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Bearings

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You get to a certain age when anniversaries can whip round a little too often.  Still, some of them are grounds, if not for exact celebration then certainly a case for marking the occasion.  And so it is this winter, this January to be precise, when a private army of some 600 security guards appeared from the depths of the cities and unemployment queues, newly stationed in a disused airforce base charged with helping clear the nine miles of the route of the Newbury bypass.  The clearance involved that of several hundred campaigners in camps, ten thousand trees and other apparent undesirables such as six different species of bat, badgers and protected species such as dormice, nightjars and the rare vertigo moulinsiana snail.

It was the crunch and culmination of a campaign spanning decades with people camping out on the route for a good year or two prior to the clearance and became a flashpoint for the anti-road protests sweeping the country at the time.  I’d arrived almost a year and a half previously, had wandered woodland for days seeking a promised camp before stumbling upon semi-squaddie teenagers who brought me to the campaign office.  From there it was a short hop to helping set up a camp in Snelsmore Common that would be a mainstay for the campaign until the final evictions, heralded by the influx of security all those months later.

What followed was a good two years that indulged as much as I could wish for of experiencing life outdoors – from ‘benders’ (struck from hazel poles and tarps) on woodland floors to treehouses in various states of sortedness or dilapidation, rarely with heating.  It was a time of stoned ‘bimbles’ in the forest, of folk music around fires (I met a Welsh fiddler while busking and she and I ended up knocking around together for most of the ensuing campaigns), of midnight raids on supermarket skips, digger diving in quaggy compounds and hectic hitching up and down the land.  It was a time of almost excoriating beauty – of seeing places in their final days, of starlit walks through miles of winter trees, of reading Welsh mythology under cover to the sound of stoves and rain on tarps that sounded almost supernatural.

And then, of course, we saw it all destroyed.  It was clearly a no-brainer this was on the way.  What surprised was our apparent inability to do anything less than fall in love with the places we now called home, knowing all the while their days were numbered.  It was in a sense bearing visceral witness, as if honouring these places we now knew, as if remembering them could somehow keep a part of them alive.

That this had an effect is not to be wondered at.  But the jarring nature of treetop evictions in particular meant for many it was an experience that could never happen again.  It was one of the chief features of those times then that a lot of caring and sensitive people were drawn like proverbial moths to those protests.  In a sense it was kind of insane.  And yet there was an emotional charge drawn from it all; of outrage amid the common carnage; that here and now we would be counted, we would lift up our voice in a cry for the country and the world where machines seemed to matter more than woman and man, more than the moors and the woods and the peace we’d come to know amid the lanes and waterways of a corner of England that would soon be no more, which spoke too for so many other places.

Time can settle things to some extent, if not always fully heal them.  While many continued campaigning, getting drawn for a large part into the anti-globalisation movement of the late nineties where riots seemed foregone conclusions, others returned to their roots, to education, gardening, raising kids, to leading quieter but still productive lives.

For my part, after a summer walking and busking I headed home, practically dragged from the woods, incarcerated for a time again, forced to settle for life within square walls that nonetheless still held its compensations.  It was a gentle and forgiving time before, for me, the long-term impact of the protests to some extent caught up with me.

But a love for the land still endured, the road building budget had been massively cut back, as much due to economic necessities than protest and politics, although they doubtless played a major part.  Many places won a reprieve, not least for me the woods and hill at the top of my road that had helped sharpen my focus, attentions and convictions from the start and led me to seek out Newbury’s camps in a time that less than two years later seemed distant and more innocent at once, as does most of that decade, years on.

More than a quarter of a century on then, after a time of too much war, of personal and more universal attrittions, those times still stand as a beacon for so many involved.  This led to further protest, sure, and may have helped form a kind of foundation for much that was to follow.  But their emotional immediacy lent a particular charge that was beautiful and sometimes searing all at once.  If it seems naïve to talk of innocence, there was nevertheless something true, something with all the makings of a mass movement that drew in supporters from all walks of life. 

Today, in a country and world that can feel riven, we need such inclusion more than ever.   Whatever the will or the wish in certain quarters it seems increasingly unlikely that direct action alone will be the thing that can save us, even if protest can always play its part.  But what Newbury and those times may yet grant us is a reminder of emotional immediacy, where a life lived closer to nature, away from the membranes of mortar and brick can stir in us a better sense of what our true place on this earth can still look like, of how it can feel to be one with the land, how her every hurt is ours to bear too, how this can help inform every action and decision, large or small, a kind of newfound code for ecological conduct, not enforced by laws or decrees (though given due restrictions for the mighty) but by some kind of heartfelt response that treats the land and the landscape as a living thing, indeed as our closest connection.

Such degrees of engendered responsibility and the extent to which they can help us hold to account the overbearing, over-invested and ethically remote are perhaps the greatest gifts those protests can bestow.  We are all still setting out on that new path, out from beneath the comfort of the lintels of our old assurances.  We do not know, and never did, what lies ahead or what degrees of agency we hold.  We should not let that discourage us as we set forth, seek some kind of greater stride in our steps, take bearings to greet the new day.

Gaza

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It can seem hard at times to find some kind of fitting way ahead.  Hard, specifically, to find ways to respond with a degree of humanity in any way adequate for the scale of what is being played out, once again, in Gaza as I write.  It’s not enough to say we should have seen it coming, that the signs were there of the faltering process, that Netanyahu may have been in any case looking for excuses to return to the levels of bombardment we are witnessing again.

