Transition Culture

16 Sep 2014

Mary-Jayne Rust on "reconnecting to the rest of nature"

Mary-Jayne Rust is an art therapist, a Jungian analyst, a feminist psychotherapist and an ecopsychologist. She runs a small private practice seeing individuals in North London, and also gives talks, workshops and courses and seminars in the field of ecopsychology.  She is the editor, with Nick Totton, of the recently published Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis.  We spoke recently by Skype, and I started by asking her “what exactly is ecopsychology?”

“The first thing to say is that it’s one of those funny questions because you can’t ever give a proper definition because it’s an incredibly diverse and wide field. But this is where I always start because obviously I often get asked that question so I start with.  It faces in two directions and the first direction is facing outwards. How can we bring a psychological lens to the collective shift that we’re trying to make towards sustainability?

It seems that we have many of the practical solutions to be able to make that shift, and it would also seem, if we listen to the media, that really that arena of politicians and environmentalists, I know that’s got nothing to do with us but actually when you look at the situation it would appear as if we’re really very stuck and it’s very difficult still for people to really face into this very urgent situation and think about it.

So I would say we have a psychological problem. I know that’s not the only reason why we’re stuck, but it’s psychological in part and we need some psychological help in many different ways. So an example of that would be: an organisation called Carbon Conversations set up by a psychotherapist called Rosemary Randal, who has gone into lots of different organisations, NGOs, working in the area of sustainability, helping them to think about how we might communicate climate change. It’s not just about ramming dry facts down people’s throats, it’s actually how do you engage people in this very difficult subject.

There are many other examples I could give, but I said two directions, so the other direction would be facing inwards. How does the bigger picture affect us personally. This is the first hurdle in a way where people get stuck, because it’s so overwhelming when we face into it. We feel a lot of grief, rage, despair and impotence. Particularly impotence I think, because when people look out there, they just don’t know when to start. Many, many people want to make a difference but they go to where they feel they can make a difference.

How can we help people begin to unpack that first of all? Joanna Macy and John Seed were two environmental activists in the 1980s who realised that if you didn’t take account of your feelings in the process of being an activist, you would very likely burn out, because most activists want to stay positive and they are afraid of admitting their sense of, at times “oh my God I’m not making a difference, this is all hopeless”, and so they would keep it to themselves and that would begin to eat away at them; whereas if collectively we can have safe containers to admit how we’re feeling at times, it’s like a natural cycle. We admit it, we go through a process. We come out the other side feeling empowered.

Ecopsychology is also about just generally not to do with the crisis but our human relationship with the non-human world. Psychotherapists concentrate on human to human relationships and our relationship to self. We tend to think if we go to see a therapist we’re going to talk about our personal problems and that’s usually to do with the marriage that’s not working, problems at work etc. Ecopsychology would say that actually we’re all born into a place and into a piece of land. We have very important relationships when we grow up with pets, with trees, with the sea, with the elements. With all manner of things to do with non-human relationships. And this is absolutely essential in terms of making us human.

You can see it all over the place, can’t you, that people long for this relationship, because at the moment we’re pretty cut off from it, I would say. It’s not just about our relationship with the non-human world out there, because that teaches us about ourselves as animals. It’s about our animal self. How I relate to my intuition or my instinct. How do I smell my way through life, rather than just relying on my head and trying to make decisions. This is what happens in this culture, isn’t it?

We’re taught to use our mind and our thinking and our rationality, but there’s all kinds of other parts of ourselves that are very important in terms of making decisions. Actually, we’re very good at knowing things. We have a great deal of knowledge. But I would say that our culture at the moment is lacking in wisdom. Wisdom comes through head, heart and hand, which you know a great deal about, but through being embodied, through using all aspects of ourselves. It’s when we go out and spend time outdoors that we begin to feel more embodied.

In terms of one more piece really about ecopsychology, many people think that it’s really just about reconnecting to nature, and there’s a very important piece about language there because of course we are part of nature. So it’s about reconnecting to the rest of nature. But I’ve begun to talk about how our culture affects us. A crucial part of ecopsychology is how our culture shapes our perception of the world that we live in, and that we can’t possibly think about our relationship with the rest of nature without thinking about that. How our culture organises things and what it teaches us is that apparently we’re on top of a hierarchy of beings.

