freedom

True Humans

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It’s probably as telling of our general predicament that we’re still in drought, and may be for some time despite the storms and weather we’ve just had. Nonetheless, the sun drops warm and welcome here today, the days are marked with beauty and with grace. Autumn lends a particular charm. But the memory of the summer heat is never far away and we know the recent warmth wasn’t quite right though we tried not to think about it. It comes as no surprise these past three months have been the dryest on record for the South East and for much of the rest of the country.

In a similar sense then, there may be an air of disquiet about this industrial ship we are all travelling in, this strange voyage we are on of modern homo sapiens where things in many ways have never been so good. And yet we know we are collectively consuming too much, that we are outstripping the planet’s carrying capacity. The water is lovely while we’re in and yet we know we cannot stay in it forever or that ecological realities are due to catch up as we hit the buffers of just how much pollution the atmosphere can take.

You’d think then, at such a time, we might collectively take stock, that someone, somewhere, might try to call time on all this, that we might awaken from our slumber. You’d think there’d be some appetite for greater behavioural change above and beyond switching our cars to electric in denial of the energy their manufacture still consumes, or quite how we’ll balance the ledgers when we know we are living in a dream of two hundred years of cheap fuel, where nearly every practical facet of our lives is built upon such abundance and we need a radical reordering – a paradigm shift in what and how we consume.

You’d think there might be some potential then, if governments are cumbersome and vested interests predictably obstructive, in alterations towards how we lead our lives. You’d think there might be some potential for recovering the hope that we wake up one day with a newfound sense of some kind of appetite for change. Change in how we go about our lives, a kind of coda for our times where we strive to take responsibility, where we audit our excesses and seek to live as simply as we can.

That is a dream then if not exactly our reality right now. Right now, so many of us are transfixed in technological chimeras – addiction tripped deliberately by those who seek to keep us sucking at the algorithmic teat. Quite apart from what that does to our psychologies, such uses have their own systemic costs. Take videos for just one thing – the amount of energy and data they require so we can be kept supplicated with images of kittens or a thousand talking heads. We take it all for granted, do not see or are conditioned to ignore the gruelling costs of energy such seemingly innocuous preoccupations require. Just think of the numbers, when most people’s weekly online activity equates to the same amount of CO2 use as a flight from London to Edinburgh; some 8.64kg with some 864g of that spent on social media alone.

If we are compliant then, what will it take for us to wake up? Where does our awareness of the road we are on with our ecology meet our day-to-day realities, where aspirations of another way of doing things bump up against the daily choices we face in how we spend our time, in how many of us are caught in pixelated fixations? But perhaps, through all of this, through the mist of myths of liberty, through the chimera of apparent free will where we are subject to insidious manipulation, some kind of sense may eventually loom. The question perhaps is not whether we can wake up but whether we can head off various prospects by doing so in time.

It is in just such a context then that we can view the data centres looming. If our problems – be they atmospheric crises or addiction to our screens – seem in any way hypothetical, remote or at one remove in terms of their impact then here perhaps we can see a face of new reality.

At least some 100 data centres are planned for the UK, to add to more than 450 already existing, with the size of the largest proposed coming in at 540,000 square metres and with a consumption of water that is hard to comprehend, even without the added pressure of the drought or demands for new houses.

The logic of course is that there is a kind of digital arms race unfolding, that the country does not want to be left behind in this bold new era, that we must compete, make the most of this new opportunity, rush headlong into brave new worlds where time and impetus is everything simply never question the imperative. I’m writing of the internet in general here and its systemic costs. But AI only ups the ante, renders choices and priorities all the starker.

It’s symptomatic of the wider dilemma. If there is a place for some data centres then the frenzied pace and scale of what is being wheeled out, aided and abetted by a post-Brexit bonfire of environmental planning regulations speaks not of judiciousness, some weighing up of merits and the cost but a kind of dizzy free-for-all. It speaks of a loosening of sense, of a rejection of all sound priorities. It speaks out in ways that a thousand spreadsheets on atmospheric CO2 or the loss of untold hours to scrolling socials can never do as to how our current preoccupations and dependencies are cruelly out of sync with what is needed. It speaks in volumes as top heavy as on online cloud as to how we are losing our way when we cannot seem able to calibrate the value of water supplies even as the milder days of wintertime and summer heat point sorely to our hubris.

