Hills and High Places

After A Long Night

2011-12-24T01:13:00.000Z

We had a Solstice ceremony here on Thursday morning. I was asked to do a thanksgiving and later a few peopleasked if I’d be posting it somewhere so, as this seems the obvious place, hereit is:

Let us be thankful for everything we tend to take forgranted – for food, shelter, heating and any amount of good company we are lucky enoughto enjoy.

Let us be thankful too for all those things that help uscarry on even when the times can seem uncertain; for community, courage, thesense that things are often not so bad as we might fear even when the world isfull of change.

Let us be grateful too for living in these times – that ithas fallen to us to help navigate the way ahead, that we have chosen or haveeven been chosen to be here, that the task is ours and that there is always help athand - invisible or more material - if we have the strength to ask for it.

Let us be grateful for all the true measures of wealth – ourfriendships, our strengths and capacity to be content.

Let us be grateful to simply be here today, blessed bysimply being on this hill, cradled by such a beautiful horizon in the knowledgethat our mutual horizon in the coming year is both what we make it and can beaugmented by the many blessings it is ours to both give thanks for and toshare.

Have a great Midwinter and Christmas. Here's to a good year in 2012...

Same Old Roads, Different Century

2011-11-30T17:47:00.001Z

We shouldn’t be surprised by now, but occasionally the scaleof the contempt for our natural heritage such as that shown by George Osbornein yesterday’s autumn review retains the capacity to stun. Salient thenamong the chancellor’s decisions to ejectlarge portions of whatever remained of his cabinet’s green credentials,backing energy intensive industries like steel and cement (to the detriment ofthe comparatively greater provider of jobs of the renewable sector) andthreatening to do away with laws to safeguard wildlife, was the decision toplough ahead with every one of the DfT’s road schemes that were in any way eligible to be built. Given the tenuousness of many the schemes' position with funding, it is in a way a pretty considerable acheivement.

It’s hard not to see this as anything other than a reversionto old Tory form, a rush in the tide of the times to what once was familiarground, hoping perhaps for crumbs of comfort in what at one point were oldcertainties. Never mind then that this particular model of infrastructurewas outdatedand out-argued a long time ago. The beast of our current car culturehad never gone away, the appetite for roads simply appeased until now by atightening of fiscal strings, a kind of silver lining in a wave of bitter news.

All that has changed and it’s hard not to feel as if we havebeen transported back to the worst of the eighties: huge youth unemployment, asurge of homelessness waiting in the wings (that is in itself a timebomb notset to go off until sometime next year) even the ghost of Margaret Thatcherresurrected on our screens. Above all a party in power there almost seemsno option but to vilify; all too easy to dismiss and loathe whatever theiractual nature or intent. And the new roads over it all, like aresurrected standard from a long gone war or a mantra for an old school modelof how business and people should move.

That the great seismic shift that saw Labour delivered topower, that saw countless road schemes effectively scrapped and a renewed sensethat a sustainable transport policy was finally on our doorsteps has now beenannulled is suddenly clearer than ever. And was it really any wonder in adecade and a half that saw trainfares slowly or rapidly rising even amid signs thatmany more people would have travelled like this had they been able to affordit? It wasn’t exactly helped by Clarkson presiding over an ever morecredulous mass, driving cars up mountain sides like some kind of leaden fuelledconquistador, motoring down to the Sea of Galilee itself, proclaiming to allwho were willing to listen that life behind a wheel is still a fundamental forfulfillment.

At times like these, it’s harder than ever not to look forinspiration to a time when a mass of largely disaffected segments of societystaged a huge rebellion on exactly this issue, just as it seems reasonable tohope that we may well be set to see something of a repeat. And with thewell documented contributionof road traffic to climate change, with the knowledge that increased roadcapacity onlyleads to increased car use, there is clearly a huge need for a response ofcomparable scale and passion, if we accept that things don’t always repeatthemselves in exactly the same way.

Without sufficient outcry and the hope of reconsideration,the schemes laid out in this autumn review look more than foreboding. Forthe countless hectares of irreplaceable land that will be lost to the plough,lost to us and taken from the habitats that they form and help maintain, it isnothing short of full blown tragedy. And it would be easy to see asdismaying that so many may feel themselves to be left no option but to protestat a time when our collective efforts would be better spent in any number ofmore constructive ways. It would be easy were it not for the knowledgethat such protests always hold the apparent but vital irony that however direthe thing they fight, there is strength and liberation to be had in the act ofresistance.

If it seems futile to urge this government to still striveto do something other than oiling the wheels of yesterday’s industries orpresenting favours to their friends in privatised big business then we have arich history of dissent to draw on and be inspired by. And the lessonssuch history lends may still hold the promise of how we might persuade Osborneand his colleagues to set a better course than this; a better course thanpopulist postures that set us back decades and which have only ever served tocarve our country into isolated pockets of what’s natural while propagatingsocial sprawl that will become ever more out on a limb as the oil wellscontinue to dry.

Taking Liberties

2011-11-17T16:14:00.001Z

There are moments when life takes on a bizarreness all of it's own, as if everything else had been a long slumber and this is what waking up feels like. Take St. Paul’s the other Sunday, where George Monbiot was leading a debate organised by Reclaim the City intheir drive against the prerogative of the City of London Corporation. They’d been joined at the last minute byStuart Fraser, policy chairman of the corporation and over the course of thefollowing hour the arguments went back and forth with many people from theprotest making their way to the mic to make themselves heard. But the overall feeling, despite the obviousdeep convictions at play, was one of a genuine civility, where Fraser - andother like minds - were given free rein to speak and they in turn were not fullof the invective you might expect from those defending an institution that wascoming under such a sustained intellectual attack.

The feeling of the surreal was not helped by an old man insome semblance of Irish traditional dress dancing round and on the spot on thestairs to the sound of an incessant tune that I knew but couldn’t quite placefrom a mini PA which was eventually silenced for being too loud anddistracting. But it had alot more to dowith the incredibly potent forces at work; being there outside the Cathedral,the crystallisation of the movement and all that the corporation appeared torepresent and mean. The name of WatTyler was invoked and we were pointedly reminded that he’d died at the hands ofa previous Lord Mayor.

And more than that, the constitutional question of therights of the corporation touched upon that other, wider theme, that Britaindoes not have a written constitution and suddenly it was like all the old facesand memories were there and the Magna Carta was more than some ageing roll ofarchaic text – the freedom that it meant and represented was heavy in the air,not least for the sense that such things must be renewed and it suddenly feltlike one of those moments in time; charged and bizarre and profound.

Nearly every one of the Magna Carta’s original articles hasbeen repealed since King John put his name to it in 1215 and it is a point ofno small curiosity that one of the only three remaining in law is that whichupholds the corporation’s “ancient rights and liberties.” Quite how ancient these are no-one seems toosure of though they are said to predate the Norman Conquest so that this particularscrap of antiquated law are perhaps one of the few direct links to our oldAnglo-Saxon past, where Aldermen were eldermen and the City was buildingitself up still from the departure of Rome. That in itself helps explains the strange state of affairs that allowsthe corporation to exist at a kind of remove from the rest of British life; itsexistence predates the formation of the modern state, its “rights andliberties” remain undefined because they have been carried down from a timewhere record keeping was patchy, where it existed at all. As such the City has never been entirelysubject to the all of the laws of the rest of country as the strange ceremonieswhenever the monarch enters the Square Mile serve to illustrate.

Nonetheless, the English thrive on such stuff. It lends events like the Lord Mayor’s show alevel of pageantry that almost amounts to a kind of mystique, where the pastgrows stranger the further back in it you go and all unbroken lines appear holyeven if we do not understand them all that well. And of course this suits an organisation likethe corporation very well. They becomethe benevolent upholders of tradition, their laws and quirks are placed beyondreproach and to the point where any criticism isalmost seen as a kind of affront on all that is best about England itself.

But even with such charity there are things which do notseem to add up. It seems curious forinstance that hundreds of thousands of employees who do not live within thecity walls take part in elections where their businesses have votes as if theywere people themselves, outnumbering actual residents by two to one. That in itself seems at best a kind of bendingof the rules. But take into account thatthe official role of the City’s Lord Mayor is to “expound the values of liberalization”and lend “support for innovation, proportionate (i.e. limited) taxation andregulation” and it all starts to become revealed as something far from archaic,something much more pertinent to current forces in the world. And far from affecting finance in the UKalone, the City’s unique legal position allows it act as a hub for offshore taxhavens throughout the world.

A closer look lays it all out beyond doubt: dissent against the City goes back a long way. Reform was sought at least as far back as thenineteenth century and Tony Blair’s government were actually the first Labourparty in power in the twentieth century not to seek the abolition of thecorporation (they actually ‘reformed’ it in a way that only added to itspowers). As early as 1917 HerbertMorrison put it like this: "Is itnot time London faced up to the pretentious buffoonery of the City of LondonCorporation and wipe it off the municipal map? The City is now a square mileof entrenched reaction, the home of the devilry of modern finance."

Today, it seems only more pronounced that the financialheart of the City itself that beats so metallic and tall continues to hold sucha serpent-like trance over the rest of the governing class of the country. Regulation, we are told, will drive off thetraders that form such a large part of our national purse and we are relayedthis with such conviction, with such a sense of weary fatalism that you’d beforgiven for thinking we’d created a kind of inescapable trap where there isnothing left for us but to trust these high priests of the markets and theirvoodoo of faith in current currencies and hope for a day where we all see thosedismal percentages and fractions of figures of growth begin to creep up and wewill tug metaphorical forelocks and be grateful for what trickles down and trynot to look at the widening gaps and sense of a world that is being screwedover because there does not seem to be another way.

We don’t seem to remember that the intense competitionbetween international centers of finance has risen to its present pitch sincethe integration of global markets during and immediately after the ‘Big Bang’as recently as 1986. We seem to chooseto forget that regulation was part of the mainstream political discourse atleast since the Second World War and into the Seventies and even beyond. Nobody seems to remember the Glass-SteagallAct of 1933 (which remained in US law until 1999) that separated banks ofinvestment from those of deposits precisely to prevent the return of conditionsthat led to that Great Depression a repeat of which now seems to stalk us all.

That’s why what occurs with the Occupy movement – and thewider public discussion it has already inspired – is currently the best hopethat we have for a better and more equitable future. That’s why we should all look a little closerat the apparently benign paternalism of institutions like the City of LondonCorporation. We should not believe that itis simply an anachronistic leftover charged with little more than the banalities ofgoverning a piece of real estate – its actions and liberties lie at the veryheart of the modern global finance whose pathological excesses society ingeneral has had to bail out.

We are told again and again that Britain needs London’sfinancial clout – apparently at any cost - but the resistance to the currentglobal laissez-faire has now become as globally endemic as the need forgovernments worldwide to act together and begin to rein in financial centres’ unprecedentedcurrent power. What’s clear is that thisargument does not stop here whatever the immediate fate of the occupationoutside St. Paul’s. It will not stopuntil governments listen.

It is only with a renewed recognition that greater regulation - together with other reforms - is as necessary now as everthat any kind of balance can be bought to the markets that appear to governus. Inspiration for the kind of discourse that can inform such recognition waitsfor us in the records and aspirations of reformers from at least most of thetwentieth century. It is the way inwhich we take them up and breathe them back to life that hope remains that theheart of this city can revolve around a greater sense of equanimity thanthe state of semi-psychosis that modern capital has come to so closelyresemble.

Zeitgeist

2011-11-11T15:58:00.001Z

Last Sunday I went up to St Paul’s, compelled by curiosityas much as the urgency that has been mounting these last few weeks and months. Part of the underground was closed forrepairs so I made my way in over the Millenium Bridge, St Paul’s all soft old stoneand grand in the burgeoning dusk and the bright white light of the floodlightsplaying on the colonnades. The camp itselfwas how you might expect it: tents all huddled up like barnacles or Islamicpilgrims at prayer before the monumental pillars and stairs, the atmospherefull of the old kinetic intensity of any protest, coupled with the lively senseof mixed stress and excitement of the capital itself.

