philosophy

Storing the Stories and Everything Else

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So a few more thoughts may be necessary about technology. Because, even if it’s clearer than ever that the net has its drawbacks, not least it’s mounting contribution to CO2 emissions, it’s probably also clearer than ever that the net isn’t going away any time soon. It’s revolutionised so many facets of life and, at its best, holds huge potential for less energy intensive ways of conducting our lives. Certainly, for anyone involved in information or communications, it’s become all but indispensable. And this means that, for most, it’s a thing we have to work with. It might be better in many respects if people collectively walked away from their screens, but outside neo-primitive bubbles, it’s probably not going to happen.

And while the arguments go on about the huge amounts of power needed to power and cool the growing pile of server farms, and while we can contribute to those efforts, there are things anyone of us can do to moderate our impacts. One is to use a green search engine like Ecosia, whose server farms are powered by clean technology and whose every search raises money for campaigns to protect the Amazon, however counterintuitive that may seem. Another is that open windows, programmes and switched on machines are still burning up juice. We could do worse than to take a leaf out of the New Home Front initiative and try and remember that a more wartime like approach to energy conservation is as necessary now as ever.

We need to rediscover a greater awareness towards, if not an abject horror, of wasting energy. And technology could help with that – if a programme existed that could make us more aware of the amount of power our machines are burning up at any given point then perhaps we’d find it easier to take stock. And perhaps somebody somewhere at some stage might need to start thinking about prioritizing what we’re saving on the servers – every book ever written, the pinnacles of learning and literature, or a billion updates on what people had for breakfast or a sea of endless Youtube videos of people eating raw chillies?

Perhaps most crucially there’s a very important case to look at our overriding relationship with technology. While the internet has its various boons we could maybe remind ourselves that it shouldn’t become an end in itself. Or, to put it another way, we should let the net aid our lives, not become the primary port of call, the dominant preoccupation that overrides everything else great, beautiful and of use in the world. We need to shift the balance in our priorities so that machines remain the servants and their myriad conveniences don’t put them in the driving seat.

What is really needed then is a greater sense of synthesis, of balance. That might mean for instance that we each of us make more time for reading more books, or spending time with friends or family, or spending more time outdoors and pursuing activities that encourage that. Life infront of a screen has become the modern grindstone – we should take what chances present themselves to spend time away from the glowing allure.

Particularly worrying then in many respects is the rise of smart phones. Leaving aside their ecological ramifications, the power of one of these machines held in your hands is phenomenal and, while their many uses are clear to see, the addiction to technology they often carry with them are also equally obvious. Someone I knew was so hooked to looking up new music that she almost missed moving house as she couldn’t find it in herself until the very last minute to drag herself away to prepare. We’ve long passed the point whereby it’s clear that technology can really screw you up.

Is it really such a hardship then, when the work has been done, to switch off the screen and walk out again into the world, remember that the sun and rain on your face holds a kind of richness computers can never emulate? I remember what spurred me to spurn my teenage computer game addiction was the dreams I had after immersion whereby reality had become pixilated and defined by the limitations of the programmers’ imaginations. To say nothing of the huge amount of hours such games ate up. As machines have become more refined the different reality they represent is maybe less stark but arguably no less insidious.

Knee jerk reactions to technology at large help no one. But we could also be on the threshold of an explosion in rediscovering and pushing human potential. Imagine those untold riches of mnemonics that allowed storytellers in pre-literate cultures to hold such huge swathes of information and lore in their memories. Think of what being the depository of such riches must have felt like – the sense of internal integration and inner wealth. Think of the singers who carry their songs, or of the poet Osip Mandelstam whose life was taken by the Stalinist regime but many of whose poems survived by the fact that his wife had committed them to memory.

Memorisation and mnemonics represent a kind of potential armoury unassailable by almost anything except not keeping such memories sharp. That’s maybe a more abiding image of who we can be at our best – alive in the woods round a fire with a database of beauty there to access, not hunched in our rooms scrabbling after a fix of information. That said, there’s never a need to be too hardline. One thing can inform another, inspiration comes from many doors and synthesis can prove a fertile ground for helping us remember how things can be. But if we ever did need to bid the internet farewell, somehow I think we could cope.

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.