It speaks to particular pains.  It can seem hard to fully empathise with the Israeli situation for example when the retribution is so disproportionate, when the tally of lives lost or destroyed renders them now the aggressor, the perpetrators of seemingly perpetual war.  It’s hard in other words, when our newsfeeds are full of dead or starving Palestinian children, to consider Israel’s experience, how any other nominally Western nation might respond (and forgive the lack of equivalence; I mention it as a statement of what’s very much part of the problem) if hundreds of their population were butchered or kidnapped, not least when Hamas still do not recognise the Israeli state, are as far away from advocating or accepting a two-state solution as anyone in Netanyahu’s cabinet.  It’s hard to imagine, even as – or especially as – we see the given state in Gaza, how it may be to live in fear of rocket raids, of the psychological strain of being surrounded by enemies real or perceived, of how it must be to feel your country is under a state of perpetual siege.

You can point fingers quite squarely at Hamas then, even if we can wonder how any of us would react in the face of seeing countless friends and family lost, how it’s not hard to see how Israel’s bombardments might act as a perfect recruitment device.  But Hamas are historically simply survivors, the last players standing in a power struggle with Fatah that had gone on since at least the Palestinian elections of 2006, that they seemed to offer something credible in the face of the latter’s clear failures and corruption, that it was in no small part that many felt driven to Hama’s arms given Fatah’s acquiescence to demands from an unreasonable Israeli state.

And, if we can be mindful of the Israeli mentality, its stresses and long forbearance, how much easier is it to see the Palestinian side?  How much less can we wonder at their response after so many decades in an effective open prison where few could leave and daily conditions were harsh if not downright humiliating and the international community largely looked away?  Is it any wonder Hamas gained such standing and credulity in such a scenario, even as the ‘solutions’ they proposed played into the hands of the Israeli right?  Hamas and Netanyahu need each other in a sense, locked as they appear to be in a mutually antagonistic spiral.

In the meantime, what can we do as world citizens when marching and letters, even vigils, do not seem enough?  Where can we go with the knowledge that, far away, over vast distances of land and sea, scenes are being played out as bad as anything the last century threw at our feet, all the worse perhaps as we like to see ourselves as more enlightened these days, the spirit of the times supposedly lit up by greater grace and goodwill, where we foster conditions for healing, where we are meant to have moved on en masse as part of a greater humanity, a greater synthesis, as if Spring itself is meant to usher in a better age?  The ongoing onslaught in Gaza pulls such aspirations into greater light; if these sentiments hold any currency at all, surely they should be brought to bear with every effort we can muster to help end the suffering in Gaza, to help bring the hostages home.  The question remains; how can we respond at all to such horror with any degree of application fitting for its scale, with anything that holds any hope at all of cessation, let alone justice itself?

As charter after charter of international condemnation is invoked, as declarations of human rights abuses, constitutions of genocide, of war crimes come and go like bitter milestones on a bitter road, it’s easy to feel words are cheap.  Would America be less intransigent if not more positively proactive without a Zionistic hinterland that seems to believe this all a precursor to some kind of greater messianic immanence?  Could we stand a little taller in the UK if we cut off all arms sales to Israel, over and above some positive moves in this respect more recently?  Can the banks disinvest?  Can boycotts carry more teeth?  Or should we be looking a little harder at the roots of this conflict, the grievances held by both sides, advocate space for renewed diplomacy, do not surrender to policy negotiated from the barrel of a gun?

If it’s clear that Israel is currently in the grip of a recalcitrant right wing and that many in the global Jewish diaspora, even many Israelis, regard their policies as the worst kind of intransigence; if we can hold some expectation that Trump could find it in himself to be more genuinely helpful, that in itself carries the hope that, in better circumstances, there might actually be more traction for some kind of better way ahead.

If it is in any way enough to seek to get our houses in better order, to bear bitter witness, to strive for Gaza with every part of us in the knowledge that every life counts, perhaps we can try a little harder too to fathom why so many Israelis support such a scale of aggression and the nature of the micro-climate of that country’s press.  Perhaps we can seek to understand a little better how wrongdoing can be facilitated not just by the banality of any absence of response, but can be driven by historic and more current wounds being wilfully exploited.  If nothing else, it may carry lessons for the future.  It might just shine a better light on our collective here and now. 

Carry Them With Us

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

I thought, in a way, that we’d still have more time.  Another day perhaps to watch as the results piled up; more time to reckon the tally of swing states, to stretch out the race.  More time for will and further prayer if nothing else.  As it was, the news sat ready and waiting, squatting like a gargoyle in the rosebed of our morning newsfeeds, newly minted like a bitter coin, disbelief pregnant as a pause in the daily functioning of things.  It seems in the coming weeks and years we may have to get used to a much longer hiatus.

Given the quite obviously poor timing of the result in a world that so clearly can do with better news, it may be instructive to bear in mind that, after the vote, we have choices.  Not the choice as to whether we abide by democratic process, if we want to abide at all in any state of justification; whatever our stomachs may feel, we can’t ignore or override the vote.  But we do have choices as to other ways in which we can respond.