It oughtn’t to need saying we have choices and that here, in acres of concrete burning through untold amounts of energy, threatening to suck the aquifers dry, we are faced with their consequences. The fight against data centres then, or certainly for their greater regulation, may yet define who we are. As ever, in the times we find ourselves in, we are faced with decisions that reflect on what it means to be human. Can we remember other ways of doing things? Can we reject the technological fix?

Perhaps one day we can all step out free and unencumbered. Not giving in to black and whites or kneejerk Luddism, we can at least work our way towards a greater sense of synthesis. No one, or very few, seek an end to the internet. But there is always room for improvement in how relate to our tech, it can make all the difference between beneficial and dystopian realities. And this – this era of addiction, collective oblivion paid for in ecological carnage only spells out how far we have to go, how much we need to rein in. Perhaps the stark necessities can still bring us to some restoration of not simply sense but what it can look like to be truly free, unrestrained by chains of dopamine, stepping into better versions of true humans.

Land of the Free

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

These are the days when we welcome the sun, perhaps because we need it more than ever; the kindled dream of Spring in store even when war is with us: far away in distant cites they are already mourning the dead and counting the cost of bombardment.

Is it ever enough, even at – or especially at – a time like this, to seek some kind of antidote, some measure of a newfound warmth we can still find in our hearts even when the headlines tell another story?  Spring comes round consistent as the bulletins but of another calibre entirely, promises something that lifts us above what we all now have to face.  Can we take any measure at all from any of this, seek to find a way forward like navigating alleys of an ancient city – to find the way through, to be surprised at unexpected vistas?

We may be able to excavate some degree of consolation; not in that we’ve seen it before – those scars are too fresh – but in that we may find some kind of consistency of spirit, some constant of humanity, of the will to live and endure and do what we can to aid the suffering.

We can measure our way by the sunrise, by the knowledge that some things will always live on, that even when things seem at their most bleak there are amelioratives, that any tyranny can overplay its hand, that, even when they’ve barely finished mopping the Tehranian streets of the January blood the American people might look again at just who has led them to this latest bout of institutional insanity where instigators struggle to agree on even the reasons for engagement other than a kind of bloodlust for explosives, for rubbing in just who may be top dog when power seems to only understand or respond to an embodied threat from the very vestiges of mirror images.

That, for a time at least, we are all going to have to live with seemingly likely repercussions of this is a given.  For as long as it persists, a newfound flux of refugees, the peace of mind of those in the desert resorts and the repercussions for the prospects of tourism there, eye watering rises in fuel costs and energy bills, a hit on the global markets already struggling to right themselves to say nothing of what may happen if missiles begin to run out or the bitter attrition of those emboldened by blood-of-their-own being spilled in another round of tit-for-tat that, to say nothing of the sorry toll of the actual casualties themselves, adds up to a brutal calculus: none of this comes as a particular surprise.  Was it ever too much to ask that somewhere, somehow, some kind of lessons might have been learned?

Two regimes then, face to face; disruptors, revolutionaries.  And what hopes for freedom beyond?  That this is, at best, a high stakes gamble and – in all likelihood – something more inchoate barely needs stating, like banging a drum on a march that needs no further addition.  Thank God then that, in this country at least we are not currently burdened with leaders indoctrinated with hues of Churchillian aspirations – the walking cliches blinding us to other circumstances than fascists on our borders even if fascists are sadly not thin on the ground – not so much reds under the bed as neo-nazis over the Pond.

Perhaps, when all of this has played out in the timeframe it takes, America; still counting the cost of historic invasions may come to a new reckoning of the men who have led them to this.  Perhaps they will see all the clearer their true calibre – not pundits for the people, not erstwhile drainers of any given institutional ‘swamp’ but brokers of a sought-for unparallelled power in all its terrible apparent might – bloodlusting, dizzy with its own top-heavy magnitude, serving no one but their own means and ends, ensconced in golden towers decked with gold, encrusted not with gems but with innocent blood and the bones of the future they currently risk bequeathing.

We are all of us better than this.  We all have it in us to rise above such a bitter inheritance.  That takes more than wishful thinking or harsh words.  But perhaps all the more of us will be able to see all the clearer the kinds of men currently running the show.

That Iran is a brutal regime there can be no doubt.  But neither can there be doubt regarding the risks and recklessness of Israel and America’s current ‘adventure’.  Wherever it leads we can perhaps take some succour from the thought that only the most wilfully blind will ever be happy to be led again by the kind of kabal now occupying the Whitehouse.  We can take some comfort that, beyond the touted drubbing of Maga in the mid-terms and come the next US election – as if in a puff of white smoke – they may be gone and America will be able to rise from its bonds, remembering the creeds of founding fathers, remembering what it can still mean to be part of the land of the free. 

