29 Sep 2014
“Hold a question in your mind and allow nature to answer it by simply listening with all your senses. Let it lead the way in this next step in your life”. Those were the instructions I was given, one sunny day in July in a protected natural woodland enclosure beside a river. I was to contemplate my question for several hours, sat still and alone. Having not eaten lunch (that was part of the practice) I was glad to escape the rest of the group because I’d managed to smuggle some banana chips.
I was on my final meet-up for the One Year in Transition course, a course from the Transition Network aimed at helping young adults to find a livelihood doing what it is they’re passionate about in a way that is sustainable for themselves and their communities. We were undertaking a Vision Quest; which asks us to regard nature as a teacher to help guide us in our lives. Now I’m a part-time teacher myself and I’m always on the lookout for new approaches, so I’m going to reflect on how and what nature has taught me over this past year.
The Nature of Love and the Love of Nature
One thing seems pretty clear to me; nature clearly doesn’t have any concise lesson objectives. Despite all of the heightened sensory experience I had sitting under that tree beside the river, nature did not provide a powerpoint presentation or a handout. We don’t learn lessons directly from nature that can be analysed or sometimes even articulated but that doesn’t mean we don’t learn something. Of course we can learn the names of all the trees, their life cycle, optimum conditions and so on but that doesn’t necessarily lead us to loving and caring about that tree. To cultivate a loving relationship with that tree you need to make time for it, not just for watering and pruning it but also for observing it and wanting to be around it.
A bit like the relationships we have with other humans, as I have discovered this year. One important aspect of the course is that although we have four meet-ups in different places in the country, the majority of our learning experience throughout the year takes place on the ground in our own communities. Mine is in Manchester where I’ve been participating in a community growing project at the Moss Side Community Allotment. It’s a remarkable space where people come together from different backgrounds to grow food and share skills. Nobody owns the allotment, rather we all co-operate to maintain the area as a site for food-growing and a home for wildlife (including homo sapien varieties of course).
From day one, I’ve been inspired by how (for want of a better word) ‘organic’ the community relationships are. There are no squabbles over who’s in charge or who is going to take home the biggest marrow. People just love being there. Why is it so successful? It’s all down to a wholehearted commitment to tea breaks and of course; fun. Our relationship is not just practical, above and beyond that we are building trust and strength because we all enjoy just being together, sharing a natural oasis in our inner city neighbourhood.
Just as an example, this year we held an event called The Village-in-the-City-Fete; a day of traditional family games, homemade food and drink, local crafts and oral storytelling. Our aim: just to have some fun together enjoying the natural space! It was an interpersonal, inter-natural encounter for all. As with all relationships, it’s all about the time you put in.
The Unruly Classroom
Likewise with relationships, we’ve got to learn to take the rough with the smooth. Making time for nature doesn’t just mean tottering down country lanes. Nature, as we have all experienced, has a dark and sometimes dangerous side. This wild aspect really came into play sitting under that tree. As I sat contemplating my life path and my rumbling stomach, a raincloud passed over, quietly mocking my puny human existence.
Unlike the classroom, when we’re out in nature, really wild nature, we don’t actually have any dominance over that space. Ultimately nature is boss. That can be really scary sometimes but it is also what contributes to the wonder of nature. It’s why we’re so enraptured with it; why a solitary walk in nature can be more stimulating than any special effect movie ever made. It’s a subtle reminder that there’s something bigger than us and this brings us outside of ourselves, reiterating that we do not have all the answers, that there’s more adventure to pursue. In its essence, it ignites curiosity and a love of learning, realizing every teacher’s life-long dream. In this way, nature really does meet the OFSTED targets.
Participating in this course over the past year has invigorated this inquisitiveness in me. What’s interesting about the course is that there is no set curriculum that tells us what we have to learn. The course rather kindles conversations that are so fundamental for young adults to be having; about ourselves and our relationship to nature, about what we love and of course what we want to learn.
By having these conversations we then have the resources to pursue our goals and go out into the community and learn the skills we want to acquire for ourselves. It introduced me to the concept of mentorship for the first time; about being taught by questions rather than answers. By offering a more spacious way of learning we have all learned to make room in our lives for our own nature as well as the nature outside of us, an invaluable life lesson for a young adult if you ask me.
