environment

To See It

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

To say it’s hot as I write really does not do the climate justice.  The dog days do their indeterminable thing, people drag their heels in sheer exhaustion.  Drought is declared to no particular surprise even if dismay hangs heavy like the muggy air.  Even at any remove from our screens, news of the fires filters through, like messengers out of the smoke and do we believe and can we bare to remind ourselves what’s been taking place upon this continent when the scale and sheer intensity bewilders. How could this happen, and happen so fast?  How do we begin to respond?

There’s a kind of easy conspiracy here.  Do not look down.  Do not look up.  Don’t look back and never second guess or try to gage the road ahead.  Live for the moment.  Live for the hour.  ‘Til days cascade and we are listless with inertia, the knowledge of the things we ought to do, the knowledge, almost visceral, that we are on an outbound train, where alighting isn’t an option and we are all aboard and in it together only half the passengers are so inured with on board entertainment you’d think they never knew or cared about the destination.

Of course, for many, it’s not so much escapism as staunching a wound of awareness.  And so the easy peace prevails, the neverminds and never noticing till it feels that we are in a play of paradise, only the show is only held fast by goodwill and wishful thinking and we can drink this nectar for another day, shore the sides as long as they last, put one last shot of assurance into the cocktail of our positivity, where positive thinking holds the only key never mind anything else.  This much we know.

But what if we remember that it needn’t necessarily be like this?  What if we remember that our future is not hostage to collective fortune, some sad but quite inevitable decline?  What if it is not written in the stars that we have had our day and eaten it?  What if it can still be another way?  Not rose-tinted or requisite of burying heads in the sand but redolent with the knowledge our future is not being so much lost as stolen.  Stolen by men with machines, more money than morals, drip feeding disinformation into the newsfeeds, deliberate as any given conspiracy, muddying the waters of collective consciousness to suit their ends where endings are a billionaire’s wet dream of profit lines and whatever it takes to preserve them?

What if then we could all awake to see it as such: that if such men have agency, where does our own lie?  What psychological embers can we breathe to life from the literal Aquitanian ashes and those of the Castilian Plains?  What if collectively we found our voice?  Not driven by assurances or even distant dreams of happy ever afters but from the knowledge we can make a tangible difference, primed by bloody-mindedness if nothing else; the will to act and speak out?  What if every amplified utterance, every feed and post and itemised nugget of data could be harnessed to this means?  What if we were united by intent, by some renewed awareness of our duty, to our own selves as much as to anyone else; to live as life demands it, if our own morality rings true?

It still persists but can’t remain unsaid that, in some respects, time was never on our side, that hope was never anything other than dependent on collective will.  For all the angst, great efforts are still being made; granular and gradual but also on a truly epic scale.  But if the fires of Spain and France can show us anything at all it must be that there is no time for anything at all but standing true.  Where that may bring us out as we navigate these times is not ours to say or grant.  But the only thing that guarantees the end is not being prepared to believe in beginnings; that fierceness, rage, can temper us, forge our intent as we face the new day.

Perhaps what we need above all else is remembrance.  Remembrance of inheritance, of that which we stand to bequeath.  Will we allow this precious earth to continue to be taken by lust for acquisition of wealth?  And wealth, as we know, for the few.  Perhaps we simply need our public discourse to run true, to enact our own capacity for vigilance, call out the lies, stand strong against the headwinds of autocracy, in the given hope its hollowness will be its own demise if we collectively can only see it?  That some kind of faith in human nature can win out, that decent discourse can provide its own brand of validation, that we can still see it born?

Promises of better days are nothing if we do not work for them.  But we can set fair reckonings upon the way ahead, take our bearings as we go, look for given opportunities.  There may still be silver linings in the scale of the monstrosities we face – if we were to pull at them, perhaps we could bring the whole covering down; the canopy whipped from the Wizards of Oz so they stand there, revealed as diminutive old men, undermined by their own ridiculousness, their edifices built in the sand.

We can take some comfort then that this day is not done and that the very earth can lend us a hand as we help her.  Meanwhile, at the time of writing this, the fires continue to burn.  Sometimes it is simply enough to endure.  But we can remember there are men and agencies who seek to stoke the status quo even now.  That, if nothing else, should calibrate our response; that the best things do not always come without striving, that there are times when there is no other option but to resist.   

