Month: May 2013

After the Tyranny of the Convenient

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It started a long time ago; those first rough voyagers of speed kicking up dust in the villages. Then a tide of Model Fords and the opening up of previously hidden inroads to the country. Black and white, the early images come to us like cinematic semaphores; comedies of Keystone cops and early reels of high jinks in ever growing towns in unknown stretches of Californian dreams and burgeoning Mid West cities, while in Europe ponies and traps were suddenly old hat and a million horses in London and their every growing tides of manure were superseded by black motors to add to the smog, weirdly and infernally echoing the tides of black-clad pedestrians, the black hats and umbrellas pushing for space in a town where everyone keeps to themselves.

In many ways the motor car was one of the key innovations of the century, facilitated by an industrial model where the workers themselves were increasingly dehumanized then shunted away almost altogether. Its one great clarion call was the way in which it opened up horizons. Distant prospects were suddenly made close. Families experienced the kind of travel almost akin to teleportation in its speed and sense of ensuing displacement. It came to be seem as a kind of cornerstone of liberty, its costs not clear to many at first, like cigarettes that were considered good for the throat.

But of course it only ever accelerated. Read accounts of people walking country roads in the seventies, their dismay at the rising tide of roadkill; shocking in the sense that it was shocking at all to us and our conditioning to the sight of flattened animals. And then the great monsters, the great modern roads – marching across the land leviathan like, ripping up hillsides, tearing neighbourhoods in two, almost Stalinistic in their scale of social and literal engineering.

And now we have the reality for so many – the conditioning to life on the motorways; the dulled sense of drudgery of endless concrete, the feeling of confinement, the sense of being nowhere at all but trapped in a kind of high-speed neverworld where there is almost a sense of not moving at all; vehicles glide from side to side and distance is distorted, time itself feeling rinsed out.

But it’s a sacrifice many are willing to make – pragmatically or reluctantly. For still a huge majority in this country, cars are the transport of choice – and they are thereby locked into the economy they represent; the financial outlay for keeping a car on the road means that that choice becomes locked in – few can afford that and regular train travel as well. That many are sick to the teeth about this and that they would very willingly embrace a move to the railways were they reasonably priced is of course one of the great scandals of the age.

But for many, cars continue to hold an allure that makes motorways a cross they are willing to bear. The endless adverts, the pull of ergonomic seats and carefully molded interiors, the obsession with performance of the machine itself – it represents a kind of wedding to the machinated world, a kind of semi-cyborg state of entrapment. And all the minor roads are sport and everyone’s cushioned in steel and polished glass and all too often never seem to hear the roar of tyre on tarmac they leave in their wake – a collective endemic whereby the air conditioning and stereo surround leaves people blind to the huge irony and madness of a nation in perpetual motion, choking the roads, snarled in inability or unwillingness to find their way out.

That our towns have been built around cars for so long hardly helps this. And for anyone out in the sticks where buses are largely the preserve of pensioners and even then are being cut to the core, cars have become a kind of no brainer. The speed they represent, their flexibility, the power they give to go anywhere at once at any given time, not limited by timetables, or routes or the absence of stations or lines – none of this can be easily dismissed.

But if we are to escape their huge costs – well rehearsed in so many places – there’s surely a need to try and do better. If rural communities are not always what they once were it’s interesting to consider how a different pattern of travel may change this. If the model of private car ownership could be successfully challenged and car sharing clubs received the kind of patronage they deserved it could prove transformative for many rural and suburban areas blighted by a kind of over individualization.

Equally, if people made decisions about where they lived based on their travel options; being somewhere that has good transport links and lobbying for them to be improved where they don’t exist it could liberate many people from the serfdom car ownership can so often represent.

But a shift away from private car ownership can represent a kind of change which could be considered something of a sacrifice. Yes, you might not be able to travel exactly wherever you wanted at high speed at the drop of a hat. But such changes can bring unsuspected rewards. There’s a lot to be said about different relationship with both a sense of place and of the experience of travel itself. It might take you longer to get somewhere, but you might come to know your surroundings a little bit better in the first place. You might have to make detours but that could take you to incredible places you might never have known about otherwise, or which you’d have been more tempted to rush through without a moment’s pause. You might miss the conditioned isolation of your own vehicle but even the basic communion of being in a peopled carriage can increase your sense of connection with humanity at large.

