Tag: natural inclusion

Is a hedgerow really the site of an endless struggle.

Druce Cranesbill, Geranium X Oxonianum. The markings remind me of Henbane – another (poisonous) stunner.

I don’t really get the idea that nature is an unending struggle for survival – red in tooth and claw – and all that violent guff which gets pressed into service to provide an ideological scaffolding for behaving in greedy and vile ways – as if Tennyson were a fan of the dark satanic mills. This isn’t a sudden insight brought on by a dose of Cornish spring (although life feels a lot better when the sun shines). We’ve had five days wandering the footpaths and hedgerows of the Roseland peninsula; photographing and recording plants as we go, and this time I was paying particular attention to the succession of plants; especially the carrot family, the Apiaceae, as they emerge one by one in the spring.

I remember the first time I tried to get to grips with this family of lookalikes. I’d noticed the plant known as Alexanders – almost always the first to emerge with its shiny celery-like leaves and an umbrella-like flower head of creamy yellow-white. I’d just bought my very first flower book, published by Warnes, and I went about finding my plant in the traditional beginners’ mode; turning the pages one by one until I found an illustration that looked right. So far so good, but fired with enthusiasm I went on to look at the others in the same family and when I came across some fine drawings of the seeds (alarmingly similar) which were the ultimate key to naming them all; I sighed, shut the book and didn’t open those pages again for years.

Six decades later I know a little bit more (not that much!) and it’s all very interesting, because there’s a distinct succession of these plants every year. Alexanders is usually first to appear as a handsome plant, but soon starts to yellow off and look very tatty. Then comes Cow Parsley – an unfortunate name for such a dazzlingly white and beautiful plant with lace-like leaves; shortly followed by Hogweed and all the others, and yes – it’s quite hard to tell some of them apart because they rarely grow side by side simultaneously. They go on mucking me about, popping out for their brief lives one by one until October and then there’s only the seeds to identify, and they are so beautiful when you look at them through a hand lens; ridged and horned as if carved by a miniaturist sculptor. They emerge, flourish, flower and die but I’ve never ever heard a Hogweed beating up a Cow parsley plant in the dead of night while no-one’s supposed to be about. I’ve never seen a Pignut abuse a Wild Carrot or cheat a Sanicle of its inheritance nor a Hemlock Water Dropwort leave its stream to poison some Rock Samphire and spoil a forager’s day. I just can’t see any evidence that there’s a battle for survival going on out there unless it’s to develop some resistance to chemicals.

The plants – not just the Carrot family – seem to have evolved a scheme to allow all of them to flourish and complete their life cycle in relative peace apart from the predation of cows, hogs and numerous small bites from insects. They grow to different heights; the later ones being generally taller than the early ones and pop their clogs before they become a burden to their neighbours – and I’ve never heard any moaning about the brevity of life from the depths of a hedge or a ditch. By and large they seem enviably contented, if that’s not a category error. We humans like to whinge about the way our happiness has been stolen (always someone else’s fault) when in fact we’ve hidden it because we don’t want to own it. Before long, the safe place where we concealed it is forgotten and we can relish the tragedy of our lives over a couple of bottles of cheap wine. Plants don’t do that.

I have the great fortune of meeting a teacher who’s thought deeply about this and whose work crosses many borders that are patrolled by legions of gatekeepers – a brave soul. He explains the fruits of his labours as “Natural Inclusion” – as against Natural Selection in its purest and darkest form. You can Google the phrase and you’ll see who he is in much more detail, his name’s Alan and he’s a great teacher. He uses scientific conceptual language, but he also uses poetry and painting to express his ideas.

Basically, and dangerously simplifying, with a little help from Google Gemini here’s a very concise summary of an important antidote to lazy evolutionary thinking that plonks us down in the middle of a merciless battle. If ever we needed to visualize ourselves as a working and living part of nature it’s now. There are many threads that have joined together to create our bondage to greed and exploitation as if it were something natural, and we have a few decades at best to cut through them and set ourselves and the ecosystem free before it’s too late.

Alan Rayner proposes a new concept called natural inclusion which challenges some aspects of traditional evolutionary theory. Here are the key points of his ideas:

  • Natural Inclusion (NI): This is Rayner’s core concept. He argues that nature fundamentally works through inclusion, not separation. Boundaries between things are seen as dynamic interactions, not fixed lines. Imagine the difference between walking through a doorway (inclusion) versus hitting a brick wall (exclusion).
  • Questioning Natural Selection: Rayner believes natural selection isn’t the whole story of evolution. He proposes that the process of change is more about the flow of energy and the dynamic interplay between organisms and their environment.
  • Nature as a Guide: Rayner suggests looking to nature for moral guidance. He proposes honesty, reasonableness, and kindness as core values because they reflect natural processes.

Rayner uses art, alongside writing, to explore these ideas. His paintings serve as a way to connect with people who might not be drawn to scientific explanations.

St Francis talked about the sun, the moon and the stars; the animals and the earth as our brothers and sisters. I found the Geranium in the photo on the footpath leaving Portscatho. It probably escaped from a garden somewhere nearby and I instantly fell in love with it. If our current worldview doesn’t allow us to fall in love with a plant, we need to get another world view!

