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By the waters of Babylon

I don’t have a harp, but there have been many times over the past few years when I might have hung it on the first available poplar tree in rage and sadness at what’s been happening – except rage and sadness don’t really achieve much. What’s depression, after all, except rage and anger turned inwards. “If only we could have better government” was always my first port of call when looking for a solution to the multiple injustices being suffered by the most vulnerable people. Chris Smage, in his book “A small Farm Future” which I’ve been reading and writing about enthusiastically this last week lists ten (yes ten) interlinked crises which should concern all of us. I think they’re worth listing here.

  • Population
  • Climate
  • Energy
  • Soil
  • Stuff (you’ll have to read the book!)
  • Water
  • Land
  • Health and nutrition
  • Political economy
  • Culture

You don’t have to be a philosopher to see that these stress markers are all flashing red at the moment. Equally, you don’t have to be a Marxist, waiting for the iron laws of history finally to show their hand, to know that these kinds of crisis tend to go critical unpredictably, like erupting volcanoes – Covid is a classic example. While we all (I hope) know that something needs to be done about them all, nothing seems to happen beyond a few reports and a bit of hand wringing.

I’ve been fascinated at this ‘rabbit in the headlights’ feature of our political lives; assuming that everyone can see the dangers but can’t – for whatever reason – react; whilst all the while I was getting more and more agitated about it. But what if the oncoming bus with no brakes was unconcerning to some/many people precisely because they think it’s a long way away and all we need to do is get a better bus driver (Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, President, Inventor – write your own in ….). For me the most acute pain of this dilemma has been to realize that there are no competent bus drivers because there is (almost by definition) no-one around who’s ever tried to control a ten headed beast like this one. We’re so immersed in our economic structure and its cultural apparatus that it’s impossible to see the crises being tackled in any other way than saving jobs, even if it means digging more mines; fracking oil; selling weapons; gambling the markets and building more nuclear power stations and inventing cardboard piercing laser weapons. Choosing another charismatic ‘big man’ to lead us back to the Promised Land is pointless.

And then, suddenly it came to me that this epochal upheaval is insoluble by any method we yet have any detailed hold on because, like Covid 19, we don’t know how it will start, how it will develop and what course it will run. Ironically this was something of a relief – not having to choose between policies that turn out to be no more than aspirations to be discarded at the first sign of a headwind. And equally surprising to me is my sense that we have many of the answers we need tucked away in our experiences and memories.

Madame and me were once on a course where we were separated and invited to write down the best and closest moment in our relationship. Our fellow course members all mentioned holidays, honeymoons and some other pretty predictable stuff. We, though, had both written down the time when we were being evicted because our basement flat was deemed unfit for habitation. Madame was 7 months pregnant and we had no idea what we were going to do but freed from any responsibility for what was being done to us we improvised, nagged, haggled and fought and after 18 months living in our unfit basement with a baby, we were rehoused. I don’t think we were ever closer than we were during that time.

So I’m able to find a ray of hope in human ingenuity, creativity and (this is the risky one) a capacity for kindness towards strangers . No-one in their right mind would look forward to a societal, ecological or economic breakdown but if it comes I’ve no doubt that we will discover gifts that we never dreamed we possessed.

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Author Dave PolePosted on November 25, 2020Categories UncategorizedTags climate catastrophe, community action, economic collapse, homelessness, political engagementLeave a comment on By the waters of Babylon

Poverty, chastity and gardening?

Yesterday we lifted the first rows of garlic, after taking a look at the developing bulbs last weekend. This variety – Early Purple Wight – is a softneck garlic and doesn’t store all winter; there’s another crop of Carcassonne Wight hardneck garlic which we’ll harvest later. These first bulbs have been a tremendous success and made stonking progress in spite of the wettest winter and dryest spring since records began, but we noticed that some of the cloves were beginning to sprout and so we lifted the whole crop and set them on a wire frame to dry in the greenhouse; bringing the two or three sprouting bulbs home to use immediately. I can see both aioli and allioli on the menu at the Potwell Inn very shortly. Allioli is much easier to make because of the tremendous emulsifying properties of crushed garlic but it’s not for the faint hearted – fierce, hot and very Basque. Having a plentiful supply of green garlic means that we can be quite extravagent with it, chucking in a whole bulb rather than a single parsimonius clove.

