Resurgence Issue 279

July/August 2013 No. 279 £4.95 US$8.00

ENVIRONMENT • ACTIVISM • SOCIAL JUSTICE • ARTS • ETHICAL LIVING

THE ECOZOIC ERASATISH KUMAR • ROBERT COSTANZA • RUTH PADEL • ROS COWARD

ANDREW MITCHELL • HUGO DIXON • CHARLES EISENSTEIN

KEYNOTES BY KESTER REID

We in Westminster live in an instant world. Dramatic events surround us, often one piece of breaking news succeeds another like the waves of the sea. Digital clocks urge us to hurry. Yet time, like music, should unroll slowly. We age gradually, wrinkle by wrinkle. Our seasons are subtle, spring edges in as flowers bud and leaves uncurl. Autumn comes slowly, celebrating and mourning the advance of each year.

It provides a lesson for politics. Human problems take time to resolve. Human hearts (and minds)build trust slowly. There are few instant fixes.Patience is the mark of statesmanship.

– Shirley WilliamsFormer Liberal Democrat Leader in the House of Lords

From 99 words collected by Liz Gray, published by Darton, Longman & Todd www.99words.co.uk

99 pence from the sale of each book will go to Peace Direct

Issue 279 1Resurgence & Ecologist

THE ECOZOIC ERAWe are not in the Anthropocene Epoch, but entering into the Ecozoic Era

WELCOME

The first principle of ethical and ecological living is to live in harmony with oneself, with the fellow members of the human family, and with all the species of the Earth community. Unfortunately,

rather than living in harmony, the industrial societies have been busy controlling, dominating and reshaping the natural world to suit the industrial design and financial greed of modern civilisation. Now it is being proposed that we should name our age ‘the Anthropocene epoch’, meaning ‘the age of Man’.

The Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who proposed this new name, has very good intentions. He believes that by highlighting human centrality and the impact of human activities upon the natural world we might wake up and do something to save the planet; we might develop a new sensibility for sustainability. However, many ecologists and environmentalists are worried about this proposal and are asking a fundamental question: by naming a geological epoch after ourselves are we not committing the ultimate act of human arrogance?

There is a reason for such questioning. Human hubris has been in evidence before – even when intentions may have been good. For example, the Whole Earth Catalog once proclaimed that we are “as gods and might as well get good at it”. And more recently, Mark Lynas named the human species “the god species”.

One way or another the industrial societies possessing powerful technologies have come to believe that they can and have conquered Nature. Now Nature must be managed, manipulated and even looked after – but only so that it can better serve the ever-increasing demands of industrial societies.

In this context even the well-intentioned idea of anthropocene could prove to be dangerous. Writing in the Spring 2013 issue of Earth Island Journal, Kathleen Dean Moore of Oregon State University says: “We should use words cautiously. Words are powerful, magical, impossible to control. With a single misguided phrase they can move a concept from one world into another, altering forever the landscape for our thinking.

“So no, not the ‘anthropocene’. That name completely muddles the message.

“Proud, solipsistic creatures that we are, we can convince

ourselves that we are shaping Earth… The very notion that humans have become the shapers of Earth makes Earth guffaw in swirls of violence.”

In the same issue of the Journal, author Ginger Strand writes: “The idea of the anthropocene plays too slickly into the hands of the techno-utopians who will argue that since we are at the helm, we might as well put our hands on the rudder and steer. The very word ‘anthropocene’ makes too little accommodation for anything else besides us; it’s not going to help us live with more grace in a world full of things we can’t control, things we don’t know, things we might never know… What we don’t need is another word that feeds

our idea of the all-powerful controllers we dream – or fear – we are.”

The late eco-theologian Thomas Berry proposed another name, which is much more humble and hopeful. He suggested that we name the coming epoch the Ecozoic. He urged humanity to repair the damage it has inflicted on the Earth and to bring about an era

that is respectful of Nature, self-renewing and ecologically sustainable. He envisioned a new age in which humans and all other species live in harmony with each other. (Somehow Thomas Berry’s suggestion has not caught the attention of scientists and academics in the same way as Paul Crutzen’s.)

Once upon a time people believed in God; they believed that God would solve all their problems. Today we have a new god: the God of Technology. The industrial mindset has come to believe that we will find solutions to all our problems in technology, and somehow the name ‘anthropocene’ leads us towards that conviction, but in this issue of Resurgence & Ecologist Charles Eisenstein takes the view that technological fixes have severe limitations and that the problems created by technology cannot be solved by technology. He says we have to find other ways. Similarly other authors also highlight the need to reconnect with Nature and thus pave the way to the Ecozoic Era.

The choice is ours. Either we can embrace the suggested Anthropocene epoch, or create a new Ecozoic Era.

SATISH KUMAr

The name ‘anthropocene’

completely muddles the message

July/August 20132 Resurgence & Ecologist

1 Welcome Satish Kumar introduces the new Ecozoic Era, which shifts our collective concerns to a deeper respect for Nature and ecology

FRONTLINE

4 AcTIoN FRom THe GRASS RooTS Lorna Howarth reports

ECOLOGIST

9 SoWING THe SeeDS oF cHANGe Environmental journalist Gavin Haines travels to Senegal to explore new initiatives tackling desertification

12 WHY ARe We eATING THe AmAZoN? Global Canopy Programme founder Andrew Mitchell continues his series on how consumption is destroying the world’s rainforests

14 moVemeNT FoR cHANGe As environmentalists work together to present a shared vision for change, Debika Ray asks “Green at what cost?”

16 THe mAGIc oF moTHS Naturalist Mark Cocker is alarmed at the rate at which British moths are disappearing

18 THe lANGUAGe oF WolVeS There’s more at stake in wolf conservation than the survival of this species, writes Ros Coward

21 FRIeNDS oF THe eARTH: WoRKING FoR PeoPle AND PlANeT Michael Warhurst explains the thinking behind the charity’s new resource use programme

22 mY GReeN lIFe Poet and conservationist Ruth Padel is one of Darwin’s 72 great-great-grandchildren. She talks to Sharon Garfinkel

ETHICAL LIVING

24 A HeAlTHY ecoNomY Hugo Dixon argues for a financial system that mirrors a healthy body by allowing for renewal and decay

26 SPIRITUAlITY IN HeAlTH cARe John Naish learns that offering patients – and medical staff – spiritual support results in better outcomes for all

28 SUmmeR DReAmS Susan Clark introduces the art of botanical cooking and revisits the joy of an English afternoon tea

30 A SPIRITeD DeBATe Robin Lee wants to know whether whisky, like wine, has a unique terroir

C O N T E N T SNo. 279 July/August 2013

NeW oNlINe

‘The way to survive’, Vietnam © Hoang Hai Thinh www.500px.com/haikeu Finalist of the Nurture Forests for the Future – REDD+ for Food Photo Competition

www.resurgence.org

Virginia Kennedy explains how a traditional mechanism of conflict resolution may help us today; Barbara Gardner on compassion and learning from our spiritual heritage; Lindsay Clarke praises the remarkable work of an under-rated novelist; and Helen Moore asks “what influences the eco-poet’s imagination?”

www.theecologist.org

All the stories environmentalists across the globe are talking about; plus lots of ideas for Green Living including Associate Editor, Susan Clark’s new foraged foods column

Check for new daily content, including regular analysis of key conservation issues plus brand new films from the Ecologist Film Unit

Social Media

Twitter : @resurgence_mag @the_ecologistFacebook: Resurgencetrust TheEcologist

Resurgence & Ecologist App

Free access for print members: www.resurgence.org/app


RESURGENCE KEYNOTES

32 FRom FRAGmeNTATIoN To WHoleNeSS Kester Reid champions the Indigenous way of intuitive knowledge

UNDERCURRENTS

36 lATeNT HeAlING Charles Eisenstein suggests technology could be better used to support the intelligence of Nature

39 SUSTAINABle WellBeING Stephen Lewis launches a new series and introduces the economist, Robert Costanza

42 eARTH PARADISe Novelist Jeremy James takes a flight of fictional fancy – to the moon – in order to discover the true majesty of the Earth

44 AGeNTS oF cHANGe Bill Plotkin reveals what it really means to be a part of the Earth

46 PeReNNIAl WISDom Jeremy Naydler suggests we make time to reconnect with our spiritual roots

NATURE WRITING COMPETITION

48 WIlD WAleS – 1st PRIZe Julie Bromilow paints a lively picture of contemporary Welsh society, but still captures the whispers of old drovers on bare hills

51 IN SeARcH oF RAmoNDA – 2nd PRIZe Sue Kindon skilfully weaves beauty, quest and historical reference in a botanical adventure

54 I WIll RememBeR – 3rd PRIZe Sarah Walsh turned to the sounds of words to bring alive a time when the moorland quarries rang with the sound of splitting stone

57 mY AlloTmeNT – RUNNeR UP Peter Jewel shares his passion for a plot of land that has become integral to his life

REVIEWS

60 THe SoVeReIGNTY oF SIleNce Anthony Seldon reviews Graham Turner’s ThePowerofSilence

61 A SeNSe oF VocATIoN Russell Warfield reviews Matthew Crawford’s TheCaseforWorkingwith YourHands

62 RADIANT SIleNce Peter Reason reviews Sightlinesby Kathleen Jamie

63 AlleGoRIcAl SToRYTellING Peter Ainsworth reviews Rowan Williams’TheLion’sWorld

64 ANoTHeR eDUcATIoN Mary Tasker reviews Richard Pring’s The LifeandDeathofSecondaryEducationforAll

65 THe PATH leSS TRAVelleD Jenny Hare reviews Adam Ford’s TheArtofMindfulWalking

66 leTTeRS

67 cRoSSWoRD New to the magazine, a brain teaser full of ecological clues!

68 ADVeRTS

Editor-in-Chief Satish KumarPA to Satish KumarElaine Green

Associate EditorSusan ClarkDesignerRachel MarshWebsite EditorAngie Burke Assistant EditorEmma CockerEcologist Assistant EditorAndrea Gear

Investigations EditorAndrew WasleyContributing EditorLorna HowarthSub-editorHelen BanksArt AdviserSandy BrownPoetry Editor Peter Abbs

PR and MarketingSharon Garfinkel+44 (0)7435 [email protected] Gill, Mandy Kessell +44 (0)1208 [email protected] ManagerPeter Lang +44 (0)20 8809 [email protected] ManagerLynn [email protected] ManagerGwydion BattenAdvertising Sales RepresentativeAndrea Thomas +44 (0)20 8886 [email protected]

Editorial OfficeFord House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE, UK+44 (0)1237 441293www.resurgence.org

Resurgence & Ecologist is published by The Resurgence Trust, a registered educational charity (no. 1120414)

32

4 July/August 2013Resurgence & Ecologist

Action from the Grass RootsLorna Howarth reports

USA

ROOFTOP READY

FRONTLINE

Recent news reports from Argentina detail how the country has covered millions of

hectares with GMOs; but not all countries are quite so gung-ho about the biotech industry’s claims to be able to feed the world through genetic engineering. Hungary’s deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development, Lajos Bognar, has stated that almost 1,000 acres of maize found to have been planted with Monsanto’s Pioneer GM seeds have been

ploughed up to stop pollen spreading and the corn getting into the food chain in Hungary. Unlike in several other EU member countries, GM seeds are banned in Hungary. Worryingly, the free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary, leaving a high risk of GMOs continuing to leak into Europe’s ecosystems. See Frontline Online (www.theecologist.org) for information about Argentina’s GM soya boom.

A man in New York is taking advantage of the ‘urban heat islands’ that a concrete jungle

creates in order to grow exotic ‘hot-house’ veggies in his rooftop garden. It can be a hostile environment up there in the NY skyline, so the appropriately named Zach Pickens has been selectively saving seeds from his most resilient plants for several seasons now and has produced a range of Rooftop Ready Seeds (a pun on Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds),

which he makes available to other budding urban gardeners. As the seeds are acclimatised to the harsh city environment, even the notoriously petulant okra will grow, as well as chillies, aubergines and tomatoes. Pickens’ collaborative ethos, where he shares his knowledge and seeds, is the antithesis of Monsanto’s profit-before-planet strategy. What a great example of grass-roots activism!www.rooftopready.com

USA

GREENSBURG’S GONE GREEN!

Six years after the Kansas town of Greensburg was hit by a devastating tornado, it has risen from the ashes and rebuilt itself

along sustainable principles. With LEED-certified (energy-efficient) municipal buildings saving US$200,000 annually in energy running costs on 13 of its largest buildings; a ‘net metering policy’ (similar to the European feed-in tariff) that makes solar and wind power more affordable for residents; and a new town master plan that includes ‘green corridors’ and a walkable downtown area, Greensburg now truly deserves its name. The community-led redevelopment attracted state and federal funding, to help establish renewable energy initiatives such as BTI Wind Energy, a local wind-turbine company that sells small-scale turbines for residential and commercial use that now generate almost 10% of the town’s electricity alone. It is hoped Greensburg will now be more resilient in the face of any future extreme weather events. www.greenpeace.org

HUNGARY

GMO CORNFIELDS DESTROYED

5Issue 279 Resurgence & Ecologist

UK charities Purple Field Productions (PFP) and Temwa, together with alternative energy

pioneers Electric Pedals, have devised a portable cinema to take educational films to remote areas of Malawi this summer. PFP make educational films for and with people across the world in their local languages, and with support from Temwa, who work in Malawi on community development, this project gives access to life-saving information in one of the poorest countries in the world. Electric

Pedals’ Rucksack Cinema uses human pedal-power to generate the electricity needed to project a film. The entire kit, including the projector, fits into a rucksack and can be easily set up in minutes. The team will be distributing to Malawian farmers the film Ulimi Mchuma Chathu (‘Farming Our Wealth’), which demonstrates new techniques for combating the effects of increasing droughts brought about by climate change.www.purplefieldproductions.org

The Housing Market Renewal Scheme has subjected the community of Anfield to a housing demolition

and rebuild programme that has ripped the heart out of this once-thriving community, home to the famous Liverpool Football Club. However, the remaining residents are fighting back, and with the assistance of artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, Liverpool Biennial arts festival and architects URBED, have taken control of the future of their neighbourhood. A cornerstone

of this inspiring regeneration process is the rebirth of Mitchell’s Bakery, a long-standing local landmark that once fed ravenous football fans, but sadly closed in 2010. Thanks to a successful fundraising campaign, the community-run bakery – Homebaked – will offer pies, bread, pizzas and cakes for match-day crowds, and even host its own breadmaking courses. Find out more about this remarkable community regeneration work: www.2up2down.org.uk

UK

YOU’LL NEVER BAKE ALONE

Leafmapoftheworld© Imagemore Co., Ltd./Corbis

BHUTAN

THE WORLD’S FIRST ORGANIC COUNTRY

MALAWI

PEDAL POWER CINEMA

Bhutan plans to become the world’s first country to turn its agriculture completely

organic. It will ban the sale of pesticides and fertilisers, relying instead on the healthy ecosystems of its farms and on farm waste. Contrary to World Bank estimations, Bhutan aims to increase its agricultural output, exporting high-quality niche foods to India and China. In one of the most refreshing statements from a minister of agriculture, Pema Gyamtsho said: “We are Buddhists and we believe in living in harmony with Nature. Animals have the right to live, and we like to see plants happy and insects happy.” Bhutan is already the world’s best example of sustainable development: 95% of the population has clean water and electricity, 80% of the country is forested, and it is both carbon neutral and food secure.


In late March 2013 the European Union (EU) failed to uphold the European Commission (EC) call for a two-

year ban on neonicotinoid pesticides. However, the good news is that thanks to concerted EU-wide citizens’ actions and petitions in favour of the EC proposal, enough support was secured amongst member states for the ban to be enforced. Worryingly, the UK’s environment minister, Owen Paterson, fought tooth and nail against the ban and, according to Greenpeace, actually lobbied on behalf of chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer.

Whilst citizens’ action groups are celebrating a great victory, it is important to remember that if the agrochemical giants have their way, the ban will be temporary. Across the world there’s a stand-off arising between such companies – who insist there is no link between neonicotinoid pesticide use and escalating bee deaths – and governments, civil society and many scientists, who believe there is a clear link. Now, new research co-authored by scientist Pierre Mineau

has identified neonicotinoids as potentially fatal for many bird species too. For those of us who know that all life is interconnected, this will come as no surprise.

In the US, where neonicotinoids have not been banned, things are not looking so bright for the birds and bees. This spring alone, over 140 million acres of cropland will have been sprayed with a chemical soup of herbicides, pesticides and fungicides containing neonicotinoids. That is to say nothing of gardeners, green-keepers and local authorities who also regularly spray

these deadly chemicals. Mineau’s research, which has been published by the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), details how neonicotinoids bioaccumulate with fatal consequences for birds, bees and key insect species, including water-borne insects.

The research concludes that neonicotinoids are highly mobile and persistent within ecosystems – which means that no species, including human beings, will be immune

New research shows ‘bees poison’ affects birds too

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) feeding on a borage flower, UK © Stephen Dalton/naturepl.com

GLOBAL

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES

Neonicotinoids may be fatal for birds too


Lorna Howarth is the founder of The Write Factor. www.thewritefactor.co.uk

UK

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN Burning wood is not the solution to climate change

Under the guise of ‘green energy’, burning wood in power stations

has become a massive growth industry in the UK, with by far the biggest demand coming from coal-fired power station operators. So far, five of them have announced plans to convert, either partly or completely, to biomass. These are Tilbury in Essex, Ironbridge in Shropshire, Eggborough and Drax in Yorkshire, and Lynemouth in Northumberland. Between them these power stations will require almost six times as much wood as the UK produces in total every year. That statistic alone shows just how unsustainable wood-fired power stations are and it spells disaster for the world’s natural habitats, human rights, and our hopes of combating climate change.

A demand for biomass on the scale planned has dire implications. So far, most wood pellets imported to the UK come from Canada and the Southern US, while some are sourced from the Baltic States, Russia and Portugal. In Canada and the Southern US, highly biodiverse forests are already being clear-cut to produce pellets. And across Russia, the Baltic States, the Mediterranean and Scandinavia, biodiverse forests are being destroyed and then turned into monoculture tree plantations for biomass. This trend is likely to worsen as demand for biomass grows in the UK. In the longer term, energy companies are looking at imports from Brazil, West and Central Africa and other regions of the Global South, where trees grow faster and land is cheaper.

At the moment there are few legal restrictions on where biomass can come from, and as the rush for biofuels has already shown, companies usually go for the cheapest growing land they can find. This means a high risk of

land-grabbing from some of the world’s poorest people, and rising food prices as land is diverted away from growing food.

Although burning biomass releases less of the chemical sulphur dioxide than burning coal does, it releases more fine particulates and volatile organic compounds. These pose a particularly serious risk of lung and heart disease to communities living in close proximity to power stations. More worrying, however, is the fact that power stations burning wood emit up to 50% more carbon dioxide than those burning coal. Companies and policymakers ignore this carbon, claiming that biomass is green because new trees grow back in the place of those that have been cut down, thereby sequestering the carbon that was emitted in their combustion, making the process carbon neutral. Yet it takes decades before a tree matures sufficiently for that to happen. And when forests are destroyed and turned into monoculture plantations, much of the carbon will simply stay in the atmosphere. Such a carbon spike is a disaster at a time when scientists have shown that human-created emissions and levels of atmospheric CO2 must be reduced rapidly if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

So how do we keep warm in the future? First, we need to address energy conservation and a reduction in energy consumption. These issues can be resolved in myriad ways and be net job creators, but we need to invest in genuine renewable energy systems, which should be small-scale and community-owned.

With thanks to Sophie Bastable from Biofuelwatch for this article.www.biofuelwatch.org.uk

from their toxicity. By leaching into water and accumulating in streams and ponds, neonicotinoids pose a severe risk to the aquatic food chain as well as to seed- and insect-eating birds. So, together with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, ABC is calling for a ban on the use of neonicotinoids in the US. However, it seems that the corporate lobby continues to sway political opinion, in the US if not the EU.

Dave Goulson of the University of Stirling, who led one of the key studies showing that neonicotinoids harm bumblebees, refutes any notion from the agrochemical companies that neonicotinoids are safe: “The independent experts at the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) spent six months studying all the evidence before concluding there was an unacceptable risk to bees. The EFSA and almost everybody else – apart from the manufacturers – agree this class of pesticides was not adequately evaluated in the first place. Yet [some] politicians choose to ignore all of this.”

Thankfully the EU eventually saw fit to impose the two-year ban on neonicotinoids, which comes into force in December 2013. The hope is that this will give enough time for our bee and bird populations to recover, and give scientists an opportunity to prove definitively that neonicotinoids do affect these creatures adversely.

Whilst the continuing machinations of the EPA in the US and the EC in Europe decide whether these chemicals pose a threat to our wildlife, the slow pace of deliberations means that birds and bees (and humans) will continue to be exposed to neonicotinoids for at least another half-decade, according to Mineau, so what can concerned citizens do? Well, for a start, eschew all brands of pesticide, herbicide and fungicide; join the Boycott Bayer campaign on Facebook (and don’t buy the other products they make, such as the Advantage pet ‘health care’ range); and most importantly, plant bird- and bee-friendly flowering plants such as native wild flowers in your garden – not begonias or bizzy lizzies!


Setting the environmental agenda since 1970

Thousands of acacia trees are being planted as part of Africa’s Great Green Wall projectPhoto © David Rose/Panos


AFRICA

A gas-guzzling motor race might prove an unlikely comparison for an environmental field trip, but as our convoy of 4x4s cuts through the Senegalese bush, I feel like we’re competing in

the Dakar Rally. Bounding over dunes and brushing past acacia trees, our driver picks a path across this harsh, unforgiving terrain using the brake lights of the car in front to navigate through the dust.

Excited by the spectacle, children run from their villages to wave at us, while bemused shepherds and their cattle look up from shady spots beneath the trees. Occasionally, we pass a horse and cart transporting giant inner tubes full of water from wells to nearby villages. Welcome to the Sahel.

This semi-arid wilderness stretches across the African continent from Senegal to Djibouti and borders one of the most inhospitable places on Earth – the Sahara Desert. It is a place of feast and famine, but mainly famine; for three months of the year the heavens open and for the other nine this parched earth doesn’t receive a single drop of rain. But despite these lengthy droughts, this delicate ecosystem supports a rich variety of wildlife and millions of inhabitants who eke out fragile existences farming the land.

However, this already precarious knife-edge existence is under increasing threat from a phenomenon known globally as desertification.

“Despite what some people think, desertification is not the advancing of the desert; we are not talking about sand encroachment here,” explains Michele Bozzano, a research support officer for Bioversity International. “Desertification describes the breaking of an equilibrium, which turns the land into desert.”

Typically, the main causes of desertification are intensive cattle grazing and deforestation, which are often the desperate acts of impoverished pastoralists living along the Sahel. “The farmers around here have an awareness of sustainability – they know when they are overdoing it,” says Michele. “But when they have to buy medicine for their children they will keep exploiting the land.”

It’s a vicious cycle: the more desperate farmers become, the more they work the land, and the more they work the

land, the less productive it becomes. In a bid to fight desertification and the associated poverty,

an epic land-restoration project has begun across the Sahel. Dubbed the Great Green Wall of Africa, the initiative aims to re-establish a more sustainable environment by planting an ambitious 4,831-mile-long corridor of trees between Senegal and Djibouti.

Keen to learn more, I packed my bags for West Africa and joined a UN-backed field trip to visit a number of Green Wall pilot sites in northern Senegal. Accompanied by NGO

researchers and representatives from various African governments (plus delegates from the Turkish government), our expedition started out bright and early with a briefing in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.

Leaving Africa’s most westerly city behind us, our convoy bumped its way through the dusty, traffic-clogged streets and into the bush, where we

peeled off the tarmac and onto a dirt track road. It was an uncomfortable, bone-shaking journey, which

Michele and I shared with Nora Berrahmouni, a forestry officer for the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) and İsmail Belen, Deputy General Director at Turkey’s Ministry of Forestry.

Turkey is also suffering from desertification, so İsmail is keen to learn more about the Great Green Wall, which he romantically describes as a “modern-day Silk Road, only green”. He’s one of many representatives from Turkey and is joined by colleagues from the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TİKA), an organisation that has provided funding. Other Green Wall benefactors include the African Union, the European Union, the United Nations and various partner organisations.

One of the first lessons we learn is that the Great Green Wall is not simply about planting a corridor of trees. “It’s more of a mosaic; you need to plant the right species in the right place,” says Nora. “And species doesn’t mean only trees – it could be a shrub or a herbaceous plant. It’s about mimicking Nature – and in Nature, of course, you don’t just see trees.”

For the Great Green Wall to succeed, Nora says, it is essential the trees that are planted benefit the people living

Sowing the seeds of changeCould an ambitious land restoration project halt desertification,

alleviate poverty and help fight terrorism in Africa? Gavin Haines heads to Senegal to find out

The Great Green Wall project is as much about enfranchising these small

villages as it is about planting trees


along the Sahel. To illustrate her point we get out of the car at Tessekele, a 600-hectare Green Wall pilot site near the village of Widou. It’s a fairly underwhelming spectacle; this dusty scrubland doesn’t look particularly green, nor does it resemble a wall.

However, its spindly-looking acacia trees are rich in gum arabic, an additive used in many products, ranging from soft drinks to pharmaceuticals. Demand for this gum – which is extracted from the acacia by cutting into the bark – is currently outstripping supply, thanks to an increase in its use in Asia. Consequently, prices are going up and these trees are becoming more valuable standing than they are felled.

They also play an important role in agriculture and so the Great Green Wall project is helping educate farmers about the symbiotic relationship between a healthy environment and healthy crops.

“The difference between having a stable environment or not is the difference between being able to grow crops and crops failing,” explains Michele. “You need trees because they provide shade, which means the ground loses less water to evaporation.”

But it’s not just crops and local economies that benefit from a healthy environment. “Wildlife has returned to the site,” says Elimane Diop, the Chief Lieutenant of Widou. “We have seen antelope, hyena, porcupine and guineafowl here.”

The Great Green Wall is not without its problems. There’s the instability in neighbouring Mali for a start, which is threatening to derail the project in parts of the country. “The Green Wall will eventually pass through six regions in Mali, but at the moment we can only work in three,” admits Kouloutan Coulibaly, Director of Forestry for Mali. “The other areas are red zones.”

Ultimately, though, Kouloutan believes a project like the Great Green Wall could be an effective weapon against terrorism in Africa. “When people have no money and no job and terrorists come and pay, people say yes,” he says. “But the Great Green Wall will help develop these regions and combat poverty, and might even be a solution.”

Climate change is another issue facing the project. Can the Great Green Wall survive in an area that is set to become even warmer? Well, with assistance from Kew Gardens in London, seed banks in Burkina Faso and Niger are giving it the best possible chance by cultivating seeds from the most resilient trees in Africa, which will then grow into the hardiest of saplings. “It’s about bringing back ecosystems that are able to adapt to a changing climate,” says Nora.

Politically speaking, Green Wall nations appear to be working cohesively (although representatives from Djibouti, Ethiopia and Chad are conspicuous by their absence on the trip). However, groups such as the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) are concerned about the management of the project.

“When you plant a tree, who does it belong to, who is going to look after it, who is going to harvest the crop?” asks Ced Hesse, a drylands researcher for the IIED.

Meanwhile, I’m troubled by the fact that some Green Wall delegates on this trip – representatives from some of Africa’s most prominent environmental ministries – seem

incapable of turning off the taps in the bathroom. It’s so basic and doesn’t inspire confidence.

Thankfully, Mustafa Ba does. Resplendent in his scarlet kufi hat, this red-eyed gentleman is Vice President of the Regional Council for a tiny village called Mboula, which is about an hour’s drive from Widou. His community have long been aware of desertification, and before they had even heard of the Great Green Wall, villagers had established a system of sustainable land management.

Logging and overgrazing became crimes punishable with fines, and judging by the natural regeneration that has followed, Mboula’s system has worked. But managing the land and fighting desertification have become much easier since the Great Green Wall project was launched in 2010, admits Mustafa, whose community has since benefited from technical assistance and education. “Instead of feeling alone while facing this huge challenge of desertification, we feel connected to the rest of Africa and the outside world,” he says. “What’s important for us is that we keep communicating with other communities involved in the wall.”

And that’s the point of this project: it’s as much about enfranchising villages like Mboula as it is about planting trees – perhaps more so. After all, it is these local communities that have the most to gain from the Great Green Wall, and by supplying them with resilient seeds, technical assistance and a forum to share information, the project should grow organically.

