Tag: green new deal

Positively the last post on Cornwall (for now!)

I took these strikingly post-industrial photographs on the beach at Porthoustock on the Lizard Peninsula last week. The beach there is completely dominated by the huge brutalist silo – now disused – that was a part of the St Keverne quarry. The quarry still operates in a small way as you can see from the top left picture of a working excavator, and by the look of the pile of crushed stone, seems to be excavating roadstone. The local granite is apparently coarse grained and often used in sea walls and such like much of it going to South Wales.

While we were there we fell into conversation with a threesome of divers – all retired – who were looking for a suitable clubhouse in the area. The talk ran down familiar tracks; litter, dogshit, tourism, housing crisis and so forth. They mistakenly identified the silo as having to do with tin mining but I think it would have contained thousands of tons of crushed stone waiting to be loaded into the kind of small ships that could pull alongside at high tide. The ports, visible from rust stains at the side, would have discharged stone straight into the boats.

There was a turn when we discussed whether the small quarrying operation was actually removing the whole headland – it is, apparently, in the face of some local opposition – and this conversational thread led to the chronic unemployment in the area, and whether lithium mines would be a boon or an environmental menace. The key moment came when one of them said – “of course we’re all retired and so we don’t have to worry about jobs. Our instincts would be to insist that nothing changes here – it’s why we moved here in the first place.”

I don’t think for a moment that they were being as selfish as that statement implies. What I think was being expressed is the ongoing paradox of living in a wildlife paradise, surrounded by beautiful views when the local people are living in demonstrable poverty caused by inflated house prices and high unemployment mitigated only by seasonal and poorly paid work.

I did a lot of work running writers groups in the Welsh Valleys during and after the miners’ strike. You could taste the anger and depression being caused by the deliberate destruction of their culture. Now, of course, we’re trying to end coal mining altogether – and nobody worth listening to is contesting the significance of climate change; but the move to sustainable, renewable energy could have been, and now must be managed through huge investment in the retraining of local people to take on skilled, well paid jobs in a greener future.

Halfway marker on Porthallow beach

On the beach there, we saw the paradox that must be faced. Simply knocking down all traces of an old and proud culture and filling the empty space with second holiday homes and caravan parks would contribute nothing to the problem. There amidst the ruins, we saw a buzzard feeding on the remains of a dead fish. The place is alive with wildlife, and of course these post industrial sites are often nature’s hotspots. I know I’ve got a bit of a thing about this kind of landscape. It comes from growing up in an exactly similar area in Gloucestershire, where one or two of our neighbours were retired coal miners, and a couple of the pits were still in operation. We had pipeworks, brickworks and – looking much further back – names relating to the woolen industry. I spent days with my friend Eddie, tracing the old dram road that brought coal from Coalpit Heath to the river Avon. I was delighted to discover that Cornwall and Gloucestershire once shared what’s known in linguistics as a soft mutation – tram roads were always spoken of as dram roads. I felt very much at home on that beach! A handful of fishing boats and the small quarry were a sign that the culture is clinging on. Further up the coast towards Falmouth we watched a large fishing boat seine netting in the bay from Porthallow beach.

I took the pictures below in 2009, in the remains of one of the abandoned tin mines on the north coast. The technicolour stains on the cliff are a permanent reminder of the poisonous effluents that accompanied tin and copper mining. The furnaces in which the ores were extracted must have been terrifying; a real-life vision of what may yet turn out to be the end of the world. A group of volunteers have restored the old steam powered beam engine – it was an awesome sight. Naturally – or, in fact, unnaturally – we could erase the buildings and make the area ‘profitable’ by building second homes or industrial estates; but to wander through those derelict acres of ruined land – which are by now being reclaimed by wildlife and specialist plants of real importance – is the best way of telling the story of the industrial revolution in a way that lays bare the downside – the greedy and extractive ruination of a whole county by unfettered capitalism. Beneath the surface of the impoverished soil, even the fungi and bacteria are doing the work of remediating the damage that our ancestors caused.

Is there any way forward so long as Cornwall is mismanaged from London by politicians and civil servants who have no connection or knowledge of its history and culture? Bring on regional government, I say, and for goodness sake don’t even think about creating a regional structure that attempts to join Cornwall with Devon. Bishop Trelawny would rise from his grave! Cornwall is as much a country as Wales.

We won’t get the answer on a bumper sticker!