Obviously, I’m a city dweller and the closest I get to wilderness on a daily basis is the ecosystem that festers in my plastic compost bin, but armed with a sense of wonder and a brave heart I’m able to make space for nature in my life every day. Completing the course has stirred me to seek out ways of inspiring this sense of wonder in others, particularly children. This has led me down the path of the oral storyteller and through my course I have found two storyteller “Skills Masters” who teach me the ropes, participating in a non-monetary exchange, similar to an apprenticeship. I’ve always been enthralled by stories and their capacity to incite imaginative and emotional exploration. Storytelling also emulates nature in its capacity to rouse curiosity and enchantment which is why I’m pursuing the art form.
‘Wonder’ I have learnt, is not only awakened in enchanted ancient forests, it’s there all the time for those with eyes to see it. The awesomeness of nature lies in the stories we tell each other, the aloe vera plant on your windowsill, the smell of your neighbour’s cooking or anywhere else you might choose to find it. After all, try as we might to control the natural world, it has its own way of poking it’s resilient green fingers through the cracks in the pavement. However, sometimes our senses need refreshment from the hubbub of the city, to be reminded of this and to imbue us with the humility that there’s something bigger that we are simply a part of. That’s why we must take respite from time to time and make space for raw, untamed nature in order to sustain our reverence for the wild and our insatiable curiosity.
Hayley recently completed the 2013-2014 One Year in Transition course. Here’s a short film about that course, in which she appears.
Read more»
25 Sep 2014
At birth we are the buds, the tips of the tree of life. Our parents are the twigs on which we sprout, our ancestors the branches, and the boughs and trunk are as old as life itself. We are gifted with a precious heirloom, our jewel-like strings of genes. Worked and reworked through our long ancestral line, they determine both how we look and function and our potential.
Three bright facets on this heirloom recently caught my magpie eye.
Children are born with small brains and five times the fat of their primate cousins – gorillas, for instance. They are primed with potential and fuel, ready to rapidly grow and learn how to survive and thrive in the world. Evolution has placed a tool in their hands. A flexible, quirky, unpredictable tool, useful when messing about and experimenting with the rich natural setting of planet earth. It’s called play, and children have a strong instinctive drive to engage with it. They enter the world expecting and anticipating play; it’s in their inherited genetic coding- We are subject to the influence of biophilia, an instinctive attraction to all that is alive and vital. It is during childhood that we are particularly motivated to seek out the natural world around us. Paul Shepard calls it “loading the ark” (1)
Human biological evolution happens slowly and our genetic make-up is still the same as that of our hunter gatherer ancestors of 12,000 years ago. Peter Kahn & Stephen Kellert write that “The neural processes that guided our ancestors’ behaviours in Pleistocene hunting and gathering bands are likely to still be in operation today’ (2). Yet our culture has evolved at lightning speed over the last millennium, leading to today’s technological society. The ancient hand-in-hand journey of our genes and culture has been broken. They have lost each other on the path and are now strangers.
These facets lead me to believe that we come into the world ready for life in a natural, forest-edge setting, within a small human group, whose ways and skills we will learn through the medium of play. Yet what’s the reality for many of us? A hospital ward, a pram, dinner in front of the TV, outdoor play in a fenced, rubber-surfaced, metal and plastic forest? Could this be why we sometimes feel so out of step with life? Why we suffer existential angst?
Research clearly shows that depriving kids of play and contact with nature (and the magic that happens when both of these are present) is contributing to the epidemic level of childhood disorders, depression, obesity and allergies that mean that for the first time in recorded history our children’s life expectancy will be shorter than ours. In the face of this I often feel amazed at how much we have lost our way, strayed from the track. How we have forgotten that, as Bob Hughes, put it (3), “as well as being modern, our children are from ancient beginnings, atavistic and primeval”.
LOST
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
David Wagoner
Our Pleistocene ancestors were adept at finding the way, being alive to the signs. If we could ask for their guidance might they take us by the hand and lead us to the words of Thomas Berry (4):
“We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but ‘inscendence’, not the brain but the gene”.
Returning to the image of the tree, if we are the leaves and our children the buds, then it seems that our culture has shot upwards so fast that we have uprooted our ancient ancestral tree. We need to look down, tend to those roots, and pay heed to the instinctive resources that rise up from them.