Moving away from individualized cars might mean turning so many things we take for granted on their head, but it can lead to lives that are more dynamic, connected and enriching. If that in any way represents an inconvenience it could also mean a liberation from the vast cost of running a motor. It could mean life with a better sense of priorities that bolsters, not separates and drains communities. And just as it would shape our experiences it would have huge ramifications for planning and how we organise and give precedence to other forms of transport. It might mean we sang the praises a little more often of those other liberators – the bicycles that opened up so many rural vistas back in the eighteen hundreds, the huge terminus railway stations that each form a kind of cathedral to models of modern transport that bring people together, not to mention the sense of dependability of shouldering a bag and knowing that, with time and a sense of great adventure, your boots can take you anywhere you wish.

Storing the Stories and Everything Else

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So a few more thoughts may be necessary about technology. Because, even if it’s clearer than ever that the net has its drawbacks, not least it’s mounting contribution to CO2 emissions, it’s probably also clearer than ever that the net isn’t going away any time soon. It’s revolutionised so many facets of life and, at its best, holds huge potential for less energy intensive ways of conducting our lives. Certainly, for anyone involved in information or communications, it’s become all but indispensable. And this means that, for most, it’s a thing we have to work with. It might be better in many respects if people collectively walked away from their screens, but outside neo-primitive bubbles, it’s probably not going to happen.

And while the arguments go on about the huge amounts of power needed to power and cool the growing pile of server farms, and while we can contribute to those efforts, there are things anyone of us can do to moderate our impacts. One is to use a green search engine like Ecosia, whose server farms are powered by clean technology and whose every search raises money for campaigns to protect the Amazon, however counterintuitive that may seem. Another is that open windows, programmes and switched on machines are still burning up juice. We could do worse than to take a leaf out of the New Home Front initiative and try and remember that a more wartime like approach to energy conservation is as necessary now as ever.

We need to rediscover a greater awareness towards, if not an abject horror, of wasting energy. And technology could help with that – if a programme existed that could make us more aware of the amount of power our machines are burning up at any given point then perhaps we’d find it easier to take stock. And perhaps somebody somewhere at some stage might need to start thinking about prioritizing what we’re saving on the servers – every book ever written, the pinnacles of learning and literature, or a billion updates on what people had for breakfast or a sea of endless Youtube videos of people eating raw chillies?

Perhaps most crucially there’s a very important case to look at our overriding relationship with technology. While the internet has its various boons we could maybe remind ourselves that it shouldn’t become an end in itself. Or, to put it another way, we should let the net aid our lives, not become the primary port of call, the dominant preoccupation that overrides everything else great, beautiful and of use in the world. We need to shift the balance in our priorities so that machines remain the servants and their myriad conveniences don’t put them in the driving seat.

What is really needed then is a greater sense of synthesis, of balance. That might mean for instance that we each of us make more time for reading more books, or spending time with friends or family, or spending more time outdoors and pursuing activities that encourage that. Life infront of a screen has become the modern grindstone – we should take what chances present themselves to spend time away from the glowing allure.

Particularly worrying then in many respects is the rise of smart phones. Leaving aside their ecological ramifications, the power of one of these machines held in your hands is phenomenal and, while their many uses are clear to see, the addiction to technology they often carry with them are also equally obvious. Someone I knew was so hooked to looking up new music that she almost missed moving house as she couldn’t find it in herself until the very last minute to drag herself away to prepare. We’ve long passed the point whereby it’s clear that technology can really screw you up.

Is it really such a hardship then, when the work has been done, to switch off the screen and walk out again into the world, remember that the sun and rain on your face holds a kind of richness computers can never emulate? I remember what spurred me to spurn my teenage computer game addiction was the dreams I had after immersion whereby reality had become pixilated and defined by the limitations of the programmers’ imaginations. To say nothing of the huge amount of hours such games ate up. As machines have become more refined the different reality they represent is maybe less stark but arguably no less insidious.

