nature

Into The Woods

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

I am tired today.  I am tired like my bones and my blood have been fighting.  Spring is here, the hawthorn already thick and full in the hedges.  The blackthorn blossom has already been and gone.  Actual sunlight graces the days, mead for the mind.  It’s all just as well.  At the time of writing, the war in Iran carries on.

But perhaps despite, of even because of such things, we can begin to pick things up a little, pick up our feet as we head for the literal hills, limber a little as we take to the tracks.  Do we go forward with what?  Bloody-mindedness? Stubborn optimism?  Spring comes unconditional, offers its charms consistent as clockwork, dependable as country people’s hope.

For all the woes of the world there is still some kind of ameliorative, a knowledge the world is much bigger than us, puts in place our mortal concerns, has been here before and knows our hearts like a mother knows the ways of her own children.

It is not so very far from the woods here – I’m practically already in them as I write.  Here, just past the sign to the village, where the footpath gives out, past the last of the streetlights, at the bottom of the garden and just up the pot-holed lane, trees encroach like memories of how things once were and could be again – blueprints of an undetermined future, holding a promise of how things can be, a sign of our natural state, an origin story for us all.

We know all this is fragile in a sense, that old guarantees may no longer suffice, that there is still much to be decided.  Our living biosphere is crying out now, crying out for change, for us to stop pumping the air full of gas; gasoline habits were hooked on, cooking up a daily brew we mainline in the atmosphere as if there was no tomorrow or we are over-confident tomorrow never comes, that we have never a care for the wake that we leave, the wreckage of inertia or indifference, a tab tomorrow’s children will have to pick up.  We are counting the cost of that bill even now, despite the distractions; we insulate ourselves with screens, chained to a matrix that seeks to consume our consciousness while all the while the old things still persist – the birds sing on perennial, the leaves unfurl like banners on a march; a million strong, militants for memory, that chant we still have our inheritance, we hold it in our hands; this bright green dream of summertime, the places we come back to, can call home.

Maybe, at some stage, we will step out anew in all this.  For now, there is just a simple sense of beckoning, the tender young sun, the birds on the bough, miles of woodland lying in wait, ambushing us with unexpected beauty.  Vistas open, tracts of trees present themselves.  Walking here becomes devotional, every observation like a prayer.

Is it ever enough to remember that, far away, people might be dealing with very different realities?  Is it enough to say we never wanted the war, seek to have no part in it?  The madness of a military might can still perhaps help us re-enforce the peaceful things, to see the green leaves budding now as if these are the fundamental things and all else is a diversion, a deviation from the original plot.

The trees at peace, the land itself arising, clear and strong – can these things set our reckonings; currencies true in the new day?  Can they, in themselves, form some kind of better direction, some guiding force like true north for the soul?  Perhaps we can find our way forward not by proscriptions or admonishment but by remembering what lies at our doorstep, at the end of the lane, that these are our values and here is the fight; to seek and to see and hold onto the gifts that we have; to hold onto and value them and strive to see them endure.

I will rise and go now and go to the woods, walk through the heathland, the paths through the trees.  Like everyone else I will hope for the best for the season – for a fair prospect, for peace in our time.  Perhaps in ways that might not be so clear, the trees can somehow help with all of this, by more than just providing sanctuary or a reference point for that which we ought to hold dear.  In my wilder moments I wonder if the woods can be a kind of sounding board – echoing and amplifying prayer, like green cathedrals: dynamic, alive.  Who can say what currencies and capabilities these dreaming beings hold?  If you sleep in a tree you may feel it – the cradling of an older consciousness, the sense these creaking creatures are still very much alive, that they can anchor us, guide us, help us find our feet on the path.

At times, it may be enough to simply go forward with a clear mind, to offer intentions, to hope for the best.  If trees and woods can be a kind of antidote perhaps it is enough to simply seek to share the secret, that the solutions may lie at our doorstep, that all that is required is to step out beneath the lintel, be it that of a house or a town, find again the things that matter, that can help us endure, remember how life can still be.

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.

The Life Cairn

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The figures sit blankly like names on a wall, somehow almost abstract to us in our cushioned lives. Cushioned from the elements outside our doors, even as they seem to threaten to go haywire, like they themselves were almost angry or in grief, or sick or in danger of dying. It has been estimated that 150 species are being lost to us every single day while life goes on and we commute and push our way through crowds in subways or push our pens or bits of paper round. How do we each of us measure a day? What value do we place upon a single week? And how then as the years fly by do we begin to comprehend the damage we are doing?

