Author: Jim Hindle

There is no ‘Away’ in ‘Throwaway’

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You can see it towering up like a kind of colossal ark against the backdrop of the sea. Cranes stoop around it like some kind of gang of gangling ministers. It is already now a living symbol of failure of vision, or something more complicit. Soon a fleet of lorries will transport daily more than 500 tonnes of waste to be burnt up in Newhaven’s new incinerator. The ash produced and the toxins it contains – whether caught in the filters or the bottom ash that constitutes around a third of that which has just been burnt – is to be deposited in ‘land raise’ sites around the county.

Here, that means that out on the flat land that runs down to the Pevensey levels, previously tranquil country lanes will be full of dumper trucks and the ash – rich among other things in heavy metals – will sit, semi airbourne, mountains in the making as a toxic realisation of what miopic local government can look like. The truly disturbing thing is that they want to use the stuff as a construction material, thereby increasing the danger of the stuff seaping into groundwater, never mind the health effect for anybody living and working in the buildings they intend to build with it.

Officials insist the risk to health is minimal, that incineration is a valuable source of power as well as a solution to the problem of our running out of landfill sites. And there is no doubt that the problem of the amount of waste produced in the UK is huge – some 434 million tonnes every year – enough to fill the Albert Hall every two hours. Some 30 million of these tonnes are produced by domestic rubbish.

But there have been great changes, not least an increase in recycling from 4% to 40% since 2000, with a target of 50% by 2020. The tragedy of the proposed move towards more incineration is that such changes are halted if not put into reverse. In fact, local authorities who’ve forked out for incinerators will be induced financially to source waste from outside their area, particularly if the incinerators are linked to providing a set amount of power. This creates the use of more trucks on the road and erodes the growing aspiration that we should be getting away from waste per se, should be encouraging more compostable products, better collection of compost itself and greater use of anaerobic digestion. Incinerators lock us in to the mentality whereby we do not think of what we throw away. The binmen do their rounds and we are all conditioned to forget.

In her recent book ‘The Secret Life of Stuff‘ – Julie Hill spells out the nature of the problems of our relationship to the stuff we consume and throw out. A large part of what we’re faced with is the effect of the ‘linear economy’ whereby we make stuff, use it, then throw it away – reintegrating any of it back into the system still takes place much less frequently. Just look at aluminium – ubiquitous because it’s so useful; light, flexible, even barely toxic when used as packaging, it is smelted in inferno-like conditions whereby a single plant can use as much electricity as a city of a million people. Transported huge distances during its manufacture we use 900,000 tonnes of the stuff in the UK every year. While around half of that used in packaging is recycled every year, that still leaves a vast amount going to waste.

Or take a look at the half a million tonnes of clothes and textiles buried in landfill each year, along with an extra half a million tonnes of carpet, 8,000 tonnes of which are laid for events lasting only hours or days. Changing our clothes and furnishings regularly irrespective of whether they still have life in them has become symptomatic of modern life – once people made patchwork quilts and rag rugs, repaired things, bought them in the expectation they would last. A hundred years ago, household rubbish mainly consisted of ash and cinders and maybe food waste if there wasn’t a dog or pig around, back in a prewar world before consumption gathered pace and where salvage was still part of the scenery.

We need to start a greater shift back to such sensibilities along with working towards solutions such as designing products for durability and for recovery of their constituent materials along with returning nutrients from food and human waste to the soil. Reforming how we reduce waste and set about its management is undoubtedly a long, hard grind and incinerators hold out the promise of a seemingly quick fix. The environmental cost of the production of the waste that they burn, to say nothing of putting elements of it back into the atmosphere shines an uncomfortable light on such a promise, or policies of here-and-now convenience.

There are now 81 incinerators planned around the country. It has been calculated they produce twice as much CO2 as fossil fuelled power stations, making the plan for more incinerators look doubly perverse. Meanwhile those living under the prevailing wind will have to deal with a legacy of increased likelihood of cancers. The extent to which dioxins produced represent a significant risk is still controversial, though their output during the start up and shutting down of the furnace has not been properly monitored in the UK. Meanwhile the filters do not catch nano particles which can infiltrate the lining of the lung and cause internal inflamation, damaging organs and even unborn children.

At Newhaven now and anywhere downwind we have to live with a leviathan that may well set the county back by decades. The building looms as a testament of how not to do things, of what can happen when councils bite the bullet of an out-of-sight-and-mind mentality that sums up our modern problem of waste production itself. The facts that the way in which the councils involved have acted here has been described by the local MP, Norman Baker, as ‘amateurish and slipshod’, that the very legality of the deal with the construction firm has been called into question are somehow depressingly unsurprising. If anything can be drawn from such a sorry story, it should be that many other places in the country still have a choice about whether to meet the future of waste management with an attitude fit for this century, not some all too easy, corporately financed non-solution that creates more problems than it claims to bring an answer to.

