Guest post: Ask the Fellows Who Grow the Beans, by Charlotte Du Cann

April 27, 2012 By 1 Comment

This article was originally posted on Charlotte Du Cann’s ‘Writing in Transition’ blog a couple of weeks ago. It raises a number of interesting questions about land use, resilient communities and the food we choose to eat.

Charlotte Du Cann is a writer and community activist and works in conmmunications for the grassroots organisations, Transition Network and the Dark Mountain Project. She was born in London in 1956 and worked during the 80s as a lifestyle journalist, specialising in food, fashion and design. After travelling for ten years mostly in the Americas, she settled in Suffolk in 2002 to write a sequence of books about reconnecting with the earth. She has published five works of non-fiction, ranging from a collection of essays about food, Offal and the New Brutalism (Heinemann) to the travelogue, Reality Is the Bug That Bit Me in the Galapagos (Flamingo). 52 Flowers That Shook My World: a Radical Return to Earth will be published by Two Ravens Press in August 2012. She edits several collaborative blogs, This Low Carbon Life, The Social Reporters Project and the OneWorldColumn, and is currently working on a low-carbon cookbook, One Planet Community Kitchen and a prequel to 52 Flowers, The Earth Dreaming Bank.

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“Leaves are easy,” Josiah tells me. “It’s the staples we need to look at.” I’m putting together a story on the Urban Food Landscape for the upcoming Transition Free Press. There are all manner of innovative veg growing enterprises in the cities: inner city and peri-urban farms (including Norwich FarmShare which he has helped set up), Abundance projects, collectives like Growing Communities in Hackney, Transition allotments and school gardens. We’re growing chard and lettuce in cracks and crevices, burying potatoes in barrrels, filling salvaged basins and gutters with seedlings in our back yards. But what about the big stuff? Our daily bread.

Barley

CDC in barley field

6am. A lovely day outside and the jackdaws are already in the fields. The house is surrounded by ploughed and greening earth – barley, sugar beet, rape, potatoes and peas, the occasional flash of borage blue or flax, and the spears of asparagus in May. I’ve been having a conversation with Josiah about these arable fields for several years now. The vast “agri-desert” of East Anglia that most people do not even notice as they walk, cycle or drive by and Lord Deben, erstwhle Minister of the Environment, wants to turn into the GM Bread Basket of England. When we began Roots Shoots and Seeds we wanted to look at our relationship with these invisible fields, ask questions that no one asks, even though we are entirely dependent on what happens with their boundaries. And that’s where I’m starting with this post: with One Day (Tuesday) in my Life as a Low Carbon Cook.

It’s a massive subject, as Jasmijn mapped out so clearly on Monday, and clearly contentious. I could go in any direction as a long-time food writer: from being a food fashion editor at ELLE magazine in the 80s to a Transition activist and blogger today. I could talk distribution hubs, slaughterhouses, Monsanto and Cargill. I could talk oysters in Paris, fugu fish in New York, baby eels in Madrid. I could tell you about any number of conversation (and arguments) I have had with hedgecutters, scientists, gamekeepers, shopkeepers, beekeepers. bakers, farmers, radical growers, happy hoarders, city chefs and local fisherman. I could show you the hell of the feedlots outside Yuma and a paradise moment eating sea urchins on a Greek island.

pheasant on poetry paper article - how do we know what's good?

And yet, to address this topic squarely, honestly, it has to start with the food we hold in our hands right now and the territory outside the window. How we can put these two artifcially disconnected things together. If we are going to be resilient as communities we need to relocalise and shorten our supply chains in a world which is skewed to favour big industrial farming and the global food machine. We’re going to have to wean ourselves off those pesticides and fertilisers from fossil fuels, replenish the soil and think hard about water and diversity. That’s the big picture.

We are also going to have to radically change our diet. As all resilience food writers will tell you, from Michael Pollan to Colin Tudge, this means less meat and dairy, more plants. Almost no fish if you care about oceans. That’s the small one. And this is the journey I have been on as a Transition cook and writer, as part of a pioneer project called the Low Carbon Cookbook. And it begins here in these barley fields outside the small brewing seatown of Southwold. Because when you look at civilisations you are looking at the cultivation of grasses, the agriculture that keeps them alive. Maize and millet, rice and wheat. We look fondly at leaves and we argue fiercely about animals, but actually we should be considering these crops, in whose praise we once sung hymns and danced at every part of the growing year.