That human hierarchy puts western values at the top. Race, class, gender is somewhere swimming about in the middle and indigenous peoples are right at the bottom, because they’re seen as closest to the other-than-human world. Sometimes they’re seen as animals in a very derogatory way. And then there’s a thick black line underneath which all of the rest of nature sits. Actually you could see this as capitalism, really. What’s happening at the moment, even though we appal slavery in the human world, actually we are treating the Earth, the whole of the web of life, as our slaves. So there’s a power relationship going on.

So I would say, at the core of ecopsychology is a radical shift in world view. [Here is a recent talk of Mary-Jayne’s]

 

When we lose a connection with nature, what do we lose?

Many, many things. One is that the motto of our culture is onwards and upwards, as if all we can think of doing is going from down there in those dark caves, making progress up into the light and into reason. This is how progress is somehow visualised.  What we’ve lost in there is that life actually moves in cycles. When we lived outdoors a bit more, like our ancestors did, we would be taught by the seasons and by death as part of life. How much contact do we have with death? I have very rarely seen a dead body, actually. Many children learn about death through their pets, that’s their first experience of death.

It’s really important, also knowing that we are very small in relation to the greater whole, and there is no greater teacher than, say, going out there and spending five days in the wilderness – which we don’t really do any more – as a kind of rite of passage. You come away from that knowing jolly well that you are smaller than this mysterious greater whole. It teaches you a lesson and it puts humans into their place. I think we’ve really lost that sense of place, and actually we’re longing for it. We invent all kinds of fake adventures through movies and scary adventures like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. We watch it all from our comfortable armchairs on telly, but we long for that adventure.

How do you think that manifests in our culture? What do we see in our culture that is a manifestation of that separation?

From small things like never eating food according to the season. We want the things now. We imagine that we can just have anything now. It makes our culture not just into adolescents, but almost into toddlers. We see these people having tantrums when they can’t get what they want. So we’ve lost a sense of patience.

Mobile phones are the icing on the cake, because every last moment where we could possibly be, like standing at the bus stop or sitting on a train, we’re playing with mobile phones. There’s no sense of being able to tolerate frustration. It’s that frustration actually that leads to creativity and leads to the invention of new ways of being.

There’s a huge longing for something. That longing gets manifested in binge drinking, binge eating, all kinds of addictions. Work addictions. Ultimately, it’s a very destructive force. When we can’t actually get met by something out there, when that longing isn’t met, when that longing for something mysterious isn’t met, then you get self-destructiveness, destructiveness towards each other and destructiveness towards the world, and we are seeing a great destructiveness towards the non-human world.

On your website you write ‘this website is dedicated to NATURE’. Do you think there’s a danger that we over-romanticise nature? Is it only a luxury of a privileged western lifestyle that we can talk about nature in this way? Surely polio, tapeworms and tornados are nature? Isn’t there a danger that we argue that everything natural is better than it isn’t?

Yes, I think we very much do. And this is a result, especially, and I’m sure in other places too, but in the UK we live in a glorified theme park really. It’s very easy, isn’t it, to have a very comfortable view of nature when you go walking in the park? There’s no wilderness left for us to get a sense of the danger. The danger actually comes to us, say recently in the flooding. The danger comes to us in illness, in viruses. There’s all kinds of dangers, aren’t there, in our encounters with the other-than-human world. But western culture would have us believe that we can conquer all of those problems. That western medicine can conquer them. So we’re still living with this illusion that somehow we’re on top of it all, that we’re omnipotent.

And I guess when you’re an indigenous person living in it, you very quickly realise that nature is not a romantic place to live in, that wilderness is dangerous as well as awesome. It’s like any relationship: if you’re in a marriage, the love is amazing, but the difficulties are also there. The same is true of our relationship with the non-human world. There is great love and it’s very important to nurture those attachments to the rest of nature, but we have to pay respect to it as a dangerous and fearful place. Some aspects of it we really don’t like at all.

What would a re-imagined relationship with nature look like?

