These are not easy issues – I recognise that. However, I stand firm against the colonisation of this country’s few remaining precious wild places by mega-windfarms. In saying that, I should make it clear that I am an avid supporter of small-scale community wind projects of the kind that are often espoused by community land buyout groups in Scotland’s crofting regions. And I am all for the small domestic wind turbine which can make us independent from the grid – in fact, we plan one ourselves, here on our croft. What it comes down to, for me, is the need to wean ourselves off our addiction to cheap and abundant power.

These questions are covered in depth in a special issue of the Scottish Wild Land Group’s magazine, Wild Land News, dedicated to the issue of wind energy. The issue, ‘Wind farms gone wild: is the environmental damage justified?’, calls into question the Scottish Government’s focus on wind power as an effective method of tackling climate change. It suggests that far more needs to be done to protect Scotland’s communities, environments and landscapes from opportunistic development. You can find it online here: http://www.swlg.org.uk/wind-farms.html. I am a contributor to that issue, and my contribution, with their permission, is posted below.

___________________________________

On windfarms, and the preservation of place

Sharon Blackie

I’ve recently noticed an interesting phenomenon in the world of environmental communications: whenever I post an article which questions the value of windfarms on the EarthLines Magazine Facebook page or on Twitter, I instantly lose followers. If you are associated with the ‘green’ or environmental movement in any way, it automatically seems to follow that you must be a supporter of all forms of renewable energy, including mega-windfarms, because the alternatives (fossil fuels, nuclear power) are unspeakably pernicious. And if you don’t think that windfarms are a good idea, then you can’t be a ‘proper’ environmentalist – in fact, you might even be a closet climate sceptic. This attitude has become even more prevalent since the UK government’s decision to encourage fracking; many of those who might have been starting to question whether they really want to live in a country teeming with mega-windfarms seem now to be actively arguing for them in a desperate attempt to offer an alternative to a form of energy production that is more visibly damaging to the environment. The ensuing debates about which is the least malign way to kill the planet would verge on the comical if there wasn’t so much at stake. Because what they’re really arguing about is how much of the world we have to destroy, and in whichever ways seem more pleasing to us (because these are almost always aesthetic rather than moral judgments), in order to ‘save’ it.

The idea that there is actually something at stake in building windfarms seems to surprise many people. How can that be, they say, when wind energy is renewable? The answer, of course, is that wind may be renewable, but the often-fragile ecosystems associated with the hills and moors colonised by windfarms are not. And we live on a small, overcrowded and over-developed island where few genuinely wild places or refuges for wildlife remain. In addition, a curious blindness seems to prevail about the fact that there is nothing remotely ‘renewable’ about the manufacturing processes, transport mechanisms and installation procedures for such developments. There is an enormous difference between ‘low-carbon’ and ‘green’, and it’s a difference that seems to escape a great many people.

Anyone who has ever objected to a windfarm proposal in a place where they live and which they love has undoubtedly been subjected to a variety of outraged accusations, of which NIMBYism (‘Not In My Back Yard’, in the unlikely event that you’re unfamiliar with the acronym) seems to be the most prevalent. I find it both odd and depressing that to be called a NIMBY is to be assumed to have been insulted. Because the idea that there’s something wrong with being a NIMBY illustrates more than anything else the extent to which our western Modernist culture has led us to become dislocated, placeless. Cast adrift, both physically and ethically. How can there be something wrong with defending our ‘back yards’ from people and corporations who plan to despoil them in the name of unending profit and growth? On the contrary: we absolutely must protect our local places. We must stand up for them. NIMBYs aren’t the enemy in the mega-windfarm story, they’re among the heroes: the defenders of the land; the protectors of place.

You don’t have to look very far, especially in countries like Scotland, to see that many of the places in which windfarms are proposed are precious and unique. They may not have fancy designations – they may not be Sites of Special Scientific Interest, or National Scenic Areas; they don’t have to have letters after their name to be valuable to the people who are rooted in them, work in them, live and breathe and die in them. It isn’t even necessary that outsiders should agree that those places are beautiful. A classic case in this respect is a protest by residents and artists on the Isle of Lewis against plans launched in 2004 to build an enormous 234-turbine windfarm which at the time would have been Europe’s largest, involving 140km of new roads and a huge number of overhead pylons to take the electricity off the island. Effectively it would have wiped out most of the unique (but assuredly flat and bleak) moorlands that cover the north of the island. The developers, politicians and other supporters said it wouldn’t matter because it wasn’t a particularly beautiful or useful landscape, and another acronym, MAMBA – ‘Miles And Miles of Bugger-All’ – was all too often used to describe it. In an article for the May 2012 issue of EarthLines, internationally renowned designer and artist Alice Starmore described the fight for Lewis’ moors. The article contains images from her ‘MAMBA’ exhibition, in which Alice reclaimed the acronym and named the exhibition ‘Miles And Miles Of Beauty Astounding ’. Her aim, both in the exhibition and in the article, was to raise awareness of the moor – its unique landscape, flora and wildlife; its preciousness to local people, and its relevance to a local culture and inheritance that would have been wiped out once and for all if the proposed windfarm had gone ahead. On that occasion the protesters won the hard battle and the AMEC proposal was refused by the Scottish Executive, but there are similar developments about to be built and under serious consideration in other fragile wilderness areas of Lewis.

This notion of beauty is an interesting one, because it implies that whether or not there should be an unlimited number of massive windfarms in wild places is a simple matter of weighing our aesthetic response to the ‘beauty’ of the ‘countryside’ against the moral response or ‘justice’ inherent in providing unlimited power for the unlimited number of humans who look set to occupy this planet. ‘Beauty versus justice’, the simplified story goes, and it can be difficult for people with a social conscience to argue with that. But what we’re missing here is the fact that the value of such places to people who live in them goes far beyond mere beauty, and we’re not even beginning to address the philosophically crucial questions that relate not only to the true value of wild places and of all that is other than us, but to our assumption that it is our right to destroy them if we choose.

Where did this assumption come from? That much at least is clear: it came from over two thousand years of rationalist, patently anti-ecological western philosophical thought that designated humans as superior to ‘nature’, and that led to Francis Bacon’s call for us to ‘establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe.’ It came from the age-old assumption that humans are the only rational (and therefore superior) creatures in the world, and that ‘nature’ is simply a background upon which we have the right (because of this superiority) to act. It came ultimately from the ongoing and deeply rooted belief that our current way of life is acceptable (even rational), even though it is ecocidal. From the assumption that these choices are for us to make. That our human-centric moral sense is what must prevail. That ‘nature’ is an ethics-free zone.

The question Alice Starmore raises in her EarthLines article is a crucial one: how did our landscapes become so devalued that we now think it is acceptable to destroy them in the name of our unquenchable thirst for more and more power? How is it that we don’t find the pain of losing these places intolerable? Because what we are talking about here is indeed loss: a loss of their uniqueness, their solitariness, their strangeness, even. We should be looking at these wild and valuable places not in terms of what we can bear to sacrifice in our incessant search for more power and consumption, but in terms of what we cannot bear to sacrifice, and what we should and must give up to preserve these places.

But there’s another issue that’s relevant to this discussion of windfarms, NIMBYism, and preserving our home places. Let’s return briefly to the example of the 2004 proposed AMEC windfarm on the Isle of Lewis. That windfarm, if it had gone ahead (just like many others that are now being built) was to provide electricity for towns and cities on the mainland – in southern Scotland, and in England. It seemed perfectly acceptable to those supporting the plan that they should destroy a unique landscape with significant importance to the cultural and natural heritage of an Outer Hebridean island purely for the benefit of cities remote from us. NIMBY that I clearly am, you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t find that acceptable. You want more electricity in Glasgow or London? Then build your mega-windfarms in and around Glasgow or London.

