life

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ponies and traps were suddenly old hat and a million horses in London and their every growing tides of manure were superseded by black motors to add to the smog, weirdly and infernally echoing the tides of black-clad pedestrians, the black hats and umbrellas pushing for space in a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.

Machinations

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Having a dig at technology’s a familiar game. For ninety-nine percent of the population it usually smacks of hypocrisy or reversion to some almost reactionary form, to the point where no one bothers anymore; the things machines can do for us present such an undeniable logic that any dissent’s already tantamount to heresy. And yet there is often a sense that all our shining gadgets – which seem to preoccupy much more of the collective consciousness than the fact that the ice sheets are rapidly melting – all too often come with more than the obvious price tag.

There’s a sense too – if we consider for a moment where we all might be in a decade or two’s time – that current sureties should not be taken for granted, that even if things bumble along much the same, there is a great deal now at stake and the degree to which we can imagine something different, the clarity with which we can diagnose what does not serve the highest good may make all the odds in delivering a better future, or at least steering clear of some of the worst possibilities.

So perhaps it’s not too idealistic to hope for a day when we might be content with less ambitious acquisitions, when we might seek to fall back on older currencies that can sustain us. Such human traits and qualities have still not left us even if at times they seem submerged or even if we sometimes seem terminally distracted by mirages of technology that offer so much but often serve to mask the riches that still lie within us and will never leave, even if we might need some reminding.

Is it productive then to rehearse more formally the drawbacks of our glittering screens – the footprints there for unknown agents to pursue, the inbuilt costs, the unseen toil of other hands in other countries who know nothing of safeguards for the people put to work? Do we need reminding of the huge costs ecologically? Or of the way in which the net and its constant feed of urgent news, it’s habit forming drive to direct us to new links and new windows can affect our concentration and even our consciousness itself? This is apparently proved by a much greater reluctance or capacity for paying attention to books or even long articles with the kind of deep reflection and singularity of intent such activities were once more associated with.

The world has changed, children must be prised from mobile phones before they sleep and can we ask is this the culmination of our hope and aspiration, are we all held in suffrage to machines? And even then some all-out-all-or-nothing seems enflamed when viewing all the gifts computers and the internet appear to offer: the way in which they have connected people, the huge amounts of information made available so easily, even their more democratic effects. But there’s surely at least a case for moderation, for better use, for more discerning application of the gifts that they can give us. Although the sense remains it may be better to hold some other skills in tandem, to not feel so bereft should technology desert us or should electricity become a thing whose steady flow cannot be always taken as a given.

In his book ‘The Eco Technic Future’, John Michael Greer talks of a thing called ‘scarcity industrialism’ whereby the industrial world carries on in a broadly similar fashion to how it does now, only accounting for the relative scarcity of fuel with which to operate. This means operations being carried out while introducing every possible efficiency – a long way away from the profligate use of energy in many industries today. On a personal level this can be mirrored by our habits as consumers: we can seek to get the most life as possible out of every appliance and develop habits of consumption that place a pride in reclamation and repair – lightyears then from many current patterns of built-in obsolescence and mounting piles of mobile phones as the latest editions are placed on the market.

But the extent of how we may be in danger of losing our way and the necessity of finding our way back can be measured by more than looking at our patterns of acquisition of the latest thing. How many of us hold within us still the old ability to sit down and compose a letter without the aid of cursors or ubiquitous functions of spell checks, cut and pasting or the strange seductive comforting effect of glowing screens? How many people still can engage with any mathematics without some form of digital pad? What other skills go squandered in our service to these double edged heaps of circuitry? What gypsy is dependent on a plug, and how then do we calibrate our dreams? Even expansive emails seem old fashioned in the wake of one-click-says-all all pervading social media.

How many of us are a little more unapproachable as we sit cocooned and earphoned up on public transport, opportunities for interaction slipping away unlooked for and unnoticed, the once familiar skill of striking up a conversation now a little more removed, each of us more separate, cut off, imprisoned in our little universe, the so-called walkman generation now like sanitised, too-familiar versions of the figures on architectural drawings where we are all factored in to some remote designer’s new world order; anaesthetised, predictable, obedient consumers in a system that is more than any grand design; as if there was a kind of raw and cold intelligence of the machine itself; always seeking to calibrate a thing that it can never understand: our human minds, our hearts.

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.