Common Vetch

About Glory

What ails you?

asparagus autumn Camino campervan repairs climate change climate emergency composting covid 19 deep ecology economic collapse environment environmental catastrophe environmental crisis field botany foraging Fungi garden pests global climate crisis global heating green spirituality herbal medicine intensive farming locally sourcing lockdown macro photography meditation no-dig pickling and preserving pilgrimage polytunnels preserving raised beds rats regenerative farming rewilding Sourdough species extinctions spring technology urban ecology urban wildlife walking water storage weeds wildflower meadows

I’ve been writing this blog for eight years, and ever since I migrated it to WordPress which gives the ability to tag posts and make them easier for readers to find; I’ve occasionally created a tag cloud like the one above so I can get an overview of the topics that have been concerning me. Click on any of the tags above and in moments you’ll be presented with all of the posts I’ve tagged with that term. It’s an incredibly useful tool for locating particular subjects of interest from approaching a thousand posts.

If you’ve ever run writers’ groups or taken part in therapeutic groups – and I’ve done both may times – you’ll know the “back pocket” moment when, after two hours of interesting but rarely illuminating talk, and just as the group is packing up to leave, someone comes up with an idea, a poem, an insight or a memory that almost sucks the air out of the room. Often it’s the beginning of an answer to the hard question “What ails you?” Complete honesty and self disclosure is terribly hard, and only the most heroic can manage it.

The quest.

There’s a reason that the ancient story of the Fisher King provides the inner structure of so many novels, plays, films and folk tales. They’re all quest stories, in which a journey – with all its hazards and reverses – brings resolution at last to the question “what ails you?” Think of writers like Tolkien, Alan Garner and Philip Pullman whose tremendous stories draw upon the structure of the Grail legend. Think of the foundational story of Homer’s Odyssey or the biblical story of Jacob crossing the Jabbok . I have absolutely nothing to add to the millions of words that have been lavished on this idea, and the point of mentioning it is not to add anything but to suggest its usefulness for isolating the right question when you’re trying to find a path through an oppressive cloud of difficulty. The key to the quest story is that it begins precisely with that nebulous and indefinable sense of ill, and that the resolution always demands leaving home because “for a hero a harbour is the place you set out from”. Home – in this case and with my tag cloud – is the place of certainty and settled knowledge; “the way we do things round here.” and leaving it means questioning and sometimes overturning received wisdom. However, received wisdom has its own priesthood and police force, its own pensioners and hangers on and its own ideas of what constitutes heresy. It has its own oppressive tools; belittling and marginalising those who challenge the status quo.

So the tag cloud is, in one useful sense, a mind map of the question “what ails you?” because all of its components are aspects of the greater question. Some tags may represent symptoms, and some may suggest remedies, but none of them are sufficient, and it’s our predisposition to fixing on a single term in the cloud as either cause or cure that paralyses our thinking and befuddles our actions. To take an example of that process from the tag cloud above, it’s obviously completely insufficient, not to mention illogical to take the tag “environmental catastrophe” and couple it with the tag “Composting” and claim to a fanfare of applause that the problem is thereby solved.

So – mainly because I’m not Thomas Aquinas – I won’t be offering a magnum opus on this topic. I remember standing in the library of my theological college and asking the librarian where I could find Thomas Aquinas and she replied with an expansive sweep of the arm across the shelves of the upper tier of the library – up a spiral staircase. Minutes later and slightly out of breath, I found many yards of shelves full of Aquinas and commentaries on his thought. But let me offer a single tentative thought on the significant absence of another possible tag cloud beginning with the concept of glory.

Lost in our utterly materialist and dualist culture we represent ourselves instinctively, (some instincts are the products of long enculturation), as isolated instances of consciousness separated by an unbridgeable gulf of empty space from all other instances of it. We see the earth as an object and we often see our neighbours as objects too. We are deeply suspicious of words like joy, glory and love as non material emotional states which – being unmeasurable – are beyond the reach of science and therefore worthless. Nature – and I’m indebted to *Alan Rayner for this thought – is defined as the subject of an eternal battle for the “survival of the fittest”, although we are arrogant enough to regard ourselves as the sole and final arbiters of what “fitness” might mean.

But what if this idea is completely wrong? he asks. What if the false idea that nature and the earth and all that exists, is there at our disposal, is the ultimate ideological enforcer of most of the tags in my cloud of shame? What if Darwin’s survival of the fittest, deserves the same fate as Marx’s iron laws of history? What if we were to reintroduce the idea of glory to field botany? What would happen to our inner lives if we included the notion of glory within the medicinal or culinary properties of plants? What would it do to our lives if we included much more sentience within the gifts of animals? What if we included within the general field of fitness the capacity of the natural world to acquaint us with glory, joy and love in a completely non-possessive way? What if we abandoned the idea of our separateness from nature and focused on our dependence upon her? What if the natural world is not locked in a grim battle for survival but an almost inconceivably beautiful and creative exchange between life forms?

The epoch changing wrong turn was to fossilize Darwin’s frangible theory into a law of nature and then illegitimately to extend it into almost every aspect of life – Social Darwinism was elevated into a spurious defense for unspeakably wicked political acts and the earth was reduced to abject servitude.

The really important question is about how we change. I think we all know enough about human behaviour to know that cultural change can never be brought about by presenting new “facts”. But there are practices and institutions from which we can learn about glory. Many of them have their own histories of times when ecstatic insight was fossilized into law and went rogue, but that, sadly, is a danger confronting all human institutions. The question is this – were we born to dominate and control nature to the point of self-destruction, or did we just forget where we came from?

Alan Rayner “The Origin of Life Patterns” – several videos also on YouTube

False Chanterelle – “All that glisters!”