“Our Richest and Most Fragile Habitat”

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

At first there was the by now usual sense of stunned disbelief: the government – not content with dispatching any public body with a goal of serving the greater public good or attempting to provide some kind of environmental balance from on high – was coming for the Forestry Commission. But beyond the justified chorus of concern, the petition that has already gathered 150,000 signatories, the score of campaign groups that has sprung up, is the idea really as bad as it sounds?

After all, The Forestry Commission itself was set up after the First World War during which the importance of a domestic supply of timber had been made acutely relevant by the interfering effect of German u-boats. Our previous habit, formed in the previous century, had been to simply strip other unsuspecting countries of their wildwood. In a short space of time after the founding of the Commission in 1919, vast tracts of upland hillsides, moorlands and heaths had been planted up.

The effect on these habitats in our backyards was obviously less than brilliant but at least we weren’t denuding the pristine forests from so much of the rest of the empire. And here, even at this first inception of the Commission, there lies the rub of how we provide for our appetite of timber without undue damage to the natural environment. Is it so bad if so much of the Commission land has now come up for sale? Weren’t these trees planted to be harvested at some stage down the line? With our current deficit isn’t now as good a time as any to call in our debts? We might even stand to reclaim some of those moors and heaths and barren but beautiful hillsides that were lost beneath the blanket of dark spruce.

One very large problem with this is that large areas of ancient woodland have been cut down and grubbed up and planted with conifers this century, seen as they were after the collapse of their age-old management pattern as somehow extraneous, unproductive patches to be tidied up. About half of our ancient woodland has been lost since the end of the Second World War and replanting with conifers accounts for by far the largest share of this. At least, such a proportion would have been lost if these woodlands had not proved so unexpectedly durable – they can revive after a considerable time with the right conditions and even decades of the heavy shade of conifers have not removed them entirely.

Infact, since the 80’s there has been a growing recognition of the need to thin out conifers where they have been planted over ancient woodland and revive the latter in all its beautiful and species-enriched glory. Which is exactly what stands to make the proposed sell off so tragic – the Commission was planning to pursue such restoration on a massive scale. A vast amount of recoverable ancient woodland stands at risk of being lost, forever.

So even if the concept of selling off an asset once held firmly for the public does not raise hackles in and of itself, even if the thought of tracts of forest losing the excellent level of upkeep of paths and rides that the Commission currently provides does not sit uncomfortably then perhaps the proposed pawning of this most precious asset – the 20,000 hectares of woodland as close to wildwood as anything we are ever likely to possess might just wake us up to what we stand to lose in this proposed sell off.

The sorry star upon a proposal which has long since shed its needles and should be removed from both houses with all speed is that the mechanism drafted to facilitate the sell off is not even constitutional. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re glibly told that this is an opportunity for community groups to acquire their local woodland – even if such groups gather the money, where exactly do their members hope to find the time to manage forests with any thing like the level of dedication the Commission currently provides?

There will always be a need for sustainable forestry. But brokerages as hasty as this one appears to be, running the risk of selling off to firms who only have profits in mind and little or no sense of what husbandry can look like don’t do the country any favours by any yardstick. The Commission maintains 100% of its woodland to Forestry Stewardship standard – there will be no such requirement for future owners. To make a former point again, even the economics is dubious; the FC making sizeable returns on their estates to the point where the body costs the public only 30 pence per taxpayer per year. But this government has no sense of value, of what a thing is worth, of what generations past have held dear and fought for. They paint themselves as bitter medicine, as the cruel but kindly short sharp shock. Really though they are just libertarians, about as respecting of institutions as their far left mirror images. Whether semi-crazed by ideology, or simply guilty of an amauterish gambling in the face of the crisis we face, they seem set to discover the limits of the population’s tolerance.

Cruel and False Economies

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Last year, October’s spending review ushered in a sense of disbelief akin to a thing like freefall: Doomsday had apparently come early for so many in the public sector, for so many of the inner city poor. If there had been any question about it before, now it was only too clear. The crunch had bitten deep, the shit had hit the fan and the government were, maybe if only for the space of a few days, seemingly made only too credible to many by the strength of something like conviction, something that passed for it, something sufficient to make people mistake it for genuine force of feeling. Though to their way of thinking, Cameron and IDS probably still believe that they are right, as for them to be right equates with a dismantling of the state, where the deficit may be unfortunate but dovetails neatly with their ideology. The true blue values of many Tories are both masked and miles away from endless touchy feely PR wooing of the swinging votes.