First and foremost, we can perhaps drop the adversarial stance; not from lack of justification but simply out of pragmatics.  It may be easier, in other words, on our collective psychologies if we view what seems to lie ahead as more of a kind of geological phenomena – more faceless, indiscriminate in its damage than a construct and outcome of a deliberate will.  It might just be easier to deal with if we see it as less a result of determined sabotage from near and far than a kind of high tide of the hand of history, where a demagogue crops up on cue – any one will do – in the face of a hailstorm of economic tribulation, where the masses are told simply what wants to be heard; that everything can somehow be put right with merely the will to believe and less reckless meddling from liberal elites who don’t seem to understand realities of putting food on the table.

We have other choices, not least simple will to continue, the will to not crumble, to not turn to the wall, to walk out defiant – not married to outcomes or even thinking of the road that lies ahead, but from a point of principle, in the knowledge survival will not lie in cowering in corners, in recrimination or deep diving on our scrolling phones.  That’s a choice that may determine a degree of dignity even if, or especially if, dignity may be all that we have left.  It certainly holds the key to whatever hope may remain.

That none of this may get easier as the months and years go by is something we can only steel ourselves for.  Whatever decisions are made, if the wire is wheeled in on our aspirations, as an attrition of newsfeeds and op-eds, redolent with apparent reality, grinds and clogs our sensibilities we will need more than simply bloodymindedness.  We will need stamina, a calling forth of resources, the will to believe that there might be more in us than we dare think.  Strange as it may seem, we can meet this moment mindful of not just a better sense of our potential but with a greater grasp of our humanity, of that which we are capable of.

We do not need reminders that none of this is a given, let alone that it may not be easy.  But we should keep an ear out for those that can help, those voices calling us on.  We may be surprised by their currency, borne perhaps by their necessity, like somebody calling us home from the dark.

Even as we dig in, we should lift up our voices, go forward unbowed even as we buckle down.  It is dark here as I write on this early winter English night.  I know it will be a long time before the inevitable Spring.  We can only do what we have always done: be mindful of the beautiful things even as we shoulder the wheel in hope of better times, mindful of our spirits, of the knowledge that, if the embers of hope be ever so small, we can still nurture them, carry them with us, still somehow keep them alive.  In spite, or perhaps even because, of everything that we may face, there is a great spirit flowing through these times.  Step outside: can you feel it?

The Veil of Trauma

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I sat down to re-read the Canadian poet Anne Michael’s testament to the life of Jakob Beer; translator, poet, survivor of the Holocaust.  ‘Fugitive Pieces’ is a book as much about love as it is about war – the things that can heal us, the things that can keep us alive.  I originally read it in a time of personal strife and the memory of its excoriating clarity has stayed with me ever since as one of the books that truly changed my life, as if, in helping document destruction, it also offered a path in how to put life back together again.

Michaels writes with a kind of harrowing detail about the Holocaust itself; the lives taken, interrupted; as Beer reads by way of escape about Houdini, he thinks of the Jews all over Europe climbing into bins, chests, boxes, under floorboards, behind walls to disappear; escape acts from discovery and capture.  She writes about the mentalities that facilitated and enabled such horrors – the dehumanisation, the labelling of one class of people as a subhuman other, where the treatment is justified as somehow the normal rules don’t apply.  When you believe your victim is more animal than man, a problem to be dealt with, an inconvenience to be ushered out of sight, normal morality flies.

Jakob Beer was smuggled to safety in the back of a car bound for a Greek island where he hid, as a boy, for and from the rest of the war, soothed to sanity by the narratives of his Greek protector Athos, emersed in a world of geology, poetry, archaeology, a thousand scraps of integral and arcane knowledge of polar explorers, ancient mariners, the aurora borealis, landscapes that lie hidden in time, one below or rising up from the other.  It deals with what masks things, reveals them, how meaning can be extracted from a stone.  It goes without saying his story from that time forward was a search to learn to live with such times, to somehow learn to be fully human in the face of the atrocities he lived through, in the face of such incomprehensible loss.

Amid all of this, it is inevitably, and quite brilliantly, a book about language.  How new tongues can put us at a distance from our past, how we can put them on like a new set of clothes, like a kind of invisible cloak, how we can be dislocated both geographically but also phonetically, which can make any eventual homecoming all the more profound.  Jakob, from necessity, became a kind of linguistic shapeshifter – his Yiddish giving way to his protectorate Greek, later to the English of his newfound home in Toronto.  It certainly fed into his work as a translator.  But if Michaels deals with the heaviest of themes, she can also have the most playful of touches, nowhere better evidenced than in her palindromes (“Yreka Bakery” of a friend’s establishment and “are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”). 

In an echo of Athos’s – and Jakob’s own – diving into layers of history; acutely personal and metaphysical by turns, Michael’s delves some precarious waters.  She documents how a man can be saved in every sense, can find his way back into a life truly lived despite decades of wading through psychological mires.  Of how our decisions can save us, of how we can truly embrace what life can place in our path.  Michael’s charts the trajectory of Beer’s excursions into the depths of his family’s past, gives some account of how we can learn to release ghosts, and parts of ourselves in the process.

But perhaps her greatest lessons can be more immediate.  She writes about the forces of history, the gradual instant, events and what leads to them as almost geological phenomena, where many years of gradual influence can amount in the occurrences of a single day.  She writes of how one generation’s trauma can be transmitted to the next. 

And so, this winter, as violence repeated itself with such terrible intensity, I found myself turning to such a work.  Not for perspective exactly, but from a kind of raw acknowledgement of horror, from wondering where to go in the face of inhumanity, from wondering if it is possible at all to be alive in the knowledge of such things and yet be human, to try and fathom how at all we can respond to such bloodshed with any degree of real depth of mercy in the face of the scenes we have seen.  