Today is the first day in a declared ‘International Decade of Biodiversity,’ conceived at the Nagoya summit last year as part of an effort to raise awareness of the mass loss of life in the natural world now underway, where die off rates of species are 1,000 higher than natural levels of extinction. It has been said we cannot even start to comprehend these figures, we don’t know how to grieve, the scale is so vast that the easiest thing to do is to not take it in at all and continue helter skelter with the rush of modern life. But still we know that to look away is simply appalling.

As an effort to counteract this trend, to raise some hope of clarified awareness, to help us begin to understand the full blown tragedy of the times we’re living in, a group of people gathered in Sussex yesterday to mark the beginning of the coming decade, to raise an actual beacon of consciousness in the form of a cairn that will stand as testimony to all the lives lost and as a point of potential hope that we can somehow turn around this terrible rate of attrition of our times.

So, people came from all over, walking from their villages, up from the bridge on Lewes High Street, over from the places further east. People travelled from Exmoor and Lancashire as well as from all over Sussex itself, carrying flint and bits of chalk and quartz and even coral, echoed by others in other countries and other places who today were doing the same thing, like the community around the town of La Especia in Ecuador building a cairn in tribute to those species lost from the Ecuadorian Cloudforest.

There was a fierce wind all the way, something that somehow served to remind us of the urgency involved in what’s at stake. But then we were there and sheltered in the lee of Caburn’s ancient hillfort. The ceremony was brief but also moving. Andreas Kornevall from the Earth Restoration Service spoke these words:

“Where were we when the last Pyrenean Female endemic Brown Bear was shot down? Why was her dying place empty with no wreaths, no flowers, no poems, no songs, no church bells? She wanted to protect her young, and live and thrive on this Earth, just like us, now her hibernation caves are hollow and bare.

Where were we when “the Goddess of the River” – the Yangtze dolphin vanished in China, never again to give birth to her young? Only empty radio static was heard; but there was no grief from humanity, no songs which to dedicate, no-one paid tribute – after millions of years of life?

Why?

Where were the great teachers, the spiritual leaders, the writers, the visionaries, the artists? Not even a moment’s silence? Why have we not been able to grieve collectively to the ending of their birth?

Has our inner emotional landscape to the natural world frozen to death? Like the cold statistics of science, which explains a great deal, but offers no meaning. Is the scientific statistic language the only language we possess? Today it seems a poor, limited and cold language. We need great poets now more than ever.

We respectfully come to say goodbye and pay tribute to the Pyrenean Brown Bear in France, the Dolphin in China and all the species driven to extinction at human hands.

We come to build the Life Cairn to speak a poetic, soulful language in remembrance to our other selves – our family which yesterday shared this planet with us.

We face the ending of their birth. It will be a place of sadness, but also joy as we are finally building a Life Cairn – the first memorial for all the extinct species on the planet.

All life to carry one life, one life to carry all life.”

We do need poets, and songwriters, and speakers and writers and those called to activism and all of us with one fervent wish; that as humanity en masse we all wake up to what is happening in this world, that we learn to see again the effect of our every action large and small, and that we can cultivate the sense that there is still so much we can do as individuals and communities that can help ameliorate the worst of what is happening and steer our culture back to something more like sanity.

On the hilltop yesterday it felt like a beginning, a clarion call to wake up, a hope of what can happen when we come together and renew our intent. The first point perhaps is to try and begin to comprehend the scale of what amounts to a holocaust of our own making of the natural world. Only then can we hope to understand the urgency that must inform our actions, only then can we hope to act with the critical mass that we need to find our way back to where we once were; with one foot at least in the world of what is wild and that which truly matters in this life. If we can find a greater perspective which states there is no separation ever from us and the world in which we live, however much we’ve turned our faces away, if we can root the sense of that in our day to day decisions and weight of every large and seemingly small action then there may well still be solid grounds for hope.

A stated aim of the coming Decade of Biodiversity is that schoolchildren everywhere will have been made aware of the issues by 2020. But we need much more than that – ten years off is far too far away. We need to speak up and act now, and with everything we possess. If enough of us will it and with sufficient force of feeling – this could be the beginning of, or re-dedication towards, a response that might be in some way worthy of the monumental challenge we are faced with.

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.