Embodied Wisdom

at the heart of earth, art and spirit

September/October 2010 No. 262

£4.95 US$8.00

EMBODIED WISDOM

Reintegrating the body and mind

BIODIVERSITY what do we save?

NATURE PIONEERS REAL CHANGE ADAPTATION THE KEY TO SURVIVAL E.O. WILSON WOLFGANG SACHS

EMBODIED WISDOM 

 VANDANA

SHIVA

TAGORE: A PEOPLE’S POET

Dancing Woman by Rabindranath Tagore

Image: courtesy National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

WELCOME

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ext year Resurgence celebrates two important anniversaries: its own 45th birthday and the 150th birthday of the visionary Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. The inspiration to integrate the arts, poetry and the human spirit with ecology, economy and activism that you find in the pages of Resurgence originates from the life and work of Tagore, whom I first encountered when I lived in a Gandhian ashram in Varanasi (Benares).

Back then, my bedroom was opposite that of a Bengali colleague, Shishir, who was a fan, follower and devotee of Tagore’s poetry, fiction and music.

Shishir edited the English weekly newspaper Land Reform, while I was the editor of the Hindi version.

So we not only shared living space but an office, too.

Shishir frequently quoted Tagore, translating his words into Hindi for me (at that time I spoke no English), and would often play Tagore’s music on the gramophone. This captured my imagination, so I bought three books: one of poetry, Gitanjali (‘Song Offerings’) for which Tagore had been awarded a Nobel Prize; a novel, Gora (‘The Fair-skinned Boy’); and a play, Dakghar (‘The Post Office’). Of course I had heard of Tagore, had read a poem here or a song there, and knew his well-known song Ekla Cholo Re (‘Walk Alone’): Walk alone, walk alone Even if nobody follows you Walk alone Even if nobody listens to you Walk alone Don’t give up. Walk alone.

Keep flowing. Walk alone.

Mahatma Gandhi used to sing this song every morning and evening, as the song resonated with his own sentiments. Gandhi said that even if you are in a minority of one, truth is truth, and you should stand up for your convictions without fear.

The second Tagore song that everyone in India knew by heart was our national anthem, a song in praise of the diverse and delightful landscapes of the Indian subcontinent.

So I was familiar with the stature and importance of Tagore, but only superficially. Thanks to Shishir, though, I felt moved to pay proper attention to the great poet. What I discovered was that Tagore was a deeply spiritual poet, a poet mesmerised by mystery, beauty and love of Nature in the tradition of Rumi

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and Kabir. He dwelt in the divinity of flowers, rivers and seasons, he sang odes to the Earth, but he was also an activist, and I, being engaged in the Land Reform Movement, found myself spellbound by Tagore’s ability to combine his poetic imagination with his social activism. His poetry and plays emerged from his engagement with agriculture, education and service to the poor. Tagore was as comfortable working in fields and with farmers as he was at home in his study writing poetry and painting pictures.

He started a radical school for the poor on his land, and famously told the pupils, “Here you have two teachers: myself, your human teacher, and the trees, your Nature teacher.” He insisted upon holding all classes under the trees, believing that the book of Nature is a more profound source of learning than the printed word. Here was a man, a famous poet and playwright, who spent so much of his time with words and books and yet, recognising the limits of the written word, he also immersed himself and his pupils in experience of the natural world.

Gandhi called him ‘Gurudev’ (‘the divine teacher’), and Western writers and scientists such as W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein called him “the greatest son of India”. In his native place he was known as “the voice of Bengal”. Above all, according to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (former UN Secretary General), he was a people’s poet and a poet of the world.

This is why UNESCO has declared 2011 as the year of Tagore. He touched millions of people around the world through his novels, short stories, plays, paintings, songs and poetry. He wrote more than 1,000 poems and over 2,000 songs, which are frequently recited and sung in every corner of Bengal, as well as wherever Bengalis now reside.

Tagore’s work has been translated into all the major languages of the world, including English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

When I became the Editor of Resurgence in 1973, Tagore was my source of inspiration, and his vision of wholeness and integrity continues to influence the ethos of this magazine. So, to celebrate these two significant birthdays, we are organising a week-long people’s festival of the arts, crafts and culture (from 1 to 7 May 2011).

And all Resurgence readers, contributors, supporters and friends are invited to participate with us in this joyful occasion.

Satish Kumar

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CONTENTS No.262 September/October 2010

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20 36 FRONTLINE 4 ACTION FROM THE

GRASSROOTS

KEYNOTES

38 SENSE OF PLACE

20 EMBODIED WISDOM

40 AUTUMN GARDENING

UNDERCURRENTS

8 THE TRAGEDY OF

BIODIVERSITY Paul Evans Why conservation must change to ‘stand up’ for the whole of Nature

PHOTO FEATURE 24 ADAPTATION

12 TRANSHUMANCE

Diego Vivanco How this dying tradition plays a role in supporting biodiversity

14 EAST AND WEST

Rachel Fleming A modern sage shares his thoughts on living in harmony

16 LETTER FROM JAPAN

Junko Edahiro Younger Japanese consumers are rejecting material abundance

18 GETTING OFF THE

TREADMILL David Boyle & Andrew Simms Did our peasant ancestors know something we don’t?

Jonathan Mitchell Those species most able to adapt will survive climate change

1 WELCOME

Philip Vann Celebrating the 80th birthday of landscape artist William Crozier

51 PAUL GAUGUIN

Tate Modern presents Gauguin: Maker of Myth

Jane Hughes

32 BIG FOOT, LITTLE FOOT Mukti Mitchell

34 SLOW TRAVEL

Peter Abbs The prophetic voice of Canadian poet P.K. Page

46 LUCID AND WILD

30 THE VEGETARIAN FOODIE

Elizabeth Wainwright

44 POETRY

28 PROJECTIONS

Brigitte Norland

ARTS & CRAFTS

Satish Kumar

Caspar Walsh The new Resurgence film column

Jay Ramsay

42 LETTERS 64 COMMUNITY PAGE

REGULARS

Adam Weymouth

36 NATURE PIONEERS

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Juhani Pallasmaa Exploring the embodied condition of the integrated human experience

REVIEWS 52 FLIGHTS OF IMAGINATION

Sophie Poklewski Koziell reviews Tim Dee’s The Running Sky

Compiled by Elizabeth Wainwright

September/October 2010

IN OUR TIME On the Seashore As an island, Britain is dominated by its coastline – rugged, beautiful and inspirational – but it’s a coastline that sadly, and all too often, is increasingly polluted by plastic waste of all shapes and sizes washing up on its shores.

Now, in a bid to raise awareness of the problem, a new online participatory art project (www.marineplastic.org) is inviting UK beachcombers to help document those places where plastic waste is spoiling the shoreline.

The project is the brainchild of artist Steve McPherson, founder of Marine Art, who is planning to incorporate some of the images submitted in his wall-hung artworks.

All washed up

Photo: courtesy Steve McPherson

54 LOST CHANCES

NEW ON THE WEBSITE:

55 SINGING THE TRUTH

SLOW SUNDAY: 10:10:10

56 A SEARCH FOR WISDOM

Resurgence is linking up with the 10:10 campaign to celebrate a ‘global day of doing’ to cut carbon. Join us to take positive, practical action to reduce your carbon footprint

Avatar e-book: issues behind the film Forthcoming events: Tagore Festival and To Be a Pilgrim or Tourist?

Readers’ groups pack: all you need to start a readers’ group

EDUCATION

WEB EXCLUSIVES

Suzi Gablik reviews Bill McKibben’s Eaarth Val Harding reviews Mimlu Sen’s The Honey Gatherers

Edmund O’Sullivan reviews Mark Hathaway and Leonardo Boff’s The Tao of Liberation

57 ELOQUENT EPISTLES

Jini Reddy reviews Peter Owen Jones’ Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim

58 SEEKING A NEW IDEALISM

John Naish reviews Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity

60 HUMBLE STEWARDSHIP

Chris Nichols reviews Martin Crawford’s Creating a Forest Garden

61 A MANIFESTO FOR OUR TIME

Mary Tasker reviews Martin Large’s Common Wealth

www.resurgence.org

RESOURCES ONLINE

The Arts, as inspired by Nature, plus forthcoming exhibitions. And look out for our next free e-book

BLOGS Add your comments to our blogs on science, education, conservation and Nature

Your Countryside Needs You: Mark Ogden profiles Simon Nash, Somerset Wildlife Trust Nature Poet: Stephanie Sorrell celebrates the late British poet Derek Neville Frontline Online: More Action from the Grassroots

Front cover: Small Yellow Bird, 2001, by Craigie Aitchison Image: private collection/Bridgeman Art Library

62 THE SACRED UNIVERSE

Peter Reason celebrates the visionary works of the late Thomas Berry

65 CLASSIFIED ADVERTS 68 DISPLAY ADVERTS

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FOR CONTACT INFORMATION FOR RESURGENCE OFFICES AND AGENTS, PLEASE SEE THE INSIDE BACK COVER

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FRO N T L I N E  AC T I O N F RO M THE GRASSROOTS PA P U A N E W G U I N E A

ECOCIDE IN PARADISE Indigenous landowners are brutally stripped of traditional land rights

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n a move denounced by Ecological Internet, a leading environmental and human rights organisation, the Papua New Guinea (PNG) government amended its Environment Act without debate, stripping Indigenous landowners of ancestral and constitutionally protected land rights and their ability to legally challenge development projects on their land.

The fact that 97% of land in PNG has until now been under communal tenure has provided an important social safety net against resource corruption. However, without any consultation, on 27 May 2010 the government of PNG introduced emergency legislation that dissolved the constitutional rights of all landowners in PNG, including the right of Indigenous people to own land, challenge resource projects in court and receive any compensation for environmental damage. The bill was passed without being seen or debated by parliamentarians.

Glen Barry of Ecological Internet says: “The Environment Act amendments reflect increasing Chinese control of the PNG government, and Prime Minister Michael Somare’s move towards authoritarian rule, reducing communities to powerless third parties as their resources are stolen.”

PNG is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, harbouring dense tropical rainforest, endangered species, and rare equatorial glaciers on its highest mountain ranges. It is also one of the most heterogeneous nations in the world, with hundreds of ethnic groups and 820 ethnic languages.

For millennia, these cultures have lived harmoniously within the ecological limits of the country, but over the last 25 years, as international corporations have sought to extract the wealth of PNG, over a quarter of its primary rainforest and countless species have been destroyed. Now, with no means to protect land, families and culture from encroaching corporate plunder, conflict is inevitable as landowners become desperate, but have no legal recourse to remedy legitimate grievances.

The Act’s amendments come after a petition against ocean waste dumping was presented to the Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Minister in Bongu village, Madang Province in April this year. The petition referred to the Chinese state-owned Ramu nickel mine in Madang Province. The mine has met with a great deal of resistance by local Indigenous landowners and local and international NGOs because of its submarine ‘tailings’ disposal plan that would dump more than 100 million tons of toxic waste into the ecologically sensitive Basamuk Bay. Mine waste will not “lie dormant” on the sea floor, as claimed by the Chinese, but will be widely dispersed in the Vitiaz Strait, notably towards Madang and Karkar Island and across Astrolabe Bay – one of the world’s last great tuna feeding-grounds.

Sadly, with this new law in place, the Ramu nickel mine is now free to dump its waste into Basamuk Bay with impunity – and need no longer worry about getting fined.

www.rainforestportal.org/issues Time to stand up for Indigenous rights in Papua New Guinea Photo: Natalie Behring/Panos

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September/October 2010

by Lorna Howarth

PROFIT BEFORE PLANET

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he cynical strategy of BP to dub itself ‘Beyond Petroleum’ was exposed in the most devastating way imaginable by the explosion in April 2010 on the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling platform 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, causing a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The blast claimed the lives of 11 people who were working on the rig and injured another 17.

The rig sank two days later, and as we go to press more than three months on, the flow of oil has only just been plugged. The Gulf of Mexico, which hosts some 4,000 drilling platforms, is home to many endangered species, and the accident is a major threat to the Gulf’s fragile flora and fauna.

Yet despite this ecological catastrophe, it seems money is still the driving force for BP’s shareholders, 94% of whom rejected a call for a review of its controversial Sunrise Canadian tar sands project.

Tar sands are a type of oily soil that requires large amounts of energy, water, and industrial processing to extract and transform

into crude oil. Tar-sand extraction in Alberta, Canada is already the world’s largest industrial project, requiring the removal of vast areas of ancient forest and consuming enough natural gas per day to heat 3.2 million Canadian homes. The extraction process emits three to five times as much carbon dioxide as conventional oil drilling, the lakes of toxic waste it produces are so large they are visible from space, and the pollution from the project is harming the health of the Indigenous people who live in its shadow.

George Poitras, a former Chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation of Canada, said: “We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan, where I live. We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the tar sands development on our doorstep.

It is shortening our lives and the blood of Fort Chipewyan people is on these companies’ hands.” www.no-tar-sands.org

GLOBAL

THE WORLD’S MOST POLLUTED PLACES …and the welcome efforts to start cleaning them up

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or the past four years, the Blacksmith Institute in New York has reported on the world’s most polluted places. These range from the artisanal gold mines in Cambodia, Senegal and Mozambique, where, during the production process, millions of miners including women and children are exposed to potentially fatal levels of methylmercury, one of the most dangerous neurotoxins known, to the urban air quality of places like Delhi in India and Tianjin in China, which is so toxic that it impairs lung development, with Cairo in Egypt having the worst air pollution in the world.

However, there has been a small but noticeable trend towards remediation, and the Institute’s 2009 Environmental Report, in collaboration with Green Cross International, highlights 12 clean-up success stories from around the world.

Whilst Richard Fuller, President of the Blacksmith Institute, acknowledges that “these success stories were few and far between”, nonetheless they offer a glimmer of hope to millions of people worldwide whose lives are blighted by pollution.

In Accra, Ghana, the availability of innovative cooking stoves that reduce indoor air pollution has significantly reduced the

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incidence of respiratory illness; in Shanghai, China, the authorities have initiated a 12year clean-up programme to remove raw sewage from urban waterways that supply drinking water to millions of people; and in Bajos de Haina, Dominican Republic, the removal and decontamination of soil that was polluted by the improper recycling of used car batteries has helped to reduce lead levels in the blood of local children.

Bioremediation plays a key role in this work. For example, in areas of heavy metal contamination, research has focused on the establishment of crops that do not absorb these metals, thereby providing

surface that was left. The application of an organic microbial accelerator together with the introduction of earthworms resulted in major improvement in soil condition.

Toxic pollution is an environmental, economic and public health catastrophe mostly affecting the poorest of the poor in the developing world. Research estimates that exposure to toxic pollution accounts for 40% of deaths in these regions.

But, as Fuller notes, “it is a solvable problem”, which requires education to inform people about these ‘silent killers’ and how to take steps to protect themselves, plus legislation, which

The remediation process is measurably and effectively improving the lives of millions safe foodstuffs, and, conversely, plants that do absorb these contaminants, so that the growth and removal of such plants gradually cleanses the sites. Another method is the use of vermiculture (worms) to deal with polluted sites. One successful project in India combined the removal to a secure landfill of a large quantity of dumped hazardous waste with vermiculture treatment of the moderately contaminated

plays an enormous role in eliminating the causes of pollution, much of which comes from poor industrial practices and corporate negligence. Together with innovation that creates new ‘clean’ economies via the remediation processes, the lives of millions are being measurably and effectively improved. www.blacksmithinstitute.org

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TREES FOR GLOBAL BENEFITS

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he Rainforest Alliance has validated the first forest-carbon project in Africa.

Located in the Bushenyi, Hoima and Masindi Districts of Uganda, Trees for Global Benefits was established

by ECOTRUST, a Ugandan non-profit organisation specialising in financing conservation projects that link landholders to the voluntary carbon market. This initiative has engaged over 500 farmers in sustainable carbon sequestration activities, helping them increase their livelihoods as well as providing significant benefits to local ecosystems. The project will sequester over 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide over 20 years.

The 138 farm plots covering 637 acres are planted with native trees, and the focus on agroforestry systems will lead to improved and diversified incomes and increased access to forest foods, fuel wood and basic building materials, reducing

deforestation pressures on nearby natural forests as well as boosting biodiversity in surrounding ecosystems. The use of native trees will expand habitat islands and biological corridors for elephants and chimpanzees, and reforestation will improve soil stabilisation and growing conditions on the hillsides of the Bushenyi District.

“This validation is a confirmation that Trees for Global Benefits is indeed a crucial financial mechanism supporting smallscale farmers to integrate tree planting as part of their livelihood strategies,” noted Pauline Nantongo, Executive Director of ECOTRUST. Christopher Gumisiriza, a farmer from Bushenyi, said, “Before the programme was introduced, I had limited ideas on what I could do to improve my livelihood. Now, with an understanding of agroforestry principles

...a prime example of how carbon finance can work for the poor from the programme, I have been better able to invest in my land.”

This is the 11th carbon project that Rainforest Alliance has validated, and the second under the Plan Vivo Standard, a system for developing community-based payments for ecosystem services, projects and programmes. “The Trees for Global Benefits Programme in Uganda is a prime example of how carbon finance can work for the poor and those most vulnerable to potential climate change impacts,” explains Alexa Morrison of the Plan Vivo Foundation. www.rainforest-alliance.org www.planvivo.org

GROUNDBREAKING ALLOTMENTS

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ith growing public awareness of the impact food production and distribution have on climate change, demand for land to grow vegetables on has never been higher. The New Allotment Company is undertaking a national survey to ascertain and map where the demand for allotments lies in the UK. Whilst initiatives such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Landshare scheme have gone some way towards bridging the gap between demand for and supply of horticultural land, there is still a dearth of allotments countrywide. In a bid to create the largest and most accurate map of allotment demand to date, allotment seekers across the UK are being invited to submit their postcodes to The New Allotment Company in order to pinpoint where the need is greatest. This will make it easier for local authorities, landowners and private companies to create more allotments. Currently, there is a shortage of over 150,000 allotments, with waiting lists of up to 40 years.

The New Allotment Company also announced the introduction of new

‘Group’ and ‘Business’ allotments.

Businesses that are conscious of their food-sourcing and green credentials are being invited to ‘grow their own’, as research has shown that businesses (particularly those that specialise in locally grown produce) consider this an interesting new operating model.

In response to feedback and demand for more socially oriented sites, The New Allotment Company has also launched bigger ‘Group’ allotments for friends and families to grow together, aimed at community groups such as schools and care homes.

Rudi Schogger, Managing Director of The New Allotment Company, says, “We have to move allotments into the 21st century by introducing more accessible formats for individuals, groups and businesses.

Our survey identifies needs in a far more accurate way than has ever been done before. We are also very excited about the prospect of business allotments and anticipate this will become a natural extension to many food-based businesses.” www.thenewallotmentcompany.com

Photo: istockphoto.com

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September/October 2010

C A N A DA

BOREAL BARGAINING Lake Bouchard, La Mauricie national park, Quebec

Photo: Erick Lamontagne/Borealphoto.com

Debate rages over the world’s largest forest ‘conservation’ agreement

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he Canadian boreal forest is North America’s largest primary forest, containing massive amounts of fresh water, threatened wildlife and migratory birds, and 25% of the world’s remaining intact ancient forest. It is also the largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon on the planet, sequestering the equivalent of 27 years’ worth of global greenhousegas emissions.

Now, 21 member companies of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), and nine leading environmental organisations including Greenpeace Canada, Canopy and ForestEthics have signed an unprecedented agreement – The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement – which applies to 72 million hectares of public forests that have been licensed to FPAC members. The agreement, when fully implemented, will conserve significant areas of the boreal forest, protect threatened woodland caribou and provide a competitive market edge for participating companies as they rebrand their products as ‘sustainable’.

Under the agreement FPAC members, who manage two-thirds of all certified forest land in Canada, commit to the highest environmental standards of forest management, whilst conservation groups commit to supporting FPAC member efforts by suspending their ‘Do Not Buy’ campaigns on forest products from this region. The agreement calls for the suspension of new logging on nearly 29 million hectares of boreal forest to develop conservation plans for endangered caribou,

while maintaining timber supplies for uninterrupted mill operations.

“The importance of this agreement cannot be overstated,” said Avrim Lazar, President and CEO of FPAC. “FPAC member companies and their environmental NGO counterparts have turned the old paradigm on its head.

Together we have identified a more intelligent, productive way to manage economic and environmental challenges that will reassure global buyers of our products’ sustainability.”

logging in exchange for the temporary suspension for three years of any new logging in 29 million hectares of forest to plan for the possible protection of woodland caribou. More troubling still, the agreement provides legitimacy to the timber and pulp industry to log much, if not all, of the remaining 43 million hectares of Canada’s old-growth boreal forests.

Critics also condemn Greenpeace Canada’s endorsement of continued ancient boreal forest logging, largely to

Together we have identified a more intelligent way to manage environmental challenges Environmental groups who are party to the agreement say the coming together of two traditional adversaries reflects a new commitment to a common goal. ”This is our best chance to save woodland caribou, permanently protect vast areas of the boreal forest and put in place sustainable forestry practices,” said Richard Brooks, spokesperson for participating environmental organisations, and Forests Campaign Coordinator of Greenpeace Canada. “Concerns from the public and the marketplace about wilderness conservation and species loss have been critical drivers in arriving at this agreement.”

However, not all environmental organisations are quite so optimistic and there are concerns that it actually legitimises continued old-growth forest

make throwaway paper items, suggesting that Greenpeace has failed to understand that all primary and old-growth forests are endangered and of high conservation value. Instead they claim Greenpeace perpetuates the ecological myth that old forests can be industrially logged in an environmentally acceptable manner.

In fact the solution to the conservation of old-growth forests is not to log them at all and to reduce the demand for consumable timber products by increasing the use of recycled materials and sourcing new fibre from regenerating secondary forests, mixed species plantations and sustainable alternatives such as hemp and bamboo. www.canadianborealforestagreement.com

Lorna Howarth is Development Director of Artists Project Earth (www.apeuk.org)

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UN D E R C U R R E N T S  C O N S E RVATION

The

Tragedy of Biodiversity If the International Year of Biodiversity has shown us just one thing, it is that we need to stand up for all of Nature and not just those aspects someone somewhere has decided are the more deserving, says conservationist Paul Evans

Reflections on fish

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Photo: Frédéric Larrey/naturepl.com

September/October 2010

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n 2002 the world committed itself to arresting the decline of biodiversity by 2010. Perhaps that was an ambition to change the way we think about Nature rather than a realistic target, but anyway it didn’t work. The erosion of biological diversity is happening faster than climate change around the world and yet has far less political purchase. This may have something to do with language: biodiversity is the variety of life, and in our culture we have learned to associate variety with choice.

Can we do without certain species? Can we favour some species over others? In conservation, does the end ever justify the means?

Scientists may reject the questions but it’s their term ‘biodiversity’ that makes space for them. Forcing ‘biological’ and ‘diversity’ into ‘biodiversity’ leaves out the ‘logical’ to produce an opaque term filled with values, which, in the more intimate, public language of Nature, creates doubt about what it really means. Biodiversity has inadvertently become a ‘quantitative view of life’ and appears the preserve of expert elites who describe it using the language of economics: competition, energy expenditure, strategies and dominance.

What has happened to Nature? For the bean-counters, Nature is primarily a resource, and biodiversity is now hitched to notions such as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’ – both free-market, consumerist ideals.

Meanwhile, as a result of those economic ideals impacting on natural processes, the tragedies of biodiversity spread across the globe. Farming, deforestation, urban development and transport are all huge threats to species and habitats, and then there’s climate change on top of that. And our anxieties about extinction carry the additional guilt of responsibility for the loss of life.

Now the conservation community is engaged in managing ‘the Nature we like’ for fear of ‘the Nature we don’t like’. The environmental orthodoxy claims that native is better than alien, rare is better than common; red squirrels are better than grey squirrels, therefore cull the grey squirrels. This kind of management is fraught with ethical questions that are being answered in ways that would be unconscionable in any other form of human endeavour.

Here is one of the most challenging and poignant examples. On a visit to Robinson Crusoe Island, I was eagerly anticipating endemic plants, cloud forest and a unique biodiversity. But what struck me first was a dusty moonscape flowering with big red poppies and bright yellow marigolds – the familiarity of the flowers only heightening the strangeness of the scene.

Named after Defoe’s famous novel (said to have been inspired by the Scottish mariner Alexander Selkirk, who was a castaway on this island for four years from 1704), Robinson Crusoe Island is the largest of the Juan Fernández archipelago. The cliffs of its extinct volcanoes soar 1,620m (5,300ft) above the ocean and are covered with a unique range of vegetation, earning the region the title ‘the Galapagos of plants’.

“This is one of the global jewels of biodiversity,” says Peter Hodum, an ecologist from the University of Puget Sound, USA, who heads up the conservation organisation Oikonos. “Although it does not have the cachet of the Galapagos, it is just as important.”