I took in the marquees and their mingling Sunday crowds andpoliticians or people from the press, being fielded and led around by mildly beleagueredor more sorted looking helpers, took at face value a large and scrawledinstruction to first and foremost inform myself about what was taking place ifI wanted to help. Overall I was struckby the feel of the place, a sense of charge that has been with me all week andwhich seemed to have more to it than simply the throng of the people or thehallowed ground of St Paul’s. It had atleast as much to do with the conjunction of time and place and points in historyand the hope that can hold in the face of the problems we’re faced with.

For weeks I’d watched with great interest asthis camp had ridden out a sometimes tumultuous narrative of threatenedevictions and actual resignations and juxtaposition of protest and the workingsof the Church and this strange potential for bringing the aims and the valuesof both towards something like a greater harmony. What is clear is that, whatever some in thepress may have said, the camp has already achieved a great deal. The protest has struck a chord across thecountry with people concerned or angered or dismayed by the homogenousdomination of a financial system that has privatised profits and socializedrisks and a government that seems hell bent on pursuing a policy oflibertarianism that is hard not to see as all too often cold and even calculating.

There has been a great deal of talk about the sense that theaims of the protests seem vague or at least unclearly stated. But that seems in counterpoint to the veryreal list of demands released this last week. The protestors, in a group specifically set up to deal with issuesrelating to the City of London Corporation (and all the fiscal weight that thatbody personifies), called for a full breakdown of the City cash account, forthe Corporation’s activities to be subject to a Freedom of Information Act andfor details to be released of all lobbying undertaken on behalf of the bank andfinance industries since the 2008 crash. Very specific demands then from what have been dismissed as a bunch ofkids with a vague intent to raise the issues and do a spot of reading on thestairs.

But it’s fair to say there is a call for wider clarity as tothe future of our economic system, above and beyond the vital technicalitiesregarding the City of London, its hitherto largely unchallenged clout and itshistoric and perhaps anachronistic privileges. In the justified audacity of setting up a camp such as this there hasbeen an expectation that the occupants should have some kind of ready-madeblueprint set to be expounded from on high or simply from the street that showsa clear direction in which to move.

That in itself is nothing if not a tall order when thegreatest of minds are struggling to come to terms with a world where all theold certainties are being stripped away and daily events have so far outrun theattempts of policy makers to get one step ahead of them. But in a week where we have been warned bythe IEA that we have five years to change the nature of our energy consumptionif we are to retain any hope of warding off dangerous climate change, it mightjust be that what could be seen as fiscal hard knocks now could help see usclear of a wider climatic disaster. Thatmay seem something of a forlorn hope when emissions are continuing to risedespite financial crisis but it is perhaps a measure of how urgently thingsmust be turned around that emissions would very likely be worse were the globalmarkets in full throttle.

The salient point in all this is that constantly andexponentially growing economies are simply incompatible with an ecologicalframework that is explicitly finite. This is surely the greatest issue of our times and we could do worsethan see the current financial interruption as an unprecedented opportunity toreconfigure our societies’ most fundamental modus operandi.

What might such changes look like in practice? We could do worse than follow the advice ofTim Jackson in his iconic book ‘Prosperity Without Growth’ when he suggestswe implement a transition to service rather than product based economies, thatwe channel investment into savings rather than consumption, invest these savingsin ecological assets and adjust the working week to help bring our carbonconsumption under control. For anyoneserious about finding a realistic way forward, his book is well worth engagingwith.

Perhaps what is clearer than ever at such a time as this isthat any amount of specific policies or suggestions or advice are secondary towhat we face as a global culture. Theold fluorescent dream of never ending growth in GDP is simply not tenable tocontinue if we are to deliver to the generations who will follow us a biospherethat remains both rich and pleasant to inhabit. Growth of some description may not be ruled out but must be accompaniedby a drop in emissions sufficient enough to make that growth tenable. As Jackson says, that means we should beruling out growth altogether until our emissions are under control.

What follows then does not hold easy answers. In the short term at least it will probably notexactly make people want to sing from the rooftops in unbridled joy as all thesureties and comforts that we have grown used to are either reduced or made alittle more hard-won. But somewhere downthe line, be it years or even decades, if we can navigate the times ahead, wemight have cause to be more grateful, we might find a perspective to look back atthe times before us as full of challenges but also holding an undiminishablepromise of how a life that balances economic needs and ecological limits couldbe both rich and rewarding.

There are other riches in life beyond the dictats of thebond markets and we would do well to cultivate a greater sense of inner andcultural strength and celebrate these: even – and especially – when they comewithout the sometimes dubious brands of officially sanctioned authenticity, ifsuch a thing means a mainstream media that has all too often grown debased orsometimes scattered in the hunt for any fresh news. It might just be that we can see in the timesthat lie ahead a greater clarity towards the things we already own and whichnobody can take away: our spirit towards life and love for one another, ourability to foster and sustain a real community, the ever-present sense thatstrength comes from within and can be cultivated even when the times seemarduous.

The protest here and the Occupy movement worldwide hasreminded us all that we have an obligation to root our spirituality in how welive our lives, in how we act in the corporeal world. And that in itself touches on somethingprofound, something perhaps that goes to the heart of the great environmentaland financial crises with which we are faced: that it is in what is immediateand before our eyes, rather than some distant paradise or a revolution thatbegins next week, that holds the key to our salvation. Our problems are urgent and need acting uponnow. Paradise, far from being something only more removed, exists in the world in its primalstate, something we have imagined and then built our way out of. In that sense it is in our imaginations thatthe road back must begin.

The revolution needed then is first and foremost one ofconsciousness and - if you go to St. Paul’s sometime soon - you may very wellfeel it; the sense of transformation in the air. The road to practical solutions then comesout of such a sense, out of the renewed belief of what is still within ourhands, out of the sense of what is possible when we wake up to the potential that iswith us everyday. Materially, the limitations thatwe face are as real as the earth that we stand on. But there is potentially great strength andliberation to be had within them. Indeedit may help wake us up to the fact that much of what truly matters can never bebought or exchanged – that that which lies within us and that which we find inthe people around us has never been anything other than the true measure of ourwealth.

Riots and Realisations

2011-08-17T01:01:00.001+01:00

Even watching on the box the scenes were truly staggering; anger and frustration manifesting senselessly; incendaries of rage from the excluded. More than anything else, it's been difficult to even start to comprehend it, though all too easy now to see the warning signs in retrospect. What has been alarming was the scale of it, the often total mindlessness, the savageness unleashed to such a brutal extent. Seeing the images of a whole block going up in flames, there was no denying that something somewhere had gone totally tits up. In all probability though, for many it had been going wrong for a very long time and now we were all witnessing the outcome.

So England shakes or has been shaken, and not in a way that anybody with any sense could have intended. A whole segment of society; derided, scorned, embittered even as their actions alienate reveals itself as septic and unloved - and that in itself is the root of the problem; avoiding any platitudes about parental care, what has society shown to this generation other than mantras to buy more stuff, to seek an apparently easy and double edged fame, to count yourself as nothing if you do not have the cars and phones and everything that marks you out as a success? Wealth for us has become irrelevant if not externalised; where are the stories in this nation of inner riches, of that which ought to bring us together and help us rise above a material condition that once was often hard but was accepted as such?

England has been slumbering for many years, or did we simply let ourselves forget, despite the signs, that all was not well on the edges? Was society held fast by anything other than our arrogant and lazy assumptions that the social contract would always hold fast, that an overriding and implicit consideration for those around us would win out even though the wolves have been howling for years?

So this is where we must wake up. This is where we have to stop and look at how it could have come to this. We need a fundamental realignment of that which we truly value - and not be afraid to articulate that which we consider important. We have to bear in mind just what it must be like to grow up in England today with little input to inform any kind of meaningful or vaguely reassuring view of the world other than what is pumped out on our screens - the caverns of the internet, the cult of fame on our TV's, the untold and almost neverending toll of adverts everywhere you look that spell out where you stand and what you do not have.

The counterpoint is there in our consciousness for most of us, we just sometimes assume it must be all pervading for almost everyone else. Though I've lived in one or two pretty borderline places over the years, I don't pretend to know what it's like to live on truly rough estates in England today and can only piece together painful scraps from the news reports that have for too long made too many of us shrink away from the very real problems they speak of, as if we were holding out hope that if we ignored the increasingly evident fraying of our common social bonds long enough somehow we'd wake up one day in a better world or at least one where we'd muddle through because we ourselves were not getting harassed or stabbed or left for dead or our parents imprisoned or caught in a snare of drugs or spiraling debt or were ourselves betrayed by our wider society and with no crumbs of comfort as the ladders were pulled up in this new stark austerity and apparently nothing and no one to say that there is everything to live for still and so many reasons why our fates are not yet settled if we can only reconfigure where we're at.

The fact that we are all currently facing some kind of economic contraction to the point where it might be the ideal time to reconsider if now is the time to try and imagine something like a steady state economy, something other than endless boom and bust, is one thing. But the fact that so much of the pain of these cuts is being metered out unfairly on the poorest and most vulnerable; this is surely a thing we can no longer afford to accept on any level - we have witnessed the rude awakening of what happens when we default on our responsibilities.

That is not to say the violence and the recklessness of what happened last week is in itself justified, that the mounting asbo-oriented culture it was some kind of culmination of is anything other than deeply disturbing. But we cannot hope to instill a greater sense of responsibility in those whose actions are only too easy to revile until we look again at how each of us serves society at large outside the cosy spheres of existence we habitually inhabit and create.

However much the riots may have been criminal and often savagely so, it would be madness not to acknowledge that they were at least in part - and probably to a very large degree - the result of a mounting desperation, a boiling fury that may stand to call again if those of us who share a sense of discontent, who perceive mounting injustice do not speak up for those who have not found their voice and so express themselves so pathologically in some kind of twisted mirror image of how divided we have let this island grow.

Ancient Woodland, Modern Minds

2011-06-29T21:12:00.013+01:00

So we live in a world where existence for so many species wehappen to share this planet with is in jeopardy, or has already beendenied. And here at home our ancient woodland - supporting at least twicethe amount of rare or threatened species than any other UK habitat - is being wiped out at a rate faster than that in evidence in the Amazonitself. So here at least, in knowing this, we’re given somethinglike a greater clarity, that if we can get beyond the myth that the world was madesolely for our benefit we surely have a duty to protect those whose lives restin our hands, in our ability and willingness to speak and act on their behalf.

So where do we start in such a monumental mission? There are the obviouscandidates of course – the HS2 linethat threatens twenty one ancient woodlands for a scheme whose money would bebetter spent on improving and maintaining our existing railway tracks andwhich, if built, would scar a wider Chilterns landscape that has so far throughaccident or luck escaped too much encroachment by the infrastructural outriderthat so often heralds more and more development. The protests againstthis particular project seem set to run and run.

Then we have the sorry story down in Kent of OakenWoods – 81.5 acres of ancient woodland due to be swept aside for a ragstonequarry, a decision which goes against not only the county council’s mineralsplan but also policy of central government towards ancient woodland. And there are no shortage of other threats – roadwidening programmes, pylons, new houses, even oil extraction.

There is no doubt these woods need all our help and that campaigning in all itsforms is now as necessary as ever. But perhaps the greatest threat to ourold woodlands – and everything else – is simply the mentality that lets us think that theirremoval is ok, that they and the species they support are somehow secondary toour own human concerns. They are not, in our common culture, in any senseinviolable. They are, or so the logic goes, the pretty chattels thatadorn a landscape loved by sentimentalists and precious few besides. There is simply no room for such pleasant irrelevancies if we want a modern andfunctioning nation. So the roads are ushered in, high speed lines arelaid out as some kind of sleek and greener future and the end justifies anymeans because industry and commerce must win out, because these are the wheelsthat keep our world turning even when such cogs drive our own end as much asthe scraps of habitat that happen to be in the way.