Millet and Rice

9am. Walking with Dano and Mark toward the tumulus, past wheat fields and pig fields. Starting the day in a wild way. When you focus on the wild you’re looking at the cracks and edges of things in England because that is where most of life is thriving. Your eyes scan hedgerows, the reedbed, the copse, the speedwells and poppies that grow amongst Demeter’s grains. As Transition medicine and plant people, we’re looking to rebalance the domestic and the culitivated, finding the true form of all living things – including our human bodies. So we start by looking at the memory of this land, its shifting patterns, at the mesh of fields and commons through time. We’re not looking at land use, or environment or diet, we’re looking at earth and food, looking for a narrative that grabs the imagination, pulls you closer to people and the plants. Less mind, more heart.

veg sellers in cuba

In Suffolk several Transition initiatives are going locavore in September, following in the tracks of the Fife and Cornwall diets. If you eat bread, meat and fish and cheese you could eat like a king within a 30 mile radius. But this is hard going if you are a gluten-free fellow who doesn’t eat animals. That’s when you see our dependence on imported food. And you start looking at those fields with some kind of respect, wondering what other crops they could support. Can we grow lentils, soya, chickpeas, all the mainstay staples of the vegetarian larder? (very hard in this climate). Looking at my breakfast I know we can grow millet (though mostly for caged birds in the UK), but not rice. “Wet rice emits more methane than cattle”, Josiah has informed me. So I’ve learned to let go of Basmati, along with rainforest palm oil and soya, tropical fruit and all processed food. I eat brown rice from Italy and a lot of tahini and winter cabbage.

You might think this is depriviation, but it isn’t: writers and cooks love challenges. We love being resourceful and witty, coming up with creative solutions. If we want to restore and rebalance the world, we have to do it by sparking interest, waking everyone up. Facts and scientific method are useful and call us to account, but they don’t inspire us to explore. Everything is material for a story to a writer, all ingredients are a dish to a cook. Show them a cupboard or a situation, and they are already imagining what inventive and delicious things they can do with it. A cook is not a chef, a conjuror entertaining the masses on television with their smart and sexy sleights of hand, or cooking up fairy feasts for the elite. A cook is someone who alchemises the rough and ready and makes life worth living, finds meaning at every turn, every day. Somehow to downshift we have to unleash our creativity. We have to learn to love the territory, get to have a relationship with those fields. We have to immerse outselves in these grains and pulses and find out their story. Put our lives in play.

beans postcard

Field Beans

1pm Lunch of left-over black eye peas (USA) and rice, spring greens and harissa, after bean planting today in the garden: black beans known as Cherokee Trail of Tears, runner beans, French beans, wrinkly peas, Dunwich broad beans, all from seeds I found at the Walberswick Seed Swap.

In the cookbook we have this game called Six Ingredients. Imagine you can only live on what grows in England but are allowed six ingredients from overseas. What would they be? Tough call for lovers of chocolate and tea, raisins and durum wheat. We reckoned that between us we could share our spices by post. Was that cheating? Or was that simply a sign of how things might go?

This is my choice: olive oil, lemons, black pepper, rice, red lentils and a bean. Not sure whether that’s a pinto, black, aduki, black eye pea or lima yet. You could substitue hemp, sunflower or rape for the olive, suggested my fellow cooks, and chillis for the pepper, and then have oranges and noodles. Yes, I say but some things you just have to have in life. Olive oil is one of them.

In the last year and a half we have discussed a hundred ingredients, we have looked at growing patterns, raw food and freegansim, we’ve lit rocket stoves, cooked together, swapped plants, read books, watched documentaries, and immersed ourselves in the living fabric of food, and reported all our findings. Our main task is to bring awareness in an area where there is a lot of denial. Most people live their lives entirely disconnected from food production, from these fields. Our task is to reconnect, investigate, make conscious, reduce carbon emission in all aspects of our meals – transport, packaging, waste. But most of all to change what and how we eat. How do you wean yourself away from a highly processed, ready-cooked, addictive diet, from a culture built on bourgeois cuisine, that makes feast food an every day occurance and turns organic “peasant” food into something that is weird and elitist? How do you eat ethically, ecologically, economically, with heart, in sych with all creatures, all life on earth?