Another day another book – blame the weather, the lockdown and the new covid strain; but sometimes a moment of boredom can bear fruit. I was sitting looking at a bit of leftover everyday sourdough in the kitchen (OK I’m a bit of a slob) when I noticed a fine mist of white mould growing on it, and so I took it to the microscope to have a closer look and the mould emerged from the blur as a delightfully sculptural mass of ovoid/spherical and translucent fungus. Then I wondered what would happen if I photographed the image with my mobile and above left is my very first attempt at a microphotograph, from which I learn that I need decent clamp to hold the phone still over the microscope eyepiece so I can focus more accurately. Nonetheless I was pleased with the idea that low budget microphotography is at least possible – if only for note taking. So aside from creative doodling and flashes of inspiration I’ve been reading a newly published book entitled “Green Meat” – subtitled “sustaining eaters, animals and the planet” Edited by Ryan M. Katz-Rosene and Sarah J. Martin and published by McGill-Queens University Press.

Some books are good because they give reliable, verifiable information on their topics. This book certainly scores on the verifiable side with each of the eleven essays fully supported by footnotes and extensive references. But I’d say its greatest strength is to frame the ethical and environmental problems facing meat production and meat eating in such a way as to articulate the difficulties with searching questions. In the words of their own formulation, to “problematize the problem”; to question the many bumper sticker simplifications that obscure a hugely complex challenge that can only be addressed in appropriately complex ways. As they say in the introduction”

For any hardline carnivores or vegans out there seeking to find material that bolsters their claims of superior dietary practices -look elsewhere!

Preface

What the book does is give space to nine writers, all specialists or practitioners experienced in meat production and farming from holistic planned grazing – (think Joe Salatin, for instance) through First Nation hunting and trapping, to intensive industrial farms and CAFOs – concentrated animal feeding operations. All of them look critically at the data that circulates widely and is often used selectively by partisans of one view or another; by agroindustry looking to ‘greenwash’ its activities and by groups promoting extreme dietary change – universal veganism, for instance – in order to save the planet. I won’t rehearse the many arguments here but if you’re interested in engaging more thoughtfully with your food purchasing I’d certainly recommend you read this book; but what I will do is focus on one or two ways which were particularly illuminating for me.

In our five years on the present allotments, we’ve always borne in mind the need to build up the soil from its original rather neglected state but I don’t think we’ve ever fully articulated the notion that we have been growing two crops all along – the crop which we eat and the crop within the soil itself, the invisible crop of carbon and other minerals, of humus, mould, micro-organisms, fungi, nematodes, worms and insects; the billions of living things that constitute the invisible, or perhaps generally overlooked crop. It’s almost impossible to design a calculus that includes a value for all that accumulated wealth but it’s at the heart of our project and “Green Meat”brought that home to me.

At first sight the essay “A feminist Multi-Species approach to Green Meat” looked a bit off-putting and yet it turned out to be one of the most thought provoking essays in the book and led me to understand that the reductionist approach to climate change – simplifying the problem down to a minimum of variables – methane, greenhouse gases, national food statistics and so forth, is in itself a symptom of industrialised framing. What about the animals and the suffering they endure by not being allowed to express themselves ‘animally’? What about the other stakeholders beyond the shareholders? – those whose lives are affected whether negatively or positively by the system. What about the societal structures that make some rich and some poor? What about the poorest consumers who, instead of being adequately fed are made sick by processed food? What about whole ecosystems and their associated wildlife?

What about localised cultures? – and this was what made me think long and hard about our fishing communities. Arguments about fish quotas obscure whole human cultures because they are framed exclusively in terms of catch. Complex ecological and social relationships are thrust to the margins of discussion. By complete coincidence we watched the multi award winning film “Bait” (poster shot above) – this evening and it flawlessly documented the destruction of the local fishing culture by tourism. The culture that sustains fishing in this country also sustains the Royal National Lifeboat Institution whose volunteers include many professional fishermen. The network of local food relationships which would be essential within a rethinking of our food sustainability is rendered invisible when an industry is reduced to considerations of efficiency. Too many discussions of sustainability want to start from scratch; reinventing the wheel. Why build it again when it was there already?