Can we learn anything at all from documenting historic atrocity and, more than that, the way out of it, the way in which a path can be found to eventual healing; a signpost perhaps of the long road ahead for survivors?  We can all be too easily caught up in narratives of victimhood; blame the other, identify ourselves as underdogs, fall into spiteful traps of ‘them or us’, fail to see the story from the far side of the fence.  

Perhaps acknowledgement of historic trauma can help somehow to find the way beyond it, that our criticisms are not compromised by lack of respect, of compassion, that we can still recognise historic hurt.  We can never forget the cruel tally of what happened in Europe which all told was not so very long ago.  If pain can ever have a purpose, it may be in its ability to keep the memory fresh, to help us not to repeat or to permit the repetition of history’s mistakes and tragedies.  Perhaps it can serve to remind us that any apparent other are really as close as our kin, our very own blood if we can only lift the veil of trauma to see clearly our mistakes, our potential, just how we might learn to let live. 

Diminishing Voids

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

At times it can seem hard to know how best to place our efforts, even whether those efforts will ever prove fruitful, whether they are worth themselves at all. Above all the myriad things we may face, which do not need any rehearsal – a cost-of-living crisis where we scrabble to fix metaphorical roofs high amongst them – above all of this there is the knowledge of that great existential crisis of the climate, not so much an elephant in the room as a kind of collective howling at the door.  Is doing anything at all quite futile in the face of the scale of the challenge?  Are we all in the UK with our languid, moist and merciful, perhaps somewhat desultory summer archetypes of the famed relaxed dogs on the sofa while the walls this time adopt the metaphor, licked with flames of distant forest fires; so easy to dismiss with a click of a switch, so difficult to forget?

Perhaps it’s a question of choice.  We can choose for instance to ignore it all, to continue to ignore it, literally screen it out with a surfeit of devices and their myriad balms and distractions.  Or we can fall into embittered enmity; rehearse our woes while doing nothing to address them.  Perhaps the biggest choice is, knowing what we know, can we really not do anything at all – through despondency or lack of drive or just not knowing how on earth we can start to respond when perhaps all we need to do, if just for a moment, is listen?

Beneath the apparent disregard or callousness there’s a deep well of something else in all of us, a well that all the phones, the hours lost to films and mini-series or scrolling socials, the buzz of pints, the near oblivion from anything else we may throw down our throats or clog our consciousness with, there’s a well that none of this can dry or fathom – a well of true feeling, an almost insatiable hunger for life, true life; not a technological chimera or booze-induced haze or mirage, but a feeling of how we are all meant to be; clear, connected – in the most meaningful way – connected and sorted and free.

None of this is to say that any of these things are necessarily bad in themselves but probably most of us rely on them more than we could some of the time, and some people much more than that. But perhaps, just maybe, maybe; if we can drink a little deeper and more often from that well when the scramble for sustenance and sanity allows, we may be able to look at our various dilemmas with a kind of clarity that engenders some kind of meaningful action, a clarity that informs and reminds us that there are myriad people out there striving and endeavouring to help, that we can join with their efforts, augment them, strive to do right by the times.

If we can do so, prise open the door just about long enough, squeeze out of the bars of the cage, we may find out there lights in the darkness; pinpoints of distant semaphores or visual morse that can guide us, help us to do what we can; silent suggestions that there is still a way, that there are still things we can do.

One such suggestion, and I do not know how I first heard it – dropped like a pearl in my inbox one morning perhaps – is the initiative over the Climate and Ecology Bill.  This proposed legislation was introduced years ago now, but it was re-introduced to the ‘Commons this Spring and is set for further debate in a couple of months.

There’s a great deal you can say about the Bill – the clue’s in the title – but it offers above all two things; a constructive, pragmatic, if admittedly ambitious road map as to how we can get our house in order in the UK regarding the Bill’s twin concerns and how we as communities and individuals can get on board and contribute in a tangible, realistic and meaningful way.

You can read all about the specifics of the Bill at the national website; the 40 peers and 127 MPs of all parties already on board, the backing of eminent scientists, CPRE, the Wildlife Trusts, the Co-operative Bank and many other businesses, 30,000 members of the public. You can read all about its suggestions, its scale and its rigour and its hope.  What is perhaps more important is that any one of us, anyone at all can play their part in its promotion and – beyond the scope of wider goals of lobbying, whose only real limit is that of the imagination – it can be a very simple thing; as simple as writing a letter.

If enough MPs are contacted these next few months by sufficient numbers of voters it would stand in good stead not only the prospects of the passage of the Bill later this Autumn but also those of the domestic environmental agenda in general as we move forward to the New Year and the prospect of an eventual election.

It may seem a thin hope at times that any of this can address the true scale of the problem.  But it may be enough, just in time.  What is clear is that, when faced with the prospect of looking future children in the eye, when all that may need to be done may be still, if just about, within our grasp, there is no decision at all; just the surrender to effort, in the knowledge that we may stand a little more resolute, that we may win a little time for the next pearl to drop into our hands, the next sweet opportunity, in the hope our mutual lights may be seen across a diminishing void, that others may still find their way ahead.

The Old Road and a New Path

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So after many months going through the process of approaching publishers, I have decided to launch a crowdfunder for the book I wrote about here earlier this year.  I intend to launch the campaign early next year and will be providing more updates closer to the time.

