E a rt h L i n e s

Issue 4 February 2013 4.99

T h e C u lt u r e

of

N at u r e

An interview with Robert Macfarlane Sir John Lister-Kaye on the nature of wildness Hugh Warwick on love Melanie Challenger on labour Esther Woolfson on balancing the urban and the wild Nafeez Ahmed on change through cooperation Sharon Blackie on place, belonging & responsibility and Susan Richardson writes on all fours

Challenging, eclectic, feisty, gritty and grounded

A real point of convergence for many thought-tributaries and philosophical paths. ROBERT MACFARLANE A deeply intelligent publication, sensitive to nature and culture, with what is perhaps the greatest quality in a magazine: curiosity. JAY GRIFFITHS Manages to do beauty and practicality in one place. A rare combination and much needed. GEORGE MONBIOT EarthLines is unique in that it springs from a way of life that is rooted in the natural world and in the wild: it is created and published from a working croft on the remote far western coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. More than a magazine, EarthLines is an active and passionate project to transform the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. EarthLines is based on a broad interdisciplinary approach to ecoliterature. The kind of transformative writing were looking for will be inspired as much by the ideas of philosophers, psychologists, ecologists and anthropologists as by those of storytellers, mythographers, visual artists, and others who live close to or work with the natural world. We aim to be as inclusive as possible. We stand for a land ethic: for real and deep connections to the land and to places, their inhabitants (human and nonhuman) and their stories. And so we stand for belonging for digging in, and digging deep. We stand for the moral obligations and responsibilities that follow from such deep connections with the natural world and the nonhumans with whom we share the planet. In this context, we stand for both individual awareness and action. We stand for community and specifically, for grassroots action and cooperative and ecocentric decision-making by communities embedded in the natural world. We stand for authentic ways of living and being in a world in crisis. We stand for celebrating the beauty and diversity of the natural world. Above all, we stand for transformation. For facing up to the tough issues, taking on the necessary changes, and for making a stand.

About E arth L ines

www.earthlines.org.uk

IMAGES Above Scilly Thorn, St Marys Thorn; top right Roar; both by Kurt Jackson (see book review p. 62)

CONTENTS
Issue 4, February 2013
EDITORIAL
2 Sharon Blackie

PROSE
4 The Quest for Wildness John Lister-Kaye 8 November at Balmedie Esther Woolfson 14 Writing on All Fours Susan Richardson 17 Wayfaring Rima Staines 22 Beyond Industrial Civilisation Guy McPherson 25 How to Write a Love Letter to the Earth Peter Reason 26 North Norfolk James Canton 28 Estuary Lydia Fulleylove 33 The New Paradigm: Change Through Cooperation Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed 36 One Walk One Place One Time One Foundling Juliet Lockhart 40 Digging In, and Digging Deep: Sharon Blackie
On place, belonging and responsibility

COLUMN
56 Holding the Door Open for the Ancestors Charlotte Du Cann

POETRY
24 Winter / Dawn by Peter Oswald 55 one boy / from one by Mario Petrucci

BOOK MARK
10 The Peregrine (J. A. Baker) by Neil Ansell

A SENSE OF PLACE
58 Delapre Abbey by Kevan Manwaring

INTERVIEW
1 1 An interview with Robert Macfarlane

44 Love Hugh Warwick

48 Living in Stone

REVIEWS
60 Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland 60 Otter Country by Miriam Darlington 61 The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie 62 Sketchbooks by Kurt Jackson
Art and poetry credits please see p. 64 Subscriptions please see p. 63

Lorne Daniel

51 On Labour and the Human Mind Melanie Challenger 59 Ar Leic Amhridh Lenny Antonelli

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EDITORIAL INFORMATION
Editor
Sharon Blackie

EDITORIAL

Design and production

Sharon Blackie & David Knowles

EarthLines first year

EarthLines Office
Taigh nam Fitheach 26 Breanish, Uig Isle of Lewis, HS2 9HB Tel +44(0)1851 672776 info@earthlines.org.uk www.earthlines.org.uk

Publisher
EarthLines is published quarterly by Two Ravens Press Ltd: www.tworavenspress.com

Advertising
For rates, see p. 64 Contact: info@earthlines.org.uk

Subscriptions
See p. 63 for print and digital rates

Submissions
We welcome submissions by email only. Please visit our websites Submissions page before submitting, to see our full requirements

Trade
EarthLines is self-distributed; for trade information see our website or contact us

Printing
Printed in the UK by The Magazine Printing Company Plc using only paper from FSC/PFEC suppliers

Connections
Follow our online supplement, The EarthLines Review, at: http://earthlinesreview.org Follow us on Twitter: @EarthLines Like our Facebook page (search for EarthLines) Join our Ning Network: http://earthlines.ning.com Opinions expressed by the authors dont necessarily reflect those of EarthLines. Copyright of content remains with the authors & artists; copyright of the magazine & design belongs to EarthLines. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form and by any means without written permission from the publishers. EarthLines 2013

ISSN 2049-3088

elcome to the fourth issue of EarthLines which means weve now been publishing the magazine for a year. The idea for EarthLines crystallised in November 2011, and its been pretty full-on ever since. Weve been delighted with the response from readers, as well as from writers in the field of ecoliterature, and others who work tirelessly to draw attention to the continuing disconnection between people and the natural world. Weve been especially grateful for the generosity of those writers and artists whove contributed in one way or another to EarthLines without payment. That generosity will continue to be necessary for a while yet if were to keep the magazine afloat; we continue to produce it without paying ourselves at all, and although we are now covering the print costs of the magazine, there are other expenses and overheads that we struggle to meet. And so we do very much hope that all those of you whose subscriptions are up for renewal with this issue will stick with us, and continue to support our work. When people see a glossy magazine filled with high quality content and a decent handful of well-known names between the covers, theres a tendency to assume that this must be the product of an entire business, with staff, salaries, expenses, maybe a reception with pot plants, and a reasonable stream of income. Thats far from the case at EarthLines, and thats how we like it. We think the fact that we produce it from a working croft in the wilds of the Outer Hebrides brings a peaty, earthy and decidedly gritty flavour to the magazines. Theres certainly a peaty, earthy and gritty flavour to all of our days which I think youll find are rather unusual compared to more traditional magazine publishing teams. There is no typical day on a croft everything we do must blend with the seasons, the day-length, the weather and the needs of the animals. As we go to press, we are in winter. Often we see nature portrayed as sleeping through the cold season. Some parts of nature, maybe. But December is also the month when the rams are with the ewes and Ruffus the boar is visiting the sows. Life looks ahead to spring, even now. And we must always be watching and taking note when we are fretting next April about the arrival of piglets or lambs, we will know who is due early and who late. So even in winter every day begins early, arranged to make best use of the small window of daylight at 58 degrees North. Im usually up by 6am, spending a couple of hours at the computer with a pot of tea, going through my email inbox and packing up any EarthLines or book orders that came in overnight so that theyre ready for David to stamp and take to the daily post bus at 8.30am. A quick flick through Facebook and Twitter, through the various environmental news services we follow, and then post up any items that we think may be of interest to our followers. Moderate and approve any posts on the EarthLines Ning network. Look through and make a decision on new submissions. Delete vast quantities of junk mail. Answer kind and encouraging mail from readers (always welcome!). By this point David is up and about, and its time for the morning feed routine for the animals on the croft. They get their breakfast before us. I feed all the poultry two lots of hens, ducks, and geese and open the door to the polytunnel, while David feeds Edna and Doris, our two sows, and (in winter) the two small flocks of Hebridean and Jacob sheep in their various locations on the croft and the common grazing land. Brighid the cow is fed and let out of her stall to graze a breathtakingly beautiful Kerry heifer, she is learning, as are we, the daily routines that will next year make her our milking cow. Then I head off to the shore to walk the three dogs if theres no work for them that morning (we have two working collies and, well, Frodo the golden retriever). David walks up to the main road (its single-track and comes to a dead end a couple of miles further on, but its a main road to us ) to meet the post bus, which takes our mail to the town of Stornoway from where its shipped off the

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island. Finally its time for breakfast, and then maybe Ill spend a couple more hours at the computer working on EarthLines (typesetting, editing, looking for images, designing the next issue, writing the editorial, soliciting contributions, spreading the word about what were doing ) or my own writing, depending on which deadlines loom largest. During spring, summer and autumn many daylight hours will need to be spent working in the polytunnel and vegetable gardens, but at this time of year theres not so much that can be done with plants. So my winter breaks from the computer are more about shovelling barrowloads of chickenshit than about lettuce and courgettes. All part of the same process, of course. Chances are that David will spend most of the day outside, in pretty much all weathers, working on the croft (fencing, ditching, draining projects, mucking out the soil needs constantly to be cared for), but when forced inside by storms or darkness he makes his contributions to the running of Two Ravens Press and EarthLines, which include the decidedly thankless task of maintaining the company accounts and updating all of our databases. Occasionally he even has an idea about an article or gets to do some poetry editing! At around 3pm its time for the afternoon feeding rounds, before another walk with the dogs. Brighid is let in to her bed and some hay. The pigs are bedded down. The darkness comes on early. So publishing EarthLines, as you can see, is rather a different business from producing your average magazine and it will remain so. Our dedication to keeping the magazine feisty and independent, as well as to crofting and to our own writing projects, isnt going to go away in a hurry. EarthLines to us is more than just a magazine: its a breathing part of our lives, and a wider, grounded cultural groundswell transforming the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. A year ago we could hardly have imagined all the wonderful directions in which EarthLines has moved, but our original focus on writing about place, the land, and the roots of our disconnection from it, remains a key priority. In that context, youll find on the inside front cover of this issue a clear statement of what we stand for: for real and deep connections to the land and to place, for the moral obligations and responsibilities that follow from such deep connections, for developing a sense of community, and ultimately, for facing up to the tough issues were surrounded by and making a stand. Deepening this statement, my article on p 40 explores why place matters in a world that seems dominated by movement and mobility, and then considers the ways in which we can develop a sense of belonging and why its important that we should do so.

No frills at the EarthLines global headquarters: subscribers copies of Issue 3 leave at dawn to catch the morning post bus. Wheelbarrow with fish box installation by poetry editor/ production director, David Knowles; light relief by sheepdogs Nell & Fionn.

And theres the rub: the question of how we choose to live, each one of us, in the face of the crisis that currently faces the planet a crisis very much of our making. In EarthLines we plan to explore a whole range of different responses to that crisis. Were not a movement, and so were not in the business of advocating a single way forward that everyone should follow. We are interested in despair, in hope, in rage, in celebration and in all the intellectual and emotional responses that lie between. Were interested in people who take off alone to the hills, and were interested in those who dig in and focus on building community in towns, cities and villages. Well be following this theme throughout the forthcoming issues of EarthLines, but were especially delighted to have in this issue an article from our friend Rima Staines, who along with her partner Tom Hirons (whose beautiful story The Bear Outside appeared in the first issue of this magazine) came to stay at the EarthLines croft this summer and offered a beautiful musical storytelling performance to friends and neighbours in our barn. Rima, while advocating always a rooted connection with the land, explores the travelling life in her article Wayfaring (p 17). Also tackling that question of how we live now, were excited to have a contribution (p. 33) from Nafeez Ahmed, whose book A Users Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: and How to Save It is a highly recommended, powerful and intellectually rigorous critique of a failed global economic and political system, and an inspiring and practical manifesto for constructive social change. And Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of natural resources and the environment at the University of Arizona, offers us his uncompromising perspective on the likely future of our civilisation (p.22). And elsewhere, and as always, we offer you in this issue of EarthLines a series of beautifully crafted articles, poems and images from a wide variety of writers and artists who continue to celebrate the beauty of the natural world and also, on occasion, to witness and to mourn elements of its passing.

Sharon Blackie is a writer, crofter and former psychologist specialising in narrative psychology, myth- and storytelling. Her first novel was The Long Delirious Burning Blue. In 2006 Sharon and her husband David Knowles founded literary publisher Two Ravens Press. They now live on and work a croft on the far south-western coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. www.reenchantingtheearth.com.

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The Rock | Jennifer Boyle

T he quest for wildness

ortune favours the bold was drummed into me by the severe and raven-like Mr Newbold, our blackgowned Latin master, who stalked back and forth in front of the blackboard when I was a timid fourteen-yearold. Say it again, boy, he barked. Audaces Fortuna iuvat! And what does it mean, exactly? he sneered at the whole class. Youll get good luck if you take risks, sir, we ventured in ragged unison. We walked right into his trap. No! he thundered. Imbecile boys! Do you never listen to a word I say? He was right, of course; we hadnt been listening properly for days because the hot, stuffy classroom was a prison that summer to boys who longed for freedom and the fresh air; because Virgils epic poem of the Trojan war, Aeneid, magnificent though it unquestionably is, was over our heads and, it seemed to us acne-picking youths of more than fifty years ago, it was ineluctably boring. The words were actually shouted as an ill-timed threat by Turnus in Book X just before he is utterly destroyed by Aeneas Trojans, and what he meant to convey was that Fortuna, the Roman Goddess of luck, was on his side that day that Fortuna will favour his boldness. As poor old Turnus discovered, she was far less impressed by those who were foolhardy.

by J ohn L ister -K aye

Later on I came to enjoy Latin and have never regretted a classical education. The Aeneid and its Greek counterpart, Homers Iliad, postulated the enticing notion that life was one long adventure from beginning to end, that it was what you make of it, that if you throw yourself into it and take calculated risks, fortune will repay the effort. At fourteen I had no idea that I was going to be a naturalist. In the post-war era natural history was not seen to be a career. It was the amateur pursuit of leisured gents who collected butterflies and birds eggs and botanical ladies in tweed skirts and excellent naturalists they often were, becoming the founding parents of the conservation movement. It is to their dedicated studies that we owe so many of the wildlife trusts and societies that make up the increasingly popular and influential corpus of nature conservation today. But I knew none of this. I only knew that somewhere out there, out in the much wilder English countryside of the 1950s, before the pre-industrial agricultural revolution the agrichemical war that would purge our countryside and force anything interesting to fail or to retreat to a nature reserve there was a private, personal grail without a name. To find it I would need all the luck and boldness I could muster. Only later, much later, did I come to understand that that grail

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was something more than worthy of the name, more than a place or a bird or a plant or badger or a butterfly, it was an elusive and mercurial but priceless quality called Wildness. What is wild? And what do we really mean when we use that word in the context of nature and the outdoors? Its one of those conceptual abstracts that have no clearly definable origins; one of the several elemental conditions that have evolved with us over the hundred thousand years or so that H. sapiens has been steadily sloughing away from the rest of the natural world; words that stem from every aspect of life and the land itself, and have just always been a part of our daily lives. Wild the notion, wild the unruly concept has always been with us, dogging our heels ever since we were truly wild ourselves. Wild the word arrived in Britain with the language of invading Germanic tribes in the 5th Century: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes; and its recent derivative etymology is entirely clear: wilde in Old English and Germanic. Its a word that perpetually echoes our origins and has stuck with us all the way on our long journey from the primeval forest. But there is much more to it than that much, much more. It is a word with a thousand faces: moods, feelings, emotions, impulses, dreams, hopes, lusts, longings and fears. It can be ferocious and utterly unforgiving or tender and loving. It is birth and death; wild is the godless alpha and omega of the natural world. Wild shouts from the mountain tops, trailing great joy and great dread in its wake. Wild is the power and the glory. Wild is the original them and us. Its the adjective that has mapped our wrench away from natures grip, and the word we fall back on when something or someone doesnt quite fit the manageable and domesticated, man-separatedfrom-nature mould. Wild man, wild-eyed, gone wild, run wild, wild and woolly, bewildered and so on. When we use it to label ourselves we seem to be looking backwards to a lost age and condition we are now embarrassed about. When we use it as a noun it leaves us firmly behind: the wild and the wilds outlandish places where humans venture at their peril. Land going wild is land no longer useful to us; again, it seems to be going backwards, away from human values and influence. We couple it up with anything out there we cant control: wildlife, wildcat, wild boar, wild fire, wildness, and the ultimate, exquisite refinement wilderness. Back in the Massachusetts woods of 1851, when penning his famous essay Walking, Henry David Thoreau famously claimed the derivation of wild was the past participle of the verb to will: willd, meaning self-willed, free acting and free thinking a wild horse is a willed or self-willed horse, one that has never been tamed or taught to submit its will to the will of another, and so with a man. To me this seems like etymological wishful thinking a bit too free-willed as though he was looking for a justification for his own mind set. Thoreau was a man obsessed with wildness: building his cabin in the forest beside Walden Pond and living as simply as possible, growing his few vegetables and harvesting wild fruits and game. Wild was a condition he fervently sought of himself: Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not

tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. He admits Walden was a bold experiment; he was playing the native, the primitif, wishing himself to be self-willed and free thinking, seeing if living wild going back to nature could work. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant. A hundred and fifty years later it is hard not to concede that it was a remarkable success, if not in quite the way he envisaged. For Thoreau the whole experience of nature was self-evidently sublime. His cogent, percipient, seminal writings are now celebrated as the founding literature of the wilderness preservation movement in the Western world. Yet for all his heady philosophising about wild nature, his experiment at Walden was but a brief twenty-six-month interlude little more than a mile from a town. In the end he had to give it up and return to manufacturing pencils in Concord. So where do we stand in the 21st century? What have we done to wild the adjective and wild the concept? What have we done with the noun that has so loyally dogged our heels all the way from the woolly mammoth and the cave bear; what have we done to the wilds themselves? Where have we parked the thing called wilderness in our complicated, cluttered brains? The answers are a sorry testament to the inspirational writings of Thoreau and Emerson, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Gilbert White, Barry Lopez, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder and now, most recently, Jay Griffiths, as well as the many other great philosophers, poets and lyricists of the wilderness movement. For the moment at least, we have lost the plot. Wild is where we all came from and to where, ultimately, we will all return. Nature is far bigger than science and technology, than religious zeal, than economic forces and all the politicians ever spawned; it is infinitely bigger than democracy and people power and, despite our most arrogant anthropocentric protestations, it utterly dwarfs and swamps the creative genius of the human brain. Just as, when we die, our nutrients return to the earth that spawned us, so we have not one twitch of control over the cosmos the great natural workings of our planet and its solar system. One hefty meteorite colliding with the Earth or a major aberration on the surface of the sun or even an extreme volcanic event erupting from our own liquid core could wipe out every one of us, like the dinosaurs, in a matter of weeks. However devastating the ecological crisis we may bring about by our own folly and greed; however many species we may drive into extinction in pursuit of our own amusement and comfort, we can never hope to control our climate or the many other natural forces that govern our lives. We are utterly powerless before the might of nature, so convincingly demonstrated by volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunami, hurricanes, typhoons, twisters, droughts and floods, encroaching deserts and rising sea levels, all of which are but tiny missed notes in the grand opera of global and cosmic forces. If we screw up altogether, we perish; but the planet goes on forever. Thoreau is persistently misquoted. He did not say in wilderness is the future of the world. What he did say was

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in wildness is the future of the world. There is an important difference. Wilderness we understand, or at least we think we do it is a place. Deserts are wilderness, as are great oceans, vast expanses of tundra or ice, mountain ranges, virgin forests and coral reefs almost anywhere that human activities are marginalised by nature and its tough for people to make a living. In Western culture over the past hundred and fifty years we have attempted to preserve some wilderness. The USA has designated wilderness areas by statute with the Wilderness Act of 1964. The World Conservation Union has an official definition for wilderness: A large area of unmodified or slightly modified land, and/or sea, retaining its natural character and influence, without permanent or significant habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural condition. (Note the contradiction: retaining its natural character and influencewhich ismanaged My own definition of wilderness would specifically deny any hint of management at all.) And at the beginning of the twenty-first century almost all international conservation authorities recognise wilderness as an official term for just about anywhere that the forces of nature have primacy. But these are ring-fenced areas; they are quantities, and thats not what Thoreau meant at all. Thoreaus famous wildness is a quality the Ur-wildness in our heads. He was urging mankind to think wild, to remember our origins and to respect the forces of nature that spawned us, not reject them as something to be endlessly conquered and exploited: I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness. In the new and exciting American world of apparently unlimited horizons and of daily expanding industrial power and mobility, most people thought he was a head case, and he didnt think much of them either: The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation. It wasnt until long after his death that the Western world on both sides of the Atlantic began

to see some wisdom in his writings. But the fact is that Thoreaus famous wildness quote was a cry in the wilderness and in the wilderness it has remained. I came upon wildness as a seven-year-old, suddenly and unexpectedly, at a fox earth so redolent with fresh scent that I started back, sure that a fierce animal of whose identity I had no idea, was about to pounce and devour me. It was both thrilling and frightening; but its inherent dangers were insufficient to ward me off and its mysteries so alluring that I was certain to return. It was also private and personal, a secret all my own. I returned many times, only slowly learning what lived and moved within this murky pungence. It became a private escape then and it is yet. Back then the countryside of my childhood was only marginally wilder than today, by which I mean that although agriculture had not become chemicalised and industrialised, it was still a man-shaped and manipulated landscape of planted woods and fields growing crops and grazing livestock. It was a pastoral countryside of English villages still largely dependent upon its mosaic of small farms for the livelihoods of whole rural communities. Milk came from the next door farms dairy still warm and unpasteurised in enamel urns, and cabbages, potatoes and turnips were hand lifted from the fields and sold door to door by a man with a horse and cart. Quaint and wholesome though that now sounds, it didnt mean that the countryside was necessarily any wilder than it is now. It was just being used in different, less intensive ways and consequently supported much more wildlife. Young men went ferreting and long-netting for rabbits in the summer evenings; boys went birds-nesting and proudly showed off their egg collections; when the local fox hunt came through whole villages turned out for an important social event; otter hunting, badger digging and hare coursing were commonplace; grim-jawed gamekeepers in tweeds and gaiters ruled the woods and copses everything that wasnt a game species was unprotected and liable to be shot as vermin. Every stream, pond, lake and river was fished by all boys and men of all ages. Country parks and nature reserves scarcely existed. The RSPB, now with well over a million members, was a tiny bird club. There was only one government conservation agency the formative Nature Conservancy and if there were any protected species, no one in the countryside of my childhood had any idea what they were. It was a different world; none of us could have foreseen how quickly it would all change. It felt benign and friendly and intimate in a villagey, Cider with Rosie sort of way, but it was not wild. There was no overt sense of the wild wood, nor of any landscape untrammelled by the hand of man. To find that elusive quality one would have had to go to the highest mountain tops or the remotest offshore island and, with one or two notable exceptions, that has been more or less

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the case since the Romans abandoned Britain in 407 AD. Englands green and pleasant land had been substantially claimed, conquered, cleared, ploughed and tamed many centuries before my boyhood adventures took flight at the end of World War II. Even the great forests of antiquity preserved by medieval kings and nobles as royal hunting parks the New Forest, The Forest of Dean, Savernake, Wyre, Thetford Chase, Sherwood, Cannock Chase, Epping Forest and several others had all been harvested, re-planted, coppiced, grazed, undergrowth burned for hunting, managed for tanbark, cut over for charcoal and rootled over by domestic pigs for pannage for more than a dozen feudal centuries. Those forests housed, sheltered and fed a thousand years of squires, yeomen, farmers, carters, labourers, peasants, trappers, poachers, woodsmen, charcoal burners, huntsmen, cottars, vagrants, outlaws, neer-do-wells, vagabonds and gypsies. Even here in the far north of Scotland the once widespread climax forest of the Highlands the Great Wood of Caledon as it has been evocatively dubbed was being similarly exploited. Slowly but surely it was cleared and fragmented, and, leaving only a few precious remnants, most of its range was finally felled, grazed or burned out of existence to meet the ever-expanding needs of an exploding population of Highlanders. The immediate victims of this gradual but systematic deforestation were the wild ox, reindeer, wild boar, the lynx, brown bears, wolves, the beaver, the polecat, the capercaillie, the red kite, the sea eagle, the osprey and, to within a whisker of their twitching noses, the wildcat and the pine marten. The eventual victims, so often unlamented, were the wildflowers, the saprophytic decaying fungi, the specialised pine forest birds such as the Scottish crossbill and the crested tit, the unsung hordes of invertebrates, the vital and intricate mycorrhizal root associations, the humic microbes, and, finally, the precious forest soils themselves. No, the wildwoods of Britain were certainly not wilderness. So what was this wild, this sidestep away from the bustling world of man I located and escaped to as a boy? Where can you find this elusive, evocative, almost mystical, self-willed, free-acting, free-thinking, not tamed or domesticated quality that hit me full face as I knelt to explore the dark entrance of that fox earth and which has haunted me all my life? It would take me more than thirty years and a lot of boldness finally to understand what it really was. Annie Dillard describes it as a peculiar tilt of the will. There we go again the will. Wildness exists in us all, but we need the will to locate it and put it to work. The tilt is that particular angling of reason and perception away from the accepted forces of materialism, domestication and tameness that have so divorced us from nature and our origins. In her striking existentialist essay Living like Weasels (1982), Annie Dillard admits: I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good

place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. Im with Annie I believe that you have to be bold, to want to locate wildness, both within yourself and out there, in order to know it and to understand it. She continues: from a wild animal I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. And Im with John Muir, who insists: Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of wilderness. It is still out there, and attainable for us all if we are bold, if we grip opportunities with both hands, if we are determined to seek it out and if we are blessed with even the slightest flicker of good fortune. In my time I have been exceptionally lucky to be able to be a naturalist and a nature writer for over forty years. I found my grail and my most earnest wish is that it will still be there for my grandchildren and for you. And when you do locate it you will know for certain that the gods have smiled. r

SIR JOHN LISTERKAYE is one of Scotlands bestknown naturalists and conservationists. He was a Times columnist and is the author of eight books on nature and wildlife. His bestselling non-fiction Song of the Rolling Earth was published in 2003, and its sequel Natures Child in 2004. His latest book, At the Waters Edge, was published in 2010. He was the first Chairman of Scottish Natural Heritage for the Highlands & Islands, President of the Scottish Wildlife Trust and Chairman of the governments Environmental Training Organisation; he is also a Vice President of RSPB. In 1986 he won the World Wilderness Foundations Gold award for environmental education; he has received honorary doctorates from St Andrews and Stirling Universities and in 2003 he was awarded an OBE for services to nature conservation. He has lectured on wildlife and conservation on three continents; has led exciting expeditions to wilderness areas like the Kalahari and Namib Deserts, the Atlas mountains, the Amazon basin, the Galapagos and Svalbard to follow the polar bear migration across the pack ice of the Barents Sea. In the winter of 2008-9 he undertook a four month, 8,000 mile Land Rover expedition up Africas Great Rift Valley to research a new book. He lives at Aigas, near Beauly, where he is director of the internationally acclaimed Aigas Field Centre, which he founded in 1970, and where he is currently running a European beaver demonstration project.