Can’t do it, you say? Well then, learn to use less electricity. Turn the damn lights off. I don’t much care how it’s achieved; if the price of our current excessive level of electricity consumption is the permanent non-renewable loss of the pitifully little that is still wild and natural in this country, then it’s too high a price to pay.

Mega-windfarms, you see, aren’t ever for local benefit. Yes, as well as a NIMBY I’m an avowed bioregionalist. What I believe, and strongly, is that communities should provide for themselves, according to what their own region can support. If we’re talking about two or three wind turbines in carefully sited locations that will serve local communities while preserving their places, then I’m all for it. But appropriating someone else’s land, wiping out unique landscapes and ecosystems in order that faraway consumers can be even more profligate with their power usage, is simply another form of colonisation. And there’s nothing much just or beautiful about that.

Sharon Blackie is a writer and crofter living in the farthest reaches of Uig on the Isle of Lewis. Formerly a neuroscientist and practicing psychologist , in 2006 she founded literary publisher Two Ravens Press with her husband David Knowles, and in 2012 she founded and now edits EarthLines magazine (www.earthlines.org.uk).

]]> http://earthlinesreview.org/2013/06/18/on-windfarms-and-the-preservation-of-place/feed/ 12 windfarmhill_31285651 Sharon windfarmhill_31285651 http://earthlinesreview.org/2013/06/12/community-growing-wild-beuysterous-and-the-garlick-man-solstice-parade-a-guest-post-by-bridget-mckenzie/ http://earthlinesreview.org/2013/06/12/community-growing-wild-beuysterous-and-the-garlick-man-solstice-parade-a-guest-post-by-bridget-mckenzie/#comments Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:19:15 +0000 Cat http://earthlinesreview.org/?p=1010 ]]> Bridget McKenzie is a cultural learning consultant, based in London. She is founding director of Flow UK, working for museums and heritage bodies. She is married to artist Brian McKenzie and together they home educate their daughter Megan, working on creative projects as a family. She likes (or rather, finds it necessary) to write poems and songs, and take photographs, and to speak and write about learning, creativity and ecology. More on aboutbridgetmckenzie.wordpress.com

Garlick Man Solstice Parade 2012 by Bridget McKenzie

The summer solstice is a time for celebrations of fertility and green growth. Fire is its element: fire for the hot midsummer sun, and for renewal and creativity. These days, summer is also about forests burning. Yes, there have always been forest fires and they can be beneficial, but with climate change we now see much fiercer, bigger fires. Last year, a record 74 million acres of Russian forest were consumed and fire damage is likely to quadruple this century. Fierce fires are only one impact evident at our current global temperature rise of 1 degree, and more impacts will unfold. In this context, it’s clear that we need to take steps to make our communities resilient, through local food and ecological infrastructure. A tree, or better still, a food forest, is a perfect example of ecological infrastructure. I believe that arts and heritage play a really important role in sustainable communities too.

Putting these together, I’ve set up a project, small and voluntary, but with wide wings. Beuysterous is about encouraging the planting, care and use of trees through creative actions and the inspirations of artists. The word, meaning ‘creatively boisterous’, is in honour of the artist Joseph Beuys, who planted 7000 oaks as an artwork. It has three elements:

1) I write posts and use social media to promote artists that work in the Beuysterous spirit, such as Anne-Marie Culhane and her Fruit Routes project, which reawakens awareness of fruit trees as a food source.

2) I use social media to run thematic weeks or months, such as Tree Play Month last March. A big one to come will coincide with the Third International Day for the Remembrance of Lost Species run by Feral Theatre and National Tree Week, in November. This will encourage artworks and rituals around trees or whole tree species lost or damaged by diseases.

3) I run creative projects, mostly in our own community in SE14 in London. For the past three years, we’ve been organising solstice celebrations, the Night of the Beasts in Winter and the Garlick Man parade in Summer.

These celebrations act as a symbolic ‘coming together’ for several overlapping groups and sections of the community. Telegraph Hill is a ‘comfortable’ conservation area around a park within New Cross, which has some of the highest indicators of social deprivation in the UK. The solstice events are part of a wider set of initiatives to overcome some of that sense of exclusion. Bold Vision is an umbrella charity for the New Cross area, set up by local people to develop skills and spaces for self-reliant and co-operative thriving. I was involved in its origins, helping to devise a ‘creative community vision’ and a network of local freelancers. This led to us rescuing a garage in a Church community centre and turning it into the Hill Station, which is a café and cultural space. Bold Vision was formed to help us raise funds and support voluntary efforts, and then it become the charity behind other ventures. For example, when New Cross Library was closed by the Council, Bold Vision backed it so that it could be run by the community, and is now called New Cross Learning. This people’s library is not just a book exchange but a place for readings, skill sharing and debate. It hosts meetings and creative workshops by Transition New Cross and another group called New Cross Commoners, which was formed by students from nearby Goldsmiths College to promote learning about the commons. Another project is New-XING, a free independent group delivering interventions to improve wellbeing in New Cross. One of these interventions is planting multitudes of sunflowers in neglected patches of ground.

Another project backed by Bold Vision is Grow Wild. This is all about local food, teaching people about permaculture, organic gardening and cooking, and supporting several community gardens. The ethnic diversity of New Cross is reflected among the community garden volunteers, who bring knowledge of plants and recipes from other cultures. Children from local schools are important and keen members of the Grow Wild project and attendees of the parades.

Garlick Man Solstice Parade 2012 by Bridget McKenzie

For the solstice celebrations, Grow Wild will be organising a community cook-up and seed-bomb workshops, then providing garlic-inspired and heritage-seeded food for the picnic. Transition New Cross will be subtly adding ideas on wild and sustainable food into the parade. We’ll be dressing up in strange and beasty costumes, banging a loud drum, dancing down the streets without permission. We’ll parade to the top of the hill where there is a view over London, to witness the ‘marriage’ of two figures from the wilder past, the Garlick Man of the Hill and the Green Woman of New Cross. It’s not about trying to re-establish Paganism, although there is a revolutionary spirit in it. It’s about ‘growing wild’ in other senses: showing how wildness can sustain us, keep us peaceful and connect us with our past.

The solstice events are about remembering the heritage of our place, with re-membering as a kind of ‘belonging again’. Telegraph Hill used to be called Plow Garlick Hill and was covered in orchards and market gardens, growing food for the inner city. There are long traditions in Deptford and New Cross of Jack in the Green parades, so we decided to ‘rediscover’ the Garlick Man from Garlick Hill. He is so long-forgotten that no evidence exists, at all!

Left over from the area’s orchard-filled days, there are still lots of plum, cherry, apple and pear trees in the streets, in the park and the many long gardens, although I don’t know how many originate from the old seeds. (I like to imagine it’s lots of them.) Some of the prunus trees are being chopped down as they are infected with fungus. Also, there are many fewer bees around to pollinate the trees and flowers, due to cold and the impact of varroa mites and pesticides. So, we want to use the celebration to promote protection of pollinating insects and to appreciate what fruit trees remain.

The event is not just for locals. You are most welcome to join us, especially if you can create costumes, music, stories or art around these themes of local food, pollination and the heritage of the area.

To take part: Parade-making workshops on 15th June (Telegraph Hill community centre 12-4) and 19th June (New Cross Learning 2-3). Join the Grow Wild cook-up on evening of 20th June. The parade crowd meets on 21st June at the Telegraph pub on Dennetts Road 5-6 pm. Email bridgetmcknz[at]gmail[dot]com for more information.