The new book was always partly intended as a means to break out of an apparent cast set by my previous writing, not least ‘Nine Miles’; my account of the British roads protest movement of the ‘nineties.  That does not negate the value of those times but as anyone who has read the book will know, those protests took their toll on many and for my part I have carried those scars a long time.  However much I hold true to what happened all those years ago, however much I believe in the power of protest, however much I believe that the spirit of those times can inform anyone acting on behalf of the environment and society at every level, it was always difficult, in some respects for me, to continue to – in any explicit or inadvertent way – advocate a particular means of action I am no longer in a position to engage with myself.  I can’t expect or encourage anyone to do something I am not able to myself and so some kind of change of tac has been in order for some time.

The new book is a product of that desire for change and that of several years of writing and research.  We all know the seriousness of the times we are in regarding the climate.  For my part, in so far as I have the space and capacity to do so, I have chosen to put my shoulder to the wheel of civic engagement: protest is nothing without the role of civic society.  The latter to my mind offers the best way ahead as we move forward to collectively tackle the crisis.  Protest and civil disobedience can certainly serve to up the anti and help stir us out of our slumber.  It is understandable that so many people may choose to engage in them.  But equally the message has got through to every level of society by now about the immediacy of the climate crisis.   We do not need, and it may well be counter-productive, to seek to set the way ahead by constant disruption, however understandable the wish to continue to do so may be.  And to my mind, defacing irreplaceable art really does not serve the cause.  At times like these, communication and clarity counts for a lot.  We should be realistic about that which we face just as a better sense of direction is always helpful.  But ultimately the need for mutual survival should inform us all.

Given the pace of change needed we need good catalysts.  For my part, to some extent, I always felt that that with Nine Miles I was preaching to the choir.  The new book is an attempt to help broaden the message and not continue to be defined solely by those things I took part in a long time ago.  I believe there is still time to turn this ship around but only if we can act with sufficient alacrity and pace.  Efforts like that of ‘Zero Hour’ – the cross-party campaign behind the Climate and Ecology Bill – hold great potential.  The campaign is one we can all easily play a part in, whether that part is sharing a link, setting up a local group or actively lobbying your MP.

Such are my thoughts in these times.  But – as figures like Greta Thunberg and others are quick to point out – it is not, and never has been, for one person alone to help carry these things forward.  We can all play our part, bolstered by the best elements of our collective history.  There may be a long way to go but, as I hope my new book – which after all recounts a tale of pilgrimage – can help show, we can meet those miles with pace and will and some kind of sure determination.  It falls to us – to all of us – to now do what we can, without a sense of any guarantee but bolstered by the moral need to do our best.  When all is told it’s always been that way, only now we can all see it all the clearer.

Heist?

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Can anything surprise us anymore?  As we all hunker down and attempt to deal with the realities of the omicron surge, another threat to national society is not far from the horizon.  Specifically, as I write, the Lords are debating the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – often dubbed simply the ‘Policing’ Bill.  Last minute amendments by Priti Patel have made the Bill all the more controversial with critics likening it to a power grab worthy of Putin’s Russia or Egypt.

Salient among the justifications are the touted necessity of robust response to the activities of the likes of Insulate Britain and XR, famed for their acts of disruption.  Protestor tactics have changed in recent years, the thinking goes, and the police need the powers to respond effectively.  While there is no doubt that obstructing stretches of motorway, blocking trains into the capital and shutting down various printing presses are far from popular, the case made for the kind of legislation we’re currently looking at tends to gloss over issues as to what constitutes ‘legitimate’ protest, how much power is to be handed over to the Home Secretary and the police and what she and they might – or are perhaps even likely – to do with it.

As Monbiot has pointed out, proposed police powers would include being able to ban anyone from protesting who has previously committed “protest-related offences” or who has even “contributed” to a protest “likely to cause serious disruption”.  If you thought “serious disruption” counted only as sitting on a tube train roof or gluing your face to the M25, consider the breadth of the remit.  If a protest is simply noisy enough to cause “serious unease” it could be banned.  But it is entirely up to officers’ discretion as to how many decibels this might entail and ignores the fact that creating some noise is often half the modus operandi of many given demonstrations.

Other, just as worrying, and imbedded ambiguities remain.  Associating with particular individuals or using the internet to encourage a “protest-related offence” for instance.  And police could effectively impose any restrictions they like on a protest and ban static demonstrations altogether.  Other sweeping statements include mandates against causing “serious disruption to the life of a community” and “serious disruption to the activities of an organisation”.  Stop and search powers could be used without given reason and the legislation as a whole would put many more protestors at risk of arrest.

The problems with this go beyond simply an attack on our rights, as disturbing as this may be.  The Bill would undermine the relationship between police and the public and frequently place impossible choices in the hands of those officers trying to do the right thing.  Relaxing of conditions for stop and search would undoubtably impact even more heavily on ethnic groups and curtailment of protests would hinder the ‘pressure valve’ they have always historically afforded.  Pushing dissent underground and radicalising its expression even further serves no one except, perhaps, those charged with drafting even more stringent legislation in response.