“Ecosystems don’t know boundaries, so for this to succeed we need trans-boundary solidarity,” says Nora, as we leave Mboula under a setting sun. “It really needs to happen at a local level; if everyone does their bit, then everyone is a winner.”

Gavin Haines is a freelance journalist specialising in environmental issues. Follow him on twitter @gavin_haines

Acacia trees are becoming more valuable standing than felledPhoto by Gavin Haines


AfterNothing was left but mushrooms.They fed on the dead.

And subsequently fedon their own dead.

After a decade or twonew strains emerged:

tall and iridescent,immensely graceful,

they swayed like noble dancersin the toxic winds.

God looked down from on high(where nothing had changed)

and saw it was good. And pretty.But regretted slightly

that mushrooms can neither seenor celebrate

their strangeness. Their Beauty.

– Julian Broughton,composer and poet


I asked a journalist to come and have a rainforest picnic one day. Intrigued, she joined me on a rug in an English woodland. I laid out a selection from a local supermarket. A Scotch egg, cake, apple juice, crisps,

delicious biscuits, some Dutch cheese and a tin of corned beef. “You can eat anything you like,” I said, “as long as you can be sure there’s no rainforest in it.”

She reached for the crisps. Checking the packet, she saw that it said they were cooked in vegetable oil. “That could mean palm oil,” I said. “It’s out.” Next came the Scotch egg. “It’s tricky,” I said. “Soya from the Amazon used to be imported through Holland as cheap feedstock for Europe’s cows, pigs and chickens, but today most is going to China.” Since 2005, the soya moratorium in Brazil has virtually ended the expansion of soya ranches into the Amazon, but if it is rescinded, the encroachment could begin again.

In the end, the only item we could be absolutely sure did not contain a rainforest footprint was the apple juice. Palm

oil is grown in plantations on land cleared of rainforests. Liquid at room temperature, it has invisibly infiltrated our cakes, cookies, crisps and curries as a replacement for harmful artificial trans fats. The corned beef also lay unopened because beef exports to Russia, Egypt and Europe from Brazil have, over decades, helped to drive the massive expansion of cattle ranching there, the principal cause of Amazon rainforest destruction.

In the last two decades the expansion of agribusiness has become the greatest cause of deforestation in the tropics. ‘Forest risk commodities’ such as beef and leather, soya, palm oil, paper and pulp, and biofuels now drive some 80% of deforestation – not poor families cutting wood for fuel!

In Africa, massive Chinese investment in land is under way to secure food provision, and palm oil is expanding there rapidly too, just as it is in the Peruvian Amazon, as Brazil successfully squeezes illegal deforestation out of its own frontier states.

Palm oil, a rainforest risk commodity, has invisibly infiltrated our cakes, biscuits and crisps © REX Features

DEFORESTATION

Why are we eating the Amazon?

A sea change in attitudes to consumption and deforestation is happening worldwide, but will it be enough to save rainforests, asks Andrew Mitchell


With 9 billion mouths to feed by 2050, water and land have become the new constraints on global food production, so land prices will rise, the upshot of which will be that land occupied by rainforests will look cheap.

So how can our food become deforestation-free? The recent horsemeat scandal in Europe has demonstrated that we do not sufficiently know what we are supplied to eat through often corrupt and convoluted global supply chains.

Traceability means knowing exactly where your food is coming from, right back to the farm. From supermarket to soya ranch or oil palm plantation, that can be hard, often involving numerous steps in the chain, from buyers to processors to importers and global traders, to big ranches that import their surplus demand from small ones. And it’s these smaller farms that are often at the rainforest frontier – poor, desperate, easily manipulated and eager to clear rainforests for cash and a better life. The law may say they shouldn’t, but who is checking?

So whose responsibility is it to check? The horsemeat scandal pointed the finger at those who sell it to the end users, the retailers. So European supermarkets cleared their shelves, wrung their hands in the media, and jumped on their compliance departments. But the biggest markets for palm oil are in India and China, and for Brazilian beef it’s the Brazilians themselves. In these markets ‘rainforest concern’ does not exist or is in relative infancy. Without consumer pressure to change, how else can change be triggered? The answer is through investors that have a stake in the companies that use ‘forest risk commodities’.

In 2009, I started the Forest Footprint Disclosure Project (which has now merged with the Carbon Disclosure Project as CDP’s Forests Program) to alert FTSE 100 companies in the global forest supply chain to the need to clean up their act and move towards becoming ‘deforestation-free’. We started sending an annual questionnaire to CEOs inviting them to disclose their use of forest risk commodities in their

operations and supply chains. Using the data, we scored performance and shared the results with investors. Most companies would bin it were it not for the investors backing our request, whose number has now grown to 184, and who manage assets in excess of US$13 trillion. It’s their authority, as part-owners of these companies, that encourages their hard-pressed compliance departments to respond.

The benefits to companies in engaging with our project, and managing down the risks they are running by being directly or indirectly engaged in deforestation, can be huge. A fashion house espousing quality may not know that the leather in its

handbags causes deforestation; a company does not want Greenpeace highlighting that the palm oil in its chocolate bars may have made orphans of orang-utans whose rainforest homes have been destroyed to make it; a toy company might have foreseen that Ken might divorce Barbie because her paper packaging contained rainforest fibres.

So is it all just about reputation? No company wants Greenpeace hanging off the building, but the impacts of such actions are transitory and rarely affect the share price for long. There is, however, a deeper and far more widespread change occurring. Every child in the UK is taught to love rainforests at school, so fewer parents want to work for a company accused of destroying them. The brightest graduates do not want to work for a ‘dirty’ company either.

The UN has made Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+) a central pillar of its bid to slow climate change. The Prince’s Rainforests Project mandated Prince Charles to badger CEOs and heads of state alike on the issue. Eighteen heads of state signed up to his ‘Emergency Plan’ that eventually led to US$4.5 billion in governmental ‘Fast-start’ funding being earmarked for rainforests at the UN climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009. In 2010, the board of the Consumer Goods Forum, representing 400 retailers, manufacturers, service providers and other stakeholders in 70 countries, agreed to a ‘no net deforestation’ goal by 2020. Last year, they and the US government announced that they would work together to reduce deforestation by promoting sustainable supply chains.

A sea change in attitudes to consumption and deforestation is happening worldwide, but will it be enough to save rainforests? In my final article, in the next issue, I will explore a largely invisible link in the rainforest supply chain: the role of the financial sector. Ultimately, it is here that the key lies to halting the money supply that has facilitated the 20th-century destruction of rainforests, and to redirecting it towards beneficial forest finance, at scale.

Andrew Mitchell is the Executive Director of the Global Canopy Programme. www.globalcanopy.org

Traceability means knowing exactly where your food comes from

Aerial view of a deforested Amazonian jungle © Paulo Whitaker/Reuters Pictures

In 2008, global sales of organic food hit US$52 billion – more than double the US$23 billion spent six years earlier. Last year, the 5.8-millionth hybrid car was sold. One thing is clear: a concern for the environment is

embedded in the public consciousness like never before. This pattern is evident at other levels. Until the mid-

1990s, environmental campaigners were at loggerheads with politicians and businesses, but today green issues dominate global events and business statements.

This high profile could be seen as a victory for environmental activists. But there are signs that, as the green movement has become mainstream, it has also become a tool for the powerful rather than for those most vulnerable to the ill effects of the changing environment. Such concerns have been around for several decades – the term ‘greenwash’ was coined in 1986. But the growing public awareness of green issues has strengthened the PR clout of eco-friendly practices, and businesses are clamouring to cash in.

Multinational retailers such as Whole Foods Market, for example, have risen to success on the back of organic food labels, the UK Conservative Party adopted a tree as its logo in 2006, and the very word ‘sustainability’ has been overused by corporations to the point of redundancy. But such displays do not always mean action. Oil companies, for instance, have been accused of touting environmental programmes while continuing to pollute. Moreover, eco-friendly boasts do not necessarily take other ethical factors into account. “Eco-labels give the impression products are sustainable,” says Tim Forsyth, Reader in the Environment at LSE, citing recent attempts by the palm oil industry as an example. “But [such schemes] are often criticised for not going far enough, or ignoring social development and technical things like fertiliser use. The Forest Stewardship Council gives an eco-label for legal logging, for example, but the World Rainforest Movement criticises this because it legitimises industrial tree plantations. The Rainforest Alliance certifies coffee, but only a small proportion of coffee certified this way is from those kinds of protected coffee plantations.”

Clearly, it cannot be assumed that all programmes designed to protect the environment are good for people. “Tribal peoples are often at the losing end of conservation and renewable energy projects,” explains Alice Bayer of Survival International, a group that campaigns for tribal communities. About 80% of the world’s most biologically rich regions are inhabited by Indigenous communities, she says, but the establishment of conservation areas on about 12% of the Earth’s surface has created 130 million “conservation refugees”.

In 2011, a tribe in Kenya were subjected to a brutal eviction after two conservation charities agreed to pay US$2 million for their land. A few years earlier, a plan to create a national park in Guinea-Bissau met intense resistance from locals. In 2009, 245 families were asked to leave an area in India to make more room for

tigers. Across the world people are being displaced to make room for renewables projects, while biofuel plantations have led to deforestation and food scarcity.

Often, ulterior motives are revealed. In 2011, it was reported that the Tanzanian government was trying to evict residents of a village on the grounds that they were degrading the area’s biodiversity – but analysts suggested that interest from foreign investors in the land was the real reason. The urban poor are not safe either. In India middle-class residential committees have adopted the language of environmentalism to evict “encroachers”, who they claim are causing the deterioration of their surroundings.

It seems that, while the green agenda has become a priority, it can also easily be hijacked.

Campaigners believe one of the main problems is that the response to environmental problems is being dictated by a few interested parties. “Policy is being shaped by powerful businesses and financial interests, whom regulatory changes would affect,” says Sarah-Jayne Clifton, Friends of the Earth International’s programme coordinator for climate justice and energy. “Many companies that discuss their green practices in public lobby against legislation behind closed doors.”

The influence on policy of those most affected by it is why many environmental standards are voluntary. The

Many companies that discuss their green practices in public are simultaneously lobbying against legislation behind closed doors


GREEN AGENDA

Movement for ChangeMany environmentalists believe the time has come

to start making stronger connections with other social movements who share the vision of a sustainable and just society. But ‘green’ at what cost, asks Debika Ray

lack of binding international regulations means national governments are afraid of introducing strict rules, in case businesses go elsewhere. In 2011, for example, the UK government embarked on a drive to slash environmental red tape to put “fewer burdens on business”.

Clifton says this is also why mainstream solutions tend to reinforce the status quo. She cites carbon trading (a system that lets the biggest polluters pay poorer countries or companies to stop polluting on their behalf), claiming this delays action on cutting emissions in industrialised countries and locks economies into continuing fossil fuel use.

The trading of water rights has been mooted as a solution to water scarcity, but investors and commodities traders have jumped upon it as a profit-making opportunity.

Such measures, Clifton warns, detract attention from problems such as over-consumption, unequal economic relations, the unsustainable globalised production network, and price manipulation. “These strategies are crowding out effective ones,” she continues. “For example, agriculture led by small farmers is low-carbon activity that promotes food security, but it is often undermined by the practices put forward as solutions.”

So, where does the green movement go from here? Far from being pessimistic, Clifton believes that this is an inevitable stage in the process of campaigning – and that the popularity of green issues, and their frequent

co-optation, suggest it’s time for activists to adjust their strategies. Primarily, this means broadening the focus. After all, environmental problems can no longer be separated from those of globalisation and governance. “The recession is highlighting the urgent need to connect environmental questions with broader ones of financial systems and the global economy. We have to start making connections with other social movements with similar visions of society.”

We are still a long way off removing antagonism towards the environment agenda. Some are – and will continue to be – disproportionately affected by environmental degradation, while others will find ways to avoid its effects and side-step regulations. Moreover, few are willing to be the first to change their ways. But environment problems continue, unavoidably, to be universal.

When it comes to lifestyle change, environmentalists acknowledge that mainstream society will not accept change unless the green movement offers more than despair. “We need to encourage a love of Nature, liveable co mmunities, respect and critical thinking to help attract people away from a consumer mentality,” says environmental campaigner Shepherd Bliss.

Debika Ray is a journalist specialising in global development and social justice.


Survival International, the worldwide movement for tribal peoples, supports the Tanzanian Hadza tribe, in their fight for their land rights© Joanna Eede/Survival International

British moths play an invaluable role

in acting as an engine house for wider biodiversity


I remember the exact moment I developed a passion for moths. I was walking to the village post office and there on the ground in front of me was a completely unfamiliar insect. The dead creature had

crinkle-edged forewings shaped like scimitar blades that spanned the width of my palm. On the head were bizarre horn-like antennae like something you might see on an extraterrestrial in a child’s comic.

The creature was grey apart from two astonishing ‘eyes’ of glorious terracotta on its hind wings. Weirdest of all was the body. From a disconcertingly furry head the moth’s whole abdomen tapered and curved strongly upwards, so it looked as if a six-legged mouse had been crossed with a tiny banana.

It was, in fact, a species called the Poplar Hawk-moth, but at the time it was so deeply unfamiliar to me that you could have told me it had just landed from outer space and I would have been equally convinced. What I have since learnt is that Poplar Hawk-moths are actually a common garden species. And during my subsequent years of regular trapping I would catch and release them weekly during spring and summer.

This is part of the compelling magic of moths. Creatures you can hardly even imagine exist are actually all around your house throughout the night. You realise that the domestic environment is a parallel universe full of other-worldly inhabitants. It is true for almost every one of us. People with the most urban of handkerchief-sized plots have recorded hundreds of moth species in their back yards.

Many of us may have little idea that moths are all around, but that is only one part of our ignorance. Worse, in some ways, is the way that their nocturnal lifestyles still make moths unpleasantly eerie for some, while others view all species as pests that ruin our woollens. In truth there are just

a handful of moth types that in the larval stage regularly eat textiles or other valuable human products. These aside, the 2,500 British species of moths are completely harmless and play an invaluable role in pollinating trees or flowers and in acting as an engine house for wider biodiversity.

Yet the real tragedy of these insects is not just that the wider public knows little about them. It is that the creatures have massively declined in the last few decades. The Dorset-based organisation Butterfly Conservation has just

published a report entitled The State of Britain’s Larger Moths 2013. The insect group is divided into what are known as micro-moths (1,620 species) and macro-moths (880 species). The report covers just the latter, which include the more conspicuous and better-known species.

The document is based on Butterfly Conservation’s own studies, and also on the 40 years of census work conducted by Rothamsted Research

agricultural science station, whose mapping of moth population trends since 1968 represents the longest continuous detailed study of insects known to have been carried out anywhere in the world.

The report highlights the fact that the overall national abundance of larger moths has declined by 28% since 1968, and that in the southern half of Britain that figure rises to 40%. In the north the rate of loss is considerably smaller and is offset by range expansions as climate change enables a number of moths to move northwards. Twenty-seven species have colonised Britain since the beginning of the century; about 110 larger moths have increased in abundance and more than 50 have doubled their populations.

One of the report’s other revelations concerns three moths that have recently become extinct. Indicative of the gloriously poetic names that moths received from early entomologists, they are the Orange Upperwing, Bordered

The Magic of MothsMark Cocker examines the phenomenon of disappearing moths

NATURE


Gothic and Brighton Wainscot. This trio joins 62 other species that have disappeared from Britain since the 20th century. Richard Fox of Butterfly Conservation, the report’s main author, argues: “Imagine if three birds had gone extinct. It would trigger a wave of public attention. But these lost moths hardly raise a flicker of concern.”

In a perverse way the most heartening aspect of the report also entails its most troubling message. While moths may be victims of widespread misconception, they are actually well studied by those people who have stumbled upon their strange magic. Perhaps as many as 10,000 enthusiasts regularly trap and record them in British gardens and supply the data that enables moth population trends to be tracked. Butterfly Conservation runs its own citizen science project, the National Moth Recording Scheme, with a website that covers every aspect of the process and allows even the rawest of recruits to take part (www.mothscount.org).

Other charismatic parts of the nation’s wildlife, such as birds and butterflies, are also well studied. Yet these faunal groups are tiny by comparison with moths. There are 10 times as many moths as British birds, and 40 times more moths than butterflies. This single fact highlights the importance of the group as a measure of environmental health. To have information on such a wide spectrum of species means that The State of Britain’s Larger Moths 2013 offers a clearer and finer-grained picture of environmental conditions in Britain than almost ever before. And what it tells us is that all is not well: that moths and all the complex habitats and landscape forms on which they depend are deteriorating before our eyes.

What needs to change to halt these losses is the entire government attitude towards natural landscape and wildlife, which is presently rooted in ideas of their disposability and marginal significance. Yet there is also much that can be done in every garden. Even small changes – permitting a few weeds, or some tall grasses and marginal scruffiness – can be beneficial. There are a number of flowers and trees that are truly superfoods for moth caterpillars, including oak (food for 130 species), hawthorn (115), hazel (72), roses (40) and even nettles (30) and dandelions (67). Better still is to get a moth trap and to tap into their bizarre and glorious magic yourself. They confirm to perfection the adage of French poet Paul Éluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”

Mark Cocker is a naturalist and a regular contributor to the Guardian Country Diary. www.birdsandpeople.org

Large Elephant Hawk-moth (Deilephila elpenor), Poplar Hawk-moth (Laothoe populi), Deaths Head Hawk-moth (Acherontia atropos), Lime Hawk-moth (Mimas tiliae) © Chris Shields www.illustratedwildlife.com


CONSERVATION

“Beware the wolves of Chiantishire,” warned a recent Daily Mail headline. Tuscany’s “idyllic landscape of rolling fields and poplar-lined hills”, the article continued,

which in the past “proved irresistible to the great, the good and the very rich”, have in recent months become “home to a savage predator – packs of marauding wolves which are growing increasingly brazen”. Politicians in Chianti-country, we are told, “have called on the government to take action. There are growing fears that the wolves could attack humans.”

The Language of Wolves

What’s at stake in wolf conservation? It isn’t just the survival of the species but the survival of wilderness, writes Ros Coward

Romania’s robust environment is home to over 3,000 wolves, the largest population in EuropeEuropean Grey Wolf, Romania © Staffan Widstrand/CORBIS


Even by the Daily Mail’s usual standards of scaremongering, this scenario is pushing it. In spite of their mythically savage status, proven attacks on humans by wolves are very small in number: globally since 2000 there have only been around 20 confirmed attacks. By comparison, in an average year there are 26 deaths caused by domestic dogs in the United States alone. The risk to humans of an unprovoked attack by a wolf is minuscule in comparison, even taking into account the vastly greater number of dogs.

Exaggerated though this report is, there’s a grain of truth: wolves are on the increase, a conservation success story of sorts in some parts of Europe at least. Reintroduced colonies have been fanning out, faster than anticipated. In Italy there have even been occasional wolf sightings within 50km of Rome. In France a growing wolf population (which spread naturally across the Italian border) is now established in 14 departments. The wolves in these countries owe their survival to the strong conservationist lobby establishing protection in the face of cultures deeply committed to hunting. Even in more populated areas, wolves have made occasional appearances, with packs establishing in Eastern Germany and occasional sightings in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The Daily Mail article also contains another grain of truth. While this expansion holds very little threat to humans, the threat to livestock is obviously very real. In Italy it is estimated that 1,000 livestock were killed last year; in France in 2011 alone, wolves are thought to have killed 5,000 sheep; and in Spain’s Asturias region wolves killed 1% of the stock reared between 2000 and 2004.

In some front-line wolf territories there are considerable tensions in spite of huge efforts by conservationists to make protection work. In France a Wolf Plan, created in 2004, pays generous compensation for livestock killed by wolves and subsidises farmers to buy and train dogs (the Patou or Pyrenean mountain dog) that traditionally protected herds against wolves. But shepherds in the Alps are complaining that these dogs can attack tourists, causing more problems than they solve, and that wolves, losing their fear of humans, are becoming more menacing.

Environmentalists believe that wolves will not approach humans, and that livestock tended with properly trained dogs will not be attacked. They are sceptical too about how many livestock are actually killed by wolves and about the compensation claims. But views have become so polarised that in the French Alps the stand-off has been described as ferocious pastoral warfare.

We only have to look at the Daily Mail piece to see why these conflicts escalate so fast and why dialogue around wolves is so charged. The language is loaded with emotive terms describing wolves as ‘savage’, ‘marauding’ and ‘brazen’, and the expansion of their population as a campaign to expand their territory. These terms imply not just that wolves are natural predators but that they have a conscious, malign intent on humanity. This is the archaic

symbolism of fairy tales, which emerged in earlier times and in wilder places where the harshness and savagery of Nature is as apparent as its blessings and where people exposed to this harshness (in which the wolves’ arbitrary depredations of their stock would figure large) would have good reason to imagine the ‘cruelty’ of Nature embodied in certain creatures.

Even though societies (even remote ones) are much better protected, connected and resourced, this ancient symbolism is easily reactivated. Indeed it plays a huge part in the ongoing persecution of wolves. When George Monbiot recently wrote about the treatment of wolves in Norway – a country that, although blessed with many wild and remote areas, has nevertheless hunted wolves to the point of extinction – he met with a barrage of accusations. At the

forefront was the charge that Monbiot was a sentimental urbanite who simply didn’t understand the true malevolence of the wolf.

And wolves are not only laden with symbolism by their opponents: they are also heavily endowed with symbolic attributes by their supporters. This is not so obvious, but it is an important factor in why the stakes are so high on both sides. Of all species, wolves can, and do, scavenge, but they are

primarily a hunting species needing to range far and wide in pursuit of both prey and mates. Wolves need space – vast, non-urbanised areas – and a healthy environment with ample big prey, as all top predators do. What’s at stake for conservationists isn’t just the survival of the species but the survival of wilderness, of unmanaged spaces big enough to sustain the wolf; in short, as close to an imagined natural state as it is possible to be. Recent research on their social structure, loyalty and sophisticated hunting communication has added hugely to the wolf’s charms, but fundamentally their charisma lies in their embodiment of Nature without human interference.

I understand the pull of this symbolism. I often choose my holiday destinations because of the presence of wolves in an area. Last summer I went to Transylvania, attracted by an environment that still supports top predators such as wolves and bears. Their existence signals that this environment is relatively pristine or at least tended in traditional low-impact ways. I didn’t see any wolves – indeed I didn’t even come across recent scats like I had in Poland’s Białowieża Forest (another destination I chose for the presence of wolves). But in the remote Carpathians they never felt far away, their presence signalled by sheep tended in the tightest of tight groups by the traditional sheepdogs and always with a shepherd present who would warn off any tourist intent on approaching the dogs. These animals are not in the business of making friends. This is an environment where the wolf is present, a robust environment therefore, an environment where Nature is not dominated or controlled entirely by humans.

But if the wolf is valued because its presence implies

Wolves symbolise a notion of Nature as untamed wilderness


Nature unsubdued, then suggestions of ‘managing’ wolf populations are inherently problematic. Management implies Nature on human terms. Of course, resistance to wolf management has some strong rational grounds because ‘management’ covers a multitude of sins. At its softest end, it can mean supporting traditional pastoral techniques like working with the dogs, and allowing farmers to fire warning shots, or even kill wolves that threaten their flocks. But at the other end, management can sometimes be used to justify wolf persecution. Monbiot has pointed out that this is not only the case in Norway but in Canada too, where the killing of wolves is explained as part of a management plan for caribou. In fact it appears the level of threat to caribou has been entirely exaggerated and is being used to support another agenda, namely the exploitation – and destruction – of the wolf’s environment.

It’s also hard not to feel repulsed by some of the language employed around ‘managing’ wolves. Some of the American states – even very enlightened ones like Minnesota – use the term ‘harvest’ for the sporadic culling of wolves. Sweden, which has just controversially given the go-ahead to the culling, repeatedly uses the expression ‘managing at sustainable levels’, even though the Swedish wolf population is already considerably reduced. In both cases these feel like euphemisms for – certainly in Sweden’s case – unjustified killing.

Yet if the wolf population grows, ‘management’ will have to be addressed; the fears are too deep, and the losses too painful for some rural communities. But to be acceptable, a new, less loaded language may have to be found. There

needs to be a way of talking about wolves without succumbing either to scaremongering and ethnocentric notions of human management on one hand, or impossible ideals of prehuman wilderness on the other.

There are signs this is happening. Jean-Marc Moriceau, a wolf expert and the author of Man Versus Wolf: A 2,000-year War, has advanced the idea of a ‘wolf parliament’, bringing together shepherds, ecologists and government. That would require a new unfamiliar language around beasts, a language of needs, rights and interests, mitigation of harm, and negotiated settlements.

Management by another name need not be disastrous. Take Romania, which, with 3,000 wolves, has the largest numbers in Europe. It is one of the few European countries that don’t pay compensation for wolf kills. Nevertheless the wolf isn’t particularly persecuted there and it’s easy to see why. Flocks are never left untended. They move with shepherds and dogs in close and continuous attendance. Insofar as money comes in from wolves, it’s not from compensation or bounties. It’s from tourism drawn to the idea of remoteness.

Language describing what’s happening there, namely “low-impact human activity in areas where wolves still have stronghold”, may not have the emotional resonance of the old polarisations, but it might just have a much happier outcome.

Ros Coward is Professor of Journalism at the University of Roehampton and is a long-time contributor to The Ecologist.

A wolf’s charisma lies in its embodiment of Nature without human interferenceWild Grey Wolf, Finland © Lassi Rautiainen/naturepl.com


FRIENDS OF THE EARTH

We are using more of the planet’s minerals, metals, forests, fuels, water and land than ever before. The environmental damage is increasingly linked with social injustices –

from land grabbing and toxic pollution to water shortages and the destruction of fertile land and the seas.

These are big challenges and Friends of the Earth is looking to identify key interventions that can start to put us on a different pathway – away from resource conflicts and the headlong pursuit of economic growth at all costs, towards a greater global quality of life for all.

Over the next 10 years we aim to reshape the UK and EU into economies that rely far less on oil, coal and gas, protect Nature and get consumption under control. Key to this is to understand that the economy should work for people and planet, rather than pitting one against the other.

Given the scale of the challenge, we’re focusing on two key areas:

• How can rich countries reduce their overconsumption of the world’s scarce resources?

• How can we ensure we shift the economy to make the transition to a sustainable use of the world’s resources?

On the first question a key issue has been establishing what the European resource use footprint is in practical terms. We have been working with the Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna to work out an effective way of measuring how much of the world’s resources Europe actually uses. We looked at four different areas to measure: our land footprint, carbon footprint (this considers all global-warming gases), water footprint, and the overall amount of materials we use. All these indicators are consumption-based, i.e. they consider the global amount of resource that we use; for example, land in Paraguay that is used to grow the soya that is fed to European livestock is included.

The European Union as a whole uses around 1.5 times its own land area every year, with 60% of this coming from outside the EU. The UK alone imports more than three times its surface area. This land demand, combined with misguided policies on biofuels and biomass for power stations, means that Europe is helping to drive land grabbing around the world.

But should we be using so much of the world’s land? If not, how can we reduce our land consumption? Options include dietary changes (reducing animal protein, increasing vegetable protein), reducing wastage of textiles (through reuse and recycling), and stopping the dash towards biofuels and biomass. The European Parliament is

backing this approach in principle and the Commission is proposing adoption of the indicators, so whilst there is still a long way to go we’re quietly confident that we’re a step closer to getting Europe to measure – and then reduce – its environmental impact.

But however much we try to reduce our resource use, the fundamental issue is that we have an economic system that drives us towards ever-increasing levels of consumption and dogmatically pursues economic growth no matter what. There is fantastic work being done in this area by the likes of Tim Jackson, and we are now focusing on three key interventions that will start to put us on the right path:

Transforming financeThe rapaciousness and short-termism of our finance system have led to ever-widening gaps between rich and poor, and created the enduring economic crisis. But it could be radically transformed and put to work for people and the planet. We’re working in partnership with a wide range of other organisations to find a way through this financial maze and recently staged a major conference called Transforming Finance, which we will now be following up.

Transition to a green industrial policyWe need to develop the industries of the future, not those of the past. The whole economy needs to be green – not just the bits of it that are making clean energy and green technologies. Government needs to have a supportive environment policy, a long-term commitment to decarbonisation, and a green industrial policy. We are working to form a broad coalition to develop and promote this green industrial policy, initially focusing on UK political parties as they develop their manifestos for the 2015 elections. Civil society and progressive businesses have already been lambasting the government for not living up to its promises – we need to help them keep up that pressure.