Wings

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The heat can hold a promise of a kind, load the dice or lift us up so that for at least the summer’s span we like to think that anything is possible, that dreams are there, infront of us, and all we have to do is dream ourselves. Storms can hammer home this sense and at other times serve as reminders: dream but don’t take time or opportunities for granted. Perhaps that stands for everything we face.

It’s as good a time as any now, if undoubtedly tedious for some, to state again the very obvious, the consequence of centuries dominated by the rise in of fossil fuels. This far down the line, we are so locked into their use that nothing short of a total paradigm shift in how we procure our needs is required. It goes deeper than simply how we get our energy. Our whole way of being is locked into an industrial system so seemingly servile that the huge infrastructural inefficiencies in how we travel, heat our homes and feed ourselves are often barely visible or normalised to the point we barely notice.

We cannot simply hope that renewables are our sole solution, that an overhaul of energy supply will save us all with just a small adjustment to our lives. The transition to their use is of course crucial and their take up and implementation should be done with all the alacrity we can muster. But it’s not the full picture. We are currently wedded to a system so centralised that nearly everything we consume is produced or transported with the use of cheap energy we barely ever see let alone think about. Our industrial ship that has carried so many of us so well for so long is increasingly revealing itself to be something of a leviathan. We still need to make real steps to move beyond it. And that means using a lot less energy per se, however we get it.

That’s the whole point of movements like Transition Towns – not a well-meaning talking shop but a practical initiative to bolster our communities in preparation for ideally heading off ecological and infrastructural energy limits. That’s the whole point of rising against a car culture where huge amounts of energy – accounting for a quarter of our country’s carbon emissions – are expended to push 31 million metal boxes along ever-expanding networks of tarmac. Or protesting the use of shale gas and tar sands that compromise the very bedrock of our ecological integrity, locked in as we appear to be to what should be considered obsolete options. And these are only some of the more manifest symptoms of a malaise created by generations of habit and habit-forming commerce built on the crux of cheap energy. In many ways, conditioned as we are, we barely register the signs as we drive full pelt towards a future of unnegotiable realities.

The cure is first and foremost psychological. We are so surrounded by distractions it often seems easier to ignore the whole thing. There’s the TV news, Spotify, smartphones, near-infinities of information. But the older, wider world is out there all the time, calling us back to our senses, reminding us of what it can mean to belong to the land. As time goes on that realm is seemingly all the more challenged as our anthropomorphic empire rumbles on. But it’s built into our evolution to find a better way of relating to it. And where we have choices, or willingness given a chance, we can all of us pick our priorities.

Today, where the climate and extreme energy is concerned, we face environmental malaise in a general and also very specific sense. This can only make our choices and priorities all the more stark. We need to aspire to an ascetic that looks beyond our industrial years, that takes on the great gifts of the last two centuries but which is still inspired and informed by that which came before it. We have to all of us want to live as lightly as we can upon the earth and no longer ignore hidden, systematic costs.

Finding our way beyond it may not be easy and there’s no escaping the gravity of that which we face. But perhaps it comes down to the wish to live with grace, to do as little harm as possible, to leave the lightest footprint that we can. And where we all need huge and rapid cultural transformation, our difficulties can still be seen as opportunities and catalysts for change.

The danger of course is to slumber along, to forget our new or renewed priorities, the value of the things we should hold dear. But the looming threat of fracking is surely a clarion call to wake up. We know that imperilling our water supplies is tantamount to suicide and this can only add to the sense of futility (at best) in an admittedly extreme manifestation of business as usual. Equally, as last winter’s weather shows (where the ‘Beast from the East’ was at least partly related to the displacement caused by record temperatures in the artic) the state of our climate ought be cause for alarm for us all. Our culture’s instinctive suspicion of alarm is not without place but that perhaps is half the problem. We have to shake ourselves out of our complacency with the sense that the move to change can still be worth it.

We need to imagine a better future, instil a greater code of honour in how we live our lives, in how we treat both one another and the planet itself, where the wider world does not come second to the glamour of consumer-led society. We need to rediscover and cherish our localities, the gifts at the end of the lane. We need a greater culture of respect. None of this is helped by market forces that – to give just one example – hollowed out the domestic economy in the 20’s and 30’s which had done so much to keep us self-sufficient and free from the shackles of dependence on factory goods.

Human nature can still win out over influences that would hold the world in chains. But it barely needs stating that none of this is a given or necessarily easy. If it seems hard sometimes to see the way ahead we should remember that we can be co-operative souls, capable of great endurance and overcoming all odds. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to look back on this time as a true turning point, the beginning of the end of our industrial dystopia. The imperative can only give us wings.