Protest, not unlike the British ‘constitution’ itself has long been subject to certain, generally unclarified, understandings.  Like those of the constitution, these understandings have always been vague, have relied to a large extent on a degree of goodwill or at least the acknowledgement of their likely popularity at large.  But equally, protests have traditionally very often entailed policing costs and a degree of disruption.  To argue otherwise is to endorse their restriction to a saccharine enfeeblement that many charged with managing them would undoubtedly welcome.  There’s always been an element of metaphorical push and shove. 

Given that protestors are often driven by the scale and immediacy of planetary crisis, it’s understandable some of them resort to disruption in the face of apparent media indifference.  But while it is true that (as Digital Rebellion have stated), activism can fill gaps in public awareness left by the press, strategies as to how to bring that public awareness on board are ignored at collective peril.  Though the need for greater traction and swifter change at large is sorely needed, no one should underestimate the extent to which people in general grasp the scale and import of the climate crisis.  The question is not whether we should act but how we should go forward.  And we stand to achieve far more with greater unity.

Activism can only ever be at its most instrumental when coupled with – in service to – wider civic society.  That our ecological situation is urgent, desperate is not in doubt.  It is right that people should find and utilise channels to continue to highlight this, to push for faster and greater change.  We can all lay a hand to that and there is as great a need as ever for those in a position to do so to dedicate themselves.  And mass demonstrations to urge on and hold politicians to account are needed today like never before.

Attempts by our government to clamp down on protest would negate all this.  The PCSC Bill is drafted in a way that would at best cause confusion in its implementation and in all likelihood represents a power grab that must be considered along with other proposed legislation including the Nationality and Borders Bill and ‘amendments’ to the Human Rights Act.  When concern about these laws includes even that of a former prime minister, and in quite forceful terms, the alarm bells for us all should now be ringing. 

Acclaimed film producer and long-standing peer, Lord Puttman, has studied the German descent into fascism in the ‘thirties in some detail and his leaving speech from last October, where he says that we’re in a “very bad place” and need to “wake up” is well worth the read.  With government placemen increasingly embedded in the hearts of our institutions, with broadcasters cautious and cowed and dissent barely more than a whisper, if it were judged alone by bulletins and headlines, it’s more important than ever we stand firm.  For all the fear of diatribes, understandable caution over an undue alarm, the biggest threat we face remains that insulant complacency that clings to the assumption it could never happen here.

Please consider emailing your MP about the Bill and signing this petition.

The Haven

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

And so, the Spring is with us once again.  In just a few days the restrictions will ease, we will stumble into gardens, drink beer or wine or otherwise and many of us will choose to count our lucky stars.  We’ve come through a terrible time.  We don’t need reminders of what we have been through, the people we’ve lost, the bewildering attrition on our patience and reserves of fortitude.  During the winter’s high tide of cases we knew that for many – the nurses and doctors, the patients themselves, it must have been like a kind of white heat while all the rest of us could do was wait.  

But, the sun shines again, we venture out onto the greens, blinking and buoyant or simply taking it in; the seeming unlikeliness of it; the actual Spring, the tangible immanence of life restored to something much closer to normal.  Finding our feet on the way out of this may be like limbering up after a long convalescence.  After all, how do we expect to stride full tilt into a return to old ways after so much solitude, so many hours whiled away or spent in furious or steady enterprise?  It may take time: we should be patient with ourselves. 

In the meantime, is it too much, too soon, to wonder just how we go forward, to think on the things we have learned, how we choose to calibrate our lives; tempered or battered as we may be but still enduring or champing at horizons so newly redeemed?  It’s tempting now to holiday and surely many will do so.  But will we forget those little points of newly discovered significance upon our daily walks, urban or rural as they may be?  Will those young shoots, the weeds in the pavements, the actual woods help inform us as we step into our renewed freedoms, as we cast off the shackles of life lived indoors for so long?

If we can retain a little poise, we may be able to integrate our reflections of these last twelve months as life cranks up another gear or two.  We may be able to remember old and new acquaintances, fresh resolutions, priorities granted by the bedrock of life that sustains us, the knowledge in uncertain times when old securities are stripped away: the land herself still underpins the basics of our lives.  Without her we are almost literally at sea; her fate is ours just as sure as the dawn.

It’s far from an untimely reminder.  As we emerge from one crisis, we are called to engage once again with that much greater emergency, however slow burning – the future of the biosphere itself.  The greatest dangers here barely need stating; they are to be found first and foremost in ourselves.  We can wilfully ignore it all, perhaps because it seems so large and so intractable a problem, perhaps because we like to think that someone somewhere has it in hand and we need not exercise our own agency.  Or perhaps we feel so overwhelmed, so caught-in-the-headlights we don’t know which way we should turn, or we feel it is hopeless or we despair at humanity at large in our apparent heedlessness.  Or we stare at it all like a mountain we haven’t yet climbed and wonder if it’s still within our gift.

For many, it doesn’t need stating – those taking to the streets for the climate in some of the biggest protests ever seen in that distant summer of 2019 for example.  Or those living out a bitter winter in those many woodlands cut into and despoiled by HS2.  Anyone who’s ever been engaged in protest knows the sense of liberation it can bring – that, after the anxiety and soul searching of what’s to be done, action brings catharsis, even peace.

But, of course, to place yourself on any actual front, to witness face to face the destruction and perhaps, historically at least, the brutality of those charged with its execution, is no easy thing and many know only too clearly the toll it can take.  But such protests are a reminder, certainly, of everything at stake.  They can serve to make society that much more conscious, that much more determined to do what we can.