Knee jerk reactions to technology at large help no one. But we could also be on the threshold of an explosion in rediscovering and pushing human potential. Imagine those untold riches of mnemonics that allowed storytellers in pre-literate cultures to hold such huge swathes of information and lore in their memories. Think of what being the depository of such riches must have felt like – the sense of internal integration and inner wealth. Think of the singers who carry their songs, or of the poet Osip Mandelstam whose life was taken by the Stalinist regime but many of whose poems survived by the fact that his wife had committed them to memory.

Memorisation and mnemonics represent a kind of potential armoury unassailable by almost anything except not keeping such memories sharp. That’s maybe a more abiding image of who we can be at our best – alive in the woods round a fire with a database of beauty there to access, not hunched in our rooms scrabbling after a fix of information. That said, there’s never a need to be too hardline. One thing can inform another, inspiration comes from many doors and synthesis can prove a fertile ground for helping us remember how things can be. But if we ever did need to bid the internet farewell, somehow I think we could cope.

Heartfires

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So, recently, my friend River Jones and I finally published our long-time-brewing poetry book ‘Heartfires.’ The book had its inception a mere ten years ago in the embers and then new light of a Beltane firepit a few hours walk from what was then my home on an estate on the outskirts of Brighton. Chatting to River that dawn it emerged we both had poems recently ready to be put out in the world. Later we met with the poems in hand and were more than satisfied with the synthesis they all held put together.

We put a shout out for an illustrator but it was several false starts and many years later before my friend Rebecca Tann, accordionist for Twenty One Crows amongst other things, stepped into the breach and produced some truly fine and beautiful lino cuts. And several years later, here we are in the midst of another bout of Beltane fires. Some of the poems are inspired by love, others by dreams, often the two combined. But some of them express a wider sense of connection too, something that can unite us all, beyond creed or class or even any search for individualized fulfillment.

Sometimes it can get to you, being down here in the South. Often a stranger talking to you is a thing treated with suspicion – another random occurrence in a far too crazy world. Perhaps this is because, in large tracts of the South at least, strangers talking to you sometimes can be slightly mad or certainly often don’t seem in possession of the kind of protocol that makes talking to people you don’t know a pleasure – it can be something of a fine art.

So instead, people hunch and put up borders and retreat, suspicious of anyone breaking down boundaries. Experience in nearby towns with their fair share of drugs, booze and their associated issues mean that such defences can be understood. But it’s good also to look at the other extremes, at where such inroads to isolation can lead us. As a culture, the Western world is riven with maladies of isolation; it’s more of a defining characteristic than any amount of tiresome street encounters.

We could all do with looking with a greater degree of self awareness of where such instincts to retreat from the world can lead us. The pensioners who barely see a soul from day to day, the countless people in jobs where they never connect with anyone at all, let alone anyone new. You could call it the English condition; a kind of cultural assimilation that has begun at home and is perpetuated by our day to day decisions, by each opportunity that presents itself to retreat or reach out.

And what’s the antidote? Heartfires I suppose represents one articulation of what another way can look like – inspired by times that were as much about people as anything else. People bonded by adversity or just by places themselves at the edges of conventional existence. That kind of fellowship never really leaves – the challenge perhaps is bringing it out in our day to day interactions.

But really, as Bob Hillary has said in one of his truly fine albums, we are all in this together; pilots of a collective human ship. Maybe at this point we should just sit back and ask; what would it be like to live in a world where every chance for connection is grasped, where no one feels alone, where communities are not some hippy pipe dream but a reality for anyone in any given place. Everyone of us operates better when we are part of a living, breathing mesh of human souls – such a state is meant to be our natural inheritance. Connection is at the heart of human existence and we are all more fully alive when this becomes apparent. That is surely the lessons that life is waiting to give us; that it can be full of such riches and counting ourselves abundant in interaction and friendships has to be one of the greater gifts life has to offer us all.