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November at Balmedie
November afternoon in the kind of northeast light which seems a fusion of fine dust and sun, like the soft glow at the edges of fire smoke. Winter again and its as if it never was anything else. Its still early, but the suns already low when I park at the Balmedie car park and begin to walk up the boardwalk through the high dunes, edging along the narrow strip of sandbar by the line of halfsubmerged tank traps, trying to keep my feet dry. Out beyond me on the hard flats of sand, a couple of dog-walkers, small from this distance, throw miniature sticks for miniature dogs here, the sky dwarfs us all. Its mild for November and almost two years exactly since the beginning of snow that lasted until spring. Away from the inlet, I turn to walk north between dune and sea on the long stretch of beach that leads to Newburgh and Collieston, to the estuary of the Ythan and beyond to Fraserborough and Peterhead. With nothing but sea and sand and sky, there might be nowhere, anywhere, that could feel as peaceful, or remote. Ive driven here from the city eight miles which seem fewer, looped between town and country in interminable roundabouts, industrial estates and conference centres interspersed by scrubby countryside and small groups of houses, all lessened in their impact somehow by their background line of sea. Far out towards the horizon, a dozen oil supply vessels head to open ocean, their outlines indistinct through this gilded mist which transforms heavy maritime engineering into a spectral Armada of high-sailed galleons and brigantines. This beach, with its atmosphere of solitude, is a place to come to contemplate or to walk in the air in the time between finishing one piece of work and beginning another. Its where you come to see who might be here feeding or passing, a single gull overhead, the few oystercatchers who rise peeping at human approach, flying in brisk formation for a short distance before they settle again to their shoreline pickings. Its where you come to protest, to add your own small voice to whatever

E sther W oolfson

noise there is and in that, to succeed or fail. Right here might be the concentrated point where every question and paradox facing us in our dealings with the world are centred, and it feels as if this sunlit afternoon beach should be crowded with penseurs, with people puzzling over the big questions of how we live on earth but its not; theres only me, trying to reconcile the word remote with the proximity to a city, wondering if remote is more concept than description, if Gary Snyders assertion is correct that, if you are of clear heart and open mind, you can experience wilderness anywhere on earth. I try to find something that might tell me what century Im in, but only the scatter of debris on the shoreline might give a hint in a twisted rope of plastic. Apart from that theres nothing, only crystalline shallows and the insistent rush of low and even breakers. Walking here this afternoon makes me question the words we use to describe our relationships to place. I think of the word city, and the values we assign according to ideas that seem often to rank most highly, the furthest from where we are ourselves. We have created, from the idea of city, an exclusion zone: one in which the natural world no longer exists in a form to be respected. And we have allied it to the notion that if were urban, the roots and promise of our mental wellbeing lie elsewhere, not where we are. This is a set of beliefs which equates the desirable with the supra-moral, which places the rare above the quotidian. Im replaying all the thoughts Ive had over the past months while Ive been writing about urban nature, wondering when well see that what is close is as precious as what is far, that numerous is not the same as worthless, that when we tell children, or anyone, that the best is somewhere else, the danger is that we close their eyes to what surrounds them. Time spent here feels comparable to time spent on beaches far from centres of population, in the Western Isles perhaps, on any great and quiet shore; this one is no less worthy, wild or solitary than they, undiminished in beauty by

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its situation, its proximity to a city. On hot days the few that there are in the northeast summer you could be in deep desert among the dunes, playing Freya Stark or Gertrude Bell, trudging heroically through the sands of Arabia. Once, you could have been among 4,000 years of blowing history, nothing but sandscapes sculpted by the wind. I walk until the sun is almost gone. Today there are 7 hours and 36 minutes of daylight, but before I turn back, I march up one of the steep divides through the sand to look over the fields and farms and the scatterings of houses to the north. I want to see the latest changes to the view but its like a palimpsest now, history almost erased, only the memory of wildness and time; moving, living sand sheets have been flattened, grown over with livid, chemical grass. Ive been watching here since the beginning, since the day, six or so years ago, when a Site of Special Scientific Interest still seemed inviolable, when the first mutterings of the plans to build a golf course, holiday homes, a hotel over it seemed so outlandish and impossible that I believed that what has happened, never could. All there is to be seen today is another wide and deadened expanse of flattened sand, more lines of wooden fencing driven in rows along the dunes, another digger destroying. Giant-stepping fast down the steep slopes of sand, I turn back south where, ahead of me, the city seems poised on the edge of dusk, about to change to a city of chill and darkness from the glow of late afternoon. In the shallows, four sanderlings, back from their breeding grounds in the high Arctic and Siberia, run and dart: small, neat birds, white and grey in their winter plumage. In Under the Sea Wall Rachel Carson writes of them running with a twinkle of black feet. Audubon, a man as devoted to killing as to illustrating, suggested helpfully: the sportsman may occasionally hit six or seven at a shot I follow them across the sand to see if theyve left any of the footprints that display so well the long processes of evolution. Theyve lost their back toes because running shorebirds dont need them, but there are no three-toed indentations the sands probably too compacted and the birds too light. Today is windless but often, in that single moment of turning south towards the city, you walk into a grating storm of sand so fine that it whips like blown chiffon against your face, speeds past you in a low and veiled white wind. Then, nowhere

could seem so strange and liminal, the lights of a city blinking through a sandstorm. This is a coast where you may put your faith in wind and sand. In 1413, Forvie village a few miles north, was overwhelmed and buried by nine days of blowing sand. William Langewiesche writes in Sahara Unveiled of dunes drifting for decades before turning to consume houses and whole villages. Dunes can cover greens and tees and bunkers, fill holiday homes, hotels, equestrian centres, accommodation blocks, leaving only giant feet standing in the sand. I head back towards the boardwalk, the beach now completely empty behind me. In an inlet, a crow is bathing, dipping and flapping in a small salt pool. Above the trees a buzzard turns gracefully in flight. Soon, Ill drive back towards Aberdeen, the sea at my left always seeming to soften the delineations, not only between places but between ways of thinking, wild, as nothing else is wild. The sky will be darkening in long streaks of navy and turquoise, the lights of ships about to come on beyond the margins of Donmouth. Over the city, bands and parties and whole societies of starlings will be sweeping in nets across the evening sky. Pigeons will be settling in their roosts behind the anti-pigeon wires on the Zoology building at the university. The trees of Seton and Balgownie will be dense black against the last flash of lambent azure sky but now, as I turn to look at the sea, it seems a moment of transition, as if this place turns from me, as if, unobserved, it will take itself back, quietly, into the promise of ice and darkness and winter night. r

esther woolfson is author of Piano Angel, a novel published by Two Ravens Press, and Corvusa Life with Birds (Granta). She has been Artist in Residence at the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability at Aberdeen University and, as Writer-in-Residence at Kielder, recently spent time in the unique environment of Kielder Forest, an account of which will be published in 2013. Her interests are in the relationship between the human and natural worlds and the natural life of urban spaces. Her latest book Field Notes From a Hidden City will be published by Granta in February 2013. www.estherwoolfson.com

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B O O K M ARK
T he
ohn Baker was a man obsessed. For ten years he pursued the peregrine falcons that overwintered on his stretch of the Essex coast. Each winter morning he would rise early, get on his bicycle, and locate them over the mudflats and rivervalleys near his home, finding them through the clouds of panicking birds on the horizon. This was the era of the silent spring, when many birds of prey seemed to be on the brink of extinction, and this added urgency to his quest; it felt to him that these were the last days of the peregrine, and that he was capturing something that was about to be lost forever. Bakers obsession extended to the writing of his book; every sentence has been chipped away at, until it glitters like cut crystal. He takes an unexceptional landscape, and renders it numinous through the intensity of his prose. Superficially, every day is much the same the birds appear and disappear, circle, roost, hunt, kill and yet by creating almost a new language of particularity, he finds the uniqueness in every moment. The Peregrine was my touchstone for when I chose to write my first book about the time in my life when, ostensibly, by far the least happened, though I would not dare to ape his style. I had to find my own way of seeing, and my own voice, as Baker had found his. At the time The Peregrine was first published, I was still a boy, a boy whose preoccupation was spending every spare moment watching the birds on the marshes, or following badger trails through the woods. Until that point most of my reading about nature had been confined to field guides, and it was a revelation to me to find a book that was not an assemblage of facts and figures, but an intensely personal account of pure day-to-day experience, mediated through crystalline prose. It was the first book I had found that spoke to my own relationship with nature, in a landscape that was so close to that of my own stamping-grounds. He took the familiar, and made it exotic through the clarity of his gaze. There have been doubts cast on the veracity of Bakers account; he does seem to have an awful lot of extraordinary encounters. But this is a product of the way he chose to shape his book, for he has taken ten years of notes and presented them as if they were the record of a single season. If you are rendering down the highlights of many years of close observation into a single short book, it is hard not to appear preternaturally lucky. Baker broke new ground in the way that we write about nature. While telling us next to nothing about his life as anything other than a watcher of peregrines, he places the observer at the heart of the story. All narrative nature writing since owes some kind of a debt to him.

by Neil Ansell P eregrine , J. A. B aker

There is currently a huge revival of interest in nature writing, and out of this upsurge have come some fabulous books. And yet I cannot help but fear for the future direction that the genre may be slowly drifting towards. The books I read as a young man books like Bakers The Peregrine and the many other wonderful books that he led me to felt like the natural end-product of years of dedication, even obsession. It should not really matter, if the writing is fine and the authors passion for their subject shines through, but with some more recent books I cannot escape a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I am reading about journeys taken, things seen, thoughts thought, in the first instance because the author had a book deal. It stems from the way that books are bought and sold. Unlike the situation with fiction, non-fiction books are generally commissioned before they are written. You come up with an idea for a book, a theme, and having sold the idea to a publisher you go about exploring that theme, following the pattern set within your book proposal. Arguably, it is this process that has caused travel writing to become degraded as a genre. No longer would people travel for travels sake, and then shape their memories into the form of a book; rather, they would come up with a gimmick that would make their journey a novelty, and sell that. It seems back-to-front to me; like proposing a memoir of life as a fireman, selling it, and then going and getting a job as a fireman. It is worth looking back at earlier classics of nature writing, like Bakers The Peregrine, and asking what it is about them that makes them so special. For me, the answer is authenticity; these are books shaped by life, rather than a record of life experiences being undertaken for the principal purpose of being written about. r The Peregrine, by JA Baker, is available in a new edition (2011) from Collins, ISBN 978-0007395903

Neil Ansell is the author of Deep Country; Five Years in the Welsh Hills, published by Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) in 201 1. His new book, Deer Island, will be published by Little Toller Books this spring. He currently lives in Brighton with his two daughters.

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An

i n t e rv i e w w i t h

robert Macfarlane

ith his three highly acclaimed and award-winning books, Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane has rapidly become one of the UKs most influential writers about landscape and the natural world, and one of a group of British writers who have inspired a new critical and popular interest in the nature writing tradition. We were delighted when he agreed to take the time to talk to us about his own work in the context of that tradition. Sharon Blackie: It has always seemed to me that British nature writing (much more so than the American equivalent, say) is a very gentlemanly tradition. And yet of course there are a few wonderful exceptions whose work youve championed Nan Shepherd, Jacquetta Hawkes as well as Kathleen Jamie and the inimitable Jay Griffiths. Is this your impression? Robert Macfarlane: Male, maybe, rather than gentlemanly But yes, this is broadly true, especially in comparison with the North American tradition (Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit etc.). Though the discrepancy here is perhaps not as stark as you suggest. To the names you mention I might add (among living writers) Pauline Stainer, Esther Woolfson, Sara Maitland, Linda Cracknell, Melanie Challenger, as well as a new novelist called Melissa Harrison (see her forthcoming Clay), and Helen Macdonald

austringer, ornithologist, historian of science, poet, essayist and memoirist whose Shalers Fish (Etruscan Press) is one of the best volumes of modern poetry I know, and whose forthcoming H Is For Hawk will, among its other achievements, sharpen and focus questions of gender and (writing about) nature. Turning to other tones and forms, I think also of such influential figures as Fay Godwin and Marion Shoard, or (casting back) Octavia Hill. SB: Do you think there are any interesting or significant differences in the ways in which women approach the natural world and writing about it, compared to men? RM: Nan Shepherd might help here, in terms of clarifying how a charismatically masculine genre (mountaineering writing) can be brilliantly revised though I am unconvinced that her revisions are optimally understood in terms of gender. As I note in my introductory essay to the reissue of The Living Mountain: Most works of mountaineering literature have been written by men, and most male mountaineers are focussed on the summit: a mountain expedition being qualified by the success or failure of ascent. But to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain, nor is a narrative of siege and assault the only way to write about one. Shepherds book is best

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thought of, perhaps, not as a work of mountaineering literature but one of mountain literature. Early on, she confesses that as a young woman she had been prone to a lust for the tang of height, and had approached the Cairngorms egocentrically, apprising them for their effect upon me. She made always for the summits. The Living Mountain relates how, over time, she learnt to go into the hills aimlessly, merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him. Circumambulation has replaced summit-fever; plateau has substituted for peak. SB: I run the risk of over-simplifying, but in the contemporary UK nature writing tradition we seem to specialise in writing about wildlife more than place. And when we do now write about place (perhaps in contrast to older works) it is very often about passing through a place especially walking something arguably close to travel writing rather than about rootedness in a place. Do you agree that were lacking much new writing about this sense of place (except maybe in fiction) and if so, what do you think the contributing factors are? RM: Im glad you asked this, as I had noticed EarthLines editorial stance on these matters emerging in earlier issues, and had started to formulate my disagreements with it. On the question of lack: no, is the answer. To my mind the most important writer at work in the broad field of topographics/ landscape/ nature writing is Tim Robinson, the unclassifiable mathematician-cartographer-deep topo-grapher-cultural historian-philosopher, whose chronic and vast studies of what he calls the ABC of earth wonders (the Aran Islands, the Burren, Connemara), among his many other extraordinary books, are profound explorations of the multiple traces and difficulties of rootedness. John McGaherns magnificent late novel, That They May Face The Rising Sun, searches out the benefits and the costs of rootedness as contrasted with mobility. Adam Thorpes brilliant Ulverton, twenty years old next year, does likewise. Nan Shepherds The Living Mountain was walked into being, and although it is about a single area, that area is enormous and, in Shepherds account of it, eventually unfathomable (it cannot be known fully). W G Sebalds The Rings of Saturn, surely one of the major literary works of the past twenty years, is about the extreme volatility of place, though it proves unable entirely to dispose with the category. Roger Deakin was a superb annotator of both dwelling (in the Suffolk farmhouse and meadows where he spent forty years) and travelling (Wildwood ranges across many countries and cultures, though there could hardly be a book more concerned with roots); Richard Mabey also. SB: And yet its not at all a criticism, merely an observation, but your own books seem to me to fall very much into this category Im describing, a focus on passing through places rather than rootedness in place. Nevertheless, youve quoted Kavanagh on parochialism: To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetimes experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. And youve written about the beautiful Gaelic concept of duchthas, which occupies the ground somewhere between place

of ones birth and heredity, spirit or blood. But I see little of those concepts reflected in your own work. RM: Well, I think I have shifted, over the past decade or so, a considerable distance from Kavanagh. The Old Ways is explicitly and continuously about landscape as a dynamically shaping experience, constantly making and unmaking the subject, rather than as either a static back-cloth to existence, or a retreat-space in which shelter from the contemporary might be taken, or as a warm bath run to the brim with nostalgia. Its for these reasons that the book keeps on the move because it is about motion, and about mobility and displacement as constituent conditions of modernity, though also (and I hope carefully) about what might still valuably be learned from those who know their places intimately, plumbing depth as well as gauging width. Its chief character, as it were, is Edward Thomas, who represents the convergence of the books many paths, and whose life I re-tell in the penultimate chapter as a kind of bio-geography. I write specifically about Thomass doublelonging for travel and rest, movement and settlement, and about how the tree (immovable) and the bird (migrant) are among the two most distinctive presences in his writings, and the root (delving downwards) and the step (moving onwards) its two chief metaphors for our relations with the world. It is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires, Thomas wrote in 1909 though it might have been 2009 the one for going on and on over the earth, the other that would settle for ever in one place, as in a grave and have nothing to do with change. These incompatible desires also animate brilliant recent work in contemporary anthropology (Tim Ingold), cultural geography (Hayden Lorimer, John Wylie, Caitlin de Silvey), literary criticism (John Kerrigan) and cultural history (Patrick Wright, Patrick Keiller), all of which is, to my mind rightly, sceptical of holding hard to any ideal of dwelling in a context of late-modernity, and much of which finds the basis for an updated environmental ethics not in dwelling but in habitation. SB: Ive heard arguments that nature writing (sorry for the quotes; I find the term difficult but cant find one I like any better! ecoliterature can be a bit stodgy) is at a minimum simply irrelevant in an age of ecological crisis. That its little more than nostalgia for an old way of life thats on its way out. That it needs to be more radical. Whats your perspective on that? Are we all just fiddling while Rome burns? RM: No. Literature and art can be powerful catalysts of change and change is surely needed. But the outcomes of art do not reduce to premeditated deliverables, and are necessarily hard to articulate or to measure. I know that my outlook and behaviour have been shaped in many ways by the literature I have read, though I would find it hard to list those ways and their origins on the page. There are plenty of means by which nature writing (ugh) or ecoliterature (ugh-ugh) can fail: description can lapse into the gathering of lustrous particulars; argument can harden into the hopelessly hortatory, etc. But the quickest

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way to bring about its failure is to task it in advance with too great a responsibility. SB: Im interested in your thoughts about the future of British nature writing. In a 2003 Guardian article you spoke about a British nature writing renaissance. You also said in a 2004 online interview that some of the most interesting and exciting inventiveness is going on in this genre. Has it lived up to its promise? Are there are recent books/ emerging writers that/ who you especially admire? What if anything do you think is still lacking in the genre or in what ways do you think it might usefully develop? RM: Well, I still see non-fiction, whatever that is (and far beyond the perimeter of nature writing, whatever that is), as being at least as tonally creative and formally experimental as fiction. Far from being shackled into immobility by its relation to fact, non-fiction today seems to me startlingly innovative. Look at the essays of John Jeremiah Sullivan, Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, David Foster Wallace or Geoff Dyer, for example. Or the reportage of Katherine Boo, John McPhee or William T. Vollmann, or the travelogues of William Dalrymple or Iain Sinclair: all intricately patterned and structurally versatile. Or, of course, J. A. Bakers The Peregrine and Shepherds The Living Mountain, about which I have said more than enough elsewhere. I have learned much myself as a writer at the levels of the image, sentence and chapter from the techniques of novelists and shortstoryists, as well as lyric poets (Peter Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, Pauline Stainer), but find myself increasingly looking to non-fiction for formal inspiration and adventure. To answer your question more directly I no longer think of nature writing, really, and certainly not of it as a genre. As soon as a form (or set of preoccupations or hopes or anxieties, which condense as literature), is imagined as a genre, it is dead in the water or rapidly deliquesces to kitsch. As to recent books or emerging writers, well Ive named plenty of names already, so Ill restrict myself to two more: Caspar Hendersons recent The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a marvellously inventive, witty and ethically serious compendium-grimoire-spell book-dream vision, whose many virtues I can neither evoke nor exhaust here. And M John Harrison, best known I guess as one of the restless fathers of modern sci-fi, and surely among the most brilliant writers at work today. To read his Light, or Empty Space, or Climbers, or is to find a novelist doing what fiction morally must: using its form to carry out the kinds of thinking and exploration that would be possible in no other form. His subjects are loneliness, beauty, modernity, loss, estrangement, space, intimacy: he is drastically frighteningly insightful about aspects of the ways we relate to one another and to the worlds surfaces, colours and places. SB: Im always delighted to see you mention Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian among your favourite books. (As an aside, reading The Crossing in McCarthys Border Trilogy was largely responsible for the abruptness of our move to Lewis from

the mainland three years ago but thats a long story!) What is it that you admire about McCarthy? Blood Meridian is often dismissed as mindlessly violent (largely I suspect by people who either havent read it properly, or who have a very strange notion of human nature ) What do you see in that book, and maybe in McCarthys work in general, that we can learn from? RM: Aha! Thank you. And I am always pleased to meet another McCarthyite (not that we are an exclusive club). And I do want to hear that long story of yours one day! The mindless violence objection is, as you suggest, mindless. The optical democracy of the novels narrative, which equalises all signs and happenings throughout its course, is as mindful a decision as could be imagined in literary terms. One of the consequences of that technical choice is the enactment (born out by the epigraph and the epilogue, that together pincer the novels body) of the extreme difficulty of successfully managing moral choice, either over the course of an individuals lifetime or over the course of the history of a species. But I find this an ethical challenge rather than a surrender. The Road Blood Meridians ashgrey, burnt-out, eye-dimmed sibling and opposite is also, of course, no aimless revelry in the bleak and calamitous, but rather uses the counter-factual mode both to appal and to rally: as activist a text as one could wish for, but devoid of any hint of agitprop. SB: Youve talked about Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, and The Old Ways as a kind of trilogy. Whats next? RM: A book called Underland, about subterranea, underworlds, claustrophilia, burial, limestone and the baroque. A book of essays, some new and still to be written, some already published (including the long introduction to The Living Mountain, and The Counter-Desecration Phrasebook, an essay on which I know you have touched in the past). A monograph study of Anglo-American writing about landscape, nature and optics from Emerson in 1836 (the floating transparent eyeball) to McCarthys The Road in 2006 (the father glassing the broken terrain ahead with his binoculars). This past year Ive also thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with jazz musicians, artists, sculptors, and photographers, so Ill wait to see what other collaborative projects emerge. I also plan to become further involved with various policy reforms in the fields of access and conservation. r

Robert Macfarlane won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his first book, Mountains of the Mind (2003). His second, The Wild Places (2007), was similarly celebrated, winning three prizes and being shortlisted for six more. Both books were adapted for television by the BBC. The Old Ways was published in 2012. Robert is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

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Writin g O n All Fours

S usan R ichardson

Whos Afraid? | Pat Gregory

d always shied away from writing a poem inspired by a dream, believing the resulting piece would be too subjective and selfregarding, with little value or relevance beyond the subliminal gnarls and night-time tangles of the poets mind. However, about eight years ago, prompted no doubt by reading numerous narratives of polar exploration as I worked on my first collection of poetry, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, I had a sequence of dreams featuring that most iconic of polar creatures, the Emperor penguin. In one dream, I received an unsolicited Emperor penguin delivery he was being shoved and squeezed through my letterbox until he landed with a reverberating thump on the tiled hall floor. In another, I was struggling to heave a sickly penguin into an enormous cardboard box, in which I planned, by some means, to lug him to the vet. And in the most surreal and visceral dream of all, I was metamorphosing, feather by feather, flipper by flipper, into an Emperor penguin myself. I tried uncommonly hard to avoid writing about this bizarre transformation, but after the dream had recurred five times in as many weeks, I finally shunted my squeamishness at dream-prompted poems to one side and started scribbling. As I wrote, I pondered on the many images of penguins that exist in popular culture, as well as on our persistent commodification and Disneyfication of animals. As the poem evolved, too, the human-to-penguin metamorphosis

became a metaphor for other, more significant transformations that of ice from solid to liquid, for example, and that of the wider polar landscape from pristine to acutely polluted. Though I hope I succeeded in giving this poem a broader context than the merely personal, it remains the only dream-triggered poem Ive written. The theme of human-to-animal metamorphosis has, however, been an abiding interest ever since. When I was doing research for, and starting to write, the poems of my second collection, Where the Air is Rarefied, a collaboration with printmaker Pat Gregory on the theme of North, I spent many an indulgent day reading Inuit folktales. These tales are brimful of shapeshifting episodes young girls change into ravens and ptarmigan; a neglected, yet resourceful, grandmother converts her vagina into a sledge so that she can go off and hunt her own food; women marry polar bears, birth half-human cubs, then begin to manifest polar bear attributes themselves. In one creation tale, variations of which are found in both Arctic Canada and Greenland, a girl who ultimately becomes Goddess of the Sea has her fingers and thumbs chopped off by her father. Her amputated digits transform into the worlds first whales, seals and walrus, and she thenceforth has the power to decide if humans have earned the right to a successful marine mammal hunting season or whether theyve been ill-behaved and profligate and deserve to starve. As I deepened and extended my Inuit folktale research, I was increasingly struck by the fact that many of the human-to-animal metamorphoses that I was coming across were voluntary (a means of escape from a difficult situation and/or a gateway to greater self-reliance), rather then involuntary (used as a means of punishment and restraint). Though I had, at the time, only an imperfect recollection of certain European myths and fairytales (thinking

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mostly of the frog prince and the similarly cursed bear/prince in East of the Sun and West of the Moon), I suspected that the human-to-animal metamorphoses therein were more likely to be punitive, with the objective of confining the transformed being in some fundamental way. I had to wait until the manuscript of my second poetry collection was complete before I could wrench my attention away from the North, focus on stories from elsewhere, and try to confirm whether my suspicions were correct. Greek and Roman mythology is, of course, teeming with transformations, and what I found most notable when I reread Ovids Metamorphoses, as opposed to relying on my memory of having done so umpteen years ago, was that it is often a violent attempt to transgress the boundaries of the female body that acts as a catalyst for the human-to-animal transmutation episodes. Zeus, for example, disguises himself as a range of different creatures, raping Leda in the form of a swan, and abducting Europa in the form of a bull. I found incidents of the punitive use of metamorphosis that Id anticipated too, such as when the hunter Actaeon comes upon the bathing goddess Artemis. He is turned into a stag as punishment for seeing her, and is subsequently torn apart by his own hunting dogs. Closer to home, delving into my own Celtic folktale tradition, I reflected on the fate of Blodeuwedd in The Mabinogian, the medieval Welsh story cycle. Blodeuwedd is created from oak, broom and meadowsweet flowers by a self-seeking sorcerer who wants a wife for Lleu, his son. Not surprisingly, she falls in love with another man and together, they plot to kill Lleu. When the sorcerer finds out about this, Blodeuwedd is cursed and transformed into an owl for all eternity. I prowled for a while, too, through werewolf tales of various European origins, lycanthropy being one of the most commonly depicted forms of human-to-animal metamorphosis. As Barry Lopez has indicated in Of Wolves and Men, western man has, throughout history, externalised his bestial nature, thrusting onto the wolf more than onto any other beast his own sins of greed, lust, savagery and deception. Almost without exception, the wolves I read about were characterised as ravening, licentious killers, irrespective of the personality of the human being from whom they are transformed. In comparison, it was something of a relief to plunge into selkie stories from Scottish, Irish, Icelandic and Faroese folklore. In many of these tales, we have whats been termed a retrograde motif instead of there being a person who is turned into an animal, we are presented with a sealwoman who, on certain nights of the year, opts to shed her skin and become human. Whats more, it is long-term humanness, usually as a result of a man stealing her skin in order to retain her as his wife and prevent her from returning to the ocean, which is portrayed as the state of confinement. In spite of the refreshing exception of the selkie, my pre-research suspicions seemed, broadly speaking, to have been confirmed. In European tales, animal shapeshifters are often the victim of a curse, restrained and/or represented in demonic form, while the indigenous worldview is one in which the condition of being animal is welcomed. In addition to having previously read numerous Inuit folktales,

I had since lingered long with a range of Native American creation myths in which Animal People, with human and animal characteristics intermingled, are the first inhabitants of the earth, from whom all two- and four-legged creatures have subsequently descended. Shaped like animals and with human speech, they are credited with the primary acts of world creation (the sun, moon, stars, mountains and rivers). Such myths reflect a close and enduring relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, while my reading of western tales suggested that most remnants of a positive connection with the wild, both without and within, have disappeared. Alongside all this research, Ive now started to write a series of human-to-animal metamorphosis poems that I hope will form the basis of my next collection. Im still very much in the early stages of exploration of the theme, posing questions aplenty rather than establishing unequivocal answers. Questions such as: where is the boundary line between humanity and animality? Where does this begin to blur and where does it cease to exist? What might becoming animal mean? What are the animal possibilities of the self? To what extent is the animal within us part of our biological heritage as human beings, and simultaneously outside and beyond human society? Is it feasible to believe that exploring the theme through poetry may help to reestablish the connection with the animal parts of ourselves and with the wider natural world, where we are just one animal among many, that western culture has lost? Can revisioning myths and fairytales help to enable this reconnection? And is a fluid state of becoming a zone of contact, involving loss of self and identity, where possibilities multiply and new perceptions are adopted precisely what we need at this time of immense ecological transition? Furthermore, how is poetry suited to the exploration of these themes? Metaphor resists the definitive, certainly, but how else, through poetry, can I write between? How might the metamorphosis theme be reflected in the form and language of the poem? Can, for example, linguistic transformations take place, mirroring the individual, societal and Gaian metamorphosis subject-matter? The more poems I write, the more I find that language is indeed beginning to slip and slide and shapeshift, with verbs becoming nouns and adjectives morphing into verbs. Dramatic monologues, written in the first person, are transforming into third person poems, and vice versa. The language register within a poem is changing midway through. Tenses that may trap a stanza in the present or past are loosening their grip. I am not, by any means, the first poet to be grappling with the human-to-animal metamorphosis theme. In Thetis, in My Life Asleep, for example, Jo Shapcott revisits the Ovidian depiction of the sea nymph who is able to shift into any shape she wishes, and who is eventually subdued and raped by Peleus. For a more sustained and wholehearted engagement with the theme, however, I find myself turning not to other poets but to performance artists. Russian artist Oleg Kulik has created a number of human-to-canine performances, including I Bite America and America Bites Me, for which he lived in New York in a cage for two weeks, interacting, as a dog, with the individual spectators who donned protective clothing and volunteered to enter his space. More recently,

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But, as I should have known from one of my favourite metamorphosis tales, that of the Welsh sorceress Ceridwen and her servant boy, Gwion Bach, poetic inspiration can come from the most unpredictable of sources. After concocting a wisdom-bestowing brew intended for her son, Ceridwen leaves Gwion Bach in charge of stirring, for a year and a day, her cauldron of awen (inspiration). Accidentally-on-purpose, he samples a few drops of the potion and, realising that he will incur her wrath, takes flight. He proceeds to move through an exhilarating range of incarnations, from hare to fish to bird to grain of corn, while Ceridwen pursues him as greyhound, otter, hawk and grain-eating hen. Finally, as a consequence of swallowing Gwion in his corn form, Ceridwen becomes pregnant and gives birth to Taliesin, the most significant and celebrated of Welsh bards. quicker than an ears fear-prick quicker than instinct quicker than the fist of a jill on jack than roads slicing through meadows and mowers through leverets so quick its tea-time tomorrow next week saprise leafdrop cropspray herbwilt so quick decades have died since i sipped that soup of ceridwen and (yes i guess it sounds strange but ive outrun march and feel perfectly sane) im so quick ive reached the next geological age (an unaesoped place no parables lakes or arable land) so quick i spill my knowledge-stock and must double-back to retrieve it so quick i catch up with a future me shocked i stop to river-watch from a form beneath this tree and wait for the time when we and she must coincide and lungpumps swapped for gills

Im Still Here | Pat Gregory

Paul Hurley has become spider, cockroach, snail and a variety of other invertebrates in a series of actions performed for live audiences as well as for camera and video. It is fellow British artist Marcus Coates who has produced the most meaningful body of human-to-animal metamorphosis work, however, focusing primarily on transformation through voice and sound, and peaking with Dawn Chorus, his multi-screen video piece in which humans communicate through birdsong. Yet exciting though its been to discover so much relevant metamorphosis material in the world of performance art, when this was combined with my accumulated reading on myth and fairytales, I began to feel as if the poems I was writing were glutted with theory and turning out rather lifeless as a result. It was evident that I needed a more intuitive route into some of the poems and, serendipitously, a few months ago, such a route suggested itself. A former creative writing student of mine, who works as a shamanic practitioner, started facilitating a Shamanic Journeying Circle. Each week, a small group of women gathers to journey to the lower, upper or middle worlds to interact with our animal guides and, on occasions, to shapeshift into them while trance-dancing to the brainwave-changing rhythm of the drum. Its been fascinating to explore the experience of shamanic ecstasy as a trigger for human-to-animal metamorphosis, and then to draw on this experience when writing poems. The fact that Ive embraced a process that is grounded in the subliminal and subjective was unexpected, too, after so many years of resistance to writing poems informed by dreams.