Another essay examines the catastrophic effects on First Nation sustainable hunting and fishing by mining and mineral extraction in Canada – shades of Cornish fishing once again. Apparently the fishing industry generates less than 1% of the GNP in this country, but does that justify the destruction of an ancient way of life? And then, difficult thoughts flow about, for instance, mining communities. However much we may accept the need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and the extractive economy , the fact is – as the old joke says – at the bottom of every mine in the world there’s a Welshman or a Cornishman, and those communities embodied community values like solidarity and a passion for education that our individualistic culture has lost at great cost. The remedy for these difficult questions won’t be reduced to a slogan. Perhaps the real enemy is the one powerful tool that has transformed the world – the reductive industrialised way of thinking has become the new common sense thinking. Gramsci’s warning that common sense isn’t always sensible gets quoted in one of the essays.

Let me give an example from this week’s Farmers Weekly. There is in development a new way of treating cattle slurry with plasma (whatever that may be) which reduces its methane releasing properties by 90%. Bravo you might say, but “Green Meat” suggests that our industrialised mindset is always taking one micro-problem at a time and attempting to solve it technologically rather than stepping back and reflecting on the whole. By all means bombard the shit tanks with high energy death rays, but that still leaves another thousand problematic areas of intensive farming untouched. Industrial farming is constantly playing catch up with the next side effect of its intensity. In medicine they’ve got a name for it – “iatrogenic illness” – which means illness caused as a side effect of treatment, and it kills tens of thousands every year.

I should end this here, except I want to raise one other issue that will raise great difficulties. In every probability, meat consumption will continue to be a part – we hope a much smaller part – of the national diet. The conversion of vast areas of pasture to arable land would bring in its wake huge losses of biodiversity and without access to animal manure, even greater consumption of artificial fertilizers and yet more chemicals. The most likely answer is to allow the shrinkage of the existing meat industry while increasing the quality of food through holistic planned grazing or similar restorative schemes. The other aspect of the policy must be to decrease food miles by building new or restoring old local food networks. The tricky question then will be – “where do we site the new, small slaughterhouses”? – and I fear the answer will be “anywhere except here!” A second tricky question – and one which is greatly troubling the farmers in national parks is -“if we’re going to step back from industrialised machine supported farming, we will need to find and train many thousands of new agricultural and horticultural workers. Where are we going to house them?” – and here the nimbyism of the incomers will chorus once again – “anywhere except here!”.

If you’re looking for the cause of the success of right wing populist politics here and elsewhere, you have to include the anger of communities in the countryside – not least hill farmers; but also miners, steelworkers, fishing communities and the many others who correctly believe that the political structure of our country has excluded and silenced them. Could it be that we have our own dispossessed people here, and they look just like us!

St Francis of the boot rack

Our youngest son has a fine sense of irony

I’ll get back to St Francis in a moment but I know that many of you will be desperate to see the Potwell Inn Christmas Day Menu. Excluded from Europe and the physical company of everyone we love, we decided to tear up tradition and please ourselves entirely as regards what we ate in splendid isolation – and so:

  • Tea in bed
  • Breakfast: muesli (made by me)
  • lunch: Christmas pudding with crême fraiche – nothing else
  • Supper: Chicken fajita

The children were a bit shocked to see that we had wilfully abandoned the family tradition; rather more, I think, because it somewhat undermined their own efforts to keep it alive. But in these circumstances I always quote the famous last six words of every great institution – “we always do it this way” – and being old is the perfect time to become an iconoclast because no-one else seems to want to put Christmas out of its misery. It was surprisingly easy to do; to wave away the orgy of overspending and overeating; and under the circumstances we felt no compulsion to pretend that everything was back to normal. “Bah humbug” – you accuse, and affecting not to understand we reply “que?!”

And so to St Francis.

I did say that I intended to write something about some kind of green spirituality, but the more I thought about it the harder it became until Joe’s Christmas present was delivered. It was a bit of a shock I must say. How would you describe something that’s hilariously funny, excruciatingly kitsch and borderline blasphemous?

I’ve always had a soft spot for heresy, whether the religious sort or the Christmas dinner menu makes no difference. A good heresy is the engine of change because good heresies are always tempting, otherwise they wouldn’t be any good. All great paradigm shifts are kicked off by a heresy. So St Francis of the boot rack (the name came to me instantly in a moment of pure grace), put me on the back foot in the most wonderful manner and rather than accepting the gift with a fake smile and gritted teeth I thought to myself – “this is marvellous”. But why???