Crossing

There’s comfort in the roll of a ship,

There’s comfort in its assurance

that we’re, after all, at sea. For now,

the confines of our world are bounded

by this solid hull. Outwardly enclosed

this world but given room to magnify

with clarity and strength that’s hard to find

on land where borders stretch beyond the mind.

And what’s a world but definition?

And what’s security if not a mood or misconception?

Or does our sense of safety fold around us;

like a gentler, softer hull, that turns

the winds of turmoil, should they come

and lets us sail through steadily, uncut.

On Not Looking Down

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes it’s difficult to ignore the doom-mongers; they can stalk or pounce or seek to wear you down by mere attrition. There may appear to be any number of reasons that can cause us to lose hope, if we decide to adopt, or abandon, a certain attitude. But whatever the rational, the prophets of doom can sometimes fail to comprehend a very fundamental point; about that which keeps us going, that which can define what it means to be human at our best.

Certainly the state of the climate in particular is clearly cause for concern. You can lay out any number of observations over this concerning hope. There’re those who decry wishful thinking as a kind of false hope that lulls us into supplication. There’s the no hope scenario that’s it too late to prevent atmospheric Armageddon. And then there’s the so far unquantified hope that somehow, undefined events will conspire to deliver a better day tomorrow.

If discussions of all of the above can be considered necessary, it’s worth remembering that hope itself is a necessity of life – be it the hope of a golden age of ecological harmony or the hope that you will find food and shelter for the night and that tomorrow may be easier. Hope is the given that makes all human effort possible. That the future may contain uncertainty, that none of us can say with any real conviction at this stage what it will hold; both of these are fundamentals of human existence.

So those who decry all hope as false operate counter to some fundamental truths – firstly that the future can be more malleable than we might suppose. The weight of declaring no hope is such that those who do so must be absolutely certain, and even then the value of it is questionable. I don’t see how anyone, at this stage, can lay claim to the real justifications of such conviction. There may be a case for encouraging ‘life boat’ scenarios but it still seems our main thrust should be to do what we can to moderate the impact of society at large to change its ways. Possibly the two should be kept in tandem but we should be wary of the temptation to bury our heads too deep in the sands of various communities while there is still so much we can have an influence over out in the wider world.

Secondly, there is the issue of how we choose to conduct our lives whatever the future holds. If there is uncertainty, we should be bold in continuing to address the problems, not give in to despair if problems can seem insurmountable. And if things were to go against us in the long run, we still have these days left us, to act with humanity and compassion, to be the best that we can come what may.

That real hope for the future rests in the degree to which we can modify our behaviour and that of corporate elites in the here and now is surely cause for greater galvanization of effort. We are poised at a kind of global, environmental Dunkirk moment. Even while there were those stashing poison in the event of invasion and the country was preparing for a guerilla resistance, time was bought and years of struggle eventually made good even against what seemed at the time unmerciful odds.

That’s not to say we should adopt some conspiracy of silence about the future or that those moved to evoke what a dark future may look like do so without justification or value. If apocalyptic visions are, as Ben Okri says, moral signposts on the road to hell, giving in to despair conditions us to be less likely to actively look for the signs of upcoming turnings. Such visions should spur us on to prevent their occurrence, in the knowledge that everything we do today can make a difference and that the kind of far future we leave depends on our efforts today.

Environmentalists often despair at our culture itself, at the depressing statistics that however many people seem aboard, society at large lumbers on and sleeping masses seem bewildered at the problems or simply don’t care and we all seem locked in to a momentum that will take us all down. But by the same token, anyone who defines themselves as an environmentalist – which should be anyone who cares about the problems we face and is prepared to take steps to overcome them – any such person can become a conduit for effecting change, not just in whatever scheme or issue they fight or champion, but in how such raised voices can stir things up, can help catalyse us all towards the kind of changes that are clearly so vitally needed.

