Resurgence & Ecologist Issue 286

ENVIRONMENT • ACTIVISM • SOCIAL JUSTICE • ARTS • ETHICAL LIVING

September/October 2014 No. 286 £4.95 US$8.00

POLITICS OF PEACE

By SAMDHONG RINPOCHE JONATHON PORRITT: GOING SOLAR MARK GOLDRING ON INEQUALITY ROS COWARD PRAISES RAW NATURE CHARLES EISENSTEIN: ABUNDANCE

Poster Š Religious Society of Friends in Britain, 2014 Courtesy of Imperial War Museums www.iwm.org.uk

WELCOME

WAR AND PEACE Freedom from fear is a prerequisite for peace

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n this, the centenary year of World War I, the war that was to end all wars, it is clear to all that that slogan was completely false.

The hope of peace was soon shattered. World War I became the precursor of World War II, which led to the Cold War and many other wars.

Wars are never about peace. They are about conquering and control. Wars don’t end wars: wars beget wars.

While ordinary people around the world hunger for peace, political and military leaders and the arms traders seem to have unshakable faith that it is wars that will bring peace. They ignore the long history of their failures and continue to prepare for wars in the name of ‘national interest’, ‘homeland security’ and ‘territorial integrity’. But all these goals remain elusive. We live under the tyranny of perpetual fear. And freedom from fear is a prerequisite for peace.

The century of war also witnessed the power of peace. At the time of World War I there was a strong people’s peace movement in Britain led by writers such as Sylvia Pankhurst and philosophers like Bertrand Russell. 20,000 British men of military age refused to join the army, and 6,000 of them went to prison. Ever since, promoters of peace have been reminding the world that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. People like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa showed that another way is possible.

The 21st of September is the United Nations International Day of Peace, celebrated around the globe. This day reminds us of the simple and self-evident truth that war and violence are futile. In this issue of Resurgence & Ecologist, as a contribution to the International Day of Peace and reflecting on the 8,000-mile peace walk I took with E.P. Menon 50 years ago, which was possible only because of the generosity, trust and longing for peace of so many ordinary people

who fed, housed and guided us, I offer an essay on the power of nonviolence.

The 2nd of October 2014 marks the 145th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest champions of peace and nonviolence. In gratitude to Gandhi, we present a talk by Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile, on Gandhi’s spiritual values and the politics of peace.

There appears to be a change in the air. At least some politicians are beginning to notice that people are sick and tired of wars. Tony Blair has lost most of his prestige and credibility because of his role in the Iraq war. So has George Bush.

Not much good has come out of these wars.

The slaughter of the innocent continues apace.

Even though President Obama has been a great disappointment to many, he is trying to reduce US involvement in international warfare. The US congress and the British parliament have refused to endorse the military involvement in Syria. The situation in Ukraine is far from good, and the two sides continue to attack each other, but at least neither Russia nor the Western powers are rushing into a military conflict. Although peace is not yet winning there, war doesn’t seem to be the preferred option.

The optimist in me would like to think that wars and conflicts may be a thing of the past.

But unfortunately peace is not in the interest of arms traders and military leaders. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if merchants of arms were to shift their focus and become the manufacturers of solar panels, as advocated by Jonathon Porritt in this issue?

All this may sound meek and naive, but Jesus said: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” In spite of the clouds of conflict darkening the human sky, I hold on to my faith in the enduring human spirit.

Satish Kumar

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CONTENTS No. 286 September/October 2014

1 Welcome

Satish Kumar

FRONTLINE 4 ACTION FROM THE GRASS ROOTS

Lorna Howarth reports

ECOLOGIST 8 A SOLAR REVOLUTION

Jonathon Porritt on the global impact of solar power

10 EXTREME INEQUALITY

12 SEEKING THE LIGHT

Cover: Navigation by Susanna Bauer (page 56) Photo © Simon Cook

Mark Goldring: too much for the few, too little for many Caroline Juler on Romania’s green movement

ETHICAL LIVING

SEEDS: A THREE-PART FEATURE SPECIAL

24 CITY WITH A WILD SELF THAT SPEAKS

14 CUSTODIANS OF LIFE

Liz Hosken celebrates women agriculturalists

16 A RESURGENCE OF HEIRLOOM PLANTS

Zion Lights meets Simran Sethi, food campaigner

18 NURTURING NATURE IS NO CRIME

Vandana Shiva: we must resist privatisation of Nature

KEYNOTES

26 LEARNING IN A LANDSCAPE

Richard Dunne on what makes a good school: children need real experiences

28 BLACKBERRY BONANZA

Susan Clark captures memories of autumnal foraging with a berry granola

30 NATURAL RESISTANCE

20 POLITICS OF PEACE

Lucy Anna Scott discovers that it is possible to live in symbiosis with Nature even in a metropolis

Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile, explores the perennial principles of Gandhi

Robin Lee explores the complexities of wine-growing in Burgundy, and living with vine blight

32 GREEN WITH AGE

John Moat’s Occasional Didymus

NEW ONLINE

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Clare Bryden on the life, vision and philosophy of Simone Weil; Peter Greaves reviews The Burning Question

by Mike Berners-Lee & Duncan Clark; Felix Padel introduces his co-authored book Ecology, Economy and questions what real development is?

Plus a new gallery feature on cover artist Susanna Bauer

All the stories environmentalists across the globe are talking about; plus opinion pieces and reviews

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Check for new daily content, including regular analysis of key political issues.

To contact the editor, email oliver@theecologist.org

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September/October 2014

UNDERCURRENTS 34 A BEAUTIFUL WORLD OF ABUNDANCE

Charles Eisenstein suggests that the

concept of scarcity prevents us from

meeting our real needs

38 THE POWER OF NONVIOLENCE

Satish Kumar says it is time we learned that war and violence are uncivilised methods of achieving peace

42 BEAUTIFUL DAYS

Warwick Fox sings the blues and restores his soul

46 NEW STORIES TO LIVE BY

Robert Holtom explores the novels of Ursula Le Guin and finds parallels between our world and hers

49 LIGHT FROM THE DARK SIDE

Ros Coward explains how seeing Nature in the raw encourages a greater ecological awareness

ARTS 50 BLESSING THE BIOSPHERE

Peter Abbs greets new eco-poetry

by Helen Moore and Lynne Wycherley

52 JOURNEY INTO DEEP SPACE

Govinda Sah ‘Azad’ describes why his painting is a process of self-discovery

56 AGOG AT SMALL THINGS

Andy Christian admires an artist who makes the invisible visible

REVIEWS 58 THE WEALTH OF THE FEW

David Boyle reviews Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty

60 A TRINITY FOR OUR TIME

Colin Tudge reviews Soil, Soul, Society

by Satish Kumar

62 FORGOTTEN INHERITANCE

John Fellowes reviews Revival and Resilience: Community Stories in China edited by Cheng Ying

63 IS EMPATHY THE NEW OIL?

David Cadman reviews The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin

64 EXCAVATING BURIED

ASSUMPTIONS Dougald Hine reviews Beyond Economics and Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich edited by Sajay Samuel

65 THE LIVING SEA

Stephan Harding reviews Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea by Peter Reason

66 LETTERS 67 CROSSWORD AND SHOP

54 COMING HOME

Laura Coleman highlights the work of the ONCA gallery and the importance of environmental art

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

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FRONTLINE Lorna Howarth reports on action from the grass roots UK

PICK YOUR OWN LUNCH AT THE BUS STOP

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Illustration by Lis Watkins www.lineandwash.blogspot.co.uk

new initiative in London that has its roots in the direct action of ‘guerrilla gardening’ is working to transform some of the city’s more brutal urban spaces and wastelands into a series of micro-parks and gardens. Called The Edible Bus Stop – because many of these transformed spaces are on the London Bus network – the project is creating growing spaces where commuters can literally pick their lunch on the way to work.

The first site was lauded by Mayor of London, Boris Johnson as a “fantastic new ‘pocket park’”, and not only do they provide oases of calm and colour in the frenetic city, but they also reduce antisocial behaviour and encourage community cohesion. The first flush of gardens are connected by a bus route – the 332 – from Crystal Palace via West Norwood to Clapham Common. The aim is to roll out the project throughout London and the UK, not just growing food but also creating a community network where skills, tools, knowledge and resources can be shared. www.theediblebusstop.org

CHINA

BEAR BILE FARM BECOMES A SANCTUARY

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n May this year, Animals Asia began the conversion of a bear bile farm near Nanning in China into a sanctuary for the 130 residents, following an unprecedented request by the farm owner to rescue and care for its animals. Animals Asia CEO Jill Robinson sees this as a significant step towards the end of this cruel practice. She said: “87% of Chinese people are against bile farming. This negotiation is a result of years of growing awareness and increased opposition, with the bear farmer himself showing the moral integrity to do the right thing. It could be the start of a wider conversation, with the aim of finally ending bear bile farming in China.”

Mr Yan Shaohong, the farmer in question, wanted to get out of the increasingly unpopular and unprofitable industry and was determined his bears would not be sold on to other bile farms.

There are still an estimated 10,000 bears in China suffering the daily ritual of bile extraction.

Animals Asia has rescued 285 to date. www.animalsasia.org

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Rescued bear © Animals Asia

September/October 2014

GLOBAL

CANADA/PERU

UNIT OF TRUST

THE PLASTIC BANK

he ‘collaborative economy’ is a quickly growing marketplace where people share resources rather than buy them. It is dependent on community participation and a willingness to co-create new business models where wellbeing rather than profit is the bottom line.

In Berlin, the Borrowing Shop’s 500 members can borrow and return any of 2,000 items, from toys and kitchen appliances to boats and bicycles. Each member brings an item to share, and that is their membership fee. Any item can be borrowed, and a time for its return is agreed.

The unit of exchange is trust.

This and other pioneering new business models are part of what entrepreneur Lisa Gansky refers to as ‘The Mesh’, where companies create and share goods and services.

A good example is thredUP, an online shop that enables people to sell their unwanted used clothes. Gansky’s website, Mesh, has developed regional directories of these collaborative organisations that are reshaping markets and seriously rattling old-paradigm corporations. www.meshing.it

ound for pound, plastic is more expensive (and therefore more valuable) than steel – but it is still one of the least recycled materials we produce. Given that virtually all plastic ever made is still present in the environment, it makes sense to reuse it.

Two entrepreneurs from Vancouver, Canada have taken the recycling principle one step further by accepting what they term “social plastic” – plastic gleaned from the world’s oceans, landfills and other sources – as a form of currency, to be redeemed at Plastic Banks. People living in poverty are being encouraged to collect plastic, sort it and take it to the banks, where they will be paid for their efforts. The first Plastic Bank is in Lima, Peru. The Plastic Bank aims to “lift people out of poverty … into a self-sustaining life of entrepreneurship”.

Interestingly, the social plastic is being reused in 3D printing, which can produce anything from medical prosthetics to household goods.

The aim, as with Fairtrade, is to give added value to products, in this case made from social plastic. www.plasticbank.org

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UK

DHARMA DAIRY

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t is a sad fact that to produce non-organic milk, cheese, yoghurt and butter, bull calves are often slaughtered at birth and dairy cows have a short life of hard labour and constant pregnancy.

Organic farms have improved animal welfare, but the Ahimsa Dairy Foundation has developed a kinder system, calling itself “Britain’s first slaughter-free dairy”.

Ahimsa’s cows are only put in calf every 3–4 years, are served naturally by a bull, and keep their calves at foot for six months, unlike intensive dairies, where cows are often put in calf annually by artificial insemination and calves are taken away after a few days.

Ahimsa’s cows are milked by hand, have names (not just numbers) and are grass-fed and allowed outside, but the biggest difference is that instead of Ahimsa’s bull calves being slaughtered at birth (or put in veal crates to endure a brutally short life), they are worked on the land, pulling ploughs and carts, and bulls and cows alike are able to live out their lives until their natural end. Ahimsa’s is a unique system, suited to a small herd of up to 40 animals, and it produces arguably the most humane dairy products possible. www.ahimsamilk.org

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A man collects plastic bottles in Lima, Peru © MARIANA BAZO/Reuters/Corbis

UK/USA

RUBBISH-FUELLED PLANES

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esurgence & Ecologist has long advocated reducing waste at source, but until we make that transition waste will continue to exist, and there’s already plenty in the ground. British Airways (BA) has come up with a possible short-term solution with its plan that by 2017 it will be possible to fly from London to New York in a plane using fuel made from municipal solid waste.

BA has partnered with Solena Fuels to make 50,000 tonnes of jet fuel per year from waste as part of the GreenSky project, based in a former oil refinery east of London. Already US$600 million has been invested in the gasification technology, and the result is high-quality fuel. What’s more, the process yields twice the energy that incinerating the waste into electricity would provide. Life-cycle analysis of the waste-to-fuel process indicates that a journey using GreenSky bio-jet fuel will emit 95% less greenhouse gases than the same journey using conventional fuel. Industry specialists believe the technology offers a promising alternative fuel for airlines. www.scientificamerican.com/article/ garbage-fuel-will-power-british-airways-planes

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Keeping the soil covered is crucial to the preservation of the land

Photo © Mario Pedraza Ruíz

SOIL CARBON CHALLENGES Eco-restoration in the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, Mexico

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n the rugged mountains of Mexico’s Sierra Gorda, the ugly scars of deforestation mark the steep slopes, which long ago lost their protective forest cover, resulting in deeply eroded soil with a diminished capacity to store water. This led to a huge decline in farm productivity, as the environmental capital of the Sierra Gorda slipped away with every mudslide.

Without carbon, which is present as organic matter, the soil loses its ability to capture and retain water, so the damaging effects of droughts are accentuated. Looking for solutions to these soil carbon challenges, Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda (GESGIAP) was formed by residents of the local area, where 30% of the land is still community-owned.

With its partner organisation Bosque Sustentable, GESGIAP adapted the Keyline hydrological design principles originally developed in Australia, which enable rapid and effective soil restoration. The natural contour lines leading from the upper slopes down through the valleys have been enhanced to create ‘infiltration canals’, ensuring that water slowly filters through the soil rather than running off as a flash flood. This improved water retention within the soil helps maintain moisture content in the humus, resulting in increased fertility and microbial activity, and effective capture and storage of atmospheric carbon.

Another activity that is promoted is the local production of fermented bio-fertilisers that use natural ingredients such as

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crushed volcanic rock, minerals and local microorganisms.

The fertiliser is cheap to produce and provides the essential elements of soil regeneration. Jacinto Vigil, a tomato grower from the Sierra Gorda, commented: “We now grow tomatoes at a lower cost that are healthy, chemical-free and of great quality.”

“Cows are an excellent ally to restore life and productivity to the soils” Legumes are renowned for their ability to fix nitrogen in the soil and are now used in the Sierra Gorda as a green manure, thereby increasing biomass and organic matter in these formerly degraded agricultural lands. When ploughed back into the soil, green manures create a sponge-like mass that holds water. It seems miraculous, but with only 1% increase in organic matter, the soil can capture an additional 144,000 litres of water and 132 tonnes of carbon per hectare. In just two years it is possible to reach 82% water absorption capacity, and this in turn directly recharges aquifers, as well as reducing erosion by 68%.

GESGIAP has been also been working with livestock farmers because, managed correctly, cows can help

September/October 2014

improve the health of soils and increase their capacity to capture carbon dioxide. Currently there are 13 pilot ranches using holistic livestock management techniques such as rotational grazing and low-density stocking. “Cows are an excellent ally to restore life and productivity to the soils,” says Mario Pedraza Ruíz, Director of Bosque Sustentable’s soil conservation programme. Mario’s ranch is part of GESGIAP’s ‘Soil Carbon Challenge’ programme.

During the devastating droughts of 2010 and 2012, farmers

throughout the region lost many cattle, but Mario’s soil husbandry enabled him to survive without losses.

Improved pasture, independence from agrochemicals and their high costs, healthier animals, and soils with plenty of stored water and carbon are now a reality in Sierra Gorda.

“We work from the bottom up and are confident that our model is an effective response to the effects of climate change,” says Mario.

With thanks to Esther Díaz Pérez for this article.

HIDDEN LANES Get out of the car and onto the moor

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vid readers of this column since its inception as Good News for Gaia over 20 years ago will know that I have consistently advocated the joys of electric bicycling – indeed, in one of my first articles I reviewed an e-bike prototype, designed by Clive Sinclair, which boasted little more than a rubber band and a very heavy battery, and which, sadly, didn’t propel me up the steep hills of Hartland as I’d dreamed! But technology has improved, so when my friend and fellow Schumacher College alumnus Inga Page suggested that I join her on her new venture – Dartmoor Electric Bicycles – there was no stopping me.

One of Inga’s motivating factors for starting her e-bike initiative was that she’d noticed tourists visiting Dartmoor in their droves but barely walking more than a few hundred metres from their cars, which were invariably parked at one of the moor’s ‘honeypot’ attractions. Inga realised that a combination of the challenging walking terrain and lack of knowledge about where it is possible to walk put people off actually experiencing the tranquillity and wilderness that the moor still offers.

I joined Inga and a group of five other cyclists on a warm and sunny late spring morning, blessed by the songs of the cuckoo and the willow warbler. Our trusty steeds were awaiting us in the bike shed: sleek, lightweight e-bikes designed and built in Switzerland to cope with that most rugged of terrains. A 16-mile cycle through the lanes, hills and valleys of Dartmoor would be a breeze, then! Well, not quite.

We set off and got used to the bikes on the track that led out of the farm. Unlike many e-bikes I’d tried previously, this one was almost silent – such a joy – and the lithiumbattery-powered engine had enough energy for even the most vertiginous slopes of Dartmoor, although one has to pedal steadfastly too. It is definitely good exercise. As Inga took us deeper into the countryside, the sounds of modernity slowly ebbed away and we became enveloped by the warmth of the sun and the sounds of Nature: babbling brooks, twittering swallows, snuffling Dartmoor ponies and the murmur of the gentle breeze. It was utterly magical.

Inga’s knowledge of the hidden lanes of Dartmoor is

Taking a break from e-bicycling to enjoy Dartmoor’s breathtaking vistas © www.dartmoorwalksthisway.co.uk

exceptional. Hearing the ancient names of the tors and valleys, learning about the Bronze Age burial sites and peering into the salmon’s spawning streams all gave a fascinating extra dimension to the tour. As we looked across Challacombe Valley towards Widecombe-in-the-Moor, we saw ancient oak woodlands and whole hillsides covered in a haze of bluebells, the scent combining with may blossom to create a heady, evocative atmosphere.

My somewhat sedentary lifestyle in front of a computer began to take its toll with about two miles of the ride left, but, perhaps more by design than accident, the last leg was mostly downhill, past a historic watermill and over a beautiful, narrow river bridge, and I had just enough puff left to make it back to the bike shed in one piece. Whilst you don’t have to be hyper-fit for the e-bike tour, a bit of stamina is necessary.

Nonethless, it was a memorable and highly enjoyable way to experience Dartmoor in all its verdant glory – for visitors and locals alike. www.highdart.co.uk/electric-bikes

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

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Setting the environmental agenda since 1970

A SOLAR REVOLUTION Jonathon Porritt highlights the positive impact of solar power around the world

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ne of the very first big pieces of research that Forum for the Future conducted was for BP in the late 1990s, looking at the prospects for the growth of solar PV in the UK; BP had its own solar business in those days. Prospects were good, we argued, just depending on the speed with which costs in manufacturing PV could be reduced and average efficiencies in the solar cells themselves increased. I’m sorry to say that our report made little impact, and BP axed its solar business just as soon as it could.

Since then, as we all know, costs of solar PV have plummeted, primarily because of Chinese manufacturers driving them down. Efficiencies (in converting that solar radiation into electricity) have also improved, though much more slowly. More importantly, costs are continuing to come down by an astonishing 6–8% per annum. Most experts in the industry believe that this will continue for quite some time to come, as will be the case with the inverters and other bits of kit associated with any PV installation, be that roofmounted, ground-mounted, embedded in building materials (roofing tiles, cladding, and so on), grid-connected or off-grid.

So let’s cut to the quick here: the Solar Revolution that has been talked about for so long is with us here and now. It’s not ‘for the future’, or ‘just over the horizon’: it’s our reality today – which explains a new-found sense of excitement about the global implications of this technology-driven transition.

All sorts of mainstream organisation (such as the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, as well as various UN agencies) are now talking up the prospects for solar, especially for the hundreds of millions of people who are not connected to the grid. Policy think tanks are increasingly interested in modelling the potential impact of this transition on all sorts of bigger economic, social and cultural agendas.

Could capitalism itself – eventually – be transformed?

What makes this so compelling is the universality of the benign impacts of mass solar roll-outs, both in the rich world and in developing and emerging countries. It’s impossible not to be moved by the instant, dramatic improvements in the lives of some of the world’s poorest people: light where there was once darkness; refrigerated vaccines where there was once death and disease; access to markets (via solar mobiles) where there was once ignorance and poverty.

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But it’s a big deal too in the rich world. I had a chance to see this at this year’s Large-Scale Solar Conference in the UK. From a standing start, 4,000MW of ground-mounted PV has been installed over the last couple of years, with the strong support of both farmers and local authorities – an 81% success rate on planning applications shows just how acceptable this particular form of renewables has become. And there’s every prospect of this growing to 20,000MW within a few years.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, as ever, it’s not quite as easy as that. The biggest threat to this unfolding revolution is ineffective, backward-looking and increasingly dysfunctional policymaking by governments.

Most governments – even now – just don’t get it, and most politicians (particularly here in the UK) still see solar power as ‘a nice little niche’ to distract people’s attention from the

“The sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some 93 million miles away.”

– Stephanie Mills still grim reality of their dependency on fossil fuels.

That continuing collective idiocy has been compounded by the fracking fantasy that is now sweeping the world – even to the extent of some companies describing fracked gas as “renewables-lite”! There’s no doubt that, as a less carbon-intensive source of energy than both coal and oil, gas can help reduce overall greenhouse-gas emissions, especially where it helps to kill off coal – but, sadly, that’s not what’s happening.

More often than not, fracked gas comes on stream in addition to coal, not as an alternative to it. And that’s already jeopardising both the speed and the scale of new investments in renewables – at exactly the time where the rate of uptake is making even the most sceptical investor sit up and open up those fossilised brain circuits. I can pretty much guarantee that the following data points (from the USA) will be unknown to all but a tiny minority of Resurgence & Ecologist readers:

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Solar power is already booming in Japan, rated the third-largest market for renewable energy in 2013 A concentrated solar power plant, in Yokohama, Japan © Koichi Kamoshida/Bloomberg via Getty Images

• Wind and solar provided 80.9% of new installed US electricity-generating capacity for February 2014.

• For the first two months of 2014, renewable energy (biomass, geo­ thermal, solar, water and wind) accounted for 91.9% of the 568MW of new electricity-gener­ating cap­ acity installed.

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• Coal, oil and nuclear provided none, while natural gas and 1MW of ‘other’ provided the balance.

(My thanks to Ben Adler of Grist for directing my attention to those figures from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.)

So we shouldn’t panic. In the worst of all worlds, a short-lived, over-

hyped fracking bubble will just slow the transition to solar and other renewables. That transition will still happen – though from the perspective of accelerating climate change, it is of course a big deal whether it happens in the next 5 years or the next 15 years. As costs fall and efficiencies rise, some of those much-touted laws of competitive markets will eventually kick in. It’s not necessarily governments, fixated as they still are on fossil fuels, that will call the shots. It’s more likely to be capital markets.

And there are all sorts of positive signals here. Back in May, Barclays downgraded the bond market for the whole electricity sector in the USA on the grounds that over the next few years all electric utilities will be threatened by “a confluence of declining cost trends in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation and residentialscale power storage”. Paul Barwell, the Chief Executive of the UK’s Solar Trade Association, said at the time: “In the USA, the penny has dropped. We are up for the challenge of ‘properly costed’ policy, based on fact, not emotion. The simple fact is that with stable, logical policies, solar should be competing with fossil fuels by the end of this decade. When it does, subsidyfree solar will fundamentally reshape the energy system.”

Paul is being appropriately cons­ ervative here. The truth is that solar PV is already competing with fossil fuels in many countries – especially when you take account of the insane subsidies that fossil fuels still receive. This allimportant indicator continues to move in the right direction year on year.

Companies like BP once had a chance to be on the right side of this historic, destiny-driving divide. Unfortunately, BP made the wrong choice, and to all intents and purposes, it is now dead in the water.

And, frankly, as one amongst many who tried hard to point to the extra‑ ordinary significance of that decision, all I can say is good riddance.

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future. His latest book is The World We Made (Phaidon). www.forumforthefuture.org

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WELLBEING

In Rio the have-nots live in the shadow of the have-it-alls

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil © Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos

Extreme Inequality Mark Goldring explains why too much for the few means too little for many

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n January this year Oxfam revealed that the richest 85 people in the world had the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population: over 3 billion people. This attracted global media interest. As usual, our claim was challenged, but not in the usual way. When Forbes magazine updated the data just a few months later, they found that we were wrong. It now took just the richest 69 people to equal the wealth of the poorest half! The disparities between the rich and the poor are increasing.

Just a few feet of wall in Rio separates the have-nots living in slums from the have-it-alls in the penthouse apartments next door. In the UK, newspaper articles on bankers’ billions sit alongside those documenting the rising number of people forced to rely on food banks.

Does this really matter? Some say that economic growth benefits and creates opportunities for all and that this must involve some getting richer than others; that attacking the very rich is an ideological position that helps no one.