A focus on quality of life, not quantity of growthIs it possible to redirect the economy so that it focuses on wellbeing, or quality of life, rather than GDP growth? And not just wellbeing in the UK or Europe, but around the world – with an equitable distribution of the world’s resources? We are only just starting our work in this area and are keen to hear the views of Resurgence & Ecologist readers. Join our Economics and Resource Use programme hub at forum.foe.co.uk/campaignhubs

Michael Warhurst heads the Economics and Resource Use programme for Friends of the Earth. Follow him on twitter @mwarhurst

Working for People and PlanetMichael Warhurst outlines the resource use programme of Friends of the Earth


What is your relationship to Darwin?My mother’s mother was one of his granddaughters, which makes me one of his 72 great-great-grandchildren.

What do you think he would have made of climate change?He would have been very interested. He was always trying to think of imagined causes at the deepest possible level. For example, when he’s on a coral reef in the Indian Ocean he looks at the spray beating on the rocks and he thinks nothing can withstand the power of this ocean, but then there are other organic forces at work to counter that power. He was amazing at gathering data, and bringing everything he knew to bear on one particular thing.

What one piece of legislation would you introduce to positively impact on climate change?Can I have three? One would be to control the human population. Second would be to control how we use energy. The third would be to make sure that the use of energy does not benefit only those who already have money.

Nuclear power or renewable energy?Renewable energy. I know that there are arguments for nuclear power, but I cannot see that it’s not all going to go horribly wrong.

What can we do in our own lives to really make a difference?Firstly, stop our total waste of energy. We just take electricity for granted (just as we take water for granted) and we forget that it is made by things that deplete the world’s resources. A fennec fox eats a lot of berries but

does not go to just one bush. It takes a few berries from one tree and a few from another. That is what we need to do. Whenever I am put up in a hotel, I’m always so shocked that the lights are always on. Now in England we have air conditioning. Surely we don’t live in a climate where we need it. There ought to be legislation that controls everybody’s use of electricity. Everybody should be entitled to the same amount, rich or poor.

Which political party do you think does the most for the environment?The Green Party, obviously. I’ve always voted Labour, but the last Labour government did nothing to help the environment.

Which politician does the most to put climate change at the top of the political agenda?There was an environment minister in India for a while who was trying to save the swamps but didn’t get anywhere against the vested interest and corruption. I think Obama is probably trying. Credit to him for trying, because that’s where it needs to come from – the very top. Al Gore, who made An Inconvenient Truth, is a brave and honest man to put out that film.

Which country do you think is leading the way?Bhutan is pretty good. I went to Bhutan for my tiger book – they’re small enough, remote enough and they’ve got enough forests. Sadly they’re not very nice to some of their migrant workers. But the politicians there know the value of their environment and are going to try to save it. People

here in the UK don’t see that the quality of our lives will depend, in the end, on protecting the forests and the rivers.

What can we learn from Greece?You have to pay your taxes, because if you don’t you don’t get the services. The further you are away from the cities, the more chance you have of a decent life. If you live near land, you can grow food, and I think people in Greece are realising the importance of land.

Who are your environmental heroes?It would have to be a wildlife conservationist. For instance Jonathan Baillie, Director of Conservation Programmes at the Zoological Society of London, wrote a wonderful book called Stories for Our Children: The World in 2050; he is a hero. George Schaller is a great, great conservationist who has written a fantastic book about pandas, gorillas and tigers. He said that all over the world there is a “great dying” and all you can do is go to the places that need you most and help to conserve the wildlife there. My brother Felix is on the human-rights side of India and has written a book. The environment is for people as well as animals, and that’s what Felix is trying to put forward.

How does Nature influence your own work?It’s the touchstone. Managing Nature – because there’s so little left of it – is what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to understand it. Nature is an inspiration.

Ruth Padel’s new book is The Mara Crossing. Sharon Garfinkel works for The Resurgence Trust.

INTERVIEW

My Green LifeThe quality of all our lives will depend on how we protect our forests and rivers, says Ruth Padel. Interview by Sharon Garfinkel

Ruth Padel photo by Mary Tziraki


Lodestone I am Magnes the shepherd who found a pebble stuck to a nail in his boot and discovered the mineral Attract. I am Heinz Lowenstam, geologist from Silesiawho identified magnetite in tooth caps of a homing mollusc. I am magnetotactic bacteriaknitted with crystals which orient to Earth’s magnetic field. I am also your garden robinwho reads geomagnetic lines the way you scan a newspaper, navigating folded thunderclouds at nightby neural pathways of ‘Cluster N’, wired to my left eye from light-processing regions of the brain.

I am the photoreceptor protein which draws young Monarch butterflies hatched on a month-long journey to the same old Mexican forest their ancestors knew. I am salamander, spiny lobster, bee, crocodile, whale and also that flock of cranes passing silently over the moon. I am fish, mammal, fungi and bird. I am two billion years of life-forms steering by the minerals of which I am made and molecular feel for the pull of the earth. What about us, poor wanderers with no inner compass? You inscribe the globe. You map, you have words, you foresee your death. Isn’t that enough?

– from The Mara Crossing by Ruth Padel (Chatto & Windus)


A Healthy EconomyA healthy body sees old cells dying and new ones being born. A healthy financial system also has to allow for decay and renewal, writes Hugo Dixon

Health is an interesting ethical concept because of the way it links to our human nature. We are

animals, albeit rather special ones. It is almost self-evident that we need healthy bodies and healthy minds. Otherwise, how else are we to realise our potential as organisms? By extension, it becomes important that we live healthy lifestyles and inhabit healthy buildings and environments. And, with another stretch, that all our socio-economic institutions – marriage, government, companies or, indeed, society and capitalism – should also be healthy.

So could the very term ‘healthy’ become more widely deployed as an ethical concept? And in particular, can it help shed light on the current debate over how to reform capitalism in the wake of the financial crisis?

To answer this we will first need to ask what, though, health is. The best-known definition is the World Health Organization’s: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” That’s fine, as far as it goes. But it may also be useful to flesh out the concept with other qualities such as vigour, balance, shock-resistance and resilience.

One way of seeing whether the term ‘healthy’ sheds useful insights on the ‘goodness’ of complex systems such as economies is to compare it with other more conventional yardsticks such as ‘growth’ and ‘sustainability’. While both have utility, it would be a mistake to fetishise either.

On the one hand, growth can easily be unsustainable – say, because of a bubble, or because society is consuming capital or natural resources as if they were income. On the other hand, sustainability isn’t always a state

to be aimed at either. Hell, for example, might be sustainable – provided the devil found a renewable source of energy for his furnaces – but that wouldn’t make it any more desirable.

That said, the concept of health shouldn’t be fetishised either. But the concept of health can shed light on why both growth and sustainability have their limitations. Health does not imply that things stay as they are. Health implies positive wellbeing, and actually, truly healthy bodies are in a state of continual regeneration.

‘Health’ also brings other ideas to the table that are useful in examining any complex system. One is the notion of disease – and linked to that, diagnosis and cure. If the economy is sick, you first need to understand why (diagnosis) and then go about making it better (cure).

There are many ways in which capitalism could be considered unhealthy – for example, its impact on the environment. Capitalism itself – with its basis in free enterprise and private property – can certainly be vigorous, but the bigger question is whether it can also be balanced, shock-resistant and resilient.

After the tribulations of recent years, the conventional wisdom is that the problem has been that capitalism has had too much freedom. That, though, is a misdiagnosis. Most of the diseases that have become apparent as a result

of the current financial crisis have been caused by a distortion of free enterprise rather than too much freedom.

Sickness number one was Alan Greenspan’s habit of lowering interest rates at the first sign of trouble during the pre-crunch era when he ran the US Federal Reserve. This numbed the fear of investors and left greed untrammelled. The natural emotional balance of a healthy organism – which is useful in guiding it to good outcomes and away from bad ones – was distorted.

Central bankers do have a role in mitigating the extremes of the economic cycle. But it is vital that, in doing so, they don’t just stoke up more trouble. They need to have the expertise to recognise bubbles, and the courage to prick them.

The second malady was caused by an excessive willingness to bail out bankrupt banks. In a well-functioning free market, investors would bear the consequences of poor decisions. Shareholders would be wiped out and bondholders would suffer. But, with the exception of Lehman Brothers and a few much smaller cases, bondholders were bailed out instead of being bailed in during the crunch.

This was understandable, given the fear of knock-on effects. But a healthy body sees old cells dying and new ones being born. A healthy financial system also has to allow for decay and renewal. Propping up zombie banks debilitates the whole economy. This is why reforms in the pipeline to allow banks to be wound down without causing the entire system to collapse are so important.

The third illness was caused by the “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose” bets that financiers and traders were able to enjoy during the upswing. If things went well, they made a fortune; if

A healthy system is built not just for

the good times

ETHICAL LIVING ECONOMICS


everything collapsed, taxpayers picked up the pieces. Not surprisingly, they spun the roulette wheel.

Such privatisation of gains and socialisation of losses is not healthy. It is a caricature of the free market.

The fourth disease was the inadequate shock-resistance and resilience of the system. Institutions such as Lehman had leveraged their

balance sheets to over 30 times their equity. This meant that a decline of only 3.3% in the average value of their assets was enough to wipe out their entire capital.

A healthy system is built not just for the good times. It should be resilient enough to cope with the bad times. The financial system in 2007 decidedly wasn’t. Policymakers around the world

are now forcing banks to hold bigger buffers in the hope that, when the next shock comes, they will be better placed to survive it and bounce back.

Most definitions of health talk about mental as well as physical wellbeing. One can make an analogous point for capitalism: values matter as well as structure. The past 30 years have seen the rise of the ‘greed is good’ culture, as epitomised by the obnoxious Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street.

Greed is a natural emotion that can play an important role in keeping an organism healthy – by driving it forward to consume and accumulate. It cannot and should not be removed from the economic body. But greed does need to be balanced by other motivations. The most important is a desire to serve. Businesses need to be asking themselves the whole time how they are adding value to their customers and society at large.

Most successful companies do this. But many financial institutions failed to think through whether their products were socially valuable during the long credit boom. Merely relying on the theory that the market’s ‘invisible hand’ will reconcile private greed with the greater good – as many did – isn’t enough, when we know how often capitalism is rigged.

Business people and financiers should never forget that capitalism rests on the consent of the people. As years of economic gloom gnaw away at that support, the challenge is to show that capitalism can be healthy. That requires changes in both structures and mindset.

Hugo Dixon is Editor-at-Large, Reuters News. An earlier version of this column was published in Reuters Breakingviews. Thanks to Viktoria Dendrinou for help with research.

Illustration by Sara Tyson www.saratyson.com


Care homes normally only get headlines when there is a scandal involving the inhuman treatment of patients by care staff working in conditions so degrading that they could bring

out the dark side in anybody.So it is unusual to find a national newspaper medical

correspondent treading the warm, welcoming corridors of a care unit where support is patently delivered with calm compassion. But this is a detective mission: I am on the trail of spirituality in health care.

Hundreds of scientific studies show how spiritual support can boost patients’ recovery and increase wellbeing. But

too often the spiritual side of care has become the lost dimension of modern ‘service delivery’. When this happens, the humanity implicit in care can disappear entirely.

Not at the Holy Cross Priory in Heathfield; this newly built complex in the East Sussex countryside is run by a religious community called the Grace and Compassion Benedictines.

Holy Cross offers an alternative way ahead. But it also harks back to the roots of our hospital system, much of which was founded by religious institutions. The accommodation ranges from sheltered homes to a high-dependency nursing unit, but you don’t have to be religious to live here.

Pam is a typical resident. We meet in one of Holy Cross’s

Spirituality in Health CareJohn Naish discovers that spiritual support equals better outcomes and better recovery in health care services

Embroidery by Linda Miller, for details about summer workshops by Linda visit www.lindamillerembroideries.co.ukLinda will also be exhibiting at MADE, London 25 to 27 October www.madelondon.org

ETHICAL LIVING HEALTH


day rooms, which has views of woodland. She is warm and chatty, but clearly retains a flinty independence. Now aged 92, she lives with her Scottie dog in the care-home part of the complex. Her memory and hearing are not what they used to be, but she remains in robust and cheery health.

Pam enjoys life. She takes her dog for a walk three times a day and can socialise whenever she likes. “No one tells you what to do here. The staff are kind and caring,” she says. “You are your own person. That autonomy is what keeps you going.”

None of that should be too much to expect. But the reality of modern care is that it can be extremely uncaring – particularly when management views patients as ‘economic units’ rather than human souls.

This has led commentators such as the Prince of Wales to urge that compassion be returned to the heart of care. Last year, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the Prince wrote: “This will always be a struggle if we continue with an over-emphasis on mechanistic and technological approaches.”

The foundation that runs Holy Cross was set up in 1954 by an educational psychologist called Mary Garson and was based near Brighton. In the course of her work, Garson found herself increasingly encountering destitute older people. Moved by their plight, she asked her spiritual director, a Catholic Father, for the £800 she needed to buy a property to shelter them. Within a day – and quite unconnected to this specific request – a benefactor donated £800 to the religious order.

Garson bought a house in Brighton and initially relied on volunteer help. Then she began employing qualified nurses. As the service grew, so did the demand. In the early 1960s, the former priory of Heathfield was donated to her. The community now runs four other English homes as well.

Sister Jaya is one of the Holy Cross nuns. In 1986, aged just 17, she joined the Grace and Compassion Benedictines at their convent in Southern India. She is now a qualified accountant, but volunteers as a care assistant and says she believes spiritual compassion is at the core of the work. “You need to be able to put yourself in the place of the person you are caring for, in order to understand their needs. If you are angry or upset, it will reflect onto those people. Likewise, if management don’t care, then naturally not caring is what will transmit to and through the staff.”

Caring for sick people continually can drain anyone’s resources of compassion. But spirituality can help staff counter this, says Jaya. “It gives us food and motivation for daily life. We feel cared for as carers. We need to feel happiness to bring happiness to the people we are caring for.”

Some very worldly problems are looming, though.

The community relies on donations to break even. “The economy means that these are drying up,” says Jaya.

Fiona Wookey, Holy Cross’s director of care, explains how the finances run: “Some of the residents are self-funding; others rely on local authority funding. But that can be only £389.24 a week, which is not enough to cover the costs of caring properly for a clinically dependent person. Charity makes up the shortfall. The nuns work for free.”

Clearly, the NHS cannot – and should not – rely on religious care staff working gratis. But equally, it is clear that good care is hard to provide at current government funding levels. We live in a nation where millions prefer to buy baubles and other extravagances, rather than paying more tax to support our older people.

Thus the scandal of abusive care homes is not simply about spiritual deficits in health care: it is part of a wider

malaise – that of our culture’s prizing of the material over the compassionate.

And whilst the Heathfield care home has received glowing reports from official inspections, many people may not wish to entrust their care to a religious organisation. (It must be acknowledged, after all, that churches have had their share of abuse scandals.)

The only sustainable solution lies in reviving the ethos of spiritual care within our NHS. Recent scandals mean the service has a reputation for being spiritually care-less. But there are areas of good practice, and these must be expanded, says Stephen Wright, the spiritual director for the Sacred Space Foundation in Cumbria. The foundation was founded in the 1990s to support health care workers suffering spiritual crises such as burnout. Now it helps people from all walks of life. “The NHS only acknowledges spirituality in varying degrees,” says Wright. “Several NHS trusts have devised strategies for developing staff to support people spiritually in hospital.”

The problem is that spirituality is “a big black hole” in health professionals’ education, Wright maintains. “While staff are well trained in intellectual problem-solving, we do not pay much attention to the inner life, and that is from where compassion emanates,” he explains. “If you have health care staff who have cultivated their own sense of inner harmony, they will be better able to ride the storm of working in health care. They may even find their way to a greater source of compassion, rather than having to produce it themselves.”

John Naish is a health journalist, an active member of the Unitarian church, and author of the book Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More.

Spirituality is a big black hole in the education of health care professionals


One of the unexpected hazards of living with a botanist is that you are never quite sure what you will find when you open your

fridge – especially in those scrunched-up, mud-splattered bags hidden on the bottom shelf at the back where your everyday vegetables are supposed to be.

I have learnt – mainly the hard way – that the best approach to this is to always expect the unexpected and then make the best of these free ingredients by finding delicious ways to cook, bottle and preserve them. I say the ‘hard’ way, because what I have actually learnt is that foraging and wild food cooking – both of which have become über-cool – is all very well, but unless you step in, you are in danger of being offered something that whilst green, often looks fairly bedraggled and, if I am completely honest, doesn’t taste much better than it looks.

So I have spent the last few years on a mission to find and create recipes that benefit from the vitality of wild and foraged foods but actually TASTE NICE too – and the result is this new column, which combines the joys of cooking up a storm using ingredients from the hedgerow (or the botanist’s fridge) alongside other things that taste good, in order to make dishes that are 100% Foodilicious!

We’ll make tinctures and tisanes, stews and scones, jams and jellies, puddings and pies – anything that I think is worth taking the time and trouble to plan for, to prepare, to cook and to share and all of which I have made myself. It won’t be a ‘bish-bash-bosh, that will do and let’s slop this in the pan as quick as we can’ style of cooking, because that’s not why or how I cook.

I cook to connect with Nature, with the people I love and with strangers who may be just one delicious meal or gift pot of jam away from becoming friends and loved ones. I cook because it is one of the things I love most of all to do, and doing what you love is the fastest track I know to reconnect to a deeper sense of what really matters. (Ten years ago I wrote a series of books

about natural health under the umbrella title What Really Works. Today, I’d change all their titles to What Really Matters.)

I like to cook in old-fashioned, time-consuming and slow ways: ways that get the beta waves of my brain settled into a quieter and more gentle rhythm. I won’t say meditation, but I will say mindful. I like to cook to music, not noise. And I am never happier than when a recipe says “pick a pound of these and then spend an hour stirring them slowly around a battered old pot that has seen you through so many different stages of your life”. I like to cook with ritual and that usually starts with putting my apron on and giving thanks for the time to cook, the food to

cook and the knowledge gleaned over years, some from experimentation and much from others, on how to cook and what to do with these amazing ingredients. I think of this as a kind of gentle and genteel ‘botanical cooking’, and for me, often

the way it starts is like this: A specific plant – its leaves, its flowers, its

fruits or its seeds – will catch my eye and then start to demand my attention. I may see it in the hedgerow or it might be in a book or even part of a company logo. Before I know it, I am seeing this same plant everywhere – I call this the ‘eyeing-up’ stage – and this goes on until I begin researching and daydreaming about how I can use it in the kitchen.

This is the start of getting-to-know-you, a bit like dating. I like to read about the plant, its folklore, its medicinal properties and its traditional culinary uses. I like to see how botanical artists have painted it, and I may even have a go at drawing it myself. I like to learn what the Maori think about it and how European herbalists use it, and to discover its role, if any, in Ayurveda or other disciplines. I have an eclectic library made up of herbals and pamphlets and magazine cuttings and I use all of this – and more – to make a lasting relationship with the plant I am going to work with.

And only then am I ready to take what I have learnt into the kitchen.

The cook’s job is to embody generosity– Edward Espé Brown

ETHICAL LIVING FOODILICIOUS

Summer DreamsSusan Clark introduces the art of botanical cooking


To make about 20 biscuits

200g unsalted butter, softened

100g caster sugar

320g plain flour

A handful of scented Rosa rugosa petals, baked for a few minutes on a low heat to a papery crispness and flaked

2 tsp crushed, coarse black pepper

Into the Kitchen – Summer Scented Rose Petal & Black Pepper Biscuits

These are biscuits unashamedly for grown-ups: biscuits with not one, but two botanical twists. A

rich, buttery shortbread dough flecked with a delicate smattering of highly scented rose petal flakes, and then, on the tip of the tongue, the unexpected hard kick of a crushed smidgeon of black pepper. They capture a summer mood, retrospective, even a little sad; the fleeting

intensity of a barely remembered English summer and all its clichés: Wimbledon 1976 played out on a teenager’s tinny transistor radio, the hard thwack of the cricket ball on the bat just before they call tea, and then the sound of scalding, over-steeped tea poured high from a delicate spout. Serve them with Devon clotted cream on the side for an afternoon tea performance to feel proud of.

Cream the butter and sugar. Sieve the flour into the mix, add the flaked rose petals and black pepper and work all the ingredients into a dough with your hands. Do this slowly and enjoy the process! Wrap the ball of dough in cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper. Split the biscuit dough in two and roll each half on a lightly floured surface until it is about 5mm thick. Cut the biscuits out and bake at 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 until golden. This will take 15–20 minutes.

Allow to cool on the trays before transferring to a wire rack. Store in an airtight tin.

A homemade rose water is soothing for the skin, especially after exposure to too much sun. It is also good for dry and more mature skins, which is why you often find rose as the key ingredient in expensive body lotions and moisturisers. To make your own rose water, simply infuse 100g of rose petals with 300ml of boiling water. Leave to cool for 15 minutes. Drain. Use the rose water as a skin tonic.

Vitality notes – Rose petals are uplifting and soothing, especially for tired or irritated skin

Watercolour painting of ‘Summer Wine’ by Rosie Sanders. Rosie gives courses on botanical painting and botanical

printmaking www.rosiesanders.com

Susan Clark is Associate Editor at Resurgence & Ecologist. She writes a regular food column for The Ecologist website and is co-author, with Erick Muzard, of The Sunday Times Vitality Cookbook. She is also the author of the What Really Works Insider’s Guides to Natural Health.


Distillation is one of the most evocative metaphors in the English language. ‘Whisky’ is anglicised Gaelic for ‘water of life’ – eau de vie in France and aquavit in Scandinavia – the all-important

fifth element (quintessence), which, alchemists believed, was necessary for life. This concept has outlived alchemy itself, and the analogy has become an accepted part of everyday speech, used unconsciously in phrases such as ‘distillation of the truth’, and the word ‘spirit’ as a synonym for the soul.

In Liber de arte distillandi simplicia et composita (1500), the first printed book about distillation, Hieronymus Brunschwygk describes “the separation of the gross from the subtle and the subtle from the gross. The breakable and destructible from the indestructible, the material from

the immaterial, so as to make the body more spiritual, the unlovely lovely, to make the spiritual lighter by its subtlety, to penetrate with its concealed virtues and force into the human body to do its healing duty.”

The flavour of whisky is completely immaterial: it’s all about the smell. Flavour is made in the brain, and it bypasses the realm of language. Flavour is therefore difficult to describe in words. It is a mysterious mosaic of memory and imagination, which is difficult to objectify.

At a recent London Gastronomy Seminar hosted by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, Jim McEwan of the Bruichladdich distillery on the Hebridean island of Islay made an impassioned case that “terroir exists for malt whisky” in a debate moderated by the wine writer

A Spirited DebateDoes whisky, like wine, have a terroir? Robin Lee goes looking for the answer and finds the history of whisky bogged down in myth and romanticism

ETHICAL LIVING WHISKY


and Islay expert Andrew Jefford. McEwan, probably the most gifted and revered distiller in Scotland, said that he believes the flavour of the whiskies he makes is influenced by the soil where the barley is grown, the salty sea breezes of the Atlantic, and Islay’s natural spring water.

Nick Morgan, Diageo’s head of whisky outreach, and Georgie Crawford, head of operations at the Lagavulin distillery on Islay, were against the motion and won the vote. Their argument was that the individualities of malt whisky have nothing to do with what it is made of, such as the variety of barley used, whether it is organic or locally grown, or the taste of the water that is used, where that water comes from, or whether the spirit is aged in Islay or in an industrial warehouse on the mainland.

Crawford, who, like McEwan, is a native of Islay, described the conundrum of where a whisky gets its identity from as being “down to 1,000 small quirks and the weird alchemy of the place”. According to Morgan, “the history of whisky is bogged down in myth and romanticism. If the water is clean and free of nitrates it is just as ‘good’ as water from wild springs, burns and lochs. We take our water sources seriously,” he explained. “Diageo has a team of lawyers in Edinburgh who do nothing other than look after our water.”

Colour and flavour come from wood. Yet all whisky, from the mass-produced bottles of the multinationals to the rarest, most expensive single malts, is aged in second-hand barrels that are of inconsistent quality. Even at Bruichladdich – which has experimented with every possible kind of barrel – they think the best come from American Bourbon distilleries. These are also the least expensive because in the US there is a legal requirement to use all new barrels. The Scottish whisky industry has always been pragmatic.

Irish monks brought barley beer to Scotland originally, but when the Scots adopted the Coffey still, whisky became an industrial product that was able to fill the gap in the market caused by the late-19th-century collapse of the brandy industry, victim of the phylloxera louse, which destroyed three-quarters of French vineyards. For the next hundred years or so, until the 1980s, malt whisky was a commercially insignificant, specialised niche and most single malts were never even bottled at all; they were produced to be ingredients in blends. Since whisky was never an artisanal product (unless one goes back to the days before any of these modern distilleries even existed), the primary objective has always been to cut costs and increase profit margins.

Today, however, the older generation of Scotch drinkers is dying off and younger consumers who are new to whisky are curious to know about the details of production and willing to spend much more

money on something they believe is authentic and special. Internet and easy travel have made ‘nerdiness’ mainstream: it is easy to research production methods, or turn up at the distillery gates for a look around in person. The growing trend to do this is breaking down barriers of secrecy and introversion, which have historically prevented questions from being asked, much less answered.

Whisky producers are beginning to realise that there is a lucrative market in being ‘authentic’, which most consumers mistakenly believe is historic and traditional. Just because something is industrialised does not mean it’s modern. Bruichladdich was first to seize this opportunity, which is not surprising since it was run, for the last decade, by a former wine merchant from London, until being taken over last year by the French producer Rémy Cointreau. Bruichladdich uses only Scottish barley, and the whisky is all aged on

Islay and bottled on-site. The water used bubbles out of the ground on nearby Octomore farm.

The Dunlossit estate, owned by the financier Bruno Schroder, is one of the largest on Islay, and has experimented with growing rare strains of barley for Bruichladdich to make into designated whiskies, which, like a French Premier Cru or Grand Cru wine, originate from a specific piece of land and aim to express its terroir. An ancient barley variety called ‘bere’, thought to be the oldest cultivated cereal grain in Britain, was resuscitated from near-extinction and planted on two fields called Achaba and Achfad, lands referred to in a grant from Queen Mary in 1562 as Ochton-Affraiche, meaning ‘The Eighth of Bleakness’.

It was a tricky task to turn the bere barley into whisky, because its husks were heavier than ordinary barley and the ferment became as thick as cement, instead of its usual consistency of porridge, and nearly clogged the washbacks. Someone had to climb down into the mash tun and manually push the stirring mechanism, which got stuck. The low sugar levels meant that 25% less alcohol was produced than would have been expected from the same quantity of normal barley.

Bere barley is also very hard to grow, and after a few years the experiment was ended because the yields were impossibly low. Chloe Randall, Donlossit’s former estate manager, thinks some of the crop might have been taken by the gamekeeper to feed the deer and grouse that are raised on the estate for sporting purposes, but she was never able to find out for sure.

And, yes, whisky made from bere barley does have a very special flavour. It is lemony, fragrant, floral. It smells like summer. Or maybe that’s just my imagination.

Robin Lee is a writer based in London.Bere Barley 2006 is available from www.bruichladdich.com

The word whisky means water of life

Jim McEwan © www.bruichladdich.com


FROM FRAGMENTATION TO WHOLENESS

Chashnamamcho Umanki – Así es mi cabeza by Pablo AmaringoCourtesy of Peter Cloudsley & Howard G Charing, co-authors of The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo www.ayahuascavisions.com

RESURGENCE KEYNOTES INDIGENOUS INTELLIGENCE


Kester Reid questions our Western obsession with science and champions the Indigenous way of an intuitive knowledge based on wholism

Evolution is a process of adapting to an environment. It is environmentally driven: a reaction to and reflection of the living environment. Culture evolves as an interpretive map of human experience, and is

inescapably tangled with this thing we call knowledge. In Britain, our co-evolution with the natural environment

stopped when our forests were cut, and the pagans and herbalist witches enflamed. Economic, religious and other forces destroyed not only our traditional knowledge systems, but also the very means of their evolution – the wild environments. In other areas of the Western world, even where wild areas remain, traditional communities, and traditional knowledge, have been irreparably altered by the cultural dominance of our industrial ideals.