The need for action, be it direct action, behavioural change, governmental or international edicts – has never been clearer. But maybe prescriptions miss the point. Perhaps the wider point is our ability to ask as humanity en masse a very big ‘What If?’ What If people could wake up on a huge scale to the harm that overconsumption is doing? What If people were able suddenly overnight to awake to the land around them like an old love, to see more clearly her beauty, to feel more acutely her pain at the harm we are doing? What If ages of prophesies heralded just this: a clarion call to remember who we really are, what we are really capable of and how much we depend upon the earth beneath and around us much more than the myriad flotsam we’re told we must have, the things that mask our fire and pain? What If none of that was needed any more? What If we remembered our promise, our dream of how we and the world can all be at our best, at the very peak of our potential?

Over the Tarmac: the Spring

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

If you had to a state a point where the government bid a final farewell to any green credentials, it arguably came with the budgetary autumn review way back in 2011. The 45 road schemes laid out back then have been augmented since by another 150 so that now we seem to be facing a road building programme on a par with the ‘Roads to Prosperity’ schemes of the early nineteen nineties. Those schemes characterised in so many ways the last Conservative government just as the protests against them were symptomatic of wider dissent.

Of the roads planned today, 42 are pretty much direct revivals of those proposed in the ‘nineties and form part of a picture comprised of 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 ring roads with another 60 more minor projects. The whole programme is being estimated at costing around £30 billion. If the figures for the roads built in the previous decade and a half are anything to go by, we can expect a fairly substantial overrun of these early financial projections.

Taken together the roads would affect National Parks, the Norfolk Broads, Areas of Outstanding National Beauty and several World Heritage Sites. They also of course represent a dramatic sea change in transport policy from on high with aspirations to curb car use and promote public transport looking more than a little forlorn. And with road transport emissions accounting for well in advance of twenty percent of UK carbon emissions, the policy effectively scuppers one of the more malleable means by which we can effectively rein these in.

It’s more than a little ironic that vast amounts of cash are being pumped into new infrastructure at a time of austerity so caustic that the upkeep of existing roads is being jeopardized. As a means of funding new roads, the government are looking at schemes such as public-private partnership deals whereby future taxpayers are often lumped with the ‘hidden tolls’ for roads under construction today. But there is still a huge immediate pricetag being picked up by central and local government.

But resistance to all this is growing, most notably with the groups affiliated with the Campaign For Better Transport’s ‘Roads to Nowhere’ campaign. And particularly vigorous protests have been taking place at Combe Haven Valley in opposition to the Bexhill to Hastings Link Road. Earmarked by the DfT themselves as “one of the worst value for money schemes in Britain,” the road’s route has been the scene of incredible acts of front and tenacity as trees have been occupied, camps set up, the less than proverbial bulldozers stopped in their tracks and work effectively delayed for many weeks.

At the time of writing, the DfT have not yet confirmed they will fund their allotted share of the scheme – some £56 million out of a total already spiraling above the £100 million mark. East Sussex County Council are forecast to spend a projected £70 million on the road at a time when it is making wider cuts of the same amount that stand to leave adult social care and children’s services particularly badly hit.

Somehow though, to see the camps spring up, to witness the energy of those making a stand and the sense of release in the process, there seems more in the air than simply a fight against old-school and deviant infrastructure. To go to Combe Haven and see the people in the oaks, to see and hear the pristine valley in the last few days before it’s due to be severed in two, the struggle seems iconic of so many other situations in the wider world. At a time of unprecedented ecological loss, the fact that here in the UK we are losing our ancient woodland at a rate even faster than that impacting the Amazon, any attacks on existing woodland should be more widely recognised for the carnage they really are. And at a time when the government seems deposed to outdo all previous levels of contempt they seem to hold large segments of the population in, there’s something that feels particularly fitting in people staking a common claim in the ground that’s due for destruction and stating enough is enough.

The gruelling conditions on site at Hasting over the previous few months are testament that none of this is necessarily easy. But the rewards for those engaged are clearly evident to see, even in the grip of bitter winter; the knowledge that when people act together there’s a very firm hope for turning round situations that might otherwise prove intractable. But just as the protests of the nineties took years to reach their final culmination, Hastings is just the first major manifestation of the kind of outcry that needs to be taken up more widely if the hydra-like heads of these hundreds of schemes stand any chance of being properly defeated.

This article originally appeared in the spring issue of the Transition Free Press.