To encourage us to consider that descent, that journey of ‘inscendence’, we can listen to the life experiences of the few surviving hunter gatherer peoples still living with their genes, culture and environment in harmonious balance, their children playing free. They may not understand our questions on ‘making space for nature’. They are nature, the same as the forest. They feel their fittingness on earth. They do not share our idea of a separate self, living in the space made by nature, and hence don’t experience the existential angst felt by many of us. Having never made an ascent away from their genetic roots they have not suffered a schism between their instincts and the reality of their lives.
This is the way we lived for the vast majority of human existence on earth and our affinity for it is only lightly covered over by our recent history. In the work to peel back that covering I find it particularly inspiring to work with children. While adults show resistance and find rational excuses to avoid such engagement, kids are often ready and eager to rip the cover off and dive into their ancestral skins. It meshes perfectly with their innate biophilia and instinctive drive to play. It is vital that we create places which allow children to explore and connect with these deep aspects of themselves.
In Wrexham, locals have been running ‘The Land’, a natural adventure playground which is the star of a new film Here is a teaser for it:
It shows that, as Peter Kahn & Stephen Kellert (2) put it, “for special places to work their magic on kids they need to be able to do some clamber and damage. They need to be free to climb trees, muck about, catch things and get wet. We need to recognise the humble places where this alchemy occurs”. They do not need to be big, expensive affairs. Second-hand lands, hand-me-down habitats, the unofficial countryside provides ideal settings, woven into the fabric of our neighbourhoods.
They add,”during most of our history when children have been left to their own devices they flee to the nearest scrap of wild place. To play unobserved by adults”. That’s what we did when I was growing up – outdoor scrounging, spontaneous adventuring on rough ground. My roaming range extended five miles along the coast or railway line to the local town. In the current climate of fear for children’s safety, this kind of freedom has evaporated. Play habitats now need to be close at hand, places kids can flee to on foot or bike, with the permission and trust of their parents.
The current buzz around making our towns and cities more ‘playable’ is a move in the right direction. It also fits perfectly with existing ideas about encouraging wildlife and biodiversity back into our neighbourhoods through the creation of green corridors peppered with natural habitats. In permaculture terms they represent a stacking of functions. Children and nature are good for each other. Playing children help preserve unkempt patches by giving them local meaning and value. Nature meanwhile fosters all that is unkempt, feral and instinctive in the child.
It may be a stretch of imagination, but for all we know the woods and trees may miss the clambering hands and feet of young humans. The stream may mourn the loss of dam-making and Pooh sticks. These places are old enough to remember times when human children were as at home in the woods as squirrels or crows.
The beauty of play in nature is expressed by Paul Shepard:
‘Trees are perhaps the most important plants in the lives of children. Because of our forest origins we have an affinity for trees, a tendency which is virtually compulsive in childhood and shared with most other primates. …. It would be hard to overestimate the degree to which trees give internal shape to the space in which the child plays. They are on the one hand like great, protective, benign adults whose whispering and lightly percussive tremolo is like the humming of a kindly aunt or uncle. On the other hand trees structure space as though it were a labyrinthine underworld, where hiding is like survival itself.
Trees were made for climbing, a return to quadrupedal motion, touching a chord in our genetic memory of an arboreal safety. The rough texture of bark against the chest and arms, the smell reminiscent of a time so long ago that we still had whiskers, the gift of nests and fruit, the green galleries and corridors, the vestibular possibilities in being rocked by the wind or bouncing on a limb are part of my own childhood recollections that go deep. Building tree houses like nests, like the spectacled bears in South America or chimpanzees in Africa making platforms, prompts delight at the thought of sleeping in treetops.’1
In these natural spaces where children are free to follow their instincts, ideas and interests, they often gravitate towards practising ancient survival activities like shelter building, foraging, fire lighting and cooking, exploring the land, hiding in bushes, play fighting, and nurturing babies.
A closer look at one of these activities, shelter building, reveals how kids are drawn to huts or bushes with protection overhead and permeable sides that enable viewing out. Long ago this would have afforded protection from being eaten by large beasties, and this survival instinct is still running in the ‘background programme’ of modern kids. They are also immersed in a kind of research, collecting and analysing experiences, putting things together in new and different ways, experimenting and making mistakes, building and testing their own ideas of what life is about.
Lost in play they’re fluidly trying to match what they need at that moment with what the environment has to offer, taking what Bob Hughes calls “the pulse of both the organism and the planet”. They are thus given opportunity to express their primeval, biological selves and satisfy their evolved genetic instincts and needs. This magical, mercurial activity is a driver of evolution that’s helped humans see changes coming, creatively and playfully grapple with them, develop adaptive strategies and so avoid stagnation and extinction.