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Oxfam’s interest is not about the rights and wrongs of wealth per se. It is about the fact that extreme inequality of wealth leads to extreme inequalities in all forms of power, policy and wellbeing, so that poor people do not benefit from improved health, education or opportunity, even in an economy that seems to be growing.

Over the last year there has been widespread recognition that increasing inequality of income and wealth cannot go on unabated. President Obama promised in his State of the Union address to tackle inequality of opportunity. Pope Francis tweeted to warn that inequality is “the root of social evil”. Even the global institutions with orthodox economic outlooks – including the IMF and the World Bank – have been warning of the dangers of inequality, and, in the case of the IMF’s Christine Lagarde, quoting Oxfam. Leaders and institutions are beginning to challenge inequality head-on and people are paying attention to this debate. Not only was Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-

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first Century, about the link between rising inequality and wealth, a massive publishing success, but it also sparked a flood of soul-searching about the state of modern capitalism (see review page 58). That an economics tome of graphs and data can top best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic clearly demonstrates the resonance of this issue.

Why does this matter for development and wellbeing?

Over the last two decades we have seen impressive reductions in poverty and improvements in health, education and other key indicators in many of the poorest countries around the world. The rapid economic growth of emerging economies has seen many countries improve their prospects dramatically. While this is hugely encouraging, looking through the lens of simple averages masks the unequal fate of those left behind. A baby born into a rich family in prospering Nigeria will live a longer life with far greater opportunities than a baby born into a poor family.

Gender inequalities will exacerbate these discrepancies even further, with a boy likely to spend more than 10 years in school, compared to the three years of schooling that a girl can expect. These disparities are not just a phenomenon in developing countries. Here in the UK a child born in leafy Richmond, South West London can expect to live 15 years longer than one born in Tower Hamlets in the east of the city. That is a year of extra life for every mile covered as you travel across London.

Whilst the marginalised are falling behind, the elite are moving further ahead. In the US, the richest 10% have captured over 90% of economic growth since the recession, while the poor have got poorer. Money yields money and power.

This massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of a few people presents a significant threat to democracy and wider wellbeing. Those with money can use it to buy power and to set the rules, regulations and policies in their favour, creating a cycle of growing inequality and poverty and undermining opportunity. Politicians and institutions that should represent citizens and keep inequality in check are instead being influenced by the rich and powerful, resulting in policies and actions that further widen the gap between rich and poor. Society becomes a vicious circle where wealth (income, assets and access to resources) and power (particularly political decisionmaking) are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, reinforcing the continued marginalisation and exclusion of the many. We saw this in the response to the financial crisis, with the banks and bankers bailed out whilst the poorest in society were left to suffer the costs of their risk-taking.

Everywhere I travel I see evidence of this. Women’s low status in society means that the issue of maternal health is neglected in budget allocations. The wives, sisters and daughters of the rich and powerful give birth safely in sparkling new private hospitals, so policymakers have very little incentive to care about the health-care provisions for the half of all women in sub-Saharan Africa who give birth in unsafe conditions without trained support.

It is clear that to eliminate poverty and achieve social justice we need to look beyond the country-level average

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and understand and address how resources, wealth, power and voice are distributed.

Breaking the cycle of inequality We know change is possible when governments make the right choices and are accountable to the many, not the few.

Countries like Bolivia and Brazil, for example, have in the last decade managed to grow their economies whilst making them more equal. Brazil has achieved this through targeted policies, including an increase in the minimum wage that

The massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of a few people presents a significant threat to democracy and wider wellbeing has seen the poorest 10% receive an income growth above the national average, compared to the rich, who have had income growth below the average. Bolivia has seen a much sharper fall in inequality, with its government introducing a range of new progressive spending programmes while, crucially, funding them by renegotiating the country’s oil and gas tax revenue. Conversely, robust growth in Zambia, averaging 4.6% between 2000 and 2006, was almost entirely captured by the richest 10%, who increased their share of the country’s wealth by more than 9% while poverty rates increased by almost 4%. When I visited Zambia last year for the first time in a decade, it had moved from low to middle income status. The economy had grown but there were actually more poor people.

Extreme inequality is not inevitable but is the result of policy choices. Different choices can reverse it: free public health services that help everyone while ensuring the poor are not left behind; decent wages that end working poverty; and progressive taxation so that the rich pay their fair share. Governments also need to ensure that there is space for people to have their voices heard to rebalance the power of political influence.

Whilst the Pope tweets and the World Bank blogs about inequality, and as new data raises even louder alarm bells, governments and policymakers around the world can choose to seize this opportunity and be leaders in challenging inequality and restoring social and economic justice. Governments everywhere must commit to a more progressive agenda for redistribution and for a fairer world.

Power and special interests must not be allowed to push us to the alternative of being tipped irrevocably into a world that caters only for the privileged.

Mark Goldring is the Chief Executive of Oxfam GB. He will be speaking at the Festival of Wellbeing on 11 October 2014 in London. www.resurgence.org/wellbeing

Resurgence & Ecologist

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ENVIRONMENT

SEEKING THE LIGHT Caroline Juler visits Romania’s increasingly confident environmental movement

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ctober 1998. A golden day. Roşia Montană lay below us, its mining scars hidden by trees.

A couple of spires peered over the treetops, but the surrounding forests were so thick that there was no sign of the 1970s’ pit – or the trouble that was brewing in it. Instead, there was Nature, the kind of Nature I had only dreamed about, made of dense woods in an array of autumn colours whose glorious visual romp was interrupted only by velvety pastures, small fields, a pitched wooden roof, and the occasional lollipop haystack. The woods rolled for miles over hills and dales to the zigzag horizon of the Apuseni Mountains. It was beautiful, and all the more so, I thought, because it belonged not to me, but to everyone: the plants, animals and people who had created it. All the gold in the world could not buy such a view.

I was researching the Blue Guide Romania, and had teamed up with Horia Ciugudean, an archaeologist who had grown up in the Apuseni and loved them with a passion I had rarely come across. He told me that Roşia Montană was one of the most extraordinary sites in the country: a prehistoric mine that had gone on to bankroll the Roman

Empire, and continued in use, mainly underground, to this day. We had driven through Zlatna’s apocalyptic industrial wasteland, past the 20-foot-tall banks of sterile earth outside Abrud, and turned north along a pot-holed road.

If you faced one way, the land was a verdant paradise; swing round, and it was dead. My picture-book view of Transylvania was falling apart.

A year later, I read that Roşia Montană was to be transformed into an even bigger pit, from which all the remaining gold would be extracted. This meant that 2,000 people would be displaced, woods dug up, farms smashed, a cyanide tailings lake installed, and five mountains razed, all for the lure of gold and silver – and possibly uranium.

Arguments for the mine said that it would bring muchneeded jobs to an area that was already depressed; and, as this part of the Apuseni had been wrecked by copper quarries, and its main river rendered sterile, what difference would more pollution make?

Not everyone agreed: a small resistance had started. It consisted of some working miners, a history teacher, one of the village priests, a writer from nearby Sântimbru, and

Recent protests have used this partially submerged church as a symbol of destruction, to remind those in power of the impact mining has on Nature and life The old church of Geamana, close to Ros¸ia Montana˘ © Bogdan Cristel/REUTERS

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Horia. They were exceptions: their countrymen and women were habitually cowed.

What was at stake? Cultural, social and environmental devastation for short-term gain; a partially crippled but still luxurious landscape, against a cyanide-tainted desert; badly paid jobs for 20 years at most, with the lion’s share of the profits going abroad, against the potential for centuries to come of income from the area’s archaeology and history, its wildlife, its craftspeople, its small, mixed farms and its forests.

Enter Stephanie Roth, a Swiss activist who has been helping to stop a Dracula theme park from destroying 500-yearold oaks near Sighişoara. For Stephanie, compassion is crucial. Her kindness and enthusiasm attracted other people, Romanians and foreigners, who were furious about environmental crime. Many local people were in shock, horrified by the idea of seeing their smallholdings destroyed. Stephanie joined them. They called themselves Alburnus Maior (AM), after the ancient Roman town on which Roşia Montană had grown.

It took a couple of years before AM joined the internet revolution and founded its website, Salvaţi Roşia Montană (‘Save Roşia Montană’). As communication systems improved, so did Romanians’ ability to travel. Young Romanians studied at the LSE and Berkeley; they too raised the green movement’s game. At the same time, Apuseni farmers showed their legendary stubbornness, summed up in the statement, “Here I was born, and here I shall die”.

Over the past decade, AM has achieved a lot: it has organised peaceful demonstrations in the county town, candlelit vigils in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, and rock festivals in Roşia Montană; it has informed schoolchildren, and used the law to root out fraudulent approvals and land deals; crucially, it has proposed alternative scenarios, including organic cheese production, ecotourism, Nature and history trails.

AM inspired others to voice their concerns, but it wasn’t the first green organisation in Romania. One of the first was Clubul de Cicloturism Napoca (CCN), Cluj’s cycle touring club, founded in 1992 to promote cycling and also to raise awareness about the mountains.

Lavinia Andrei masterminded Terra Mileniul III (TM3, ‘The Earth’s Third Millenium’, terramileniultrei.ro) in the early 1990s. Based in Bucharest, TM3 promotes sustainable development in the fields of energy, transport and climate change. One of its most important services is making inventories of companies’ greenhouse-gas emissions.

“After the Central and Eastern European countries joined the EU, a lot of environmental policies started going slower, or in the wrong direction,” Lavinia told me. “For them, it’s important to see rapid economic development, while Nature suffers. It’s time for solidarity around Europe; the green movement should be united.”

“We are like watchdogs,” she added. “We don’t have any relationships with big business and they don’t appreciate our activity. We still need a lot of expertise, such as impact studies and case studies.”

Lavinia got involved in the Roşia Montană campaign

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around the same time as Stephanie, and used the opportunity to create a hub for like-minded bodies. In 2002, 40 organisations signed TM3’s declaration of unity; today, it’s a forum for 70 Romanian NGOs that campaign for social justice as well as green issues.

The demands for environmentally friendly solutions to Romania’s social and economic issues are making themselves felt in ever-widening circles Most of the country’s organisations dedicated to environmental protection are based in Transylvania. But there are plenty of others, notably in Bucharest, the Danube Delta and Timişoara (western Romania).

“We’ve got a long way to go,” says Bogdan Papuc of Romania’s Ecotourism Association. “Our government is weak and its policymaking role is very unstable. But before Roşia Montană happened, people were totally inert; it was a turning point for environmental problems.”

A year ago, hundreds of people held hands in a circle around Bucharest’s parliament building. They were a small proportion of the thousands who came out to protest about the corporate rape of Romania after clashes over fracking proposals in Pungeşti.

Roşia Montană Gold Corporation has been throttling Roşia Montană, buying people out of their homes and stifling alternative regeneration schemes. But the protesters’ doggedness and the growing demands for environmentally friendly solutions to Romania’s social and economic issues are making themselves felt in ever-widening circles.

In June 2014, two EU-funded bodies, Europa Nostra and the European Investment Bank Institute, issued a press release saying that Roşia Montană should become a model for sustainable development in Europe. On the face of it, this is a great move: Europa Nostra consists of 250 EU-wide heritage organisations that could make a great difference to future conservation policies. But the wording is vague, and in the absence of more specific plans we should be wary.

I’m putting my faith in grassroots schemes such as the one initiated by AM whereby volunteers can help buy and restore some of Roşia Montană’s handsome townhouses, damaged by neglect. It is a brave and hopeful action that confronts the mining company’s hostility.

If you squint, the view from the hills above the village is still leafy. We don’t know how much longer it will last.

We do know how greedy politicians can be. One thing is certain: if the opencast mine goes ahead, you won’t need to squint, because there’ll be nothing left to see.

Caroline Juler is a writer and artist with a long-standing interest in Romania. www.mamaliga.co.uk

Resurgence & Ecologist

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SEED COMMUNITY

Ghanaian women at work in their fields near Zoosali

Photo © Ruth Leavett/The Gaia Foundation

CUSTODIANS OF LIFE Liz Hosken celebrates women who nurture food, family and life

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orking with women in East, West and Southern Africa, I hear time and again the most compelling stories of how communities can regain control of their seeds, their livelihoods and their lives. When they begin to recognise how their communities, ecosystems and ancestral heritage have been unravelling, a deep sense of responsibility awakens, and an urgency to revive their former seed diversity, related knowledge, and biocultural practices, to ensure a beautiful future for the generations to come.

Without seed there is no food, no life. And it is women in most cultures who are traditionally the custodians of the whole seed cycle, from selecting seeds and identifying which to sow each season, through to harvesting, cleaning and storage. Their criteria include taste, nutrition, ceremonial uses, cooking time and storability. These criteria are increasingly indicators of our changing climate, with a diversity of seeds chosen to assure a harvest in unpredictable circumstances, ranging from quick growth to drought resistance.

Patricia Howard, one of the few researchers on the role of women in agriculture and biodiversity management, has seen through her work that “there’s an incredible amount of knowledge that goes with plant cultivation in order to plan for the needs of the whole family and obligations to the community in ways which are appropriate to your culture.”

And, surprising to many, “Accruing this knowledge can take up to a third of a lifetime.”

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Melaku Worede, internationally acclaimed for his seed conservation work in Ethiopia, is equally emphatic. “It is the women who carry out most of the seed selecting, breeding, storing and protecting. In addition to staple domesticated crops, women are far more intimately connected with the numerous species of edible wild plants than their male counterparts. They often deliberately leave the weeds as a

Seed is more than the source of family nutrition. Seed symbolises and represents life’s regenerative capacity method of intercropping and dealing with pests attracted to the main crop, as well as a vital source of nutritious greens.

Their knowledge of complementary planting is extensive and passed on orally from mother to daughter.”

But seed is more than the source of family nutrition.

Seed symbolises and represents life’s regenerative capacity.

Spiritual practices and traditional governance systems are deeply interwoven with women’s custodianship of seed, food and the cycles of life. For the vhaVenda clans in South Africa, for example, seed is important at every stage of life.

VhoMakhadzi Vhutanda, one of the women elders, explains: “When a baby is born, we mix all our indigenous seeds with

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millet and plant them at the gate, as a prayer to ask for the baby to be healthy. When a child is ready for initiation, seed is used. When we marry and when we die, seed is used. A woman’s role is connected to seed, because seed is about Mupo, the whole of Creation. A woman has to take care of her children, the life of her family and the community. To do this she has to take care of seed, the ecosystem and our relationship with our ancestors, who support us.”

Sabella Kaguna Julius, from Tharaka district in Kenya, shares a similar story. “Our traditional seeds are sacred to us and used for special ceremonies like the birth of a child. We take seed when we visit the child, as a gift for the mother. When we carry out ceremonies at sacred sites, women are responsible for bringing the required seeds. When we are weeding together, we sing, sharing news and tips on seeds and planting.”

So why has the exquisite role of women as nurturers of life in the home, in the community and on the land been so grossly undermined and undervalued? The industrialeconomic growth model has, by its very logic, undermined rural livelihoods. It is sadly ironic that communities, especially women, who can read the complexity of ecosystems and climatic interactions and produce food in constantly changing conditions while also enriching the soils and the diversity of seed are generally labelled ‘poor’, ‘illiterate’, ‘marginal’, or ‘backward’, and are invisible to a country’s agricultural statistics and gross national product. Meanwhile, transnational agro-chemical corporations, who push for control over the global food system and the ‘harmonisation’ of seed laws, threaten to make the practice of seed saving and exchange a criminal offence. This is a profound violation of women’s traditional roles as custodians of life.

That is why we celebrate VhoMakhadzi Vhutanda, Kaguna and other women, defiant and proud of their agricultural traditions and knowledge. They are beacons across the rural landscapes of Africa and elsewhere, resisting corporate control over seed and people’s lives. Increasingly, women are leading their communities on a journey of rediscovery, tracking down the knowledgeable elders, both women and men, who are the ‘living memory’ of community traditions and local seed diversity, to revive the seed and knowledge.

They are passionate about what they are doing, as both a responsibility and a joy – reconnecting the community to who they are: custodians for the next generation.

“By learning from the elders, we rediscovered exciting things like a pumpkin that is as big as a watermelon, but white inside. It grows well when it is dry, cooks well, and you can even feed the cows with the outer skin,” says Kaguna.

“It feels so good now to see the children planting these crops with their mothers and grandmothers. The connection has been made again between the generations. Now we can be sure that the knowledge and the seed will be passed on to the next generation. We have learnt a very tough lesson. I know we will never let our seeds go again!”

Liz Hosken is Director of The Gaia Foundation, and co-author of Celebrating African Women, Custodians of Seed, Food, Life.

The DVD and book Seeds of Sovereignty are available from www.gaiafoundation.org

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VhoMakhadzi Vhutanda (top) and Sabella Kaguna Julius Photos © Jess Phillimore/www.gaiafoundation.org

Resurgence & Ecologist

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SEED HERITAGE

A RESURGENCE OF HEIRLOOM PLANTS Zion Lights meets Simran Sethi, a champion of food freedom

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s a child I loved the film explains: “With more transparency Fern Gully. In one scene over GM products, people can choose a character says: “All the to boycott the patented seeds, and magic of creation exists support farmers who favour seed within a single tiny seed,” and that was diversity instead.” This shift of power the moment I became ‘switched on’ to from faceless corporation to individual seeds. Since then I have continued to grower is crucial to regaining the grow, save and cherish them year-round. biodiversity of the seed kingdom.

Today, I think of seeds as invisible Simran says that this is starting to bees, essential to our wellbeing and happen around the world, as “people survival but under siege from our are ... choosing to support farmers’ modern lifestyles. First, there is a markets and local, chemical-free crops problem with seed biodiversity across instead” as a way of avoiding GMOs. the globe. This is down to the fact that Simran Sethi by Cem Ersavci www.cemersavci.com This support has also led to the we now grow and eat a small variety resurgence of some heirloom plants, of grains, fruits and vegetables, mostly due to monocrop which dedicated small-scale farmers are putting time and agricultural practices. It is no longer common to find energy into acquiring and growing, not for the love of profit hundreds of medicinal herbs growing in our hedgerows, or alone, but for the love of labour and for the love of seed for bees to enjoy the nectar of endless species of flowers. Not biodiversity. only does the monocrop culture deplete the biodiversity that Simran’s talk of seeds makes my mouth water. She tells me is around us, but it also puts other seeds out of the running. of a trip to the local farmers’ market, where she saw several It is with some relief, then, that I spoke to Indian- varieties of aubergine, something that would startle many American activist Simran Sethi, named as a top 10 eco-hero of us into looking twice. “We need these crops,” Simran of the planet by The Independent newspaper for her work. tells me. “These are the seeds our taste buds crave”: the rare Simran is a champion in the food freedom arena, as she heirloom tomato like no other you have seen before, the speaks for the heirloom varieties of grains and vegetables strange squash that feels like nothing your mouth has ever whose taste we have forgotten, while speaking out against felt. These textures, smells and tastes are missing from our the large corporations that seek to own these seeds and take palates, but we have also lost something else that they have away our freedom to grow them. to offer us: the “unique seed memories” that these seeds Simran argues that supermarkets choose to produce hold – and “we must remember that cultural changes come and sell only uniform, easy-to-grow varieties of fruits, from diet changes.” vegetables and grains because it is easier to grow one crop The good news, Simran tells me, is that “in recent years at a time and to spray it with the same pesticides and the heirloom varieties of some crops have been gaining steady same amount of water. “Nowhere in Nature do we see popularity, such as some tomatoes and types of onion.” growth like this, of a single variety of crop,” she tells me. Change begins with a single, simple step. All you need In a natural woodland, the trees grow with the fungi and to do is contact an heirloom seed grower and ask for an the flowers, the bees nest in the trees, and the leaves fall to unusual seed, then sow it in a pot of compost, home-made create mulch and feed the insects on which other creatures if possible. Tend to it, water it and watch it, and when it’s feed. This is what a thriving ecosystem consists of. This is ready plant it out in the garden, in full or partial sunlight, as the essence of biodiversity. suggested by the seed donor. When it grows, leave the plant When biodiversity is discussed, our thoughts do not often to seed, so that you can save those seeds for the following turn to seeds, but this is what Simran educates people about year, sow some and give some to those who wish to be – the “precious older varieties of seeds [that] have fallen out part of the cycle. Now the seed has a new story, and when of the food chain completely”. She talks about food heritage, you pass it on, you do so along with the seed’s old story of about “the stories of individual seeds”. Seeds hold memories, where it was grown, where it has travelled, which cultures and we can learn much from the missing seeds, the varieties used to grow it. that were pushed aside in order to propagate the ‘popular’ It all begins with a single, tiny seed. And it ends with crop varieties that dominate supermarket shelves. that too.

Simran says that this preference for uniform seeds is making them into “a non-renewable resource”, and this Zion Lights writes for The Huffington Post and Green Living is why she calls seed monopolies the battleground of our Ideas. www.zionlights.co.uk time. So what can we do about it? Thankfully, a backlash The first London Freedom Seed Bank Festival takes place on against corporate control of seeds has begun, as Simran 11–12 October (p74): londonfreedomseedbank.wordpress.com

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Illustration by John Burgoyne www.johnburgoyne.com

The shift of power from faceless corporation to individual grower is crucial to regaining the biodiversity of the seed kingdom – Simran Sethi Issue 286

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SEED FREEDOM

NURTURING NATURE IS NO CRIME Vandana Shiva defends the freedom of farmers to save their own seeds

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or thousands of years farmers, especially women, have evolved and bred seed freely in partnership with each other and with Nature to further increase the diversity of that which Nature has given us and adapt it to the needs of different cultures. Biodiversity and cultural diversity have shaped each another.

Every seed is an embodiment of millennia of Nature’s evolution and centuries of farmers’ breeding. It is the distilled expression of the intelligence of the Earth and the intelligence of farming communities. Farmers have bred seeds for diversity, resilience, taste, nutrition, health, and adaptation to local agro-ecosystems.

In times of climate change we need the biodiversity of farmers’ varieties to adapt and evolve. Climate extremes are being experienced in India, through more frequent and intense cyclones, which bring salt water to the land. For resilience to cyclones we need salt-tolerant varieties. Along coastal areas, farmers have evolved flood-tolerant and salttolerant varieties of rice. These seeds need to stay in the commons to adapt resilience to climate change.

Forty per cent of the greenhouse gases causing climate

change come from an industrialised, globalised model of agriculture. Having created this crisis, the corporations that made profits from industrial agriculture now want to turn it into an opportunity to control climate-resilient seeds and climate data.

Corporations like Monsanto have taken out some 1,500 patents on climate-resilient crops. With these very broad patents, corporations can prevent access to climate-resilient seeds after climate disasters, because a patent is an exclusive right to produce, distribute and sell the patented product.

Nature and farmers have evolved the traits of climate resilience in seeds. This is not a corporate invention.

Corporations, which claim legal personhood, are now claiming the role of creator. They have declared seed to be their ‘invention’, hence their patented property. This implies that the farmers’ right to save and share seed is now defined as ‘theft’, an ‘intellectual property crime’.

In times of climate change, such monopolies aggravate the disaster by blocking farmers’ rights to the seeds they have evolved. In defining seed as their own creation and invention, corporations like Monsanto become, in the words of a

We need climate-resilient seeds in order to survive in a world of increasing extremes Residents wade through a flooded village after Cyclone Phailin hit India last October © REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

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Monsanto representative, “patient, diagnostician [and] physician all in one”. They define the farmers’ act of saving seed and having seed sovereignty as a problem. Seed as a common good has become a commodity of private seed companies, traded on the open market.

That is why, in July 2013, Prabha Sridevi, Chair of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board of India, dismissed Monsanto’s appeal

The threat to seed freedom impacts the very fabric of human life and the life of the planet against the rejection of its patent application for “Methods of enhancing stress tolerance in plants and methods thereof”. The title of the patent was later amended to “A method of producing a transgenic plant, with increasing heat tolerance, salt tolerance or drought tolerance”.

The patent office refused to grant the patent, because it was found that the application lacked an inventive step. It was merely an application of already known cold-shock protein in producing cold-stress-tolerant plants, and tolerance to heat, salt and drought conditions, which falls within the scope of India’s Patents Act, 1970.

The patent office found that the method was not patentable, because the claim also included the essential biological process of regeneration and selection, which includes the growing of plants in specific stress conditions. The Act excludes from patentability “plants and animals in whole or any part thereof other than microorganisms but including seeds, varieties and species and essentially biological processes for production or propagation of plants and animals”.

Industrial breeding and intellectual property rights, including patents on seed, fail to recognise the contributions of Nature and farmers in giving us climate-resilient crops.

Just as the jurisprudence of Terra Nullius defined a piece of land as empty, and allowed the takeover of territories by the European colonisers, the jurisprudence of intellectual property rights related to life forms is in fact a jurisprudence of Bio Nullius – life empty of intelligence.

The door to patents on seed and patents on life was opened by genetic engineering. By adding one new gene to the cell of a plant, corporations claimed they had invented and created the seed, the plant and all future seeds, which were now their property.

As the Indian patent laws recognise, life makes

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itself; life forms are not an invention, and hence biological processes cannot be treated as inventions.

Today, this freedom of Nature and culture to evolve is under violent and direct threat. The threat to seed freedom impacts the very fabric of human life and the life of the planet.

Not only are corporations like Monsanto claiming patent monopolies on climate-resilient seeds, but they are also claiming a monopoly on climate and weather data. Monsanto has bought, for US$1 billion, the US-based Climate Corporation, which controls vast data on climate.

Not only will corporations sell the chemicals and seeds adapted to their chemicals to farmers, but they will also sell climate data. This is a strategy for total control of agriculture in times of climate change.