Twenty Years On

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

This January marks the twenty year marker since thousands of people from all round the country converged on the Hampshire, Berkshire border for an often gruelling campaign against the Newbury Bypass in particular and new roads in Britain in general. It’s a familiar story by now, or at least ought to be; what can happen when people come together to protest, of how far both sides are prepared to go when a line has been drawn in the sand, of the hope and bitterness, of the inspiration and grinding attrition of states of muted and mutual conflict.

It had gathered a sense of near inevitability by that point; the culmination of years of campaigning and of the desire to push through what was then one of the biggest road building programmes in the UK’s history. There is much you can say, looking back. Certainly the timeliness of doing so probably speaks for itself, with the latest resurgent road building programme; everything that was fought for stands in peril once again; the landscapes and the hope for a manouvre away from ongoing car culture and all its implications for the climate.

That can be banged on about indefinitely and there’s clearly scope and a case for doing so while we are faced with such retrogressive policies. But, if that case ever seems predictable or reductionist, there’s a lot to be said for that time that was about more than simply a battle with the state. If we came to protest, we also came from an instinct simply to gather itself; to live on the land among like minded people and to find as we did a sense of a very real kinship. We came to escape urban life, to make the most of a chance just to live as a people, back in a place we could truly call home.

It was one of the defining, and sometimes tragic, aspects of the time then that people who felt so keenly connected with nature answered their heart’s calling to put themselves right at the front, to fight against and witness what was being done to this country for the sake of apparently insatiable demands for burgeoning infrastructure. Evictions, ongoing actions and more traditional forms of protest all both inspired and took their toll and there are many I know who, while they’d never have had it be another way, left sufficiently scarred just to want to move on.

At the same time, many felt moved to join ongoing movements; against genetic modification, against global free trade and all its repercussions, seeking to cut off the head of the beast rather than fight piece by piece the tentacles each new road represented. At times, along with many more, I’ve sought a return to those kind of days. And they certainly hold a currency of experience and example for anyone protesting now; against new roads or fracking or dubious nuclear deals.

But, while it might sound naïve, there’s a sense too that these protests shouldn’t really be necessary at all. There’s a sense that people shouldn’t have to put their lives and health on the line due to the culpability of governments. That direct action is still a necessary stopgap when official policy seems out of kilter (at best) if not an example of the very worst a state can do (and in this sense the ongoing campaign against fracking couldn’t be more important), there’s also a feeling at times that there is potentially a wider game; that of the potential for mass behavioural change, for the catalysts of a newfound environmental consciousness that need not be necessarily allied to protest overall. Though when lobbyists and corporations still threaten so much, the role of protestors is clearly as needed as ever.

But for my part at least, direct action is no longer an option. The stress of evictions, the minimal food and grinding months of attrition all conspired to mean that activism is a thing I cannot now repeat. And many more find that frontline campaigning can still be too emotionally and psychologically fraught. But while protest is currently crucial, we can remember too that wider stories can persist; of waking up, of how we lead our lives, of how we see to and relate to the world, of what it can feel like to live close to the earth, whether as part of creation or something more immediate; to see her as the relation she is, not some tableau of resources for the taking.

Environmental responsibility starts with every one of us, removed from any sense of ‘us or them’. It can help spark campaigns but can also fuel another sense; what it means to live well and as lightly as we can. Remembering stories can light up our times, but history more often bears echoes of itself rather than perpetuating more exact repetition. People can learn from what happened at Newbury but I also do not doubt that they can be every bit as imaginative and pioneering as anyone involved in the nineties. Ideally there should be no need for division down partisan lines, just as surely as we all have to see our way beyond the machinations of the poorer aspects of the modern world.

Inspiration can take root in many forms. Perhaps what’s needed more than ever is the currency of enabling greater benevolent change, of how a people can be when we hear the call of our hearts as well as that of the planet. In truth of course there’s never really been a separation – the lie that there has been has helped shape so much of our world. Remembering this unity is perhaps the most important, and still urgent, task that we face.

Landscapes

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Probably one of the more major repercussions of the recent Tory electoral catastrophe is the apparent green light it gives the government to plough ahead with their gargantuan resurgent road building programme. By way of a reminder, that means the continuation of some 238 schemes; more than 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 link roads and 56 widened roads. All in all that’s some 772 miles of new or widened roads. It’s a reversion to old Tory form, given apparent legitimacy by a panicky response to our economic situation where any kind of fiscal stimulus is seen as the only way forward.