Forgive me if you’ve read a previous post where I told this story but it fits well here. Some years ago we visited Chartres Cathedral which, on first impressions, was a kind of religious Disneyland. Queues of pilgrims clutching plaster models of the Virgin Mary waited to have them blessed. The building was heaving with visitors and I was rigid with the kind of anger that comes from fear; fear because I couldn’t understand what was going on. Nothing in my aesthetic experience had prepared me for such a festival of utterly bad taste. Until, that is, I was overwhelmed by a sense of holiness that was completely impervious to the cattle market atmosphere. I was so overwhelmed that I took off my shoes and socks and, for a hour, walked barefoot around the building as it spoke to me through my feet. It was one of the shortest pilgrimages ever conducted and I still haven’t fully digested it but, like a zen koan, it shorted out my overeducated theoretical mind and showed me another mind space altogether.

Pop. There goes another one!

So St Francis of the boot rack – what’s he saying? Well I think he’s teaching a lesson about idolatry – and I’m sorry for the big, loaded word but it’s a crucial shorthand way of describing the way we habitually try to cram an ocean of meaning into a fishbowl. This piece of fibreglass kitsch has no aesthetic merit at all and yet its strength lies somewhere else altogether – perhaps in its innocence, its naivety, its acceptance that it claims no more for itself than the grid reference can claim to be the mountain. Idolatry just means worshipping the part, thereby diminishing the whole. St Francis of the boot rack is a device for popping ego bubbles.

Next, sometimes reading a book can lead to the uncanny sense that the writer has somehow broken in to your mind and carried off your memories. I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and the second clue to constructing a green spirituality came to me when he wrote about an experience that exactly parallelled my own – not that it was a special revelation at all, but simply the puzzle, for a non believer, of dealing with the sense of thanksgiving for an entirely undeserved gift that comes out of nowhere. When picking blackberries in the autumn; when coming across a field full of fresh mushrooms; when harvesting a crop on the allotment. Who to thank?

I suppose we could walk away from such an experience congratulating ourselves on our foraging expertise, mycological acumen or horticultural skill; but it never seems enough because, in truth, we make very little contribution to our good fortune .

Of course there are any number of theological readymades queueing up to claim these oddly numinous experiences for themselves, but they all come with a heavy price tag. They all require that you buy into the whole system with all its inconsistencies and occasional cruelties just in order to give you a mailing address where you can post your thank-you’s.

For the avoidance of idolatry that narrows these experiences down until they become trivial; and the avoidance of the great systematic theologies that confine these ecstatic experiences like wild animals in a zoo; any credible green spirituality would, for me, need to remain largely silent. In fact you might steal a concept from the Carthusians and other religious communities who keep a great silence after compline each day. Such a great silence would need to stop struggling to explain things while giving us a space to which to bring our thanksgivings and laments. There is so much that lies beyond our present capacity for explanation (maybe our science needs a paradigm shift as well) – that there’s no need to invent supernatural entities to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s. There is the earth whose ways are still largely unknown to us. There is the sun, the moon; there are stars and there is weather and there are the great orders of living things. I’ve naughtily paraphrased St Francis great Canticle of the Sun because I still kind of identify with him in his artless extremism; his simplicity and his love of nature. I should own up to the fact that I was once a lay member of the Anglican Third Order of the Society of St Francis and like all the best teachers, Francis embedded himself in my mind even though I moved on and away from the orthodoxies.

The religious systems of the past don’t have the monopoly on concepts such as humility –humus, the condition of the earth – on forgiving or on generosity, on equality or thanksgiving or human love. They’re all there ready to be recycled and repurposed in ways that work for us, speak to us and generate new meaning. Naturally the concessionaires and leaseholders of the existing spiritualities will kick up a fuss – they would, wouldn’t they – and we shall always have to look out for a new breed of snake oil salespeople who talk the talk but don’t do the other bit, they’re human after all, just like the rest of us. But – I’m just speaking for myself now and I don’t expect you to agree – for me a Green New Deal without some kind of spirituality would be too thin to survive. A farming method or an algorithm for life without poetry, music and dance , without thanksgiving and (dare I say?) liturgy would be a poor half-starved creature; unfit for purpose.

Just forget the dogma, the hierarchy, the keyholders and all the bureaucracy. Forget all that “we always do it this way” stuff and gaze in wonder at the daft plastic statue of St Francis of the boot rack. What better reminder of our frailty do we need.