Wilderness, Nature and Kin

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Reading Paul Kingsnorth’s recent piece in Open Democracy, ‘Confessions of a recovering environmentalist’ stirred up a mix of emotions. In it, he charts his beginnings as an ‘ecocentrist’ – the long enforced marches as a teenager with his father, a kind of half entranced epiphany on St Catherine’s Hill among the Dongas, coming back to England after months in tropical forest – the sense of introspection in the people here, the sense of something missing, the barrage of the ads we are conditioned to ignore. He speaks of his disillusionment with environmentalism since; the sense of carbon targets taking over at all costs, the shift towards inclusion of a Left he largely sees as dubious, the creeping realization that what was once about protecting the natural world has become co-opted to mean a continuation of the human project, albeit in a friendlier, more sustainable packaging, whatever the cost of life outside the empire of homo sapiens sapiens that we are all a part of.

Above all, he communicates the sense that we have lost our way, that environmentalism has become mainstream at the cost of its soul. He speaks for the wilds, for the unadulterated mountains, for a sense of kindred feeling reading Wordsworth when he wrote that stones have souls. He puts himself apart, decries the infiltration by a bag of ‘washed out Trots’ and anti-capitalists, pronounces a bemusement or simple distrust of progressives. For him it’s all about the land, our love of it and how we do or don’t fit in with something much bigger than us, that does not revolve around us, that does not put mankind firmly at the centre of a wheel where we are God and nature is ours to do with as we please and as long as we safeguard the means of doing so, as long as we have enough to feed an ever growing economy, all will be well, even if we find ourselves at the pristine centre of a wasted, battered land.

Like him I was lucky or young or impulsive enough to get drawn into the protests of the nineties and the intensity of that experience has stayed with me; the sense of place, the love of it, the dedication to the natural world. Like him I have been somewhat suspicious of certain aspects of the Left – the legions of certain socialist groups looming like an ever constant threat that would swallow up what seemed at times a relatively tiny band of semi-feral, half anarchic lovers of what is wild and is green, engulfing us in a fashion reminiscent of something from the Spanish Civil War. And watching from the sidelines the rise in certain quarters of dogma winning out, the heady mantras that pronounced we all should ‘smash the system’ or the City, I can see what he means when he speaks of the ‘rattling sabers and stomping boots’ of a fifth column. Alot of people, myself included, left the movement then and it took years for it to reform itself, to build itself up again into something inclusive; still radical, but sane, appreciating the necessary balance that protest must hold.

Back in the timeless months among the trees, I was angry at our society, I was sickened at a mentality that was so insulated from the world that it could justify tearing great scars in the lines of the hills. The earth seemed to sing like a sickening lover, birds articulated her cries of distress; civilization was slowly killing her and every car and every hour we burned electricity was bringing her closer to the time she would not recover. It was as immediate and intense as that. Now the same story is played out for all of us, albeit on an apparently more intellectual level. There are reports. We are informed. We can barely even think how we will feel should we cross the tipping points, as we are on course to do without sufficient shift.

I had to be almost literally dragged from that world – a life out of doors where the golden leaves of oak shone with such ferocity it was almost more than being alive, it was like immersion in the wind and the sky, it was everything, defined everything, was life itself and I was happy in the hills and knew that leaving this would claim a part of me. There are things I don’t miss; scabies, rats, half mad compatriots who always burned wood faster than I could gather it in a curious dynamic echoing how people tend to use more energy the cheaper it is priced. But the rewards were huge, could take some time at first to tap into but which brought me to a state of such connection that stepping back from it seemed inconceivable, back then.

I’ve been in houses ever since and though I’ve generally been lucky, though I am grateful for water from a tap and every other amenity, there has at times been a growing hunger, a growing sense of isolation from the natural world. It prompted in the end a move from the city, a conscious step towards somewhere closer to the hills. And even though walks and time outdoors are cherished I still remember keenly those few years of living simply and in touch for every waking moment. But however much I pine for a life beyond walls, I can see that the balance rests – for most of us, most of the time and certainly for the foreseeable future – somewhere between the beautiful if frugal life in the woods and the kind of lifestyles most of us now lead.

Kingsnorth talks of all of this and his words and passion are a jolt. But for all of this, despite his distinction between our ‘human project’ versus an increasingly beleaguered natural world, I do not see our situation as one that should be summarised with such a stark polarity. The story of our country, since way before the Romans, since the first time we ploughed the soil has been that of a careful husbandry. Not exclusively, as the denuded soils of many heaths still tell and there’s no doubt that our Island even several hundred years ago stood in utter poverty in terms of the wildlife it supported when compared to the days of the distant wildwood. But despite this we have been handed a landscape that has evolved over thousands of years and somehow in it, at its best, it still finds a place for our wild creatures, it carries something of the spirit of what stood here long ago.