Too bad then that the weight of evidence is stacked up against the long-term efficacy of building our way out of congestion. And too bad that figures show that levels of traffic may have actually been plateauing these last ten years if not on a steady decline. But that hardly seems to matter in the new paradigm of Conservative consensus. Let’s just build our way out of recession, whatever the logic or evidence may actually be.

Many people I know would rather not drive were it not for the exorbitant costs – and frequent overcrowding – of public transport. A unique opportunity of potential behavioral change is being lost by at best indifference but in all likelihood a cynical rejection of a genuine chance for a true modal shift.

Though of course while that’s true, it cannot all be laid at the feet of the government. While a probable still-sizable majority of folk own and frequently travel by car, it can be argued that procurement of roads is simply responding to popular demand. For most people in the UK, regular car use is a fact of life. For families in particular or for most living anywhere particularly rural, they’re often a seemingly unalterable crutch if not actually outright indispensable. Their advantages in getting people exactly where they need to be at any given time, their capacity for shifting stuff as well as people apparently give them a huge upper hand.

That’s the logic of car use; an undeniable one for so many. But their plush if pathogen-laden interiors insulate people in more ways than one. Not only is the immediacy of the natural world removed from us as if by a veil or the displacing effect of rapid movement, but the true costs of the roads that facilitate car use are equally hidden. Not just the landscapes and communities marred or removed but fiscally too; the cost of roads are rendered obscene at a time of supposed tightening of belts. It has been estimated that each metre of new road costs in the region of £25,000. And that at a time when, as we all know, other vital services in local councils are being cut to the quick; real, vital services that make a huge impact on people’s daily lives here and now.

It would be easy to say this was tragic. Tragic because we could be at a genuine crossroads for major changes in how we get about. Not some throwback where cars are got rid of altogether, but shifts in overall behaviour where car ownership is no longer some kind of mechanised Holy Grail for individuals and families alike, where lift sharing and car sharing clubs can truly take off, where trains are affordable and spacious, where we cultivate a different sense of distance, a different sense of respect for the places we pass through.

If it wasn’t for the prospective loss of so many places you could say it was more like a very black farce; at least as far as governmental policy goes. In times of financial hardship a clear choice has been made along ideological, not practical grounds. It has less to do with the grinding pressure of congestion and everything to do with car manufacturing, oil and road building lobbies. It’s just a happy accident for them that so many of us are suckling on the petrol-headed teat.

And the roads themselves; vanguards of development, offering a dream of easy freedom. For another few years till another is needed, steering the masses away from hard choices, fostering an easy way of doing things, taking us further to escape what we’ve done to our immediate locality. They lock us in to six-laned roads, to half-lives on the motorways where everything is flat and air comes stalely through the vents.

Who wouldn’t be free of all this if we actually believed we had a choice? A choice that might not always be as gratifying or easy as jumping in the driving seat at any given moment. But one which offers another kind of freedom; freedom from the drudgery of roads, from the financial yolk of keeping a car on the road, a freedom to be able to really look at and travel benignly through the landscapes and places around us.

Otherwise we only enforce on the wider world the landscapes already within us. If we are wired to machines every hour of the day, if our heads and souls are so full of a never-ending media, if we are so transfixed with affairs of the day or the latest app or who in the public eye is saying precisely what about precisely who and all the while the world at our windows is crying out to bring us all closer and home to our natural gifts, our natural inheritance just to be out in creation – is it any wonder that, if we cannot hear that call, then all the moors, the woodlands and the ancient fields seem a little bit more abstract as we weigh their cost; expendables to modern life, pleasant irrelevancies that mean little to economies of luxury and pace while all the while we let ourselves grow poorer by degrees, the world suffers and one day we wake and find ourselves surrounded by a wasteland, crying out how was it that we let it come to this?

We all of us have choices still, whether as individuals or as part of our society itself. For many, car use remains alluring and undeniably convenient. But it’s clearer than ever it comes at a huge cost. Perhaps it comes down to that which we consider most important; our landscapes and communities, the wildlife we should act as stewards towards, or an open road, however temporary, the ability to pass unhindered down the screeslope of prediction and provision. We cannot wish some all-or-nothing, either-or where every journey amounts to an irredeemable castigation. But choices remain and we cannot continue to deny that new roads ultimately serve no one; they may help cut congestion for a time but we all have to pay a long-term price. We have to ask ourselves what kind of country we really want to live in. Will we be remembered as a generation that sacrificed so much while propping up policies discredited decades ago? Finding our way into a different future is largely a question of will. It’s a real sorry state of affairs then that our current government seems so intent on building the last things we need.