“Eating is an agricultural act” – or how to use those Christmas book tokens!

The headline quote is a characteristically sharp observation by Wendell Berry, one of my favourite writers and quoted by Michael Pollan who adds that Wendell Berry could, equally appropriately, have called eating a political act as well. This reflection begins and will probably end in books, so having promised a list a few days ago I’ve decided to publish a very provisional one today that represents my personal meander through the question of farming and food. I’ll head the list with Michael Pollan because his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” was among the first to be published, and was groundbreaking in the way it embraced the whole of food culture from producer to consumer. As a critique of industrial food it’s brilliant, but as a critical friend he addresses many of the questions that sceptics might ask of the alternatives he considers – which, after industrial food production, are – industrial organic food; “beyond organic” farming – basically pasture based livestock production; and foraging. I’ll start the list with this book because I was directed back to it when I started to read Tom Philpott’s new book “Perilous Bounty”, which looks at the state of American farming two decades after Michael Pollan’s research began.

It would be easy to imagine that my reading has focused entirely on American agriculture, but the next four books are UK centred – although in agricultural terms where the US has led, the UK all too often follows to its cost. The feedlot and giant milk production units are here in the UK already and increasing in number.

My third book is Simon Fairley’s “Meat – A Benign Extravagance” – a forceful, evangelistic and highly entertaining book on the virtues of mixed farming. Fourth (and these are in no particular order), Chris Smaje “A Small Farm Future” and finally a couple of more technical books; Dieter Helm’s “Green and Prosperous Land” is an economist’s take on reordering farming and building a greener economy and Tim Lang’s “Feeding Britain – our food problems and how to fix them” is a comprehensive survey of UK food policy, what’s wrong with it and – as the title says – how it could be fixed. Finally James Rebanks new book “English Pastoral” has the advantage of being written by a proper hill farmer and it’s a highly readable book, just like his last one.

There are so many other books on the subject ranging from deep ecology through green spirituality and practical handbooks to monographs on single ecological challenges but I’ve mentioned these particularly because I spent 25 years working in farming parishes and I’d be confident to recommend any of these books to the farmers I came to know and respect even though I had many reservations about what they were doing.

Overseas readers will need to know that the Potwell Inn, virtual though it may be, is firmly situated in the South West of England whose soils are nowhere near as suitable for arable farming as they are for grass. The temperate climate, and soils all favour the production of grass and so (since humans don’t have rumens) by far the most economical use of the majority of the landscape is grazing which allows cattle to turn sunshine into concentrated food that we can eat. And so there is an inescapable focus on meat and milk production which, when it’s done intensively is undoubtedly a cause of real environmental concern.

I’m interested in food security and so the lorries, thousands of which are stacked up against the closed border in Dover today, represent the almost 60% of food that we import and the fragility of the supply line – in one news report. Therefore if we’re to increase self-sufficiency to a much safer 80% it seems inevitable that we will have to make the most effective use of all the land we have and play to our strengths. Sadly, (vegans and vegetarians may think), the future will have to include a significant amount of traditional (and rotational) mixed farming because much of the South West is unsuitable for the kind of large scale grain and pulse production that would be needed to avoid importing huge quantities of protein food. The point about the ecological catastrophe that’s bearing down on us is that it’s universal. It doesn’t respect borders.

Incidentally I noticed an article in this week’s Farmers Weekly on a similar track, discussing whether lupins could replace imported soya as a protein food for cattle. Personally I think the future lies in eating much less meat and feeding cattle on grass which they’ve evolved to digest, rather than concentrates that keep them in a perpetual state of stress and digestive disorder. The irony in the article came when I saw that the breakthrough has come through the licensing of several new weedkillers, one of which is called “Nirvana”. Is that some kind of sick joke?? I quoted Wendell Berry only a couple of days ago saying that intensive farming takes a solution and turns it into two problems. There’s only one way of ending industrial meat production and that’s to eat less meat and only buy the best and most sustainable meat as occasional treats. Those who argue that such a move would mean meat for the rich and starvation for the poor miss the point that:

  • (1) once the subsidies are removed from industrial farming, the prices will converge, although they’ll never meet.
  • (2) We will have to address inequality within any green new deal.
  • (3) The environmental benefits will be felt universally.
  • (4) The potential health benefits of ending the reign of junk food are almost incalculable.