Something similar persists for many places all over the world, however many light years their habitats may be from what remains on these so heavily used shores. Many indigenous people point out that the notion of wilderness itself is often a kind of misconception and lets developers wade in and claim a place as virgin territory when in fact it is part of a reciprocal bond with those who have lived on it and cared for it with such a graceful touch that their imprints are almost invisible to us but which have been developed over a vast acreage of time. As Darrell Posey of Oxford University writes in the book ‘Paradigm Wars‘:

“One hundred thousand years before the term sustainable development was coined, aboriginal peoples were trading seeds, dividing tubers and propagating domesticated and non-domesticated plant species. For millennia, human beings have molded environments through conscious and unconscious activities to create “sacred sites” – what anthropologists call “anthropocentric” or “cultural landscapes.” These “sacred sites” or “cultural landscapes” express a merger between Nature and culture so complete it is impossible to separate the two.”

Such perspectives do not imply that true wilderness does not exist – but they present a counter argument to a simplistic either-or that runs the risk of touting mankind as little more than some kind of plague, even if our modern human footprint and the onslaught on the natural world it represents may well look very much like one. But in our original essence, in the sense of who we are meant to be and how we are meant to behave, our place in the world can perhaps best be summed up by Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation when he said “all living beings are kin.” In this sense nature, plants and animals – even in the very wilds – are neither ‘out there’ or somehow otherly; they are part of an extended family that includes even us.

So back here part and parcel of the modern world, I often find myself still thinking about how life was once – and could perhaps still be. Part of me longs to see bender camps across the land, even though I know that, at the moment, this is about as likely as our developing flying towns. But even with a massive will to live like this, planning permission is notoriously skewed against low impact development, even if you have the money for the land. In England now vast cities sit and we cannot simply walk away and leave them overnight, even if we wanted to. But for me that style of living – few possessions, a small hut, a single burner and a bed, gas lamps and the smell of the soil and enough of the sky in the day to lift your soul – it informs my sensibilities, it reminds me in a sense of a way of existing that shapes every decision I make on a day to day basis, it hammers home the impact we all have even when the complex systems that govern our lives make that impact all but invisible.

I believe our society would be a healthier one if more of us had the chance to live like this – for a week or month or a year, an alternative to charging round the planet at every opportunity, a chance to know what it means to sit by a fire on a daily basis, to be dependent on it, to let it fill the essence of your bones. To step off the treadmill briefly, to simply stop and watch the stars and then take this feeling back into the kind of lives we are most of us induced to live, for the foreseeable future at least. If such an opportunity was more widely given, if it did not require a ticket to Thailand to experience it, it could massively help us determine a better way ahead.

But also, over the years, I’ve begun to hold much more dearly the things we have in this bewildering, beautiful mess of human affairs. I’ve come to see more clearly just how precious every life truly is and have become more accepting that life itself is far from perfect, is often a series of compromises in which the value that we glean is often largely determined by the stance we choose to take towards the cards that have been dealt us. That does not for a moment put our civilization on an unassailable pedestal, it does not make our lives in the West any more precious than those in other countries even though others often pay the price for our luxuries – as the terrible human cost of oil companies’ activities in the Amazon and the Niger Delta only reinforces.

Nor does it mean we are somehow above the natural world, or separate from it. We live in deeply imbalanced times, something borne out in our dominant politics as much as our impact on the biosphere but even here, as time goes on, I find myself having more and more time for political philosophies that offer a solution to this state of affairs in terms of how we govern ourselves. That does not negate the fact that direct action and other forms of protest will always have their place, will infact in all probability remain a very necessary part of the political spectrum. But they can never be in any sense a kind of final answer, even if the need for them is huge, even though it looks like there will never be a shortage of things to fight against and places to defend, even though the level of grassroots organisation that they represent can inform those higher up, can remind us all of just what liberty can look like.

We cannot define our lives and that of nature as distinct, or suggest our interests are mutually exclusive – to do so would reinforce a notion of separation that is a large part of the problem. Admittedly we have a long, long way to go in finding our way back from the sometimes glorious if deeply flawed dystopia that we have engineered. But remembering how things once were – and are for many round the world – can wake us up to what our lives could look like in a better balanced world. It can help inform us now in determining a future in which the kind of harmony we need stands any chance of being realised again.