Nine months on from the election, the ground has been well primed with months of saturation in the press of stories of benefits scroungers, a national vilification that few have seen fit to deny. The climate is set and the sound of belts being tightened en masse hardens feelings to those who may be neither strong nor productive, who simply do not have a bus or bike to get on, who are set to be brushed beneath a rug of touted necessity, of a new and harsher colder world.

A kind of glee in many quarters sets the picture further down a deeply unsettling road. There was a sense of vindication which Cameron did not restrain from whipping up. “Think of how many nurses that money could employ,” he spouted, clear enough that you could almost hear the spittle on the mic as he talked about benefit cuts. “Think how many schools and hospitals it could help to keep running.” It was a denouncement so enthusiastic, that pandered so unapologetically to the most predictable and emotive lines of reasoning it sent a bolt of warning down my spine.

So London held its breath and even months on from the touted claims of “sociological cleansing”, the sense of shock, of something bitter sinking in has not entirely gone, even as the students vented the rage of a nation, even as that shock has been transformed to a kind of fire of the spirit and vindication that this cannot be allowed. Perhaps it is partly a reflection of this change of public mood that the proposed housing benefit cap has been postponed till this time next year. What’s clear is that if these measures are not moderated or overturned there will be very real misery. There will be greater homelessness. There is already stress in countless thousands of houses and on the estates.

What was shocking in reading some of the early comments on the web, the product of the vanguard of the loyal libertarians perhaps, or an indication of the power of Cameron’s crude popularism, was the drawing up of a thousand proverbial bridges. The poor are undeserving after all. Let single mothers be moved into bunkhouses. Let immigrants now find their own way home. This stunned and all too nearly broken Isle, this shocked and awed and deferential country; is this really now how it will stand; a shrugging of our shoulders and wallowing, complicit, in a lie that says it cannot be another way, that only the strong can survive, that only the virtuous prosper, that it is not for a government to be compassionate and the people all must fill the breach because the state has no greater role than sweeping the board clean to let the markets do how they see fit.

Such rushed and savage cuts in many quarters stand to only bring out cruel and false economies, the bills from block-booked B and B’s for the displaced being just one. Even the vaunted ideals of a move away from New Labour’s totalitarian streak are looking little more like cynical window dressing for what was an almost mandatory piece of mendacity for the elections.

It’s worth remembering that the current deficit, while it has risen sharply since 2008 is still just over half of what we faced after World War Two when it is placed in line with GDP. Admittedly that’s an extreme example; we had just come through a full scale global war, the years following 1945 brought with them a sharp decline in what we owed, our credit as a nation was still good and the role of a still bouyant US was no small factor. But it helps to show there are good grounds for reducing the deficit more gradually, if such a possibility can only be articulated to greater effect. But whatever the necessity, however undeniable the crisis, these cuts are being ushered in at their present speed and on their current scale because of Cameron’s view of what the government should look like, irrespective of what we stand to lose as a nation. And the cuts’ nature all too often seems to fly in the face of good sense, as the changes to the way tax is to be collected exemplifies.

Meanwhile, the poor have simply to pull up their own breeches and get on with it. It is will and work that make a person rich in his society, not chances dealt at birth or through health or education. The fact that there are now 2.5 million unemployed and only 500,000 jobs is an inconvenience that those in his circles will not have to suffer. It amounts to more than minimal government; it is effectively Social Darwinism, a return to the worst facets of nineteenth century attitudes to society at large. Factor in that, whether through design or accident, cities like Liverpool will be disproportionately hit and the whole thing takes on the pallor of a monumental sick joke. Except there is no joke, no waking up from the nightmare, no sudden admission from Downing Street that this has all been some mistake or monumental wind up from the start.

Across the South, in many coastal towns there looks set to be new ghettos for the poor; Hastings, in North Kent, in all the conurbations stretched out as a kind of commuter country nineteen thirties afterthought along the Sussex coast. If the caps continue, in fifteen years vast tracts of the South East will be made unaffordable to an equally vast tract of people, an ensuing migration to the far more jobless North only exacerbating the situation.

This could be avoidable if people are willing to conceive we have a choice and that it does not include another four and a half years of a coalition with such a shaky mandate from the start. The crisis is real, but this kind of short, sharp shock is exactly what neoliberals espouse as the best way to respond to it. The tragedy is that this may well lock the UK into a spiral of decline from which only the very richest stand to benefit. Economically, even when dealing with a deficit in a recession, these cuts represent an absence of clear thought.