According to island biology expert Tod Stuessy, from the University of Vienna’s Faculty Centre of Biodiversity, its plant life has evolved to produce such vegetation that “the Juan Fernández islands are a bio-geographic puzzle, a unique place to test evolutionary hypotheses, and a symbol for conservation. We all have a responsibility for its stewardship.”

‘Stewardship’ is an important idea in Nature conservation, but there is also a kind of stewardship that has changed the ecology of the islands. In 1540, the discoverer of this archipelago dropped off four goats to provide food for future mariners. Unlike Selkirk, who was eager to be rescued, people came to Robinson Crusoe Island to stay: pirates, political prisoners and, in the 19th century, colonists. There are now 600 people living in the pretty village of San Juan Bautista, sustained by lobster fishing and livestock in a garden paradise.

But carving such an idyll from this wilderness has profound ecological consequences. Overgrazing by goats, cattle, sheep, horses and rabbits has led to irreversible erosion. Rats and mice jumped ship to become predators of endemic birds and gnawers of rare plants, some species of which are down to one lone survivor. New plants arrived with immigrants, and flowers skipped over garden fences to colonise disturbed land and oust vegetation that had evolved over four million years.

The population of the Juan Fernández firecrown – a hummingbird adapted to the pristine forest, and one of the rarest birds in the world – was thought to have plunged to 400 individuals because only 10% of the forest where it feeds on insects and nectar has survived overgrazing, erosion and replacement by introduced plants (such as the European blackberry) which don’t have the kind of flowers the firecrown needs. Thanks to conservation programmes and the planting of native shrubs in village gardens, the firecrown numbers are back up to 2,000– 3,000 individuals, but when they come into the village to find food they are now vulnerable to attack by cats.

Of the 123 endemic plant species on the archipelago, five are now declared extinct, 72 endangered and rare, 21 endangered and 21 vulnerable. A further 14 species have less than 10 individuals left in the wild. Saddest of all, perhaps, is the tale of the cloud-forest flowering shrub Robinsonia berteroi: the last of its kind was gnawed by a rat and as a result an entire species has gone forever.

The unique ecology of the Juan Fernández Islands faces irreversible change, which the international conservation community and islanders see as a catastrophe. What is happening here is being repeated all over the world: habitats are lost and species face extinction. The islands are a microcosm of the tragedy of biodiversity and offer a graphic account of rapid change through human

We need a partisan advocacy for non-human life, to stand up for the whole of Nature, not just those bits of it privileged by experts

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settlement in vulnerable ecosystems.

Because of this, the values implicit in biodiversity draw us into an adversarial conflict with Nature.

The term ‘biodiversity’ celebrates difference between things rather than the things themselves. It may be that diversity is strength and that we need it to sustain ourselves and be what we are. Although all living things depend on the relationships between them for their existence, it is hard to care for abstract ideas of diversity, especially when our impulse is to love the particular: this fern, this bird, this seal.

Valuing diversity itself may not discriminate between which kind of living thing we love and which we persecute. To discriminate, using scientific conservation values such as ‘nativeness’, rarity, threat and vulnerability, ceases to be neutral.

We are told that we stand on the brink of mass extinctions and that the imperative is to act to save biodiversity. “Shoot the goats, poison the rats, grub out the bramble,” was the consensus of a recent conference of conservation scientists on the Juan Fernández archipelago. Alan Saunders, who leads New Zealand’s invasive-species management programme, is optimistic about protecting endemic species on the Juan Fernández Islands from ‘invasive aliens’: “They say you can’t turn the clock back but I say we can get awful close in restoring islands to their previous state.

We’ve eradicated introduced species from New Zealand islands and we can have a good go with this.”

In a way, stewardship has become a way of reconciling the ethical dilemmas of the ends justifying means. “The important thing about this biodiversity is that it has a meaning for itself but it’s up to us to take care of it,” says Ivan Julio Leiva Silva, Director of Juan Fernández National Park.

“It’s not pretty work,” says Peter Hodum of Oikonos, “but it is essential to save these endemic species.” And many in the local community back such measures.

“We must act now,” says one islander.

“Our islands are dying.”

Engaging the local community has been central to the success of conservation. Similar projects appear around the world, and the UK government supports rat eradication on Ascension Island for similar reasons.

The increasing desperation about biodiversity makes these management measures more drastic, but because

the debate is controlled by an expert elite using a very specific language, its ethics and practices are not being scrutinised publicly.

The kind of care given to biodiversity is managerial, a ‘standing-in’ for Nature.

It stems from a desire to control, to garden, and is adversarial towards natural processes, such as the colonisation of animals and plants that cause longterm change to the preferred model of biodiversity. Management is antithetical to wildness, and even if pristine wilderness is little more than a romantic ideal, caring for the qualitative ‘wild’ of wildlife is a hands-off advocacy, a standing-up for Nature to be as it is, even if we think that that’s bad for us.

These differing visions of Nature can be hard to reconcile, particularly when standing in a forest on Robinson Crusoe Island with firecrowns singing from the white-flowered luma trees, and unique ferns at every step, watching the advance of the smothering acres of European bramble wipe out four million years of isolated evolution.

Extinction, after all, is not relative. But then, is imposing the future based on human preferences as justifiable as the scientists seem to assume?

Creating order in Nature is always oppressive to something, and interventions tend to be a temporary holding-back until attitudes or natural processes change. For conservation to become a cultural project it must involve everyone and not just a professionalised elite with specialised language and selfappointed rights.

This year – The International Year of Biodiversity – demonstrates that the focus on ‘diversity’ will not in itself help life on Earth. We need a partisan advocacy for non-human life, to stand up for the whole of Nature, not just those bits of it privileged by experts. We can reclaim a public language of Nature that is not an adversarial choosing between kinds of diversity. We can support communities that make a difference. Together we can help inspire international efforts at least as urgent and comprehensive as those dealing with climate change.

Paul Evans writes regularly for The Guardian, is a presenter of BBC Radio 4 Natural History Unit programmes, a former Conservation Director of Plantlife, and Development Officer for the British Association of Nature Conservationists.

Fur seal, Robinson Crusoe Islands, Chile Photo: Luiz Claudio Marigo/naturepl.com

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September/October 2010

What if ?

A lost number in the equation A simple understandable miscalculation And what if, on the basis of that The world as we know it changed the matter of fact Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong What if we found in the ground a vial of proof What if the foundations missed a vital truth What if the industrial dream sold us out from within What if our impenetrable defence sealed us in What if our wanting more was making less What if all this wasn’t progress Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong What if our wanting more was making less What if all this wasn’t progress What if the disappearing rivers of Eritrea The rising tides and encroaching fear What if the tear inside the protective skin Of Earth was trying to tell us something Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong What if the message carried in the wind Was saying something From butterfly wings to the hurricane It is the small things that make big change What if the question towards the end of the lease is No longer the origin but the end of the species Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?

What if we weakened ourselves getting strong What if the message carried in the wind Was saying something.

Lemn Sissay Issue 262

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UN D E R C U R R E N T S  D I S A P P EARING TRADITIONS

Transhumance The traditional practice of transhumance plays a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity, writes Diego Vivanco, who joined one of the last transhumant caravans in his native Spain

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ranshumance – the traditional migration of livestock – in which shepherds move herds along a huge network of tracks known as the cañadas, has existed in Spain for hundreds of years. It has played a vital social, economic and environmental role in the country’s history, but now the tradition is struggling to stay alive.

I am to accompany Lionel Martorell, one of Spain’s last transhumants, who will be herding his cattle from his mountainous home to the lowlands in search of milder climes and better pastures. When I arrive at his village, Fortanete, in the Maestrazgo region, an old villager tells me: “Transhumance was important in the past – 30 families would take their cattle to the lowlands and back – but now only two people still do it. The practice is dying. The end is inevitable.”

Fortanete is situated in southeast Aragón, a region with a notable transhumance past. Herds have been moved since the times of the Reconquista, enjoying the protection of monarchs and powerful farmers’ organisations such as the Casa de Ganaderos, formed in the 13th century. The 125,000km network

of cañadas (which encompasses most of Spain) was created by King Alfonso X in 1273. Shepherds enjoyed privileges and tax exemptions, and the animals could travel along the ‘droveways’ or paths, which have since gained legal protection.

Spain became a powerful nation partly because of the trading of wool from Merino sheep that traversed the cañadas. But times have changed. Most transhumance has been replaced by lorry transportation, and the herders find little profit in remaining loyal to the old traditional system.

I meet Lionel and his team the night before we are due to set out. He is the only shepherd in our group, two helpers will travel by foot, four more on horseback and a backup truck will carry our kit.

Over dinner, he reflects on his life. “We are all from Amposta, in the Ebro River delta. My father was a transhumant. He would travel to Fortanete and back with his herds every year. I’m 47 and have been doing this journey for over 30 years – I think you could say it’s in my blood.”

Lionel explains we will be travelling for five days and covering 140km. The cattle will stay in the lowlands at Amposta until the beginning of the summer, when they will return to the mountains. We take off early the next morning with 91 Avileña cows, black beasts renowned for the quality of their meat. The animals set a considerable pace, and it’s hard to keep up.

“Notice how a couple of the cows are leading the way,” says Lionel. “They have done the journey before and so know they are heading for better pastures.”

Tame cows are slower and more easily distracted in a transhumance than wild cattle.

The sun appears on a new stage of the journey Photo: Diego Vivanco

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September/October 2010

Avileña cows; only 3% of Spanish cattle are now transhumant

The horse riders have a tough time keeping the cattle on the trail and out of the pine forests, whilst those on foot work hard to guide the herd. As we leave the pine forests behind, the droveway boundaries become more defined. The day passes without incident and, making the most of the last rays of sunlight, we finish in the dark.

In the evening, we talk about the evolution of transhumance. “We are not doing anything new,” explains Lionel.

“Millions of years ago, animals completed the same migratory routes. Traces of nomadic hunters have been found both in these mountains and in the Ebro River delta – they were following their prey. We know the animals were already covering these journeys in search of better grazing land and climate. All we have done is domesticate them.”

The presence of country roads along the droveway exemplifies a major threat to the cañadas: that of human interference. The cañadas must have a width of 90 Castilian varas (72.22m), and livestock have priority over anything that does not respect the trail’s official use, such as roads, farms and buildings. But the constant development of roads and villages is creating severe problems in livestock movement.

This trip is no exception – the herd has had to cross busy A roads, and the shepherds must endure abuse from landowners unhappy at the presence of cows on their land. “Things can get nasty,” says Lionel. “We do all we can to stop the cattle from going onto their farms and plots, but the truth is that they are the ones not abiding by the rules. The droveways are clearly demarcated by law,

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Photo: Diego Vivanco

Enduring cold nights in near-solitude is compensated by the freedom of rural life, the intimacy with Nature

and anyone can get hold of the maps that show these boundaries.”

Our day ends in the semideserted hamlet of La Llacua in Castellón province. We drink coffee laced with an alcoholic punch to keep warm, and the team swaps stories around the bonfire.

“You are bearing witness to the death throes of transhumance in Spain,” says Lionel. “Only 3% of cattle in the country is now transhumant, and the numbers keep dropping. People just don’t see the advantages of this practice. Cañadas are natural spaces and if transhumance disappears so will the cattle routes. They go hand in hand.”

The direct benefits of transhumance do not stop with society. Scientists and conservationists defend its contribution to Nature preservation and argue that mountain and lowland ecosystems thrive thanks to it. As cattle move from one area to another, they reduce species extinction and soil erosion through overgrazing.

Grazing along droveways also helps to keep the trails clean, stop forest fires and contributes to tree regeneration.

One of the biggest arguments in favour of transhumance is its role in maintaining biodiversity. Pascual, one of the horse riders, points out the importance of cattle in the dispersion of species: “They carry seeds in their stomachs and hooves for hundreds of miles, enabling species to spread.” The decline in transhumance is also having a negative impact on genetic diversity, endangering flora and fauna. Reduced plant

seed movement is affecting flower diversity, which has a knock-on effect on insects.

We continue through Castellón province, the cows advancing slowly. The Mediterranean woodland gives way to orange groves, holm oaks and almond trees. By the end of the fourth day, the pace has dropped dramatically, the calves forced to rest in backup vehicles. The herd has covered an average of 30km a day.

On the last day of our journey, I wake at 6am to admire the star-studded sky of rural Spain. It feels like another example of how transhumance is in tune with the landscape and the environment. The herd enters Catalonia early, and I look around, taking in the weary yet happy faces. A migrating shepherd feels that leaving their family behind and enduring cold nights in near-solitude is compensated by the freedom of rural life, the intimacy with Nature and the importance of conserving a heritage of great cultural value.

There are questions about how this vast knowledge will be passed on if the practice dies out, and as we complete our journey, I can’t help but feel, sadly, that I’ve observed the last custodians of a dying tradition.

Diego Vivanco is a freelance documentary photographer whose work focuses on landscape, communities and social issues. www.diegovivanco.es

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UN D E R C U R R E N T S  WO R L D WISDOM “It’s those things that every wise and thoughtful person knows to be true.

It’s nothing to do with East or West: it’s about crystallising the best of everything we know into a world cultural heritage and using it to live in harmony.

“We live in such a beautiful world and all of us in our hearts want to live in harmony and peace, not in conflict,” he continues. “I think all the thoughtful people in the world are looking for ways to honour each other. We have to be able to respect the cultural heritages of others and know that in essence we’re all the same: we are all looking for ways of being that are more tolerant, wiser and more knowledgeable. In China we don’t call things like Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism religions like we do in the West.

We don’t become a Buddhist or Taoist to limit ourselves. We embrace the best from all of them as a life philosophy.”

Huang grew up with traditional Chinese philosophy instilled in him, spending his early years in the rural villages of China. It Photo: Dan Ottney

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“Modern sage” Chungliang Al Huang in front of a Tai Ji sculpture by Zhu Ming

EAST AND To live in harmony we need to become more reflective. This is the message of Chungliang Al Huang – a man they call a modern sage – who tells Rachel Fleming how his own peasant upbringing instilled a deep respect for Nature

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ounder of the Living Tao Foundation and internationally acclaimed Tai Ji master Chungliang Al Huang is a man of diverse talents. He has been a best-selling author, a teacher, dancer, artist and architect, and as well as sharing a stage with the Dalai Lama, he has worked with people like Sammy Davis Jr., Bruce Lee, Joseph Campbell and Joan Baez.

He has been described as a sage for the modern age and a master in the art of living and yet claims that he still hasn’t decided what to do when he grows up: “I am interested in everything,” he admits. “I’m a perpetual student of life. I don’t want to be a professional. I am always a beginner.”

One thing that runs through all of Huang’s work is his passion for sharing and communicating understandings that he calls ‘world wisdom’. It’s a bringingtogether of teachings from the East and the West that can help us navigate our way as global citizens through an uncertain future: “World wisdom is made up of the understandings that cut across culture and religions,” he explains.

was from here that his family fled after the Japanese invasion and it was this lifestyle that would follow them when they later had to leave mainland China for Taiwan after the Communist Revolution: “The simple peasant life of China has some wonderful qualities,” he remembers. “I grew up learning Tai Ji, chanting Tang Dynasty poetry, Tao Te Ching and Confucian classics and being immersed in a deep appreciation of Nature. Many children were not lucky enough to experience this at the time.”

He has lived in the West for many years, having first arrived in America as a young man to study architecture. “I couldn’t wait to see the world,” he says. Soon after graduating, he became interested in performance arts and, whilst teaching dance at the University of California, he began to realise the extent to which Western students were drawn to Eastern philosophy and practice. “I taught Tai Ji and meditation techniques to the dancers,” he recalls. “At that time I had no idea that what I learned as a child would be of so much interest to them.” But a chance

September/October 2010

encounter with Alan Watts led to a lifelong career teaching at the Esalen Institute, an alternative retreat centre in California. Here he collaborated with the likes of Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, John Blofeld and Huston Smith, and wrote widely acclaimed books on Tai Ji and Tao, including the best-selling Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.

“There is something deep down in all of us that we want to share and communicate in this short run of life,” he says, “and you have to keep finding new ways of sharing your understanding. My different careers have helped me to get the message across about how to build a bridge between East and West; how to achieve a balance between the two.

“I grew up as Chinese and became Western to survive, but I relied on an Eastern heritage to balance my life in the world. I’ve been lucky enough to realise that Westerners want to learn these things too, in order to find their balance. I can introduce Eastern philosophy in a way that makes sense to Westerners because I understand both sides. I have followed my bliss and doors have opened for me.

“Westerners are doers – they invent, they create, they do,” he adds. “They are good at science, technology and reasoning – look at all the things they’ve done – but they are missing the ability to step back and be more reflective. They miss emotions, feelings, art and cultural riches. They need to come back to family relationships, emotional intelligence and learning from the Earth.

WEST Traditional Asian philosophies have something to teach the West about finding these things and bringing them into balance. In Asian teaching we believe you must begin with the individual.

First you must cultivate yourself and then you learn how to relate to other human beings: siblings, spouses, colleagues and bosses.

If you have harmony yourself, you can expand out to your family, then community, then the world.

“In the West if we have a goal, we aim our bullet at the target; we go out to save the world. But in Asian philosophy the goal is inside. If you don’t work from inside out you are an offcentred person trying to do good but probably only making things worse. But if you are fully centred, you will hit the target.

Miracles happen when people get close to their centred place, which is when their lives change. With Tai Ji I help people to find that centre. Once we embrace the whole palette of ourselves (including the things we don’t like), we can become grounded.

Then, rather than always looking for the next mountain top, we can just elevate our grounding.”

Huang’s ideas for the need to centre and rebalance apply not only to Westerners but also in the East, where he teaches widely too. “There are increasingly more people in the West that are aware of the need for balance than there are in the modern East, where folks are now madly trying to catch up with the West in technology and consumerism and overlooking their own cultural heritage,” he says. “Ironically, as the East becomes more Westernised and the West embraces Eastern philosophy, we have come full circle in cultural

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We need to come back to family relationships, emotional intelligence and learning from the Earth Chungliang Al Huang, South China Sea

Photo: Ko Si Chi

synthesis.The task now in the world is to embrace diversity without losing ethnicity. We need to realise how rich and variegated our world is and to honour the multiple dimensions of being a global citizen whilst retaining our national and cultural identity.

“In human nature we have this eternal conflict of not finding harmony,” concludes Huang. “Even Adam had to be exiled from Eden. But we have to keep faith that collaboration is possible and that we can wake up to reality. We have a chance to live in harmony on this Earth in the East and in the West but we must choose to take it, otherwise we will become extinct like the dinosaurs. I used to be called a cockeyed optimist and a dreamer in my youth and I was proud of it. I refuse to lose my belief in humanity. There is some good inside us that we must believe will evolve. This is what gives me hope.” www.livingtao.org Rachel Fleming is Editor of The Source.

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UN D E R C U R R E N T S  N E W T HINKING

Letter from Japan Japanese consumers are reportedly staying away from buying goods and are choosing spiritual richness over material abundance. Junko Edahiro explains why

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henever I have a chance to speak with high school or university students, I ask them about wanting to own a car. Few answer that they do, while an increasing number are saying that owning a car is “not cool”. And I find quite a few young people saying, “All I need is my mobile phone.” These responses echo new data showing that it’s true – a decreasing number of consumers now want to own an automobile, once a must-have social status symbol.

If people are sitting on their wallets simply because the economy is slow, then the problems will be solved after the economy recovers. However, there are many writers who think that some changes are happening at much deeper structural and psychological levels. In fact, numerous books focusing on this point have been published in Japan recently.

Among them are Rebellion of the Simple Lifestyle Clan, No Brand Japan: The End of Twentieth-Century Consumer Society, The Young Generation That Doesn’t Want Much, and The Lifestyle and Consumption Behaviour of the Young Generation: Are Young People Really Not Spending Money? On the cover of a book with the title Study of the Anti-Consumption Generation: The Young Generation That Doesn’t Want Much Shakes the Economy, a sentence in big, bold letters, “Aren’t you being stupid to want to buy a car?” jumped off the page at me. (All English titles are my translations.)

I believe that behind these trends is a conscious and/or unconscious awareness of the absolute ceiling for resources, energy and ecological carrying capacity including carbon dioxide absorption. As it becomes more apparent that the world is going beyond the limits of the Earth, people’s sense of values is changing, especially in their deep psyche.

It is certain that the parameters of consumerism are decreasing as Japanese society experiences a declining birthrate and ageing population ahead of the rest of the world. In addition, as public opinion surveys on people’s lifestyle conducted by the Cabinet Office of the Government show, a growing number of Japanese now value spiritual richness more than material abundance (and this applies particularly to people in urban areas, and more to women than to men). It is this fact, I think, that lies behind the major structural change. Would people who regard spiritual richness as more important than material abundance be willing to buy new products launched every few months?

The younger generation is particularly seen as having little desire for material ownership. They simply say, “When I have to go from

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point A to point B, I will drive a car if that’s the only option, but the car does not have to be mine. I can rent a car or use a car-sharing service, since that’s now available, or maybe I can catch a ride with somebody. Or I will go by bicycle if possible.”

In my opinion, people’s value systems can change rather easily. Let me give an example. In 2000, when car-sharing services started to become popular in Europe and the United States, I introduced the movement to Japanese people in my email magazine covering environmental topics. At the time, the majority of Japanese subscribers reacted adversely, saying: “We like things clean and tend not to want to use things when we don’t know who used them before us. So a car-sharing service will never be popular in Japan.”

But things have changed. People can now find a car-sharing service near any station along the Yamanote Line, a main railway loop in Tokyo. And similar car-sharing services in other areas of Japan become available almost every day.

“Japanese people like cleanliness.” “A car is a necessary item for any young adult.” “To be considered an adult, you must have your own house.” These are examples of conventional assumptions, or a mental model that dictates that things “should be this way”.

The ability to identify and loosen up these types of mental model would, I believe, be indispensable for the future success of society and businesses.

I see three new trends that are changing people’s conventional assumptions. The first one is ‘deownership’, as described above. Another example: young people buy new books, but after reading them they usually sell them to Bookoff, a nationwide usedbookstore chain, or to other secondhand bookshops.

They most often purchase a book based on the premise that they will sell it after reading it. In that sense, secondhand bookstores are the modern version of the book-lending shops that were very popular in the old days in Japan. As for music, the industry is going through a tough time, since far fewer people now buy CDs. More people are downloading music, or borrowing CDs from rental shops. House-share has

September/October 2010

Bamboo Lined Path at Adashino Nembutsu-ji Temple

An increasing number of Japanese people now define happiness as coming from an engagement with Nature become very popular, especially among young people, and even has its own real-estate market, and fashionswap events known as ‘xChange’ are held in many places in Japan.

The second major trend is ‘de-materialism’ of happiness. Conventionally, buying and owning material goods is considered the best way to be happy.

But now an increasing number of people define happiness as coming from personal relationships and from engagement with Nature. More and more Japanese say they are interested in agriculture, enjoy candle-lit events with their friends and families, and participate in Neighbours’ Day, an annual event that started in Europe to enhance relationships among neighbours. The xChange events are designed to exchange not only fashion items but also information and sentiments from the owners of the clothes, using what is called an ‘episode tag’. Participants put a tag on each of the items they bring and write on it their name and a brief note such as “I loved this item but it doesn’t fit me any more. I hope someone who loves

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Photo: © Rudy Sulgan/Corbis

red can wear it.” Participants love reading the episode tags because they make people aware of the human connection – something that can’t be measured in monetary terms – and also promote the exchange of feelings and communication by exchanging goods.

The third major trend is ‘de-monetisation’. In Japan, it used to be common for people to plan their lives around the amount of money they earned by devoting much of their time to their businesses. But now an increasing number of people are choosing a new lifestyle, such as being “half-farmer, half-X”. The idea is that people spend half their time growing food for their own family, and the other half on something else. I know a “halffarmer, half-writer” and a “half-farmer, half-NGO member”. The basic thinking behind this lifestyle is that it may not be necessary to spend all your time earning money.

Continued growth of these three trends could turn the tables on companies that persist in an over-reliance on business models of seeking profit simply by selling increasing numbers of products.

This is because a growing number of people are feeling less need for material goods and are refraining from buying them.

In the light of this, I personally have high expectations and am paying attention to the three trends of de-ownership, demonetisation and de-materialism, which are quietly progressing at the grassroots level deep in people’s minds and changing their sense of values, although articles about such trends rarely hit the headlines in economic newspapers.

For further information visit http://www.japanfs.org/en/ Junko Edahiro is an environmental activist based in Tokyo.

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UN D E R C U R R E N T S  G R E E N ECONOMY

Getting off the Treadmill Why is it that as we seem to get ‘richer’, we are all working much harder? David Boyle and Andrew Simms have a hunch our debt-free medieval ancestors may have had the answer

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ome years ago, we posed what we call the Nether Wallop Question.

It’s a little like the West Lothian Question – a British political paradox that saw English MPs banned from voting on matters affecting that Scottish region whilst allowing Scottish MPs to still vote on issues affecting similar places in England – and is similarly unanswerable.

But it is nonetheless still a question that we humbly suggest goes right to the heart of the problem of modern economics.