We can fight any number of projects and - where they threaten preciousecosystems, protected by laws that are routinely deemed fit to be overidden –it is right that people should do so. But if we are serious aboutpreserving them for good, if we are serious about somehow grappling with theunderlying assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and even that most unmodern ofmindsets: the stories we tell ourselves, we have to see more clearly theancient change in attitude - what you might even call the original sin - thatlet us think this world was ours to do with as we please. Without theshift in perspective such insight would hopefully bring, we will ultimatelystill be simply pushing at revolving doors, or banging our heads againstwalls. If we do not change the state of mind that underpins each pushthen even immediate success in any campaign will be rendered temporary becausethe beast would still live that breathes life into yet another threat and thenanother.

A long time ago there was no need to sweep aside the plants and animals thatdid not appear to matter to our immediate concerns. The day such actsbecame permissible was perhaps the inception for the sorry times we facetoday. The more we can all recognise that and struggle to imagine a waybeyond it is perhaps the greatest and most important challenge we face. Until then nature will remain apparently expendable as will our own lifelinesthat she carries, a reminder if one was still needed that there is no boundarybetween us and the world around us except that which we have created in ourminds. Demolishing that arbitrary and hitherto all too powerful borderhas never been more urgent or more vital.

Boots, Blisters and Barrows

2011-06-24T18:22:00.009+01:00

So this Solstice I went walking with some friends, joined the Ridgeway on the Thames past scores of women in fancy hats in Reading station, knowing that staying at home wasn’t an option even though the weather forecast did little to encourage thoughts of camping. We missioned fifteen miles that afternoon, slept in an oversized hedge, a random late night friend of a friend turning up unexpected to me with a bottle of mead and everything looked like it had started to look up. So past White Horse Hill the next day and an existential-conversationed stop at Wayland’s Smithy with one of us departing from bad boots and a blister the size of a cherry tomato. Later, we trudged down an A-road and then a green lane that for the first few miles did a good impression of being anything but a green lane. Past Liddington fort and nearing the end of the day, we finally wound up in a copse beneath the ridge in various states of pain and exhaustion and wonder.

Somehow the blisters did not come for me but for others it was like walking on nails and bubble wrap at once to the point where as we stopped just shy of the motorway crossing, a friend knelt with his head to the kerb and every bit of his body language spoke of pain and composure at once, of wanting to go on and being severely put to the test. A few of us went up the hillfort that night, came across a gang of wannabe-gangster and moped-ed teenagers who may or may not have been responsible for the burning of the roundhouse there that I helped build five years ago now. Two gateposts still stood, charred a bit but still with the original carvings of twin snakes. Liddington sat between the two on the horizon, reminding me of the four-post-wide gap that had once been there that opened up the view from a darkened interior to all the hills beyond.

The area has always held some kind of almost inexplicable magic for me. I don’t know if it was from the first time I’d walked up this way, fuelled by mini popadoms from a skip in Devizes after a trip down the canal on a boat, together with a bag of hash and no real gear besides my german army boots, a modern, summer sleeping bag and an old sports holdall which just about did a good impression of a rucksack. Dry then the summer and me walking down the Lambourne road after a night at the Smithy, and dust on my face and a welcome from a man who’d been at Snelsmore before anyone else and kittens in the bender on the camp from the semi-feral black cat who had only just returned since the eviction.

It might have the mission a few of us made, travelling up in some last minute enterprise and camping in a copse on a track halfway up the hill itself. It was a strange arrival, some huge looming mass in the dark as we approached; a cow we thought but then it turned out to be some kind of standing stone and when my friend began to read staccato phrases from the instant flint flash of his lighter I thought he was making it up. But there they were, quite real the words when I looked, memorials to the Victorian naturalist Richard Jeffries and a close associate, moved from the top of the hill thanks to the kind of Swindon-induced carnage that had made the torching of the roundhouse almost inevitable.

But the place has an appeal from far more than any individual associations and this was of course why we were there – walking as a pilgrimage to the central stones of the upland, heartland inner landscape of Wiltshire, as so many had surely done before, converging from all corners of the country, walking up or down the ridges that span out in every direction – South Downs, North Downs, Chilterns, Cotswolds, Mendips; fingers from Salisbury Plain’s palm.

Finally arriving and stood on a barrow, a man I’d met at Barbury pointed out the line of distant dots of vehicles stretching up the opposite hill of the Sanctuary – a gathering that seemed almost incredible as a reminder of an age no further distant than the eighties, however many echoes it held of our more seriously ancient past. Down the avenue that stretches out from Avebury towards the southwest and the Sanctuary itself, a line of yellow bollards had been placed in an unconscious echo of the stones to either side, one to ward off travellers, the other to welcome them in.

So this perhaps was an old narrative, one mentality settled but far from sedentary, the other one more easy going but peopled by people who were living a life much like anyone else, settled like so Romanies on the estates, a few holding out in trucks and other sites but sure of one thing, that it is right to come to ancient places at these times and mark the turning of the seasons, to be there as more than mere tourists, to recognize these places were built for such a purpose, are somehow intertwined with our own fates and destinies as sure as stone is stone and that grass is still green when there’s rain.

So we partied and danced and played tunes and stayed up to see in the dawn and somehow there was something here that felt right; our being on the land again, however briefly, even in our small symbolic walking to the spot. It was a reminder, brief but deep and pertinent, a moment like an acupuncturist’s needle that spoke of how life can be when we live it together in something approaching some kind of natural order.

I felt different leaving the stones, something that had more to it than simply the minimal food of the last few days or the sleep deprivation or the mead. It felt like everything that must be done was somehow now more possible. The land and the sky seemed more alive, animated and lit up by showers and sunlight and even faith in humanity had somehow been restored thanks to the excellent company. And all these days and decades of cultural clash seemed to be somehow transparent or melting away in the knowledge that we’d made it once again, that it felt good to be here, that suddenly the world appeared to be turning on some kind of better axis.

And that was the point of it all when all the arguments of antiquarians, all the neo-pagan highs and lows of mashedness and the utterly sublime, all the crazy face paint, all the slightly strange and well intentioned throwback cloaks; when all of this had been and gone or had been showed to matter hardly at all in the face of the spirit behind it: that was why we were here, to honour something both ancient and totally immanent, to help create a little more harmony in the world that needs as much love and devotion as we can show in large or small acts or the simple pictures of our observations, creating new memories from the experiences that life is always trying to show us, when we remember to step off the wheel of work or busy mindedness or every groove of our casual ruts and simply see how rich we all are just to be here in the first place.

Monsterdam

2011-06-13T10:30:00.004+01:00

When it was first proposed in 1975, Brazil’s Belo Monte dam was one of several on the table, riding high on a wave of big development sponsored by the military regime that was then in power. Over the ensuing decades of bitter contestation the other dams were dropped but plans for Belo Monte somehow remained; to be, if built, perhaps the third largest in the world. A natural ninety foot drop in the river’s course provides a location that has so far proved all too alluring to big budget engineers. As one of them remarked with an unswerving marriage of predestination and stark utilitarianism: "God only makes a place like Belo Monte once in a while. This place was made for a dam."

The project was given the go ahead by Brazil’s environment agency at the beginning of this month. If building work is carried out successfully it will flood more than 150 square miles of forest, affect supplies of fresh water, displace between 20,000 to 40,000 people and seriously disrupt the lives of those downstream who depend on the river for both fish and transport. It has been estimated that around 100,000 migrants will be attracted to the area by the project, many of whom – judging from the record of previous large infrastructural developments in the area - are likely to stay around, competing for resources with and jeopardizing the health of many of those indigenous peoples who have not been displaced by the flooding itself. It is one of 140 dams in the Amazon region that are currently planned.

In addition, there would be a greatly increased likelihood of diseases affecting those living near the large areas of stagnant water created, as at the Tucurui Reservoir where there was a plague of Mansonia mosquitoes and malaria and where there was a rise in other waterbourne diseases such as river blindness and schistosomiasis. Denser populations in resettlement areas can also lead to new diseases such as intestinal infections and influenza. The Xingu river is also home to around six hundred fish species, many of them not found anywhere else on the planet. Hundreds of species would be at risk of extinction is the project is continued.

The dam is being billed as a ‘clean’ energy alternative to fossil fuels and essential for the continued economic expansion of Brazil. But even here serious questions have been asked: it has been estimated for instance that huge amounts of methane – 21 times more noxious a greenhouse gas than Co2 - will be released on account of the rotting submerged vegetation in the area to be flooded. 112 million metric tons of Carbon dioxide or equivalent gases are likely to be produced in the first ten years of dam’s use. A report by Brazil’s WWF stated than increased energy efficiency could amount to savings equal to 40 Belo Monte dams.

The irony to all this is that, largely due to the methane produced, hydro-power can actually produce as much as 3.5 times more greenhouse gas emissions than would have been produced by using oil. The Brazilian government however state that Belo Monte will save 19 million tons of carbon when compared to a plant using gas to produce the same amount of energy.

At any rate, it cannot be disputed that Brazil is a young country on the up, and growth – in the right hands - can be equated with greater prosperity and growth needs energy as surely as plants needs the sun. Doesn’t it? Were we to lay to one side for a moment the mammoth in the room of carbon emmissions, it might be tempting to portray this story as one of a lesser of two evils, one where the indigenous peoples' plight is bitter and unfortunate but not at the end of the day relevant to the cut and thrust that determines life for modern nations in the modern world. But that of course is a tragic oversimplification - we all of us stand at a turning point in these times we live in and it has never been clearer that it is more urgent than ever before to reconfigure the very foundations on which we look at economic life and at patterns of development. We are hard wired for economic growth, it has become the be-all end-all mantra of our times and so much so we barely seem to notice that if we carry on like this these days will be our last on a temperate, accommodating planet.

Consciousness has always been a funny thing, as the famous story goes of the Indians who watched the shore as Columbus’s ships stole over the horizon. They didn’t see the ships of course, until they’d landed – such things were so removed from their experiences up until that point that they simply didn’t register at first. Today it is imperative we all look at our cultural blind spots as it is these that hold the promise - if understood, properly clocked and somehow countered - of leading us back from the brink of a full throated stampede whereby it makes some kind of sense to forcibly evict tens of thousands of the very people who hold the key to our redemption in their hands and from a habitat whose flora helps to constitute the very air we breath, whose hundreds of unique species form perhaps our greatest treasures.

As Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund put it: "The government has an important choice – to go back to a future of wasteful publicly funded mega-projects and frontier chaos, or ahead, to the future of a sustainable and equitable green economy leader, with rule of law, good governance and a secure natural and investment environment."

The opportunity remains, if only just, for Brazil to show the imagination of demonstrating to the world that a young and rapidly changing country can still carry the hope of a pattern of growth that neither stampedes on the rights of so many of its citizens nor denigrates the rich natural heritage it ought to have a hand in safeguarding. The opportunity remains to break free from policies that encourage the growth of industries like aluminium smelting that dams such as Belo Monte are often principally built to power, just as it does to find a way in which the Kayapo, Juruna, Enawene Nawe, Arara, Bororo, Xavante, Cinta Larga, Terena, Bakairi e Fulni-ô - and all the other ethnicities up and down the Xingu - can help inform the picture of the way ahead, and not be shoved aside by what a few too many still apparently believe; that collosal infrastructure and industry remain the twins great gods ushered in by aspirations - that should be long gone but somehow still persist - of what a better, braver world should look like. If such imagination cannot be found in the boardrooms of Brasilia, should we then bow down and give up dreams of what is green and good and is integral to our very future?

Antônia Melo, the coordinator of a group based in Altamira, a city that will be partly flooded if the dam is built, is clear about the way ahead: "We will not cede an inch. Our indignation and our strength to fight only increases with every mistake and every lie of this government."

* * *

Please consider signing the following petitions to help stop the Belo Monte Dam:

http://www.raoni.fr/signature-petition-1-EN.php

http://amazonwatch.org/take-action/stop-the-belo-monte-monster-dam?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4ded0c7157391700%2C0

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/amazon_under_threat/?r=act

The Life Cairn

2011-05-23T15:12:00.004+01:00

The figures sit blankly like names on a wall, somehow almost abstract to us in our cushioned lives. Cushioned from the elements outside our doors, even as they seem to threaten to go haywire, like they themselves were almost angry or in grief, or sick or slowly dying. It has been estimated that 150 species are being lost to us every single day while life goes on and we commute and push our way through crowds in subways or push our pens or bits of paper round. How do we each of us measure a day? What value do we place upon a single week? And how then as the years fly by do we begin to comprehend the damage we are doing?