Garlick Man Solstice Parade 2012 by Bridget McKenzie

There’s a Kiowa story about an arrowmaker, a ‘man made of words’. It’s about a man and a wife. They were alone at night in their teepee. By the light of a fire the man was making arrows. Suddenly he caught sight of something outside the teepee. He continued working but said to his wife ‘Someone is standing outside. Do not be afraid. Let us talk easily, as of ordinary things’. He drew his arrow and moved it around, aiming at different points outside. All the time he spoke like this: ‘I know that you are there on the outside, for I can feel your eyes upon me. If you are a Kiowa, you will understand what I am saying, and you will speak your name.’ But there was no answer. At last his aim fell upon the place where his enemy stood, and he let go of the string. The arrow went straight into the enemy’s heart.

N Scott Momaday talks about this story, about the way the emphasis is not on what the arrowmaker says, but that he says it; through speaking the arrowmaker realises himself, and his reality consists of language. He also realises his other through language. He must speak; it is his only chance of survival, but language inherently carries risk and responsibility.

Speaking aloud carries risk and responsibility. Whilst the listener must be there in order to receive and give life to the story, the presence of a listener can also carry added risk and responsibility. There seems to be a balanced line between a non-judgemental self and other, but also a need to realize one’s truth (and the truth of the story) to another, and in the presence of another. The pressure of having an enemy on the outside of a teepee, or a witness to a process, is that we have to clarify ourselves to another, and in doing so, there is some sort of realising of ourselves that takes place.

I am in a forest, ancient woodland – oak, birch, ash, cherry. The trees are  coppiced, reminders that this land is managed, curated. I still can’t grasp this value system -

it’s good, that wood, for this and that, for burning, for making tools,

and we cleared the birch from around the hemlock to show its branches, to show it off

and we clear the land for the bees, the insects, for biodiversity.

Well the last is certainly a good thing, I think. It must be. And yet -

I spend my days between the arboretum and the ancient woodland. I’m here to explore, to create something, to be in residence. Am I using the land too, using it for inspiration? Ah, too many of these questions could paralyse me into forming no relationship whatsoever with anything. So I walk. But I don’t walk how I usually do, map in hand, striding out across the fields and forest, winding through the city or finding my feet on the footpaths and bridleways. I walk in circles. I walk around a remarkably small area of land. I find the same trees again and again – the Sequoias, the Blue Atlas, the Himalayan pines – none of them at home here, but all making a home, plunging red roots into the clay soil of Kent. Kent, the garden of England. Managed land. We settle and we cultivate, this is what we’ve done; even our image of going back to something is one that wishes to change the land, to manage it in some way. I walk in circles.

In the evenings I pick up my trusty bible, ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ by David Abram. I remind myself of what I believe in, that language came from the land, from listening and speaking aloud with the trees, the birdsong, the animal calls. I think of the arrowmaker. He didn’t speak inside his own head, he didn’t speak silently, or realise himself or the world from daydreaming silently. And then God said…

I read Abram’s chapter about the forest having eyes, the sense that the land holds a morality in place, by seeing and being seen; it is watching and therefore you are watchful of your actions within it. Given the stories I’d heard about some of the people who’d come to live in the Canterbury forest over the last decades – ex-prisoners, drug addicts, mis-fits – I wasn’t sure if I agreed with Abram on this one. I think it’s a very culturally specific feeling, and what had struck me about hearing those stories, was that people had come to the forest for respite, precisely because it wouldn’t judge, not in the way people would. In a society with laws and repressions, the forest is traditionally the place of no rules, the other-world. It watches, but its morality also lets you speak yourself, unashamedly.

I am in the forest again. It is raining and I spend hours trying to mimic the sounds of it slapping the wet leaves. Is it pl or glt or ts…? I cannot tell, I cannot tell. I walk home, frustrated, dump my bag with my notebook, my sound recorder, my snacks. I’m not ready to leave the trees. Head back out:

Ha – freedom! Freedom

to have nothing but a body, remembering its way

to have nothing but a tongue and a voice to speak what is happening here

to have nothing that could remember anything for me, nothing but my words

to repeat and lodge in my body.

I speak aloud. I am in the forest, walking with the rain rinsing down my cheeks, licking it from my top lip, I am alone, walking in the forest.

I look mad, I think. Anyone seeing me talking like this to myself, would think I am mad.

And that’s the difference, Mr Abram, that’s the difference. I do not speak to myself like this in a society that would think I was mad. I speak myself into being here, with the trees as my witness. The trees are not holding me accountable in a way that stunts my voice; they are witnessing, they are listening, not judging, not naming. No wonder we have come to our forests for refuge, to hide, to write different rules. I walk on, speaking louder and louder: I am still in the forest, walking, lonely. A branch snags my face. I am walking through the trees. I am walking through the rain. I begin to speak to the rhythm of my movements, to the speed at which I can touch the biggest trees.

I come to a small clearing between some ash trees. It is perfect for a ceremony, for a dance. I move with the trees, I speak aloud: I dance the rain and the trees, I dance the rain and the trees. It is simple, I’m not trying to be clever, I’m just saying what I’m doing, saying it aloud over and over because it is true and because I will remember it later when it is lodged in this place, and my bones. I say it louder and louder, dancing like a stretched-up tree, exuberant to be

pummeled by the rain.

It is time to go. We all know it -

I walk on, no now I’m running, speaking faster with every other step. I come to a small hill in the forest:

Ha! The forest is a hill! I can see it sloping down!

I run on. The river! And here we meet again, me and the river, and the only thing to say is shall I swim today in the rain?

It gurgles a reply. I rejoice in the fat, full sounds of my words, in the fat full rain and the river water. I pour it down my face and neck, run on.

The forest is a hill! Again I come to the hill place, I can see it sloping down!

I run on. The dancing place! I cry out to the forest, laughing hysterically. What joy! To have found that place again where I dance the rain and the trees, what complete un-fettered joy.

I dance the rain and the trees!

I move so quickly, speaking, singing, laughing, running. The words change organically, find their own structure. Each place is its name, the story I have placed there: ‘the dancing place’, ‘the forest hill’ and ‘the swimming river’. I repeat it, this time – ‘this is the place where I dance the rain and the trees’; then ‘this is the place where I say ‘I dance the rain and the trees’. I run and speak and dance and run and speak and wash the river down my face.

When eventually I grew tired, I made my way back to my cabin. I checked my watch when I got back. I had been two and a half hours, in an area smaller than a football pitch, and it had felt like mere minutes. Time had become cyclical, not linear, connected only to the patterns I was making in my actions, and the words I was repeating in my body. The forest as witness, let it all happen. I was exhausted and energised. I slept.

The next day I felt small and quiet. I didn’t want to speak out-loud. I wanted to hide in my notebook, to sit with the trees and listen and be still. In the afternoon I found myself back in the woodland. I searched for a long time until I came to the Dancing Place. When I got there I smiled and felt the memory of yesterday in my bones. I began to pick my way through the forest towards the hill and the river, when I noticed a remarkable thing. I was moving branches, stopping to turn and find my feet amongst the ferns and bramble. I was having to walk slowly and methodically, dodging branches, ducking under trees. Was this really the place where I ran yesterday, not feeling a thing on my face, not stumbling once, not finding my way, just running? It couldn’t have been. But yes, I saw the bluebells and ferns crushed flat down from where I’d been. I had been so in tune with my senses, that I had been able to run through this place yesterday without colliding with any other thing. I felt sure why this was. I felt sure it was because in that moment, I had come a little closer to understanding what it was to speak. I don’t think I speak from that place very often. It had felt completely as though it tied my body and me to the land, that it tied my memory to place, that it put me deeply in sensory perception with my environment.