The National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005 was a legislative proposal put forward by US senator Rick Santorum to bar the national weather service from issuing forecasts, so that climate and weather services could be privatised. In effect, the knowledge of a cyclone or a flood would only be provided to those who could pay. Fortunately the bill attracted few supporters and was never passed.

Yet the vision of the corporations, and sadly of the US government, is to privatise every aspect of life – our seeds and biodiversity, the atmospheric commons, and knowledge of the climate and weather as a public good.

At a time when the world needs to recognise that life forms, including seed, are not an invention, and that the US should correct its laws to be more in alignment with the rights of the Earth and with human rights, the US government is threatening India with trade retaliation to force us to change our patent laws yet again and introduce the unethical, unscientific and antihuman laws of patent monopolies on seed.

This is not just a US–India dispute. It is a corporate enclosure of the commons – the seeds that give us food and can adapt to climate change, and hence guarantee our right to food, the medicines that we need for our right to health, and information and knowledge about the climate.

If we are to survive as a species, we need to reclaim our commons – of seed, of climate, of knowledge – and resist the privatisation of every aspect of life.

Our commoning the seed includes creating the commons of the seed and cultivating seed freedom through seed saving, seed exchange and participatory breeding. Our commoning our lives includes the creation of Earth Democracy.

Vandana Shiva is the director of Navdanya. www.navdanya.org

Resurgence & Ecologist

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K E Y NOTES MAHATMA GANDHI

POLITICS OF PEACE In celebration of the 145th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, Samdhong Rinpoche explores the philosophy and wisdom of this leading advocate of nonviolence

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eace and nonviolence are perennial principles. All the religious traditions talk about them; they were not invented by Mahatma Gandhi. Why then is Gandhi so special in the field of nonviolence? Because Gandhi was the first person to tell us that nonviolence is not only a personal or a spiritual principle: rather it should be adopted and practised in all spheres of human life. It may be politics, it may be the struggle for national freedom, it may be the reconstruction of a nation – there is no need for violence anywhere.

Before Gandhi, people thought that when it came to worldly affairs, you could not avoid violence; that a certain degree of violence was indispensable, particularly in the management of a state. Even states like Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar who consider themselves Buddhist countries do not know how to dispense with military force, how to avoid war, how to abolish the system of capital punishment.

In this context Gandhi was the first person to say nonviolence is not only a business of personal spirituality: it is for everything. He did not just talk about this philosophically: he demonstrated practically that it can work. He believed that basic human nature is nonviolent.

Violence is the conditioning of our society, conditioning by our so-called civilisation. So Gandhi tried to bring us back to our own authentic human nature. He was not talking merely about a theory: he practised it himself. That’s why his statement “My life is my message” is very true.

If I had to choose between the two books, the Buddhist text of Dhammapada and the book by Gandhi Hind Swaraj, I would choose Hind Swaraj, because Dhammapada gives us a spiritual way in personal life, whereas Hind Swaraj gives us social, economic and political philosophy and action based on spirituality. The division between spiritual life and ordinary life has always been a basic problem for humanity.

Traditionally when we want to lead a spiritual life, we have to withdraw from society and join a monastic order. Being free from social responsibilities and leading a spiritual life may be good, but that is not the answer to the real problems

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of humanity. Therefore practising nonviolence while living within society was Gandhi’s message. He believed that we must make politics spiritual and even business spiritual.

Spirituality and social justice cannot be divided. If you meditate day in and day out, it might offer solace to your mind but it does not help you to perform your human responsibility. If you are not able to perform your human responsibility, then you cannot repay the debt you owe to society, to your family members and to your community; and without repaying that, how can you advance spiritually?

The majority of social or environmental activists are not able to succeed, because they stay away from spirituality.

When you cut off the inner world from the outer world, you have cut yourself into two halves and, therefore, you are not able to perform fully They stay away from nonviolence. It might appear that they are nonviolent but in the core of their hearts they still have reminiscence of anger. They may not indulge in physical violence, but they are not able to act from a pure heart and be free from hate and anger. That’s why most social and environmental actions are ineffective.

Gandhi’s satyagraha has been called ‘truth force’ or ‘nonviolent resistance’. Before he went on the salt march, he delayed for several months. He was just meditating. Until the inner conscience gave him the message of spirituality, he would not start any action. When he undertook fasts, he clearly stated: “I am not trying to pressurise my opponents.”

Today many people in India fast, but their intention is to pressurise their opponents or to draw media attention. That way the fasting has no value in it. It is just a struggle. When Gandhi found that his words were not able to change the

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Gandhi believed we should continue to evolve, but without destroying our roots and traditions Songs Unsung by Fiona Watson. Commissioned by Glasgow Print Studio www.gpsart.co.uk www.flickr.com/photos/fiona-watson-art

hearts of his opponents, he felt: “I’m not pure enough to change the heart of the opponents. Therefore, I must purify myself. For that purpose I will fast, and fasting is a way of purification of my soul.” This way Gandhi made fasting a powerful tool of nonviolence. His fast was an expression of love and not of fight.

People think that Gandhi was a great strategist and that he undertook fasting as a way to force his will on others.

But this is a mistaken view. The language of strategy is military language. Gandhi was not a strategist; Gandhi was trying to purify himself to bring about a change of heart in his opponents such as the British colonialists. For Gandhi nonviolence was a way of life.

Gandhi was a prolific writer. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi is now published in nearly 100 volumes.

But the essence of his thinking, his philosophy and his

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vision is in his book Hind Swaraj, which is now translated into English (published by Cambridge University Press).

In this book Gandhi condensed the entirety of his lifelong experiments. The first publication was banned by the British government. Then, after about 30 years, it was republished.

At the time of reprinting Gandhi was asked if he would like to make any changes. He said: “I find nothing to add or to alter. I stand by every word.” That means that it was the real essence of his findings, his experiments and his research. In this book Gandhi challenged the very notion of civilisation. In his view modernity and civilisation brought humanity away from Nature, and away from spirituality and nonviolence.

Hind Swaraj was written in 1909. Today there are people who criticise modernity or civilisation, but in 1909 modernity and civilisation were the ruling concepts.

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“My life is my message” – Mahatma Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi spinning cotton at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, 1925

Even religious people were saying that their beliefs could live with modernity, that religion should be brought up to date and should be made acceptable to modernity. But Gandhi completely denied that there was any goodness in so-called civilisation. He gave some very solid arguments, one of which was that civilisation separates the body from the mind and gives importance to the body and neglects the mind. This is a solid argument. Body and mind are completely interrelated. You cannot separate them and then give importance to one side and neglect the other.

Some people think that giving attention to the mind or to the spirit is the job of religion. We are politicians, social workers or business leaders; we have nothing to do with spirituality: our work is to take care of the body. When you cut off the inner world from the outer world, you have cut yourself into two halves and therefore you are not able to perform fully. Gandhi challenged this separation and fragmentation of body and mind.

Two years ago I read in a newspaper in Australia a heading that said “Never Mind Human Rights, Money Matters”. This is the real attitude of modernity. Human rights, spirituality and culture are all ornamental. The money really matters. You have to earn it by hook or by crook. If you are talking about spiritual values, then you are

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Photo © akg-images/Archiv Peter Rühe/GandhiServe

a very bad businessperson. You have to put aside all social, ecological and spiritual values in order to earn money.

Modern civilisation engages in the genocide of Nature or genocide of animals and considers that if there’s a profit, it’s OK. So this attitude has come out of modernity and particularly the modernity that started with industrialisation.

That is why Gandhi questioned the machine. He was not completely against machines, but against today’s multitude of machines, which can produce more commodities than society needs. In ancient times, things were produced by hand and with love. Gandhi recommended the Singer sewing machine because it was invented with the intention of love.

Women were unable to stitch in the light of an oil lamp and not able to thread a needle. Out of this situation, the sewing machine was invented, so Gandhi very much recommended it. Everything depends on intention and motivation. Violence, or nonviolence, is a matter of motivation.

In our industrial age, commodities are produced much more than the needs of humanity. What are the consequences of this age? One, industrialists have to find a market to sell their products. Two, they have to use raw materials indiscriminately in huge quantities, thereby having to exploit natural resources in an unsustainable manner.

Three, to find the market, they have to encourage human

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greed. Without encouraging human greed, no one would purchase all these mass-produced goods. Humanity knows what its needs are. A pair of shoes will last for three or four years. But mass-produced shoes have to be sold every year in large quantities. Therefore, people are enticed to buy shoes even when they are not needed. People are enticed to buy more pairs of shoes than they can wear. The daily change of style, the design, the shape or the colour makes things go out of fashion. Things soon become outdated. Humanity ceases to be a user and becomes a consumer. Once humanity becomes a consumer, it has lost its value.

The value of human beings is that we have intellect; we can choose. We are not slaves of the machine or the market.

The machine and the market should be our servants. But in ‘modern civilisation’ the market has become the master. We have the rule of the market and the machine, and we are in its service. That is why Gandhi said that we do not want mass production: rather, we want production by the masses.

It is fine to have a machine to help human hands, but when a machine replaces human hands it becomes dangerous. It causes mass unemployment and depletes natural resources.

Those who are producing much more than human need have researched things very well. They know how to exploit human greed. They have found that comparison and competition is the easiest and most effective way to exploit greed. So, right from their childhood, people are being taught to compare and compete.

The other obsession of modern civilisation is novelty. We have to be always new. We have to show that whatever we are doing is not the repetition of tradition, it is a newly invented idea, a newly produced item. We have to cut ourselves from continuity and tradition. You have to stand on your own achievements.

Gandhi believed that we must reform and transform tradition, without destroying it. Gandhi was not trying to consign humanity back to a primitive age. We have evolved; we should continue to evolve but without destroying our roots, our traditions and the wisdom of our ancestors.

Modern civilisation looks at primitive people as backward or undeveloped. Modernity is advanced and developed.

Modern civilisation has this arrogance about itself. Gandhi was a humble man. He respected ancient and primitive wisdom and tried to renew India by attempting to remove corruption, such as untouchability, from society.

We are all interrelated. Not a single thing exists of or by itself. Whatever I do has some connection with my family, my community, my nation and with the entire universe.

Therefore, if we are violent to others, we are violent to ourselves. Violence is self-destructive. Anyone, even a most selfish person, should not indulge in violence, because through violence he or she cannot achieve even a selfish end.

The scope and capacity of violence are totally negative. I like the statement by Martin Luther King, Jr. He said: “We cannot afford to choose between violence and nonviolence.

The choice is only between nonviolence and non-existence.”

Martin Luther King was greatly influenced by Gandhi.

Swaraj is essentially self-autonomy and self-control, selfrevelation, self-realisation and self-perception. That is why

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swaraj is a form of spiritual politics. When you are able to perceive the self, then you can hear the voice of your inner self, and that voice of your inner self will never lead you into conflict or into violence.

The purpose of swaraj is the realisation of the self, which can only happen when your inner wisdom, inner intelligence is awakened. Spirituality cannot be taught, nor can it be imposed. If something is imposed, then you need a watchdog, you need police, you need courts, in

Swaraj is essentially self-autonomy and self-control, self-revelation, self-realisation and self-perception.

That is why swaraj is a form of spiritual politics order to keep order. When morality is handed over to the government, then they keep morality in a very immoral way. Police become corrupt. The judges become corrupt.

Morality and spirituality are inborn: they arise from one’s own inner core. Gandhi said that basic human nature is good but we are conditioned to behave badly. So we have to remove the conditioning of our intelligence. The realisation of interconnectedness of mind, body and spirit is the key point. Separation of mind and body, separation of mind and matter, separation of cause and effect and the separation of the way of looking and the way of acting – all of these splits need to be healed.

There are two ways of looking at the world: you can view evolution in the form of conflict and struggle, or you can see it in the form of cohesiveness and cooperation. A seed, a liquid, warmth and soil come together. Then a tree is born. Do you see it as struggle and conflict or do you see it as cooperation? Modern science is saying that all the four elements are opponents, they are struggling, and through their struggle they destroy the seed and the new sprout comes out, whereas from the Gandhian perspective four elements come together in a cooperative way to produce the tree. The four elements are not destroying each other: they are supplementary to each other and they are able to transform the seed and produce the tree, and in turn the tree will produce the seed. All this is dependent on cooperation with each other, not on competition or conflict. The elements work in a complementary way.

The corollary of this thinking is that class struggle cannot achieve a classless society. Only class cooperation can achieve a classless society. The Marxist view fits in well with modern civilisation. Marx advocated class struggle, and Gandhi class cooperation. Cooperation is the way to reduce violence. Conflict is the way to increase violence.

Samdhong Rinpoche is a former Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile. This is an edited version of a talk he gave at the Gandhi and Globalisation Course at Navdanya, India.

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E T H IC AL LIVING URBAN LANDSC APE

City With a Wild Self That Speaks Lucy Anna Scott discovers that even in a heaving metropolis it is possible to live in symbiosis with Nature, as we all must learn

I

was, and am, a rural girl. I grew up under vast skies and spent summers straying, idling, teetering on the steep banks of rhynes, scanning the water for frogs and spawn. I grew awkwardly tall under those skies. I came of age surrounded by fields where my friends and I would bend to the will of a lazy day, as mellow as shoots of corn in a breeze. There, then, clock hands never called time: it was the hedgerows, expectant with berries, that closed the door on summer holidays. And when winter was near ready to claim the land we knew, those mighty skies paled to white and silence.

I arrived in London in September 2002, at the age of 22.

And even by then, fresh out of a university in Warwickshire, itself defined by fields, I’d rarely been surrounded by so many buildings. I had drifted to the city on a whimsical tide and docked without plan or job. Outrageously broke, too. It was about love, as many barely considered leaps of faith so often are. And faithful to a summer crafting whatnext stories under the fluttering campus oaks, I’d followed him. Followed him to a landscape fortified with so much tarmac and steel that I could only catch glimpses of the sky as spindly fragments between the tower tops.

London, his natal city, anchored him. But I was rootless, barely breathing as I negotiated my way through the tight weave of my citified environment: ill-fitting temp jobs, a concoction of cocktail bars, old friends in new, responsible suits. We failed, but the city and I did not. And over a dozen years hence, I’m still here, a Londoner.

In the early days, I survived by denying what I thought I was. The career success it promised, I told myself, would make up for the sacrifices being borne by my gypsy soul. But as the years rolled on, something changed: the city began to expose my capacity for hardness, even ambition. Meanwhile I uncovered its own multiple, competing selves, some kind, wild and spirited. And while keeping pace with the hard house London beat exposed my own tough edges, the city, in turn, revealed its softer personalities and moods to me.

A decade on, I now write about Nature in the city. A tense paradox. An awkward pairing of contrasting worlds.

These are both things you could assume. Indeed, when I set out to focus my work in this way, sceptical friends asked

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me if I worried I’d run out of things to write about, “and quickly”. I also met many who assumed that London’s natural, green space – still one third of all its kingdom – is somehow more artificial, less relevant to an understanding of what the wild is, believing it to be undermined or confined by its urban context.

More and more Londoners appeared to be re-examining what it was that made them feel truly real But the complete opposite is true. London has a wild self that speaks. It’s a side of the city that negotiates challenges in a language that’s crucial for all of us to learn, as half the world’s population will soon find itself living in cities. For me, it’s that very tension between the human-made world and the natural world in one physical place that goes to the heart of how we, as human beings, learn to live a life that bridges the two. It’s these stories, that describe this attempt at understanding, that fascinate me as a writer.

It wasn’t until 2010 that I found myself at this equator.

After six lost and miserable years as a business journalist, I quit my editing job, mindful of what the magnificent Jay Griffiths describes as the two sides: “the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose,” she roared from the pages of Wild.

For me, that was a challenge about truthfulness – not to that rural child but to something present and innate. And that summer, idling on how to follow a different path, my friend Tina Smith and I fashioned a plan to launch our own magazine. At the time London’s boom economy had exhausted itself, creating a need by those who lived there to nurture a more meaningful, self-sufficient relationship with their urban surroundings. Like me, more and more Londoners appeared to be re-examining what it was that made them feel truly real, and were finding the same answers.

All of a sudden, foraging groups, home-grown-food collectives, rooftop beehives and new community orchards

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Swallows perform aerobatics above the city

Illustration by Sue Gent www.suegentdesignandillustration.com

were proliferating, luscious green blooms spreading out across the pavements. The movement – or so it appeared to us, anyway – seemed to express something deeper about how many of us wanted, needed, to live in cities, and we urgently wanted to capture and articulate it. So we set to it, creating designs, persuading busy people to be interviewed for our non-existent publication, and coaxing other artists and writers to help us make it happen.

After a few months and many long nights in Tina’s spare bedroom-cumoffice in Tooting, we carefully pieced together the first issue of Lost in London – an indie magazine with a mission to show people that even in a heaving metropolis it is possible to live in symbiosis with Nature.

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Back then, it was a mission born out of hope rather than conviction. But ask anyone who’s seen the peregrine falcon chase lunch from the roof of the Tate, and they’ll tell you that this odd distinction we draw between the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ world is ludicrously artificial. And the more I looked, the more I realised it.

I discovered the river Thames, a pulsing natural aqueous landscape, which surges eight feet higher when the moon is at her fullest. I met a painter in Putney who visits its foreshore each day just to capture splinters of light as they strike the water’s surface anew.

I walked many miles of the capital’s Green Chain route to the city’s ancient woodlands: delicate, sweet universes lined with the spent leaves of hundreds

of years, that sing with the rarest of beings – trees, butterflies, birds. And under dusky skies, I crossed heaths in search of bats, all the kinds you’d find in any other place in Britain.

That symbiosis is not always easy to achieve. At a former dockyard in Rotherhithe I met people who’ve turned a troubled wasteland into rugged woodlands to give urban children a space to roam, as they continually fight those trying to build at its boundaries.

In the borough of Ealing, I explored a nature reserve coated in millions of bluebells (and rare plants and insects besides), where generations have held off creeping suburban sprawl since 1902 – with the latest guardians now fighting maybe its hardest battle yet: the HS2 railway project.

On a wetland in the east, I met conservationists who are painstakingly nurturing seedlings of a once widespread but now extinct London plant – the marsh sow-thistle – against the near-impossible odds created by severe habitat loss.

London’s wild self screams in struggle. But its victories and losses represent something of our ability to make space for Nature in the most pressurised of circumstances. And if we can do this in landscapes where population densities are at their greatest, there is hope.

Will I ever return to live under those mighty skies of my childhood? If that day ever comes I’ll know it was only living life in the city that taught me that the wild is not a distant place, moving ever further from the city’s walls. That the natural world in the urban context is as real as the bricks and the railway tracks. That London is a landscape with ancient contours, marshland, chalk, wood, water, and wild-hearted city-dwellers who tune in to it all. And, as I observe this natural and human world jostling together, I’m reminded of the danger, of the false distinctions between the urban and ‘other’ – if only to ourselves. And for that, dear London, I will forever be grateful.

Lucy Anna Scott is a writer and is co-creator of Lost in London, a magazine about Nature in the city. www.lucyannascott.com

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E T H IC AL LIVING EDUC ATION

Learning in a Landscape Richard Dunne suggests that what makes a good school is a process of discovery.

Pupils need experiences in education, he argues

A

s headteacher of a state primary school for over 12 years, I am constantly asking myself what our young people should learn, and why. During my teacher training, I learned plenty about how to teach. But the literal meaning of ‘education’, from the Latin educare, is ‘to draw out’ or ‘to lead out’.

So in its more enlightened format, education is not simply a process of teaching, of putting in.

Rather it is an engaging process of discovery that stimulates curiosity, nurtures passions and enables young people to lead relevant projects of learning.

With that in mind, we have developed learning in my school around five key areas: Values, Enquiry, Experience, Great Works and Leadership.

Values. Values underpin the way we live and the way we interact with the world. They are not simply words to be communicated, discussed and explored: ultimately they need to be owned, rolemodelled and lived out. But what do we value, and why? And how do we ensure our young people are able to articulate the values that they want to live by – values such as love, trust, respect and compassion? When we get that right, children start to develop a sense of their own worth and the positive contribution they can make.

Enquiry. At a deeper level, enquiry is a searching for truth. When we shift learning from an objectives-driven process to a questions-led process and we keep seeking out the truth of what we are researching, it immediately becomes more purposeful to those who are asking the questions. And of course our young people often have great questions to ask: Why are bees and bugs so brilliant? Is Antarctica worth protecting?

What is my favourite wild flower, and why? What journey does a river take?

Experience. Now the journey of learning begins and the subjects weave seamlessly through.

Importantly, the journey needs experiences to bring it to life. For that we need to seek out those in our communities who are the experts in what we need to know.

When learning about bees, what better way to understand them than to work with a beekeeper,

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put on a beekeeper’s suit and watch in wonder as the bees busy themselves on their allotted tasks?

When learning about Antarctica, what better way to learn about ice, melting and climate change than to carve a penguin ice sculpture out of a block of ice with a local sculptor? When studying wild flowers, what better way to learn than to link up with a wild-flower expert and appreciate the incredible diversity of flowers that can be found in our verges, meadows and woodlands?

And who could enable the learning of a river?

So we punctuate learning with captivating experiences that bring us into relationship with our world, and promote partnerships with those in our communities who have the knowledge and skills to inform and enrich the process.

Great Works. To make learning truly purposeful, we engage in what we call Great Works. For example, • the children run tours of our community orchards to showcase local varieties of fruit trees they have planted: apples, pears and plums; • they make traditional wooden toys and contrast them with the plastic toys of today; • they capture the awe and wonder of the rainforest by performing rainforest soundscapes to family and friends; • they apply their maths to running Fairtrade stalls; • they design, sew and embroider cotton bags to use as alternatives to the plastic bag;

The literal meaning of ‘education’, from the Latin educare, is ‘to draw out’ or ‘to lead out’ • they conclude their enquiry about Life on the Home Front by harvesting the school’s organically grown vegetables to make seasonal soups and then enjoy them with elders in our community; and • the culmination of their learning about bees is to spin off the honey from the honeycomb, strain it, pour it into jars and then label up the jars for sale at one of our regular Green Stalls.

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Learning beyond the classroom walls, Chamonix, France

The Great Works provide memorable conclusions to what the children do. They connect the children to real life, to community, and to an appreciation of how to live more sustainably.

Leadership. In our school the children lead much of what we do. We have leaders who manage our energy use, who analyse and weigh food waste before it is composted, who care for the chickens, who monitor water consumption, who weed the growing beds, who challenge the school to reduce what we throw away. And they design their own projects of change, too, each term, each year, on anything that matters to them.

They know they can make a difference. Their voice is heard.

In their final term at the school, at the age of 11, our eldest students travel by train to Chamonix, in the Alps.

The expedition is part-funded by parents, community fundraising and through business sponsorship. This keeps down the cost so that everyone can go. During their week away, the students focus on three things: First of all, they learn that if we want to see wellbeing in our world, we each have to start with ourselves and understand

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Photo courtesy of Ashley School

what we need to be well. It’s a great question to ask!

Next, they learn how to develop a strong sense of wellbeing in a community or team. They trek in teams up in the mountains, and when they tell us on arrival at the refuge that team wellbeing is seeing a need and responding to it, they are learning something very important.

Finally, they look out on the Mer de Glace, a glacier dramatically retreating 10 metres every decade due to climate change, and they consider what we can do to find a better way of living in harmony with our world, a way that sustains the balance of life for all.

Throughout their time away, they take on more and more responsibility to lead what they do. On the final morning, we visit a beautiful garden in the Chamonix valley. We look up at the mountains, and if we’re lucky we will see paragliders way up in the sky. We remind them it is now their time to fly, to take their vision of how they want to see their world and make it happen.

Richard Dunne is the Headteacher at Ashley Primary School, Surrey. www.ashleyschool.org.uk

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E T H IC AL LIVING BOTANIC AL COOKING

Blackberry Bonanza Susan Clark captures happy memories of autumnal foraging in a breakfast bowl of golden granola

I

like the word ‘bonanza’. It reminds me of the TV Western series that ran from 1959 to 1973 spanning 14 seasons and 430 episodes – many of which I watched with my brothers, Timothy, Vaughan, Jeremy and Christian.

And many of which – if it was autumn – we’d only be allowed to sit down and watch on a Saturday teatime after we’d scrubbed away the tell-tale wine-coloured fingertip stains that were the result of having spent the afternoon out blackberrying in the Devon lanes.

At least that’s what we said we’d been doing.

And whilst it’s true we would arrive home bleeding from the nasty bramble scratches up and down our bare arms and arguing about who had picked the biggest bucket-load of juicy blackberries, that’s not all we would have been up to.

Our favourite bramble patch overhung an old disused quarry a mile or so from our home, and this was our gang’s HQ. The quarry pit had long ago filled with rainwater and we had an old rotting rowing boat we secreted here for urgent escapes. Nobody knew how the boat had first arrived at the quarry or who it really belonged to, and since we would usually be the only people there, the hows and whose didn’t matter.

What mattered for blackberrying missions was that the boat gave us access to the more difficult to reach bramble patches, and with one sibling hanging onto the trouser leg of another, we would stand on tiptoe on the boat’s old bench seat and reach as far as we could to drag those branches down and pick the best of the fruits.

When we tired of this – and the way those brambles fought back – we’d simply lie back in the boat, pick the tiny bramble thorns out of our wounds, and take turns rowing each other in meaningless circles around the circumference of the pit whilst sucking the juice from the biggest berries we’d picked and then pulling the pips from our teeth.

Blackberries in childhood were also great for faking a bloody injury, especially after a clash with a rival gang.