Today is the first day in a declared ‘decade of Biodiversity,’ conceived at the Nagoya summit last year as part of an effort to raise awareness of the mass loss of life in the natural world now underway, where die off rates of species are 1,000 higher than natural levels of extinction. It has been said we cannot even start to comprehend these figures, we don’t know how to grieve, the scale is so vast that the easiest thing to do is to not take it in at all and continue helter skelter with the rush of modern life. But still we know that to look away is simply appalling.

As an effort to counteract this trend, to raise some hope of clarified awareness, to help us begin to understand the full blown tragedy of the times we’re living in, a group of people gathered in Sussex yesterday to mark the beginning of the coming decade, to raise an actual beacon of consciousness in the form of a cairn that will stand as testimony to all the lives lost and as a point of potential hope that we can somehow turn around this terrible rate of attrition of our times.

So, people came from all over, walking from their villages, up from the bridge on Lewes High Street, over from the places further east. People travelled from Exmoor and Lancashire as well as from all over Sussex itself, carrying flint and bits of chalk and quartz and even coral, echoed by others in other countries and other places who today were doing the same thing, like the community around the town of La Especia in Ecuador building a cairn in tribute to those species lost from the Ecuadorian Cloudforest.

There was a fierce wind all the way, something that somehow served to remind us of the urgency involved in what’s at stake. But then we were there and sheltered in the lee of Caburn’s ancient hillfort. The ceremony was brief but also moving. Andreas Kornevall from the Earth Restoration Service spoke these words:

“Where were we when the last Pyrenean Female endemic Brown Bear was shot down? Why was her dying place empty with no wreaths, no flowers, no poems, no songs, no church bells? She wanted to protect her young, and live and thrive on this Earth, just like us, now her hibernation caves are hollow and bare.

Where were we when "the Goddess of the River" - the Yangtze dolphin vanished in China, never again to give birth to her young? Only empty radio static was heard; but there was no grief from humanity, no songs which to dedicate, no-one paid tribute - after millions of years of life?

Why?

Where were the great teachers, the spiritual leaders, the writers, the visionaries, the artists? Not even a moment's silence? Why have we not been able to grieve collectively to the ending of their birth?

Has our inner emotional landscape to the natural world frozen to death? Like the cold statistics of science, which explains a great deal, but offers no meaning. Is the scientific statistic language the only language we possess? Today it seems a poor, limited and cold language. We need great poets now more than ever.

We respectfully come to say goodbye and pay tribute to the Pyrenean Brown Bear in France, the Dolphin in China and all the species driven to extinction at human hands.

We come to build the Life Cairn to speak a poetic, soulful language in remembrance to our other selves - our family which yesterday shared this planet with us.

We face the ending of their birth. It will be a place of sadness, but also joy as we are finally building a Life Cairn - the first memorial for all the extinct species on the planet.

All life to carry one life, one life to carry all life.”

We do need poets, and songwriters, and speakers and writers and those called to activism and all of us with one fervent wish; that as humanity en masse we all wake up to what is happening in this world, that we learn to see again the effect of our every action large and small, and that we can cultivate the sense that there is still so much we can do as individuals and communities that can help ameliorate the worst of what is happening and steer our culture back towards something that better resembles something more like harmony.

On the hilltop yesterday it felt like a beginning, a clarion call to wake up, a hope of what can happen when we come together and renew our intent. The first point perhaps is to try and begin to comprehend the scale of what amounts to a holocaust of our own making of the natural world. Only then can we hope to understand the urgency that must inform our actions, only then can we hope to act with the critical mass that we need to find our way back to where we once were; with one foot at least in the world of what is wild and that which truly matters in this life. If we can find a greater perspective which states there is no separation ever from us and the world in which we live, however much we’ve turned our faces away, if we can root the sense of that in our day to day decisions and weight of every large and seemingly small action then there may well still be solid grounds for hope.

A stated aim of the coming decade of Biodiversity is that schoolchildren everywhere will have been made aware of the issues by 2020. But we need much more than that – ten years off is far too far away. We need to speak up and act now, and with everything we possess. If enough of us will it and with sufficient force of feeling - this could be the beginning of, or re-dedication towards, a response that might be in some way worthy of the monumental challenge we are faced with.

Land Matters

2011-03-15T10:31:00.000Z

Whatever you think about flying, picture yourself for just a minute as one of the masses on a flight towards Heathrow from Dublin or Cork. The destinations and points of departure are arbitrary, as is the thought of the flight, other than the fact that it would allow you to look down on the countless sea of green of Ireland and Wales and the English West while further east vast swathes of urbanized acres stretch out almost sentient paws towards what went before. It might give you some sense, a vague and distant one, a sense that was cushioned and somehow unreal but nonetheless still lent you some greater perspective of how we sit now in these few raw days of sunlit early spring.

As flowers come up there is a mounting sense of disbelief or just foreboding as the effects of looming cuts and those of a so far faltering economy come a little closer every day. But there is consolation still to be had in the sun, the green fields are lit up and those who work upon the land may count themselves as blessed. The paths that now may not be so well maintained still beckon, the hills still stand; memorials to everything that can endure, speak of bedrock despite a world that sometimes seems precarious.

Life goes on and here, for now, that means the same old story of concrete and of tarmac in a counterpoint to everything that has been handed down; the old sad shires and network of a hundred thousands fields and woods; the timeless things, the things that once perhaps we thought would last forever. These two worlds seem set against each other; the former logical if not quite ruthless, conforming to a rational that people must be housed, those houses must have power and an ever growing infrastructure needs to keep the whole thing somehow ticking over. In opposition then: the greenery, the things we all still cherish seem both fundamental and almost anachronistic, a never never world that cannot last against the march of everything that's modern.

This narrative is ridiculous of course, however much traction it has; we depend upon all that is green for our future, as surely as we all need heat and shelter and have every right to expect the two with a reasonable degree of comfort. But their opposition, the dichotomy that says it must be one above the other is at best born of a failure of imagination. The voices that suggest it can be another way seem relatively muted; we largely do not hear the ideas of low impact life, of living with as light a footprint as possible, in homes other than those formed by four brick walls. Those who may aspire to this find themselves set against a planning infrastructure geared towards the more conventional, that does not distinguish between the poles that separate these two contrasting forms of housing.

It almost seems a form of institutionalized insanity; that those who seek to pioneer a way of life that surely offers us so much can be kept back at every turn. But perhaps the times are shifting after all. Last summer, the Landmatters permaculture cooperative in Devon were successful in their bid for the extended planning permission that will allow their enterprise to carry on. A small ecovillage of perhaps half a dozen benders, yurts and the occasional barn, they run dozens of courses every year, manage woodland, rear livestock as well as provide a model of life and of another kind of agriculture. The cooperative has been accepted as part of the LAND project; a network of demonstration permaculture sites set up by the Permaculture Association of Britain. The place represents a microcosm of a pattern of living that could be rolled out on a much grander scale, or which could perhaps be simply replicated in many more places throughout the country – it offers a very different vision of the future than the shards of glass and steel going up in central London.

Landmatter’s success with their planning permission could not be more timely, with central government now looking at a new national planning framework. Perhaps this could be the beginning of a process that will allow greater leeway for those who choose to live as simply as they can, in the knowledge that this is far from the restriction it may sound like – it represents a liberation from the myriad distractions we associate with what we call modern life, it offers a much greater connection to the outer world and so with life itself where it does not come transmitted through the prism of a sometimes out-of-kilter media. Those who have tasted it know how rich such a lifestyle can be – so that the environmental benefits come almost as an aside, or are so deeply embedded in the essence of the whole experience that separating motivation and the result becomes an almost artificial exercise.

The dynamic that we need to decouple ourselves from – as individuals as well as a society - can never be an either or; four brick walls cannot represent an outright denial of everything with value, just as life in a yurt will always be a choice and never anything more mandatory. But those who choose to live outside the literal box and who seek to keep to a minimum their dependence on the host of related consumer services that often accompany more mainstream lifestyles have much to teach us all. They can serve to set the way ahead, can remind us all what life can look like, can help us navigate towards somekind of tenable and even decent future.

A greater shift to simpler living gives us as a culture other options, makes our collective position in an ever changing world all the more robust. Far from representing any kind of step back, low impact living at its best is a form of refinement that frees up both time and energy. It’s surely time we began in greater numbers to take on board the lessons it provides.

there is no 'away' in 'throwaway'

2011-01-24T20:52:00.001Z

You can see it towering up like a kind of colossal ark against the backdrop of the sea. Cranes stoop around it like some kind of gang of gangling ministers. It is already now a living symbol of failure of vision, or something more complicit. Soon a fleet of lorries will transport daily more than 500 tonnes of waste to be burnt up in Newhaven's new incinerator. The ash produced and the toxins it contains - whether caught in the filters or the bottom ash that constitutes around a third of that which has just been burnt - is to be deposited in 'land raise' sites around the county.

Here, that means that out on the flat land that runs down to the Pevensey levels, previously tranquil country lanes will be full of dumper trucks and the ash - rich among other things in heavy metals - will sit, semi airbourne, mountains in the making as a toxic realisation of what miopic local government can look like. The truly disturbing thing is that they want to use the stuff as a construction material, thereby increasing the danger of the stuff seaping into groundwater, never mind the health effect for anybody living and working in the buildings they intend to build with it.

Officials insist the risk to health is minimal, that incineration is a valuable source of power as well as a solution to the problem of our running out of landfill sites. And there is no doubt that the problem of the amount of waste produced in the UK is huge – some 434 million tonnes every year – enough to fill the Albert Hall every two hours. Some 30 million of these tonnes are produced by domestic rubbish. But there have been great changes, not least an increase in recycling from 4% to 40% since 2000, with a target of 50% by 2020.

The tragedy of the proposed move towards more incineration is that such changes are halted if not put into reverse. In fact local authorites who've forked out for incinerators will be induced financially to source waste from outside their area, particularly if the incinerators are linked to providing a set amount of power. This creates the use of more trucks on the road and erodes the growing aspiration that we should be getting away from waste per se, should be encouraging more compostable products, better collection of compost itself and greater use of anaerobic digestion. Incinerators lock us in to the mentality whereby we do not think of what we throw away. The binmen do their rounds and we are all conditioned to forget.

In her recent book 'The Secret Life of Stuff' - Julie Hill spells out the nature of the problems of our relationship to the stuff we consume and throw out. A large part of what we're faced with is the effect of the 'linear economy' whereby we make stuff, use it, then throw it away - reintegrating any of it back into the system still takes place much less frequently. Just look at aluminium - ubiquitous because it's so useful; light, flexible, even barely toxic when used as packaging, it is smelted in inferno-like conditions whereby a single plant can use as much electricity as a city of a million people. Transported huge distances during its manufacture we use 900,000 tonnes of the stuff in the UK every year. While around half of that used in packaging is recycled every year, that still leaves a vast amount going to waste.

Or take a look at the half a million tonnes of clothes and textiles buried in landfill each year, along with an extra half a million tonnes of carpet, 8,000 tonnes of which are laid for events lasting only hours or days. Changing our clothes and furnishings regularly irrespective of whether they still have life in them has become symptomatic of modern life - once people made patchwork quilts and rag rugs, repaired things, bought them in the expectation they would last. A hundred years ago, household rubbish mainly consisted of ash and cinders and maybe food waste if there wasn't a dog or pig around, back in a prewar world before consumption gathered pace and where salvage was still part of the scenery.

We need to start a greater shift back to such sensibilities along with working towards solutions such as designing products for durability and for recovery of their constituent materials along with returning nutrients from food and human waste to the soil. Reforming how we reduce waste and set about its management is undoubtably a long hard grind and incinerators hold out the promise of a seemingly quick fix. The environmental cost of the production of the waste that they burn, to say nothing of putting elements of it back into the atmosphere shines an uncomfortable light on such a promise, or policies of here-and-now convenience.

