ask I usually find.  But also knowledge comes to you serendipitously rather than in a structured way, and so I often say to myself – I wish I’d known that years ago. On the other hand I do think it’s a great privilege never to have lost my excitement at the commonest of things.  I remember once saying to someone on a field trip that I struggled with identifying grasses – “Oh” she said rather dismissively – “Grasses are easy!” – not for me they weren’t, but I was so incensed I spent the next months laboriously learning as many as I could. Suddenly, knowing my lemmas from my awns became an occasion for genuine joy.  Whoopie – I thought – more friends!

As you see from the inset, Greta Thunberg is coming to Bristol on Friday to support the school climate emergency strikes.  It’s actually half term week so no lives will be ruined by taking an hour off revision!

Believing and belonging

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” – on Karl Marx’ gravestone.

I have met some people for whom even the mention of Karl Marx would lead to the paroxysms of tooth grinding and frothing, so for the sake of sanity, and to save anyone the bother of frothing, the quotation is not a wholesale endorsement of  everything Marx said or wrote; but he’s an important thinker and deserves better than being wildly misquoted at every turn.

So simply knowing that there are some people in government who think that demonstrating against environmental damage and species extinction amounts to a form of terrorism is a chilling thought. Just as a ludicrous overreaction, it could be laughed off if it weren’t backed up by hard state power. I’m quite sure that there are many more people in this country and across the world who believe the evidence that a global catastrophe is looming up on us but feel powerless in the face of the ideological onslaught that tells us every day, and in a million subtle ways, that there is no alternative. Since the brexit referendum and in particular since the UK general election I no longer listen to news broadcasts and I don’t read the newspapers which are part of the problem. I choose my sources carefully and I try as best I can to verify what they’re saying – especially if I really want their stories to be true. As a result I have no idea who the members of the Cabinet are, for instance, but I’ve a pretty good hunch that they’re a dangerous bunch of charlatans and chancers.

Which is all very well except it raises the dilemma of how to respond effectively in a particularly challenging way. Let’s assume that there’s no point in writing letters about it to MP’s who, it seems to me, have no horizon beyond the next election or being appointed to profitable directorships. Successive prime ministers have learned the art of ignoring demonstrations, however huge, and convincing themselves that they know what “the people” are thinking even when best part of a million of them are walking peacefully past the houses of commons suggesting that they don’t. The principal opposition parties all seem to be clutching their favourite parts of a potential policy jigsaw but refuse to collaborate with anyone else in order to put something workable together. Waking up every day feeling powerless and lonely is a bad place to be.

I’ve always been a bit sniffy about direct personal action. I’d wonder – sometimes out loud – how wearing organic cotton T shirts or making your own soap was supposed to change the world. I suppose in part it’s my age, what with being a first generation hippie and seeing our dreams of a better world crushed relentlessly. I’ve written before about my own moment of enlightenment at a free festival in Bath, when I saw a young mother scraping the crap off her baby’s nappy against the only standpipe and water tap on the site. People have always misunderstood St Augustine when he said “love and do what you will” What he meant was that if you love, then you will make better moral choices – like, for instance, not threatening hundreds of people with salmonella because you can’t be arsed to clean your baby up safely.

Although the language changes, selfishness, greed and idolatry – in our case the worship of profit and the neoliberal economy – have always been the real problem. That’s my belief and it brings me no comfort whatever. Even if I were able to convince millions of people that my belief is correct, it wouldn’t do anything to get us off this self destructive path.  The only way to do that is to change our behaviour and – I’m finally beginning to understand – that it begins with me. It may not change the world if I wear an organic cotton T shirt or eat more veg, but if I do –  I’m part of the solution and not part of the problem. Change from the bottom up is the only show in town now and we at the Potwell Inn have been thinking about it for ages.  The allotment, our diet, our choices when we replace our worn out clothes, the way we get about, how we wash and what we wash with, what goes down the sink, how effectively we recycle – all these things are part of the fight back. I suppose you could say “that’s just virtue signalling”  – I’ve said the same many times as a defence against changing.

The most encouraging thing is that when we change our own lives we inevitably start to interact with other people who are doing the same thing. Just like the way you notice when you’ve got a baby on the way that the world is full of pregnant women, so it is that the allotment site is full of people who feel the same way about organic farming and gardening. Today we were continuing our search in Bath for somewhere we could buy food staples without packaging, and reading the small print on the back of re-chargeable shampoo bottles – it takes all sorts! – and we found just the shop we’d been looking for and it was like coming home.  We even met a fellow allotmenteer who works there.