I’d like to say this was all very innocent, but whilst there were no weapons other than hands, fists and the odd hurled stone, it’s shocking to think back to how much those gangs (average age about 10) really did dislike each other for no other reason than that they went to different schools.

Once home, where the rule was never to talk about gang clashes, whatever the injuries, my brothers had no further

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IIllustration by Caren Heine www.cheine.com

interest in the blackberries, but I would spend the rest of the weekend trying to make jam.

I say trying because (a) I was very young, (b) I had no jammaking equipment of any kind, and (c) I spent a lot of time having to scrape jam that had failed to set back out of the jar to reboil whilst I scrubbed those sticky jars clean again.

What I remember most about those early jam-making sessions is a feeling of dogged determination to end up with a jam that did eventually set, that did capture the glorious taste of sweetened blackberries and that my brothers would devour on great hunks of crusty white bread.

This autumn, I’ve made blackberry and cider jelly (I don’t really like the pips in blackberry jams) and I’ve hidden a few jars away for later in the year when the rich hedgerow harvest of blackberries will be a fading memory.

But I have also extended my blackberry repertoire and found a way to start my day with a tribute to the blackberry bonanza of autumn by making and enjoying a bowl of home-made blackberry granola.

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Into the kitchen Blackberry Granola Ingredients

To toast your hedgerow hazelnuts:

• 300g rolled oats • 2 tbsp sunflower oil • 2 tbsp clear honey • 125ml maple syrup • 1 tsp vanilla extract • 200g mixed seeds (I use sunflower, pumpkin, sesame) • 100g flaked almonds • 100g toasted hazelnuts (see below) • 50g desiccated coconut • 100g semi-dried hedgerow blackberries (see below)

As your blackberries are semi-baking, place 100g of hazelnuts on a parchment-paper-lined baking tray and allow them to toast slowly. Again, keep an eye on them, and turn them from time to time so that they toast evenly.

You want the nuts lightly toasted, not burnt.

To semi-dry your blackberries: This takes a little time and patience; select the best of your blackberries and place them on a cooling rack to allow the juice to drip down onto the tray you place underneath the rack.

You only need about 100g of the dried blackberries to make an impact, so a single tray should suffice.

Preheat your oven to 100°C and place the tray/rack and blackberries carefully into the middle of the oven to slowly semi-bake. This will take 30–50 minutes, depending on how juicy your blackberries are and the quirks of your oven. Keep an eye on them – you want semi-dried but not shrivelled blackberries in your finished dish.

Remove them from the oven.

To prepare your granola mix: Preheat your oven to 150°C. Mix your rolled oats, sunflower oil, honey, maple syrup and vanilla extract in a large bowl. Add your seeds, almond flakes and toasted hazelnuts, but keep the blackberries and coconut to one side.

Tip the granola mix onto two flat baking sheets and spread thinly. Bake for 10 minutes, check, mix, and bake for another 5 minutes.

Now add the coconut and blackberries.

Mix, spread out again and return to the oven for 15 minutes, checking and turning regularly to get an even, golden-toasted colour throughout the mix.

Remove when the granola is golden brown and then allow to cool, during which time it becomes deliciously crunchy.

Remove blackberries from the oven and leave for an hour to continue drying before adding them to your granola.

Break up any clumps and store the mix in airtight containers for up to a month.

Granola is so easy to make – and so expensive to buy – that I don’t know why I don’t make it all the time. But I had this vision of a rather luxurious-looking breakfast cereal that would be a real celebration of the autumn hedgerow by including blackberries and hazelnuts.

The challenge was how to dehydrate the blackberries without decimating them (I still don’t have the ‘proper’ kit), so I tried slow-baking them to remove most of the moisture (juice) and then allowed them to semi-dry out of the oven before tossing them into the granola.

This process was messy, but it worked, so it was worth all the clearing up after myself.

I had started with high hopes for the finished dish, but it was so pretty that it surpassed all my expectations.

Because the blackberries had only been semi-dried, a little of the remaining moisture leached into the toasted oats and desiccated coconut strands to give the finished cereal a pretty pinkish background tinge, which made a beautiful contrast to the dark purple of the baked whole blackberries

that go in for the last bout of baking.

The glory of granola is that as long as you have your basic sweetened oat mix you can pretty much make it up as you go along and include any of your favourite dried fruits, nuts and seeds.

Serve this blackberry granola with a tangy plain yoghurt for a healthy breakfast you’d pay a fortune for at Claridge’s – or anywhere else that is miles from an actual hedgerow.

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Vitality notes Blackberries are a rich source of immune-boosting vitamin C, so country folk would traditionally make bramble cordials, teas, tisanes and syrups to use throughout the winter to help stave off the common cold and other ailments, including sore throats and chest infections.

Susan Clark is a food editor and writer. This column was shortlisted in the 2014 Fortnum & Mason food writing awards.

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E T H IC AL LIVING WINE

Natural Resistance Robin Lee explores the complexities of wine-growing in Burgundy

B

urgundy is good at names, which in wine are rather magnificently called ‘appellations’.

Burgundy has 22 regional, 53 communal, 585 Premier cru, and 32 Grand cru appellations.

In Genesis, Adam named every animal and plant because naming, defining and dominion go hand in hand. Burgundy has dominion in the world of wine.

The great wines of Burgundy have become an international obsession because so little is produced.

Consequently, land in the appellations has become very expensive. Wine is a form of artisanal agriculture that makes serious money. Since the Grand cru wines are priced out of reach for most people, there is much interest in the Premier cru wines. This effect trickles down the hierarchy to village wines, and the wines of obscure villages that no one ever used to bother about. All in all, it no longer makes sense financially to grow other things besides grapes in the appellations.

So grapes have become a monoculture. Outside the appellations, land that is unsuitable for grapes is being intensively farmed, mostly for corn. Is this a reason for the new blight, flavescence dorée, which has now arrived in Burgundy?

Flavescence dorée kills grapevines and severely reduces yields. It is being compared to phylloxera, the noxious insect that was accidentally imported from North America to Europe at the end of the 19th century and nearly obliterated viticulture. Flavescence dorée has no known cure. Affected vines must be uprooted and the vineyard sterilised – a devastating prospect for those who live by their vines. For prevention, the only solution is to eliminate the supposed vector, the cicadelle, a tiny leafhopper insect that plagues Burgundy in ever-increasing numbers.

Gregory Jones, viticulture research climatologist at Southern Oregon University, says that climate change could be part of the problem: “Many of our pathogens have limits depending on climate. A small change that is almost imperceptible to us can dramatically change the geographic range and the frequency of generations of a pathogen.”

In response to the threat of another plague like phylloxera, in 2013 the regional authorities in Dijon decided that all the vineyards in the region had to be sprayed against the cicadelle. However, many growers refused to comply, including many of Burgundy’s most illustrious domaines, even though both the organic and the biodynamic regulatory bodies approved the sprays and they are used in organic and biodynamic vineyards

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throughout France. One famous biodynamic producer, who does not wish to be named, told me: “We have these diseases for a reason. There is an imbalance. Spraying will only make the imbalance worse. We are going to have to learn to live with flavescence.” This producer, like others I spoke to who share this view, openly admits to buying the required sprays, not using them, and keeping the receipts in case of challenge by the authorities.

Another grower, Emmanuel Giboulot, who refused to go along with this subterfuge, was prosecuted. His

In an age where each small producer is his or her own boss ... who is there to uphold communal faith in terroir? wines are not so famous or so highly regarded, and possibly all the publicity surrounding his case was good for his business and made him better known.

The famous biodynamic domaines who decided not to spray tend to be reticent about defining themselves as biodynamic, and uneasy about being portrayed as rebels against the authorities that govern the appellation system. After all, their great wines are defined first and foremost by the illustrious appellation names, the names of Burgundy’s famed terroir.

Giboulot gives good reasons for not spraying. The prescribed spray is not a selective treatment that kills only cicadelles. Spraying kills all kinds of insect, including beneficial ones. Beekeepers in the region are among his fervent supporters. Giboulot also objected to spraying without conclusive proof that flavescence dorée was in the near vicinity of his vines.

He is concerned that there is no proof that spraying against cicadelles is even a solution to the spread of the flavescence, since the disease is so little understood, and alternative treatments have not been fully explored.

In Burgundy, people live in close proximity.

Vineyards are mostly family-owned. Winemakers in Burgundy are not famous consultant oenologists.

They are the sons of their fathers, and the daughters of their mothers, who handed the vineyards down to them. Since the Napoleonic Code stipulates that an inheritance be divided equally, historic vineyards have fragmented into tiny parcels over a few generations.

Sometimes just a row of vines is all that gets handed

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Vineyards surround a village in Saône-et-Loire, France

down. Communities have evolved, each with its way of doing things. Each village, and each vineyard in the village, has its distinctive style. The way one person treats his vines affects his neighbour’s. In the case of spraying, it cannot be effective if everyone does not do it. Many small producers in the region are angry with Giboulot because if a vineyard is infected the consequences will affect everyone.

Until recently a few big merchants in Burgundy had tremendous power and influence on the region’s viticulture.

They would buy the grapes and the wines from the small growers, blend them, and sell the wine under their own label. Today, thousands of small producers bottle their own wine and market it themselves. Giboulot, for example, asks a high price for his wines, even though his vineyards are on the fringes of the appellation, where other crops such as fruit trees used to grow.

The big négociants, a few elite producers, and a small number of wine critics, who once decided what Burgundy’s wines should be like, no longer have absolute power. In an age where each small producer is his or her own boss, where a famous critic’s opinions matters less than the judgements exchanged by sommeliers on Twitter, and where scientific methods of analysis are the basis of ever more technical wine jargon, who is there to uphold communal faith in terroir?

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Photo © Michael Busselle/CORBIS

Biodynamics and terroir are two systems of belief that are not rational. Both lack a scientific basis of any kind.

Interestingly, these two beliefs guide the thinking of the most sophisticated minds in wine. In Burgundy there is an intense confluence between the two. The vineyard holdings are so small, so precisely delineated and so valuable that any trouble taken (no matter how painstaking, time-consuming or expensive) is amply repaid. For the top producers it is practicable to deal with each individual plant on a separate basis, rather than spraying a whole field from a tractor.

But is this really biodynamics? One of Rudolf Steiner’s main principles of agriculture is maintaining a diverse ecosystem, which would preclude a monoculture of grapes, especially grapes grown to produce wine. “The bad effect of alcohol on the brain function”, he wrote, “has been scientifically shown, and knowledge of spiritual things is made completely impossible through its use.”

Belief in terroir, however, which is undoubtedly native to France and conducive to wine, rules out taking an individualistic stance against the prefecture. The great domaines of Burgundy profoundly understand that freedom has a price, and it is a price that they do not want to pay.

Robin Lee is a writer based in London.

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E T H IC AL LIVING OCC ASIONAL DIDYMUS

Green with Age John Moat narrates a story of Nature’s forgiveness

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rowing old gracefully – or even better, disgracefully – is a liberating experience. I recommend it.

Especially when one is secure within the sturdy columns of Resurgence & Ecologist, where ageism poses no threat. Or not to me, because our Editor, with the consistency that is one of his hallmarks, is consistently and perennially one month older than I am.

The Editor puts himself about in the green cause a great deal more than I do… but does this, I wonder, show seemly respect to his assemblage of years? For my part I contend that there is nothing more actively green than senior inactivity. For instance, when I come in from putting myself about, not globally but locally, in the garden, and sit on the third step of the stairs to remove my boots… and don’t remove my boots because I’m overcome by an unquesting content that holds all motivation in suspense, I find myself in unregistered certainty that at this moment I am the world’s most engaged green activist. Look at my boots; look at the prohibited footprints I trace to the backdoor: mud, yes, but of carbon not one jot.

I should confess that when this impeccable absence of mind becomes conflated (I’ve never used that word before and am a little unsure as to its meaning) with senior activity in the garden, it, too, can be a threat to the environment. Last December for instance, I noticed that our glorious Viburnum tomentosum had layered a satellite of great promise. There was a vacant lot awaiting it far side of the garden. I dug round it with a spade, but the ground was stony and I couldn’t adequately loosen it. Stubborn, but I knew what to do: when men need to bring Nature into line they employ a machine. I fetched the car and the mighty rope I’d salvaged 30 years before from the beach. The adrenalin was flowing.

I quickly looped one end of the rope round the bush, the other to the car’s tow-bar. I leapt aboard (yes, I still leap), started up, first gear and let out the clutch. Bang: no give!

Brave bush, I thought. I reversed a yard and tried again. Ah, this time! I got out of the car to survey the surrender. My survey was prolonged, aghast, disbelieving. Absent-minded?

No, this was criminal dotage. I stood there tearful, like King Lear facing the dead Cordelia, “a foolish, fond old man” – surveying the fallen glory of my most favourite, about to come into flower, Lonicera purpusii, winter-flowering honeysuckle. I had… you won’t believe this: I had roped the wrong shrub. All but torn it out by the roots.

But this is a story of Nature’s forgiveness. I ran my guilt and grief into the house, where I was disciplined by Antoinette (my wife) and despatched back into the garden with instructions. I restaked the honeysuckle, dressed it with the sweetest compost, and watered it with penitential tears and rescue remedy. Next day, without additional violence, I completed the transplant of the viburnum. It was one month later, testing a January day of boreal iciness,

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Illustration by John Moat

that I was frozen in my tracks. Not the burning bush, but full glimmer no less in the wintry light: the honeysuckle, winter’s starry welkin, in unprecedented flower.

And yesterday, a leap from that now to this, into midMay’s gloaming, I’m the other end of the garden. Look, the endorsement of this new viburnum arrived in its sudden lacy flower. One now to another… I’m in sudden free fall back 50 years. Evening. New to the garden. Doctor, who had himself worked 30 years to bring the garden up out of a meadow, is so present I’m convinced I saw just now the old man bending over his rose. Maybe that day, or maybe the next, in memory of the Doctor I would start on the poem I called Reverie for Child and Garden. It began… It begins: I inherited the garden towards dawn And keep it with a very moderate art But this may prosper now a child is born To simplify complexities of heart…

Which makes me smile, since recent evidence suggests that “moderate” may have been overstating it. I start back towards the house, trying to remember what “towards dawn” was meant to imply. A simple metaphor? So then, what of evening? Would that ever become metaphor for my time of day? So I say the poem aloud until… until let’s say I catch up with myself – at the end: At evening I have the clearest sight Of the real directors of my garden’s life.

As birdsong softens and the querulous light Subsides, so all the inmates of my daily strife (the tout, the tramp, the over-perfect knight) Withdraw, and then the gardeners arrive With delving learned beyond time-torn repose To tend my child, and bud my blighted rose.

John Moat’s latest novel, Blanche, is published by The Write Factor. www.thewritefactor.co.uk

September/October 2014

Be Free The oranges are squeezed hard and look what happens, delicious juice with clarity and substance, with nourishment, a different state of matter with the same freshness.

So don’t be afraid when life squeezes you hard, the state of matter within existence will change for the better, there will be freshness and clarity but most of all, it will also release your seeds and let them free. – Niti Majethia (a 16-year-old Indian student) Issue 286

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U N DERCURRENTS SC ARCITY

A Beautiful World

A world of plenty surrounds us, if we open our eyes and hearts

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The Dreaming Tree by Rob van Hoek www.robvanhoek.com

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of Abundance Charles Eisenstein suggests that if we can free ourselves from the artificial perception of scarcity, we could meet our real emotional and spiritual needs

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carcity is one of the defining features of modern life. Around the world, one in five children suffers from hunger. We fight wars over scarce resources such as oil. We have depleted the oceans of fish, and the ground of clean water. Worldwide, people and governments are cutting back, making do with less, because of a scarcity of money. Few would deny that we live in an era of scarce resources; many would say it is dangerous to imagine otherwise.

Yet it is not hard to see that most of this scarcity is artificial. Consider food scarcity: huge amounts, as much as 50% of production by some estimates, are wasted in the Western world. Vast areas of land are devoted to producing ethanol; vaster areas still are devoted to America’s number one irrigated crop: lawn grass. Meanwhile, land that is devoted to food production is typically farmed by chemicalintensive, machine-dependent methods that may actually be less productive (per hectare, not per unit of labour) than labour-intensive organic agriculture and permaculture.

Similarly, scarcity of natural resources is also an artefact of our system. Not only are our production methods wasteful, but also much of what is produced does little to further human wellbeing. Technologies of conservation, recycling and renewables languish undeveloped. Without any real sacrifice, we could live in a world of abundance.

Perhaps nowhere is the artificiality of scarcity so obvious as it is with money. As the example of food illustrates, most of the material want in this world is due to lack not of anything tangible, but of money. Ironically, money is the one thing we can produce in unlimited quantities: it is mere bits in computers. Yet we create it in a way that renders it inherently scarce, and that drives a tendency towards the concentration of wealth, which means over-abundance for some and scarcity for the rest.

Even wealth offers no escape from the perception of scarcity. A 2011 study of the super-wealthy at Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy surveyed attitudes towards wealth among households with a net worth of US$25 million or more (some much more – the average was US$78 million). Amazingly, when asked whether they experienced financial security, most of the respondents said no. How much would it take to achieve financial security? They named figures, on average, 25% higher than their current assets.

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If someone with US$78 million in assets can experience scarcity, it obviously has much deeper roots than economic inequality. The roots lie nowhere else than in our ‘Story of the World’. Scarcity starts in our very ontology, our selfconception and our cosmology. From there it infiltrates our social institutions, systems and experience of life. A culture of scarcity so immerses us that we mistake it for reality.

The most pervasive, life-consuming form of scarcity is that of time. ‘Primitive’ people generally don’t experience a shortage of time. They don’t see their days, hours or minutes as numbered. They don’t even have a concept of

When you know enough is enough, you already have enough. But when you don’t know enough is enough, you never have enough!

– Chinese proverb hours or minutes. “Theirs”, says Helena Norberg-Hodge in describing rural Ladakh, “is a timeless world.” I have read accounts of Bedouins content to do nothing but watch the sands of time pass, of the Amazonian Pirahã fully absorbed in watching a boat appear on the horizon and disappear hours later, of native people content to literally sit and watch the grass grow. This is wealth nearly unknown to us.

Scarcity of time is built in to the ‘Story of Science’, which seeks to measure all things and thereby renders all things finite. It delimits our existence to the boundaries of a single biographical timeline, the finite span of a separate self.

Scarcity of time also draws from the scarcity of money.

In a world of competition, at any moment you could be doing more to get ahead. At any moment you have a choice whether to use your time productively. Our money system embodies the maxim of the separate self: “More for you is less for me.” In a world of material scarcity, you can never ‘afford’ to rest at ease. This is more than a mere belief or perception: money as it exists today is not, as some teachings claim, “just energy”; at least it is not a neutral energy. It is always in short supply. When money is created as interestbearing debt, as ours is, then always and necessarily there

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This abundance that surrounds us is a kind of wealth often unknown to us: A Hilltop Paved with Gold by Rob van Hoek

will be more debt than there is money. Our systems mirror our collective perceptions. “More for you is less for me� is a defining axiom of separation. True in a competitive money economy, it is false in earlier gift cultures in which, because of widespread sharing, more for you was more for me. Scarcity conditioning extends far beyond the economic realm, manifesting as envy, jealousy, one-upmanship, social competitiveness, and more.

The scarcity of money, in turn, draws from the scarcity of love, intimacy and connection. The foundational axiom of economics says as much: human beings are motivated to maximise rational self-interest. This axiom is a statement of separateness and, I hazard to say, loneliness. Everyone out there is a utility-maximiser; all are in it for themselves.

You are alone. Why does this seem so true, at least to economists? Where do the perception and experience of aloneness come from? In part they come from the money economy itself, which surrounds us with standardised, impersonal commodities divorced from their original matrix of relationships, and replaces communities of people doing things for themselves and each other with paid professional

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services. As I describe in my book Sacred Economics, community is woven from gifts. Gifts in various forms create bonds, because a gift generates gratitude: the desire to give in return or to give forward. A money transaction, in contrast, is over and done with once goods and cash have changed hands. The two parties go their separate ways.

The scarcity of love, intimacy and connection is also inherent in our cosmology, which sees the universe as composed of generic building blocks that are just things, devoid of sentience, purpose or intelligence. It is also a result of patriarchy and its attendant possessiveness and jealousy.

If one thing is abundant in the human world, it should be love and intimacy, whether sexual or otherwise. There are so many of us! Here, like nowhere else, the artificiality of scarcity is plain. We could be living in paradise.

Sometimes I lead a workshop activity that involves prolonged mutual gazing between two people. After the initial discomfort fades and the minutes go by, most people experience an ineffably sweet intimacy, a connection that penetrates through all the superficial posing and pretence that define daily interactions. These pretences are much

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A kind of obscene excess accompanies each dimension of scarcity on our planet: hunger side by side with obesity; drought with flooding; energy shortages with profligate waste; loneliness with virtual hypernetworking; crushing debt with huge excess banking reserves; bloated houses with shrinking public space.

I could go on to mention many other kinds of scarcity that are so normal in our society as to escape notice: scarcity of attention; scarcity of play; scarcity of listening; scarcity of dark and quiet; scarcity of beauty. I live in a 100-year-old house. What a contrast there is between the regular, factoryperfect commodity objects and buildings that environ us, and the old radiators in my house, clanking and hissing all night, with their curved iron, their irregular valves and connectors, made with a touch more care than they needed to be, that seem to possess a quality of life.

We have maximised our production of the measurable ... at the expense of everything qualitative: sacredness, intimacy, love, beauty and play

Rob’s work will be on show at The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle upon Tyne, from 12 September–17 November www.thebiscuitfactory.com

flimsier than we would like to think – they cannot withstand more than half a minute of real seeing, which is probably why it is considered rude to gaze into someone’s eyes for more than a couple seconds. That is all the intimacy we typically allow ourselves. That is all the wealth we can handle right now. Sometimes, after the activity, I will observe to the group: “Can you imagine – all that bliss is available all the time, less than 60 seconds away, yet we go for years and years without it? Experiencing it every day, would people still want to shop? Drink? Gamble? Kill?”

How close is the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible? It is closer than close.

What need, beyond basic survival needs, is more important to a human being than to be touched, held, groomed, seen, heard and loved? What things do we consume in futile compensation for these unfulfilled needs? How much money, how much power, how much control over other people does it take to meet the need for connection? How much is enough? As the Boston College study implies, no amount is enough. Remember that, the next time you think greed is the culprit behind Gaia’s woes.

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I drive past the strip malls and big box stores, the parking lots and car dealerships, office buildings and subdevelopments, each building a model of cost-efficiency, and I marvel: “After 5,000 years of architectural development, we’ve ended up with this?” Here we see the physical expression of the ideology of science: only the measurable is real. We have maximised our production of the measurable – the square feet, the productivity per labour unit – at the expense of everything qualitative: sacredness, intimacy, love, beauty and play.

How much of the ugly does it take to substitute for a lack of the beautiful? How many adventure films does it take to compensate for a lack of adventure? How many superhero movies must one watch to compensate for the atrophied expression of one’s greatness? How much pornography to meet the need for intimacy? How much entertainment to substitute for missing play? It takes an infinite amount.

That’s good news for economic growth, but bad news for the planet. Fortunately, our planet isn’t allowing much more of it, nor is our ravaged social fabric. We are almost through with the age of artificial scarcity, if only we can release the habits that hold us there.

From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity.

From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off.

From the scarcity of meaningful labour comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation. Is it any wonder that we are wreaking havoc on this planet?

Charles Eisenstein is the author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (North Atlantic Books). www.charleseisenstein.net

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U N DERCURRENTS WAR AND PEACE

Removing the Thorn (St Jerome, or Androcles and the Lion)

© PJ Crook/Robert Dandelson Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library

The Power of Nonviolence The use of violence to solve human problems is uncivilised, says Satish Kumar

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he idea of nonviolence is very simple and yet very profound. There is nothing new about this idea.

The principle of doing no harm to others, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, is as old as the hills. However, putting the principle into practice is much more difficult and complex.

Nonviolence works on three levels: the first is nonviolence to ourselves, as we cannot be compassionate to others if we are not compassionate to ourselves – I cannot save someone from drowning if I am drowning myself. Therefore taking care of myself is not selfish. When I am being angry, I am being violent to myself; I am punishing myself for the mistakes of someone else. Thus anger is violence. Similarly anxiety, inferiority complex and cynicism are also violence to oneself. Freedom from fear is a prerequisite for peace

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in the world. To bring peace in the world we have to make peace with ourselves and practise nonviolence in our personal lives; in our thoughts and speech. Aggressive thoughts and harsh speech lead to conflicts and wars.

The second level is social and political nonviolence.

Colonialism, racism, exploitation of the weak, poverty, social injustice, sexism and all kinds of discrimination against others are forms of social and political violence.

It is easy to recognise the violence of weapons, wars and terrorism, but what is more difficult to recognise is the institutionalised violence that is built into the system of economic inequality and political oppression, which eventually leads to war and terrorism. Therefore the pursuit of a just and equitable social order is an integral part of the principle and practice of nonviolence and peace.

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Religious teachers have often limited the scope of nonviolence to the personal sphere. The practice of kindness and generosity at a personal level is promoted, but at a social, economic and political level an unjust and unfair order is often tolerated. However, nonviolence activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela highlighted the paramount importance of challenging the institutionalised violence of political and social systems.

When we follow the path of nonviolence, we do not hate the human beings who may be in positions of power and presiding over the unjust order. This is a very fine line to tread: hate the sin, but not the sinner. Martin Luther King did not hate white people: in fact, he loved them and respected them as human beings even if he did not like their system. Thus he was not against white people, but against the system of racial discrimination. He said that it is easier to love your friends and those who agree with you, but that the test of true compassion is to respect your opponents and yet fight against their injustice. The power of love and nonviolence are capable of changing the heart of your opponent, and as a consequence changing the system.