” …. all of which is to say that a successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore”

Michael Pollan – “The Omnivore’s Dilemma

So without resorting to a long piece that I’m completely unqualified to write; it seems to me that we have an urgent need to develop the skills we’ll need to invent or more likely rediscover in order to achieve a sustainable and ecologically safe food future, and perhaps surprisingly much of the emphasis will have to be placed on changing our food culture on the consumer side. I’ll reserve the philosophical and spiritual aspects to this to another post, but practically speaking we’ll need to bring the teaching of growing, harvesting, cooking and preserving back into the mainstream as Michael Pollan suggests.

We’ll have to hugely increase the provision of allotments by local authorities because these are the laboratories for a greener future. Anyone who has experience of growing their own food, even in small quantities, will quickly learn to recognise quality and pay less attention to price. Informed consumers make better, greener buying choices and waste less. Allotments can be much more productive than the equivalent area of conventional farms.

We’ll also have to build a huge network of local food and farmers’ markets to reduce food miles and completely overhaul the agricultural colleges to address a wholly new ethos; turn agriculture and horticulture into a better paid and better regarded occupation and offer training at local colleges to give people the skills they need to get the most out of gardens and allotments. Finally we need to grow more fruit and veg – much much more of them. One of the tragedies of the CAP was the subsidy paid to established fruit farms to grub up their trees, only to pay them some years later to replant them.

Food security really is possible without resorting to ever more intensive and destructive chemical farming and the destruction of the environment; but as I’ve been arguing, the change in our food culture will need to be huge and it will demand leadership and vision that is nowhere apparent in our present political system. But the thought that it’s our Christmas lunch that’s rotting in the back of a lorry on a border somewhere ought to focus our minds pretty sharply.

And if I don’t get the chance to write again tomorrow have a very happy christmas if that’s your thing; and if it isn’t – do enjoy the next few days!

Gert lush

I’m not sure if the phrase gert lush ever properly existed as Bristol slang. Lush certainly did, and meant really good; and gert did too, meaning big. But the combination seems to have come into existence as a bit of a joke when non Bristolians tried to speak like us. However the Bristol accent is not to be trifled with and the dialects tied you down to a single parish sixty years ago; so adding an ‘ul’ to China and saying Chinul or Africul wouldn’t get you very far into my affections. I say I’m a Bristolian because it’s an easy way of describing a complicated situation. If I was being pedantic I’d say that I come from Gloucestershire, but that opens a whole can of worms because the boundaries have changed so frequently over the years that for my first twenty years I lived in three counties without moving an inch. I now live in a fourth newly minted county but I could walk in a few hours to the place I was born. Where I was brought up we still used thee and thou when we thought no-one was listening; and when strangers or teachers were around we could lapse into impenetrability very easily. I love my accent even though once, in a restaurant in Birmingham, the waiter leaned across confidentially as we were leaving and asked “are you a farmer?” I thought it was very funny, but I’m not sure she saw the joke. Nonetheless I have needed to remind one or two people that having a local accent – even a very mild one like mine – doesn’t mean I’m stupid.

Anyway, after that long excursus, we were on the allotment last evening and a hot air balloon took off from Victoria Park a couple of hundred yards away. It’s always a lovely sight, and I once had a balloon ride from the exact same spot on a similar summer’s evening some years ago. The launch site is surrounded by tall trees and buildings and so it’s necessary to gain height very quickly; therefore the technique seems to be to fill the balloon with hot air to the point it’s straining at the leash, and then release it like a cork from a bottle. A pretty thrilling experience. In my case we flew south and east, following the course of the river Avon until we swung north and landed somewhere around Marshfield. When the burner was silent we glided noiselessly above the fields and at one point followed a fox which was apparently unaware of our presence above him. All this was thirty years before we moved here and tracking the flight from memory on a map today, I can see that we would have passed exactly over Bannerdown where we spent the day yesterday.

It was – to use the phrase I started with – lush – and I’ve only just remembered that the owners of the balloon were our new next-door neighbours when we first moved here. Lush, then and a bit weirdly prophetic too. The pilot on my flight was a police inspector and I probably found a way of thanking him without using the dialect word to avoid evidencing any potential criminality on my part.

“Lush” – such a rich word; made for a couplet like “lush grass” … Lush, flush, blush; all wonderfully suggestive of fullness, of flow, of generosity or suddenness.