In Transition Norwich we started by mapping: Norwich FarmShare began with a plan called Can Norwich Feed Itself? The Low Carbon Cookbook began with Deconstruct the Dish, an exercise which places attention on the material, engaging the imagination, our ability to cross-reference and make different pathways, to ask ourselves questions.

map of dishesThis is how it goes: everyone sits down at a table with a large sheet of paper (two people to one piece). You draw a circle and put all the ingredients of the dish inside. Then you take each ingredient and write everything you know about it alongside. You ask yourself and/or your drawing partner: Where did I buy this? Which land did it come from? How did it get here? What people were involved? What’s my relationship with them? When did I first eat this dish? Then you share what you discovered with everyone in the room.

The dish I brought was Fava, which means bean in Greek. It’s made with yellow split peas, traditionally served with eggs, red onion and olives. Beans are the big story. Right now we’re working with field beans: one kind of bean that grows brilliantly in these fields and makes one of the best hummus I have ever tasted. Soon to be available in food stores in Norwich, thanks to Josiah and Nick Saltmarsh of Provenance and East Anglia Food Link.

Quinoa

cape gooseberries in the hand4pm Going out into the garden to pick the salad, for tonight’s Cookbook meeting. I’m pretty sure Erik will bring leaves from among the 76 plants he grows in his permaculture garden in Hethersett – sorrel, land cress, lovage, early lettuce (maybe), salad burnet (for sure), so I’m collecting some perky wild leaves to add to the base mix – dandelion, cleavers, daisy, chickweed, yarrow, mugwort, hawthorn, with some flowers – violet, primrose, rosemary and alexanders. I’m walking past my donated strawberries and cherry and apple trees now coming into blossom, the three greengages, blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes in flower, rhubarb coming up. Apart from oranges and lemons, I only eat seasonal fruit, so Im looking at those trees with joyful anticipation.

Back in the kitchen I cook up lentils (Canada) for a salad, and quinoa (Bolivia), flavoured with orange and cinnamon, wild garlic leaves and some seeds I’ve sprouted in a jar. Quinoa is a quandary crop. Hailed as a modern superfood, it is an ace staple due to its protein content and is a great gluten-free substitute for cous cous and bulgar wheat. But the new global demand for it is destroying the fragile soils of the altiplano and the people who grow it are are going hungry. Forced away from their native food and eating white bread, they are going the way of all people who eat a Western diet. I eat it now very rarely and buy Fairtrade. Polenta has become a stand-by.

head grower at norwich farmshare with produce11pm Returning from Norwich the fields are dark and still. The cat is out hunting rabbits, the owls are hooting one to another in the oak trees. Bilions of stars are sparkling over our heads. We had a good time at the cookbook meeting. Erik didn’t bring his leaves, but a delicious home-grown apple, rhubarb and pumpkin crumble, sweetened with Norwich Community Bees honey. Our main focus was on how much KW energy goes into making a vegetable stew cooked in three ways – hay box, on the hob and pressure cooked – and into baking bread and boiling water. Nick had been trying everything out in his boat in the river outside the house. We exchanged facts about gas and electrity and swapped stories about cooking under pressure in the community kitchens of Norwich FoodCycle and Sustainable Bungay’s Happy Mondays! And then we talked plants: achocha and chia, goji berry and blue honeysuckle, and all the wild things you can forage right now. And quinoa seeds, which Erik is going to send me in the post. Yes!

“Does it grow OK here?” I ask. It grows fine, says Erik, but it’s tricky to harvest and you have to wash it or it tastes of soap.

Outside in the tiny yard stand trays of broad beans planted by Sophie’s Spanish flatmates who have come to the city in search of work. A memory of their homeland. Plants that have been growing quietly for a million Spring nights. Plants that keep us all rooted in a rocky time.

Looking over the barley field (Mark Watson); roadkill pheasant on the Poetry Paper; still from Power of Community; with Dano and Whitney and wild salad, filming for the Journal of Wild Culture; postcard for Great British Beans (Josiah Meldrum); mapping the dish by Elena Judd (Norwich FarmShare) and Gemma Sayers (Transition Ipswich/Oak Tree Low Carbon Farm); cape gooseberries and Tierney, head grower at Norwich FarmShare, among the brassicas (by kind permission of Tony Buckingham, copyright).