In the tropical forests of the world, however, Indigenous peoples continue to co-evolve with a complex natural environment, retaining traditional knowledge systems from which we might learn new, or perhaps old, ways to humanly experience. The medicinal practices of Indigenous forest peoples, for example, offer a helpful illustration.

Some 40% of drugs on the commercial market are extracted directly from plants, and 80% are derived originally from plants. Nature really has the answers. Native groups of these forests know too, indeed knew first, that plants have the power to heal. They know which plants have the power to heal, and they know how to combine plants in what were subsequently found to be very specific chemical relationships, such as the ayahuasca mixture that ingeniously marries an understorey shrub containing the active compounds with a climbing vine containing the necessary enzyme-inhibitors to allow absorption of the remedy through the gut.

The Indigenous people also know that preparation is critical, simmering some remedies for hours, whereas boiling would denature the active components. And treatment is highly particular: in many cases plants are not ingested, but rather applied as a poultice, or infused and inhaled or bathed in. From an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 plant species in a forest such as the Amazon, each producing a complex mixture of metabolically affecting compounds, native societies extract a multitude of remedies for almost every conceivable ailment. Their evolved knowledge is of a depth and complexity no chemist could ever hope to obtain. In practical terms they understand the chemistry, and yet without knowledge of chemistry. The question remains, how?

The routine answer cites a millennial process of trial and error. Indeed, such explanation seems axiomatic, but it

is challenged by the mystifying complexity of Indigenous medicinal knowledge. To look beyond our presumptions for a moment, what the people themselves say is that the knowledge is imparted to them directly via powerful ‘teacher plants’, with whom shamans are able to communicate on the spiritual level.

Shamanic cultures believe a continuum exists between the natural and the supernatural, each element of the physical world having a spiritual existence in the other realm. The shaman, assisted by teacher plants such as ayahuasca, can inhabit both realms to maintain balance between the two. He, or often she, consults the spirit world to learn the supernatural origin of diseases, and the spirits tell, or he/she simply ‘sees’, which plants or other treatments to prescribe. This is the way they profess to learn of medicine, but we disregard the explanation because it contradicts the very axioms of our particular cultural routine for attaining knowledge. That routine constitutes external observation, measurement, causal isolation, theory, and prediction; ultimately the existence of these spirits cannot be proved, and so the idea is ridiculed by our rationalist culture.

To discredit their knowledge through reasoning that their spirits are simply ‘not real’ is insufficient, however, for belief in them clearly delivers a very real knowledge. Real in its application to not just physical but also psychological and spiritual illness – for millennia shamanic cultures have practised relaxation and massage, aromatherapy, hypnosis, visualisation and dietary prescription, yet to us these curative therapies have only recently started becoming ‘acceptable’. Such practices indicate a long-held understanding of the great power of the mind over the body, which we are only now beginning to accept in the West (and this despite consistently documented hints such as the placebo effect).

The reality of Indigenous medicinal knowledge is further supported by the fact that, contrary to popular belief, these societies are actually some of the healthiest anywhere in the world. If sufficiently isolated from outside contact, cause of immature death among forest peoples is rarely illness, but traditionally animal attack or warfare. Life expectancy can be low due to these factors, but mature death commonly occurs in the nineties or upwards, the elder generations remaining strong and healthy until an astounding age.

The real consequences of their supernatural beliefs warrant a reassessment of our customary dismissal of such notions. I would not claim that trial and error was not a factor in the development of this knowledge, but I would claim that it is not its basis. It is, literally, not that simple. Shamans continue to discover medicinal uses for plants previously unknown to their cultures, and undescribed by ours, and their ongoing discovery is still explained in terms of spiritual conference. Regardless of millennia past, what we observe today is that ‘trial and error’ is not the tradition, but that a real practical intelligence is apparently derived from non-rational levels of experience.

We are faced with a problem of cultural incompatibility:


two perspectives, each self-supporting within its respective structure of logic, and yet together, seemingly contradictory. Perhaps we might propose that each is a valid interpretation of things, but neither complete; would we only view the contrast this way we might learn a great deal.

The Indigenous perspective represents a completely different experience of the tropical forest environment

from that which a Westerner would undergo. It also represents an alternative and deeper understanding of the forest. Indigenous people’s understanding includes supernatural elements – their ‘spirits’ – which represent, as a facet of culture, an evolved system of interpretation, but what this indicates is some felt expression of the animate Earth, an affecting energy ceremoniously apparent amongst the abundance of life in a tropical forest.

Such beliefs might be termed ‘esoteric’, but so were meditation, acupuncture and even Freud’s idea of the unconscious before the very real benefits of each became accepted in academic terms. There are indeed areas of science that may one day overlap with esoteric notions of energies: vibrational resonance, for instance, or electromagnetism. The point is merely to demonstrate that there is more to this physical reality than what we can see, measure or as yet prove. The Indigenous people in the forest, those who are most in touch with the living environment, feel something more, and they interpret it as spirits.

A cultural predisposition to denying such abstract felt experience prevents us from taking seriously this ‘something more’, whether we feel it or not. The rationalist foundation of our intellectual culture invalidates the experience of so much we cannot explain, and yet we agree there remains much to be explained! It is peculiar that we would admit our model of reality to be incomplete, whilst maintaining that our method for its interpretation is not. But the method is fragmentary – splitting phenomena into supposedly isolate parts in a bid to eventually piece together the whole. And what we find is that it is impossible to know the whole of any phenomenon this way.

In physics we discover the very nature of matter to be empty space, in chemistry that compounds have properties completely unrelated to those of their constituent elements, and in biology we find a level of complexity that simply grows and grows as we delve into the bacterial, fungal and microbial relationships interconnecting every natural system. Either we hit brick walls with our method, or we discover there is exponentially more that we cannot explain. The analogue of this tragedy is the academic community itself, in which a scientist must be so specialised as to render him or her an expert in the very narrowest of fields, often absurdly so.

Our scientific method isolates and decontextualises a billion parts of a given phenomenon, which add up to far less than the whole. And this is the critical point – to focus so specifically on any one aspect of anything denies the observer experience of the whole. “But how can we know a ‘whole’?” the indignant mind screams. And truly, it does not seem to make sense – we cannot measure, or explain simply ‘the whole’. We can know the whole of something

only by experience of it, and it is in this experience that true understanding lies.

We think, rationally, that we cannot take something in ‘all at once’ like this, being so conditioned to conceive of understanding as strictly linear – through interminable lines of print, algebra, code and time. But when we interact with our environment we really do experience it all at once. And a familiar experience, such as a view out of a bedroom window, or a favourite painting, we can truly know in this way – if something is out of place, we sense it at a glance, without even knowing what it is that is different. Such is the nature of experiential knowledge. It is intuition, it is feeling, not the technical theory into which science abstracts reality, but the very substance of reality: experience itself. Such understanding is not by facts, but by affinity – the difference between knowing about something, and knowing it.

This is the knowledge by which the Indigenous person knows the forest. She or he knows by being, by simply existing in the environment, and not by the removed study of any particular aspect of it. The knowledge of Indigenous people is deep, exemplified by their medicine, and it does well to note that their knowledge includes many of the ‘parts’ over which we so obsess, only each part is regarded in the context of the whole.

To ask natives of the Amazon the name of a fruit lying below a tree would typically precipitate the volunteering

of not only its name, but which tree it falls from, which animals come to eat it, which time of year it falls, what its flowers look like, the medicinal properties of the tree, and so on. Culturally, everything makes sense to them by nature of the unity of the whole. And critically, this whole includes themselves as one part.

Even isolated communities have been shown to share our understanding of complex biological processes such as pollination, not through putting flowers under a microscope, but by intuiting that we are life, we reproduce, and of course every expression of life does the same thing by some means. Intuition is too often mistaken for the frivolous presumption so misguided by our unconscious, but it is rather a deep wisdom that stems from living laws of existence to which we are privy by the very act of being. It is a real intelligence indeed, but in misinterpreting Nature as a mechanical set of deterministic processes, we deny her inherent creativity, denying ourselves her intelligence.

Forest people recognise that they are just one part of their system, subject to it, and in so doing they understand themselves in reflection of the whole. They are subject physically to the viper and the jaguar, but more critically, in their spiritual beliefs, they place themselves existentially subject to their environment. They recognise themselves, therefore, as a fundamental part of everything, intrinsically connected to the natural and supernatural. This is what allows not only the basic survival of these peoples, but real flourishment in their particular environment as healthy, happy societies.

It is the converse to this holistic view, our distinctly Western anthropocentrism, that has allowed our society to


overplay humanity’s part in the global system, attempting to dominate it, and so cutting a swift path to self-destruction. This perspective is both symptom and cause of the gross disconnection with Nature that has occurred in our societies, to the point now that we most value the Earth in monetary terms.

We forget even that we are natural beings, and thus sex becomes twisted pornographic fantasy, almost every natural process becomes taboo, and it is even strange to see women breastfeeding publicly. We do not feel this connection to the sensuous world around us, we do not feel a part of any natural system, and so we blindly destroy. This is not success and we are not flourishing, which is very clear if one looks at even the most immediate consequences of our unsustainable way of life.

Indigenous forest peoples feel a connection with the world around them, an energetic affinity that is expressed and maintained in the supernatural aspects of their cultures. It is this recognition that is pertinent to their unprecedented understanding of and flourishing in their environment. In the West we have conceptually and physically separated ourselves from the wild Earth, just as we separate all things to understand what is irreducibly unified. In this way we limit our experience of existence to what is rational, and verifiable, and we destroy the very means of our survival.

Rational enquiry is undoubtedly a useful tool, but its doctrinaire claim to an unsettlingly religious monopoly on truth renders it flawed. It condemns my own field of conservation to the desperate realm of mitigation, lagging forever behind the fundamentally damaging attitude we have towards the biosphere. The damage will only continue until we deprioritise rationalist methods of knowing, and acknowledge our sacred affiliation with the natural world.

This way a deeper experience presents itself, and a truer understanding in which we feel that environmentally

considerate behaviour simply makes sense. Beyond the political implications, we must assess whether

our ‘science’, so institutionalised and universal, really is a sound method for finally understanding this world. Perhaps it is only separating us from the world, distancing us from true understanding. It challenges the revelatory nature of pure experience, by fragmenting it and transmuting it into abstract theory, damaging our capacity to ‘experience the whole’ of anything. And this is surely what life ought to be about, the full experience of experience.

The goal of science is understanding; the goal is not flawed: only the method is. We are caught up in explanation, which is merely the communication of understanding. But true understanding is intuitive, and true experience subjective – it ultimately cannot be shared. Its conclusions can, however, such as environmental consideration, starting with basic protection. We must divest ourselves of the fear that there be unknowable things, for there are not: only inexplicable things, and those we must leave as they are; such is their nature, and our own.

To engage these ideas, only go out and find beautiful things. Encounter a natural beauty and explore the feeling this entails. ‘Beauty’ is, after all, only a word, a symbol that becomes limiting as soon as it is uttered, but what it represents is a feeling, a raw sensing perhaps, of the connection we have with the world around us, particularly the natural world. It is the feeling of communion with the sacred. Therein lies the full experience of humanity, therein the understanding, therein the guidance. The idea of human beings as an embedded part of Nature is self-evident; we must only, if we have forgotten, start remembering how that feels.

Kester Reid is a tropical conservationist and writer. kspreid.wordpress.com

Alto Cielos by Pablo Amaringo

Indigenous forest peoples feel a connection with the world around them. In the West we have conceptually and physically separated ourselves from the wild Earth


UNDERCURRENTS TECHNOLOGY

The purpose of this essay is not to instruct the reader on the fallacy of the technological fix. We can assume that by now the environmentally conscious person has seen through the delusion of

applying technology to remedy the problems that have been caused by previous technology.

It is obvious that a new pesticide won’t finally eliminate the superweeds that evolved to resist the previous pesticide; that new and more powerful antibiotics won’t bring a final victory over the superbugs that evolved to resist previous antibiotics; and that massive geo-engineering projects – such as seeding the stratosphere with sulphuric acid or the oceans with iron to combat climate change – will likely cause horrific unanticipated consequences.

What is less obvious is how pervasive the mentality behind the technological fix is. In the United States, we respond to the failure of metal detectors, lockdowns and other forms of control in our schools by calling for even more control.

European countries unable to pay their debts are lent even more money, with the proviso that they try even harder to pay their debts. Imperialist powers apply military violence to fight the terrorism that is a response to previous imperialism and violence. Doctors prescribe drugs to address the side effects caused by other drugs. Urban planners address traffic congestion by building more roads (which leads to more development and more traffic). And millions of people manage the emptiness of a life of material acquisition by buying more material possessions.

As the word ‘fix’ implies, the logic of technology has very often been the logic of addiction. Feel bad? Have a drink. Feel even worse the next morning? Get drunk again. Depressed because you’ve now lost your job, your marriage and your health due to drinking? Well, why not do what made you feel better last night? Have another drink. As with agricultural chemicals, ever-increasing doses become necessary to maintain what was once your natural, normal state, and all at the cost of everything precious.

Where does the mentality of control come from, and what is the alternative? Is technology fundamentally a violation

of Nature? Surely not. After all, all beings use their physical capacities to influence and cocreate their environment. What is different about what we humans have been doing? How can we embrace technology, and not reject this uniquely human gift?

We environmentalists decry human exceptionalism when we criticise the ideology of endless growth, linear extraction and toxic waste, but to say that our capacity for technology has no useful purpose on this planet is another kind of exceptionalism.

Ecology says that each species has a gift that enhances the wellbeing of the whole. The extinction of one species

impoverishes the whole. Humanity is no different. The problem isn’t that we have the power of technology. The problem is that we have not used that power in the spirit of a gift. We have not used it in the spirit of ecology. We have not asked: “How might we best serve the totality of all life on Earth?” In contemplating a nuclear power plant, an incinerator, a subdivision, a mine, even a new patio behind our house, we are not in the habit of asking: “Does this best serve the wellbeing of all interested parties?” Our cost–benefit analyses do

not include the trees, the water, the fish or the birds.Why not? Is it because we are Nature’s big mistake? Is

there something wrong with us? To think so would be to invoke human exceptionalism once again. It would imply as well that the way to live in harmony with the planet would be to conquer or suppress this badness. How different is that from the mentality of spraying pesticides and exterminating wolves, damming rivers and levelling mountains? The war on Nature, whether internal or external, is part of the problem; it is not the solution.

One simple explanation for why we fail to use technology in the spirit of service to all life is that we have lost touch with our unity, or as Thich Nhat Hanh terms it, our interbeingness, with the rest of life. Seeing Nature as separate from ourselves, of course we see it as inconsequential to our wellbeing. We might acknowledge our conditional dependency on Nature, but not our existential dependency. We might therefore imagine that someday we may become

Latent HealingCharles Eisenstein explores how technology could better be used to support the unfolding intelligence of Nature

Thus begins the healing journey, out of the

old story, through the space between

stories, and ultimately into a new story


independent of Nature, if only we perfect technological substitutes for Nature’s gifts.

This indeed was the explicit vision of scientific futurists of the 20th century: some day, they dreamed, we will synthesise food, create artificial air, live in bubble cities, abandon the Earth for space colonies, even conquer death with bionic parts or by uploading our consciousness into computers. To some extent, such ambitions are still with us today in the ravings of nanotechnology and genetic-engineering evangelists.

Well, let us not call these visions ‘ravings’, as if they had lost touch with reason. These people are as rational as anyone. What has happened to them is the same thing that has happened

to humanity generally (at least to modernised humanity): their reason operates within a narrative – shall we call it a mythology? – in which their aspirations make perfect sense. It is a story that casts us into an alien universe of impersonal forces, in which matter is a purposeless, insensate substrate upon which (why not?) we can impose our designs with impunity, and in which the tendency of all things is towards entropy, disorder, chaos.

In this story, Nature is devoid of purpose or intelligence. Any semblance of purpose is just the accidental result of the senseless cacophony of interacting forces and masses, the blind melee of genetically programmed flesh robots, each seeking to maximise

its own genetic self-interest.Underneath the technological fix is

a way of perceiving ourselves and the world. More than a mere mentality of separation and control, it comes from a disconnected state of being that is blind to the indwelling purpose and intelligence of Nature.

For example, the skilled organic farmers might see unwanted weeds or bugs not as interlopers but as a symptom of imbalance in soil ecology. To address them holistically, they must believe there even is such a thing as soil ecology. In other words, they must believe in the wholeness and interconnectedness of all beings that make up soil. They must see soil as a collective, emergent entity in its own right, and not as an inert, generic substrate that plants grow in.

Conventional agriculture, on the other hand, sees weeds as an outbreak of badness, similar to the way we have seen terrorism, or violence in schools, or disease. To see them otherwise – as a symptom of a deeper disharmony – presupposes there is such a harmony, an integrity, a beingness, and not just a senseless jumble. The technological fix addresses the symptom while ignoring the illness, because it cannot see an integral entity that can become ill.

I don’t want to gloss over the profundity of the paradigm shift we are accepting if we are to see Nature as intelligent and purposive, to do which is to abdicate the exclusive domain to which we have appointed ourselves: the sole intelligence of the world. It is to humble ourselves to something greater, and seek our place not as Cartesian lords and possessors of Nature, but as contributors to an unfolding process

Ecohouse by Dennis Wunsch www.denniswunsch.com


beyond our selves. This inescapable conclusion is, perhaps, the reason why teleology is anathema to orthodox science. Purpose was supposed to be our domain! And the king of that domain was the scientist, wielding technology to enact its dominion.

The idea of an inherently purposeful universe is far more radical than religious notions of intelligent design, which agree with mechanistic science about matter and cede intelligence to an external, supernatural being. Such a narrative offers no compunctions to limit the despoliation of Nature. It asks us to humble ourselves to nothing of this world.

To be so humbled, we must see that the soul of Nature – its purpose, intelligence and beingness – comes not from without but from within. It is an emergent property born of non-linear complexity. In non-linear systems, small actions can have enormous consequences. The technological fix is based on linear thinking. The alternative is to develop sensitivity to the emergent order and intelligence that wants to unfold, so that we might bow into its service.

What would the expression of our uniquely human gifts of hand and mind look like exercised in the spirit of service to all life? In the short and medium term, this is not a difficult question to answer. The most urgent need before us is to heal the damage that has been done in the millennia-long course of separation. Vast realms of technology, much neglected today, have been developing in the margins, awaiting their moment for full expression. Here are just a few:

• Regenerative agriculture and permaculture to heal the soil, replenish the aquifers and sequester carbon – all while producing far more food than chemical monocropping and GMOs can. (Industrial agriculture maximises yield per unit of labour, but not per unit of land, energy or water.)

• The use of fungi to detoxify PCBs and petrochemical waste.

• Restoration of deserts. This is not done by pumping in water (which leads to salinisation and the necessity for some new fix), but by identifying and encouraging latent healing processes.

• Conservation technologies that could reduce energy consumption to a fraction of what it is today without any big sacrifice.

• Waste-water treatment with reed beds, aquaculture, and so on (and composting toilets).

• Healing modalities that take seriously the intelligence of Nature and the body, including herbalism, mind-body modalities, touch-based therapies, bioenergetic modalities, and pretty much anything that goes by the name ‘holistic’ or ‘alternative’ today.

• And, since I am veering off the territory of scientific respectability, I may as well mention a few more controversial technologies (along with some so unorthodox they aren’t even subject to controversy) –

cold fusion and other unorthodox energy technologies; unorthodox ways to neutralise radioactive waste; Schauberger-inspired water technologies; technologies of the mind called psi phenomena; and shamanic technologies based on direct communication with the hidden beings and forces of Nature.

Every one of the above technologies clashes in some way with our civilisation’s current operating systems. In some cases the clash is paradigmatic: the technologies contradict conventional scientific beliefs. In other cases the clash is economic: there just isn’t much money to be made in establishing public space or generating positive externalities such as aquifer restoration or carbon sequestration. Sometimes laws, building codes and conventional practices impose obstacles as well.

All of these – scientific orthodoxy, the economic system, and law and habit – are expressions of the same mythology of separation. Our money system, for example, rests on the conversion of Nature into products, and relationships into services, reifying the binary subject–

object distinction that is at the heart of separation. If you examine closely the phenomena that science refuses to acknowledge, you will find that most of them imply intelligence, purpose and interconnectedness.

What about the long term? What is the purpose of technology on a healed planet? What is the purpose of this unique species to which Gaia has given birth? To that, no one can offer

anything but speculation. I think it is something that we can only discover on the other side of the healing journey.

That journey has begun. Today, painfully, we are becoming aware of the folly of

the delusion that we can, with clever enough technological solutions, avoid the consequences of what we do to the world. The pretence of separation is increasingly difficult to maintain. We are learning that we are not separate from Nature, and that it bears a wholeness that we ignore at our peril.

Our techno-utopian dreams and scientific paradigms are unravelling in tandem with many of our social institutions, because the underlying narrative of separation is unravelling as well. These converging crises – social, ecological and intellectual – are expelling us from our old story. As that happens, none of our fixes, technological or otherwise, are working any more to control the pain: the grief, the rage, the loneliness we feel as we gaze out upon what we have wrought.

Thus begins the healing journey, out of the old story, through the space between stories, and ultimately into a new story of cocreative participation in the unfolding destiny of our planet.

Charles Eisenstein is the author of Sacred Economics. www.charleseisenstein.net

The most urgent need before us is to heal

the damage that has been done


We all know that many of the ecological and social problems confronting the world today

are in large part a consequence of the way our economic system operates. Thus economics is of central importance. Yet the unfortunate fact is that the type of economics that has become dominant seems unable to contribute anything to finding solutions to the great questions facing humankind and the planet. Indeed, worse than this, economics is itself a significant part of the problem. This is both because it doesn’t have much to do with how real economies and markets actually work, and also because it provides an ideological screen for rampant self-interested capitalism.

But there are many other types of economics. Some are relatively new, but others go back at least 200 years. Although they are very different, what they have in common is that they all try to understand the world as it really is and not how it theoretically should be, and unlike the current system of economics they do not ignore moral questions and issues of social, economic and ecological justice.

In this new series I have decided to ask some more holistic economists to contribute their views to show that economics needn’t be a dismal science and could be part of the solution.

The first contributor is ecological economist Robert Costanza. Robert is co-founder and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and was chief editor of the society’s journal, Ecological Economics, from its inception in 1989 until 2002. He is also founding editor-in-chief of Solutions, a unique hybrid academic but popular journal (www.thesolutionsjournal.org). His transdisciplinary work integrates the study of humans and the rest of Nature to address research, policy and management issues over multiple time and space scales – from small watersheds to the global system.

Ecological economics has a long pedigree and is one proof of the fact that economics can be part of the solution rather than a significant hindrance.

Stephen Lewis is acting Commissioning Editor for this Economics series of articles which will appear periodically in future issues.

ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS UNDERCURRENTS

Stephen Lewis introduces a new series to show that economics need not be a dismal science

The world has changed dramatically. We no longer live in a world relatively empty of humans and their artefacts. We now live in a new geologic era known by some as the Anthropocene, a full world

where humans are dramatically altering our ecological life-support systems.

Our traditional economic concepts and models were developed when the human population was relatively small and natural resources deemed abundant. So if we are to create sustainable prosperity, we need a new vision of the economy and its relationship to the rest of Nature that is far better adapted to the conditions we now face.

We are going to need an economics that respects planetary boundaries, that recognises the dependence of human wellbeing on good social relations and fairness, and that recognises that the ultimate goal is real, sustainable human wellbeing – not merely the endless growth of material consumption concentrated in the hands of a few. This new economics also recognises that the material economy cannot grow forever on this finite planet.

The time has come when we must make a transition. We have no choice. Our present path is clearly unsustainable. Paul Raskin, founding director of the Tellus Institute and the Global Scenario Group, has said: “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, business as usual is the utopian fantasy; forging a new vision is the pragmatic necessity.”

What we do have is a very real choice about how to make this transition and about what the new state of the world will be. We can engage in a global dialogue to envision “the future we want” (the theme of the UN’s Rio+20 conference), and then devise an adaptive strategy to get us there, or we can allow the current system to collapse and rebuild from a much worse starting point. Obviously, the former strategy is better.

To do this, we need to focus more directly on the goal of sustainable human wellbeing rather than merely GDP growth. This includes protecting and restoring Nature, achieving social and intergenerational fairness (including poverty alleviation), stabilising population, and recognising the significant non-market contributions to human wellbeing from natural and social capital. And to do this, we need to develop better measures of progress that go well beyond GDP and begin to measure human wellbeing and its sustainability more directly.

We need a new model of the economy based on the worldview and principles of ecological economics. Ecological economics starts by recognising that our material economy is embedded in society, which is embedded in our ecological life-support system, and that we cannot understand or

Sustainable WellbeingRobert Costanza outlines the parameters of a new economic paradigm


manage our economy without understanding the whole, interconnected system. It also recognises that growth (increase in size or scale) and development (improvement in quality) are not always linked and that true development must be defined in terms of the improvement of sustainable wellbeing, not merely growth in material consumption.

Finally, it recognises that sustainable wellbeing requires a healthy balance among thriving natural, human, social and cultural assets, and adequate and well-functioning produced or built assets. These assets are referred to as ‘capital’ in the sense of a stock or accumulation or heritage – a patrimony received from the past and contributing to the welfare of the present and future. Clearly our use of the term ‘capital’ is much broader than that associated with ‘capitalism’.

These assets, which overlap and interact in complex ways to produce all human benefits, are defined as

• Natural capital: the natural environment and its biodiversity, which, in combination with the other three types of capital, provide ecosystem goods and services – the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. These goods and services are essential to basic needs such as survival, climate regulation, habitat for other species, water supply, food, fibre, fuel, recreation, cultural amenities, and the raw materials required for all economic production.

• Social and cultural capital: the web of interpersonal connections, social networks, cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, trust, and the institutional arrangements, rules, norms and values that facilitate human interactions and cooperation between people. These contribute to social cohesion, strong, vibrant and secure communities, and good governance, and help fulfil basic human needs such as participation, affection and a sense of belonging.

• Human capital: human beings and their attributes, including physical and mental health, knowledge, and other capacities that enable people to be productive members of society. This involves the balanced use of time to fulfil basic human needs such as fulfilling employment, spirituality, understanding, skills development, creativity and freedom.

• Built capital: buildings, machinery, transportation infrastructure, and all other human artefacts and the services they provide that fulfil basic human needs such as shelter, subsistence, mobility and communications.

Ecological economics also recognises that human, social and produced assets depend entirely on the natural world, and that continued taking from natural capital is therefore ultimately non-substitutable. Sustainability therefore requires that we live off the interest (sustainable yields) generated by natural capital without depleting the capital itself.

Balancing and investing in all our assets to achieve sustainable wellbeing requires that we pursue three dimensions in an integrated way: ecological sustainability, social fairness, and efficient allocation of resources. Ecological sustainability means that we live within planetary boundaries – within the

capacity of our finite planet to provide the resources needed for this and future generations. Social fairness means that these resources are distributed fairly within this generation, between generations, and between humans and other species. Efficient allocation means that we use these finite resources as efficiently as possible to produce sustainable human wellbeing, recognising its dependence on the wellbeing of the rest of Nature.

We have never had greater global capacity, understanding, material abundance and opportunities to achieve these objectives. This includes scientific knowledge, communications, technology, resources, productive potential, and the ability to feed everyone on Earth. However, we are not achieving sustainable wellbeing and indeed we are moving in the wrong direction at an increasing rate. For example, global

greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, humanity is using resources much faster than they can regenerate, biodiversity is diminishing rapidly, most global ecosystem services are in decline, and inequality is growing. The United Nations has acknowledged that progress towards the Millennium Development Goals has stalled.

We will never achieve the world we want unless we change the current economic paradigm, which is a fundamental cause of the current crises. This paradigm, institutionalised at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, was devised prior to an understanding of finite global resource limits and the emerging science of wellbeing. Without a new economic paradigm, we will continue down an unsustainable and undesirable path. The Bretton Woods system rightly considered a growth economy better than another world war, especially when the world population was relatively small. However, times have changed and it is now time for a new paradigm.

To make the transition to a just and sustainable economy will require a fundamental change of worldview or vision of what the economy is and what it is for. The new worldview is one that recognises that we live on a finite planet and that sustainable wellbeing requires far more than material consumption. This implies replacing the present goal of limitless growth with goals of material sufficiency, equitable distribution and sustainable ecosystems. It also implies a complete redesign of the world economy that preserves natural systems essential to life and wellbeing and balances natural, social, human and built assets.