Odd then, to think that what encourages the immensely rich flora of meadows and limestone grassland is a kind of poverty. We’re planning to make a pond on the allotment this autumn, and we’re also going to create a small area for grasses and wildflowers, and that’s led us to an interesting conundrum. We’ve spent four years increasing the fertility of our ground and now, the bed we intend to convert is far too rich to support much more than the rankest of rank grasses and weeds. So the rather complicated plan is to remove most of the topsoil on the proposed “meadow” bed and move it to some new raised beds where it will be just what we need and better than any soil we could buy in. Next we’re going to do the same with the topsoil where the pond is going, and then while digging out the pond, move the less fertile soil and subsoil to the meadow bed to bring it back to level. The exact composition of the surface layer will need to be worked out, but to reduce fertility any other way would mean cutting and disposing of plant matter for years and growing something like yellow rattle to discourage the rank grasses. It’s my favourite occupation – making experiments. For wildflowers and their associated invertebrates, less is most certainly more. We couldn’t resist another trip to Bannerdown yesterday and I went armed with a notebook and a couple of plant cribs. So while Madame hunted butterflies I did a quick survey and in a couple of hours I’d listed fifty species and increased the grass total to fifteen and all of this on very thin limestone soil with rocks poking through in places.

And what struck us most was the heavenly smell of wildflowers. Madame said it was like being a child again. If there was a downside – and it wasn’t a big one – we were accompanied by a land rover towing a seed collecting box behind it. This was part of a project (with input from the Cotswolds Conservation Board), to create a wildflower corridor through Bath and yesterday’s seeds were on their way to Swainswick to re-seed a piece of land there. As we were leaving we passed the fruits of the day’s collection on a large tarpaulin on the ground, and we talked to the recipients and owners of the about to be reseeded field, who were tremendously excited about the project. We can only presume that our little allotment patch of a few square feet will form a tiny part of the whole in years to come.

It sounds counterintuitive to think that to regain lost species we need to make the ground less fertile, less lush; but one of the principal causes of our ecological crisis is the current agricultural policy of driving the land harder and harder using chemicals and artificial fertilizers, and if you’d been able to stand with us yesterday and enjoy the ridiculous numbers of wildflowers and grasses, you’d see why it’s so important to change our whole attitude to farming. But of course the takeaway point is that we can’t avert the coming destruction by writing new rules just for farmers, although that needs to happen. None of us will escape the coming moment of truth unless we all of us change our ways.

I’ve been reading Ann Pettifor’s book “The Case for the Green New Deal” and I think it’s the clearest summary I’ve seen yet on what needs to be done. Better than that, it seems really do-able if we can just knock the idea of continual growth off its perch and stop worshipping the economy as if it were some kind of abstract God, demanding constant obedience to the “Market” – a set of concepts I find almost as difficult as systematic theology. Today, as I write this we’re sheltering in the flat with the temperature approaching 30C. At what point do we start noticing that the king has no clothes?

Surviving in a hostile environment

I realized a while ago that I was going to have to get much closer to some of my botanical subjects in order to identify them properly and study them in more depth, and I’ve invested in a very useful 20x LED hand lens. Then a friend – out of the blue – offered to lend me a microscope, which will be a tremendous help. My desk is getting pretty full at the moment, not least because I’ve been experimenting with my Panasonic camera with a Leica 45mm macro lens photographing against a lightbox background.

I was casting around for something to practice with yesterday, and I spotted a piece of stonecrop – Sedum acre – that I’d collected while I was doing the plant survey of the car park. My desk is a mess at the best of times, and at the moment it’s also dotted with bits of drying and dying plant material that I seem to have a resistance to throwing away. So amongst the dead and dying this piece of stonecrop caught my eye and I set up the camera on a tripod (it’s almost impossible to take macro photos without one) got the flash unit going and after a few duds, got the picture.

The contrast between set-ups and the phone camera is absolute. I’ve said before that they each have their place and I wouldn’t be without either, but there’s nothing spontaneous about the set-up photograph. You’re forced to think what do I really want to see in this shot? and so I can use a small lab clamp, studio lamp, wireless flash and anything else that helps to capture the principal details. On a good day the aesthetic and the observational combine and you get a cracker, but most of the time they’re reference material for the future. I only wish my cataloguing skills could keep up but my tiggerish instincts are always racing on to the next excitement.