Kids playing freely in nature looks on the surface like a simple activity, but on a deep level they are tending to their own well-being and the well-being of their species and culture.
Mike Jones works as part of a small Totnes based company designing and building natural play spaces. He helped form the TTT Play Group which is looking at how kids and play fit within the larger transition picture. He’s also involved in a European wide movement to promote adventurous play in nature.
References.
1. Paul Shepard, Coming Home To the Pleistocene.
2. Peter Kahn & Stephen Kellert, Children and Nature.
3. Bob Hughes, Evolutionary Playwork.
4. Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth.
Photos: Mike Jones, Sigrun Lobst, Erin Davis, & Rusty Keeler.
Read more»
25 Sep 2014
Aniol Esteban is head of Environmental Economics at the New Economics Foundation. He is a biologist and environmental economist. He is the author of, among other things, Natural Solutions: Nature’s role in delivering well-being and key policy goals – opportunities for the third sector, published by nef. I started by asking what, for him, is the link between nature and wellbeing?
“The link between nature and wellbeing is multiple. At one level, it provides everything we need to live and so guarantees our survival. That’s a very basic condition. At the other level, it makes our lives worth living and delivers multiple benefits. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment produced by the United Nations describes very well the different services the natural environment provides to human beings, using the ecosystem service framework. That’s a very good starting point.
It’s very important to make clear that that framework is obviously purely anthropocentric. It’s about what nature does for us human beings, and it doesn’t look at the value of nature per se. The framework includes things like the provision of food, provision of guaranteeing the stability of the climate, delivering pollination services which is part of the food, minimising our risk to shocks, like flood protection. It also includes things like aesthetic value, recreational value, spiritual value. Nature obviously contributes to our wellbeing in a multiple range of ways.
Now look at it from a public sector perspective. Nature contributes to our mental health. It delivers mental health benefits and physical health benefits. It delivers a wide range of societal benefits. It contributes to our education. It can help reduce levels of crime. It can help urban regeneration. There is a huge range of areas and ways in which nature contributes to our wellbeing – individual wellbeing and collective wellbeing.
Given that it’s so useful, is it reasonable, as some environmental economists do, to try and put a value on nature?
It’s very important to be clear with language here. Describing how nature contributes to humans’ benefits and describing some of those benefits in economic terms is a useful exercise in that it helps you visualise where the benefits are created, where the costs are generated, who receives the benefits, who bears the costs. That, as such, is a useful geography that can help identify actions that we can take as a society to make the most of nature or deliver societal benefits or be clever about how we manage it.
However, the danger lies in how we use that information. If we are using that information to put the conservation of nature in a pure conventional cost-benefit analysis framework, then that’s dangerous. If we are using that information because we think that we can create environmental markets and the markets will deliver the efficient level of nature conservation then that’s extremely dangerous because we know that markets are very inefficient in delivering public goods.
I don’t see any problem in running the exercise of describing how nature contributes to our wellbeing and benefits us, not even describing those benefits in economic terms and in some cases putting a monetary value on them. The problem lies in how the values are used and what the motivation is that leads some people to want to do that. That’s where I think the red lines are.
I’m very glad you asked that, because environmental groups are not even clear themselves about where those red lines are and we have now started a process together with nature conservation organisations to try to clarify where those red lines are. The environmental movement has jammed onto nature evaluation a bit blindly, believing that it’s going to sort out all their problems. They are now starting to realise that actually it’s a very dangerous game.
What are the societal costs when a society loses its connection with nature? When you have a generation that grows up spending very little time in nature or experiencing nature or becoming familiar with nature, what are the wider societal costs and impacts of that?
I would imagine that one of the biggest costs is that it increases humans’ inability to understand why nature and the natural environment as a whole is so fundamental to our economy and our society. It makes it more difficult for people to understand that nature underpins our socio-economic system and that obviously puts the whole of society at risk of taking the wrong decisions. So that could be the micro-cost of that.
Another big cost is that biophilia theory shows how we humans are intrinsically and naturally programmed to engage in contact with nature. That’s still very lively within some individuals, whereas some others have been able to disconnect a bit more. But that natural connection with nature, or the lack of that connection with nature seems to be the underlying factor explaining lots of mental illnesses or depression or all sorts of mental related health issues.