There are now 81 incinerators planned around the country. It has been calculated they produce twice as much CO2 as fossil fuelled power stations, making the plan for more incinerators look doubly perverse. Meanwhile those living under the prevailing wind will have to deal with a legacy of increased likelihood of cancers. The extent to which dioxins produced represent a significant risk is still controversial, though their output during the start up and shutting down of the furnace has not been properly monitored in the UK. Meanwhile the filters do not catch nano particles which can infiltrate the lining of the lung and cause internal inflamation, damaging organs and even unborn children.

At Newhaven now and anywhere downwind we have to live with a leviathon that may well set the county back by decades. The building looms as a testament of how not to do things, of what can happen when councils bite the bullet of an out-of-sight-and-mind mentality that sums our modern problem of waste production itself. The facts that the way in which the councils involved have acted here has been described by the local MP, Norman Baker, as 'amateurish and slipshod', that the very legality of the deal with the construction firm has been called into question are somehow depressingly unsuprising. If anything can be drawn from such a sorry story, it should be that many other places in the country still have a choice about whether to meet the future of waste management with an attitude fit for this century, not some all too easy, corporately financed non-solution that creates more problems than it claims to bring an answer to.

"Our Richest and Most Fragile Habitat"

2011-01-17T23:55:00.000Z

At first there was the by now usual sense of stunned disbelief – the government, not content with dispatching any quango with an even vague goal of serving the greater public good or attempting to provide some kind environmental balance from on high was coming for the Forestry Commission. But beyond the justified chorus of concern, the petition that has already gathered 150,000 signatories, the score of campaign groups that has sprung up, is the idea really as bad as it sounds?

After all, The Forestry Commission itself was set up after the First World War when the importance of a domestic supply of timber had been made acutely relevant by the interfering effect of German u-boats on our previous habit of stripping other countries of their wildwood. In a short space of time, vast tracts of upland hillsides, moorlands and heaths had been planted up.

The effect on these habitats in our backyards was obviously less than brilliant but at least we weren’t denuding the pristine forests from so much of the rest of the empire. And here, even at this first inception of the Commission, there lies the rub of how we provide for our appetite of timber without undue damage to the natural environment. Is it so bad if so much of the Commission land has now come up for sale? Weren’t these trees planted to be harvested at some stage down the line? With our current deficit isn’t now as good a time as any to call in our debts? We might even stand to reclaim some of those moors and heaths and barren but beautiful hillsides that were lost beneath the blanket of dark spruce.

One very large problem with this is that large areas of ancient woodland have been cut down and grubbed up and planted with conifers this century, seen as they were after the collapse of their age old management pattern as somehow extraneous, unproductive patches to be tidied up. About half of our ancient woodland has been lost since the end of the Second World War and replanting with conifers accounts for by far the largest share of this. At least, such a proportion would have been lost if these woodlands had not proved so unexpectedly durable – they can revive after a considerable time with the right conditions and even decades of the heavy shade of conifers have not removed them entirely.

Infact, since the 80’s there has been a growing recognition of the need to thin out conifers were they have been planted over ancient woodland and revive the latter in all its beautiful and species enriched glory. Which is exactly what stands to make the proposed sell off so tragic – the Commission was planning to pursue such restoration on a massive scale. A vast amount of recoverable ancient woodland stands at risk of being lost, forever.

So even if the concept of selling off an asset once held firmly for the public does not raise hackles in and of itself, even if the thought of tracts of forest losing the excellent level of upkeep of paths and rides that the Commission currently provides does not sit uncomfortably then perhaps the proposed pawning of this most precious asset – the 20,000 hectares of woodland as close to wildwood as anything we are ever likely to possess might just wake us up to what we stand to lose in this proposed sell off.

The sorry star upon a proposal which has long since shed its needles and should be removed from both houses with all speed is that the mechanism drafted to facilitate the sell off is not even constitutional. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re glibly told that this is an opportunity for community groups to acquire their local woodland – even if such groups gather the money, where exactly do their members hope to find the time to manage forests with any thing like the level of dedication the Commission currently provides?

There will always be a need for sustainable forestry. But brokerages as hasty as this one appears to be, running the risk of selling off to firms who only have profits in mind and little or no sense of what husbandry can look like don’t do the country any favours by any yardstick. The Commission maintains 100% of its woodland to Forestry Stewardship standard – there will be no such requirement for future owners. To make a former point again, even the economics is dubious; the FC making sizeable returns on their estates to the point where the body costs the public only 30 pence per taxpayer per year. But this government has no sense of value, of what a thing is worth, of what generations past have held dear and fought for. They paint themselves as bitter medicine, as the cruel but kindly short sharp shock. Really though they are just libertarians, about as respecting of institutions as their far left mirror images. Whether semi-crazed by ideology, or simply guilty of an amauterish gambling in the face of the crisis we face, they seem set to discover the limits of the population’s tolerance.

Cruel and False Economies

2011-01-10T15:00:00.000Z

Last year, October’s spending review ushered in a sense of disbelief akin to a thing like freefall: Doomsday had apparently come early for so many in the public sector, for so many of the inner city poor. If there had been any question about it before, now it was only too clear. The crunch had bitten deep, the shit had hit the fan and the government were, maybe if only for the space of a few days, seemingly made only too credible to many by the strength of something like conviction, something that passed for it, something sufficient to make people mistake it for genuine force of feeling. Though to their way of thinking, Cameron and IDS probably still believe that they are right, as for them to be right equates with a dismantling of the state, where the deficit may be unfortunate but dovetails neatly with their ideology. The true blue values of many Tories are both masked and miles away from endless touchy feely PR wooing of the swinging votes.

Nine months on from the election, the ground has been well primed with months of saturation in the press of stories of benefits scroungers, a national vilification that few have seen fit to deny. The climate is set and the sound of belts being tightened en masse hardens feelings to those who may be neither strong nor productive, who simply do not have a bus or bike to get on, who are set to be brushed beneath a rug of touted necessity, of a new and harsher colder world.

A kind of glee in many quarters sets the picture firmer down a deeply unsettling road. There was a sense of vindication which Cameron did not restrain from whipping up. “Think of how many nurses that money could employ,” he spouted, clear enough that you could almost hear the spittle on the mic as he talked about benefit cuts. “Think how many schools and hospitals it could help to keep running.” It was a denouncement so enthusiastic, that pandered so unapologetically to the most predictable and emotive lines of reasoning it sent a bolt of warning down my spine.

So London held its breath and even months on from the touted claims of “sociological cleansing”, the sense of shock, of something bitter sinking in has not entirely gone, even as the students vented the rage of a nation, even as that shock has been transformed to a kind of fire of the spirit and vindication that this cannot be allowed. Perhaps it is partly a reflection of this change of public mood that the proposed housing benefit cap has been postponed till this time next year. What’s clear is that if these measures are not moderated or overturned there will be very real misery. There will be greater homelessness. There is already stress in countless thousands of houses and on the estates.

What was shocking in reading some of the early comments on the web, the product of the vanguard of the loyal libertarians perhaps, or an indication of the power of Cameron’s crude popularism, was the drawing up of a thousand proverbial bridges. The poor are undeserving after all. Let single mothers be moved into bunkhouses. Let immigrants now find their own way home. This stunned and all too nearly broken Isle, this shocked and awed and deferential country; is this really now how it will stand; a shrugging of our shoulders and wallowing, complicit, in a lie that says it cannot be another way, that only the strong can survive, that only the virtuous prosper, that it is not for a government to be compassionate and the people all must fill the breach because the state has no greater role than sweeping the board clean to let the markets do how they see fit.

Such rushed and savage cuts in many quarters stand to only bring out cruel and false economies, the bills from block-booked B and B’s for the displaced being just one. Even the vaunted ideals of a move away from New Labour’s totalitarian streak are looking little more like cynical window dressing for what was an almost mandatory piece of mendacity for the elections.

It's worth remembering that the current deficit, while it has risen sharply since 2008 is still just over half of what we faced after World War Two when it is placed in line with GDP. Admittedly that's an extreme example; we had just come through a full scale global war, the years following 1945 brought with them a sharp decline in what we owed, our credit as a nation was still good and the role of a still bouyant US was no small factor. But it helps to show there are good grounds for reducing the deficit more gradually, if such a possibility can only be articulated to greater effect. But whatever the neccessity, however undeniable the crisis, these cuts are being ushered in at their present speed and on their current scale because of Cameron's view of what the government should look like, irrespective of what we stand to lose as a nation. And the cuts' nature all too often seems to fly in the face of good sense, as the changes to the way tax is to be collected exemplifies.

Meanwhile, the poor have simply to pull up their own breeches and get on with it. It is will and work that make a person rich in his society, not chances dealt at birth or through health or education. The fact that there are now 2.5 million unemployed and only 500,000 jobs is an inconvenience that those in his circles will not have to suffer. It amounts to more than minimal government; it is effectively Social Darwinism, a return to the worst facets of nineteenth century attitudes to society at large. Factor in that, whteher through design or accident, cities like Liverpool will be disproportionately hit and the whole thing takes on the pallor of a monumental sick joke. Except there is no joke, no waking up from the nightmare, no sudden admission from Downing Street that this has all been some mistake or monumental wind up from the start.

Across the South, in many coastal towns there looks set to be new ghettos for the poor; Hastings, in North Kent, in all the conurbations stretched out as a kind of commuter country nineteen thirties afterthought along the Sussex coast. If the caps continue, in fifteen years vast tracts of the South East will be made unaffordable to an equally vast tract of people, an ensuing migration to the far more jobless North only exacerbating the situation.

This could be avoidable if people are willing to conceive we have a choice and that it does not include another four and a half years of a coalition with such a shaky mandate from the start. The crisis is real, but this kind of short, sharp shock is exactly what neoliberals espouse as the best way to respond to it. The tragedy is that this may well lock the UK into a spiral of decline from which only the very richest stand to benefit. Economically, even when dealing with a deficit in a recession, these cuts represent an absence of clear thought.

Meanwhile everything that generations passed have fought for in the name of equality and freedom is being swept aside. The result may be a breeding ground for the kind of conditions that brought about an interwar interim of massive turbulence, which eventually necessitated the creation of a fully fledged welfare state as a way of ensuring a fairer society and more stable political climate. As Karl Mannheim wrote in 1943:

"All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order."

However we choose to do so (and this is worth a read for anyone taking to the streets), it is imperative that more and more of us continue to articulate our discontent. What stands in the balance is not just our own fate over the following months and years or the fate of generations down the line; it is an honouring of a tradition that goes back to at least the mid nineteenth century. It is an honouring of those who sought to reform a Poor Law that condemned the unemployed in a world of finite opportunities to brutal and degrading conditions in the workhouses. It is an honouring of those who fought for the notion that the poor have a right as a matter of course to a greater share of society’s wealth and who, while a culture of hard work should always be maintained, should not be subjected to humiliating means testing. It is an honouring of those who believed that the state had a greater role than fiscal maintenance or passing laws; that it could be an instrument in the building of a fairer and more equalitarian world.

Men and women have suffered and died for such dreams. Don’t let us fail to serve their memory because we have forgotten as a nation that such things were hard won, that we have been handed down unparalleled opportunities, damaged a little on the way perhaps by a thirty-year-long slumber Thatcher set the way for. But we must still be willing to believe that we have it in our hands to shape the kind of world we would see fit, as surely as a generation did sixty five years ago, blinking from the rubble of a global total war, sure of only one thing in a time of unprecedented uncertainty; that they had fought for a better world and would not see the chance for its creation snatched away by the duplicity of a party of privilege with no right to sell this country down the river. It was Ghandi of course who said that each generation must re-enact the struggle for its rights, or lose them. Be under no illusions; that time has come again, there is as much at stake today as there ever was in 1945.

Toppling King Coal

2010-12-21T21:43:00.002Z

The news pops up unmissable, if it weren’t for every other scrap of news also popping at the same time, along with reports of Ann Widdecombe being transported by a showbiz wire above the heads of an incredulous or simple nervous audience on the now worryingly ubiquitous Strictly. So, this particular bit of news says ‘anger was justified’; and this from the former NASA scientist talking about the invasion last year of a coal powered power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar near Nottingham by a troupe of activists aiming to shut it down for a week.