Meanwhile everything that generations passed have fought for in the name of equality and freedom is being swept aside. The result may be a breeding ground for the kind of conditions that brought about an interwar interim of massive turbulence, which eventually necessitated the creation of a fully fledged welfare state as a way of ensuring a fairer society and more stable political climate. As Karl Mannheim wrote in 1943:

“All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.”

However we choose to do so (and this is worth a read for anyone taking to the streets), it is imperative that more and more of us continue to articulate our discontent. What stands in the balance is not just our own fate over the following months and years or the fate of generations down the line; it is an honouring of a tradition that goes back to at least the mid nineteenth century. It is an honouring of those who sought to reform a Poor Law that condemned the unemployed in a world of finite opportunities to brutal and degrading conditions in the workhouses. It is an honouring of those who fought for the notion that the poor have a right as a matter of course to a greater share of society’s wealth and who, while a culture of hard work should always be maintained, should not be subjected to humiliating means testing. It is an honouring of those who believed that the state had a greater role than fiscal maintenance or passing laws; that it could be an instrument in the building of a fairer and more egalitarian world.

Men and women have suffered and died for such dreams. Don’t let us fail to serve their memory because we have forgotten as a nation that such things were hard won, that we have been handed down unparalleled opportunities, damaged a little on the way perhaps by a thirty-year-long slumber Thatcher set the way for. But we must still be willing to believe that we have it in our hands to shape the kind of world we would see fit, as surely as a generation did sixty five years ago, blinking from the rubble of a global total war, sure of only one thing in a time of unprecedented uncertainty; that they had fought for a better world and would not see the chance for its creation snatched away by the duplicity of a party of privilege with no right to sell this country down the river. It was Ghandi of course who said that each generation must re-enact the struggle for its rights, or lose them. Be under no illusions; that time has come again, there is as much at stake today as there ever was in 1945.

Toppling King Coal

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The news pops up unmissable, if it weren’t for every other scrap of news also popping at the same time, along with reports of Ann Widdecombe being transported by a showbiz wire above the heads of an incredulous or simple nervous audience on the now worryingly ubiquitous Strictly. So, this particular bit of news says ‘anger was justified’; and this from the former NASA scientist talking about the occupation last year of a coal powered power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar near Nottingham by a troupe of activists aiming to shut it down for a week.

The action is a clear case-in-point of a host of issues wider than the heavy handedness of the police response; the right to protest, how this may somehow impinge on wider rights if it means it interferes with the public’s ability to watch Ann Widdecombe – and many more besides – sailing literally or metaphorically with apparent tranquility above the host of disbelieving heads. These millions of mesmerized, vaguely despairing or just bored – a number I could be in on another night – caught in the glare of a mass media that has become both slicker and strangely more popular as it gets ever more debased, suggest we will not think again about our actions even as the savage weather of a dawning century paws with renewed ferocity at the door of our collective consciousness.

And that of course is why those protests took place, why one hundred and fourteen people felt inclined to brave the vagaries of trespass and the response that was bound to come with it. We’re all of us only too aware of the wolf down the road, of the carbon ratcheting up as we hurtle down the motorway of ambivalence towards a fate we all try not to think about. Really, it is not indifference but a kind of collective terror at the situation that we’re in that makes the retreat to the semi fantasy of Saturday night TV seem all the more appealing.

So many now will not join up the dots. The more pronounced the arguments become, the greater the need to take stock of our situation then the greater the temptation not to engage, to turn the other cheek, to ignore the growing feeling that one day soon we will not be able to ignore the rising tides or signs of climatic instability. It is here now, with us, this is the perfect storm, Northern Europe freezes while in Canada and elsewhere the temperature is well above the norm.

But somehow, for the most part, it does not seem so bad. So long as we are warm and have enough to eat we discover our capacity to be content. Sitting virtually incarcerated in cars on the immobilised motorways a thousand motorists turn up the radio and keep their fingers crossed. The more fortunate of us curl up in our living rooms as ice locks us all in and scour our DVD’s and anything else that will help to pass the time and really all of this is only natural; to make the best of any situation. But we seem at times strangely reluctant to not let ourselves really appreciate the nature of our situation, we do not feel inclined to count the cruel tally of the coal as the carbon stacks up from the stacks that churn it out. And partly this is understandable as to do so is to walk along the edge of a kind of precipice looking out over our future, one that does not reassure, an apparently perilous path that could lead us all too easily down a scree or more sudden slope towards despair.