The dimensions of this new economy include, but are not limited to, the following policies and changes:

A Sustainable scale – respecting ecological limits• Establishment of systems for effective and equitable

governance and management of the natural commons, including the atmosphere, oceans and biodiversity.

• Creation of cap-and-auction systems for basic resources, including quotas on depletion, pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions, based on basic planetary boundaries and resource limits.

We are probably already in the

middle of a critical turning point


• Consumption of essential non-renewables, such as fossil fuels, no faster than we develop renewable substitutes.

• Investment in sustainable infra-structure, such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transport, watershed protection measures, green public spaces and clean technology.

• Dismantling of incentives towards materialistic consumption, including banning advertising to children and regulating the commercial media.

• Linked policies to address population and consumption.

B Fair distribution – protecting capabilities for flourishing• Sharing of work to create more

fulfilling employment and more balanced leisure–income trade-offs.

• Reduction of systemic inequalities, both internationally and within nations, by improving the living standards of poor people, limiting excess and unearned income and consumption, and preventing private capture of common wealth.

• Establishment of a system for effective and equitable governance and management of the social commons, including cultural inheritance, financial systems, and information systems like the internet and the airwaves.

C Efficient allocation – building a sustainable macro-economy• Use of full-cost accounting measures

to internalise externalities, value non-market assets and services, reform national accounting systems, and ensure that prices reflect actual social and environmental costs of production.

• Fiscal reforms that reward sustainable and wellbeing-enhancing actions and penalise unsustainable behaviours that diminish collective wellbeing, including ecological tax reforms with compensating mechanisms that prevent additional burdens on low-income groups.

• Systems of cooperative investment in stewardship (CIS) and payment for ecosystem services (PES).

• Increased financial and fiscal prudence, including greater public control of the money supply and

its benefits, and other financial instruments and practices that contribute to the public good.

• Ensuring availability of all information required to move to a sustainable economy that enhances wellbeing through public investment in research and development and reform of the ownership structure of copyrights and patents.

The world is at a critical turning point. This turning will not come overnight, however. In fact, we are probably already in the middle of it. It will take decades. But it is a time of real choices. One scenario is to continue ‘business as usual’, pursuing the conventional economic growth paradigm that has dominated economic policy since the end of World War II. A second scenario

is an environmentally sensitive version of this model with an attempt to achieve “green growth” that is not so damaging to the environment. A third scenario – the one sketched here – is a more radical departure from the mainstream. It does not consider growth to be the real goal at all, but rather sustainable human wellbeing, acknowledging uncertainty and the complexity of understanding, creating and sustaining wellbeing. This scenario is the only option that is both sustainable and desirable on our finite planet. The substantial challenge now is making that transition to this better world in a peaceful and positive way.

Robert Costanza is Chair in Public Policy at Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra.

What is our economy doing to Nature? Illustration by Yuko Shimizu www.yukoart.com


Dr Obruchev (“call me Vladi”), the mission leader, pointed to the plateau. “Go straight up. Don’t turn around,” he said, “or you’ll break the spell.” To look back before you reached the

plateau would spoil it: you wouldn’t get the full impact. What’s more, Nature had conveniently placed a flat-topped rock at the back of the plateau, “like a municipal bench”, he said, “put there by some obliging council officer with an elegant sense of duty”. A perfect viewing platform. Besides, there was another thing.

The plateau was about 400 feet up. You could see it clearly from the bottom as you approached. It looked as if it had been deliberately cut from the rock, as did the track up to it. Vladi shook his head: “That too was a freak of Nature. Who could have made it?”

I could hear my feet crunching on the brittle stone as I climbed. My breath seemed loud. Sweat ran down my spine. There wasn’t a single sign of life anywhere, though it didn’t stop me looking. I kept thinking I might see a mountain goat, or a hare or a lizard, but I knew there couldn’t be any. The rock was a mix of basalt and some other igneous composite that had been subjected to enormous temperatures, split and crumbled into these ragged shapes amongst the slabs.

The temptation to turn round all the way up had been strong; I could feel the image rising behind me, could sense its presence composing itself as I ascended, step by gritty step.

The plateau was exactly as Vladi had described: perfectly level, and at the back of it was this convenient municipal rock.

My feet crunched loudly as I crossed the gravelly floor. I stopped at the rock bench, breathed in, closed my eyes, turned around and sat down. I kept my eyes closed and with my hands on my knees allowed myself to calm down. It had

UNDERCURRENTS A SENSE OF PLACE

Earth ParadiseJeremy James takes a fictional flight to the moon and discovers the true majesty of the Earth

not been a hard so much as a steady climb, and my oxygen intake was low.

Vladi had been right about the other thing: once you turned round, the experience was vertiginous. The first time it happened to him he very nearly fell off the plateau. I was careful to sit down, to follow his advice.

As soon as I opened my eyes, I slewed from the stone, dropped forward and landed with a crump on my hands and knees, walloping my head against my visor. It was the most peculiar sensation, as if I had been pulled, and it left me reeling for a good five minutes, lying on my side.

Quite why it did that, I do not know. I crawled back onto the rock and this time I looked up slowly, carefully, clinging on.

Views have different effects on us, depending on the place, your mood, your age, the time of day or night, who you’re with. I like being alone. Some views evoke memory, others arouse images from half-remembered dreams. Some make you relax. Others alarm.

Some take your breath away. This one nearly took my life.My heart stopped. I know. I felt it skip a beat and stop.

It gave a great thwack and got going again, but not before making me completely light-headed. I thought I’d had a stroke, a blood clot – I’d given my head a hard thump when I fell.

I could see all of Africa. All of it. From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Cape. I could see the Nile. It sparkled suddenly in the sun, just as I was watching, in a flash that ran all the way along its length right to its delta. The Sahara shone like a vast freckled ingot, while beneath, equatorial Africa was ribboned in a living, green mantle. I couldn’t stop looking, couldn’t tear my eyes away. But the seas! The seas, the oceans; the reefs and shallows, atolls, islands and depths described in such a bewildering palette of blue and turquoise

The Sahara shone like a vast freckled ingot


that I found myself gasping for breath, again and again.

White-headed mountain ranges pricked the brown like a procession of ancient gods, their feet sequined about with patchworks of greens and yellows, crimsons and purples, all swathed in a toga of nitrogen blue. It was obvious, abundantly obvious, that the whole planet, the world, the Earth itself was alive. It was one vast, living ball suspended magically in an ocean of ether that was also life but of such a different kind that I couldn’t possibly comprehend it.

The blue globe moved, a great living goddess striding resolutely and alone, bearing all her children defiantly through the blackness of space with

dignity and purpose, her trailing skirts streaming around her. She was the most exquisite being I could ever have imagined and her whole, magnificent form tumbled slowly, silently across eternity. My eyes filled, throat knotted. I had to look away. I was overcome. Utterly. Overwhelmed.

How anyone could ever wish to do her harm, to do any injustice to her body, to mutilate her face, was an unforgivable crime. She was not to be torn or hacked at, but revered. In that moment I felt, small, absurd, insignificant. I longed to be back there. I did not want to be on the moon. I wanted to be in her arms. I ached for the company of her trees, her rivers and mountains, to gaze upon her family

of animals, watch children play, put my hand in a stream. Hear birdsong. Listen to rain. The contrast from where I was sitting and what I had left behind on the Earth made being where I was feel all the more terrible even though I, myself, had chosen it.

Slowly she revolved on her invisible axis. Europe came into sight, and the great white polar cap. I had looked at thousands of photographs but not one of them ever came close to describing the sheer, outright majesty of the world, her aura, her divine beauty, staggering to behold. What a treasure she was, how glorious, unique. How fantastically privileged we were to know, to experience it. How valuable every single thing, how much every fragment of life matters, down to the tiniest mite. There’s nothing else like it. Nothing. No place we can identify with and say, ah yes, that reminds me of...

Take-off and touchdown had been as smooth as any commercial airliner. We got back six weeks ago. The first tourist flight: they took three of us. Sold my house, sold my business, all my shares, cashed every penny of my savings. Just enough to scrape in. The other two paid a lot more, but it got us all up there and helped to fund the new oxygenating plant.

Vladi and his team are growing deep-rooting, drought-resistant legumes under sheets of reinforced plastic, lit and warmed by the sun. Water is precious and nothing is wasted but all the same we learned that the plants are growing well and their exhaled moisture is condensing on the plastic, which is the point. The plan is to bleed oxygen into the atmosphere, enough to colonise lichens and... It’s all beyond me. I hope they succeed. Projects as far-sighted as that might one day take us to the other side of the sun. Maybe there is a paradise there too.

But I’m not leaving the Earth, not again. I looked up into the stars when I stood on the moon. They seemed very close. Very bright. Maybe somewhere out there are other paradises – maybe. But you’ll have to go a very, very long way to match this one, if there is another at all.

Jeremy James is a novelist.

Wavy Trees by Jonathan Ashworth www.jonathanashworth.com Jonathan’s work is on show at The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle until the 30 August www.thebiscuitfactory.com


UNDERCURRENTS PSYCHOLOGY

It’s time to take another look at ourselves – to re-enliven our sense of what it is to be human, to breathe new life into ancient intuitions of who we are, and to learn again to celebrate, as we once

did, our instinctive affinity with the Earth community in which we’re rooted.

We are all called now to rediscover what it means to be human beings in a wildly diverse world of feathered, furred and scaled fellow creatures; flowers and forests; mountains, rivers and oceans; wind, rain and snow; sun and moon.

In Western culture, we’ve enclosed ourselves within continuously mended fences of excessive safety, false security, and shallow notions of ‘happiness’, when all the while the world has been inviting us to stride through the unlocked gate and break free into realms of greater promise and possibilities. Our human psyches possess, as capacities, a variety of astonishing resources about which mainstream Western psychology has had very little to say. By uncovering and reclaiming these innate resources, we can more easily understand and resolve our intrapsychic and interpersonal difficulties as they arise.

The alleviation of personal troubles is, of course, important to all of us, but our innate psychological resources are of even greater significance and relevance. Our untapped inner resources are also essential to the flowering of our greatest potential, to the actualisation of our true selves, and to the embodiment of the life of our very souls. These natural faculties are what we must cultivate in order to actively protect and restore our planet’s ecosystems and to spark the urgently needed renaissance of our Western and Westernised cultures. And these innate human resources are precisely those that enable each of us to identify the unique genius and hidden treasure we carry for the world – and, in this way, to participate fully and consciously in the evolution of life on Earth.

These resources – which I call the four facets of the Self, or the four dimensions of our human wholeness – wait within us, but we might not even know they exist until we discover how to access them, cultivate their powers, and integrate them into our everyday lives. Reclaiming these essential human capacities of the Self ought to be the highest priority in psychology, education, religion, medicine and leadership development. Doing so empowers people to wake

up, rise up and become genuine agents of cultural transformation – and, in doing so, experience the most profound fulfilment of a lifetime.

The Four Facets of the SelfThere’s a facet of the Self associated with each of the four cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. Describing the Self in this way is in keeping with traditions around the world that have mapped human nature onto the template of the four directions (and the closely related templates of the four seasons and the four times of day: sunrise, noon, sunset and midnight).

As a brief introduction, the North facet of the Self is what I call the Nurturing Generative Adult, the compassionate and competent aspect of our psyche that is fully capable of providing for the wellbeing of others and ourselves and of caring for the habitats that sustain us and for all species that collectively make up Earth’s web of life. This North facet of the Self is what enables us to empathically and courageously serve our human and more-than-human communities as leaders, teachers, parents, healers, builders, farmers, designers, scientists and artisans. The Nurturing Generative Adult is at the core of archetypes such as the benevolent King or Queen, mature or spiritual Warrior, Mother and Father.

The South facet is the Wild Indigenous One, the sensuous, emotive, erotic, playful and instinctual dimension of ourselves that loves being embodied as a human animal, celebrates the experience of all emotions, is fully at home in the more-than-human world, and enjoys a visceral and deep-rooted kinship with all other creatures and with the diverse ecosystems we inhabit – the rivers, mountains, deserts, plains and forests of our local bioregions. The Wild Indigenous One is resonant with archetypes such as Pan, Artemis/Diana (Lady of the Beasts) and Green Man (Wild Man).

The East facet of the Self is the Innocent/Sage – an amalgam of the Innocent, who perceives the world purely, simply and clearly, and the Sage, who possesses a lighthearted and big-picture wisdom about the world. The Innocent and Sage actually have much in common – they both, for example, love paradox. Consequently my name for this East facet is the paradoxical fusion Innocent/Sage. Our Innocent/Sage sometimes takes the form of a Sacred Fool (who lives beyond the rules and norms of

Agents of Change Bill Plotkin reveals what it means to be a part of the Earth and shows how we can tap those inner resources


is also resonant with archetypes such as Anima/Animus, Magician, Wanderer, Hermit, Psychopomp and Guide to Soul.

We’re born with the capacity to embody each of these four sets of psychological resources, but we must consciously cultivate them in order to have ready access. Mainstream Western culture ignores or suppresses all four facets because the embodied Self is incompatible with egocentric ways of life.

Mature humans – those who have cultivated their fourfold Self – are developing the infrastructure of future mature societies. As agents of cultural transformation and renaissance, they’re succeeding in extraordinary ways in realms such as education, economics, religion and governance. In their everyday lives, these women and men are fashioning and fostering contemporary ways of being human that are sustainable and life-enhancing. Doing this requires the foundational cultivation of the fourfold Self.

Tending the Wellbeing of Our PsychesWhen an ecosystem has been damaged – say, from logging, overgrazing, or chemical-dependent mono-crop agriculture – and then you leave it alone, invasive species typically show up and take over. If you then attempt to simply suppress or eliminate the invasives – whether through pesticide application or heroic weeding – you’re not strengthening the ecosystem but rather merely suppressing a symptom called weeds.

In contrast, if you tend the health of the ecosystem – for example, by improving soil quality or planting native species – the invasives find a less suitable landing site and the ecosystem is more quickly restored to its natural and mature wholeness. Likewise, when we tend the wellbeing of our human psyches – by improving our social and ecological ‘soil’ and cultivating the ‘native species’ of the Self – there is less opportunity for the fragmented or wounded elements of our psyches to take over; the psychological ‘space’ is already occupied by the facets of a more fully flourishing being.

We’ve placed the emphasis on promoting health and wholeness rather than on (merely) suppressing pathology and fragmentedness. We can douse our psyches with pharmaceutical pesticides and therapeutically weed them, but a much better approach would be to enhance our psychological, cultural and ecological soil and to cultivate the capacities of our native human wholeness.

This is an edited extract from the book Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche by Bill Plotkin. Published with permission of New World Library. Bill will be teaching a course on Soulcraft at Schumacher College from 5 to 9 August 2013.

These women and men are fashioning contemporary ways of being human that are sustainable and life-enhancing

the everyday social world) or as a Trickster (who uses humour and chicanery to help us lighten up and appreciate the greater realities of our lives and the world).

The West facet is the Muse or Inner Beloved. This is the adventurous and visionary dimension of ourselves that loves to explore the unknown: the fruitful darkness; the processes of decay and death – the natural recycling of things; the world of dreams and imagination; and the realms of metaphor, symbol, poetry and myth. The Muse-Beloved is our inner romantic, who is attracted by liaisons and experiences that are both dangerous and alluring, including the descent into the underworld mysteries of soul.

In addition to the Muse and the Beloved, this facet

The Myth of Sisyphus by Darrel Perkins www.drlperkins.com


Perennial WisdomUNDERCURRENTS PHILOSOPHY

It is timely to revisit the visionary thinking of PlatoPlato and Aristotle by Raphael © Vatican Museums and Galleries/The Bridgeman Art Library


Many years ago, at the time when the Green movement first emerged as an organised political force, calling itself the Ecology Party, a book was published by the distinguished

Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr entitled Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man. In it, Nasr warned his readers: “The ecological crisis is only an externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man.”

At the time, this was not a perspective that many activists were prepared to take on board, and this remains the case today. Nasr, though, understood that if the ecological crisis is of our own making, then clearly we need to see what it is in ourselves that has brought it about. This is not instead of taking much-needed actions, but rather as a precondition to ensure the actions that we take are wise ones.

One reason why it can seem to be a luxury to address the question of our own collective “inner malaise” is that we are still under the thrall of the Cartesian worldview, in which what is out there in the world is seen as having no connection with what occurs in our inner life. Nature has been relegated to the background of our all too absorbing human dramas, and many struggle to feel a genuine link between what takes place within the human sphere and what is occurring in the natural world. This feeling of human separation from Nature belies the fact that the condition of the natural environment indubitably reflects our collective values, and indeed our underlying worldview.

The prevailing worldview of the West was defined in the 16th and 17th centuries by such thinkers as Galileo, Bacon and Descartes, who inaugurated the scientific revolution. Displacing the older, traditional reverence for Nature as a manifestation of the divine, the new scientific method prioritised mathematically precise quantitative thinking over the older qualitative approach to understanding and relating to the natural world.

Spiritual intuition and a feeling of empathy for Nature – which had underpinned the older sensibility – had no place in the conduct of the new science. From its inception, the new science allied itself to a technological view of Nature as a resource to control and exploit as efficiently as possible, cutting itself loose from the older, reverential view of Nature as a living organism imbued with spirit. This meant that a large part of what lived in the human being was denied legitimacy as providing a valid way of knowing and relating to Nature.

It is for this reason that the current plight of ecosystems needs to be seen as reflecting back to us a fatally reduced conception not only of the world but also of the human being.

We have been able to wreak ecological devastation on the planet not just because we have adopted a highly partial, one-sided view of the world but also because we have succumbed to a drastically diminished view of what it means to be human.

Since many of us have been persuaded to reconceive ourselves as no more than biological computers, those aspects of human nature that were once regarded as essential – such as our ability to think morally, creatively and imaginatively – are now seen as increasingly marginal to finding solutions to the problems that we face. With the soul so besieged, the spirit denied and the ground of human decision-making thoroughly permeated by computer-compatible rationality, we are in danger of becoming strangers to truly human values, insight and wisdom. More computing power and more technological interventions seem to be the answer rather than the one thing that is actually needed, which is a change of heart.

It may therefore be timely for us to revisit the philosophical, religious and visionary tradition that was swept aside by those thinkers who ushered in the scientific revolution. There is a stream of wisdom that goes back at least as far as Plato and Plotinus, and that was also expressed in the visionary poetry of Dante and in the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart, to name but a few, and which is often referred to as the

perennial philosophy, or philosophia perennis. In it we find a view of Nature as a manifestation of spirit, and a view of human interiority as opening towards the divine.

In this wisdom tradition, the interiority of Nature and the interiority of the human being ultimately coincide, for the originating source of both is the one universal spirit manifest throughout creation. Within this tradition reverent contemplation of Nature makes complete sense, while to persist in treating Nature merely as a resource to be exploited, controlled and manipulated is actually to undermine what is most precious within the human being.

To reacquaint ourselves with this tradition does not mean that we should attempt to put the clock back, but rather that we should reconnect with our cultural and spiritual roots. Instead of prioritising financial gain and technological might, the perennial philosophy emphasises ideals such as beauty, truth and goodness as the basis for wise decision-making.

There is a dangerous hubris in continuing to think we can eventually solve our ecological problems by simply increasing the computational and technological power we throw at them, while at the same time dismissing with condescension our own spiritual heritage. Of course the perennial wisdom is not a panacea for the enormous challenges we face, but it does offer guidance as to how we might find a different orientation to these challenges, and a grounding in values and ideals that promote rather than subvert what is truest and best in the human being.

Jeremy Naydler is a tutor on the Temenos Academy Foundation Course in the Perennial Philosophy, which begins in London in October 2013. www.temenosacademy.org

Jeremy Naydler suggests we make time to reconnect with our spiritual roots

We have succumbed to a drastically diminished view of what it means

to be human


Wild WalesSo many talk of change as if it is something to be feared, but in her account of walking the mostly deserted new Wales Coast Path, Julie Bromilow embraces the challenge of what lies just ahead

NATURE WRITING COMPETITION 1st PRIZEWINNER

Sometimes I hear the whisper of old drovers on bare and empty hills


I have so far walked 500 miles around the edge of Wales and have yet to meet anybody knitting by the side of the road.

I roll up my tent when there is enough light to see my rucksack. Ducks rise and circle the water field, leaving as they arrived the night before when the sky was pink. A startled hare pauses its journey across the field, shrinking low and lower until it cannot be seen among the divots. There are wet leaves in the grass, yellow mushrooms clustering at the kissing gate, and in the sycamore lane scuttering pheasants crash through the trees.

A pink television light wobbles through a dark window at a huddle of bungalows. On the path, I meet a stoat with a wren in its mouth. We regard each other long seconds before it turns to loop back into the hedge. It is two hours before I see a person – far below me on a beach, jogging with abandon, snatched song tossed up the cliff by the wind. It will be two hours more before I see three builders on a roof, and two more again before I speak to anyone, when I order coffee in a beach café.

Things were different when George Borrow walked around Wales in 1854. He was an enthusiastic English gentleman who talked to people he met along the way, astonishing them with his accomplished use of Welsh. He wrote a cheerful account of his journey in his book Wild Wales and what impresses me most is the sheer number of people he met in the countryside. Stone breakers, Irish fiddlers, millers, masons, tree fellers, gypsies, drovers and knitting women all populate his pages, which are merry with dialogue.

My journey is quieter. I am walking 1,027 miles around the edge of Wales, my adopted country, via the new Wales Coast Path and the longer-established Offa’s Dyke Way. I walk alone on weekdays and Rob joins me at weekends bringing chocolate and love. We have a small budget, camp at night and cook breakfast on beaches and in fields. Winter has determined a pause – we’ll resume in the spring with the light. I have walked on duney soft paths, smelled blackberry scent grasses, lain on rabbit thump headlands to watch Atlantic grey seals, crossed gorsey fields and lorry spray roads bordered with ragwort, campion and scabious that tremble in rain, and talked to the salt marsh sheep. There are moments of beauty and reflection. Sometimes I meet hikers, often I meet dog walkers, especially

when near to car parks. Some days are even busy – a Flintshire County Council litter truck joined the crowds at Jubilee Tower on a blue day in the Clwydian hills. Occasionally I try out my uncertain Welsh and no one is astonished. When we have money to spend, we meet café people, campsite folk, and shopkeepers. But if there is none and we pass through no towns, we sometimes meet no one at all.

Just north of Bangor, rain was approaching. A few stubbly fields away from the path, the train frequently passed, passengers blurred and unseen. The water was high up the salt mud flats. I boiled noodles among the bladderwrack; the paper mushroom bag caught alight and burned to flimsy fragments dark and whimsical as the clouds over Puffin Island. I looked across the estuary green grass at the magnesium light and washed my cooking pot in the silt-lapping Menai Straits. Squadrons of piping oystercatchers ranked up with black-backed gulls, herring gulls, crows solitary among them, and overhead a murmuration flashed silver against the ink sky. I camped in an oak copse and saw no one.

I have grown to love and anticipate countryside walking as an act of solitude and contemplation, though I sometimes hear the whisper of old drovers on bare and empty hills. When dusk falls and I pitch my tent, I imagine crossing meadows in the summer dark with George Borrow, returning the ‘nos da’ greetings of homebound folk.

Sheepdogs swirl in a field. There are berry ropes in the hedge and lingering harebells on muddy paths. Smashed orange beech leaves smudge the lanes, cashmere clouds soften the hills and crab-apples lie crushed on the tarmac – in autumn the hillsides appear knitted. Sometimes there’s a tractor, and once a rosy farm lad raced his quad bike over the field to correct my route. George Borrow would stop and talk to gangs of reapers about poetry and religion, but farmland here is barely populated now, and rarely arable. Musing among the scarlet pimpernels at the edge of a wheat field on the Llŷn peninsula, I was boom-shocked by an automated crow scarer.

Of course I have met people – just far fewer than George Borrow did. He met more in a day than I would in a week, but they colour my diary too. Away from the billowy Shell Island campsite tents and car radios, kids and dads scragged for causeway

Strumble Head from Garn Fawr, Pembrokeshire by Luke Piper

www.lukepiper.com


crabs. Wildlife Trust bracken clearers raked paths next to their Land Rover, big coffee mugs on the dashboard. Anglers were out on the south coast of the Dee – kids threw stones in the sea, men sat on tackle boxes and one watched his rod from inside his car.

A winkle digger at Criccieth dug hasty buckets with a fork on the tide line, and three contractors repaired a Nefyn fence. Sherry-faced hunters tumbled from a barn at Carmel Head – with their guns – straw caught in their jumpers. The organ repairers at Bodfari church told me I was lucky to find it open then tripped the electricity – there was a flash and a mournful curse from behind the chapel screen as I tiptoed out. On Porth y Nant a check-shirt beachcomber shared a rover’s grin, and an old man dug muck into his allotment at the edge of Holyhead. None of these rare and cheery encounters led to conversations, and no one asked if I was there to buy hogs, though a salesman in Penegroes watching me sit on my rucksack to wait for Rob’s bus did come and ask if I had any need for Sky TV.

The sun rose raw and fiery over the frosty hills. Puddles had skin ice that cracked on the cinnamon moors. The clear sky bowl was blue and cold and still. Two mountain bikers called a greeting as they scrambled the paths, black grouse crouched in the leking places and far away an owl surveyed the heather husks from a rock. Hours further along, under the limestone cliffs at the Edge of the World, fieldfares hustled in a hawthorn tree newly arrived from Scandinavia, come for the berries, and old moss furnished a wall.

People standing in their yards would invite George Borrow in for some tea or ale but I walk through streets and whole estates that seem to be unoccupied. In the neat empty Llandudno suburbs next to the bird berry crag of Little Orme just one man is out in the sun, power-washing his drive. He doesn’t invite us in to see his bible, he doesn’t even say hello.

But when I arrive at a farm campsite past Aberdaron after hiking up weary from the fishing creek, the farmer’s wife invites me into her kitchen for tea. She talks to me of errant boys and motorbikes while detergent dish steam billows round three large bags of Yorkshire puddings defrosting on the draining board. Her husband John laments the lapse of rural life. “There are no jobs for young people any more,” he says. “Just sheep farming and the council, and the council look after themselves. Retired people move in; we don’t meet them till they’re in the doctor’s waiting room, and when they die they go back home. Not many English in the graveyards,” he says. But it doesn’t matter to him what language is spoken, only that the shops and schools and pubs are busy. Anyhow my Welsh is the wrong kind of Welsh, he says kindly, “not much use this far North”.

I sometimes hear the whisper of old country folk but I’m not yearning for a gone era – times are always changing. Life was hard for the Irish refugees, the urchins and the quarrymen, the lime kilns burned acrid and stifling, the valleys round Swansea were ‘full of blast and smoke’ and in truth I’m not much good at knitting. Sheep subsidies and grain imports did away with the oat fields, and supermarkets killed off the Pembrokeshire cauliflowers, but long before George Borrow went a-roaming, forests covered the hills. Times have changed, and they’ll change again.

Researchers show how we could respond to the challenges of climate change by altering the way we use land. Reduced grazing and an increase in carefully managed food and energy crops would mean that the land could capture more greenhouse gases than it releases. We would have a more diverse countryside than today, with agriculture pushing

into towns and cities, and an increase in wildlife as well as rural livelihoods. Agriculture would be less intensive, and people would once again work in the fields and woods.

Montgomery canal is frozen. This section is no longer used as a waterway, and ducks nibble at the edges of ice. Moorhens walk across it and floating swans keep their heads buried under their wings. Crimson berries are frosted, birds chatter in the ivy. I cross lump hard fields in which Offa’s Dyke is a gentle swell and sheep

look brown against the stricken white. Behind the hedge the hill line has vanished in a glacial mist, and below it yellow headlamps speed unsteadily along the A458, a lorry pulled up in a lay-by. Further along and into the hills, I watch a hare race across the high white field at Beacon Ring and a distant farmer tossing hay from his tractor. Cobwebs are frozen white and trembling on hedges and trees. It is not till late afternoon that I meet anyone – a sprightly old couple bent over their sticks and eager to greet. “It’s such a lovely day, we couldn’t stay inside,” they say. “We’ve come out to look at the frosty trees.” I leave them with a smile and a spring in my step.