The Nether Wallop Question refers to the small Hampshire village of Nether Wallop, hardly a disadvantaged area, with more than its fair share of thatched roofs and retired major generals, though it has council housing and playing fields too.

Half a century ago, it boasted two village shops, a post office, two pubs, a butcher, a village policeman, a doctor and district nurse, a railway station a short bus ride away, and a multiplicity of postal deliveries.

That was in the austerity years of the late 1940s. Now, when we are incomparably ‘richer’, all that is left is one struggling pub, some groceries available in the wine merchant’s, and a very occasional bus.

I have never found a definitive answer to the Nether Wallop Question, but our book The New Economics: A Bigger Picture tries to pose a similar one: why do we work harder than medieval peasants?

First, let’s look at the evidence. We know that medieval peasants had more days off a year than we do now in the UK. It is also increasingly clear that most of us in fulltime employment in the UK work longer hours than the most downtrodden peasant.

The average UK employee currently works a 37-hour week – although many work far more – which adds up to around 1,700 hours a year once holidays are

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taken into account. (This figure is rather more in the USA.) Most calculations about medieval peasants give them an average of only about 1,620 hours a year, and some put it as low as 1,440 hours.

This seems to have gone hand in hand with, in bygone days, a more positive attitude to what work could be. Professor Christopher Dyer – Gordon Brown’s former history tutor – argues that, by the 12th century, work was sometimes described as “sweet and delightful”.

The real question is why, despite two centuries of economic growth, we are tied even more closely to the treadmill than ever. Like the Nether Wallop Question, the issue of why we work harder and harder goes to the heart of our assumptions about economics. Why are things not getting better, as the prevailing economic ideology says they should be?

Worse, the Victorian economist James Thorold Rogers calculated that the average English peasant in 1495 needed to work annually for just 15 weeks to

Children’s Games, detail, by Bruegel

Most of us in full-time employment in the UK work longer hours than the most downtrodden peasant earn the money needed to survive for the year, supported as people were by access to the common land. In 1564, this figure had risen to 40 weeks.

Now, of course, when GDP tells us we are incomparably richer, it is extremely difficult for a couple to buy a house in southern England and live a reasonable life without both partners working flat out all year.

Sometimes even then it simply isn’t possible.

Subscribers to the Whig view of history,

September/October 2010

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna/Ali Meyer/The Bridgeman Art Library

and the heroic style of economics that went with it, have cast European medieval civilisation as hopelessly dark and bestial.

The new economics tradition, stretching back to Morris and Ruskin, is encouraging people to take a second look at English medieval life to see what we can learn from medieval work, creativity and sense of spiritual certainty.

We need not swallow the idea that everything about the Middle Ages was better, any more than everything about it was worse. Medieval dentistry alone might put us off swapping our lives with theirs. There were certainly barbarisms, diseases, intolerances and hunger that would be insufferable to us today.

But there is something about the economic arrangements in Western Europe in the 12th century particularly that deserves a second glance.

When archaeologists unearth skeletons in London from the 12th century, for example, they are as tall, and therefore as well fed, as skeletons in any other period of history, anywhere, except our own.

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In the case of women, they are even slightly taller.

There was famine, even poverty, in northern Europe at the time, though it was largely brought about by war.

In peacetime, hundreds of thousands of small farmers in England produced debt-free economic security, with varying degrees of feudal control.

In fact, it may be debt that is the key to the problem. The opposition to usury from the Church included all money-lending at interest, which meant that, apart from the aristocratic classes, people were largely debt-free, though – of course – feudal duties were owed instead.

Yes, huge resources went into building the gothic cathedrals, and these remain shadowy, but the latest research suggests they were not paid for by ruinous taxation but partly by the cathedral authorities issuing their own currencies in the 12th century, known to history as ‘black money’.

These cheap coins were called in and re-minted every few years – with a fee attached – encouraging local spending. These were the elusive negative interest currencies that monetary enthusiasts talk of today, but that explanation still remains fringe and obscure.

Why did people work less hard? Was it perhaps the medieval regulations against usury and debt that avoided the kind of mortgage-based work demands we now face?

Was it the overwhelmingly local and independent structure of the economy, supplemented by some international trade only in luxury and a few specialist items?

Was it, perhaps, the spiritual basis on which the culture was based, as people like Ruskin and Chesterton believed?

The truth is that we really have no idea, any more than we know why the life represented by a thriving local economy in a large village like Nether Wallop should have declined more recently.

But some things we can be increasingly certain about: prosperity – as conventionally measured – does not seem to bring the promised leisure we were all led to expect. Not only that, but conventional policymakers find it inconvenient to talk about it.

Even so, the new economics does suggest places to look for answers. The idea behind our book is that we can only move forward by asking the really difficult questions of conventional economic wisdom.

Why did a tiny Pacific island get to the top of the Happy Planet Index? Why did China pay for the Iraq War? Why has London traffic always travelled at 12mph? Why do fewer people vote when there is a Wal-Mart nearby?

But the question of why we work harder than medieval peasants goes to the heart of it. Why do we work harder as we seem to get richer?

It is the central conundrum of economic growth.

David Boyle is a Fellow and Andrew Simms is Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation. The New Economics: A Bigger Picture is published by Earthscan.

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KEY N OT E S  P H I L O S O P H Y

Embodied WISDOM We have forgotten that we do not ‘live in’ our bodies but are ourselves fundamentally embodied constitutions, says Juhani Pallasmaa

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estern consumer culture projects a dualistic attitude towards the human body. On the one hand we have an obsessively aestheticised and eroticised cult of the body, but on the other, intelligence and creative capacity are celebrated as totally separate, even exclusive, individual qualities. In either case, the body and the mind are understood as unrelated, even conflicting entities that do not constitute an integrated unity.

This separation is reflected in the strict division of human activities and work into physical and intellectual categories. The body is regarded as the medium of identity and self-presentation (as well as an instrument of social and sexual appeal), but its significance is seen merely in

Embodiment is not a secondary experience; the human existence is fundamentally an embodied condition its physical and physiological essence. As the very ground of embodied existence and knowledge, the body remains totally undervalued and neglected.

Of course, the division of body and mind has a solid foundation in the history of Western philosophy. Prevailing educational pedagogies and practices continue to separate mental, intellectual and emotional capacities from the senses and the multifarious dimensions of human embodiment.

Educational practices usually provide some degree of physical training for the body, but they do not acknowledge our fundamentally embodied and holistic essence.

The body is addressed in sports and dance, for instance, and the senses are directly acknowledged in connection with art and music education, but our embodied existence is rarely identified as the very basis of our interaction and integration with the world. Training of the hand is provided in courses that teach elementary skills in the handicrafts, but its integral role in the evolution and different manifestations of human intelligence is not acknowledged.

In earlier modes of life, the intimate contact with work, production, materials, tools, climate and the ever-varying

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phenomena of Nature provided ample sensory interaction with the world of physical causalities and developed an unspoken existential understanding of how we occupy the “flesh of the world” (to use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughtprovoking notion). Closer family and social ties, as well as the presence of domestic animals, provided more experiences for the development of a sense of empathy and compassion than today’s technologically individualised world.

In our age of massive industrial production, surreal consumption, euphoric communication and fictitious digital environments, we continue to live in our bodies the same way that we inhabit our houses. Sadly, we have forgotten that we do not live in our bodies but are ourselves fundamentally embodied constitutions. Embodiment is not a secondary experience: human existence is fundamentally an embodied condition.

We are connected with the world through our senses.

However, the senses are not merely passive receptors of stimuli, and the body is not only a point of viewing the world from a central perspective. Neither is the head the sole locus of cognitive thinking: all our senses, in fact our entire bodily being, directly structure, produce and store silent existential knowledge. The human body is a knowing entity. Our entire being in the world is a sensuous and embodied mode of being, and this very sense of being is the ground of existential knowledge. “...understanding is not a quality coming to human reality from the outside; it is its characteristic way of existing,” claims Jean-Paul Sartre.

Existentially essential knowledge is not primarily a knowledge moulded into words, concepts and theories.

In human interaction alone, 80% of communication is estimated to take place outside the verbal and conceptual channels. The knowledge and skills of traditional societies, for instance, reside directly in the senses and muscles, in the knowing and intelligent hands, and are directly embedded and encoded in the settings and situations of life.

The curious historical fact that the representation of the human figure was perfected in Greek sculpture roughly 1,000 years earlier than painters could perfectly depict the human body is explained by the surprising theory that early sculpture was not a visual art form at all but a communication

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In their thought-provoking book Philosophy in the Flesh George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out that even ordinary daily acts and choices call for a philosophical understanding: “Living a human life is a philosophical endeavour. Every thought we have, every decision we make, and every act we perform is based upon philosophical assumptions so numerous we couldn’t possibly list them all…Though we are only occasionally aware of it, we are all metaphysicians – not in some ivory-tower sense but as part of our everyday capacity to make sense of our experience.”

Learning a skill is not primarily founded on verbal teaching but rather on the transference of the skill from the muscles of the teacher directly to the muscles of the apprentice through the act of sensory perception and bodily mimesis. This capacity of mimetic learning is currently attributed to human ‘mirror neurons’, which make us unconsciously mimic movements that we sense around us, and this information helps to explain, for example, why something like yawning is so socially contagious.

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Hundertwasser, 682 The Sunset Man in Black City, 1968

© 2010 Hundertwasser Archive, Vienna

from the muscles of the model through the muscles of the sculptor directly to the muscular sense of the viewer.

As Sartre asserts, we are all born into the world, which in itself is the most important source of knowledge for us. Our normal understanding is that children are born completely ignorant of the world. But, according to today’s cognitive psychology, this is a gross misunderstanding.

“We know now that babies know more about the world than we would ever have thought possible. They have ideas about other human beings, about objects and the world – right from the day they are born,” explains Alison Gopnik, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. “And these are fairly complex ideas, not just reflexes or responses to sensation …Newborn babies have an initial theory about the world and the inferential learning capacities to revise, change and rework those initial theories on the evidence they experience from the very beginning of their lives.”

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o how does all this apply to my own specialised field of architecture?

The same principle of embodying knowledge and skill continues to be the core of artistic learning. In my view, the foremost skill of the architect is to turn the multidimensional essence of the design task into embodied and lived sensations and images; eventually the entire personality and body of the designer becomes the site of the design task, and the task is lived rather than understood.

Architectural ideas arise ‘biologically’ from unconceptualised and lived existential knowledge rather than from mere analyses and intellect. If my assumptions, which have gradually arisen through almost half a century of personal design practice and four decades of teaching, are true, it is obvious that today’s intellectualised emphasis of architectural education is misguided.

Architectural problems are, indeed, far too complex and deeply existential to be dealt with in a solely conceptualised and rational manner. Profound ideas or responses in architecture are not individual inventions ex nihilo either: they are embedded in the lived reality of the task itself and the age-old traditions of the craft.

Milan Kundera writes about “the wisdom of the novel” and argues that all gifted

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Hundertwasser, 691 Irinaland Over the Balkans, 1969

writers collaborate with this historically accumulated wisdom. There is certainly a similar “wisdom of architecture” that we need to acknowledge and collaborate with. The significance of tradition is thought-provokingly pointed out by the Catalan philosopher Eugenio d’Ors in his paradoxical statement: “Everything that is outside of tradition is plagiarism”. The role of this fundamental, unconscious, situational and tacit understanding of the body in the making of architecture is grossly undervalued in today’s culture of quasirationality and arrogant self-consciousness.

Even masterful architects do not invent architectural realities. Rather, they reveal and articulate what exists and what are the natural potentials of the given condition. Álvaro Siza, one of the finest architects in our time to combine a deeply rooted sense of tradition with a unique personal expression, says: “Architects don’t invent anything: they transform reality.” Jean Renoir, the film director, expresses the same idea of artistic humility in film-making somewhat differently: “The director is not a creator, but a midwife. His task is to help the actor give birth to a child that she has

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not realized having carried inside her.”

Architecture is also a product of the knowing and feeling hand.The hand grasps the physicality and materiality of thought and turns it into a concrete image. In the arduous processes of designing, the hand often takes the lead in probing for a vision, a vague inkling that it eventually turns into a sketch, a materialisation of an idea. The pencil in the architect’s hand is a bridge between the imagining mind and the image that appears on the sheet of paper.

In the ecstasy of work, the draughtsman forgets both hand and pencil, and the image emerges as if it were an automatic projection of the imagining mind. Or, perhaps, it is the hand that really imagines, as it exists and operates directly in the flesh of the world, the reality of space, matter and time, the very physical condition of the imagined object, or space.

Martin Heidegger connects the hand directly with the human thinking capacity: “The hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp...Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking,

© 2010 Hundertwasser Archive, Vienna

every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element.” Gaston Bachelard writes about the imagination of the hand: “Even the hand has its dreams and assumptions. It helps us understand the innermost essence of matter. That is why it also helps us imagine [forms of] matter”.

The capacity to imagine – to liberate oneself of the limits of matter, place, and time – must be regarded as the most human and essential of all our qualities. Creative capacity as well as ethical judgement calls for imagination and it is evident that the capacity of imagination does not hide in our brains alone. Knowledge is normally supposed to reside in verbalised concepts, but any grasp of a life situation and a meaningful reaction to it can, and indeed should, be regarded as knowledge.

In my view, the sensory and embodied mode of thinking is particularly essential in all artistic phenomena and creative work.

Albert Einstein’s well-known description of the role of visual and muscular images in his thinking processes in the fields of mathematics and physics gives an authoritative example of embodied

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thinking. In his famous letter to the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, Einstein confesses: “The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined…The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.”

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t is also evident that an emotional and aesthetic factor, as well as an embodied personal identification, is equally central in scientific creativity as in the making and experiencing of art.

The British sculptor Henry Moore, for example, emphasises the bodily identification and simultaneous grasp of several points of view in the sculptor’s work: “[The sculptor] must strive continually to think of, and use form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head – he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualises a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realises its volume, and the space that the shape displaces in the air.”

All art forms, such as sculpture, painting, music, cinema and architecture are specific modes of thinking. All profound artistic works are engaged in the philosophical issues of the human condition. They articulate the very boundary line, ‘the skin’, between us and the world and they represent ways of sensory and embodied thought characteristic of that particular artistic medium. These modes of thinking are images of the hand and the body, and they exemplify essential existential knowledge.

Instead of being mere visual aestheticisation, architecture for instance, is a mode of existential and metaphysical philosophising through the means of space, structure, matter, gravity and light.

Profound architecture does not merely beautify the settings of dwelling, as it articulates the experiences of our very existence, such as gravity, matter, light, time and order. Meaningful works of art, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House to Giorgio Morandi’s minute still lifes, are microcosms, miniaturised representations of the world.

All artworks articulate the boundary between the self and the world in the experience of both the artist and the viewer/ listener/occupant. In this sense, the art form of architecture not only provides a shelter for the body, but it also redefines the contour of our consciousness, and it is a true externalisation of the human mind. Architecture, as well as the entire world constructed by humans with its cities, houses, tools and objects, has its mental ground and counterpart. As we construct our selfmade world, we construct projections and metaphors of our own mindscapes. We dwell in the landscape and the landscape dwells in us. A landscape wounded by human acts, the fragmentation of the cityscape, as well as insensible buildings, are all external and materialised evidence of an alienation and shattering of the human inner space.

Even in the technological culture of today, the most important existential knowledge in our everyday life does not reside in detached theories and explanations, but it is a silent knowledge,

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beyond the threshold of consciousness, fused with daily environments and behavioural situations. The poet, too, speaks of encounters at the “threshold of being”, as Bachelard points out. Art guides us to this threshold, and surveys the biological and unconscious realms of the body and mind. In so doing, it maintains vital connections with our biological and cultural past, the soil of genetic and mythical knowledge.

Consequently, the essential time dimension of art points to the past rather than the future; significant art and architecture maintain roots and traditions instead of uprooting and inventing. However, today’s obsession with uniqueness and novelty has misguided our judgement of artistic phenomena. Radical works of art and building surely appear as ruptures or discontinuities of convention, but at the same time, on a deeper level, all profound artworks reinforce the perception and understanding of human biocultural historicity and continuity. Artistic revolutions always imply a reconnection with the invisible undercurrents of the universe of the human mind.

We dwell in the landscape and the landscape dwells in us The duty of education is to cultivate and support the human abilities of imagination and empathy, but the prevailing values of culture today tend to discourage fantasy, suppress the senses, and petrify the boundary between the world and the self.

Consequently, education in any creative field in our time has to begin with the questioning of the absoluteness of the lived world and with the resensitisation of the boundaries of self. The main objective of artistic education may not directly reside in the principles of artistic making, but rather in the emancipation and opening-up of the personality of the student and his/her self-awareness and selfimage in relation to the immensely rich traditions of art, and to the lived world at large.

It is evident that an educational change concerning the significance of the sensory realm is urgently needed in order to enable us to rediscover ourselves as complete physical and mental beings, to fully utilise our capacities, and to make us less vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. In the words of the philosopher Michel Serres, “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses.”

The intelligence, thinking and skills of the hand also need to be re-discovered. Even more importantly, the unbiased and full understanding of human embodied existence is the prerequisite for a dignified life.

Juhani Pallasmaa is Professor of Architecture Emeritus, Helsinki University of Technology. This is an edited extract from his book The Thinking Hand: Embodied and Existential Wisdom in Architecture, ISBN: 9780470779286.

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BIO C U LT U R A L D I V E R S I T Y яБо HIMALAYAN SPECIAL REPORT

Adaptation

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September/October 2010

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” – attributed to Charles Darwin

For the snow leopard to survive, adaptation will be key

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Photo: Tom and Pat Leeson Photography/leesonphoto.com

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BIO C U LT U R A L D I V E R S I T Y ď Ž HIMALAYAN SPECIAL REPORT

Angphoura Sherpa lives in the tiny hamlet of Langmoche. He lost several yaks and hectares of land during a GLOF (Glacial Outburst Flood) event in 1985, barely escaping with his life

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September/October 2010

The top of the Khumbu Glacier and Khumbu Icefall

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or the Sherpas who live near Mount Everest, glacial outburst flooding from meltwater build-up is an ongoing concern, threatening some of their pastures, fields and even lives.

For the myriad of other species that inhabit the Khumbu Himalaya, rising temperatures are bringing a new wave of species previously unseen in the area, from tiny bacteria to plants to mammals.

The high-Alpine and sub-Arctic climate zones are warming and changing. Forests have to adapt to increased dryness and fires.

Humans have to live with less water and increased desertification. Species like the snow leopard may benefit in the short term from an increase in game, but others may

Photo: Jonathan Mitchell

face accelerated extinction.

Already, the humble house-fly has been spotted by mountaineers at Camp II on the southern face of Mount Everest in the subArctic climate at around 7,000 metres.

Clearly, the natural world – humans included – has a great ability to adapt to a changing environment. However, we should not let this fact prevent us from better adapting our societies to avoid causing further rapid, accelerated change to areas like the forests and snows of the Great Himalaya Range.

Text and photographs by Jonathan Mitchell, who is a photojournalist and the Editor of Special Report: Himalayan Climate Change. http://lightroom.weebly.com

Photo: Jonathan Mitchell

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RE G U L A R S  P RO J E C T I O N S

Celluloid

Connections In his new column on the power and possibility of cinema, writer, film-maker and wilderness teacher Caspar Walsh explores how film can be a platform for personal transformation and global change

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f all the art forms I’ve worked in, produced and taught over three decades, cinema is the one that has inspired, transformed and excited me the most.

It’s helped me make sense of my life and the world I live in. Reflections of the trials and triumphs of my life are found time and time again within the celluloid stories flickering in front of my eyes, much like the ancient flames of the fires illuminating the faces of storytellers throughout history.

I’ve been searching long and hard for a way to convey the global significance of film as a platform for emotional, psychological and physical change.

Cinema has always felt to me sidelined by the forces of literature and theatre. Like it isn’t a serious artistic contender, particularly when it comes to the epic adventure stories that so inspired me as a kid. I’m often left with the feeling that stories with meaning have to be conveyed to small audiences with big minds.

Only the films with limited reach are the ones to be taken seriously, blockbusters being ‘popcorn for the eyes’, something to be enjoyed on a rainy day or as a means of escape from the demands of daily life. But inside the epic fantasy of films like The Lord of The Rings, Braveheart and The Matrix lies the gift of a reflection of our own individual potential and the ability to be the heroes and heroines of our own life stories, inspiring us to make real changes in our lives. The same is true for biopics and documentaries made from the heart and with an eye on the capacity of film to bring about fundamental change.

With a medium that seems to lean so heavily towards entertainment, escape and making money,

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where is film’s place in 21st-century Resurgence, and what is its future?

This column will explore contemporary and historical films, directors, writers and actors who offer us messages of hope, reflection and empowerment through their carefully crafted work, and so it feels right that we should start with the most financially successful film in the history of cinema. A movie that has changed the technical landscape of entertainment and the possibilities within cinema, a breathtaking achievement, a narrative as old and familiar as the history of story itself.

I sat in the Manchester IMAX in January this year

The magic of cinema, of stories told with passion and love, is part of the fabric of our society and we need its magic now more than ever with my wife, and prepared myself for what I knew was going to be a new cinematic experience. It flashed me back to the first time I saw Star Wars, at The Odeon Leicester Square in London with my brother in 1979. Both events left me wide-eyed, inspired and full of the possibility and adventure in the world beyond the cinema (a feeling that has never left me).

The film I had awaited with so much anticipation and sat down to – over-sized 3D glasses perched on the end of my nose – was James Cameron’s epic environmental polemic, Avatar.

This is a production that encompasses the trinity of technology, spirit and tribe with a story

September/October 2010

Avatar encompasses the trinity of technology, spirit and tribe

focused on the fight against injustice and corporate greed and their inevitable destruction of both the environment and its inhabitants. The buzz and discussion this film has triggered across the planet has been astonishing and appears to have ‘woken’ certain sectors of society that had been conveniently ‘asleep’ to the current environmental crisis we are facing.

Cameron really has his money where his storytelling mouth is off screen, and he has now stepped up as a figurehead for the campaign against the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian rainforest – one of many urgent causes to save the ‘lungs of the Earth’.

He recently told the tribal elders of the Xingu, “We’re here to listen to what you are saying, to hear your concerns and, because I am a film-maker, to share this with the outside world.” And this message is now reaching a massive audience – cross media, cross continent – and shining a powerful light in those dark places corporate industry would much rather remained in shadow.

The global impact of Avatar is clear; the local, more personal effects are harder to define but no less powerful. One good example: my wife and I had entered the IMAX that night locked into a stubborn silence brought about by an earlier argument.We were watching a key scene in

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the film unfold: the soon-to-be hero Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is mesmerically covered in floating alien seedlings as a sign of his being ‘chosen’ to lead the Indigenous tribe. We sat, eyes wide, utterly transfixed by the beauty of it and the vision of hope and connection to Nature it conveyed. We got out of the way of ouselves, held hands and let ourselves be drawn into the story, allowing our conflict to dissolve away in the face of the message on the massive screen in front of us.

There is an abundance of independent films, both factual and fictional, from around the world that address politics, war, poverty, injustice and environmental issues. They are for me often powerful essays on their chosen subjects and deserve a much wider audience than they currently enjoy. But the truth is that they tend to communicate their message in ways that only a minority connect with, and more often than not that minority is already converted. For the message to expand its current reach, the language with which it’s being conveyed needs to be simple and clear and above all entertaining. It has to engage, not lecture.

Despite its obvious storytelling flaws and the production’s carbon bootprint, Avatar does this in spades.

In this column, I will be searching for the keys that unlock the simple reality that

Still: 20th Century Fox/Album/AKG

what we see in the films we watch and what inspires us – makes us feel less alone, and more hopeful, connected and alive – is in essence a call to our own individual adventures and to our need for personal and collective change. That the deeper reason we walk time and time again into those darkened theatres or sit down at home to watch a movie is that we are consciously or unconsciously seeking something that will give our lives meaning, something that will help us reconnect to each other and our communities.

When we find this inspiration through the images, sounds and emotions projected back at us from the silver screen, we discover something much more than mere entertainment. We discover the essential, life-giving power of story that transports us not away from ourselves to another land or time but back into ourselves, into our hearts and souls, to a place that has always existed in us and can never be fully crushed by the trials of life.

The magic of cinema, of stories told with passion and love, is so much more than a distraction from the everyday. It is part of the fabric of our society and we need its magic now more than ever.

Caspar Walsh is the new Resurgence Film Editor.

He will be posting regular film updates on the Resurgence website: www.resurgence.org

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RE G U L A R S  T H E V E G E TA R I AN FOODIE

Pumpkin Magic The golden flesh turns into a meltingly soft base for soups and risottos, making this autumn staple the ultimate comfort food, writes Jane Hughes

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know I started cooking in 1984, because that’s the year Sarah Brown’s Vegetarian Cookbook was first published. I spent a precious £10 on it, and I’ve been carrying it around ever since. I simply had no interest in cooking until I turned vegetarian – but I was off to a flying start in 1984, despite being hampered by the filthy, ill-equipped and occasionally, frankly, infested kitchens of the student houses where I lived at the time.

Even now Sarah Brown’s big cheery book makes me smile because it reminds me of the sudden and quite unexpected wave of enthusiasm for cookery that overtook me at that time. And the page that bears the most stains and splashes is the page with a recipe for pumpkin soup.

Whatever possessed me to set about chopping up a pumpkin in those conditions? I guess I didn’t know any better. I had no hang-ups about needing special equipment – I remember using a straight pint glass as a rolling pin (was I the only student making pastry?).

And I probably cut up that pumpkin with a bread knife.

I had no idea what to expect – I only knew that when I saw that big fat orange pumpkin, I was somehow compelled to buy it. There’s a reason why pumpkins are associated with witchcraft. They make me do it.

In later years I would often end up with four or five of them, sitting in a hefty row in the kitchen. I could hardly bring myself to cut them up. What is it about pumpkins? Perhaps their shape – you can hold a pumpkin like a fat hen. Perhaps their colour?

Growing up in the 1970s, I have a soft spot for that retro orange. More likely, though, I think the urgent desire that I experience for pumpkins is linked to the fact that they are not really available all year round.

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Some vegetables (and fruits) mark the changing of the seasons – pumpkins arrive when the nights start to draw in. It gets me all excited to see them, and I get the urge to fill my house with cosy throws, gather pine cones (though I never know what to do with them) and make soup. Toffee apples have a similar effect. I accept that a toffee apple is not really, strictly, a seasonal fruit. But I bet it counts towards my five-a-day. I’m surprised, in retrospect, that I stumbled upon a pumpkin at all, in Hull in 1984, but obviously I did, and naturally I needed to possess it.

I gather recipe books like squirrels gather nuts, but their authors would despair if they were to watch me cooking, as I very rarely follow a recipe to the letter. I’m always tempted to tweak. I’ve learned from teaching cookery classes that there are lots of people who wouldn’t dare to do this. Some people need ‘experts’ and instructions, perhaps because they’re aiming for perfection. I think learning to cook in a student house taught me to find ways to manage with whatever was to hand, and cooking for myself rather than for a demanding or fussy family gave me the leeway to take chances and to produce dishes that were not perfect.

When I needed to find something fairly easy to do with a pumpkin, Sarah Brown came to the rescue.

But I certainly didn’t have the means to weigh out two pounds (900g) of pumpkin flesh. I probably just sawed the top off the thing, scooped out the seeds and stringy stuff, and then dug out as much of the flesh as possible whilst keeping the outside intact – ready, of course, for the obligatory lantern-making.

Thus I learned that soup-making is basically a question of frying a collection of chopped vegetables,

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 gently, with the lid on the saucepan, until a consistency

Illustration: Meriel Thurstan

Pumpkin Comfort A recipe Weighing ingredients is anathema to the preparation of real comfort food. You need something to calm you down and make you feel better – you don’t need any number-related stress Avail yourself of a substantial baking potato. Peel it and chop it into cube-like pieces somewhere between a centimetre and an inch across. Put these into a shallow oven-proof dish. Now do the same with a sweet potato of similar size. And one or two red onions. And roughly the same amount again of pumpkin, peeled and chopped in a similar manner. Slosh over some olive oil, some crushed garlic (you know how much you like) and, absolutely essentially, a heaped tablespoon or so of chopped fresh sage.

Mix it all together. Enjoy the colours. Now take a wedge of blue cheese, crumble it over the dish and mix well. The best way to do this is with your hands. Come on, don’t be scared. Cover the dish with foil (or a lid) and leave it in a medium oven for about 30 minutes. Revisit it to remove the foil and give it all a good stir (not with your hands this time). Continue to cook without the foil until the whole thing turns deeply golden and bubbly, and your entire home is filled with the scent of garlic and sage.

A health warning: this kind of comfort food should not be eaten daily – it’s really for emotional crises and is at its most healing and magically potent when enjoyed without accompaniment. If you have to share it, it goes nicely with brown rice.

And maybe also try:  Denis Cotter is King of the Pumpkins. Try his gratin of roast pumpkin, leeks, sweetcorn and hazelnuts with a Gabriel cheese cream (from Paradiso Seasons).

 Yotam Ottolenghi also has a way with pumpkins. Have fun with his Halloween soufflés (from Plenty).

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generally described as ‘meltingly soft’ is achieved. You then pour on some ‘light vegetable stock’ (ah, how I came to rely upon those green Oxo cubes…), simmer for a bit longer and then blitz the whole lot with a liquidiser. (How on earth did I manage that bit? I probably attacked it with a potato masher.)

Herbs and spices are a matter of taste, or trial and error. I was surprised to find that Sarah B’s recipe contains nutmeg and ground coriander – my version these days contains cinnamon and ginger, so clearly there have been some adjustments made in the years since I made that soup for the first time.

Denis Cotter, the Irish vegetarian chef whose books are amongst the best loved in my vast collection, writes: “It would surely strain my imagination beyond capacity to produce lunch and dinner menus throughout the long autumn and winter without pumpkins. More than that, it would depress me to have to live without them.” I agree. Pumpkins are a lot of fun, and really, they’re not that difficult to tackle. Once you’ve managed to cut a pumpkin in half, you can place it firmly on its flat side and cut off the skin – always cut away from yourself. From there, you can easily scrape out the seeds and cut the flesh into chunks or slices. Toss the pieces in some olive oil, or a mixture of olive oil and butter, and roast them in a moderate oven until they’re tender.

This is comfort food of the highest order. I love to add sage or rosemary – Denis Cotter suggests thyme with lemon zest, but admits to having “a thing about spiking comfort food with a kick”, so he often teams pumpkin with chillis, whole cumin seeds or chopped coriander seeds. Yotam Ottolenghi, whose new book, Plenty, has filled me with pure joy, has a recipe for ‘crusted’ pumpkin wedges – slices of pumpkin roasted beneath a herby, lemony breadcrumb topping. He suggests serving the wedges with a mixture of soured cream and chopped dill. I’ll be making it very soon.

Unlike Denis, I like my comfort food really comfy.

Pumpkins do ‘meltingly soft’ exceptionally well, and there’s no better way to make use of this characteristic than in a risotto. One of the best I’ve made came from The Vegeterranean, the book of recipes from Country House Montali, an award-winning Italian vegetarian guesthouse in the Umbrian hills. Preparation involves cooking up a rich, smooth mash of pumpkin, onion, shallot and garlic, which is stirred into the risotto when the rice is partly cooked. The recipe also uses grated ginger, lots of lemon juice and a fair bit of white wine, naturally. Memories of this fabulously aromatic dish were awakened when I noticed a pumpkin risotto on the menu at Jamie Oliver’s lovely restaurant in Oxford. I even tried to resist and was delighted by an unexpected ‘twist’ – a light, crispy crunchy topping of garlicky breadcrumbs – pure magic!

Jane Hughes is Editor of The Vegetarian magazine, for The Vegetarian Society.

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RE G U L A R S  B I G F O OT, L I T TLE FOOT

Food...

glorious food!

One of my favourite things in life, says Mukti Mitchell. And isn’t it utterly fantastic that we get hungry three times a day?

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write in June, and Clovelly Court gardens, near my North Devon home, have just produced the first summer crops: lettuce, radish and cucumber, which I augment with wild garlic and sorrel from the woods. The ‘hungry gap’ has closed and I no longer have to go shopping in town for fresh produce.

Today’s menu: stewed rhubarb, oats, nuts and raisins for breakfast. Potato and mint soup with homemade bread for lunch. And for dinner, rice, dhal, curried spinach with wild garlic and a salad of lettuce, radish and sorrel. It’s high in greens, but they have 10 of the 14 vitamins and minerals that Liz Cook (lizcookcharts.co.uk) says I need. And since in this region Swiss chard crops 12 months of the year, I should be as healthy as Popeye!

straight out the window. Sorry, does it seem like I’m doubling back after suggesting that you “go all the way” on taste? Let me put it like this: philosophy meets sensuality, and to live in peace they begin by compromising. But in time both philosophy and sensuality realise that when the one is happiest, the other is, too.

So here is my philosophy of low-carbon eating:

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Avoid importing water. A kilo of rice feeds a family for a week, a kilo of bananas is dessert for one meal and a kilo of wine (one bottle) is simply an accompaniment to a meal. Ships are 12 times more efficient than lorries and 260 times more efficient than aeroplanes per kg of freight transported (Defra figures). Therefore dried food such as rice, beans, nuts and raisins shipped from across the world will be part of a low-carbon lifestyle for decades to come.

Question Where do queens, princes and presidents get their food?

Answer From home-grown, organic gardens outside the back of their palaces.

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Why? Because you simply can’t get better taste.

I feel a little pride as I walk back through the gorgeous beech woods from Clovelly Court, basket brimming with fresh greens, knowing that my dinner will be fit for a king. But mainly it’s the beautiful walk to get there, chatting to Heather the gardener, coupled with the awesome taste that makes me go back time and time again. I can eat buttered parsnips and steamed chard week after week in February and they still make me half close my eyes and groan with pleasure. How many experiences in life have that effect? I rest my case.

So the guidelines for low-carbon eating start with “follow your ecstasy”. One can’t experience ecstasy when feeling guilty, so air-freighted food goes

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Keep your feet on the ground (avoid air freight).

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Eat organic foods. Fertilisers release large amounts of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, and 1kg of nitrous oxide is equivalent to 300kg of carbon dioxide in its global warming capacity!

Eat from small farms. New research reveals that farm practices contribute far more to greenhousegas emissions than machinery and transport fuel put together. Soil stores vast carbon reserves in the form of humus. If the soil is not managed correctly huge amounts of carbon are released into the atmosphere, for example by deep ploughing and leaving soil bare. Conversely, if soil and plant life are managed correctly, they can sequester vast amounts of carbon. After developing an Agricultural Carbon Calculator with Climate Friendly Food, I formed the opinion that smaller farmers tend to follow more traditional practices including using fertiliser crops and compost, and animal manure rather than slurry

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single one out of the box without putting my thumb through the shell! The indication is that good food comes from rich soil, and rich soil reduces carbon emissions.

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Eat food you know. At the greengrocer’s I can ask what local produce is in stock and in season and get directed straight to the right veg without having to take the time to read all the labels. Expressions of interest in local food may encourage grocers to stock more of it. If you know the market trader, even better the farm, better still the market garden, and best of all your own allotment, you can develop a feel for the practices employed.

Have fun shopping! Buying food from the person who produces it creates a bond of mutual appreciation and enjoyment over time and this adds so much to the experience, it can lift my whole day. How much would I pay to have someone lift my whole day? A lot more than the price differential between massproduced and carefully produced food! Throw in ultimate taste sensation, and I’ll raise you again. Add long-lasting health, and I’ll double it. Good food is worth a fortune!

Buy expensive food! (And do without a TV.) When I was selling plastic bags for a living in Ecuador (oh, the trials of youth) I earned the average wage, which was a dollar a day. My food expenditure was roughly half of this. What we call expensive food in Britain today is cheap as chips! Imagine if we spent half our wages on food! How good would it be? (My mouth is watering.)

Friends have said “They saw you coming” when I got back from the delicatessen. Yes, I spend twice as

These cottage industries make up the world I want to live in

Broad beans: food fit for a king

Photo: Joy Michaud/Ecoscene

(causing aerobic rather than anaerobic decomposition, with vastly lower emissions), and sharing the land with wildlife.

Together these practices can absorb rather than emit CO2 from the land. Some small non-organic farms may practise what I call “rich soil farming” better than some large organic farms. For example, the Clovelly Court gardens are not officially organic because they use a small amount of fertiliser and pesticide, but they use home-made compost and traditional practices to produce delicious, “mostly organic” food. In contrast I purchased from a large supermarket six organic eggs that had watery whites and pale yellow yolks and was unable to get a

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much on the same thing (it tastes twice as good).

But what makes me do it is that it supports lots of little artisan cottage industries. People making pasta by hand, goat’s cheese in small dairies, bread in small bakeries. These cottage industries make up the world I want to live in. They are peopled by happy, roughshaven men and women with cream-coloured aprons on, coming out of little stone doorways and going into little wooden barns, who know thousands of little things about the food they make. People who work hard, but who actually like their jobs. By making that purchase I feel I’m creating the world as I want it to be, and – more than that – I am actually living in my dream world, all the way home from the shops, all the way through dinner, all the way until I next go shopping. And all the way through holidays when perchance I get to visit these wonderful places.

Mukti Mitchell is the author of The Guide to Low Carbon Lifestyles and the founder of www.lowcarbonlifestyle.org

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RE G U L A R S  S L OW T R AV E L

The Kindness of Strangers On the first step of his year-long walk from England to Jerusalem, Adam Weymouth has discovered the true meaning of hospitality

I

recently walked the 25 days from London’s Heathrow Airport to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Flight time is an hour and fifteen minutes – a journey some commuters make twice a day. This wasn’t some sort of perversion, but part of a longer walk from England to Jerusalem, which happened to take me through the two cities, and airports can be good places to sleep.

I don’t know if anyone has ever walked between these two airports before, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. But it got me thinking, especially as it coincided with the eruption of the volcanic ash that grounded flights over Europe for days.

People began to consider the reality of something previously taken for granted. Easy-to-reach destinations became seemingly impossible. Weekend breaks took two weeks. It was a Europe with more video conferences and fewer mangoes.

Such disregard for the journey is impossible as a pedestrian Such an awareness of the journey is a state of mind that has been diminishing for several hundred years. The 18th century saw the rise in a new type of tourism built around ideas of the picturesque, a word recorded as first used in 1703 with the definition “in the manner of a picture fit to be made into a picture”.

A picturesque traveller is described by Christopher Hussey as one “who has a conception of an ideal form of nature, derived from landscape painting”. William Gilpin, one of the best-known writers on the subject, suggested in a work of 1770 that we examine “the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty”, and in a later book goes on to say that his writing is intended to “characterise the countries through which the reader is carried”. This new breed of tourist made their way through landscapes, paintbox or pen in hand, taking the world’s first holiday snaps. They recorded the most aesthetically pleasing scenes, failing to mention or even notice what went in between.

It was at this time that “the business of travel began to be distinguished from the activity of walking”. The affluent began to see walking as something beneath them, a form of travelling that was literally a travail, even though the carriage

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was neither a much faster nor a much more comfortable alternative. It is an idea that lingers in the residual connotations of the word ‘pedestrian’. If walking did have to be endured it got barely a mention in the traveller’s account. Centuries later, and we have in-flight films and even DVDs in cars. But such disregard for the journey is impossible as a pedestrian.

I began this walk with a belief that walking, more so than any other transport, forces you to engage with everyone, and everything, you pass. In his most recent book, Earth Pilgrim, Satish Kumar talks about the importance of experiencing place, of approaching the world as a pilgrim rather than as a tourist. Yet this is not always a pleasant experience. Before setting out, studying maps at home, I never planned for the days of endless boredom, trudging through landscapes so humanised that they are no longer human-sized. Vast fields of wheat and oilseed rape, the surrounding land so bare of trees that you can barely stand in the wind. Small villages in the north of France where the communities have long since disappeared under the advance of second homes, commuters and agribusiness, the cafés and schools now closed. The endless sprawl walking out of London, walking into Paris: business parks and car showrooms, shanty towns propped up by motorway flyovers. The impossibility of walking through an airport. They are places we can only see comfortably through the eyes of a machine, moving at a machine’s speed.

Yet, similarly, I have seen other things that people assume no longer exist in their world. Hospitality, the kindness of strangers. I have been looked after in a way I never imagined. I have been invited into people’s houses for coffee, for Sunday lunch, for a bed. I have spent evenings in bars buying food and drink to find at the end that someone has paid for me.

I have been given oranges, Easter eggs, meals in restaurants.

And I have been shown friendship at times when I really needed it. It has been extraordinary.

But this is not a tale of getting something for nothing.

The word ‘hospitality’ derives from the Latin hospes, meaning ‘stranger’. And this goes both ways, for in a hospitable relationship each is a stranger unto the other. The exchange feels reciprocal, in a way that is hard to pin down. We share a conversation, a friendship, the age-old human act

September/October 2010

Tea at Furlongs by Eric Ravilious

of two people connecting over a gift. Furthermore, it does not feel like a one-off exchange, but more the continuation, or a recommencement, of a circle of hospitality that increasingly needs refreshing.

Two years ago a friend of mine walked from Edinburgh to London, barefoot and without money, as an exploration, amongst other things, of hospitality in the 21st century. A bishop had advised him that he should ask for nothing except water – that he should tell his story and trust that everything else would follow. To ask for anything else, he said, would be to rob people of the opportunity of offering hospitality.

It seems that many constructs of our world – flights, fear of strangers, obsessions about safety and security – are robbing people of the same chance.

For under our modern, paranoid veneer there is a core of hospitality that remains very much alive. Sites on the internet that offer hospitality, for example, are increasingly popular (CouchSurfing, for example, now has close to two million members) and, contrary to what many people think, it is still

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Bridgeman Art Library © Estate of Eric Ravilious. All rights reserved, DACS 2010

relatively easy to get picked up when hitchhiking.

Yet these opportunities to connect with strangers on their journeys are few and they are decreasing.

Walking through people’s villages, I have sometimes felt like a rare beast, and found people almost eager to invite me into their houses, to share stories.

This is not a plea to return to a way of life I don’t have answers for. Merely a suggestion that travel has more functions than simply finding what you set out to experience. Children learn by interacting with the world, not by being told that things are just so. Maybe we need to restore an element of travail to travel, forcing us to engage with the whole of our world in whatever ways it presents itself, and to acknowledge both the incredible generosity of strangers, and the unloved, uncared-for parts of our world that are often only a few miles from where we live.

Adam Weymouth is a writer and storyteller who has spent the past years working with various environmental campaigns.

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RE G U L A R S  N AT U R E P I O N EERS

A Photographer  A Peacekeeper There are many ways – large and small, loud and quiet – for us all to make a positive difference in the world, both near and far. Here, in the last quarter of the International Year of Biodiversity, we celebrate three Nature Pioneers who, despite global recognition, still work at the grassroot level to champion biodiversity and effect real change.

And it is in this context of compassion and commitment to protecting biodiversity that the elephant has become a powerful symbol of all that we are in danger of losing but must keep hold of if we are to work together to halt the dramatic threat of a sixth mass extinction.

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T

uy Sereivathana, or ‘Uncle Elephant’ as he is affectionately known, is the head of Cambodia’s Elephant Conservation Group, which was set up by UK-based Fauna & Flora International and works to ameliorate human-elephant conflict in the remote Cardamom Mountains.

It’s a role Sereivathana – who grew up in a small rural village in Cambodia Tuy Sereivathana Photo: Tom Dusenbery – believes he was born for, having decided, the moment he saw his first elephant as a young boy, that he wanted to be an ‘elephant protector’.

Today, as a result of low-cost measures such as the use of barriers of rope dipped in chilli to stop elephant crop raids and thus halt elephant killings, there has not been a single elephant death as a result of humanelephant conflict in the region since 2005.

Just as crucially, Sereivathana, who is one of the six 2010 Goldman Environmental Prize winners, has also worked to revive the national and religious pride attached to the Asian elephant, which is a long-revered sacred Buddhist symbol.

The Goldman Environmental Prize is awarded annually to grassroots environmental activists for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment. www.goldmanprize.org For more about Fauna & Flora International’s commitment to preserving biodiversity visit www.fauna-flora.org

September/October 2010

compiled by Elizabeth Wainwright



An Environmental Lawyer

T

huli Brilliance Makama is Swaziland’s only public interest environmental lawyer and the first to win a landmark case giving the country’s environmental NGOs a legal right to representation in conservation decisions.

Although Swaziland is plagued by food and water shortages, health problems and acute poverty, its diverse range of ecosystems make it a magnet for wildlife and, equally, big-game hunters and wildlife tourists.

But in an abuse of the word ‘conservation’, local people have not only been forced off their traditional lands but also persecuted for continuing the hunting and gathering practices necessary for their survival, creating, says Makama, the irony of starving populations living on the edges of lush wildlife parks.

This is a country where game protection laws are controlled by the monarch, not the government, and in a 1997 amendment to the Game Act (not debated in Parliament) rangers were given immunity from prosecution as long as they were acting while “protecting game”.

Working with Yonge Nawe, her local environmental action group, Makama, who is also a 2010 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, has been documenting the forced evictions, violence and killings of local people living in areas around conservation parks, and is now calling on the Swazi government

Thuli Brilliance Makama

Photo: John Antonelli

to bring the perpetrators to account and to pay compensation to local communities for lost land.

She believes that Swaziland’s remaining wildlife will not survive unless local people are given a stake in preserving it and can share some of its benefits.

“It can be done,” she says. “Look at Kenya and Zimbabwe.”

Walking Thunder

T

It is time, says elephant photographer Cyril Christo, to heed their warning while we still have elephants trumpeting across the last great spaces of the world.

Walking Thunder: In the Footsteps of the African Elephant by Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson is published by Merrell (ISBN: 9781858945057).

Issue 262 From Walking Thunder: In the Footsteps of the African Elephant

Photo: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson/Merrell



he Samburu people of Kenya talk of the concept of tenebo, which refers to the idea that the family structure of the elephant is a model for human social dynamics. “Without them we will lose everything,” warns Samburu elder Pacquo. “We will lose our minds.

Nothing will remain if elephants are gone. Only the crazy people will remain.”

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RE G U L A R S ď Ž S E N S E O F P L ACE

The Draw of the

Desert

A warm Bedouin hospitality and a place to find inner freedom await the pilgrim to the extraordinary Sinai Desert, writes Jay Ramsay Finding space and emptiness in the Sinai Desert

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Š Joan Dalton

September/October 2010

T

hirteen years old: I am standing in the south of Morocco gazing towards the edge of the Spanish Sahara. What is that shimmering on the horizon? I am looking away from the known world towards something edgy, exciting, empty, essential.

And then two weeks before I leave for Sinai at the invitation of Makhad Trust, an old friend in New Mexico phones me on his way to a Zen retreat and tells me how in Islam there is a story where, having created everything in the world, God leaves one place for himself.

The journey from the airport at Sharm elSheikh is a passage in itself. Surrounded by fake green and more lawn sprinklers than you have ever seen, our minibus with its Bedouin driver heads out into the desert, the road initially flanked by pylons, the central reservation littered with random rubbish.

Then gradually as the light fades, it all falls away. And we realise (our small retreat group of eight, attending Desert Feast run by Danny Shmulevitch, with Resurgence’s Satish Kumar attending as its special guest) that we are about to spend a week outdoors without electricity and most of our usual comforts. We secretly hang on to our mobiles, or (just as rigorously) abandon them.

Eighty miles or so later, we reach somewhere. Two jeeps are waiting. The luggage is shifted. Then we are driving who knows where, out into the open sand, both drivers suddenly and crazily accelerating spontaneously to avoid the wheels getting snagged. It is exhilarating.

It is surreal.

The first experience of the silence (particularly under moonlight, greeted

by Danny wearing mostly white) is unforgettable. It’s like a soft hiss, spacious, resonant; within and beyond the sound you also realise is the blood in your ears.

And the spectral shapes of the ancient rocks, whose deeply furrowed surfaces so nearly resemble creatures of all sorts, poised in stillness and a profound peace.

And suddenly there’s nowhere else to go.

After a 20-minute walk on rock and sand, the camp waits below: a beautiful woven Bedouin tent ringed by candles marking the rocky natural bedrooms under the stars that are our resting places.

Bedouin hospitality is central to their days.

The fire in the ring of stones, the slowburning acacia log like a giant cigar (wood

is scarce out here), the blackened kettle with its sweet red hibiscus tea... and later the cry of “SOUP!” followed by a simple rice dish; all as we sit cross-legged with candles in sawn-off plastic water bottles weighted with sand. Nothing is wasted.

Danny is articulate about the Bedouin sense of freedom despite the Egyptian authorities (Sinai does not feel like Egypt in any other sense). He quotes his friend Farrag: “We have no electricity, no water, no education – and yet we are free.” Bushmen and the Aborigines are relegated by authorities because they can’t be controlled.

They are also unconsciously envied.

Makhad’s work through Danny is establishing a school at nearby Nawamis, which is part of a bigger vision he has around a centre for conflict resolution.

inviting us into the necessity of self-care.

Most of all it invites us to trust – in a way we may not at all be used to because of our cultural (and medical) conditioning – self-healing. Actually, trusting life itself.

We return to the wilderness, to an absolute encounter with our environment in days that – framed by silence – expand out of all recognition. A fasting day can feel like three. And the starlit nights, with the stars clear as precise points of light... all of it held in the same primordial spacious calm silence, a silence that has virtually vanished from our world and our experience, which is something we know in our bones to be true and essential. And slowly over the three days, we are closer to the pure consciousness that is also truly here and now, present to its presence. My own practice as a poet, with camera, recording equipment and journal, is to enter into the spirit of the place.

And at the end of each day, the ritual of the meeting tent (the makhad) awaits.

Then the fast is finally broken. We move on into an unforgettable wilderness walk along the Exodus route on foot, with all its contours and alternations between hardness and softness, sandstone hill and dune, granite and silica. Next morning we continue our journey until we have less than an hour before we board the minibus to leave. We’ve even washed in the sand (it is remarkably cleansing), and the desert dust is on our boots and clothing. And our eyes are bright with the light as well as with all we’ve seen.

There is an aliveness that is purely light, an innocence, a freedom that we can touch beyond bright lights and constant addictive stimulation... that is the gift of being here, as it is in being anywhere our bodies are allowed to be in their natural ecology.

The gift of the desert then is an expansion. Freed from our busy contracted (or preoccupied) minds, where we can truly find our hearts again... even as our shadows walk with us?

In Islam there is a story where, having created everything in the world, God leaves one place for himself

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Funds of course are needed. The wilderness trips all contribute.

And we receive something invaluable from the Sinai that is beyond price, encoded in this extraordinary landscape that was once under water, beyond the geological rift that stretched either side of its peninsula into being drained, leaving mile after mile of empty valley, hillside, mountain and dune ceaselessly shaped by wind, sand and sun. God’s invisible hands in God’s country, where Moses and the Israelites came through Purgatory towards the Promised Land. The very openness of everything everywhere invites an openness in us, as well as sharing with a notable transparency as a group relatively quickly. Our lives may be full of noise and clutter, but they are also precious in all this space and emptiness.

Danny takes us walking as part of an induction process before the central part of the week, the context of why you might want to eat nothing for 72 hours when you thought you were on holiday.

Barring illness, the process is not at all as intimidating as you might fearfully think: it is a natural detox for the body that is also strengthening and regenerating; but above all it leaves a space where the Self, the More Than, can enter in. It will also focus whatever our inner process is, with its accompanying challenges, as well as

For further information on the Makhad Trust and retreat journeys visit www.makhad.org Jay Ramsay is a poet and psychosynthesis psychotherapist. His latest publications are Places of Truth: Journeys into Sacred Wilderness (Awen Publications) and The Poet in You (O Books). www.jayramsay.co.uk

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RE G U L A R S  AU T U M N G A R DENING

The

Painting: © Mary Newcomb Estate; Photo of painting: © Peter Nahum/ The Bridgeman Art Library

Alchemy of the Compost Heap

Heavy Evening, 1956, by Mary Newcomb

Often dismissed as a dumping ground for unwanted waste, your compost heap is actually the most important thing in your garden, writes Brigitte Norland

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September/October 2010

T

he autumn equinox sees the end of the growing season as plants die back and decomposition takes over. While the Earth retains summer’s warmth for a while longer, roots can continue to grow, which means many of the winter greens can carry on developing through the back end of the year. But at the surface, vegetation begins to break down and it is this natural activity we can utilise to make our compost heap.

Perhaps the most important installation in any garden and sometimes treated as a dump for unwanted material, it is in fact the guarantee of future fertility.

If we left everything where it fell, leaves, stems and even logs and branches all would rot down in time, and I do take advantage of this in large areas of our garden with interesting results as environments mutate. The shrubs and weeds make their own alliances, evolving in creative symbiosis. In the natural garden, decomposition is a large part of the means whereby habitat is created.

Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The Natural Way of Farming, commends all kinds of surface composting, and while acknowledging the value of compost itself, he considers intensive composting unnecessary, as it actually depletes the soil from which the organic material is taken.

However, within the scale of the garden, a compost heap need not compromise the integrity of the site.

What you don’t need today will become something you cannot do without next month or next year Bringing all kinds of vegetable matter together into a relatively controlled environment accelerates the process of decomposition, with the maturing time of any heap modified by the initial ingredients and any subsequent turning. Slowest to rot is a wood pile (though poplar’s papery wood soon disappears, while oak, yew and elm will last much longer).

A good heap is made from a blend of woody and sappy material, neither too dry nor too wet, with particles large enough not to deteriorate into a compact, anaerobic mass, and small enough to give the bacteria sufficient surface area to initiate decomposition. My own heap was set up in its present form 20 years ago between sheets of corrugated iron, about six foot square.

The bottom is filled in spring with all the twiggy herbaceous material and small prunings to create an aerating layer. Throughout the summer, weeds, mowings, wood shavings and poultry manure are added, together with the contents of the (urine-only) compost toilet and the top layer of sludge from the septic tank. Covered with a large sheet of black polythene, it soon heats up with bacterial activity. I might stir the top layer to cool things off when the weather is warm, and whilst some gardeners recommend activators, I find that with urine and manure the heap has enough nitrogen to function well. Composting human waste to high temperatures or for at least a year in a domestic heap renders it fit for garden use, and is especially useful where crops provide seed or tuber.

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Our compost heap deals with docks, dandelions and couch grass, but bindweed and ground elder are dried and stored in a bin for two years, when they are reduced to papery cords, good for mulching. My mother’s heap, enclosed in a wooden structure, is about a cubic metre in capacity and is fed in careful layers with kitchen trimmings, shredded paper, a few weeds and mowings, together with year-old dry leaves, since leaves need two years to rot and become available to soil life.

Not everyone is keen or able to compost on their own premises, and our district council has established a composting plant hardly a mile from our house, adjoining a landfill site in an old quarry. Keen to know more, I was most courteously shown round the site – the first of its type to be built in the UK and administered

by Viridor.

Kitchen waste including cooked food, together with garden waste and cardboard, is thoroughly mixed, wetted and shredded through long, rotating blades, then loaded into a chamber about as big as a squash court.

The volumes dealt with could generate too much heat, so air is passed through the heap in order to maintain a temperature of 60ºC for 48 hours. No bindweed would survive this but, more importantly, any pathogens that might be present in food waste will not survive these levels of exposure to heat either. On completion of this cycle the material is emptied and reloaded for a second period of composting to the same temperature, again for 48 hours. The air passed through the heaps is filtered to deodorise it, through a large volume of chipped wood, mostly from the building trade.

Once intensive composting is completed, the heaps stand outside to mature, screened for outsize material, which goes through the cycle again, and is then analysed for potential fertility and appropriate use on local farmland. Some mature compost is always retained to inoculate the next batch of raw material – a little like a sourdough culture! I was impressed with the compact nature of the site, made possible by the manipulation of the material, which can be ready for use within eight weeks. The maturing product on view the day I visited looked relatively dry and fibrous, but evidently easy to handle. The yard had been emptied of all screened compost the day before.

A short walk from the bottom of our garden leads to our village’s composting site, supported by grants from landfill tax (due to the proximity of the aforementioned landfill site), as well as by sales of its excellent compost.

Here garden waste is shredded, heaped, turned and sieved to produce a sterile mulch and soil conditioner that is excellent as a surface dressing.

So, whether you chop and turn or simply wait, the compost heap is really an alchemical crucible. What you don’t need today is to become something you cannot do without next month or next year. All that derives from growing matter is never useless: each leaf, stem or twig will become part of the soil again to grow next year’s food, flowers or fuel.

Brigitte Norland gardens in Devon, UK.

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RE G U L A R S  L E T T E R S

Letters to the Editors Proven Benefits of Reforestation Reading the Frontline section of the May/June issue of Resurgence (No. 260), I wanted to tell you about the Shinyanga Soil Conservation Programme (or HASHI in Swahili), which has supported the restoration of 500,000ha of trees and natural woodland by rural farmers, women’s and youth groups from over 800 villages (about 2.25 million people) in a region that was once called “the Desert of Tanzania”.

There have been many benefits – including the economic benefit of $14 per person per month – making a strong case for the importance of forest in so many different ways including biodiversity and empowerment and the balance of traditional and modern knowledge.

Edmund G. C. Barrow IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), Nairobi, Kenya Editors’ note: We have posted a detailed report on all the beneficial outcomes of this programme at www.resurgence.org

Clearing the Mist The articles on education (Resurgence 260) were very inspiring and enlightening.

Bhutan’s Prime Minister Thinley’s advocation of education for Gross National Happiness is an admirable aspiration, and an idea that other countries would do well to adopt. Too long have we put the needs and emotional wealth of the human being secondary to the needs and financial wealth of nations. Education is about developing full human beings, not about developing larger economies.

The replacing of the three R’s with the four H’s (Head, Heart, Hands and Home) could put us back in touch with a lot of things that have been lost in modern society. The intellect and the mind have taken prominence over the heart and hands and the results are clear to see. Wars, inequality, poverty and the ecological destruction of the planet are all results of a mind-dominated culture that has lost touch with the caring and compassionate qualities of the heart.

Developing the heart and hands can

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clear the mist of mind and awaken us to the beauty of the Earth, which we learn to take care of as a result. Perhaps then we would get a little closer to the Resurgence ideal of a world more dedicated to the values of “creativity, ecology, spirituality and frugality”.

Evan Dwan Dublin, Ireland

Spectacular U-turn Again, with unhealthy regularity, the spectre of GM crops in Britain (Resurgence 261) casts a dark shadow across our landscape, as unelected EU Commissioner John Dalli proves without doubt that the EU is not listening to the public’s fears over GM issues.

Without consumer cooperation, the GM issue is dead in the water. It matters not one jot who is marketing the product because if there is a potential health risk, the public will, quite rightly, reject it.

It remains a mystery how the EU can concoct the most elaborate rules on food safety, only to break through their seemingly impenetrable barrier of checks to produce such a spectacular uturn, defying all the acceptable rules of common sense.

David Harvey Wiltshire, UK

Cruelty of Wool Production In her article ‘Why Wool Still Matters’ (May/June Resurgence), Sue Blacker expounds the wonders of wool. However, little is said about the sheep that produce it.

Whilst the majority of sheep appear to have been less affected by intensive farming practices than other farm animals, their rearing can still involve considerable suffering, welfare and environmental problems.

After centuries of selective breeding, a sheep grows far more wool than it needs. Before shearing, it can suffer from the heat, and after shearing, it may be susceptible to cold and wet weather. (An estimated one million sheep die in the 30 days after shearing.)

Sheep kept primarily for their wool

do not die of old age. When their wool production declines, they are sold for slaughter. The commercial production of wool is inextricably linked to meat production. Some wool is taken direct from the skins of slaughtered sheep and lambs.

The average breeding life of female sheep is up to 15 years; however, the vast majority are slaughtered by the age of six. Lambs are slaughtered as young as four months.

Some four million newborn lambs – about one in five of the total – die every year within a few days of birth, mostly from disease, exposure or malnutrition.

Castration and tail-docking take place shortly after birth. The castration technique most commonly used is to restrict blood supply to the testicles through the use of a tight rubber ring, causing them to wither and drop off within a few weeks. The same method is used with tail docking. A rubber ring is fitted, designed to restrict the blood supply to the lower half of the tail. Farmers perform this mutilation to prevent “flystrike” or “blow fly”, an infestation that occurs in faeces that gather around the tail.

Sheep along with cows, pigs and poultry have been awarded the dubious honour of being among the world’s greatest environmental threats, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO report says the livestock industry is degrading land, contributing to the greenhouse effect, polluting water resources and destroying biodiversity. In summary, the sector is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every scale”.

Thankfully there are many good alternatives to wool, because the cruelty and environmental impact of wool production far outweigh its benefits.

Marilyn Harrison Swindon, UK

We welcome letters and emails commenting on Resurgence articles. These should include your postal address. Send your letters to: The Editors, Resurgence, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE or email: editorial@resurgence.org Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity.

September/October 2010

The Age of Absurdity It is shocking and profoundly regrettable but, apparently, sales of oranges are falling steadily because people can no longer be bothered to peel them.

As soon as I read this I began buying oranges more frequently...

Now, I peel an orange very De.lib.er.ate.ly.

sl.ooow.ly

voluptuously above all

DEFIANTLY as a response to an age that demands war without casualties public services without taxes rights without obligations celebrity without achievement sex without relationships running shoes without running course work without work and sweet grapes without seeds.

From The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to be Happy

by Michael Foley (Simon & Schuster). See review on page 58

Issue 262

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ART S & C R A F T S  P O E T RY

The Nature of Being

F

or the distinguished poet P.K. Page, writing was a form of contemplation, a trance-like activity which opened the mind to new patterns and unexpected connections. Her work, written over a long and creative life, examines the elusive maze-like nature of being and affirms the encompassing beauty of Nature.

One vital characteristic of her poetry is, at times, its striking use of a prophetic voice, a voice which certainly fits the extremity of our predicament, but which is seldom heard among contemporary poets. She claimed in a late interview that her task as a poet was to serve the Earth, adding, “if we do not change our ways the planet is doomed”.

Like a Cruise Ship

Funeral Mass

It is like a cruise ship bursting into flower or a municipal building intricately blooming.

And its myriad miniature petals blink as I pass.

In his blackest suit the father carries the coffin

Each year it grows more outrageous, spreads itself unpruned, untended, a vegetable amphitheatre with pizzicato blossoms pinking the air.

Oh, tree! I say as I whizz past, bowing. I bow. I whizz powered by some high-octane fumeless fuel that spring has invented. Oh, tree! I say. Tree. Tree!

And the word is new – another of spring’s inventions.

Newer than biots or quarks or nanoseconds.

Preparation Go out of your mind.

Prepare to go mad.

Prepare to break split along cracks inhabit the darks of your eyes inhabit the whites.

Prepare to be huge.

Be prepared to be small the least molecule of an unlimited form.

Be a limited form and spin in your skin one point in its whole.

It is light as a box of kleenex He carries it in one hand It is white and gold A jewel box Their baby is in it In the unconscionable weather the father sweats and weeps The mother leans on the arms of two women friends By the sacred light of the church they are pale as gristle The priests talk Latin change their elaborate clothes their mitres, copes their stoles embroidered by nuns Impervious to grief their sole intention is the intricate ritual of returning a soul to God this sinless homunculus this tiny seed

Be prepared to prepare for what you have dreamed to burn and be burned to burst like a pod to break at your seams.

Be pre-pared. And pre-pare.

But it’s never like that.

It is where you are not that the fissure occurs and the light crashes in.

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Entreaty O. Image-Maker

throw your bridal flowers.

September/October 2010

edited by Peter Abbs

Lighthouse and Lookout by Peter Baldwin

Courtesy of the artist Peter Baldwin has an exhibition during September at Duncan Campbell Fine Art, London www.peter-baldwin.com

To a Dead Friend

Seraphim

I miss your letters Fail to connect To find ways to connect Can you help? Surely from where you are – where are you? – your view is better than the view I have which is short

In the dream it was the seraphim who came golden, six-winged with eyes of aquamarine and set my hair aflame and spoke in a language which written down – an elegant script of candelabras and chalices – spelled out my name

Can you see back and forward yet? Or what I mean is is your time vertical?

If so how high?

Right out of sight?

You I invisible each to each?

Or you invisible and I enmeshed fleshed out in space?

So if you cared to could you see me failing to find ways to connect?

And could you help?

Or what I mean is will you?

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but it was not my name The mornings following were bright as wings sky’s intricate cirrus the feathers under his wings the wind’s great rush the bladed beat of his wings Mare’s tails traced the passage of his seraphic chariot Hummingbirds ruby-throated roared and braked in the timeless isinglass air and burned like coals high in the fronds of a brass palm sunbirds sang girasoles swung their cadmium-coloured hair and I heard the seraphim telling once again the letters of my name but my name was lost in the spoken syllables

Reprinted from The Hidden Room: Collected Poems (in two volumes)

by P.K. Page by permission of The Porcupine’s Quill.

Copyright © P.K. Page, 1997

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ART S & C R A F T S  V I S UA L A RTS

Road to Ballydehob, 2002, oil on canvas

Lucid and Wild The Scots-born artist William Crozier – who celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year – exudes a radiantly redemptive quality in his bold Irish landscapes, writes Philip Vann

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September/October 2010

Siegfried’s Way, 1987, oil on canvas

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illiam Crozier was born in Yoker, Glasgow in 1930, but now divides his time between his homes and studios in Hampshire and the west of Ireland.

His early paintings – often grim and harrowing – were based on his existentialist awareness of the destructive but ultimately transformative power of Nature, but in moving to Bantry, Cork, he discovered what he described as a ‘pristine landscape’ that somehow felt like it belonged to him.

What followed was a kind of second surge in his career, and a series of radiantly redemptive landscape paintings.

He says, “I like to know the landscape well. I like to know not only its looks, but its history. I like to know the man who owned it … Every field in Ireland has a name, for instance. An ancient name. It was originally a Gaelic

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The Plant Room, 1997, oil on canvas

name, and usually had something to do with the quality of the field: ‘the field that gets the suns first’, say, or ‘the field that dries quickest’.”

Central to his Irish landscape paintings is an exploration of the interplay between wild Nature and humankind’s perennial, much thwarted battle to cultivate and redefine the landscape. The Irish weather does not preclude his use of sumptuous colours – colours that are both of the mind’s eye and actually present in the landscape if we care to look with clarity and absorption.

Extremes of season and weather in West Cork, as well as an awareness of both extreme historical and epically commonplace events, help to dictate the direction of Crozier’s vision. For example, he has described “Dermot’s Castle…a small cliff-faced promontory to the East of Skibereen…the surrounding land is bog and heather, a barren exposed place in winter where one can lean at precarious angles against the wind on the raw Atlantic rain”.

Summer changes the scene utterly: it “has the appearance of a medieval illuminated manuscript…everything is lit

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from within. Farmers make haystacks, lemon yellow against a turquoise sea. The green is green as in Paradise, the cliff and rocks of the sea, pink and sky blue. Standing off from the land, the Stag Rocks wait untouched, angular and bare…and in 1602 the great Chief Dermot O’Driscoll made his last stand here on this promontory.’’

It is this kind of inner illumination, a transfigured awareness of Nature (imbued also with a haunting historical dimension), that is at the heart of Crozier’s landscape vision: even his bleak or tempestuous scenes of places at nightfall are “lit from within”.

Crozier’s art has a paradoxical quality – at once lucid and wild. And his paintings move us with their pristine perceptiveness, their raw, heightened vibrancies and subtleties of colour, and their intense philosophical search for the authentic nature of human identity.

Philip Vann is a visual arts writer and a regular contributor to Resurgence. His book William Crozier is co-authored with Katharine Crouan and S.B. Kennedy.

September/October 2010

It is this kind of inner illumination, a transfigured awareness of Nature, imbued also with a haunting historical dimension, that is at the heart of Crozier’s landscape vision

Exotic Garden, 1994, watercolour and crayon on paper

All paintings taken from William Crozier by Katharine Crouan, S.B. Kennedy and Philip Vann, published by Lund Humphries, 2007 (ISBN: 97808533319702)

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A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space.

We now experience ourselves, our thoughts And feelings as something separated from the Rest…a kind of optical delusion of our Consciousness. This delusion is a prison for us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this Prison by widening our circle of compassion to Embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in her beauty.

– Albert Einstein

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September/October 2010

EXHIBITION  ARTS & CR AFTS

Paul GAUGUIN In the first exhibition of his work in 75 years, Tate Modern presents Gauguin: Maker of Myth

Teha ‘amana Has Many Parents, 1893, by Paul Gauguin Painting: Art Institute of Chicago, USA © Art Institute of Chicago, USA

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illed by critics as ‘the art event of the year’, Gauguin: Maker of Myth gathers over 100 different Gauguin works in every medium and genre – from paintings to pots – all exploring the importance of myth and story-telling to an artist who famously went into self-imposed exile in Tahiti, where he immersed himself in the rapidly disappearing Maori culture.

Signifying a major re-evaluation of the Paris-born painter, sculptor and printmaker (who was also a onetime stockbroker), it is clear that at a time when other artists believed story-telling to be dead, Paul Gauguin used stories and myth to give a powerful narrative tension to his paintings, and fable remained central to his work.

His favourite topics included creation, reincarnation, life-cycle myths, the femme fatale, Venus, Eve and temptation, the Nativity, and the ‘noble savage’, and his remarkably profound ideas about human nature and religion are reflected in the bold imagery of his paintings, watercolours, pastels, drawings, prints, ceramics and sculptures. The exhibition also offers an insight into his artistic processes

by including rarely seen illustrated letters, sketchbooks, memoirs and other publications.

Gauguin’s life in French Polynesia has traditionally been portrayed as some mystical quest for ‘the other’, with the artist himself as the romantic explorer encountering ‘primitive’ cultures for the first time, whereas in fact he was deeply immersed in world art and was an avid reader of Polynesian stories and fables even before he exiled himself there.

Vision of the Sermon (1888) and Teha’amana Has Many Parents (1893) demonstrate the inspiration Gauguin derived from Tahiti’s tropical flora, fauna, daily island life and traditions, whilst Self-portrait as Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889) and Self-portrait with Manao tu papau (1893) reveal his further fascination with role-playing in the guises of victim, saint, Christ-like martyr and sinner.

Much of this mystique – including his self-mythologising and presentation of himself to the world as a suffering Christ-like figure – is explored in this new exhibition and the accompanying book of the same name, both of which firmly reposition him as Gauguin: reader and thinker.

Gauguin: Maker of Myth is at Tate Modern from 30 September to 16 January and moves to the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 27 February to 5 June, 2011. The new book, Gauguin: Maker of Myth, is edited by Belinda Thomson, curator of the new exhibition, and is published in September 2010 by Tate Publishing (ISBN: 9781854378712) For an account of how Gauguin used myth to portray his own life, read Resurgence writer and art consultant Andy Christian’s exhibition preview at www.resurgence.org

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RE V I E W S

FLIGHTS OF IMAGINATION

Sophie Poklewski Koziell is bewitched by the originality with which this author writes about birds The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life Tim Dee Jonathan Cape, 2009 ISBN: 9780224081986

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he Running Sky is a rich read. It is a distillation of 40 years of passionate birdwatching, which took the author, Tim Dee, from a “hardcore and obsessed” professional birder to a more sensitive place of appreciation.

The book starts in June, in the full flight of the year, marvelling at the wheeling performance of a seabird colony on a Shetland cliff. Each chapter is based on a month of the year, a loose structure that allows Dee to pull in his experiences from his many moons of quiet watching. Most of these are close to home – cuckoos and woodcocks, Wicken Fen and Chew Valley Lake – but, thanks to his travels as a BBC radio producer, he occasionally gets to gaze at skies further afield.

Dee’s passion has remained the same throughout his life, but his interpretation has gently shifted from dry scientific observation to vivid poetic description.

Take this entry by the teenage Dee listening to nightingales: “21st May 1977 Ingelstone Common, Gloucestershire; wind: light southerly force 2–3; 22:30 Nightingale: 3H [heard]”. He admits that this “anti-poetic minimalism” eventually didn’t work for him; perhaps it was partly an inheritance of the style from the ornithological community, partly teenage

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gaucheness. From this time on, he hung out with professional birdwatchers, whilst on the sly he began to indulge himself in the literary and poetic heritage of birdwatching (John Clare, J.A. Baker, Gilbert White, John Keats). The fusion of these two strands in Dee’s life produced an astonishing quality of description; so that 30 years on, he writes with enviable originality and expressiveness.

He describes the wren caught in his hand as “an energetic walnut” and comments on its “midget roundness”. A pied wagtail is “cheeping open its orange gape”. A goldcrest’s call is “fuse-wire thin”. He digs deep into language, and rolls it out, infused with reverence and rhythm.

You feel like you’re in the presence of a sensitive, expressive genius; but ‘genius’ is a lazy word. It insinuates that things come easily. But it is clear that Dee has worked at it all. He strives to push his imagination, to see ‘deeply’ and then to describe. Sometimes he admits defeat at attempting to comprehend, let alone describe, the wonders before him. For instance, watching a gathering of starlings on the Somerset Levels, he writes, “To describe the flock is like trying to hold on to a dream in daylight – it slips from me, it cannot

be summoned except in fragments, and they cannot be transcribed”.

So Dee’s romantic appreciation has blossomed, but the book could not survive without his younger self’s obsession for fact-finding and listticking. It is knowledge that provides the backbone to the poetry. He can draw out a story from one lone encounter with a bird; imagining a life, a nest, a migration, a death. “The redstart is quivering its tail on the worn carpet of lichen that covers the top of the dry-stone wall at Kennaby.

A month from now it will do it from an acacia branch in the savannah belt south of the Sahara in western Africa. Next spring it will do it at the edge of its breeding hold in a tree fresh in leaf anywhere from Spain to the far north of Russia.”

Dee takes his reader on a flight of imagination but a flight which is also grounded in truth. He also has a gift for highlighting the miraculous in the everyday obvious: “A few weeks before, many of them had been eggs”, or “A nest is the sole fixture of a bird’s life. It marks the longest joining of a bird to a single place.”

This is not a book about Tim Dee, but a book about Tim Dee’s life of birds.

However, there is a natural merging,

September/October 2010

He digs deep into language, and rolls it out, infused with reverence and rhythm Starlings flocking prior to roosting

so within the passages examining and exalting the life of birds, there are small inferences as to who he is, who he became, and the becoming. From a threeyear-old being lifted up, and creeping his fingers over the rim of a swallow’s nest, to collecting his first dead bird, aged four – “a dunnock’s tiny chalky skull”.

Occasionally I get the feeling that Dee is doing some gentle exorcism on the side.

In a chapter dense with peregrines and J.A. Baker, we are watching the skydiving stoops of these killers over the Avon Gorge in Bristol. Then, as if it can’t be helped, the peregrines recede and we are witnessing a family break-up. Dee’s family break-up. You see a boy turning away from the crisis and hurt and becoming buried in birds. In another chapter he revisits Fair Isle, where he’d spent a previous September “at the threshold of adulthood”, immersed in the migrants, vagrants and weather systems. You sense that this remote off-shore community has acted as a port in the storm for Dee as well as for the island’s feathered visitors.

I like this strong sense of the author – of Dee – because it gives another dimension to the book. He knows that the reader is seeing and hearing through his senses and interpretations, and he is

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Photo: Steve Knell/naturepl.com

unapologetic in refusing to play the cold, objective ornithologist. However, it is clear that he doesn’t want to get in the way: he manages to keep a fine balance of unobtrusive presence.

In the introduction, Dee comments “I am not a professional bird man now.” That little aside, plus a chapter on John Buxton and John Clare, is a big clue to where Dee’s philosophy now lies. It describes the gulf between the professional and the amateur, science and poetry. On one hand, there’s the history of ornithological reference books, one of which Dee describes as “a neurotic encyclopaedic terminus that erects a barrier in the mind”; on the other, the romantic poets. Then, in the middle, Dee and Buxton.

Dee says of Buxton, “He wanted to be an amateur because he knew the etymology of the word, that an amateur is a lover, and that his love for his redstarts lay at the heart of his experience of them”. That is why I believe Dee moves away from the professional. He sums the whole debate up beautifully in the following few lines: “Science makes discoveries when it admits to not knowing, poetry endures if it looks hard at real things. Nature writing, if such a thing exists, lives in this

territory where science and poetry might meet. It must be made of both; it needs truth and beauty.”

The Running Sky is a bridge for me, from the Guide to British Birds lying unopened on my shelf, to the birds outside my window. One is dry and necessary, but wholly unenticing (for me); the other is alive, but somehow a mystery beyond my reach. This book, with its bewitching language and depth of knowledge, has already enriched my looking. One of my favourite lines is in the Afterword: “In November 1971, when I was 10, a girl kissed me for the first time. I couldn’t kiss her back – a mistle thrush got between us.” It tickled me, this scene of a boy not yet in the mood for love, his life so far tightly wrapped up in birds. Then a few days later, I was on the telephone to my sister, entwined in her day and stories, when my attention was snatched by a glimpse of red in the hedge. In that instant, my mind pulled out of the conversation and was solely focused on “Is that a bullfinch?”

In that instant, I understood.

Sophie Poklewski Koziell is an Associate Editor of Resurgence.

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RE V I E W S

LOST CHANCES Suzi Gablik discovers she is not alone in “fearing the worst”

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet Bill McKibben Times Books, 2010 ISBN: 9870805090567 Image: istockphoto

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ave you ever had the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something, and you can no longer ignore its message? I am writing this in the same week that I began reading my first climate-change book in years.

Called Eaarth, it is by the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, who explains that the extra ‘a’ in the title stands for ‘awful’.

I bought it because I had the feeling that this book would be different from all the others. I have not been disappointed. From the moment he starts writing, McKibben goes full-bore into the eye-popping truth: we had our chance, he says, a brief opening to steer a different course, away from the rocks. But we didn’t take it.

My reading of McKibben’s book also happened to coincide with the spectacular volcanic explosion of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland on 14 April (which brought global air travel to a grinding halt for nearly a week) and with the unprecedented explosion of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which resulted in incalculable amounts of oil relentlessly gushing towards the shores of Louisiana.

I won’t deny it: these days I pretty much inhabit the ‘archetype of the apocalypse’ as a full-time denizen. The only thing that surprises me is that more folks don’t live there – that others can still manage not to be preoccupied or obsessed with the drastic meltdown of society, the economy, and the accelerating prospects of environmental cataclysm.

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Our utter helplessness in the face of what is happening is stunning.

Fortunately, McKibben is a nofrills writer. There are no ‘feel-good’ projections about an optimistic future in which we have all mysteriously ‘changed our consciousness’, and no hectoring about humanity’s devastating failure to live sanely on the planet. Just this excruciating X-ray of what worldwide ecocide actually looks like.

The frequency of hurricanes, for example, has risen by 75% in the last 13 years. There have been four times as many weather-related disasters in the past 30 years, and more than in the first threequarters of the century combined. Polar ice is melting 50 years ahead of schedule and last year, lightning strikes in the Arctic increased 20-fold, igniting the first tundra fires ever observed.

Large forest fires now burn for four times as long as a generation ago, also pumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And oil – the very basis of our modern, technologically intensive lifestyle – is disappearing. The costs of both environmental restoration and humanitarian disasters have become so prohibitive that the insurance industry is foundering, and we can’t possibly afford to repair things fast enough to preserve the planet we used to live on.

“Here’s all I’m trying to say: the planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists,” McKibben writes. “The stability that produced that civilization no longer

exists...The earth that we knew – the only earth that we ever knew – is gone…and there’s no use pretending otherwise.”

To read this book is to understand how all debates about whether or not climate change exists or doesn’t – whether it is a human-made calamity or just a hoax driven by politics and money – are hopelessly obsolete. At this point, such questions no longer matter. Recent provocative events alone make it clear just how much any alteration of the features of Nature affects the destiny of mankind, and vice versa: mankind’s activities irrevocably affect Nature. It is all one big feedback loop.

What we need to focus on instead, says McKibben, is how to survive what’s coming at us, because “we simply can’t live on the new eaarth as if it were the old earth; we’ve just foreclosed that option”.

From now on, he argues, we’re about keeping what we’ve got: maintenance, not squandering, has to be our mantra.

Our new life, however, is likely to be a lot harder than the old one, an uphill slog at best. These words were uttered even before the game-changing oil spill. Not squandering what we have becomes an almost surreal injunction as those precious oil reserves haemorrhage relentlessly into the sea with the potential to ultimately destroy it.

Suki Gablik is an artist, writer and teacher whose books include Has Modernism Failed?, The Re-enchantment of Art and Conversations Before the End of Time.

September/October 2010

REV IEWS

SINGING THE TRUTH Val Harding is moved by a passionate tale of life with the Bauls of Bengal

The Honey Gatherers Mimlu Sen Rider, 2010 ISBN: 9781846041891

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he magic started for me on the first page of The Honey Gatherers. Mimlu Sen begins her story with her first contact with the songs of the Bauls of Bengal – an album called Indian Street Music, published in the USA in 1970 – and how she had been haunted by a particular song, Oh My Spirit, Dress Like Nature, Learn to Be a Woman. This album was also my first contact with the songs of Bauls, and hearing those haunting melodies led me, too, on a journey of discovery.

At the heart of Baul philosophy lies a deep understanding of how our real selves are bound in this transcendent physical body, which is inseparable from the natural world around us – a true message for anyone who feels passionately about the future of our planet, our environment and our relationship with Nature.

Sen recounts her journey into this powerful sphere of Baul music and Baul mysticism, but first traces her own Bengali roots and her life, which began in Shillong, Meghalaya, before moving to Kolkata and to Europe and back again – a story of transition and bravery that included time spent in jail in India for her sympathies with left-wing politics. Whilst in jail she encountered again the songs of Bauls, this time not on a vinyl album but sung by her female co-prisoners.

She goes on to describe her 1982 encounter with 26-year-old Baul singer Paban Das, who was on tour in France. Their growing relationship takes her on a journey from her home in Paris back to her roots in West Bengal and an itinerant life with Paban and the Bauls.

She writes with passion, openness and honesty about the hardships and harrowing experiences of poverty, which are commonplace amongst many Bauls who, like Paban Das, come from poor rural communities.

She creates a balance between political awareness and spirituality, reflecting the themes of Baul songs,

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Bauls of Bengal

Photo: Carlos Munoz Yague

which are about spirituality and the mystical body, and which lampoon hypocritical and elite society to express the truths of equality between all people, whether Hindu or Muslim, male or female, from whatever caste or creed. In the words of the great philosopher and song-maker Lalon Shah, “there is no caste in the Saddhu’s market!”

Throughout the book we read about the passion for music and the talent of Paban Das, who is now an internationally renowned artist. Sen’s vivid descriptions take us through towns and villages, down wide flowing rivers and across the verdant landscape of West Bengal, to concert venues, melas and festivals, ashrams, initiation ceremonies and encounters with yogis from the tantric world.

The story ends with Mimlu and Paban’s creation of their own mahotsava (festival) in Boral, which they ran for 12 years from 1988 to 2000, when sadly it became impossible to sustain because, in the author’s words, “urbanisation and globalisation had set in with a vengeance”.

This book dispels romantic illusions about saintly lives and gives us some hard-hitting facts, but never fails to inspire.

Editor’s note: the word ‘Baul’ means ‘mad’: madly in love with music and with God! Val Harding is a researcher in ethnomusicology and studies North Indian Classical and Bengali music in London and Baul music in West Bengal.

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RE V I E W S

A SEARCH FOR WISDOM Edmund O’Sullivan endorses a book that promotes spirituality as the key to social and planetary change The Tao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation Mark Hathaway and Leonardo Boff Foreword by Friitjof Capra Orbis Books, 2009 ISBN: 9781570758416 Unfurling hart’s-tongue fern

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his is a work of the combined efforts of the celebrated Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and the Canadian educator and social activist Mark Hathaway. It starts with a foreword by the ecological thinker and social activist Fritjof Capra, who gives it a glowing endorsement, and combined with this foreword are the enthusiastic testimonies of other major ecological thinkers: Brian Swimme, Matthew Fox and Mary Evelyn Tucker, to name a few. And after reading this book, I can add my own strong endorsement of what is a very powerful work which, in the depth and range of the topics it explores, shows a virtuosity and deftness in what I would call integral transformative learning.

The opening prologue starts with the following sentence: “The Tao of Liberation is a search for wisdom, the wisdom needed to effect a profound transformation in our world.” Although this work draws inspiration from the Tao Te Ching, it is not in any way a text on Taoism.

Each chapter begins with an evocative quote from the Tao to set the ambience for the material that follows. The work creatively holds many diverse areas in an integral manner covering, with a commanding scholarship, such fields as economics, psychology, cosmology,

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ecology and spirituality. It also displays a strenuous commitment to issues of social justice combined with a path-breaking reflection on sustainability in a larger evolutionary context, exploring the work of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in the context of cosmology. This complex weave opens up a view of evolutionary transformation that brings to the fore the intense importance of spirituality as the creative dynamism for social and planetary change.

In the opening prologue, the crisis of the Earth is seen in the context of cosmic time, and the authors explore the meaning of the Ecology of Transformation. The work then moves on and is divided into three parts. Part I bears the title Exploring the Obstacles. The themes within this section are threefold: the first is Unmasking a Pathological System, the second is Beyond Domination and the third is named Overcoming Paralysis.

Part II is entitled Cosmology and Liberation and develops themes including Rediscovering Cosmology; Complexity, Chaos and Creativity; Memory, Morphic Resonance, and Emergence; and The Cosmos as Revelation. Finally, Part III, entitled The Tao of Liberation, features the themes of Spirituality for an Ecozoic Era and The Ecology of Transformation.

Of the many highlights I could elaborate

Photo: Imagebroker, Michael Peuckert,I/FLPA

on, I shall concentrate on the two that impressed me most. The first is a reflection on the Earth Charter, which is a document that provides a radical shift in perspective and gives a set of foundational principles that deals with the planetary crisis of our times. The World Secretariat on the Earth Charter Initiative is presently trying to coordinate a programme to bring the Earth Charter to the attention of educators around the globe. The book articulates a fundamental role that the Earth Charter can play in formulating and deepening the concept of the ecology of liberation that the authors of this work espouse.

The second is the exploration of spirituality in what Thomas Berry calls the Ecozoic Era. In the final section of this book there is a very pointed discussion on spirituality in the context of ecological transformation. Both authors come from a Christian background, and so it includes an extended reflection on Christianity and its possibilities in this transformative moment in history. That said, the book is not restrictive and really does address the multifaceted spiritualities that we experience in our lives.

Edmund O’Sullivan is Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Co-director of the Transformative Learning Centre at OISE/UT.

September/October 2010

R E V I EWS

ELOQUENT EPISTLES Enjoyment of this memoir hinges not on a belief in divinity but rather the sacredness of all life, says Jini Reddy Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim: Reflections on Life, Love and the Soul Peter Owen Jones Rider, 2010 ISBN: 9781846041334

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or those of you who aren’t familiar with the globetrotting, spirit-lifting adventures of Peter Owen Jones, he is the British Anglican vicar and writer who from time to time moonlights as a presenter for the BBC, for whom he filmed a documentary called 80 Faiths around the World.

This whirlwind tour of 80 of the world’s religious traditions made for gripping TV. From voodoo to polygamy, Pentecostal serpent handlers to Korean shamanism (and taking in six big world faiths), Owen Jones explored them all, participating in sometimes obscure rites, and managing (most of the time) to retain his composure, while courageously questioning the tenets of his own faith.

The prequel to this, however, was Extreme Pilgrim. Narrower in focus, the programme examined a handful of paths to enlightenment – spiritual alternatives to Western Christianity, which the presenter declared to be too much a faith of the head, and not enough a faith of the heart.

The final episode revolved around a pilgrimage in the Sinai desert. Eager to gain some insight into the hermit lifestyle followed by St Anthony, a Christian saint and monk from Egypt, Owen Jones spent 21 days alone in a cave, in prayer and contemplation. In the course of his retreat in the arid wilderness – a landscape of wind-sculpted rock formations and shifting sand dunes – the vicar got writing, and the result is Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim: Reflections on Life, Love and the Soul.

These eloquent – and, crucially, riveting – epistles are directed towards those, he says, who have shaped his being. Here are tender, heartfelt letters to family and friends, as well as thoughts on bigger issues addressed to a pantheon of infamous and exalted figures, among them Satan, St Anthony, Jesus and Osama bin Laden. The vicar has plenty to say to all, and that he does so with a rare combination of raw candour, diligence, flair and humanity is gratifying.

In place of diatribes, intellectual posturing, or tedious proselytising, we are privy to genuine musings, gentle probings, expressions of affection, bewilderment, and concern. How many

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Lone tree in the Sinai desert

© ENP/Alamy

parish priests would have the generosity of spirit to end a letter to Satan (questioning the source of his hatred and ruminating on the perils of fear and loneliness), with an ‘all my love’?

Yes, in places, Owen Jones talks of God. However, enjoyment of this memoir hinges on a belief not in divinity, but rather in the sacredness of all life.

He says, refreshingly: “The notion of proving the existence of God looks increasingly ludicrous to me, as does the notion of disproving it”.

In fact, the most beguiling letters are those in which he talks of love and enchantment. Take, for example, the impassioned letter to his ex-wife: “Darling Jacs,” he begins, charting the course of their (one imagines, highly charged) relationship, “You were and you still are one of the most beautiful women I have ever met…” Only the stoniest of hearts could fail to melt on reading this.

Fittingly for a memoir exploring the nature of relationships, and the gifts, lessons and sorrows they bestow on us, Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim prompts the reader to delve into his or her own soul and examine whatever truths, fears, loves and longing reside there.

And for that we must give thanks, in some part, to the primordial silence of the desert.

Jini Reddy is a journalist who writes on travel, holistic health and personal development.

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RE V I E W S

Seeking A New Idealism We don’t need more grumpy books that simply complain, says John Naish

The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy Michael Foley Simon & Schuster, 2010 ISBN: 9781847375247

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s our culture really just an absurd place full of gullible idiots – a place where the only sustainable response is to laugh bitterly at it all? This is the world according to Michael Foley’s new book. But it is not all negative: reading it has inspired me to come up with a positive new mantra: ‘Complaining is not campaigning’.

Foley, a novelist, poet and IT lecturer, has unintentionally provided a prime example of why we need to move on from witty tirades about the state of consumer culture to something far more positive. He has clearly fallen out of love with the world. His book, now out in paperback, is chatty and given to flashes of wit. But his polemic soon begins to feel disheartening.

It is essentially a bantering tirade against, well, everything.

Despite the word ‘happy’ appearing in the title, this book is not for the seeker of inspiration or solace. In Foley’s grumbling worldview, modern mass communications mean that no one listens any more, convenience is actually a curse, people who go on luxury cruises are completely stupid, all mainstream religion is wicked, young rock-music audiences don’t know how to listen properly, students are impenetrably dumb, and celebrity culture turns everyone into externality-obsessed sex objects who have forgotten how to make love.

His solution is no more life-affirming: our daily existence is nowadays so irredeemably absurd that the best we can do is laugh derisively at its follies. Well, perhaps. But are we really so doomed that we have to giggle our hearts black with nihilism in order just to cope? And what got Foley into such a bate? I suspect it has much to do with his life-stage – and our culture’s, too. Foley freely acknowledges that he is middle-aged and sorely disappointed with his academic career. The flower of his youthful idealism has soured into bitter fruit.

This is not so unusual. Now that I am in my forties, I regularly have to intercept internal monologues that begin: “In my day…”

But such grumbling has gained currency as entertainment, thanks to the television series Grumpy Old Men. This, in turn, has

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created the illusion that menopausal negativity is somehow related to the eternal verities of life.

But it has all been said before, and to no effect.

Modern life too rushed? Try this quote: “How men are hurried here; how they are hunted and terrifically chased into double-quick speed; so that in self-defence they must not stay to look at one another.” That was the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, on London in 1831. Bah, modern kids? “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all are reckless beyond words and impatient of restraint.” That was the Greek poet Hesiod, on teenagers in 8 BCE. Foley’s book joins a growing genre that we could call Curmudgeon-lit. This also covers such books as Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Oliver James’s Affluenza, and Is it Just Me or Is Everything Shit? by Alan McArthur and Steve Lowe. The genre has done an effective job of pointing out how modern culture has its many faults. I think we are now adequately persuaded.

Beyond this point, we may drown in our own bile.

Curmudgeon-lit is a form of conservatism: we sink into our armchairs and rail at the world. Why try to change things? There’s no point, we’ve ‘gorn to the dogs’. This is the literature of a society in midlife crisis. We remember our past with unwarranted romance. The present feels lumbago-ridden. And the future… Well, what future?

Written with force-ten wit, this genre can indeed be diverting. But we should not be diverted. There is work for us to do. This nihilistic dead-end should be our positive point of departure. At the point of destruction begins the job of reconstruction. The wisdom is ancient: it is embodied in archetypes

All this negativity ignores the fact that countless millions of people in our culture are busily doing their best to help others and to live sustainably such as the Indian goddess Kali. It prompts the vital question, where do we go from here? What is the dream we should build upon these ashes? Where is our 21st-century Utopia?

Curmudgeonly complaining aside, the real dreadful truth of these cynical times is that it is considered irredeemably naff and irrelevant to discuss ideals. Bitching about the status quo is cool and clever, but idealistically suggesting radical future alternatives is nigh taboo. Even now, after the consumerist financial system has expensively collapsed, the only mainstream option offered is that we unquestioningly prop it up again (and ignore the fact that our planet is incapable of sustaining such a wasteful system).

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Statler and Waldorf, the original grumpy old men

There has been no mass protest against this; just a majority slope-shouldered assent. I suspect that this is partly because our culture has become mesmerised by short-term, short-range complaining – this shirt is so yesterday, that celebrity’s life is so car-crash – that the universal picture is lost. Hell, it’s even got me complaining about people complaining.

And all this negativity ignores the fact that countless millions of people in our culture are busily doing their best, through their work, volunteering and social engagement, to help others and to live sustainably.

This negativity also ignores the fact that technology is not necessarily a modern social plague: it is merely a tool – a great enabler that, used wisely, could help to realise the positives of our human potential.

Notably missing from Curmudgeon-lit is any hint of human spirituality. (Foley, for instance, was evidently brought up an Irish Catholic and is still bitter about it.) This ignores the fact that our modern-day problems are essentially spiritual rather than logistic. We now have the tools we need to ‘do good’. We just lack the motivation and inspiration.

The lack of any spiritual element in such

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Photo: David Dagley/Rex Features

complaining blinds us to our wider duties.

Indeed, do we really have the right to complain about our minor discomforts and absurdities, when we live as a comfortable minority in the narrow part of the world where water is drinkable, power available and freedom from tyranny taken for granted? Economically, our world is built on the backs of people who genuinely don’t have anything.

Perhaps we ought to be focusing our dissatisfaction in that direction.

But Foley seems to have given up on the idea of any human progress. Indeed, he dismisses the whole of evolutionary psychology in less than the space of a page. Personally I think, hope and believe that we can and will move on. To help us, our culture needs to drop the trendy Goth garb of nihilism and strive ever more to develop popular new visions that are enticing and entrancing. A new idealism can draw us from our gloom out into the sunlit plains of our potential. It would certainly prove more entertaining.

John Naish is the author of Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More.

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HUMBLE STEWARDSHIP Chris Nichols is inspired by the principles of lightly managed chaos Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops Martin Crawford Green Books, 2010 ISBN: 9781900322621 Sweet cicely with green seeds ready for eating

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n our short courses at Schumacher College we often pay a visit to Martin Crawford’s Dartington garden and, without fail, the students leave feeling inspired. I, too, learn something new on every visit and it is the same with Crawford’s new book, which deserves to become a classic – there is something of value on every page, and it seems to turn up something new each time I return to it.

Crawford divides the book into three main sections – How Forest Gardens Work, Designing Your Forest Garden, and Extra Design Elements and Maintenance – and it is lavishly illustrated with Crawford’s and Joanna Brown’s beautiful colour photographs along with line drawings

by Marion Smylie-Wild. Overall, this is a wonderful piece of work, crafted with love and speaking to the spirit.

It is a visual treat, and a book that works on many layers. It contains, for example, several chapters reflecting the author’s research on the characteristics, limitations and uses of species after species. There are chapters on canopy species, shrub species, perennial and ground-cover species, annuals, biennials and climbers.

Each chapter describes hundreds of plants, with a helpful summary table for each species covering size, growing conditions, uses, harvesting and storage, cooking and processing, propagation and maintenance.

These chapters are interspersed with additional chapters on the design factors associated with each layer of the agro-forest.

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This research-led content continues in the appendices, which provide detailed propagation tables, lists of trees and shrubs for various purposes, and monthby-month analyses of bee- and insectattracting plants and edible species.

But this book is so much more than a research guide or growers’ almanac.

It is also a passionate and authoritative exploration of the why and how of food-forest creation. It is sympathetic to the small-scale gardener, with a helpful schedule of plants suitable for smaller plots and words of wisdom on dwarf fruit trees.

Is it the perfect book on food forests? Of course there is room for improvement. This is a big, expensive book, which would suit an electronic format.With minimal redesign it would work well, or even better, online.

That way it could be made searchable, more use could be made of the photography, and it could incorporate videos.

Is it a good book? Absolutely yes. Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns movement, describes this book as “the definitive manual”. I agree, and recommend it wholeheartedly. I also hope that it will one day speak to a wider audience than the committed core of growers that might constitute the original market.

It is my hope, too, that this book, because of its passion and its captivating beauty, will also speak to people who work in other fields, including business, politics and civic society. The principles of lightly managed chaos – working closely

Photo: Joanna Brown

with Nature and not seeking to dominate and impose order – are good advice in the garden but also represent deeply applicable and practical advice to leaders everywhere.

Crawford relates, for example, a story about how his raspberries have migrated southwards during the time his garden has been growing. He could have spent vast amounts of energy and effort containing them, but instead he has let them be – worked with what is emerging. How different would our organisations and societies be with this kind of attentive and humble stewardship?

How different would our businesses be if we all let the raspberries head south, if we let the creative human spirit flourish rather than seeking to impose containment in the name of predictability and order? We would certainly have more attentive, less resource-intensive organisations that would be much more attuned to natural processes, and this is something we most certainly need.

This is an important book on every level. Crawford’s passion, energy and humour flow out from the pages. It is a work that embraces the practical and the profound, and the author himself is a true frontiersman, a pioneering teacher and an inspiration. Both his book and his garden are national treasures.

Chris Nichols is a Visiting Fellow in Sustainable Organisations at Schumacher College and is Director of the MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility at Ashridge Business School.

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REV IEWS

A MANIFESTO FOR OUR TIME

Book cover image: Clifford Harper

Mary Tasker celebrates a new model of sustainable society

Common Wealth: For a Free, Equal, Mutual and Sustainable Society Martin Large Hawthorn Press, 2010 ISBN: 9781903458983

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Without vision the people perish.”

Martin Large has used this old biblical saying at the start of this revolutionary book. His vision is of a free and democratic society that works for everyone and guarantees the chance of a good life for all and he also quotes John Ruskin, who, along with John Stuart Mill, Gandhi, Rudolf Steiner and Karl Polanyi, has shaped his thinking.

“There is no wealth but life,” says Ruskin in Unto This Last (1862), and one of the themes of this book is that for many people life has been stripped of meaning as ‘wealth’ is no longer seen in terms of wellbeing and the common good but in terms of the acquisition of material wealth. To restore the old notion of the ‘common weal’ both locally and globally, Large proposes a remaking of society and argues that the values of freedom, equality, mutuality and sustainability should underpin this remaking.

How have we come to the point where the values and language of the market have encroached on every area of our social lives? How can we talk about children in schools and patients in hospitals as customers and consumers? Large describes how ‘capitalism unleashed’ has captured the state and appears to hold out the message that there is no alternative. The brilliant coup executed by neo-liberalism – the doctrine of the free market as expressed by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman at the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 – was to conflate

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cultural freedoms such as freedom of conscience and of speech with the values of the free market such as competition and self-interest. In this way the very concept of freedom was hijacked for capitalism.

As the dominance of global corporations grew in the 1980s, so the boundaries between government, business and civil society blurred. The encroachment of corporate capitalism into fields hitherto associated with civil society – education, health, scientific research, childhood and the media – has led to what Large describes as “the enclosure of our intellectual and genetic commons”. This process was made possible in 1995 by the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), an instrument of the World Trade Organization formed as part of the new world order of corporate globalisation. By signing up to this agreement, Britain opened up its social welfare services – its common weal – to privatisation and to the commodification of cultural life.

We are now seeing the collapse of this system, but, in order to avoid going down the same road again, it is important to know how the free market worked. Large spells this out, but what does he offer to replace it?

A major part of the book is concerned with separating out the boundaries between business, government and civil society to ensure a healthy balance between the three. Large calls this the move from the neo-liberal to the tripolar

society. He defines four transformative entry points needed to rebuild society; these are to do with capital, land, labour and education.

He proposes a Commons Capital Trust, which would receive, acquire, hold and invest capital for “enduring economic, cultural and social benefit”, a Citizen’s Income as an unconditional basic income (Citizen’s Incomes are currently being considered in South Africa, New Zealand, Canada and Germany), and Community Land Trusts, which passed into law in the 2008 Housing and Regeneration Act. These are now being set up in villages and towns across Britain as a means of providing affordable homes.

Education is the fourth transformative point. Quoting Einstein’s maxim that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking used to create them, Large sees the reforming of education as an essential part of changing the way we view the world and ourselves. The effect of market thinking on schools and children has been crippling, and schools need to be freed up so that well-researched good practice can emerge.

This is a fascinating book combining deep theoretical understanding with the evidence gained from personal involvement in community projects across the country and abroad. It is truly a manifesto for our time.

Until recently, Mary Tasker was Chair of Human Scale Education, Bath, UK.

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THE SACRED UNIVERSE Peter Reason celebrates the late great Thomas Berry’s vision of being human The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth Thomas Berry Orbis Books, 2009 ISBN: 9781570758515

The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century Thomas Berry Columbia University Press, 2009 ISBN: 9780231149525

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ith the death of Thomas Berry last year, we have lost one of the great religious and ecological teachers of our time. Yet through the good work of two of his former students and now editors, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, we have access to a range of his papers and thus to the great richness of his thoughts.

These two books collect together Berry’s unpublished papers, dating back to 1972. In some ways the content will be familiar to those who have studied Berry’s earlier books – and indeed the serious student of Berry’s work may recognise whole paragraphs that were reworked for The Great Work. Yet with closer study the reader will find in these papers a fuller articulation of much of Berry’s thought, with particular emphasis on its religious dimension. Further, they demonstrate the development of Berry’s thinking over time and how his earlier insights developed into fuller articulations.

I found several places where the essence of Berry’s thought is presented succinctly in a few short pages. Christian Cosmology (Chapter 4 in The Christian Future) is helpful in setting out, point by point, how the universe constitutes a sacred community and the primary revelation of the divine; and The Cosmology of Religions (Chapter 9 in The Sacred Universe) provides a challenge to anthropocentrism.

Berry points out that we humans “find it difficult…to think of ourselves as integral or subject to the universe, to the planet Earth, or to the community of living beings. We think of ourselves as the primary referent”; yet we can learn from our emerging understanding of the evolution of the universe and of Earth that “our nature as species…has emerged out of planetary process” and we are thus part of a wider sacred community.

But maybe these books are important most of all because

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they show Berry as a profound religious thinker, and demonstrate the necessity of radically new religious imagination for the crisis of our times. When the materialist vision and ‘new atheism’ of writers such as Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens holds so much of popular attention and vies with religious fundamentalism to trivialise religious debate, the profound, subtle and boldly religious thinking Thomas Berry presents has a particular importance. For Berry shows us in these two books that the present crisis actually arises out of religious traditions, and calls for a most profound revolution in the nature of religious imagination in response.

He shows, too, how religious life, in all its traditional forms, “reached a certain state of stagnation” and a “spiritual impasse” even before the rise of the modern scientific and materialist world. He argues that there has been a failure of religious imagination in Christian thought over several centuries: caught in a historical rather than a cosmological perspective, emphasising humandivine and human-human relations at the expense of human-Earth relations, and defensive in the face of secular scientific society, it “has shown neither the intelligence nor the willingness to walk with us through this modern period of our splendour and our shame”. He further points out that the “present disruption of all the basic life systems of Earth has come about within a culture that emerged from the Christian-biblical matrix”.

The emphasis in Christianity on redemption from this fallen world – rather than revelation of the divine in the wonders of the life on Earth – and the promise of a millennial period when the ills of the human condition would be lifted, together lead to an alienation from the natural world, a dissatisfaction with the world as it actually is, even a rage against the unsatisfactory qualities of human existence. All this opens the way for the technological exploitation of the world in the name of ‘progress’ whereby we will ‘improve’ the planet through human activities. Thus the “radiant presence of the divine” is lost and the Earth becomes “a commodity to be bought and sold”.

In the face of what he sees as this failure of religious imagination and the challenge of secularism, Berry dares to take our religious intuition and marry it to our scientific understanding of the universe as an evolving whole, so that the natural world becomes the primary source of religious consciousness: “the genius of our times is to join the physical identification, experience, and understanding of the Earth, given by scientific inquiry, with the traditional mythic symbols and rituals”.

Through the teachings of science we understand anew the universe as a sequence of irreversible transformations leading to ever greater complexity and out of which the human being has evolved.

Applying a religious imagination to this discovery, we can see that “from the beginning the universe has a psychic-spiritual as well as a material-physical

September/October 2010

The order of the universe is the ultimate and noblest perfection in things

aspect”. Each part of this evolving universe is both a reflection of and integral with the whole, so that the universe itself is the “primary sacred community”.

While emphasising the diversity of religious revelation, Berry shows how this new Universe Story can be entirely compatible with the Christian tradition, for example following Thomas Aquinas in asserting that “the order of the universe is the ultimate and noblest perfection in things” and that this perfection lies both in its wholeness and in its differentiation: “each part articulates the whole in some unique fashion. The perfection, however, is in the whole, not in the part as such”; and it is in this “fabric of the whole” that the divine reveals itself most fully. So it follows that: “The spirituality of the Earth refers to a quality of the Earth itself, not a human spirituality with special reference to the planet Earth. Earth is the maternal principle out of which we are born and from which we derive all that we are and all that we have. Simply put, we are Earthlings. The Earth is our origin, our nourishment, our educator, our healer, our fulfilment. The human and the Earth are totally implicated, each in the other. If there is no spirituality in the Earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves.”

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Photo: Kaj R. Svensson/Science Photo Library

And, even wider, in this new vision spiritual traditions are localised on parts of the Earth, their origins in the “limitless

religious not just but have swirl of

The Earth is our origin, our nourishment, our educator, our healer, our fulfilment space”, just as humans do. We are integral with the universe, so that “the universe is the larger dimension of our own being”, and in turn the human enables the universe to “reflect on and celebrate itself…in a special mode of conscious self-awareness”.

Thomas Berry demonstrates in these papers the qualities he calls for: humanist vision and imagination. Into this new religious vision we can weave ecological economics, natural capitalism, a legal system that recognises the rights of all beings, new forms of education, and so on. But the vision comes first: without it we do not have the capacity to respond fully to the challenges of our times.

Peter Reason, formerly a Professor at Bath Spa University, UK, is devoted to the study of human participation in the Earth and the universe.

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CO M M U N I T Y PAG E  R E G U L ARS

Nature’s Language Photo: courtesy Peter Lyons and Ann Palmer

Ann Palmer swimming with a bottle-nosed dolphin in the sea at Amble

In another of our special reader highlights, couple Peter Lyons and Ann Palmer share their passion for Nature writing and invite Resurgence readers to enter the 2010 Earth Vision Nature Writing Contest

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he Earth Vision contest is the brainchild of Josef Graf, a Canadian ecologist and Nature writer, who set it up “to support the cause of writing on the subject of Nature and deep ecology”.

Resurgence reader Ann Palmer, who is a judge in this year’s contest, is an awardwinning Nature writer herself. Ann had an honourable mention in the 2007 Earth Vision Nature Writing contest, and won first prize in 2009. Both she and her husband, Peter, use pen to put word to the vastness and the awe that comes from being a part of Nature.

In discussing the benefits of Nature writing, Ann and Peter talk about the ‘Earth Vision’ prefix to the Nature Writing competition, and how it raises the bar because of its planet-wide remit and because of the inclusion of that word ‘vision’. “It has the potential to widen every horizon...boundless.”

“Nature writing makes you look, close up, at your relationship with the planet.

It focuses it up to the point where it’s central, key to life, the place it actually occupies but is so rarely acknowledged, celebrated or discussed,” says Ann, for whom it seeded the writing of the book Earthbonding:The Matter of the Planet and You. “The ultimate effect is to vitally underpin and enormously strengthen the personal bond with Nature.”

The deadline for submissions to this year’s competition is 15 October and entries can include poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction or poetic prose.

At the time of writing, Ann was recovering from flu. “The only upside

to having flu was it gave her a great opportunity to re-read recent issues of Resurgence,” says Peter. Having been totally submersed in the magazine, Ann wrote a piece in which she urges us to “revel in Nature’s wonders, and live in the reverence that it seeds in the human heart.”

Actions can speak louder than words.

“But, as the yin-yang symbol shows, the wheel turns again, revealing the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword,” Ann adds.

Further details and information on how to enter are available on the Earth Vision website at www.evbooks.net/contest.htm, or by emailing Peter at plyons.gress@tiscali.co.uk.

If you have a story that you think other readers will be inspired by – whether it tells of the work you do, a project you are involved with, how you use Resurgence magazine for inspiration, or something else – then please do send it to community@resurgence.org or write to Elizabeth Wainwright, Resurgence Community Pages, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE.

A big THANK YOU

SLOW SUNDAY 10.10.10

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The next Resurgence Slow Sunday will take place on 10 October 2010, and will aptly link in with the 10:10 campaign which is about positive practical action to help us cut our carbon emissions by 10% a year, starting in 2010.

10:10:10 will be a ‘global day of doing’ to cut carbon.

There’ll be thousands of practical carbon-cutting events and activities around the world and Resurgence Slow Sunday will be part of this initiative.

For more information on this special 10:10:10 Slow Sunday see www.resurgence.org/take-action/slow-sunday.html

e would like to say a big thank you to all our members and particularly to those who made a Gift Aid declaration.

Thanks to this support, The Resurgence Trust has been able to reclaim over £20,000 from HM Revenue and Customs.

To qualify for Gift Aid, what you pay in UK income tax or capital gains tax must at least equal the amount The Resurgence Trust will claim on your membership in the tax year (currently 25p for each £1 given). If you have already made a Gift Aid declaration but you no longer qualify, please notify our Membership Department so that we can update our records.

Tel: 01208 841824. Email: members@resurgence.org

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September/October 2010

C L A 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 2010: 1 September 2010 January/February 2011: 1 November 2010 All adverts are subject to our minimum specifications, available online at www.resurgence.org/advertise or by request.

ACCOMMODATION CENTRAL EDINBURGH Friendly B&B in quiet Victorian street with superb views to Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat. Varied continental breakfast. Walking distance castle, palace, etc. 5 min. main bus route. Tel: Moira 0131 668 3718 ST IVES, CORNWALL Organic B&B. Attractive house on the edge of town with spectacular views. Great access to beaches, headlands and galleries. Good rail and bus connections. Tel. 01736 797377 email roger.297amos@btinternet.com HIGHLANDS Warm welcome for readers at Cairnhill B&B, Dornoch, Highlands. Most dietary needs catered for. Rest, relaxation and Reiki too. cairnhillbandb@gmail.com Geraldine 07540 645222

COURSES LEARN BOOKBINDING Create beautiful handmade books using traditional and contemporary craft bookbinding techniques. Regular classes or individual tuition. Surrey. www.otterbookbinding.com Tel. Marysa 01932 845976 MEDICINAL PLANT STUDY WEEKENDS Hands-on practical herbal medicine making and botanical drawing workshops on beautiful herb farm on the Isle of Arran, Scotland with campsite. Led by herbalists inspired

by Goethe’s contemplative approach. Also pilgrimage herb walks on the islands of Arran and Mallorca. www.veganherbal.com INTRODUCTION TO HOMEOPATHY Weekend seminar at the College of Practical Homeopathy London 20th/21st November www.collegeofpracticalhomeopathy.com For anyone considering a career in

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Homeopathy or wishing to learn to use this natural medicine for everyday health needs.

Cost £50. Contact Julia Linfoot RSHom, 020 7732 1417 juliahomeopath@btinternet.com www.julialinfoothomeopathy.co.uk

SUSTAINABLE LAND USE 24th Jan - 4th March, 2011. Permaculture, Ecology, Organic Horticulture, Sustainable Forestry. Fully modular - take the whole course or just one module. Full details: www.patrickwhitefield.co.uk

ECO-ARCHITECTURE ECO-ARCHITECTURE, planning & permaculture design Sustainable ecological architecture and design of buildings, planning applications, planning appeals, Feng Shui advice.

Email: Sophie@eco-architectureandplanning.com Telephone: 01235 529266 Website: www.eco-architectureandplanning.com

EVENTS GAIA GROUPS Resurgence readers’ opportunity to meet together in local groups, sharing meditation, ideas, an eco-friendly way of life, and seasonal food. For more information on local groups across the UK, or to start your own group, contact Jeanette Gill, members@resurgence.org 01208 841824 Birmingham: Abdul Al-Seffar, 0121 426 2606 alseffar@gmail.com East Devon: Christina, 01297 23822 tinabows@hotmail.com Hertfordshire – Hemel Hempstead: paulsandford28@yahoo.co.uk Hertfordshire/Bedfordshire: Baya Salmon-Hawk, Hawkeye5000@gmail.com Leeds: David Midgley, david@schumacher-north.co.uk

Photo: Rachel Marsh

Please fill in the form on page 72 and send together with a cheque or card details to: Gwydion Batten, Resurgence, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon, EX39 6EE Tel: +44 (0)1237 441293 Fax: +44 (0)1237 441203 advert@resurgence.org

Welsh Borders – near Hay on Wye: 01981 550 246 elaine@gaiapartnership.org West Sussex – Cuckfield: Margaret Tyzack More, 01444 412 228 makaet@yahoo.co.uk South Africa: Galeo Saintz, +27 (0) 82 888 8181 galeo@galeosaintz.com ECOHESION PRESENTS an inaugural lecture and discussion: ‘The Ecology of Economics’ - assumed separability, in an ecologically cohesive world. An ecological evaluation of the basic concepts of Economics.

Saturday 25 September 2010. Friends’ Meeting House, Mount Street, Manchester M2 5NS, 12.30pm-4.30pm. Representational installations, books, cards and refreshments.

Tickets £10 (£5 concessions). Details from Stuart McBurney, Ecohesion 0114 2888037 SPECIAL ARTISTS’ TOUR TO BHUTAN Spring 2011.Please contact Merlyn Chesterman 01237 441670 merlyn@twohartonmanor. co.uk WAY OF THE DREAM Intensive weekend of films by Marie-Louise von Franz covering the big life issues from the perspective of dream, with discussions.

Oct 29-31, Salisbury, Wiltshire. £89 non-res.

01747 870070 m@msteer.co.uk http://msteer.co.uk/edu/3Dream2.html

Mindfulness and Nature Weekend 24th-26th September in the beautiful North Pennines. See www.mutualinspiration.co.uk or ring Patricia on 0191 241 0236

FOR SALE SATISH KUMAR TALKS ON CD A selection of talks by Satish Kumar is now available on CD and DVD via the Resurgence website. Talks include Satish’s Schumacher

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lecture ‘Slow Down, Go Further’ (Dublin 2004), ‘Cultural Nonviolence’ and ‘Reverential Ecology’. To find out more or buy a CD/DVD online visit www.resurgence.org/satishkumar/video-audio.html

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.

NORTH DEVON Small, comfortable converted barn. Very pleasant location, 3m from sea, nr Clovelly.

Open plan. Woodburner. Sleeps 2/4. Organic vegetables available. Tel. 01237 431589 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. Tel. 01752 862382 churchwoodvalley@btconnect.com www.churchwoodvalley.com LONDON HAMMERSMITH Nice B&B in family homes. Comfortable, centrally located.

Direct transport to attractions, airports and Eurostar. Double £50, single £36 per night. Children’s reductions.

Tel: 020 7385 4904 www.thewaytostay.co.uk NORTH CORNWALL Self-catering accommodation in spacious barn conversion. Sleeps 8. Secluded rural location. Ideal for visiting all attractions – Eden Project just 40 min. Well-equipped and very comfortable, with large private garden. Contact Jeanette and John Gill, Rocksea Farmhouse, St Mabyn, Bodmin, Cornwall PL30 3BR john@rockseabarn.co.uk www.rockseabarn.co.uk YURTS AND HUT BY THE POND A single yurt or a group of 4, or a hut by a pond on an award-winning Cotswold organic farm near Cirencester. See www. theorganicfarmshop.co.uk for details.

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 smallholding. Each sleeps 4. Coastal path 2 miles.

Tel: 01348 891286 holidays@stonescottages. co.uk www.stonescottages.co.uk 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. Canoe hire available.

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www.littleriverside.com Tel. 01803 866257 Mobile: 07738 634136 GRETA HALL, KESWICK, LAKE DISTRICT Former home of Coleridge and Southey.

Beautiful self-catering accommodation sleeping 2, 6 or 11. Large grounds, stunning views & seclusion close to town centre. Gold green tourism award (GTBS) & 4*. www.gretahall.net 01768 775980 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 SUMMER ISLES, SCOTLAND Comfortable cottages to let on the beautiful Isle of Tanera Mòr. No cars or TV: just stunning wild scenery, birds, flowers, and space. Kayak/ dinghy hire, RYA Sailing School. Residential creative courses. Working holidays. Spring and Autumn, not just Summer! 01854 622 252 www.summer-isles.com 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 far-reaching 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 GREECE: WORKCAMP Join our 7th annual autumn workcamp for an inexpensive (£65/week) working holiday: 2, 3 or 4 weeks from 24 September to 22 October. Building, maintenance, permaculture skills useful. Or join the support team that cooks the vegetarian meals and does the packing up. Beach time every afternoon!

Details: info@kalikalos.com tel. 0208 816 8533, book at www.kalikalos.com SNOWDONIA GUIDED MOUNTAIN WALKING Restorative Breaks to Unwind. Tailormade. Weekend/mid-week specials. B&B/ hotel/camping. www.walk2unwind.co.uk email gail@walk2unwind.co.uk NORTH CORNWALL Bodmin Moor. Lovely Grade farmhouse. www.tredarras.com

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listed

Cornwall – Lizard Peninsula Beautiful 2 person cob cottage set in 2 acre contemporary walled garden. Superb walks around the Helford river. Pentagonal Meditation Studio. Matt Robinson 01326 221339. www.build-art.co.uk/caervallackgarden.html THATCHED COTTAGE holiday. Unspoilt, built 1550, rural setting outside Hartland, North Devon. Sleeps 4/5. mwatney@hotmail.com or 01865 744627

PEACEFUL HEREFORDSHIRE Two lovely cottages in quiet rural hamlet, each sleeping 4/5. Friendly owners, Green Tourism National Award, good for walking, cycling or just relaxing. 10% discount for Resurgence readers. www.litmarshfarm.co.uk or 01568 797374 (brochure available) SOUTH DARTMOOR Totally secluded holiday cottage, sleeps 6+.

Generously proportioned, single-storey, comfortable and well-appointed. Own land, magnificent views and private access to moor. catchdesign@yahoo.co.uk Tel. 020 8255 0322 eco-friendly cottage, hartland Solar water, green central heating. Stunning coast & countryside views. Sleeps 4. 01237 441490 www.peaceandplentyholidays.co.uk email r.r@tosberry.com GREECE: WORKCAMP AT KALIKALOS community-based holistic centre, 24 Sept-8 Oct. A cheap (€150) working holiday helping us wind down our season. Staff volunteers also required throughout the autumn. Useful skills: DIY, maintenance, building, vegetarian cookery, gardening, group process, healing and creative arts. Gorgeous beaches, fine mountain walking trails, community camaraderie. Website: www.kalikalos.com email: info@kalikalos.com Tel. 020 8816 8533 CORNISH RETREAT Tranquil hamlet close to sea. Complimentary tai-chi. Luxurious barns. Self-catering or B&B. Holistic therapies. Dogs welcome. Tel 01326 280236. www.thehenhouse-cornwall.co.uk TOTNES Hope Cottage. Cosy cottage situated in centre of town, easy walking distance to the station.

Sleeps up to 5. Parking, courtyard.

Tel: 01803 866257 ECO COTTAGES: SW SPAIN OR SNOWDONIA Sleep 4-5. In peaceful olive grove or mountain woodland. Birdwatching, walking, historic towns. 01766 590638 www.finca-art.co.uk DORSET LOG CABIN Peaceful & secluded location, 4 miles from Lulworth Cove, on own area of heathland, next to Dorset Wildlife Trust nature reserve.

Sleeps 6. www.dorsetlogcabin.co.uk or email sohnrethel@aol.com

MISCELLANEOUS FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT Proofreading and copy-editing by a member of the Resurgence team. Reliable, friendly service. Helen Banks 01726 823998 helenbanks@phonecoop.coop STRESSFUL LIFE? Articles, blog, professional coaching.

Sustainable living, sustainable small business, how to downshift. www.sallylever.co.uk

September/October 2010

WHAT WORLD WILL YOUR GRANDCHILDREN Inherit?

Your legacy, however modest, to the Resurgence Trust could make it a better one.

For more information, contact Satish Kumar, The Resurgence Trust, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon, EX39 6EE, UK, or email info@resurgence.org POETS AND IMAGE MAKERS wanted for a book: Shropshire Butterflies.

Email fairacrepress@btinternet.com for details. Deadline 30th September.

HOMEOPATHY & COMPLEMENTARY HEALTH Telephone consultations, remedies & energy medicine, significant discount for Resurgence readers, free training for health practitioners from highly experienced homeopaths at Kesteven Natural Health Centre. www.centreforhomeopathy.co.uk or call Sue on 01529 460536

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)6192 1498 www.gvp.ie JARDIN DES ARBRES Attractive granite cottage and adjoining ancient farmhouse with landscaped three quarter acres including pond, orchard, soft fruit, vegetable and flower gardens. Rural hamlet 30 km SW of Dinan, Brittany. £185,000 01305 261410 or email alankrayner@gmail.com

ORGIVA, SOUTHERN SPAIN Fully renovated traditional two-storey townhouse. www.orgiva-property.eu 01583 431298 SOUTHERN SNOWDONIA Comfortable farmhouse dating from 16th century, many original features, solar panels. Two letting-units. Stunning views of mountains, estuary and sea. Secluded but near to train and bus. £425,000. 01341 250065

SERVICES BEAUTIFUL BARGAIN ECOHOUSE with land in Southern Spain. Would suit small community.www.cathylotus.co.uk SW WALES Traditional 5 bed stone house, original features, 2 fine stone barns. Ecologically planted gardens, raised beds, fruit trees, large glasshouse, mature trees. 2 secluded, southfacing acres amid rolling countryside. Great walking, mountain biking. 3 miles A40; M4 easily accessible. £455,000. Applicants in a position to proceed only, please email ajmw@ waitrose.com WANT TO LIVE IN AN ECOLOGICALLY MINDED COMMUNITY? ‘Burnlaw’, a 50 acre organic smallholding and vibrant community, sits on the edge of the Northumberland West Allen Valley (an AONB). Residents run courses, work as teachers, Arts Officer, Choreographer, workers-in-wood, website designers etc. For sale: ‘The Stable’, 4/5 bedrooms, master-craftsman-built in 1996. See http://www.houseladder. co.uk/SearchEngine/PropertyDetailsPrint. aspx?PropertyId=542036

BI JA Walking with Gandhi 22 November – 4 December 2010 This course will explore sustainability through Gandhi’s vision of a civilisation where the wellbeing of the whole planet is ensured.

Week 2: Ethics, Energy & Equity 29 November – 4 December

Week 1: Ecology, Education & Equity 22 – 27 November Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence, will introduce participants to the key

PERMACULTURE IN SCOTLAND Experienced designer and forest gardener available for consultation, design and landscaping work throughout mainland Scotland and the Isles. First consultation session is free. All sizes of project considered.

Call Ludwig: 07760 142495 Email: info@reforestgarden.co.uk

D. Stainer-Hutchins Architects Ltd 5 Bridge Street, Nailsworth GL6 OAA www.dstainer-hutchinsarchitects.co.uk

Tel: 01453 839121

Let us help you with: Feasibility studies, surveys, sustainable design, conservation, planning applications, building regulations, project management

An International School for Sustainable Living Dehra Dun, North India

Gandhian concepts through interactive sessions enabling students to explore their relevance in their life.

Madhu Suri Prakash, Professor of Education at the Penn State University, USA, will introduce a Gandhian approach to Education.

Ecology, Education, Energy and Equity

Large Property For Sale Currently running as a retreat centre although could be a community etc. SW Wales stunning coastal location with amazing views. Acre organic gardens, solar panels, own spring water, natural paints. Easily reachable public transport. Currently 6 self-contained flats plus other rooms, group rooms/facilities; however, could easily be other layouts. See www. healingretreat.co.uk Tel. 0845 539 9938

Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche, The Prime Minister in Exile of Tibet, will share the principles of non-violent governance based on spirituality.

Vandana Shiva, Gandhian environmental activist, will deconstruct the violence of

today’s ego-economics and offer alternative solutions steeped in non-violence and a spirit of service to the community.

Aruna Roy, right to information campaigner, will be sharing her experience in ensuring equity through access to information for all members of Civil Society so as to achieve a truly democratic governance.

Bunker Roy will talk about initiatives where communities have evolved a sustainable way of living in harmony with the local conditions.

The course includes daily yoga classes, meditation, temple visits and work on the farm.

For further information on fees and logistics please contact Mini Joy at: bijavidyapeeth@vsnl.net or bija@navdanya.net Tel +91 11 268 532 772 Issue 262

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D I S P L AY A D V E RT I S I N G Photo: Elizabeth Wainwright

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A series of revealing and inspiring workshops for people passionate about creating a sustainable future 4th September 2010 5th September 2010 2nd October 2010 3rd October 2010

What Will Sustain in the Future?

Finding the Future in Me What Sustains the Human?

Dealing with the Future

The courses will be held at Waunifor in West Wales For more details visit www.humanfuturesnetwork.com To book phone Joan on 01559 395443

Human Futures

Tax-free {ethically} Open a Triodos Online Cash ISA and save with a global pioneer of sustainable banking Triodos only invests in ethical, sustainable organisations that have a positive impact on people and the environment. What’s more we’re the only commercial bank that will tell you exactly who we lend to. Open an Online Cash ISA safe in the knowledge that it’s tax-free and 100% ethical. Great for you and everyone on the planet.

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Tax-free is the contractual rate of interest payable where the interest is exempt from income tax. The favourable tax treatment for ISAs could change. Interest is calculated daily and paid six monthly. Interest rate is variable. 33 day notice period. Minimum opening deposit £10.

Triodos Bank NV (incorporated under the laws of the Netherlands with limited liability, registered in England and Wales BR3012). Authorised by the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for the conduct of UK business. Registered office: Brunel House, 11 The Promenade, Bristol BS8 3NN.

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September/October 2010

KYLEVIALLI.COM

Brockwood Park School

V³ E V E N T S

PRESENTS

We are a co-educational international boarding school in the Hampshire countryside, offering a diverse and personalised programme of study including pre-AS, AS and A level subjects. Our aim is to provide an holistic education for around 65 students aged between 14-19 years old that encourages academic excellence, selfunderstanding, creativity and integrity in a safe, noncompetitive environment.

“A unique school” The Good Schools Guide, 2009

Open Morning Saturday 6th November 10am to 12.30pm For information contact Vicki Lewin, Tel: 01962 771744, Email: enquiry@brockwood.org.uk Founded in 1969 by J. Krishnamurti.

Part of Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Registered Charity No. 312865

O N L I N E A DV E RT I S I N G Resurgence(port).indd 1

13/07/2010 14:44

Increase your audience...

How do we live with Courage, Compassion and Constancy in a fast changing world?

Working with the warrior archetype: + Public workshops, including a year training in 2011 + Leadership development programs for organisations + Team-building Email: samuraigameuk@live.co.uk Phone: 07903 543018

www.fudoshin.org.uk Including The Samurai Game® created by George Leonard

Issue 262

The Resurgence website gets an average of 50,000 visits per month Resurgence now offers online advertising for everyone who advertises in the magazine – just place your classified advert online for an extra £10 Display advertisers can place a banner linked to a website for an extra £20 For more information call 01237 441293 email advert@resurgence.org or visit www.resurgence.org and click on Resurgence Advertising All adverts are subject to our terms and conditions, available at www.resurgence.org/advertise or on request

69

Schumacher College

Transformative Learning for Sustainable Living Celebrating 20 Years of transformative education at Schumacher College in 2011

Photo; Azul Thome

Photo; Daniel Thistlethwaite

Ecoliteracy: First principles for radical change

Up-coming courses and teachers:

What could a new economy look like?

October 25 – November 5, 2010 (one or two-week options)

To Buy or Not to Buy? Consumption, Growth and Prosperity October 2010

In September 2011 Schumacher College will run a new Masters programme in economics.

This course offers an opportunity for those wanting to make a real difference in their lives and work through a deep understanding of theory and practice in this area. In the first week participants will explore the elements of an ecological world view - focusing on key concepts such as self-organisation, resilience, connectivity and adaptation, and placing these in the context of the global challenges we face. In the second week, they will look at how these concepts can be applied in areas such as design, social activism, energy and food production to support the transition to an ecoliterate future.

Teachers: Fritjof Capra (by videolink), Gustavo Esteva (by videolink), Terry Irwin (by videolink), Stephan Harding, Philip Franses, Satish Kumar, Emily Ryan (course facilitator) Oliver Greenfield, Toni Spencer, Anne Miller

Tim Jackson, Ed Mayo, Julie Richardson

Ecological Facilitation: A gritty and creative approach to leadership October 2010 Jenny Mackewn and Toni Spencer

Systems Thinking in a Complex World January 2011 Hardin Tibbs, Philip Franses, Jean Boulton, Gunter Pauli

Ecopsychology: Exploring the Roots to Change March 2011 Mary-Jayne Rust, Dave Key and guest teachers

E. F. Schumacher was a foresighted pioneer who laid out a new approach to economics that put values and compassion, people and planet at the heart of our economic system. Key thinkers and practitioners have been further developing alternative ways forward that were once dismissed as radical and marginal, but now are fast moving centre stage. Now is the time to make visible these achievements, learn from what works and what doesn’t, re-write economic theory from the bottom up and accelerate the great transition towards a low-carbon economy.

See our website for more information about how you can help co-create this exciting programme.

For further information please contact us: +44(0)1803 865 934 admin@schumachercollege.org.uk The Old Postern, Dartington, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EA, UK Schumacher College is a part of The Dartington Hall Trust, a registered charity

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www.schumachercollege.org.uk September/October 2010

self knowledge and global responsibility two faces of one vision discovered through esoteric education where all you need to know is in you already and has always been there to be drawn out because education is for nothing if not for a sustainable future asking the deepest and most universal questions like who am I what am I doing here feeling the need to get beyond thought to the stillness at the heart of all things to uncover meaning to feel an essential compassion to be loved to establish a contemplative dimension in life that gives meaning and heart to action the possibility of real and lasting progress so that life itself teaches because we have the ears to hear we have cleaned the mirror with the help of our fellow travellers and those who have been there before Ibn Arabi Lao Tsu Meister Eckhart Rumi Vedavyasa and so many others who have left words of undying luminosity such as tradition has left us only words it is up to us to find out what they mean and I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known so I created the universes so that I might be known and always at the heart of it the unity of being conscious participation in the evolutionary process study work meditation devotion practice the awareness of seeing no other but one’s self and the world as one self that single consciousness beyond even the interconnectedness that is so clear and evident in nature a six month course is barely enough time to grasp this my reality and birthright to rediscover the dignity of the human being a lifetime’s work but what a joy Issue 262

The wise man whatever happens will not allow himself to be tied to one form of belief, because he knows himself�

Ibn Arabi

The Foundations of Conscious Living

study meditation work devotional practice

The Beshara School

six month intensive course begins 1 October 2010

nine day courses throughout the year

at the Chisholme Institute, Roberton, Hawick, The Scottish Borders, TD9 7PH, UK +44 (0) 1450 371108 secretary@beshara.org www.beshara.org

www.beshara.org

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RESURGENCE CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING COPY DATES

Issue 263 Nov/Dec - 1st Sept Issue 264 Jan/Feb - 1st Nov Issue 265 Mar/Apr - 4th Jan Please include my advert in the next one q three q issue(s)* of Resurgence.

ADVERT

* Please tick as appropriate

Please place in the following section:

6 month training 2010/11 bringing a psychological eye to bear on green matters and a green eye to the psychological For those in the helping professions wanting to re-vision their role and integrate ecological awareness in practice.

Themes are • Consuming the earth: unconscious processes and crisis • Collective denial or initiation: cultural narcissism • Ecological unconscious and envisaging the future • Oracular dreams of the non-human world.

Course structure: 1 residential weekend (15-17 Oct) plus 6 monthly Fri/Sat tutorial, seminars and workshops.

Open talks: Alida Gersie Nov 12, Paul Maiteny Dec 10 For details: http://www.re-vision.co.uk/ecopsychology or call re-vision on 02083578881

Accommodation q Communities

q Events q Holidays q Property for Sale q Situations Vacant q Boxed q Courses

q Eco-Architecture q For Sale q Miscellaneous q Property to Let q Wanted q Web q

ecopsychology

Bristol Schumacher Conference 2010

Zero Carbon Britain - from Aspiration into Action

10am-5.30pm Saturday 16th October 2010 Council House, College Green, Bristol BS1 5TR

Juliet Davenport

Please debit my card no.

Chief Executive, Good Energy Expiry date

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Head of Research and Innovation, Centre for Alternative Technology

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Jacqueline McGlade Executive Director,

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Email Please remind me when my advert expires: Yes q No q Adverts cost £1.00 per word (incl.VAT).

There is a 25% discount for advertising in three or more issues. Payment must be received before placement of first advert.

By submitting any advert for publication you are agreeing to our terms and conditions available at www.resurgence.org/advertise or on request.

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Britain has the potential, the skills and the natural resources to lead the world in carbon reduction. Join in workshop discussions with Paul Allen (CAT), Eugenie Harvey and 10:10, Prof. Peter Reason (University of Bath), Victor Anderson (WWF), Jean Boulton (Sustain), Mark Gater and others. Become part of the solution. Put the date in your diary!

The Schumacher Society, in partnership with the Centre For Alternative Technology, Machynlleth

The Schumacher Society, Create Centre, Smeaton Rd, BRISTOL, BS1 6XN Further info and online booking at: http://schumacher.org.uk admin@schumacher.org.uk 0117 903 1081 SUK_BSL10_Resurgence.indd 1

September/October 2010 02/07/2010 11:15:08

3 days of conversation, contemplation, questions and discovery; a genuine gathering of hearts and minds in the beautiful Scottish Borders; excellent food and even better company including Saskia Bruysten Director of Grameen Creative Lab Michael Buck Sustainable Building Chipo Chung Actor Activist Founder of Fouth World Productions Scilla Elworthy Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, Founder of Peace Direct Jonathan Hyams Photographer Maja Gรถpel Director of Future Justice, World Future Council Arif Hasyim Climate Change Activist Robert Turner Director of Neurophysics, Max Planck Insititute Emily Young Sculptor Peter Young Principal of the Beshara School what does facing the unknown mean to you?

self knowledge and global responsibility symposium

FACING THE UNKNOWN 9 - 11 September 2010

+44 (0) 1450 880215, secretary@beshara.org www.selfknowledgeglobalresponsibility.org

Rathbone Greenbank Investments You have values do your investments?

We recognise you want investments that are right for you financially. But we also know you want us to seek investments that are responsible and respect your values.

Ethical investment for private clients, trusts and charities Tel: 0117 930 3000 www.rathbonegreenbank.com greenbank@rathbones.com Rathbone Greenbank Investments is a trading name of Rathbone Investment Management Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Reg. office: Port of Liverpool Building, Pier Head, Liverpool L3 1NW. Registered in England No. 1448919

Issue 262

73

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Inspiration for Self Reliance Permaculture Magazine – Inspiration For Sustainable Living features practical, real life stories from real people who are creating a more sustainable, life-enhancing human society. Their inspiring solutions show you how to grow your organic food, eco-build and renovate, how to live an environmentally friendly life and much, much more. It is full of news, reviews, courses, contacts and clever money saving ideas for you and your family.

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www.permaculture.co.uk 74

Winners 2008

September/October 2010

Jill Purce JillHealing Purce Voice The Rediscover the ancient power of group chant The Healing Voice Magical Voice Techniques • Mantra & Sonic

Meditations the • Mongolian Overtone Chanting Rediscover ancient power of group chant Magical Voice Techniques • Mantra & Sonic

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Indigenous teachings of the Flowering Mountain Earth

Martín Prechtel Weekend workshop

New Sap in the Old Tree 5th – 7th November 2010 Ladram Bay, Otterton, Devon email: event@kayode.co.uk or call: Kayode on 01621 826975

Casa Delureni “House in the H i l l s ”

Transylvanian Guest House and Retreat Centre Experience the quiet peace of the Romanian countryside. Walk in the mountains, enjoy the wild flowers and the birds, fish in mountain streams. Take part in our many holidays - yoga, walking, fishing, cooking, reflexology, watercolour painting.

Inexpensive en-suite accommodation with country style cooking, sourced locally. Easy travel.

between architecture art and furniture pieces and spaces, built of simple materials that are integral to place and utilize sustainable principles.www.sasaworks.co.uk

www.casadelureni.com tel: (0044) 07867 577416 Supporting the children rescued from the orphanages

Issue 262

75

Student boycott victory

Mixed media: the best of 2009

Israel/Palestine working together

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New Internationalist

Independent reporting from around the world 76

September/October 2010

CENTRE FOR THE CREATIVE SPIRIT

Who am I? What is Life?

The Interfaith Seminary's one and two year training brings intense and joyful inquiry to these fundamental questions.

Saturday 2nd October 11am

Life Essence:

The New Gold Standard how to value the present to ensure a flourishing future

A lecture by Simon Davison director, the bleddfa centre

Recent students describe the journey as ...... 'radical homecoming, continued awakening, healing and acceptance....'

Now enrolling for our Autumn intake at various centres.

lecture2010

‘Simon Davison will bring some very broad and fresh perspectives to the crucial subjects he proposes to address in his lecture. I hope what he says will be listened to with care and reflective self-questioning’ ~ the most revd and rt hon dr rowan williams archbishop of canterbury

(patron of the bleddfa trust)

Call or visit our website to find out more about our introductory events.

UK enquiry line: 08444 457004 www.interfaithfoundation.org

SuNFLOwER phOTOGRaph by FabiO viSENTiN

Many Ways : One Truth

The Interfaith Seminary is part of the Interfaith Foundation, a charitable company limited by guarantee. Registered Charity No: 1099163 (England and Wales) SCO40148 (Scotland)Registered Company No: 4432622 (England and Wales).

The 2010 bleddfa annual Lecture is based on a seminal work started at yale university and suggests the use of life essence as a concept of valuation to bring about real lasting economic, social and political change. humankind is facing unprecedented challenges that if we fail to address adequately will threaten our very existence.

This lecture presents participants with an opportunity to embrace a paradigm shift in our thinking that could help initiate the creative restructuring required to give shape to a different world order, and help us ensure a flourishing future.

Tickets: £15 unreserved.

Please book early.

The Bleddfa Centre Bleddfa, Nr Knighton, Powys, LD7 1PA, UK t: +44 (0)1547 550377 e: enquiries@bleddfacentre.com www.bleddfacentre.com

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Saturday 20 & Sunday 21 November 2010 Seminar with Pir Zia Inayat-Khan Head of the Sufi Order International Two days of sufi teachings, meditations and practices on awakening the heart. 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.

Limited places. Advance booking recommended.

Booking: info@sufiorderuk.org, Tel: 020 7266 3099 Web: www.sufiorderuk.org

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14 Billion Years of History – at a Glance!

The What on Earth? Wallbook is a beautifully illustrated timeline of the past covering 14 billion years from the beginning of the Universe to the present day.

Discover the connections between natural and human history with this engaging 2.3 metre-long visual history of the world that can be read like a book or hung on a wall.

More than 1,000 pictures and captions

An ideal Christmas gift appealing to children, families and grandparents alike. RRP £17.50 A donation of £5 will be made to The Resurgence Trust for every Wallbook purchased.

Quote Resurgence as an offer code when ordering online at: www.whatonearthwallbook.com or by phone on 01443 828811

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September/October 2010

3/3/10

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Share your passion with like-minded friends of Resurgence Camphill Community

Botton Village WE are looking for an energetic and idealistic person to run our Food Centre; producing our popular jams and juices with a team of workers of mixed abilities; developing new products using seasonal, biodynamic produce from our gardens and farms. You would be responsible for the acquisition of raw materials, organisation and supervision of the work & marketing of the products.

If you are interested in joining us, we welcome applications from single people as well as families.

Experience or relevant training in either food production or supporting people with learning disabilities would be advantageous, but most important is enthusiasm and a willingness to learn.

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Issue 262

The Camphill Village Trust Limited is a registered Charity 232402 in England & Wales and SC038286 in Scotland, and is a non-profit company limited by guarantee 539694 England & Wales.

Registered office: The Old School House, Town Street, Old Malton, North Yorkshire YO17 7HD

79

at the heart of earth, art and spirit

Resurgence magazine presents

To be a Pilgrim or a Tourist?

Satish Kumar hosts a day of talks, music and poetry Saturday 30 October 2010 11am – 5pm

Speakers:

Peter Owen Jones

Presenter of BBC 2’s Around the World in 80 Faiths

Rupert Sheldrake

Author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home

Professor Ursula King

Author of The Search for Spirituality

Caroline Lucas MP

Leader of the Green Party

Satish Kumar

Editor of Resurgence Music by Annemarie Borg and pianist Gabriel Keen Poetry by Deborah Harrison

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At: Loyola Hall Heythrop College 23 Kensington Square London W8 5HN ( High St Kensington) Tickets: £25 Concessions: £15 From: Resurgence magazine, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE 01237 441293 or via the website

www.resurgence.org Other enquiries to Peter Lang, Resurgence Events Director: peterlang@resurgence.org 020 8809 2391 Restaurant facilities available

September/October 2010

at the heart of earth, art and spirit

The Resurgence Trust is a registered educational charity (no. 1120414).

The magazine and its associated network of individuals and groups are dedicated to the service of the soil, soul and society. Our aim is to help create a world based on justice, equity and respect for all beings.

EDITORIAL OFFICE

MEMBERSHIP

DISTRIBUTORS

Editor-in-Chief Satish Kumar PA to Satish Kumar Elaine Green

Membership Office Jeanette Gill, Rocksea Farmhouse, St Mabyn, Bodmin, Cornwall PL30 3BR, UK Tel: + 44 (0) 1208 841824 Fax: + 44 (0) 1208 841256 members@resurgence.org

USA Kent News Company 100511 Airport Road Scottsbluff, NE 69361 Tel: +1 308 635 2225 rmckinney@kentnews.com

Editor Susan Clark Art Director Rachel Marsh Website Editor Angie Burke Editorial & Education Elizabeth Wainwright Contributing Editor Lorna Howarth Sub-editor Helen Banks Art Adviser Sandy Brown Poetry Editor Peter Abbs Trust Manager Ian Tennant Office Manager Lynn Batten info@resurgence.org Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE, UK Tel: + 44 (0) 1237 441293 Fax: + 44 (0) 1237 441203

ADVERTISING Advertising Manager Gwydion Batten Advertising Sales Andrea Thomas Tel: + 44 (0)20 8771 9650 andrea@resurgence.org

TRUSTEES Chair James Sainsbury Sandy Brown, Rebecca Hossack, Nick Robins

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Herbert Girardet, Hazel Henderson, David Kingsley, June Mitchell, Sophie Poklewski Koziell, Jonathan Robinson, Andrew Simms, Martin Wright

ADVISORY PANEL Ramesh Agrawal, Rosie Boycott, Ros Coward, Oliver James, Annie Lennox, Philip Marsden, Geoff Mulgan, Jonathon Porritt, Gordon Roddick, Sam Roddick, William Sieghart

Membership Rates One year: UK: £30 Non-UK airmail: £40 Non-UK surface mail: £35

OVERSEAS MEMBERSHIP USA Walt Blackford, P O Box 312, Langley, WA 98260 U.S.A. Airmail: US$65, Surface: US$56 Australia Sustainable Living Tasmania, Level 1, 71 Murray Street, Hobart, 7000, Australia Tel: 03 6234 5566 info@sustainablelivingtasmania.org.au The Ethos Foundation, 37 Bibaringa Close, Beechmont, Qld 4211, Australia Tel: 07 5533 3646 info@ethosfoundation.org Airmail: A$70, Surface: A$62 Japan Global Village/Fair Trade Company 3F, 5-1-16 Okusawa, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan 158-0083 Tel: + 81 3 5731 6671 Fax: + 81 3 5731 6677 info@peopletree.co.jp Airmail: ¥5500, Surface: ¥4800 South Africa Howard Dobson, SEEDS, 16 Willow Road, Constantia 7806, Cape Town, South Africa Tel: + 27 2 1794 3318 howdy@mweb.co.za Airmail: R462, Surface: R405

UK Jeanette Gill, Rocksea Farmhouse, St Mabyn, Bodmin, Cornwall PL30 3BR, UK Tel: + 44 (0) 1208 841824 Fax: + 44 (0) 1208 841256 members@resurgence.org

RESURGENCE SUPPORTERS Patrons (£5,000) Roger & Claire Ash-Wheeler, Anthony and Carole Bamford, Roger Franklin, Kim SamuelJohnson, Lavinia Sinclair, Doug Tompkins, Michael Watt, Louise White Life Members (£1,000) Robin Auld, Klaas and Lise Berkeley, Peter and Mimi Buckley, Anisa Caine, Mrs Moira Campbell, Anne Clements, Mary Davidson, Liz Dean, Craig Charles Dobson, John Doyle, John and Liz Duncan, Rosemary Fitzpatrick, Hermann Graf-Hatzfelt, Guy Johnson, Michael Livni, Mill Millichap, Mrs O. Oppenheimer, Vinod Patel & Rashmi Shukla CBE, John Pontin, Colin Redpath, Jane Rowse, Gabriel Scally, Penelope Schmidt, Philip Strong Sustainer Members (£500) Mr G. Bader, Mrs K. Dudelzak, Marcela de Montes

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.

EVENTS Peter Lang Tel: + 44 (0) 20 8809 2391 peterlang@resurgence.org

Resurgence (ISSN 0034-5970) is published bi-monthly

by The Resurgence Trust and is distributed in the US

by SPP, 95 Aberdeen Road, Emigsville PA. Periodicals postage paid at Emigsville PA POSTMASTER: send address changes to c/o Resurgence, PO Box 437, Emigsville PA, 17318-0437

A week long People’s Festival of the Arts, Crafts and Culture

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of

Rabindranath Tagore

the Nobel Prize winning poet Speakers and presenters include:

Resurgence is hosting Gitanjali Tagore 150 (Gitanjali means ‘song offerings’) in association with the Dartington Hall Trust and the Temenos Academy. This is also the 45th birth anniversary of Resurgence! The festival will present poetry, music, dance, films, lectures and of course wholesome Indian food!

In order to make the festival a success we are looking for financial support and sponsors. If you would like to help and/or would like to be kept up to date about the programme, please contact Minni Jain: Email: tagorefestival@resurgence.org Address: Tagore Festival, Schumacher College, The Old Postern, Dartington, Totnes, Devon, TQ9 6EA, UK

Poet Andrew Motion Poet Robert Bly Author Shashi Tharoor Author Deepak Chopra Poet William Radice Poet Alice Oswald Dramatist Peter Oswald Broadcaster Mark Tully Artist Chris Drury Sculptor Peter Randall-Page Artist Susan Derges Environmentalist Jonathon Porritt CEO of Eden Project Tim Smit Director of Soil Assn Patrick Holden Musician Debashish Raychaudhury Musician Kartik Seshadri Poet Matt Harvey Singer and Filmmaker Sangeeta Datta Author Amit Chaudhuri Author Pankaj Mishra Former MP Clare Short Lord Bhikhu Parekh Bauls Mimlu & Paban Green MP Caroline Lucas Musician Chloe Goodchild Artist Shanti Panchal Sufi Poet Coleman Barks Musician Ananda Gupta Author Michael Morpurgo

This event will help raise money for The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity (no 1120414) registered in England and Wales