There is evidence showing that more connection with nature, being outdoors, engaging with green spaces and so on has positive effects on mental health and physical health. There is also evidence showing that having more contact or access to green spaces incentivises people to go out more and do more physical exercise, and obviously that has health benefits and savings to our health system.
I’m just trying to turn around your question and say actually one of the costs of not having contact with nature is health costs, both mental and physical. The health aspect is one of the clearest.
The Fabian Society published a study a few months ago called Pride of Place, which argued that the environmental movement has lost connection with people, and the way to re-engage was to start at the local scale, a bit like Transition does I guess, and that actually people have attachments to the places where they live and that attachment needs to be the foundation you start with because people feel they can affect that in their own back yard and then from there you build out. Is that something that you would agree with as well?
I absolutely agree with that. It’s a very strong argument and it’s absolutely true. The environmental movement has done lots of good things and succeeded in many things, but it has not been effective enough for two reasons. One is because sometimes the environmental movement, and I include myself within that, we have talked about macro issues. Big problems and people don’t know where to start, or big issues that people feel a bit lost about, and then they don’t know where to engage or how to engage. So therefore starting from the local place makes a lot of sense.
But the other aspect is that sometimes the environmental movement has failed to recognise the social and economic realities that people face. It’s very hard to tell someone to care about the environment if they don’t have a job, or if they might be moved from one place to another because they have financial insecurities or if they don’t have a proper house or a decent place to live. In those contexts, it’s very hard to go to people and say – listen, we need to protect these beautiful newts here.
So the environmental movement needs to move into the social and economic territory, because we all know that things are interlinked, and campaign about things which are out of their comfort zone like housing or minimum wage, or all these very basic things that people need to have a decent life, and then they you are creating a much more favourable context for people to care about the environment.
People can care about a local place assuming that they will be able to live there for most of their life. Sometimes that’s not true, because of the economic system in which we live. Maybe in a particular town there are no jobs and people need to move away from there, and that’s something that needs to be taken into account.
Do you feel that actually there is a strong economic case nationally for rewilding (as set out in George Monbiot’s book Feral), that that should be part of our national economic policy?
I personally love the rewilding project. I have very strong preferences for natural conservation and biodiversity to obviously I believe that it’s a fantastic idea. However, at a national level I think rewilding is a great project. It makes sense and there are lots of benefits. But how do we explain to the rest of society that rewilding makes sense?
The way I think about it is that at the moment nature is seen as a barrier to progress. We live in a context in which there is this narrative that says “it’s nature or the economy”. When there are economic problems, protecting nature is a luxury we can’t afford. The opposite is true. The predominant narrative is one that says no, at a time of economic trouble you need to forget about nature.
Then you hear George Osborne talking about “gold plating” European directives! There is DEFRA saying there was not too much legislation about the environment constraining the economy, which was the hypothesis, and then they did a report that showed actually the level of legislation was right. So there is this predominant narrative that it is very difficult to protect nature because it is seen as a constraint rather than a condition for progress.
What we need to do is create a narrative that puts nature at the heart of economic policies and wellbeing policies. Rewilding is one solution to that. The way to explain to the rest of society or to decision makers to do that is that if you can communicate effectively that nature delivers a triple win. The triple win first of all of giving you more resilience to have everything you need to live. More resilience to floods because it prevents flood risks and it will prevent some potential natural disasters and will save some money. It will also create resilience to guarantee food provision. It will make you more resilient to avoid pests. It will deliver all the things you need to live. That’s the first benefit, the first win.
The second one is that it can help you do more with less. That’s something that governments should be very interested in doing. Nature can be critical to help you deliver health outcomes and education outcomes and crime reduction outcomes in a cost effective way. At the moment we have government departments working very much in silos. You have a Nature Conservation department, you have an Education department, you have a Health department. Nature should be cost cutting, so should be at the heart of health policies, together with other things. Nature should be at the core of education policies. If we integrate nature into other policies that could deliver some savings to the public budget.
Then the third win is the potential change in people’s behaviours towards more sustainable lifestyles. That’s something you need if you want to move towards a low-carbon economy and deliver all the changes you need to deliver to face the environmental challenges that we face. As I said, all these are potential wins.