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.

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.

Landmatters

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Whatever you think about flying, picture yourself for just a minute as one of the masses on a flight towards Heathrow from Dublin or Cork. The destinations and points of departure are arbitrary, as is the thought of the flight, other than the fact that it would allow you to look down on the countless sea of green of Ireland and Wales and the English West while further east vast swathes of urbanized acres stretch out almost sentient paws towards what went before. It might give you some sense – a vague and distant one, a sense that was cushioned and somehow unreal but nonetheless still lent you some greater perspective – of how we sit now in these few raw days of sunlit early spring.

As flowers come up there is a mounting sense of disbelief or just foreboding as the effects of looming cuts and those of a so far faltering economy come a little closer every day. But there is consolation still to be had in the sun, the green fields are lit up and those who work upon the land may count themselves as blessed. The paths that now may not be so well maintained still beckon, the hills still stand; memorials to everything that can endure, speak of bedrock despite a world that sometimes seems precarious.

Life goes on and here, for now, that means the same old story of concrete and of tarmac in a counterpoint to everything that has been handed down; the old sad shires and network of a hundred thousands fields and woods; the timeless things, the things that once perhaps we thought would last forever. These two worlds seem set against each other; the former logical if not quite ruthless, conforming to a rational that people must be housed, those houses must have power and an ever growing infrastructure needs to keep the whole thing somehow ticking over. In opposition then: the greenery, the things we all still cherish seem both fundamental and almost anachronistic, a never never world that cannot last against the march of everything that’s modern.

This narrative is ridiculous of course, however much traction it has; we depend upon all that is green for our future, as surely as we all need heat and shelter and have every right to expect the two with a reasonable degree of comfort. But their opposition, the dichotomy that says it must be one above the other is at best born of a failure of imagination. The voices that suggest it can be another way seem relatively muted; we largely do not hear the ideas of low impact life, of living with as light a footprint as possible, in homes other than those formed by four brick walls. Those who may aspire to this find themselves set against a planning infrastructure geared towards the more conventional, that does not distinguish between the poles that separate these two contrasting forms of housing.

It almost seems a form of institutionalized insanity; that those who seek to pioneer a way of life that surely offers us so much can be kept back at every turn. But perhaps the times are shifting after all. Last summer, the Landmatters permaculture cooperative in Devon were successful in their bid for the extended planning permission that will allow their enterprise to carry on. A small ecovillage of perhaps half a dozen benders, yurts and the occasional barn, they run dozens of courses every year, manage woodland, rear livestock as well as provide a model of life and of another kind of agriculture. The cooperative has been accepted as part of the LAND project; a network of demonstration permaculture sites set up by the Permaculture Association of Britain. The place represents a microcosm of a pattern of living that could be rolled out on a much grander scale, or which could perhaps be simply replicated in many more places throughout the country – it offers a very different vision of the future than the shards of glass and steel going up in central London.

Landmatter’s success with their planning permission could not be more timely, with central government now looking at a new national planning framework. Perhaps this could be the beginning of a process that will allow greater leeway for those who choose to live as simply as they can, in the knowledge that this is far from the restriction it may sound like – it represents a liberation from the myriad distractions we associate with what we call modern life, it offers a much greater connection to the outer world and so with life itself where it does not come transmitted through the prism of a sometimes out-of-kilter media. Those who have tasted it know how rich such a lifestyle can be – so that the environmental benefits come almost as an aside, or are so deeply embedded in the essence of the whole experience that separating motivation and the result becomes an almost artificial exercise.

The dynamic that we need to decouple ourselves from – as individuals as well as a society – can never be an either or; four brick walls cannot represent an outright denial of everything with value, just as life in a yurt will always be a choice and never anything more mandatory. But those who choose to live outside the literal box and who seek to keep to a minimum their dependence on the host of related consumer services that often accompany more mainstream lifestyles have much to teach us all. They can serve to set the way ahead, can remind us all what life can look like, can help us navigate towards somekind of tenable and even decent future.

A greater shift to simpler living gives us as a culture other options, makes our collective position in an ever changing world all the more robust. Far from representing any kind of step back, low impact living at its best is a form of refinement that frees up both time and energy. It’s surely time we began in greater numbers to take on board the lessons it provides.