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Guest post: In Search of Old Trees by Ian Hill

April 18, 2012 By 1 Comment

Ian Hill is a writer, bookbinder, printmaker and lover of wild places. He lives in Cumbria, with a view of the hills. His blog is The Printed Land.

rigg beck oak & scree

I am knee-deep in heather, struggling to find the measure of the sloping hillside beneath my feet. As I wade through the thick tufts of brittle growth, crisped dry from days without rain, I drive up a smell of summer meadows and haymaking; the smell of dust and straw I remember from playing amongst haybales in my childhood.  The heather holds the dried flowers from last autumn’s flowering; they crackle and scatter under my heavy, incompetent feet.

I am climbing this hillside, across runnels of angular scree which chinks and shifts under my feet, in search of oak trees.  The valley path, now fifty or so feet below me, is almost lost behind the thick growth of heather.  On these slopes, beneath the spires of shattered crags which descend from the ridge above me, are patches of remnant oak woodland.  The wood has a shape, as though it is a single organism inhabiting the slopes of the fell; the crown of each tree is pruned by the wind to fit neatly against the curve of its neighbour.  They lie, napped to every curve and contour of the hillside, like a downy drift of feathers amongst the dark purple-brown of the heather.

rigg beck wood

As I approach the base of the wood, the heather thins, replaced by a soft underlayer of mosses, speckled in places by the grey-green twists of the lichen known as reindeer moss, which favours these less-grazed hillsides.  The trees are smaller than they seem from below: ten feet tall at most, thinning to spindly individuals no more than three or four feet tall at the top of the wood.  Up here, tucked beneath the crags of the higher mountain, are oaks which exist at the very limit of their altitude range; this is the level at which, five hundred years ago or more, one would have emerged from the thick valley woodlands onto open fellside.  As I stand at the upper limit of the wood, looking between the smallest of the trees and across the thickening wood below me, I understand that this is a vision of how the Cumbrian fells would have looked before the large-scale clearance and coppicing of the woodlands for pasture and fuel, before the expansionism of the monasteries and the earliest of the agrarian industries.  This woodland would have thickened down-valley, where the oaks would be mixed with alder and willow, perhaps beeches too, and from which the higher mountains emerged like isolated peaks: stranded islands of heather above the soft wave of the woodland.

Although the trees are not tall, they have a substantial girth: thick, knotted trunks which hint at an indeterminable age.  But the age of the individual trees is not important here; what matters is the lineage of ancient woodland, the presence of trees just like these, growing on this hillside, and on others around Cumbria, since the post-glacial flowering of Britain.  Here is a touchstone of antiquity, a reminder of how the land might have looked before we intervened in our heavy-handed way, a relic of the sheltered woodland which would have provided our home, our fuel, our food.  A place in which nothing happens, slowly.

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Guest post: The Lean-to Glasshouse by Gerry Loose

April 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Gerry Loose has lived in England, Ireland, Spain, Morocco (briefly) & now Scotland: a slow-moving nomad. Work has been in poetry, agriculture & horticulture. He also designs & make gardens. His poetry is as likely to appear in these (& ungardened landscapes) as on the page. For more information about Gerry and his books, see www.gerryloose.com. The piece below is from Gerry’s blog about hutting at Carbeth: http://carbeth.blogspot.com. If you’re interested in huts, Gerry maintains Reforesting Scotland’s ‘Thousand Huts’ Campaign Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/home.php?filter=lf#!/groups/118307858251185/.

Gerry Loose: photo by Morven Gregor

I think it was in 2005 or thenabout that Rokpa House, a Buddhist Centre in Glasgow, was having its windows replaced. Rokpa House is an early Victorian town house with high ceilings and tall windows. At that time there were perspex secondary glazing panels, which were unwieldy and difficult to open and close. When the fully double-glazed windows were fitted, I took the old panels to the hut at Carbeth. I knew they would be useful.

Last year, another house was being refurbished, this time in Helensburgh: a Georgian house, again with high ceilings and tall windows. The secondary glazing – and it was glass – was being removed, together with a glass panelled door.