The signpost in the photo at the top stands in a guerilla garden on Walcot Street and when I spotted it I felt the presence of a mass of people who also want to change the world. The new community crosses all the barriers that artificially divide us – age, gender, orientation WTF?

Any half decent evangelist, for any cause whatever, will understand that belonging is far more important than believing. Environmental change will happen when our collective imagination reaches the tipping point where not to change becomes unthinkable.  So the most powerful strategy for change in the face of a hostile government is having more fun, being better neighbours and refusing the limits that their edited version of human possibility try to impose on us. They’ll  tell us that we’ll only survive if we build a better machine, invent a new technology, build a higher wall. And we’ll show them what human flourishing really looks like. When you look at it that way there’s no contest.

 

This won’t buy the baby a new coat

IMG_20200112_102746

After quoting from Cold Comfort Farm a couple of days ago, I couldn’t resist reading it again for the umpteenth time and once again it made me laugh out loud  on almost every page. I mean it’s not as if it’s a piece of great literature, but it’s absolutely joyful  and it feels as if it was written in much the same way that Jack Kerouac is supposed to have  written “On the road” – in one long binge. I’ve read it so many times, now, that I’ve worn it out over and over and my latest copy – bought from an Oxfam shop – started life at 2/6 – that’s half a crown or twelve and a half pence in new money. While I was reading today the spine began to break once more so that’s something else I need to look out for.

But there’s more to it than just the comedy.  The book was written as a riposte to the Thomas Hardy school of literature. I’m a great fan of Hardy but you have to say the unremitting grimness of, say, Jude or Tess does make it something of an ordeal to read them – the grey wraiths of fate hang over them rather like an appointment for a colonoscopy….

But then I suddenly remembered my first ever sermon while I was training when one of the assessors said it was like being immersed in Thomas Hardy – which I didn’t take as a compliment. A rather kinder mentor said gently that it would be best if I didn’t try to say everything that was on my mind at once. Being a Hardy fan is not unlike being an old fashioned Marxist – you know something terrible is going to happen but you just don’t know when: which is precisely why my mind travelled to Amos Starkadder’s sermon after seeing the photographs in Cardiff last week. I needed something to laugh at amid the suffocating thought that something pretty awful is happening to us all.

Reading the whole novel again brought other rewards as well. Madame, for instance, reminded me that it was one of my father’s favourite books – a fact which I’d completely forgotten, and which prompted me to remember that I had seen him laughing until the tears ran down his face and he fell to coughing furiously.  It was a great memory for displacing some of the more gloomy ones as he grew old.

Last night the south westerly wind was in one of those strange moods where it simply blew hard and steadily, without variation, finding the tiniest cracks in the window frames and causing a continuous soughing noise.  We woke up this morning to rain, again the uncommon sound of a heavy and continuous shower, blitzing through the early sunlight as the sun rose over the roofs of the buildings opposite with a fine mist rising up in the intense brightness. All very Hardy-esque I thought. They call it synchronicity when events and thoughts seem to coincide. It happens a lot at the Potwell Inn.  The other memory to bubble up from the silt was the phrase spoken by (I think) Mrs Beetle – “This won’t buy the baby a new coat” – one of my mother’s frequent expressions.

Yesterday I glimpsed a newspaper headline suggesting that the government had decided to treat Extinction Rebellion activists as potential terrorists.  I’m not much of an activist but it amuses me to think that at my ripe old age I’m finally being taken seriously as a threat to the way we do things so badly round here. Good thing too, we need to shake things up a bit if we’re going to survive – this woebegotten bobbery pack of a government can stick their fingers in their ears and shout “lah lah lah” as much as they like but it hasn’t worked in Australia and it can’t work here.

I know it’s a mess but it’s my mess

IMG_20191214_085730

My son will feel faint when he sees this mess, but I find it comforting. The little tin of Leonardt pen nibs just to the left of the laptop, the Rite in the Rain notebook with so many botanising adventures written inside, the red cabbage leaf patiently waiting to be painted.  He’ll laugh out loud at the early morning espresso that will shortly make me feel faint and – knowing him – he’ll be looking at the book to see what I’m reading. He’s a philosopher so his life and mine are both made from books which we eat up eagerly and then after an interval of indigestion, wait for our minds to turn into food.