I had the pleasure of meeting King in 1964. He told me that nonviolence is more than a tactic, even more than a strategy, to bring an end to racial discrimination.

Nonviolence is a way of being, a state of mind that leads to right speech and right action.

Mahatma Gandhi, who was an inspiration to King, was following a similar path. He said that he was not against the British and that they could live in India as his brothers and sisters without any problem – but that he was against British colonialism, imperialism, materialism and industrialisation.

He went on to say he would oppose any system based on the exploitation of others, even if it was practised by the Indians themselves.

Nelson Mandela set an example of nonviolence after his release from 27 years of imprisonment. He said that revenge should not be taken on those who had perpetrated the violence of apartheid, and that he wanted to practise forgiveness through truth and reconciliation, because revenge is as much violence as apartheid. He concluded that you cannot extinguish fire with fire, violence with violence, or apartheid with revenge. Under the leadership of Mandela and Desmond Tutu, South Africa set a shining example of nonviolence in practice.

King, Gandhi and Mandela showed that nonviolence does not mean non-resistance to injustice. In fact, acceptance of racism, colonialism and apartheid is itself violence, and therefore they used the power of nonviolence to fight those injustices and they proved that the power of nonviolence was greater than the power of the white establishment or the British Empire or the police state of the apartheid regime.

Albert Einstein said that a problem could not be solved with the same mindset and the same tools that created the problem in the first place. The corollary of this statement is that you cannot solve the problem of violence with violent methods. You need to find an antidote to a violent system, and that is the way of nonviolence. The ends do not justify

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the means. Noble ends must be pursued by noble means.

There is no way to peace: peace is the way.

When one is engaged in nonviolent struggle, one does not expect an easy ride. One is prepared to sacrifice one’s comfort, even one’s life. When Gandhi was brought to the court of justice, he pleaded guilty to breaking the British law, which he considered unjust. He asked the magistrate to give him the harshest punishment in the book. When he was sentenced to imprisonment, he said he would go to jail as a bridegroom goes to the wedding chamber. Gandhi spent 12 years in jail. King and Mandela were also imprisoned.

These three examples show that nonviolence can be more effective than violence in bringing about social and political change. But nonviolence must not come from a position of weakness: it must come from strength. Nonviolence is the way of the brave and courageous.

The way of nonviolence is more democratic than the

Unless we can learn to make peace with Nature we will not be able to make peace either with ourselves or with humanity at large way of violence. Men, women, young, old: everybody can participate in the process of the nonviolent movement for social change. The power of nonviolence is ultimately people power. Millions of people can withdraw their cooperation from the oppressive system. However, only a few can take part in an armed struggle. You have to have training in the use of weapons. You have to have funds to acquire the weapons. Such guerrilla warfare can be waged only by a small minority. It is not easy to build a mass movement based on weapons of violence. Therefore nonviolence is a prerequisite for the people’s movement and democratic participation of all. Violence is violence, whether it is practised by guerrilla groups or by governments. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, no matter whether the eye is taken legally or illegally!

The 20th century was a century of violence: World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and, more recently, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the list is long, and civilian and military deaths number in the millions. What did we gain?

The national and international conflicts are still with us.

Wars bring more problems than solutions. We are supposed to live in a civilised time. War is uncivilised and barbaric.

We should be at the stage of human evolution when we can solve all our problems and disagreements through civilised means. It is ironic that the more a country is ‘civilised’, like the USA or countries within the EU, the more weapons of mass destruction it possesses. When will we learn that war and violence are out-of-date and uncivilised methods of achieving peace and national or international harmony?

Perhaps this centenary year of World War I is as good a time as any to renounce war and make a pledge for peace.

Solving all our conflicts through peaceful means and without

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The Dove, the Tiger and the Angel

resorting to war is, and ought to be, common sense, but sadly common sense is no longer common these days. Any fool can make things complicated; it requires a genius to make things simple. The simple truth is that through compassion and negotiation we can achieve better results than through wars and violence. Fools wage war. The wise make peace.

The third level of nonviolence is that of nonviolence to Nature. Modern humankind looks at Nature as something to be exploited for economic growth and for human benefit.

We act as if we were on a mission to conquer Nature. The way we treat animals in factory farms, the way we pollute our rivers and oceans, the way we destroy rainforests, and the way we poison our land with pesticides and herbicides are all acts of violence against Nature. Unless we can learn to make peace with Nature we will not be able to make peace either with ourselves or with humanity at large.

Personal nonviolence, political nonviolence and planetary nonviolence are three dimensions of one single truth: the truth of learning to live in harmony with ourselves, whoever we are; with others, whatever their race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or political persuasion; and with Nature, accepting the limits and constraints of the finite Earth.

Thus nonviolence is a total philosophy embracing all

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Š PJ Crook/Robert Dandelson Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library

aspects of our lives. This means not only that we oppose war, injustice and consumerism through nonviolent methods, but also that we build communities, social organisations, economies and politics based on nonviolent principles.

As Gandhi said, we have to be the change we wish to see in the world. A life of elegant simplicity, local economy, human-scale business, decentralised politics, conservation of Nature, protection of wildlife, compassion for animals and respect for the rights of Nature are all part of positive nonviolence to construct a nonviolent social order.

The Green Belt Movement in Kenya is a supreme example of the positive action of nonviolence. Twenty million trees were planted under the inspiring leadership of Wangari Maathai, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize. There are millions of groups and individuals engaged in small or large actions of this kind. They are the true heroes and heroines of our time, creating a nonviolent future for all.

Thus nonviolence has two aspects: resistance to injustice, and sustenance of a just system. That is why nonviolence is more than a technique: it is a way of life.

Satish Kumar is the author of Soil, Soul, Society (Leaping Hare Press). This is an edited version of an article first published in the June/July 2014 issue of Red Pepper. www.redpepper.org.uk

September/October 2014

THE GREATEST CRIME To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognise and yet when it comes to the greatest crime – waging war on another state – they praise it! ...

If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white. ...

So those who recognise a small crime as such, but do not recognise the wickedness of the greatest crime of all – the waging of war on another state – but actually praise it – cannot distinguish right and wrong. So as to right or wrong, the rulers of the world are in confusion.

– Mozi, China, c.470–391 BCE

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U N DERCURRENTS PHILOSOPHY

Beautiful Days An extract from Warwick Fox’s new book On Beautiful Days Such As This: A Philosopher Sings the Blues and Restores His Soul in Greece

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have long been drawn to the Tang dynasty poet Li Po’s way of describing our predicament and pointing towards its remedy:

Since water still flows, though we cut it with swords, and sorrow returns, though we drown it with wine; since the world can in no way answer to our craving, I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishing boat.

I follow Li Po’s example in my fashion: after getting through another dreary English winter, and another round of coping with the toomuchness of things in my working life, I have come once again to the Greek islands in order to restore myself. More positively, I have come here in order to feel more alive. Yes, that, ultimately, is why I return again and again to the Mediterranean, the ‘middle of the earth’, and to Greece in particular, the mother of the Western adventure, because it quickens my sense of being alive. Although moments of feeling truly alive seem to come unbidden, somehow there just seems to be a greater chance of being struck by them here. This has been true of my visits to Greece over many years now and it remains true notwithstanding Greece’s current difficulties.

The irony here, though, is that I, a latter-day example of the Western philosophical tradition, have returned to Greece, the birthplace of that tradition, in order to escape from my philosophical work for a while – or at least from its workaday institutional pressures. Even so, taking to a fishing boat in this way allows me to look back at the shoreline in a more detached and appreciative way than I was able to manage before I left it. It allows me the time and space in which to remind myself of what it was that drew me to philosophy’s kaleidoscopic halls of enchantment, enlightenment and perplexity in the first place, and of why I came to do the kind of philosophy I do.

I remember that I began my university career by pursuing not philosophy but rather experimental

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psychology, and by doing so in a ‘tough-minded’ way too: my fourth-year undergraduate honours dissertation was a heavy number-crunching experimental study entitled The Alpha Rhythm as an Electrophysiological Indicant of Hemispheric Specialization in Humans. (Let’s face it: some of us just have a gift for titles, right?) But then I drifted, maybe not as far as Mae West of “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted” fame, but I drifted nonetheless. I become lured, initially, by philosophy of science: Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and all the rest. Although I’d also studied philosophy as part of my undergraduate degree, the intense interest that was being focused on and generated by the philosophy and sociology of science at the time – the mid-1970s – led me to move, via philosophy and sociology of science initially, more and more towards philosophy in general.

But how to pursue philosophy in the contemporary world, with its many pressing problems, without getting lost in undue abstraction, logical mazes, and intellectual forms of smoke and mirrors? You know the old joke, “How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?” Answer (delivered in one’s best Oxbridge accent): “Well, it rather depends on what one means by ‘philosophers’, and ‘change’, and ‘light bulb’.”

Or consider this example of ‘what can happen’ if you get your philosophical light bulb working but forget to turn it off. Once, I happened to be walking along the same street as another philosopher I knew. After our preliminary hellos, I ventured to make casual, passing-thetime-of-day conversation with him by asking how his wife (of 20 years) was. (My wife and I had recently been introduced to her at a dinner party.) He then proceeded to talk quite seriously about the ‘epistemic problem’ of knowing how one’s partner is. I could see his point, up to a point, of course, and, indeed, I have written on ‘theory of mind’ – that is, our ability to be aware of the awareness of others – myself, but, you know, there’s a time and a place. Or so I tend to think, yet some philosophers seem always to

September/October 2014

Returning to the roots of philosophy to discover a new way of thinking

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Vatersay 4 by Kevin Marston/www.kevinmarston.com

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be ‘on’. In my colleague’s case, this matter seemed to vex him so much that he dilated on the subject for the full five minutes or so that it took us to walk from one end of the street to the other, and I never did get a clear answer to my casual enquiry as to how his wife was.

When we reached the end of the street and were about to head off in our different directions, he suddenly thought to enquire, by way of social reciprocation I suppose, how my wife was. “Fine,” I said. And he seemed momentarily stunned by the surety with which I could be so casually certain that my wife was indeed ‘fine’, which indeed she was. (Get a grip, man.) I double-checked when I got home, too: “Fine,” she said.

How, then, to pursue philosophy in this day and age without getting ‘lost in (philosophical) space’? That was the question. For me the answer was to wed my interest in philosophy with my ‘real world’ concerns about the state of the world around us. I knew then, and it has been becoming even clearer since, that the life-sustaining capacities of the planet on which we live are being threatened on a planetary scale by the sheer ongoing impact of our human numbers, rates of consumption, and technologically amplified power.

In their line of work, human ecologists do not worry about the real-world implications of the E = mc2 formula so much as those of the I = PAT formula, which is far less well known but at least as important in the larger scheme of things. What human ecologists mean by this formula is that human impact (I) is a combined function of population (P), multiplied by affluence (A) (which refers to the average level of consumption), multiplied by a factor that is weighted so as to reflect the environmental impact of the technology (T) that we employ to produce, transport and dispose of the goods and services we use. And ecologists know that the world as we know it can just as ‘easily’ end in a long, painful whimper as in a more or less instantaneous bang.

(Y’all have a good day now, hear?)

If we think of Robert Oppenheimer as “the father of the atomic bomb”, then there is a strong argument for thinking of Rachel Carson as “the mother of the environmental movement”. Historians of ideas and others who study social and political developments typically date the birth of the environmental movement as a vigorous, temporally continuous, geographically widespread and increasingly well-organised social and political phenomenon to the virtual explosion of interest that attended the 1962 publication of Carson’s book Silent Spring. It is therefore not surprising that Robert B. Downs included Carson’s book – along with the Bible and works by such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Marx and Freud – as the most recent of the 27 entries in his many times republished Books That Changed the World.

In Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, my first book (which, of course, did not change the world), I noted in the opening chapter that, Although Silent Spring was primarily concerned with the question of the biological damage we were doing to the world and, particularly, to ourselves, it was clear that, at another level, Carson’s book was also

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an indictment of our arrogant conception of our place in the larger scheme of things. For Carson, our ecological thoughtlessness was matched only by our lack of philosophical maturity. In the last paragraph of her book, Carson concluded that “the ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.” The effect of Carson’s critique was to suggest to many people that what was needed first and foremost in regard to ecological problems was not bigger and better technical solutions but rather a thorough rethinking of our most fundamental attitudes concerning our place in the larger scheme of things.

Coming of age in the context of the threats posed by both environmental destruction and nuclear weapons, which is to say, as part of a generation that was informed by Rachel Carson’s legacy just as much as Robert Oppenheimer’s, I felt profoundly alienated by the kind of ‘instrumental rationality’ that could view the making of weapons of mass destruction as a ‘technically sweet’ problem (Robert Oppenheimer’s term for the challenge of building the first atomic bomb) and that turned the world around us, including human beings, into just so many ‘resources’ to be utilised. I therefore experienced a palpable sense of

I felt profoundly alienated by the kind of ‘instrumental rationality’ that could view the making of weapons of mass destruction as a ‘technically sweet’ problem relief, and even liberation, when I came across the then newly emerging area of ‘environmental philosophy’, and particularly the ideas associated with an approach within that field known as ‘deep ecology’.

These ideas not only expanded and amplified Carson’s critique of what she referred to as the “Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man”, but also offered the “thorough rethinking of our most fundamental attitudes concerning our place in the larger scheme of things” that I was looking for. They were life-enhancing rather than lifethreatening; ‘vitally rich’ rather than ‘technically sweet’. As far as I was concerned, they had a real ‘charge’ about them, an intellectual sex appeal.

They still do, even if I’m no longer living with them in the way that I used to. Instead, I have gone on to develop more detailed ideas of my own – I discuss these in a later chapter in the book from which this section has been extracted – but first loves in anything are owed their due, and I’m more than happy to pay mine here.

Warwick Fox is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Lancashire. His new book is available online from Amazon. www.warwickfox.com

September/October 2014

Gather yourself, O Poet and arise.

If you have courage bring it as your gift.

There is so much sorrow and pain, a world of suffering lies ahead – poor, empty, small, confined and dark.

We need food and life, light and air, strength and health and spirit bright with joy and wide bold hearts.

Into the misery of this world, O Poet, bring once more from heaven the light of faith. – Extract from Call Me Back to Work by Rabindranath Tagore

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U N DERCURRENTS NARRATIVES

New Stories to Live by

The power of magic lies in the depths of the Earth amongst the roots, rocks and mud

Moonrise-Sunset by Paul Klee © akg-images

What we need now are not lonesome heroes, but heroic communities – Robert Holtom 46

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Robert Holtom finds many parallels between our world and that of Earthsea, as imagined in the novels of Ursula Le Guin

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rsula Le Guin’s Earthsea books are some of the most magical, beautiful and inspiring tales I have ever read. She wrote the first three between 1968 and 1972 and they tell of the heroic deeds of Sparrowhawk, a powerful mage (Le Guin’s terminology for men who use magic). Twenty years later, she revisited the land of Earthsea and wrote three more books, which explored the post-heroic lives of the protagonists. She looked at what happened to the heroes once the monsters had been slain, and in doing so dramatically rocked many of the assumptions and institutions that the original stories had been founded upon.

As the books progress they become increasingly subtle and complex – where we thought there was one point of view, we discover a myriad of subjectivities, and under the dominant monoculture we find a world teeming with many ways of life. As these changes occur, the Earthsea books come to better represent the world we live in, a world where we cannot rely on simplistic, monolithic narratives and instead must learn to live within thriving diversity and complexity. These heroic and post-heroic tales have much to tell us about the stories we tell ourselves and the challenges we are facing, suggesting that the answers we seek are much closer to home than we might have thought.

Introducing Earthsea Sparrowhawk is a young man from Gont, one of the many islands in the Earthsea archipelago. As he grows up he demonstrates a rare gift for magic and is taught by witches and sorcerers, until he travels to the school of magic on Roke Island (long before Hogwarts!). There he is taught the Old Speech, which reveals the true names of things, thus granting a mage power over them. He is told not to use the Old Speech in vain, as it will upset the Equilibrium: that which keeps the world balanced. He also learns his true name in the Old Speech – it is Ged – and how he must guard it and share it only with those he most trusts, for knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them. As his adventures progress he encounters all manner of challenges – in an act of adolescent arrogance he unleashes a shadow into the world, from which he flees only to learn that if he wishes to defeat it he must confront it; he battles with dragons; he rescues the young priestess Tenar from the underground labyrinths of Atuan; and he sails the western seas with the young Prince Arren, crossing into the land of the dead and preparing Arren for his reign of Havnor, the chief isle of the archipelago.

However, for all the heroism and epic beauty of the first three books, there is much lacking in the world of Earthsea. For the stories we read are stories of men, as women with magical abilities are forbidden to study at the School of Roke and are degraded as common witches, allowed only to deal in healing charms and so-called lesser forms of magic. Meanwhile, Tenar is introduced as part of an all-female cult that is malicious and cruel. She taunts Ged at first but eventually he wins her round

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and takes her from the tombs of Atuan. Whilst Ged would not have been able to navigate the tombs without Tenar’s help, the story still smacks of the captured princess rescued by a dashing hero. Furthermore, book three ends with Arren’s ascension to the throne of Havnor. With the initiation of his reign there is the assumption that now a king is back on the throne, peace will reign across the lands. It all seems a little too ‘happily ever after’.

Things Change “All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.”

– Ursula Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea So, 20 years later, when Le Guin returned to Earthsea she discovered that much had changed. She takes us back to Gont, where we find a cowed Ged, who lost his powers in his final act of heroism, and Tenar, a widow tasked with the responsibility of running a farm. From the mythic we arrive at the mundane, and there we discover different sorts of challenges: raising a family, growing sufficient food, surviving the day-to-day. However, there is still room for the heroic in this world, as Tenar adopts a young girl who was beaten and left for dead by her parents and captors. They return to taunt Tenar and threaten her, and we see how characters once steeped in magic must defend themselves, not from dragons and wizards, but from the far more disturbing brutality of the everyday.

As the stories develop, many assumptions of Earthsea are rocked. We learn that the School of Roke was founded hundreds of years ago by a group of women called the Hand; that the vow of celibacy made by wizards is more a tool of control and exclusion than a guarantor of their magic powers; and that whilst the magic of male mages rises up like fir trees, the magic of women has deep roots like brambles. Perhaps most importantly, we learn that the power of magic might not lie in the arcane texts studied at Roke, but in the depths of the earth amongst the roots, rocks and mud. So all that was simple and carved in stone is rendered complex and earthly.

As Le Guin’s stories progress, the narratives become more subtle simply because they become more human. Truisms are questioned, women gain a voice, and hegemony is challenged. However, as the complexities mount, one simplicity shines forth: the power of love – Tenar and Ged’s love for one another, the love of the women of the Hand and their desire for freedom from tyranny, and even the love of power, twisted and warped though it is. Thus increasingly complex tales of identity and human striving are threaded through with the unifying theme of love, and it is the power

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of this love that sees these protagonists venture forth into changing and uncertain times.

Modern Parallels There are many parallels between our world and the fantastical world of Earthsea. We are often presented with very strong, simplistic narratives founded on common assumptions. For example, the pervasive stories of economic growth, of modernity and its guarantee of progress, and of how science holds all the answers. These may seem like compelling narratives, but life is not simple. So these grand meta-narratives of growth, modernity and progress must not be taken at face value: they must be scrutinised.

I do not need to elaborate on the problems of relentless economic growth, or the idea that progress only takes us forward and we should never look back, or the myths of modernity and how we, the rational and scientific few, have risen above our primitive peers and ancestors. No, these critiques are already widespread. Instead I wish to focus on what comes next, once our big stories have been found wanting. What lies on the other side of what has been called ‘narrative collapse’, when the stories and seeming certainties we live by come crumbling down?

The similarities with the Earthsea canon are clear. The first three novels follow strongly the archetypal story form of the hero’s quest as popularised by the 20th-century mythologist Joseph Campbell. In brief, the quest is this: a young hero is called to action, leaves home, learns new skills from mentors, begins a quest, faces trials, proves his heroism and eventually triumphs.

So Ged does all these things. But the hero’s quest itself is one of those questionable, overly simplistic narratives. For example, it is masculinist, as heroes are predominantly men, and women are rendered trophies or temptresses; it is individualistic, as it invests the hero with paramount importance; and it promotes the myth of the self-made man so popular in our time of celebrity culture and idolised entrepreneurs, as if these people made themselves from nothing.

However, the loss of Ged’s powers at the end of book three is a crucial turning point in the series, as he, the now magic-less mage, experiences his own narrative wreckage.

He retreats back to Gont, and what he discovers there, on the other side of his story, is the same world of Earthsea, but very, very different. Thus, as he loses his powers, he gains a new way of seeing that involves perceiving the subtleties of magic beyond male dominance, the beauty of the everyday, and the role of women in society.

So, when we turn our gaze back to our homes and look beyond the simple narratives that seek to control us, we may spot the same places and the same people, but we also find there is so much more to discover. We find amazing legacies of activists, throughout time, who have striven for peace and justice. We discover the enchantment of the everyday and the mundane, rather than the rarefied and airbrushed.

We learn also that we no need longer need to hold out for a hero, because we, together, are the heroes of the story; we are indeed the people we have been waiting for.

Thus our stories should tell not of lone heroes solving all the world’s problems but of heroic communities who band

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together in difficult times and strive to create something better. And we are more than heroes as we play many parts – we are mentors, guardians, teammates, adversaries, lovers, and bit-parts in the lives of others, and as our myriad stories necessarily intertwine, a larger societal storyscape is woven.

The fabric of this storyscape is strong, but it can also fray, which is why that thread of love is vital. As we are bombarded with narratives of division and hate, as an even bigger wedge is driven between the 1% and the 99%, as we are encouraged to blame those from different countries for our woes, as the youth are written off as feral and untrustworthy, so we can greet these ill-conceived, manipulative narratives with love, and only together can we ensure that our patchwork storyscape is no longer so loose at the seams.

The stories we live by are crucial because they have a tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Just as the mages of Earthsea learned the consequences of excluding women from their counsels, so too are we learning the consequences of objectifying the very world we live on.

However, this is not a call to stop telling stories: far from

We no longer need to hold out for a hero, because we, together, are the heroes of the story; we are indeed the people we have been waiting for it, for, as Mary Midgley writes, our imaginative visions are central to our understanding of the world. Instead we must adapt our symbolic techniques, our narratives and metaphors, to embrace the diversity and complexity that the world presents. This begins with first questioning the dominant stories of the status quo and then offering our own more nuanced ones in return.

So where might we find such stories of heroic communities, of people acting together for the common good? Well, here for starters, in the pages of this magazine, and also at home. Our own communities are rife with people working tirelessly to care for their families and neighbourhoods; there is so much brilliance and beauty in the everyday. And we need to hear these stories now more than ever, to remind us that we are not alone and that there are alternatives to the destructive stories of the status quo. Turn also to Earthsea: there is so much wisdom there. As the saga unfolds, watch how the huge history of peoples integral to the Archipelago’s success grows; read of the women of the Hand who together founded the great school of Roke; and read of all those whom Ged held dear and how they saved him from the dark, just as he saved them – we can learn an awful lot from this magical, mythical archipelago. It seems the hero’s quest, the story of the self-made man, is an undernourished myth, and instead we must gather ourselves and our stories – for what we need now are not lonesome heroes, but heroic communities.

Robert Holtom is a writer, playwright and storyteller.

September/October 2014

TA B O O S E T H I C A L L I V I N G

Light from the Dark Side Seeing Nature in the raw gives children valuable awareness, says Ros Coward

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recent wildlife series on British television followed some small birds over three weeks as they nested, laid eggs and raised their chicks. One episode included a gory incident: some crows raided the nest of a particularly appealing bird, killing and eating the chicks. This led to the presenter explaining that although corvids (the crow family) have had a sinister reputation, associated in some mythology with death and darkness, their behaviour should be seen in the wider ecological context. They resort to an opportunistic kill when a food source presents itself, but what they mainly do is the very unscary job of clearing up dead and decaying material.

Many such species have been reviled in mythology – wolves, vultures, hyenas, rats, foxes, bats, to name but a few. But now environmentalists emphasise their role in the wider ecology, dismissing earlier thinking as projections of human social fears onto the natural world: these creatures were ‘evil’, a source of horror, because they appeared to break social taboos – some hunted sneakily at night, some associated with dead flesh, some had ‘excessive’ sexual appetites or particularly disgusting (i.e. non-human) habits. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, recently criticised this mythologising by suggesting that fairy tales with their supernatural versions of Nature were damagingly irrational.

But while we no longer need ‘evil creatures’, do we need to shun any suggestion of a darker side of Nature? I raise this because there are some who, equally emphatic about ecological interrelatedness, are at ease with using Nature’s darker side as a source of metaphor. This is in the areas of natural play and ecological psychology.

American writer Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods argues that children suffer from ‘Nature-deficit disorder’, needing to rediscover unstructured play in Nature.

In the UK, Tim Gill advances similar ideas. Their main focus is on the value of play in Nature to foster self-reliance, confidence and creativity. Environmental psychologist Louise Chawla observes that playful immersion in Nature is also often a precursor for the development of environmental activism.

But all hint at another value: this freedom also feeds the imagination, allowing children to “create their own play and enter Nature through their own imaginations”, as Louv puts it. Ecological psychology fleshes this out: free play in Nature helps the healthy integration of the personality.