Susan Richardson is a Wales-based poet, performer and educator. Her most recent poetry collection, Where the Air is Rarefied (Cinnamon Press, 201 1), is a collaboration with printmaker Pat Gregory on a range of environmental and mythological themes relating to the Far North. Susan regularly performs her work at literary, environmental and science festivals throughout the UK and has been poet-in-residence both for Radio 4s Saturday Live and BBC 2s coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show. For the past fifteen years, Susan has been running ecopoetry and Wild Writing Workshops, encouraging people of all ages and backgrounds to engage with the natural world and wildlife/conservation issues through poetry. She was recently invited to become a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers. www.susanrichardsonwriter.co.uk

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Bedford CA with family & trailer, en route to Europe

Wayfarin g
A wheeled and painted life

words & images by

R ima S taines
earnings and the kindness of neighbours and nuns. This was our life for a few years, though we moved into an old house when it got cold, and came back to London for a while when my brother was born. When I was four, we were given just two weeks to pack up and leave Germany because of visa troubles. Im told that I would not look my parents in the eye for weeks after they brought me back to the concrete and taxi fumes of London, but that is where I went to school and grew up. My dreams never grew less vivid, though, and I painted all this time. I dreamed of colourful caravans and houses made from moss at the roots of trees growing far from here, in earth unencumbered by paving slabs and billboards.
The Hermitage gouache

heels have turned in my life since before I can remember. The characters in my paintings are wheeled, their houses are wheeled, my stories are wheeled. Handcarts and wagons and caravans have always drawn my eyes, in that urgent, beautiful way in which a wellloved colour or a certain kind of face stands out in a crowd. Wheels call to me even louder if they have a door, a window or a chimney atop them. Something about the combination of vehicle and house sets my blood thrilling. Travelling, I have gradually realised over the years and more specifically, living in a house that moves is a fundamental part of the person I am; its what makes my heart sing the highest, and my feet feel the rightest. Before Id spent a year in this world, my parents decided to travel with me, their first child, to the Bavarian Alps to learn from the old woodcarving tradition in the villages there. I was only a few months old when they bought an old Bedford CA removal van, and converted it into a live-in vehicle with wooden cupboards, a tiny kitchen, netting on the ceiling for storing and airing clothes, and a little trunk-bed for me. I am not sure whether the seed of the travelling life was first planted in me then, but I know the memories are vivid and beloved. I had my first birthday in that van, and as I grew older, my days were filled with undulations of mountain and river and forest. In Oberammergau, Bavaria, my dad would cycle into the village each day to work in the woodcarving workshop, returning with a hunk of wood which my mum would clamp to the tail-gate of the van and carve, while I amused myself in a baby-bouncer strung in the van doorway. They got paid by the piece, and we survived on those small

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Bedford TK interior Rima playing accordion by stable door

My first home of my own was a little basement flat underneath an unusual thatched house in West London. Behind the house there were several acres of overgrown woodland with a natural spring, where I could wander and pretend I wasnt in the city, while I hung on there and tried to find out how you made a living as an artist. This place was The Hermitage whose name I took onward with me as a casket for my art, a business name and a kind of ethos, too. From here, one day, I left for Scotland and the hills of South Lanarkshire. My then-partner had lived in vans previously as a musician and we began to travel and sell our art on the streets of Britain, scuttling back to a Scottish cottage in between, and making plans for a more permanent journey. Eventually, we found an old 1976 Bedford TK wooden-backed horsebox for sale. It took a year to turn this truck into a home. The original wooden sides were left for their beauty and hoof-marks. Over time we added a stove, portholes, and leaded windows from a Welsh chapel. The heavy tailgate was replaced with a front door and window. Storage (of utmost importance in a small space) was built in every corner, as were bookshelves. We put in a painting desk and a little kitchen with an old Belfast sink, with a brass pump tap from a boat. Sometimes wed head to a particular town because there was good selling, and it was the end of the month (and therefore payday). Living on wheels means you must have an itinerant way of earning your pennies too. Street selling was a skill Id been learning on our travels you can buy a pedlars license from the police for about 12 for the year, and this arcane certificate allows you to sell your wares on the move: The term pedlar means any hawker, pedlar, petty chapman, tinker, caster of metals, mender of chairs, or other person who, without any horse or other beast bearing or drawing burden, travels and trades on foot and goes from town to town or to other mens houses, carrying to sell or exposing for sale any goods, wares, or merchandise, or procuring orders for goods, wares, or merchandise immediately to be delivered, or selling or offering for sale his skill in handicraft; Interpretation of the term pedlar from the Pedlars Act, 1871 We would arrive early in the morning in a town and scout a good pitch, sure to respect those who were already there. We would prop our small prints along a wall, and then a day of clear dry weather with a good crowd of passers-by could yield good earnings. There was always abuse from jeering youths and/or snooty folk who did not want our sort here. Not to mention the mad, lurching world of the street, which you only come into contact with once you stop and become part of it for a time; most of those walking about do not really see the whole layer of rough, beautiful, hard and complicated life that exists in every town and city. The biggest obstacle to street selling is the law. Police and council

officials would often ask us to move on, since we were not sticking strictly to the requirement of the pedlars license to keep moving. There would follow an experiment on our part to see if we could talk with these people on a human level, leaving aside any preconceptions. Wed explain that we understood they were just doing their job, but that this was our job, and no matter the outcome of the conversation theyd be paid at the end of the day, but if they moved us now, we would not. We encouraged them to see beyond the rules or at least to question them: this was our own hand-crafted artwork, we were bringing welcome colour to the town, we were not harming nor negatively affecting anyone else. Often they let us stay for a couple more hours. The council officials were usually less accommodating. Occasionally, too, wed find ourselves on a stretch of street that was apparently not public at all, but guarded by private thugs in fluorescent jackets with walkie-talkies. Heroin addicts would sometimes slope up and steal pictures to sell, and the early drunks and nutters would always make a beeline for us. I loved it, though: it made me brave, and I felt very warmly toward that world. The townspeople loved it too these colourful and unusual pictures and folk whod made them, appearing one day in town from somewhere else, and gone the next day to whoknowswhere.
Bedford TK with art display at Offgrid festival, Somerset

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As well as the streets, we attended fairs and festivals to sell our work, and our road was mapped between them. Since the Criminal Justice & Public Order Act of 1994, this way of life has been all but outlawed, and so finding park-ups had to become a cleverly thought-out operation. Scotland is more spacious and friendly, but England is so tightly packed that finding a hidden green space is extremely difficult. For one- or two-night stops, quiet laybys on country lanes and in forest parks were perfect. There always came the dog-walker, though, or the park warden; they would either be friendly and come and chat, or else phone the council from a safe distance. England is full of curtain-twitchers, terrified of the unusual, and these folk are quick to report Travellers to the council. We never had long in these lovely leafy liminal places. We endeavoured to always be the tidiest, most quiet, polite and considerate of travellers, so as to counterbalance the enormous prejudice that was always weighing heavily against us before wed even arrived at a place. If a longer park-up was needed, though and you really cannot keep moving every day landowners consent was

Rima painting Atching Tan oils on wood

required. When a landowner had invited us, there could be a time of relaxing, of getting on with paintings, of walking the woods and the hedgerows, of washing clothes and doing repairs to the truck without the fear of having to move again too soon. The pressure is strong, though one day, one friendly landowner had a call from the council: Weve been informed that there are some travellers on your land, and wed like to know what you intend to do about them? Our host could have argued that we were his guests, but he had plans to convert an old barn that stood in the orchard, and for that hed need both the councils and the neighbours goodwill. And so he asked us to leave. We left with a bad taste in our mouths. Life on wheels is raw, and hard work, and real and wonderful. Our firewood had to be collected and sawn and chopped and stacked under the truck. All our water had to be collected from the nearest tap (which was often not very near). I would boil an egg for breakfast and save the hot water to wash up with afterwards. Most vital clotheswashing was done in rivers, or launderettes when they were near. We had a small tin bath which hung on a hook. I boiled water on the woodburner in the evenings in a jug,

and used this inch of water to wash in the tin bath. When a kind person offered a real bath, I gratefully accepted. There is nothing quite like the joy of a hot bath when you havent soaked all your skin in one go for weeks. I have thought long about the itinerant life, and the reasons for my loving it so. There is something inherently wonderful for me about the woodsmokey chill autumn air framing the scene of a live-in vehicle parked in a green lane, chimney askew, bundles of tat against the wheels. Life on the move is vivid, full-colour, in the same way your holiday memories stay with you: brightly captured in your reminiscences. The travelling life is constantly like this, because you are forcing change upon yourself more than is usual in a settled life. The fact that the views from your windows are ever-changing causes you to live in real time: always learning, always seeing with fresh eyes, always experiencing new things. As a result, time slows down. It passes as slowly as it did when you were four, when next week felt like another country. This seems like a wonderful sort of magic to me. Another fundamental difference to the settled life for me is the relocation of what could be called your personal mandala, your sense of where everything important is. In a house, you are inundated with bank statements, tax-returns, your hours spent on the phone to a robot in another country; your stuff, in the endless spewing boxes, the piles of paper,

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freed by needing not nearly as much money to survive and by having my mandala close about me. It is a beautiful irony that moving allows you to be still. Living in your own wheeled home makes you deeply consider what is important to you in a home. This is likely to be different for everyone, but Id wager there are some requirements in common. For me, I realised, the vital things that I need to make a home are: warmth, a proper mattress, the wherewithal to make tea whenever it is desired, drawing & painting materials, books, music, and beauty (and I mean the beauty inherent in the homes structure and decoration my home has to be beautiful). The other vital reason for my loving the travelling life is the relationship you have with nature so much a part of us, and yet, in a house, so very far away. Somehow, when Im in a house though it sounds ridiculous when I say this to people the trees, the moor, the grass, the wrens, the stitchwort, the buzzard, the fox, the gorse, the rain, the wind and the blackbirds song all
Baba Yaga watercolour

the drawers containing warranties for dishwashers, and cupboards of plastic things you might need, the internet, more chairs than there are bottoms in your house, twelve different frying pans, Hoover attachments, paper shredders. Just reading that list makes me stop breathing. If you live in a wheeled home, everything you need is always with you. When you travel all the time, your kitchen is always with you, containing only the small number of things youve decided you need to cook with. Your work is with you, your tools are with you. You do not have a letterbox. You can only have as much stuff as will fit into your small space. Thats enough. By becoming snail-like, you choose to relocate your personal mandala to where you are (and where it always should have been); this gives you an enormous sense of relief and release. I loved the space in my days that was
Come away o human child oil painted wooden clock

Rima washing clothes in the river

seem a very long way from me. When you live in a house, you decide to go for a walk to experience these things, then you come home, and they remain out there. When you live in a more temporary structure, you must go in and out all the time to collect wood and water and to wee; this makes your walls more permeable. The outdoors comes in, too: in the wind, your house rocks as though you are at sea. You lie in bed listening to the tiny scuttles of squirrel feet above your head. It is a wonderful thing

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to step out of your door straight onto grass. In the end, I stopped living in my wheeled house because the relationship ended, and the truck had to be sold. The loss of my itinerant life was a cause of great mourning for me. It was a strange and surreal time. This change in my life circumstances happened on the edge of Dartmoor. I had always wondered in all the time of travelling through beautiful green places, whether I would experience the rooting feeling, the desire to stop and the deep recognition of home. I hadnt, until that point, and had begun to wonder whether I was just peripatetic in my soul. On reaching this place, I felt a strong and physical tug from within the granite and moss of these moorland-edging hills. And I felt it from the people, too. There was such a robust, vibrant and interesting community of kind people who held me to them and welcomed me in a way Id not experienced before. So here is where I fell apart, and here is where I decided to stay. I have found my rooting place. But here, and now with Tom and a scruffy grey lurcher called Macha, I still long for a simpler, more vagabond life. I am happier now than I have ever been, but all the time that I have lived in a house, I have continued to dream of that Bedford TK, to feel as if an intrinsic part of me is on hold. The longing I feel physically whenever I see another live-in vehicle is almost unbearably strong: it is that strange and terrible feeling of watching pass by the life that you know you should be living. This is why, in the field behind our rented house is now parked an outrageously beautiful vehicle a pre-1960 Bedford RL lorry. We go out and sit on the tailgate, dreaming of the return to a travelling life which is now so much more tangible. My dreams still have a live-in vehicle in them, but as soon as we made this purchase, my dream-TK was replaced with this new wonderful RL. We may appear to face a dilemma: the desire to be travellers, vagabonds, wayfarers who nevertheless have also rooted in a particular place, in a particular community; but our keenness to live like this stems not so much from a desire to go away as from a longing to leave walls behind, to live more simply and immediately and wildly, and to move around as we feel. Perhaps well just circle the village or the moor for most of the year, as local nomads, staying close to our community, spending several weeks or months in one place, exchanging work of some variety for our park-up, and then moving just a little way, to park by a different wood, and then travel further in the summer, with our house and our stories and our kettle and our puppets and our acupuncture practice and our paints and our memories and our musical instruments and our boots and our bed and our books and our family and our fire and our free-roaming imaginations, and always the wheels turning beneath us as the skies turn above us. We will spend this winter drawing plans. Well take our time creating this home: beautiful and useful and imaginative, it will be a theatre of our dreams and our work, and from it will ring the clear music of life lived true to its calling. r

Rima and Tom, storytelling on Dartmoor.

Image Amy Behrens-Clark (amybc.co.uk)

A new Bedford RL awaits new adventures Rima and Tom

RIMA STAINES artwork has appeared on book jackets and record covers on both sides of the Atlantic. She maintains a passionately-followed blog at intothehermitage.blogspot.com and has sold paintings and prints of her work (as well as the clocks she makes) in her travels the length and breadth of Britain. A former accordionista with the London Gypsy Orchestra, she can now be found playing by Devons street corners and campfires. She has books in the making, and also produces animations and puppets and obscure games in lost dialects. See also: thehermitage.etsy.com; onceuponoclock.com the-hermitage.org.uk

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B E YO ND INDUSTRIAL C I V I L I SATION

G uy M c P herson
clean air, clean water, and all other elements necessary for human life from the surrounding countryside. In the case of the American Empire, the countryside is the planet. In exchange for the raw necessities of human life, cities export garbage and pollution while destroying every aspect of the living planet on which we depend for our existence. Most civilized people think this is a wonderful exchange, although it is unsustainable by definition because there are limits on natures ability to clean up our messes. In other words, cities drain life from Earth. And yet we herald cities as centers of culture, and applaud them as a result. As pointed out by John Ralston Saul in Voltaires Bastards, Never has failure been so ardently defended as though it were success. Industrial civilization and the attendant cities drive us further into human population overshoot at the rate of more than 200,000 people each day on an already overcrowded planet. We ratchet up climate chaos on our only and overheated home so that it threatens our species and nearly every species on Earth with near-term extinction. We wash healthy soil into the worlds oceans at an insane and accelerating rate. We drive about 200 species to extinction every day on an increasingly depauperate planet. We oppress people throughout the world while making protest practically illegal in the United States, a country founded on resistance. In short, there is no need to wonder when the apocalypse will arrive. Its here. Yet most people I know claim it will never happen. The living planet has a spurting wound, and the cuts

ecently I was speaking to a colleague on the campus where I worked as a professor for two decades. Like me, he calls himself an ecologist and conservation biologist. So I was taken aback by our brief conversation, which went something like this: Him: How are you, and what brings you to Tucson? Me: Morbidly depressed, thanks. Tucson does that to me, so I only show up briefly to engage with a few people and catch up with my snail mail. Him: What do you mean? Tucson makes you depressed? Me: Like every city, Tucson is an example of civilization. The horrors associated with industrial civilization drive me to despair. Living at the apex of empire is not for me. Him: Oh, cmon. Its not that bad. Stunned to silence, I stare briefly before I walk away. Not that bad? Tucson imports its water more than three hundred miles across the desert, uphill. That water, like the food and fossil fuels requisite to keep Tucson habitable for the million or so humans who live there, is stolen from nonhuman species, the few remaining indigenous humans, and future humans. If any city in the world can and should be viewed as the apex of American Empire, its Tucson. How bad is it? As emblems of civilization, cities extract

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come from cities. As the blood shoots across the planetary stage, politicians apply compression to the chest, claiming they are trying to revive the planet. Central bankers hang bags of saline solution and whole blood purchased from corporations. The people, convinced that they are consumers rather than citizens, construct the bags and donate the blood, occasionally grumbling to their co-workers, At least I have a job. Self-proclaimed conservationists and environmentalists busily clean up the blood as it spews onto the sidewalk. All parties earnestly and studiously point out their contributions to maintaining this system which they view as beneficial. Its difficult to fault the majority of people. Most of us professors excluded are not paid to think. So, most of us dont. We might ask the occasional question about improving the system into which we were born. But few people question the system itself. Those of us paying attention and I hope that number includes you know that we need to develop a new system because the current version is not working. Even a quick glance indicates the corrupt immorality of the way we live. Can there be any doubt about the immorality of a system that enslaves, tortures, and kills people, while abusing the lands and waters needed for the survival of our species and others? Big Energy poisons our water, Big Ag controls our food supply, Big Pharma controls the behavior of our children, Wall Street controls the flow of money, Big Ad controls the messages we receive every day, and the criminally rich get richer through criminal exploitation of an immoral system. This is how America works. Yet through it all, we fall under the false misconception that we live moral lives in the land of the free. It should be clear that the industrial economy is making us sick, mentally and physically, and also greatly reducing habitat for our species on Earth. As a result, Im a huge proponent of terminating this set of living arrangements and replacing it with a saner and more durable set.

have the option of choosing to collapse now and avoid the rush. The two obvious choices here include agrarian anarchy and the post-industrial Stone Age, which I describe below.

Agrarian anarchy
Anarchy assumes the absence of direct or coercive government as a political ideal, while proposing cooperative and voluntary association between individuals and groups as the principal mode for organizing society. This close-tonature, close-to-our-neighbors approach was the Jeffersonian ideal for the United States, as evidenced by Monticello and the occasional one-liner from Thomas Jefferson. It was also the model promoted by Henry David Thoreau and, more recently, radical thinkers such as writer Wendell Berry, philosopher Noam Chomsky, historian Howard Zinn, and Tucson-based iconoclastic author Edward Abbey. Consider, for example, a few well-known lines from Thomas Jefferson: (1) The result of our experiment will be, that man may be trusted to govern themselves without a master; (2) I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it; and (3) When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. Although Jefferson did not call himself an anarchist, his words and ideals indicate he strongly supported the rights and role of individuals, as well as preferring a small government that minimally oversaw the citizenry. The Greco-Latin roots of anarchy suggest the absence of a ruler, which seems like a good idea to me. Like Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau idealized an agricultural society that was close to nature. Thoreau was a staunch defender of agrarian anarchy, and he focused even more closely on the individual than did Jefferson: That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. To my knowledge, no state governments believe weve yet reached that point. Fast-forward to the late twentieth century, and we find several other philosophers defending agrarian anarchy. Perhaps the best known examples are Berry, Chomsky, and Zinn, but the clearest voice for agrarian anarchy came from Edward Abbey in the years before he died in 1989: (1) Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners; (2) Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others; and (3) A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. In my dreams, industrialized nations are headed for agrarian anarchy. Other countries can show us the way, if only we allow them to lead. If a region never acquired ready access to cheap fossil fuels, agrarian anarchy was an obvious approach. How else but a strong sense of self-reliance and dependence on neighbors to grow and distribute food locally? How else but reliance on those same traits to secure the water supply, and protect it from the insults of industry?

The Choices We Make

Alternatives to the current omnicidal system abound, and generally rest along a continuum ranging from the current system to the post-industrial Stone Age. I will consider three points along the continuum: (1) the current system, which must be replaced if we are to persist as a species beyond a few decades, (2) agrarian anarchy, and (3) the post-industrial Stone Age.

The Current System

The contemporary version of civilization is creating a dire set of predicaments: human population overshoot, climate chaos, and an unparalleled extinction crisis. It is the primary problem we face. As such, I think its time to leave it behind before it leaves us. Considering the ongoing, accelerating collapse of the industrial economy and the virtual absence of national- or international-level discussion about mitigation, I strongly suspect our society is headed for the post-industrial Stone Age within a very short time. But communities and the individuals comprising communities

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How else to develop a human community dominated by mutual respect and mutual trust? Contrary to our current set of living arrangements, no currency is needed: barter fills the bill. Better yet, a gift economy is well-suited to agrarian anarchy.

Post-industrial Stone Age

The first two million years of the human experience, and the first few hundred thousand years for our own species, were spent with relatively small communities living close to the land. These humans knew each other and they knew the plants and animals with which they shared the area. They had minimal impact on the lands and waters that supported them. These humans spent a few hours each week doing what we call work, making sure the members of the community were well-hydrated, well-fed, and warm. This was a durable set of living arrangements, as characterized by its longevity and minimal impact on Earth. We arrogantly and disparagingly refer to this time as the Stone Age. It is unclear what the future holds. I suspect that completion of the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy, which is based on ready access to inexpensive oil, will engender short-term but large-scale mortality of humans in industrialized nations. Shortly thereafter, renewable energy systems will fail because they depend heavily on maintenance and support from oil-driven industries. For example, the batteries associated with most home-based photovoltaic solar and wind-energy systems have a life of a decade or so. When collapse of the industrial economy is complete and is followed by inability to generate electricity via renewable systems, humans will be forced to live yet again close to our neighbors and close to the natural systems that allow for our survival. That is, well be immersed in the postindustrial Stone Age, albeit with plenty of technology that was not present during the Neolithic period. The simplest of these technologies, including knives and jars, will be readily usable for a long time. The more complex technologies, especially those relying on electricity, will fade quickly from our memories. Long before we are enmeshed within the post-industrial Stone Age, my colleagues will understand some of the myriad disadvantages associated with promoting and benefiting from a transient set of living arrangements. Unfortunately for most of them, the lesson will come after the exam. r
Guy McPherson is professor emeritus of natural resources and the environment at the University of Arizona, where he taught and conducted research for twenty years. Hes written well over 100 articles, ten books the most recent of which is Walking Away From Empire and has focused for many years on conservation of biological diversity. He lives in an off-grid, straw-bale house where he practices durable living via organic gardening, raising small animals for eggs and milk, and working with members of his rural community. Learn more at guymcpherson.com or email Guy at grm@ag.arizona.edu.

POEMS by Peter Oswald

WINTER
The grass is dragging down the rain And I am dragging winter down Into my bones and veins again. It was a model of a day, Not the real sun, not the real sky, All summer long a fist of clay I spun into a jug and glazed Horizon blue and there it stands, While winter smashes me to pieces.

DAWN
Dawn is a kingdom just beyond the world, Working for us. It lasts for just one instant, Travelling westwards, leaving in its wake Daylight. I saw it over and beyond Swindon, this morning, as the night wore out Swindon, part of a dark plain streaked with lilac, And the dawn just above it, distant kingdom Pausing towards me, opening its instant, White bird that passes over with one wingbeat. Night, that is shut tight, day that is shut tight, Two closing wardrobe doors and dawn the crack Always between them where they almost meet First and last instant, over and beyond Swindon, and the night fainting into daylight.

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How to W rite a Love L etter to th e E arth

P eter R eason

he cold weather has passed. It is thawing, although the earth is still frozen hard. The remaining snow lies thinly on the ground. It has melted more quickly around twigs and other debris, slashing dark lines through the white. Along the base of the garden wall, where the earth has remained soft, badgers searching for worms and roots have turned over the soil, scattering brown oak leaves over the snowy surface. I am clearing our overgrown walled garden on the outskirts of Bath, as I have most days through the winter, wrapped up warm: woolly hat, heavy boots, thick gloves. Yesterday I pollarded a hazel tree, so today I am cutting it into firewood. There is a path of grey slush where I have walked between the pile of branches and my saw bench, and another where the wheel of the barrow has rolled from the bench to the hedge where I am stacking the cut firewood. I am enjoying the physical work the stretching of muscles and the rise of sweat all the while watching the thoughts and reflections that pass through my mind. For Valentines Day, the people at Eradicating Ecocide have invited supporters to write a love letter to the Earth, part of the campaign to put ecocide on the same legal footing as genocide. As I clip twigs into bundles for the bonfire and saw the thicker branches into handy lengths for the fireplace, I wonder what I might write. The melting snow sets me thinking about how life arises and passes away. Do we love what is impermanent? In these temperate islands, what could be more impermanent than snow and last years oak leaves? The Buddha taught that suffering is caused by attachment: forms are empty, there are no things in themselves. Life is characterized by impermanence, as entities of the world arise and pass away. It is easy to see the impermanence of snow, from that moment when a footprint disturbs the pristine surface to the dripping thaw that leaves bedraggled patches in shaded places. We can grasp the cycle of seasons, how the oak sprouts young leaves that mature, fall and slowly rot away. Maybe when we stand dwarfed by an ancient oak we can glimpse the hundreds of years that make up the cycle of the trees life. It is less easy, maybe scarcely possible, to grasp the immense planetary cycles in which we are embedded, cycles that maintain the composition of the atmosphere, the patterns of temperature and rainfall, the emergence and decline of civilizations and even of species like our own. I heard a teaching story on a Buddhist retreat a few years ago: A bereaved lady said, Master, truly presence is impermanent, but absence is permanent. Quite so, said the Master. We may learn through Buddhist and other practices to release our attachment to forms, to accept impermanence, even our death, as part of life. But the ecological crisis is not simply death: the disappearance of species, the destruction of ecosystems, the disruption of the great cycles of the planet, are impermanence of a different order. They are disruptions of the process of life itself, permanent loss of evolutionary complexity, permanent endings of patterns of being. They are also moments of transition in geologic time, in which one grand order passes leaving space for a new dispensation to emerge. But this is beyond the

grasp of everyday human consciousness. I work my way to the bottom of the heap of hazel branches and rake up the twigs and bits of bark left on the ground. Tomorrow I will start pruning the apple trees, so there will be more twigs and branches to cut up. It will soon be time for another bonfire. The invitation to write a love letter to the Earth pulls me toward lament. I might write celebrating the elegance of snowdrop flowers dangling delicately on their fragile stems. I might recall my joy at the bright double rainbow that yesterday arced across the sky, two lines of intense colour penetrating down into the valley. But can I also offer love to these great disturbing transitions? My love letter must be accompanied by grief for what is being lost. In the end, all I was able to write for Valentines Day was, Dear Earth, I couldnt live without you. r
Peter Reason retired in 2009 from an academic career at the University of Bath. He is co-editor of Stories of the Great Turning (Vala Publishing Cooperative, 2013), narratives of contributions to a more sustainable world. He is finalizing the manuscript of The Call of the Running Tide, the story of a singlehanded sailing voyage to the west coast of Ireland exploring his relationship with the world of sea and coast. www.peterreason.eu; peterreason.posterous.com/

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N O RTH NORFOLK

words and images by

J ames C anton
I follow the moment of their arrival from Siberia a blur of starlings gleeful at the sight of the marshes, delightedly dancing in the warmer Norfolk airs. On the open wilderness of sand at low tide, the grains play tricks with your eyes. The flat horizons of beach and sea and sky run together. Your vision jolts, turns inward. Turning grey clouds spill across my sight. Black leaping circles, fluid, grey saucers float across my vision: strange motes of the imagination. Opticians call these dancing swirls muscae volitantes flying flies. They are the nothingness of focus, the shadows of sight. In darker days these patterns once grew to haunt me. Now they are merely playful; mirrors of the mass of starlings that fly over the marshes. They are a product not of me but of the sands, of these beaches. It is low tide. The sea still retreats. The open acres of sand will soon dry to form their own dancing shadowplay. As the top layer of the sand dries, it lifts from the beach with the wind as spindrift. As millions of specks of stone rise in the wind, so their moving masses will mirror those in my own eyes, and those in the skies above. Following the paths of rabbits, I head back inland through the dunes, leaving the ghosts of the sands. Filled with the sea air, I bound up the nearest sand hill, a shrunken Munro built of marram grass. On the summit, the view down is of the open crater of exposed sand. I wonder if this is Gun Hill. The words leak out, spill into the North Sea airs. Is this Gun Hill? They betray a fracturing of memory, of childhood remembrances falsely mapped. On a cleft pew of grass root I halt and let the question sit awhile. Another sense embraces me. It is the smell of pine. Blown down from the Holkham woods, it is a heady perfume. The OS map puts the matter straight. It is not Gun Hill. Gun Hill is on the other side of the dyke path, half a mile and more away over this pockmarked lunar landscape.

ctober 25th. It is low tide in the harbour. The clouds are too grey to pronounce it a beautiful day. There is, if anything, something rather inauspicious about the sky. Stepping on to the dyke I begin to walk towards the sea. To the north, the brown carpet of the salt marshes has been exposed. In the mudflats that edge the marshes, a curlew steps hesitantly, puncturing the watery surface with a long, delicate bill like an upturned scimitar. Beyond tucked away in a dark creek stands the pure white silhouette of a little egret.