Arguably, the western world view, the world view of industrial growth culture, if you like, is at the root of our environmental crisis. So if we carry on seeing the Earth as a bunch of dead objects that we can just take as we wish, with no respect for life at all, with no thought of reciprocity, with no thought that this is a relationship, then we will carry on until we have destroyed ourselves and most of the rest of life.

So how do we re-imagine that? It comes back to relationship. But in an indigenous world-view for example, they would say that humans are one of the last species to arrive. So we need to ask permission to take what we need and we need to live with respect for all others. If that’s too extreme for some people, to think about indigeny, then it’s really just quite straightforward. We need to see ourselves as part of the web of life, and not on top of it. It’s a very big project to start to live with respect for other beings. To live in partnership with the rest of nature. Otherwise we’re not going to survive.

As part of this month, we interviewed George Monbiot about his book Feral and the concept of rewilding. If we were to pursue that, and to extend the large areas of wilderness populated with top predators and all manner of wildlife we currently lack, what would we discover about ourselves? What would happen to our personal and cultural level if we really let wilderness back into our landscape and our world?

This is quite a difficult question to answer. I’m familiar with what George Monbiot is proposing. My first response to your question is that it’s a great unknown really. In the unlikely event, it seems to me, that we would populate our world with top predators, I can’t imagine the powers that be really agreeing to that. But let’s just imagine for a moment that they did agree to it and the world radically changed, wouldn’t that be wonderful.

First, we’d be on the menu. That would be the first reason, wouldn’t it, that people wouldn’t allow it to happen. It’s been a very long time since we’ve been on the dinner menu. Not just us, of course, but all the other animals that we use in our farming would also be on the menu. That’s also why, for example, you don’t want to reintroduce wolves to Scotland.

But what we would find is what you get when you listen to George Monbiot speak about this: you get a sense of coming back to life. There’s a sense of deadness in how comfortable we’ve made our world. Of course I understand why we’ve done that, but we’ve lost all sense of adventure. We’ve lost a sense of living on the edge in ourselves. We’ve lost a sense of our wild selves. As I said earlier, we see many humans going in search of that because it’s a huge piece that’s missing.

We create the adventure that we’ve lost. We go into wilderness for adventure holidays and sometimes people die and then health and safety gets very agitated, but introducing top predators would be a very big issue for health and safety people, wouldn’t it?  I suppose we would bring back a sense of that wild part of ourselves which would be a very core part of the meaning of being alive.

How important is connection with nature as a tool for addressing burnout in activists for positive change?

In terms of burnout there’s connection on many levels. There’s a connection with self, for a start, and I’m going to go back to what I said earlier about when we spend time outdoors, we’re reconnected to life as a cycle. Many activists, understandably because of the urgency of the situation, go onwards and upwards as our culture has taught us to do. We don’t allow for fallow periods. When was the last time you heard of an activist going on a pilgrimage for eight months? They don’t take time out. Somehow it just seems as though we’ve got to get on with the cause. So that would be the first thing, to learn how to live in a cycle with oneself, and that would mean on a daily level, on a yearly level, but also that we might do seven years on and take one year off.

But also it would look a bit different if we were living a bit more outdoors and getting that incredible sense of nourishment. That’s another question for activists. Where do you get nourishment? You can’t go on giving out. You have to have some input. Where does that come from? I suppose for everyone there’s going to be a different answer to that question. For me personally, I make a pilgrimage to Hampstead Heath every single day.

I swim in the Women’s Pond and that takes me about an hour and a half if I’m quick and that’s an absolutely essential part of my day. I couldn’t see endless clients without that and I couldn’t do the ecopsychology work that I do without that. Everyone has to have some form of daily practice in my opinion, in order not to get burnt out.  That’s just a few little examples.

My last question was the thing that came out of talking to Caspar Walsh recently that was really interesting. He does work with young men from the cities who’ve been in prison or whatever, and brings them out to a wild place in Devon and they spend time in the woods and all that kind of stuff. He said when you’re in the bus with them, and they come out of London and they drive down the M5, down the A38, down the little lanes and the lanes get smaller and mossier and then you pull into this place in the middle of nowhere, actually their experience is by the time they arrive there they’re terrified because the only time that their key experience of nature is in horror films. People go into the woods and terrible things happen to them. He said the film, the Blair Witch Project, probably did more damage to a whole generation and its interaction with nature than anything else. I thought that was a really fascinating insight and just wondered what your thoughts were on that?