Children don’t just gain scientific knowledge and selfreliance, but also use what they witness to process feelings through the imagination. Witnessing the range of natural behaviour, including that which seems scary, revolting and random, provides vital metaphors for life, as does having access to a variety of natural locations. Secret places, scary places and tranquil places provide children with metaphors for their range of emotions.

Richard Kerridge’s book Cold Blood is ostensibly about

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Illustration by Helen Dent www.helenandapen.blogspot.co.nz

the ecology and cultural place of amphibians. But it is also a personal memoir about childhood contact with Nature.

Fascinated by amphibians, he learned everything he could about them, and this fascination – love – fed his escapism.

He also learned about sex, violence and horror, as when he discovered a toad infected by toad fly. He gives graphic details of the fly laying its eggs on the toad’s back. The eggs hatch into maggots, which crawl into the toad’s nostrils, where they “settle and begin eating their way through the nostril walls in all directions, reaching the brain after several days”. Kerridge concludes: “Nowadays, we do not consider some animals to be demonic, but if ever there was a candidate for rational demonisation, the toad fly is one.

Yes, the fly is merely reproducing in its evolved fashion. Yes, it has found an ecological niche, a livelihood. But what a truly dreadful niche it is.”

I like this term ‘rational demonisation’, which allows for scientific rationalism but also acknowledges repulsion. Even Dawkins rowed back from his apparent blanket dismissal of fairy tales, admitting they probably aren’t harmful. Quite right, because fairy tales often reflect that Nature can indeed provoke feelings of dread. Like human life itself, Nature is redolent with arbitrary death, accidents, fear, failure of resources, and remorseless instinctive behaviour. Children free to observe Nature closely witness this and process it as part of life through their imagination. So when the crows snatch the chicks, it shouldn’t make us hate them as evil or fear them as a threat. But nor is it out of order to shudder.

Ros Coward is a journalist whose work has been published in The Guardian.

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A RT S POETRY

Blessing the Biosphere Peter Abbs greets new, ecological writings by Helen Moore and Lynne Wycherley

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wo recent volumes of poetry demonstrate the growing power and authority of ecological poetry: poetry that affirms our place in Nature as verbal witnesses, sensitive participants and ethical protectors.

Helen Moore’s new volume, Hedge Fund, is explicitly about survival. The poems are lyrical, but they often have a cutting political edge, exposing the ways in which an unfettered capitalism is threatening the beauty and diversity of our planet. Memorably, she counts the sad gaps in our hedgerows and enumerates the losses.

Lynne Wycherley’s new and selected poems, Listening to Light, draws on five previous publications and includes a further anthology of subtle new work called Perseids. Her poems, with their exquisite eye for detail and their sense of the vast and encompassing, reveal a fine ecosensibility in balletic action.

The Fallen A growing number of wildflower species are on the edge of extinction – according to The Vascular Plant Red Data List 2005, nine native species have been lost within the British Isles.

Here lies Ghost Orchid; once haunted Beechwoods – rest in peace.

Here lies Small Bur-parsley; legion pot-herb of wastelands – rest in peace.

Here lies Alpine Bladder-fern; crosiers lost from damp highland rocks – rest in peace.

Here lies Cottonweed; assieged from Britain’s beaches – rest in peace.

Here lies Purple Spurge; eternally procumbent – rest in peace.

Treasure Trove Survey of English Dialects, Northern Counties In a country of the past a young Bird, freshly shocked from its shell, was no standardised date-stamped nestling, but a bare-arse, biddy, gollop, bare-golling, raw gorbet, lile bird, pudding kite, red-raw kellick, new hatched one.

Here lies Marsh Fleawort; ditched from fens, unrecorded – rest in peace.

Here lies Downy Hemp-nettle; the deceased passed unremarked from fields – rest in peace.

Here lies Summer Lady’s-tresses; style totally outmoded – rest in peace.

Here lies Lamb’s Succory; succumbed to high-yield wheat – rest in peace.

And with each plant, its embedded companions, the unknown biota lost to steady human pressure – may your souls also rest in peace.

Hedge Fund by Helen Moore is published by Shearsman Books.

Poetry is edited by Peter Abbs. www.peterabbs.org

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September/October 2014

Cow Parsley with Bees by Alex Egan www.alexegan.co.uk

In a Summer Wreathed with Bees Heath-brushed and orchard bees, ‘starline’ and ‘golden’ bees, I watch you weave from vetch to thyme. Listen: how the rock-rose sings.

Mason and red-miner bees, you busk through summer, a vibrato in heather; the drowsy leaves are basking in your sound.

Honeybees: ever-hum.

Accomplices of wind and sun, you follow ciphers, u.v. lines on bell and stem.

Feral bees in chestnut furs, black-haired bees on northern moors, coal-dipped and dwindling.

We thrive: you fall – In dreams I try to call you – I hear your songs grow hesitant and thin.

The world you gave us teeters on your wings.

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Shape-shifter Shy as a hind, he’d slip down to the dark water to breathe its ciliate shadows into life or flick a thumb in the stream’s cold skin so galaxies slipped and ran in silver eddies.

Ruffed with awns, late drifts of the sun he’d skim the hill behind our barn to salt its nape with stars – pyrite, zircon – and trail an icy rustle past our sills.

Illiterate, I’d scan his light, faint spore floating beyond the trees, their bleak calligraphy.

Far from the farm, the stream’s cool braids he rides neutrinos, quantum waves.

A sea-otter in the infinite.

Water-beads, fissile worlds flung from his coursing back.

Apple Tree in Blossom No words pure enough to speak this tree, its scented poem, white silk. Is a life long enough to learn its language, intricate branches, its thousand routes into sky?

See: its stars are not pinned to unreachable boughs, the burn of the absolute blue but float, whisper-close, in wild aromas. I breathe and see the universe through its heaven and the blossom makes a bride of me, snows on my skin. Marries me to the world again the fragrant and the green, the longed-for return as grain by crushed grain the years’ stored pain crumbles.

Hardpan dissolving in blossom, light’s kiss.

Listening to Light by Lynne Wycherley is published by Shoestring Press.

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A RT S PAINTING

Above the Blue, 2013 (Acrylic on linen, 100x100cm) by Govinda Sah Azad

Photo © Jonathan Greet/October Gallery, London

Journey into Deep Space For Govinda Sah ‘Azad’, painting is a process of self-discovery

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I

was born in Nepal, south of Everest and close to the Indian border. Most people there are subsistence farmers, growing rice, wheat and various vegetables on good, fertile land. But in the rainy season the nearby Kosi River frequently bursts its banks, causing disastrous flooding, and many people lose their lands and often also their lives. I was the fourth of six children, and my parents worked hard to feed and look after us properly.

As a young boy I was very shy, so I spent a lot of time by myself. I was always interested in how things worked, so if, for example, a radio fascinated me, I’d open it up to see where the sounds came from. I’d always try to sketch things out to understand them better, and I filled pages with drawings of the insides of things. Since my family couldn’t afford any extra paper, I’d cut pages from my brothers’ schoolbooks to make my own ‘sketchbooks’. I couldn’t stop myself, and when they discovered another missing page, they’d punish me! Still, I was determined to draw things even though no one taught me how. It all just poured out from inside my head.

One day in Kathmandu, on my way to work I saw some painted canvases – exactly the sort of paintings I’d always dreamed of doing – drying in the sun. I knocked on the door and announced to the older man who came down that I wanted to paint like him. That man, Krishna Gopal Ranjit, was a wellknown Nepalese artist, and he encouraged me to go to the Fine Art College to study painting seriously. I took him as my guru, followed his advice, applied and was accepted.

My ideal was to immerse myself totally in painting, and to travel and record everything through the lens of my art. In 2000, I made an 80-day cycle tour crossing from eastern to western Nepal, during which I discovered the amazing diversity of people and places in my country and produced 72 oil paintings. I stayed on the road, painted on the streets, stopped in schools to teach, and gave hands-on demonstrations of how to paint, in order to draw attention to the importance of art in our lives. That was at the height of the Maoist insurgency, a dangerous time to be travelling alone. But I protected myself with the mantram ‘The 21st century is the century of art and peace’. I received wonderful hospitality everywhere and held many ‘pop-up’ shows along the way.

My work portrays those transcendent energies surrounding us all, and of which we humans, with all our complexity, are just a tiny part. Many emotions began to surface spontaneously within my cloud studies, and these constantly shifting energy patterns, both inner and outer, intrigue me. In works like Emotion in Motion and Above the Blue I’m exploring this interface between clouds and emotions, using both as metaphorical representations of energy transforming between different states. Clouds become a visible means of suggesting the wonders of the invisible. What I’m imagining is so much easier to represent visually than to describe in words!

I work by building up layer upon layer of oil and acrylic paints so that the painted surface becomes saturated. The detail is in the textured layers. Just as the micro and macro levels get lost inside each other, I often lose myself in this detailed process of layering. So I might begin by painting a cloudburst to represent

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Govinda Sah ‘Azad’ © Jonathan Greet 2010

The paintings talk to me, and I respond, initiating an extended conversation between the canvas and me my feelings about something, before realising I’m working on the birth of a star or journeying through deep space towards some mysterious planetary system. Here I am, fixed on this Earth, examining my own emotional responses to things; at the same time, my imagination is exploring alternate realms outside of me, which somehow seem hidden just beneath the surface within me.

Painting becomes this continual process of losing myself.

At the simplest level, I forget about who I am. That everyday consciousness just disappears, and the process of painting takes over. The paintings talk to me, and I respond, initiating an extended conversation between the canvas and me. They question me constantly: “What are you doing?”

“Why do you think that?” I reply using paint. During these dialogues, ideas arise within me, surfacing through the mysterious process of painting. My paintings come out of such encounters. They record, not things I know, but images I bring back from imaginary journeys into the unknown: encounters with mysterious Nature or perhaps with unfamiliar parts of myself. Knowledge exists outside all of us, and for me painting is the activity by which I reach out to discover it. The truth isn’t just within us: it surrounds us. I know it exists out there and, sometimes – if I really stretch – I can just about touch it.

This is an edited version of an article courtesy of Gerard Houghton, who is responsible for Special Projects at the October Gallery. www.octobergallery.co.uk For more information on Govinda Sah ‘Azad’ visit www.govindasah.com

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A RT S GALLERY

Coming Home Laura Coleman argues that environmental art should be recognised as a critical medium for addressing ecological change

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hat is the purpose of environmental art?

When, in 2012, I was thinking about setting up an environmental arts organisation, that was the question I was repeatedly asked.

Today, One Network for Conservation and the Arts (ONCA) is a charity, gallery and performance space in inner-city Brighton that uses creativity to address issues of ecological change. We organise and host exhibitions, outreach, community engagement and debate. We have attracted patrons including Green Party MP Caroline Lucas and the writer Robert Macfarlane, provided exhibition space and inspiration to over 4,000 artists and young people, and covered topics from the ice melt to biodiversity loss and plastic pollution.

And yet, for many, an environmental arts initiative is out of place in the city. It belongs in the domains of the ecoenthusiasts, buried deep in forests or fields. It deals with elephants and tigers, seas and mountains. It is pleasing, beautiful, even awe-inspiring, and yet rarely does it earn a place in the ‘high art’ galleries.

In the 1960s, a movement of land artists brought a new form of environmental art that integrated rather than separated subject and viewer, artist and Earth. Led in the UK by the likes of Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy and Chris Drury, it is work from Nature, in Nature. Land art is ephemeral and fleeting, and draws comparisons between the erosion of life, Earth and time. However, despite the acclaim received by its major proponents, land art still holds hints of the stigma. But now, as our recalibration of place is becoming ever more urgent, environmental art is stepping closer to the limelight, becoming an art form that is an essential and critical medium for our understanding of the coming future.

At the heart of all ONCA’s exhibitions is the need to process and engage with the changing planet whilst acknowledging the necessity to stay within modern culture. We address the question of how we can live within towns and cities, and still, through emotional, creative and positive engagement, effect the greatest change possible.

Thus the concept of home, in the multitude of ways it can be understood or explored, lies very much at the core of our projects. In June, we exhibited a moving image installation called Seed to Seed by the Italian artist and

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Smoke and Mirrors (Heathland Series No.2) by Ellie Davies www.elliedavies.co.uk Part of The 100 Project: A Making of Trees

At the heart of ONCA’s exhibitions is the need to process and engage with the changing planet film-maker Lorenza Ippolito. Ippolito is interested in the connections between identity, belonging and nostalgia, and whilst on a trip to Navdanya in northern India she started researching the traditional art of seed keeping. In Navdanya, campaigning against multinational domination of food production works to preserve this ancient approach to safeguarding biodiversity. Traditionally, local farmers save and exchange seeds across generations. However, due to increasing pressure to substitute local seeds with genetically modified, branded seeds, the land grows weaker, and many farmers are unable to afford the pesticides and fertilisers new seeds are dependent on. As a result, these seed keepers are spiralling into debt and even suicide.

“For me,” says Ippolito, “the story of the seed keepers was symbolic of the impact of globalisation, not only on biodiversity but on cultural diversity too. Every action has a reaction and I wanted to explore what happens when

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Seed to Seed installation (pictured in gallery) by Lorenza Ippolito

communities such as the Indian diaspora are displaced.

How is a new sense of belonging created?”

Back in the UK, Ippolito became fascinated with the spread of Indian communities throughout the world: “By using the seed as a metaphor I drew out ideas about heritage and social ecologies of place, to create a piece that explores personal stories about making a home in a culture different from one’s own.”

The result is an allegorical piece combining audio, photography and moving image, using digital media to portray the broader impact of environmental change. It tells an important story about cultural displacement, the links between human and environment, and what happens when globalisation starts to impact on both.

What, then, if we looked from new perspectives at this idea of displacement? After Seed to Seed, ONCA launched three projects that focused on forests – exploring how trees and the animals (both human and non-human) that interact with them are consistently being rooted and un-rooted.

The first was A Making of Trees. Artists and young people created 100 forest-inspired artworks, alongside which we are planting 100 new trees in central Brighton – a project that we aim to complete by the end of 2015.

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Photo © Francesca Moore

The second was A Living of Forest. Through an exhibition entitled Exile, encompassing puppetry, writing competitions, workshops and debates, we asked artists and audiences to “become animal”, and experience the forest through different eyes.

The third project was A Changing of Home, launched in September with a solo exhibition entitled To the Trees by emerging artist Jennifer Hooper. Hooper lived in a Bolivian refuge (Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi) for exotic animals rescued from the black market, and she witnessed daily evidence of jungle deforestation. The animals had been taken by humans from the wild homes that they knew, and whether confused or content in the refuge they now live in, they are and forever will be displaced. This exhibition, like many of the projects at ONCA, is about the necessary recalibration we must all now undertake. Whether we are human, jaguar, bird, tree or polar bear, how do we understand and find our place – our home – in this changing world?

Laura Coleman is the Director of One Network for Conservation and the Arts, Brighton. The exhibition Exile is open until 14 September, and To the Trees from 18 September to 12 October. www.onca.org.uk

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A RT S HUMBLE MATERIALS

We are rewarded by the wondrous only if we take the time to sharpen our eyes to her world

Agog at Small Things Andy Christian admires an artist who makes the invisible visible

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s a small child in her native Germany, Susanna Bauer was taught to crochet; but she was not interested in making the usual blankets and covers, but rather in making tiny items in fine cotton thread. They mirrored the matchbox-sized world that fascinated her. She grew up in the Bavarian countryside, where she could further explore the small things that most adults simply pass by unseeing. Her acute observation and her appreciation of the miniature along with her craft skills led her into a career in model making. She made props for the film industry, for advertising and for animations. That career was largely city-based and made her restless for time to spend closer to Nature once again.

Before Bauer moved to Cornwall permanently, on her short escapes from London she began to crochet once more and to combine that work with found objects. In the most subtle of her interventions on pieces of wood she added outcrops of crochet like a dome of mould or an unusual fungus. These are easily missed by casual viewers. In other works, two leaf forms are linked by tenacious threads as if some strangely ordered spider had left an unyielding net.

We are rewarded by the wondrous only if we take the time to sharpen our eyes to her world. A combination of fine craft skill, a concern for small things and collecting found objects has made up her vocabulary.

Aura by Susanna Bauer

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September/October 2014

We might imagine the whole world in the single leaf of a magnolia tree Octagon by Susanna Bauer

More recently, Bauer discovered magnolia leaves.

Magnolias are ancient trees and some fossil forms of them may date back nearly 60 million years. They preceded bees, so they rely on beetles to pollinate them. Bauer’s primary interest has been in their leaves. She has homed-in on one particular tree and collects some of the leaves it sheds throughout the year. These fleshy leaves are robust and they have a wide range of sizes and a broad palette of colour, depending on when they fall. Some are scarred by weather or by insects. Others have their fine veins exposed but clinging to their more substantial skeletons. Bauer collects and selects them and then they people her studio awaiting further consideration for transformation.

Whether Bauer cuts and realigns, patches holes or makes three-dimensional forms from the leaves, the attuned viewer will become aware of the extraordinary nature of the acute vision and dexterous fingers that enable her to put these works together. The crochet is visible and it is stitched through leaves that must be quite brittle and prone to tearing. Bauer has become sensitive to the qualities of each leaf and to what each might allow her to add to or to manufacture with it. But the crafting is so subtle that it does not call attention primarily to itself: it always remains the means to the making of the overall work. The combinations of leaf and thread, wood and thread, thread and stone are the source of her metaphors.

Bauer seems understandably shy and unwilling to try to elucidate or decode the allusions in her work. It is as if she

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Susanna’s work is on show at Arte Sella, Italy until 31 September. www.artesella.it

sees her role as making visible the invisible. If she were to try to write down meanings it would nail the work and not allow its focus to shift for each viewer. Our attention is called to something we may not have considered or begun to understand. In a very simple way, we can consider each magnolia leaf as a person. Each certainly has a personality.

Each bears the scars and traces of its life and each echoes its small part of that larger body, the root and branch of the whole tree and a seasonal life in the world. Indeed, we might begin to imagine the whole world in the single leaf of a magnolia tree.

Bauer has begun to work with small branches in combination with leaves. Some of the leaves are stitched into place and others are curled into cones like lone wasps’ nests. The branches have all the vigour of sprightly, drawn lines and they are selected to dance with one another in white box frames. This gives them a curious status, as if they had been collected as specimens by an eager naturalist.

This contextualisation helps viewers to focus and maybe to afford closer examination. Around her studio sit pieces of beachcombed detritus, lines of leaves queuing for her consideration, a huddle of twisting sticks and empty boxes awaiting inhabitants. It is a place where the humblest materials will find the nimblest of fingers to join them together in ways that can provoke and awaken us.

Andy Christian is a writer and an adviser to small businesses. www.susannabauer.com

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The Wealth of the Few David Boyle asks, what is the purpose of the economy, and is ours at all fit for purpose?

Capital in the Twenty-first Century Thomas Piketty Harvard University Press, 2014 ISBN: 9780674430006

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hen economists start getting compared with rock stars, you know something peculiar is going on.

What have the two categories got in common after all, except perhaps their commitment to strange worlds where the rules are not quite the same as they are for ordinary mortals?

The important question is probably not why the media have taken to calling Thomas Piketty the “rock star economist” – which is anyway mildly tongue-in-cheek – but whether the extraordinary reception of his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, all 700-plus pages of it, really reflects a major shift in thinking.

Piketty is a man of the left, a 43-yearold professor at the Paris School of Economics. He was not a household name until a few months ago – and perhaps he isn’t now – and his book was only published in English this year. What makes him interesting is first, that he dared fly in the face of mainstream economics to talk about equality – a big no-no for the current economic consensus – and second, that he pioneered statistical techniques, along with others, that allowed him to measure it.

And measure it he did, right back to the 18th century in Europe and America, borrowing from the insights

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of Jane Austen and other great contemporary critics along the way.

What he found was that the 1% now take as much as a fifth of all income in the UK and the USA, just as they did before World War I. This is not really a revelation, even if the statistics are. In the UK, inequality was pinpointed back in 2009 in The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which took an alternative statistical approach. What the PikettyPickett combination suggests is that the postmodern economy seems to have been designed to funnel money upwards to the very rich. It is the precise opposite of trickle-down.

What seems to have turned Piketty into a rock star from a best-selling economist – achieved in May 2014 in New York – was the wholehearted enthusiasm of the doyen of liberal economic commentators, Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Review of Books almost at book length himself.

Piketty certainly has a novel approach to telling the story, but – as one of my colleagues suggested – economics books get rock star coverage not so much when they really say something new (people just ignore that), but when a familiar idea is finally accepted. We applaud loudest when someone laboriously confirms our existing opinions.

That said, of course, the fightback has begun. Chris Giles in the Financial Times suggested that small statistical mistakes undermined the Piketty case.

The state of the argument is that Giles’ attack failed, but the argument has barely begun.

“This latest attempt to debunk the notion that we’ve become a vastly more unequal society has itself been debunked,” wrote Krugman, dashing to Piketty’s defence. “And you should have expected that. There are so many independent indicators pointing to sharply rising inequality, from the soaring prices of high-end real estate to the booming markets for luxury goods, that any claim that inequality isn’t rising almost has to be based on faulty data analysis.”

What happens now is that the world will argue, first, over whether it matters, and then over what to do about it.

This is where radical economics comes in. My own book, Broke, argued that the way we had organised the financial services industry was simply corrosive of the middle classes, hoovering up wealth and – if it prevents damage

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The postmodern economy seems to have been designed to funnel money upwards to the very rich. It is the precise opposite of trickle-down

Illustration © Matt Mahurin www.mattmahurin.com

to the industry itself – bankrupting its clients. The Lloyds of London scandal in the 1990s showed just how far they would go to protect the financial status quo, and the whole charade was repeated again, on a unimaginably bigger scale, after the 2008 banking crash.

Piketty doesn’t put forward much of a manifesto, beyond the super-Fabian idea of a global wealth tax. It isn’t clear from his book either that he is much aware of the challenges of global warming or the potential redistributive power of local energy. Or that he has much to say by way of a solution, beyond the usual business of redistribution using a new tax system.

So while the statistics are important, I have a feeling that the debate is moving on. Not only is the planet now crucial to the economy, but also taxing people is not the obvious solution – the wealthy simply avoid it. The truth about income tax is that for the mega-rich it is now almost a voluntary contribution.

It is possible to imagine other kinds of tax that are not avoidable in quite the same way – on resource usage, or fossil fuels. But the next agenda for policymakers is at least a little clearer, if they dare: it is to make sure that the rewards

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of business and investment get distributed more fairly in the first place, so that they don’t have to be redistributed later by cumbersome bureaucracies.

I find myself harking back, not so much to Keynes as to G.K. Chesterton and the Distributists in the 1920s, and not so much for their answers as for the way they framed the questions.

How can we provide people with the basic assets they need without having to beg for them, apply for them or compete for them – via a place and a small plot of land to underpin their lives? Where are we heading if we have no underpinning? Is there any possible end to the story of the new Belle Époque, as Piketty calls it, except a kind of indebted slavery, locked into a vast, efficient machine? And finally, what is the purpose of the economy, and is ours at all fit for purpose?

What Piketty has done is to track the history of this inequality back two centuries. What we have to do is shape a system that puts the great vacuum cleaner mechanism into reverse.

David Boyle is the author of Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis.

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A TRINITY FOR OUR TIME Colin Tudge is delighted with three small words of harmony

Soil, Soul, Society Satish Kumar Leaping Hare Press, 2013 ISBN: 9781782400448

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atish Kumar’s title – Soil, Soul, Society – could hardly be more sparse; yet it represents, he says, a “distillation” of his own lifetime’s thinking and that of his heroes – and the three small words are all we really need to put the world to rights. For our aim should be – should it not? – to create harmony in the world; and this must be achieved at three levels. As individuals and as a species we need to move away from our anthropocentricity – for “humans have come to believe that they are separate from Nature and above Nature” – and to see ourselves once more as part of Nature; and this is the notion symbolised by ‘soil’.

For this as for all else, we need harmony within ourselves, practising humility and seeking to abandon ego: the idea encapsulated as ‘soul’. Of course, too, we need to seek harmony with the rest of humanity – ‘society’ – and indeed to treat all creatures with the same compassion.

All this should be second nature, yet it is the diametric opposite of the worldview that came out of the West and now dominates the whole world: entirely anthropocentric; entirely materialistic; crudely ‘rational’ in a calculating kind of way; employing science to control and even ‘conquer’ Nature; and locking us all into no-holds-barred competition, which in essence and commonly in practice has no truck with compassion at all.

Satish’s ideas have been shaped, as all ideas must be, by his own life. He elected as a nine-year-old to become a Jain monk, and there absorbed the essential principles of nonviolence, self-restraint and self-discipline. He became deeply immersed too in the teaching of Buddha and in the great Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita – which, said the early20th-century sage Vinoba Bhave, teaches us that “Nature is divine, sacred, and holy as well as abundant”; indeed, that everything around us “is nothing but divine”.

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Then Satish discovered Mahatma Gandhi, who came to play “a very special role in my life”. For Gandhi declared that “to practise spirituality you don’t have to forsake the world and become a monk. The true practice of spirituality … has to be in the world, in everyday life, in politics, in business and in domestic life.” So Satish forsook the monastery, and at age 18 he became an “Earth pilgrim”, of which he has written elsewhere: walking 8,000 miles from India to America spreading the idea of peace – an extended

If you look at the world with benevolent eyes, the world reciprocates with benevolence.

If you project suspicion and self-interest, you get the same in return echo of Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930 in protest against imperial domination.