Digesting a book is a slow process. The good ones are often very expensive and so they need to be prepared for. Fifty quid for the new, fourth, edition of Stace will need a long period of deliberation followed by a reckless moment of ordering (it’s not the sort of book you can get from the local Waterstones), anxious days of waiting for the post to arrive from Summerfields and then ….. first anxious look …… plants have mysteriously uprooted themselves from their familiar page and re-homed themselves with another family. Looking up the simplest thing is agonisingly slow and so back to the old familiar.  This can take months! Finally (I haven’t even dared to order it yet) we shall become friends.

Most books need a period of resting before I can read them – let’s call it shelf life for the sake of an easy joke. I need to get over the extravagance and remember what the exact impulse was for buying them in the first place. Sometimes, no – often – the original impulse was associated with a particular vein of thought which has become a worked out lode.  The roof collapsed, or got too low to follow. Sometimes I consume them hungrily but either the book’s not ready for me or I’m not ready for the book, and it goes on to the shelf again until I’ve caught up – maybe years later.  The best books are the ones I read when I was nineteen and understood perfectly – until I read them again at thirty, or fifty or even seventy and each time discovered I’d never understood them at all. I have the clearest memory of a boring summer afternoon in a library where I pulled down a copy of Bernard Leach’s “A Potter’s Book” and read it standing up as only a hungry teenager can. I didn’t understand a fraction of it; I only discovered that Leach was a Sufi many years later – hence the profound spirituality of a book about pots  – and even today my first impulse on handling a pot is to turn it upside down to see the base, touch the bare, unglazed rim to my lips and ping it.  Everyone I know except my son’s partner, who was born in Stoke on Trent, thinks this is a bit weird. The best books are long affaires, kept secret from any chance of mockery.

Sometimes me and the book need a period away from each other while we both catch up.  I read them once, put them back on the shelf and then come back years later with an older mind. The book on my desk took 25 years, or rather it took me 25 years to catch up. I probably bought “This Sacred Earth” – Roger Gottlieb’s compendium of writing from around the earth in 1996, the year it was published. At that time I would have been deeply involved in parish life, and I’ve no recollection of reading it the first time.  It’s still in print in a second edition, along with a number of other books on green and deep ecology and radical political thought. It came off the shelf yesterday and I was transfixed by the relevance of the essays and extracts.

Yesterday I was talking about the Extinction Rebellion movement with my son. He told me he’d been shocked to see an old edition of “Spitting Image” (TV show) in which may of the ER issues were aired, more than a decade before many of its members were born. Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” was published before most of their parents were born! Species extinctions and climate catastrophe aren’t new ideas, they’ve been around for more than half a century and, by and large, we did nothing about them. If the young have a charge against the old it’s our inaction in the face of the incontrovertible facts that were staring us in the face.  We turned away – and that was a sin against the earth.

Now, wherever I look, I see the voices of the unheard shouting across the years. Did it only become a ‘proper’ problem when the dominating culture of the west appropriated it? Did we only take it seriously when it became an ‘ology’? – to borrow a phrase from an elderly friend who would say (disparagingly) “Oh he’s very clever, he’s got an ‘ology!'”.

Gosh I can’t remember the last sentence I wrote with four consecutive punctuation marks.

So there it is.  My bookshelves are groaning under the weight of slowly composting ideas that will, in the fullness of time, be returned to the earth. To borrow an idea from another book I needed to put aside, because I didn’t know if anyone was listening any more, may we be granted time for repentance and the amendment of our lives – not just for ourselves but for our children and their children down the years.

 

Despair is the last weapon they have left

 

I think something shifted yesterday afternoon when we all shipped up to Uncle Jo’s pizza place for an impromptu Sunday lunch. It was fairly quiet and so Jo was able to come out from beside the oven and chat. In the love and peace department families are never all they’re cracked up to be – that’s a figment of the official ideology – and so it’s a blessing beyond value when they work, even occasionally, and  I wonder if the grandchildren will remember lunch at Uncle Jo’s when they’re my age. Next to the family album is a basket of vegetables we picked on the allotment yesterday – courgettes, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers and gherkins. Later Jo came back with hs Polish girlfriend and one of our fermented half-sours was presented to her to taste.  She gave them her seal of approval although I thought the home-grown garlic was a bit too fierce in the quantity I used. Interestingly our oldest son was complaining the other day that his biometric passport never works properly and he always gets called in for interrogation.  He asked a passport official why, last time he came back from Europe, and was told that it was probably the ‘Pole’ surname. You have to wonder what kind of software can’t tell the difference between a surname and a nationality.