The next day I walked, with a map, following the footpaths through the Blean Forest, and north towards the coast of Kent. The forest passed in a blur; trees merging into one another, a green mesh on either side of me, and I was separate. I was passing through. I was path-bound. I was map-heavy. I was making lines. I was concerned as to my location in relation to where I had come from and where I was heading. I was feeling the land on a horizontal plane, a superficial gradient of moving out and across, not plunging downward like the roots of a tree, into a few familiar places. At some points, deep in the forest, when I hadn’t seen anyone else for a good hour or so, I felt vulnerable. I was a woman walking alone. I hadn’t seen anyone for hours, I didn’t have my phone with me, nobody knew I was there. I felt afraid in the forest. I felt like the forest was a place that could hide not only my self-consciousness and allow me to speak, but also could hide danger, or hurt. I walked faster, taking less note of what was around me. I remembered Baba Yaga.

Vasalisa made her way into the thick forest, no light on either side of her. When she saw the hut of Baba Yaga looming through the darkness, she froze. She waited and waited. Then she heard the sound of Baba Yaga, pummeling the ground past her in her pestle and mortar. Vasalisa leant her fear to the darkness. She stayed.

After two days of fulfilling Baba Yaga’s task, Vasalisa is let go, with a light for her way from Baba Yaga. She goes into the darkness, and she travels into the forest, but not to pass through. To be there. To stay in the darkness, at the heart of it, to stay with Baba Yaga. When she has been there, really been there and stayed there, she is ready to go again. She does not pass through this fear or the unknown. And how does she manage to get away? She speaks.

I have my mother’s blessing

and Baba Yaga froze.

Both Vasalisa and the arrowmaker realise themselves through speaking, and it is the act itself, as well as what they say, that allows this grounding, this realising to take place. The arrowmaker has a listener; Vasalisa speaks to Baba Yaga. If the forest is our witness and the world is listening, what does it do to destroy those places where we can speak? When we speak aloud to no one but ourselves and the world, we hear ourselves as well as speaking; so we are aligned with the listening world as well as ourselves. Our boundaries are blurred. We are multiple – speaking and listening self, we are the other, listening to ourselves speak. Speaking as an act of empathy. Again, as Abram has said, it is the wind that connects this speaking breath, that carries the words on its wings. The world is connecting us to it when we speak ourselves into being. When we speak silently, to our inner minds, wary of what people will think or say, we go inward, we forget that we are everywhere and that the world is listening. Stories tell of this connection between animate world, animal, human, spirit and dreamworld, but the act of speaking in itself makes this connection, tells this story. There is so much emphasis in this day and age on literacy, on getting people to read, but when we speak, we weave a web of meaning around ourselves and we hear it on the wind, and the world hears it to. When we speak the places that we are, we embed our speech and our realising of ourselves into those places, deep like roots. The stories grow then, grow out from those words and the soil that holds them.

Holloway, by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, Dan Richards

Faber & Faber 2013. £14.99

Hardback, 48 pp. ISBN: 9780571302710

Reviewed by Sean Hamill

Sean Hamill has been Head of English at Dean Close School in Cheltenham for the last ten years. In the summer he will be emigrating, with his wife and five children, to a rural spot beside the River Earn near Perth in Scotland to take up the post of Deputy Head Academic at Strathallan School in the village of Forgandenny. He is passionate about wild swimming, landscape, new perspectives, and old-fashioned roses; having spent a long time teaching students to write critically, he has started to find his own creative voice through his blog The Peregrine Files.

In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset’s sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres and great strangeness.

Six years later, after Deakin’s early death, Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards.

The book is about those journeys and that landscape. [Faber]

The review is Sean Hamill’s response to Holloway.

Image ©Dan Richards

Holloway – the hollow way. A sunken path, a deep and shady lane. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed into the land. A track worn down by the traffic of ages and the fretting of water, and in places reduced sixteen or eighteen feet beneath the level of the fields.

Holloway, by writers Robert Macfarlane and Dan Richards, and artist Stanley Donwood, poses far more questions than it answers. It does not offer a blueprint or a route map; but it does offer the promise of form and pathways. It does not offer explanations but it does suggest ways of understanding. It is, in essence, a whimsical collaboration, a snatched moment wrought into new words and images: a realisation. There are so many reasons why this book might never have come about: a chance remark, a shared interest, an inspired third party and somehow a trip was planned—a visit, an expedition. Macfarlane explains that the collaboration between different voices, texts, and images was intended,

to embody and perform some of the rich and echoic strangeness of the holloway space itself: in which history seems, to ‘pleat and repeat’ in curious (and oblique) ways, such that repetition and echo and pattern-making came to seem the only ways to represent it. We wanted, I think, readers to fall into or move through the space of the holloway: thus Stanley’s advancing drawings, thus the lack of explanation, thus the repeated and weaving motifs between individual pages, and between the voices.

This slim volume is the result. And it is brief, momentary almost; the ideas stir and fizz, the context gives it meaning and depth, and then it is gone, finished, leaving a vapour trail of ideas and links. ‘Just enough’, Dan Richards says, ‘we didn’t want to destroy the atmosphere and the mystery of the space, by creating something definite.’ And this is the interesting concept at the heart of this new book: something which is not something. Like the holloway, it forms a conduit or a portal, an access point to a parallel world. Richards goes on to describe the experience of exploring the physical space as a ‘crossing and an uncrossing, at odds with expectation.’ Here then is the idea: a way of looking, feeling, experiencing, but without specific expectations or a clear end-point in mind.

The paper dust-cover is of thick white paper. A monochrome winter holloway draws the eye inwards: it is skeletal and imposing. Stripped of its leaves and colour it narrows to a focal point in another world, a world redolent of childhood stories of the wild woods. But, inside, the faerie tale suggested by the cover is implicit rather than explicit because this is a three-way project (four if you include the printing process of the initial print run) with three very different approaches. Richards’ prose poems, Donwood’s images, and Macfarlane’s narrative; the poet, the artist, and the story teller, equally balanced, equal billing. Here is a collaboration that hints and suggests; a book of riddles and moments. It offers a way to meaning rather than the finished product. As such, wayfarers of the imagination, of internal pathways, are given licence to explore and ramble—to journey through. This is a collaboration that echoes the shared journeys of those who created the holloways in the first place. Dan Richards’ prose poem ‘Pilsdon Pen’ offers a starting point on a ‘Floating island steppe’ —Casper David Friedrich-like, three wanderers above a sea of fog. What might this starting point have been on a clear May Day—the blue air streaming—as a foil to the limpid, latticed greenery of the holloway? Or a snowbound scene; or one dominated by the longing of lovers, or the fear of the fugitive? But answers to these questions are not the function of Holloway; this is a book which is, unexpectedly, more akin to the needs and ways of our multi-faceted media age: spliced perspectives, largely unexplained, functioning in real time. Either keep up or miss out.

Golden Holaweg
©Stanley Donwood

Holloway, then, is a bold, artistic experiment, a new venture where poetry, narrative and image butt up against one another, where the interplay between genres is equal and unmanaged. This book is an idea—a single rather than an album—and it is full of playful, boyish fragments: ‘three men in a hedge’, ‘the next valley’s pub’, a slow motion bike crash and ‘a shooting star…!’ These wheel about the focal point of the holloway and its allure. A distinctly English humour pervades, preventing the reflective nature of the book from becoming some sort of vanity project. Richards’ admission that, ‘[w]e gave up the idea of questing and simply revelled in the space’, suggests that whilst the three men were well aware of the pitfalls of faux Romanticism, they were not afraid to engage with the true adventure that is fundamental to the Romantic ideal: searching, through personal experience, for the deeper truths offered to us by the physical and imagined landscapes that surround us. Donwood’s dangerously imagined series of pictures, repeating as an arboreal vortex at powerfully focused liminal points, dares us to join him. Richards’ poems reflect intense moments where the senses hum with input on all sides and the perspective is dominated by the present. But it is Macfarlane’s reflective, understated presence which provides the contextual binding glue and the book’s driving force. Macfarlane’s gentle, subtle narrative belies the strength of his thinking. Words such as ‘defence’, ‘guard’, and ‘disguise’ darken the atmosphere; he describes the holloway as a ‘view down a rifle barrel; an eye to the keyhole’ conjuring a world of dark imaginings and a powerful proximity to death and the spirit world. The lens of light at the end of this tunnel is unexpectedly ‘empty’, but out of this foreboding tone he adds that he also finds within the holloway ‘a glimpse into the shade world’. The image is a potent one: the pallid light of the holloway from the inside on the one hand and the ghosts of fellow wayfarers on the other.