Then while Madame peeled the bulbs, I got on with sowing coriander, splitting chives, planting out leeks and prepping the newly empty beds ready for the next tenants. There’s never a really quiet moment on the allotment whatever the experts say.

But something’s been worrying at me for days now. I half alluded to it a couple of days ago when I joked about not wanting the Potwell Inn to be a lifestyle blog. But I protest too much. Inevitably when I write about the pleasure that the allotment gives us, or the intensity of flavour we get from home grown vegetables, or baking bread – every one of those subjects is connected to lifestyle. When I write about recycling everything from vegetable peelings to cardboard and even our own urine; mending clothes, buying less and wasting less; aside from making us sound a bit whacky and self-righteous even, it’s all a bit inward looking. Our lives might begin to seem like a monastic existence of poverty, chastity and gardening.

But I don’t think that’s true at all. The choices we make have real impact on other people and on the earth as well and I’ve already written that a part of the purpose of this blog is the slightly subversive aim of presenting a simple, less impactful lifestyle in as attractive and positive way as possible, to get away from the hair-shirt image and to help to change our dangerous and destructive culture.

But I’m also constantly aware of the danger that the Potwell Inn could become a form of displacement activity; of withdrawal from the really important challenges of our time. On Saturday during the walk along the canal that I described, we passed a big ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstration in Green Park. Later, after I’d written and published the post I saw a video clip of the Edward Colston statue being pulled down from its plinth in Bristol, and thrown into the docks – in my view a fitting end to the statue of a man who bought and sold hundreds of thousands of slaves, and cast into the sea the bodies of the thousands who died during their transportation. All this was happening while we were doing something quite different: watching a peregrine falcon feed its young. It raised the thought that life without nature would only be half a life, but so too would a life of poverty without education or health care. The search for social justice can’t be an optional bolt-on to a virtuous life, and I don’t think there’s an option any more to take a back seat on the politics and economics.

So here’s the thing – I know we’re not alone in our anger at violence and injustice. I know we’re not alone in fearing the ecological disaster that’s taking us down the ralway line like an out of control train. I know we’re not alone in wanting an end to poverty around the world; an end to war and terror, and an end to avoidable deaths caused by austerity for the many and obscene wealth for the few, and I’ve been paralysed by the the thought that there is no way out of this predicament.

there is a way out but it demands ingenuity, commitment, courage and above all, vision because these aren’t separate problems that can be taken down and solved one at a time – they’re one big challenge

But that’s not true – there is a way out but it demands ingenuity, commitment, courage and above all, vision because these aren’t all separate problems that can be taken down and solved one at a time – they’re one big challenge that can only be successful if we are brave enough to overturn the big lie; the lie that the only way to solve these symptoms of system collapse is to carry on what we’ve been doing but work even harder at it. As if one more drink would make an alcoholic into a temperance leader.

I’ve spent some time this week reading Ann Pettifor’s recent book “The case for the green new deal” which spells out much more in terms of what we really can do to change things. There are a number of other books on my to-do list, new ones and old ones that I need to read again more carefully. My sense of paralysis is gradually lifting because whatever the prophets of Baal say about our present economics being the ‘end of history’ – that’s to say immutable, written in stone, we know that there is another way and if we follow the historical threads that brought us to this dangerous place we’ll find – like Dorothy and her friends did in the Wizard of Oz – that there’s just a bunch of frightened old men with megaphones, terrifying us with the prospect that there is no other way. Well, yes there is!

And that helps me to believe that there is a real purpose in putting a different way of life before the world – so long as we always remember that the Potwell Inn is no more, and no less that the attempted outworking of the bigger picture at the smallest scale. It’s not, and never could be the solution on its own but neither is it an escape from the realities of the world. We still have hearts, and hands and voices – and deep change, paradigm shift change, is always an emergent property. It sits there, latent, sometimes for decades and suddenly it’s there in all its unexpected complexity; much richer, much deeper and more inclusive than any of us ever imagined. In what will seem to be the blink of an eye.

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Author Dave PolePosted on June 9, 2020Categories About the Potwell Inn, Allotment, Eudaimonia - flourishing, Food, Natural HistoryTags Black Lives Matter, environmental crisis, garlic, political engagement, urban ecologyLeave a comment on Poverty, chastity and gardening?

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