I love countryside solitude but also to meet people busy about the land – blackberry pickers, fishermen on rocky headlands, conservationists baling heather. I loved to glimpse an old man climb secretly over a gate in a shady green wood with his fishing rod. I hear the whispers of George Borrow’s old country voices along empty roads and like to think they might also anticipate the future, when fields and lanes are once more lively with folk. I don’t expect peat carts and roadside knitting to replace four by fours and television but I can believe we might once again have the time and inclination to pause, and pass the time of day.

Julie Bromilow has enjoyed a colourful and diverse work history ranging from farms and bars to factories and charities in Britain and overseas, though her core work was in sustainability education.

Fresh, original and beautifully written. Julie paints a

lively picture of contemporary Welsh society

– Ruth Borthwick, judge


2nd PRIZEWINNER NATURE WRITING COMPETITION

In Search of Ramonda Sue Kindon describes a plant-hunting excursion that turns her expectations on their head and leads her to the holy grail of field botany – the rare and elusive ghost orchid

Hard to imagine, listening to the Cumbrian hail beating against my window as I write, the July warmth of southern France and the excitement of last summer’s botanical quest.

In my Grande Flore Illustrée des Pyrénées, its portrait hides discreetly, bottom right of the broomrapes. A bit of a misfit, being part of the African violet family, or Gesneriaceae, which is represented in Europe only in two areas: the Balkan peninsula, and the Pyrenees, the mountain range where France merges into Spain.

It’s Ramonda pyrenaica I’m after. I’ve studied the black and white drawing in the Flora, all crinkly leaves and proud flowers, and have long harboured a desire to see it coloured in. Now I’m on the trail – hardly a pioneer: the mountain valley I’m about to explore is well known as a habitat for this emblematic endemic, and word has come that it’s in flower.

In the mountains the weather can change with great speed, and that’s particularly true here in the Ariège, where wisps of cloud encroaching on a gentian-blue sky from the Spanish side can soon become disorientating mist. In this knowledge my companion and I have chosen our day with care, not only paying attention to the weather forecast, renowned for being

fickle from one valley to the next, but observing for ourselves the wind direction and lack of clouds.

As it is early July, we presuppose heat in the upper twenties, take plenty of bottled water in our rucksacks, and make an early start. From the parking place we set off through shady woods, skirting a stream bright with melt-water, where the vegetation is decidedly like that of our own West Country – red campion, valerian, buckler fern, even the odd Welsh poppy.

After crossing the stream by means of a substantial wooden bridge, the path takes a steep uphill turn through the beech woods, alongside a wall of exposed rock to our left. We’re getting warmer…

I can’t help thinking of how it must have been for the early botanist about to make a discovery for the first time. The identification of this plant is credited to Jean Michel Claude Richard (1787–1868), and here I have more detective work to do. All I have found so far is that he was gardener-in-chief in Senegal, so what he was doing in the Pyrenees remains unclear. In naming the Ramonda, he pays tribute to Louis Ramond de Carbonnières (1755–1827), a colourful figure and Renaissance man who trained as a lawyer, wrote historical fiction and went in for politics

A refuge to weary walkers The Chapelle de L’Isard, Antras, France Photo by Jon Atkins


before discovering a passion for these mountains in general and their geology and botany in particular. Such was his new-found interest, that he studied botany under the great Jussieu at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

His political involvement meant that he was forced to flee Paris during

the Revolution, and he took refuge in his beloved mountains until he was arrested in 1794 and, lucky to escape the guillotine, was imprisoned briefly in Tarbes. On his release, he taught natural history at the newly established Central School of Tarbes, and undertook several expeditions to Monte Perdido. He returned to politics and became prefect, then deputy for Puy-de-Dôme in the Auvergne, but his name is inextricably linked with the early exploration of the Pyrenees.

But we are in for a disappointment: the rocks are generously dotted with rosettes of dark, embossed leaves – it must have been a picture – but now there are only a few straggling blooms as an aide-memoire, and the slight ditch between the stony, beech-leaved path and the rock face is strewn with faded amethyst stars, petals still joined around a central circle. They’ve piled up like confetti after a wedding, and I select a single flower from the litter, the wedding guest come too late. It feels smooth and surprisingly resilient, so I pocket it as a five-petalled consolation.

Feeling somewhat despondent, we decide to press on upwards, as there might still be plants in full flower at a higher level. Altitude can make quite a difference, and you can travel through several seasons as you progress from the high summer of the lower slopes, through a spring of hellebores and hepaticas, to the alpine buttercups and snowbells of the snowline.

We are in the presence of a thing of rarity and great beauty. I mark the spot with three

large stones

Ghost orchid (Epipogium aphyllum) © Paul Harcourt Davies/naturepl.com


My companion has stopped to photograph a goblins’ stovepipe of a fungus growing on a rocky outcrop. Out of idleness, I scoop a handful of fallen washed-purple petals, and try to imagine them carpeting the bank. My attention is suddenly drawn to an unusual flower spike emerging from the gingery covering of beech leaves. Small in stature, no more than 20 centimetres, it has an other-worldly, luminescent quality, and I can’t immediately put a name to it, although I recognise it from the flower shape as an orchid. It is delicately pigmented in shell pink and cream, and we wonder about coral root; obviously something unusual, growing in this place of deep shade. We photo it with reverence. For the moment its name doesn’t really matter – we are in the presence of a thing of rarity and great beauty. I mark the spot with three large stones.

We continue in silence for a while, and then at the upper limits of the forest the desire for Ramonda is duly satisfied. Past their prime, perhaps – the seed-pods poke through the milky inner circle of the petals like inquisitive beaks – but here at last is the hoped-for mass of mauve with its wow factor. The flowers look strangely delicate, incompatible with their rugged basal clumps: velvet-green and wavy-margined leaves, textured, almost smocked, like my relief model of the Ariège itself, with its veins of mountain streams descending to the river valleys, irresistible to the touch.

Once above the tree line, the midday heat is such that we decide to turn back, but first we picnic on baguette and local sheep’s cheese in the shade of a large boulder that has at some time been dislodged by an avalanche and has come to rest conveniently beside a stream. Sometimes such boulders bring with them alpine plants from the cliffs above, but not today, although there are fragrant pinks, yellow rock roses and large-flowered eyebrights all around. There is the rustle of a lizard doing its disappearing act. We dine in the company of a large, shiny black beetle, and notice small blue butterflies from time to time – other worlds waiting to be explored. Overhead, we watch a pair of vultures circling long and wide, no doubt assessing us as lunch possibilities of their own.

I can make out a building with a tin roof gleaming in the sun on the opposite bank, and consult the map. It’s marked as a chapel, but in the middle of nowhere. Our descent takes us past its buttressed walls. The Chapelle de L’Isard, as it is known, is dedicated to Our Lady of the Isard (the local variety of chamois, prized by huntsmen). One end is now a refuge, with very basic overnight facilities, to welcome weary travellers; the other is still a place of worship – we are lucky enough to find the door unlocked, and to marvel at the elaborate wrought-iron altar rail with its golden sheep decoration, and the framed paintings adorning the simple walls, one showing bears separated from other animals by some sort of miracle.

We haven’t yet seen a bear, but it can only be a question of time: they are about, and in increasing numbers. The local stock had dwindled to single figures, brought back from the brink by the introduction of Eastern European bears in a project that is not without controversy. Ask any mountain sheep-farmer, and you will be told about the decimation of his flock in gory detail, but that’s another story.

In front of the chapel is a flat area cleared of trees, apart

from the odd juniper. Once a year, in August, a service is held here to bless the sheep. The place has an ancient feel to it, the shiver of a sacred site, and the view to the snowy skyline is spectacular.

By now I’m keen to return to base and consult the reference books. The way down from the chapel is narrow and stony, inaccessible in the extreme, and there is no evidence of a mining community that might have explained why it was built. The stream tumbles back down, cascading under the wooden bridge, and here, at the pathside, watered by the constant spray, is the best yet display of Ramonda. It looks almost planted, too stunning to be arrived at by Nature unaided. More photos.

We retrace our footsteps, down through the beech wood. My companion walks straight past the stone markers that indicate our orchid find, but I have no trouble locating it, having made a mental note of a dead tree trunk resembling a bear on the bank above. Further inspection reveals that the orchid has no leaves. The stem is reddish pink at the

top, fading to light beige towards the base, encircled by the occasional diminutive sheath. The flowers hang like a pair of angels, creamy white, tinged with coral and pale green, suspended from tiny cream-and-pink striped ‘lampshades’.

There is an unspoken possibility here, so unlikely that neither of us dares mention it. As soon as we are back in the cool sanctuary of the shuttered house, we view our photos on the laptop, and reach for the Grande Flore (too heavy to take in the rucksack). No shadow of a doubt, even to my inexpert eye – we have stumbled upon the ghost orchid, Epipogium aphyllum, the field botanist’s holy grail. “Rarissime”, says the book; and it can spend many years lying dormant, making it very elusive indeed.

My hunch about the Chapelle de L’Isard is also borne out: the current building was erected on the site of a probable place of worship dedicated to Pan and Sylvanus.

When I return to the valley the following week with my son, who is eager to see all these wonderful sights, the ghost orchid, true to its name, has vanished, the door of the Chapelle de l’Isard is locked, and the Ramonda is well and truly over – until next summer, that is.

Sue Kindon is a poet. Her poems have appeared in magazines including The Rialto, The North, and The Interpreter’s House, and she won the Maryport poetry competition in 2012.

This piece skilfully weaves together the beauty of place,

quest, historical reference, the roles of chance and

the passing of time – Harry Barton, judge


The sky is a clear luminous blue; cumulus clouds gather and stack in huge silent piles on the horizon. I can hear

the wind gently rustling the leaves of sycamore, oak and ash in the shaggy hedgerow as I make my way up the southerly slope of our hay field, long fine grasses brushing my shins. Behind that is the steady drone of farm machinery as haymaking gets under way all around us. The breeze makes the tips of the inflorescences ripple and shimmer in the sun, their final tremble before the cut. Before this happens I’m looking out for spear thistle, which I want to pull before a fountain of tiny seeds make a thousand more, though some are left to go over at the edges of the field so that birds can feed.

I’m hot from the climb and I stop and look back across the valley. The bare granite hills of Bodmin Moor are in the distance, scattered with slabs of stone. I imagine swimming in the quarry up there, the water heavy and cold, our voices echoing back to us from the steep vertical sides of granite. Then I remember, further back, my father swimming in the River Wey in a wide pool tucked away at the bottom of a steep woody bank. Made by a natural weir, the suddenly fast-flowing water makes a powerful current on which to ride.

At the edge of the pool a sandy bank makes a beach under the dappled shade of crack willows and I’m sitting on that beach with my friends, watching my dad make a dive into the

deep water. I hope I’m like you when I’m fifty, I say.

As it turns out it’s not until winter that I make it up to the quarry again. And this time it’s too cold to swim. During a break in rain-sodden days I seize the opportunity, as I don’t want to miss this rare crispness, this wringing-out of damp and mist.

The rumble of iron shakes and vibrates the car as my wheels go over the cattle grid onto the moor, like crossing a threshold, separating the ordinary world from this ancient place. Tranquillity descends to my shoulders like a breath from a benevolent giant and I’m smiling at the undulating land stretching before me into the blue, the close-cropped grassy hillocks and shimmer of bleached flaxen grasses giving way to the scoured hills of Rough Tor, Brown Willy and Scribble Downs. It’s not long before I can see the rocky outline of Carbilly Tor on the horizon, and when I reach the track that leads to it I park in the rough layby. Getting out into the cold air, I’m entranced by the quietness, an unusually windless day on the moor. The sky is high and pale blue, with a narrow tail of cirrus clouds far away; the sun floods brightly and obliquely, bouncing and sparkling wherever it lands.

In the stone-built hedge bank next to the road, a lonely hawthorn reaches out, winter branches metallic bronze, a plethora of whippy young shoots sprouting from its most recent flail and just a few dark red berries left, crumpled and brown at the edges. I

NATURE WRITING COMPETITION 3rd PRIZEWINNER

I Will Remember Piqued by her memories of a time when the moorland quarries rang out with the sounds of stone-splitting, Sarah Walsh catches the echoes of a long-abandoned way of life

open the gate by lifting the big thick heavy chain draped over the granite gatepost, a regular ritual of weight and sound that marks the entry to yet another world.

Splitting, sawing, scappling, axing, dunting...

...the sounds of metal on stone, which rang out over this hillside in the past. Pausing, all I hear now is the call of a crow, the ping and chatter of small birds and the faint murmur of farm machinery, though I can almost sense the ghostly shouts of the quarrymen carrying through the air. And there on the slope is the ruin of the smithy where the tools were sharpened, its


chimney still intact. To my left a sturdy three-stemmed oak rises out of a pile

of stones or ‘wasters’, its knobbly branches hung with fairy-like shawls of pale green filigree lichen. They now seem to be part of each other, the rocky skirt discarded by industry, acute angles too imperfect for practical use, but softened now with a furry carpet of moss.

For centuries these tors were visited by stone splitters, laboriously chiselling series of grooves and using metal wedges to cleave the granite, making anything from cider presses, millstones, pig troughs and gateposts to lintels, jambs, mullions and thresholds. Mostly they used surface stone, ‘grass-rock’, and until the advent of metalled roads and a more efficient method of splitting, their remoteness made them uneconomical for commercial interest.

The track curves away to the left, pocked with big blobby puddles, the granite chippings crunching beneath my feet,

just as it would have done under the heavy-soled boots of the men as they made their way to work. To my right is a stand of rounded gorse bushes topped with a smattering of bright yellow flowers. Below the smithy I can see a naturally formed cheesewring, a pile of huge flat rocks, one on top of the other, the height and width of a small house.

The moorland around the tor is made of spongy short grass which has been nibbled by cattle and sheep, punctuated by stubby oaks, gorse and grey, lichen-splodged rocks, between which I find the deep imprints of cloven hooves. Off the track my footsteps sound squishy; the land is saturated to spilling point. The moss creeps over the granite boulders, and it’s difficult to tell whether it’s from the quarries, or natural. But

The winter water looks oily, black in the shade, mysterious

Disused quarry, Bodmin Moor © Rosie Spooner www.rosiephotos.co.uk


that’s what I love about this place: the way the wild has made its own unique habitat from the industrial past.

Stalks of dull brown bracken are still standing, just. A rabbit jumps out of my path, white tail a flash as it bounds up the hill and out of sight. Looking out to the west I can see a farm far down a stony track and beyond that the bare brown hills, hazy, topped with flat boulders balanced in graphic piles, left there after the glaciers melted. Small fields with outgrown hedgerows creep up the hillside, while in the dip stands a straggly copse of scrubby windblown oaks, their leafless limbs making a soft tangle of greys and browns. The low winter sun shines like gold on beautiful brindled cattle of cream, tan and black who look up in alarm as they hear me approach. I can feel the warmth of the sun through the cold air. The sky is turning deeper blue at the horizon; a dark grey smoky cloud hangs low and elongated, suspended.

From this aspect it’s not possible to see the flooded pits; all that is visible of the quarries are the waste creations, long giant fingers of angular rocks balanced one on top of the other, reaching out into the surrounding terrain. There are four separate pits on the tor and at one time they were all being worked. From around 1800 the plug-and-feather method for splitting stone was used, which meant hand drilling series of holes, then placing short iron chisels, the ‘plugs’, between pairs of thin iron feathers that reached the bottom of the holes. Striking the plugs cleanly in turn brought percussive pressure to the sides of the holes and thence to the heart of the stone, making splitting more efficient.

Better road access subsequently allowed these more remote tors to be quarried with some commercial success and this one was opened in 1918 by the Bodmin Granite Co. Ltd., responding partly to the need after the war for memorials to commemorate the dead. It supplied monument and building stone to London and Birmingham and extracted large blocks of flawless granite, reducing them on-site to precise shapes and sizes. It wasn’t to last. In the end, competition from abroad forced many moor quarries to close, though this one was still in operation until the early 1960s.

Now it is all abandoned. The remains of a hand crane stand lonely on an island platform in a flooded pit, its iron column rusting away, a fading witness to the last quarrymen. The siphons and pumps are long gone, though it’s possible to glimpse the farmer’s black plastic pipe, a stealthy conduit snaking through mats of vegetation, used for watering stock in summer. What will remain forever are the plug-and-feather and charge holes, the traces of cleaving etched indelibly into the vertical faces.

Hunger nags, and I clamber on top of a boulder the size of a car to eat a banana. There is a small pool on the top of the rock, worn down into a shallow circle by centuries of rain and erosion. I play with the pleasing variety in the depth of

field – the rocks very close up and then, just over the brow of the hill, the wide and empty moor. Everything is very still, a vapour trail high in the sky.

A moment later I hear a buzzard call, an eerie high-pitched cry into the silence as it wheels around above. A flock of birds rise in a distant valley, the light catching their wings. Behind me I see a white van travelling along a road, silently busy. Then I hear an engine, and a farmer is coming up the south slope on a quad bike, a collie perched up on the back. The herd of cattle that were steadily grazing on lower ground suddenly crank themselves into gear and begin to follow, surprisingly dainty as

they pick their way through the muddy mires.

I jump down and rejoin the track, which has now melted into the general green as I make my way to the largest of the quarries, my goal, our swimming spot. Underfoot, the path turns to a mat of soft thick moss and blades of grass, a dazzling emerald walkway, startling against the blue of

the sky. After climbing a couple of dilapidated gates I turn a corner and the flooded pit comes into view.

Perfectly still, the high rock face of the far north side mirrored in its dark depths, a magical pond echoes and whispers here. Gorse-topped sheer sides of hewn granite step down in a tumble of tiers, their faces mottled by time. Fine feathery grasses cling to the cut ledges, softening, while muted colours and sky are reflected in the pool’s glassy surface. On one side, moss-covered steps climb like a royal stairway disappearing to an unseen Elfin Queen’s palace, enticing and ethereal. The winter water looks oily, black in the shade, mysterious. Large rocks can just be glimpsed hovering underneath the surface near a marooned outcrop, the smooth tension occasionally broken by a small ripple. I can hear water dripping out of sight and a little grey bird hops from ledge to ledge.

The tiers eventually descend to meet an area of grass, a close-cropped flattish knoll, springy underfoot. This is where we sit in the summer, spread out on blankets and towels, hair drip-drying in the sun, munching on sandwiches. A wide strip of delicate airy reeds, their sharp tips catching the light, separates the deep part of the quarry from a smaller pool that has flat boulders in the shallows, a perfect place to launch. I stand and watch, drinking it all in, awed once more.

I think of my father again. He has gone but what he has given me is valuable. Not only a love and care for the natural world, but also an understanding that it is the small things in life, the reliable rituals of everyday walks and the excitement of braving cold water in unusual places, that are the rhythm and balm for the soul. Next time I dive I will remember.

Sarah Walsh is a landscape designer turned writer, now managing 10 acres of land for increased biodiversity in North Cornwall. www.thinkingcowgirl.wordpress.com

In the end it was the freshness of expression, the surprises and the

sheer narrative energy of the winners that I admired the most

– Miriam Darlington, judge


My Allotment Peter Jewel shares an engaging sense of wonder over the plants that will emerge from tiny seeds or pips on the allotment that has become such a part of him

A bitter wintry morning, the ground soggy from several days’ heavy rain, yet covered with a crisp frost, like icing.

The white on the branches of the little apple tree stands out against the dull grey sky, and my breath condenses in the still air. A shiver runs up my spine – part cold, part anticipation – as I walk to my plot. In their neat rows, the cabbages, kale and chard look limp in the dampness. By the overflowing water butt the fox’s sodden droppings, and on a bare branch a solitary magpie, squawking. It’s 8.30 am on my allotment, and I’m the only one here working, all the other plots a silent empty patchwork. My winter landscape.

I left my warm bed with the cat snuggled into the hollow left by my head. But I’d rather be here than almost anywhere, a place that I have created and nurtured, one of a small group of allotments bordered by the road on one side and the railway on the other, a little bit of flat suburban England on the edge of town. Three years ago I was offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan to give a talk at a friend’s important anniversary. My immediate thought was: “Oh no, I won’t be able to go to the allotment!” and I had to think very hard before accepting.

For the allotment has become part of me. I remember standing on it one morning at the beginning of last autumn, by the beetroot and parsnips. My whole body and being felt rich and utterly at peace, and there was a growing sense of warmth that seemed to rise from the ground and permeate every sinew and nerve. I really belonged to the earth, was completely rooted. The warmth percolated up from the rich loam and went right through me like an energy-giving sap. I was full of

a calm joy, fully connected, absolutely part of the world, the earth, the grass, and all the vegetables. The laden tree exemplified the sense of swelling

fruitfulness and glowing fulfilment of the whole allotment. It was Samuel Palmer’s Magic Apple Tree.

When I was a small boy living in a small house in a London suburb, my father created three tiny gardens, for me and my two brothers, at the end of

his own vegetable patch. We each had a little fence and a gate, and I loved creating borders, sowing a few seeds, and watching some of them actually come up and produce real carrots or peas. Now as I stand in my prepared allotment all the delight and thrill of that small boy returns, and I find myself in touch with that wonderful sense of the possibility of growth.

When I took the allotment over it was not like that – it was in a state of great neglect. Waist-high thistles and nettles covered much of the large plot, and as I gradually and painfully dug them out by hand I discovered the couch grass roots, feet deep in the ground. Years later, I still haven’t got rid of them all. The digging was very hard work, but I resisted the temptation to hire a rotavator or use any chemical

One of the joys of having an allotment

is the sense of camaraderie with other plot holders

Paintings by Chris Cyprus www.chriscyprus.com

RUNNER UP NATURE WRITING COMPETITION


weedkillers, and very gradually what looked like rich, pristine soil was exposed, full of large plump worms. The excitement of seeing beautiful beds of clear fertile earth! I had at last got the ground ready for planting, hoeing and raking to achieve a fine tilth, and this felt like a great achievement in itself. I had carefully prepared the canvas and was now rather nervously ready for the first brushstroke.

It was very daunting too. I had no particular gardening skills or horticultural knowledge. Over the years, I had tended various gardens attached to houses I had lived in, and I had enjoyed doing that. I had sometimes bought and planted flowers, shrubs and even occasional vegetables chosen from garden stores. But this was very different. It would all be trial and error. And that felt fine – it was

even part of the excitement. I had no desire to grow show vegetables or compete with the other allotment holders. I would gratefully accept any tips they might offer, and perhaps in time I would become a ‘good enough’ grower of vegetables myself.

One of the joys of having an allotment is the sense of camaraderie with other plot holders. I can think of no other human activity where one meets and works alongside people from completely different backgrounds, and all are accepted and valued for themselves. People often offer each other some of their vegetables, or share seeds. Around my plot there are a Spanish husband and wife, whose plot is impeccable and who each year present me with some of their pepper plants; a company director who plants by the

To see more of Chris’ work visit Best of British – Paintings by Chris Cyprus & Mark Sofilas from 5 October, Creation Fine Arts, Beverly, East Yorkshire www.creationfinearts.co.uk


moon; a drama teacher from a local secondary school; an ex-policeman who grows wonderful leeks; and an Indian gardener who has a huge coriander patch and cultivates many other herbs. Two young women share a plot, and near them is a family with young children who dig away enthusiastically with their plastic spades. The IT specialist three plots away told me he used to belong to a health club that cost him nearly a thousand pounds a year. Now on his allotment he gets all the aerobic exercise he needs, plus the fresh air and a year’s supply of fresh organic vegetables – and all for an annual rent of about £30.

Most people have a sense of the beauty of the natural environment, but it is often a selective one. They will walk in the Cotswolds or the Lake District, and take their holidays on the Cornish coast. They will fly to exotic locations around the world, and take photos of spectacular scenery. Travel documentaries and glossy brochures reinforce this sense that beauty is always somewhere else, somewhere not really connected to one’s real life. We go there, see the sights, and then return. Next year, having ‘done that’, we find another beauty spot.

On my allotment I have a very different sense that it is where I am right now, working on the soil of my small patch of ground, that is so beautiful and so fulfilling. Banal and very ordinary-seeming to most people who drive past without really looking, allotments are places where you have to slow down and open up to a different rhythm – the rhythm of the Earth, from which we have cut ourselves off, and to which we need to return to fulfil our human potential.

Many years ago I used to make a lot of homemade wine. A friend and his wife came to offer their help collecting dandelions, which make a delicious white. “What next?” he asked, once we had picked a large pile of the flower-heads. “We’ll sit down in the sun and pull off the individual petals and put them in this bucket,” I said. “But that’ll take hours!” – he was horrified. “Yes,” I smiled, and I think his wife understood: she smiled back and settled down. On an allotment many things take time; one needs to settle back into a different sense of time, to get back into balance with the pulse of Nature.

Each year I witness the amazing miracle of growth, and still get as excited as I did as a little boy when I see the first shoots emerge. How incredible it is that from the small bean I planted several weeks ago a plant will emerge that grows to waist height and produces so many long pods of broad beans! That a straggly large-leaved plant producing masses of green or yellow courgettes that seem to get bigger and bigger in front of my very eyes should come from a little pip! Or that amazing cabbages or leeks will emerge from tiny seeds! One cannot fail to experience a sense of wonder and awe, and when the fruit or vegetable is picked at the end of the

long process that began with the planting of the seed, there is a sense of joy in the completion. Then, a couple of hours later it is cooked and eaten, and the delight in its startling freshness and rich full flavour is something no supermarket commodity can ever match.

This delight continues through most of the year. Those long pods of broad beans, with seven or eight beans swelling inside, give way to the carrots with their filigree leaves and a hint of dark orange stump, and the red-veined leaves of the beetroot. Later comes the wonderful ‘Cosse Violette’ French climbing bean, purple flowers and stems and long purple pods, soaring upwards, while on the ground the straggly courgettes, some buttercup yellow, others light and dark green stripes, sprawl and swell. Throughout

autumn the glossy dark leaves and bright yellow stems of the Swiss chard intermingle with the densely curled violet-green leaves of the curly kale, and – my favourite vegetable of all – the profusion of dark florets of the purple sprouting broccoli.

Allotments are bright havens in a world where the destructive plundering of Nature by industrial companies and the despoiling of the environment by agribusiness are all around

us. My heart screams out when I see cut hedges where the mangled, ripped and torn branches are the gashed wounds of a callous and brutal machine. Contrast that with the work of the traditional hedger whose sympathetically half-cut and carefully bent saplings are woven into a living fence that will grow organically – a source of pride and delight.

It is exactly that sense of pride and delight that I feel in my allotment. Things of course go wrong – some seeds don’t come up, blackfly and blight sometimes destroy my broad beans and tomatoes, slugs and snails are a perennial problem, whitefly can get everywhere, the weather sometimes makes things very difficult, and there are always the weeds, which survive and flourish when my vegetables don’t. But that is all part of the way things are in the natural world, like the sweat and aches of my body. I accept it all as it is, just as I accept the fox who tramples and digs up some of my plants. Once as I was sitting by my shed, he walked up to me, stopped a few feet away, and looked long and hard at me, almost nonchalant. He was scraggy and thin, but still very beautiful. I smiled at him, a momentary recognition, a connection. Then he was off, and I got up and carried on digging.

I think of him now, in the winter cold. I hope he’s survived. As I dig through the crisp frosty covering to the rich earth beneath, the damp greyness all around me, I notice that the first tiny tips of the winter onions are emerging from their globe-shaped bulbs, and there is a hint of green.

Peter Jewel is a person-centred counsellor and supervisor, with a special interest in the potential for growth.

Nature writing at its best brings together description,

narrative and metaphor. It takes us into a sense of place

and offers new meanings– Peter Reason, judge


REVIEWS

A book about silence? You must be joking. Why a book? Surely it would have been better to have had a tome of 254 pages, all entirely empty, the literary

equivalent of composer John Cage’s silent composition 4'33'' or dramatist Samuel Beckett’s play Breath, consisting entirely of silence. Because words can drown out silence.

I love the old Jewish joke about a group of rabbis who heard that other religious groups were going away on ‘retreats’, which were all the rage. The rabbis met together one Sunday morning and decided they too had to have a retreat. “But what should our focus be?” asked one rabbi. “Silence,” said another. “Great,” said the first rabbi. “Let’s spend the time talking about silence.” For those like me who have spent eight and more hours on Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) drowning in a barrage of words, silence is indeed a welcome idea. As the outgoing Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, acknowledges in these pages, “We’re not very much into silence in Judaism.”