The bravery of those involved, risking incarceration besides vilification is as obvious as their being treated with the full heavy handedness of the law is predictable. The action is also a clear case in point of a host of wider issues; the right to protest, how this may somehow impinge on wider rights if it means it interfers with the public’s ability to watch Ann Widdecombe - and many more besides - sailing literally or metaphorically with apparent tranquility above the host of disbelieving heads. These millions of mesmerized, vaguely despairing or just bored - a number I could be in on another night - caught in the glare of a mass media that has become both slicker and strangely more popular as it gets ever more debased, suggest we will not think again about our actions even as the savage weather of a dawning century paws with renewed ferocity at the door of our collective consciousness.

And that of course is why those protests took place, why one hundred and fourteen people felt inclined to brave the vagaries of trespass and the response that was bound to come with it. We’re all of us only too aware of the wolf down the road, of the carbon ratcheting up as we hurtle down the motorway of ambivalence towards a fate we all try not to think about. Really, it is not indifference but a kind of collective terror at the situation that we’re in that makes the retreat to the semi fantasy of Saturday night TV seem all the more appealing.

So many now will not join up the dots. The more pronounced the arguments become, the greater the need to take stock of our situation then the greater the temptation not to engage, to turn the other cheek, to ignore the growing feeling that one day soon we will not be able to ignore the rising tides or signs of climatic instability. It is here now, with us, this is the perfect storm, Northern Europe freezes while in Canada and elsewhere the temperature is well above the norm.

But somehow, for the most part, it does not seem so bad. So long as we are warm and have enough to eat we discover our capacity to be content. Sitting virtually incarcerated in cars on the immobilised motorways a thousand motorists turn up the radio and keep their fingers crossed. The more fortunate of us curl up in our living rooms as ice locks us all in and scour our DVD’s and anything else that will help to pass the time and really all of this is only natural; to make the best of any situation. But we seem at times strangely reluctant to not let ourselves really appreciate the nature of our situation, we do not feel inclined to count the cruel tally of the coal as the carbon stacks up from the stacks that churn it out. And partly this is understandable as to do so is to walk along the edge of a kind of precipice looking out over our future, one that does not reassure, an apparently perilous path that could lead us all too easily down a scree or more sudden slope towards despair.

The actions of those at Nottingham in 2009 were of those who chose not to look away, who sought to raise awareness that here, in Britain in the twentyfirst century we are rolling on quite happily with the burning of a fuel that is the major cause, besides the oil we use in cars, of anthropocentric driven climate change. Whether we continue to use coal in anything like historic quantities sets up the expectancy or otherwise for any other country in the world to follow in our wake, or set off on another, far more hopeful path.

Of course, it is not enough to beat our chests and sing out; “let there be no more burning of coal.” We have to take stock of the truly huge scale of the problem, of how much we are reliant of this source of fuel, of how comparably unreliable alternatives sources of energy can be when providing the necessary base load capacity to enable sixty one million viewers to turn on their kettles in the breaks between Ann’s airbourne debuts on the box. The answers are there but they require both political will and appropriate investment.

In the recent court case, it was argued that seeking to engage the public by encouraging the use of less power on certain days would have been a more constructive response. But, as James Hansen argued, we need to leave the stuff in the ground, not merely moderate our use of it. In that sense taking on a government policy where coal is all but mandatory looks alot more credulous.

Speaking on a debate on Radio Four recently, George Monbiot defined a crucial element of justification of any protest as one of accountability, of surrendering yourself to the full force of the law if you are to break it, in the belief that your actions will be tried in a court, that the rightness of your cause will meet the rigors of the legal system and have the chance to be vindicated in the process. As I understand it, the protestors at Ratcliffe were planning to lock on en masse; in this, they had made the decision to have their beliefs put to just such a test and in the process to present themselves as accountable for their deeds.

However much such protests may make us uncomfortable, they remain, at their best, a simple articulation of an article of a clarified awareness. Whether or not shutting down power stations is the best way to go about it, even an action like this can serve to remind us that things are wrong, that we cannot afford to sit by in denial or complacency while we betray the future through the failure to acknowledge that there must be change, that whatever the complexity, whatever psychological mires we may face, we are at a turning point and must look for and continue to express our expectations that we can moderate our impact on this earth, that we remain - to a possibly still crucial degree - the masters of our destiny if we can only see it.

wilderness, nature and kin

2010-09-21T22:24:00.006+01:00

Reading Paul Kingsnorth’s recent piece in Open Democracy, ‘Confessions of a recovering environmentalist’ stirred up a mix of emotions. In it, he charts his beginnings as an ‘ecocentrist’ – the long enforced marches as a teenager with his father, a kind of half entranced epithany on St Catherine’s Hill among the Dongas, coming back to England after months in tropical forest – the sense of introspection in the people here, the sense of something missing, the barrage of the ads we are conditioned to ignore. He speaks of his disillusionment with environmentalism since; the sense of carbon targets taking over at all costs, the shift towards inclusion of a Left he largely sees as dubious, the creeping realization that what was once about protecting the natural world has become co-opted to mean a continuation of the human project, albeit in a friendlier, more sustainable packaging, whatever the cost of life outside the empire of homo sapiens sapiens that we are all a part of.

Above all, he communicates the sense that we have lost our way, that environmentalism has become mainstream at the cost of its soul. He speaks for the wilds, for the unadultered mountains, for a sense of kindred feeling reading Wordsworth when he wrote that stones have souls. He puts himself apart, decries the infiltration of a bag of ‘washed out Trots’ and anti-capitalists, pronounces a bemusement or simple distrust of progressives. For him it’s all about the land, our love of it and how we do or don’t fit in with something much bigger than us, that does not revolve around us, that does not put mankind firmly at the centre of a wheel where we are God and nature is ours to do with as we please and as long as we safeguard the means of doing so, as long as we have enough to feed an ever growing economy, all will be well, even if we find ourselves at the pristine centre of a wasted, battered land.

Like him I was lucky or young or impulsive enough to get drawn into the protests of the nineties and the intensity of that experience has stayed with me; the sense of place, the love of it, the dedication to the natural world. Like him I have been somewhat suspicious of certain aspects of the Left – the legions of The Socialist Workers’ Party looming like an ever constant threat that would swallow up what seemed at times a relatively tiny band of semi-feral, half anarchic lovers of what is wild and is green, engulfing us in a fashion reminiscent of something from the Spanish Civil War. And watching from the sidelines the rise in certain quarters of dogma winning out, the heady mantras that pronounced we all should ‘smash the system’ or the City, I can see what he means when he speaks of the ‘rattling sabers and stomping boots’ of a fifth column. Alot of people, myself included, left the movement then and it took years for it to reform itself, to build itself up again into something inclusive; still radical, but sane, appreciating the necessary balance that protest must hold.

Back in the timeless months among the trees, I was angry at our society, I was sickened at a mentality that was so insulated from the world that it could justify tearing great scars in the lines of the hills. The earth seemed to sing like a sickening lover, birds articulated her cries of distress; civilization was slowly killing her and every car and every hour we burned electricity was bringing her closer to the time she would not recover. It was as immediate and intense as that. Now the same story is played out for all of us, albeit on an apparently more intellectual level. There are reports. We are informed. We can barely even think how we will feel should we cross the tipping points, as we are on course to do without sufficient shift.

I had to be almost literally dragged from that world - a life out of doors where the golden leaves of oak shone with such ferocity it was almost more than being alive, it was like emersion in the wind and the sky, it was everything, defined everything, was life itself and I was happy in the hills and knew that leaving this would claim a part of me. There are things I don’t miss; scabies, rats, half mad compatriots who always burned wood faster than I could gather it in a curious dynamic echoing how people tend to use more energy the cheaper it is priced. But the rewards were huge, could take some time at first to tap into but which brought me to a state of such connection that stepping back from it seemed inconceivable, back then.

I’ve been in houses ever since and though I’ve generally been lucky, though I am grateful for water from a tap and every other amenity, there is at times a growing hunger, a growing sense of isolation from the natural world. Walks are cherished but can never compare to the fire in the soul of living simply and in touch for every waking moment. But however much I pine for the outdoors, I can see that the balance rests - for most of us, most of the time and certainly for the foreseeable future - somewhere between the beautiful if frugal life in the woods and the kind of lifestyles most of us now lead.

Kingsnorth talks of all of this and his words and passion are a jolt. But for all of this, despite his distinction between our ‘human project’ versus an increasingly beleagured natural world, I do not see our situation as one that should be summarised with such a stark polarity. The story of our country, since way before the Romans, since the first time we ploughed the soil has been that of a careful husbandry. Not exclusively, as the denuded soils of many heaths still tell and there's no doubt that our Island even several hundred years ago stood in utter poverty in terms of the wildlife it supported when compared to the days of the distant wildwood. But despite this we have been handed a landscape that has evolved over thousands of years and somehow in it, at its best, it still finds a place for our wild creatures, it carries something of the spirit of what stood here long ago.

Something similar persists for many places all over the world, however many light years their habitats may be from what remains on these so heavily used shores. Many indigenous people point out that the notion of wilderness itself is often a kind of misconception and lets developers wade in and claim a place as virgin territory when in fact it is part of a reciprocal bond with those who have lived on it and cared for it with such a graceful touch that their imprints are almost invisible to us but which have been developed over a vast acreage of time. As Darrell Posey of Oxford University writes in the book 'Paradigm Wars':

"One hundred thousand years before the term sustainable development was coined, aboriginal peoples were trading seeds, dividing tubers and propagating domesticated and non-domesticated plant species. For millenia, human beings have molded environments through conscious and unconscious activities to create "sacred sites" - what anthropologists call "anthropocentric" or "cultural landscapes." These "sacred sites" or "cultural landscapes" express a merger between Nature and culture so complete it is impossible to separate the two."

Such perspectives do not imply that true wilderness does not exist - but they presents a counter argument to a simplistic either-or than runs the risk of touting mankind as little more than some kind of plague, even if our modern human footprint and the onslaught on the natural world it represents may well look very much like one. But in our original essence, in the sense of who we are meant to be and how we are meant to behave, our place in the world can perhaps best be summed up by Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation when he said "all living beings are kin." In this sense nature, plants and animals - even in the very wilds - are neither 'out there' or somehow otherly; they are part of an extended family that includes even us.

So back here part and parcel of the modern world, I often find myself still thinking about how life was once - and could perhaps still be. Part of me longs to see bender camps across the land, even though I know that, at the moment, this is about as likely as our developing flying towns. But even with a massive will to live like this, planning permission is notoriously skewed against low impact development, even if you have the money for the land. In England now vast cities sit and we cannot simply walk away and leave them overnight, even if we wanted to. But for me that style of living – few possessions, a small hut, a single burner and a bed, gas lamps and the smell of the soil and enough of the sky in the day to lift your soul – it informs my sensibilities, it reminds me in a sense of a kind of idealized state that shapes every decision I make on a day to day basis, it hammers home the impact we all have even when the complex systems that govern our lives make that impact all but invisible.

I believe our society would be a healthier one if more of us had the chance to live like this – for a week or month or a year, an alternative to charging round the planet at every opportunity, a chance to know what it means to sit by a fire on a daily basis, to be dependent on it, to let it fill the essence of your bones. To step off the treadmill briefly, to simply stop and watch the stars and then take this feeling back into the kind of lives we are most of us induced to live, for the foreseeable future at least. If such an opportunity was more widely given, if it did not require a ticket to Thailand to experience it, it could massively help us determine a better way ahead.

But also, over the years, I’ve begun to hold much more dearly the things we have in this bewildering, beautiful mess of human affairs. I’ve come to see more clearly just how precious every life truly is and have become more accepting that life itself is far from perfect, is often a series of compromises in which the value that we glean is often largely determined by the stance we choose to take towards the cards that have been dealt us. That does not for a moment put our civilization on an unassailable pedestal, it does not make our lives in the West any more precious than those in other countries even though others often pay the price for our luxuries – as the terrible human cost of oil companies’ activities in the Amazon and the Niger Delta only reinforces.