The actions of those at Nottingham in 2009 were of those who chose not to look away, who sought to raise awareness that here, in Britain in the Twentyfirst Century we are rolling on quite happily with the burning of a fuel that is the major cause, besides the oil we use in cars, of anthropocentric driven climate change. Whether we continue to use coal in anything like historic quantities sets up the expectancy or otherwise for any other country in the world to follow in our wake, or set off on another, far more hopeful path.

Of course, it is not enough to beat our chests and sing out; “let there be no more burning of coal.” We have to take stock of the truly huge scale of the problem, of how much we are reliant of this source of fuel, of how comparably unreliable alternative sources of energy can be when providing the necessary base load capacity to enable sixty one million viewers to turn on their kettles in the breaks between Ann’s airbourne debuts on the box. The answers are there but they require both political will and appropriate investment.

In the recent court case, it was argued that seeking to engage the public by encouraging the use of less power on certain days would have been a more constructive response. But, as James Hansen argued, we need to leave the stuff in the ground, not merely moderate our use of it. In that sense taking on a government policy where coal is all but mandatory looks alot more credulous.

Speaking on a debate on Radio Four recently, George Monbiot defined a crucial element of justification of any protest as one of accountability, of surrendering yourself to the full force of the law if you are to break it, in the belief that your actions will be tried in a court, that the rightness of your cause will meet the rigors of the legal system and have the chance to be vindicated in the process. As I understand it, the protestors at Ratcliffe were planning to lock on en masse; in this, they had made the decision to have their beliefs put to just such a test and in the process to present themselves as accountable for their deeds.

However much such protests may make us uncomfortable, they remain, at their best, a simple articulation of an article of a clarified awareness. Whether or not shutting down power stations is the best way to go about it, even an action like this can serve to remind us that things are wrong, that we cannot afford to sit by in denial or complacency while we betray the future through the failure to acknowledge that there must be change, that whatever the complexity, whatever psychological mires we may face, we are at a turning point and must look for and continue to express our expectations that we can moderate our impact on this earth, that we remain – to a possibly still crucial degree – the masters of our destiny if we can only see it.

Wilderness, Nature and Kin

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Reading Paul Kingsnorth’s recent piece in Open Democracy, ‘Confessions of a recovering environmentalist’ stirred up a mix of emotions. In it, he charts his beginnings as an ‘ecocentrist’ – the long enforced marches as a teenager with his father, a kind of half entranced epiphany on St Catherine’s Hill among the Dongas, coming back to England after months in tropical forest – the sense of introspection in the people here, the sense of something missing, the barrage of the ads we are conditioned to ignore. He speaks of his disillusionment with environmentalism since; the sense of carbon targets taking over at all costs, the shift towards inclusion of a Left he largely sees as dubious, the creeping realization that what was once about protecting the natural world has become co-opted to mean a continuation of the human project, albeit in a friendlier, more sustainable packaging, whatever the cost of life outside the empire of homo sapiens sapiens that we are all a part of.

Above all, he communicates the sense that we have lost our way, that environmentalism has become mainstream at the cost of its soul. He speaks for the wilds, for the unadulterated mountains, for a sense of kindred feeling reading Wordsworth when he wrote that stones have souls. He puts himself apart, decries the infiltration by a bag of ‘washed out Trots’ and anti-capitalists, pronounces a bemusement or simple distrust of progressives. For him it’s all about the land, our love of it and how we do or don’t fit in with something much bigger than us, that does not revolve around us, that does not put mankind firmly at the centre of a wheel where we are God and nature is ours to do with as we please and as long as we safeguard the means of doing so, as long as we have enough to feed an ever growing economy, all will be well, even if we find ourselves at the pristine centre of a wasted, battered land.

Like him I was lucky or young or impulsive enough to get drawn into the protests of the nineties and the intensity of that experience has stayed with me; the sense of place, the love of it, the dedication to the natural world. Like him I have been somewhat suspicious of certain aspects of the Left – the legions of certain socialist groups looming like an ever constant threat that would swallow up what seemed at times a relatively tiny band of semi-feral, half anarchic lovers of what is wild and is green, engulfing us in a fashion reminiscent of something from the Spanish Civil War. And watching from the sidelines the rise in certain quarters of dogma winning out, the heady mantras that pronounced we all should ‘smash the system’ or the City, I can see what he means when he speaks of the ‘rattling sabers and stomping boots’ of a fifth column. Alot of people, myself included, left the movement then and it took years for it to reform itself, to build itself up again into something inclusive; still radical, but sane, appreciating the necessary balance that protest must hold.