Culls, Cows and Carbon

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It could never be anything other than emotive. The culls that have resumed this autumn are expected to wipe out between 930 and 1800 badgers, though last year’s culls fell far short of their target, which only undermined their already highly dubious prospects of effectiveness. It’s pitted farmers against pro-badger campaigners and there’s no getting round the fact that TB is huge problem for dairy producers with some 26,000 cattle affected in 2013 alone. However you look at it, it’s an appalling situation and one which is only exacerbated by the very real emotional distress from both sides concerned with animal welfare.

It has been said that culling badgers will have no meaningful effect on TB in cattle, where new badgers will move into culled territory thereby only spreading the disease. But even if every badger in the country was killed, it’s been estimated that this would reduce bovine TB by only 16%. An independent panel appointed by DEFRA last year concluded the culls were neither effective or humane. But perhaps the most telling remark came from Natural England’s Chief Scientific advisor when he said that they have been “an epic failure”.

Prospective vaccines for TB in cattle are complicated by the inability to differentiate between infected and immunised cattle and the implications of this on exports. There are echoes here of the foot and mouth epidemic where mass culling took place as the viable vaccine would have affected overseas trade. The subsequent mass movement of cows in restocking was a major factor in the spread of bovine TB. But vaccines alone aren’t the answer; there are very real structural problems within the dairy industry that have huge ramifactions for the ability of cows to withstand infection. It has implications not just for TB but the emphasis of our general farming itself and even for our potential to lock huge amounts of Co2 back in the soil.

One problem is the lack of genetic diversity in dairy herds, a factor which severely limits their ability to fight off infection in general and TB in particular. The use of artificial insemination to help boost milk production is key in reducing genetic variation and production of antibodies and may have been instrumental in the rise of BSE itself. And TB in humans is notorious as having thrived in communities marked with the stress of poverty – this is mirrored in modern dairy cows where milk production from the average cow has doubled in the last forty years, from 4,000 litres in 1970 to 8,000 in 2010. Modern herds are under a huge metabolic strain that can only add to their susceptibility to disease.

Another problem is that so many herds are raised on grains – a development that took root when the production of cereals soared due to the hugely increased productivity of crops in the so-called ‘green revolution’ of the ‘60’s and 70’s. Short-stemmed new varieties of high-yield wheat and rice made food scarcity of the 50’s a thing of the past. This made grain so abundant and cheap that the practice emerged of feeding half of it to livestock.

Cue cows in sheds and a huge rise in the use of energy-intensive chemical fertilisers and pesticides while more and more land is put under the plough to farm rice, wheat and maize. While few cattle are kept indoors to the extent seen in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s much healthier for both cattle and those consuming their milk or meat when cows are reared exclusively on pasture. For one thing they are free to move around, growing healthier and stronger than cows spending more time under a roof. And grain-raised beef contains more saturated fats and less of the beneficial omega-3 fats. Herb-rich pasture also contains the cancer-fighting compound CLA which is totally absent in beef fed from cereals. There is also no need for nitrate fertilizers in clover-rich pastures and no need for the tractors and harvesters and all their oil endemic in conventional crop rearing.

Far from a pie-in-the-sky picture, advocates of pasture (including Graham Harvey, author of ‘The Carbon Fields’) seek a return to mixed farming where grain production took its place alongside the use of our grassland. This after all is how it’s been done, in some shape or form, since the rise of farming itself. It carries the huge benefit that, when pasture is ploughed up, it’s full of the natural fertilizer the animals provide and can later be re-sown with grass in a timeless, self-sustaining cycle.

And there’s another very big factor in favour of pasture. All soils contain carbon as organic matter. A healthy soil can contain 10 per cent of its mass as organic matter in roughly the top thirty centimetres – about four hundred tonnes of organic matter every hectare. Continuously cultivated soils contain less than forty tonnes per hectare. A thirty-year study showed that soil under pasture was not only in a generally better state than the cultivated tests but that it increased its store of carbon by a tonne every year per hectare. In other words, soil under pasture doesn’t just lock in carbon – it can help take it out of the air.