I walk a liminal landscape on the edge of England where sea touches land. As the dyke turns east, the northerly breeze lifts a wave of soggy smells into my face; that fecund gallimaufry of mud and decaying organic matters: rotten seaweed, dead microscopic life, bird-shit. The Brent geese chatter and lift in splintered squadrons from the mire a short trip to the inland fields of green. Exposed on the dyke, we few humans tug hats tighter, zip up coats, adjust scarves and gloves. It is a dull day, one of the first cold ones of autumn. The seas low murmur can be heard beyond the raised body of the dunes. From the Staithe, separate fragments of land lead out to the North Sea. Salt marshes stretch along the coast. It is a world of half-land, half-sea. It is through this that the dyke marches, holding the highest tides from deluging the fields where hardy cattle graze. Beyond the salt marshes lie the dunes. Here are worlds born of broken stone and shell, painted with the delicate shades of marram grass, lichen, mosses and sea-holly. Here is a land never still or stable, a place turning with the tides, where shifting sands drift into vast desert beaches. Above, in grey skies, a swirling cumulus turns overhead; a body of migrants freshly arrived across the North Sea from the north, the east. They are a cloud contorting, shifting shape, morphing. As they turn again,

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I reach the peak of another sandy hillock, the highest of the current range, and scatter a dun cluster of blackbirds that shower like shrapnel into the bushes. The hill is tucked beside the pine trees. I shuffle, settle in my seat. Oddly, being so close to the woods, the smell of pine has vanished. A family of long-tailed tits chitter and flit amidst the bramble bushes. A shadow flickers to the south. The binoculars confirm what I already know. It is a marsh harrier. Pale faced. A female. She slips in the air, a lumbering hover over the reed beds. Her mate lifts from an unseen gulley. Slimmer. Bronzed. At dusk, this same landscape will be patrolled by the white ghosts of barn owls. Once, a year or so ago, on a late autumn afternoon, I watched the angry meeting of the two: a lone owl out hunting, harried away from the marshes. The two haunt the same land, the same prey; one in the night, one in the day. Both can be seen from this dune. It is merely a question of sitting and waiting. This is the place where in spring there is the croaking of natterjack toads to be heard. They meet and mate in the brackish ponds down beside the marshes. This is the place where I wanted to plant a bench to the memory of my father. Instead, I sit on a sandy seat and wonder where this walk will lead. It could stretch out across the empty sands along to Wells. It could go on weaving inland through the woods, up to the gentle inclines, the gentrified landskips of Holkham Hall, and on over the fields to the warm snug of The Nelson at Burnham Thorpe. But I am due back at two. It will have to be shorter; it will end at Joe Jordans hide. As I burst into the pines of Holkham Meals, I am halted by the still air of the woods. The silence the presence of the trees, those silent standing bodies demands reverence. I slow my pace, thankful for the welcome trampoline of the pine needle floor after the soggy sands of the beach. There are regular sightings of birdwatchers. In drab pairs and threes, they are every few hundred yards stumbling with their cumbersome tripods. This is birder country. The path wanders through bronze wreaths of dried bracken to the hide where wooden steps lead up towards a leaden sky; each foot fall on the stairway bursts the still. Inside there are whispers. The door creaks open, revealing a coterie of twitchers. I join them, taking the last place on the benches. The slatted wooden windows are all raised to reveal a wide horizon of daylight, lending a cinematic quality to the view: the raised curve of an Iron Age fort, a remnant of the Iceni. The birders are silent. Binoculars sit at pairs of eyes, scanning the marshes. A claustrophobic air settles over the hide. The breaths seem harder to

shift from my chest. Then the hush is broken: Is that a blackbird? The question has a quaint commonality, banality even. Tossed into the still nest of the hide, it is greeted with tart silence; incredulity at the utterance. If some rara avis had been named, it would have sparked some spirited interest, wonder. But a blackbird? I look away from the novice, embroiled in embarrassment, to a fresh flock of geese swirling, banking; raucous and excited. I remembered three, four years ago, here in Joe Jordans hide sat beside a line of three wild figures, all men in their sixties, their local voices telling of the cranes that could be seen down on Bones Road. In a row beside me they had nodded together as if in perfect imitation of the birds. Back in the wood it is not silent, though it seemed so at first. There are layers of sound. There is the distant croaking of a cloud of geese, the closer chitter of a reed bunting, and ever the low grumble of the sea. Each speaks in whispers, sibilant murmurings from the land. The trees smother the winds and make the world still. In this venerable void I step more gently, as in a vast holy place like an empty cathedral, mosque or temple; my breath stays in my chest, too wary of disturbance to breathe comfortably. Then the path beneath me turns to sand. The sky opens above. A noise tears through the prayer. It turns rapidly to a roar, two roars. A pair of F16 US fighter planes passes overhead: the ultimate raptors of the skies. They appear in a surge of noise, steel silhouettes, fearsome fighting falcons slipping through barriers of sound. My feet, light footsteps on the spring of the woodland floor, now stumble in the sticky sands. I pass the natterjack ponds and another gang of birdwatchers, step on to the patchwork quilt of mosses and lichen. These are the pale green dales, the rolling valleys of the mossy dunes. Since childhood I have pictured these

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lands as a rabbit paradise. I had never seen a stoat or weasel here. Of course, there was the odd poacher. Morris, a good old local voice, had told the story once of when hed had an incendiary bomb go off on him further round by the woods: Been out collectin sloes, hed explained. Hed shown me a cutting from the local paper, faded, aged, dating from the 1950s. I werent poachin, Morris had stated. The article had noted that the exploded remains of some rabbits were found at the scene. Still, Morris wouldnt have it. Must ave been blown up by the bomb; just like me. He is still a common figure on the dyke, weaving his way to or from the sea on a rickety bicycle. He recites one of the same lines to any soul he meets on the way: Ive drunk a bottle of whisky today, I ave. Been for a swim, I ave. Just off for a swim, I am. Now, stepping up on to the dyke, the sky spreads. Morris is nowhere to be seen. This bridge between the marshes leads me back to the clouds of swirling starlings. A grey notch in the sky for a moment really does fool me. Is it not a peregrine? It is another F16 whose presence surges with the rising wall of sound behind it, a sonic wave that breaks ominously over the land. A pale little egret is unmoved. Proud, stoic, static; it remains immobile as the boom echoes across the marshes a dash of white on a brown canvas. On the approach to the Hard, tucked into a corner of the dyke, a whitehaired woman sits on a bench with a cup of coffee. I envy her stillness and stop to chat. Does she know what geese they are on the fields? She doesnt. Isnt much of a bird watcher herself. But she says she overheard someone earlier who said there were clouds of golden plover arriving: en route to France. She holds her Thermos between cupped hands. I smile at the Chinese-whispered words, at the magic that has transformed, has conjured, those black swirls of birds muscae volitantes of the skies into something more exotic. They have turned starlings into golden plover. r

estuary
L ydia F ulleylove
It is not ecologists, engineers, economists or earth scientists who will save spaceship earth, but the poets, priests, artists and philosophers. Lawrence Hamilton, World Conservation Union

ut, over the churchyard wall onto Causeway Field. Its mid-autumn and this is a prelude to our Estuary project. Part of the funding is not yet confirmed but we already have the landowners permission to wander off the official paths, anywhere you like, really. We cant believe our luck. We follow the edge of the field to the rough marshy land towards the river. Reeds hiss and the north-east wind carries away the noise of the nearby town. Theres a heron, almost an extension of the silver-grey dead tree its landed on. Across the rippled steel of river, a redshank rises from the salt-marsh. One small oak stands alone, between copsey creek and marsh. Its to become one of my Estuary landmarks, to which my eyes are always drawn, perhaps because it settled itself in my mind during that first walk. Others accumulate as the months pass: that particular gap in the blackthorn hedge through which I glimpse the salt-marsh; the slant line of river across the narrowing end of Long Ground, the glimmer of the reeds beyond Estuary Moor. I dont know this place yet, I write in my notebook later, as if one can ever completely know a place but perhaps what I mean is that its not yet in my heart or on my inner map. One of the first things we did when the project proper began the following February was to order a section of the OS map for the area, to the scale of 1.5000, showing the River Yar estuary, the flanking salt-marsh, woods and fields from the Causeway to Yarmouth. I pinned my copy to my workroom wall. At first its there as a reference point, an indication of what I might want to explore, somewhere I can tentatively pencil in discoveries, including the names of each of the fields. Later it seems to acquire a life of its own, as if reaching out towards the real river. In our final exhibition, artists Colin and Caroline Riches designed silk batique hangings based on the map, each one depicting a season and a section of the river from north to south, with images and fragments of text created by the groups involved. map shows how live is river how lithe it draws the twiggy delicacy and tide-bent elegance of river branches map shows how fields honour river with their names Causeway Long Ground Estuary Moor beyond Jetty Redlake Creek (Lydia Fulleylove) We were working on the Kings Manor Farm estate, which completely surrounds the tidal River Yar Estuary in the west of the Isle of Wight. Described as one of the most exciting

JAMES CANTON teaches at the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. He studied at Exeter and Essex universities, gaining a PhD in literature. He has taught the MA in Wild Writing at the University of Essex since its inception in 2009, exploring the fascinating ties between the literature and landscape of East Anglia. His book From Cairo to Baghdad was published in 201 1. He latest work, Out of Essex, a collection of writing inspired by rural wanderings in the county, is due to be published in February 2013.

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environmental habitats in southern England, it has great biodiversity. The owners have treated the tidal area as a wildlife sanctuary and have run the organic farm as a sustainable operation. Our project design was twofold: to develop a collaboration between writer (myself) and artist (Colin Riches) in response to this landscape; and to help reconnect local groups with the natural world. We hoped that each art form might illuminate the other, at the same time as helping participants to explore their own responses, gaining a stronger sense of the place and of farming practice. Our workshops followed the passage of a year, responding to the changing activities on the farm and to the transformation of the landscape through the seasons. We worked with Drawing Ahead Artists and with High Tide Poets, both of which are support groups for adults with mental health difficulties and for carers; and with Year 5 and 6 children from two local primary schools who had been selected as having potential but under-achieving. I also worked, albeit in a rather different context, with prisoners in HMP Isle of Wight, exploring this and other estuary landscapes through imagination, memory, literature and art. Thats another story A March morning, wind, scuds of rain, patches of sun. Across the farmyard, down on the mud by the river, members of two groups, Drawing Ahead Artists and High Tide Poets, were searching for whatever materials and tools they could find to make marks on paper. Colin suggested that they experiment, take risks, play, find their own ways of responding to the place. At first they were wary of each other and of the activity, but gradually, for a few at least, there seemed to be a tiny shift. The first thing I notice is relaxation on normally quite tired and controlled faces we are free, we are having fun, we are sharing, not competing, despite knees less flexible now, we are crouching as low as we can manage, fossicking in mud, revelling in a bowl of extra wet black, using any old twig as a brush wrote Joan in a piece of flow-writing back at the workshop base. Dont stop, dont think or worry you cant get it wrong, Id said. It was a way of exploring whatever comes into their heads about the place and themselves. The first thing I noticed were different smells, noise of cows, clank of iron rails, uneven stones, oops, leaves greening, view of river, mud, mud, hands are cold, cows stare, munching, crunching, big teeth, puddles under blue sky, above birds fly, wind in my face wrote Marilyn. At the end of the afternoon, she said, Were taking a bit of the place home with us words marks on paper. Perhaps it was partly exposure to the uncertain weather which helped the two groups make the first tentative gestures towards the place and each other, even though some, at this stage, voiced their anxiety at the newness of both. From hereon, the writing and drawing of the group reflected their

Black-tailed godwits on the ice (Richard Mair)

sense of being out there and the weather was always in evidence as part of the shared experience. The air is cold but the spring sun caresses the cheek June day, light breeze, clouds dull, grey, rains on and off all day, in the distance through the mist, Afton Down shows To develop a state of relaxed awareness we started all our workshops with a gentle tuning in, eyes closed, listening, taking deep breaths. We encouraged participants to be present in the moment, to pay attention to the place. Colin said of his own work: The immediacy of being present the marks, materials and tools are a record of being there at that moment, evoking my relationship with place at that moment. A dialogue between myself and the place. The work is a sign of having been there. This informed all our work in which we tried to be present without intrusion. And presence also implies absence of which the place gave us a particular understanding The presence of the farms Aberdeen Angus herd in the barn made a strong impression on everyone in the spring workshops. Even the children, skittish in the wind, slowed down, looked and listened in the winter cow-barn, the Aberdeen Angus herd shuffling, lowing, pulling at sweet meadow hay, heads buried in hay, wet black noses emerging, dung-petalled flanks, thick curled tongues, soft breath, a sense of deep content. Although it was the start of the project and I was keyed up, I relaxed and breathed deep too. They were a strong solid presence; cows, calves, bullocks, steers in different parts of the open barn, all with their different characters, Anthony the farm manager told me later. He pointed out Stumpy, one of the old breed. He made himself known to the men early on. Colin drew one of the cows, using mud, black ink and dung. Long after she was gone, those marks called up both her absence and her presence. It was during these first workshops that we learned that the whole herd was shortly going to be sold to farms in Sussex and Norfolk, mainly for economic reasons the closing of the local abattoir some years ago necessitated long, costly and stressful journeys to mainland abattoirs, complicated by the fact that this was an organic herd. (Ironically, I discovered

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Children working in classroom (Jeff Piggott)

later that when the young stock reached killing age, they were transported across the country to an abattoir in mid Wales, which offered the best price.) Eight men originally worked on the farm; by March 2011 there were four. By the end of April when the herd went, there were only two. What do you do on a winter morning when the herds gone? Terry, a good stockman, lost his job: Bull in the barn before the lorry comes, mans hand on the bulls neck, bulls head dropped, soft, bulls shoulder glossed, bulls face eased towards the man, man walking away, back hunched, head down. When we came back for our mid-summer workshop, the only animals on the farm were the Hebridean sheep. The children were restless in the empty barn. We helped them to focus by asking them to make rapid one-minute sketches of what was there cow-backscratcher, straw bales Afterwards, I scribed a collaborative poem: Whats in the barn? No cows, dry poo, straw wisps, shadows, cobwebs, no cows, flies, troughs, no moos, no snorts, no cows Later that day the children visited the butchery, next to the cow-barn, where the carcass of one of the last of the herd that the family had kept for their own use hung headless on a meathook in the chiller. The owner of the farm said, Dont worry, it doesnt look like an animal without a head. Did we want to forget that the meat came from an animal? Had the children really made the connection between the animal and the minced meat they were using to make their own beef-burgers? We thought perhaps some of them might be beginning to, from their subsequent writing and art work, which featured both meat and Aberdeen Angus cattle. Saffie wrote: Squishy meat runs through my fingers, a massive dead cow is hanging up, a button clicks, I smell strong meat. The adults response to the absence of the cattle was more emotional, and a sense of their absence pervaded much of

the work they did for the rest of the project, poems were written in the voices of the animals, pieces described the empty barn and the fields. Dont know whats happening, know not my fate, though Ive heard whats been said, bellow, bellow, bellow and just tilt my head. (Sandy) The act of looking was central to the whole project, crossing both art forms, sometimes close up, focused, sometimes taking the eye on a journey across the landscape. On the chilly midsummer day of the second workshop, the adult groups stood outside the farm caf and we drafted a collaborative poem about the view, moving from near, to mid-distance to far away. VIEW FROM KINGS MANOR FARM CAF Cars metallic gleam, tax discs, gravel, grass, sorrel stained, dots of poppies, drifting shadows, a lone blackbird, a wandering rowan, fence posts marching away across empty pasture where cows once roamed, dung heaps, patches of dull green between, misty rain blowing over the ribbon of saltings, a solitary oak before the pewter strip of river, reed beds, dark woods, trees pearl grey, grey mist, grey sky, grey on grey. (Drawing Ahead and High Tide Poets) Perhaps this act of collaboration, the making of a poem, one persons observation built on by anothers, coupled with the shared act of looking, helped to connect individuals to each other and to the place. It was a way, at least, of narrowing the gap between us. The oldest member of the group, eighty-one-year-old Malcolm, wrote a poem which encapsulates this. It begins: BY THE YAR So much I didnt see but I saw something the stretch of water beyond the reed beds. Whats that you saw? Gnarled arthritic trees? and ends: I was on my own when I saw life and death in the still water; a crack in eternity. No entry down there, called back by the birds and the love of comrades. It was Malcolm who made a different and very intimate

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connection with place during our high summer workshop. As we left the riverside track, heading through the leafy copse towards the broken jetty, he slipped away from the group and began to climb an oak tree. He seemed almost part of it, beaming all over his face, peering down at us then climbing on. Afterwards, I wrote: he treasured the tree From the top he took a picture, paused, gazed at all we could not see. Hand, foot, he descended deftly, honouring each nook. Another cool summer day. I was working with a small group of children, walking The Little Jetty route which we first visited in spring, making a rough map of our journey and showing three stopping places, where we wrote or drew to show what we experienced through as many of our senses as possible. Can you remember the name of this tree? What would it say about whats changed? What can you hear? What can you smell? What do the reeds feel like? Is there something we could find to stick onto our map when we get back? We sat together on the bank, watching the river. For a few moments, everyone was quiet. When we got back to the workshop base, they were keen to add to their summer map. Its not a neat piece of work but it contained something immediate about the place whether a reed or a leaf stuck to the card, or a patch showing the colours of summer, a drawing or words which give us a glimpse of what they experienced through any one of their senses. We offered them an outline to which they add their notes and findings; When I came to the place where the jetty stuck out into the river like a pointing finger. I saw a branch floating staring up at me like an upside down statue. I heard the tip-tapping of rain like leaves flittering and a curlews sad whistle I smelt the river as fresh as if it had just been cleaned (Louella, Kian, Jack) We used this mapping exercise as a way of encouraging children and adults to look closely at their surroundings and particularly to notice how these changed with the seasons. It was planned as a continual seasonal activity throughout the workshop programme. Each group was given a piece of card and a different short route to map, and they returned to the same route each season. Sometimes it was difficult to keep in balance our work with community groups and our personal response to the farm and to the estuary landscape, yet what I began increasingly to feel was a sense of expectation, even excitement each time I arrived on the Causeway, looked downriver. Tide going out? Sea-river or riversea? Are those teal by the far mud bank? Where are the five hybrid mallards which are always together, always near the bridge? Other things faded from my head. I realised that I didnt always need to be consciously observing, making notes or visiting as many areas as I could in the time available. I began to learn to be still and aware. I could sit for an hour with a flask of tea on the branch of one of the oaks which sprawled over the mud, watching a curlew on the far bank, the slow seaward drift of the river. Swimming in that un-salt, un-fresh water was one way of

Drawing the wind (Colin Riches)

intensifying my experience of the place; walking there on an August night was another Parked at dusk on the causeway, low tide, the radio still on, sealed in. Then, black-tailed godwits on the mud, dot, dot, dot, piercing mud-skin, all bills and legs and the stuff of the day backs off. Their reflections waver in the mud, they lift flat webbed feet which sink right in when they stand still. Down-river, staying close, edging round the back of the farm, onto Estuary Moor, where Thor the orphan ram-lamb skitters behind the four big rams with tight-spiralled horns. Their slant eyes glow, they square up to me, then sheer off into the dusk. Beyond the wooden fence, the faint glitter of saltmarsh pools. Through the tight gap in the blackthorn onto saltmarsh. Purslane crackles underfoot, reeds hiss, river channels finger mud, tiny lappings against Yarmouths clatter, hustling up on the wind. And always, east-nor-east, beyond the river, beyond the woods, high on the downs, the two red masts glare. Masts, marsh, masts, marsh. In daytime they can be forgotten, at night they punctuate the sky. I follow thin paths to the edge of Pipe Creek, glasswort creeping down the bank onto the mud, river lit by silver grey light, sky ribbed like sand when waves have left it, a bandaged moon. Creek rises, catching clouds and banks in its glimmer. The pipe stalks across on stiff legs. Back through the copse, stumbling over the ditch, through tangled branches, glad of no torch, searching out soft dark, plunging into it in the spinney behind the farm, surfacing as the yellow lights of Freshwater burn beyond the path ahead, diving again in the churchyard, among yew trees and foot-felt grass paths. Its easy to make assumptions about places and people. Id watched Anthony and Pete at work on the farm on the tractors, admiring their skill in swinging

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the machines round tricky corners, the lean of the lime green combine harvester, the mans hands lightly on the wheel and Id thought, Modern farming sealed in, radio, airconditioning, how can they be really aware of where they are? Then I talked to Anthony and made a few discoveries. Sat in the machines, its bloody boring. I like to do a straight drill but Im looking round all the time. I keep a bird book in the cab and binoculars Once on the marshland by Barnsfield, where the stream runs through the sluice, I saw an otter. A commotion in the water. I wasnt sure at first. And theres silver eel there, jumping. The dog was trying to get them. Theres rudd too. He talked about the changeover to organic farming: We make beetle banks with cocksfoot grass for ladybirds, lacewings, beetles, natural predators that means aphid control. They dissipate into the crop. Once, if we had a problem wed have reached for the sprayer, easy as that. Now the bird life is increasing again. Theres meadow pipits, redpolls, snow buntings birds I never saw before. And hares have increased. I saw 39 one morning. Afterwards, whenever I came across a stationary tractor, I looked for the bird book and the binoculars. We spent the morning of our autumn workshop walking very slowly along the hedgerow with a botanist and an ornithologist from the local field study centre. Ears and eyes were opened to so much that we would have missed: a blackcap making a warning sound, like two pebbles banged together; zanthera lichen, grey-green and hairy; black horehound, creeping cinquefoil; goldfinch feeding in the teazles; spangled star-shaped galls on the turkey oak; a sound like a finger run along a comb was that a mistle thrush? And we looked, properly, at what was in front of our eyes: spindleberry, sloe, brilliant crimson hawthorn, sometimes experimenting with the stain of a berry on our sketchpads. Everyone was asking questions. Perhaps this process from observation to identification, this delight in naming, was an important part of our connection to and respect for this place. As the project progressed, much of the writing became more specific, more down to earth. Mine too. The winter workshops followed an icy spell, a return to the wild and windy weather which had dominated the groups visits. I wrote in my diary after the winter bird walk: I leave early to walk along the river before the children arrive. Tide low, widgeon, teal and black-tailed godwit on mud banks. Trees on the old railway track like a winter cathedral, eyes drawn up to great spaces and airy twig-work, river shining, puddles catch trees and sky. Back at the workshop, adults and children arrive early, spits of rain and cloud looming but sky clears again and we set off along the lane towards the Causeway. Children lively and leaping, many ill-clad, despite instructions: no gloves, no hats, not always coats with hoods, thin wellies, some soon cold, maybe because of indoor lives, impact of elements still something many have no real experience of, wildlife more often seen through a screen. Focusing their attention on birds is hard, binoculars swing wildly, but Keith, patient, keeps gently showing us whats here, close, seen, heard, unseen: a dunnock in the hedge, blue tit, collared dove, wood pigeon, black-headed gulls, chaffinch, great tit, wren, starlings, rooks, lapwing 120 how do you know? a boy asks carrion crow, 13 curlew they fly over and settle in Peters Field a kestrel, a sparrowhawk, a buzzard down the side of Long Ground on a small oak, a water rail in the reeds a sound like a pig whose tail has been stepped on widgeon, teal,

moorhen, one redshank downriver, something across the river its either a paper bag or a little egret. The childrens response was in tune with the weather, all their senses alert as, challenged to beat the adult groups record of 37 species spotted, they began to connect sound with sight. In one particularly windy moment, Colin gathered the group in the shelter of small oaks by the railway track and asked them to draw the sound of the wind. Despite cold fingers and damp paper on clipboards, pencils swooshed and swirled across paper. Afterwards they made poems about the walk, using their new understanding in their own patterns:Lapwings lining up on the edge of the estuary, Mediterranean gull gliding in the sky, rooks looking at the open fields, herons hiding on the rocking trees, moorhens meeting by the broken fence. swans swimming on the River Yar (Denver) But it was the first-hand, outdoor wildness of their drawings which had a real immediacy and sense of the place. When the last on location workshop was over, some of the adults commented on how sad they were. One wrote on his end of project evaluation that he felt almost bereaved. My own feelings are similar as, two years after Colin and I first put in our ACE application, we work on and shape the material we have gathered, re-visiting the Estuary but knowing that the freedom to go where we choose wont be ours for much longer. Back in October 2010, I could see in a detached way the beauty of the place; I took note of what my father was to describe as its gentleness: not a pushing kind of place. I felt it was different from the sort of landscape to which I was usually attracted: the rough, shifting wildness of the south coast of the island, or mountains or moorland. Now, its become a landscape to which I return in memory and imagination; it overlaps with those other landscapes which have become part of my inner map. Down on my boulder-strewn local beach I sometimes glimpse the river, a slim channel like a back-tofront S between shining mud banks at low tide. The words of a High Tide Poet stay with me: it is the voice of January marshes that turns the mind to melancholy so for a while this bleak of land and sea becomes an austere paradise (Robin)

LYDIA FULLEYLOVE is a writer and writing and cross arts project facilitator. Her first collection, Notes on Sea and Land, was published by Happenstance Press in 201 1. Her poem Night Drive was shortlisted for the Forward Best Single poem Poetry Prize in 2010 and chosen for the Forward Poems of the Decade anthology. She is most at home when out of doors, whether in the hills, woods or by the sea. Further details about the project at www.lydiafulleylove. co.uk/estuary and www.richesart.co.uk/estuary

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T h e N ew Paradig m: C h an g e th rough C ooperation

N afeez M osaddeq A hmed

umanity faces a momentous period of transition. Modern civilization is not only in crisis. It confronts a multiplicity of overlapping global crises that are potentially terminal. Were all aware of the devastating findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose worstcase scenario is that on a business-as-usual trajectory, global average temperatures will rise by 6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, creating an uninhabitable planet. We now know that this was far too conservative. The IPCC didnt sufficiently account for the interconnected complexity of different ecosystems. Arctic sea ice coverage is now at the lowest level its been for a million years. It will likely disappear in the summer by 2015. The loss of summer sea ice is linked to the accelerating melt of permafrost, releasing the vast underground stores of methane about thirty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon. The process is happening much faster than anticipated. Methane concentrations in the Arctic now average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years. If this reaches a tipping point, we could trigger a process of unstoppable runaway warming, and we could see a rise of 8-10 degrees Celsius, by the end of this century. Scientists also link the Arctic melt to our increasingly extreme weather. It will mean more colder, stormier winters in the UK and northern Europe. This, in turn, will damage British and European agriculture. With four-fifths of the