The flower meadow below Copper Hill
©Dan Richards

And for Macfarlane, especially, the shade at the heart of this particular holloway is Roger Deakin, who, like some noble wild boar, left ‘memory traces’ only his friend would know in the den the two shared when he and Macfarlane first came to the holloway in 2005. Deakin exists in as real a way as he did back then to Macfarlane:

I had not gone in search of Roger’s shade, but I found him there nonetheless, glimpsed startlingly clearly at the turn of the corner or the edge of a treeline. […] I now understand it certainly to be the case, though I have long imagined it to be true, that stretches of path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path.

This is the leap of understanding that Holloway encourages us to make; the idea that time folds back on itself. TS Eliot depicted time present, time past, and time future as one and the same. For Eliot, the compressive folding in on itself of time ensures that things that happened a long time ago are as real in the present as they ever were in the past.

The visit and the book pay homage, then, to figures from the past who are still very much in the present: to Roger Deakin, in particular, but also to poets and writers, like Edward Thomas, who, like Macfarlane, sought meaning along the thoroughfare. It is personal and it is private. When Macfarlane tells us that the book is about ‘a holloway and its shades & a clear map of the holloway’s finding is not contained within it’ we get the clearest indication that the most intimate moments within such spaces are for personal consumption only; the challenge for us is clear: journey forth into the landscape, make our own associations with place and moment.

There is a dualism at work here: the personal and the private, the experience within the space, the experience without. Richards echoes this in one of his prose poems with beguiling antithetical pairs where images are both ‘inviting’ and ‘sad’, ‘strange’ and ‘familiar’; he speaks with the immediacy of the moment. His detailed descriptions suggest he has just understood something about his experience before the strangeness overwhelms him: ‘then I fell off the world’, like Geoffrey Household’s rogue male in the novel that prompted the initial 2005 search for the holloway, who falls at the beginning of the novel into another existence. Two sides, then, to life: this world, and the world at the end of the holloway.

Richards describes how the branches inside the space, already etched in magnesium white in our minds via Donwood’s pictures, ‘Shone white when I blinked or turned away. A fretted photo negative weaving with the vessels of my eye. Burnt in. Of a piece’. Like Donwood’s etchings these are lines which are deeply scored, visceral even. But all is not what it seems in this uncanny place: in the foreground the white of the cross-hatching depicts the solid trunks and branches; push deeper into the image and the opposite becomes true: white for the gaps, black for the branches—a shift from one world to another.

Perhaps, in the end, the ghostly nature of holloways is a 21^st century preoccupation. In our world there is a tendency that the holloway becomes a destination, an endpoint of experience, rather than the thoroughway which created it. This book allows all eventualities and reconnects with fundamental ideas about the passing of time and how both personal and cultural memory is irreversibly fused with landscape. It challenges us, all the while, to do the same.

And, like the ampersand that runs throughout, this is a book that will generate its gainsayers and naysayers. The initial print run (of 277 copies hand-printed on type forged especially for the book) is a deeply respectful marker of the old ways, but in our quicksilver digital age where voices, graphics, and images, both moving and static, are integrated seamlessly at the touch of a finger into our reading experience, and ideas about how text is represented on the page are changing all the time, perhaps the publication of Holloway is less of a nostalgic throwback and more of a leap forward. Those who made this book stand equal: Donwood’s mesmerising images, Richards’ vibrant poetry, and the layered compulsive force of Macfarlane’s ideas—three questing minds converge in the fascinating space of the holloway.

Macfarlane speaks for their shared experience in the holloway:

such a mysterious, mobile and overlapping place – we could not deal straightforwardly with it.

Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood
©Dan Richards

With thanks to Robert Macfarlane, Dan Richards and Stanley Donwood for their generous assistance in sharing their images [please note, copyright is as stated on each image]

Further Links – Holloway’s page on the Faber website is a wondrous portal to images, sound and connections that imaginatively enhance the reading experience.

Anthony Garratt, Brighton Old Pier Study, 1 x 0.7m

“Britain provides us with weather which makes us feel vulnerable. For me that is what makes it such an exciting place to paint. The sky changes continuously – one can visit a place a hundred times and each time have a different experience.” ~ Anthony Garratt (Innocent Gallery Catalogue)

I first became aware of Anthony Garratt’s work at a small group show at the Colston Hall in Bristol, some two and a half years ago. Although the paintings on display then were small, compared to the larger scale work being shown and attracting attention now, Anthony’s work struck me as having a special resonance in terms of the quality of the light he builds into the image, layering the oils until there is a still, translucent, compelling glare from somewhere. It was this rare ability to paint light that stayed with me, reminding me of J.M.W. Turner’s ability to make light the centre of his paintings, no matter what the subject matter was.  A year later, while having some pictures framed, I saw a chap next to me holding a canvas that instantly took me back to that quality of light I had seen in the Colston show. I complimented the work, and was delighted to find that the man with the canvas was Anthony himself.

Anthony Garratt, Invitation, Sand Bay, 1.5 x 1.2m

To stand in front of one of Anthony’s large-scale paintings, exhibited at London’s Thackeray Gallery last year and more recently at the Innocent Gallery in Bristol, is to become transfixed by the portrayal of light and whiteness. If elsewhere in the paintings energy is happening, sea crashing and water coursing, it is that starting point and spread of whiteness that seems to hold and direct the energy of the image. ‘Hit Rock’ is a tremendous example of force in a painting: the water hits the rock and creates the core whiteness of the image.

Anthony Garratt, Hit Rock, Tresco, 1.5 x 0.6m

Many of the paintings at the Innocent show were crowded in by darkness, coming out as we were (certainly in Bristol and the South-West) of a long and intense winter, where light was diminished and it felt like sleet, snow and greyness was creeping through the skin into our very souls. These were paintings that seemed to say, ‘wait, spring and a greater lightness is coming! Hold out! Enjoy the darker colours and stay watchful for light! ‘Winter Light’ and ‘Winter Light Study’ particularly draw the eye into the work: layers and lines of paint create a panorama of landscape, and tiny figures in ‘Winter Light Study’ serve to delineate the vastness of the space created in this relatively small piece. ‘Arnos Vale’ (a Victorian cemetery in Bristol) exemplifies the use of colour and the intensity of the white light hovering in the centre, above the distant city.

Anthony Garratt, Arnos Vale, 150 x 120cms

Here is a painter intensely aware of seasonality, of colour creeping in; with an ability to read and absorb a landscape, tracing lines of land and sea through movement, stillness, displacement and the very present. Through all of this, as the land, sea and sky merge, Garratt blends the unity of light. There is mysticism at play within his images, and they spellbind me.

Talking with the artist in his Bristol studio about his work and his connection to landscape, he tells me of his love of remoteness and “aggressive landscapes”. Garratt is currently artist-in-residence on the Island of Tresco, where he returns regularly to immerse himself in the point between rugged land and often wild sea. Talking of the painting ‘Paradise’, he tells me of being in the thick of the storm, needing to feel it with all his senses and let it overcome him, before he could return to get it down on canvas. He painted while we talked, and it was a revelation to see two very different seascapes, one calm and one violent, emerge simultaneously.