Back in the timeless months among the trees, I was angry at our society, I was sickened at a mentality that was so insulated from the world that it could justify tearing great scars in the lines of the hills. The earth seemed to sing like a sickening lover, birds articulated her cries of distress; civilization was slowly killing her and every car and every hour we burned electricity was bringing her closer to the time she would not recover. It was as immediate and intense as that. Now the same story is played out for all of us, albeit on an apparently more intellectual level. There are reports. We are informed. We can barely even think how we will feel should we cross the tipping points, as we are on course to do without sufficient shift.

I had to be almost literally dragged from that world – a life out of doors where the golden leaves of oak shone with such ferocity it was almost more than being alive, it was like immersion in the wind and the sky, it was everything, defined everything, was life itself and I was happy in the hills and knew that leaving this would claim a part of me. There are things I don’t miss; scabies, rats, half mad compatriots who always burned wood faster than I could gather it in a curious dynamic echoing how people tend to use more energy the cheaper it is priced. But the rewards were huge, could take some time at first to tap into but which brought me to a state of such connection that stepping back from it seemed inconceivable, back then.

I’ve been in houses ever since and though I’ve generally been lucky, though I am grateful for water from a tap and every other amenity, there has at times been a growing hunger, a growing sense of isolation from the natural world. It prompted in the end a move from the city, a conscious step towards somewhere closer to the hills. And even though walks and time outdoors are cherished I still remember keenly those few years of living simply and in touch for every waking moment. But however much I pine for a life beyond walls, I can see that the balance rests – for most of us, most of the time and certainly for the foreseeable future – somewhere between the beautiful if frugal life in the woods and the kind of lifestyles most of us now lead.

Kingsnorth talks of all of this and his words and passion are a jolt. But for all of this, despite his distinction between our ‘human project’ versus an increasingly beleaguered natural world, I do not see our situation as one that should be summarised with such a stark polarity. The story of our country, since way before the Romans, since the first time we ploughed the soil has been that of a careful husbandry. Not exclusively, as the denuded soils of many heaths still tell and there’s no doubt that our Island even several hundred years ago stood in utter poverty in terms of the wildlife it supported when compared to the days of the distant wildwood. But despite this we have been handed a landscape that has evolved over thousands of years and somehow in it, at its best, it still finds a place for our wild creatures, it carries something of the spirit of what stood here long ago.

Something similar persists for many places all over the world, however many light years their habitats may be from what remains on these so heavily used shores. Many indigenous people point out that the notion of wilderness itself is often a kind of misconception and lets developers wade in and claim a place as virgin territory when in fact it is part of a reciprocal bond with those who have lived on it and cared for it with such a graceful touch that their imprints are almost invisible to us but which have been developed over a vast acreage of time. As Darrell Posey of Oxford University writes in the book ‘Paradigm Wars‘:

“One hundred thousand years before the term sustainable development was coined, aboriginal peoples were trading seeds, dividing tubers and propagating domesticated and non-domesticated plant species. For millennia, human beings have molded environments through conscious and unconscious activities to create “sacred sites” – what anthropologists call “anthropocentric” or “cultural landscapes.” These “sacred sites” or “cultural landscapes” express a merger between Nature and culture so complete it is impossible to separate the two.”

Such perspectives do not imply that true wilderness does not exist – but they present a counter argument to a simplistic either-or that runs the risk of touting mankind as little more than some kind of plague, even if our modern human footprint and the onslaught on the natural world it represents may well look very much like one. But in our original essence, in the sense of who we are meant to be and how we are meant to behave, our place in the world can perhaps best be summed up by Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation when he said “all living beings are kin.” In this sense nature, plants and animals – even in the very wilds – are neither ‘out there’ or somehow otherly; they are part of an extended family that includes even us.

So back here part and parcel of the modern world, I often find myself still thinking about how life was once – and could perhaps still be. Part of me longs to see bender camps across the land, even though I know that, at the moment, this is about as likely as our developing flying towns. But even with a massive will to live like this, planning permission is notoriously skewed against low impact development, even if you have the money for the land. In England now vast cities sit and we cannot simply walk away and leave them overnight, even if we wanted to. But for me that style of living – few possessions, a small hut, a single burner and a bed, gas lamps and the smell of the soil and enough of the sky in the day to lift your soul – it informs my sensibilities, it reminds me in a sense of a way of existing that shapes every decision I make on a day to day basis, it hammers home the impact we all have even when the complex systems that govern our lives make that impact all but invisible.