That’s an interesting view and it’s not an insight that I’ve had, so it’s quite new to me making that link with nature and horror films. I would also say that it’s terrifying because it’s so unfamiliar. I heard on the radio the other day about some kids who saw potatoes in the ground for the first time, and said ‘eurgh, I’m not eating that, it’s come out of dirt’. They’re just not familiar with it. Or milk out of cows’ udders. They would probably think it was disgusting. It’s a lot to do with familiarity, I think, as much as associations that our culture has laid onto it.

One of the most important things about trying to make this shift, it’s coming to me more and more strongly about how important it is to understand the resistance in our culture at quite a deep level to making the change. It manifests in all kinds of different ways but let me give you a couple of examples.

One is a ‘green prison’ that I was reading about in Norway, where the prison is on an island and the men grow their own food and they spend a great deal of time outdoors, and lo and behold the violence towards themselves and towards the prison officers and towards each other is drastically reduced, something like 80%. Their reoffending rate is brought down massively after they’re let out of prison. So wouldn’t you think that as soon as all governments in the world would hear about such a project that they would want to convert all prisons to looking like that, because it would save them enormous amounts of time and money?

But couldn’t you imagine what would happen in this country if such a prison were opened? The tabloids would tear it apart immediately, because prisoners must be punished. So there’s a real tension there between what we know would be a very good idea, ultimately and would save us all time and trouble and would protect people, protect the general public, and somehow an idea that people have got about what should happen.

Another example, the Natural Change Project which colleagues of mine, Dave Key and Margaret Kerr have been doing up in Scotland. They were funded by a large green NGO to set up this project where they picked key people, key leaders of the community, to take them through a six month programme which included spending large amounts of time in the wilds as well as really thinking about sustainability at a deeper level. Their own relationship to the non-human world and their own relationship to themselves.

They go through a long process and come out the other end, and it’s had a huge impact on all of those people. And by the way, those people at the start were no greenies. One quote from one of them was that she’d never been off a pavement in her life. So this is quite an amazing feat that they have made such an impact, not only on these individuals, but then these individuals have taken these ideas back into their organisations and made a huge impact. It’s had huge ripples right across the board in terms of policy making, education, all sorts of things.

Now, wouldn’t you think that would be a really great project to be funded across the country and across the world? Here we have a new exciting way by which to enable people to live more sustainably and to communicate that to other people so effectively? But no, their funding has been cut. Why? I’m only left to imagine why, but I imagine because it’s too touchy-feely for quite a traditional green NGO. They didn’t like what was going on, they didn’t like the emotional process that these people were being taken through. It clashed with the image of their organisation.

Now I have to say that Dave and Margaret have taken that organisation on and they’ve developed it in other ways, and they’re about to start a three year training. But it’s been a real struggle without organisational funding. There’s loads of examples like that. I just think it’s really interesting psychologically to think about what stops us doing what makes most sense. 

Images from a walk taken on Dartmoor by the Editor and his son. 

Read more»

8 Sep 2014

Caspar Walsh on nature, writing and community

Caspar Walsh‘s childhood combined “experience of nature, of writing, rehabilitation from crime, drugs and alcohol, and generally a pretty dysfunctional upbringing”.  “I had these three things which were nature, writing and community” he told me.  After years as a professional writer, he had what he calls his “aha moment” and thought “maybe I can bring these things together to create something really unique to me in terms of my own life journey and could possibly offer something to help other people”.  And so the award-winning charity Write to Freedom was born. Our conversation took place in a wood on the Dartington estate (if you listen to the podcast you’ll hear a steam train in the distance). 

Your book ‘Criminal’ tells the story of your very dysfunctional childhood.  Did it include access to nature? What role did nature play in your childhood and how did you experience the absence of it, I suppose?