Satish sees Gandhi’s friend and contemporary Rabindranath Tagore as “an Earth activist, a spiritual activist and a social activist”. Tagore believed, like Gandhi, that personal spirituality must be translated into action, and everything he did was “underpinned by a vision to serve the Earth, lift the spirit and transform society”. He was a polymath – a poet and musician who also took over the management of his father’s land and established a rural bank to provide micro-credit to his farm workers.

He was also a great educator who liked to teach under a tree because, he told his pupils, “You can learn much more wisdom from the tree than from me.” Tagore collaborated with the English agronomist and philanthropist Leonard Elmhirst to establish the Institute for Rural Reconstruction in West Bengal, called Sriniketan, ‘House of Grace’; and with Dorothy, his wife, Elmhirst went on to establish Dartington

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Satish Kumar, Editor in Chief of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine for over 40 years, pictured on Dartmoor in 2007

Hall in Devon, based on similar ideals. Tagore also had a great interest in science, and among his correspondents were Werner Heisenberg and the deeply spiritual Albert Einstein, who famously commented: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” To the greatest scientists, science too is a spiritual pursuit.

The greatest Western influence on Satish was E.F. Schumacher, best known as the author of Small is Beautiful. Like the Eastern teachers, Schumacher knew that mere intellect must be underpinned by spirituality, saying that humanity was too clever to survive without wisdom.

Like them, too, he translated spirituality into practical action, for the service of humanity and of the Earth. In Small is Beautiful, he does not argue simply that smallest is always best, but that everything – machines, governments, commercial companies, farms – has an optimum size, beyond which growth is destructive. Alas, his advice has not been heeded, and universal growth has become the universal obsession, with all the resulting distortions and miseries. Satish co-founded Schumacher College in 1990, on the Dartington Hall estate.

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Like all his personal gurus, Satish sees the world as essentially benevolent – but it is, he says, “how you see it and what you make of it. If you look at the world with benevolent eyes, the world reciprocates with benevolence. If you project suspicion and self-interest, you get the same in return… If we sow seeds of benevolence, benevolence will grow.”

Thus in this concise, eminently readable, semiautobiographical form and through the words of his own personal gurus, Satish presents much of the world’s most ancient and most profound wisdom – what Gottfried Leibnitz and then Aldous Huxley called “the perennial philosophy”: that the world is miraculous, ultimately beyond our ken, and certainly cannot be grasped by ‘rational’ thinking alone; the absolute need for compassion to all humanity and to all life; the duty to translate compassion into action.

The themes are among the most ancient ever written down, but Soil, Soul, Society is very much of our time.

Colin Tudge is co-founder of the Campaign for Real Farming.

His latest book is Why Genes Are Not Selfish and People Are Nice. www.campaignforrealfarming.org

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Forgotten Inheritance John Fellowes applauds community stories from across China Revival and Resilience: Community Stories in China Cheng Ying (Executive Editor) Partnerships for Community Development, 2013 ISBN: 9789889994334 Illustration by Quan Haiyan and Goby Lo

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nce considered the main alternative to Western capitalism, modern China is on a parallel and dizzying course of economic growth. Despite the accumulating cost to humans and Nature, high-level calls for ‘many-sided’ (balanced) development, and recent vows to control toxic air pollution, the parameters of progress are rarely, it seems, questioned in depth. The rush from rural ‘backwater’ to ‘advanced’ city life seems axiomatic.

One Guizhou resident put it thus in this book: “When we were small, our life was deeply merged with the village.

At school age, we left the village. We studied hard but the knowledge had nothing to do with the village. Those who didn’t go to school left their home and worked outside. In any case, our aim was leaving the village for the city.”

This collection of stories and anecdotes paints a more varied picture. A recurring theme is regret at the decline of the local environment: the rising tide of plastic rubbish; the loss of beloved catfish in local streams, due to pollution and the breakdown of traditional fishing restraints. Culture is eroded with Nature; in a Tibetan village, a destructive landslip caused by deforestation reminds villagers of their neglected reverence for the Mountain God. Returning Guangxi students listen to their aunts’ traditional songs, and are shamefully unable to reciprocate. Through them we feel the loss of sisterhood, “thick in rural villages, but thin in cities”.

Revival and Resilience stems from the work of a unique organisation, Partnerships for Community Development (PCD).

Founded in 2001 with the support of the Kadoorie Foundation, it inherited the Foundation’s commitment to a dignified life as the entitlement of all. Like its sister charity Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden, PCD believes this life should be rooted in relationships, including a clear-eyed view of energy and resources. The rural-to-urban diaspora has been, like economic growth itself, a by-product of the cheap fossil-fuel era. Like most aspects of ‘progress’ it is double-edged – and reversible.

Ecological agriculture – low-carbon, low-tech, lowchemical – runs through much of PCD’s work. But rather than bringing quick fixes to the ‘hardware’, PCD’s emphasis is on the ‘software’. It works with communities to reconnect people with Nature, from the heart, and to explore ways to live sustainably: simply, in harmony with Nature, and in

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locally self-reliant communities. PCD holds that contentment, creativity and security come not from extrinsic factors like money and status, but from expansive and mutually supportive relations. The shared vision of community is “small but rich in substance” – finding tradition and ecology have more to offer than the globalised marketplace.

Unlocking this potential calls for a skilled pool of facilitators, many of whom contribute to this anthology.

Referring to the Community Stories writing project she facilitates, Miao Yun notes how the writing process encourages people “to slow down a little, to let personal feelings come out, and to give deeper thought to the stories that they have encountered”. She likens formalised reports to putting on formal dress – there is a distancing between the writer, the community and the reader. Personal stories strip off the dressing, and help us bridge the gap.

Through this approach, we feel the impacts of projects: how reflecting on litter brought about the motivation to clean it up; how a group of young Miao people retraced their ancestors’ migration route, bringing the songs and stories to unforgettable life; how setting infrared cameras in the forests evoked a deeper appreciation of wildlife.

Not every project has worked practically, and the sharing of disappointments is a valuable element. “The ideas were good but the will and strength did not match,” wrote one participant. Indeed many of those who have challenged the mainstream ideas have met ongoing bafflement, or resistance, from elders still caught up in Green Revolution thinking.

“What happened to the university students like you? What has gone wrong?” was one such response. “Don’t fool around any more!” Some have bowed to such pressure, and reverted, for now at least, to occupations within the ‘system’.

But undeniably, and even to China’s leaders, such work brings a welcome touch of yin to the relentless yang of ‘modernisation’. An earlier PCD book, The Dialogue, recorded discussions between 10 young interns and their mentors in a community-based programme. Each spoke, over three years, of their aspirations for their people, their land and the issues they are involved with. The book was selected by the government as recommended reading for elementary schools and high-school students in China.

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RE V I E W S There is no challenging dogma here: only a searching for inner truth in confusing times.

If China’s development is a river in full flow, the perspectives gathered here are like snagged twigs in the current, arrayed at differing angles. While distinctly Chinese in flavour, the sum effect is a universal reflection around community; for those seeking a more human path, respectful of natural limits and resonant with natural rhythms, the tales may bring welcome solidarity and hope.

They also challenge the inevitability of that progression from

rural to urban. As a Miao-minority student says, “We don’t need to promote Miao culture. What is needed is for young people to return home and inherit it.” Another contributor concludes, of another backwater: “Falling behind the steps of modernisation may be a blessing to the community after all.”

John Fellowes is a conservation biologist, now working in the philanthropy sector for transformative change.

Revival and Resilience: Community Stories in China is available from PCD www.pcd.org.hk

Is Empathy the New Oil? David Cadman welcomes a whole new economy founded on relationship The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism Jeremy Rifkin Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 ISBN: 9781137278463

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omething strange is happening. Almost unspoken, an old economy is coming to an end and a new economy is arising. And it is arising out of relationship and the need for connection. It is now commonplace and is there every time we choose to share rather than possess. It is founded on empathy.

In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin foresees a new society emerging out of the decline, or rather the eclipse, of the old economy. The driving force for this change, he says, lies not in revolution, but in a contradiction set deep within the DNA of capitalism itself – the inherent drive for innovation and competing prices upon which growing consumption depends.

These principles are embedded at the very centre of the capitalist economy and its drive for profits. Each new product must first entice and then be unsatisfactory so that demand for the next product can arise. This is the rule of scarcity and waste that underlies the operating assumptions governing modern capitalism, the economy of “growth”.

Nothing must ever be enough. There must always be a new and even more desirable product. Yet suppose, says Rifkin, we carry this to its logical conclusion. Then, as competition and innovation drive marginal costs towards zero, profits dry up and capitalism withers.

Based upon the power of the cellphone, computers and the internet, this is the endgame to which we are now being taken. The downloading and sharing of music has already wreaked havoc on the music industry; Twitter and Facebook have revolutionised communication and publishing; and online provision of university courses is beginning to have an impact in the field of education. As websites like meshing.it (see Frontline page 5) show, a whole new economy of sharing is emerging – cars, rooms, toys, clothes, driveways to park in, time and personal skills.

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A new industrial revolution is under way. The first arose and then declined, being replaced by the second, which is now being replaced by a third. The driver for each one has been new forms of energy and new systems of communications – coal, steam and trains; oil, electricity and cars; and now renewable energy and telecommunications – an “Internet of Things”.

The third industrial revolution is quite unlike its predecessors, because for the first time it is based not on competition, but on collaboration – the “Collaborative Economy”, a sharing economy, based upon principles of using, not owning.

This world of sharing is gaining ground This requires that we rethink all of our ideas about possession and ownership, re-examine what is ‘mine’ and what is ‘ours’. Rifkin captures this in a second proposition, which he calls the “Collaborative Commons”.

The commons pre-dates capitalism and is the oldest form of institutionalised, self-managed activity in the world.

In contrast to the capitalist market of material gain and property rights, it is collaborative, open and transparent, and, says Rifkin, it is most suited to the new economy.

This world of sharing is gaining ground, and whilst there will no doubt be attempts to capture it in the old economic order, it might not be possible to do so. Indeed, says Rifkin, the rise of the collaborative economy may bring about the slow demise of the old capitalist system and the rise of a new economy in which welfare is measured less by the accumulation of market capital and more by the aggregation of social capital.

Above all else, this new economy requires that we take down the barriers between us and let go of the need to possess in order to be. It requires that we connect and relate to each other. So, if oil was the driver of the second industrial revolution, is empathy the new oil?

David Cadman is a Quaker writer and the author of Love Matters. www.lovematters.uk.com

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R E V IEWS

Excavating Buried Assumptions Dougald Hine reflects on the early thinking of a philosopher ripe for rediscovery Ivan Illich, 1977 © Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

Beyond Economics and Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich Sajay Samuel (Ed.) Marion Boyars Publishers, 2013 ISBN: 9780714531588

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rder a second-hand copy of one of Ivan Illich’s books over the internet, and it will more than likely come with the insignia of a university library and a stamp confirming that it has been ‘Withdrawn’. This says something about the trajectory followed until recently by the reputation of this deeply radical thinker – but the publication of a new collection of four of his most insightful essays suggests that the rediscovery of Illich is gathering momentum.

For a time in the 1970s, Illich was a kind of intellectual celebrity, brilliant and controversial. At the centre of his work was the idea of “the threshold of counterproductivity”: the point beyond which more schooling starts to make us stupider and more health care makes us sick. He dedicated himself to revealing the idiocies of industrial society. He once calculated that, when all the hours worked to pay the direct and indirect costs of cars and roads were taken into account, the average speed of automotive transport was less than 5mph.

What is harder to imagine now is the reach that these ideas had. The essay in which he made that calculation – an extended version of which appears in this collection as Energy and Equity – was first published on the front page of Le Monde. The New York Times dedicated an extensive article to the details of his falling out with the Vatican. (Illich had started out as a Catholic priest, though his critique of institutions included a call for the church to get rid of professional clergy, and the fierceness with which he criticised more modern institutions grew out of his sense that they were repeating the mistakes of institutionalised Christianity in secular form.) He hated the loudspeaker, calling it the most anti-democratic technology humanity had invented, but when he gave public lectures in those

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years, his voice would often have to be relayed to audiences that spilled over into neighbouring lecture halls.

Around the start of the 1980s, he slipped from view.

History had turned a corner: many of the possibilities for a saner reaction to resource scarcity, environmental and economic crisis that had been glimpsed during the previous decade were now lost in the dustcloud of the neoliberal juggernaut. From a status in which no university library would be without his books, Illich reached the point where they could be safely discarded.

Yet, as Sajay Samuel argues in the introduction to this new collection, Illich’s voice speaks now more clearly than ever. When the contradiction of ‘sustainable development’ was launched upon the world later in the 1980s, Illich

Illich warned of the danger of treating the environmental crisis in isolation immediately saw through it. He warned, too, of the danger of treating the environmental crisis in isolation, rather than recognising its roots in the deep cultural contradictions of our economic order and the worldview that underpins it. In the company of an extraordinary collection of friends and collaborators, he sought to excavate the buried assumptions on which modern societies have been founded and to show us how strange those assumptions would have looked to most of the people who have ever lived. “All through history,” he points out, “the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.”

Sometimes the insight is contained in a single sentence, sometimes we are led to it over pages, through the back alleys of history, but the reader will encounter many of them in these pages. And even now, perhaps there are university librarians placing orders for Beyond Economics and Ecology as a first step towards rebuilding that gap on their shelves.

Dougald Hine is a British writer based in Sweden and is co-founder of the journal Dark Mountain. www.dougald.nu

September/October 2014

RE V I E W S

The Living Sea Stephan Harding comments on a thrilling voyage of discovery – where the world is more alive and enchanted than is normally accepted

Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea Peter Reason Vala Publishing Co-operative, 2014 ISBN: 9781908363107 Illustration by Sue Gent www.suegentdesignandillustration.com

I

n this rich, beautifully written book, Peter Reason shares his search for the sacred wildness of the world during a return voyage in a small sailing boat from Plymouth in south-west England across the Celtic Sea to the remote Blasket islands off the south-western coast of Ireland. My seasickness at the slightest roll of a boat prevents me from experiencing anything of the tumultuous ocean, or of developing the deep knowledge that seasoned mariners such as Peter have of tides, maps, tackle, huge waves and tempestuous, seascaped weather. But reading Spindrift from the solid reassurance of the land gave me a palpable sense of what it would be like to set out on such an adventure, apprenticed to the wide oceanic soul of our planet, in search of meaning.

Peter shares a great deal in this book, both about the practice of sailing and about his own deep ecological wisdom as it unfolds during the long voyage. Coral, his 31ft boat, is our home, small in the vastness of the ocean. We meet her sails, her ropes and rigging, her pumps and boathooks, and experience her cramped but well-designed interior. We learn how to steer her in various ways, how to cook a meal on her tiny gimballed stove, how to sleep in a bunk during a storm.

We share Peter’s delight at the intricacy of naval charts arrowed with flows of water around rugged coastlines. We feel the cosy security of our waterproofs in rough weather, even as we experience our fragility and vulnerability in the massive waves that crash onto the boat’s deck.

As we travel we learn, amongst other things, about the state of the Earth, about Gaia theory, about Peter’s life as a university professor pioneering the practice of Action Research, about Chan and Zen Buddhism, and we see how Peter slowly realises his aim of discovering “how might we again experience ourselves as participants in a wider, morethan-human world”. We witness how, mostly alone, but sometimes in the company of his friend Gwen, he is helped

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by the ocean to reach the lived, bodily experience that “the world is more alive, more sentient, more interconnected and more enchanted than is normally accepted in Western civilisation”. We witness with delight how he enters into a wider conversation that takes place not via words and images but by means of “physical interaction with wind and water”.

Coral, his 31ft boat, is our home, small in the vastness of the ocean By the time he reaches Bolus Head, near Darrynane in South-West Ireland, on the extreme outer edge of Europe, his marinating in the ocean’s soul has found its maturity, for he experiences Bolus Head itself and the Atlantic swell around it “not as things in the world, but as presences with which I was required to negotiate”. The world has at last taken on a “subjective presence”. It is alive, it feels, it knows. This is what we must all discover in our bones and guts if we are to live well with the world. This is the end of our destructive 400-year-old voyage of cosmos-as-machine, and is the beginning of a new voyage in which the world wakes us into aliveness when we recognise her aliveness in the midst of our loving, empathic interactions with her.

With Peter, in his marvellous book, we enter into the world as a great story, full of ineffable meaning, and at last find our true home.

Spindrift is the winner of the Rubery Book Award for nonfiction. www.ruberybookaward.com Stephan Harding is Head of Holistic Science at Schumacher College. www.schumachercollege.org.uk

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L E T TERS

Letters to the Editors policy positions that they have never held and then attacking them for holding such positions.

In the July/August issue you published ‘A New Vision for Whilst climate activists have rightly pointed out the the Somerset Levels’, a piece presumably submitted by apocalyptic consequences of a potential 6 °C rise in global Natural England. temperatures, they have never urged that tackling this should Having lived near the Levels for over 50 years and be done at the expense of all other social or ethical watched with increasing concern and dismay issues. Rather we have advocated that social for more than 20 years the lack of proper justice issues should be tackled in a way that maintenance for this unique flow of water also incorporates tackling the climate crisis. to the sea, I am at a loss with the statement A good example is the provision of zero“previously unsustainable farm practices”. carbon social housing, which costs almost But these farming practices have been in nothing to run in financial and CO2 terms. place for several hundred years and have The global fossil-fuel industry has spent survived many floods. millions on propaganda to create doubt in The assertion that “the aim is to create and the public’s mind about action on climate manage extensive wetland pasture that will science.

How sad therefore that Eisenstein st r, ra tio de accommodate winter flooding, thereby reducing should use such doubts to justify his opposition a e nb y a Resurgence r flood risk elsewhere” is a bit of a pipe dream. The to the inclusion of climate science when we argue land is farming land – where food is produced! The against environmentally destructive fracking, mountainfarmers there have always maintained a good relationship top removal for coal, and the obscenity that is tar-sands removal. with the environment and it is organisations such as the RSPB Charles is correct that humanity needs to value Nature in et al. that have created an imbalance with the flooding of many and of itself, but many people also pay attention to what acres for the ‘birdie things’ (to quote Michael Eavis). they can measure, and so the encouragement of individual, At the moment it seems there will be a re-creation of community and international pride in reducing our carbon farmer-led drainage boards. For more years than I can footprints is an essential tool in the battle for the survival remember, localised boards worked very well. As farmers of the planet’s ecosystems. It is essential that we put aside were working on the land every day, observations in the rise appeals to unreason and division and agree instead to push of water were made quickly and a call to the local pumping forward with a united front of climate, environmental and station would divert a possible overspill. social justice campaigners. Together we are all stronger and I so resent the notion that farmers do not have a clue only together can we win. about anything other than machinery and animals. The Donnachadh McCarthy farmers on the Levels have always had to keep clued up Camberwell, London about the dispersal of water towards the sea.

Caroline Woolley Somerset I have an issue with the article about the Spirit of Humanity (Issue 284). Whilst I find the founding of Spirit of Humanity Forum wonderful, I find it unnecessary to bash business.

I found Charles Eisenstein’s article (Issue 284) disturbing. Whilst it is true that many businesses and big firms are still I would like to challenge his assumption that concern stuck in the old paradigm of money and power as the prime about climate change comes “at the expense of all other goal, there is a rapidly growing number of entrepreneurs values”. This is not so – the Green Party, for example, is and businesspeople, including CEOs, who have ‘seen the very concerned about climate change, but its manifesto and light’ and live and promote actively with their employees its activities cover many other topics. and customers value-based business, including meditation Most campaigners against climate change I know share and mindfulness. I think it would be a benefit to us all to many of the other concerns that Charles claims they acknowledge and appreciate these, too! neglect. To prioritise reduction of carbon emissions does not Christina Hurst-Prager necessarily involve ignoring everything else. Campaigners Zürich, Switzerland against climate change are mostly not guilty of the criticisms that Charles makes. It is those resisting action on climate We welcome letters and emails commenting on Resurgence & change who are ignoring as well the other problems he raises.

Ecologist articles. These should include your postal address.

Peter Adams Send your letters to The Editors, Resurgence & Ecologist, Ford Stockend, Stroud

FLOODS AND FARMERS

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DON’T BASH BUSINESS

NOT GUILTY

In Issue 284 Charles Eisenstein used the unfortunate polemical device of accusing climate activists of advocating

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House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE or email: editorial@resurgence.org Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity.

September/October 2014

C RO S S WO R D

Crossword

1

2

3

4

7

5

6

8

Across 7 Worn out, of the end of a rope, or hem. (6) 8 How Nature treats a vacuum, said Aristotle. (6)

9

10

9 In weaving it cooperates with warp to create cloth. (4) 10 Surname of James, who released ‘A Rough Guide to the Future’ this year. (8) 11 Person who can perceive information hidden from normal senses.

(7) 13 A Muslim Sufi ascetic. (5)

11

20 There is a dolphin sanctuary just 20 minutes from the centre of this Australian city. (8)

13 14

15

16

17

18

19

15 Traditionally you need a hazel or willow branch to do this. (5) 17 Africa’s oldest national park, where a UK oil company, SOCO, is to cease operations. (7)

12

20

21

23

22

24

21 According to Dr Seuss, this is a state where “you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams”. (4) 23 A therapy which uses light to balance a patient’s energy levels. (6) 24 River subject this year to the worst flooding since 1947. (6)

16 Fish that swims back from the ocean to the upper reaches of rivers to spawn. (6)

Down

18 To pass data from a PC, say, to a major computer system. (6)

1 “The ___ of 14 down must be refreshed … with the blood of patriots and martyrs” – Thomas Jefferson. (4)

19 The birthstone of this star sign is opal. (5) 22 To change direction suddenly. (4)

2 Such as Meg, who used to appear on TV lottery programmes. (6) 3 Blissful. (7) 4 To generate a new iceberg. (5) 5 One of the four ancient Greek words for love. (6) 6 A mining technique whereby high-pressure liquid is injected deep underground. (8) 12 Common name of ‘galanthus’, which forms a white carpet in gardens in late winter. (8) 14 See 1 down. (7)

R E SURGENCE SHOP

Solution to the crossword in Issue 285 The answers are also available online at www.resurgence.org/crossword To comment on the crossword, email Tim at ecores_crossword@hotmail.co.uk

BOOKS ON GREE N L I V I N G

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Order today on +44 (0)1208 841824 (Mon–Thurs, 9am–5pm) For more books, plus magazines, CDs, DVDs, and cards, shop online: www.resurgence.org/shop

Issue 286

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C LA S S I F I E D A DV E RT I S I N G CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING RATES ‘Small ad’ £1 per word incl. vat Semi-display ad (boxed classified) £5 extra Box number £10 Inclusion on our website £10 for two months 25% DISCOUNT when you book three consecutive adverts THE NEXT TWO COPY DATES ARE November/December 2014: 1 September 2014 Januar y/Februar y 2015: 1 November 2014

ACCOMMODATION HERTFORDSHIRE Woman early 50s seeks housemates for friendly,community house share in AL10 area.

Cat household. susaneeeee@hotmail.com

COURSES SKEP-MAKING COURSES IN SOMERSET held throughout the year, using our own scythecut rye straw, grown biodynamically.

– Call Brock on 07878 510669 or email loveslane@gardener.com COME AND EXPLORE YOUR CREATIVITY through Multi Media Mosaics. Holiday Workshops & Regular Courses in Oxfordshire.

For more information please visit www.memorablemosaics.co.uk

EVENTS ECOHESION offers freelance lectures in 2014. ‘The Ecology of Economics’ – the assumed ‘separability’ of the ecologically cohesive (ecohesive) world, of which we are part.

Details: Stuart McBurney 0114 288 8037 WALK WITH have teamed up with Resurgence again to offer a series of facilitated walks with writers and teachers from Resurgence & Ecologist magazine in the Bristol area during late Spring, Summer and early Autumn 2014. See www.walkwith.co.uk for more details.

EKUTHULENI RUSTIC RETREAT PLACE SW France: simplicity, meditation, ecology.

Schedule: ekuthuleni-retreat.blogspot.com GREENSPIRIT ANNUAL GATHERING 7–9 November 2014, Somerset. Speaker – Glennie Kindred. www.greenspirit.org.uk/ag2014 or Joan tel. 02392 599299 RENEWYOU IN HAMPSHIRE Personal development day, for women at a crossroads in life or work. 10 October 2014. Visit www.heartofwork.co.uk or email felicity@heartofwork.co.uk

HOLIDAYS FOR ALL READERS who are considering a trip overseas, we would urge you to visit www.seat61.com to plan your journey by train.

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YURTS AND HUT BY THE POND A 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 FARM Lovely 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 PEMBROKESHIRE Two eco-friendly converted barns on small­ holding. Each sleeps 4. Coastal path 2 miles. Tel. 01348 891286 holidays@stonescottages.co.uk www.stonescottages.co.uk 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 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 ITALY, TUSCAN-UMBRIAN BORDER Lovely 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 farreaching views and large swimming pool. Well sited for Florence, Arezzo, Cortona, Urbino and Perugia. Available year-round. www.laceruglia.com Tel. 01392 811436 or email slrs@perridge.com 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 CHURCHWOOD VALLEY Wembury, 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. www.churchwoodvalley.com Tel. 01752 862382 info@churchwoodvalley.com

PERSONAL RETREATS, FRANCE Make space to reflect and be still. Beautiful retreat house in Auvergne offers supportive, welcoming environment for individual retreats. Daily rhythm: meditation; silent interludes; contemplative/ artistic activities. Lovely walks. Organic vegetarian food. www.retreathouseauvergne.com HAND-BUILT WOODEN ROUNDHOUSE in Somerset for a completely different holiday cottage, on our organic farm. Romantic retreat or family holiday. Sleeps up to 4. www.glamping-uk.org.uk TO LET Beautiful old farmhouse on organic farm near Aix-en-Provence. July – 1st week August. 2 weeks minimum. Sleeps 6. Tel. 0033 679 91 11 81 GREECE Findhorn-inspired community-based summer holistic holidays combine retreats, healing and sustainability workshops with lush forest, gorgeous beaches and Greek vegetarian meals.