So rewilding can be the solution that can help you to that, but you might need to find a more persuasive way to reach the decision makers and the wider section of society, because otherwise you could alienate some people.
If you were the chancellor and the next budget was to be one which truly put nature at the heart of it, what kind of things would be in there, do you think?
I would create an ecosystem restoration fund. That fund would help us move from over-exploited systems to sustainably managed systems, because to move from exploitation to sustainable management you need to ease the pressure on those systems.
I’ll give you two examples. One would be the seas. You let the fish stocks grow, you have more fish, but to let them grow you need to reduce fishing. Reduced fishing means that fishermen will have less income. So this fund would help manage the transition, letting fishing communities live through this period and maybe improving their fishing techniques so that they are more environmentally friendly and so on.
Another example would be soil fertility restoration. Trying to use this fund to increase the fertility of our soil systems, which are being dramatically reduced and lost. That would fund farms to leave some significant amounts of land to be able to fix nitrogen and other nutrients naturally through different crops, and then after three, five, seven years you have restored the quality of those soils and that will allow you to deliver food for many more years in a much more stable way.
This is just an example of how you could use that fund. You could use that fund obviously to guarantee the good management of nature reserves, because what happens is you protect some spaces and then those spaces are not managed properly and you need to take some action to restore them to guarantee high nature spaces and to meet all our biodiversity commitments you need some investment.
The big question is where would you get the money from. That’s what economists will tell you. If you’re going to fund this, where are you taking this money from? What else are you going to stop funding? You could find many different solutions, whether you move some money from the Ministry of Defence and you then do Trident and then do more nature conservation.
But one solution that we could consider is to use strategic quantitative easing. This is something that Tony Greenham has written about. It’s about using our central bank to generate money that goes to fund this transition to sustainably managed ecosystems. We will be printing money to do that rather than give it to banks and then expect them to lend it to what we think it should be lent to.
If I was the Chancellor I would also change lots of things from the treasury rule book to ensure the way economics captures environmental and societal needs much better. To start with, I would reduce the discount rate that is used in cost benefit analysis because – I know this is a bit complex to explain – if you use a high discount rate, then any long term investment, the benefits resulting from a long term investment are going to be zero or very little. So there will be less incentives to invest in any long term project as a result of having high interest rates.
This affects lots of social and environmental restoration projects. Delivering environmental or societal goals takes a very long time. If you have a high discount rate you’re making it less likely for people to invest into that.
Read more»
24 Sep 2014
“Did you grow all those yourself?”, a young woman asked me last week at Transition Town Tooting’s 7th Foodival. She was pointing to a wicker basket filled with the aromatic lemon balm, rosemary, anise hyssop, marjoram and a dozen or so more herbs and flowers I was preparing tea from at the event:
“A lot of them I grew at home in Suffolk, some are wild plants and others are from gardens here in Tooting, including the Community Garden up the road,”
She looked suprised, almost shocked. “My only reference for that kind of thing are the supermarket shelves,” she said.
In that moment I realised many things all at once: that events like the Foodival show how we can come together and regain autonomy over what we eat (and drink); that you never know who will walk in the door and get switched on by something they’ve never considered before; that making space for nature goes beyond the world of nature reserves, wildlife documentaries or even pilgrimages into the wilderness.
I realised that an intrinsic engagement with the living world is what I’ve been showing and teaching in the last six years since I became part of the Transition movement; and that Transition has offered me a role where I can use my knowledge and skills to bring plants and people together in a dynamic and inspiring way.
Bungay is a small rural market town of 5000 people on the River Waveney in north-east Suffolk, surrounded by conventionally farmed agricultural land. The common idea that people in rural areas are automatically more connected with nature can be misleading. Wherever we live now much of the time is spent in artificial spaces: in front of computers, television screens, in our minds and indoors.
When I consider Sustainable Bungay, the Transition group where I’ve been most active since 2008, I see that (re)connection with living systems and considering the planet is intrinsic and implicit to everything we do, from the permaculture inspired Library Community garden, to the Give and Grow plant swap days to a cycle ride down to the pub by the locks of the Waveney at Autumn equinox. The very first Transition event I led was a Spring Tonic Walk introducing people from Bungay and Transition Norwich to dandelions, cleavers and nettles, the medicine plants growing in the neighbourhood.
Our monthly community kitchen, Happy Mondays is now in its fourth year. A meal for 50 people, most of it locally sourced, is prepared from scratch in under three hours and features everything from nettle pesto and bittercress salad to puddings with foraged sweet violets or blackberries from the common.