I grew up in London but I also went to schools in the countryside, a very fractured financial upbringing in terms of money for boarding school, then no money. I went to a boarding school called Summerhill which was very much in the countryside, so I had a very strong connection to nature there, and then I would come back to the city in the holidays and London is full of parks, so I was sniffing out trees at any opportunity. I’d be straight up a tree and I’d often sit in it, and I found that was a place where I didn’t have to deal with any adults or any of the stuff that was going on around me.

It wasn’t a conscious thought, it’s only on reflection that I realised what I was doing. It wasn’t “I’m going up a tree because I’m feeling stressed”. I’d just go up a tree like a monkey and sit up there and feel peaceful. I have lots of memories of being in the boughs of trees and looking at people who didn’t know I was looking at them.

There was a real mix of what I call concrete and chlorophyll. I had my green fix in the country and then would be in London, and when I was in London and it all got too much I would scoot off to a park or a garden where I could get some solace.

A lot of the work that you do now is working particularly with young men. What do you observe in a lot of particularly urban young men and the culture that they grow up in now, and what the relationship with nature is to that culture?

We go into prisons or probation or the youth offending teams and as part of our assessment process we have an interview and a written assessment. One of the questions on that is “what’s your experience of nature?”  Some of them will say nothing, but then you realise that they used to hang out in parks. There’s some kind of a connection. They may not necessarily have been drawn to it or felt that it was a real need, but they knew they had that thing and there was usually a camping trip story when they went off with school.

In terms of them coming on the courses we run up on Dartmoor and on the coast in South Devon, it’s really interesting. A lot of them come from a prison, they get released on license, so they leave this very municipal environment, a very concrete-driven environment and they get on the motorway, the M5, then the A38 then they get off at Maniton and are on this little country road.

It’s a progression of dropping into the countryside and you end up with these big walls covered in moss and trees overhanging and into the site we use, Heathercombe. Generally what they say is they feel like they’re in a horror movie. Their experience of that kind of nature, the non-urban-park type nature, is this is what you’ve seen in movies, that there’s a werewolf somewhere and you’re going to get eaten.

In terms of the impact on them, it’s profound. They come into that space a bit shaken up and a bit wide eyed. Half of what I do with them, or should say don’t do, is just let nature run its course. She, it, whatever it is, works on them and softens them up so I don’t have to do all the work.

So Blair Witch Project had probably a worse impact on a generation’s understanding of immersion in nature than anything else?

Yeah, I think Blair Witch Project had an impact on me for a while, I was worried about going into the woods and seeing things hanging from trees. I think the Blair Witch Project is the Jaws of the noughties, the land-based Jaws in terms of the impact it had on us.

One of the other things we work with them on is around tracking and connecting with nature and opening the senses to nature. We work with them and allow them to use their experience what it is to be on alert and intuition in an urban environment in terms of being hunted, there’s this big thing about hunting. They are generally predated upon either by pimps or bigger dealers or rival gangs. They’re literally being hunted on the streets. So we allow them to engage in that energy – you’re in an environment so connect to those senses and you’ll be able to tune into this environment and it works every time.

If you’re experience of nature that it is scary and dangerous and you’re actually safer among bricks and concrete and X-boxes and streets, what does that do to people?

In nature?

How does it change how they develop? What does it do to young men who have grown up with this being their view of the world?

It’s based on the world being a threatening place to live. We’re putting them in a natural environment that they feel threatened by, and the process that we are inviting them to step into is seeing that nature is a resource and an ally to them, and that’s not something that just happens by us sitting down and saying “it’s an ally to you, it’s great, everything’s fine”. They generally have to have at least a weekend with us to get to the end of it and think “you know what, I feel quite good in this space, it’s alright”.

We don’t have any apex predators particularly in this country. We’ve got things that can kill us but … interestingly their relationship to insects and bugs and stuff, these big heavy-duty gangsters that wield blades, they’re literally jumping into people’s laps when they see a wasp or a spider.

So it has an impact on them because it’s like growing up in a war zone. That was my experience, it was like growing up in a war zone .. that I’m under threat constantly so I have to check and see what’s going on. I’m sitting opposite you – you seem like a nice guy but you could turn at any minute so I’m constantly tuning in thinking is this going to kick off. So it is very much about changing that relationship so that nature becomes an ally and a friend and something they can go to and trust.

What kind of impact do you see that that has on them, that nature immersion? Do you have any stories of people who’ve been through that experience and the kind of impact it’s had?

It’s that thing of the difference between empirical and anecdotal evidence. It’s all anecdotal as far as I’m concerned, we’re working on building an evidence base that this really works. The first impact that I see is a real softening. At the end of the weekend you can see that there’s been a holding or a tightening or aggression, fear basically on their face and that really softens and eases up.

I’m still in touch with two of the lads from the first weekend in 2008 that we ran on Dartmoor. We’re in sporadic contact but they’re there. The fact that they’re still in touch and that they communicate with me through Facebook or text messages says that there was an impact for them. There was a guy who lives in Portsmouth who said that it was a life-changing experience for him. I’m very wary about how much somebody might big up their experience because it’s a very heightened experience for them.

Anyone who says “this thing has changed my life”, it’s like, well, ok that’s great, but I think there are other things at play. What we do is not to say this to bodies and funders and organisations is we’re not the Holy Grail and never will be, and even if an individual says this is the thing that turned their life around, this makes us really happy, but you’ve got to have all these other things as well supporting you in your community.

As education becomes more and more focused on results and all of that kind of stuff, and particularly the young men, who aren’t academically gifted just seem to be failed horribly by that, what would be your sense of how we could bring some of the learnings from that, from more exposure to nature and bringing that more into our education system? What would that look like?

This image of not academically bright or not seen as intelligent is based on the framework of the teaching system that we have in this country at the moment, which is primarily whiteboard learning. It’s downloading information. There are a lot of people who are predisposed to that. I don’t know what the learning style is for that. But the learning styles that I work with is kinaesthetic learning so primarily hands-based learning. You have those individuals who really respond to the whiteboard downloading process and they’ll end up in university and they love a lecture and all this information. I never had a thing for that. I always struggled with it because my body needed to move.

In terms of what would we do is that we could either look at a binary split in the education system between the kinaesthetic learning and the non-kinaesthetic learning, assess and identify those individuals and then stream them to those two individual places; or we have a way to bring them both in where you say there are times when you do need to be sitting in the classroom. With the teaching that we do at the weekends, we try to keep the classroom-based teaching to an absolute minimum. There is a whiteboard but I try and stay away from it, or I’ll just literally put some bullet points on the board and talk to that so that they can see what I’m talking about.

I’m amazed, it’s almost medieval. The lack of common sense, intelligence, understanding, empathy from the systems that deliver education. So many people didn’t know that dyslexia is a major way to disengage from the education system. They’re then seen as troubled kids. They get excluded. They get into trouble. That causes more trouble and they end up in prison.

I’ve worked with loads of young men and you can just track that process from being dyslexic and not really being into school to ending up in prison under a major sentence for a really heavy duty crime. For me that was a real revelation because understanding that I’m dyslexic … I grew up with this thing of not being academically bright. I got to the age of 29, 30 before I fully acknowledged that I was intelligent.

The truth is that the guys that I work with, the young men, they’re all very very bright. They’re just not bright necessarily by other people’s standards. It’s our job to find out where that is. One of the things we do is we say “what’s your genius?” Everybody has a genius. It’s not exclusive to Einstein or Stanley Kubrick or whoever, it’s our job to help discover that, identify it and tell them that, and let them grow into a belief of that.

When young men grow up isolated from nature, what does it do to them? What does it do to us when all we ever see is screens and buses and streets and never experience the wild? When we grow up and have no experience of that, what does it do to us? What bits of our psyche or the way we work in the world are damaged or influenced by that?

It does a lot of things to us. The first response is that it makes me ill. When I lived in Bristol, I’d come back after a weekend in the country and people would say “you’ve got colour in your cheeks”. You see guys coming out of prison and they’re looking quite pale and freaked out, understandably because they’re in a prison environment and have been locked away.