Family fortnight 1-15 August, Raw Food detox weeks, 15-29 August. Also, non-workshop livingin-community weeks (£205/week). Or join our inexpensive (£60/week) autumn workcamp for a working holiday 12 September - 3 October. www.kalikalos.com Email: info@kalikalos.com Tel: 020 8816 8533 CORTIJO ROMERO, SPAIN Year-round courses in yoga, pilates, writing, dance, singing, relationships, therapy.

Mountains, pool, vegetarian food. For a brochure/ info: 01494 765775 cr@cortijo-romero.co.uk www.cortijo-romero.co.uk FRENCH PYRENEES Ariège Retreat Centre. Gypsy caravan and old barn studio, for single retreaters. Also cosy cabin in exchange for outdoor work.

Tel. 0033 534 140356 www.mountainarc.com

MISCELLANEOUS FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT Proofreading and copy-editing by a member of the Resurgence & Ecologist team. Reliable, friendly service. Helen Banks 01726 823998 helenbanks@phonecoop.coop SHITAKE MUSHROOM LOGS Grow your own mushrooms on our Ready to Grow Logs, various species. DIY Log Kits and dried mushrooms also available. Unusual healthy presents! www.rusticmushrooms.co.uk Tel. 01825 723065

September/October 2014

COACHING WITH SPIRIT Professional coaching for sustainable life and livelihood, from a spiritually intelligent perspective. www.sallylever.co.uk LUDDITES FOR MUTUAL SUPPORT Contact Peter Quince, PO Box 283/1, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE UNIQUE SPIRITUAL EMAIL READINGS

by Jo Walker. Individual, positive, healing advice. Over 20 years’ experience. Payment by donation. For more information or to request a reading email me at jcwalker888@yahoo.co.uk

PROPERTY FOR SALE IRELAND Co. 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 BURGUNDY DREAM Traditional Burgundy farmhouse converted by present owners, with 4 acres of land. Main accommodation (2 bedrooms) plus a selfcontained flat on 1st floor. A second flat could easily be adapted from 2 additional bedrooms.

Ornamental garden, orchard, soft fruit area, apiary and potager. Land and accommodation for raising pigs, sheep, etc. £290,000. Details and photos from hkverslesbois@hotmail.com SNOWDONIA, NORTH WALES Wisteria-clad 3-bed stone long cottage. 2.5 bathrooms, dining room, inglenook/sitting room, woodburner.

Garden with views, cabin and workshop. Wonderful walking country.

Near Conwy.

Price £239,000.

Tel +44 (0)7794 357503 email leila.artstudio@gmail.com SRI LANKA TEA ESTATE forest garden ecological retreat. 57 acres, river, several wells, three bungalows. 30 min. beaches, Galle Fort. US$600,000. www.samakanda.org Contact spowersrory@gmail.com +44 7542 958 028 BEAUTIFULLY RESTORED 450-YEAR-OLD HOUSE IN SOUTHERN SPAIN Stunning three-bedroom Moorish-style village house in Casarabonela, Malaga. With patio, sun terrace, fireplace and incredible views. Whitewashed stone walls. 35 km from airport and Malaga centre. UNESCO heritage listed area, with local traditional produce.

5-minute walk to shops and school. €80,000.

Photos available. zofaifi@hotmail.com +61 498 102 894 TOTNES Eco-renovated stone cottage, south facing, four bedrooms, wood-fired range/heating, solar water, FiT PV, heat recovery system, natural insulation, green oak porch, large sunny organic garden, parking. £495,000. oneorc@yahoo.co.uk LOVELY FOUR-BEDROOM HOUSE on 13.06 acres on Hornby Island, British Columbia. Mature garden fields, pond. Otter and deer. Very private and peaceful with cabin by the sandstone shore. Listed @ CAD$1,750.000.

Tel. +1 250 335 0395 seaswallowfly@gmail.com

Issue 286

IRELAND, DONEGAL Tranquil, secluded house, mountain views, outbuildings, own woodland, fields, organic orchard, vegetable plot, low heating bills, private water. Brochure: http://goo.gl/Hr9wfq Email: house.donegal@gmail.com TIMBER-FRAME SINGLE-STOREY HOME Ripe for eco-renovation, in 7 acres of beautiful, unspoilt mature woodland and gardens in tranquil heart of North Devon, near to ocean and moors. Full of wildlife and wild flowers, with potential for renewable energy from stream and south-facing aspect for photovoltaics. Has own private water supply and sewage treatment plant. Auction September 26th, guide price £250,000£300,000. For more details, contact Phillips Smith and Dunn 01237 423007. www.phillipsland.com

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BRENDON HILLS, SOMERSET Wildlife-friendly buyer sought for detached farmhouse bungalow, 3 beds, garage, modern kitchen/bathroom, private water/drainage, 25ft greenhouse. Accessible location.

No neighbours.

14 acres pasture & woodland.

Stables, outbuildings, extensive barns, easy access bridleways. £615,000.

Confidential retirement sale. 07855 207192 ECOBUILD OPPORTUNITY Interested in co-designing and investing in a new ecobuild to complement an existing cohousing house in Sheffield? See bit.ly/Oakbuild ALLENDALE, NORTHUMBERLAND 4-bedroomed detached house, large garage/ workshop, 4 acres mixed ancient woodland, beautiful garden. £315,000. sally.greenaway@homecall.co.uk 01434 683813 6-ACRE SCOTTISH CROFT Buy this beautiful croft on a remote Scottish peninsula. Secure, heritable crofting tenure.

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COASTGUARD COTTAGE, SOUTH DEVON Calling artists, writers, walkers, swimmers, wildlife lovers... coastguard cottage for sale, to someone who will cherish it. Hallsands is a wild, beautiful part of the coast, twenty minutes from the estuary market town of Kingsbridge. The cottage directly overlooks Start Bay, and the south west coastpath winds past the bottom of the garden. Pretty coastal garden in front, peaceful green countryside at the back. Two double bedrooms, ‘master’ bedroom in the roof, sitting room, dining room, galley kitchen, two bathrooms.

Coastguard cottages rarely come on the market. Asking price £400,000.

For further information contact Sue Proffitt tel: 01548 511300.

September/October 2014

a different kind of leaning a different type of activism

The Right Livelihood Programme Starts November 2014 With Ha Vinh Tho, Julia Kim, Julie Richardson and Satish Kumar A year-long programme to help you align your livelihood with a deeper purpose – based in the UK and Bhutan.

Postgraduate Programme Bursaries available for: • Ecological Design Thinking (MA, Pg Dip, Pg Cert) - Jan 2015

Short Courses • Circles of Trust, Rick Jackson and Barbara Reid, 8 – 12 Sept • The Rewilded Child, Jay Griffiths, David Bond, Chris Salisbury and Lemn Sissay, 20 -24 Oct • Ecopsychology, Andy Fisher, 10 -14 November

Tel: +44 (0)1803 865934 www.schumachercollege.org.uk Issue 286

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“The kind of school that changes lives” The Good Schools Guide, 2013

Please join us for our 45th Anniversary celebrations and enjoy classes, tours, presentations, music and refreshments.

45TH ANNIVERSARY

OPEN DAY SATURDAY 15 NOVEMBER TH

FROM 10:00AM PLEASE REGISTER TO JOIN US

T: +44 (0)1962 771744 E: enquiry@brockwood.org.uk W: brockwood.org.uk Founded in 1969 by J. Krishnamurti. Part of Krishnamurti Foundation Trust. Registered Charity No. 312865

BI JA A-Z of Organic Farming Navdanya Organic Farming Training

1-30 September, 2014 Dr Vandana Shiva and Navdanya experts

This 4 week course addresses the physical, intellectual, and holistic aspects of agroecology and organic food systems, and will be 50% scientific principles and 50% hands on practical experience. The course will help facilitate a paradigm shift from perceiving soil, seed and food as dead matter to understanding Living Soil, Living Seed, and Living Food. From sowing and harvesting, to the politics and science of chemical-free farming, students will leave the course with an understanding of how to create, through hands, head, and heart, agroecological and organic farming methods around the world. Students will return home equipped in the methods of Navdanya organic farming and the skills necessary to create sustainable and just food systems.

An International School for Sustainable Living Dehra Dun, North India www.navdanya.net

Gandhi, Globalisation and Earth Democracy 21-30 November, 2014 Satish Kumar, Dr Vandana Shiva, Dr Madhu Suri Prakash, Arun Gandhi, Samdhong Rinpoche

Globalization has led to the unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a few global corporations. The course explores the relevance of the four Gandhian principles of swaraj (self-governance), swadeshi (local production), sarvodaya (the liberation for all) and satyagraha (non-violent civil disobedience based on the force of truth) to create and defend people’s economic and political freedom. The course will combine information and knowledge with experience, by being on the Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation Farm and participating by doing.

For further information please contact Mini Joy at: bija@navdanya.net Tel +91 11 268 532 772 72

Resurgence & Ecologist

September/October 2014

A LTERNATIVES St James’s Piccadilly/London

Life on the Edge One person’s attempt to emulate Resurgence’s philosophy of Earth-Art-Spirit online weekly at: www.windgrove.com

TARA BRACH True Refuge Monday 15 September

Switch to us and get 4 months free broadband* Line rental with Evening and Weekend calls at £14.95 per month applies Go to www.thephone.coop/freebroadband for full T&C’s or call us on 01608 434040.

Quote ‘Resurgence & Ecologist’ and we’ll donate them 6% of your monthly spend

GABRIELLE BERNSTEIN Miracles Now Monday 27 October

GRAHAM HANCOCK Psychedelics and Civilisation Thursday 13 November

alternatives.org.uk

The Path of Love and Light Saturday 22 & Sunday 23 November 2014

Seminar with Pir Zia Inayat-Khan Head of the Sufi Order International Two days of sufi teachings, meditations and practices on the the Sufi path; the path of love and light.

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan is the spiritual leader of the Sufi Order International, a mystical and ecumenical fellowship rooted in the visionary legacy of Hazrat Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan.

Venue: London Sufi Centre/CCPE, Beauchamp Lodge, 2 Warwick Crescent, London W2 6NE Cost: £140 (both days) or £80 single day.

Concessions available.

Limited places. Advance booking only.

Booking: info@sufiorderuk.org www.sufiorderuk.org/events

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Meditation RetReats in the Buddhist tRadition

www.gaiahouse.co.uk

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Celebrating The Seeds That Feed Us

11th - 12th October 2014 London and around the UK

With fringe events throughout October, UK Food Sovereignty Month “Seeds are magical creatures... they seem to lack all properties of life, they are still and quiet, they cannot see nor hear, they seem to have no will of their own, and are moved only by forces external to themselves. Yet, they are not only very much alive; they are the very bearers of Life itself.”

FELIPE MONTOYA GREENHECK The Great Seed Festival will bring together farmers, growers, environmentalists, chefs, activists, gardeners, allotmenteers, artists, musicians and everybody in-between to celebrate the magic of seed, bring to light the importance of seed diversity and rekindle the connection between seed and food.

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For the full programme visit

www.greatseedfestival.co.uk If you’d like to organise a fringe event or volunteer, please contact Helen Strong on

info@greatseedfestival.co.uk.

September/October 2014

www.permaculture.co.uk Permaculture Magazine display ads 2014

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Fun for inquisitive children!

AQUILA Magazine is perfect for lively children who like to ask questions. Using a fun mix of science, arts and general knowledge this unique publication will capture their interest with an exciting new topic every month.

The magazine will also nudge children’s awareness in the right direction with thought-provoking articles that sometimes include elements of philosophy, health and well-being.

“She has loved and kept her magazines over the years, and now at 14, still uses them for her homework.”

Mrs D. McNeight

AQUILA is advert free, and comes recommended by parents and teachers worldwide.

Why choose AQUILA? There are so many things competing for their attention these days, but here is a magazine that is different – one that aims to educate and inspire. ✔ ✔ ✔

Encourages reading and writing Nourishes bright minds Ideal for 8 years +

See sample online For puzzles, facts and fun every month, start a gift subscription to this great publication.

SUBSCRIBE NOW You will not find AQUILA in any shop as it is by mail order only. An annual subscription costs only £45 for 12 monthly issues – that’s just £3.75 per issue. If you are not delighted with the first magazine, let us know for a no-quibble refund.

Call 01323 431313 www.Aquila.co.uk RES14

Preserve & Conserve

Want to preserve your original windows and conserve more heat?

Find out how our award-winning secondary glazing and insulation can:

• Save up to 40% on fuel bills

• Last longer than double glazing

• Provide superb sound proofing • Approved for listed buildings

‘We are thrilled with our new insulating windows. They are very discreet and provide excellent insulation’ Mr S. For a free quotation and energy saving survey by Director, Mukti Kumar Mitchell, call us on 01237 429826 or email info@cosyhomecompany.co.uk See secondary glazing in action in our video at www.cosyhomecompany.co.uk For every house we insulate through this ad, we’ll donate £50 to Resurgence & Ecologist.

supports

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September/October 2014

An Ode to GAIA A Fundraising Dinner for Resurgence & Ecologist Wednesday 12 November 2014 At the Lancaster London hotel, London, from 7.30pm

Featuring an auction of art and experiences with speakers including Satish Kumar and Tony Juniper

© Susan Derges

Tickets £150 from The Resurgence Trust Call 01237 441293 or go to www.resurgence.org/dinner Items in the auction include paintings and sculptures from a number of well-known artists including Clive Bowen, Susan Derges, Olivia Fraser, Axel Scheffler, Hugo Grenville and Peter Randall-Page, as well as terrific experiences including a walk with Sir Roy Strong in his gardens. © Peter Randall-Page

The Resurgence Trust is a registered educational charity (no. 1120414)

INSIDE M E D I TAT I ON G AT E W AY T O P O S S I B I L I T I E S

• 200-Hour Meditation Teacher Trainings • Workshops & CPD’s meeting the requirements of our modern times Yoga Alliance UK accredited

www.insidemeditation.co.uk

Holistic Holistic Holidays Holidays In In Greece Greece

Biodanza+ and 5-Rhythms® Byron Katie Self Enquiry Creative Writing Exploring Sustainability Family Fortnight (August) Hiking Mt Pelion Living in Community weeks Raw Food Fortnight (August) Tao of Democracy Traders’ Workshop Satsang (non-duality) Vipassana 10 day Retreat

brochure@kalikalos.com

Check out the 2014 programme

www.Kalikalos.com

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doortothehimalayas.co.uk Tibetan singing bowls Pure Pashmina stoles Meditation shawls Handloom blankets Ethically sourced, individually hand-crafted items by rural artisans across the Himalayas

matt harvey presents

THE LAURENCE SOCIETY OF HOLISTIC MEDICINE

ANNUAL CONFERENCE SATURDAY 11 OCTOBER 2014 REGENTS UNIVERSITY, LONDON NW1 4NS

SPEAKERS Michael Kern D.O., B.C.S.T., N.D. (UK) RHYTHMS WITHIN RHYTHMS All healthy, living tissues subtly ‘breathe’ with the motion of life. These subtle rhythms have been identified by Craniosacral Therapists and Cranial Osteopaths. Michael is a leading exponent of this biodynamic approach.

Dr. med. Ulrike Gudel (Switzerland) HOW TO DETECT AND TREAT ENERGY BLOCKS WITH PSE Ulrike has been working as a medical doctor for the last 30 years and focuses on freeing chronic conditions using Psycho Somatic Energetics. She is aided by skilled dowsers to locate geopathic problem areas.

the

element in the room

new energy‐inspired poems

Chris Day MA, VetMB, VetFFHom, CertIAVH, MRCVS (UK) HOMEOPATHY & HOLISM IN VETERINARY PRACTICE Chris has been one of the pioneers of veterinary homeopathy in modern times – a whole generation of veterinary homeopaths exists through his teaching.

launch evening features: Jackie Juno + guest speakers open slam + free book!

Cost: £30.00 for the day to include morning coffee and afternoon tea. Lunch is available at the University cafeteria.

7pm Tuesday 23rd September The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter

For full details and an application form go to our website www.laurencesociety.org or write or phone to LSHM, Sycamore Cottage, Tamley Lane, Hastingleigh, Ashford, Kent TN25 5HW. Tel: 01233 750363 TOLLE CAUSAM

£10 (£8 conc) – Bookings: 01392 434169 www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk SPONSORED BY

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PRODUCED IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Resurgence & Ecologist

September/October 2014

Temenos Academy Review 16 / Resurgence advert_La

Jill Purce The JillHealing Purce Voice Rediscover the ancient power of group chant

The Healing Voice

“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness” – Confucius

Magical Voice Techniques • Mantra & Sonic Meditations • Mongolian Overtone Chanting Rediscover the ancient power of group chant Magical Voice Techniques • Mantra & Sonic

Healing Family Weekends - London Healingthe Voice WeekendsLondon Meditations • Mongolian Overtone Chanting July 6-7; Oct 26-7; Dec 7-818-19 September 27-28 • October • November 29-30

The Small School hartland, Devon

Founded by Satish Kumar in 1982 A co-educational school for a maximum of forty 11-16 year olds that offers holistic, human scale education, embodying personal, ecological and social dimensions.

The school is seeking new Guardians to support the school through a regular donation £25 a month, or Friends who donate £5-25 a month.

For more information on the difference your financial support could make and the benefits enjoyed by Small School Guardians, please email office@thesmallschool.org.uk or visit www.thesmallschool.org.uk “a priceless opportunity to make a positive contribution to society by investing in education based on trust and mutual respect.”

Mary Billson, Chair of Trustees

Edited by John Carey and James Harpur Contributors include Wendell Berry William Chittick Ananda Coomaraswamy H. H. The Dalai Lama John F. Deane Jeremy James Kathleen Raine Fiona Sampson 234 155mm 262 pages £12 in the UK

Healing the FamilyRitual-&London Resonance Sept 28-9 Healing Weekends HealingVoice Voice WeekendsLondon July 6-7; 1-2 Oct •26-7; Dec 7-8 November December 6-7 - London Oct 26Healing Voice-Week Intensive Nov 1 Voice Healing - WeekRitual intensive - London Sept 28-9 Healing the Family& Resonance November 1-7 Unmissable! (Accom. available at venue) Healing Voice-Week Intensive - London Oct 26Nov 1 www.healingvoice.com • T: 020 7435 2467

www.healingvoice.com • T: 020 7435 2467

WHY WE LIVE AFTER DEATH

By Dr Richard Steinpach WHY AREWE HERE ON EARTH TODAY? WHAT IS THE REAL MEANING OF LIFE? WHAT HAPPENS TO US AFTERWE 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

Telephone 01233 813663 temenosacademy@myfastmail.com www.temenosacademy.org

FOUNDATION W HY WE LIVE AFTER DE 0845 658 5666

By Dr. Richard Steinpach E-mail: info@grail-uk.org Visit: www.grail-uk.org

WDP HY 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: info@grail-uk.org DP

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Join us for a two day event, which aims to explore how we can move away from an obsession with economic growth to growth in wellbeing

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Craig Bennett

Friends of the Earth

Dame Carol Black Newnham College

Journalist and author

Mark Goldring Oxfam

Leo Johnson

Sustainable Finance

Roman Krznaric School of Life

Brina

Monty Don

Singer

Soil Association

Satish Kumar

Pascale Petit

Resurgence & Ecologist

Poet

With: Juliet Davenport, AlysJames Fowler, Lynne Rupert Franks, Tony Juniper, Satish Vinjamuri Sainsbury Sheldrake Vandana ShivaKumar, Mark Williamson Resurgence Trust Biologist Campaigner for Action for Happiness Ragasudha Richard Wilkinson, Tamsin Omond, Suraj Subramaniam, Ben Okri, Jacqueline McGlade, farmers’ rights Classical dancer Rowan Williams, Geoff Mulgan, Ruth Padel, Theodore Zeldin, Edward Skidelsky

Saturday 11 October, 2014 10am – 6pm Bishopsgate Institute 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 4QH

Tickets: £45 individual | £35 concessions Indian vegetarian lunch: £15 Booking: 01237 441293 | info@resurgence.org www.resurgence.org/wellbeing

Ticket includes attendance at Wellbeing UnLtd, a participatory workshop on how to turn inspiration into action. Sunday 12 October, 11am–5pm.

Workshop venue: UnLtd, 123 Whitecross St, London, EC1Y 8JA.

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Enquiries: Resurgence & Ecologist, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon, EX39 6EE Sponsors: Network of Wellbeing, Pukka Herbs, Neal’s Yard Remedies Resurgence & Ecologist September/October 2014 This event will raise money for The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity (No.1120414)

in partnership with Friends of the Earth MEMBERSHIP

Leeds

Membership & Distribution, UK Jeanette Gill, Rocksea Farmhouse, St Mabyn, Bodmin, Cornwall PL30 3BR, UK Tel: + 44 (0)1208 841824 (Mon-Thurs 9-5) Fax: + 44 (0)1208 841256 members@resurgence.org

David Midgley david@schumacher-north.co.uk Bi-monthly meetings

Membership Rates Six issues per year UK: £30 Europe: £38 | Rest of the World: £40

Contact: Lucy Baird 07850 143737 luciarose@gmail.com

OVERSEAS MEMBERSHIP USA Walt Blackford, P O Box 312, Langley, WA 98260, U.S.A. Airmail: US$68

North Cornwall

Contact: Simon Mitchell 01208 851356 simonthescribe@yahoo.co.uk Occasional meetings at St Breward

Wales – Newtown area Welsh Borders

Contact: Elaine Brook 01981 550246 elaine@gaiapartnership.org Near Hay on Wye, 6.30pm, quarterly

Newcastle Group

Contact: Margaret Evans 0191 290 1516 margaretevans.wb@gmail.com

Japan Sloth Club, 6-15-2-912 Ojima, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan Tel: +81 3 3638 0534 babi@sloth.gr.jp Airmail ¥6943

AUSTRALIA Melbourne

South Africa Howard Dobson, SEEDS, 16 Willow Road, Constantia, 7806, Cape Town, South Africa Tel: + 27 2 1794 3318 howdy@mweb.co.za Airmail: ZAR726

ITALY Faedis, Udine

DISTRIBUTORS

Contact: Gabriela Cunha (+351) 919991585 gabrielacunha@gmail.com Rajesh Pai rajesh.pai@green-pai-energy.com Meeting bi-monthly

USA Kent News Company 100511 Airport Road, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 Tel: +1 308 635 2225 rmckinney@kentnews.com

RESURGENCE GROUPS An opportunity to share ideas and seasonal food. For more information, or to start your own group, contact Jeanette Gill: 01208 841824 members@resurgence.org

Birmingham

Contact: Abdul Al-Seffar 0121 426 2606 alseffar@googlemail.com Meeting 3–4 times a year

East Devon

Contact: Christina Bows 01297 23822 tinabows@hotmail.com Monthly at The Spiral Sanctuary, Seaton

Hampshire

Contact: Sue Routner 07773 428 229 sroutner@yahoo.co.uk Bi-monthly at The Art House, Southampton

Contact: Debby Badger 03 9530 8642 badgers@optushome.com.au Meeting monthly

Contact: Mauro Cavallo 0039 (0)432 728606 cortedeimolini@libero.it

PORTUGAL Paredes de Coura

Porto

Contact: Helena Soares (+351) 919 541828 helenasolaris@gmail.com Meeting bi-monthly

Sobral Pichorro

Contact: Lizzie Daisley-Smith (+351) 936 583 802 lizzie@korashan.com Meeting bi-monthly

SOUTH AFRICA Cape Town

Contact: Galeo Saintz +27 (0) 82 888 8181 galeo@galeosaintz.com Meeting every two months

SUPPORTING GROUPS Hemel Hempstead

Contact: Paul Sandford Tel. 07767 075490 paulsandford28@yahoo.co.uk Meets on the 2nd Wednesday of the month

RESURGENCE SUPPORTERS Patrons

Roger & Claire Ash Wheeler, Anthony & Carole Bamford, Viscount & Viscountess Cowdray, Dr Cherian Eapen, Kim SamuelJohnson, Lavinia Sinclair, Doug Tompkins, Michael Watt, Louise White, Nigel & Margaret Woodward

Life Members

Colette 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, Thomas Lingard, 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 Members

Mr G. Bader, Mrs Helen Carlton, Mrs K. Dudelzak, Marcela de Montes, GR Murthy, Rosemary Steel, James Stelfox, Mrs Charmaine Wright

TRUSTEES James Sainsbury (Chair), Josephine Amankwah, Dick Baker, Sandy Brown, Rebecca Hossack, Tony Juniper, Hylton Murray-Philipson, Nick Robins, Kim SamuelJohnson, Ana Stanic

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Herbert Girardet, Hazel Henderson, David Kingsley, June Mitchell, Sophie Poklewski Koziell, Jonathan Robinson, Andrew Simms, Martin Wright

PRODUCTION Printer Kingfisher Print, Totnes, Devon ISSN 0034-5970 Printed on Evolution paper: (75% recycled fibre/25% FSC certified virgin pulp), using soya-based inks

London

Contact: Annemarie Borg amb@annemarieborg.com Antara Project Group focused on role of artists

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

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