Anyway, enough of the technical stuff because what blew me away when I looked at this sample was that it is clearly alive and waiting patiently for the good times to roll again. They don’t put Sedums on wildflower roofs for nothing. Plants have their survival strategies and these can seem very smart indeed. The rue leaved saxifrage that lives on the wilderness of the fire escape survives by flowering and setting seed before the summer sun bakes its remains to a crisp. One of the abiding challenges of amateur botany is the brief lives of many species. Finding some plants is like getting six numbers up in the National Lottery – right place, right time, right weather ….. and so it goes on.

This gift of resilience is a marvellous thing, but I don’t at all underestimate our capacity to chemically outstrip the most resourceful life form – ourselves included. I’m reading Mark Avery’s book “Fighting for Birds” at the moment and he shows the way that extinctions are brought about so often by changes in farming practices which are not just to do with chemicals but also times of harvesting and sowing. But when the going gets tough …. and the real survivors are the kind of plant species – now totalling 26 – that can survive in the hostile environment of our car park.

But is that the kind of world we want to live in? Although I sing the praises of the sturdy beggars below my window, is that all I want? Of course not, but desperation drives us all. Yesterday as I looked out on the Green I saw a previous Director of the National Botanical Garden of Wales kneeling down with his phone to photograph some wall barley. Good for him – perhaps I’ve won him over at last, or perhaps he’s doing a survey of the Green where we’re making small progress on preserving an un-mown strip around the edge.

And if this was simply about preserving some hobby examples for grumpy old botanists and birdwatchers then you could maybe concede the point that it’s an unbalanced and unsustainable view of the world. But if we regard the reduction of our ecosystems to a few super resilient survivors, if we treat the symptoms like the canary in the mine – then it’s horribly clear that we may be the next species to disappear.

I’ve spent the greater part of my life thinking that our self-destructive way of life would end with a bomb and a nuclear winter. In many ways a sudden end to everything would be a more comforting vision than the possibility of a relentless decline into anarchy with terrible flooding, mass migrations from areas no longer capable of sustaining life and the desperate search for food, water, and ultimately air to breathe. I don’t want my grandchildren or their descendants to end impoverished lives like fish writhing on the deck of a boat, gasping for air.

I’ve written before about denial being one of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s symptoms of grieving. But there has to come a moment when denial is overcome and a new life – with all its difficulties and disappointments – has to begin; and this is the moment. Right now.

Aaaargh – more tomatoes!

IMG_6158We planted more tomatoes this season and we knew that judgement day would come sooner or later and they would need to be processed into winter stores.  Today was that day and I spent most of it on the stove when I wasn’t cranking our small but perfectly formed passata machine. The good news and the bad news this year was that the cherry tomato crop failed completely with the blight so I was excused the drying. It’s a shame really because dried tomatoes keep well (as long as they’re completely dried) and they’re a great thing to have in the store to give a touch of acidity and sweetness in other dishes. As for the rest, I processed another 25 lbs of ripe tomatoes today and turned it into 3 litres of passata and four and a half litres of pasta sauce. The passata is indispensible as a base for all sorts of other sauces. Back on the allotment there are at least as many still to go, plus a big batch for chutney as well. Much as we love tomatoes, they can be a struggle to keep up with at this time of year.

While I was cooking the tomatoes Madame was sowing our first batch of indoor basil – we’ve still got quite a bit growing on the allotment but the first sign of frost will see it  off. The other herbal revelation this year has been French tarragon which seems to thrive on our plot and is wonderful (the French always knew this) with chicken.

The rain hardly let up all day so we spent most of our time indoors but I’ve got a couple of new books to read and spent a lot of time pondering on Spinoza at the stove.  I was very touched by Greta Thunberg’s  speech at the UN, and we even sat down to listen to Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at the Labour Party conference during the afternoon.  I liked a lot of what we heard but I find the constant emphasis on new technology to solve the related problems of extinction and global heating far wide of the mark.  We’ve relied far too much on keeping on doing the wrong thing by hoping some new technology turns up to help clean up the mess. There was no mention of farm subsidies either. We need to stop making the mess now.

After a long break mostly away, we’ve got the Potwell Inn kefir and sourdough production line running sweetly and so here’s a photo of breakfast – the smoothies are a great way of using our frozen spinach cubes.

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