Anthony Garratt, Paradise, 1.5 x 1.5m

A recent trip to Uganda has resulted in a shift in Anthony’s work. A series called ‘ The Impenetrable Forest’, goes deep into what is now a narrow strip of forest, producing darker, busier images, which capture some of the glaring tensions he witnessed between the pressures of logging and agro-business, and efforts to preserve the forest and care for the gorilla population.

JMW: I’m struck by the quality of light in your work. When you are painting in the landscape, or later, when you bring the sketches back into the studio, how do you start translating both the scene and the lightscape you witnessed there, into the painting?

AG: It is very difficult for me to explain how a painting comes about. Everything is exaggerated in the painting; scale, light, contrast and colour are all abandoned from experience and then re-constructed impulsively. It would be rather arrogant of me to suggest that each work was entirely impulsive as this is somewhere many expressionist painters (including myself) are trying to get to and this is more than a lifetime’s work. Of course the paintings rely on learned actions: how the paint behaves, how to apply the paint, which colours to use, and so on. In my view, it is impossible for us as individuals with accumulated life experiences to abandon learned action in order to act entirely on impulse. My works are also from memory. I have a terrible factual memory, so I can only ‘bag’ a couple of facts from each scene in reality before taking back the image to the studio. I then translate those couple of facts to canvas and surround them in paint.

JMW: What do you feel about your own relationship with landscape, both as a person and as a practising artist?

AG: The more I paint, the more I realise that we are at the mercy of the landscape and elements. This is very appealing to me. In a world where we are obsessed with ownership and control, it is humbling and important that we are reminded to respect the weather, sea, hills and landscape on which we rely. I enjoy isolation as much as I enjoy company and some of my most vivid memories are of standing on the edge of a hill in the wind, on the front of a sailing boat in the spray or being caught off guard in the rain.

JMW: Do you prefer to do much of the work outside in the landscape, or do you equally need the intimacy and intensity of the studio to be able to capture the place?

AG: I think my best work comes from painting outside; there is much less temptation to over-work a painting because of the natural time restraints outdoors. Having said that, the studio allows flexibility and space to experiment and a space which I can dedicate entirely to painting. I make such a mess when I paint, it is an important part of my practice to be able to do so – I suppose that is why the large works painted outdoors are the most free, there is no restriction on arm movement or space…

JMW: I know you’ve done a lot of travelling recently, to Uganda and other far-flung places. How is this changing your response to landscapes? Are you finding common threads between capturing British landscape scenes, including hills, the sea and coastal areas, (and generally quite green landscapes!), and these new vistas?

AG: I never travel with the intention of painting or sketching. In fact, quite the opposite: my travels recently to Mexico and Uganda were an escape from painting and a chance to re-charge and invigorate new ideas. Painting can be an incredibly frustrating process; much as you can always see a vision of where you would like to get to as a painter, the actual execution is a much slower process and one full of backward steps. Having said that, a few weeks after travelling, things begin to leak out as ideas for landscapes based on what I have seen. For example, the roads in Uganda were a beautiful red earth colour and this has started arriving in the paintings; even in the paintings of the UK – not only because the red is so striking but the red earth says so much. It is so much more apparent than brown earth and continually reminds you as you travel through Africa that it is fertile and the most important thing there.

Anthony Garratt is currently working on a large-scale public art project, details to be revealed shortly. For more about Anthony’s work, see http://agarratt.intuitwebsites.com/

Reblogged from Re-enchanting the Earth:

Approaching along the track, it is hard to see why this place was chosen: a subtle lip in the curve of the hillside; a slackening of the steep slope which falls from fell top to lake, is all there is to suggest any difference in the structure of the rock.  Perhaps there were outcrops of the mottled slate which broke the surface of the land; lines of lichened crags which hinted at harder strata, less brittle slabs, larger blocks.  There must have been some knowledge of this kind that passed between people in the valley, some property of the rocks here which offered their use for walls, for houses, some suggestion that here was the place to dig a quarry, here were the stones we needed to re-build the farm, to enclose the land for sheep.

On this April day, the land is dry from weeks without rain, the grasses crisped to the pale colour of straw after harvest.  I follow the line of small quarries which rises gently across the hillside, following the trend of the layers of dull grey slate.  Each quarry is like a small bay in a windswept headland; cropped turf grows beneath the faces of rock; heather and gorse tangle with the litter of stones, the discards and offcuts.  On the floor of one quarry, stones have been arranged in the shape of a heart.

The rock here is without sheen, reflecting back nothing of the light.  It is the colour of a sky full of rain, or a winter evening.  It cleaves into broad slabs; some lying discarded on the grass are the size of a coffin lid, bloomed with lichen and the springy tufts of parsley fern.  I picture the rocks from these quarries, dressed and laid as window sills, holding up rotting gates, nested in the corner of a wall, and I wonder if they hold some genetic memory of their own, in the way that each of us carries an imprint of the place in which we were raised, some understanding of the way landscape is.  I like to imagine that there is some invisible link between the thousands of stones pressed into use for houses and walls in the valley below, and the quarry up the hill from which they riven a hundred, two hundred years ago.

It is a fancy, I know it is.  And yet I run my weathered, ageing hands across slate gate stoups, along lintels and capstones, and try to imagine beneath my flesh the presence of a living, breathing organism.  I am waiting for the stories they could tell me.

At university, I studied geology.  I learned to recognise rock types by the sound they made when struck by a hammer; I spent hours staring down a microscope at paper-thin slices of rock specimens, lit by a strange bright light, shifting colour as they turned beneath a polarising filter; I learned an arcane vocabulary of fossils and minerals, the long and unfathomable sequence of time which sounded like an incantation of the lost tribes of these islands: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian.  I lived with rocks; I breathed their sulphurous smell when they were freshly splintered, which reminded me of an outdoors fire on a winter’s morning, my hands roughened under the dry texture of granite and gabbro, schist and gneiss.

I learned all that I could about rocks, but geology did not teach me the things I wanted to understand.  I knew somehow that the way we lived, our valleys and rivers, our houses and walls, were connected to the rocks which lay close beneath the surface, in the way that our skin reveals, rather than conceals, the bones which define the shape of who we are; their presence so close to the surface a constant reminder of our mortality.  I could picture the landscape as a series of richly coloured layers, thick with fossils and the stilled ripples of sediment, locked forever in time like an endless memory of ancient rivers.  I could tell from a distance whether a house was built from gritstone or limestone, but geology did not explain to me how the rocks beneath the surface determined our lives; why the people in this place or another were taciturn or loquacious, why they walked with an upright air or the stooped burden of time and weather.  I knew there was something about rocks which I had failed to grasp; some inevitable truth I had yet to learn.

But, before all this, I found a dinosaur footprint.  I was on a school field trip to a sandstone quarry in Nottinghamshire; a muddy pit of ochre-coloured earth, rippled with the traces of rivers and wind-dunes from millions of years ago.  As I write this, I fail to grasp the immensity of time which has passed since these mudstones dried and cracked on the bottom of a lake, although the numbers, the millennia, came easy to me then.  I flipped over an angular slab of mudstone and traced with my fingers the dimpled marks of a three-clawed foot – the fourth claw had been broken off at the edge of the slab.  For a brief, transient moment, I felt some odd connection with the reptile which had left its mark in this soft lake bed, as crisp and as fresh as the print of a fox seen in an autumn lane.  My teacher was overjoyed; I lugged the slab back to the school minibus, up the stairs of the school and onto the table of curiosities at the back of our geology classroom.