The words in this book, nevertheless, are put to very good

The Power of Silence: The Riches That Lie WithinGraham Turner Bloomsbury, 2012 ISBN: 9781441182234

The Sovereignty of SilenceAnthony Seldon discovers a quest for the meaning of silence

use. They soothe and persuade us into taking silence more seriously. The power comes from the book being written by a coolly detached intellectual rather than a fully paid-up member of one or another sect. In a territory that is full of dodgy characters and cults, Turner provides a piercing and no-nonsense intellect. His book is a quest for the inner meaning of silence, prompted initially by an experience he had when on national service in Singapore.

Turner wanted to find whether others too had experiences of “interior locutions”, or direct instructions from God. He sets out on a journey that takes him across the world, encountering some of the wisest and most thoughtful people alive today. He travels to India, where he meets the story-telling holy man Morari Bapu, and an 80-year-old nun called Usha who tells him: “Not speaking conquers the senses, but not thinking conquers the mind.” When the mind is empty and we have no desires, something fresh arises in the air and we merge with God.

Turner explores the world of music, where Stephen Varcoe of the Royal College of Music tells him that silence “is extremely important to music. It is not only a lack of sound. It is the canvas on which the whole thing is painted.” He learns how Mozart used silence to heighten drama and create expectations, and Beethoven used it to hold tension, whilst Chinese and Japanese music has even longer and more meaningful silences.

In his chapter on drama, Turner notes how modern British playwrights, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and David Storey (most noticeably in his play Home), use silence to great effect. Shakespeare too was a master of silence, as in the pauses in Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be”, or the ominous silence that follows Lear’s retort to Cordelia: “Nothing can come of nothing.” Turner probes the utilisation of silence by analysts and therapists to heal troubled minds, the unity with Nature that can be found in silence in the mountains, and the use made of ‘collective silence’ by Quakers.

The author is gently teasing of those he considers lacking in gravitas, but is laudably free of malice. He is unstinting, however, in his praise for those he considers his heroes, none more so than Father Damien, who until recently was abbot of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, USA, where the mystic Thomas Merton spent so much of his time. Father Damien told Turner about his own spiritual evolution: “It was as if God had been waiting for all the busyness to be over, so that he could really talk to me.”

In the same chapter on Gethsemani, the author quotes psychiatrist Carl Jung arguing that humans need noise because it stops the inner voice of the conscience from being heard. People, Jung wrote, become habituated to noise as they do to excessive alcohol: “Just as you pay for this with cirrhosis of the liver, so in the end you pay for nervous

Flotilla (oil on board) by Stuart Buchanan Paintings by this artist available from Lena Boyle Fine Art www.lenaboyle.com


REVIEWS

stress with a premature depletion of your vital substance.” The most moving chapter in the book describes the impact of silence in war-torn Lebanon, where it has encouraged Islamic and Christian fighters to want to build bridges and peace together.

Silence, a Zen master explains, exists on five levels. The first is the absence of words and talk. Then comes inner silence and the stilling of the endless internal monologue inside our heads, then a total absence of self, then a discovery of the “state of pure energy”, and finally the realisation of oneness with the entire universe. This book is light on such analysis, and it might have been helpful to have broken up the essentially descriptive text with more such analytical passages.

It is easy and perhaps trite to pick out omissions in the text. But, that said, I would have liked more on mindfulness and the work of medical advocates of meditation such as Jon Kabat-Zinn in the USA. Nothing, however, can detract from the fundamental value of this book. Nowhere in it is the case for silence made more clearly than by another of the author’s heroes, Trappist monk Thomas Keating, who is mystified by the widespread hankering after noise across modern society. “Our nature is absolute silence,” he says. “Everything comes from silence, including God. Silence was not something you had to go and get. It was something you were.”

Anthony Seldon is Master of Wellington College.

I’m young enough to testify that our education system still looks down on qualifications leading to a living earned by trade. But I’m also old enough to be among those

visited by anxieties about one’s sense of self as an employee in the knowledge economy, where one of the most fearsome questions to be asked at a party is “So, what is it that you do?” The point at which these two fault lines meet gives rise to Matthew Crawford’s highly stimulating book The Case for Working with Your Hands, which stands up for the intellectual demands of handiwork, as part of broader anti-zeitgeist philosophising on education and employment.

Surnames like Baker and Miller suggest that one’s vocation was once something that one was, rather than something that one simply did. They suggest a recognised purpose within a community, and a strong sense of identity. Today, by contrast, it is becoming increasingly in vogue to talk about one’s work/life balance, as if one were not plainly a subset of the other. (And consider the likelihood of one of my descendants ending up with the name of Russell Communications-Assistant.) Examining how this shift occurred, Crawford argues that most jobs have been drained of the need for intellectual engagement, to the point that workers valued for their ostensibly superior education are becoming actively stupider. And with individual jobs being subsumed into globalised processes, he concludes that we are divorcing ourselves from the things that we rely upon, to the detriment of our moral and intellectual character.

Crawford begins from the obvious (if rarely articulated) point that the plumber who can fix the BA graduate’s

gushing tap is a hell of a lot smarter than their respective standings in society would credit. From here, he meditates on how the works of thinkers like Aristotle, Marx, Heidegger and Arendt come to bear on a toilet that won’t flush – resulting in far-reaching conclusions on morality, economics and culture. His points are frequently convincing, with the book’s best chapters shot through with insight on each page. When he paints today’s job market as a vacuous, dystopian extension of the Taylorist logic that led to the assembly line a century ago, it feels as if he is pointing towards a blueprint for a far better way of living – where the apparently competing demands of capitalism and community are reconciled, while restoring a sense of agency to the individual.

Crawford is specifically rallying at the dehumanised homogenisation effect of globalisation and new capitalism, but his repeated calls for ‘personal responsibility’ betray a libertarian streak, placing him in a margin of the political spectrum. But any reader with an eye on environmental issues cannot fail to build the bridge from Crawford’s arguments to something resembling the fabric of a more sustainable culture – one built around humanised community, localisation and reconnection with the things that we rely upon.

So whether or not you’re convinced by the nuances of Crawford’s philosophising, The Case for Working with Your Hands remains an engaging and radical book simply by virtue of calling into question the legitimacy of holding certain means of employment in higher esteem than others. As a catalyst for rethinking our attitudes towards work, how work shapes individuals, and how individuals engage with society, Crawford’s book is a lonely, yet powerful voice within the narrowing parameters of the knowledge economy – but a voice as welcome as it is vital.

Russell Warfield is the sustainability communications assistant for NUS (National Union of Students).

The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels GoodMatthew CrawfordPenguin, 2010ISBN: 9780141047294

A Sense of VocationRussell Warfield urges us to bring dignity to handiwork


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Those who have read Kathleen Jamie’s first collection of essays, Findings, will remember the close-up quality of her writing: always quietly observant

and thoughtful, sometimes domestic, often linked with her experiences as a mother of young children. She watches peregrines nesting from her kitchen window, writes about spiders and fever, and visits Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh to examine pathology specimens, as well as following trails and visiting islands and clifftops. This is Nature writing as intimate encounter rather than as heroic adventure.

In the London Review of Books she rather caustically, and some would say unfairly, criticised Robert Macfarlane’s book The Wild Places as the writing of “a lone enraptured male”, too conservative, too romantic, and indeed too self-centred for her taste. Not ‘wild-minded’ enough. She is interested in the wild not as something we stride over but as a “force that requires constant negotiation”. The wild will come to us, she argues, in childbirth, in fever, in the smaller and sometimes darker moments of life.

Jamie’s second volume, Sightlines, like Findings, consists of a dozen or so essays describing and reflecting on the world about her. This takes her further afield, to the Norwegian Arctic, a gannetry on Shetland, cleits in St Kilda, and wildlife and ancient remains on Rona – but also to a pathology lab in Dundee and to watch an eclipse of the moon from the window of her house. Whether it is icebergs, whale skeletons, the corpse of a dead petrel, or Helicobacter pylori studied on a microscope slide, the reader is taken to an intimate view. We are brought not just to see through Jamie’s eyes but to feel through her perspective as well, which often means connecting the wild that we reach out for with a wild that is always with us.

I am an unashamed Kathleen Jamie fan, and have been returning often to her essays with the question, “What is it that makes this writing so beautiful and so evocative?” Just to open the book and read the first lines – “There’s no swell to speak of, just little lapping waves … All along the shoreline lie trinkets of white ice, nudged up by the tide…” – we are led into the gentle adventure. The party from the ship cruising the Norwegian Arctic are taken inland across the “hummocky goose-plain” to a higher spot, where their guide invites them to sit for a while, keep quiet and listen.

Jamie tells us how she found herself listening not just to the silence, but through the silence, which she describes first simply as extraordinary, but then more startlingly as a

SightlinesKathleen JamieSort of Books, 2012ISBN: 9780956308665

Radiant SilencePeter Reason reflects on the evocative quality of Kathleen Jamie’s Nature writing

silence that “radiates from the mountains, and the ice and the sky, a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies … deep and quite frightening”. The silence becomes not just what is heard and not heard, but a synaesthesia: the aural is interpenetrated by the visual and the kinaesthetic. We are taken directly into her experience of silence that is so close to, and that illuminates, our own.

So what is it about this writing that is so compelling? It is partly Jamie’s presence. In all the stories, she is completely there, with her observations and reflections, yet never obtrusive. She never insists, never forces us to see through her eyes, and yet she leads us to do so. She draws what is familiar towards us, so we see it afresh, and she makes the unfamiliar feel as though it could become known. The writing is close at hand, with detailed reflections that are not unnecessarily decorative or over-elaborated; yet on close study they are full of evocative metaphor: “radiant silence”, gannets “interrogating the sea”, the Earth’s shadow eclipsing the surface of the moon “translucent, like black silk”. Hers is a poet’s eye, in this prose just as in her poetry: the award-winning collection The Tree House and, just published, The Overhaul.

Reading Kathleen Jamie shows us that we are participants in our world. Her writing teaches us that we make false distinctions when we separate the wild and the not-wild, the extraordinary and the everyday. She brings together the world of rocks and icebergs and aurora with the world of emotions, memory, hopes and fears. She does not preach, for there is here no heavy or explicit environmental message – indeed, she seems rather wary of environmentalism. The wonder, the strangeness and the beauty stand for themselves and remind us how precious they are.

Peter Reason is completing his book The Call of the Running Tide. He blogs at peterreason.posterous.com

Gannet, Shetland Islands © Jouan & Rius/naturepl.com


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We tend not to burn or behead archbishops these days, but the Anglican Church is still capable of making a nuisance of itself, as Rowan

Williams knows only too well. There have been rows over the prospect of legalising gay marriage; rows over the appointment (or not) of women bishops; difficulties with handling the vibrant though culturally disparate branches of the Christian faith in Africa and North America.

Narnia is a far cry from all of this. Or so one might think. The magical world created by C.S. Lewis in a series of seven Narnia novels for children has never been out of print, but neither has it avoided controversy. Williams strides into the row, robes flowing, with academic relish.

I am not sure that he does Lewis any favours by doing so. As one might expect from such a distinguished pen, this is a thoughtful and serious book. On one level, it is a contemplation of Christian faith as seen through the prism of Lewis’s undoubted genius at story telling. On another, though, it is a deliberate attempt to argue with people whose views Williams should be happy to ignore, or just live with.

Phillip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and other novels clearly influenced – or affected – by Lewis, took time out to excoriate the Narnia novels several times, notably at the Hay Festival in 2002. He was reported in The Guardian as saying that Lewis’s work was “monumentally disparaging of girls and women”. Just for good measure, he added: “It is blatantly racist.” Even J.K. Rowling (also clearly influenced by the Narnia series) has implied that Lewis was sexist.

Williams deals with these accusations very well. He makes the “boringly obvious” point that Lewis was a male writer in the 1950s. That is an important point to make. Recent scandals involving the behaviour of dead celebrities in the subsequent decade should cause us to reflect on the profound way that public attitudes to gender, race and class have changed. Lewis was undoubtedly a hugely successful writer and an influential Christian thinker, but he was of his time. And, Mr Pullman, who is not?

In the end, though, this book gives too much of an impression of being written in reaction to criticism of the world of Narnia. It is undoubtedly a work of scholarship and affection, but it is defensive and it doesn’t need to be. Does it matter that the lion Aslan (Lewis’s fictional way of depicting divine intervention) is an animal rather than a human? Does it matter whether some animals speak and others don’t? These are just some of the issues with which

The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of NarniaRowan WilliamsSPCK Publishing, 2012ISBN: 9780281068951

Allegorical StorytellingPeter Ainsworth is not convinced Narnia needs defending

Williams grapples in his learned and rather tortuous way. He is also exercised by the criticism Lewis has attracted from fundamentalist Christians who don’t like the pagan presence in Narnia of mythical creatures like centaurs, let alone witches. Who would want to be Archbishop of Canterbury?

It’s not a row worth having. Lewis does not need to be defended from his critics, and his critics should have better things to do with their time. The enduring appeal of the Narnia books lies in their ability to create an exciting, vivid, new place in the imagination of all readers of all ages and faiths. Of course the Narnia books are allegorical; but their appeal derives not from any religious purpose, but from great storytelling and a massive sense of adventure. Lewis said: “At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the lion came from or why he came.” They are children’s stories. Perhaps we should look no further.

In any case, which of us will ever forget that moment when, either prompted by the book or by the numerous film and television adaptations, we first went through that wardrobe and entered the magic of Narnia?

Peter Ainsworth chairs the UK Big Lottery Fund, Plantlife, and the Elgar Foundation. He writes poems and short stories.

Rowan Williams © Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features


R ichard Pring was formerly Professor of Education and Director of Educational Studies at Oxford University. He is a distinguished philosopher of education, an

advocate of the practice and philosophy of the American educator John Dewey. He is also a patron of Human Scale Education and a believer in the importance of human scale in the education of children and young people. The Resurgence Trust chair, James Sainsbury, in his New Year message last January, urged that human activities must be on a human scale, not an industrial scale, if we are to lead “good and purposeful” lives in harmony with Nature. Pring argues that education has a crucial role to play in developing in young people the values and attitudes that will enable them to lead such good and purposeful lives. He restates the true aims of education and shows how

Other countries have pinned their faith in

children and teachers

Another Education

The Life and Death of Secondary Education for AllRichard PringRoutledge, 2012ISBN: 9780415536363

Mary Tasker finds hope for education in humanity, not the market

in the provision of secondary education we have failed to articulate these aims, let alone achieve them.

Before the 1944 Education Act, secondary education in Britain was the privilege of the few, and the majority of working-class children attended the non-fee-paying elementary school or central school up to the age of 14, to receive a basic training in skills. After 1944, all children were entitled to a free secondary education up to the age of 16. But the division of schools into a tripartite structure – grammar, secondary modern and technical – led to the separation of children into

those who went to grammar school and those who did not, with the result that 20 years later a government report stated that “half our future” had not achieved the aspirations of 1944. The new comprehensive schools of the 1960s and 1970s were intended to bring together children of all abilities under one roof, but the industrial scale of these schools,

and their reluctance – with some notable exceptions – to develop new approaches to learning and school organisation again led to frustration and failure for large numbers of young people. The dream of universal secondary education that would develop the talents of all children and prepare them for the democratic life and community living remained unrealised.

Today it would seem that the dream is even more remote. Comprehensive schools remain, but the cohesiveness of the school system has been shattered by the introduction of state-funded independent schools. These are academies, which have increased from 200 in 2010 to 2,400 today and are either ‘converter academies’ or ‘sponsored academies’ – free schools of every description, including faith schools and technical schools. It is a chaotic mix. Local Education Authorities are in a state of free fall, and the control of the whole system of 20,000 schools is vested in one person: the Secretary of State. In 1944 the Minister of Education had but three powers. In 2013 the Secretary of State has over 2,000. The fragmentation of the system has brought with it the entry of business interests, and the future may well lie with chains of for-profit schools being run by business. The language of business now shapes policymaking, and Pring is coruscating in his criticism of the “language of deliverology” and “management speak”.

Into the moral vacuum of a market-led education system, Pring injects the values of a person-centred education. He believes that the fundamental question to ask is: “What does it mean to be human?” In Pring’s view the essence of being human is “understanding, capability, community mindedness, moral seriousness and sense of dignity”, and the purpose of education is to develop these human attributes. Against this backcloth education takes on a different light. The experience of the learner becomes central and informs a wider vision

REVIEWS

Illustration by Robert Hunter www.robertfrankhunter.com


REVIEWS

of learning that combines the academic, the artistic and the practical to forge a common culture accessible to all children.

Other countries have pinned their faith in children and teachers and turned their backs on the quasi-market in education with its tests, targets and league tables. Finland, for example, has achieved the highest levels of educational attainment in the world – without constant testing and inspection. Pring sets out the steps whereby a locally managed and democratically accountable system of education could be

created. It is not yet too late. The effect of government policy in this country over the last three decades has been to create a fearful and demoralised teaching profession and a growing divide between those students who can ‘achieve’ in the system and those who cannot. This is morally unacceptable in a democratic country. In this carefully argued and uplifting book Richard Pring tells us that there is another way.

Mary Tasker is former chair of Human Scale Education.

Walking keeps me fit, makes my dog bouncily happy and unfailingly lifts my spirits too. It’s also wonderful for thinking things through, and

sometimes understanding, ideas and inspirations come to me. Blissfully, there is the feeling of being in touch with Nature and often with something mystical or spiritual.

How welcoming to read in the introduction: “Don’t set out to do some thoughtful walking. Just walk.” So I started reading The Art of Mindful Walking with no fear of prescriptive demands, stern teaching or pressure: I would simply read, just as I simply walk, step by step.

And a beguilingly enjoyable journey it proved. Just like a walk, as the pages progress the views change; there is always something remarkable to catch attention where you are now, and a pleasant anticipation of new interests and insights to come along the way and over the horizon.

Throughout the book there is the comforting, humbling and yet at the same time awe-inspiring sense of being part of a timeless tradition. Our oldest human ancestors would have been mindful as they walked when searching for food, while the first written records we have of mindful walking are by the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece.

It also made me tingle with recognition to read that the concept of a sacred path is at the heart of many religions: for example, early Christians were ‘followers of the Way’, Taoism is named after the Tao – the Way and the mystery behind the world – while for Buddhists mindfulness is the seventh element of the Eightfold Path in our journey towards understanding and peace.

There are some profound thoughts on life and its dichotomies. Adam Ford writes: “I was very aware of the transitory and vulnerable nature of my own existence” and later mentions “the immortal dignity of the human being”. He is also illuminating on the questions of loneliness and solitude, and on walking alone or in company.

The Path Less TravelledJenny Hare accompanies a mindful walker and shares his insights

The Art of Mindful Walking: Meditations on the PathAdam FordLeaping Hare Press, 2011ISBN: 9781907332586

But the book is more than a philosophical and spiritual journey. It reminds us of practical considerations. What to wear? What to take? And in both his company and others’ we are vividly shown places where we may never have the chance to walk. We meet Kierkegaard, who wrote that daily he walked himself into wellbeing and away from illness, into his best thoughts and away from burdensome ones. Sections on great travellers such as Robyn Davidson and Bruce Chatwin made me want to read more of their work.

As we walk with Adam Ford in the countryside, through cities, along the waterside, memories of walks taken in the past flood back. The feel of the track, beach or road beneath our feet, the things we saw, conversations, thoughts. So many feelings. Such richness, echoed here as the pages turn and the path unfolds.

There is a delightful section on walking in moonlight. Oh, how good it is to walk in the light of a moon – let’s do it more. Let’s walk more day and night.

To read this book is to enjoy the company of Adam Ford as he walks, generously and charismatically sharing his thoughts and anecdotes. I loved the journey and learned much along the way.

Jenny Hare is a poet, counsellor, artist and author. Her latest book is Unlock Your Creativity.

Cover illustration by Clifford Harper courtesy Ivy Press Limited


CANADA’S CATASTROPHESBaroness Neuberger (My Green Life, Issue 277) is woefully misinformed about Canada: I know, I live there. The right-wing Harper Conservative government has dismantled almost everything that we have accomplished environmentally in this country for the past two decades. It has also blocked international treaties on climate change, and has just withdrawn from the UN Conference on Desertification.

Through the Bill C38, scientists have been laid off and research stations closed, environmental safeguards have been removed from most of our lakes and rivers and protection for endangered species watered down – all in the name of streamlining the environmental process. What this bill effectively did was to give our oil and mining companies a free rein to do pretty much whatever they please. This bill has been an environmental disaster for Canada and Canadians.

Then there is the Alberta Tar Sands, probably the biggest environmental catastrophe in the world. Even if Baroness Neuberger didn’t know about our Bill C38, and our government’s collusion in the blocking of international treaties on the environment, how could she possibly not have known about the Alberta Tar Sands?Colin Creasey, by email

FOSSILISED ECONOMYI like Vandana Shiva’s description of the economy as fossilised.

One glaring fault in our present economic paradigm is that it recognises and measures only financial capital. A new economics that gives equal weight to environmental, human, social and financial capital would do much towards setting the economy in a new and more sustainable direction.Patricia KnoxAnglesey

CHANGE FROM WITHINI read Andy Fisher’s article on ecopsychology (Issue 277) with very great interest.

It seems very timely to me that someone from the world of psychologists should enter the fray and the discussion of what I would call the ‘real world’ – namely that world that is trying realistically and earnestly to confront the ‘real’ issues of our time and how to move forward in our

evolution as a species to come to terms with these.However, I feel the need to sound a note of caution about

the “changes at the cultural and social levels rather than just the individual”.

All cultural, social, economic, corporate, political, etc. institutions are managed by individuals – not by some disembodied mysterious forces – and can in essence only be changed by changing the attitudes of those individuals.

Albert Schweitzer said that “when the meadows green in spring” – as they are at last doing here – “it is because each individual blade of grass turns green from inside out,” and he maintained that tinkering with the structures of institutions will achieve very little if not accompanied by a change in attitude.

That is not to say that we don’t need society and the help and support we can give each other, but the ‘change’ has to happen in people’s hearts – and they beat in individuals.Percy Mark, by email

PROUD TO BE AN ANARCHISTI greatly enjoyed the wide range, lively writing and splendid photography in the May/June issue, including Peter Ainsworth’s positive review of the late Colin Ward’s essays in Talking Green. But I was surprised to see Ward described as ‘a self-confessed’ anarchist’, as if the name was something of which he might have been ashamed, rather than proud.

It would also have been useful if Ainsworth’s reference to Ward’s fondness for the phrase ‘the seed beneath the snow’ had led to his recommending the 2006 book Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow by David Goodway, with its thought-provoking account of “Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward”. Peter Faulkner, by email

COVER TO COVERFor me, Resurgence has vastly improved in the last couple of issues. I used to find many of the articles a bit waffly and repetitive, and shamefully, I must admit I skimmed them, concentrating on the reviews and arty stuff at the back. But now the articles are sharper and newsier, the arguments are more rigorous and I’m reading the whole magazine.

Double the value! Thanks, Resurgence & Ecologist!Sean Sinclair, by emailPS Don’t cut the arty stuff at the back, though!

Letters to the Editors

We welcome letters and emails commenting on Resurgence & Ecologist articles. These should include your postal address. Send your letters to The Editors, Resurgence & Ecologist, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE or email [email protected] may be edited for reasons of space or clarity.

LETTERS


1 2 3 4 5 6

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15 16 17 18

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22 23

CROSSWORD

Across 7 Moonlight, for example, composed by Beethoven.(6)

8 Country known by its natives as ‘Land of the Thunder Dragon’. (6)

9 It could follow service, family or shoe. (4)

10 Encourage to arrange Tim a veto? (8)

11 How Mark Beaumont covered the globe in 2007-8. (7)

13 Persian for ‘voice’, this website mobilises campaigns for environmental and political causes. (5)

15 A woodland creature from Greek mythology. (5)

17 They should pay who do this. (7)

20 According to many bible translations, man has this relationship with animals. (8)

21 Fiery destination of those who commit suttee. (4)

22 At least one fifth of the Earth’s surface is covered by this. (6)

23 Often used as an aid to meditation. (6)

Down1 The ------ Canyon spilt its oil off Land’s End

in 1967. (6)

2 This is moral in the title of a Radio 4 programme. (4)

3 The F in CIWF. (7)

4 Milton, first President of independent Uganda. (5)

5 Teddy Goldsmith published a blueprint for this in 1972. (8)

6 ‘Om mani padme hum’ is an example. (6)

12 The UK is crisscrossed by these ancient paths. (3,5)

14 Do only this, a byword for a holistic approach. (7)

16 This bird is the symbol of the RSPB. (6)

18 The lowest class of worker in Norse society. (6)

19 Intuition represents this sense. (5)

21 Long for a larch? (4)

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ACCOMMODATION

ROOM ONLY IN CENTRAL EDINBURGHWalking distance main tourist attractions, university & theatres. Many cafés and restaurants nearby. Tea & coffee provided. £27 pppn. Tel. Moira 0131 668 3718

CORNWALL: SELF-CATERINGDelightful spacious cottage in peaceful rural location between Truro & Falmouth. 4 bedrooms, large family kitchen, private garden, parking. Available July, August, September. [email protected] 01872 864988 or 07583 136169

COMMUNITIES

SEEKING COMMUNITYWe’d like to hear from others interested in community, with the opportunity of smallholding/growing food, with separate residences and shared undertakings. One of us is Anglican and a member of the Iona Community, the other a Quaker. We’d hope to find ways of sharing worship (possibly of different kinds), and serving the local community as well as finding a way of life consistent with global justice and a flourishing earth. For more information or to chat please contact Tim or Gill: 01647 24789 or [email protected]

COURSES

COURSES AND EVENTS AT BRAZIERS PARKSustainability courses. Yoga & Tai Chi retreats in beautiful Rural Oxfordshire. 01491 680221 www.braziers.org.uk

CLEAN LANGUAGE COURSESLearn to ask questions without assumptions and help people explore their inner landscapes through metaphor. Courses from 1 to 12 days or experience your own ‘personal journey’ in Hampshire. 023 9221 5355 www.cleanlearning.co.uk

SPIRITUAL LANDSCAPES23-25 September 2013. Tutor – Howard Hull, Director Brantwood Trust. A literary and artistic retreat. A series of carefully selected meditations in word and image with walks amid the beauties of the Brantwood estate frame this opportunity to refresh busy lives with days of personal space and reflection. 4.00pm 23 Sept - 1.00pm

25 Sept. £110 per person. Residential option recommended. For further details please contactBrantwood, Coniston, LA21 8AD, Cumbria. Tel. 015394 41396. www.brantwood.org.uk

LOWER SHAW FARMAffordable Courses, Events, & Weekend Breaks.Yoga and Massage, Mosaics, Textile Crafts, Family Activity and Craft Breaks, Circus Skills, Willow Baskets, Sauna Building, Wild Food, Healthy Cooking, Bread-baking, and more. Meals prepared with local and organic food. Friendly welcome, organic gardens and friendly farm animals. 01793 [email protected]

PREHISTORIC LIVINGTwo-day experience living the Prehistoric way using ancient wisdom making stone tools, natural cordage, fire, lamps and pots. www.ancient-arts.org/training.html

TASTE THE PASTTwo days of brewing ancient ale using hot stones and a pit and gathering and cooking food with a prehistoric flavour. www.ancient-arts.org/training.html

EVENTS

ECOHESIONoffers freelance lectures in 2013. ‘The Ecology of Economics’ – the assumed ‘separability’ of the ecologically cohesive (ecohesive) world, of which we are part. Details: Stuart McBurney 0114 288 8037

GREENSPIRIT ANNUAL GATHERING 11-13 October 2013 at Trigonos, North Wales. Jay Griffiths speaker. www.greenspirit.org.uk/ag2013 or tel. Joan on 023 9259 9299

TAUNTON VEGAN FAIRSaturday 3 August. 11am-3pm. Free entry. Free food tasters, cafe, stalls, local producers, ethical fashion. North Street Church Hall, Taunton, TA1 1LW. www.tauntonveg.moonfruit.com

HOLIDAYS

SOUTH WEST WALES Mill Stream Cottage & The Wren’s Nest - perfect woodland retreat, half-hour from sea. www.penpynfarch.co.uk 01559 389 917

FOR ALL READERS who are considering a trip overseas, we would urge you to visit www.seat61.com to plan your journey by train.