Hut. Photo by Morven Gregor

Thus, after only seven years, I had the basis for that long-planned glasshouse. The Helensburgh panels, eight feet by two feet, will fit against the gable end of the hut; the door will be - well, the door (although transported safely the twenty miles from Helensburgh to the hut in a rattling hired transit van unscathed, on unloading, the west wind took the door and stove in the single glass panel – it needs to be replaced); the Rokpa perspex panels will form the lean-to roof.

The framing timbers are all worked out, there will be plenty of reclaimed wood for the shelving: tomatoes and peppers, maybe a grapevine – the delights of planning a crop free from the grazing of deer is to be savoured.

Hard against the hut gable end in a whisky half-barrel, oak, but now disintegrating with age. Someone, many years ago, planted a then probably exotic Lawson’s cypress. Now overgrown and threadbare, I had pruned it to thicken some years ago, but that didn’t really work. Though it did provide me with some fine “grotches”, as one of Thurber’s characters calls them (“by and by we go hunt grotches in the woods”, he says, much to Thurber’s bafflement): I know he meant forking branches that will hold up a clothesline, or make a thumbstick.

So the old cypress will come down for the glasshouse. It stood for perhaps fifty years and is in the wrong place, shading the hut kitchen window. In this over-temperate climate, we need all the light we can get.

But not yet. Though everything is in place for the glasshouse, this year for the first time, a blackbird has built her nest in the cypress, balanced in a grotch and looking pretty unstable to me, but nevertheless a nest has been built. She sits (or is there a pair?) on the eggs. Until they are hatched, and the chicks fledged, I can do nothing. With two weeks or so for hatching, a further two weeks or so for fledging and maybe three broods a year, the nest should be finally empty some fine day in late July. Maybe August.

The glasshouse would be very useful now, but the blackbird’s eggs and chicks outside the hut-kitchen window at eye level are rare and precious things, cheering me on while brewing the morning Assam in a way that even the imagined growth of tomatoes would never achieve.

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Guest post: Hope in the Age of Collapse by Paul Kingsnorth

April 7, 2012 By 3 Comments

When Paul Kingsnorth’s essay ‘Confessions of a recovering environmentalist’ was republished in the American magazine Orion a few months back, the American writer Wen Stephenson suggested to Paul that ‘this is what giving up looks like.’  Wen then asked Paul to engage in a conversation on his blog (Wen writes a blog from the birthplace of Henry David Thoreau) about the themes of the essay. We strongly encourage everyone to visit Wen’s blog and read the whole exchange; both writers make excellent and important points, and it’s not a conversation that can in anyway be ‘won’. However, from a purely personal perspective, it seemed to me that Paul’s statement of the problem that we face today was so perfectly formed that I wanted to re-blog that specific piece here at EarthLines. So here it is … but please do also visit Wen’s blog and see it in the context of the whole fascinating conversation and the comments it provoked, and make up your own mind!

From: Paul Kingsnorth

To: Wen Stephenson

Dear Wen,

Isn’t the Internet a strange thing? Sometimes I think it is a symbol of what our culture is becoming. It gives us abilities that we never had even ten years ago. Here we are, two men from separate continents who have never met, never spoken to each other, but we are responding to each other’s work almost instantaneously. We have a capacity for research, for discussion and for intellectual exploration that is unprecedented, thanks to this advanced technology.

But it is also a technology which isolates us from the rest of nature, and which, oddly enough, isolates us from aspects of ourselves even as we use it. I have lost count of the number of times I have had arguments or spiky exchanges with human beings over the net which I would never have had in real life. We are able to communicate in words, but because we are not relating to each other as human animals – because we cannot read each other’s body language or facial signals or the innumerable tiny, intuitive responses that humans have to each other’s bodies in physical spaces, we get off on the wrong foot time and time again. We are, in other words, able to communicate far more widely than ever before, but the way in which we communicate is far less fully human.

This combination: a technologically-accelerated ability to achieve certain goals and a simultaneous disconnection from much of the rest of nature is the world we now live in. And it is the context in which I would like to respond to your email.

I’d like to start this response with your very last line. Here it is:

‘Unless we find ways to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, it will be the end of the world (or of humanity), full stop.’

This is an interesting statement for this reason: that it elides modern human civilisation and the living planet. They are not the same thing. They are very far from being the same thing; in fact, one of them is allergic to the other. If we don’t start to realise this — really get it, at a deep level — there will be no change worth having for anyone.

