more co-operatively and understand yourself as a part of a whole. It’s really deep living together and doing these things. Being able to sustain yourself in a place that is tense however can also be draining. Grow Heathrow is both a home and a public project and anyone can come through, and obviously you are by an airport, so there is no getting away.” “Technically we can be evicted at any time. We’re still trying to appeal to the Supreme Court and negotiate with the owners to buy the land. This would change the organic nature of Grow Heathrow, but it would also release a lot of potential; for example we’d be able to work with local kids, which we can’t do because of insurance.” Looking back what would you see as key experiences? “Some of them are practical: building my first cold frame; helping weld the blades for the wind turbine; making the wood burner in my house; walking barefoot around the site; learning how to make capers from dandelion buds; making cider from local apples; making dyes from leaves in autumn. Being in a community, knowing this is the energy and we created it, this is the food and we created it. Some are massive events like our third birthday; Christmas last year when the neighbours came round with a turkey; making a coffin for Keith when he died, and digging his grave and planting a cider apple tree for him with manure from our compost toilet.” Do you see yourselves as an example of living in the future? “Our official line is ‘Furthering the Heathrow vision - an iconic symbol of community resistance to economic, ecological and democratic process.’ We don’talwaysmeetouraimsfullyofcourse! It can be a struggle against the tide. But I see Grow Heathrow as an example of how we can begin to create a resilient community, how we can increase resource autonomy and build new alternative structures of organisation.” “Is there anything you miss in terms of comfort?” I asked finally, remembering last winter’s snow and mud. Rosie laughed: “Two things we really need to build are a bicycle powered dishwasher and washing machine. ” All offerswelcome. www.transitionheathrow.com. Charlotte Du Cann is Editor-in-Chief of Transition Free Press and editor of Playing for Time – Making Art as if the World Mattered (with author Lucy Neal). She blogs at charlotteducann. blogspot.com
books
Light shines from new narrative
Uncivilisation Festival fire by Bridget Mackenzie. Dark Mountain books available from www.dark-mountain.net
The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers in search of new stories for troubled times. Their books explore and celebrate writing rooted in place, time and nature. Gemma Seltzer reviews the latest collection. “Ours is an age whose people can see the crisis that is beginning to engulf them, but can’t yet bring themselves to believe that they cannot still prevent or reverse or manage it,” begins this year’s Dark Mountain 4 anthology, and it’s a statement that sets the tone for the collection. Poets, essayists, storytellers, photographers and activists are assembled, each wondering how we can be within the natural world as human beings, yet also separate: witnesses to a changing physical environment.
From Elizabeth Rimmer’s poem Explaining a Few Things to Neruda, in which she reflects that her work is “pretty”, concerning “all those woodlands and winter skies”, rather than “the litter, the broken windows, / graffiti curse-words”, to Coming Home by Paul O’Connor who urges us to “find somewhere you can dwell, somewhere you can put down roots and gradually increase the level of permanence and reality in your life”, the best pieces don’t idealise nature or a childhood amongst trees and don’t disassociate from others to find a better way to exist. Instead, they offer new ways of looking at that which is directly in front of us. It’s a lovely hardback edition, a beautifully presented collection
that expresses a complex relationship between humans and the wild world. There is a wonderful humility to Narendra’s Dispatches from Bastar, descriptions of graceful, nomadic individuals living in a remote region of India, now receiving increased influence from the outside world. In Beyond Words, Charles Foster muses on his dyslexic son’s experience of the world without the constraints of language influencing his thoughts. Mass literacy through the printed press versus the consequent environmental damage from wood pulp paper production interests Rachel King in The Soul Selects Her Own Society, a reminder that there are many solutions to a single problem. Colony Collapse by William Hass is a hundred stark words describing the ways bees die, “like trembling golden pebbles”, an apt image for an anthology grappling with the future of the earth. This dense book draws together disparate and challenging voices all producing work about ecological crisis, so I would have welcomed a chronological contents page and a fuller introduction to the authors to aid my appreciation. Many of the fiction pieces use elevated language, making the reader very conscious that the writer is attempting to tackle a Major Issue. In these stories, characters
are superior to those surrounding them: only they can see the terror of industrialisation or climate change, while others are mindlessly cutting down trees or pumping the air full of poison. The creative non-fiction, being grounded in real encounters, seems to be more genuine about writing as a vehicle for the author’s own view. Steve Wheeler’s interview with the philosopher-againsttechnological-civilisation John Zerzan showed a refreshing clarity of thought. Wheeler talks of his notion of fragmentalism and how people separate their own thoughts in order to manage their lives. We disconnect the idea of air travel, and its impact on the environment, from the tremendous time we’ll have on the beach. A similar argument could be applied to this Dark Mountain anthology, which appears disjointed, but leaves it up to the reader to find the links and perhaps start to comprehend our precarious position in the world. Gemma Seltzer is a writer working online, live and in print. Her writing projects include Speak to Strangers, 100 stories about conversations with Londoners (Penned in the Margins, 2011). She has recently joined Transition Crystal Palace and has high hopes of becoming a champion local jammaker. www.gemmaseltzer.co.uk.
The book-in-progress, Playing For Time, has gathered up nearly 60 activist projects about making art and building community in relation to Land, Home, Rites of Passage, Food Growing, Hands, Words, Water and more. However there are some gaps and we’re keen to hear from anyone involved in or about to launch into projects that involve song, sounds, poetry, making with hands, open-air large-scale community celebrations, especially those that involve the seasons, gratitude and/or loss. Please send a line to lucy@lucyneal.co.uk. Thankyou!
Telling tales and exchanging gifts Tales of Our Times by Stephanie A W Bradley, reviewed by Mike Grenville “Once, in a time that was, and was not, a time of transition, there was a town that was not too big, and not too small, with a river running through it, and a steep, steep high street, with a castle on the top.” Setting out from her home in Totnes with only with a pair of red flip flops and a small pack, Steph Bradley begins her tale of a six month walk around England collecting stories from people in Transition. Relying on the hospitality of Transition groups, green activists, Quakers, and other like-minded groups of people, her journey followed the footpaths and byways of England and met with generosity and tales of change. She visited around a hundred places, 76 of them Transition Initiatives, in the process. As a way of kindling the interdependence of one place with another, she collected gifts from one place that symbolised their common wealth in terms of its skills and resources and gave them to another. Which is how it came about that I received a pair of hand made ladies pants from her, from www.whomadeyourpants.co.uk, made by marginalised women in Southampton. From Devon her path wound its way along the south coast to Lewes, then turned north through London and on to Cambridge. From Nottingham she went all the way up to York, across to Penrith, then back down the west coast through Blackpool, south to Gloucester, before finally crossing Dartmoor into Cornwall and turning back home. In this lighthearted traveller’s tale, Steph takes a snapshot of the countryside and how the people in it are responding to rapidly changing times. In doing so she brings to light insightful and charming qualities of both the places she visited and people she met. Told over more than 400 pages, readers will get a real sense of travelling alongside her and find many delights on the way. Copies can be ordered from http://storyweaving.co.uk