United States in drought, prolonged droughts in Russia and Africa, and a lighter monsoon in India all due to climate change were already seeing a global food supply crash that will precipitate dramatic food price spikes. This alone will lead to unprecedented food riots in poor countries around the world. By mid-century, if we fail to act, world crop yields could fall as much as 20 to 40 per cent due to global warming. Imagine what this would look like when we factor in the role of energy depletion. In 2010 the International Energy Agency acknowledged that world conventional oil production had most likely peaked in 2006. Future production, relying increasingly on unconventional sources like tar sands, oil shale and shale gas, will be increasingly expensive. But industry hype has promised to reduce these costs dramatically with new drilling technologies, namely fracking. But this just isnt true. Despite the US having increased its total oil supply by up to 2.1 million barrels per day since 2005 world crude oil production overall has remained largely flat since that very year. Writing in the journal Nature, Sir David King, the former UK government chief scientist, confirms that unconventional oil and gas wont be able to produce sufficiently cheap liquid fuels at the same rate as that of conventional oil. Production rates at shale wells drop off by 60 to 90 per cent within their first year of operation. Sir David also argues that oil companies have overestimated the size of world oil reserves by about a

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third. To make matters worse, a typical frack job uses about 4.5 million gallons of water what New York City consumes in seven minutes. As climate change intensifies drought, it will make fracking more costly and unsustainable. The problem is that every major point in industrial food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels on-site machinery; production of artificial fertilisers; processing, packaging, transport and storage. Ten per cent of energy consumed yearly in the United States is used by the food industry. So as oil becomes more expensive, this will place massive strain on industrial food production. And it wont just be food. By 2030, on our current course, climate change alone will lead to the deaths worldwide of over 100 million people, and a 3.2 per cent reduction in global GDP. What happens when we factor in the impact of peak oil? A study this year in the leading journal, Energy, concluded that world oil supply has not increased since 2005, that this was a primary cause of the recession, and that the expected impact of reduced oil supply will mean the financial crisis may eventually worsen. What happens when we factor in the interconnected feedback effects of water scarcity, food riots, civil breakdown, state failure, mass migrations? The costs will be amplified tremendously. This is because the growth that weve pursued over the last decades has been tied, inextricably, to the systematic expansion of debt. Although total world GDP is around $70 trillion, global external debt is at $69 trillion, and global public debt is at 64 per cent of global GDP. Meanwhile, the total size of global derivatives trading the debt-based speculation which got us into this mess has risen from $1,000 trillion in 2008 to $1,200 trillion now: a number with no relation to the real-economy. Its no coincidence that debt and derivatives have both intensified, because the speculative investments designed to benefit the 1 per cent are being bailed out by the 99. So its only a matter of time before accelerating costs catch up with unsustainable debt. Its time to wake up to the fact that the conventional economic model has run out of steam. Having outlasted its welcome, its now leading us along a path to self-destruction. The heart of the problem is the skewered structure of our current form of capitalism, which makes endless material growth at any cost a seemingly rational imperative. What is this structure? It comes down to who owns the Earth. Todays capitalism is based on a completely unnatural condition in which approximately 1-5 per cent of the worlds population owns the entirety of the planets productive resources, as well as the technologies of production and distribution. This is the outcome of centuries of colonisation, imperialism and globalisation, which has centralised control of the earths resources and raw materials into the hands of a few. With the entire planet subjected to the unrestrained logic of endless growth, were witnessing the accelerated degradation of our natural environment, our resource base, our economic and financial system, as well as our material and psychological well-being. These are not separate crises. They are interconnected symptoms of a global Crisis of Civilization. So how can we respond? We must first awaken to the reality that this is not the end, but the beginning. We are witnessing the collapse of the old paradigm which, hellbent on planetary suicide, isnt working. By the end of this

century, whatever happens, civilization in its current form will not exist. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is this: What will we choose to take its place? As a species, we are on the cusp of an evolutionary choice. Standing at the dawn of this perfect storm, we find ourselves at the beginning of a process of civilizational transition. As the old paradigm dies, a new paradigm is born. And many people around the world are already making the evolutionary choice to step away from the old, and embrace the new. Already, local communities and grassroots activists are cocreating this new paradigm as I speak, from the ground up. In Greece, locals in Athens gave up their salaries to form an eco-village, producing their own food, building sustainable houses, and decreasing reliance on money. As austerity wipes out jobs and businesses, the eco-village has become a citizens hub, giving advice and running workshops on independent living. In the UK, there are 43 communities producing renewable energy through co-operative ownership structures. These projects are established and run by local residents, who collectively invest their own time and money to install local wind turbines, solar panels, and hydro-electric power. The Borough of Woking in Surrey, for instance, produces 135 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources, selling energy to the national grid, and earning revenue that feeds back into the local economy. In 2008, 200,000 US households were living off-grid sourcing their own water, generating their own electricity, and managing their own waste disposal. By 2010, this had jumped to 750,000, and is now rising by about 10 per cent a year. Across the Western world, there are now 380 Transition Towns, whose citizens are actively collaborating to make urban life resilient to fossil fuel depletion and climate change. The new paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another, but as interdependent members of a single human family. Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society, such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the pathology that it is. Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values that make us human values like meeting our basic needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more than mere money and things. And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment. These grassroots endeavours are pointing us toward a vision in which people reverse their irrational investments in counterproductive conflict. Over the last decade, under the old paradigm, weve steadily increased world military spending by about 4.5 per cent annually. In 2011, world military spending totalled $1.74 trillion rising 0.3 per cent from the preceding year flattening only due to the financial crisis. Imagine what we could achieve if we transferred such absurdly huge expenditures on war-preparations for the nation, into development concerns for the species. Study after study proves that we could successfully transition to a 100% global renewable energy infrastructure, within the next thirty

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years. The costs of this transition would be no more than 1 per cent of the annual national budgets of all world governments. This implies not just sending home armed forces, reducing unnecessary weapons production, and curtailing the influence of the military-industrial complex. We must convert that very industrial capacity by re-training our workers in the defence industries, and re-employing them in the new industries of sustainable peace that can underpin post-carbon civilization. This will generate a new sustainable form of prosperity. Even by todays completely inadequate levels of investment, by 2020 some 2.8 million people in Europe will be employed in the renewable energy sector, boosting Europes GDP by some 0.24 per cent. Imagine what we could achieve if hundreds of millions of households across Europe came together in their communities to invest their collective resources into each becoming owners and producers of energy? The new energy paradigm is not about corporate-dominated mega-projects, but about empowering small businesses and communities. Up to 70 per cent of energy is lost in transmission over large distances. So theres potential for huge efficiency gains when power is produced and consumed closer to the source. This model, where households, communities and towns become producers and consumers of clean energy, is being successfully scaledup in Germany, where 20 per cent of the countrys electricity comes from renewables, and 51 per cent of distributed energy generation is owned by individuals, not utility companies. This new paradigm also applies to food. On the one hand, we need to put an end to the wasteful practices of the industrial food system, by which one-third of global food production is lost or wasted every year. On the other, we must shift away from resource-intensive forms of traditional corporate-dominated agriculture. In many cases, we will find that smaller-scale forms of organic farming which are more labour-intensive, though less energy- and water-intensive, can be more sustainable than current industrial practices. Communal organic farming offers immense potential not only for employment, but also for households to become local owners and producers in the existing food supply chain. In poorer countries, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food finds that small-scale organic methods could double food production. And a recent University of Michigan study concludes that no-pesticide, local forms of organic agriculture without artificial fertilisers, could theoretically be scaled up to sustain high nutritional requirements for the entire global population. This new paradigm of distributed clean energy production, decentralised farming, and participatory economic cooperation, offers a model of development free from the imperative of endless growth for its own sake; and it leads us directly to a new model of democracy, based not on large-scale, hierarchical-control, but on the wholesale decentralisation of power, towards smaller, local ownership and decision-making. In the new paradigm, households and communities become owners of capital, in their increasing appropriation of the means to produce energy, food and water at a local level. Economic democratisation drives political empowerment, by ensuring that critical decisions about production and distribution of wealth take place in communities, by communities. But participatory enterprise requires commensurate mechanisms of monetary exchange which

are equitable and transparent, free from the fantasies and injustices of the conventional model. In the new paradigm, neither money nor credit will be tied to the generation of debt. Banks will be community-owned institutions fully accountable to their depositors; and whirlwind speculation on financial fictions will be replaced by equitable investment schemes in which banks share risks with their customers, and divide returns fairly. The new currency will not be a form of debt-money, but, if anything, will be linked more closely to real-world assets. But equally, the very notions of growth, progress and happiness will be redefined. We now know, thanks to research by the likes of psychologist Oliver James and epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, that material prosperity in the West has not only failed to make us happy, it has proliferated mental illnesses, and widened social inequalities which are scientifically linked to a prevalence of crime, violence, drug abuse, teenage births, obesity, and other symptoms of social malaise. This doesnt mean that material progress is irrelevant but that when it becomes the overriding force of society, it is dysfunctional. So we must accept that the old paradigm of unlimited material acquisition is in its death throes and that the new paradigm of community cooperation is far more in tune with both human nature, and the natural order. This new paradigm may well still be nascent, like small seeds, planted in disparate places. But as the Crisis of Civilization accelerates over the next decades, communities everywhere will become increasingly angry and disillusioned with what went before. And in that disillusionment with the old paradigm, the seeds were planting today will blossom and offer a vision of hope that will be irresistible tomorrow. Theres only one question that remains. Are you going to hold fast with the grip of death to the old paradigm, or will you embrace life to become an agent of the new paradigm of community cooperation? r

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and Chief Research Officer at Unitas Communications Ltd., where he leads on strategy and geopolitical risk. His latest book is A Users Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), which inspired the awardwinning documentary feature film, The Crisis of Civilization (201 1). Ahmed has written extensively on the security impacts of environmental, energy and economic issues, including for the Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Le Monde diplomatique, Foreign Policy, the New Statesman, Prospect, and Huffington Post, among others. See http://iprd.org.uk/

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One One One One

Walk P lace T ime Foundlin g

words and images by

J uliet L ockhart

begin by walking. All things that happen have to happen somewhere, in some space, so that story and place are bound together. The way I feel and think about the landscape is rooted in stories. The East Anglian coastline is my landscape, my local. There are traces left on this landscape that both provoke and evoke memories, occurences and history. It is about connections what has happened and what will happen. I am drawn to borders; in the landscape it is where sea meets land, open space meets woodland, rock meets sky. In narrative it is the moment we balance on the brink of one world, leap, and see it is possible to change, to transform, to wonder. Puppets hover between animate and inanimate, between secular and sacred, between facsimile and reality. Walking through a physical landscape produces a memory map of the place. Impressions, scents and textures underfoot are stored in the mind. By revisiting a place over and over again different experiences are layered one on top of another. The way that shingle banks reform daily; relics of WW2 defences that are revealed when the tide is low and concealed when high; evidence of fossilised wood; the sharks teeth that are scattered on the sand as the waves recede; the skies as the sun sinks and trees that stand on the edge of the cliff poised as if to dive. All of this peels away at a place, so that it unfurls to allow a glimpse of what has been and what might be.

The initial findings then, come from this tidal landscape. A place of constant change, a shape shifting, volatile place. The product of a place where natural forces come together with human forces sometimes in opposition and sometimes as one. These findings are salvaged materials from salvaged places, memories and stories that come together momentarily in between the tides on one particular walk along a section of coastline. Broken shells, spars of wood, plastic bleached like bones, bits of rope and tangled fishing line, a silk rose and shards of sea polished glass are collected, sifted and stored. As in an archeological dig some shards remain mute, isolated and disconnected, waiting for someone to come along to discover their pattern and reassemble them. These fragments are bleached, categorised, boxed and labelled with a time and date and location of the walk on which it was found. In time, they are laid out, each given a space around it so that they become components, parts of a figure. Sometimes the character will make itself apparent immediately, limbs falling effortlessly into place, sometimes they struggle to make themselves known, hiding within a jumble of twisted sticks, knotted driftwood and hag stones. They are Natures debris re-assembled into puppet-like objects, hovering between life and death, on the brink, on the edge. The art of bringing things to life is how I relate my sculpture to puppetry. Puppets are objects that always appear

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to be as much dead as alive; always on the brink of life or death, on the edge, the not-knowing. Puppets are figures of metamorphosis, of magical potential. They stand on the cusp of what is real and what is longed for. The Foundlings have their roots in the beginnings of puppets, raw and elemental. From when man first carved tiny figures from soft stone, bones and tusks. From the Venus of Willendorf carved from limestone and covered with red pigment. Wood, string, stone, wire, leather, shell, linen are materials that bind, connect, thread and weave together into animated images, constructed bodies that become a physical manifestation of the spirit of a place. Each puppet suggests a narrative. Memories are projected through these figures, embedded in them. They are constructed from a multitude of narratives layered onto place. They are the beginnings and the ends of stories. As objects they exist to be animated by action; they cannot perform on their own but need human intervention. The verb to animate does not mean to move, but rather it means to give soul to, from the Latin word anima. The notion of soul crops up time and time again in connection with puppets. There is something intensely magical about being able to bring to life an inanimate object. The power of being able to articulate that which cannot easily be spoken. What a gift to be given. Folk tales in their various guises are scattered throughout time and history. They allow us to endlessly retell, reshape and revise them so that they can continue to enchant us. The folk tale takes its time to unfold, to reveal its meanings. In the same way it takes time to explore the spirit of a place, to delve deep into its layers in order to bring a new story into being. My tale, The First Foundling, is a retelling of La Loba, the bone woman, a story taken from Clarissa Pinkola Ests

in her book, Women Who Run With The Wolves. Ests tells of an old woman, La Loba, who collects bones and preserves them. She gathers bones from everywhere: from all the hidden places, through mountains, across river beds, trailing deep in the forest and stalking the deserts. She searches for those that belong to creatures in danger of being lost to the world, but her speciality is wolves. When she has assembled an entire skeleton she sits by a fire to think about what story she will sing. Then she stands over the skeleton, raises her hands and sings. Flesh covers bones, fur covers flesh. As she sings, more of the creature comes into being. It becomes wolf again and is set free to roam.

The First Foundling

While the world was still finding its feet, she would place her own soft soles gently onto the ribbed sand, tasting the landscape. The prints she left behind were faint upon the ground. Both she and the young world were feeling their way forwards, one step at a time step by step; step by step. She watched as the first light came into the sky; watched as the night split and dawn broke loose. She watched the sun drop white-hot cinders into the waiting sea, watched barely formed waves briefly toss them, and felt the roll of the tide tug gently at something deep inside her. She stood and looked out across the light skimming the surface of the water wondered what lay at the end of the sun-path. The world began to settle, to recognise its rhythms and to spin out its history. She became at ease with her surroundings with the sun, the winds, the tumble of rocks and waves, the sounds and the scents of a hinterland shaped by salt. She walked the seam between water and land, the threshold of light and the nevermore of dark: a

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crack between worlds. She is the breath on which these two worlds turn. Once she had found her place on the earth, she let her gaze fall, to see what lay beneath her steady step. She no longer wondered about what might lie at the end of the sun path. She watched stones betray their secret light as the water covered them; saw the sun steal it as the tide receded, leaving behind a faint smoky lustre on the rough surfaces. She caught the murmurs of ancient creatures safe within their chalk skeletons as they whispered along the sand; held past and present in her hands as the waves crested and broke over her broad feet. She slept nightly under simple stars on sea-sifted shingle as the oceans kept their secrets. What comes from out of the dark cannot always be seen in the dark; the sea has a cruel humour, sacred drownings on the tide: shipwrecks; the shadows of wave and wind the waters part, and sailors plunge into its chasm. Patches of silver light coming and going between the clouds light the way for a rushing sheet of seawater that reels earthbound settlements into a new watery environment, and casts them across the seabed.

~
She lies asleep, her salt-laden hair spread heavy around

her eyes and lips lightly closed. Her breathing is gentle and rhythmic like the undertone of a calm sea. Her feet no longer walking the shoreline rest apart, her soles and insteps still puckered from the water. Behind her hangs a great sweep of sea. A quiet sea, all grey beneath a grey sky, flat for miles out, and at the tideline the waves scarcely break before they pull back across the sand. It is a vast silent wilderness; the sun lost, the wind lost, the clouds a dark canopy spreading slowly over the land. Her body sinks deeper into the rough grains of sand, granular and gritty, stone and shell, a covering for tide-tumbled bones. Far out on the horizon the sea level changes, swelling as something approaches. The waves grow higher, softly turbulent they flow forward and towards her. Whirling inward the storm comes. She wakes. The moon sets and the land is lost in thick darkness. The storm is all about her, passing through her, drenching her, submerging her, pulling and combing her out into long strands like tidal seaweed. She waits in the gloaming, waits until the storm exhausts itself, is reclaimed by the ocean. Waits to see what will be revealed as the cloudy water clears, the stirred silt sinks, and the foam-flecked edges of the waves retreat. Beneath the wind-scuffed sand, fragments of knotted limbs appear, splintered slivers of wood, twisted arthritic branches and charred and cracked timber. The soft powdery grains lie over them like a blanket. She falls to her knees, strokes the sand away and blows her breath is warm upon the frozen spars. She gathers them up, flooded with grief like the shore by an incoming tide. The horror of the scene, the recollection of the devastation appears again and again before her inward eye. She feels shut inside her sorrow; the world withers, shrinks and encloses her. The wind picks up, swirls through her hair like an invisible flood tide amongst seaweed, tugging her, compelling her towards the watery wasteland. She stumbles forward and the undertow reaches out to embrace her. It winds around her legs and her white dress spreads itself across the surface of the water. She sways, her arms full of broken scraps. The sea sings to her, cradles her, hushes her and her dress dips and bows in response. It wraps her up in warm currents and spins her round until she feels like she is breaking up, her bones dislocating, her skin sloughing away, drifting under the surface of the water. In her arms the fragments skitter and fret. They push against her body, nudging her blindly, trembling against one another. In the moment before a powerful soundless swell lifts her body and swallows her, before the surging rope of water binds her, her head clears and she turns. Her body leans into the force of the waves and she braces herself against the weight of the water, breasting the current until at last she emerges onto the waiting shingle. Behind her the sea boils and rages, howling against the loss of one of its own. She gently sets down the pieces from the shelter of her arms. Her findings, laid out in expectation, between water and land, between the isles of the dead and earthly paradise. Head on one side, she watches them with dark eyes; stands feet together, hands clasped in front of her belly. And waits. The moon rises, rides high in an indigo sky smeared with flat clouds. The sand has a blue cast and where it lies in the brilliance of the moon, it gleams pure white. Her shadow lengthens and slips towards the high cliff that rises behind her. The moon is a yellow orb now that idly plays with the water below as it watches her. Her body begins to move, to sway. The hem of her

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dress undulates and flows around her legs, her shadow rubs against the cliff face. She lets her head roll back, closes her eyes and her feet dig into the sand until they find the sighs of the stories layered beneath. The sighs draw breath, wisps of halfremembered tales, rising up through the chill night air and, wraith-like, circle her body. Through the night as the moon travels the sky, and the sea simmers under its watchful gaze, the story of the first foundling is told. Slowly the creature is re-formed. Broken limbs knit together; ochre-brushed pieces bearing the scars of nails and beetle burrowing fit alongside grey streaked nuggets. Hag stone joints slot back into position, ash and elm bind together. Bleached white jaw bones re-attach to a long creviced muzzle and bud-like wings flecked with leaf green settle between shoulder blades. Flakes of bark coat, like fur, an upright body and a sea-sharpened tail hangs low. A shard of fired clay, cream edges smoothed and rounded, protects a storm-tossed heart on the verge of beating.

The story of this first foundling can be traced in every deep gouge, in every laceration, in every slash. They are vulnerable creatures, ever-dependent on seclusion, protection, and doomed to lose their way, fodder for the sea and its devouring appetite. She could not defend them, could not save them from being shattered against the rocks or flayed by the unstable rips and crosscurrents. So they danced with death, danced to the tune of sea voices and she called them back, the dismembered, to dance with life again. In the still inshore water beside the beach she attended them. Scrabbled out of the mire, mixed with sea water, with sand, with flint, with ashes of bones, kneaded, caressed, moulded and sculpted by her patient hands. Coaxed into dancing with life again. As she grew older her skin, once like sea-smoothed sand, became coarser. Life lines etched into her face. Her feet kept the memories of the seashores she trod, and her once-soft soles and insteps crusted over. She walked the tide wrack searching through the storm tide debris; gathering amongst the kelp, the tongue stones, wireweed, thunderbolts, sea hares, china limpets, heart cockles and brittle stars. She sifted thin bones that tinkled like glass, pitted shells, bones burnished to a deep coral red, clumped oyster shells like mermaids bones, ivory sculpted sea potatoes stitched together, bundles of dried marram grass. The stories had to be collected. Incomplete, soaked with tears, lit with pleasure, cloaked in loathing, bathed in ecstasy, stories that fought to be re-written, to be voiced; stories that concealed themselves within other tales. She told them as

they were meant to be told. As each creature came back into being, as each story found its way into the world an infinitesimal piece of her was left on the shoreline. A price to be paid a life for a life. The high seas called her name, in the shush of the tumbling stones, in the drone of the jet stream, in the rumble of the white horses and in the sough of the spring tide. They called her to join them, and on wild nights she was tempted to let them take her and the stories, to give back the foundlings, back into the trackless deep. In the end the salt waters wore her down; as each foundling became whole so she began to disintegrate. Her story dispersed lay down its beginning to be covered by stone and flint, wove its strands through the dark red filaments of seaweed on wave-washed rocks, and gave its ending back to the sea, to the dreamtime where it began. The sea bestows life and takes life. It holds all the stories ever told. It determines what to cast out and when to give refuge. It is regretful; gently washing shattered limbs, licking at them, trying to bring life back to them but it cannot do this alone. r

JULIET LOCKHART is a sculptor and installation artist. Narrative and place have always threaded through her work, alongside a deep interest in puppetry as an art form. In 201 1 she graduated from the University of Essex with an MA in Literature & Creative Writing. Through writing about place and re-telling folk and fairytales, her own practice underwent a transformation. Her new work, Foundlings, has its roots in wild writings and was born of Tidal Margins, a three-year project responding to the Suffolk Coastline. Alongside her studio work she delivers an arts in mental health project, Art In Mind, which runs art courses in various museums throughout Suffolk. www.julietlockhart.co.uk; julietlockhart.wordpress.com

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DIGGING IN,
and

DIGGING DEEP:
On place, belonging, and responsibility S haron B lackie

Harris | Beth Robertson Fiddes

t seventeen, knowing everything and knowing nothing, I fell in love. The object of my love was beautiful and sad; broken, beyond comfort yet filled with a strange wild hope. Mine was no ordinary love, more spirit than flesh: but a love that brought me to a revelation of my own body-in-the-world more thoroughly than any other love I have ever known. How did such a great love come to be? We met in an elegant, white-covered Penguin paperback version of D.H. Lawrences novel, The Rainbow. My love affair happened in the unlikely setting of an allgirls grammar school in the heart of a city in the Midlands, where I was given a copy of The Rainbow to study for English A level. To a child who had been force-fed a traditional girls-school diet of Jane Austen, George Eliot and John Milton, this was a radical work in every way. Imagine the girl I was then, her early years circumscribed by an ugly northeastern industrial town surrounded by chemical works, steel works, chicken-processing factories and sugar-processing factories with docklands and shipyards for light relief. But that girl lived mostly on the fringes of town, looking across abandoned fields surprisingly full of flora and fauna to those heavy industrial complexes on the River Tees. Her days were spent rooting in an overgrown one-time cabbage patch next to an old WW2 bomb shelter, learning about worms and pissy-beds and caterpillars and grandmother, grandmother, pop-out-of-beds; she fell asleep to nightmares of smokespewing chimneys and giant industrial pitchforks, and woke in the night to the sound of fog-horns. That girl, older now, felt the same gnawing, scraping sense of fear and loss that Lawrence felt she just hadnt been able to put a name to it. She recognised, then, the complexities and contradictions

inherent in his representation of the deep and instinctive connection between humans and the natural world, and all of the ways in which it was being obliterated by the industrial machine. Growing up as the son of a Nottinghamshire coalminer who taught him the names of plants and trees and how to recognise animal tracks, Lawrence was well aware of the head-on, bone-splitting collision between those two worlds. The Rainbow paints a picture of a world in transition, of the modern move from pastoral to urban, from a landfocused, hard but deeply nourishing life, to dependence on the industrial machine. It follows several generations of an English family, the Brangwens, through that transition. The first generation of Brangwens that we meet are farmers, and their connection with the land and the natural world is deep, visceral and vivid: They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed in begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the day-time, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds nests no longer worth hiding So much warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, so much exchange and interchange they had with these, that they lived full and surcharged, their senses full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of generation, unable to turn around. As the book progresses, though, and the narrative moves into the modern age, it becomes populated with characters

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who have lost that connection to the land that was the mainstay of previous generations existence. One of the younger generation of the Brangwens, Ursula, observes the hard, cutting edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph, a triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle; she saw the dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from the Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat. Most of Lawrences writing throughout his life was concerned with a critique of Modernity: with the creeping progress of industrialisation, with the consequent loss of our connection to the natural world and its rhythms and its seasons. He argued passionately that we have constructed an exclusively human world for ourselves, and in so doing, we have cut ourselves off from the source of our belonging: the land, and the nonhuman others who occupy it with us. We have lost touch with that sense of being a part of the natural world, of being in our bodies, in present time. The ultimate result of such abstraction from nature, the body, and the present, he wrote, is the destruction of any possibility of inner peace and fulfilment, and of community. Today, close to a century later (The Rainbow was published in 1915) we suffer still from those losses. Wherever you go, and whatever you read, people will tell you about it: that curious sense of dislocation, and the feelings of meaninglessness, alienation, homelessness, rootlessness which accompany it Aggravating this complex of conditions is our tendency (Modernist perhaps; certainly, the result of two thousand years of human-centred Western philosophy) to retreat inside our own heads and look there for solutions to all of our problems. But inside of us isnt where the solution lies. We spend our lives searching for meaning in ourselves, when it is beneath our feet, all around us, in the air we breathe. We are so wrapped up in the centrality of our own exhausting self-referential humanness that we forget that we are creatures of the earth, and need also to connect with the land. We need we badly need grounding; we need to find our anchor in the land. And once we find that anchor, so much of the rest of it falls away. At eighteen, that girl who had been so inspired by Lawrence went on to study psychology, and she too for a while came to imagine that it might possible to find the answers within ourselves, as if the rest of the world were little more than a backdrop to the often-competing dramas of our own intellect and emotions. That a lifetime spent trying to figure out who we are, and searching for our true self could be a lifetime well spent. But it is clear to me now, three decades later, that it is only when we learn to pull ourselves outside of the comfort of our heads that we can begin to know anything about belonging.