I believe our society would be a healthier one if more of us had the chance to live like this – for a week or month or a year, an alternative to charging round the planet at every opportunity, a chance to know what it means to sit by a fire on a daily basis, to be dependent on it, to let it fill the essence of your bones. To step off the treadmill briefly, to simply stop and watch the stars and then take this feeling back into the kind of lives we are most of us induced to live, for the foreseeable future at least. If such an opportunity was more widely given, if it did not require a ticket to Thailand to experience it, it could massively help us determine a better way ahead.

But also, over the years, I’ve begun to hold much more dearly the things we have in this bewildering, beautiful mess of human affairs. I’ve come to see more clearly just how precious every life truly is and have become more accepting that life itself is far from perfect, is often a series of compromises in which the value that we glean is often largely determined by the stance we choose to take towards the cards that have been dealt us. That does not for a moment put our civilization on an unassailable pedestal, it does not make our lives in the West any more precious than those in other countries even though others often pay the price for our luxuries – as the terrible human cost of oil companies’ activities in the Amazon and the Niger Delta only reinforces.

Nor does it mean we are somehow above the natural world, or separate from it. We live in deeply imbalanced times, something borne out in our dominant politics as much as our impact on the biosphere but even here, as time goes on, I find myself having more and more time for political philosophies that offer a solution to this state of affairs in terms of how we govern ourselves. That does not negate the fact that direct action and other forms of protest will always have their place, will infact in all probability remain a very necessary part of the political spectrum. But they can never be in any sense a kind of final answer, even if the need for them is huge, even though it looks like there will never be a shortage of things to fight against and places to defend, even though the level of grassroots organisation that they represent can inform those higher up, can remind us all of just what liberty can look like.

We cannot define our lives and that of nature as distinct, or suggest our interests are mutually exclusive – to do so would reinforce a notion of separation that is a large part of the problem. Admittedly we have a long, long way to go in finding our way back from the sometimes glorious if deeply flawed dystopia that we have engineered. But remembering how things once were – and are for many round the world – can wake us up to what our lives could look like in a better balanced world. It can help inform us now in determining a future in which the kind of harmony we need stands any chance of being realised again.

A Very Basic Thing

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961 partly out of the heightened awareness of the region’s people and wildlife brought about by Laurens van der Post’s descriptions in ‘The Lost World of The Kalahari.’ Today, his name has been invoked by those very people he described – the Gana, Ghi and Tsila Bushmen – whose continued existence in that place is still very much under threat. Partly evicted in the nineties, the process was completed in 2002 as the entire population was forcibly removed to settlement camps at the edge of the park where the depression so common with people removed from their lands was compounded by alcoholism and the spread of HIV.

Restored to their territory by a ruling of the Botswana High Court in 2006, their one borehole – that was capped upon their expulsion four years previously – remains sealed and the government seem determined for this state of affairs to continue. A second court case has just taken place to assert this most basic human right of the Bushmen of access to water. The region is one of the planet’s driest and the Bushmen are having to take an arduous 300 mile trip to gather water from the nearest available source. At least one woman has died of dehydration and the conditions in general are described as harsh and dangerous. Hundreds of the tribe are languishing in the resettlement camps, too afraid to return to their ancestral lands without such a vital resource. Meanwhile numerous boreholes have been drilled for the reserve’s wildlife and a Safari Lodge within the reserve has been allowed to build a swimming pool. Many Bushmen, especially the old and young, are sufferring from lack of water. In an effort at intimidation, the government sent in truckloads of troops to the region in the run up to the court case. When it came to it, the Court reserved judgement. It is not clear when the final decision will be made. “It pains us that the animals and tourists on our land can drink our water to their heart’s content yet we go thirsty” said Jumanda Gakelebone, a Bushman in the reserve.

That Botswana’s government wants the Bushmen off the land, there can be no doubt. One very obvious reason is the diamonds found within the reserves – a further deposit of which is supposed to be under a Bushman settlement. It is perhaps convenient then that there are those who claim there can be no place for people – any people – within a wildlife reserve. Chief among such exponents is John Terbough, author of ‘Requiem for Nature’, an advocate of ‘fortress’ conservation. His feeling that “a park should be a park and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it” is echoed by Botswana’s Director of Wildlife and National Parks, Trevor Mmopelwa, who claims that allowing people to live in the reserve would “make the management of CKGR extremely difficult in that there will be two conflicting rights existing side by side.”

Is this really then a story of the contrasting needs of people and the animals they happen to share land with? Are efforts to defend the Bushmen placing human rights over that of the local wildlife? The issue has certainly been divisive but attempts to override the rights of people living on the land are at best simplistic and at worst fall victim to a mindset that is seeing indigenous people evicted from their lands across the globe at an unprecedented rate.