However much we may like to, we can’t all go off and set up in the woods, whatever the value of life out of doors.  But, as this last year has reinforced for so many, time spent in nature can bring a great boon and can certainly help should the going be hard.  And it can inform how we act, what we do.

One thing anyone concerned with the climate can do is get behind ‘Zero hour’; the campaign for the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, currently making its way through the ‘Commons.  The Bill is principally concerned with picking up where the Climate Change Act and the Paris Agreement left off; pressing for targets bolder than ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050; a target that has been described by Caroline Lucas as “calling for the fire brigade thirty years down the line”.  The campaign is principally calling for people to write to and lobby their MP’s to urge them to support the Bill (140 MP’s and Peers already do so).  But there is an almost infinite scope of other means to lend your support, from banner drops to holding public meetings and principally spreading the word however you can to help make the campaign one no politician can afford to ignore.

For those younger, or more inclined to get their hands in the earth, there are all kinds of tree-planting initiatives, including ‘The Children’s Forest’ project, affiliated with the Forest School Association and which I will be writing more about soon.  For now, it may be enough to say that it is rooted in envisioning a positive and bountiful future and to let that inform our actions, in this case creating abundant forests for future generations, borne first and foremost in our imaginations.

Perhaps that’s as much as we need to go on for a guiding light; we all know the pitfalls of despondency, denial and despair.  But if we can picture the world we would like, strive for it sinew and soul, perhaps that can give us not only the wind in our sails but can help to tangibly create a kind of harbour for our future, however distant arrival may be, however much work it will take.    

The Great Re-Imagining

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Is this the time to look for compensation?  At least we finally can say it’s truly Spring.  Those that can will walk and listen to the birdsong and maybe even find a little peace; unlooked for or prayed for, unlikely but making a pure kind of sense.  God knows we need such moments.  A friend of mine watches a raven for how long he doesn’t quite know.  Others gather weeds along newly familiar paths.  I shelter from the suddenly seasonal sun, think about summer, feel a strange sense of assurance that might have nothing and everything to do with my own one temporal fate.

Will things be different after all of this?  Will the flights resume, the factories stutter back into some kind of life?  Bars, cafes, shops stammer open like nothing has happened at all and we’ll wipe away the salt of weeks alone or crammed in close confinement?  Gratitude right now seems pretty likely; a bloody-minded courtesy, acknowledging we still can breathe, we still can take in each day in the air like it was our first.

And somehow we must al of us come through; survivors, witnesses, beleaguered or hopeful and strong.  It’s no time for sweeping statements, triumphalist crows that we know when the end is in sight, or that this is all part of some grand scheme of nature, that there is reason for this other than some random roulette.  We can give in to terror, despair but we might as well be optimistic or look for very major silver linings.

It’s not some random fantasy to say there might be some grace in all this, or chance of it, if we can take the perspective that we might in the long run be getting thrown a line.  A frenetic world of global commerce, global travel has just hit the brakes.  We might as well enjoy the sudden peace.  We have a chance to stop and think, reflect on the lives we’ve been leading.  Can we imagine our way out of this?

Maybe we’ll be able to step forward into a world where just-in-time networks of supply and demand are replaced by something more resilient, that we can source and grow the goods we need a little closer to home, where we’re all weaning off a glut of luxury but still live well and maybe a little more honestly, not dependent on imports whose source we can’t name, where conditions of labour or livestock are hushed out of sight.  Maybe we’ll see a return of the domestic economy, hollowed out in the 20’s and 30’s where we’re all a little more self-reliant.  How many containers of latest electronics does the world really need? How much of our once-innate ability to source our needs at home or close to it are we happy to continue to relinquish?  How much do we really want to spend large parts of our working week in little boxes, hurtling their cargo to horizons whose value we’ve only too nearly forgotten?

No one would wish these times on another or any others we do not consider our clan.  For we are all connected now, connected in brightness and grief.  But we owe it to ourselves and one another, to every huddled in hospital beds and most of all to the children to see there are gifts here if we can only see them as such.  Somebody somewhere appeared to hit pause and now we can think and plan and even dream.  We can think on the state of the planet today, her all-too-clear signs of distress, how we can help her, the habits we can break, how we can renew our commitments (or make them at all if now new), how we can seek to redeem the unspoken bond we have broken, a rift that may have something to do with our current plight, as if collective survival rests in a natural corrective.

Whether we see the virus as a desperate manifestation of the will of the world to endure or something far more arbitrary in arguably besides the point.  Whatever the reason for it and whatever our thoughts, we can see that while no one would wish for the virus, it’s still giving us a chance.  The kind of world we all step into when the threat recedes may depend on the degree to which we can reimagine our world, reimagine our place upon it, how we serve it, cast away the things that hinder or obstruct.

We’re used at times like these to being told we are enduring a great trial, are being put to the test, tempered, told we must be strong.  And all of these are true.  We can pull upon the deep well of our inner reserves; our patience, compassion and will to endure.  We can show the extent of collective resolve, our ability to adapt and our strength in adversity’s face.  And we can meditate on that which can bring us all peace; our own peace of mind and that of those all around us; at times like these its necessity is only made clearer than ever.

But there’s another element as well; that we are being given opportunities, if we can see them.  The degree to which we make the most of them may depend upon our ability to walk with eyes open, to imagine and dream again, dream harder.  Our future remains a thing we can all of us shape.  We now have a chance just to stop and slow down and reflect how we do so.  We have a little time.  And perhaps time is all that is called for, for now, that all our haste and rush, our daily and global migrations, our obsession with temporal efficiencies has been for so long such a part of the problem.  We have the chance to remember to just be ourselves; an estrangement it’s high time to heal.