What is it anyway, this business of belonging, and what does it entail? Its often talked about as if it were one of those longed-for conditions that people imagine will descend on them one day, rather like the Holy Ghost. It doesnt, of course; belonging is frequently an act of will: active, not passive. Sometimes you have to work quite hard at developing it. This flies in the face of another curious idea that we seem to have attached ourselves to: the notion that if we have to work at something like belonging (or like love, or compassion) it must therefore be less real or less authentic. Thats a Romantic illusion which (like so many Romantic illusions) we badly need to let go of. The problem of belonging and how we learn to do it is compounded by the fact that it seems to be out of fashion with many contemporary intellectuals, because it is so often associated with belonging to a specific place, and so with rootedness in place. In other words, with staying put: anathema to the mobility junkies that weve now become. Place (like Heideggers concept of dwelling), we are frequently told, is rather a static idea, whereas movement and mobility are inevitable and essential consequences of the Modern condition. Rootedness apparently is pass; were supposed to have moved beyond it. And so the implication is that if we promote a connection to the land, and a deep sense of place as a critical component of belonging, we must be promoting an odd kind of intellectual conservatism that is quite out of step with the times. Is that really the case? Is the very concept of belonging dead and gone? Are we just hankering back nostalgically to a primitive past? For we cant go back to it, for sure not to the kind of unmechanised, simpler life which was lived by people like the early generations of Brangwens in The Rainbow. Not with our current progress-and-growth-driven economic and social systems still in place. We certainly cant all be farmers, and besides, most of us havent the slightest desire to be. So how do we can we, even bring place and belonging back into contemporary life? Specifically, if we want to develop a sense of place and belonging today, how might we go about it? First, I want to challenge that notion that place is an outdated, static concept. There is a strong sense in which these arguments miss the point. To me, place is far from a static concept. The question of whether rootedness in place is a good thing is not at all about change versus stability, tradition versus progress and growth, standing still versus travelling. Thats far too simplistic. Im certainly not advocating an attachment to place and a rootedness that are based in a nostalgic attachment to a pastoral Golden-Age past; theres more than enough of that kind of nostalgia going around. Nor am I talking about the backward-looking advocacy of a sense of place, country or national identity that has been obsolete for a thousand years, nor any other attempt to escape the vicissitudes of the modern world by tying oneself to an inherited religion, ethnicity, or location. Because it is indeed entirely possible for a historically derived and idealised view of place to be associated with romanticised escapism, reactionary nationalisms, competitive localisms, or obsessions with heritage and with concepts of belonging that are rigid, categorical and exclusive. But it doesnt have to be so. Conversely, it is also important to understand that mobility isnt automatically a good thing, associated as it is

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with progressive globalisation, uncontrollable ecologically unsound migrations and excessive urbanisation. From a psychological perspective, rootless wandering may be a consequence of Modernity, but that doesnt make it a healthy one, or one that we should actively advocate. Mobility can just as easily be translated into restlessness at best; an inability to commit at worst. There are a number of reasons why it seems to me that place is far from a static concept, among them the frequently ignored fact that we dwell not only in three-dimensional space, but also in time. Movement also is movement through time, and so wherever we are, we are moving whether we are aware of it or not. As Tim Ingold1 tells us, the essence of what it means to dwell is to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. Life is filled with movement, with processes of becoming. You dont have to walk, or wander from place to place to move. Wherever we may stand or anchor ourselves, we move always in time. In this way, we move change grow even when we are standing still. And if we do happen to be standing still for a while, attending, it seems to me that we grow in a deep way, with deep, strong roots not with surface roots which run the risk of drying out and lacking nourishment, and which are too susceptible to random changes in the weather. Similarly, the geographer Torston Hgerstrand regarded not just human life but every constituent of the environment as a path of becoming: there are human becomings, animal becomings, plant becomings all moving together through time and encountering one another, their paths interweaving. Rootedness in a place, then, leads to a coherent sense of being that is never fixed, but always under construction always becoming. Theres nothing static or conservative about this concept of place: its revolutionary. So if we can conceive of an idea of place that isnt static how then do we learn to belong to that place? Its one of the things I often think about here in the Outer Hebrides where we live, and where so many incomers come who have no history here. How do you develop a sense of belonging, without taking over or appropriating? Some people will argue that proper belonging isnt possible unless you were born in a particular place, or have lived there for a large portion of your life, and no-one really does that very much these days. And it is of course true that the longer you are in a place if you are attentively, lovingly committed to it then the more you know it. The knowledge and sense of belonging that I derive from my three years in this particular Outer Hebridean landscape is only partial compared to the knowledge and deep-rooted connection of people who were born here, and whose families have lived and crofted here for generations. But belonging can be grown nevertheless, and people who move into new places are perfectly capable of forming deep and committed bonds with them. Those bonds are formed in two ways: through knowledge of the places ecology the land, the structure of the soil, the wildlife, weather and through knowledge of a places culture its history, language, myths and folk tales, social and economic background: in short, its people. You need both, of course; if youre going to live in a new place you owe both it and its inhabitants that much respect. Thats how you learn

belonging, and if its a different kind of belonging from the people who were born and who grew up in your place, its no less valid. (And if your life should move you from place to place, it is no less important to develop that sense of belonging in each of them. Because, yes many of us are rooted in several places an interconnected meshwork of places with which weve had relationships.) We have come to know this dual aspect of belonging here in this place that weve inhabited for just three years now, and weve come to know it not only by working the land ourselves, but by talking to and working with those whose families have lived on and worked it for generations. The knowledge that it is a golden plover which sits peeping loudly on a large flat rock by the old gateposts at the side of the track down at the cleared and now-abandoned village of Mealista is fine enough. Even finer are the ways in which we connect with golden plovers as we share this landscape with them throughout the year: their call punctuates our dawn walks, and the silence of the slow-descending summer nights. But adding a new layer of complexity to a landscape that suddenly then becomes storied, and which feeds our imagination in new ways, is the knowledge, gleaned from a man who was born and raised here, that this enormous flat rock has a name: it is called Clach an Eich (the Horse Stone), because it was placed there years ago by the men of the village who, having dismounted from their horses to pass through the gate, would then use it as a stepping stone to remount on the other side. This is more than mere history: these are the stories that bring a landscape to life. The gate may no longer exist, nor the horses, and the village of Mealista may no longer be inhabited but that rock is there still, and new uses are found for it by the inhabitants of this beautiful place where the sheep and cattle of the township still graze. But just learning about the old stories and histories of a place isnt where it ends, either, because that is where stasis sets in. A place and you in it and with it can only be in the process of becoming when you go on to make your own stories of that place, as a new and unique contributor to its ever-evolving natural history and culture. You bring your own points of reference, and you will tell new stories of the place based on your own way of seeing it. There is always, then, an ongoing and reciprocal relationship between a place and the people who are in it or who come to it. And so, to give a simple example, we may now think of Clach an Eich as Golden Plover Rock, because there it was that we saw the golden plover for the first time, and there it returned all summer long. The two stories the old, and the new do not compete; they just reflect a change of use, or custom. The question which remains, perhaps, is why belonging matters so much in the first place. Isnt it all just about humans feeling good about personal growth and wellbeing? And when we occupy a planet that is clearly in an advanced state of crisis as a consequence of human activities, arent those just luxuries that we cant afford? For sure, the continuing emphasis that so many self-help gurus, therapists and others place on personal growth and wellbeing is often little more than paradigmatic fiddling while Rome burns but for me, the key reason why we need to develop a sense of place and belonging isnt just to make us feel good. It is because the critical value that we can derive from a sense of place and

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belonging entails more than just knowledge of a place: it entails responsibility for it. The sense of responsibility that comes from a deep understanding of a place, and caring about the consequences of our actions in it and on it. True commitment to place love for a place should lead inevitably to ecological stewardship: if you are devoted to a place, and know yourself to be a part of its ecosystem, then youre more likely to protect it and to fight for it, if necessary. The difficulty that many of us face, of course, is powerlessness. Because generally we dont own the land that we inhabit, and so it is rare that we can easily influence the decisions that are made about its future. Study after study in all fields Loch of the Green Corrie | Beth Robertson Fiddes of psychology tells us that when people feel powerless, theyre less likely to engage with Car-sharing and bicycle-sharing initiatives are underway; waste fat from cafeterias catering for passengers on island a problem, or to take action to solve it or fight it. Which brings me, finally, to the growing movement ferries is being converted into biodiesel; every house is being towards community land ownership: an important means provided with a compost bin, and an island-based woodfuel by which a sense of belonging can not only grow, but bear business is up and running. Its hard to argue with that, and fruit. Its a movement that is especially strong in Scotland, a indeed renewable energy projects feature heavily in many country which is now at the forefront of community-centric other local buyouts, providing sensitively sited, small-scale, land reform. For example, over half the land in the Outer community-focused electricity-generating schemes small Hebrides where we live is in community ownership, and enough that the community retains both control and profit. North Harris, meanwhile, has focused on making visible more than two-thirds of the population lives on communityowned estates. This is thanks to a series of radical legislative its cultural heritage, treating the land as a working wilderness. initiatives which culminated in the Scottish Land Reform Bill Projects include the creation of community woodland and of 2003 a law that gave the right to crofting communities sensitive management of environmentally protected areas, to buy back their crofts and their townships common land in collaboration with organisations such as the John Muir even from landlords who wished to retain it. A large number of Trust. There is a focus on the careful management of hunting buyouts have now taken place, including (but not confined and fishing resources which not only enables preservation of to) major projects on the Isle of Eigg, in Assynt, North Harris, wildlife, but means that it no longer constitutes a sport just West Harris, Gigha, South Uist, and the Bhaltos and Galson for the wealthy. In a 2007 report summarising the impact of community crofting land buyouts in Scotland, geographer estates on the Isle of Lewis. Whats interesting about all of this is that many of the Fiona D. Mackenzie noted that land-owning crofting estates which are now in community hands communities communities [are] in a strong position from which to respond that are made up both of families who have lived on the to contemporary calls for support for biodiversity and the land for generations, and of committed incomers are sustainable management of the land. It is here that ecologically recognised for their outstanding environmental awareness precise, local, knowledge, essential for both is found.2 Developing a sense of place and belonging, then, is very and stewardship programmes. The Isle of Eigg is perhaps the best-known example: when the local community took control much about engaging with our responsibilities to the planet. of the island they initiated a ground-breaking environmental Its arguably a necessary prerequisite for that engagement, for programme which continues still to grow and develop and there is a strong argument that you begin to approach loving surprise. A major focus has been in the field of green energy, more than just the idea of the whole by learning to fully love with the establishment of Eigg Electric, allowing the island to the reality of a part. We engage in a meaningful way by starting be self-sufficient in power derived from water, wind and the with the place that we call home, and by participating in the sun. Even more radically, islanders voted to install limiters development of that ecologically precise, local, knowledge. that keep their power consumption within agreed bounds. And ultimately, and in whatever ways are open to us, we can

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then begin that necessary work of taking responsibility for, and helping to protect, the land that we occupy. This seems to me to be a moral imperative, and the places we inhabit, which provide us not only with shelter but with all the necessities of life, deserve and demand no less. In this way, belonging, and the embracing of a sense of place, becomes a radical, not a conservative, activity. That original copy of The Rainbow lives with me still. Its looking a little shabby now much-thumbed as it is, and very much loved. The first page, containing a brief biography of the author, tells me that after the First World War D. H. Lawrence embarked upon a savage pilgrimage, in search of a more fulfilling mode of life than industrial Western civilisation could offer. And indeed Lawrence, who was often as naive as he was wise, never came to understand that belonging is something that you create an act of worship, almost or maybe, these days, of contrition. He expected to find a place, ready-made, into which he could slot, and though he travelled the world, he never found it. And so he too, like so many of the characters in his books, became a wandering, rootless victim of Modernity. The Rainbow was one of a small number of books that accompanied me through my own rootless, wandering years the years in which I lost sight of that great love from time to time, and seemed to forget what I understood so deeply at first. I dont speak about belonging from any position of superiority, you see; its taken me long enough to know with my feet and my body what I knew in my head and my heart at seventeen: that we make our own belongings. That we participate, each of us, in creating the songlines for every place that we inhabit. That we enmesh ourselves into the web of life around us, or we do not: its our choice. And to those of you reading this article who wonder still about your own belongings, I can do no better than to repeat the words of American poet Gary Snyder in Turtle Island: Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there. r
Ingold, Tim. Being Alive. Routledge (2011) A. Fiona D. Mackenzie The Contribution of Crofting in the 21st Century. Report to the Committee of Inquiry on Crofting (2007)
1 2

LOVE
H ugh W arwick

Sharon Blackie is a writer, crofter and former psychologist specialising in narrative psychology, myth- and storytelling. Her first novel was The Long Delirious Burning Blue., and her shorter work has been published in a variety of magazines and journals. In 2006 Sharon and her husband David Knowles founded literary publisher Two Ravens Press. They now live on and work a croft on the far south-western coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides Sharon is editor of EarthLines magazine. www.reenchantingtheearth.com.

tanding in a lecture theatre filled with some of the countrys leading ecologists, I knew it was going to be a daunting moment. I had been talking about the complications of wildlife management, about why the cull of hedgehogs in the Outer Hebrides was a mistake, and how ecological training misleads graduates into thinking they are being entirely objective. And then I had to do it introduce the L word. I found out later that some of the discomfort in the audience came from those thinking it was a statistical term with which they were unfamiliar; but that was nothing to the reaction when I revealed I was referring to love. I am a big fan of love. Not just because I am a soppy romantic, but because of an idea that was very neatly summarised by biologist Stephen Jay Gould: We will not fight to save what we do not love. As I was finishing my first book, A Prickly Affair, I started arguing that the hedgehog was the most important creature on the planet for this very reason. My point, still valid I reckon, was that while conservation and wildlife organisations spend their time trying to seduce us into loving the natural world (because why would we fight for it if we did not love it?) with images of the charismatic mega-fauna the lions, tigers, elephants and whales they are missing the point. It is like relying on images of A-list celebrities in Heat and Hello magazines to form a coherent idea of what human relationships are like. In both instances the pictures show endangered, remote and unobtainable creatures. But the hedgehog? Well, we are most likely to fall in love with the girl or the boy next door and the hedgehog is the animal equivalent. We have a chance of meeting a hedgehog, of getting nose-to-nose with a hedgehog. We can look into the eyes of a hedgehog and get a glimpse of the very real wildness within. And that is the start of a proper relationship, and without a proper relationship you dont get love. And without love you dont get the motivation to fight. Now, clearly the love I have for hedgehogs is very different from the love I have for my family, or my friends. And it struck me that it is odd that we have just the one word for it, love. The Ancient Greeks identified six varieties of love, as described by my friend Roman Krznaric in his superb book, The Wonderbox. He pointed out that it is a pretty odd state of affairs to have more varieties of coffee on offer than of love. What I found even odder, though, was being moved to argue that the Ancient Greeks had missed one they have philia friendship, family love; eros the madness of desire; ludus playful, flirty, dancing love; pragma long-lived love, pragmatic

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and strong; philauteo self-love (if we dont love ourselves, it can be hard to love others) and agape universal love. What was missing? Biophilia. And they can be forgiven, as the word was coined some two thousand years later by Erich Fromm in 1964, and then popularised by the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson when he described the importance of this innate need we have for contact with nature. We have, he argued, an instinctive urge to affiliate with other forms of life. There has been plenty of research indicating that this is real and that this urge is something important, something that affects not just a superficial aesthetic, but works deep in our physiology and psychology as well. Richard Mabey wrote powerfully in Nature Cure of the transformation a reengagement with nature had on his depressed state. And Essex Universitys Jules Pretty argued, at a conference I attended, that the management of what is left of our natural heritage should be shifted from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to the Department of Health, as the health benefits we gain from time spent out in the wilds is so great. Recidivism rates in prisons are reduced if inmates get out into the countryside; recovery rates in hospitals are faster if the room has a view of green fields compared to a scene of concrete, and in a Chicago tenement, random allocation of rooms revealed that domestic violence was lower in the flats facing a tree as opposed to a brick wall. But do we need research to tell us of the power of nature? Probably not. We feel it, we know it. If I want to clear my head or calm my children we head for the woods and the mud. It is there in the background. We instinctively know that nature helps heal. Do we reciprocate? Could we make a conscious choice to share a loving relationship with the world around us? And how would we go about it anyway? It is such an amorphous thing what is there to grasp onto? That is where the hedgehog comes into its own and over the years of pushing my view of the importance of this oftoverlooked mammal I have been surprised, in fact shocked, by the number of people telling me that other animals were equally as suitable a candidate for adoration. These arguments became the catalyst for my latest book, The Beauty in the Beast. Because while I was having fun with the idea that the hedgehog was easily the most important creature on the planet, I did recognise that other animals were as wonderful for other people. So I set out to meet fifteen people a little like me, people who had knowledge and passion. Some were formidable academics, and while I was unable

to get the countrys leading fox expert, Professor David Macdonald, to declare love for his animals, he talked a great deal about appreciation. And when I pressed him, suggesting that his focus on scientific rigour might diminish this, he replied that understanding and appreciation are all part of the same thing. And as a friend beautifully summarised this point, it is a mistake to think that things retain their magic better if they arent understood. The problem that scientists face with love is that you cannot measure it it is the ultimate subjective experience. So it was with real delight that I met Dr Andrew Lack. He is a well-respected academic at Oxford Brookes and has written a key book on pollination, among many other publications. But what makes him stand out is his overt appreciation of art. He is the leader of the Isis Chamber Orchestra and I had the pleasure of seeing him performing The Lark Ascending. Not content with the violin, he has written or rather rewritten a book on robins. Called Redbreast, it is based on the book his father produced sixty years ago, pulling together the art, poetry and folklore of this much-loved bird. Dr Lacks acceptance of the equal status of the arts makes him special, and he left me with a wonderful thought, one that I will never bore of sharing. Scientists do themselves a disservice if they deny the importance of the unquantifiable. Marrying the ideas of these two wise people is at the heart of what I strive to do understanding more, but not dismissing the intangible. For many people, though, the rush of love comes unbidden. Kate Long is a best-selling novelist who for many years kept her real passion hidden. But during the time that people were relishing The Bad Mothers Handbook she was maintaining one of the most exciting blogs on the internet it was about the water voles she encountered in Staggs Brook near her home in Shropshire. It featured photographs and descriptions of what she saw water voles, trackways, feeding stations and, mostly, poo. When we met she took me out to her patch of stream, and we sat on little folding stools, let the noise of the water trickling into our boots (it had flooded more than she expected) and the rushes brushing against each other fill our senses. Very soon a small, furry, brown animal popped into the open and stopped to feed on the piece of slightly fermenting apple Kate had placed by the waters edge. It was a transfixing moment. Later, as we dried off, she described her Damascene moment. I was eight years old and travelling with my parents to the West Country for the

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One of Hughs bat-women: Jenny Clark with a brown long-eared bat at the Sussex Bat Hospital

summer holidays, she said. I remember we pulled into a car park we had to walk across a small bridge to get into town, and as we did I noticed an animal sitting beside the stream. I could see it quite clearly, using its dextrous fingers to hold the grass it was eating; and I was hooked. What happened next was to mark the course of her life. Her mother tried to get the young girl to leave the bridge, but with an audacious strength of character Kate refused. They were less suspicious days, back in the early 1970s, so my mother eventually agreed to leave me there. I stood, transfixed, for the best part of an hour. My mother had cautioned me against falling into the water, but what happened was more profound: I did fall. I fell in love. Utterly. My heart was bonded to this little animal and it has stayed with me all my life. Love leapt out at a young age for Miriam Darlington too though this time from the pages of a book. Tarka the Otter had such an impact on the eleven-year-old girl that I was basically living my life as an otter without all the water and fish, of course, she told me. My heart was the heart of an otter and the more I learned about the animal, the more I felt like someone who had discovered the true meaning of love, only to discover that the object of that love had gone. I fell in love with otters when they were on the brink of extinction in this country. Miriams life has been immersed in otters ever since. A poet, and author of the magical Otter Country, she spends as much of her time as she can in the otters world, walking, wading and swimming in the rivers where they sport. Gordon Maclellans environmental education business is called Creeping Toad. He is massively popular in the schools he visits eccentric, charismatic and wise, he can bewitch a group of dissident adolescents with ease. His love of toads is practical he keeps a bucket in the car to collect columns of road-crossing toads that have had their ancient

pathways interrupted with sudden tarmac (toads, he would argue, think slowly, and tend to look at the bigger picture). But his love of toads also goes far deeper. He is a shaman and he dances into a trance world that has at its (and his) heart, a large toad. He does not look very toad-like: tall, slim, long-haired and bearded. And I have long wondered, for he has been a friend for over twenty years, what this means. As part of the research for my book he invited me to join him on a shamanic dancing retreat in the High Peaks. Until a few years ago this would have been a nightmare for me but I have beaten my self-consciousness into submission thanks to the strangeness of my Five Rhythms dancing habit. However, I was remarkably poorly prepared for what Gordon had on offer mainly I had made the mistake of thinking we would be dancing indoors. And it was January. And the grass had frozen into crisp needles. Needless to say, dancing into a transcendental state while wearing tweed is tricky. I wonder whether what Gordon experiences is something that can only happen from within his world of altered awareness. I feel, from our long conversations, that there is a continuum, a sense in which people experience deeply piercing connections with nature a sometimes heartbreakingly painful empathy when our eyes have been opened to the realities of loss. Even the most seemingly mundane of creatures have attracted deep emotions the house sparrow, for example. Denis Summers-Smith is not prone to hyperbole. He told me how he took up birdwatching during his convalescence from a combat injury. It took me a little while to work out which conflict this was from D-Day when he stood a little too close to an exploding shell and Denis is now over ninety, still studying his lifes love. He never became a professional ornithologist, instead he used his job as a senior engineer at an international chemical company to travel the world and

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pursue his desires. He has written four books and over fifty scientific papers. And said to me, quite simply, that sparrows had kept him alive this long. His systematic observations of their behaviour have resulted in his being recognised as a world leader in the area he is always trying to learn more about what they do and still the answer to the sudden and dramatic decline in sparrows in the large cities of the country eludes him. There are environmentalists out there who simply dont do nature; they think it a little beneath them. This anthropocentric thinking has got to change, because to create real change we need to fight and as I keep saying, that wont come without love. Part of that motivation comes from the real sense of loss. And I feel there is an unrecognised need to grieve this loss: a process that might reinforce our love and solidify our determination. Of all my ambassadors it was Gareth Morgan who encapsulated what I was thinking, most eloquently. Weve got to fall in love with nature, the wonderful midWales badgerman said. And my badgers and your hedgehogs, they are like gatekeepers to the wider wonder of the natural world. He managed to embrace a deep love for nature without slipping out of society. I love them like I love my wife, he said. I am not saying more, because that would be dreadful, really. She is pretty good, Maz, my wife. Sometimes she will ask me not to go up on a night, but it is like a magnet, something pulls me, and I say, Weve brought up our family, Maz, and Ive got another family up there to look after. She copes with me, but she thinks Im setts mad. He did not keep these encounters to himself. Generous and energetic, he introduced thousands of people to his wildlife family. I know the delight in getting close to a wild animal; it is very special. And Gareth was convinced that it had healing properties. He told me about a woman who had been in a wheelchair for four years walking back to the car after an evening with the badgers. And a man was dying of cancer; well, I brought him here as a last wish. He calmly opened a pack of biscuits and placed them on his lap, and the badgers were up and on his knee. They were leaning on him as he wept. When an animal can do that for a person and we treat them so poorly, that is so wrong. Gareths recent and sudden death (he was out doing what he loved, looking for ospreys) is a great loss, not just to the badgers but also to the people he has had such a profound impact upon over the last thirty years. The

time I spent with him was very moving and educational, as it was, I am sure, to the thousands of people with whom he shared his passion. One of the last things he said to me, while we were walking back from his sett, was, We should be in love with nature; its all we have got. Im coming on seventy now, and Im not going to be here soon. But for my children and for theirs, we have to do something. It was not clear whether he was talking about his children or his badgers, but it didnt matter. What I love about this love is the way it forms such a virtuous cycle. We will fight to save what we love and what we love is in turn helping us. As with all love, it is not without its risks. Because to open yourself up to feel deeply means that if what you love dies, you will suffer the pain all the more acutely. And so it is with our relationship to nature. We see it being killed, we are hurt, but this pain must stimulate us into action. The alternative is to stand aside and let it happen. To prevent the numb non-reaction to the destruction of so much beauty, we need to find our way into profound love. I believe the best way to do that is to find a gatekeeper, one that can lead you into seeing the world more clearly. So go on, get out there and start shifting your perspective. Find a hedgehog, or whatever else takes your fancy; get close and be inspired to risk love. And be inspired to talk about it, to whatever audience you might face. r
Hugh Warwick is an author and ecologist. His most recent book, The Beauty in the Beast, is published by Simon & Schuster. He has an active (and eccentric) website www.urchin.info on which you can hear interviews with characters from the book. All images Hugh Warwick.

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L I V I NG IN STONE
pproaching the American border from the north on Alberta Highway 4, the eye dulls. Relentless patterns of prairie, road and sky stretch to the horizon in all directions, stretch it thin. Over the road, heat shimmers, air ripples. Off to the south-east, a series of grey-green wrinkles form. They appear to be large hills (perhaps small mountains), floating somewhere between heaven and earth. These highlands could be fifty kilometers away, or five the thrumming ride has dumbed our sense of distance and time. My wife and I are driving to Writing-on-Stone park, speculating about what we will find, wondering about what we think we see. I allow the possibility that this geography may not be. The forms could be apparitions, cooked up in our overheated minds. Mirage: the reflected dream. But we turn east at the town of Milk River and the hills swell steadily, growing solid as we grow ever more incredulous. Then we aim south again, and just as the landscape seems reconnected, singular, the ground falls away into the coulees of the Milk River valley. We weave our way down as the late day sun lights towering sandstone hoodoos with an orange glow, while on the valley bottom the river slips between dense stands of bush and leafy trees. Tucked amid the greenery are hundreds of tents, trailers and camper-trucks. In a shallow bend of the river, sand bars have formed and the shores are as smooth as resort beachfront. Children swim, fill orange plastic pails with sand, and float on inflated green creatures.