So with the day punctuated by benevolent thoughts for all our family I got back to reading in the evening. This latest binge is seeing me get through a new book every couple of days and at the moment it’s Mark Cocker’s book ‘Our Place’ which I thought might be a bit of light relief after Fred Pearce’s book ‘The New Wild’ . When I put it down for about the fifth time I realized I am only able to absorb a certain amount of bad news at a time. You’d think a book with quite as many references to Committees and Governmental enquiries would be a bit arid but this book makes it dreadfully clear that the ecological distance between where we were a century ago, and where we now are is not paved with misunderstanding and innocent lack of knowledge but by greed, selfishness and a determination by the powerful to enrich themselves at the expense of the environment, and all paid for by taxpayers’ money. When I see the Forestry Commission exposed as a government assisted tax avoidance scheme for the further enrichment of the aready rich, I need to walk around the room for a while before I can calm down and read more. The subsidy system is an elaborate and utterly destructive con trick, with the biggest beneficiaries being the wealthy.

And it was precisely that thought that lifted me out of a gathering sense of gloom. In a moment of mad insight I realized that the sense of powerlessness and despair which, according to some recent figures 60% of us share, is a last ditch attempt by the powerful to hold on to their privileges. Of course they want us to think there’s nothing we can do about it because ……. wait for it …… they’re scared, absolutely terrified that the rest of us will wake up and demand change. Their one last throw of the dice is to persuade us that we’re sunk and then put up a “strong” leader  (chosen by them of course) who will bring everything back to the way things used to be – that’s to say their way.

That’s why we see so much divisive comment in the press. We’re told all the time that the way things are is the responsibility of the ‘selfish baby boomers’. Really? Or is the worry that we who were forged in the community politics of the sixtes and seventies have too much in common with the young? That we might form a formidable grouping? They want to divide us by race, by gender, even by diet or occupation or interest because that way we’re easier to marginalise, because they know all too well that a house divided cannot stand.

I’m laughing out loud at the thought of their secret late night committee meetings and ‘influencer’ friends on the internet all turning their gimlet eyed attention to the next secret weapon.  Here’s a heads-up chaps (for they are mostly chaps) we don’t read the Daily Mail or the Times and we know how to block effluent from our laptops and phones.

We are the new powerful! and we take our inspiration from the earth, its tides, its inbreathings and outbreathings and its capacity to mend our shrivelled souls and bring food and shelter and joy even while it repairs the damage we have inflicted on it. The Earth is not for sale however many petrochemicals and insecticides the Prophets of Baal pour on the altar – and it would be better for the human race if they realized that the game is well and truly up.

 

 

Is the tide finally turning?

IMG_4357The environmental movement didn’t start last week – I just thought it was worth mentioning it because Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” was published in 1962, that’s 57 years ago, and ever since then, we’ve been pushing back at the problem with very little apparent success. Was it Thomas Kuhn that wrote that science advances as scientists die? He wasn’t being harsh, but simply pointing out that vested interests rarely go away because a better explanation has been found. Billions of pounds/dollars have been spent on defending the indefensible as the evidence of environmental damage has mounted up year by year and decade by decade.

But this week I’ve suddenly felt a bit more optimistic. When Kuhn wrote about ‘paradigm shifts’ it always seemed that they mostly involved obscure corners of particle physics where there was no immediate impact on the way we do things round here. This week it’s been astonishing to see the public response to the Extinction Rebellion protests in London.  On TV and on the radio – or wireless as we ancients prefer – there have been an increasing number of programmes explaining new approaches to the crisis that’s engulfing us. What’s different is that ‘common sense’ seems to be changing in the incredibly swift manner of a paradigm shift. Everwhere I looked last week there were pieces on do-dig and no-till systems. A short walk to any bookshop will demonstrate the level of interest in ecology and climate change. The Microsoft TV advertisement extolling yet another technological solution to the moral and ethical problem of intensive farming seems suddenly out of date, and although the prophets of Baal with their endless expensive technologies are dancing vainly around the altar of progress the fire never comes. [That image comes from a very funny Old Testament story] After decades of fruitless handwringing, our young people have siezed the initiative and it feels good.

Something has shifted under the surface and the belief that change is possible is gaining traction. Alleluia!

%d bloggers like this: