Resurgence&Ecologist287

ENVIRONMENT • ACTIVISM • SOCIAL JUSTICE • ARTS • ETHICAL LIVING

November/December 2014 No. 287 £4.95 US$8.00

THE FUTURE WE WANT AND THE ONE WE CAN’t AFFORD HERMAN DALY on Steady-State Economics PLUS: HERBERT GIRARDET – sustainable cities GEORGE MONBIOT – campaigning with hope JILL PANGMAN – watershed for the Yukon ANDREW MOTION – saving the countryside

Courtesy www.goldmarkart.com

Mother and Children in Spring in the Park by Dora Holzhandler, from Dora Holzhandler: A Celebration, published by Goldmark Gallery. Among the tributes to the artist in the book, Satish Kumar writes: “A lot of contemporary art comes with a body, but without the soul. In vibrant contrast, Dora Holzhandler’s beautifully interwoven images of human figures, flowers, trees, birds and animals have a deep meaning, a soulfulness... Her art is rooted in the pattern of this intimacy of humanity in contact with and at one with Nature, and also in her profoundly felt experience of life. Her art is never art for art’s sake, but rather art for the sake of spirit. Her work refreshes the mind, the body and the imagination. She rises beyond divisions between people; she sees the unity of humanity.”

WELCOME

THE ECONOMICS OF PEACE Wellbeing means rejecting the illusory, consumerist notions of limitless growth

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uch conventional economics is focused on market-based competition, money and profit – all predicated on the illusory notion of limitless economic growth. The results, in too many cases, are inequality and social conflicts, environmental degradation, and even wars. So we are glad to present in this issue a call from the distinguished economist Herman Daly for a new, greener, steady-state economics. It is economics as if people and the planet mattered more than the profit motive.

Sadly, the departments of economics in many of our universities and colleges do not see the overarching importance of any other values, such as peace, sustainability or ethics. Yuan Yang, the founder of Rethinking Economics, and many of his fellow students are demanding a fundamental change in this attitude. We are delighted to present their views, too, in this issue.

Symbolic of our growth-centred economics has been the sprawl of the world’s cities, home today of more than half the Earth’s population, and increasingly drawing on the Earth’s natural resources. In a thoughtful analysis in this issue, Herbert Giradet presents his arguments for making our cities regenerative, and by doing so preserving our countryside, villages and local life – causes argued on other pages by Andrew Motion and Peter Macfadyen.

Healthy economic systems must also concern themselves with justice and peace among people as well as sustainability of the natural environment. Society will be more secure if it stands on the two legs of ecology and economy.

Instead, in my view, what we have presently is the economics of war. Wars are about power over resources and control over them. The pursuit of political power is part of it, but what drives the politics of war is greed for greater and greater profit derived from the possession of natural resources such as oil, gas, water and land.

In such a context national interest, defence and security become dependent on acquisition of natural resources wherever they are. As long as societies are driven by everincreasing consumerism, there can be no hope for ending wars and establishing peace among nations.

Peace, though, is not merely absence of war. Peace is a way of life; a life based in voluntary frugality and elegant

simplicity. Instead of an unlimited search for material prosperity, peaceful societies need to seek personal, social and environmental wellbeing. As the example of Bhutan shows, instead of seeking Gross National Product, peaceful societies seek Gross National Happiness. For another side of this argument, see Leo Johnson’s call in this issue for our taking back control over our lives.

In order to satisfy human greed, not only do nations go to war against other nations, but they also wage war against Nature. Animals are treated with horrific cruelty in huge factory farms where living creatures are no more than a means of profit. The over-fishing of the oceans, the destruction of rainforests and the poisoning of the land are no less than acts of war against Nature. If humanity is genuinely to pursue the path of peace, we have to change the way we do business. There is always some room for moderate profit, but the purpose of business and the motivation of those involved in business have to arise from a mind of caring, sharing and sustainability.

Such motivation cannot be imposed by government: it has to emerge from within each and every person and it has to be an integral part of social and political culture.

The seeds of greed, consumerism and materialism are there in every human mind. In order to establish peace in the world, we have to start by making peace within ourselves. A greedy mind cannot be a peaceful mind. A peaceful mind is a mind of contentment and fulfilment.

The biggest challenge for our time is to create a new kind of economics, a new kind of business and also a new kind of politics, which will be rooted in the soil of ethics and spirituality. Profit and power must be subordinate to ethical and moral principles. Only then will we be able to minimise conflict within ourselves, conflict between nations and conflict between humans and Nature.

Herman Daly’s thesis, that we need an approach to economics that is environmentally and socially sustainable, is in the spirit of the ideas Resurgence has been championing for nearly half a century, arguments strengthened by our merger with the Ecologist two years ago. In 2016 we will celebrate our 50th anniversary. As we approach that milestone, we welcome your continuing support, and hope you enjoy this issue.

SATISH KUMAR

Issue 287

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CONTENTS No. 287 November/December 2014

1 Welcome

Satish Kumar

4 IN MEMORIAM: John Moat

A tribute to Didymus, and his final column

FRONTLINE 6 ACTION FROM THE GRASS ROOTS

KEYNOTES

10 OUR CITIES NEED REGENERATING; OUR VILLAGES MUST BE VALUED

Herbert Girardet warns that an unplanned, urbanising

world could be a tragedy in the making

14 AN OUNCE OF HOPE IS WORTH A TON OF DESPAIR

Our language should reflect our hopes and values – not

our fears, argues George Monbiot 16 WE’VE MADE DEMOCRACY LOCAL Peter Macfadyen explains how like-minded neighbours fought back against voter apathy

18 CHURCHES TURN UP THE HEAT

Adam Weymouth meets faith groups that are choosing to take their investment away from fossil fuel companies

20 STORIES CHANGE; ACTIVISM GOES ON

The head of Greenpeace UK tells Russell Warfield that online eco-protest is just part of the future

22 MY GREEN LIFE

www.denniswunsch.com

Lorna Howarth reports

ECOLOGIST

Cover: illustration by Dennis Wunsch

Sharon Garfinkel meets the organics enthusiast Jo Wood

24 WHY WE NEED A STEADY-STATE ECONOMY

The Earth evolves and develops without growing in size.

The economy should follow the same pattern, says

Herman Daly

UNDERCURRENTS 30 THE ‘NEO-GREENS’ WILL NOT REVIVE OUR MOVEMENT: THEY WILL BURY IT

Paul Kingsnorth believes that new ‘pragmatic’

environmentalism splits humanity from Nature

34 WE ARE OUR COUNTRYSIDE, AND SAVING

IT MATTERS Andrew Motion argues that, whatever our nationality, in trying to preserve our landscape we assert our identity

37 LIFE IS A NATURAL PROCESS, WITH A

NATURAL END Ros Coward wonders whether ecological awareness can help us address the ethical dilemmas facing an ageing population

NEW ONLINE

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Peter Kirby-Harris analyses the chances for agreement at the Lima Conference this December; Nick Inman looks at the myths of science and urges us to synthesise rationality with intuition; and selected writers review a collection of some of 2014’s best books. Plus a new gallery featuring the work of artist Dennis Wunsch.

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

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

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November/December 2014

54 REALIGN WITH THE WORLD

38 SEEDS OF HOPE

Botanist Stephen Blackmore revisits a pioneering forest-restoration project

40 WATERSHED FOR THE YUKON Jill Pangman on the fight to protect one of the world’s great wildernesses

44 STOP! LET THE WORLD BACK IN

Leo Johnson rallies us against the forces of automation, atomisation and alienation

46 FOLLOWING THE PILGRIMS

Bébhinn Ramsay joins a day of rediscovery walking St Kevin’s Way

48 HEALING THROUGH NATURE

Mukti Mitchell talks to Jewels Wingfield about conscious relationship

50 UPLIFT: ONENESS IN ACTION

Chip Richards previews a festival in the “land of first light dreaming”

51 SWEET CHESTNUTS,

SWEET MEMORIES This Christmas, one meal will hold special significance for Susan Clark

A pioneering exhibition at the V&A examines the powerful role of objects as tools for social change

REVIEWS 58 A DISMAL SCIENCE, SETTLED

BY SPREADSHEETS Ed Mayo reviews I Spend, Therefore I Am: The True Cost of Economics by Philip Roscoe

59 THE STATE WE’RE IN

Mike Jay reviews The State is Out of Date: We Can Do It Better by Gregory Sams

60 A BRIGHT SOLAR FUTURE

Jonathon Porritt reviews The Burning Answer: A User’s Guide to the Solar Revolution by Keith Barnham

61 CLIMATE QUESTIONS, AND

RATHER HARDER ANSWERS Peter Ainsworth reviews Climatechallenged Society by John S. Dryzek et al.

62 TREES OF ENCHANTMENT

ARTS 52 A BONE THAT GOD CAN

India Windsor-Clive on a campaign bringing together artists and scientists

56 THE ART OF REBELLION

ETHICAL LIVING

WHISTLE THROUGH Peter Abbs introduces Rowan Williams’ first collection of poems

Caspar Henderson reviews The New Sylva: A Discourse of Forest and Orchard Trees by Gabriel Hemery & Sarah Simblet

63 SENSES OF PLACE

Greg Neale reviews three highly different works of Nature writing, by Richard Mabey, John Lewis-Stempel and Adam Thorpe

64 IN FAMOUS FOOTSTEPS

Peter Reason reviews Walking the Woods and the Water by Nick Hunt

65 BOWLING WITH ANGELS

Merlyn Driver reviews Himalayan Sound Revelations: The Complete Singing Bowl Book by Frank Perry

66 FRESH LEAVES FROM THE

JUNGLE John H. Bowles reviews Jungle Trees of Central India by Pradip Krishen

67 LETTERS

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On modern slavery; reining in big business; immersion in Nature

68 CROSSWORD AND SHOP 69 ADVERTS

Editor-in-Chief Satish Kumar PA to Satish Kumar Elaine Green Editor Greg Neale Designer Rachel Marsh Assistant Editor Emma Cocker Resurgence Web Editor Angie Burke Ecologist Web Editor Oliver Tickell Contributing Editor Lorna Howarth Sub-editor Helen Banks Art Adviser Sandy Brown Poetry Editor Peter Abbs Fundraising Manager Sharon Garfinkel +44 (0)7435 781842 sharon@resurgence.org Membership Jeanette Gill, Mandy Kessell +44 (0)1208 841824 members@resurgence.org Events Manager Peter Lang +44 (0)20 8809 2391 peterlang@resurgence.org Office Manager Lynn Batten info@resurgence.org Advertising Manager Gwydion Batten +44 (0)1237 441293 Advertising Sales Rep Andrea Thomas andrea@resurgence.org Aditus Acquisitions Membership sales +44 (0)20 3476 3909 General enquiries +44 (0)20 3053 3541 Editorial Office Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE, UK +44 (0)1237 441293 www.resurgence.org Resurgence & Ecologist is published by The Resurgence Trust, a registered educational charity (no. 1120414)

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I N MEMORIAM

John Moat 1936–2014

Lindsay Clarke pays tribute to a poet, painter and peace activist

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any readers of Resurgence & Ecologist may be familiar with John Moat’s bright, engaging spirit only through the delightful columns he wrote under the pen name Didymus – his last appears on the facing page – but John was a man of many gifts and he was invariably generous with them all. This was certainly the case in his commitment to the values of this magazine, for which, many years ago, he and his wife Antoinette helped Satish Kumar and June Mitchell – and Resurgence, as it simply was then – find a permanent home in Hartland, north Devon.

“He was a rock to us,” says Satish, “a constant source of encouragement and support offering a hand of friendship and a heart of love.”

Thousands of people whose creative lives have been enlarged by the Arvon writing courses he established with his friend John Fairfax in 1968 are also beneficiaries of John’s generous and inventive heart. His own skills as writer and painter were encouraged by two mentors committed to the integrity of the artistic life: the painter Edmond Kapp and the poet John Beaumont. Those early learning experiences fused the transformative powers of art and education in his imagination, eventually providing the model for Arvon’s work.

With Antoinette’s support, John also founded Tandem to refresh the creativity of teachers, The Yarner Trust to propagate self-sufficiency skills, and The Extension Trust to assist imaginative endeavour. Meanwhile he produced works of rare distinction in verse and fiction, along with many fine paintings, and his inspired collaboration with Antoinette and Satish gave the world the Peace Prayer: Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace; Let peace fill our hearts, our world, our universe.

Behind such prolific enterprise lay a humane vision of the urgent need for change in the world and the energy to accelerate it. However, John viewed himself as the vehicle rather than the author of these achievements. About Arvon he wrote: “I’ve often wondered to what extent the thrust behind the adventure came from Fairfax and myself and how much was the determination of the Imagination itself.”

Practising meditation with the same diligence he devoted to his work, John came to recognise Imagination as the eternally renewing source of true creation, both the voice of the

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Portrait of John Moat by Andrew Lawson

soul and a mysterious life force that he revered as sacred throughout a life lived in its service.

Having long rejoiced in the kindly warmth of his friendship, I recently walked with him on the cliffs above the mill-house where he lived for 55 years and where his poems, novels and paintings were carefully crafted out of his love for his wife and the beauty of that corner of the Devon landscape. We knew his time was now short, but as I listened to his quiet composure, I was deeply moved by the patient, generoushearted wisdom with which he had transformed the ordeals of his illness into a profound affirmation of life and love for his family and many friends.

That John was an alchemist of the Imagination is clear in the truthfulness, far-reaching insights and often very funny pages of his recent memoir, Anyway. He was both messenger and guardian of values deeper than those currently fashionable, and as writer, educator and philanthropist he did everything he could to foster their growth. Always a loving husband, father and friend, John Moat was one of the most complete human beings it has been my privilege to know. His legacy is inspirational and his presence is sorely missed.

■ David Nicholson-Lord, a regular columnist for Resurgence in the 1990s and early 2000s, has died. He was 67. David, a writer with a wry, observational style, wrote the Up the Elephant and Round the Castle column, and later the Notes from the Underground. He was formerly a journalist with The Times and Independent newspapers, and latterly an environmental campaigner with a particular interest in the greening of cities. A fuller appreciation will appear in the next issue of Resurgence & Ecologist.

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T H E L A S T O C C A S I O N A L DI DY M U S

Quantum of Solace

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John Moat speaks up for a medical alternative

hey are wheeled out every time the Medical Establishment or the lobby section of Big Pharma feels it’s time to put the boot into homeopathy again. To me they always sound grim and oddly threatened, rather in the way of those Politburo spokesmen when they feared some grass-roots rash of perestroika was about to break out. They claim to be heavyweight scientists and pronounce that their research studies reveal homeopathy to be entirely ineffective. I think of Dr Johnson’s response when he kicked the stone to rebut Bishop Berkeley’s contention that everything is immaterial.

I mean, to someone who has actually benefited from a wide range of homeopathic medicine for forty years, the most generous explanation is that these hardheads have as yet failed to catch up with the science (quantum-related, I think) that demonstrates that observations are conditioned by the viewpoint of the observer… In this case, a viewpoint that won’t stand for anything that threatens its monopoly, and one whose cynical self-protectiveness is sufficiently virulent to fidget or fudge the findings of the research. Their objective wits seem so numbed by this fear that it doesn’t occur to them to question how the placebo effect could be so selective, targeting homeopathic cures while leaving drug-related cures entirely unaffected!

The internet… My old laptop and I have come late to this expanding universe, but now on any pretext I run to have my wonder reaffirmed. So to today’s relevant research: I enter, “Prescription drug-related death”. My laptop barely stutters… Maybe its age accounts for the entries being a bit dated. First: “In 2004 a team of scientists reported, ‘A definitive review and close reading of peer-review journals and government health statistics shows the total number of deaths from medical treatment is 783,936 in the USA. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.’” And then from way back in 1994 a study in the journal of the American Medical Association reported that modern medicine causes 180,000 deaths each year in the USA (most of these from prescribed pharmaceutical drugs). Homeopathy can’t compete!

But if forty years of kicking the stone, or the gnosis of actual experience counts for truth, here is one who knows it works. Not in every case, but often enough. Where to begin?

I like this one because it reads like a parable: I’m deepstabbed at the foot-of-the-thumb by a noxious rose-thorn.

Issue 287

Illustration by John Moat

The poison moves so fast that I dash to the doctor for an antibiotic. I complete the course: it seems to have worked.

But within an hour of swallowing the last antibiotic there are alarming red ‘threads’ moving up my arm. Fast. Not what one wants to see. It has to be Saturday night… Out in these sticks there is nowhere to turn. Unless… I take a dose of Hepar sulph 30. Another after half an hour. I actually watch the red threads begin to draw back, then draw right back; in a couple of hours they disappear.

Parable? We are being told that the threat from bacteria becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, due to overuse, misprescribing and indiscriminate addition to animal feeds (“Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections.” – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) could, as one leading medic on the radio put it the other day, “take us back into the Dark Ages”. No more routine hip-replacements, for a start. Given such a situation, you might expect even the hardheads to be swallowing the homeopathic placebo! Any port in a storm… We’ll see.

But, come on, how could it all be placebo? What, with animals? Surely not. Salome, the cow, her stubborn mastitis cured by Pulsatilla, the vet left scratching his head? The retrievers, within seconds calmed from thunder-terror by Arnica? True, they’re dotty enough to fall for a placebo – but not the more earthed Salome. From the endless list my favourite, the Lazarus in the collection, is Masher. I returned to find him laid out on the mat, mostly dead, eyes dilated, a terrible foam dried round the mouth, rigor mortis from the neck down, a goner. But you do what you can, which is to ring Mrs Robinson; she has no truck… not even with death.

“Describe his character,” she says. “He’s big,” I say. “A bit of a wimp. He cries on walks if he thinks he’s being left behind.” “Sulphur 200,” she says. I don’t know how I manage to get this stiff, almost lifeless thing to swallow the pill. An hour later I am down the far end of the kitchen from where he lies. By chance I’m opening for lunch a tin of pilchards. The tin half-opened, and there he is back to life, staggering the length of the kitchen. So he’s up for my lunch. He never looked back.

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

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FRONTLINE Lorna Howarth reports on action from the grass roots UK

SEVEN MILES OF WOOL AGAINST WEAPONS

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t a time when the global media is dominated by stories of war and terrorism, it is important to remember that millions of people around the world are actively working towards peace. Take Wool Against Weapons as an example: on 9 August this year, hundreds of participants unrolled a seven-mile-long ‘peace scarf’ from the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston to AWE Burghfield, Berkshire to symbolise ordinary people’s opposition to nuclear weapons, and to commemorate the bombing of Nagasaki 69 years ago, in which 74,000 citizens lost their lives. Thousands of people around the world had knitted pink wool into individual segments for the peace scarf, which were then sewn together in such a way that they can be easily unpicked and reassembled into blankets for refugees. This marked the start of the People’s Mobilisation for Disarmament, which will culminate in a month of protests in March 2015 prior to the government vote on replacing Trident at an estimated cost of up to £100 billion – money that could be better spent on health care, education and renewable energy. www.woolagainstweapons.co.uk Jaine Rose, founder of Wool Against Weapons, unrolling the ‘peace scarf’ © Steve Hurrell

UK

Wind Power GENERATION Exceeds Coal

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Wind Turbine, Green Park, Reading © Richard Bryant/Arcaid/Corbis

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any of us who live in areas where wind turbines have proliferated have come to love them: they symbolise sanity and give us hope for the future – and, actually, are rather beautiful. As climate change precipitates more storms, these turbines harvest the abundant wind energy and transform it into electricity, creating some positives from the inclement weather. Indeed, this summer, in the aftermath of Hurricane Bertha, wind-powered electricity generation exceeded coal power for the first time in the UK, creating 16% of the energy output compared to coal’s 11.3%. This was almost a record high, but that was set last December when, during another battering by storms, wind output reached 17% of energy generation. Later in the summer, as EDF Energy was forced to shut down four nuclear reactors in the UK because of a fault found in a boiler unit, wind power helped pick up the slack. Thanks to the UK’s wind turbines (and because demand is low in the summer), the nuclear closures did not affect the National Grid supply – which should effectively silence those critics who cite unreliability of renewable energy generation. www.ecowatch.com

November/December 2014

GLOBAL

BOTSWANA

Bike Trains

1,000th World Heritage Site

major deterrent to riding a bicycle in busy cities is the sheer volume and speed of traffic. Even experienced cyclists become anxious when attempting to negotiate bicycleunfriendly road layouts and even less friendly motorists who view bikers as obstacles to be narrowly avoided. When veteran cyclist Nona Varnado moved to Los Angeles, she refused to be cowed by the city’s notorious ‘cars rule’ attitude, and instead formed LA Bike Trains.

On given times and dates (organised online and via social media), commuters, schoolchildren and fledgling cyclists join forces to create safety in numbers. The aim is not to hold up other road users, but to be an assertive yet friendly presence on the roads. In Brighton, UK the Bike Train aims to “ride like a shoal of fish or a flock of starlings providing mutual support and protection”. Bike Trains educate cyclists on their rights as road users, giving advice on how to become more proficient, visible and aware of potential danger. They are also fun, creating vibrant new urban communities that have coalesced around the joy of cycling. www.biketrain.org www.labiketrains.com

he beautiful and biodiverse Okavango Delta in north-west Botswana has become the 1,000th World Heritage Site, giving this critical wilderness international conservation protection. The delta comprises 10,000 square miles of permanent marshlands and seasonally flooded plains – a pristine wetland ecosystem, but one where, unusually, the river does not meet the sea. The mighty Okavango River rises in the Angolan mountains 1,000 miles away, but sinks into the sands of the Kalahari before it reaches the Indian Ocean, creating in its wake a home to endangered species of large mammal, including cheetahs, white and black rhinoceros, the African wild dog and lions. For seven years, the Wilderness Foundation UK and Wilderness Foundation South Africa worked with multiple stakeholders, including 36 local communities and the government of Botswana, to broker the arrangement. Jo Roberts, CEO of the Wilderness Foundation UK, said: “The Okavango Delta is a jewel in the crown for areas that fall under the protection of World Heritage status … and will now remain protected on a global scale for all generations to come.” www.wildernessfoundation.org.uk

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UK

The Tech Crèche

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he Resurgence & Ecologist offices are based in a beautiful part of the world, endowed with wooded valleys, wild coastlines and rolling meadows – and the area is visited by thousands of people every year. Nonetheless, it is common to see people sitting on the cliffs, magnificent vista before them, engrossed in their mobile phones or tablets, oblivious to the natural wonders they’ve come to see. We were delighted then to hear of an ingenious scheme taking place in the New Forest called the Tech Crèche, where visitors are encouraged to drop off their mobile phones, tablets, mp3 players and other techie gear, and even their car keys, in a bid to ‘disconnect to reconnect’. The electronic devices are stored in a safe, and an open-top bus stands ready to take the slightly disconcerted gadget-free visitors into the heart of the National Park, where they can truly reconnect with Nature without modern-day distractions. With over 15 million visitors to the New Forest every year, that’s a lot less trilling, pinging and beeping and a lot more observing, relaxing and engaging. tinyurl.com/tech-creche

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GLOBAL

Seven Swims in Seven Seas

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n August this year, Lewis Pugh, ‘Ocean Advocate’ and UN Patron of the Oceans, undertook seven long-distance swims, one in each of the Seven Seas – the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Red, Arabian and North Seas – to raise awareness of the need to conserve at least 10% of our seas in a network of well-managed and well-designed Marine Protection Areas (MPAs). “We have done it on the land – think of Kruger National Park, Yellowstone and the Serengeti – [and] now it is time to protect the seas,” said Pugh, who on completing the Adriatic leg expressed concern over how few fish he saw during his swim. In the Aegean swim, he drew attention to the plight of the monk seal, whose numbers have been drastically reduced by over-fishing, hunting and habitat loss to only 200 animals, making it one of the most endangered mammals in the world. MPAs are seen as critical to help build ocean resilience in the face of climate change and to ‘re-seed’ the wider oceans as healthy fish populations move beyond their boundaries. www.lewispugh.com

Lewis Pugh swimming the fourth leg of his campaign in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey © kelvintrautman/nikon/lexar

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Big top, big ideas

Photo by Ruth Davey www.look-again.org

RESURGENCE IN ACTION Summer Camp sparkles with inspiration

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he sun shone, it rained, but then it shone some more… This year’s Resurgence Summer Camp had its damp moments, but for all those who were there it was a bright gathering in very special surroundings.

The camp, held at the Green and Away outdoor conference centre in Worcestershire, featured a lively mix of events, giving Resurgence & Ecologist readers a chance to discuss a wide range of ‘soil, soul and society’ topics, as well as enjoying practical events – and some excellent food and entertainment.

Archaeobotanist-turned-farmer John Letts drew an enthusiastic response from his audience when he talked about the need to preserve biodiversity in our fields. He described heritage grains and the many benefits they engender, including their greater resilience to climate change and lower gluten content than conventional varieties. A pioneer in recovering, preserving and growing ancient wheat varieties, John cultivates many of them on his farm and is campaigning against the restrictions currently placed on our valuable grain heritage – whilst it is legal to grow them, it is illegal to trade them.

Jon Every and Susan Clark led a wild-flower and botanical cooking workshop, which included foraging for wild foods and making sourdough bread incorporating the plants that were collected. The bread was cooked on the open fire in the middle of the camp’s ‘village green’ – bringing the ideas from John Letts’ talk into action.

Other highlights included Matt Harvey’s readings of his poetry, which is both humorous and pointed. The ‘open mic’ session brought Photo by Matt Adam Williams

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together a joyous mix of performance poetry, spiritual music, improvisation, and even choral music from a group of young singers fresh from performing in several European cathedrals. It was deeply humbling and moving to connect with the other camp members through this sharing of poetry and music.

In another session, Tom Crompton, Change Strategist at WWF-UK, revealed new research on how campaigners can best spread their messages, aligning them with intrinsic values. This philosophy is at the heart of the camp: each of us, through our own considered actions, really can change the world. One participant, Ian Mowll, said: “The Resurgence Summer Camp gives me the fuel to carry on living and promoting eco-justice.”

Next year’s Resurgence Summer Camp will be held from 30 July to 2 August.

For more information visit www.resurgence.org/summercamp

Campfire conversation

Photo by Matt Adam Williams www.mattadamwilliams.co.uk

POSITIVE CLIMATE ACTION TRENDS Latin America forges ahead with CO2 reduction plans

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olitical stability, climate-related weather disasters and landmark climate action taken by Mexico in 2012 have been key in initiating a “blaze of climate legislation” in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia and Peru – each of which has this year either passed new policies or announced an intent to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The initial piece of the domino effect was Mexico,” says Andrés Ávila Akerberg, who heads the Americas chapter of GLOBE International, the global legislators organisation committed to overseeing the implementation of laws in pursuit of sustainable development. In 2012, Mexico approved the first national climate law by a developing country, mandating cutting emissions 30% below ‘business-as-usual’ levels by the end of this decade.

“I witnessed personally how Mexican legislators shared their experiences with Peruvian lawmakers on a recent visit to Lima,” says Akerberg. “Now there are positive things happening all over the region.”

This sharing of best practice and the willingness of Peru to learn from Mexico’s experiences bodes well for the United Nations climate convention – COP20 – which Peru hosts this December. The spotlight is on Latin America to create a progressive agenda for what some see as the last chance to pass a workable global agreement on climate change at the final conference, COP21, which takes place in Paris in 2015.

To further the progressive agenda, Chile’s newly elected president, Michelle Bachelet, has vowed to create a carbon tax of US$5 per metric tonne of CO2 on thermal power

plants. Meanwhile, Colombia announced that it too would be implementing a climate change law that is expected to include sectoral emissions goals, a national adaptation plan and forest protection plans. In Costa Rica’s legislature, a bill was introduced in late 2013 to develop a framework for climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, although as we go to press, the bill faces criticism from environmental groups and its fate is unclear. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have also approved national strategies to help steer their nations through the worst impacts of climate change and to coordinate responses to natural disasters.

Latin America relies heavily on oil for energy but is less dependent on coal than other parts of the world. It also has good renewable energy resources. Now that there is a degree of political stability in the region, it is possible to cooperate and concentrate on developing climate-resilient policies. “Advancing legislation between now and 2015 is absolutely key for building the foundation for a deal in Paris,” said Terry Townshend, Policy Director at GLOBE International. “The more countries understand the risks and the costs of inaction ... the more likely it is that the leaders can go into the negotiations in 2015 with confidence and ambition.” www.gcca.eu Peter Kirby-Harris analyses the chances for agreement at the Lima Conference on the Resurgence website: see page 2 for details.

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

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LIVING SPACES

In 2015 Bristol will be recognised as Europe’s Green Capital for its innovative approach to urban development

OUR CITIES NEED REGENERATING; OUR VILLAGES MUST BE VALUED Herbert Girardet warns that an unplanned, urbanising world could be a tragedy in the making

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live in a village, but my recent work has been mostly focused on cities. A contradiction in terms? Well, not really. I am not an urban planner, but a cultural ecologist, and a great concern of mine is to deal with the impacts of cities on the world’s ecosystems, the atmosphere and the oceans. A recent very popular book by the American author Edward Glaeser was called Triumph of the City, subtitled How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, but in my view an urbanising world, in which most people

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become city dwellers in ever larger cities, could actually be an environmental and social tragedy in the making.

As economic and consumer hubs, cities are characterised by a huge throughput of resources. They are the economic powerhouses of a globalising world, and whilst they currently hold just over 50% of the world’s population, 80% of global GDP is produced in them. Apart from a near-monopoly on the use of fossil fuels, metals and concrete, an urbanising humanity now consumes nearly half of Nature’s annual ‘output’ as well.

All this has enormous consequences for all life on Earth.

It has become fashionable to claim that urban living is much more resource-efficient than rural living – country dwellers have to use their cars more, they tend to live in detached houses that require more heating than urban terraced houses, and many drive to nearby market towns to shop in the same supermarkets as city people. Yes, country people tend to grow

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Clifton Bridge to Hotwells, Bristol by Clare Halifax www.clarehalifax.com

more vegetables and fruit, but by and large their consumption patterns have come to closely resemble those of city dwellers.

In Europe, villages close to cities are increasingly taken over by commuters, and the countryside in between has become a drive-through agro-industrial landscape to which local villages are now barely connected.

All this is true for Europe as well as America and Australia, but what about China and India, which between them have a third of the world’s population? Here village people make much more frugal use of resources than urban dwellers. But as Chinese villagers become city dwellers, they typically increase their per capita resource consumption fourfold.

In recent years, hundreds of millions of people across Asia have moved from humble village dwellings to second homes in high-rise megacity tower blocks.

Whereas previously, as village people, they relied on biomass for heating and cooking, composted organic waste as crop fertiliser, and lived in family units, the move to the city tends to turn them into consumers, requiring a daily dose of fossil fuels and many other non-renewable resources. Meanwhile in the depleted village communities back home, the remaining farmers are driven to adopt

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cultivation systems that depend on fossil fuels, fertilisers and pesticides.

UN statistics show that hundreds of millions of people in Asia have risen out of poverty in the process of becoming urban dwellers: hence the “Triumph of the City”. But the tragedy I have alluded to is particularly concerned with the aggregated environmental impacts of an urbanising humanity, and this is largely ignored by urban planners and decision makers. We need to face up to the systemic problem that modern cities take resources from Nature but give little back in return to help assure the wellbeing of ecosystems on which the long-term viability of cities ultimately depends.

As they currently function, cities are ‘entropy accelerators’ – they deplete and downgrade the resources they depend on in the process of using them. As fossil energy is used and raw materials are processed, their quality inevitably deteriorates. Cities are not just structures but also processes: they are vast interconnected systems designed for turning energy into ‘work’ or motion, flowing along their roads, rails, wires and pipes. The manufactured products that are used on a daily basis inevitably end up either dumped or burned, or recycled into lower-grade objects. Order, which

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is established and maintained in the form of cities, causes disorder elsewhere in Nature. This cannot continue.

The position of urbanists today is similar to that of astronomers before Galileo: cities are regarded as the centre of the universe, and the world’s ecosystems are seen as somehow revolving around them. And yet let us be clear: cities are only appendages of living systems. The Earth is a vast web of life of which urban life has to be a beneficial part, or no part at all.

We need to acknowledge that urban living currently requires vast inputs from natural systems, from farmland and forests, as well as from mining activities. Urban decision makers tend to ignore the fact that whilst cities are built on only 3–4% of the world’s land surface, their ecological footprints cover much of the productive land surface of the globe. Urban populations collectively use the bulk of the world’s resources and are also prime contributors to environmental damage, biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change.

The time has come to take stock of urban impacts and to assess how they can be dramatically reduced.

Circular economy and cradle-to-cradle thinking have been making great strides in recent years. My own work on the metabolism of cities – turning linear processes into circular processes – is closely connected to these ideas. But we need to go further. If we really want an urban world, we’d better make sure that cities become environmentally benign organisms. For me that means trying to create not just liveable and sustainable cities, but regenerative cities.

There can be a long-term future for humanity only if we develop a proactive relationship between our cities and the world’s ecosystems – nurturing Nature’s dynamism and abundance whilst only drawing on its income. This is all about cities giving back to as well as taking from Nature

Christiania, an independent community project, Copenhagen

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– helping to regenerate the soils, forests and watercourses that they depend on, rather than just accepting that they are ‘sustained’ in a degraded condition.

Across the world, different cities invariably face different challenges. In Europe, North America and Australia, where urban growth is now very limited, the primary task is to undertake ‘ecological retrofits’ of urban systems. In rapidly urbanising countries in Asia, Africa and South America, urban development needs to be ‘smart from the start’: defined by high standards of resource efficiency, with renewable energy as a key component.

In my new book, Creating Regenerative Cities, I have case studies that illustrate the steps towards regenerative urban development that are being taken across the world.

Copenhagen, a city of over 3 million people, is a remarkable example of green innovation. In its postwar urban plan of 1947, Copenhagen set out to develop along five ‘green fingers’, centred on commuter rail lines, which extend from the city’s ‘palm’, its dense city centre. In between the fingers, green wedges were created to provide land for both agriculture and recreational purposes.

Then, in 1962, as car traffic swamped the city, a radical redesign of the heart (or the palm) of the city was initiated.

Copenhagen’s city council decided to establish a car-free pedestrian zone in the maze of narrow streets and historic squares. Today it is the largest inner-city pedestrian street system in the world. It has acquired a Mediterranean-style ambience, where markets, cafés, restaurants and green spaces proliferate.

In Copenhagen, initiatives on liveability, sustainability and regenerative development come together in a very effective way, with remarkable environmental as well as economic and social benefits. High levels of building energy efficiency, renewable energy and combined heat and power have become

© Ken Gillham/Robert Harding

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standard, and so has circular waste management. Due to a comprehensive network of cycle lanes, Copenhagen has more cyclists than most other European cities, and its public transport system is second to none. Offshore and onshore wind farms are much in evidence. The green economy in the capital region has grown dramatically in recent years, generating thousands of new jobs. But Copenhagen has further ambitions: it is working to become the world’s first carbon-neutral capital city by 2025!

Other cities have implemented similarly impressive measures, and in my book I have also highlighted Adelaide for its tremendous achievements in moving towards regenerative development.

In the UK, smaller towns such as Totnes and Stroud are pioneering citizen-led green initiatives. Larger cities such as Bristol are also showing great promise. In 2015 Bristol is European Green Capital and, under the leadership of independent mayor George Ferguson, vigorous new initiatives are being taken to put Bristol on the fast track to regenerative urban development.

But what about villages? Until recently they were the primary habitat of humanity, and they are at the traditional heart of human culture. Many villages across the world have sustained themselves over thousands of years in a continuous give-and-take with their local countryside. Across the world, there are about 2 million villages, but many now face a

Villages close to cities are taken over by commuters, and the country in between a drive-through agroindustial landscape

precarious future. The magnetism of the modern city and the loss of rural employment due to the mechanisation of farming and other factors have taken their toll. In rapidly industrialising countries such as China, pollution from factories and power stations has poisoned irrigation water and soils, forcing even more farmers off the land. And then there is the simple fact that the bright lights of ‘Petropolis’, the fossil-fuel-powered city, can’t easily be countered by the candle lights or paraffin lamps available in remote villages.

Britain exemplifies the global trends towards urbanisation in a particularly vivid manner. With some 80% of people living in cities, only a tiny fraction of the population is still engaged in farming and other aspects of the rural economy.

Urban–rural migrants may contribute to the emergence of pretty-looking old-world villages with fast internet connections, but the link to the soil has largely been lost.

In some developing, urbanising countries, governments have initiated measures aiming to counter rural–urban migration, and to improve living conditions in villages – through rural education and health programmes, improved water supplies and sanitation, road construction, electrification and investment in rural economies. But such policies also tend to introduce urban cultural norms into rural areas. The spread of satellite dishes and multi-channel TV to remote rural communities can increase the fascination of local people, especially the young, with urban living.

Whilst villages have drawn the short straw in the competition with cities, it is time to define new opportunities for making them a viable part of the future, particularly in developing countries. Many NGOs across the world are trying to ensure that, despite the pressures of urbanisation, villages retain their relevance as a human habitat.

Foremost among these is the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). Since the 1970s, many attempts have been made to create new ecovillages in Europe, North America and Australia. GEN aids these efforts. It consists of not only intentional communities created by refugees from the stresses of urban life, but also existing villages in the global South that want to exchange experiences about how to upgrade traditional practices with new ideas on permaculture farming, efficient crop irrigation and renewable energy systems.

Mahatma Gandhi said: “The future of India lies in its villages.” While the sheer pace of urbanisation is running counter to the sentiment of Gandhi’s statement – in India and elsewhere – it is becoming clear that the revival of villages needs to be undertaken with a clear sense of purpose. Even as the world continues to urbanise, the village has a vital role to play as the quintessential human habitat.

The ‘environmental boomerangs’ of an urbanising world are increasingly in evidence. Inhabiting planet Earth in a manner that enhances rather than degrades its ecosystems has become a primary challenge for humanity. Let us trust that we recognise what is at stake, and that we are able and willing to deal with it.

Herbert Girardet is a cultural ecologist. His new book, Creating Regenerative Cities, is published by Routledge.

Housing in Orestad, Copenhagen © Marc Goodwin/Arcaid 2014

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ACTIVISM

An Ounce of Hope is Worth a Ton of Despair

Our language should reflect our values, and our hopes for the environment – not our fears for the future, argues George Monbiot A hibiscus flower on an ash-covered plant, following a volcanic eruption in Indonesia

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f we had set out to alienate and antagonise the people we’ve been trying to reach, we could scarcely have done it better.

This is how I feel, looking back on the past few decades of environmental campaigning, including my own.

This thought is prompted by responses to a recent column I wrote for The Guardian, which examined the psychological illiteracy that’s driving left-wing politics into oblivion. It argued that the failure by parties such as Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US to listen to psychologists and cognitive linguists has resulted in a terrible mistake: the belief that they can best secure their survival by narrowing the distance between themselves and their conservative opponents.

Twenty years of research, comprehensively ignored by these parties, reveals that shifts such as privatisation and cutting essential public services strongly promote people’s extrinsic values (an attraction to power, prestige, image and status) while suppressing intrinsic values (intimacy, kindness, self-acceptance, independent thought and action).

As extrinsic values are powerfully linked to conservative politics, pursuing policies that reinforce them is blatantly self-destructive.

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One of the drivers of extrinsic values is a sense of threat.

Experimental work suggests that when fears are whipped up, they trigger an instinctive survival response. You suppress your concern for other people and focus on your own interests.

Conservative strategists seem to know this, which is why they emphasise crime, terrorism, deficits and immigration.

“Isn’t this what you’ve spent your life doing?” several people asked. “Emphasising threats?” It took me a while.

If threats promote extrinsic values and if (as the research strongly suggests) extrinsic values are linked to a lack of interest in the state of the living planet, I’ve been engaged in contradiction and futility for about 30 years.

The threats, of course, are of a different nature: climate breakdown, mass extinction, pollution and the rest. And they are real. But there’s no obvious reason why the results should be different. Terrify the living daylights out of people, and they will protect themselves at the expense of others and of the living world.

It’s an issue taken up in a recent report by several green groups, called Common Cause for Nature. “Provoking feelings of threat, fear or loss may successfully raise the profile of an issue,” says the report, but “these feelings may

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Photo © REUTERS/Roni Bintang

leave people feeling helpless and increasingly demotivated, or even inclined to actively avoid the issue.” People respond to feelings of insecurity by “attempting to exert control elsewhere, or retreating into materialistic comforts”.

Almost everyone I know in this field is motivated by something completely different: the love and wonder and enchantment that Nature inspires. Yet we scarcely mention those things Where we have not used threat and terror, we have tried money: an even graver mistake. Nothing could better reinforce extrinsic values than putting a price on Nature, or making similar appeals to financial self-interest.

We’ve tended to assume that people are more selfish than they really are. Surveys across 60 countries show that most people consistently hold concern for others, tolerance, kindness

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and thinking for themselves to be more important than wealth, image and power. But those whose voices are loudest belong to a small minority with the opposite set of values. And often, idiotically, we have sought to appease them.

This is a form of lying – to ourselves and other people. I don’t know anyone who became an environmentalist because they were worried about ecological impacts on their bank balance. Almost everyone I know in this field is motivated by something completely different: the love and wonder and enchantment that Nature inspires. Yet, perhaps because we fear we will not be taken seriously, we scarcely mention those things. We hide our passions behind columns of figures, and if sometimes we come across as insincere there’s a reason for it. Sure, we need the numbers and the rigour and the science, but we should stop pretending that these came first.

Without being fully conscious of the failure and frustration that’s been driving it, I’ve been trying, like others, to promote a positive environmentalism, based on promise, not threat.

This is what rewilding, the mass restoration of ecosystems, is all about, and why I wrote my book Feral, which is a manifesto for rewilding – and for wonder and enchantment and love of the natural world. But I’m beginning to see that this is not just another method: expounding a positive vision should be at the centre of attempts to protect the things we love. An ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair.

Part of this means changing the language. The language we use to describe our relations with Nature could scarcely be more alienating. ‘Reserve’ is alienation itself, or at least detachment: think of what it means when you apply that word to people. ‘Site of special scientific interest’, ‘no-take zone’, ‘ecosystem services’: these terms are a communications disaster. Even ‘environment’ is a cold and distancing word, which creates no pictures. These days I tend to use ‘natural world’ or ‘living planet’, which invoke vivid images. One of the many tasks for the rewilding campaign some of us will be launching in the next few months is to set up a working group to change the language.

None of this is to suggest that we should not discuss the threats or pretend that the crises faced by this magnificent planet are not happening. Nor that we should cease to employ rigorous research and statistics. What it means is that we should embed both the awareness of these threats and their scientific description in a different framework: one that emphasises the joy and awe to be found in the marvels at risk; one that proposes a better world, rather than (if we work really hard for it) just a slightly less awful one than there would otherwise have been.

Above all, this means not abandoning ourselves to attempts to appease a minority who couldn’t give a cuss about the living world but think only of their wealth and power. Be true to yourself, true to those around you, and you will find the necessary means of reaching others.

George Monbiot is a regular columnist for The Guardian. His latest book, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life, has recently been published in a new, paperback edition by Penguin.

The Common Cause for Nature report can be downloaded from valuesandframes.org/new-report-nature

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GR ASS ROOTS ACTIVISM

We’VE MADE democracy LOCAL Peter Macfadyen and his neighbours felt powerless in the face of big, anonymous government. Then they decided to take control…

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here is a palpable sense of frustration in Britain today as citizens feel that their wishes are far too often ignored by politicians and lawmakers at Westminster. From the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service to the imposition of fracking, the feeling that the country is run for the benefit of those in power smothers people’s natural desires to engage with society. People care about the area where they live. They want the best for their village and town; they often have a visceral attachment to the weft and warp of their locality and they want their politicians to reflect their passions.

In the Somerset market town of Frome it was this dissatisfaction that brought together a group of individuals hungry for change, disillusioned with the party political bickering and missed opportunities of the local decision makers. Motivated by the potential of the new Localism Act, which provides communities with the right to buy, the right to build, and the ability to develop neighbourhood plans that could determine local development decisions, the group launched an audacious attempt to win the next local election.

These events took place against a background of everincreasing cynicism and disengagement from politics in Britain. In national and local elections, turnout has fallen to around 60% and 40% respectively, with the choice of representative resting on the votes of a minority of – primarily older – people. The ‘winner takes all’ system means views are not proportionally represented. So, for example, in the 2010 national elections, around 265,000 Green votes led to just one seat, compared to 35,000 for each Conservative seat. Locally, fewer people are coming forward as candidates, resulting in uncontested council seats. In the May 2013 elections, only one of the 16 parishes in Marlborough, Wiltshire, had enough candidates for an election (and in one case there were no candidates at all).

Across England 1,200 parish councillors (59% of seats) were elected unopposed.

Worldwide, the Occupy Movement and ‘Arab Spring’ saw huge numbers of ordinary people searching to find ways of being heard. Our group in Frome identified political parties, not apathy, as the problem. Independents for Frome (IfF)

The regular independent markets are an example of the ‘can-do’ attitude and philosophy of this town

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Christmas market, Frome © Tim Gander/Alamy

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was formed in 2011 with the belief that people wanted to engage and participate in decision-making but were fed up with the shenanigans of politicians of all stripes and with a council that was hard to access.

The recent history of independent councillors working together was not encouraging. Most form around a single issue and later cease to cooperate when that has been tackled. Other collaborations fall apart as individuals put their particular key issues above the common good. To counter this, IfF quickly developed a ‘Way of Working’ based on how people make decisions and behave in everyday life. This includes understanding the difference between constructive debate and personal attack; admitting mistakes; and having trust, confidence and optimism in the expertise and skills of others. (IfF’s ethos was based on Piet Hein’s aphorism “The noble art of losing face may some day save the human race”.)

On this platform, and with a strenuous effort to register voters, IfF secured half the votes cast, with a 75% increase in turnout, electing 10 out of 17 councillors. We immediately set about reforming the outward-facing structure – how the public viewed us. We suspended all existing committees and replaced them with two – one for internal and one for external matters, the former dealing with things such as staffing, over which the council has direct control, and the latter with our relationships with other organisations. We reduced five layers of management to three. We embraced the General Powers of Competence allowed in the Localism Act, and started creating a Neighbourhood Plan. We increased grants to the voluntary sector and appointed full-time staff to build its capacity. Throughout, we have worked hard to simplify both what the council does and what it says.

We established Participation Week, where residents’ views were canvassed using ‘Open Space’ and ‘World Café’ forums – new methodologies where everyone is actively engaged instead of the stultifying process of traditional meetings; a mass town clean-up was organised; a young people’s consultation process was launched, linked to their own mayor and dedicated grants; a traditional soapbox was set up so that people could share their views with a live audience able, in turn, to respond. The whole event culminated in a Town Meeting, open to all.

Confidence and aspiration have played a major part in a growing can-do attitude. A key philosophy has been the belief that saying ‘Yes... and…’ is preferable to ‘No’, and that diversity is positive. One example is the regular independent market, facilitated and encouraged by the town council. Now, once a month, the main streets are closed and thousands of people come from miles around both to spend money and to engage and converse with hundreds of local traders.

The council believes well-judged spending and borrowing will reduce the impact of recession, and has done both to completely refurbish the town’s main public building.

This upbeat approach brought in donations and funding for large projects, including the creation of Fair Frome, a charity dedicated to reducing the impact of poverty and campaigning on social justice issues. The council inherited a 10-year waiting list for allotments, which it reduced to nil

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by the purchase of a piece of land that was subsequently converted to self-managed allotments. The Oxford Mail wrote: “When it comes to buzz, most towns should want what Frome is having.”

Activity has been underpinned with a strong ‘green’ theme.

IfF promoted the view that building Frome’s economy means focusing on wellbeing and the environmental as well as traditional council areas such as supporting libraries and apprenticeships. The Neighbourhood Plan has One Planet Living at its core, and an Energy and Recycling Officer has been appointed to support this. Her post, unique in Britain at this level, is a good example of actions and aspirations well beyond those of most town/parish councils.

A key philosophy has been the belief that saying ‘Yes... and...’ is preferable to ‘No’ So does this mean that an enthusiastic bunch of wellorganised individuals can make localism work anywhere?

Yes – but only partially, for three main reasons: First, we have limits. We are unpaid town councillors, and our ambitions have outpaced our available time and energy.

This is not helped by our failure to bring the remaining party-based councillors on board.

Second, we have only started the process of engagement and public participation required. Frome has an extraordinary range of community organisations and volunteers, but it turns out that the implementation of localism will require a concerted effort to build informed engagement by many more people.

Third, our proposals are often thwarted by the district and county council layers of local government that sit above us. They control funds and decision-making on a range of key issues. Operating within a national government dictate of austerity, these highly politicised councils have reduced budgets and are struggling with their own survival. We cannot depend on their support, and need increasingly to build our own local autonomy.

Living beyond our means – in both economic and environmental terms – is now not an option, so the coherent and resilient communities espoused by the Transition Town movement are clearly the way ahead. The Localism Act provides important legislation to enable this. However, David Cameron’s project in this direction has stalled as central government focuses on conventional economic growth and preparing for the next general election. But Frome has shown it is possible to use the best bits of localism while also encouraging and supporting ideas that grow from below and from which, ultimately, future resilience springs.

Peter Macfadyen is the mayor of Frome. His recent experience as a local councillor led him to write Flatpack Democracy (EcoLogic Books). www.flatpackdemocracy.co.uk

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DIVESTMENT

Banner courtesy of Union of Maine Visual Artists, Artists Rapid Response Team (ARRT!) & 350 Maine

Churches Turn up the Heat on the Climate Changers Adam Weymouth meets faith groups that are choosing to take their investment away from fossil fuel companies

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hen I met Giles Goddard, Priest in Charge of St John’s Church, Waterloo, in February this year he was at the end of a busy week. The General Synod of the Church of England had voted 274 to 1 in favour of a motion he had brought, one tenet of which committed the Church to align its investment portfolio with its ethical commitments concerning tackling climate change.

Giles is the pastor of a parish that includes the headquarters of Shell. When Siobhan Grimes, a member of his congregation and then campaigner with Climate Rush, took issue with Shell’s sponsorship of the summer festival at St John’s, a conversation began between her and Giles that led, three years later, to the Synod’s vote. “I didn’t even realise that faith institutions have investments in fossil fuels,” Siobhan told me, “and then I discovered it was normal for institutional investors to have huge investments in things that don’t quite match up with the world they’re meant to be in.”

Not for much longer, perhaps. A campaign launched by 350.org to persuade investors to remove their money from the fossil fuel industry is, according to a recent study by the University of Oxford, the fastest-growing divestment campaign in history. In less than a year it has found strong support across the US, Europe and Australasia, with hundreds of university campuses, organisations, philanthropic institutions and cities committing to divest, and now it is garnering the attention of religious institutions.

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The economic arguments for divestment are persuasive.

Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based group of financial analysts, has highlighted the potential for fossil fuel investments to wind up as stranded assets if targets for global emission reductions become mandatory and reserves become unburnable. The Church of England, with a portfolio of £9 billion, is small fry, but everyone from HSBC to the World Bank is starting to take note. And whilst the resulting impacts upon the fossil fuel industry are unlikely to break the bank, a recent report by academics at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford points out that indirect impacts could be widespread. “The outcome of the stigmatisation process, which the fossil fuel divestment campaign has now triggered, poses the most farreaching threat to fossil fuel companies,” say the academics.

Both Siobhan and Giles are trustees of Operation Noah, an ecumenical charity running the Bright Now campaign, which is calling for all UK churches to divest from fossil fuel companies. There is widespread excitement amongst everyone I spoke to, a sense that a strong stance on climate change could push the Church into a position of relevance, which it currently struggles to hold.

Giles believes that the Church has powerful reasons to be engaging with climate change. “We kind of have it in our manifesto,” he told me. “We care about justice, and clearly this is a justice issue because of the way it affects those who’ve contributed to it much less than it affects those who haven’t. But it is also about how we look after

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Creation. Stewardship is about making sure that the whole of the planet is properly cared for.” For Siobhan it is about authenticity. “If churches make their decisions purely based on financial returns,” she said, “then what makes a church a church, if it’s not trying to live up to some gospel value?”

If such discussion seems ideological when faced with the cold reality of making a profit, then the Quakers are proving it is possible. In 2011 they made a national commitment to become a low-carbon community. That, says Sunniva Taylor, Programme Manager of Sustainability for Quaker Peace & Social Witness, raised questions around investment.

“Is it right for us to benefit from damaging the Earth in the way we use our money?” she asks. “Quakers try and put their lives under the guidance of the spirit. The whole life needs to be governed by what the spirit is guiding us to do, and that includes the finances. Through our money we can witness to our beliefs and our commitments.” The Quakers had finished divesting their portfolio by last Christmas.

Beyond its importance for their own integrity, the move has, Sunniva believes, enabled other religious groups to contemplate following suit. From the Anglican Church in New Zealand, to the Diocese of California, to the Church of Scotland, discussions are spreading with a rapidity matched by the campaign’s take-up in the secular world. In July, the World Council of Churches, a fellowship of 300 churches representing 590 million people, voted in favour of divestment, a decision hailed by 350.org as perhaps their most important commitment to date. “I think talking about

money is a really good way in to connect the personal and the political and the systemic,” says Sunniva. “Through money we can start talking about things that are a lot bigger than ourselves.”

As I finish my conversation with Siobhan she speaks to me of prophecy. “There’s this whole idea in churches of

In order for churches to be prophetic we have to talk about things like climate change and money – Siobhan Grimes being prophetic,” she says, “which means speaking the truth. In order for churches to be prophetic we have to talk about things like climate change and money. The Bible says an awful lot about money; that money can be used to exploit the poor. It’s at the heart of Christianity, and so I’m sure divestment will happen. It’s an untenable situation to continue to be in.”

In the temples, it seems, the tables of the fossil fuel companies are being overturned.

Adam Weymouth is a freelance writer. www.adamweymouth.com @adamweymouth

Member churches, from across 120 countries, representing some 550 million Christians voted ‘NO’ in July 2014 to investments in fossil fuels © World Council of Churches www.oikoumene.org

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C AMPAIGNING

Stories Change; THE Activism Continues In the wake of the Arctic 30 campaign, the head of Greenpeace UK tells Russell Warfield that online eco-protest is just part of the future

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ome environmental organisations may be older, others may boast more legislative victories, but Greenpeace is probably the best-known environmental campaigning organisation in the world, and its recent campaign success in freeing the Arctic 30 protesters must be counted as one of its most high-profile victories to date.

Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace Nordic – two of Greenpeace International’s numerous national and regional offices – led an international collaboration to secure the release of 30 activists who were detained in Russia in late 2013 while conducting a peaceful protest in Arctic waters against further oil drilling. Following this campaign success, I spoke to Greenpeace UK’s chief executive, John Sauven, about his organisation, its approach to direct action, and the future of environmental protest.

“There is no other organisation that has our reach or depth,” he says. “We are not just bearing witness to environmental wrongdoing, but in direct action we are peacefully stopping environmental wrongdoing.”

Before taking on the role of chief executive in 2007, London-born Sauven was director of communications from 1999, following many years of environmental activism with Greenpeace, initially in Canada. “I first started working in the mid-nineties in British Columbia,” he tells me, “which is home to the largest remaining area of temperate rainforest. Loggers were

‘‘

determined to clear-cut this rainforest for things like toilet paper. We were equally determined to stop them.

After quite a bitter battle we won, and now the Great Bear Rainforest is a protected area with sustainable use by local communities.”

That was the first of many successes during Sauven’s time at Greenpeace. Currently, he and his organisation are concentrating on opposing oil exploration in the warming Arctic, something he calls “an insane cycle of destruction”.

With Greenpeace’s Arctic 30 protesters receiving widespread public sympathy during their period of arrest and detention, things have changed a lot since the 1970s, when the image of environmental activists could be easily stereotyped. As former director of communications, Sauven – who studied economics at Cardiff University before setting up a printing business and moving into publishing – is alive to this shift in public opinion.

“For quite a long time, the environmental movement turned people off,” he argues. “Some of it was the way we were portrayed in ways that weren’t true, but it was an easy picture to paint. Some of it was our own fault, in terms of the story we told – it wasn’t compelling or inviting.”

That story has changed. New channels of digital communication have enabled grass-roots campaigns to compete with big business, whose vast resources have typically been able to shape the narrative however they wished. Things are different now.

“Corporations are quite slowmoving beasts,” explains Sauven.

“They’re not that flexible. Even though they have masses of data and are doing all this predictive analysis, they’re actually overloaded with complexity.

For organisations like Greenpeace who are campaigning for environmental protection or social justice, I think [social networking tools] are far more effective, because they’re always at the cutting edge, and are always creating and innovating.”

With national political party membership at an all-time low (he goes as far as to say “party politics is dead”), Sauven believes grass-roots engagement

We are up against some of the most powerful and entrenched forces on this planet.

John Sauven © Greenpeace

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Freeing the Arctic 30 was a brilliant demonstration of Greenpeace’s ability to engage people globally

builds by addressing immediate problems at the local level.

“Take China,” he says. “The biggest problem China has around climate change is the emissions from burning coal.

But people don’t see that. Climate change is not visible, and the risks aren’t immediate in people’s minds. But when people step out of the front door and they’re confronted with smog, they’re confronted with the consequences of coal burning.”

This, Sauven suggests, is what brings people into the wider debate around climate change. Helping people to see their place within the broader tapestry – as well as appreciating how their concerns are connected to global problems – is essential to meaningful engagement.

The proposed expansion of London’s Heathrow airport is a good example of this. At first, the residents of the nearby village of Sipson were mainly – and understandably – concerned about the destruction of their homes. But as time went on, Greenpeace campaigners found it was the perfect gateway to offering a deeper understanding of wider environmental issues across that community.

“I got to know the landlord of the local pub,” Sauven tells me, “and I doubt she’d ever listened to anyone talking about climate change. But as we ran the campaign, she became more and more familiar with the language, and we became more engaged with what was happening with her village.”

But just as you need to make the climate problem digestible, Sauven appreciates that you need to make the dissenters relatable too. With the rise of social media shaping new public narratives around protest, that’s the sort of thing we’re starting to see happen.

“Pussy Riot is an interesting example,” he suggests.

“They’re like celebrity protesters. People latch onto those celebrities, because the world is [otherwise] too complex [to comprehend]. You can’t latch onto millions of political

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© REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

prisoners, so you latch onto representatives of them… It’s bringing things down to bite-sized chunks, making things manageable and relatable. It’s the idea of the narrative again.”

This seems to be the crux of the success of Greenpeace’s own Arctic 30 campaign. It created relatable figures of people who would have seemed distantly radical just a few decades ago.

“The narrative and the story, that’s what’s really critical with emotional engagement,” Sauven agrees. For many, this initial engagement will have led to deeper, more meaningful activism within the green movement, and that’s why Sauven is right to say that the narrative is so important.

But Sauven is keen to make clear that these new narratives have to build alongside real-world activism. While it’s enormously important to be able to build engagement and support online, it’s essential this doesn’t descend into what Sauven and others call ‘clicktivism’: a remote replacement for real involvement.

“What’s important is to be able to run global campaigns that are locally relevant and engaging,” he reiterates. “It’s absolutely key for success that people are mobilised locally but connected globally. We are up against some of the most powerful and entrenched forces on this planet. To break that down needs a lot of skill, determination and creativity.

We hope in future to do better at all three.”

Freeing the Arctic 30 was a brilliant demonstration of doing exactly that. Looking at how they’re driving engagement online and activism offline, we can expect to see more high-profile success stories coming from Greenpeace for many years to come.

Russell Warfield is a freelance journalist.

Rainbow Warriors: Legendary Stories from Greenpeace Ships

by Maite Mompo, is published by New Internationalist. www.greenpeace.org.uk

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MY GREEN LIFE

JO WOOD Sharon Garfinkel meets the organics enthusiast whose rock ’n’ roll lifestyle changed after serious illness What led you to be green?

In 1992 I was misdiagnosed with Crohn’s disease – it was much later discovered that I had a perforated appendix. As a result I spent two years on steroids, and I needed to find a way out. A naturopath, Gerald Green, wrote to me and said: “I can put your disease into remission for life if you follow my diet and take my herbs.” We met and spoke for three hours about food. He changed my life.

I started eating organic food and reading as much as I could on all things organic. It all made sense to me. I detoxed my whole body. After it was discovered that I had a perforated appendix, and as I lay in hospital after the operation to treat it, I thought that if I hadn’t cleaned my body out I would still be on steroids. I decided to be organic for the rest of my life. It started with the food and then a few years later I began to make my own organic products. I try and change the way people think about food and what they put in their body and on their body. [ Jo met the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood in the late 1970s. They were married for 24 years, and she accompanied him on many tours, introducing him to organic food.]

I had made and took on tour my own stove, so I didn’t have to eat the food in the hotels. I’d get to each city, buy really good food, come back and make me and my then husband dinner. The band all thought I was mad. But I’d be the one who never got ill on tour.

Keith [Richards] turned round to me once and said: “The trouble with you, Jo, is you’re addicted to organic food.”

I thought, that’s a fine thing coming from Keith – the man who was addicted to heroin for years.

When you eat well you feel healthy and your mind feels better – you’re happier in yourself. If I had a burger and fries and a fizzy drink, that would take the life force out of me.

Why did you set up Jo Wood Organics?

I realised that we needed products that looked beautiful and were really good for us.

Some people consider organic foods and body products to be expensive. What would you say to them?

The option is you either feed your body really good food or you suffer the consequences. When you eat bad food, your body will give up on you eventually. It’s not expensive, if you grow your own. It costs very little, and there’s a great pleasure you get in growing your own food. My garden is small and yet I can feed myself and my family well throughout the summer.

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Jo Wood: “We can’t outdo Nature”

© Tristan Gregory/CAMERA PRESS

What does Nature teach you?

She teaches me that we’ve got to listen to her. We can’t outdo Nature. We have to go by her rules and treat the Earth with care.

Which political party does the most for the environment?

None of them are good enough for me. None of them are green enough. None of them care about the planet. You don’t have a sick person in a hospital and give him or her crap food. You heal with food. What they give people in hospitals is a disgrace. There’s no political party that I can say is good enough.

How can people make a difference in their lives?

It starts with food. What we must do is change our eating habits. All I can do is talk to people when I meet them. If I can change one person a week to organic, then I’m happy.

That’s 52 people a year, and they influence their contacts.

You start with the children, show them where the food comes from, give them cooking lessons.

What needs to happen to bring the environmental movement together?

We should all come together and create a big revolution.

With social media we should be able to connect more. We’d be so strong if we worked together. We are too fragmented.

We should be talking with each other. When we start talking with each other, then we will make a big difference.

Jo Wood’s autobiography, Hey Jo: A Rock and Roll Fairytale, is published by HarperCollins.

Sharon Garfinkel works for The Resurgence Trust.

November/December 2014

Rosebay Willowherb On the A4169, just over the brow of the hill where the verge widens before the gateway down to Shadwell Quarry, it shows its true colours. Blown by the swiping wake of lorries piled with larch-lap fencing, the down has drifted off like steam rising from the tilth of fields across the road. Now liberated from growing and flowering and seeding, it is free to show the glorious trauma which earned its title, ‘fireweed’. Scarlet, crimson, sienna, umber, tangerine: its blitz colours burn along the roadside above a gutter-mulch of ash leaves and stubborn grass. Rosebay follows traffic and fire. It sets up camp in the damaged places and, like a new memory which hides an old loss, bits of fluff make willowy stems and the carmine flowers of August. Now it stands in autumn, still and stiff for a bonfire moment before its leaves drop and brittle sticks snap from roots which suck the toxic sweat of roads on their journey from the bombsites.

This is an extract from Herbaceous, written by Paul Evans and published by Little Toller Books, 2014.

Rosebay Willowherb by www.differentia.co.uk

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K E Y NOTES GROWTH

Why we need a...

Steady-state

Economy Illustrations by Dennis Wunsch © www.denniswunsch.com

The Earth evolves and develops without growing in size.

The economy should follow the same pattern, says Herman Daly

H

ow do you envision a successful economy without continuous growth? To answer that question, it helps to consider a prior question: how do you envision a successful planet Earth without continuous growth?

That is easy to envision, because it exists. The Earth as a whole does not grow in physical dimensions. Yet it does change qualitatively: it evolves and develops. Total matter on the Earth cycles, but does not grow. Energy from the sun flows through the Earth, coming in as radiant low-entropy energy and exiting as high-entropy heat. But the solar flow is not growing. Nearly all life is powered by this entropic throughput of solar energy.

There is birth and death, production and depreciation. New

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things evolve; old things go extinct. There is continual change.

But the Earth is not growing.

Our global economy is a subsystem of the Earth. Imagine that the economy were to grow to encompass the entire Earth. At that point, the economy would have to conform to the behaviour mode of the Earth. That is, it could no longer grow, and would have to live on a constant solar flow, approximating a steady state – an exceedingly large steady state to be sure, well beyond optimal scale. By then, the economy would have taken over the management of the entire ecosystem – every amoeba, every molecule and every photon would be allocated according to human purposes and priced

November/December 2014

accordingly. All ‘externalities’ would be internalised by this all-encompassing economy. This is not an achievable or even a desirable goal: the information and management problem would be astronomical – vastly beyond the combined capacities of both central planners and free markets.

A more realistic aim would be to limit the economy’s physical scale relative to the containing ecosystem. The way to do that is to leave a large part of the ecosphere untransformed, to limit our absorption of it into the economic subsystem – to keep a large part of the Earth ecosystem in natura – as a source for low-entropy matter/energy inputs and as a sink for high-entropy waste, and as a provider of life-support services.

In this context, laissez-faire takes on a new meaning – it is the ecosystem that must be left alone to manage itself and evolve by its own rules, while the economy is carefully constrained in aggregate scale to stay within the limits imposed by the ecosystem. To stay alive and produce, we must use environmental sources and sinks.

But the rate of use must remain within the regenerative and absorptive capacities of the ecosystem. That quantitative limit on resource throughput at a sustainable volume will automatically get reflected in market prices, effectively internalising the social value of sustainability imposed by limits on resource extraction. The metabolic throughput from and back to the ecosystem cannot keep growing.

Every encroachment of the economy into the ecosystem is a physical transformation of ecosystem into economy.

Growth means less habitat for other species, with loss of both their instrumental value to the ecosystem, and the intrinsic value of their own sentient life. Clearly, in addition to a maximum scale of the economy relative to the containing ecosystem, there is also an optimal scale (much smaller), beyond which growth becomes uneconomic in the literal sense that it increases environmental and social costs faster than production benefits. We fail to recognise the point at which economic growth becomes uneconomic, because we measure only production benefits (for which there is a market demand), and fail to measure environmental and social costs (for which there is no market demand).

Nevertheless, illth – the opposite of wealth – is also a consequence of wealth production. Examples of illth are everywhere, even if usually unmeasured in national accounts. They include nuclear waste, climate change from excess carbon in the atmosphere, biodiversity loss, depleted mines, deforestation, eroded topsoil, dry wells and rivers, sea-level rise, the ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico, gyres of plastic waste in the oceans, the hole in the ozone layer, exhausting and dangerous work, and the unrepayable debt from attempting to push growth in the symbolic financial sector beyond what is possible in the real sector.

Growth all the way to the limit of carrying capacity has an unrecognised political cost as well. Excess capacity is a necessary condition for freedom and democracy. Living very close to the carrying capacity limit, as on a submarine or spaceship, requires very strict discipline. On submarines we have a captain with absolute authority, not a two-party democracy. If we want democracy, we’d better not grow up to the limit of carrying capacity – better to leave some slack,

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some margin for tolerance of the errors that freedom entails.

We need a non-growing economy that strives to maintain itself in a steady state at something like the optimum scale.

How are we to achieve that?

It is as simple (and difficult) as going on a diet. Cut the matter-energy throughput to a sustainable level by capauction-trade (quotas on the right to extract resources are set within ecological limits, then auctioned by government and then freely traded among purchasers – the auction receipts are then used to lower income taxes, especially those on lower incomes) and/or ecological tax reform (taxing resource throughput – fossil fuels – rather than value added).

There is an optimal scale beyond which growth becomes uneconomic in the literal sense that it increases environmental and social costs faster than production benefits We should cap or tax fossil fuels first, and then redistribute the auction or eco-tax revenues by cutting income taxes for all, but first and mainly for the poor. A policy of quantitative limits on throughput (cap-auction-trade) raises resource prices and induces resource-saving technologies.

The quantitative cap will also block the subsequent erosion of resource savings, as induced efficiency makes resources effectively cheaper (known as the Jevons effect). In addition, the auction will raise much revenue and make it possible to tax value added (labour and capital) less, because in effect we will have shifted the tax base to resource throughput. Value added is a good thing, so it should not be taxed. Depletion and pollution are bad things and should be taxed accordingly.

Along with a physical diet, we need a serious monetary diet for the obese financial sector, specifically movement away from fractional reserve banking and towards a system of 100% reserve requirements. This would end the private banks’ alchemical privilege to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest. Every pound or dollar loaned would then be a pound or dollar that someone previously saved, restoring the classical balance between abstinence and investment. This balance was abandoned by the Keynesianneoclassical synthesis after the Great Depression because it was thought to be a drag on economic growth, the political panacea. But in the new era of uneconomic growth, the discipline recommended by classical economists regains its relevance. With investment limited by past savings, investors must choose only the best projects, thereby improving the quality of new ventures while limiting their quantity.

This idea of 100% reserve requirements on demand deposits has an impeccable academic pedigree. It was championed by the early Chicago school in the 1930s, as well as by Irving Fisher of Yale. The idea was first proposed in 1926 by Frederick Soddy, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and underground economist. In addition to 100% reserves, a small tax on all

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financial trades would reduce speculative and computerised short-term trading, as well as raising significant revenue.

What about population growth? In my lifetime the world population has tripled, and the populations of other ‘dissipative structures’ (cars, houses, livestock, cell phones, etc.) have vastly more than tripled.

Limiting the populations of artefacts by capping the metabolic throughput (food supply) that sustains them seems a good policy.

However, limiting food supply to humans is Nature’s harsh limit, Malthus’s positive check. There is also Malthus’s preventive check (celibacy and late marriage), and the more palatable neo-Malthusian preventive check of contraception. Contraceptives should be made easily available for voluntary use everywhere.

More people are better than fewer, but not if all are alive at the same time. We should strive to maximise the cumulative number of people ever to live over time in a condition of sufficiency. That means not too many people alive at the same time – no more than could enjoy a per capita resource availability that is enough for a good (not luxurious) life. Exactly how many people at exactly what per capita standard would that be? We do not know, but the current rate of ecological degradation tells us that it is not more people at a higher per capita consumption, and that is enough to get started in the right direction.

Even if we limit quantitative physical throughput (growth), it will still be possible to experience qualitative improvement (development), thanks to technological advance and to better ethical ordering of our priorities. Some say that we should not limit growth itself, but only stop bad growth and encourage good growth. However, only if we limit total growth will we be forced to choose good growth over bad.

And furthermore, we can also have too much ‘good’ growth or, as it is often called, ‘green growth’.

There is a limit to how many trees we can plant as well as to how many cars we can make. Growth beyond optimal scale is uneconomic growth, and we should stop the folly of continuing it. It makes us poorer, not richer. It makes it harder, not easier, to end poverty.

Those who are optimistic regarding ‘soft’ technologies (e.g. conservation, or solar energy) may be right. I hope they are. But even if they turn out to be wrong, there is really no downside, because it was still necessary to limit throughput and consequently the ‘hard’ resource-intensive technologies (e.g. fossil fuels, or nuclear energy) that are currently pushing uneconomic growth.

Our strategy so far has been to seek efficiency first in order to avoid frugality (i.e. limiting physical throughput). But ‘efficiency first’ leads us to the Jevons paradox – we just consume more of the resources whose efficiency has increased, thereby partially or even totally cancelling the initial reduction in quantity of resources used.

If we impose frugality first (caps on basic resource throughput), then we will get efficiency second as an induced adaptation to frugality, avoiding the Jevons paradox. Blocking the Jevons paradox is an advantage of the cap-auction-trade system over eco-taxes, although taxes have the advantage of being administratively simpler.

Is this vision of a developing but non-growing economy not more appealing and realistic than the deceptive dream of an economy based on continuous growth? Who, in the light of biophysical reality, can remain committed to the ‘growth forever’ vision?

Apparently our decision-making elites can. They have figured out how to keep the dwindling extra benefits of growth for themselves, while ‘sharing’ the exploding extra costs with the poor, the future, and other species. The elite-owned media, the corporate-funded think tanks, and the kept economists of high academia, Wall Street >

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CLASSROOM REVOLUTION It’s not only respected economists such as Herman Daly who are calling for a new economics to address the environmental crisis. An international group of students have called for radical changes in the way the subject is taught. Here we publish an edited version of their manifesto.

‘

It is not only the world economy that is in crisis. The teaching of economics is in crisis too, and this crisis has consequences far beyond the university walls. What is taught shapes the minds of the next generation of policymakers, and therefore shapes the societies we live in. We, 42 associations of economics students from 19 different countries, believe it is time to reconsider the way economics is taught. We are dissatisfied with the dramatic narrow­ ‑ing of the curriculum that has taken place over the last couple of decades.This lack of intellectual diversity does not only restrain education and research. It limits our ability to contend with the multidimensional challenges of the 21st century – from financial stability, to food security and climate change. The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods.

United across borders, we call for a change of course. We do not claim to have the perfect answer, but we have no doubt that economics students will profit from exposure to different perspectives and ideas. Pluralism could not only help to fertilise teaching and research and reinvigorate the discipline.

Rather, pluralism carries the promise to bring economics back into the service of society. Three forms of pluralism must be at the core of curricula: theoretical, methodological and interdisciplinary.

Theoretical pluralism emphasises the need to broaden the range of schools of thought represented in the curricula. It is not the particulars of any economic tradition we object to. Pluralism is not about choosing sides, but about encouraging intellectually rich debate and learning to critically contrast ideas. Where other disciplines embrace diversity and teach competing theories even when they are mutually incompatible, economics is often presented as a unified body of knowledge. Admittedly the dominant tradition has internal variations. Yet it is only one way of doing economics and of looking at the real world. This is unheard of in other fields; nobody would take seriously a degree programme in psychology that focused only on Freudianism, or a politics programme that

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“At times we fail to recognise the point at which economic growth becomes uneconomic” – Herman Daly

focused only on state socialism. An inclusive and comprehensive economics education should promote balanced exposure to a variety of theoretical perspectives, from the commonly taught neoclassically based approaches, to the largely excluded classical, post-Keynesian, institutional, ecological, feminist, Marxist and Austrian traditions – among others.

Furthermore, it is essential that core curricula include courses that provide context and foster reflexive thinking about economics and its methods per se, including philosophy of economics and the theory of knowledge. Also, because theories cannot be fully understood independently of the historical context in which they were formulated, students should be systematically exposed to the history of economic thought and to the classical literature on economics as well as to economic history.

Methodological pluralism stresses the need to broaden the range of tools economists employ to grapple with economic questions. It is clear that maths and statistics are crucial to our discipline. But all too often students learn to master quantitative methods without ever discussing whether and why they should be used, the choice of assumptions and the applicability of results. Also, there are important aspects of economics that cannot be understood using exclusively quantitative methods: sound economic inquiry requires that quantitative methods be complemented by methods used by other social sciences. For instance, the understanding of institutions and culture could be greatly enhanced if qualitative analysis were given more attention in economics curricula.

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Finally, economics education should include interdisciplinary approaches and allow students to engage with other social sciences and the humanities. Economics is a social science; complex economic phenomena can seldom be understood if presented in a vacuum, removed from their sociological, political and historical contexts. To properly discuss economic policy, students should understand the broader social impacts and moral implications of economic decisions.

Change will be difficult – it always is. But it is already happening. Indeed, students across the world have already started creating change step by step. We have filled lecture theatres in weekly lectures by invited speakers on topics not in the curriculum; we have organised reading groups, workshops, conferences; we have analysed current syllabuses and drafted alternative programmes; we have started teaching ourselves and others the new courses we would like to be taught. We have founded university groups and built networks.

Change must come from many places. So now we invite you – students, economists, and non-economists – to join us and create the critical mass needed for change. Visit our website to show your support and connect with our growing networks.

Ultimately, pluralism in economics education is essential for healthy public debate. It is a matter of democracy.

’

The member organisations of the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics. www.isipe.net

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“It would be more realistic to limit the economy’s physical scale relative to the containing ecosystem”

and the World Bank all sing hymns to growth in perfect unison, deceiving average citizens, and perhaps themselves.

Their commitment is not to maximise the cumulative number of people ever to live at a sufficient standard of consumption for a good life for all. Rather, it is to maximise the standard of resource consumption for a small minority of the present generation (including themselves), and shift the costs onto the poor, the future, and other species.

Some of the elite do not realise the cost of their behaviour and will change once they are made aware. Others, I suspect, are already quite aware and don’t care. The former can be persuaded by argument; the latter require repentance and conversion – or violent revolution, as Marxists would argue.

Probably this line of division in some way runs through each of us rather than only between us. Intellectual confusion is real and we need better understanding, but that is not the whole story. The elite may already understand that growth has become uneconomic. They may have already adapted by learning how to keep the dwindling extra benefits of growth for themselves, while ‘sharing’ the rising extra costs.

On what grounds could one oppose them?

I am not able to solve this large ethical and metaphysical difficulty, least of all in a short article aimed only at explaining the idea of a steady-state economy. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that merely describing the

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steady-state economy (or any other proposal) will somehow provide the purpose and inspiration to bring it about.

So, in closing, I will only mention what seems to me to be the deeper issue. Is Creation the purposeless, random consequence of multiplying infinitesimal probabilities by an infinite number of trials, as taught by the reigning paradigm of scientific materialism? I say Creation with a capital C advisedly, and certainly not in denial of the wellestablished scientific facts of evolution. Rather it is in protest to the metaphysics of Naturalism that everything, including evolution (by random genetic mutations selected by a randomly changing environment), is ultimately happenstance.

It is hard to imagine within such a worldview from where one would get the inspiration to care for Creation, which of course Naturalists would have to call by a different name – say, ‘Randomdom’. Imagine urging our fellow citizens to work hard and sacrifice to save ‘Randomdom’! Intellectual confusion is real, but the moral nihilism logically entailed by deterministic materialism (Naturalism), uncritically accepted by so many, is probably the bigger cause of environmental destruction.

Herman Daly is Professor Emeritus at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland. He was senior economist at the World Bank 1988–94, has written numerous books, and received the 1996 Honorary Right Livelihood Award.

November/December 2014

In Praise of Print and Paper At Resurgence & Ecologist, we are proud of our websites. But we could not help admire these sentiments from the American magazine, Geez.

Reasons Why We’re Primarily P

rint

front of screens. If we in e tim ch mu o to d en sp we se cau Be on of the world will pti rce pe ary im pr r ou l, efu car t no are illiant bits of coloured br th wi n ee scr t fla a by ted dia me be a slug, the yips of a light. The veins of a leaf, the slime of ly in an online context. on se the ow kn us of ny ma – te yo co ble than that. Let’s let Reality is more real, more engage-a eway experience into gat a be ine gaz ma a of y ilit gib tan the n. the world represented by the scree ... ring and automation Because convenience is disempowe and able to change is dehumanizing. To feel more active ine for a while. Flex things, it’s better to opt out, go offl your personal power, turn a page. ... mation needs to Because the flood of unending infor , we benefit from be navigated. Swamped in info-clutter vial and distracting, footings for discernment. What is tri limits of a printed what is engaging and orienting? The d, with feedback from page demand editorial judgement, an d concision. readers, we aim to provide clarity an ... the sacred is not online.

Because, we suggest, the source of reflecting. Prepare to be Spend time alone, reading, walking, , and then redeemed! bored, uncomfortable, disappointed ... ine in our hands.

Because we like the feel of a magaz Extracted from Geez magazine

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U N DERCURRENTS POLITICS

The ‘Neo-greens’ Will Not Rejuvenate Paul Kingsnorth argues that new ‘pragmatic’ environmentalism splits humanity from Nature

I

have been rather often quaintly known as a green activist for around 20 years now. I sometimes like to say that the green movement was born in the same year as me – 1972, the year in which the Limits to Growth report was published by the Club of Rome – and this is near enough to the truth to be a jumping-off point for a narrative.

If the green movement was born in the early 1970s, then the 1980s, when there were whales to be saved and rainforests to campaign for, were its adolescence. Its coming-of-age party was in 1992, in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. The 1992 Earth Summit was a jamboree of promises and commitments: to tackle climate change, to protect forests, to protect biodiversity, and to promote something called sustainable development, a new concept that would become, over the next two decades, the most fashionable in global politics and business. The future looked bright for the greens back then. It often does when you’re twenty.

Two decades on, things look rather different. In 2012, the bureaucrats, the activists and the ministers gathered again in Rio for a stocktaking exercise called Rio+20. It was accompanied by the usual shrill demands for optimism and hope, but there was no disguising the hollowness of the exercise. Every environmental problem identified at the original Earth Summit has got worse in the intervening 20 years, often very much worse, and there is no sign of this changing.

The green movement, which seemed to be carrying all before it in the early 1990s, has plunged into a full-on midlife crisis. Despite all their work, their passion, their commitment, and the fact that most of what they have been saying has been broadly right, greens are losing. In most green circles now, sooner or later, the conversation comes round to the same question: what the hell do we do next?

There are plenty of people who think they know the answer to that question. One of them is Peter Kareiva, who would like to think that he and his kind represent the future of environmentalism, and who may turn out to be right.

Kareiva is the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, an American NGO that claims to be the world’s largest environmental organisation. He is a scientist, a revisionist, and one among a growing number of former greens who might best be called neo-environmentalists.

The resemblance between this coalescing group and the Friedmanite neoliberals of the early 1970s is intriguing. Like the neoliberals, the neo-environmentalists are attempting

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If there is discord within the green movement, whom do we listen to?

November/December 2014

Our Movement: They Are Burying It

Painting by Ron Waddams © Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

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to break through the lines of an old orthodoxy that is visibly exhausted and confused. Like the neoliberals, they are mostly American and mostly male, and they emphasise scientific measurement and economic analysis over other ways of seeing and measuring. Like the neoliberals, their tendency is to cluster around a few key think tanks: back then, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Cato Institute and the Adam Smith Institute; now, The Breakthrough Institute, The Long Now Foundation, and the Copenhagen Consensus. Like the neoliberals, they are beginning to grow in numbers at a time of global collapse and uncertainty. And like the neoliberals, they think they have radical solutions.

Kareiva’s ideas are a good place to start in understanding them. He is a prominent conservation scientist who believes that most of what the greens think they know is wrong. Nature, he says, is more resilient than fragile; science proves it. “Humans degrade and destroy and crucify the natural environ­­­­­ment,” he writes, “and 80% of the time it recovers pretty well.” Wilderness does not exist; all of it has been influenced by humans at some time. Trying to protect large functioning ecosystems from human development is mostly futile; humans like development, and you can’t stop them having it. Nature is tough and will adapt to this: “As we destroy habitats, we create new ones.”

Now that science has shown us that nothing is pristine and Nature adapts, there’s no reason to worry about many traditional green goals such as protecting rainforest habitats. “Is halting deforestation in the Amazon ... feasible?” Kareiva and colleagues ask. “Is it even necessary?”

Somehow, you know what the answer is going to be before the authors give it to you.

If this sounds like the kind of thing that a US Republican presidential candidate might come out with, that’s because it is. But Kareiva and colleagues are not alone. Variations on this line have recently been pushed by the US thinker Stewart Brand, the British writer Mark Lynas, the Danish anti-green poster boy Bjørn Lomborg and the American writers Emma Marris, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. They in turn are building on work done in the past by other self-declared green “heretics” like Richard D. North, Brian Clegg and Wilfred Beckerman.

Beyond the field of conservation, the neoenvironmentalists are distinguished by their

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Painting by Ron Waddams © Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

attitude to new technologies, which they almost uniformly see as positive. Civilisation, Nature and people can be saved, they declare, only by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering, and anything else with the prefix ‘new’ that annoys Greenpeace.

Neo-environmentalists also tend to exhibit an excitable enthusiasm for markets. They like to put a price on things like trees, lakes, mist, crocodiles, rainforests and watersheds, all of which can deliver “ecosystem services”, which can be bought and sold, measured and totted up.

Tied in with this is an almost religious attitude to the scientific method. Everything that matters, they say, can be measured by science and priced by markets, and any claims without numbers attached can be easily dismissed. This is presented as “pragmatism” but is actually something rather different: an attempt to exclude from the green debate any interventions based on morality, emotion, intuition, spiritual connection or simple human feeling.

Some of this might be shocking to some old-guard greens – which is the point – but it is hardly a new message. In fact, it is a very old one: it is simply a variant on the old Wellsian techno-optimism that has been promising us cornucopia for over a century. It’s an old-fashioned Big Science, Big Tech and Big Money narrative, filtered through the lens of the internet and garlanded with holier-than-thou talk about saving the poor and feeding the world.

But though they burn with the shouty fervour of the bornagain, the neo-environmentalists are not exactly wrong. In

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fact, they are at least half right. They are right to say that the human-scale, convivial approaches of many of the original green thinkers are never going to work if the world continues to formulate itself according to the demands of late capitalist industrialism. They are right to say that a world of 9 billion people all seeking the status of middle-class consumers cannot be sustained by vernacular approaches. They are right to say that the human impact on the planet is enormous and irreversible. They are right to say that traditional conservation efforts sometimes idealise a pre-industrial Nature. They are right to say that the campaigns of green NGOs often exaggerate and dissemble. And they are right to say that the greens have hit a wall, and that continuing to ram their heads against it is not going to knock it down.

What’s interesting, though, is what they go on to build on this foundation. The first sign that this is not, as declared, a simple eco-pragmatism, but something rather different comes when you read statements like this: For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature.

This passage appears on author Emma Marris’s website, in connection with her book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post -Wild World, though it could just as easily be from anywhere else in the neo-environmentalist canon.

But who are the many “people” who have “unquestioningly

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accepted” this line? I’ve met a lot of conservationists and environmentalists in my time, and I don’t think I’ve ever met one who believed there was any such thing as “pristine, prehuman” Nature. What they did believe was that there were still large-scale, functioning ecosystems that were worth getting out of bed for to help protect them from destruction.

To understand why, consider the case of the Amazon.

What do we value about the Amazon forest? Do people seek to protect it because they believe it is pristine and prehuman? Clearly not, since it’s inhabited and harvested by large numbers of tribal people, some of whom have been there for millennia. The Amazon is not important because it is untouched: it’s important because it is wild, in the sense that it is self-willed. Humans live in and from it, but it is not created or controlled by them. It teems with a great, shifting, complex diversity of both human and nonhuman life, and no species dominates the mix.

This is what intelligent green thinking has always called for: human and nonhuman nature working in some degree of harmony, in a modern world of compromise and change in which some principles, nevertheless, are worth cleaving to. Nature is a resource for people, and always has been; we all have to eat, make shelter, hunt and live from its bounty like any other creature. But that doesn’t preclude our understanding that it has a practical, cultural, emotional and even spiritual value beyond that too, which is equally necessary for our wellbeing.

The neo-environmentalists, needless to say, have no time for this kind of fluff. They have a great big straw man to build up and knock down, and once they’ve got that out of the way, they can move on to the really important part of their message. Here are Kareiva and fellow authors Robert Lalasz and Michelle Marvier, giving us the money shot in their Breakthrough Journal article: Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people … Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people.

There it is, in black and white: the wild is dead, and what remains of Nature is for people. We can effectively do what we like, and we should. Science says so! A full circle has been drawn, the greens have been buried by their own children, and under the soil with them has gone their naive, romantic and antiscientific belief that nonhuman life has any value beyond what we very modern humans can make use of.

The neo-greens do not come to rejuvenate environ­ mentalism: they come to bury it. They come to tell us that Nature doesn’t matter, that there is no such thing as Nature anyway, that the interests of human beings should always be paramount, that the rational mind must always win out over the intuitive mind, and that the political and economic settlement we have come to know in the last 20 years as globalisation is the only game in town, now and probably forever. All of the questions the greens have been raising for decades about the meaning of progress, about how we should live in relationship to other species, and about

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technology and political organisation and human-scale development are to be thrown in the bin like children’s toys.

Over the next few years, the old green movement that I grew up with is likely to fall to pieces. Many of those pieces will be picked up and hoarded by the growing ranks of the neo-environmentalists. The mainstream of the green movement has laid itself open to their advances in recent years with its obsessive focus on carbon and energy technologies and its refusal to speak up for a subjective,

This “pragmatism” is actually something rather different: an attempt to exclude from the green debate any interventions based on morality, emotion, intuition, spiritual connection or simple human feeling vernacular, nontechnical engagement with Nature. The neo-environmentalists have a great advantage over the old greens, with their threatening talk about limits to growth, behaviour change, and other such against-the-grain stuff: they are telling this civilisation what it wants to hear.

In the short term, the future belongs to the neoenvironmentalists, and it is going to be painful to watch.

In the long term, though, I suspect they will fail, for two reasons. First, bubbles always burst. Our civilisation is beginning to break down. We are at the start of an unfolding economic and social collapse, which may take decades or longer to play out – and which is playing out against the background of a planetary ecocide that nobody seems able to prevent. We are not gods, and our machines will not get us off this hook.

But there is another reason that the new breed are unlikely to be able to build the world they want to see: we are not – even they are not – primarily rational, logical, or ‘scientific’ beings. Our human relationship to the rest of Nature is not akin to the analysis of bacteria in a Petri dish: it is more like the complex, love–hate relationship we might have with lovers or parents or siblings. It is who we are, unspoken and felt and frustrating and inspiring and vital, and impossible to peer review. You can reach part of it with the analytical mind, but the rest will remain buried in the ancient woodland floor of human evolution and in the depths of our old ape brains, which see in pictures and think in stories.

Civilisation has always been a project of control, but you can’t win a war against the wild within yourself. We may have to wait many years, though, before the neo-greens discover this for themselves.

This is an edited extract from Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth, edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist and Tom Butler (Island Press). Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize.

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U N DERCURRENTS CONSERVATION

We Are Our Countryside, and Saving It Matters Andrew Motion argues that, whatever our nationality, in trying to preserve our landscape we assert our identity

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aurie Lee’s best-known book captures a period in time when the rural England he knew was changing beyond recognition. He wrote in Cider with Rosie: “I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ life. The change came late to our Cotswold valley, didn’t really show itself till the late 1920s; I was twelve by then, but during that handful of years I witnessed the whole thing happen.” In our time, 55 years after the first publication of that book, we feel that the gigantic upheaval he witnessed is about to be followed by another. It is a defining moment.

According to Laurie Lee, the last nail was hammered into the coffin of old England in 1926. This was a period when speculative builders, motor cars and the growth of the electricity network began to change the face of the country for ever. Some of these changes represented progress – we needed good new homes and a better infrastructure. But some were more often driven by corporate greed.

Such rampant commercialism made many suspect that England had fallen under the spell of America. When J.B. Priestley left London on his English Journey of 1933, for instance, he followed the new Great West Road and found himself in a place so strange he thought he “might have suddenly rolled into California”. Although he allowed that there were more familiar kinds of England still available – the Old England of “quaint highways and byways” and the “industrial England of coal, iron, steel...” – he feared that a new England was taking over: an England of “filling stations and factories … dance-halls and cafes … cocktail bars [and] Woolworths”.

Rapid change always threatens our sense of self. But if we don’t panic, we can see that while the processes of change work through and around us, we are generally able to adopt certain aspects that we like, and ignore or amend others that we don’t. Isn’t it striking, for example, how many people lamented the demise of what they considered to be a muchloved institution when Woolworths went under?

So change can invigorate and broaden. Yet while we accept this idea, we also want to insist that some things are unalterably sacred to us, each in our own place. And in England, the countryside is one of the most precious of all.

Two years after completing his English Journey, Priestley said: “Being a heritage, the beauty of this island is also a trust. Our children and their children after them must live in a beautiful country. That is something we can all leave them if we fight to preserve it now.” Priestley also understood that it was daft simply to fight change. He said the country we pass on to the next generation must be “a country still happily compromising between Nature and Man, blending what was best worth retaining from the past with what best represents the spirit of our own age – a country as rich in noble towns as it is in trees, birds and wild flowers”.

By the time the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) was launched in 1926, it didn’t so much represent a campaign, as a whole movement – a surge in national feeling for the countryside, which itself caught a wave of feeling that had been building since the onset of industrialisation, and that increased greatly during the First World War. Cider with Rosie alludes to this, and so do many other writers at work in the period, or remembering it later.

A.E. Housman, for instance. Kenneth Grahame. Edward Thomas. Thomas Hardy. George Orwell – who typically warned that the “charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place names” had the potential to produce “a kind of idealised rustic” that was pernicious as well as potent. That being said, it’s especially appropriate for us to think about the effect of the war in this commemorating year. What motivated those who were so quick to enlist?

Duty? Jingoism? There was something else. The pastoral imagery used by early recruiting advertisements – and the posters sent to the front line in 1916 to “awaken thoughts of pleasant homely things” – suggest that many soldiers believed they were defending the English countryside rather than the British Empire. A crucial part of our modern, country-loving form of Englishness was forged in the heat of

Walter E. Spradbery, 1929 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection

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“A crucial part of our modern, country-loving form of Englishness was forged in the heat of the First World War”

war – a manipulated sort of concept, certainly, but also one felt in the blood and felt along the heart. When Edward Thomas’s friend Eleanor Farjeon asked him why he was enlisting, when they were out walking in 1915, he bent down and picked up a handful of earth. “For this,” he told her.

The war, in other words, placed the countryside at the heart of what it meant to be English. But even before the war, this association was already in place. Exactly 100 years before the outbreak of the First World War, William Wordsworth had written this in The Excursion:

at social Industry’s command, How quick, how vast an increase! From the germ Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced Here a huge town, continuous and compact, Hiding the face of the earth for leagues…

Manchester typified the sort of change that Wordsworth was thinking about. Yet there was a silver lining, because the sprawling growth of the city could also claim to have caused the first public movement for countryside preservation. Footpath preservation groups were formed in Manchester by the 1820s, and their cause was taken up by a Whiggish MP, Robert Slaney. Proposing a Select Committee on Public Walks in 1833, Slaney argued that it was essential for growing towns to provide footpaths on their rural fringes for “comfort, health and content”.

By the 1860s, it was the politicians who were leading the movement. It was an MP, George Shaw-Lefevre, who co-founded the Commons Preservation Society in 1865, following several years of heated debate about the

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Poster © Imperial War Museum www.iwm.org.uk

threats to Hampstead, Richmond and Wimbledon. Today, we think of these places as urban oases, but at the time they were real countryside, on the edge of the metropolis; and the temptation for landowners was to cash in on the building boom. While the political establishment showed huge resistance to interfering with private property, there were enough enlightened politicians, supported by popular resistance and artistic patrons like John Ruskin and William Morris, to save London’s great open spaces.

Politically, there was also a general consensus about many of CPRE’s early campaigns, stemming from the joint appeal by the party leaders Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and David Lloyd George during the 1929 general election.

The great post-war settlement for the countryside – National Parks and a democratic planning system – was delivered

by Clement Attlee’s government, but was a testament to the work of a National Government and CPRE during the war. In the bold new world of 1945, planning promised to create a better, more cohesive society, while protecting the greatest component of Englishness – the natural beauty of our countryside – for future generations.

Since the end of the Second World War, planning has done a difficult job pretty well. It has delivered much – but of course not all – of the housing we need, while preserving a large percentage of our countryside. National parks have been an unqualified success, and so too have green belts, despite what their detractors have to say about them.

Not so long ago politicians were trying to take the credit for these green belts. Now we hear politicians constantly talking about swapping green belt, or loosening green belt,

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or giving cities the right to grow over the green belt. This is not simply foolish and destructive. It is also out of step with public opinion. I said earlier, I think we’ve reached a defining moment in the history of our relationship with the countryside. And in my opinion, the assault on the green belt lies at the heart of this crisis.

What is the matter with politicians? Is it impossible for them to show the vision and ambition of their predecessors – the men and women who stood up for the protection of commons, of national parks, of green belts, of footpaths?

Surely we can recapture some of that progressive, enlightened thinking? Surely it’s possible to resolve the growing gap between people’s consumerist impulses and their deeper desires as citizens? Of course it is. Of course we can achieve the change in outlook promoted by CPRE’s 2026: A Vision for the Countryside, where people see houses as homes, not investments; where economic growth is not the only measure of national progress; where beauty and wellbeing matter; where we aspire to improve the quality, and the equality, of life. Of course we can, if we ask what I believe should be the great question of our time: how do we want to live? – and give our clear and ringing answer.

The fate of England, and the planet, is at risk if we don’t.

An appreciation of our natural heritage, and a growing environmental consciousness, is not just a joy forever. It’s vital. It’s a part of what makes us who we are. National

parks and green belts are national icons as much as the National Health Service. They are among the things that make England – and Britain – great. Scotland and Wales are rightly proud of their unique sense of identity, but we seem to be hell-bent on smearing concrete over ours. I don’t want to see an England that’s forgotten what is worth caring about, any more than I want to live in a country that is characterised by insularity and fear of the other. Who does?

CPRE is not and never has been a reactionary organisation.

When we hear politicians say we need to build 200,000 more homes a year we don’t say, “No way!” We say: “Why only 200,000? – but why on earth ruin the countryside by building them on the green belt and on green fields and open land?” There are suitable brownfield sites available for a million and a half homes. Build there. That way people can have roofs over their heads – roofs of an appropriate size to their needs – and England can be saved. The foundation of our character can be preserved.

Englishness is a difficult notion, not least because whatever it is has tended to shun large gestures and big rhetorical flourishes. I like that modesty and decorum. Yet it also makes us vulnerable, because it can make us feel there’s something intrinsically embarrassing or unnecessary about feeling proud of our country. And vulnerable, too, because our body politic can become an easy prey to those who speak stridently and think crudely. But in my own view, Englishness has never been about being small-minded and insular. Traditional values like our pride in the countryside exist in a wonderful big melting pot of Englishness, together with our pride in absorbing new cultures, and our appetite for them, and our refusal to make Englishness an issue of race or birthplace. Satish Kumar, Benjamin Zephaniah, Marina Lewycka and Anish Kapoor have all signed the CPRE’s Charter to Save Our Countryside. The great majority of politicians lack the courage to stand up for the countryside in any way. That says a lot.

Once upon a time, David Cameron seemed to understand all this. Back in 2008 he said: “The beauty of our landscape is a national treasure, to be cherished and protected for everyone’s benefit. It’s not enough for politicians just to say that – we need leaders who really understand it and feel it in their bones. I do.”

What happened, Prime Minister, to make you forget these beliefs? What is it, politicians of all parties, that makes you so willing to trash the heritage and traditions that form the foundation of the country you were elected to serve? Why can’t you see that we can have the progress, and the houses we desperately need, and an economy that benefits all of us, and still preserve the vital, fundamental things? I’ll ask the question one more time. How do we want to live? As things stand, we are facing the ruination of England as we know it, and we are destroying it not by accident or chance, but by design. We are inflicting, in Laurie Lee’s words, “a selfinflicted wound that not even time will heal”.

Andrew Motion, a former Poet Laureate, is President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. This is an edited extract from his speech to CPRE’s annual general meeting in June.

World War One Recruiting Poster

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© Gary Lucken/fotoLibra

November/December 2014

A S S I S T E D DY I N G U N D E R C UR R E N T S

Life is a Natural Process, with a Natural End Ros Coward wonders whether ecological awareness can help us address the ethical dilemmas facing an ageing population

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n ecological perspective is not often considered relevant to the question of assisted dying. It’s usually seen as a purely human, ethical issue concerning individual conscience and social values. Yet as death is probably the one event that still powerfully reminds us we belong to the natural world, surely ecological awareness might cast light on the issue?

Currently the debate focuses on the rights of the terminally ill to choose to end their lives, on the legal consequences for those who assist them, and on the social consequences for a society that allows it. Those in favour of assisted dying argue that when death is inevitable and life intolerable, an individual should have the right to choose death, especially as the medical means exist to enable a peaceful, ‘dignified’ end.

But many balk at this. It goes against the idea of our ‘time decreed’ on Earth, by intervening in something that should not really be in our hands. This side also asks: would society begin to think it is ‘dignified’ to leave life before you become dependent? Would the old, lonely and frail feel they were a burden, unwanted by society, if they needed care?

Those supporting assisted dying say that ‘in Nature’, people with diseases would not have survived as long as they do now and that medical advances that keep people alive too long should now be used to restore dignity.

Those opposed claim that the strong survival instinct often witnessed in even the most frail must be respected as a natural force; that there should be a presumption in favour of preserving life. Confusingly, both sides mobilise ‘Nature’ in their arguments – Nature as life instinct, Nature as the inevitability of death, Nature as a natural process unfolding.

While I was looking after my elderly and increasingly frail mother, I was swayed by both sides. Once, I wrote a strongly worded column against assisted dying. I thought that it would damage social morale to allow people to assist in ending life, arguing that life should take its course. I also suggested that the issue was not just about those dying, but also about their carers, because caring for the dying could be enhancing. But I wavered later, having witnessed some terrible cases in hospital where people were being kept alive by modern nursing but were barely existing as we know it.

Perhaps if people want to avoid coming to the end of their lives in this state, they should be entitled to do so.

Yet in spite of my vacillations I did become convinced of one thing: we may not know what it would mean to act in accordance with Nature, but we can be sure that many of these problems and dilemmas around assisted dying and end-of-life

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October Tree by Jess Davies

www.jessdavies.net

dependency have been created because the inevitable process of dying is not properly acknowledged and catered for in modern medicine. Modern medicine is wonderfully skilled at treating illnesses to delay death, and modern nursing is wonderfully skilled at maintaining life. And it is to their credit that most people involved in medicine regard these as inviolable principles.

Yet the dominance of these principles over the acceptance of the inevitability of death – and its accommodation – have exacerbated the dilemmas we now have about assisted dying.

Many medical professionals are themselves struggling with these dilemmas. Harriet Copperman, a retired palliative care nurse giving evidence to the recent Commission on Assisted Dying, spoke in support of assisted dying because “modern medicine has ‘interfered’ so much in natural disease processes and biological deterioration of the body, that what in the past may have been a relatively quick decline and death is now frequently prolonged by years of slow and distressing decline.”

Professor Sir Mike Richards, National Clinical Director for Cancer and End of Life Care at the Department of Health, argued in his turn that those involved in hospital medicine “are very much attuned to cure and to trying to make people live longer”. It would be a huge cultural challenge to change this view. Nevertheless, he continued, what was needed was a shift towards speaking more openly, with greater acceptance of death and more emphasis on palliative, non-interventionist care.

A cultural shift of this kind – towards more acceptance of life as a natural process with a natural end that can only be delayed, not banished – is a big ask. But it’s no bigger than asking society to accept the principle of ‘assisted suicide’, and possibly a lot less dangerous and damaging for society’s morale.

Ros Coward is a journalist. www.roscoward.com

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U N DERCURRENTS FORESTRY

Seeds of Hope on the Mountainside Botanist Stephen Blackmore revisits a pioneering forest-restoration project

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s a botanist I have been privileged to visit some of the most beautiful places on Earth, but all too often this has been a bittersweet experience. Around the world Nature is on the retreat. Even the most remote wildernesses are shrinking, and oncecommon species are becoming rare. Fortunately, there are places where the tide is turning, thanks to a growing emphasis on ecological restoration.

One such beacon of hope is Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG) in Hong Kong’s New Territories. From the high, northern slopes of Tai Mo Shan, Hong Kong’s highest mountain, it looks out over the Lam Tsuen Valley and beyond.

In his delightful 1951 book The Hong Kong Countryside, Geoffrey Herklots called this “a valley of surprises” for its wildlife and beautiful landscapes. That has also been my experience of the place, which I first visited 50 years ago as a schoolboy in Hong Kong. Tai Mo Shan was a firm favourite for family picnics, and at that time the Lam Tsuen Valley, like the New Territories more generally, was an agricultural landscape of rice paddies and vegetable fields with scattered feng shui woodlands. The mountains, in contrast, were covered with coarse grassland, over longabandoned tea terraces, with narrow patches of scrub or forest following gullies and watercourses.

For me the surprise came in April 2007 when, after an absence of 40 years, I visited KFBG

Maud’s michelia (Michelia maudiae) Photo by Gunter Fischer, Head of Flora Conservation Department at KFBG

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with a group of British botanists. The steep hillsides were shrouded in fog, concentrating our attention on the sights and sounds of our immediate surroundings. What was surprising to the point of disorientation was that we were surrounded by sizeable trees in a place where previously there had been none. The opposite experience, returning to once-forested places and finding farmlands or urban development, is sadly far more familiar. What had happened here?

Many trees had been planted on the extensive terraces constructed when what was originally the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association (KAAA) settled there in 1956. These included shelter belts, a wide variety of fruit trees and a steadily expanding conservation collection including many rare local species. Fast-growing exotic trees were used to create the windbreaks, and many of the fruit trees had become over-mature,

When the clouds lift it is obvious that what is happening is one of the world’s most important forest-restoration projects yielding little fruit. Nature was slowly reasserting her influence after the demise of agriculture in the New Territories. Seeds buried in the soil seed bank germinated, and slowly a forest was beginning to take shape. At the highest section of road, the drizzle stopped, and we emerged from our minibus alongside a dozen pickaxes and a short row of plastic shopping baskets each containing about twenty small saplings.

Next day, we were told, these native trees were to be planted by volunteers to re-establish forest on Tai Mo Shan after an absence of many centuries. Hugely impressed by the boldness of the vision and the evident commitment of staff and volunteers, I asked: “How will you get them there from here?” thinking this to be a journey of several miles. “It’s just there, in the clouds,” came the reply. But in my mind I could see only the distant, grass-covered mountain of the 1960s.

All became clear when I had the good fortunate

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The lower terraces at Kadoorie Farm & Botanic Garden

to visit again, in each of the last three years. When the clouds lift it is obvious that one is standing on Tai Mo Shan and that what is happening there is one of the world’s most important forest-restoration projects. There are many larger projects, of course, but too often they follow what should be an outmoded practice of planting the fastest-growing exotic trees. A forest may result, but not one that can support the local web of life. What makes the work at KFBG so special is that it is a well-designed experiment, testing and evaluating simple but effective methods of protecting the young saplings, suppressing the competing grass, improving the soil, and accelerating the natural processes of ecological succession.

Here the original forest is long gone, taking with it the rich biodiversity it would have supported: fungi, invertebrates, birds and mammals – the pollinators, decomposers and seed distributors of a living forest.

Without human help, the forest that returns from the soil seed bank is composed only of the toughest pioneer species that can colonise eroded and impoverished soils. To re-establish the natural cycles so that human intervention can eventually be phased out requires late-succession species to be brought in. Among the 30 species being planted are several oaks, including thick-leaved oak (Cyclobalanopsis edithiae), bamboo oak (Cyclobalanopsis neglecta) and tanoak (Lithocarpus glaber), as well as two close relatives of magnolias, Ford’s manglietia (Manglietia fordiana) and Maud’s michelia (Michelia maudiae). Many such trees are now extremely rare and facing extinction, so nurseries for seed production and plant propagation must be established.

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Photo by Stephen Blackmore

Fortunately, botanic gardens are centres of excellence in growing wild plants, with around 80,000 species now in cultivation worldwide. They have the botanical and horticultural know-how to collect genetically diverse source material from the wild and to grow and propagate plants in large numbers. There is a new sense of mission in botanic gardens. Increasingly they see themselves as pathfinders, engaging with society to discover a sustainable future through projects from inner-city greening projects and urban farms to healing damaged landscapes. Recently the Ecological Restoration Alliance of Botanic Gardens (www.erabg.org) was established to focus the special skills of botanic gardens on the restoration of degraded ecosystems around the world and build a global movement that others will join.

KFBG’s innovative restoration work is world-leading, and the lessons learned will be relevant throughout South China and, indeed, anywhere in the world. If you had asked me 50 years ago whether there might ever again be forests on Tai Mo Shan, I would have laughed at the thought, but now I have seen them! Fifty thousand saplings turning back centuries of adverse human impact to create a haven for biodiversity. In my mind’s eye I can picture them in another 50 years, teeming with life, a source of inspiration and hope for the world.

Stephen Blackmore is Chair of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (www.bgci.org) and Queen’s Botanist and Honorary Fellow at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (www.rbge.org.uk).

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E T H IC AL LIVING C AMPAIGNING

Watershed for the Heart of the Yukon Jill Pangman reports on the fight to protect one of the world’s great wildernesses

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y canoe surges through the water, spray flying off its bow, as it careens through a series of standing waves. I let out a whoop of joy as I glide over a sea of coloured stones shimmering in the translucent shallow waters of the Wind River. A great arc of limestone peaks frame a jagged skyline that soars at least a thousand metres above the valley floor. And in the midst of it all a golden eagle circles, a distant speck against a deep blue sky.

I’m on a two-week river journey into the Peel Watershed, North America’s largest constellation of wild mountain rivers, tucked in the north-east corner of Yukon, Canada, straddling the Arctic Circle.

Healthy populations of caribou, sheep and grizzlies and a host of other species roam freely across these 16 million acres of roadless tundra and forest, seeing so few people that most have not yet learnt to fear humans.

Around one tight bend I happen upon a bull caribou with a massive rack of antlers, eyeing me as I ease past the patch of gravel where he’s temporarily perched. I dip my paddle into the current only to the degree necessary to keep me on course, lest he bolt. But he remains there, perplexed by the sudden appearance of this strange object drifting past.

The Peel Watershed, at close to 70,000 square kilometres in size, is a vast and intact wilderness ecosystem. It’s rich in rare species that have flourished in these unspoiled waterways and mountains since long before the last Ice Age. It’s also rich in oil and gas, coal, uranium and gold, and other precious metals, placing it at the heart of a far too familiar fight over resources and wild spaces.

Yet this pervading silence, the curious wild creatures, the untouched, raw beauty could all too quickly become a distant memory. In January 2014, despite seven years of consultation-driven land-use planning and widespread public support for Peel protection, the Yukon government announced its own unilaterally developed plan to open more than 70% of the watershed to industry and roads.

This is a land that has sustained not only untold numbers of wild animals. First Nation families have been harvesting game for food and clothing, gathering plants for medicine, and fishing from these fresh wild rivers for hundreds if not thousands of generations.

“The Peel is too important,” says Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation elder Jimmy Johnny. “I’m afraid if mining ever started in the watershed it would be really bad for the downstream people, the water and the fish. No matter how much money you spend you can’t heal the land and make people healthy after you poison them.”

Jimmy drove through blinding snow and 40-degree-below temperatures to share his concerns with the Peel Watershed Land Use Planning Commission, the independent body tasked with drafting a land use plan for the region under the elaborate process laid out in the Yukon First Nations agreements. This process was to take into account competing land uses and conflicting values and, through listening to the people, make a recommendation for the region based on what it heard. >

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Mount MacDonald Range near the Snake River, Yukon

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Jimmy Johnny worked as a guide outfitter in the Bonnet Plume, Snake and Wind River drainages from the 1960s, and has spent more time in the remote regions of the Peel Watershed than any other person alive. He’s seen the impact half a century of mining exploration has left on the land, with abandoned camps, zigzagging access tracks on the occasional mountainside, rudimentary airstrips, rusting oil drums, and a 50-year-old winter road still visible on the forested landscape.

This is nothing, however, compared to the more permanent damage that would have been inflicted by any one of a handful of industrial proposals that, had they been more economically feasible to develop, would have forever altered the region’s wilderness character. It turned out that none of the mineral deposits was of a high enough grade nor extensive enough to warrant the high cost of development. The relative inaccessibility of this country has been its saving grace.

This could change, however, if even one road is built into the heart of the watershed. Proponents of preserving the land and waters of this unique region have long recognised this potential, and years ago launched an impressive campaign.

Foremost amongst those fighting to protect the area are the First Nations people whose ancestral lands span the entire watershed: the Na-Cho Nyak Dun, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Vuntut Jimmy Johnny on the banks of the Wind River

Moose feeds in the Peel River watershed

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Gwitch’in and Tetlit Gwitch’in. They have been joined by two local conservation groups: the Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), which initially brought the region into the wider public eye about 15 years ago and was the driving force behind the campaign until recently, and the Yukon Conservation Society (YCS).

Key stakeholders such as wilderness tourism operators, along with many concerned members of the public, have weighed into the debate as well.

The Peel campaign has become a collaborative effort and a mammoth task. The First Nations have been concerned primarily with their constitutional rights, and have been vocal about what the land means to them and their culture. CPAWS and YCS have focused on bringing the world-class merits of the region into the territorial, national and global eye.

Those determined to see the watershed protected from the inevitable ravages of industrial development are up against not only multinational corporations, but also a territorial government that the majority of its own people believe is not listening to them. Its politicians seem to subscribe to the old paradigm of prosperity, which is as outdated as the free entry mining laws that still govern the way Canadian land is valued, or not. Industry has been operating for too long with a sense of entitlement to the land’s non-renewable resources, as if no other values were as worthy of consideration.

When, at the eleventh hour, in January 2014, the Yukon government released its own unilaterally developed plan, thereby opting to ignore the whole planning process, disregard the commission’s recommendations (which called for 80% of the land to be protected) and discount the huge outpouring of public support for Peel protection, the First Nations, CPAWS and YCS were left with no choice but to go to court.

“This is a lawsuit nobody wanted to bring,” says Thomas Berger, the Canadian aboriginal rights lawyer who has been enlisted to lead the legal charge, along with his colleague Margaret Rosling, “but the Yukon government has forced these plaintiffs to go to court not only in defence of First Nations and environmental values in Yukon, but also to uphold principles entrenched in the Constitution.”

Berger, now in his early eighties, is well suited to lead this case, as the lawyer who originally put aboriginal rights on the map – and into the Constitution – of Canada. The future of the Peel now rests in his and the court’s hands.

The case was heard in the Yukon Supreme Court in July and could make its way through the Yukon Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, in which case a decision could still be years away. Not only will the outcome of the Peel lawsuit influence whether the commission’s recommendation for 80% protection is upheld, but it will also determine whether modern land claims treaties are to be interpreted in spirit and intent, or merely paid lip service by governments of the day.

The Peel campaign, which started as an effort to protect a fairly pristine watershed, has grown over the years since its inception to become emblematic of the injustices committed in the name of industrial progress. Places like the Peel are a treasure on a global scale, and they need to be honoured as such, not sold off to corporate interests for short-term

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Clear waters of the Wind River

All photos © Fritz Mueller www.fritzmueller.com

financial gain. Not only does the area offer crucial habitat for a plethora of wildlife species that need uninterrupted space to roam, but also the Peel watershed is the traditional homeland of Indigenous people who have the right to continue to travel in this land and to subsist on and be renewed by its renewable resources.

The Peel is also about the wild, about the essence of wild places and the impact they have on us at a soul level. It is up to those of us who have been touched by wild Nature, who understand how essential it is, to be its voice, to defend its right to exist. There’s no room for human arrogance and greed in a place like the Peel. Life just is, and all living forms within it are equally part of the whole. This fabric that has been woven in defence of this land and her waters is as expansive as the breadth of the entire watershed, and as exquisite and powerful as only forces of raw untamed Nature can be.

When I dip my cup into one of the Peel’s rivers and drink from its pure essence, I know I have come home and have been embraced by the shifting moods of this land and its endless panorama of changing light. The peace I feel within me radiates out as ripples do in a still pond, carrying the breadth of my love for this place and for all things wild.

Jill Pangman is a wilderness advocate and guide in Canada’s Yukon Territory: www.silasojourns.com For more information on the campaign, visit www.protectpeel.ca

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E T H IC AL LIVING

STOP! LET THE WORLD BACK IN Leo Johnson sounds a call to action against the forces of automation, atomisation and alienation

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ound about 8.30 on a summer evening way back in August 1992, the police in Finsbury Park, North London started getting phone calls. The tower blocks in the local estate were swaying. Windows were cracking, balconies coming loose. Panic spread among the residents evacuated onto the street. There’s an earthquake in Finsbury Park. Then the police got a phone call from a local resident. Maybe, she told them, it isn’t an earthquake. There’s a Madness concert in the Park. What had happened? It was Madstock, Madness’s reunion gig, and at the opening bars of One Step Beyond, 80,000 fans started dancing to the beat. The vibrations, amplified by an underground lake, carried all the way to the foundations of the eight-storey blocks, and the towers started dancing. The concrete began to skank.

A moment of connection in North London, an earthquake born out of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the ecstasy of others”. But 25 years later the Los Angeles Times

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Illustration by Ping Zhu www.pingszoo.com

gave a hint of a subtly different earthquake building up, one that could have the opposite effect.

At 6.25am on 17 March this year, Ken Schwencke, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times, emailed to his editors a brief story on the latest tremor to hit the region. “A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning…

According to the USGS [the US Geological Survey], the epicentre was six miles from Beverly Hills, California...”

But the real earthquake was not in the story. It was in the byline: “This post was created by an algorithm written by the author.” Quakebot, the program Schwenke developed, plugs alerts from the USGS into a template, then sends it to the LA Times editors for review. Schwenke’s input into his report that morning was estimated at three seconds’ worth.

What’s the point? In September 2013 the Oxford Martin School released a report that predicted that, with the advance of big data, 47% of US professional-class white-collar jobs were at “high risk” of being replaced by automation. It was not just physical tasks, routine and non-routine, that could be “off-peopled”: it was now tasks involving cognition. What Quakebot shows is that the process that the Martin School report identified has started to hit the mainstream. Quakebot programs are not just the domain of PhD mathematicians.

Laypeople – journalists, even – are at it. The question isn’t

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whether we are headed for the age of the algorithm: it’s what it’s going to be like. Is it going to solve or add to our problems?

There’s heated debate around the issue of jobs. Even if technological change is nothing new, will the rate of obsolescence this time outstrip the rate of new job creation?

Will white-collar workers, the former nomenklatura of the professional classes, have to compete for an already shrinking supply of blue-collar jobs? But there is also a broader challenge. As we leave the age of productivity and enter into the age of the algorithm, what happens to our notion of interdependence?

“Technology”, commented Kentaro Toyama, former research director at Microsoft, “is not the answer.” It is “just an amplifier of human intent”. Never in our history have we had equal technological power to solve the global problems that face us – from access to potable water, sanitation and power, to education. Our capacity to address these fundamental challenges is a function not of technology, but of intent. So the question is, what happens, in the age of algorithm, to that intent, the desire to shape a form of capitalism that in the words of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, “fits the world around it”?

There are three spheres we can influence the easiest: reclaim home, work and the public realm Abnormal blood sugar levels? Elevated cortisol after her play date? The i-Tedi teddy bear relays live data on your child’s wellbeing. Need to monitor an ageing parent? Try the GrannyCam. There is an unstated query: why do others need us when there’s Google Flu Trends, driverless cars and telemedicine? And do we need others? Why have friends when we have click-farmed likes? Why keep an ecosystem when Soylent gives you an all-synthetic diet, when Organovo can print Tubesteak for food? Why fret about climate change when we can back up Earth with Mars as biosphere? The risk is that we lose not just the emotional capacity to care for the online effigies to which we might reduce each other, but also the intellectual notion that we need to, when we can outsource the task to technology. The risk is that our attachment to each other, our acknowledged interdependence, looks kind of retro. Bonobo-like.

The second risk to intent is one that is already on us, palpable in a Europe where xenophobia, the fear of the other, is once again rampant. If we do disengage from the other, if we fail to use technology with the intent to solve at scale the problems that matter, we create the conditions in which those problems of others come back to haunt us as our own.

It is in the parts of Somalia where climate change struck hardest that al-Shabaab, the bombers of Nairobi’s Westgate Centre, came to prominence. Outside Nairobi, as the elite flee, there are now four “smart cities” under construction, from Konza “ICT Technopolis”, to Migaa with its 18-hole executive golf course. The absence of the intent to include collapses into the intent to exclude. Our cities become not places of combinatorial creativity, but gated communities,

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homeless-spiked, sensored and censored, where technology is used not to solve problems, but to shield us from them.

So what is the call to action? We have spent the last 50 years competing with the machines of mass production. What we are now up against are the machines of mass cognition.

How do we win? Robert Zajonc, the Guggenheim Awardwinning sociologist, said, memorably, that the human mind is not like a computer, but that it’s better than that: it’s like a computer with barbecue sauce. So our strategy is simple.

We reject the Fordist dogmas that valued us according to our conformance with the performance of machines. We reclaim the human. We own, in short, our barbecue sauce, the qualities that make us unique and worthy of each other’s intent. How do we put it into practice? Here’s the humble beginnings of a manifesto of intent, starting with three spheres we can influence the most easily: First: reclaim the home. What is the strategy? It’s simple – make the real more fun than the virtual. Is someone close to you on their iPad round the clock? Who is to blame? We are.

We aren’t being present. So if you have children, nephews, nieces, parents on their screens, then find a staircase, find a duvet, and pull them down. Tell them there will be plenty of time to play Candy Crush in hospital.

Second: reclaim our work. Some 93% of British managers work unpaid overtime. Half of them work a whole day a week extra – unpaid. How can you be there for anyone, working that hard? Strategy two, to boost your work, is to ask this paradoxical question: what is the least I can do?

How can I sift the signal from the noise? How can I find the most important outcome, and then find the most jujitsu action to achieve it?

Third: reclaim the public realm. Nørrebro was the toughest district in Copenhagen. It had 57 separate nationalities, ethnic tension and rising knife crime. The Danish government labelled it a ghetto. Then a local project asked each ethnic group to come up with one national object to share. What did they get? A sound system from Jamaica, a Thai kickboxing ring, a Japanese octopus playground, a high swing from Kabul, and from Britain, finally, a dustbin (we are a romantic people). They got a place, a reclaimed ecosystem that they themselves had made, and as a by-product of that collaboration they also got civic intent, the ties to each other that drive the shift from consumer to citizen.

Will it work? Take participatory budgeting, where local people are directly involved in public spending and priorities. Or transition towns, those communities working on developing sustainability for the uncertain future. Or the rewilding movement. In each case there’s a simple phenomenon: what resonates, replicates. It taps into and gets amplified by the underground currents, the hidden rivers of what is natural to all of us, and it turns from the small to the massive small, the force that can make the concrete dance.

Leo Johnson is a Visiting Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and is co-author of Turnaround Challenge: Business & the City of the Future.

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E T H IC AL LIVING SLOW TRAVEL

Following the Pilgrim Paths

St Kevin believed that the land and all the elements of Nature were alive and sacred

Photo © Garry Boggan, 2011

Bébhinn Ramsay joins a day of rediscovery and revival

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he gorse glowed golden with an otherworldly effervescence, as 250 Irish pilgrims wound their way down into the ruined monastic city of Glendalough on Easter Saturday. We walked along this ancient path in the footsteps of our ancestors, who have come here in search of solace since Glendalough was an alleged Celtic site of Lughnasa celebrations more than two thousand years ago. There is something magical about making a pilgrimage to Glendalough. This is not about historic heritage: it is about savouring the living, breathing spirituality of our land.

Our walk was part of an important resurrection this Easter: that of the Pilgrim Paths of Ireland. The resurgence of these paths on the first ever National Pilgrim Paths Day, spearheaded by author John G. O’Dwyer, is a source of spiritual reconnection for all of us in Ireland, irrespective of our religious beliefs.

Some 1,500 pilgrims took to these sacred pathways throughout Ireland to celebrate the day.

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I had the pleasure to be part of the group on a walk along St Kevin’s Way in County Wicklow, just outside Dublin, which was one of the ten pilgrim routes involved. We expected 30 people, yet an amazing 250 men and women turned up to trudge over soft bog and up hard mountain before descending into the valley of the two lakes. Each pilgrim carried a stone symbolising the intention with which they were walking the path, and a pilgrim passport to be stamped on arrival at the Round Tower. As one pilgrim put it, this was “so much more than a walk in the hills”.

I have often followed this path alone or with one or two others, walking through the lonely and lovely countryside in the hushed hue of the changing seasons.

As I looked back at the unending line of pilgrims snaking up the hillside to the Wicklow Gap, some with heads down, some in gentle banter with their friends, I was filled with a joy that made my heart feel too big for my body. The landscape shone in delight before

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me, energised by the footsteps of so much gladness and reverence.

We stopped at the Wicklow Gap to catch our breath and to enjoy a reflective moment. With the rousing sound of an Irish fiddle filling the air, we stood at the Gap moving our gaze from where we had come from towards where we were going. As the music dissolved into the mountain air, the word camino blazed and flared through the group; some had done it, some hoped to do it, and many had found their passion for pilgrimage in Northern Spain. The Camino de Santiago is a transformative experience – I followed the 800km myself 15 years ago and I am forever opened and changed by the experience.

My pilgrimages along St Kevin’s Way and the Saints’ Road in Dingle, County Kerry remind me, however, that our own pilgrim paths in Ireland have the same transformative power. We do not have to take a trip abroad to connect with ourselves, with awe-inspiring Nature or with the divine mystery. We have them right here, literally on our doorsteps. What a wonder it has been for me to wake up to this fact.

It took me 15 years abroad to discover that what I was looking for was right here at home.

National Pilgrim Paths Day is a spark to rekindle in us the respect and awe that our ancestors had for the sacred paths and places of the island of Ireland. It points us to the sacred essence that is as alive and accessible now as it was when St Kevin was drawn along this same path from Tallaght to Glendalough more than 1,400 years ago.

St Kevin has been an inspiring discovery for me. I grew up with peripheral awareness of him during my childhood in Dublin. He was a 6th-century saint, part of our heritage of Celtic Christianity. Now, as I walk in his footsteps and talk about him with co-organiser and wise friend Eleanor Sutherland, I discover a man more of the future than of the past. He symbolises a golden age in Ireland, when our land was still soaked in animism, in a belief that the land and all elements of Nature were alive and sacred. Deer brought him milk, cows licked his feet, trees moved aside to let him pass, and otters brought him his dropped psalm-book from the lake. He lived in a voluntary simplicity, fused with reverence and integration into the natural world around him. He was of Nature, not in it. He was Ireland’s very own St Francis of Assisi. He had transcended the separation from Nature and become completely infused with it.

In a time when we have brought Nature to the brink of collapse, when we have disconnected ourselves from the natural world we inhabit and stand uncertain whether our children and grandchildren will enjoy Nature’s bounty, Kevin is a beacon. He represents not only who we were, but who we can become. He represents the possible future for Irish men and women.

Like our group of pilgrims at the top of the Wicklow Gap, Ireland too stands at a moment of reflection, digesting our past and choosing our future. The old certainties of church, politics, media, education and the economy have been undermined, the survival of our natural beauty hangs in the balance, and we are confronted by the need to choose for ourselves a new direction. The large turnout for National Pilgrim Paths Day gives me a sense of hope that we might just follow St Kevin’s example and our forever ancient, forever new ‘pilgrim soul’ as we move together into the future.

Bébhinn Ramsay is the author of Love’s Last Gift (Hachette Ireland) and co-founder of Saúde Criança Florianópolis, Brazil. www.saudecriancafln.org.br For more information on St Kevin’s Way and National Pilgrim Paths Day, visit www.pilgrimpath.ie www.facebook.com/PilgrimPath St Kevin praying with blackbird, from Topographia Hibernica © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images

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E T H IC AL LIVING INTERVIEW

Change by Aimée Sicuro

www.aimeesicuro.com

The Healing Power of Nature Jewels Wingfield is one of Britain’s leading lights in the field of conscious relationship. Mukti Mitchell met her to find out more You work with people to help them find a deeper relationship with themselves, with others and with the environment. What set you on this path?

As a child I had an incredibly strong connection with Nature. My childhood was pretty challenging and the way I would escape being in that environment was to go out in the garden and make a den in the bushes. I remember that while I was smelling a rose, I couldn’t think a bad thought or have bad feelings. I was in wonderment at the natural world and was transfixed by a butterfly or watching ants go from A to B or how the tree would change its leaves through the year.

That woke me up to Nature. I felt like God spoke to me through Nature. That’s how it started. Being in Nature was a process of self-healing that stayed with me forever.

How did it become your profession?

It was a very gradual process. Through healing my childhood wounds by being in Nature and going on a journey of reclaiming myself, I felt that if I could do this for myself, then

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maybe it would be helpful to others. People kept asking me to lead training workshops because I understood the power of ritual. Ritual is such a simple way to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Through ritual we can access parts of ourselves that are not available to us in any other way.

Was there a time when you did a lot of work on yourself?

Yes. For many years I have been committed to my own awakening. One time I went with a group on a vision quest up into the mountains for 48 hours. I felt an absolute terror of the darkness. So I made a circle of fire around me and kept it alight all night. I experienced layers of existential fear, but then I suddenly thought, “What is it that I’m really afraid of?”

Finally I got to death: “I’m afraid that I’m going to die.”

And then I thought, “It’s not that I’m afraid I’m actually going to die. It’s actually that I’m afraid I’m going to really live!” And then it all changed and the darkness no longer felt like darkness. It was just the magic of the night: the exquisite energy that was there.

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You once described to me a time when you used to drop your daughter at school, and you used to go into the woods, all day until you had to pick her up…

I was having a breakdown. I just could not function, and my daughter must have been four or five. She was at kindergarten. All I could manage to do was get up in the morning, drop her off at kindergarten, and drive straight to the woods. I had a tarpaulin and outdoor gear there, and I found a natural hollow in the woods and I would just stay there until my alarm went off to collect my daughter from school. So it would be, like, six hours straight. It was the only thing that made it possible for me to stay sane. I was utterly in grief and rage. I would lie in the ground and cry, and scream. What was so frightening was that I couldn’t feel myself. I didn’t even know if I existed, I was so out of my body. But the smell of the mulch leaves, and the smell of the soil, and the smell of the rain, all of it felt like the body of Earth was somehow pulling me into my body, and that made it possible for me to manage all of the difficult feelings that I was having. As soon as I got out of that burrow and got into the car, the confusion would creep back and I just wanted to be back in the Earth. This made me realise the incredible healing power of Nature on my emotions and how much I need Nature, which made me want to work for Nature as much as for humans.

Do you have an introductory workshop for women?

Yes. It’s called Awakening the Sacred Feminine.

Why would a woman want to come to your workshop?

She may have this nagging feeling that there’s more to life than she is experiencing, like a quiet voice that won’t go away. That’s why she may come. Although some women may feel, “Oh, my God, I don’t want to open this whole thing. My life’s going to fall apart, I’ve got kids and family or work responsibilities, I can’t afford to do that.” But then there is another voice that says, “I can’t go on like this. I have to do something to heal myself.” Then they come to me. In fact, women go away from the workshop feeling nourished and understanding themselves more and feeling stronger.

What you do in the workshop?

I create an environment that makes it easier for women to just take a little bit of time for themselves. Often they are there for everyone else. So it’s important that one takes time for oneself, when one can say, “For this moment I will take care of myself.”

I offer a non-judgemental environment, an environment where I am just accepting each woman, whether she is feeling low or depressed, or afraid; whatever it is, there’s a space for her.

You have said that there’s a connection between the environment and the feminine. What is this connection?

The feminine is a universal quality that’s in both women and men. For the past 6,000 years we have experienced the violation of the feminine. And that has happened both with women and with the natural world. Whether it’s the exploitation of women or the exploitation of forests, it is the same. That’s the connection. If we want to transform

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the environmental situation in the world, then we have to restore the respect for the feminine. Environmental crisis is the symptom of the problem. The forests are going, the rivers are polluted, the land is degraded, because the feminine is being either squashed, violated or just not present. All of Nature is feminine. So if you violate or control and suppress the feminine, you violate or control and suppress women.

You also violate, control and suppress the Earth. We’re in the mood of domination and violation. It’s not just men doing it: we’re all doing it. All of us have lost this connection with the feminine to a lesser or greater degree.

Through ritual we can access parts of ourselves that are not available to us in any other way How does your work address this?

If we’re carrying out our work from a place of love and from the recognition of the sacred, then we create more love and a sense of the sacred in the world. First of all we recognise the divinity of ourselves, the sacredness of our body, and we see that this life and all of Nature is a miracle. It is precious, it is beautiful, it is an exquisite expression of love; therefore why would we want to harm it?

If we were in love with ourselves, the choices we would make about the planet would be to cherish and care for our world. There is no separation between ourselves and the world. So my personal way of dealing with the environmental crisis is to get people in touch with their body, their soul and their own Nature, with their very sacred essence, and through that, their heart will naturally want to care for the world. It’s no longer a moral choice, but a choice of love.

How do you put such ideals into practice?

The Earth Heart centre, where I carry out my workshops, is as environmentally sustainable as possible. I’m running it on heat pumps and solar panels. It’s as low-carbon as it can possibly be. We eat organic food as much as possible. But the point of our centre is to show people that if you live a low-carbon lifestyle, you can still live a rich and full life. I want people to realise that when they come here, they can feel inspired by the natural world, as being here is a total immersion into it.

Earth Heart is situated on four acres of land in the middle of the Forest of Dean, which is one of Britain’s ancient forests.

We have a spring-fed lake and we have a seven-bedroom house, where we’ve built an ecological temple. It is a meeting room/workshop space built from trees of this forest. For me this place feels like a beautiful union of the masculine and the feminine. The union of Nature and spirit.

Mukti Mitchell is a sailor, an author, and director of CosyHome Company. www.cosyhomecompany.co.uk For more information on courses at Earth Heart, visit www.jewelswingfield.com

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P R E VIEW

UPLIFT: Oneness in Action Chip Richards introduces a festival in the “land of first light dreaming” “When we join together in small groups, festivals and larger gatherings … we hold the code to more intelligent and loving life right here among us now.” – Barbara Marx Hubbard

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n the edge of the township of Mullumbimby, in the north-eastern corner of the Australian state of New South Wales, there is a modest white house on a slightly larger than average block of land. If you were to walk down the bright orange path and open the front door, you would find that the front bedroom is in reality a festival production headquarters, the study is a film studio, the guest room belongs to the web portal team, and the living room is a boardroom and gathering place for project leaders, production teams and visiting guest speakers.

This is the global production headquarters of UPLIFT. UPLIFT is a four-day festival of transformation held annually in the nearby town and cultural centre of Byron Bay, Australia’s most easterly point, long revered by local Indigenous people as the “land of first light dreaming”.

It brings together pioneers in science, spirituality, health, sustainability, creativity, youth and Indigenous wisdom to explore dynamic solutions to our planet’s greatest challenges and discover new pathways of working, living and creating together for the good of all.

In its three years of existence, this diverse collection of guests and presenters who gather for a week of ceremony and creative exploration prior to the UPLIFT festival has not only given birth to an extremely interactive live and virtual event (with keynote presentations, open forums, in-depth workshops, classes and creative expression sessions), but also given rise to a wide variety of unique collaborations, partnerships and ongoing initiatives. These include projects to treat water in India, empower inner-city youth, support peace and reconciliation in the Middle East, and bring unity to Indigenous cultures around the world.

In the words of Bharat Mitra, the founder of the company Organic India and UPLIFT, the purpose of the festival is “co-creating oneness in action in the world”, such that not only is UPLIFT a great convergence of consciousness, but it also serves as an annual celebration of the initiatives that have come to fruition since the last festival.

What makes UPLIFT unique for many people is a sense of unity in diversity. For presenters, many of whom are already acknowledged as pioneers in their own field, UPLIFT offers an opportunity to collaborate with like-minded visionaries from other walks of life and to weave their unique thread into a larger tapestry. For festival participants, who come from around Australia (or tune in live via www.upliftconnect.com), UPLIFT is an invitation to immerse themselves in self-discovery and the creation of a new collective story. This year celebrates the return of several festival favourites – including cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, spiritual evolutionary Barbara Marx Hubbard, medical clown Patch Adams and peace activist Satish Kumar – and welcomes a wave of newcomers: sacred economist Charles Eisenstein, film-maker Jamie Catto, leadership consultant Tim ‘Mac’ Macartney, peace activist Scarlett Lewis, and many more.

UPLIFT is an acronym for Universal Peace and Love In a Festival of Transformation, and since its inception the founders and organisers have developed a very inclusive interpretation of ‘festival’ – such that any authentic expression of the underlying intention of sarvodaya (Sanskrit for ‘UPLIFTment for all’) is recognised as a form of the festival taking shape in the world. In this way, UPLIFT has the possibility of happening every day all around us, and all those who feel called to the mission of generating more peace, love and new possibility for the planet are already playing a vital part in the global community of UPLIFT. In the words of Bharat Mitra, “Each one of us has our own unique gifts, purpose and role to play in this magnificent existence … and it is only when we all come together that this new era can manifest. We truly can create oneness in action in the world.”

Chip Richards is Creative Director for the UPLIFTconnect.com media channel and an MC/Presenter at the main UPLIFT festival.

The UPLIFT festival takes place from 11 to 14 December 2014. www.upliftfestival.com

Wish-Fulfilling Tree (after Robert Beer) by Amanda Erlenbach

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B OTA N I C A L C O O K I N G E T H I C A L L I V I N G

Sweet Chestnuts, Sweet Memories This Christmas, one meal will hold special significance for Susan Clark

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his column is for someone very special who left us earlier this year. To one man she was a wife, to two a mother, to four a grandmother and to others a colleague and friend. She made an impact on me the moment we first met (she was already well into her seventies) when she told me she spent a day or two a week “looking after the old people” at the local day centre.

That should tell you everything you need to know about Joyce Hissey: a good woman who lived a good life. She had just celebrated her 85th birthday in May when it was as if she simply decided it was time to go. And that’s what she did. She died quietly, leaving a huge amount of love and affection in her wake.

For one family, this will be their first Christmas without Joyce. But I can promise you we will be thinking of her, not least because we will be cooking – on Christmas Day itself – a very special sweet chestnut vegetarian nut roast, and in a moment I will explain why this will put Joyce very firmly at our Christmas table.

Sweet chestnut fruits when the nights draw in and we can hardly believe that the long, warm summer has been put to bed. There is a tree near my house that produces a prolific number of sweet chestnuts, but you need to beat the squirrels to it. So I’m ready from about the end of October to collect just enough to make the Christmas nut roast.

But the sweet chestnut does not surrender with ease. You need to mind that prickly outer case and carefully prise the cherished nuts from within their cosy casement.

As I harvest my sweet chestnuts this year I will think about how it was the Romans who first introduced Castanea sativa to Britain and that the oldest living specimen is at Mount Etna and is reckoned to be 2,000 years old. I will also remember how our family gathered to find the perfect place to scatter Joyce’s ashes just as summer began to give way to autumn and how instead of finding the perfect tree close to where she had lived a full and happy life, it found us.

And as we stood quietly before it, each of us remembering a different version of Joyce, I thought about how we could come back, gather just a few of the nuts and make a special dish in her honour that Joyce would have pronounced “Delicious!”

Joyce Hissey, 21 May 1929 – 24 June 2014

Vitality Notes Although they contain less protein than most other nuts, sweet chestnuts are a rich source of immune-boosting vitamin C and so the perfect tonic as winter chills and splutters begin to set in. You can also make a gluten-free sweet chestnut flour or a purée that you can use to thicken nourishing winter soups.

Illustration by Ronelle van Wyk www.africantapestry.wordpress.com

Sweet Chestnut Christmas Loaf Ingredients 450g sweet chestnuts, skinned and chopped roughly 25g butter (or dairy-free alternative) 2 medium-size onions, skinned and diced 100g plump, dried cranberries 50g toasted pine nuts 350g fresh breadcrumbs (white or brown) 75g vegetarian suet 3 tbsp horseradish sauce juice of a lemon salt & pepper to taste

To make the loaf: Soften the onions in the butter until translucent, but don’t let them turn brown or crispy at the edges.

Add the chopped sweet chestnuts and all the other ingredients except the toasted pine nuts and the cranberries. Cook this mix for 10 minutes, remove from the heat and add the pine nuts, which give the loaf a good crunchy texture, and the cranberries, which bring sweetness and a Christmas flourish.

Line a 1kg loaf tin with baking parchment and fill it to the two-thirds mark. If you are making this ahead of Christmas, freeze the loaf, and defrost it on Christmas Eve ready to bake on Christmas Day. If you are using it straight away, bake at 180°C for 40 minutes or until cooked through. You are aiming for a long, thin loaf that you can slice into elegant fingers to serve as the star of your vegetarian Christmas meal.

Susan Clark is a vegetarian food writer and cook.

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A Bone That God Can Whistle Through Peter Abbs introduces Rowan Williams’ most recent collection of poems

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owan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, is a theologian, scholar and poet. His engagement with a long tradition of thinking informs his poetry, giving it a complex aura of feeling and reference. As well as offering his own honed versions of the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and a number of modern Welsh poets, he writes about the predicament of Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Simone Weil. He is a conservationist poet working the inherited soil to a fine tilth, showing how it is always capable of new growth and a further flowering. But in the first instance a poem is always a personal struggle with language to create a resonant and memorable pattern.

Rowan Williams writes: I’ve been trying to write poetry since my teens, though (predictably) most of what I wrote between 15 and 25 was pretty terrible. What I began to learn in my twenties was the crucial importance of attending to the structure – to the sounds, to the placing of sounds, the balancing of stresses, and so forth. Without the struggle to make a resonant pattern, poetry is going to be flaccid and dull. So for me it has a great deal to do with a sort of inner listening. A phrase or a picture drops into my mind, or something I see suddenly opens up unexpectedly as mysterious and suggestive; and I ask, “Where does this come from? And where is it going?”

And I listen to hear the context of this phrase and to find out what made it possible and what makes it possible.

Sometimes this is a surprisingly rapid process, sometimes painfully slow; but it’s always listening so as to hear that little bit more than what ‘ordinary’ language tells me.

Nietzsche: Twilight At the clinic, he broke windows, shouting that there were guns behind them, desperate not to be shielded by the thin, deceiving skin that looked as if it wasn’t there. He liked the opaque curtain or the open sky; not this.

His mother took him home; out for walks, she told him, Put on your nice professor’s face, when they met friends. His head grew vast, pulling him downwards till he could not breathe.

At night he roared; during the day, My voice is not nice, he would whisper. White, swollen, his skull drowned him like a stone, his breath, at the end, the sound of footsteps on broken glass.

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Strata Florida

From the Welsh of T. Gwynn Jones Wind murmurs in the trees at Ystrad Fflur but does not wake the dozen abbots dozing in their tombs while the leaves shake.

Dead with his clever verses, Dafydd too lies in his bed Among forgotten warlords, swords dulled, armour shed.

Summer will come and rouse the wind-stripped trees.

But not the men.

Stones unobtrusively decay. They will not stand again.

Defeat, oblivion, rotting monuments of dead belief.

Why is it then I find no words, here, quietly, for private grief?

Angel from the German of Rainer Maria Rilke He bends his head away, says his hard No to everything that might commit him, tie him down, because there’s always something circling, always just about to land, something enormous pushing up through his heart.

And the deep blackness of the sky is full, for him, of shapes, and any one of them could summon him – come here! see this! So for God’s sake, don’t try to put what weighs you down into those airy hands of his; because it’s you they’d grab for.

In the middle of the night they’d burrow in and scrabble like a maniac round your house, and clutch you, wrestle you to the floor, squeezing and kneading, wanting to sculpt and hollow, to push you, break you out of the form you know that clothes you round.

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Burn Moor (Double Rainbow), 2013 by David Tress

www.davidtress.co.uk

Advent Calendar

Simone Weil at Ashford

He will come like last leaf ’s fall.

One night when the November wind has flayed the trees to bone, and earth wakes choking on the mould, the soft shroud’s folding.

Upstairs into the air: a young god, pupils dilated, blows into his little flute.

At each stair’s end, he breaks it, reaches for a new one, climbs again. Below the crowd blurs, hums, ahead the sky is even, dark from the bare sun.

Breaking the last instrument, he waits, and in a while they will tear out his heart, now it is still and simple as the rise and fall of tides. The crowd and the sun breathe him in.

He will come like frost.

One morning when the shrinking earth opens on mist, to find itself arrested in the net of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.

One evening when the bursting red December sun draws up the sheet and penny-masks its eye to yield the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come, will come like crying in the night, like blood, like breaking, as the earth writhes to toss him free.

He will come like child.

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No, we don’t walk like him. We stagger up the steps in padded jackets, moonboots, crash-helmets, filters and shades. In gravity.

Some of us try to strip; but what’s beneath is very cold, even under the dark bare sun: a stiff, gaunt crying, I must not be loved, and I must not be seen, and if I cannot walk like god, at least I can be light and hungry, hollowing my guts till I’m a bone the sentenced god can whistle through.

The poems have been taken from The Poems of Rowan Williams published by Carcanet Press, 2014.

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

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Realigning Us with the Natural World

Forest by Alice Shirley

India Windsor-Clive reports on a campaign bringing together artists and scientists to communicate concerns for wildlife and conservation

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www.aliceshirley.com

Biophilia, n.: an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems; an innate love for the natural world

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t is estimated that around 3% of charitable donations goes towards protecting the environment and, of that, only a fraction is targeted effectively. Synchronicity Earth is a young, Londonbased charity working to identify the gaps in global conservation in order to better serve the environment we live in and the species we live amongst. Underpinned by holistic thinking and evidence-based action, Synchronicity Earth’s mission is to increase and improve the impact of environmental philanthropy to effect change where it is most needed. An innovative and inspiring way of raising awareness and

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concern for biodiversity is in its use of creativity to promote and encourage the changes in thought needed to rekindle biophilia.

Biophilia is Synchronicity Earth’s campaign to help bring human society back into alignment with the living world.

According to Laura Miller, the charity’s executive director, “Biophilia is more than just the love of the natural world.

It is a guiding principle that – if followed – would create the conditions for resilient societies that replenish and restore ecosystems; that promote environmental and social justice.” Launching this November, the campaign celebrates 50 years of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, the world’s most comprehensive source of information on the global conservation status of plant, animal and fungus species.

Something of a barometer of natural life, the IUCN Red List is an independent inventory compiled by around 9,000 scientists from around the world and includes over 74,000 species, of which approximately 20,000 are threatened by extinction and around 850 are probably extinct.

Although Synchronicity Earth has a comprehensive scientific base, with extensive analysis used to identify priorities for conservation, science doesn’t always compel us to act. Valuing the potential in art’s dialogue with Nature, Biophilia employs artists interested in the complexities of the natural world to engage with ideas emotively: to move people in ways science cannot. Visual narratives offer the emotional and sensory impact needed to engage a wider audience; it can be accessed openly across all areas of society and has the potential to be a process by which we can refocus attention.

Art plays a key role in guiding trends that shape and develop culture – society often looks to artists for a visual response to the world – and it is now more than ever, in an age of social media, branding, advertising and the internet, that art can be employed in conservation. Founding Synchronicity Earth trustee Jessica Sweidan says: “Art plays a vital role in making our impacts on the planet visible, challenging us to see what is happening and discuss its implications.”

From birds soaring high above mountaintops to sediments on the ocean floor, from gorillas and other endangered species to threatened Indigenous fishing communities, the artists involved in Synchronicity Earth’s recent exhibition at Gallery 8 in central London, Disappearing Nature: Artists Supporting Life on Earth, contemplate our relationship with Nature. Film stills of the African Eagle Owl and Harrier Hawk by leading contemporary artist Jeremy Deller explore notions of the wild and primal, whilst offering a rare close-up of the fanned feathers and glassy eyes of these majestic birds of prey. Dan Holdsworth’s still and contemplative photograph of a barren Icelandic landscape left by a glacier, one of the planet’s great markers of time and evolution, features a concrete bridge in the distance signifying human intervention in the natural landscape. Also exhibiting was Alice Shirley, who has become something of an artist-in-residence for the campaign, with her colourful brush beautifully illustrating the different habitats and species that populate our planet.

Marcus Coates’ photograph Self-Portrait Underground

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(Worcester) is a playful yet powerful reflection on our relationship with Nature. Self-taken, buried in a pit beneath a meadow with a shutter release in the photographer’s hand, it simulates hiding from destruction by humans. Coates becomes physically part of the field, suggesting a subjectivity that is indistinguishable from its surroundings, yet remains fully visible; it is the “idea of seeing ourselves in Nature, making our identity partial in a way, so we’re not totally autonomous and we haven’t got this screen around us”.

In a discussion at the exhibition’s opening between the anthropologist Jerome Lewis and Marcus Coates, both described the need to see Nature as indistinguishable from ourselves, as Indigenous communities refer to Nature as indistinct from themselves. In Coates’ case art is not about Nature itself but about the relationship between humans and

“It’s not actually the animal itself, it’s the relationship between me and that animal” – Marcus Coates Nature: “it’s not actually the animal itself, it’s the relationship between me and that animal. That’s why I became interested in art. It’s our relationship to it, from a position of sameness, not as separate.”

Our relationship with the ocean is explored by two artists: Tania Kovats, in Where Seas Meet, comprising two connected glass vessels containing seawater from the point where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean to the north of New Zealand; and Mariele Neudecker, in her video Dark Years Away. Created in collaboration with Alex Rogers, a leading world marine biologist and adviser, Neudecker’s footage documents an underwater excavator collecting specimens at the bottom of the world’s deepest oceans.

Bringing together artists and scientists over mutual interests and concerns highlights the power of interdisciplinary dialogue. As a panel discussion between artists Zana Briski and Tania Kovats and scientist Simon Stuart – chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission – showed, art and science share obsessive qualities. Although very different in form, both disciplines require certain measures of curiosity, tenacity and perseverance. There’s a shared desire to communicate their findings and verify the value of their obsessions. However, artistic curiosity doesn’t have to be proved; nor does it comply with the strict rules that science operates under. As Stuart describes how one set of questions leads to another set of questions, becoming more and more detailed and more and more difficult to communicate to the outside world, Kovats describes art’s open and uninhibited investigation. This is where art can work with science, operating in a communicative capacity to relate, to emote and to wonder. Art for conservation’s sake may help rekindle what we know but may be forgetting.

The launch event for Biophilia takes place on Saturday 22 November in the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum. www.synchronicityearth.org India Windsor-Clive is a freelance writer.

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The Art of Rebellion A pioneering exhibition examines the powerful role of objects created by grass roots movements, as tools for social change

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ocusing on a period from the late 1970s to today, the Disobedient Objects exhibtion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London displays arts of rebellion, from around the world, that demonstrate how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity. Many of the ‘objects’ in this exhibition were produced under pressure with few resources. Some of them may appear rough or unfinished, but they are all thoughtful responses to complex situations.

“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely… I would say that there is good reason to study the dynamics of disobedience, the spark behind all knowledge.”

Above: ¿Dónde están nuestros hijos?

(Where are our children?)

Santiago, Chile, 1979 During the Pinochet dictatorship, women in Chile made arpilleras (appliquéd textiles), such as this.

Crafted from basic resources and sold through solidarity networks abroad, these arpilleras provided vital income for the women who made them. Sometimes dismissed as folk art, arpilleras existed for a time below the radar of political censorship, raising awareness and strengthening solidarity outside Chile. Today they serve as living memories of the violence and hardships experienced then.

Roberta Bacic’s collection © Martin Melaugh

Above left and above right: Badges of the struggle against apartheid South Africa and other countries, about 1980–94 These badges were created by South Africans and liberation groups, forced into exile during the apartheid, a system of racial segregation, as well as by international solidarity groups. The badges demonstrated unity in the face of censorship.

International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

– Gaston Bachelard, ‘Prometheus’ Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, 1961

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Top right: Trini dolls Mexico, about 1996 In 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) emerged, asserting Indigenous autonomy against neoliberal capitalism. These dolls represent Trini, commander comandante of the Zapat­ istas, and are masked versions of the traditional Mexican Chamulan dolls.

Sold to visitors, the dolls are a means of symbolic and economic solidarity.

Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Middle right: Still the Enemy Within, by Ed Hall London, 2013 Fabric banners have been an integral part of the spectacle of marches and demonstrations for trade unions and campaign groups since the 19th century.

This piece was created by contemporary banner maker Ed Hall for the South Yorkshire Community branch of Unite.

It responds to Margaret Thatcher’s comment on the striking miners and their families who resisted her reforms as “the enemy within”.

Bottom right: Stamped dollar bill,

by Ivan Cash & Andy Dao United States, 2011 There is a long history of defacing coins and banknotes to put a political message into circulation. Currency represents the face of the state and tampering with it is an illegal act in many countries.

In 2011, inspired by the Occupy movement, artists Ivan Cash and Andy Dao created a set of stamps to illustrate the widening wealth disparity in America. In this example it is revealed that the richest 400 people in America have as much wealth as the poorest 150 million.

Disobedient Objects is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London until 1 February 2015. www.vam.ac.uk

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A DISMAL SCIENCE, SETTLED BY SPREADSHEETS Ed Mayo agrees with much, but not all, of a new critique of economics I Spend, Therefore I Am: The True Cost of Economics Philip Roscoe Penguin Viking, 2014 ISBN: 9780670922826

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ritz Koenig’s sculpture The Sphere is a giant bronze globe that symbolises world peace through trade. Commissioned to mark the opening of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, it stood for 30 years in the open public plaza between the two towers – a popular spot for workers having their lunch. In the September 2001 attacks, the sculpture was scarred and holed, but it survived.

“It was a sculpture; now it’s a monument,” said Koenig afterwards.

“It now has a different beauty, one I could never imagine.”

The idea that free exchange could enrich those who take part and bind them in peace and prosperity has informed the field of economics from the earliest days, explains Philip Roscoe. Today, economics as a discipline is more influential than ever, extending into a confident ‘economics explains everything’ genre of books, from global policy through to trivia on why cups of coffee in railway stations are so expensive or whether swimming pools are more dangerous than guns.

And yet, as the story of Koenig’s sculpture suggests, conflict remains.

“The discipline’s Enlightenment pioneers”, Roscoe writes, “would have struggled to imagine a world where more prosperity, more goods and more wealth could somehow impoverish us, but contemporary psychologists have proved what philosophers have long

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The Sphere by Fritz Koenig

claimed: increases in wealth and status can make us unhappy.”

Roscoe is an academic at the University of St Andrews, with an eclectic eye in terms of research around economic life. He draws on his own experience in an investment firm to

Increases in wealth and status can make us unhappy assess the way in which “individuals, failed by mainstream finance, are forced to fend for themselves in an unfriendly market where they become the prey of those very same financial institutions.” He looks at how online dating and university rankings start by offering descriptions to help people make choices, but end up changing

Photo © Mario Tama/Getty Images

those choices fundamentally – reducing “a social good, rich in intrinsic worth … to an instrumental, short-term lever for personal advancement.”

In health, he looks at the rise of the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) as a way to guide decisions on who gets what. This is calculated by the number of years you have left to live, multiplied by the expected quality of those years, with 1 being perfectly healthy, 0 being dead, or even −1, worse than dead. “The defence of the QALY is, of course, that it saves us from the arbitrary nature of human judgement … but if we pursue and identify each of the decisions that has gone into its construction, we will arrive at moments of expert judgement and, equally arbitrary, assumptions.”

Economics is not, therefore, just about description. As we internalise

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REVIEWS “the rules, and expectations of economic governance … so we become the very creature on which economic theory is based”. Roscoe is not alone in arguing this, and the only weakness of this readable and important book is that it sidelines the long and rich history of economic dissent that challenges and, critically, provides alternatives to the orthodox view.

The risk of mainstream economics is that it can imprison us. Roscoe

retells the story of Nicholas Stern on climate change – “a respected figure, an expert, a pillar of the global establishment, [who] tells us that nearly half of the world’s species may cease to exist if temperatures rise by as little as 2 degrees C, and that there will be 200 million refugees sleeping out on Europe’s collective lawn”. Instead of exploring this, the debate that followed among the policy elite was about the discount rate that Stern had

applied in his analysis. Because Stern’s argument was framed in the language of economics, it then became a debate about method, not about ethics.

“Once the discussion has been dragged onto economic terrain,” the author concludes, “it can only be settled with calculators and spreadsheets.”

Ed Mayo is Secretary General Co-operatives UK and blogs at www.edmayo.coop

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The State We’re In Mike Jay wonders whether the age of big government is ending The State Is Out of Date: We Can Do It Better Gregory Sams Disinformation Books, 2013 ISBN: 9781938875069

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regory Sams opens his book with a quotation from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the pamphlet that inspired the American Revolution in 1776: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right…” His point is that we assume modern societies require central command and control, and have difficulty imagining how they might function without it. As a result we take it for granted that state government is necessary, and limit ourselves to discussing its complexion.

But what if we no longer need it at all?

The State Is Out of Date argues that most, if not all, state functions either could be performed better in other ways, or don’t need to be done in the first place. It is organised into short, readable chapters, peppered with pithy quotations, from Lao Tzu to Lenin, and examples drawn from sources ranging from ancient Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire to the FBI and the Common Agricultural Policy. Unlike many anarchist manifestos, this is not an attempt to improve human nature, but rather just to arrange things better. Sams has been accruing this material for decades, and his book is densely packed with smart and original thinking.

Sams’ roots are in the ecological movement – he founded Harmony/Whole Earth Foods in the 1970s – and his thinking is informed by his pioneering engagement with chaos theory in the 1990s (from which he drew the insight that what people call ‘chaos’ often works fine). His critique of the state transcends the politics of left and right. Though he sees consumer culture as wasteful and self-destructive, he regards multinational corporations as an essential part of any post-state future: unlike governments, they don’t coerce you into buying their products or imprison you if you don’t.

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He sees the insurance industry in particular as a valuable model for managing risk, taking on debt and cutting crime without the need for state intervention.

Some elements of the post-state landscape are easier to visualise than others. Government regulation of medicines and foods, for example, could simply be replaced with the trade licensing systems and trust networks that consumers naturally develop in their own interests; vast projects such as the bloated and corrupt ‘War on Drugs’ could be abandoned tomorrow. But Sams accepts that we need complex structures to manage some aspects of modern societies, and that some of their post-state forms can only be guessed at. Behind everything looms a banking system and money supply that has become so opaque and dysfunctional that its collapse may be inevitable. If so, he reckons, bring it on.

As its title suggests, The State Is Out of Date is a critique rather than a list of solutions. Its subtitle, We Can Do It Better, points out the direction of travel. It is not a call for revolution – modern states are extremely well defended against direct confrontation – though Sams is attracted to ‘fluffy’ positive protest and subversive culture-jamming, and offers spirited tales of his engagement with direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s. Perhaps the most powerful weapon in the hands of the people is the gradual withdrawal of activity and energy from the state – which, appropriately enough, is already happening without any organisation.

The previous version of the book was titled Uncommon Sense, a quality even more striking in this new edition.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pronounced the death of monarchy and the divine right of kings, and called for its replacement with the modern state. Gregory Sams, in the same spirit, is calling time on the modern state and asking us to imagine what comes next.

Mike Jay is an author, historian and curator. www.mikejay.net

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A BRIGHT SOLAR FUTURE Jonathon Porritt hails a hope-filled guide to energy policy The Burning Answer: A User’s Guide to the Solar Revolution Keith Barnham Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014 ISBN: 9780297869634

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had a stroke of luck with Keith Barnham’s The Burning Answer. I found myself on a long weekend in Wales (sunny spells, punctuated by quite a lot of the wet stuff), which meant I could read it cover to cover. Even so, I nearly didn’t. I nearly gave up by around page 150, beaten into submission by this eminent physicist’s account of the semi-conductor revolution, the nature of light, Einstein’s legacy, electromagnetism, the Manhattan Project and quantum mechanics, with a good dose of cosmology thrown in for good measure.

All of which is, of course, directly or indirectly relevant to Barnham’s real story: the solar revolution, which is already in the process of transforming our entire global energy economy.

But it was just too much to cope with for a non-scientist like me – a barrier rather than a helpful introduction to the brilliant second half of the book that follows. So my advice to other scientifically illiterate readers is this: start on page 145!

And what a solar feast awaits you! Forget the idea of solar energy as a nice little niche on the margins of conventional energy systems; a giddying and glorious plethora of solar technologies lie at the heart of the all-renewable energy system that awaits us.

Barnham’s no solar fruitcake. After an extremely successful career in experimental particle physics, he switched to researching solar energy before getting stuck in as a solar entrepreneur – inventing a solar cell that is three times as efficient as the most efficient solar cells on the market today.

He’s hugely knowledgeable about the industry, and about the barriers to success, and uncomplicatedly, joyfully passionate about its transformative potential – for the money-poor (but ‘sun-rich’) world as much as for the money-rich world.

He’s also very clear why nuclear energy will play no part in this transformation. The nexus between the military, nuclear weapons and nuclear power is still a critical factor in the choices that nations make about different energy technologies.

His hypothesis that all nuclear weapons countries lag behind the field on solar and renewables precisely because of that nexus of relationships and money is compelling.

For the same reason, he has little time for the ‘all of the above’ brigade – as in the idea that we need renewables, efficiency and nuclear to get the task of decarbonisation completed in a timely manner. People like James Lovelock and George Monbiot have simply got it wrong: everything they hope new nuclear will do for a low-carbon world can be done far more cost-effectively (and safely) with a 100% renewables strategy.

Barnham also takes on David (‘Hot Air’) MacKay, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate

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Sun over Waterfall by Stuart Daly www.springoncemore.com

If politicians really understood the threat of accelerating climate change, we would be witnessing a dramatically different response Change, one of today’s most influential and problematic solar-sceptics. He gently demolishes some of MacKay’s more erroneous assertions, simultaneously demonstrating that DECC’s much admired ‘Pathways to 2050’ are pretty much rigged to ‘prove’ the need for nuclear.

Both technologically and economically, Barnham argues that the solar revolution is doable right now. But that’s just the start: digging deep into the solar innovation pipeline, he reveals the extraordinary wealth of breakthroughs (on materials, costs, efficiencies, integration, storage and so on) that are now bearing down on bemused politicians and shellshocked diehards in the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries.

As someone who still bears the scars of endless battles trying to get some of these breakthroughs deployed in the market, Barnham knows as well as anyone the scale of the challenge ahead. If politicians really understood the incomparably serious threat of accelerating climate change

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REVIEWS (the burning platform for which solar is indeed the burning answer), we would be witnessing a dramatically different response from leaders today.

Why is it, he asks, that politicians are only too happy to commit tens of billions of euros to the international collaboration on nuclear fusion at Cadarache in France, knowing full well that nothing useful will come of this investment for at least another 30 years, but can’t even stump up a few million to establish a proper international solar laboratory? (Back to that military nexus, I’m afraid!)

But the overwhelming impression I take away from The Burning Answer is one of a slowly building but completely unstoppable momentum behind this solar revolution. This makes it one of the most exciting and genuinely hopeful books I’ve read in a long time – notwithstanding the impenetrability of some of the accompanying science!

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future and is the author of The World We Made. www.forumforthefuture.org

Climate Questions and Rather Harder Answers Peter Ainsworth welcomes a primer on our biggest environmental challenge Climate-challenged Society John S. Dryzek et al.

Oxford University Press, 2013 ISBN: 9780199660117

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here has been so much polemical ink spilt on the question of climate change that it’s refreshing to come across a book that, almost, has no opinion to express at all – other than that we have a problem. This is an academic work, put together by three professors eminent in their respective fields of social theory, ecological economics and environmental politics. It may be academic – the number of bibliographical references exceeds its slender 147 pages – but don’t be put off. It is a highly readable ride around the political, economic and social conundrums posed by the biggest challenge faced by humanity.

The starting point is an unequivocal acceptance of the overwhelming scientific opinion that human activity is causing our climate to change in ways that threaten global stability; the authors assert that “climate change will challenge the human community in many ways for centuries to come.”

This is not, therefore, a contribution to the debate between those who accept the scientific evidence about humaninduced climate change and those who do not. There is some analysis of that debate and of the reasons why, like some stubborn weed, it refuses to go away. The finger is pointed firmly at “organized denial” of the science, “financed by fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil and run by rightwing think tanks in the US such as the Heritage Foundation” which “aims at winning, not understanding or reasoning”.

The bad news is that, according to this analysis, the deniers are the only people who are winning. Politicians seem incapable of delivering the kind of radical long-term policies that are needed within their national boundaries, let alone globally; in the US, Canada and Australia in particular there is potent and active hostility to the science (sometimes fuelled

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by religion); despite a huge investment in renewable energy, China has become the world’s largest emitter of CO2; India seems disengaged; the UN process has stalled; economists squabble about how to account for potential disaster; climate change scientists disagree about details and are hung out to dry by unfamiliar encounters with the media; and such policies as do exist, for example carbon trading, have been easily subverted by vested interests. Not surprisingly, as a result, the global public is confused and inclined to believe that – if there is a problem at all – it’s somebody else’s job to sort it out.

For all their erudition and deep knowledge, the authors are short of solutions. In classic academic mode, suggestions are made and then countered. For example, they maintain that face-to-face engagement with the public on the issue would be the best way of persuading people that there is something to be done; then they recognise the practical impossibility of doing that. On the question of climate justice, they delineate the issue and then refer to the need for “engaging people ... in democratic deliberation about just adaptation policy”. That won’t work either.

Another thing that won’t work, but is explored, is the “biomedical modification of humans to make them better at mitigating climate change” in order to deliver the “pharmalogical enhancement of altruism and empathy”. The authors don’t endorse that approach, thank goodness. GM crops are disturbing enough; but GM humans? The authors also raise – and then question – the idea of seeding the oceans with iron to increase their ability to absorb CO2; and then there’s the notion of injecting sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block solar radiation. These are counsels of despair.

So this book raises far more questions than it answers. But if you want to know what the questions are, it is a great place to start.

Peter Ainsworth is a board member of the Environment Agency, a former Conservative MP and a founder member of the Robertsbridge Group. www.robertsbridgegroup.com

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Trees of Enchantment Caspar Henderson dreams of a wild and beautiful future The New Sylva: A Discourse of Forest & Orchard Trees for the Twenty-First Century Gabriel Hemery & Sarah Simblet Bloomsbury, 2014 ISBN: 9781408835449

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ver the last two and a half million years or so, successive ice ages have smothered much of what is now the British Isles in enormous glaciers, which scoured the land. Each time, following the retreat of the ice, the forests have returned, carpeting the hills and valleys, mountains and estuaries, first with species such as birch and hazel, and then Scots pine, alder, oak, elm, lime, ash, beech, holly, hornbeam and others. After the ice retreated around 11,000 years ago, woodlands once again established themselves, climaxing in almost complete coverage of the archipelago in forest dominated by oak, alder, lime and Scots pine by around 6,000 years ago. A squirrel could have walked and hopped almost from one end of Britain to the other without touching the ground.

Then humans began to arrive. Though in small numbers at first, they nevertheless transformed the landscape, slaughtering animal species that played a role in forest ecology and beginning a process of felling, burning and managing woodland that has, with important variations, expanded and continued to the present day. A densely populated island, Britain today has the lowest forest cover in Europe after Ireland, with some 10% under trees compared to a European average of more than 30%.

But no story is complete without its paradoxes and contradictions. The peoples of these islands have also cherished trees and woodlands – and not merely for their utility as sources of fuel, forage and materials for tools and construction. Recognition of the beauty and the spiritual importance of individual trees and wooded places, and the deep connections they can awaken in us, dates back as far as we know. It may come as a surprise to modern readers that John Evelyn’s Sylva, a treatise on forestry published by the Royal Society in 1664, which placed economic and practical concerns – notably the pressing need to provide sufficient oak to supply England’s navy – front and centre, includes an entire book on sacred and standing groves.

Rapid technological and social change, climate change, flooding and other factors pose massive challenges to our forests and woodlands today. Education, dialogue, practical everyday involvement by citizens, and political engagement have never been more important. The New Sylva, which was published earlier this year on the 350th anniversary of Evelyn’s great work and takes inspiration from its illustrious predecessor, will be a valuable and enduring aid in the struggle.

The New Sylva describes the nature of Britain’s diverse

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Illustration by Sarah Simblet

and changing trees, their cultivation, their use and their management. Gabriel Hemery’s text is a precise, fascinating, fluent, wide-ranging and hard-headed synthesis: an excellent popular introduction to tree biology and forestry. But the book is more than that. Together with his co-author, Sara Simblet, whose 200 drawings make up at least as substantial a part of the book as its words, Hemery is out to celebrate and inspire passion and love – to bring more readers into the camp of those who, like William Blake, can be moved to tears of joy by a tree. The drawings really are astonishing: they are fine and vivid, combining anatomical precision with qualities that arouse intense emotion – at least among those to whom I have shown the book. The places where they were drawn are listed so that the reader can – and this would be a worthwhile way to spend a good part of one’s time if it were possible – go to observe and meditate upon the originals.

This book is gorgeous, precious and important. I would put it in the hands of a distracted small child or a jaded adult and defy them not to be enchanted. The New Sylva deserves a place alongside a select number of books on our trees and woods, amongst them Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, Richard Mabey’s The Ash and the Beech, Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands and Thomas Pakenham’s Meetings With Remarkable Trees, as well as works by such as George Monbiot in Feral, who are ready to dream boldly about a wild and beautiful future.

Caspar Henderson is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. He is writing A New Map of Wonders.

November/December 2014

REVIEWS

Senses of Place Greg Neale reviews three highly different works of Nature writing Home Country Richard Mabey Little Toller Books, 2014 ISBN: 9781908213211

Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field John Lewis-Stempel Doubleday, 2014 ISBN: 9780857521453

On Silbury Hill Adam Thorpe Little Toller Books, 2014 ISBN: 9781908213242

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ature writing is currently enjoying something of a golden age in Britain, though perhaps that might equally be described as the current state of Nature reading. As discussed elsewhere in these pages, the natural world and writers’ reflections on it are attracting new audiences as well as encouraging new interpretations.

Resurgence & Ecologist readers thinking about seasonal gifts might therefore find inspiration in these three books, each reflecting a differing way of viewing the natural world.

Richard Mabey’s publishers describe him as “the godfather of contemporary nature writing”, and certainly few others have written so extensively and discursively over the past four decades as he has, whether in his encyclopedic Flora Britannica, his writings on natural food and foraging or, more recently, his account in Nature Cure of how the landscape of East Anglia helped him confront depression.

Home Country originally appeared in 1990, but it has now been republished in a handsome paperback edition with a thoughtful introduction by Andrew Motion and some excellent illustrations by Paul Nash. It is an account of Mabey’s childhood and early adult years growing up in two contrasting landscapes – the Chiltern Hills area around Berkhamsted, and coastal Norfolk – as well as his subsequent explorations of marginal landscapes within London, culminating in his purchase of a small Chilterns wood.

As such, it is an invaluable insight into his development as an observer of and thinker about natural history and landscape. “What is it that makes us so moved by the signs and territorial movements of other species?” Mabey asks at the conclusion of this memoir. “Are we reminded of our own animal ancestry, of maps and calendars encoded deep in our biological make-up?” Mabey has spent much of his career in such – for us – profitable observation, such poignant speculation.

Another calendar marks John Lewis-Stempel’s Meadowland, his record of a year in “the private life of an English field”. If recent decades have seen the flowering

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of ‘micro-histories’, with such writers as Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie and Eamon Duffy mining local records to illuminate our understanding of the Cathars and the English Reformation respectively, then Lewis-Stempel’s book is surely a micro-natural history. The author is a farmer, a military historian and a naturalist, and Meadowland is his diary of a year spent observing a field on his Herefordshire farm near the English–Welsh border.

This is Nature writing stripped of sentiment. LewisStempel sees the land through a farmer’s eye as much as a naturalist’s. He has a keen eye for wildlife, but one just as keen for his own livestock. There is a vivid description of his coming across a red kite tearing at the still-warm body of one of his recently born lambs. The natural historian in him admits how “years of persecution by keepers on shooting estates beat the bird back to mid Wales” and its mountain fastness, before recording, honestly, “Today I wish the damn wall of the mountain had held the bird back.” Unsparing, Nature red in tooth and claw: seen through the eyes and pen of a writer engaged in wresting a living from the land, yet also alert to the silent signs of the seasons.

Whilst Meadowland paints a vivid picture on a confined

Thorpe proves an engaging guide to a landscape steeped in secrets canvas, Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill explores a landscape across millennia. Two decades ago, Thorpe’s magnificent novel Ulverton, exploring English village life from Civil War fastness to modern commuter development, announced his imaginative talents. In his latest book, Thorpe explores his long fascination with the extraordinary Neolithic mound that rears above the Wiltshire countryside, forming a mysterious adjunct to the nearby stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge.

As a not particularly happy schoolboy at Marlborough College, Thorpe found his imagination kindled by the prehistoric landscape. In On Silbury Hill, he counterpoints this obsession, with autobiographical passages of his boyhood, adolescence and early adulthood spent variously in England, India and West Africa – a child of empire, now a writer living and working in France. Yet the Earth mysteries of Silbury and its environs call him still. Honest enough to admit that we cannot hope to do more than conjecture at the precise purpose and meaning of these monuments from the distant past, and yet sympathetic to successive archaeological, psychological, poetic and spiritual interpretations, Thorpe proves an engaging guide to a landscape steeped in secrets.

Greg Neale is Editor of Resurgence & Ecologist.

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IN FAMOUS FOOTSTEPS Peter Reason follows two walkers through the heart of Europe

Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn Nick Hunt Nicolas Brealey, 2014 ISBN: 9781857886177

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n 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall had fallen, I was invited to a conference in Hungary on the educational challenges of the countries emerging from the Communist Bloc. For three days we talked with teachers, politicians and civil servants, all excited by the opportunities in their free societies. We also saw the first uncomfortable signs of exclusive nationalism and the flip-flop from restrictive planned economies to rampant consumer capitalism.

As we explored the old city of Budapest, with its crumbling grandeur, marvelled at the great River Danube, and visited as many bathhouses as we could, I was thrilled to experience the opening up of what seemed like the heart of Europe. I was also disturbed to realise how little I knew about those countries that had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

As in 2014 we mark the centenary of the First World War, and our popular press is up in arms at the so-called invasion of alien Romanians, I am reminded again of my ignorance of what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its conflicts with Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

In December 1933, 18-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor – known universally as Paddy – who came from a privileged but disturbed family background and had a history of failure and rebellion at school, set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (as he insisted on calling Istanbul). Many years later he wrote about the journey in two books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, leaving at his death in 2011 the unfinished manuscript of a third, since published as The Broken Road. These books have been hailed as among the finest travel writing of the 20th century.

In 2011 a rather older Nick Hunt, who as an 18-year-old had been inspired by A Time of Gifts, set out to follow in Paddy’s footsteps. Walking the Woods and the Water is his account of the same journey 78 years later, a narrative that ranks alongside Paddy’s in its adventure, its observation of culture and Nature, and the quality of its writing.

Paddy wrote that his intention was to travel like “a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar”. He describes his journey along the road in hobnail boots and army

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Cover illustration by Ed Kluz

www.edkluz.co.uk

greatcoat, meeting people in streets and bars, in churches and monasteries, in woods and on hillsides. The Europe he travelled was both intensely local and cosmopolitan, with Jews, Turks, Bulgars, Slavs and Magyars intermingled in sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile relationships. It was still a Europe of peasant farmers and shepherds. But it was also a Europe of the old aristocracy of the AustroHungarian Empire, to whom the charming Paddy obtained introductions. So, in between tramping and sleeping rough, he moved from one grand mansion to another, studying in their libraries, engaging his hosts in historical and philosophical discussion, and participating in the balls and parties of elite culture. But change was clearly on the horizon, even though as a young man he could not see it coming. In Germany, Hitler had just become Chancellor, and Brownshirts and Nazi salutes were becoming common on the streets.

Nick Hunt walked through the same landscape in a culture utterly changed by the Second World War, the holocausts and ethnic cleansing, the grim totalitarianism of Communism, and the kleptocracy of the market economy.

The small farms have been drawn into collectives; the great houses are now ruined or have been converted into mental hospitals. The Danube has been dammed at the Iron Gates

November/December 2014

REVIEWS and elsewhere, so that ancient sites Paddy explored are now deep under water. There is a grim sense of tragedy, of people and places having endured deeply dark times.

And yet, even while the culture has been impoverished and the natural world carelessly exploited, at the end Hunt discovers “the deep continuities between our times”. While “suburban sprawl, motorways and hydroelectric dams may have irrevocably altered landscapes […] Europe’s wilder edge seldom felt far away”. Similarly, “in human terms, everything and nothing had changed,” since beyond the larger tragedies, “people’s lives, with their everyday quibbles and concerns, hadn’t greatly altered,” and “in every country of my walk I encountered kindness and generosity that

Paddy would have recognized.” As the young Turkish man who buys Hunt tea toward the end of his walk puts it, “The way we see it, you have walked all this way just to meet us.”

There is an awful lot of reading in these four books (to which one might add Artemis Cooper’s biography of Paddy) and few will want to read them right through in sequence. Nevertheless, they deserve our attention, because they give engaging accounts of human living on Earth over a period of decades, and provide Western Europeans with a glimpse of a part of our continent of which we are often shamefully ignorant.

Peter Reason is the author of Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea.

BOWLING WITH ANGELS Merlyn Driver struggles to separate man from musical instrument Himalayan Sound Revelations: The Complete Singing Bowl Book Frank Perry Polair Publishing, 2014 ISBN: 9781905398317

W

hen my parents purchased a singing bowl many years ago, I remember being quite disappointed that it didn’t sing actual songs. This disappointment quickly gave way to a curiosity and respect for the noises that it did make. Stroking around its rim with a small wooden stick, or ‘wand’, one could excite the bowl to produce a peaceful hum that slowly grew to fill the room.

I have always retained a certain intrigue for singing bowls, and so I was excited to come across something claiming to be “the complete singing bowl book”.

Frank Perry is one of the leading practitioners of singing bowls, as well as a successful musician, artist and healer.

Having previously played as a jazz percussionist in several bands, he has subsequently used his solo work to explore spiritual interests. It was in this way that he became involved with singing bowls. Although doubts remain over their precise history and use, such bowls have long been associated with meditation and pre-Buddhist shamanic traditions dating back thousands of years.

Himalayan Sound Revelations is a readable account of the author’s experiences with singing bowls. It covers not only bowls and the techniques used to play them, but also Chinese bells, and other traditional instruments such as the drilbu (Tibetan handbell) and the ting-sha (small, paired cymbals).

Perry also draws inspiration from his own spiritual beliefs relating to esoteric Christianity, chakras, astrology, and a range of other elements. In the first chapter, he explains how a Tibetan “spirit helper”, who lived thousands of years ago, visited him and imparted traditional wisdom about the bowls. Not all his inspiration, however, comes from such

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unusual sources. He goes on to direct the reader to a video on YouTube featuring an acclaimed Zen master.

The book contains an admirable level of historical investigation. Tracing the origin of bells, for example, Perry takes us to China, where the earliest civilisations used bells for purposes both sacred and profane. The oldest tuned bells to have been excavated date back to around 2000 BCE. Wind bells, Perry explains, were once hung outside homes and temples as protection from evil spirits.

Despite the depth of Perry’s research, one of the book’s weaknesses, for me, is the extent to which his own unique views on spirituality and esoteric religion become entangled with the main subject matter. When working with the four elements (earth, water, air and fire), for example, he tells us that “we must be ever mindful that these [elements] are governed by angels and that these angels are God’s servants.”

“We can ask the Lord”, he continues, “to send his angels … as we stroke the bowl.” He makes these statements in such a matter-of-fact way that it becomes difficult to ascertain where his own opinions end, and where the true story of the singing bowl begins.

While Himalayan Sound Revelations is undoubtedly a thought-provoking book, it is, in some ways, perhaps more revealing of the inner workings of the author than it is of its subject. Although it contains a wealth of valuable information on the sacred instruments of the Tibetan region, it is not, as it claims to be, the “complete” singing bowl book, but rather the story of one man’s love affair with these intriguing objects. In particular, it tells how singing bowls helped the author explore different aspects of sound, healing and spiritual development. Whether or not you agree with all of Frank Perry’s ideas, it is clear that singing bowls can provide an ideal space for contemplation.

Merlyn Driver is a London-based musician who has spent time in the Norwegian Arctic studying traditional music and religion among the Sámi people.

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FRESH LEAVES FROM THE JUNGLE John H. Bowles salutes Pradip Krishen’s elevation of arboreal awareness in India’s heartland Jungle Trees of Central India: A Field Guide for Tree Spotters Pradip Krishen Penguin India, 2013 ISBN: 9780143422525

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o the south, as far as the eye can see, lie range upon range of forest-covered hills, tumbled in wild confusion…” Thus Captain James Forsyth – a forester in colonial India’s so-called Central Provinces – rhapsodised over a Pachmarhi plateau vista. Elsewhere in his 1871 book The Highlands of Central India, Forsyth romantically observes (in ways reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s subsequent Jungle Book) how the local “aboriginal tribes” worship certain trees, Nature deities and “woodland sprites”. Yet he also reports the devastation of vast swathes of forests lost to both widespread indigenous practices (e.g. slash-burn agriculture and the use of wood for fuel) and badly managed colonial ‘progress’ (especially indiscriminate clear-cutting to secure millions of crossbeam ties for supporting railroad tracks).

To this day, controversies surrounding the use or abuse of forest lands – including their underlying mineral deposits and submerging through mega-dam projects – continue to pit conservationists and rural communities against advocates of ‘development’. Although select areas like Pachmarhi are now fairly well protected, elsewhere the hotly contested destinies of immense tracts of Indian forests have polarised political parties, intellectuals and citizens-atlarge – and have become a key factor underlying central India’s ongoing if under-reported civil war between the government and neo-Marxists.

This is part of the larger, blaring context in which Pradip Krishen’s beautiful and comprehensive book now quietly appears, a context that gives it a greater significance than is usual for field guides.

Krishen’s passion for trees began in 1993 in Pachmarhi, which he chose as the setting for the last of several films he directed (now considered cult classics by Indian film buffs). The director of Satpura National Park helped with the shoot, befriended Krishen, inadvertently ‘hooked’ him on the local jungle and its wildlife, and became his ‘tree guru’. Soon Krishen began studying botany on his own, and by 2006 he had produced his first field guide, Trees of Delhi. Suddenly, some of that city’s hurried citizens began to slow down and savour the abundant Nature quietly surviving amidst their urban mayhem. The book’s beautiful design and illustrations were unprecedented for Indian tree field guides; and perhaps because Krishen is an autodidact ‘amateur’ naturalist (and not a professional or academic botanist), his text was unusually clear and reader-friendly.

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Jungle vista from Pachmarhi by John H. Bowles

In a television interview, he explained that writing a book about trees “is not a dry business – you’re also telling stories, you’re also capturing people’s imagination”.

Jungle Trees of Central India takes tree spotting to a yet higher level. Over 2,000 photographs – and what photographs! – combined with maps, diagrams and userfriendly keys are elegantly presented in a larger and bolder format than Trees of Delhi. The book’s pellucid introduction presents the natural history of a region larger than France and geologically one of the planet’s oldest, with various distinctive ecological zones wherein certain trees thrive only in particular kinds of soil/drainage/topography.

Krishen’s account of how spring occurs in a hot, dry jungle is especially clear and vivid, and includes theories about the colour of new foliage. Catalogue entries of 163 species include two double-page spreads devoted to mahua (Madhuca longifolia, var. latifolia). The first spread includes careful botanical descriptions and notes how a fermented and much-cherished liquor is produced from mahua’s flowers, its seeds provide an oil that is used for cooking and in oil-lamp illumination (and reputedly cures rheumatism and skin ailments), with the leftover oil-cake employed as “a detergent, manure, vermicide and to poison fish”. The second spread celebrates “the subtle shades of mahua’s new foliage” in a glorious collage of 10 photographs.

Jungle Trees of Central India may gently inspire the minds and hearts of a large and influential middle-class readership that perhaps too often regards trees, forests and India’s natural environments as merely abstract ‘resources’.

Krishen’s dedication page quotes Gandhi’s sage warning, “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”

John H. Bowles curates exhibitions and authors publications on India’s Indigenous arts.

November/December 2014

LETTERS

Letters to the Editors CHURCHES MUST ACT ON SLAVERY

The government is in danger of blowing a golden opportunity to restore Britain to its historic role in the abolitionist movement.

When I helped bring the Modern Slavery Bill into parliament, the government was within touching distance of once again making Britain a world leader in the fight against slavery. But as things stand, the potential for such effective action against this evil practice is in danger of unravelling, thanks to the recent mishandling of the Bill by the prime minister, David Cameron.

The prime minister has balked at the idea of stipulating that registered companies must report on how they are monitoring and tackling the use of slave labour in their supply chains. He thought this would introduce an unnecessary regulatory burden on businesses. In fact, a host of big businesses, from Tesco to the Co-op, from Primark to investment bankers such as Rathbones, would welcome the legislation. By not forcing companies to conduct due diligence and to declare their supply chains slave-free, the prime minister has denied them the best line of defence in lawsuits: “I checked my suppliers, as the law demands.” He is failing on both moral and practical grounds.

So we must now build a broad coalition of influence to open up the prime minister’s eyes. Church institutions mobilise the biggest numbers in terms of activists and signatories for petitions. If the faithful push for a supplychain clause to the Bill, I think many MPs will have no choice but to listen; all the more so if people decide to name and shame those politicians who refuse to come on board. By exerting such pressure, the churches have a chance with the Modern Slavery Bill to make the world more just. Such opportunities do not present themselves that often.

Frank Field, MP House of Commons

REIN IN BIG BUSINESS

As I read Peter Ainsworth’s ‘Finding Our Way to a Sustainable Future’ (Issue 285), I couldn’t help feeling that his assertion that there is “a total convergence on what is good for business and what is good for the environment” doesn’t quite ring true when we consider capitalism at the start of the 21st century.

Things have changed massively since the days of Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli. For starters, international capital wields very heavy influence, in many cases overcoming the wishes of national governments, in a way that was unimaginable when Disraeli introduced the Public Health Act in 1875. Capital can now be moved from any country that brings in regulations that hinder the maximisation of profits, and be reinvested in countries where protection of the environment and protection of workers’ rights are far more lax.

Then there is the lobbying power of industries that pour

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millions into political parties in return for access to the corridors of power. What happened to David Cameron’s promise of minimum alcohol pricing? One can only assume that the big boys in the alcohol industry scuppered legislation that would have had a massive impact on alcohol consumption.

Property developers who make bigger bucks building large houses on green fields than on brownfield sites; the food industry, which lobbies hard against any sugar tax; pharmaceutical companies that fleece the NHS with their insistence that we all take statins… The list is endless and very worrying. Where is democracy, when huge corporations wield such power, and when short-term profit takes precedence over the long-term welfare of people and environment?

No, old-fashioned conservatism will not deal with the 21st-century problems we face, unless it finds a way to rein in the power of multinational corporations and take back democracy from the clutches of international capitalism.

Only then will we be able to bring in the regulations needed to protect the environment.

Eileen Peck Thundersley, Essex

LIGHT FROM THE DARK SIDE

Ros Coward’s article in Issue 286 is excellent and thoughtprovoking, articulating themes that seem to be re-surfacing just now from many authors and many directions.

There is an important take on Nature that the article did not acknowledge, however: that we humans are an integral part of Nature. Whatever we do or don’t do, Nature will continue. Gaia evolves and changes according to absolutely everything she experiences. It could be inferred from the article that we humans and Nature are separate, that it is acceptable to use Nature for our own ends, whether dark myth or our personal development. Such a view would be at the top of the slippery slope that leads to the justification of exploitation in its grosser forms of extraction and pollution.

Ros does make a good point here: that a child’s immersion in Nature can lead to environmental activism throughout her or his life. But there is still a sense of our separateness from Nature in that. George Monbiot has made this case well, too: without that immersion in Nature, how can we understand and feel our oneness with Her? Let us put the emphasis upon what, directly, we can give to Nature!

Giles Chitty Salisbury

We welcome letters and emails commenting on Resurgence & Ecologist articles. These should include your postal address.

Send your letters to The Editors, Resurgence & Ecologist, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE or email editorial@resurgence.org Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity.

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C RO S SWO R D

Crossword

1

Answers to cryptic italicised clues, loosely categorised as 4 across, might feature in a vegan Christmas dinner.

2

3

4

8

9

11

12

5

6

7

10

Across 1

Post filled by Innocents, amongst others. (6)

4

See prologue.

8, 23 Maxim which suggests man is a microcosm of the universe. (2,5,2,5) 10 Brazilian mammal and vegetarian. (5) 11 European. (5)

13

14

16

17

18

12 Vasectomy? Sounds like it. (7)

15

19

20

21

13 They’re essential to achieve 2, 14. (11) 18 It’s unpleasant to behold. (7)

22

23

20 Dance. (5) 22 Gateway to a Japanese Shinto temple. (5) 23 See 8.

24

25

24 A colourless, odourless gas, at normal temperature and pressure. (6)

15 Nightmare. (7)

25 Trembling trees. (6)

16 Grasp it at your peril. (6) 17 Ex-PM’s family contrasts with 4. (6)

Down 1

“ ------ does wonders for our sense of hearing.”

Arnold H. Glasow (6)

19 It’ll have you in tears. (5) 21 Beat. (5)

2, 14 What we all pray for at this time of year. (5,2,5) 3 A very detailed snap. (5-2) 5 A helicopter has at least one (however you look at it). (5)

Solution to the crossword in Issue 286

6 Cost. (7) 7 It occupies the highest rank in the Christian angelic hierarchy. (6)

The answers are also available online at www.resurgence.org/crossword

9 They all have a boss. (9)

To comment on the crossword, email Tim at ecores_crossword@hotmail.co.uk

14 See 2.

R E S URGENCE SHOP

GIFT IDEAS

Earth Pathways Diary 2015 Inspiring our connection to the land A beautiful diary celebrating the work of artists and writers who share a deep love for our land and a vision of a sustainable future for all.

Includes a page-a-week view, month-at-a-view planners, year planner and notes pages, plus moon phases, sunrise times and astrological information for the UK. £13 plus p&p

Order today www.resurgence.org/shop/cards

Order today on +44 (0)1208 841824 (Mon–Thurs, 9am–5pm) For more books, plus magazines, CDs, DVDs and cards, shop online: www.resurgence.org/shop 68

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November/December 2014

C LA S S I F I E D A DV E RT I S I N G ‘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 Januar y/Februar y 2015: 1 November 2014 March/April 2015: 2 Januar y 2015

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

– Call Brock on 07878 510 669 or email loveslane@gardener.com MASTERY IN SUSTAINABILITY Feel the call to engage more powerfully in life in these turbulent times? Join others on a sixmonth journey, combining spiritual practices, leadership development and eco-psychology. 10 evening sessions, starting 3 February, central London. “…the course was challenging, moving, thought-provoking, and wonderful. Thoroughly recommended.” www.masteryinsustainability.com

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

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

URBAN PILGRIM November 29-30, Pewsey, Wiltshire – Gatekeeper Trust Annual Conference. Join us in exploring what it means to be an urban pilgrim and how pilgrimage can renew our connection with our sacred landscape. Weekend £65, one day only £35.

More details, speakers and themes and to book: www.gatekeeper.org.uk or call 0300 123 7723 (local call rate number).

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.

YURTS AND HUT BY THE POND A single yurt, the 4-yurt camp, the hut by the pond and the shepherd’s wagon – all available on our Cotswold organic farm near Cirencester. Tel. 01285 640441 www.theorganicfarmshop.co.uk

Issue 287

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HOLIDAY COTTAGE ON COTSWOLD ORGANIC FARM Lovely south-facing holiday cottage at the end of the track. Woodburner, old Indian furniture, farm shop and café to visit, the whole farm to roam.

See www.theorganicfarmshop.co.uk for details.

RUGGED, BEAUTIFUL PEMBROKESHIRE Two eco-friendly converted barns on small­ holding. Each sleeps 4. Coastal path 2 miles. Tel. 01348 891286 holidays@stonescottages.co.uk www.stonescottages.co.uk ISLE OF SKYE Superb yoga studio, teacher available, sea loch, log stoves, self-catering 1-4 persons.

No single supplement! Tel. 01470 592 367 www.skye-yoga-holidays.co.uk MID WALES Earth, Air, Water, Fire... Walk wild hilltops, breathe fresh air, explore streams and waterfalls, snuggle down by the woodburner.

Cosy, bright, peaceful s/c hideaway for 2+2. Also quiet streamside camping and campfires. Rob and Pip: 01686 420 423 www.the-gorfanc-hideaway.co.uk ITALY, TUSCAN-UMBRIAN BORDER Lovely 17th-century farmhouse, flexible accommodation for 12-14, in two buildings (access for partially disabled), six bedrooms and four bath/shower rooms. In its own private curtilage in soft rolling countryside with farreaching views and large swimming pool. Well sited for Florence, Arezzo, Cortona, Urbino and Perugia. Available year-round. www.laceruglia.com Tel. 01392 811436 or email slrs@perridge.com TOTNES (SOUTH DEVON) Self-catering double-bedroom riverside apartment. Situated on the edge of the magnificent Dartington estate. Short walk along the river path to Totnes mainline station and town centre. Perfect base for exploring by foot, canoe and bike. www.littleriverside.com Tel. 01803 866 257 mobile: 07875 727 763 CHURCHWOOD VALLEY Wembury, nr Plymouth, Devon. For peace and tranquillity, s/c holiday cabins in beautiful natural wooded valley close to the sea. Abundance of birds and wildlife. Gold awards for conservation.

Pets welcome. www.churchwoodvalley.com Tel. 01752 862 382 info@churchwoodvalley.com HAND-BUILT WOODEN ROUNDHOUSE in Somerset for a completely different holiday cottage, on our organic farm. Romantic retreat or family holiday. Sleeps up to 4. www.glamping-uk.org.uk

PERSONAL RETREATS, FRANCE Make space to reflect and be still. Beautiful retreat house in Auvergne offers supportive, welcoming environment for individual retreats. Daily rhythm: meditation; silent interludes; contemplative/ artistic activities. Lovely walks. Organic vegetarian food. www.retreathouseauvergne.com CORTIJO ROMERO, SPAIN Year-round courses in yoga, pilates, writing, dance, singing, relationships, therapy.

Mountains, pool, vegetarian food. For a brochure/info: 01494 765 775 cr@cortijo-romero.co.uk www.cortijo-romero.co.uk RETREAT/SABBATICAL GREECE Villas for 3-month rentals, £450 a month, in beautiful, unspoilt Peloponnese. http://www.gargarou.com

MISCELLANEOUS COACHING WITH SPIRIT Professional coaching for sustainable life and livelihood, from a spiritually intelligent perspective. www.sallylever.co.uk SHITAKE MUSHROOM LOGS Grow your own mushrooms on our Ready to Grow Logs, various species. DIY Log Kits and dried mushrooms also available. Unusual healthy presents! www.rusticmushrooms.co.uk Tel. 01825 723 065 INSIGHTFUL INVESTOR SOUGHT for microbudget feature documentary exploring modern British culture/counterculture. Write to Box 287/1, Ford House, Hartland, Bideford, Devon EX39 6EE

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 61 921 498 www.gvp.ie BURGUNDY DREAM Traditional Burgundy farmhouse converted by present owners, with 4 acres of land. Main accommodation (2 bedrooms) plus a selfcontained flat on 1st floor. A second flat could easily be adapted from 2 additional bedrooms.

Ornamental garden, orchard, soft fruit area, apiary and potager. Land and accommodation for raising pigs, sheep, etc. £290,000. Details and photos from hkverslesbois@hotmail.com

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SRI LANKA TEA ESTATE forest garden ecological retreat. 57 acres, river, several wells, three bungalows. 30 min. beaches, Galle Fort. US$600,000. www.samakanda.org Contact spowersrory@gmail.com +44 7542 958 028

A LTERNATIVES St James’s Piccadilly/London

LOVELY FOUR-BEDROOM HOUSE on 13.06 acres on Hornby Island, British Columbia. Mature garden fields, pond. Otter and deer. Very private and peaceful with cabin by the sandstone shore. Listed @ CAD$1,750.000.

Tel. +1 250 335 0395 seaswallowfly@gmail.com BEAUTIFULLY RESTORED 450-YEAR-OLD HOUSE IN SOUTHERN SPAIN Stunning three-bedroom Moorish-style village house in Casarabonela, Malaga. With patio, sun terrace, fireplace and incredible views. Whitewashed stone walls. 35 km from airport and Malaga centre. UNESCO heritage listed area, with local traditional produce.

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

Photos available. zofaifi@hotmail.com +61 498 102 894

THOMAS MOORE A Religion of One’s Own Monday 10 November

ALLENDALE, NORTHUMBERLAND 4-bedroomed detached house, large garage/ workshop, 4 acres mixed ancient woodland, beautiful garden. £315,000. sally.greenaway@homecall.co.uk 01434 683 813

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RUSTIC FINCA IN UNSPOILT MALLORCA Rustic stone 6-bedroom property with 4 acres of organic land. Main house: 5 bedrooms, 2 reception rooms, kitchen leading to large porch, 2 bathrooms and utility room. Self-contained adjacent apartment: 1 bedroom + ensuite bathroom, open-plan kitchen/lounge. Garage/ workshop 54m2. C/H. Own water spring.

Land includes fruit orchards, native trees, bamboo, large pond. Perfect for retreats and residential groups. Development potential. €750,000. For details and photos email j.abbottslade@yahoo.com NEW YORK PROPERTY Just minutes to the largest ski resort in western New York, an hour from Niagara Falls and Canada. A restored old farmhouse and 160 georgeous acres on rolling hills with woods, meadows and stream. Superb for development of high-end country living.

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New Internationalist

OLIVER JAMES on why Love Bombing works

Michel Odent

discusses men and childbirth

CRANIOSACRAL THERAPY

Knitting Summerhill Lino-cutting

Five Stages of Girlhood

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Juno Publishing, Elms Farm, Upper Tockington Road, Bristol, BS32 4LQ

Country Profile

China Stand on the Bund in Shanghai looking over at the spectacular outline of the Pudong financial district on the other side of the water, as increasing numbers of tourists now do, and you are looking at a global icon. This is where Tom Cruise jumped off the skyscraper in Mission Impossible III; James Bond was also here in Skyfall.

This is the 21st century’s equivalent of Manhattan in the 1920s – an awe-inspiring testament to the power

continued, after a bitter period of Japanese occupation, with the 1949 Maoist revolution.

Mao Zedong’s China was extraordinary for its boldness and strength of purpose and not without its achievements in prioritizing food production and greater equality. But it was unquestionably brutal – the mass famines created by the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and

Economic progress has been the be-all and end-all, with both foreign and domestic policy entirely dictated by its continued pursuit. The result is that China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy – and will inevitably eclipse the US some time in the 2020s.

The idea that the 21st century will belong to China tends to cause much trepidation in a West used to calling

the wholesale purges and perpetual the shots. All kinds of adjustments Free-trade takeover – 10 reasonsofto stop and money and theTTIP confidence of a TPPturmoil of the Cultural Revolution of will certainly need to be made, and Scottish independence country that feels it embodies the the 1960s are periods that no Chinese Chinese power (cultural as well as– a shot in the arm for radical politics?

New

future. Yet if you had stood on the person would wish to relive. Mao, Should we ban halal NI 474 July/August 2014 Bund and looked over the water as who died in 1976, is still revered as kosher recently as 1990and not one of thoseslaughter? a unifying symbol but in practice his skyscrapers would have been there. ideology was carefully shoved up a side Beyond burnout – alley The transformation of China in by the one-time ‘capitalist roader’ traumaistakes the space of a generation one of its toll Deng Xiaoping and his successors. human history’son great stories – it has Early experiments with a activists involved the biggest mass migration ‘responsibility’ system that would What’s wrong withallow people to keep profits that in history, of peasants to the thrusting megacities, especially on theCadillacs? east they generated soon expanded into electric coast; it has turned an inward-looking full-blooded encouragement for sleeping giant into the engine room of entrepreneurialism and ‘getting world trade; it has, almost at a stroke, rich’, with special economic zones created the next global superpower developed on the coast as magnets for out of what is still manifestly a foreign capital investment. China’s developing country; and it has asked economy has now been growing at new questions about the impact of an average of close to 10 per cent a such vertiginous growth on the planet year for two decades, sucking in raw that are far from answered. materials (and boosting commodity China’s modern history began prices) and spitting out the products with the nationalist uprising of 1911 that the rest of the world wants to buy that ousted the last emperor and with astonishing energy and efficiency.

rU S S I a Harbin Changchun

MoNGolIa Beijing

fights back

XINJIaNG U YG H U r

China

X’ian

INDIa

BaNGlaDeSH

●

Chongqing

S o U t H Ko r e a

Wuhan Guilin

Kunming

N o r t H Ko r e a

Shanghai

Chengdu

tIBet N e Pa l B H U ta N

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newint.org

remains resistant to notions of Putting theentirely world to rights since 1973

At a glance K a Z a K H S ta N

Feminism

NI 475 September 2014

Internationalist ble Gold trou

Putting the world to rights since 1973

‘I don’t deserve to be raped’

economic and political) will not look like US power. But many of those fears arise out of orientalist prejudice, as you will soon discover if you visit and find a welcoming people only too pleased now to be a key part of the wider world, and whose aspirations are not so different from those of people the world over.

And while China’s ruling party

New

newint.org

Internationalist

Fuzhou

ta I wa N Guangzhou Hong Kong

N e w I N t e r N at I o N a l I S t

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Leader: President Xi Jinping, who is also General Secretary of the Communist Party.

Economy: Gross national income (GNI) per capita $4,930 – up from $840 when profiled 10 years ago (India $1,410, Japan $45,180).

Monetary unit: Yuan (currency = renminbi).

Main exports: Manufactured goods dominate, with an accelerating move towards hi-tech industries; China took over J a Pa N as the world’s largest exporter in 2010.

China’s consistent growth at 10% a year has now slowed to 7.5% but this is to some extent planned.

The KYrG Y Z Sruling ta N party’s aim is to encourage domestic consumption rather ta J I Kso I S ta N than depending heavily on exports.

People: 1,348 million, around a fifth of total world population. People per square kilometre 140 Pa K(Britain I S ta N 257).

Health: Infant mortality 13 per 1,000 live births – down from 32 per 1,000 a decade ago (India 47, Japan 2). HIV prevalence rate under 0.1%. Lifetime risk of maternal mortality 1 in 1,700.

Environment: The air quality in the biggest cities has reached life-threateningly poor

political freedom, its continued belief in the efficacy of state ownership of key industries and its investment in infrastructure should give some pause for thought to Western governments still incomprehensibly dazzled by the broken mould of neoliberalism.

China has effectively now made the Great Leap Forward of which Mao once dreamed. ■

Misha Kally

levels. Local and international attempts to stop the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze failed but another series of dams in Yunnan province are at least on hold. The impact of China’s rising energy consumption on greenhouse-gas emissions remains a global concern but it is investing heavily in renewables too.

Electric scooters are ubiquitous in the cities.

Culture: The Han – less an ethnic group than a civilization – dominate, with 92% of the population but there are 56 official recognized minority nationalities, including Chuang, Uighur and Tibetan.

Religion: The moral code of Confucianism is key. Formal religion is, however, less frowned on than in the past, and there are large Buddhist, Muslim and Taoist minorities.

Language: Official Chinese is a modernized version of northern Mandarin. There are many variants, the biggest being Cantonese in the south. There are 205 registered minority languages.

Time to junk the UN Security Council? ● Sperm jailbreak in Palestine

New

Mother Teresa’s poisonous legacy

NI 468 December 2013

newint.org

Internationalist

Why is college so damned expensive?

How to set Josie Long’s heart racing

Putting the world to rights since 1973

UK £4.45

Star ratings $

$

2003 ★★

LIFE EXPECTANCY ★★★★

73 years (Japan 83, India 65).

2003 ★★★★

POSITION OF WOMEN ★★★

Communism left a small positive legacy in this regard but women are still notable by their absence from key political positions 2003 ★★★ of power.

FR CKING

LITERACY ★★★★

The adult literacy rate is 94%. Education remains a key priority – with children under huge pressure at school and facing extraordinarily long school days (7.30am to 2003 ★★★ 10pm in high school).

FREEDOM ★

The Communist Party still brooks no dissent or opposition – though public debate can be lively on issues other than the Party’s right to rule. Civil-society groups are flourishing where once they would have been discouraged.

2003 ★ Internet use is restricted.

SEXUAL MINORITIES ★★★

Homosexuality has been legal since 1997.

Recent years have seen rapidly growing social acceptance in cities. But there’s no legal recognition of same-sex unions and no laws protecting LGBT people against discrimination. Prejudice and negative attitudes still prevail, especially in rural areas.

POLITICS ★★

Xi Jinping became leader late in 2012 – and, if all goes to plan, his cohort will retain power for the next 10 years. There are tests ahead. They must grapple with their surfeit of foreign exchange and must negotiate a new relationship with the US. They urgently have to find solutions to China’s appalling environmental problems. But as long as they can pull off the (ultimately unsustainable) trick of delivering such high rates of economic growth, pressures for more political freedom are likely to be staved off.

The gathering storm

www.c-blyth.com Available to view and buy at: www.blurb.co.uk

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ExCELLEnt ★ ★ ★ ★ GOOD ★ ★ ★ FAIR ★ ★ POOR ★ APPALLInG

N e w I N t e r N at I o N a l I S t

S E P T E M B E R 2013 UK £4.45

New Internationalist | newint.org

Citizens fight back

NI assessment

Last profiled Jan/Feb 2003

INCOME DISTRIBUTION ★★ From what was once the world’s most equal base, inequality continues to rise sharply, though meteoric growth rates have also improved the living standards of the poor.

Sri Lanka’s crude and cruel triumphalism What did the US shutdown teach us?

The dirt on Olli Rehn – the EU’s austerity tzar

Gasland director Josh Fox on toxic cash

Top: The Pudong financial district at night, as seen from the Bund in Shanghai; village schoolchildren heading home for lunch in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Middle: Live music in a Chengdu park (music, dancing and t'ai chi are common sights in all Chinese parks); one of many replicas of Buddhist statues in Leshan, near Chengdu; a flooded bridge in the countryside near Guilin. Bottom: Selling fruit in Yangshuo and a small farm, both near Guilin; electronic poster in Chengdu. Photos by Misha Kally.

●

S E P T E M B E R 2013

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New Internationalist | newint.org

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Change your Self Change the World

The Elmhirst Programme Soul, Spirit and Story With Anita Moorjani, Bruce Lipton, Jules Cashford, Satish Kumar, Bharat Mitra, Matthew Fox, Margaret Wheatley, Charles Eisenstein and more.

A new programme of short courses and events exploring the myths, stories, beliefs and values that define our purpose and action in the world.

Starts January 2015.

• Rising Women, Rising World, 12 -16 January With Scilla Elworthy, Karen Downes and Rama Mani Inner strength and practical skills for women contributing to a world that works for all.

• Are We Virtually Dead? 2 - 6 February With Iain McGilchrist and Rupert Sheldrake Are we becoming more machine-like, does it matter if we are, and what does this have to do with the brain?

Tel: +44 (0)1803 865934 www.schumachercollege.org.uk 72

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November/December 2014

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

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

45TH ANNIVERSARY

OPEN DAY SATURDAY 15 NOVEMBER TH

FROM 10:00AM PLEASE REGISTER TO JOIN US

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

BI JA

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

Gandhi, Globalisation and Earth Democracy

Earth Democracy: Protecting the rights of Mother Earth and Human beings

21-30 November, 2014

Grounded in diverse cultures and traditions, this workshop will explore the inherent rights of members of the Earth community to be free to achieve their original purpose – and identify the forces that are infringing those rights. Doctors Vandana and Mira Shiva and Sister Pat Siemen will engage participants in examining the practices, laws and customs that protect – and also destroy – nature’s freedom to flourish and regenerate.

Respect for diverse cultural responses will be valued.

Time spent on the farm is a part of the overall program.

Satish Kumar, Dr Vandana Shiva, Dr Madhu Suri Prakash, Arun Gandhi, Samdhong Rinpoche

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

2–6 February, 2015

Workshop on Pesticides 27 Feburary–2 March 2015

The workshop on pesticide will address the impact of pesticide on environment and health, as well as the action strategies to create pesticide free agriculture and food.

For further information please contact Mini Joy at: bija@navdanya.net Tel +91 11 268 532 772 Issue 287

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doortothehimalayas.co.uk Tibetan singing bowls Pure Pashmina stoles

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

Meditation shawls Handloom blankets Ethically sourced, individually hand-crafted items by rural artisans across the Himalayas

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Ethical invEstmEnt in a rEnEwablE EnErgy social EntErprisE Whalley Community Hydro is an Industrial and Provident Society for community benefit in Lancashire. Income from the sale of electricity will be used for more renewable energy and carbon reduction for the local community.

For photo diary of construction progress and share offer document see www.whalleyhydro.co.uk or email info@whalleyhydro.co.uk

Meditation RetReats in the Buddhist tRadition

www.gaiahouse.co.uk

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November/December 2014

Creating Regenerative Cities Herbert Girardet

Build your own solar charger Charge phones or laptops

In an urbanising world, we all need to confront our impacts on the world’s ecosystems.

Modern cities have effectively declared independence from nature, and yet they effectively exist only as appendages of living systems.

Creating Regenerative Cities argues that sustainable development is no longer enough. It is a concise, solution-oriented manual for regenerative urbanisation, augmenting summaries of Girardet’s own work with 20 other case studies.

Published by Routledge in October 2014. www.routledge.com/books/ details/9780415724463

Gain skills to build low-cost solar PV systems

The Findhorn Foundation community has been exploring dynamic new ways of living.

Our workshops and ecovillage are dedicated to unfolding a new human consciousness and creating a positive and sustainable future.

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An invitation for you to let go of your limitations, open to love and to be the change you want to see in the world. It is an unforgettable week of connecting with your inner self, meeting new people, and engaging with life in a completely new way. Join us in attunement with nature, teamwork, meditation, dance, and daily tasks in a thriving ecovillage community. Sustainable living on all levels.

Tel: 01309 690311 Findhorn Foundation, The Park Findhorn, Forres IV36 3TZ Scotland Scottish Charity Number SC007233

info@demandenergyequality.org 01173144657 / 07749552063

D. Stainer-Hutchins Architects Ltd

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5 Bridge Street, Nailsworth GL6 OAA

www.dstainer-hutchinsarchitects.co.uk

Tel: 01453 839121

Explore this question in a small group with Gill Coombs, author of Hearing Our Calling, at a beautiful, inspiring retreat in the French Alps.

4th–7th June 2015

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

Issue 287

For more information: www.maisonlacerisaie.com/retreats

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Together it’s time to create a new story.

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PRESENTERS INCLUDE:

Barbara Marx Hubbard, Bruce Lipton, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Charles Eisenstein, Satish Kumar, Patch Adams, Tim ‘Mac’ Macartney, Agnes Baker Pilgrim, Joan Borysenko, Scarlett Lewis, Jamie Catto, Joshua Gorman, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and many more.

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supports

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An Ode to GAIA A Fundraising Dinner for Resurgence & Ecologist Wednesday 12 November 2014 At the Lancaster London hotel, London, from 7.30pm

Featuring an auction of art and experiences with speakers including Satish Kumar and Tony Juniper

© Susan Derges

Tickets £150 from The Resurgence Trust Call 01237 441293 or go to www.resurgence.org/dinner Items in the auction include paintings and sculptures from a number of well-known artists including Clive Bowen, Susan Derges, Olivia Fraser, Axel Scheffler, Hugo Grenville and Peter Randall-Page, as well as terrific experiences including a walk with Sir Roy Strong in his gardens. © Peter Randall-Page

The Resurgence Trust is a registered educational charity (no. 1120414)

INSIDE M E D I TAT I ON G AT E W AY T O P O S S I B I L I T I E S

• 200-Hour Meditation Teacher Trainings • Workshops & CPD’s meeting the requirements of our modern times Yoga Alliance UK accredited

www.insidemeditation.co.uk

Ad-LivingSpir-AUGUST_188x66mm_ResurgenceMag-V2 27-08-14 12:02 Pagina 1

Living Spirituality Who am I? What gives my life meaning?

The One Spirit Interfaith Foundation offers a two year cutting edge experiential programme creating your unique path to wholeness and service, weaving together living community, spiritual leadership, social action, ritual and spiritual counselling. ✷ Training programmes commence each autumn. ✷ Open introductory events are held in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. ✷ Contact Lindsay Jarrett 0333 332 1996 for details www.osif.org.uk

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Jill Purce The JillHealing Purce Voice Rediscover the ancient power of group chant

The Healing Voice

“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness” – Confucius

Magical Voice Techniques • Mantra & Sonic Meditations • Mongolian Overtone Chanting Rediscover the ancient power of group chant Magical Voice Techniques • Mantra & Sonic

Healing Week intensive - London HealingVoice Voice-WeekendsLondon Meditations • Mongolian Overtone Chanting July 6-7; Oct Dec 7-8 (Accom.

November 1-7 26-7; Unmissable! available at venue) Healing the FamilyRitual-&London Resonance Sept 28-9 Healing Weekends HealingVoice Voice WeekendsLondon July 6-7; 1-2 Oct •26-7; Dec 7-8 November December 6-7 • February Healing Voice-Week Intensive - London21-22 Oct 26Nov 1 the Healing - London Sept 28-9 Healing theFamily Family-Weekends Ritual & Resonance November 29-30 • February 14-15 • March 21-22 Healing Voice-Week Intensive - London Oct 26Nov 1 www.healingvoice.com • T: 020 7435 2467

The Small School hartland, Devon

Founded by Satish Kumar in 1982 A co-educational school for a maximum of forty 11-16 year olds that offers holistic, human scale education, embodying personal, ecological and social dimensions.

www.healingvoice.com • T: 020 7435 2467

WHY WE LIVE AFTER DEATH

By Dr Richard Steinpach

The school is seeking new Guardians to support the school through a regular donation £25 a month, or Friends who donate £5-25 a month.

WHY AREWE HERE ON EARTH TODAY? WHAT IS THE REAL MEANING OF LIFE? WHAT HAPPENS TO US AFTERWE DIE? Through irrefutable evidence Dr. Steinpach answers all these questions and, gives a new knowledge that clearly demonstrates how our Earth-life is but a short, yet decisive episode in our entire existence.

For more information on the difference your financial support could make and the benefits enjoyed by Small School Guardians, please email office@thesmallschool.org.uk or visit www.thesmallschool.org.uk

To obtain this 69-page booklet free, please contact: GRAIL MESSAGE

FOUNDATION W HY WE LIVE AFTER DEA

“a priceless opportunity to make a positive contribution to society by investing in education based on trust and mutual respect.”

Mary Billson, Chair of Trustees

0845 658 5666

By Dr. Richard Steinpach E-mail: info@grail-uk.org Visit: www.grail-uk.org

WDP HY ARE WE HERE ON EARTH TODAY? WHAT IS THE REAL MEANING OF LIFE? WHAT HAPPENS TO US AFTER WE DIE?

A gift to delight the thoughtful children in your family!

AQUILA magazine is perfect for inquisitive children who like to ask questions. Using a fun mix of science, arts and general knowledge this unique magazine will capture their interest and offer friendly companionship as they learn about the world and how things work.

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

To obtain this 69-page booklet free, please contact: GRAIL MESSAGE FOUNDATION P.O. BOX 5107, Glasgow, G78 9AU , 0845 658 5666 E-mail: info@grail-uk.org DP

AQUILA is produced by a small team of writers and artists. It is advert free, and comes recommended by parents and teachers worldwide.

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

Exciting new topic every month Encourages reading and writing Nourishes bright minds

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

Mrs D. McNeight

Subscribe now www.aquila.co.uk Call 01323 431313 Issue 287

Through irrefutable evidence Dr. Steinpach answers all these questions and, gives a new knowledge that clearly demonstrates how our Earth-life is but a short, yet decisive episode in our entire existence.

See sample online October issue: Fungi Coming up next: Orchestra, Storytellers (Christmas), Robots, The Story of Horses. £45 for 12 monthly issues We can post AQUILA out for XMAS with your gift message. You will not find AQUILA at the shops, it’s only by mail order.

Full refund: just let us know within 28 days.

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RESURGENCE SHOP: CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEAS Hand-picked, beautifully written and illustrated story books for children, available from the Resurgence shop.

Ice Bear Jackie Morris

Tell Me A Dragon Jackie Morris

Set in the pristine polar regions of the Arctic, this beautiful story reminds us that we are caretakers of these wild creatures and our actions directly affect their future.

Everyone has their very own dragon, and this book describes many different varieties of the beast, showing in words and stunning pictures exactly why their owners find them so entrancing.

£10.95 plus p&p

£10.95 plus p&p

40pp, hb, 300x220mm

32pp, hb, 300x220mm

I am cat, the ice bear, lord of the forest, the snow leopard Jackie Morris New miniature editions of these beautiful stories. The perfect gift for animal lovers of all ages. £4.99 each or £18 set of 4 plus p&p 32pp, hb, 140x103mm

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

ECONOMY BEYOND ECONOMICS Our economy relies on a stable ecological foundation.

So why is ecology missing from the big economic and political debate? Is it time for a new approach?

SATISH KUMAR SPEAKS AT LSE Thursday 13 November, 2014 6.30–8pm Tickets: £10 Hong Kong Theatre Clement House Building 99, Aldwych, London WC2B 4JF

For further information contact Vyvyan Evans Email: v.evans@lse.ac.uk

It’s your life…

but it’s our children’s future

Once you’ve remembered your loved ones, please help Resurgence to serve the planet for future generations by leaving a gift in your will. Your legacy will ensure Resurgence lives on, offering positive perspectives and upholding the values that were important to you in your life.

A gift in your will, no matter what size, will help Resurgence to embrace and include more like-minded people and organisations. Together, we can make the world a better place for our children.

For more information on what your legacy can achieve, please call Satish Kumar on 01237 441293 or email legacy@resurgence.org www.resurgence.org/legacy The Resurgence Trust is a Registered Charity (No. 1120414) Image: James Savage from Voice of the Children www.leafandstar.co.uk

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November/December 2014

in partnership with Friends of the Earth MEMBERSHIP

Leeds

Membership & Distribution, UK Jeanette Gill, Rocksea Farmhouse, St Mabyn, Bodmin, Cornwall PL30 3BR, UK Tel: + 44 (0)1208 841824 (Mon-Thurs 9-5) Fax: + 44 (0)1208 841256 members@resurgence.org

David Midgley david@schumacher-north.co.uk Bi-monthly meetings

Membership Rates Six issues per year UK: £30 Europe: £38 | Rest of the World: £40

Contact: Lucy Baird 07850 143737 luciarose@gmail.com

OVERSEAS MEMBERSHIP USA Walt Blackford, P O Box 312, Langley, WA 98260, U.S.A. Airmail: US$68

North Cornwall

Contact: Simon Mitchell 01208 851356 simonthescribe@yahoo.co.uk Occasional meetings at St Breward

Wales – Newtown area Welsh Borders

Contact: Elaine Brook 01981 550246 elaine@gaiapartnership.org Near Hay on Wye, 6.30pm, quarterly

Newcastle Group

Contact: Margaret Evans 0191 290 1516 margaretevans.wb@gmail.com

Japan Sloth Club, 6-15-2-912 Ojima, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan Tel: +81 3 3638 0534 babi@sloth.gr.jp Airmail ¥6943

AUSTRALIA Melbourne

South Africa Howard Dobson, SEEDS, 16 Willow Road, Constantia, 7806, Cape Town, South Africa Tel: + 27 2 1794 3318 howdy@mweb.co.za Airmail: ZAR726

ITALY Faedis, Udine

DISTRIBUTORS

Contact: Gabriela Cunha (+351) 919991585 gabrielacunha@gmail.com Rajesh Pai rajesh.pai@green-pai-energy.com Meeting bi-monthly

USA Kent News Company 100511 Airport Road, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 Tel: +1 308 635 2225 rmckinney@kentnews.com

RESURGENCE GROUPS An opportunity to share ideas and seasonal food. For more information, or to start your own group, contact Jeanette Gill: 01208 841824 members@resurgence.org

Birmingham

Contact: Abdul Al-Seffar 0121 426 2606 alseffar@googlemail.com Meeting 3–4 times a year

East Devon

Contact: Christina Bows 01297 23822 tinabows@hotmail.com Monthly at The Spiral Sanctuary, Seaton

Hampshire

Contact: Sue Routner 07773 428 229 sroutner@yahoo.co.uk Bi-monthly at The Art House, Southampton

Contact: Debby Badger 03 9530 8642 badgers@optushome.com.au Meeting monthly

Contact: Mauro Cavallo 0039 (0)432 728606 cortedeimolini@libero.it

PORTUGAL Paredes de Coura

Porto

Contact: Helena Soares (+351) 919 541828 helenasolaris@gmail.com Meeting bi-monthly

Sobral Pichorro

RESURGENCE SUPPORTERS Patrons

Roger & Claire Ash Wheeler, Anthony & Carole Bamford, Viscount & Viscountess Cowdray, Dr Cherian Eapen, Kim SamuelJohnson, Lavinia Sinclair, Doug Tompkins, Michael Watt, Louise White, Nigel & Margaret Woodward

Life Members

Colette Annesley-Gamester & Johnathan Harding, Robin Auld, Keith & Debby Badger, Caroline Bennett, Klaas and Lise Berkeley, Carmen Blazquez, Peter and Mimi Buckley, Ruy Barretto, Anisa Caine, Mrs Moira Campbell, Anne Clements, Viscount Cowdray, Mary Davidson, Liz Dean, Craig Charles Dobson, John Doyle, John and Liz Duncan, Rosemary Fitzpatrick, Mrs V Hamnett, Hermann Graf-Hatzfeldt, Tony Henry, Guy Johnson, Thomas Lingard, Michael Livni, Maya Melrose, Mill Millichap, Valerie Morgan, Mrs O. Oppenheimer, Vinod Patel & Rashmi Shukla, CBE, John Pontin, Colin Redpath, Jane Rowse, Gabriel Scally, Penelope Schmidt, Miss N Sharpe, Philip Strong, Caroline Windsor, India Windsor-Clive

Sustainer Members

Mr G. Bader, Mrs Helen Carlton, Eric Chen, Mrs K. Dudelzak, Marcela de Montes, GR Murthy, Monika Sachtleben, Rosemary Steel, James Stelfox, Mrs Charmaine Wright

TRUSTEES James Sainsbury (Chair), Josephine Amankwah, Dick Baker, Sandy Brown, Rebecca Hossack, Tony Juniper, Hylton Murray-Philipson, Nick Robins, Kim SamuelJohnson, Ana Stanic

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Contact: Lizzie Daisley-Smith (+351) 936 583 802 lizzie@korashan.com Meeting bi-monthly

Herbert Girardet, Hazel Henderson, June Mitchell, Sophie Poklewski Koziell, Jonathan Robinson, Andrew Simms, Martin Wright

SOUTH AFRICA Cape Town

PRODUCTION

Contact: Galeo Saintz +27 (0) 82 888 8181 galeo@galeosaintz.com Meeting every two months

SUPPORTING GROUPS Hemel Hempstead

Contact: Paul Sandford Tel. 07767 075490 paulsandford28@yahoo.co.uk Meets on the 2nd Wednesday of the month

Printer Kingfisher Print, Totnes, Devon ISSN 0034-5970 Printed on Evolution paper: (75% recycled fibre/25% FSC certified virgin pulp), using soya-based inks

London

Contact: Annemarie Borg amb@annemarieborg.com Antara Project Group focused on role of artists

Resurgence & Ecologist (ISSN 0034-5970) is published bi-monthly by The Resurgence Trust and is distributed in the USA by Mail Right Int. 1637 Stelton Road B4 Piscataway NJ 08854.

Periodical Postage Paid at NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ 08901 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Resurgence, The Resurgence Trust C/O 1637 Stelton Road Ste B4, Piscataway NJ 08854

You have values do your investments?

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Ethical investment for private clients, charities and trusts.

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The value of investments and income arising from them may fall as well as rise and you might get back less than you originally invested.

Rathbone Greenbank Investments is a trading name of Rathbone Investment Management Limited, which is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.

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