Nor does it mean we are somehow above the natural world, or separate from it. We live in deeply imbalanced times, something borne out in our dominant politics as much as our impact on the biosphere but even here, as time goes on, I find myself having more and more time for political philosophies that offer a solution to this state of affairs in terms of how we govern ourselves. That does not negate the fact that direct action and other forms of protest will always have their place, will infact in all probability remain a very neccessary part of the political spectrum. But they can never be in any sense a kind of final answer, even if the need for them is huge, even though it looks like there will never be a shortage of things to fight against and places to defend, even though the level of grassroots organisation that they represent can inform those higher up, can remind us all of just what liberty can look like.

We cannot define our lives and that of nature as distinct, or suggest our interests are mutually exclusive – to do so would reinforce a notion of separation that is a large part of the problem. Admittedly we have a long, long way to go in finding our way back from the sometimes glorious if deeply flawed dystopia that we have engineered. But remembering how things once were - and are for many round the world - can wake us up to what our lives could look like in a better balanced world. It can help inform us now in determining a future in which the kind of harmony we need stands any chance of being realised again.

on not going nuclear

2010-08-31T22:51:00.002+01:00

It is the very bitter pill, the controversial fix, the thing that stirs involuntary reflexes of alarm. The choice of increasing our use of it is apparently borne of a kind of resigned pragmatism, recognising it as an important part of the solution in a less than pefect world. Our government, despite earlier signs to the contrary, have given the industry a thumbs up and now are poised to embrace it more formally, with as many as ten new reactors in the pipeline. We need it, we are told. As much of it as possible, and fast. The case, we are assured, is obvious; renewables are considered patchy when compared to the comparably vast amounts of energy currently produced by the fossil fuels that we must surely start to put behind us. Expansion of nuclear power is seen by many as the only realistic option left to us if we're to see a future both free from climate chaos and in which we can still function as a modern society, ie a world in which we aren't subjected to power cuts that will send us back to level of squalor comparable with the Middle Ages, or at least 1974.

There are no shortage of facts being banded around in what has become a war for public sympathy; renewables have effectively been competing with nuclear for funding for some years. It's true that the former, with previous levels of investment, currently constitute an incredibly modest proportion of the power currently supplied by coal. In March this year a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering suggested that massive investment in nuclear as well as renewables and carbon capture and storage was necessary if we are to both meet our carbon targets and make up the ensuing energy shortfall. They tout the need for as many as forty new nuclear or CCS power stations in the country. This seems a sober appraisal of the potential – and limits – of renewables. But it stands at loggerheads with subsequent and comprehensive evalutaions from the Centre for Alternative Technology and a report sponsored by UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Scottish government, and a number of large companies. Charged with looking at the potential for the UK of offshore wind, the report concluded that this resource represents the opportunity for us to become a net exporter of energy.

Critics of nuclear point out that it won't affect our CO2 emissions rapidly enough. The power stations carry too much risk of accident, attack or simply criminal indifference. We still don't know what to do with the waste and the cost of handling it, and the costs of decommissioning old plants is astronomic. Take the underground waste storage facility in Yucca mountain, Nevada for example; down a tunnel eight kilometres long, designed to comply with a host of regulations, it is arguably as close as anywhere will get to get to the kind of place required for the long term storage of the waste. But when the sheer enormity of the time scale required for the waste to become stable is factored in – hundreds of thousands of years – the chance of a leak created by geological activity, or simple human buffoonery makes the enterprise look like something of a hugely high-stakes gamble. And at Yucca there was shown to be a clear risk of permeating water contaminating the local area, which has effectively put on hold a project that has already swallowed hundreds of millions of dollars. Then there is the issue that, like transport networks and the banks, nuclear power projects are simply too big to fail – whether or not taxpayers are expected to front the subsidies, the governmental bail outs if things go wrong are almost impossible to avoid.

The long-neglected potential of thorium reactors seems to hold a really interesting potential here, in that it offers a means of disposing of uranium from used warheads, is relatively danger free compared to its more unstable and widely used cousin, (even though claims that it is impossible to use the stuff in weaponry after domestic energy use seem to be not entirely accurate) and is far more abundant globally. But the costs and speed of building the new (and much smaller) models of reactors that it would be ideally suited to mean that some kind of uranium/thorium hybrid reactors look depressingly more likely, negating to a great extent the safety and waste related advantages it holds. And, even with thorium forming the vast majority of fuel used, there will still be waste, though it would remain dangerous for hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that exposing only a few dozen generations to hideous risks seems like a suddenly rosy option gives some indication of how deeply out of balance the very essence of nuclear is, whatever form the fuel.

Nuclear power as it stands remains a kind of poisoned chalice, a throwback to the bright dreams of another era where electricity was cheap by any standard, a kind of wonder stuff that echoed aspirations of a cleaner, more civilised world. Like much of such notions we have inherited from our parent's generation, the cracks have been showing for some time now and we are approaching the threshold where things could be different or where – if we let ourselves be taken in - a stale and hazardous continuation of a long outdated, terrifying model stands set to be continued down the years. Nuclear is symptomatic of the worst that modernity has to offer us. It is at once anaesthetised and semi-sterile, offers us so much while leaving a truly awful legacy. It capitalises on perhaps our greatest blind spot in the Western world – what we do with the waste we produce. Generally we try our best to ignore it and nuclear appears to be no exception, as the problem of ships carrying this cargo being turned away from ports, dumping illegally off the coast of Africa and even in the Mediterranean (albiet by non-governmental gangsters) only goes to show.

The waste however sits on our collective conscience, hidden away but gnawing at the edges of our memories, the weight of it growing surreptitiously more septic every passing day. If we accept it then we let our sense of self respect slip with every container, with every barrel of rods that sits there, inconvenient, reminding us that perhaps we cannot have everything we ever dreamed of after all, that energy and matter play by other rules than endless credit without price or repercussions – we have to live within some kind of limits and efforts to transcend them invariably lead to a literally deformed ecology.

In Britain, there is probably no realistic option other than keeping hold of our existing plants until such a time as they can no longer safely function (even by the somewhat dubious standards of the present age). But after that? Building new plants or prolonging the life of those already existing constitutes an act of violence on matter itself. We are after all engaged now in the business of leaving a future fit for living in. Jeopardising this so fundamentally for potentially such vast distances of time seems a deeply perverse attempt to pay our debt to coming generations.

The alternatives are there if we choose to give them credit. And reducing demand - accepting that there is a balance to be struck and that we have to move to greater efficiency on all levels - should be a given in the years ahead. Not because the world we're on the threshold of needs to be unduly austere, if we invest wisely while we can. But we have to acknowledge that much of the energy we consume today is wasted needlessly and, in a world of rising populations, we all must embrace a greater degree of voluntary simplicity – out of an appreciation of the richness of what such simplicity can bring, coupled with the knowledge that we're all in this together if and when some form of carbon rationing comes in. Changing our lifestyles - driving and flying less, steering ourselves away from consumerism, leading lives more geared to our localities - is the only hope, in a world of rising populations and aspirations, for more of humanity to live with dignity and a decent - not corpulent – level of material wealth.

Whether we embrace such challenges with sufficient vigour to steer ourselves clear will be determined by both our imaginations and our attitude, by the kind of vision our representatives can muster as we enter a new era. The decision to pursue new nuclear would represent an utter absence of such qualities – it is the hollowed promise of an old and broken way of looking at the world.

Food for the Free

2010-07-26T00:22:00.000+01:00

It’s that time of year again. There’s a glut of black and redcurrants at my friend’s allotment, at the market everyone is selling raspberries and old ladies at the bus stop at the bottom of the road pick blackberries with a death defying disregard of traces of lead from the traffic. Last year, for some reason, I was asked to help on a couple of wild food days run by a good friend. She had me helping prep food infront of a group of a hundred in the woods at a festival. I managed to mash the beech nuts in their shells (they should be de-husked before grinding) and had to get volunteers to painstakingly pick one from the other, which they did with a surprising degree of tolerance that probably had a lot to do with it being the third day of festivities; long past the point of doing much more than taking events as they came with a kind of glazed bewilderment.

Other conspicuous staples on the menu included acorn flour (progenitor of acorn burgers, even acorn cupcakes) and fruit leather (sloes and hawthorns mostly, mashed and pressed and dried to form a kind of preserved sweet that can be eaten all year round). There are also all the other fruits and a bewildering variety of tubers and greens that help us form some approximation of what our ancestors may have considered a good diet. And people come out in scores to partake of this knowledge, enthused perhaps with a love of what is natural, wanting to connect with something real and meaningful, or simply build up their experience of utilizing the great treasures that nature offers us, away from the florescent glare of supermarket aisles and their well attested vulnerabilities of just-in-time deliveries.

To what extent does such knowledge present any kind of real solution to our collective predicament, given that we are an island of 61 million people growing less than 60 percent of our own food with a very possible global food crunch on the horizon? Even if we were all clued up experts, doesn’t expecting these wild food to provide for any significant proportion of our needs seems idealistic? Are all such efforts little more than palliatives, well intentioned window dressing that verge on a kind of idealization of a way of life we only can surmise at, attempts at its revival left looking almost like a slide into semi-fantasy? Or do some survivalists hold some glimmer of the hope rooted in our Christian heritage that a chosen few will survive the coming turmoil and be lead into a golden future where the dandelion root coffee is always strong and sweet and the hedgerow greens are near perennial?

As far as learning about wild food and other associated skills goes, however much they may be of very real value to an individual in a given situation and however much they fall short as some kind of strategy en masse, their use is not necessarily some all or nothing absolute. Cultivating such skills is not just an insurance against hard times, as it was for the many who, in World War Two, augmented meager rations with a residue of knowledge that had been handed down for centuries. Like making tentative or more solid steps towards growing our own, or supporting community agriculture, developing an itinerary of plants that we can call on is rendered pretty wise behaviour even if we are not pressed by dire necessity.

Such skills can enhance our lives, can give us cause to walk beneath the trees and can help us train ourselves to really look at what’s around us, to enter into an appreciation of the species we would otherwise not notice. And to make some step away, however apparently token or small scale, to put something in our bellies we’ve gathered ourselves, that does not come spoon fed from factories, or which was produced in conditions we know little of – this is a kind of reclamation of what really matters. Spending time – as my friends do – in collecting and straining and drying and grinding endless acorns is in a way an act of belief in both our own resources and that which is given us direct; untrammeled, a taste of something heaven-sent that – while such efforts alone may not meet our every need – provides something we can navigate by, something that is as valuable for what it represents as for its ability to keep us alive, or at least to make our daily plates more lively. This is a kind of other sustenance, a reminder that – in using our own nouse – we can provide ourselves with something that adds meaning to our lives, something that rises above any toting up of calorific value in and of itself. It speaks of the satisfaction of a thing done well, of knowledge brought to life, of connection to a way of doing things that somehow leaves a strange and almost hard to grasp feeling of grace.

For many of my friends, when given the opportunity, it is almost a kind of observation of duty, an article of faith, to gather berries for the autumn wine, or look for puffballs and the edible brackets on trees – routines as natural as breathing. Occasionally I get roped in – soaked in the Midlands looking for sloes, on my knees in Sussex gathering acorns from prodigious or more poultry masts, looking for elusive fungi while nursing toxic hangovers – and it's always a reminder of where things are really at, a kind of tangible reality amid the myriad abstractions that often constitute our daily lives amid the modern world.

Reaching out to these ways of seeing and engaging with the world forms a kind of bedrock of experience that starts as a tentative putting down of roots but which may well lead to the day when such strange rituals become at last the norm, through love of them if not from necessity, and by stepping outdoors we step into our real inheritance, we are reminded of what it means to come back to some sense of being in the world that rings a little truer with the way that things are surely meant to be. It goes beyond grand plans and leaves us with a simple message – that the best things still come unadulterated and that when we choose to align ourselves more closely with what is natural we are given gifts that constitute much more than the merely material.