There is the factor of methane produced by ruminant animals to be accounted for, but this is more than compensated for by the lessened emissions of pasture fed animals, together with the gains of the carbon locked in the soil. And cows fed on grains produce methane anyway, with all the extra emissions mechanised agriculture entails. Grass is apparently susceptible to drought, but a pasture with deep-rooting herbs is far more resilient in this respect than cereal crops.

If pasture is such an obvious boon, why was it ever abandoned to the extent that it was? The economy of cheap grains is one obvious answer, though with the rising cost of their production that could all change. Maintaining good pasture is also more of an art than the relatively simple mechanics involved with cereal production. But the massive industries involved with the production of grains, fertilizers and pesticides, without even getting onto modified crops, appear to still hold a huge sway.

It’s clear that the very basis of our agricultural economy has been way off kilter for quite a long time. The TB crisis and the appalling culls it has engendered are the presenting symptoms of this general malaise. Only a humane approach to cattle rearing and a return to the husbandry of mixed farming can bring any kind of lasting solution. Though the promise of pasture for the atmosphere itself ought to focus attention.

Until then the words of Richard Manning in his book on the American prairies – that most productive of pastures – are more timely than ever: “A centuries worth of work, warfare and technology replaced fifty million bison with forty-five million cattle whose meat is fattier and higher in cholesterol. One wonders what progress is for.” And when our government ignores expert advice to inflict such suffering on a protected species for no tangible gain, it’s a lot more than progress we all have to question.

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.

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.

Ancient Woodland, Modern Minds

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So we live in a world where existence for so many species we happen to share this planet with is in jeopardy, or has already been denied. And here at home our ancient woodland – supporting at least twice the amount of rare or threatened species than any other UK habitat – is being wiped out at a rate faster than that in evidence in the Amazon itself. So here at least, in knowing this, we’re given something like a greater clarity, that if we can get beyond the myth that the world was made solely for our benefit we surely have a duty to protect those whose lives rest in our hands, in our ability and willingness to speak and act on their behalf.

So where do we start in such a monumental mission? There are the obvious candidates of course – the HS2 line that threatens twenty one ancient woodlands for a scheme whose money would be better spent on improving and maintaining our existing railway tracks and which, if built, would scar a wider Chilterns landscape that has so far through accident or luck escaped too much encroachment by the infrastructural outrider that so often heralds more and more development. The protests against this particular project seem set to run and run.

Then we have the sorry story down in Kent of Oaken Woods – 81.5 acres of ancient woodland due to be swept aside for a ragstone quarry, a decision which goes against not only the county council’s minerals plan but also policy of central government towards ancient woodland. And there are no shortage of other threats – road widening programmes, pylons, new houses, even oil extraction.

There is no doubt these woods need all our help and that campaigning in all its forms is now as necessary as ever. But perhaps the greatest threat to our old woodlands – and everything else – is simply the mentality that lets us think that their removal is ok, that they and the species they support are somehow secondary to our own human concerns. They are not, in our common culture, in any sense inviolable. They are, or so the logic goes, the pretty chattels that adorn a landscape loved by sentimentalists and precious few besides. There is simply no room for such pleasant irrelevancies if we want a modern and functioning nation. So the roads are ushered in, high speed lines are laid out as some kind of sleek and greener future and the end justifies any means because industry and commerce must win out, because these are the wheels that keep our world turning even when such cogs drive our own end as much as the scraps of habitat that happen to be in the way.

We can fight any number of projects and – where they threaten precious ecosystems, protected by laws that are routinely deemed fit to be overridden – it is right that people should do so. But if we are serious about preserving them for good, if we are serious about somehow grappling with the underlying assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and even that most unmodern of mindsets: the stories we tell ourselves, we have to see more clearly the ancient change in attitude – what you might even call the original sin – that let us think this world was ours to do with as we please. Without the shift in perspective such insight would hopefully bring, we will ultimately still be simply pushing at revolving doors, or banging our heads against walls. If we do not change the state of mind that underpins each push then even immediate success in any campaign will be rendered temporary because the beast would still live that breathes life into yet another threat and then another.

A long time ago there was no need to sweep aside the plants and animals that did not appear to matter to our immediate concerns. The day such acts became permissible was perhaps the inception for the sorry times we face today. The more we can all recognise that and struggle to imagine a way beyond it is perhaps the greatest and most important challenge we face. Until then nature will remain apparently expendable as will our own lifelines that she carries, a reminder if one was still needed that there is no boundary between us and the world around us except that which we have created in our minds. Demolishing that arbitrary and hitherto all too powerful border has never been more urgent or more vital.