Bungay Community Bees was formed in 2009 in response to the global pollinator crisis. There are now more than a dozen beehives in orchards and gardens in and around the town. The group has also created a purpose-built apiary (an observation shed with a hand-crafted glass hive) in association with Anglia Regional Co-operative Society and Featherdown Farms. In the summer schoolchildren from the region come to visit the bees and go on nature walks where they learn about flowers and pollinators.
Even behind the Give and Take days with their ethos of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Refashion, Re-just-about-everything, there is the sense that the planet needs a major break from all the stuff the industrial system keeps pumping out. Nature needs a breathing space!
A natural breathing space is among the many things that Bungay Community Library Garden offers. In 2009 a subgroup from Sustainable Bungay teamed up with the town library, organised an Introduction to Permaculture course with Graham Burnett and worked with local builders, gardeners, tree surgeons and group members to transform the unused brick courtyard with one jasmine and a honeysuckle into a flourishing community garden with raised beds, fruit trees, flowers and herbs.
Each year since its opening in 2010, the garden’s central bed showcases a different theme: plants for bees in 2011, plants as medicine in 2012, an edible bed in 2013 and this year dyes and textiles. This way people can get a feel for just how multi-faceted plants are and just how interwoven they are in our human lives. In many cases the categories change but the plants stay the same. The calendula you made a tea from in 2012, you tossed into a salad in 2013 and dyed a scarf with the following year!
The person curating the garden each year organises events around the theme. In the Plants for Life series I ran in 2012 focusing on health and wellbeing, there were monthly talks, walks and workshops with guest speakers, on everything from biodynamic growing to walking with weedsto the medicinal properties of homemade wine! I also ran ‘plant surgeries’ during the summer where people could come and ask questions about the project and the plants and exchange their knowledge too.
The garden has become a focal point for many of Sustainable Bungay’s activities from steering group meetings in the summer to seed and produce swaps, Abundance exchanges of foraged fruit, and apple pressings. It is also the starting point for the wellbeing walks begun by the Arts, Culture and Wellbeing group last year.
The idea behind the walks was to explore local places together to encourage wellbeing and a sense of belonging. How that might increase personal, and particularly community, resilience, help combat the desire to be somewhere else and so encourage lower use of fossil fuels. Many people reported that simply by taking part in the collective walks brought an experience of wellbeing in itself.
There is more. Recently a group called NR35 (‘Natural Resources’ 35) based on the local postcode, began to explore “how to use our skills, knowledge and labour to generate an income by sustainably managing/harvesting the resources which are wildly abundant around our rural market town.” The results include the harvesting of fruit and vegetable gluts, some of which are supplied to local restaurants and grocers and a communal firewood store. Last spring a small group of us learned how to make a dead hedge with local tree surgeon Paul Jackson. It took just a morning but I remember practically everything Paul taught us.
So what I’m saying here is that making space for nature can start right outside our doors, and in the places we find ourselves. That it’s not always the big exotic landscapes abroad where Nature is to be encountered. We need to discover the natural world where we are and engage with it, because it’s the natural world that makes sense of everything in the end.
In 2015 it will be my turn again curate the theme at Bungay Community Library garden, and the focus will be on ‘Helpful Herbs’ of all kinds. Lavender and rosemary are settling into bed, with thyme, St. Johns Wort, sweet cicely and others already there. And I’m working with a team on some exciting events. I’m also planning to map the project as part of a group helping to shape a new Transition Diploma, a collaboration between Gaia University and the Transition Network. Oh, and to make it into a Transition livelihood!
Meanwhile here is a picture from a plant walk around Bury St Edmunds I led in June this year with Sustainable Bury. The caption would probably go something like this:
“You can’t go anywhere nowadays without people sitting on walls looking at Hoary Willowherb!”
Mark Watson is co-chair of Sustainable Bungay, a Transition Initiative in Suffolk, UK. Mark teaches groups and individuals to reconnect with nature through plants in the places they live. Details about his talks, walks and workshops can be found on Mark in Flowers.