Their power boosted by various sponsors, no small proportion of them corporate, various big international nongovernmental conservation organisations (or BINGOs) have embarked on a huge global push to increase the number of ‘protected areas’. In 1962 there were some 1000 official such ‘PA’s’ worldwide. By 2005 there were 108,000 with more being added every day. A land mass the size of Africa itself – more than 12% of all land globally – has been ringfenced in this way.

And all too often, if these PA’s have happened to have been occupied by indigenous people, they have been moved on, either through force, through ‘soft evictions’ or the contestably phrased ‘voluntary resettlement.’ In Chad, a tenfold increase in protected land resulted in an estimated 600,000 conservation refugees during the nineties. India, the only other country even bothering to count, admitted to 1.6 million five years ago. Globally the figure could be anywhere from five to tens of millions. The figure in Africa alone may well exceed 14 million.

What should be obvious but which flies in the face of the logic of the various BINGOs is that many of the places deemed worthy of protection are so valuable precisely because of the knowledge and practices of the people living there. In Africa, where indigenous evictions from protected areas are highest, 90% of biodiversity now lies outside their boundaries. History is showing us that, for the sake of biodiversity alone, where indigenous people live in ways that are ecologically sustainable (and for that, read the vast majority), their eviction is the most counterproductive thing we can do.

Perhaps the real nub of the issue is our conception of wilderness, of the wild and our place upon it. A very real problem is our notion of nature as separate, as ‘out there’, a thing which can be visited but which sits apart from our modern lives, from the ever mounting effects of our daily actions. Tribal peoples here are seen as throwbacks, ‘archaic fantasists’ as Botswana’s President Khama has said, removed from the realities of 21st Century life, a people to be educated and absorbed.

But in reality of course they hold so much that we can learn from; often enhancing their environments through a sophisticated knowledge of biological diversity without any formal schooling in ecology, botany or zoology. The world that they inhabit holds the key to how life – far from the environmentally dystopic state of affairs most of us have grown accustomed to – can be far less intrusive on the natural world and, at its best, can approach something genuinely harmonious. How tragic then that the Bushmen and others like them should be brushed aside while we are still allowed to visit what has become a semi-artificial, pristine natural world we only ever tend to reach by jetting through the skies our planes have wounded.

The aims of international conservation are wholly noble but suffer from this trap of dual realities. Its sponsors include the World Bank as well as a host of bilateral and multilateral banks and transnational corporations. The Nature Conservancy has around 2000 corporate sponsors while Conservation International has 250 corporate ‘partners’. Often, there is a ‘debt for nature’ swap, with PAs created in return for annulment of part of that country’s national debt. So perhaps there is a kind of logic as well as more than a hint of the perverse at President Khama’s membership of Conservation International.

Perhaps, in contemplating the Kalahari, we could do worse than remember the creation of the first nature reserve ever created – Yellowstone Park – which was ‘set aside’ at the expense of the Miwok, Shosone, Lakota, Bannock, Crow, Nez Perce, Flathead and Blackfeet peoples who had all existed there benignly for so long. Laurens van der Post bought the Bushmen’s existence to a global audience and it was explicitly for their benefit – as well as that of the wildlife around them – that the Kalahari Game Reserve was created. Today the Bushmen call out to van der Post’s godson – Prince William – who is visiting the country this month. His response will perhaps indicate the kind of figureheads we can expect in the years ahead of us, it will determine whether, as a culture, we have in any way moved on from the days of evicting whole peoples whose outlook can teach us so much.

Botswana’s government’s actions are undoubtedly driven by money, by a complete disregard for both their own constitution and the basic human rights of their countrymen. At their root these actions stem perhaps from a contempt for a way of life they think we should move on from. And it is the messages we all send out, deliberately or otherwise, than help determine such perceptions. We cherish our lifestyles, the thousand little things that make them easier and often let ourselves forget our sense of what is really vital. A certain level of development undoubtedly has served us well, but perhaps we have for too long lost the very precious thing which is so vital; the sense of being part of that which lies beneath our feet. Without it we are all at sea and seek to plug the gap with things which only compound our feelings of emptiness; we are often like ghosts or children pushing at a wheel we cannot see nor understand. There has to be a greater balance, some sense of what is valid and what we need to get beyond. The Bushmen here can help to lead us back, remind us that when we live in greater harmony with the land we are all the richer for it. Don’t let us forget them and their right to such a very basic thing.