I have spent twenty years and more as an environmental campaigner. My feeling, my philosophy, if you like, across that whole period has been rather different to yours, and rather different also to that of Tim DeChristopher, who you mention in your e-mail, remarkable though his current stand is. My worldview has always been, for want of a less clunky word, ecocentric. What I care passionately about is nature in the round: all living things, life as a phenomenon. That’s not an anti-human position – it would be impossible for it to be so, because humans are as natural as anything else. But my view is that humans are no more or less important than anything else that lives. We certainly have no right to denude the Earth of life for our own ends. That is a moral position, for me, not a pragmatic one. Whether or not our current (temporary and hugely destructive) way of life is ‘sustainable’ is not of great concern to me, except insofar as it impacts on life as a whole.

You might find that an odd position, or even a dangerous one, but I see it as quite cogent and rational. The fact is that ‘pumping carbon into the atmosphere’ will not cause ‘the end of the world’. The world has endured worse. It has endured five mass extinctions and half a dozen major climate change events. I do think that climate change campaigners like yourself should be more upfront about what you’re trying to ‘save.’ It’s not the world. It’s not humanity either, which I’d bet will survive whatever comes in some form or another, though perhaps with drastically reduced numbers and no broadband connection. No, what you’re trying to save, it seems to me, is the world you have grown used to. Perhaps it’s the Holocene: the period of the planet’s history in which homo sapiens sapiens (cough) was able to build a civilisation so extensive and powerful that it energetically wiped out much non-human life in order to feed its ever-advancing appetites.

‘Sustainability’ is, as far as I can see, a project designed to keep this culture — this lifestyle — afloat. I have two problems with this. Firstly, I am not convinced it is a good idea! To put it mildly. The modern human economy is an engine of mass destruction. Its ravaging of all non-human life is not incidental; it seems to be a requirement of the program. Economic growth of the kind worshipped by our leaders could be described as a process of turning life into death for money. With nine billion humans demanding access to the spoils, there is not going to be much life left to go around. Of course, I am conflicted about this. I live at the heart of this machine; like you, I am a beneficiary of it. If it falls apart, I will probably suffer, and I don’t want to.

But I do feel the need to be honest with myself, which is where the ‘walking away’ comes in. I am trying to walk away from dishonesty, my own included. Much environmental campaigning, and thinking, is dishonest. It has to be, to keep going. The journey I am on is intellectual and, perhaps, spiritual too. I’m not sure I will find any answers. Certainly I won’t come up with any better ways to ‘save the world.’ But what world are you saving, Wen, and why? Do you imagine that Thoreau would have looked out of that window at this Machine and determined to put all his efforts into marching about trying to keep it afloat? I think he would have kept on growing beans. His retreat from activism, after all, produced the words which now inspire yours.

I sense in your response a lot of the confusion, and the passion, that drove me for many years (I am still both passionate and confused, of course, though perhaps for different reasons.) There is a plaintive quality to your questions. ‘Are you suggesting that art and storytelling can help spur the transformation of our energy systems?’ you ask. ‘Or do you dismiss the idea that such a transformation is possible?’ The answer to the first question is, of course, no, and the Dark Mountain Project has no such end in mind. Art and storytelling are worthy in their own right, and we need a cultural response to the collapse of our world, if for no other reason than my personal desire to have an honest story to tell my children about how we destroyed beauty for money and called it ‘development’.

But as for the ‘transformation of our energy systems’: the minute you ask this question in this way, you are trapped in a paradigm, with no hope of escape. What are ‘our energy systems’ for? Who is us? Us, I’d guess, is the bourgeois consumer class of the ‘developed’ world, and ‘our energy systems’ are needed to provide us with our cars, planes, central heating, Twitter feeds, ambulances, schools, asphalt roads and shopping malls. How are we going to transform these systems, in short order, globally, busting through economic vested interests and political stalemate and cultural patterns, in less than 100 months, to prevent more than a 2 degree climate change? How, in other words, are we going to change the operating system of the entire global economy in a decade or so?

Answer: we’re not, though we’ll do a lot of damage trying, not least to much of the natural world we want to protect. I notice that a US-government backed plan to cover much of the Mojave desert in solar panels is currently running up against resistance from both conservationists and Native Americans; and let’s not even get started on the battles over carpeting vast areas of mountain, rangeland and countryside with giant wind power stations. This new world of yours is beginning to look a lot like the old one: business-as-usual without the carbon. The beast must be fed; the only question is what it will eat.