The First Hill in the World

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

In a lecture given in the Ulster Museum in 1977, Seamus Heaney said that there are two ways in which a place may be known and cherished; the lived, illiterate and unconscious and then the learned, literate and conscious. It was a tension that certainly preoccupied him. Perhaps it defined him as well; his ability to resolve apparent contradictions without necessarily ever laying them to rest. Heaney’s life was full of such tensions or at least was characterised by differing forces, territories and loyalties. Part of the Catholic community in Ulster, the sense of straddling boundaries was somehow always more ingrained for Heaney, right from the very beginning.

He grew up on a farm at Mossbawn, County Derry. A stream ran close to the farmhouse, dividing the townlands of Anahorish and Tamniarn, which belonged to two different parishes and which were themselves in two separate dioceses. Amongst other things, this resulted in learning – and needing to know – different catechisms for church and living in the Bellaghy district but being part of a different region’s football team. In his own words he was always “a little displaced; being in between was a kind of condition”.

This only amplified later in his life; his loyalties tested as the civil rights movement he spoke out for gave way to the Troubles, his decision to move to the Republic, his later teaching in America. And he wrote in English, was offered a place at Oxford (though conflicted, he turned it down from a desire to stay close to, and give back to, his people and roots), was part of a literary world where the English and the Irish cultures met. He returned to teach in Belfast and was instrumental in a greater recognition of Northern Irish poetry in general, part of a tradition of poets from both communities; poets like Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague and John Hewitt.

Heaney was part of a world that reflected older literary lines; in particular the resurgent Irish identity of the Nineteenth Century that resulted in a new literature, set against an increasingly secular world where those like Sir James Frazer (and his Golden Bough) sought greater standardisation and the demythologisation of traditional beliefs and the places inspiring them. The new literature was part of a counter cultural movement that sought to reinstate the importance of the native tradition, of old places, old faiths, fairie lore and the legends whose entomological associations echo in the landscape even now; place names redolent with battles and saints, flights and homecomings and the steady pattern of an ancient way of life.

One of Heaney’s greatest acts of straddling different worlds was his relationship with landscape and the land itself, between the geological landscape and that of the mind. He wrote of this relationship as a kind of marriage. He thought that just as marriage is sacred, so too is this sensing of place. The landscape was “sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities.” For Heaney it possibly stemmed from a kind of almost formalised betrothal, bathing as a boy in a moss-hole, “treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened.” The poems of the bog, the bog oaks, the very bog people that formed such a rich seam in so much of his later work are surely touched by such an intimacy.

It’s with a profound sadness then, if with a sense of no longer being surprised, that I heard of plans to build a dual carriageway within one hundred metres of his childhood home of Mossbawn. The impact of the landscape and ecology there can only be imagined. That landscape helped inspire poems such as ‘Anahorish’ (with it’s ‘First Hill in the World’, and also the name of his very first school), ‘Broagh’ and the ‘tattoo’ of its vocal, low ‘O’, the Strand at Lough Beg, a poem dedicated to his cousin Colum McCartney, murdered in the Troubles that Heaney always treated with both care and a rare kind of grace.

The water pump in the yard at Mossbawn once marked the centre of his world. He drew on the experiences there for his early work – his first collection, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ was published fifty years ago this week. It is full of descriptions of that way of life; his father ploughing with horses, the rituals of butter churning that could be from the sixteen-hundreds, his early disillusionments in ‘Blackberry Picking’ and in the title poem itself. They are borne out with an intense and almost cinematic detail, testaments to a very different life. He writes too of another juxtaposition as he watches his father digging, aware that he himself will now work – and dig – in another fashion.

These were the worlds that Heaney found himself both between and a part of above all the rest; his writing and the farming life, the old world that even then seemed somehow irreproachably unthreatened by modernity. But though he chose, or was destined for, a life that was at one remove from the rest of his family, he remained wedded to the land and the people he lived amongst, enshrining the culture and places of his original home. But he often lived in cities, understanding Kavanagh’s internal quarrel with “the illiterate self, tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony grey soil, and the literate self that pined for the ‘city of Kings/Where art music and letters were the real things’ ”.

It’s a quandary that in some respects affects us all today. But amid the pull and tow of cities and hills, farming and art, landscapes and the pressures of a modern world that it often seems only grows harder to understand by the day, we shouldn’t forget that we all of us have choices, that the division between the world we enshrine and that which we continually create – one way or another – remains a still malleable thing. It’s simplistic to say that roads don’t get congested or that new infrastructure doesn’t sometimes have a place. But cars remain one of the ultimate mixed blessings of our times. Surely we have it in us still to value the green and the good and not be subservient to tides of tyres and metal that hook us in with their convenience but stand to take away so much?

It’s a tragic situation that the love of so great a man; the landscape in which he grew up now stands to be desecrated (a word he himself used when he heard of the plans) by a literal inroad to a vision of modernity borne, at best, of an utter absence of imagination. In a world increasingly defined by manufactured needs we should all remember our options, look for every avenue for change, hold onto that which we value and love. Heaney’s work is a testament to those values, to a world that is carried in our culture and our hearts. Nothing can touch that. We owe him so much.