L orne D aniel
Writing-on-Stone is an improbable place. It is remote, to us we drove many hours yet central to these plains. It is a subterranean bounty cut into the spare grasslands, lying below the surface. A lush garden of native green, bordered by badlands. In the morning, on a walk with a park interpreter, we begin to name things. I take along notebook and pen, writing of place in this place of writing. Those unlikely hills are just across the border, we hear, in Montana. The Sweetgrass Hills. Ice and water have written the land. Writing-on-Stone is located on a terrace of the Milk River a wide, flat coulee. From the terrace, sandstone walls rise sharply to the prairie. The smaller, narrow Police Coulee runs ten kilometres south up a spring-fed creek. The breeze whispers around sandstone pillars: hoodoo, hoodoo. Grama grass and speargrass grow on the bottomland, with patches of Russian wild rye. We study the fine-haired barbs of speargrass plucked from our clothes. Here is wolf willow and buffalo berry, sagebrush, currants, chokecherry. The most extensive cottonwood forests on the plains cluster here, sheltering bats and kingfishers, deer and people in tents, tipis and trailers. Yellow-bellied marmots bask in the sandstone. The stillness of rattlesnakes rattles around in our minds. We learn by relating what we see, the unfamiliar, to what we know the familiar. Thus we get a fix on the place. Fix the place. These leaves are like those on the Ming cherry

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back home. The Coopers hawk circling reminds us of the osprey at Three Mile Bend, near home, where we walk the dogs on weekends. The Parks Service has given us a Bird Checklist. We are always trying to write the site. Right the site. Right the sight. Impress our vision upon this geograph, this written place. However unfamiliar the site, we attempt to place the self, to press our vision. We seek the self in situ. The long stretch of valley, of sandstone, of rock has had us looking and looking again, squinting and staring. The late day sun bakes, the heat wilts. Stone is hard, we are soft. Our eyes sweep up and down, across and over (so much stone, so much writing, so many forms), trying to see everything and failing. And then STOP: wait a minute. We see something familiar. This is not the writing of water or wind, but the sign of hand on rock. Look at your own. You recognize its work. The lines are written on a human scale. The stains upon the rock speak of intent dark red, like dried blood. There are grooves in the stone to fit a fingers curve, to fit a tongue, a human tongue. Circles, curves, lines straight with an arrows point. Not our signs, not our symbols, these pictographs. Unfamiliar forms, yet so close to what we know. We weave home, back to our tent, through the work of wind and water hoodoos, sculpted sandstone tables, tunnels, caves, cups, swirls and crevasses. On one outcropping we see a stone face, a countenance of mean demeanor. Beneath a strong forehead the stone bridges a socket that runs eye-to-eye (where we imagine the eyes would be). Below that is a flare of nostril, a fullness of lip. We half expect it to stick out a tongue at our stare. This is rock with attitude, a gargoyle that we can imagine spouting water when rains hit the dry valley. Our trail is sinuous; something slides through the shade alongside. Shadows stretch and the coulee relaxes. At dusk rabbits and mule deer bound from nowhere, abound. Tiny flowers of light burst from the night blooms of evening star thistle. Evening. Star. Thistle. The words are almost good enough. The next day we walk to the Old Man. The river may be forded easily [even] when the water is very high, and the banks being accessible are much used by travelers and law-breakers in crossing the boundary, North West Mounted Police Superintendent Sam Steele wrote in 1887. Curious travelers that we are, we shed our hiking boots and socks, ford the river to the reconstructed North West Mounted Police post. An officer steps out of the little white log house, out of the 19th century into the blazing sun, blinking at his good fortune to greet a party of visitors. His staccato chatter is full of facts but tainted by the delirium of isolation. Many of his fellow officers have deserted to chase gold, liquor and women at Gold Butte, the American boom town in the Sweetgrass Hills. Miscreants, he says, who took the dishonourable path. As he talks to us, the officer fondles a stubby key. He will lock his valuables away before leaving on todays patrol;

his cup and tobacco cutter will be secured. He points us up Police Coulee and we climb to the prairie, within shouting distance of the border. The medicine line, as the Blackfoot call it, separates us from the long knives, cavalry, Sioux and whiskey of America. It is a dry line. There is crunch in our step; the grasses are sparse and everywhere there are reminders of rocks preeminence, its position just below the thin surface. Less than 2% organic content, the Atlas of Alberta tells us, only 20% arable. The mark of the plough is absent. Hooves and wheels and shoes and padded feet leave their mark, too, in absence. The bald paths are written in erasure, in palimpsest: the surface smoothed by what has passed over it, what is passed, past. Where do we find value? We have always valued the practical. There is a most bountiful supply of stone in this township and easily accessible at any place along the Milk River, or on Police or Rocky Coulees, land surveyor A. H. Hawkins wrote in his Field Notes in 1906. The supply is practically unlimited and is used by settlers for foundations, etc., and appears to be a very good building material. No minerals of economic value were observed although a prospector showed me what he called petroleum, but declined to point out the position of his locations. But what other values are written in this sandstone? Writing-on-Stone is the greatest concentration of native rock art on the plains. Pictographs and petroglyphs: writing on stone and writing in stone. Inscription. The Milk River itself inscribes, writing its sandstone canyons. Our world is constantly writing itself; the world is text. The sandstone cliffs are marked in red ochre crushed iron ore and water mineral marking mineral. Stone on stone. Alongside, incisions have been made by pointed hammer-stones. Stone in stone. This writing is easy and natural. The problem, the difficulty, is in the reading and understanding. We visit The Battle Scene, where the writing is on the wall, the wall of stone protected by a wire fence, its top wires barbed. Here, the figures date from a few hundred to a few thousand years ago. It is believed that young warriors Blackfoot, and probably Shoshone would travel here alone, on a vision quest without food or water. Their visions would percolate in the heat until what was outside was inside, what was inside was outside, they and the world were of the same essence. Then, perhaps, they shared their vision on the rock. They came here first to understand, then wrote, or moved on in silence. Most of the rocks are unmarked. Perhaps, as the Peigan story goes, the signs appeared on the rock without aid of human hand. I dont believe that. Yet I can believe that the human is mere agent, the hand scratching on rock simply one more way for the wind to speak. It is easy to over-write, to write over the simple and clear. Vandals with spray cans or poets with insights feel compelled to issue forth, impress upon the world. It is easy to scratch names and dates alongside or overtop the ancients. Graffiti documents their passing. To document (from the Latin docere) is to prove, to teach. Graffiti teaches us

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everything the writer did not know. I can read the symbols of my time. Every letter says: Ego was here. Ego is the sign of our times, the logo. I search the native pictographs for the I, the individual, the insecure one scratching out a self. Perhaps there is none, no I to see here. Perhaps this is a geo-graph, a world speaking. Narrative is the moving word, the wagging tongue. Parks Interpreters read The Battle Scene like narrative: warriors attacking an encampment, horses dragging travois. Figures resting in tipis. One figure striking the other with a hatchet. Most pictographs are pictures, things: nouns. These ones, the Interpreters enthuse, show action, pointing to the static images, animating them with smiles and gestures. We smile back. Looking for the line of story, we move from the older pictographs (animals, we think bear, bison, dog? shields and rounded people) to arrows, hatchets, horses. Then, after 1730, rifles. Pictures of all other animals rapidly decreased after that date; the animated scenes of warfare that succeeded them suggest a shift in cultural orientation, notes a book by the Glenbow Museum. Our interpreter prefaces almost every comment with it is thought or I like to believe, or what do you think this might be? Women are absent from this art: what do we think? The absences and the questions deepen, rather than threaten, the story (such is the intrigue of that which is not). The life of this place, its power, grows out of the telling and retelling, remembering and inventing. Yet the pictograph cannot be spoken. The lines do not say. The writing on stone is paralingual. The tongue that knows these lines is silent. The tongue is silent in the stone. The valley is a strong and safe haven. That is its lore, layered from sandstone up through silt and root and leaf. Here we are wrapped in the Peigan legends, in the Mounties red coats. The early police, posted here for years on end with little to do but shoo American cattle back over the border and drink confiscated whiskey in the valley where the wind starts to talk to the lonely, must have understood the powers of this place. They chose to leave their marks on their own Signature Rock, up Police Creek, across the river from the native works. Thirty-three names can be deciphered, some carefully chiseled, even decorated. An archeological dig skimmed off layers of land to find the patterns of early Mountie life: figure 53: Household artifacts a. Tobacco cutter b. Mop spring mechanism

c. d. e.

Cupboard door lock Key Metal cup handle

The archeologists say of the key, A small skeleton key is 4.37 centimetres long with a hollow tube and a broken handle. The handle is ovular and measures 1.98 by 1.52 centimetres. The stem is .66 centimetres in diameter at its thickest point. The archeologists own tools included a walking tour, a detailed plane table and transit survey with notes and measurements, test pits and excavation, by trowel and shovel. They shot photos and drafted planviews, took measurements whenever an artifact was found. Lists were made and entries categorized. They call this stratigraphy: the study of order and strata, the discovery of layers of meaning. Perhaps meaning is not of primary importance here, environmentalist Edward Abbey wrote about rock art in Beyond the Wall. What is important is the recognition [that] these canyon paintings and canyon inscriptions are valuable for their own sake, as works of elegance, freshness, originality (in the original sense of the word), economy of line, precision of point, integrity of materials. An hour or two of walking, talking and listening lead us back to where we began, on the valley floor. Interpreting the silence of lost wisdom, of forgotten bonds. Tomorrow we will drive up and out to the flat prairie, into the illusion that we move across the land, above its hold. As if the land did not write itself through us. We will travel with the rolling hum of tires on highway, imagining stone, speechless. Listening for the voice of stone. The mind will slide on beyond ego, logo, logos, to another kind of thought. We will move on with the simple sense of living in stone. r

Lorne Daniel is the author of four books of poetry including, most recently, Drawing Back to Take a Running Jump: Selected Poems (201 1). He is a past recipient of the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Prize (Writers Guild of Alberta). His work has been published extensively in literary journals in Canada and on CBC Radio. He has also served as writer-inresidence at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada).

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On Labour and t he Human Mind

M elanie C hallenger
intolerable. Pressing down on a fingertip until it becomes painful reproduces one small fraction of the slow squeeze of a strong contraction, which lives across the whole central core of the womans body. As the contraction begins, the large swell of the pregnancy becomes taut and hard, much like candlewax suddenly clouding and hardening on loss of heat. For the woman, this causes a curious sense of weight, as if the goods in her arms had turned suddenly and amazingly from timber to stone. As the contractions become more pronounced, there is a feeling akin to extreme drunkenness: the body is now in a state that only time can overcome. No amount of mental effort will entirely eradicate these sensations. There is the fleeting wish, somehow, to reverse the experience. Its an urge that is more interesting because of what its hopelessness suggests: mechanisms and powers of which were a part and yet completely unable to command. Deep in my body and in that of the unborn child are different kinds of intelligence than those that we commonly talk about. Chemical, cellular, and ancient, they direct action and order experience. Sound in our cells, their curious memories extend far back in the earths history, the stamp of ancestral feet on dust, recalled and run through again without the use of mind or any kind of central consciousness.

he labour has been going on too long and Ive been sent into hospital. My body is new to the experience of birth and it seems confused about what it should be doing. Contractions began days ago and then ran out of energy. When they began again, those parts of my body that should have listened and responded instead stubbornly ignored the messages. My wombs waters feel like a tide held back, obstinately resisting the moons weight. Aileen, one of the midwives, places a hooked metal instrument up to the base of my womb and snags. Theres no pain but a sudden feeling of warm wetness as if Ive lowered myself down into a bath. A sharp needle is pushed up into a vein on the top of my hand and a synthetic hormone feeds into my body in little glassy beads. The drug they are administering is like a slow, steady lecture, counselling my body to do what it ought to do. Tricked by or accepting of the artificial nature of these interventions, it begins. The contractions of labour have a lot in common with the discovery of a sudden and overwhelming truth. The feeling meets the rest of the body through the nerves that spread out from the sites of comprehension. The pain is distinctive in its strong sensation of inescapability and in its use of the whole being of the woman. It is a very deep and generous pain, as if each of the cells of the body is being slightly, uncomfortably pressed. Cumulatively, it can become almost

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I remember as a child seeing a lamb born. I was on a school trip to a farm and we were lucky. The ewe was lying down on a pile of hay, quite still, quite calm. Other sheep moved around her, unconcerned, keeping to their interests. She made no sound but began to paddle her hind leg as if trying to kick free of some invisible restraint. The lambs bloodied nose nudged through the opening. As the head emerged, the ewe began to shift her haunches as if beginning a slow dance, the leg still paddling. Then suddenly, the lamb rushed out into the world, a watery motion that begged for the sea instead of a grubby pile of hay. The lamb didnt move or sound. The pale grey membrane was across its face. The ewe turned her head to see. She didnt seem distressed. Most probably, she was tired. I remember the farmer waiting in a way that then seemed cruel. He might have muttered something like Come on, girl, but, if he did, it was softspoken. Then, just as suddenly and mysteriously, a point was reached and he stepped forward. He rubbed his hand across the lambs mouth and tucked a few fingers inside, flicking away the matter. He took hold of its slick back hooves and swung it gently. Then lay it down again. Its head flopped into an odd position, out of the symmetry of life. He waited a moment longer, then took the hind legs again and swung the lamb in a full circle with all his might. For a minute, it looked as if he might be intending to hurl the newborn into the distance like a discus. I dont know if I gasped. Or if anyone shouted. We were too surprised. But when he gently lowered it for the second time, its mouth was wide, its breaths unmistakable. It can only have been minutes before it struggled up to its feet for the first time. Years later, I saw a short film of an elephant born in captivity in Bali. The mother stood on the concrete floor of her enclosure, the great boles of her legs slightly spread. She too made no sound. Below the small whip of her tail, the birth sac appeared, suddenly swelling out of her as if she were blowing up a balloon with her rear. Through the membrane, a tiny rump and tail were visible. The mother bent her knees, began to squat a little, and out burst the infant, smashing onto the floor, followed by a flood of blood and fluid. This baby, too, was lifeless. The keepers and whoever was making the film stayed out of sight. It must have been the middle of the night because the only sign of their observation were three or four huge flashlights pointed into the scene. The people remained behind these as shadowy shapes, unrecognisable. Almost immediately, the mother elephant began to inspect its baby with its trunk, a movement at once so identifiable and yet so beyond the ken of any of us. A hand. A searing wire to the mind and all its outburst of emotion. Yet a hand that could sniff and taste. The mother released a cry, a rally, but the baby remained still. She kicked the baby across the floor, an act of profoundly measured might. She kicked again. Still, it didnt move. She prospected all over its small form, and then she took its tiny trunk and wound it around her own in a movement of such extraordinary dexterity that it brought me to tears. She tugged the childs head upwards once, twice, until the little beak-like mouth opened and began to gasp for air. Immediately, the mother elephant stopped her interference and allowed the baby to breathe. Then she was

at it again, using the huge stool of her foot to cajole the baby onto its feet. Another cry. Another rally. It was standing by itself, and, just as quickly, stepping forward. Independence, a chance. Once the labour is progressing, my sense of self retreats. I am more body than anything. Bouncing this body up and down on a large, rubbery ball, the bodys shadow endlessly pools away and gathers again. A wire sticks out of the back of the hand, curling up a metal stand and into a plastic pocket of fluid. The hands of others, the grandmother, the husband, rub across the soft flesh of the hips, the gentle dimness of the spines end. They press hot towels against the soft flesh, the gentle dimness. For hours, the body bounces, paces. The experience inside this body is quite different. Inside the body, the wire melts away to nothing. The metallic sounds, the distant fuss of motors, all reinvent themselves. The pale composite walls of the room scatter like the wind across a dune, leaving a darkness almost as of still night air. Time and movement become a close thought. The way out of the body, through the eyes, is dusted by the sands of the dune the hard edges of separate objects and beings have softened and taken on the colours of gold and stone. The husband, sleeping in a chair in the corner, seems to drift on the surface of the night. The grandmother, in a state of vigil, has become a mask of tenderness that hangs in the air like a dim lantern. There is another reality of machines and bright, artificial lights and brief examinations by doctors but this is transmuted, quite unconsciously, into the dream of something milder, more instinctive. It is as if the intensely concentrating body effaces one painting and exposes an alternative to view, one painted in another hour of history. The body passes through the steady minutes of the night in its trance of quiet intention. If it thinks, it does so by the integrity of muscles and nerves and bones. But the body becomes inexplicably revitalised by the approaching dawn. It does not think in terms such as dawn, but experiences a different kind of thought about the nearness of light, a thought that occurs in senses throughout the rocking, groaning body. The predawn whispers of the day instil confidence, a profoundly immersed vigour. The pain endured is both stronger and somehow easier, a persuasive energy, imposingly mechanical in the way of a great steam engine beginning to gather through its weight. As the body breathes, it urges on the impulse to move through a point in time. Quite suddenly and strangely, I return to myself a little. It is a much longer, more considerable strain of the feeling of temporary absence one experiences when unexpectedly called out of a moment of inattention. It is morning. Hours have passed in an astonishing, unimaginable way. The pain has become much deeper, beyond the body, down through the pelvis into the earth, far into the earth, into and out of which the pain falls and rises like an irresistible spring of energy extending a long way down. Although there is a splintery sense of self, I do not experience the world as do the others with me. For them, it is a morning of bright sunshine. But I am inside an unlit midnight. I see nothing

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but my husbands eyes. If I had the time to consider myself, it as natural forest. For a long time it was home to just a I might be astonished by the low, taut, steady groans I am few hardy subsisters. Then landowners forced them out and making. My body is speaking to itself. It is growling to brought in sheep; later, deer for bloodsports. Both creatures itself. The child is moving through my body, transformed damaged the trees. Finally, sensibilities changed and it came by effort far beyond its small form into a kind of heatless under the care of the National Trust for Scotland, whove heat that radiates through all the lower half of my body. The battled with the sporting estates and the farmers in order to contractions are now of such magnitude that they bear down try and restore the natural processes of the forest. Natural, on the entirety of my body. Then, an overwhelming and spontaneous, free from our hand. My son fell asleep. The effect was of someone switching undeniable urge. This deep, unquestionable urge to push grinds inside me and I push. It is a strange push made up of between frequencies, shutting out all that before had all my muscles and cells and nothing of my mind. It is brute, clamoured, and bringing a whole extraordinary undertone in the fullest sense thought through the instincts of the to sharp clarity. I could hear the birds singing, tooting, body without aid of consciousness. It washes over all of me, pipping, purring, and the quick rhythm of a waterfall, the crack and flutter of the forests decay and regeneration. this burning urge to push and push. Wordlessly, my husband Somewhere between the pointed to a goldcrest flitting appearance of the crown Somewhere between the appearance of about in one of the pines like and my deep concentration, the pain alters. I experience, the crown and my deep concentration, a thief. For just a moment, it was still long enough for me for a moment, the pulse of the pain alters. I experience, for a to catch sight of its gaudy everything, the reason for the tides and the seasons. Sounds moment, the pulse of everything, the cap. I could hear the drone of my own body too, which my from below the window find reason for the tides and the seasons. childs cries had over-sung. their way up and into the My vigour seemed to have room, where they coil and dropped further down into disperse. The feeling of the childs emerging head is one of heat too, but a stinging my body and to have tucked in and quietened. I knew that heat. It is exquisitely painful, at times almost unbearably one unexpected cry from my child would chase it back up painful, but exciting because the pain is thinking for itself, into my skull as if someone had trodden on the tail of a encouraging me to act. I know Im grimacing, rolling my eyes sleeping dog. But for now, all was still. I wasnt aware of back and grunting. I make one very long phase of effort, thinking much at all, only of watching, sensing, listening concentrating all my energy into that stinging heat, and I of passing slowly through a musical phrase of which I was feel the childs life emerging. I hear the midwife telling me only one small element. The sensation of suddenly paying attention to more to pant but my body already knows and as I pant, I feel the childs easier slide out of me, a great magnitude of effort than our existence was timeless, secretive. The effect was so moving out into the world. With this ecstasy, the tiny body remarkable that as my mind shifted from thinking through our concerns to experiencing the forest life around me, it is beached on the sheets. The little boy cries briefly, an ululation of arrival. The came as a mild shock. The rattle of everyday occupation and room is light again. Sunlight gushes across my senses. The order stilled and space opened up. The moment of attention traffic begins to sound. The oystercatchers sing out among bristled with a stillness that was not an absence of movement but rather a light held steady enough to bring into perspective the grasses below the window. other movements that we might otherwise not have seen. This ancient woodland could easily have been a ghost, a Years later, I was walking through a forest with my husband memory in archaeological layers of the soil, a description in and infant son, who was crying out of baffled anger at being old books, records. Gone and largely forgotten. But people strapped into his pushchair, in want of his midday sleep. have since entered its soft shadows and dug out those His cries seemed to enter by the soles of my feet as if Id ornamental trees planted by others in the past, foreign to been shorn of my shoes and the unmediated temperatures the soil. Fence posts have been knocked into the ground and of the ground were screaming up the nerves of my body to some of the deer culled. The work of previous inhabitants my mind, Dosomethingdosomething. Oh my boy, ayeaye, you has been undone and the forest given a chance to come just need some sleep, shushshush, therethere sweet thing. into and out of existence by its own processes. People have I began forcing the pushchair up through the wood path, stepped between this place and our prior nature. The forest knowing that he would fall asleep, fall silent, and in his reserve has become a suspension of our intent. Id come to walk through this old stand of forest to silence I might suddenly step into a very profound stillness. interrupt something in myself too. Turning from all the Something I thought of as my resting place. A little plaque by the main parking area informed me that energetic processes of life, I found solace in the brief respite this was one of the largest remnants of ancient Caledonian from thought, an hour of drifting selflessness. So relaxing pine forest, a hint of what once covered the whole country. and rich was this feeling that it was easy to begin to wish away Lanky trees knocking together in shadow, pale green tatters of the self, the mind, for only in achieving this silence could I lichen on every branch. The authors of the plaque described close the aperture of choice that seems to exist between the

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natural world and us. In seeking to lift out the self as if it lay between the outside world and my body like a slide through which the projectors light had to shine, I sought to give my attention to something freely. This kind of attention was like a little rip in my own nature through which the essential truth of the world might somehow steal. By this kind of attention, the reality of the world beyond me and my child could enter me without passing through our own needs first. In this resting place, I was given over to natural beauty and liveliness. It was an awareness that sought to see and to know without condition. It wasnt long, of course, before the soft murmurs and sleepy beginnings of words signalled the end of my sons sleep. I began to talk. While all the musical phrase ran on, I felt and heard less of the nature around me. Not for the first time, I wondered at the strong sensation of another kind of attention rushing up out of the rest of the body and into the mind, where it buzzed and shaped itself into a stream of consciousness. And I wondered, too, at what lay between the resting place, the selflessness, the silence, and the speaking, thinking self. Our bodies are interventions in time and order, cohering for a brief moment, a kind of interruption in the pure silence of historys flow. Our minds are altogether different. People of so many societies see the mind as intercessory, a connection between the earth and a realm of spirits, even a property of god. It is astonishing to watch the birth of another mammal, like a lamb or an elephant calf, for the swiftness with which they seek to stand. As yet uninfluenced by the outside world, their imperative is clear. To survive, they must be on their feet. Our babies loll about on the ground, their large heads moving like balloons full of water. For months, and for many infants, for over a year, there is no sign of walking. Unless we cage or cushion them in some way, they cant be left for a moment. How many parents experience powerful sensations of wanting to escape this, even for just an hour or so to sit down, read, talk to someone else, run, dance, be free to pursue their own pleasure? Birds, rather than the other mammals, are perhaps closer to us, their unfledged young ceaselessly hungry, their efforts at assuagement fraught with potential loss. It was one night that showed me. The season was at the end of its strength, the harvest moon a perfect, oaty round, crisp and shallow in the dark. Night had that denseness charged with history and spirit, a sense of the uncanny that extends possibility again, protests against our cynicism. My son, for no explicable reason, wouldnt sleep, yet his need for sleep was at my chest like a snakes bite. I could hear it in his cries, the need. He was just old enough to have the volatile, undirected beginnings of stubbornness. He wanted life, experience, but he needed sleep the negotiation rang out of him as a pitiable howl. When it neared midnight, I decided to get him out of the house and walk him down the shoreline path. As we crossed out of our home and into the fizzing sharpness of the outside world, his cries stopped. I stood and looked at his face, faint in moonlight. His eyes stood out, staring up at me, full of lifes oddness, alert to any

sign of assurance. The village was asleep. All those intentions stilled. I smiled at him and we stole into the quiet, out from under the orange street lighting and into the blue midnight. We glided across the road and onto the track, beyond which the sea softly crackled, as if the moonlight coated its endless activity in nickel. I felt anonymous, free from distinction, all the force of concern for this child had channelled into monotone. It was this channel of concern that flowed out of the village, down by the shore, across the track, oblivious and unswervable. Choice became a fools dream. I dont know exactly the moment when sleep overtook him. Somewhere, halfway down the track towards its sharp crook away from the sea, I felt a great passion rise up out of the shadowed fields and begin to circle me. It was then that I glanced hurriedly down to see his face, marbly and faultless in deep rest. I didnt realise what this passion was at first. Our passage through the landscape had been so braced by a sense of necessity that I hadnt taken heed of anything beyond the call of my child. I might as well have been sweeping along a path of skulls, for all Id have noticed. Then his need quietened, closing as cleanly as a mouth, and my own hadnt yet worked its way up to fill the gap. A little crack, as a fault between past and present, a brief hiccup on a records play, let a great swelling force rush towards me. How had the birds looked, roosting in the blackened beeches, the joins between their forms and the trees invisible to the eye? If I had seen the moment of their flight, would it have appeared as if the trees themselves were falling to pieces, blown out by some freak, internal punch? Only the incredible din gave them away as something else, one creation briefly hidden in the branches of another, suddenly declaring separate powers, the gift of flight. And the wind was in sympathy with them. It had picked up and I could see foam in the moonlight racing to nothing across the sand like shooting stars. How many? A hundred? A thousand? More? Rooks, crows, jackdaws, cheek by jowl, plume by claw. I stood still, my sons face an abstract of fragile symmetry, a leaf in the air, and I watched the birds revolve above us, a giant eddy of agitation and, beyond them, the moonlight stirring the clouds like a potters wheel. r On Labour and the Human Mind is excerpted from a work in progress, If I Had the Eyes of a Fox.

Melanie ChallengeRs first collection of poems, Galatea (Salt: 2006), received the Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award and nomination for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She was Creative Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London until 2009 and Arts Council International Fellow for the British Antarctic Survey from 2007-8, for which she researched and wrote her non-fiction book, On Extinction (Granta: 201 1). Her research for On Extinction received a British Council Darwin Now Award. Previously, she co-authored Stolen Voices (Penguin: 2006) with Bosnian writer Zlata Filipovic.

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poems 

mario petrucci

from one
but there is that spring negotiated within : buds dark & on the ecology of a newborn late among bright blood -leaves swelled by absence breeze -bustled baby hearts hard with desire down twigs tyre-black through winter their sap resinous almost over -much to split the carapace to pump life or semblance into flit-tipped wings : an entire canopy profligate with butterflies greenly sprung with the youth a mornings warmth brings from each chrysalis these veined leaflets seemingly ready to lift to a black sun ah these feed

on ebb-light an invisible rein to galloping sight they reverse chemical day deep in trunks or dim that green togetherness even the slimmest tree makes itself pixels to darken the overall & interrupt here or there with a bunched-up jet agitated as if upon a greenbreasted hill black florets shook to a distant rumble of guns & yet such blossom each star of dark in a greened sky what waited-for spate-fruit runnily dripped down chins & the very why bees rowing air (sunny but relentless with what shadows sweetness) give darker hues in first-most honey

one boy
that complex guttural bathplugs make endless glottal stops culled from swamp small bib-talk in a stomach never growing up that slow suck of flesh sweeter off stone as though a peach could kiss son through stone flesh air each care -conducting sound how ever botched or parched seems with or with out us a world world bent on speech

forthcoming in crib

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LIFE IN TRANSITION

Holding a Door Open for the Ancestors

Sometimes the seeds of a new time lie buried deep within us. C harlotte D u C ann on forgetting history and remembering the future.
am in a car, a European estate from the 1960s, in a grasscovered car park. The car wont start it doesnt click. Oh, its still in gear, I say out loud. When I shift out of gear it starts. Then I realise there are no brakes and I am skedaddling around the car park, out of control. Its at that point I notice there is a full moon in the sky, about ten times the size of an ordinary moon. I manage to stop the car to look at it. As I stare at the sky a huge black woman comes out of the bushes. She stands before me: What about your obligations? she demands. The dog and the cockroach. This was a dream I once had many years ago, when I was working on a project called The Earth Dreaming Bank. We asked questions in the dialogue practice that followed the dream, as we always did each morning: why was she not red? Why was the moon so large? What did it mean that I had to get into neutral to start the car? And why, on awakening, did I feel so light, after months of feeling drained and disturbed? The ancestor dream was a reminder: it was personal but it was also collective. A vocative dream that told us: you are in charge of the gears but you are not driving the car. Fossil fuel is driving the car; millions and millions of ancestral trees; millions and millions of lives lived on earth. The energy that is coming through time, that runs through your body, through your intelligence, is from the millions and millions of beings who have lived through time: the ones who went before. Your obligations are to them. You need to remember what you are doing here.

Second Spring Arizona 2001

In the late summer the fierce heat of the desert brings huge towering clouds from the south. Animals and plants endure the heat and wait for the rain to replenish them. The clouds advance like great beasts, throwing down curtains of water. At night rainbow lightning dances across the skies and dry washes roar suddenly in the darkness. This second spring is where the regenerative power of this desert land lies. These are the months when the Pima and Tohono OOdham and Hopi people plant their seeds and sing to them and to the clouds. These rains bring forth the pumpkins, the beans and squash that feed their people. Sometimes the seeds of a new time lie deep buried within us, in the secret places, in the sacred places, where the ancestors planted them, and we are just waiting for a certain kind of song and right condition for them to break open. The dreaming practice gave us keys about living in time big time, deep time a present in which all past and all future is contained. The desert house was our crucible, in the rainy season, in a big land, in the year 2001. What is our obligation? I found, working with this dream, that my obligation was to the ancestral earth. It was not to hold the unbearable heaviness of human history, but to remember how it had been originally, to live in these mud and straw places, in these round houses, with the storms all around, with this intensity, with these growing plants. To live in the rhythm of

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time, to love the place though I never owned it. Its a common assumption that only indigenous people have access to the ancestors. That somehow, our link to them has gone indeed if civilised people had them at all. We scrabble self-importantly to look up our family trees, trying to find a link to the powerful of the land through our violent history, a castle, battlefields, our properties. But none of this helps us belong to the earth, or find meaning in a world held to ransom by a ticking clock. What brings meaning are the ones who have gone before: the primordial beings that form the bones and breath of the earth, its rocks and rivers and sky. My bones, your bones, my sky, your mind, my trees, your fingers, my water, your blood. The dream reminded us that there is a primal place inside us that remembers a time where feeling was instructive to our beings. Its a sense you sometimes get by rivers, with the desert rains advancing, or walking down the lane in moonlight. That big moon was a doorway. When you go through the ancestor moon you remember everything. It is the doorway of memory. You are no longer fixed in clock time. You get to a sense of belonging that doesnt square with civilisation, or calendars. Nobody likes to go through this memory moon, because it demands your feeling and letting go of control, all of which terrifies the rational mind. You have to face the personal and collective forgetting that is kept in the moons gravity. Because you realise we have put the best of ourselves out with the trash, and what we have now is the life of a dog and a cockroach. A subservient and a scavenger existence in a technological cityworld.