A Very Basic Thing

2010-06-18T13:43:00.000+01:00

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961 partly out of the heightened awareness of the region's people and wildlife brought about by Laurens van der Post's descriptions in 'The Lost World of The Kalahari.' Today, his name has been invoked by those very people he described – the Gana, Ghi and Tsila Bushmen – whose continued existence in that place is still very much under threat. Partly evicted in the nineties, the process was completed in 2002 as the entire population was forcibly removed to settlement camps at the edge of the park where the depression so common with people removed from their lands was compounded by alcoholism and the spread of HIV.

Restored to their territory by a ruling of the Botswana High Court in 2006, their one borehole - that was capped upon their expulsion four years previously - remains sealed and the government seem determined for this state of affairs to continue. A second court case has just taken place to assert this most basic human right of the Bushmen of access to water. The region is one of the planet's driest and the Bushmen are having to take an arduous 300 mile trip to gather water from the nearest available source. At least one woman has died of dehydration and the conditions in general are described as harsh and dangerous. Hundreds of the tribe are languishing in the resettlement camps, too afraid to return to their ancestral lands without such a vital resource. Meanwhile numerous boreholes have been drilled for the reserve's wildlife and a Safari Lodge within the reserve has been allowed to build a swimming pool. Many Bushmen, especially the old and young, are sufferring from lack of water. In an effort at intimidation, the government sent in truckloads of troops to the region in the run up to the court case. When it came to it, the Court reserved judgement. It is not clear when the final decision will be made. "It pains us that the animals and tourists on our land can drink our water to their heart’s content yet we go thirsty" said Jumanda Gakelebone, a Bushman in the reserve.

That Botswana's government wants the Bushmen off the land, there can be doubt. One very obvious reason is the diamonds found within the reserves – a further deposit of which is supposed to be under a Bushman settlement. It is perhaps convenient then that there are those who claim there can be no place for people – any people - within a wildlife reserve. Chief among such exponents is John Terbough, author of 'Requiem for Nature', an advocate of 'fortress' conservation. His feeling that “a park should be a park and it shouldn't have any resident people in it” is echoed by Botswana's Director of Wildlife and National Parks, Trevor Mmopelwa, who claims that allowing people to live in the reserve would “make the management of CKGR extremely difficult in that there will be two conflicting rights existing side by side.”

Is this really then a story of the contrasting needs of people and the animals they happen to share land with? Are efforts to defend the Bushmen placing human rights over that of the local wildlife? The issue has certainly been divisive but attempts to override the rights of people living on the land are at best simplistic and at worst fall victim to a mindset that is seeing indigenous people evicted from their lands across the globe at an unprecedented rate.

Their power boosted by various sponsers, no small proportion of them corporate, various big international nongovernmental conservation organisations (or BINGOs) have embarked on a huge global push to increase the number of 'protected areas'. In 1962 there were some 1000 official such 'PA's' worldwide. By 2005 there were 108,000 with more being added every day. A land mass the size of Africa itself – more than 12% of all land globally - has been ringfenced in this way.

And all too often, if these PA's have happened to have been occupied by indigenous people, they have been moved on, either through force, through 'soft evictions' or the contestably phrased 'voluntary resettlement.' In Chad, a tenfold increase in protected land resulted in an estimated 600,000 conservation refugees during the nineties. India, the only other country even bothering to count, admitted to 1.6 million five years ago. Globally the figure could be anywhere from five to tens of millions. The figure in Africa alone may well exceed 14 million.

What should be obvious but which flies in the face of the logic of the various BINGOs is that many of the places deemed worthy of protection are so valuable precisely because of the knowledge and practices of the people living there. In Africa, where indigenous evictions from protected areas are highest, 90% of biodiversity now lies outside their boundaries. History is showing us that, for the sake of biodiversity alone, where indigenous people live in ways that are ecologically sustainable (and for that, read the vast majority), their eviction is the most counterproductive thing we can do.

Perhaps the real nub of the issue is our conception of wilderness, of the wild and our place upon it. A very real problem is our notion of nature as separate, as 'out there', a thing which can be visited but which sits apart from our modern lives, from the ever mounting effects of our daily actions. Tribal peoples here are seen as throwbacks, 'archaic fantastists' as Botswana's President Khama has said, removed from the realities of 21st Century life, a people to be educated and absorbed.

But in reality of course they hold so much that we can learn from; often enhancing their environments through a sophisticated knowledge of biological diversity without any formal schooling in ecology, botany or zoology. The world that they inhabit holds the key to how life - far from the environmentally dystopic state of affairs most of us have grown accustomed to - can be far less intrusive on the natural world and, at its best, can approach something genuinely harmonious. Such ways of life are in very real loggerheads with a love of money that would cripple what is left of our collective future. How fitting then that they should be brushed aside so that we can place a balm upon our conscience by visiting a semi-artificial pristine natural world that we only reach by jetting through the wounded skies.

The aims of international conservation are wholly noble but suffer from this trap of dual realities. With half a foot in the corporate world it lets these companies cast a glean of patronage upon their other far more suspect actions. Its sponsers include the World Bank as well as a host of bilateral and multilateral banks and transnational corporations. The Nature Conservancy has around 2000 corporate sponsers while Conservation International has 250 corporate 'partners'. Often, there is a 'debt for nature' swap, with PAs created in return for annulment of part of that country's national debt. So perhaps there is a kind of logic as well as more than a hint of the perverse at President Khama's membership of Conservation International.

Perhaps, in contemplating the Kalahari, we could do worse than remember the creation of the first nature reserve ever created – Yellowstone Park – which was 'set aside' at the expense of the Miwok, Shosone, Lakota, Bannock, Crow, Nez Perce, Flathead and Blackfeet peoples who had all existed there benignly for so long. Laurens van der Post bought the Bushmen's existence to a global audience and it was explicitly for their benefit - as well as that of the wildlife around them - that the Kalahari Game Reserve was created. Today the Bushmen call out to van der Post's godson – Prince William – who is visiting the country this month. His response will perhaps indicate the kind of figureheads we can expect in the years ahead of us, it will determine whether, as a culture, we have in any moved on from the days of evicting whole peoples whose outlook can teach us so much.

Botswana's government's actions are undoubtably driven by money, by a complete disregard for both their own constitution and the basic human rights of their countrymen. At their root these actions stem perhaps from a contempt for a way of life they think we should move on from. And it is the messages we all send out, deliberately or otherwise, than help determine such perceptions. We cherish our lifestyles, the thousand little things that make them easier and forget our sense of what is really vital, of what really serves our bodies and our souls, and of that which merely makes them flabby. A certain level of development undoubtably has served us well, but perhaps we have for too long lost the very precious thing which is so vital; the sense of being part of that which lies beneath our feet. Without it we are all at sea and seek to plug the gap with things which only compound our feelings of emptiness; we are often like ghosts or children pushing at a wheel we cannot see nor understand. There has to be a greater balance, some sense of what is valid and what we need to get beyond. The Bushmen here can help to lead us back, remind us that when we live in greater harmony with the land we are all the richer for it. Don't let us forget them and their right to such a very basic thing.

No Oil But Dirty Oil

2010-05-17T17:29:00.002+01:00

Some things strip away the camouflage and leave the very ugly truth just staring back, unshamed. Suddenly the hopes are gone that somehow we might struggle through the end of the age of cheap oil even though it represents a monumental challenge. Or rather the conditions of such hopes become much clearer; that all such efforts will be totally in vain if we do nothing to prevent the onslaught facing our remaining indigenous peoples and the land that they protect. They are threatened by the corporations that effectively dictate the currents of our Northern policies, that are now rushing at full tilt into securing the resources a rapaciously expanding economy demands.

What's clear is that those in these corporations that - as the recent article in the Washington Post confirms even Obama’s administration has been to a very large degree in deference to – will stop at nothing to do what must be done to feed the mindset and reality of an industrial dream long since turned sour. And those that stand to suffer most; who are even now in many places fighting for the very right to live, are those who have done the least damage, who are infact light years in everything they do from those patterns of thought and behaviour that are so surely selling us right down the river.

Suddenly it all comes crowding in, the floodgates are unleashed, an awful clarity arrives; the people in Ecuador suffering records rates of cancer thanks to the activities of Texaco, the very water that they drink and wash in poisoned by the run off from substandard oil sumps so that their children suffer horrific lesions, the ground itself so polluted that their poultry and their dogs simply keel over. Waking up to the scale and extent of what is now well underway in Canada is equally horrific; a realisation that what is planned for the tar sands of North Alberta will probably make that region uninhabitable in another fifty years.

Add the ever-spreading travesty within the Gulf of Mexico, think about the lapse in regulations that helped to lead to such a tragedy occurring and there can be no doubt that those who profit from oil also do so from a truly diabolical contribution to our collective fate. And they will not be stopped by governments, by wishful thinking, by their laying down to accept that the show is really over, that they will have to grow up and get used to finite resources on a finite planet. They will not stop by any volition of their own. They will not simply ruin or take the lives of nearly every people living in accord with any kind of ancient harmony. They will not simply remove what hope remains of our ever building something better than our outgrown industrial model as we endeavour to remould our cultures and societies. They stand to remove our last real chances of our ever leaving a biosphere that will not have reached the tipping points, that can still be classed as habitable or which would enable such a thing under something other than the direst circumstances. If we do not act we will only witness so many countries running even further out of water, or which are either fried beneath the anvil of an ever more intolerable sun or have been swallowed beneath the waves that only echo the despondency that stands to let this happen.

Out of our own humanity if nothing else we must all wean ourselves off our extravagance of oil. We must not shy from holding up a mirror to our Western world, to the cars we nearly all see as a right, the planes that are now almost mandatory to many. It is not fashionable. There is a faint embarrassment in crying out too loud, in scaring off all those who would be sympathetic to our cause. But what price does pandering to such sympathy entail? This is no joke or abstract wishing well of good intentions that bears little resemblance to real life. This goes further even than seeking to preserve our here and now, our own green hills and valleys - as intrinsic in their understated way to the big picture as they are. This is the ideal that we must wake up to and the earth herself is attempting to shake us by the throat. But the dream we are caught up in - and it is one that holds us in its very real concerns and even snares – almost seems to know this and raises the pitch of her siren-like voice.

We must find our way beyond it, we must wake up to the other story that we lost so long ago and whose importance now could not be greater. The longer we leave it, the more our denial is written in blood. For the scale of the horror we are all responsible for, look to the jungles of Ecuador, try to imagine the cries of people who have had no part in contributing to this mess, who - from Russia to Papua New Ginea to Nigeria - are now fighting for their lives and that of the land they have lived truly lightly on.

We must wake up. We really know on every level that we are in trouble but seek to block it out, to let our lives hold to their current course because this requires less effort, because we are caught up in the momentum of several centuries of change that let us think we could play God. Our awakening must be as much as anything from the forces of despair and apathy and must bring us into not only a greater perception of the nature of the problem; it must bring us into a greater sense of our own power, of what we can achieve despite all odds. Even the most glorious of summers, even the strongest sense of peace will not lead us clear if we do not confront the paradigm that seeks to keep our future from us and which vast leagues of speculators serve, blindly or recklessly or simply caught by love of money and the power it appears to bring but which ultimately leaves you all the weaker if in it’s acquisition you have lost so much that once was precious.

The scale of the challenge is nothing short of monumental. It is already one of several fields – the often literal coalface in the most unspoiled regions of the world being the most obvious and perhaps the most pressing and extreme. But also we are challenged in what we permit to pass within our nations’ borders - however much such borders must be held in perspective with the growing volkerwanderung we all now face, however much we cling to the comforts of a passing age. We must too challenge everything about our own behaviour, about how we relate to our land and localities. We must above all never think we are incapable or unworthy of the task that has been set us.

Everything we love lies in the balance and this is not the time to sit back, cross our fingers and hope for the best. We must all act to the best of our potential. It is for every one of us to play our part. And to do so we must step away from our screens for a while, think what it is like to lose your land and health and loved ones and remember this is not some tubthumped doomsday that may come if our elected politicians do not save us. It is already the reality for a growing number of First Nation peoples to whom we all owe a massive debt of gratitude, who hold so much knowledge that can inform the nature of the way ahead. We owe it to them to re-evaluate our every shared assumption, our every scrap of received wisdom: our own survival rests upon their fate, as does that which still remains of our morality.