Images: hoary willowherb on a plant walk; talking plants and teas at Tooting Foodival, September 2014 by Chris from NappyValleyNet; Wild sweet violets adorn Happy Monday pudding by Josiah Meldrum; School visit to Bungay Community Bees’ observation hive by Elinor McDowell; Preparing the beds, 2010, Bungay Community Library garden (MW); the garden flourishes, summer 2014; Walking with Weeds, Plants for Life, 2012 (MW); 1st Wellbeing walk by the Waveney, 2013 by Charlotte Du Cann; Throwing our arms up under the cherry trees, April 2014 (CDC); Of walls and hoary willowherb in Bury St Edmunds, 2014 by Karen Cannard
Read more»
22 Sep 2014
At the end of the Peoples’ Climate March in London, the last speaker, from Avaaz, asked the crowd to think of a place, or a person, that they really cherished, and to hold them in their thoughts during a minute’s silence. To remember who it is that you are there for. You could have heard a pin drop. It was an incredible moment. Thousands of people in complete silence outside the Houses of Parliament.
As I stood there, thinking about my children, three of whom had travelled with me to the march and were stood feet away from me in silence too, I could hear in the distance the march still arriving from miles away, blowing its whistles and cheering. Big Ben struck. Everything was still.
The march was extraordinary. 40,000 people came to show their support for deep and meaningful action on climate change. The march left Temple at 1pm, and at 2.35pm, speaker Emma Thompson said that the march still hadn’t finished leaving Temple. It was huge.
I found the whole thing very moving. It’s always quite an experience to stand in solidarity with so many people who care deeply about an issue. But climate change is an issue all of its own. What really moved me, and still does, was the number of older people walking, not with placards, but with photos of what I assumed to be their grandchildren.
Avaaz had provided banners with a big red heart on, with the words “For the love of [insert something] let’s do something about climate change”. People’s insertions included “The Arctic”, “Coral reefs”, “my grandchildren”, and the slightly odder, “Kate Bush”.
Struck me how ludicrous it is that we should have to turn out in such numbers to call for the protection of the things that we love. Given that, one would hope, a march calling for the eradication of life on earth, and the deliberate unsettling of the biosphere would hopefully draw substantially less people, it all seemed rather silly. I was also struck that, to the best of my knowledge, there were no representatives of any of the main political parties present. Where were they?
But this was also a celebratory march. This was the resurgence of the climate movement. Back with a passion. In New York over 300,000 turned out. As I made my way through London, I could feel, deep below me, tectonic plates miles below the tarmac of London starting to shift. Earlier that day, Desmond Tutu had written a piece in which he wrote “we fought apartheid. Now climate change is our global enemy”. The following day the Mayor of New York City announced the city would be cutting its emissions by 80% by 2050. The Rockerfeller Fund announced it would be divesting $50bn from fossil fuels. The plates are shifting.
This shift towards momentum on climate change and away from silly obstructive climate scepticism is clearly uncomfortable for some. “Dr Roy Spencer” on his dire climate-change-is-all-a-hoax website (yawn) got terribly exercised about the Peoples’ Climate March:
“The marchers will be relying on fossil fuels for transportation to get to the event, and relying on mostly fossil-fueled electricity to power their cell phones. They will be enjoying food and drinks which similarly relied on fossil fuels for growing, processing, and transportation. Their clothing relied on fossil fuels. Their health care and entire standard of living that allows them the luxury of attending the march required abundant and affordable fossil fuels”.
He clearly fails to get the idea that moving from a fossil fuel-based economy to a low carbon one doesn’t happen magically (hence ‘Transition’). The fact that withdrawing 100% from the fossil fuel economy today would mean cold and hunger doesn’t negate the need to plan for and design that transition over a more realistic time frame.
The idea that because your “clothing relied on fossil fuels” you’re some kind of hypocrite is too silly for words. No-one would argue that abundant fossil fuels haven’t created a world with health care and a good standard of living. But sadly they come with a high price to pay, what Nicholas Stern called “the greatest market failure the world has seen”, and we have to progress beyond them.
The Peoples’ Climate March made it clear that while some may choose to retreat from the inevitability of change, many more are embracing that change with passion, creativity and an unstoppable force. As I marched along with 40,000 others, I felt we were marching towards something rather than away from it. We made history on Sunday, in towns and cities around the world.
Yes, the window of opportunity to prevent runaway climate change is small, and shrinking all the time, but it’s still open, and while it is, we march, mulch, draughtproof, install, educate, inspire, invest, divest, discuss, lobby and innovate. It’s what we do.
Read more»