LONDON HAMMERSMITHNice B&B in family homes. Comfortable, centrally located. Direct transport to attractions, airports and Eurostar. Double £54, single £42 per night. Children’s reductions. Tel. 020 7385 4904 www.thewaytostay.co.uk

YURTS AND HUT BY THE PONDA single yurt, the 4-yurt camp, the hut by the pond and the shepherd’s wagon – all available on our Cotswold organic farm near Cirencester. Tel. 01285 640441 www.theorganicfarmshop.co.uk

HOLIDAY COTTAGE ON COTSWOLD ORGANIC FARMLovely south-facing holiday cottage at the end of the track. Woodburner, old Indian furniture, farm shop and café to visit, the whole farm to roam. See www.theorganicfarmshop.co.uk for details.

RUGGED, BEAUTIFUL PEMBROKESHIRETwo eco-friendly converted barns on smallholding. Each sleeps 4. Coastal path 2 miles. Tel. 01348 891286 [email protected] www.stonescottages.co.uk

MID WALES Earth, Air, Water, Fire... Walk wild hilltops, breathe fresh air, explore streams and waterfalls, snuggle down by the woodburner. Cosy, bright, peaceful s/c hideaway for 2+2. Also quiet streamside camping and campfires.Rob and Pip: 01686 420423 www.the-gorfanc-hideaway.co.uk

SW FRANCESmall, detached cottage in peaceful, beautiful surroundings. Lovely walks, local restaurants and markets, river nearby, wine-growing area, lots of books + hammock! Tel. 0033 565 36 22 13 or email [email protected]

CHURCHWOOD VALLEYWembury, nr Plymouth, Devon. For peace and tranquillity, s/c holiday cabins in beautiful natural wooded valley close to the sea. Abundance of birds and wildlife. Gold awards for conservation. Pets welcome.Tel. 01752 862382 [email protected]

C LA S S I F I E D A DVE RT I S I N G


ITALY, TUSCAN-UMBRIAN BORDERLovely 17th-century farmhouse, flexible accommodation for 12-14, in two buildings (access for partially disabled), six bedrooms and four bath/shower rooms. In its own private curtilage in soft rolling countryside with far-reaching views and large swimming pool. Well sited for Florence, Arezzo, Cortona, Urbino and Perugia. Available year-round.www.laceruglia.comTel. 01392 811436 or email [email protected]

TOTNES (SOUTH DEVON)Self-catering double-bedroom riverside apartment. Situated on the edge of the magnificent Dartington estate. Short walk along the river path to Totnes mainline station and town centre. Perfect base for exploring by foot, canoe and bike. www.littleriverside.com Tel. 01803 866257 mobile: 07875 727763

MID WALES Streamside caravan, sleeps 4+. Conservation smallholding; abundant wildlife, pond, swimming, beautiful walks. Near Machynlleth and Centre for Alternative Technology. £160–£180pw. No smoking. Also CAMPING. 01654 702718 [email protected] www.yfelin.plus.com

ISLE OF SKYE Superb yoga studio, teacher available, sea loch, log stoves, self-catering 1-4 persons. No single supplement! Tel. 01470 592367 www.skye-yoga-holidays.co.uk

TREE OF LIFE ORGANICSHorsebox holiday. Somewhere different to stay in Cornwall. Off-the-grid vintage horsebox on a registered organic smallholding. Only 2 miles from the north coast with wonderful beaches, walks & wildlife. Tel. 01872 552661 Web: www.treeoflifeorganics.co.uk

BIG SKY RETREAT – DEVONSolitary handcrafted wood cabin with fantastic views of Dartmoor. www.big-grass.com

YURT HOLIDAYS IN BEAUTIFUL WALESAll amenities, woodburner, sauna. [email protected]

ARGYLL, WEST SCOTLAND Victorian villa in fishing village. Sleeps 7. On Kintyre Way. See www.daisy-cottageholidays.com

NORTH CORNWALL, MAWGAN PORTHSouthfacing ground floor apartment with panoramic sea views. Two bedrooms, secluded patio, dogs welcome – five-minute walk down to the beach or onto coastal path. www.greenoceancornwall.co.uk Tel. 01684 566652

BUCKFASTLEIGHDevon (edge of Dartmoor). Small two-bedroom cottage. Centre of town, great for walking, exploring, local activities. Close to Dartington, Totnes, Schumacher. Very reasonable rates in exchange for careful guests. Contact Hilary 01291 627125 or [email protected]

FRANCEThree cottages and a pool in five acres of trees and nature. Pesticide-free, just lovely Dordogne tranquillity. www.planchecottages.com

COSY ECO-COTTAGE, HARTLAND, DEVONConverted barn in beautiful location (sleeps 2), short walk from Hartland village and stunning coastline. Perfect for artistic or spiritual retreat.Phone 01237 441426 or [email protected]

MISCELLANEOUS

WALKING TOWARDS SUNRISEI am a Chinese student at Schumacher College. I plan to make a pilgrimage in September 2013 walking from the college to my home town in Guangzhou, China, visiting ecological and spiritual centres on the way. I will walk without money so as to have more connection with people, while receiving food & accommodation. I am looking for people who might host me, suggest centres to visit, or walk with me for parts or the whole of the pilgrimage. Email. [email protected] Tel. 0044 7438 426310 (UK)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNTProofreading and copy-editing by a member of the Resurgence & Ecologist team. Reliable, friendly service. Helen Banks 01726 [email protected]

COACHING WITH SPIRITProfessional coaching for sustainable life and livelihood, from a spiritually intelligent perspective. www.sallylever.co.uk

THE WRITE FACTORSpecialists in bespoke book publication, e-books, social media management and editorial services. Full advice and support for all your publishing needs. Contact Resurgence & Ecologist’s Contributing Editor, Lorna Howarth: [email protected] www.thewritefactor.co.uk 01237 440268

WHOLE WOMAN YOGA Natural, safe, effective treatment for pelvic organ prolapse. www.wholewoman.com, [email protected], 01823 275766

PROPERTY FOR SALE

IRELANDCo. Clare and surrounding areas: farmhouses, cottages, smallholdings, etc., in beautiful unspoilt countryside. Some within reach of Steiner school. Greenvalley Properties. Tel. (+353) (0)61 921498 www.gvp.ie

NOTO, SOUTH-EAST SICILY Property for sale or short/long lease in secluded, lush valley in Sicily’s finest countryside. 15 hectares organic land (subdivisible), private access, abundant spring water, sea views, silence. Baroque Noto 6km, pristine beaches 10km, Catania airport 75mins. Olive, almond, carob, lemon, orange and other Mediterranean trees and plants. Currently used as eco-retreat. Ideal for agriturismo, retreats, private residences or small organic estate. Restored buildings accommodate 10+. Additional 200sqm of ruins to restore. For details + photos email [email protected]

HAY-ON-WYE AREASubstantial 3-double-bed bungalow. Kitchen diner, lounge sitting room with woodburner. Edge of national park village. £310,000. Phone 01497 820252

PEACEFUL LOIRE VALLEYPicturesque farmhouse with 2 holiday cottages generating income, plus productive land. Details www.civray.co.uk

SPAIN, ANDALUCIA, LAS ALPUJARRASA protected gem in the mountains. Established and stunning rural tourism home in the sought-after Taha de Pitres. Genuine 12 bedrooms, old farmhouse beautifully restored into 5 independent dwellings. Superb salt pool and unspoilt views. Central heating. Set in 2 acres of landscaped gardens with abundant water and income-producing almonds, olives and many fruit trees. Total tranquillity. 1km all amenities and Sierra Nevada National Park. Granada city or the sea 1 hour. £565,000.www.alpujarraspropertysalebyowner.comTel: + 44 (0) 1865 200 023

HOUSE IN SOUTHERN BRITTANY, FRANCENeo-Breton 2-bed house. Edge of Tréal village. Large organic plot 2,510m2. €127,000 ono. Further information [email protected]

FRANCERural Charente, near Charroux, ensemble of traditional stone houses and land for sale or rent together or separately. Suit families, community, gîtes. See website: www.luizart.net/LaBussiere Tel. Peter or Patricia +44 (0) 7941 466 503 or +44 (0) 7812 104 933

LIVE/WORK PORTUGAL Townhouse/commercial property in historic centre of Algarve market town. www.louletownhouseforsale.weebly.com email [email protected]

UMBRIA/TUSCANY BORDERRare rural ruin with planning for 225m2 house. 2.5ha land. See ruinwithaview.wordpress.com

OPPORTUNITIES

AUTUMN WORKCAMP IN GREECE Still time for an affordable working summer holiday! Only €75/week, from 20 Sept to 4 October, for those with building, maintenance, DIY, organic gardening skills or wishing to be part of the support team. Free time every day for the beach! Tel: 020 8816 8533 Email: [email protected], Website: www.kalikalos.com

VENUES

EXCITING NEW VENUE FOR HIRE near Glastonbury: retreats, workshops, yoga, trainings, cookery. naturesretreatcentre.com

WANTED

ELECTRO-SENSITIVE RETIREE,forced to abandon flat, urgently needs remote, off-grid living-space with water supply. No close neighbours, phone/radio masts, wind farms, power cables, Wi-Fi. I am a single woman, independent, professional, reliable, non-smoking. Anything, anywhere considered in order to enable sleeping. Please write to Box No. 279/1, Resurgence, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon, EX39 6EE


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www.Kalikalos.comLiving-Learning Summer School

Holistic Holidays In GreeceHolistic Holidays In GreeceAugust Family FortnightBiodanza+Community Building for students Hiking Mt Pelion

Living in Community weeks throughout the summerMagic Council CirclesHealing weeks & Aura diagnosisMedicinal herbs of GreeceMusic, Song & DanceRaw Food DetoxSatsang with Gaia Michael ZipfSculpture week

Check out the 2013 programme

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For more information and current special offers see www.orientalbrighton.co.uk or call 01273 205050


Enjoy four days of talks, music, crafts & walks hosted by Satish Kumar at Green and Away, nr Worcester. Off Grid, sustainable living in action!

BOOK TODAY!Adults: £195 inc all meals Reduced rate for children and low income

25 – 28 July 2013SUMMER GATHERING

For more details and bookings: www.resurgence.org/summergathering Email: [email protected] Tel: 01237 441293

This event will raise money for The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity (No.1120414)

Speakers

Natalie Bennett, Green Party Leader

Miriam Darlington, creative writing: Writing the wild: thinking with animals

Mumta Ito, International Centre for Wholistic Law: Evolving Earth Law

Satish Kumar, Editor-in-Chief at Resurgence & Ecologist: Soil, Soul, Society

Donnachadh McCarthy, 3 Acorns Eco-audits: How To Save the Planet from The Prostitute State

Shantena Augusto Sabbadini, Associate Director of the Pari Center for New Learning: The Valley Spirit, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Workshops

Botany and wild flower walks: Jon Every

Implications of Wild Law for the economic system: Linda Siegele and Christian Heitsch

Green woodworking and crafts

Open Space workshops: Tricia Lustig

Weave your own community action: Jan Copley

Meditation, movement & voice

Harmony Singing Around The Fire: Janne Tooby and Toni Gilligan

Morning voice and body work: Janne and Will Tooby

Indian Raga and embodied voicework: Will Tooby

Tai Chi Movement for Wellbeing: Teena Gould

Chi Gong with bamboo sticks: June Mitchell

Performance Poetry

Helen Moore and Niall McDevitt

Music

Caitlin and Tablatom: mantra concert

Music from Kora Colours

Sophie Stammers, singer-songwriter

Open mic evening hosted by Helen and Niall including poetry, performance and song.

ENVIRONMENT • ACTIVISM • SOCIAL JUSTICE • ARTS • ETHICAL LIVING


* Please tick as appropriate

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Bees are vital to so much of British life: they help pollinate 75% of our food and help our gardens and countryside to thrive. Disease, chemicals and disappearing green spaces have all contributed to their dramatic decline in recent years.

The full impact of losing British bees could be devastating. But thankfully, it’s not too late. You can save us – but please act now.

* All texts will be charged at your normal network rate and someone from our team will phone you back free of charge. Friends of the Earth Trust, a registered charity. www.foe.co.uk

Mason Bee Osmia rufa

Early Bumblebee Bombus pratorum

Red Mason Bee Osmia bicornis

Honey Bee (worker) Apis mellifera

Tawny Mining Bee (male) Andrena fulva

Hairy-footed Flower Bee (male)

Anthophora plumipes

Great Yellow Bumblebee

Bombus distinguendus

Common Carder Bumblebee

Bombus pascuorum

Buff-tailed Bumblebee Bombus terrestris

Tawny Mining Bee (female) Andrena fulva

Hairy-footed Flower Bee (female)

Anthophora plumipes

Forest Cuckoo Bumblebee Bombus sylvestris

Garden Bumblebee Bombus hortorum

Early Mining Bee Andrena haemorrhoa

Willughby’s Leafcutter Bee

Megachile willughbiella

Honey Bee (queen) Apis mellifera

Red-shanked Carder-bee Bumblebee

Bombus ruderarius

Fabricus’ Nomad Bee Nomada fabriciana

Davies Mining Bee Colletes daviesanus

Brown-banded Carder Bumblebee

Bombus humilis

White-tailed Bumblebee Bombus lucornum

Shrill Carder Bumblebee Bombus sylvarum

Communal Mining Bee Andrena carantonica

Blue Mason Bee Osmia caerulescens

Red-tailed Bumblebee Bombus lapidarius

Ivy Mining Bee Colletes hederae

Short-haired Bumblebee

Bombus Subterraneus

Some species of bumble bees, honey bees

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Bee identification guide

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Your Bee Saver Kit Everything you need to get busy for bees.

Fabricus’ Nomad Bee Nomada fabriciana

Davies Mining Bee Colletes daviesanus

White-tailed Bumblebee Bombus lucornum

Communal Mining Bee Andrena carantonica

Blue Mason Bee Osmia caerulescens

Ivy Mining Bee Colletes hederae

WinterSpring

Summer

AutumnWinter

Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb

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[email protected]: 01309 690311Scottish Charity Number SC007233

EXPERIENCE WEEKAn invitation for you to let go of your limitations, open to love and to be the change you want to see in the world. Creating A New World

Together

Spiritual Community • Learning Centre • Ecovillage

Once you’ve remembered your loved ones, please help Resurgence to serve the planet for future generations by leaving a gift in your will. Your legacy will ensure Resurgence lives on, offering positive perspectives and upholding the values that were important to you in your life.

A gift in your will, no matter what size, will help Resurgence to embrace and include more like-minded people and organisations. Together, we can make the world a better place for our children.

It’s your life…

The Resurgence Trust is a Registered Charity (No. 1120414) Image: James Savage from Voice of the Children www.leafandstar.co.uk

For more information on what your legacy can achieve, please call Satish Kumar on 01237 441293 or email [email protected] www.resurgence.org/legacy

but it’s our children’s future

Life on the EdgeOne person’s attempt to emulate Resurgence’s philosophy of Earth-Art-Spirit

online weekly at: www.windgrove.com

ALTERNATIVESSt James’s Piccadilly / London

GRAHAM HANCOCKShamanistic Consciousness

Sunday 16 June

Events inspiring yourheart, mind and soul

www.alternatives.org.uk

MARIANNE WILLIAMSONWork, Money and Miracles

Weekend 6/7 July

BYRON KATIELoving What IsSaturday 13 July


Tel: +44 (0)1803 865934www.schumachercollege.org.uk

Living Soil1-5 July - With Patrick Whitefield, Charles Dowding, Stephan Harding and Bethan StaggUnderstand the alchemy of soil and how to manage it for a productive and low-carbon future.

Complexity and Collaboration15 - 19 July - With Prof. Eve Mitleton-KellyTransform and empower your workplace with 10 principles of complexity theory.

Radical Ecopsychology22 July - 2 August - With Andy Fisher and Joel KovelExplore a new psychology for our ecological age.

Exploring the Wild Mind5-9 August - With Bill Plotkin and Geneen Marie HaugenAn immersion in soul-craft.

transformative and small-group learning

Plus John and Nancy Todd, Colin Tudge, Vandana Shiva, Mark Boyle and Fergus Drennan.

Postgraduate Programmes• Holistic Science (MSc, PG Cert)

Look beyond the limits of traditional science to solve our ecological and social issues.

• Economics for Transition (MA, PG Cert) Become a leader in the low-carbon, resilient and equitable economy of the future.

• Sustainable Horticulture and Food Production (MSc, PG Dip, PG Cert) Join the growers and activists at the forefront of a revolution in food production.

• NEW Ecological Design – a Holistic Approach to Sustainability (MA, PG Cert) Rethink your design practice and theory for the 21st Century.


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ORGANISING A BABY NAMING CEREMONY

GIRLSSteve Biddulph and Sue Palmer discuss

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Active BirthA journey to change

your thinking

Foraging

Stargazing

Biking

Wild Weather crafts

What it means to be a doula

Tim Smit • Holly Bellebuono • Jim Keeble

*Offer applies to 2 and 3 year UK subscriptions only. 1 year subscriptions and back issues available. While Stocks last, UK addresses only.

JUNO is a magazine that aims to inspire and support families as they journey through the challenges of parenting. It shares fresh perspectives in this fast-paced technological world, creating a non-judgemental community for those who are keen to follow a more natural approach to family life.

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A-Z of Organic FarmingNavdanya Organic Farming Training1-30 September, 2013Dr Vandana Shiva and Navdanya expertsTaught in English, the international group will be guided by dedicated instructors who will teach the basics of Navdanya’s organic farming methods: the physical, intellectual, and holistic aspects of organic farming including living seed, living soil,living food. Based on Navdanya’s biodiversity and conservation farm, the course will be 80% hands on and 20% academic focusing on the practical, theoretical, and political aspects of Soil, Seed, and Food. From Seed Saving to diverse methods of soil fertility renewal, to the politics and science of chemical-free farming. Students will leave the course with a comprehensive understanding of how to create, through hands, head, and heart living food systems from seed to table.

BIJA An International School for Sustainable Living Dehra Dun, North India

For further information please contact Mini Joy at: [email protected] Tel +91 11 268 532 772

Gandhi, Globalisation and Earth Democracy21 November-30 November, 2013Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, Samdhong Rinpoche The economic paradigm based on limitless growth and corporate greed is collapsing across the world. In Europe, the “indignados” demand an alternative to the imposed austerity of the financial institutions. In the U.S., the Occupy movement has defamed the dominant economy as the economy of the 1% excluding the 99%.Everywhere, people are searching for an alternative to corporate rule. Gandhi’s visions, practices and philosophy can give us new inspirations, new ideas, on how to create an Earth Democracy that ensures the well being and freedom of all life on Earth.

www.resurgence.org

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ENVIRONMENT • ENGAGED ACTIVISM • PHILOSOPHY • ARTS • ETHICAL LIVING

Free Access For Members (Print Only)If you’re an existing member, receiving the printed magazine, you can access Resurgence for free with access to the digital archive as a bonus.

For more information on how to unlock your free access see www.resurgence.org/app

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“Resurgence is a much-needed source of hope, inspiration and practical proposals – an essential survival guide in difficult times”

– Caroline Lucas MP


Healing Voice Weekends- LondonJuly 6-7; Oct 26-7; Dec 7-8

Healing the Family- Ritual & Resonance Sept 28-9

Healing Voice-Week Intensive - London Oct 26-Nov 1

www.healingvoice.com • T: 020 7435 2467

The Healing VoiceThe Healing VoiceRediscover the ancient power of group chantMagical Voice Techniques • Mantra & SonicMeditations • Mongolian Overtone Chanting

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Healing the Family - Ritual & Resonance - W/Es London Sept 28 - 29 • Oct 12 - 13 • Nov 30 - Dec 1













Healing Voice Weekends - LondonJuly 6 - 7 • October 26 - 27 • December 7 - 8

Healing Voice - Week intensive - LondonOctober 26 - November 1 - Unmissable!

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Why are We here on earth today?What is the real meaning of life?What happens to us after We die?

Through irrefutable evidence Dr. Steinpach answers all these questions and, gives a new knowledge that clearly demonstrates how our Earth-life is but a short, yet decisive episode in our entire existence.

To obtain this 69-page booklet free, please contact:GRAIL MESSAGE FOUNDATION P.O. BOX 5107,Glasgow, G78 9AU 0845 658 5666E-mail: [email protected] ARE WE HERE ON EARTH TODAY?

WHAT IS THE REAL MEANING OF LIFE? WHAT HAPPENS TO US AFTER WE DIE? Through irrefutable evidence Dr. Steinpach answers all these questions and, gives a new knowledge that clearly

demonstrates how our Earth-life is but a short, yet decisive episode in our entire existence.

To obtain this 69-page booklet free, please contact: GRAIL MESSAGE FOUNDATION P.O. BOX 5107,

Glasgow, G78 9AU , 0845 658 5666 E-mail: [email protected]

By Dr. Richard Steinpach WHY WE LIVE AFTER DEATH

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WHY WE LIVE AFTER DEATHBy Dr Richard Steinpach

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The full British Postgraduate Training in AnthroposophicMedicine -over three yearsOctober 2013

For Doctors and medical students.

A three year part time course consisting of 5 three day weekend seminars and a five day summer intensive per year. Based at St Luke’s Medical Centre, Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Developing a comprehensive perception of patients and illness that

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source materials through plant and mineral studies.

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Exploring exercises and meditations that support personal development in

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British Postgraduate Training

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For further details of these courses see

www.anthroposophic-drs-training.org

E-mail Dr. Michael [email protected]

Telephone 01453 750097


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Tickets: £60 individual | £45 concessions

indian vegetarian lunch: £10 extra

booking: 01237 441293 | [email protected] www.resurgence.org/wellbeing

enquiries to Peter lang: 020 8809 2391 | [email protected] event will raise money for The resurgence Trust, an educational charity (no.1120414)

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The One Spirit Interfaith Seminary’s one and two year training brings

intense and joyful inquiry to these fundamental questions.

Recent students describe the journey as ......

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Now enrolling for our autumn intake at our London study centre

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UK enquiry line: 08444 457004www.interfaithfoundation.org

The One Spirit Interfaith Seminary is part of the One Spirit Interfaith Foundation, a charitable company limited by guarantee. Registered Charity No: 1099163

(England and Wales) SCO40148 (Scotland)Registered Company No: 4432622 (England and Wales).

in partnership with Friends of the Earth

Resurgence & Ecologist (ISSN 0034-5970) is published bi-monthly by The Resurgence Trust and is distributed in the USA by Mail Right Int. 1637 Stelton Road B4 Piscataway NJ 08854. Periodical Postage Paid at NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ 08901 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Resurgence, The Resurgence Trust C/O 1637 Stelton Road Ste B4, Piscataway NJ 08854

MEMBERSHIPMembership & Distribution, UKJeanette Gill,Rocksea Farmhouse,St Mabyn, Bodmin,Cornwall PL30 3BR, UKTel: + 44 (0)1208 841824 (Mon-Thurs 9-5)Fax: + 44 (0)1208 [email protected]

Membership RatesSix issues per year UK: £30Non-UK airmail: £40/surface mail: £35

OVERSEAS MEMBERSHIPUSAWalt Blackford,P O Box 312, Langley, WA 98260, U.S.A.Airmail: US$65, Surface: US$56

AustraliaSustainable Living Tasmania,Level 1, 71 Murray Street, Hobart, 7000, Australia Tel: +61 (0)3 6234 [email protected] A$70, Surface mail A$62

JapanSloth Club,6-15-2-912 Ojima, Koto-ku, Tokyo, JapanTel: +81 3 3638 0534 [email protected] ¥5145 Surface ¥4502

South AfricaHoward Dobson, SEEDS,16 Willow Road, Constantia, 7806, Cape Town, South Africa Tel: + 27 2 1794 3318 [email protected]: R462, Surface: R405

DISTRIBUTORSUSAKent News Company100511 Airport Road, Scottsbluff, NE 69361Tel: +1 308 635 [email protected]

RESURGENCE GROUPSAn opportunity to share ideas and seasonal food. For more information, or to start your own group, contact Jeanette Gill: 01208 841824 [email protected]

BirminghamContact: Abdul Al-Seffar 0121 426 2606 [email protected] 3–4 times a yearEast DevonContact: Christina Bows 01297 23822 [email protected] at The Spiral Sanctuary, SeatonEdinburghContact: Anastasia Somerville 07527 055568 [email protected] bi-monthlyHampshireContact: Sue Routner 0238 0620486 [email protected] at The Swan Centre in Eastleigh

LeedsDavid Midgley [email protected] meetingsLondon GroupSharon Garfinkel 07435 781 842 [email protected], andPeggy O’Hare 07794 620137Meeting bi-monthly in central LondonNorth CornwallContact: Simon Mitchell 01208 851356 [email protected] Bi-monthly meetings at St BrewardWales – Newtown areaContact: Lucy Baird 07850 143737 [email protected] Welsh BordersContact: Elaine Brook 01981 550246 [email protected] Near Hay on Wye, 6.30pm, quarterlyNewcastle GroupContact: Margaret Evans 0191 290 1516 [email protected] – Malvern AreaContact: Penny Douglas 07932 252 [email protected] on first Tuesday of the month

AUSTRALIAMelbourneContact: Debby Badger 03 9530 [email protected] monthly

ITALYFaedis, UdineContact: Mauro Cavallo 0039 (0)432 [email protected]

PORTUGALParades de CouraContact: Gerda Chapuis (+351) 91 7017583 [email protected] bi-monthly

PortoContact: Helena Soares (+351) 919 541828 [email protected] bi-monthly

Sobral PichorroContact: Lizzie Daisley-Smith (+351) 936 583 802 [email protected] bi-monthly

SOUTH AFRICACape TownContact: Galeo Saintz +27 (0) 82 888 8181 [email protected] every two months

SUPPORTING GROUPSHemel HempsteadContact: Paul Sandford Tel. 07767 075490 [email protected] Meets on the 2nd Wednesday of the monthLondonContact: Annemarie Borg [email protected] Project Group focused on role of artists

RESURGENCE SUPPORTERSPatronsRoger & Claire Ash Wheeler, Anthony and Carole Bamford, Dr Cherian Eapen, Kim Samuel-Johnson, Lavinia Sinclair, Doug Tompkins, Michael Watt, Louise White, Nigel and Margaret Woodward

Life MembersColette Annesley-Gamester & Johnathan Harding, Robin Auld, Keith & Debby Badger, Caroline Bennett, Klaas and Lise Berkeley, Carmen Blazquez, Peter and Mimi Buckley, Anisa Caine, Mrs Moira Campbell, Anne Clements, Viscount Cowdray, Mary Davidson, Liz Dean, Craig Charles Dobson, John Doyle, John and Liz Duncan, Rosemary Fitzpatrick, Mrs V Hamnett, Hermann Graf-Hatzfeldt, Tony Henry, Guy Johnson, Michael Livni, Maya Melrose, Mill Millichap, Valerie Morgan, Mrs O. Oppenheimer, Vinod Patel & Rashmi Shukla, CBE, John Pontin, Colin Redpath, Jane Rowse, Gabriel Scally, Penelope Schmidt, Miss N Sharpe, Philip Strong, Caroline Windsor, India Windsor-Clive

Sustainer MembersMr G. Bader, Mrs Helen Carlton, Mrs K. Dudelzak, Marcela de Montes, GR Murthy, Rosemary Steel, James Stelfox

TRUSTEESJames Sainsbury (Chair), Josephine Amankwah, Dick Baker, Sandy Brown, Rebecca Hossack, Tony Juniper, Hylton Murray-Philipson, Nick Robins, Ana Stanic

ASSOCIATE EDITORSHerbert Girardet, Hazel Henderson, David Kingsley, June Mitchell, Sophie Poklewski Koziell, Jonathan Robinson, Andrew Simms, Martin Wright

ADVISORY PANELRamesh Agrawal, Rosie Boycott, Ros Coward, Oliver James, Annie Lennox, Philip Marsden, Geoff Mulgan, Jonathon Porritt, Gordon Roddick, Sam Roddick, William Sieghart

PRODUCTION PrinterKingfisher Print, Totnes, Devon

ISSN 0034-5970 Printed on Evolution paper: (75% recycled fibre/25% FSC certified virgin pulp), using soya-based inks

You’re tucked at the top On a smoothed outcrop Above the bubble-toothed maw And it’s watery roar:A ten tonne thunder Down a twenty foot drop Pummelling twenty thousand years of solid rock.But when you’re tucked at the top All this is swapped For rainbowed spray And wet kisses on your face.This is Good Energy.

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Switch quoting ‘Resurgence’ and we’ll give you a bottle of biodynamic champagne to celebrate

Aberdulais Falls, 248kW hydro With thanks to National Trust Aberdulais Falls, Neath, Wales

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Resurgence Issue 279