As for the climate movement which you believe is necessary to prevent this: well … I know I am beginning to sound cynical, but it’s not exactly cynicism, it’s a raw realism born of 20 years of wanting to believe in such movements and not seeing them. There is no ‘climate movement’. Sure, there are a few thousand people who may take to the streets in the wealthy West, or on the odd threatened atoll, and there are many more people who, when asked in opinion polls, will say they want to stop climate change. But how many of these people will be taking to the streets to demand personal carbon budgets? How many of them will be taking to the streets to demand much higher gas prices, limits on their holiday aeroplane flights and their daily electricity use, and radical reductions in their ability and right to consume at will? And how many of the two thirds of the planet not living in the rich world will be taking to their streets to demand that they do not have access to the consumer cornucopia that we have, and which we are using so effectively to destroy non-human life without even really noticing?

I don’t think any ‘climate movement’ is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: we are all climate change. It is not the evil ’1%’ destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. Here I am writing to you on a laptop computer made of aluminium and plastic and rare earth metals, about to send you this e-mail via undersea cables using as electricity created by the burning of long-dead deposits of fossilised carbon. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you’ll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25% of the world’s wildlife in the last four decades alone.

I’m afraid my current beliefs are going to seem to you rather bleak. I believe that our civilisation is hitting a wall, as all civilisations eventually do. I believe that the climate will continue to change as long as we are able to pump fossil fuels into the atmosphere, because I believe that most human beings want the fruits of that burning more than they want to save the natural world which is destroyed by it. I think we have created an industrial techno-bubble which has cut us off from the rest of nature so effectively that we cannot see, and do not much care about, its ongoing death. I think that until that death starts to impact us personally we will take very little interest. I think we are committed to much more of it over the next century. I fear for what my children will experience and sometimes I wish I was not here to experience it either. I am not yet 40 but I have seen things that my children will never see, because they are already gone. This is my fault, and yours, and there is nothing that we have been able to work out that will stop it.

How do we live with this reality? Politics is not going to do anything about it, Wen, because politics is the process of keeping this Machine moving. What do we do? I don’t know. The reality is that we have used the short-term boost of fossil fuels to give us a 200 year party, which is now coming to an end in a haze of broken bottles, hangovers and recrimination. We have built a hugely complex society which now can’t be fuelled and is, in any case, responsible for a global ecocide. Living with this reality — living in it, facing it, being honest about it and not having to pretend we can ‘solve’ it as if it were a giant jigsaw puzzle — seems to me to be a necessary prerequisite for living through it. I realise that to some people it looks like giving up. But to me it looks like just getting started with a view of the world based on reality rather than wishful thinking.

Sometimes people say to me: ‘But you have children! How can you say all this? Don’t you want a better world for them?’ Other people say other things to me, things like: ‘We know this might not work, we know it’s a long shot — but it’s better than doing nothing! It’s better than giving up!’ I find this kind of thing very telling, because what is actually being said is: ‘doing something is better than doing nothing, even if the something being done is ineffective and powered by wishful thinking!’ I don’t agree. Sometimes, I think stepping back to evaluate is a lot more useful than keeping on for the sake of keeping on.

I don’t want to sound like a nihilist. There are a lot of useful things that we can do at this stage in history. Protecting biodiversity seems the crucial one. Protecting non-human nature from more destruction by the Machine, for example. Some of the best projects I know of creating islands and corridors of wild nature and trying to keep them free from our exploitation. Standing up in whatever small way we can to protect beauty and wildness from our appetites is a worthy cause if ever there was one: probably the most vital cause right now, I’d say. I’m all for fighting winnable battles. But we need to do so in the context of a wider, bigger picture: the end of the Holocene, the end of the world we were taught to believe was eternal; and, perhaps, the slow end of our belief that humans are in control of nature, can be or should be. You asked me about hope for the future: the thought that the disaster we have created may help us see ourselves for what we are — animals — and not what we believe we are — gods — gives me a kind of hope.

There is much that is noble about being human, but we have a big debt to pay back, and debts, in the end, always have to be paid.

All the best,

Paul

Filed Under: Navigating collapse Tagged With: ,
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