When I uncovered the print, some seventy or eighty million years after it was left, I could still feel a sense of the creature which left it.  Once I put it on that table, some sort of magic seemed to disperse, some presence which the stone had in my hands had evaporated.  It felt like the opening of a vast and ancient amphora, buried for lifetimes beneath the desert sand, the contents of which collapse into formless dust the moment the lid is lifted.  I still wonder if I should have flipped the stone back the moment I found it, although the curiosity of youth knows no such caution.  It remains as an unanswered riddle in my life; an event whose portents I have yet to understand, whose message is obscured by time and the restless shifting of sediments.

Years later, I visited the Musée des Sciences Naturelles in Brussels.  Our first son was just old enough to manage the walk from the Métro to the museum, through a park in which a thick, soft snow was falling, impossibly slowly and silently in the milling chaos of the noisy city.  The museum, standing on a rise of land above Parc Leopold, brushed the edges of the colourless cloud with its ornate eaves.  In the entrance hall, a blue whale skeleton, suspended from the ceiling by wires, reminded us of the power of science, the hold it has over wild nature, the monuments we build to rationalism.

In the light, airy wing which overlooked the park, there were dinosaurs enough to satisfy any three-year-old boy.  I left him in front of the tall glass cases with his bewildered mix of fear and fascination, and wandered around the hall. On a single slab of mudstone, set into the floor like a patterned tile, were a pair of human footprints.  They had been found in a lake bed in eastern Africa, and were thought to date from two million years ago.  They were of an adult and child, walking close together, perhaps hand-in-hand.  I wanted so much to kneel down and run my fingertips over their ribbed curves.  I could picture the people who left them, their sense of wonder at the world, their delight in being together.  It is possible, from a footprint, to know if they were made in haste or at leisure, whether the person was running or walking.  I know nothing of biomechanics, but I knew that these prints were left by two people moving at a relaxed pace, comfortable in their surroundings.  I could almost sense their joy at feeling the warm, sticky mud between their toes.  I thought of the random chance by which marks like these are preserved, the footprints we leave on beaches which are erased twice-daily by the tide; of the prints which my wife and son and I would have left in the snow outside, and which were now being covered by dense grey-coloured drifts.

I never worked as a geologist.  My friends and colleagues left university and went into the oil industry, or to work on the digging of the channel tunnel.  I realised that geology has been pressed into service for exploitation as surely as any discipline.  Science, as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, is how capitalism views the world.  It would never explain to me the feeling I have, when hefting a piece of slate in my fingers, of a deep sense of understanding which can be found in no textbook.

On warm, sunny days, I run my hand over rocks speckled with years of lichen, and perhaps I understand a little more what it is that makes me pause as I do so.  I like to feel the warmth of the stone which has been absorbed through the long day of sunshine, the rough, flaking texture beneath my palms like the skin of some vast and ancient beast, stirring and breathing, so gently.

More of Ian Hill’s writing can be found at http://www.printedland.blogspot.co.uk. To read earlier guest posts, click here, and here.

Update: please note that the September 2013 ‘Re-enchanting the Earth’ retreat referred to below has now become an additional ‘Singing Over the Bones’ retreat. See the weblinks for details.

Further to our plans to offer writers’ retreats here in the wild and beautiful Western Isles, we now have some courses and some dates to offer.

From September 28 – October 5 this year we’ll be running a ‘Re-enchanting the Earth’ retreat for both men and women. (We’ll also be running this retreat in autumn 2014, very likely the week of September 20.) http://reenchantingtheearth.com/courses/residential-courses/re-enchanting-the-earth-retreat/ Prices start from £425 full board for 6 nights.

From May 4 – 10 2014, we’ll be running a ‘Singing Over the Bones’ retreat for women only. http://reenchantingtheearth.com/courses/residential-courses/singing-over-the-bones/ Prices also start from £425 full board for 6 nights.

The themes of each course will be similar, in that we will be focusing on deepening our relationship with the land and our connection to the natural world, and exploring the ways in which we can communicate it. We’ll be talking about authentic ways of living and being in the midst of a world in crisis. We have a unique opportunity here in the ‘working wilderness’ of our crofting village of Breanish to explore these issues. Nestled at the foot of Mealasbhal, Lewis’ highest mountain, we are sandwiched between sea and hills and look out to St Kilda, the Flannan Isles, Scarp and the Monachs. The landscape is rugged but intensely beautiful in all weathers. No guarantees of good weather can be given in the Outer Hebrides at any time of year, but standing by the sea in the face of a south-westerly gale and letting the air hold you up, then returning to a warm fire with your face encrusted with sea salt, is an experience not to be missed! Working the land as we do, David and I know the ecology and history of the place very well, and will share that knowledge as generously as we’re able. Side trips to the EarthLines croft are also encouraged.

Stags at Traigh Uig

It may seem as if travelling to the Outer Hebrides is impossibly long and slow, or impractically expensive: it doesn’t have to be so. Do have a look at this page for more information about the place, accommodation and travel.

Places on both courses are limited so if you’re interested please do contact me as soon as possible: sharon[at]reenchantingtheearth[dot]com.

As this is my maiden blog, I feel I should first declare my hand. I work for a conservation organisation but am in no way trained as an ecologist. I am in the people engagement side of things, habitats of hearts and minds, rather than spade work out on a fen or the case work of ecological science. When it comes to knowledge about the natural world, in every sense I’m an amateur. Nevertheless, I must stress the role that literature and in particular, poetry has had in this. I grew up on a typical suburban fringe where the countryside is close by and in that not too distant past when kids were still allowed to play in it. All that got left behind by the usual distractions of growing up, but it was poetry that pulled me back. Poetry re-acquainted me with the natural and ultimately led to my working for conservation today. Small beer no doubt, but poetry ‘made that happen’.

As to ecopoetics itself, I consider myself someone who is trying to become a more adequate reader of poetry whilst trying to write more and better poems of my own. I’ve recently withdrawn from a Creative and Critical PhD that was looking at the poetry of birds as ecopoetry. Balancing such rigorous study against full time work was just too much, but equal to that was the weight of how it gobbled up time for writing. So I stand in an odd position. I’m hugely in awe of the intellect, skill and tenacity of academic theory, humbled by the demands it requires, though I’m also suspicious. I struggle with the need for such distancing, by a discourse that by its very nature seems to foreshorten its own ambition and its relevance to the environments, art and practice that it exists to test and serve. Given that the hour is so grave with human pressures on the state of nature so great and ever increasing, I think ecopoetics needs to be reappraised.

Bate’s The Song of the Earth is a landmark text, wonderfully written – a real inspiration. The idea that language, literature, can be asked ‘to do ecological work’ alone makes it essential reading. For me this is criticism, ideas of a poetics, at their very best, something that has pollinated poetic practice ever since. Yet 13 years on from its publication, I’m concerned there remains a restraint in poetry that engages with the natural world. If our poetry does not engage with issues of dwelling, can it really be considered ecopoetry at all? I’m just not sure that ideas of ‘presencing’ are enough for ecopoetry. I want to suggest that there is a hedging of bets towards the prevailing view that moves in suspicion of the Romantic tradition, of ‘nature’ or pastoral poetry and indeed of rhetoric in poetry. I wonder whether all this is a sort of hangover of relativism and postmodernist notions that are too wary of the grand narrative. But then, to raise examples from our relationships with birds, Great Auk, Dodo and Passenger Pigeon, quite simply they’re either extinct or not.

The current plan to develop Lodge Hill in Kent seems to me a vital example of how ecopoetics has to be reappraised. The site is ecologically significant as a stronghold for nightingale. This is a species so beloved of poets through time. It is also a species that has suffered a huge crash in numbers in the last 40 years. If we accept such a thing as ecopoetics exists to do ecological work, how can it not engage with this? I’m absolutely not making a call for prescribed poems of protest. Neither am I arguing here for a poetry of didacticism or for a simple poetry by numbers, rattled off to serve this or any other campaign. I am however suggesting there can be a poetry of and for numbers. The commitment will always be to language, to form and craft, to the poem itself; but that commitment must be on equal footing with the ‘eco’.