Playing for Time London 2012

In a dark room I am listening to a voice telling me about the caves at Lascaux and about the menhirs, markers of prehistoric time, that stand on a windy cliff in Corsica. This is an exhibition based on the work of John Berger, and these recordings are from a performance conducted underground in Strand Station in 1999. Its called The Vertical Line. Outside in the corridor I sit down at a typewriter he used to use, which was also my first typewriter. I type: it is a long time since I used a Lettera 22 and a young man walks past with a bunch of dried stalks in his backpack. Isnt that wormwood? I ask him. Yes, he laughs. Its from the Imperial War Museum. They dont use pesticides in their grounds and you can find all kinds of plants there. Afterwards I stand at dusk outside Somerset House, a building which once housed all our records, our births and our deaths, and hear the dark river flowing past under Waterloo Bridge. For a moment it is all I am aware of. A sense of vast and complex time opens: wormwood time, tree time, river time, flint time, in which all the rushing traffic and scurrying 24/7 seems to disappear. The Earth Dreaming Bank was a practice that began in Australia, with a story about a goanna, and it ended in England in 2003. For five years now I have lived horizontally in time, in this narrow land, and placed my attention on the Transition movement. Ive focused on forging a community

practice, working in groups, finding ways to be resilient in the face of an uncertain future in which resources are scarce and an unstable climate challenges us to change our ways dramatically, or face some kind of apocalypse. This autumn I began working with fellow Transitioner Lucy Neal on her book about collaborative and transitional arts practice. As we sat in her kitchen discussing the people who would help shape it, Lucy handed me a ceremonial bowl an Aboriginal woman had given her, and something clicked. Remember your obligation. This is where the book begins, I said. The bowl contained chunks of chalk from the downs, some empty honeycomb, and stones from the river bed of the Thames. To seek the origin, the ancestor, is to know how to proceed. To go forwards is first to go backwards, which is to know why the ancestors have to be in charge of the car. We want always to go forwards and leave everything behind. But to make changes you have to negotiate with them first. All native people know this, just as they know that all life begins in the dark. But we came into our brave new world without any such knowledge, or obligation. We devoured millions of ancient trees, buffalo, lakeland birds, arctic creatures, seas of cod; we hounded scores of native peoples, skedaddled over the prairie grasslands, and still we have not stopped. In the desert you can know how people once lived for thousands of years, with their vast intelligence, their vibrant imaginations, respecting the primal forces that break open the seeds. They waited for the rain, they looked to the moon, because without water they could not live. They knew how to listen for water underneath the ground in a place that was once the sea. They learned the songs of the water and sung them to their seeds, to the clouds that each year banked up around the sky islands. Around their fires they told the stories of the watery ones who came before, who lay down and made the mountains, the rivers, the bones of ourselves, who knew where the water was hidden and who had been here when the moon was ten times the size it is now. They knew the black ancestor drives the car.

Driving the car

I am not a driver, but I am always dreaming of cars. Sometimes I am waiting in a car park, or going very fast down a highway. Often I am blind and have no real control. I have to trust I can see without my eyes. In the dream, nothing is working except the gears. Things only get on track when I listen to the ancestors, then I know what I am doing here and now. The ancestors make it all right. They begin everything again. The ancestors dont live in modern geography, with passports. They are not in this time. They have always been here and will always be. Once they were here when the moon was near and the world was a watery place. We were close once, but then we broke away and became restless, sunworshippers, in a logos-ruled world. We liked to have our adolescent hands on the steering wheel and go where we wanted, come what may. We could get it right, if we just stopped for a moment and waited. If we held a door open they would come, as they have for thousands of years, in our dreams, in the flickering firelight, in the sound of the rain

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A SENSE OF PLACE
DELAPRE ABBEY
I lean with my spine against the trunk of an oak tree its thick ridges like vertebrae. The clean, blue sky can be glimpsed through the dense canopy, heavy with summer growth the distinctive leaves like tiny hands reaching for the light. Wood pigeons coo around me in the glade; one flaps through the branches, momentarily disturbing the stillness. No one is in sight although families are nearby, making the most of the rare summer sun savouring it like vintage champagne. Ive been coming to Delapre Abbey the grounds of a 12th Century Clunaic nunnery since I was a child, living over the road. I did a lot of my growing up here. Every day I would take my dog for a walk here escaping the challenges of growing up in a rundown East Midlands town in the 70s and 80s. The peaceful beauty of Delapre acted as both balm and ballast to the post-industrial ugliness and severe Sixties Newtown development of Northampton. Delapre was my sanctuary, my sanity. It was here I started to learn the language of trees: oaks dominated the surrounding park and these were the trees I first came to know and fall in love with seeing their changing moods through the seasons. I wandered in wonder about them, like a child amongst adults yet their peaceful power and silent strength reassured me; were my constant in an unpredictable world. The one I liked to lean against in the heart of the wilderness gardens became my axis mundi. It would be here I would return to, again and again: as pupil, student, graduate, teacher, and writer. This oak grove saw me grow from boy to man. Three oaks stood here two I intuitively thought of as symbolising my parents; the third, myself.

Amongst them I felt in communion with an archetypal family: Mother, Father and Child. One year I came here and to my horror, I saw my tree had been cut down it was devastating at first. Then I realised I needed to be as the oak now strong guardian of the threshold; shelterer of life; conveyor of wisdom and I stepped up onto the stump to take my place in this personal Council of Trees. My parents both died suddenly within a couple of years of each other. Now, the two trees that remained serve to remind me of them a living memorial. Around their roots I scattered the ashes. They contributed to the mulch from which swathes of snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells grow every Spring. And I return here on pilgrimage every year to remember them. I lean against their trunks and look up into their canopies, like an infant looking up at a parent. Here, where the nuns once communed with Spirit, I commune with my own my own family tree. Kevan Manwaring

arriving from the south. Well know what to do when we get out of gear. Its a large debt but it can be repaid. This year, as I began working for Playing for Time and the Dark Mountain Project, I remembered the time of waiting a decade ago. I recognised that no matter how smart we were about climate change and peak oil and management systems, only the arts of ourselves, the music and the poetry, connects with the part of our being that knows how to speak with the planet. Only the mythos can break us from our servitude to industrialised time, get into the tempo of our beating heart, and find a future that is worth living in. Inside each artist is the dancing and storytelling ancestor, the one who sits by the fire and tells us how it once was and must always be. The ancestors are everywhere, singing for everyone, in every land, so long as we have the courage to face the moon and remember. They are reminding us of the seed we carry for the future, waiting for the right conditions to break open and flower. A seed for all our relations. They are singing a song that comes through the timelines, through our bones; they are singing the land anew. In the flinty pathways we walk along the coastline, in the gorsecovered sandbanks that were once rivers. In the wind in the leaves, in the starlings gathering above the marshland. The lines on our faces. The hands that type these words.

For life one is obliged, as I know now, to give back. I am obliged to remember, to write the dream down that I once had in the desert of Arizona. Once there were dances and songs that showed us our obligations to the ancestors, to the animals, to the trees, to the mountains, to the sea. We saw them in the elders faces, in their painted limbs, the connection that came down to us though time. We havent paid for a long time and the debt is long, stretching back through history. Our dreams tell us this. What we have forgotten, what we have thrown away, what we have become. A pack of English hounds thirsting for the wild red fox, a thousand cockroaches ravening in a New York larder. No one has said thank you for a very long time. r

Charlotte Du Cann is a writer and community activist, working in grassroots communications for the Transition Network and Dark Mountain Project. She edits Transition Free Press. Her book, 52 Flowers That Shook My World A Radical Return to Earth was published by Two Ravens Press in August 2012. http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com

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Ar Leic Amhr idh

Lenny Antonelli takes a walk in the west of Ireland
pick up the trail near Maam Cross, where lake-pockmarked bog meets quartzite mountain in Connemara, County Galway. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein described this region as one of the last pools of darkness in Europe, as elegantly recorded by cartographer Tim Robinson in the second of his Connemara trilogy of books. Though they rarely break 700 metres, the wet brown slopes of the Mm Tuirc (boar pass) range are primitive, complex and exposed. I walk over bog towards a vast conifer plantation under Leic Amhridh mountain. Only the rubber mesh-mat under the trail keeps my ankles above the muck. Robinson described an old plantation at nearby Barr na Orn as a sticking plaster on the face of a high-cheekboned beauty. But like them or not (and I dont) the plantations are here, and the trail will take me deep into this one. I enter the forest on a timber boardwalk built from old railway sleepers, studded with nails for grip. My head is down; I am alone. Walking on a trail is meditative: there is nothing to think about it. I dont have to navigate because the path takes me where I need to go. I neednt worry about the terrain, and there are no crowds to dodge. My mind may attend to what it wishes. The trail runs straight ahead, lined by sitka spruce. The fringes of the boardwalk host red and green sphagnum moss, tiny bushes of white Cladonia lichen, and mushrooms with names as weird as their shapes and textures: the deceiver, the sulphur tuft, the sickener. A sun-lit gap in the plantation opens up, framing the bulk of Leic Amhridh and offering escape from the forest. I step off the boardwalk into soggy purple moor grass and hop a fence onto open mountain. This is what I have come here for. Walking the trail was pleasant, but ultimately a means to an end, a passageway to the wild. Leaving it offers a rare joy: now I can walk for hours in any direction I choose. I am free. Dont go into the mountains alone, were told. But then how could I ever really pay attention to this landscape? Stick to the trail, were advised. But whats the point of visiting this immense place if I must stay on a narrow path? Leave a detailed description of where youre going, they say. I can try, but what if spontaneity takes hold and I want to explore a lake or gully thats off my route? Breaking the rules carries risks and demands preparation and the learning of new skills. But thats the point, the mountaineer Jack Turner wrote in his essay The Solitary Way in Outside magazine in 2003. You pay more attention. You feel more alive. Walking off the trail is also meditative, but in the opposite way: now I must navigate carefully, keep an eye on the skies above me, watch every step. These tasks are all-consuming; nothing else can occupy my mind. The Canadian naturalist and artist Bill Mason was fond of taking long solo journeys by canoe around the Great Lakes. All my life people have been telling me you shouldnt travel alone, he said in his film Waterwalker, a beautiful meditation on solo canoeing. But its interesting, Ive never been told that by anybody whos ever done it. Canoeing is just like hillwalking: quiet, slow and purposeful, and close to the surface of the earth. It too can offer the rare freedom to move in any direction you wish.

Heading up the mountain, I hop over wet gullies from quartzite hummocks to dry clumps of heather. But the ground steepens. I move west to gentler terrain, but this exposes me to an Atlantic gale that the Mm valley funnels against my frame. I stumble backwards, but my footing holds. Leic Amhridh, meaning the rugged rockslab, is a complex mountain with many forms: from the plantation its a sheer cone of bog and rock. From the floor of the Mm valley, its a trapezium with a steep face and long tapering tail. And from the east its pyramid that looks over Lough Corrib, sheltering a brilliant secret: a forgotten broadleaf woodland, a rarity in this land of bog, squeezed in a remote fold between mountain and lake. But I am just a fairweather visitor to this place. Ive studied the weather forecast, picked the clearest day, set out at noon. How can I ever really come to know it? I will never see its darkest, most violent hours. And when I wearing my expensive technical rain-gear and fluorescent-yellow fleece pass the wool-clad shepherd who has perhaps come the closest of anyone to understanding it, I will wince with embarrassment. I reach the summit, a patchwork of bog pools, bloomless heather, moss, rock and dead bracken. But I cannot move further: the wind forms a wall against my body. So I move east below the ridge, where Leic Amhridh can shelter me once again. From here, I can descend. Lenny Antonelli is a journalist & writer based in Galway, Ireland. His website is www.lennyantonelli.ie

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BOOK REVIEWS

gOSSIP FROM ThE FOREST

Granta, 2012 ISBN: 978-1847084293 H/back, 296 pp, 20

Sara Maitland

Review by Sharon Blackie

Sara Maitlands writing has always been laced with fairy tale motifs from the imaginary dragon in her wonderful and subtly magical realist novel Three Times Table, to her gloriously irreverent rewriting of classic fairy tales in books like On Becoming a Fairy Godmother. In Gossip From the Forest, issued to coincide with the bicentenary of the publication of Grimms fairy tales, she uncovers the tangled roots of northern European fairy stories in the wildwoods both of history and of the human imagination. Maitland journeys, over the course of a year, into twelve British forests, musing as she goes on the association between forests and fairy tales. These forests, very much more than a mere backdrop for fairy stories, are brought to life by Maitlands characteristically vivid writing. They range from the ancient woodland of Epping Forest (accompanied by Robert Macfarlane) to Forestry Commission managed plantation. Each chapter explores a particular wood, its cultural and natural landscape, and some of the historical and ecological issues associated with it. Each is then followed by a thoroughly original and characteristically subversive retelling of a well-known fairytale such as Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and an

utterly beautiful version of The Sleeping Beauty, which ends the book. Maitlands argument is that the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are the sources of our fairy tales. And Maitland is at her always-enthusiastic best when talking about dark, secret places and the treasures that can be found within them. However, she argues also that the integrity of our woodlands are increasingly at risk, and that our children no longer know or play in them. And so these risks then extend to the common images and archetypes that we derive from our fairy tale heritage. These arguments have particular resonance, of course, with the recently discovered threat to British ash trees. If I had a quibble with the book, it would be Maitlands over-egging of the role of forests in our fairytales and her insistence on our predominantly Teutonic heritage. Her thesis is that we sprang from the forests, and so did our fairy tales. The British are Germanic people from the northern European forests, she announces, rather curiously, for there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that influxes from the Celtic fringes of Northern Iberia contributed considerably to our gene-pool. Nor is it the case that the roots of fairy stories in much of Wales, Scotland and Ireland derive in the main from the forests. Maitland dismisses Celtic fairy stories as predominantly hero tales, but thats far from the truth. The traditional fairy tales of Scotland and Ireland sprang from their landscape too, but these landscapes werent the lush dark forests of which Maitland speaks: they were hollow hills, empty moor and bog, and the sea. But if its forests, woodcutters and tangled roots that are the source of your childhood dreams and nightmares rather than hollow hills, fairy music, kelpies, selkies and brownies, and if the words fairy tale to you are instantly associated with the Brothers Grimm, then this rich and wonderfully imaginative work is most definitely the book for you.

OTTER COUNTRY
Granta, 2012 ISBN: 978-1847084859 H/back, 368 pp, 20

Miriam Darlington

Review by Jos Smith

Otter Country is more than just a book about otters. It is a search for an otters eye view of the world as measured out by human footsteps. It is a struggle for a revitalised sense of geography. It tracks and follows the otter through cold water, nights spent camped out on riverbanks, torrential rain and more than one baptism of midges. It is tight and sharp in its focus on this singular creature, but the focus opens out too, onto a wider geographical and personal vision, making it a very welcome contribution to the contemporary literature of landscape and place.

Otter populations fell disturbingly low in the twentieth century due to over-hunting, water pollution and the dramatic growth in the number of cars on the road. The first national survey in 1977 revealed the presence of otters in less than 6% of the sites assessed. A ban on otter hunting resulted in 1978 but it wasnt until the 1990s that a clean up of the rivers began to take effect and it was only by the fourth national survey in 2002 that numbers began to show marked improvement. It is for this reason that Darlington suggests the otter is a barometer for the health of our rivers. There is a sense, then, in which this is a story of hope and cause for celebration. However, the fact that the number of otters once caught and killed each year by hunting is similar to those now killed accidentally by traffic is a pointed reminder of the need for a continued commitment to their conservation. Otter Country is also a hymn to those people who battle for the health of our waterways or for the safety of otters in a turbulent modern world. But the book is compulsive because it is a personal narrative of discovery that we share with Darlington. Unlike other more broadly landscape-focused works in this genre, the pursuit of the otter throughout the book makes this

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a particularly intense, almost dreamlike quest at times. Tracking an otter in Wales, Darlington reflects, whether I see it or not, holding it in my imagination requires something A journey on foot of me that is greater than all the weight of experience and Macfarlane scientific knowledge that Ive beenRobert accumulating here. That Hamish Hamilton 2012 20 something, she suggests, is a kind of sympathy. Otter Country Hardback, 433 pp is steered by this sympathy, though not in any sentimental ISBN: 978-0241 143810 way. Darlington is too knowledgeable, too passionate and committed for that: As I watch the otters arms working, Review Sharon Blackie I sense the gnawing hunger, the force of by adrenaline, the sharpened determination to survive the winter. After coming close enough in the Somerset Levels to see its five different sets of whiskers she reflects: I must be printed on that otters retina as it is upon mine. I wonder how long I will stay there, the untrustworthy outline of me, meaning nothing but all the contours of danger. These observations are sympathetic in a very discerning and precise way. The otters map of this area must look very different than it does to me, she suggests. Otter Country is a search for that otters map, welling up through territory we often view with a kind of somnambulant sovereignty: It could be that otters live closer to us than we think, she reflects, reminding us that they will retreat to a holt near the water during the day, carrying on at dusk in spite of the recent daytime scents and mayhem of cars, lights, bonfires, ftes, canoeing races, dogs or paddling families. The otters map acquaints us with a familiar landscape but one charged anew with a very different perspective alert, aquatic, nocturnal, territorial and threatened. John Burnside has written of feeling homesick for the other animals and in a sense Darlingtons book could be read as something of an Odyssey in search of this creaturely home. But home in this sense is a way of being alive, one arrived at through the books sustained and intense sympathy

ThE OLD WAYS

for another animal. The final chapter (without spoiling what is a bold, strange and brilliant ending to the book) is a search for otters very close to Darlingtons home on the tributaries of the river Dart. Almost by accident, she finds herself sitting in wait for an otter looking back at the human world in a moment when otter and human perspective (and otter and human behaviour) all seem to warp and bend together. In a passage looking at the wildlife of her garden, Darlington quotes Thoreau, describing a return to the senses. The senses here have a tangible urgency to them. But this is also a reflective awakening, accompanied by such questions as what horrors are in my concentrated washingup liquid and my cleaning products, and where are they ending up? To return to the senses then is to change your life, to walk to school rather than drive, to question the ways in which we live on a day to day basis, aware of those others with whom we share a landscape. Jane Bennett has written on some interesting animal/ human crossings in literature and popular culture: a parrot who can do maths, Kafkas lecturing chimpanzee, etc. As imaginative experiments, she argues, such morphings can be richly productive: their charm energizes your social conscience, and their flexibility stretches your moral sense of the possible. What Darlington undertakes in Otter Country is something slightly different, something more personal, driven by this discerning sympathy, but the result is the same an energized social conscience and a stretched moral sense of the possible. We come away from Otter Country with a vivid spatial sense that we share this landscape with other animals, that we rest on the periphery of each others imagination. This spatial sense is a powerful thing to draw out in readers, and one that charges our collective and private geographies with a new life.

ThE OVERhAUL
Picador, 2012 ISBN: 978-1447202042 P/back, 64 pp, 9.99

Kathleen Jamie

Review by David Troupes

What a species, Jamies midlife beachcomber exclaims at the spectacle of her fellow combers still working the same/ curved bay, searching for salvage among the debris of a blown-out storm, hoping for the marvellous. The Beach is a compelling opener, setting a scene of confrontation with nature which is really a confrontation with the unfamiliar recesses of the self, and intoning the quiet courage and self-reliance that wanders along through the pages of this book. We find in these poems of stones and woods and saltwater a sense of our own mutability, our all-too-humanness in face of the indifferent

world, and it is this which makes them so instantly credible. The immediate stuff of the poems are the familiar staples of much Scottish poetry: glens, seabirds, stags, rough coasts. But there is no attempt to capture these elements in florid language and wrenching metaphors. These poems speak tentatively, as if from the middle of some difficult thought. Though set continually in natural places they are not nature poems in the conventional sense: they are rather dispatches from internal struggles of doubt and drift, comments upon the difficulty of circumscribing ones own life. These thoughts come, Jamie shows us, when we are alone with the hard facts of rock and wind, or in the brief company of wild animals but these are insensitive to our thoughts. We fling poems to the hills, the sea, even to the moon, and they cannot notice. We address the deer but it has already fled. This poignancy, this isolation, finds its sharpest expression in the title poem, addressed to a boat the Lively, in a moment of perfectly pitched irony hauled up and abandoned above the tide line. Too easily, the boat becomes an emblem for the speakers mid-life listlessness. She puts a brave face on the scene, preaching patience to the overhauled and underloved craft but Jamie is scrupulous in not allowing the briefest moment of reciprocity to the encounter. The boat cannot care: its a

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boat. Whatever comfort we find is comfort the speaker herself put there, and this truth, of which the poet is well aware, is responsible for the intelligence and, as I said before, credibility of this work. Even in the company of rooks or bluebells, we are never asked to sign off on pleas for humanitys connectedness with nature, even though the desire for such connectedness is strongly implied throughout. Poem after poem hits this deep register of unfulfilled need, this sense that the world has been emptied out, and the speaker, though struggling in the way humans struggle, feels at least a kind of relief to be undeceived of the notion that nature might give a damn to be alone with a few private associations. Indeed, this is a book of private associations, and though we might mark some details of a marriage or a death, the poems largely exist in the gaps between stories the pauses for breath as one chapter ends and another begins. The Bridge, one of my favourites, exemplifies this weather-eaten approach to narrative, with the titular bridge long since demolished but very much alive to memory: Did you ever notice how walking out over the water made us more human: men became gracious, women unfolded

their arms from their breasts and where else could children, beggars, any of us, pause and look up at the sky! And that river! Forever bearing its breeze to the sea, like a rustic bride, scented now with blossom, now with pine sap, But what was the sea to us, then? Everywhere in this book the artefacts of our lives are crumbling, and the natural world makes a disinterested substitute. This passage contains the poems only simile, which is typical of Jamies plain-speaking approach, as though even language has been humbled by time and effort. This deliberate understatement does give rise to a few weak moments, when Jamie settles for too easy a phrase, such as pretty white flowers bloomed in Glamourie, or A few brave souls in The Beach. Even a slight upping of the poetic offer in these lines would have made all the difference to showing us how deeply engaged are Jamies speakers with their surroundings. Such slight lapses aside, however, The Overhaul is a masterful exploration of how private struggle intersects with raw-weathered Scotland.

KURT JACKSON SKETChBOOKS

Alan Livingston & Kurt Jackson

Lund Humphries 2012 ISBN: 978-1848221 109 H/back, 144 pp, 35

Review by Sharon Blackie

Kurt Jackson has been described as one of Britains most compelling contemporary landscape painters (Financial Times). A glance at his biography (see p. 64) reveals not only his artistic but his environmental credentials, among them collaborations with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Survival International and other green organisations. His focus on natural history, ecology and environmental issues is apparent in his large mixed media canvases. This beautiful book is derived from twenty of Jacksons sketchbooks, dating from 2007 onwards. Theyve been published in this format because he has asserted strongly that his sketchbooks are a body of work in their own right, and should be taken as seriously as his paintings, prints and sculpture. An introduction by Alan Livingstone, Between Artist and Place, sets Jacksons work in its artistic context. The bulk of the book then consists of a series of short pieces of writing by Jackson, interspersed with images from the sketchbooks, as he travels throughout Britain (the Cornish coast, Scilly, Glastonbury, the River Dart) and Europe. In both his art and his writing, Jackson demonstrates a deep and detailed response to place as well as to the flora and

fauna of the locations hes painting. As Livingston describes it, It is almost as if he is endeavouring to create his own unconscious taxonomy of landscape Jacksons creativity appears to be heightened by his constant revisiting of these mythical and magical places [Valency Valley, behind Boscastle, and Priest Cove, near St Just]. Jacksons artists statement declares: In all my paintings the aim is to convey my feelings and sense of awareness in that particular environment. And that genuine and visceral immersion in his landscapes which is so apparent in his paintings, is vividly described in his writing, too: I enjoy the rivers involvement in the drawing the river rocks the boat, which jolts me, which in turn affects my line; the river splashes me the water on the page moves the graphite. A randomness, a natural rhythm is involved. And theres no questioning the deep connection with the land in the practical making of his art: in Greece, finding himself with just two tubes of acrylic and some kids colouring pencils, he mixes earth with glue to make ochres and Indian reds, flesh tones, ploughed soils, cliff edges and terracotta roofs. He uses collaged paper bags and cardboard boxes, leaves and sand. This fascinating book not only provides a unique and valuable perspective on Jacksons artistic process, but teaches us something unique and wonderful about the artists way both of looking at and seeing the world. Livingston sums it up perfectly: The sketchbooks are a testament to Jacksons intense, lifelong fascination with and relationship to nature they raise our environmental consciousness and actively encourage us to find a deeper, spiritual fulfilment through our engagement with nature. Examples of Kurt Jacksons work can be seen on the inside front cover and on p. 1 of this issue of EarthLines.

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COMING UP IN OUR MAY ISSUE

An interview with Lierre Keith Reflections on time: Jeppe Dyrendom Graugaard in conversation with Jay Griffiths New writing from the UK, Ireland, Chile and the article which won the first EarthLines Essay Prize

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CREDITS
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Cover: Steve Green: http://stevegreenphotography.wordpress.com/ Inside front cover & page 1: Kurt Jackson www.kurtjackson.com. Kurt Jackson MA (Oxon) DLitt (Hon) RWA graduated from St Peters College, Oxford with a degree in Zoology in 1983. While there, he spent most of his time painting and attending courses at Ruskin College of Art. On gaining his degree he travelled extensively and independently, painting wherever he went. He travelled to the Arctic alone and hitched across Africa with his wife. This has given him a broad experience of environments and cultures which has enriched his work with a unique insight and an attention to detail. He moved to Cornwall in 1984 where he still lives and works. He has been Artist in Residence on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, at the Eden Project and at Glastonbury Festival since 1999. He has an Honorary Doctorate (DLitt) from Exeter University and is an Honorary Fellow of St Peters College, Oxford University. He is an ambassador for Survival International and frequently works with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WaterAid, Oxfam and Cornwall Wildlife Trust. He is an academician at the Royal West of England Academy. Page 13: Rosamund Macfarlane Pages 16 & 1 8: Pat Gregory is a printmaker, illustrator and crafter, and earns the rest of her living through action research. She has lived in Cardiff for thirty years and is a member of the core group of Cardiff Transition. Her current obsession is with the Roundhouse Partnership project, a group of friends who have bought some land near Cardiff to develop a forest garden. Her website is: patgregory.co.uk Pages 44-6 Beth Robertson Fiddes www.bethrobertsonfiddes.com: I work in acrylic, ink, oil and also use paper. I enjoy experimenting with mixed media, creating surface and texture in the paintings through the use of collage, and varying the thickness of the paint from impasto to glazes. Its a balance between the inspiration and reference point of the landscape and allowing the painting to gain its own identity. My aim is to return to a different way of seeing my surroundings, to a time before I had any knowledge of science or history and the world seemed full of possibilities. I look for unusual structure in landforms and in coastal areas and try to emphasise their ambiguous qualities. I try in my work to evoke a sense of character in the landscape, to capture the feeling and essence of the landscape on a more intuitive level. Returning to favourite childhood haunts and seeing them afresh has given my painting a new dimension allowing memories to combine with new sights and experiences. My work has always been based on observation and drawing outdoors is fundamental to my working methods. I find more and more now that I want to retain the spontaneity of the initial impressions and sketches in the final pieces. Currently Im working on pieces based on Harris in the Western Isles and developing work from Tiree, Mull and Iona. I went to St Kilda in July and Im currently producing a body of work for exhibition next year.

POETRY and A SENSE OF PLACE

Page 24: Peter Oswald is a poet, playwright and performer whose verse plays have been performed at The Globe, the National Theatre and around the world. He has recently published a book of poems, A Reply to the Light, with Authorsonline. He has published a joint book of poems, Dyad, with Sean Borodale. He and his wife Alice Oswald perform with their theatre company Attention Seekers. They have published two joint pamphlets Village, and Performance. They have three children. Page 55: Reminiscent of e.e. cummings at his best, Mario Petruccis work aspires to Poetry on a geological scale (Verse). Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon, 2004) secured the Daily Telegraph/ Arvon Prize and inflicts the finest sort of shock to the conscience, to the soul (Poetry London). i tulips (Enitharmon, 2010) takes its name from his vast Anglo-American sequence of 1 1 1 1 poems, hailed by the Poetry Book Society as modernist marvels. A PhD physicist and ecologist, Mario is intensely active at the literature-ecology-science membrane, generating groundbreaking educational resources and poetry that combines issues of searing social, linguistic and personal relevance with innovation and humanity. Page 58 Kevan Manwaring is a writer, teacher and storyteller who lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire. He teaches creative writing for the Open University and Skyros Writers Lab. As a professional storyteller he has appeared in numerous shows both in Britain and abroad. He is the author of Oxfordshire Folk Tales, Turning the Wheel, The Bardic Handbook, Lost Islands, The Windsmith Elegy, and others. He is the founder of Awen Publications.

World Enough and Time

Poetry Art Reflection

Summer Isles retreat with Christian McEwen and Jan Kilpatrick

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