Surely if a poet is so moved to write a poem about nightingales in my example, has knowledge of Lodge Hill, (let’s say they are committed in an ecological sympathy) is there not therefore, an imaginative obligation to craft the science, the politics, the empathy for human and bird, to feel and think it all so that it can be mediated into poetry?

Maybe for too long we’ve imagined ourselves into a position where ‘anything goes’ and the poem only has to make sense to itself. But why should the ecopoet be apologetic in their engagement and commitment? Is this merely a postmodern scepticism creeping in, working against any ideas of the devotional? (There is an irony here in that the round of confessional and anecdotal poetry does not apologise for its devotion to the self).

I hope I’m raising some questions that will spark debate. One last point I’d like to make is to suggest that perhaps now might be the moment for an impure ecopoetry. I’ve been thinking about Louis MacNeice, writing in the 1930s, his plea for an impure poetics appears particularly relevant to our wider cultural and historical moment:

‘… poets [writing in a time of crisis] should write honestly, their poetry keeping pace with their lives and with their beliefs as affecting their lives, neither lagging behind in an obsolete romanticism nor running ahead to an assurance too good to be true.’ [1]

________________________________

[1] Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay, Oxford: by Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1968) p.205

Chris Seeley leads an MA programme in Sustainability and Responsibility at Ashridge Business School and works with post-graduate learners and organisations concerned with sustainability in Europe and Africa. She paints and draws, explores artful knowing and sometimes clowns and tells stories. For more about Chris, see www.wildmargins.com

James Aldridge is an artist and creative learning consultant, working with adults and children as well as making individual artwork. James is committed to exploring the role of the arts within ecological learning and emotional wellbeing. For more about James, see www.creative-ecology.co.uk

London, photograph by Chris Seeley

Last week, I was working with my Sustainability and Responsibility Master’s students at Schumacher College. We come every other year to get a good dose of wisdom from Schumacher’s resident ecologist, Stephan Harding. This time, I’d been nursing a thought for a few years to combine Stephan’s work on Deep Ecology with Ecopsychology. To that end, I also invited Dave Key, an experienced and down-to-earth practitioner who came from industrial design towards outdoor learning, psychology and all round humanity. The combination worked – where Stephan left off, touching the realms of “farming consciousness”, Dave’s work dug deep, exploring the ecological self, the dark and inevitable living contradictions of our time.

I listened in, as I have done for many years now, and, as usual, wondered how my living practice was stacking up against the likes of Arne Naess, sitting in his Norwegian mountain top hut, brewing tea and writing books.

Not very well, I thought. It was a bit of a B-, could do better, with (good) work in Senegal, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Germany and The Netherlands occupying much of the past 12 months. Did taking landscape photographs out of aeroplane windows count as Deep Ecology? I didn’t think so.

“We live with these tensions,” Dave said, and I thought again of my neglected house and garden, my now unfamiliar community, my sketchbooks and the pile of post that would be awaiting after yet another two week absence.

So I’m home again this week; the sun is shining and my garden is growing at an shocking rate. The post has been opened and I am (nearly) up to date with my emails. Birds have been singing outside whilst I sit in, glued to the computer screen. Arne Naess, Stephan and any semblance of my ecological self are miles down the road in Dartington. How do I live this and not just yearn for it? How do I bring Deep Ecological common sense into my ordinary life… just a bit more? How do I bring my attention, again and again, to the outdoors until, as Norwegian ecophilosopher Sigmund Kvaløy so rightly says, it becomes the inside, and the indoors of offices and buildings become the outside?

In short, how do I live this in mind and body and place? This was where, with the help of a local artist/shaman, Lucy Voelcker, I came up with a new intention – weaving in the wild – however and wherever I can. Tonight, at Lucy’s suggestion, I have lit a small fire in my garden – not a bonfire, but nor either a tame barbeque or fire pit. It has brought my garden to life without hours of neatening and weeding. Maybe taking photographs of the lit capillaries of London at night does count for something whilst my work still takes me airborne. Inviting workshop participants out into nature as a norm when the weather permits. Eating in my garden, perhaps making more shelter for when it rains. And yes, drawing and making bundles of sticks and grasses while I am out walking (learned from James). But also not scolding myself when I don’t go far and just make it into the garden, a few feet from my own door. There’s scope for some kindness here in cultivating this conversation with the world. Living Deep Ecology doesn’t need to be an extreme sport. “Start close in…” says poet David Whyte:

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,

don’t take the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step you don’t want to take.

Start with

the ground

you know,

the pale ground

beneath your feet,

your own

way of starting

the conversation.

Start with your own

question,

give up on other

people’s questions,

don’t let them

smother something

simple.

To find

another’s voice

follow

your own voice,

wait until

that voice

becomes a

private ear

listening

to another.

Start right now

take a small step

you can call your own

don’t follow

someone else’s

heroics, be humble

and focused,

start close in,

don’t mistake

that other

for your own.

Start close in,

don’t take the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step you don’t want to take.

~ David Whyte ~

(from River Flow: New and Selected Poems)

First Step, photograph by James Aldridge 

Whilst Chris has been at Schumacher, I have been coming to the end of three different schools based projects, working with both children and staff. One is concerned with using art to engage with science and to promote creative thinking around the subjects of re-using and recycling, a second explores and researches the benefit for the social and emotional development of a group of boys that creative interaction with their surroundings can have, and the last, for which I am setting up an exhibition this afternoon, has used walking and making to enable children to respond in a playful way to their local environment.

I am increasingly concerned at what this government is doing to the education system, as testing and planning gets more rigid and rigorous, and fantastic teachers bow under the weight of rules and expectations. It seems a symptom of what many of us face in our everyday lives, walking a path that we feels is expected of us, looking to others for approval and instruction. I’m not suggesting we should all always run free, skipping continuously through the daisies with no thought of our responsibilities or our place in society, but that we need opportunities to pay attention to where and who we are right here and now, to discover what our needs are and what our role is to be in the world for ourselves. Enabling people to pay attention to their sensory awareness of, and their emotional response to their social and material/ecological environment leads to engaged, excited, confident people, who are self and environmentally aware. What I hear more and more in the media though and from politicians is that we are equipping ourselves and our children to join ‘the global race’. A race to what or where?

We need to stop racing. To stop. We need to make friends with our innate capacities, our bodies, our senses, and each other. We have been given all we need to survive and thrive if only we were allowed to use it. Creativity is an innate capacity, we are all differently creative, and we were born that way. I am an artist, that’s my job, my passion. It’s largely how I explore and express my own creativity, it’s my way of making sense of the world. You don’t need to be an artist to be creative, you may express what you see and feel through the way that you bring up your children, the way that you write, dance, garden, cook or teach. But arts processes can offer something to all of us, whoever we are and however we express our creativity on a day to day basis. Artful ways of knowing the world enable us to pay attention to capacities that we have often been taught to ignore. To be artful is to be mindful, to be playful, to pay attention to our bodies and imaginations within the context of place; to make marks on paper or in the dirt, to hear a sound from above in a tree and interpret it with sound or movement, to gather together experiences in a journal, to press clay onto a tree and receive its imprint. Artful ways of knowing the world open us up to a direct relationship with it, a dialogue which tells us that we belong, we are exactly who we were meant to be, and that we each have something unique to offer the world.

Chris Seeley and James Aldridge will be facilitating a weekend course on ‘Mind, Body and Place’ from Friday 31^st May until Sunday 2^nd June at Hawkwood College near Stroud, Glos. For more information see www.hawkwoodcollege.co.uk