I think it creates a disconnect and there can be a predisposition to panic at that disconnect, to say that there’s something that’s broken in that individual. Our thing as well is that there’s nothing actually wrong with any of them. What’s wrong is what’s going on within the system, and the opportunities that they’ve had. The speed with which they reconnect, not necessarily at a conscious level but an unconscious level, actually physically the blood starts to rise into their cheeks.

We had a guy recently, we were running a project with the Torbay Youth Offending team. They were in group situations, which I don’t really favour any more. I just want to get them outside as quickly as possible because that’s where they want to be. This kid was really disengages in the sessions, irritating and I found him really difficult to work with. We got him out into a wood and another guy, another friend of his for the day and he just became like an animal. I don’t mean tearing around ripping things apart, but he was immediately in tune with the environment. He had had some connection to nature.

So in terms of what it does to them, I think it creates a disconnect, but for us not to be afraid or think that we’ve got some massive onerous task in order to help them reconnect. As human beings, our neural pathways and our senses and our sensory awareness crackles to life like static electricity when we’re put into a natural environment very very quickly. You can’t really destroy the soul of a man or a woman. I don’t think you can really take that away.

But in response to your thing about the games, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I spent a lot of time in front of computers as a kid and a lot of time in front of the television. I also spent a lot of time outdoors and I wonder whether there’s a bit of moral panic around that. It’s what teenagers do.

I think there is a bit of a problem, I think it’s more intense than it was when I was younger but it’s a process that encourages them to get out. There was a Facebook photo that I saw, which was a picture of a forest, which said “the original Playstation” I think it’s great to be in the forest and there are advantages.  There’s a really good TED Talk about this, the advantages of console game playing. But everything needs a balance.

You mentioned prison before. Prison is by definition the ultimate nature deficit experience. You’re indoors 23 hours a day or whatever it is. Could you imagine a prison system that brings nature more into what it is and how it works?

I could and I see it. The young offender institution that I work with was starting it. One of the things with Write to Freedom was looking at creating a programme where we could bring the wilderness experience into the prison. Obviously there are restrictions on what you can do, but we were looking at creating a fire where they could sit around a camp fire, have tents and things. It was a nice idea but it didn’t actually work. They often have gardens in prisons, they’re quite municipal-looking gardens with nice arrangements of chrysanthemums and begonias and things.

But there is a connection for them. Park Prison that I work with, which is a young offender and an adult prison have increasingly extensive flower garden and I think they grow vegetables as well. There’s a project in America which has a major food growing project in the prison which ended up supplying food to the local community. It provided a lifeline and massive levels of rehabilitation for the offenders, and reconnection to the community. Originally, they would say – we don’t want vegetables grown in prisons, as though they’re going to be infected in some way. But they were eating them and thinking, actually this is really good.

My take on the prison system is that it’s a necessary place for some people. The majority of people don’t need to be in prison but some do for their own safety and the safety of the public. So to some extent, there needs to be, not a total removal but “this is a stark environment and I don’t want to be in here”. I don’t mean turn prisons into Medieval dungeons where people are dying and are terrified. They have to have humanity within them.

There needs to be a balance, and giving them a taste of nature, giving them a connection with it is important and it happens. I haven’t been to all the prisons in the UK. There’s a prison in Suffolk which has a bird of prey centre in the prison. They have buzzards, hawks, eagles, and the young prisoners work with these animals in the prison environment.

Fantastic, thank you. Any last thoughts on why it’s important to make space for nature in what we do?

There’s a phrase which I’ve started using. It’s not a new one, but that nature is a life support system. Obviously it provides us with the oxygen that we breathe. But I do think there is a disconnect. The growing cities – my sister for instance doesn’t spend much time in nature at all. The more you’re away from it, the easier it might seem, that sense of not really understanding that something’s missing, not fully being yourself, not in great health. Because it happens over time, it can be like looking in the mirror and not really noticing you’re aging. There can be an incremental detriment.

But as I said before, get them out. There are lots of parks and there’s a real passion for parks and when the sun comes out people want to get to the water, to the sea. So it’s absolutely central to what we do. When I tell people what Write to Freedom does, that we offer wilderness and writing activities, the wilderness comes first. The writing is a way to express those experiences that come up within that, how we feel about that.

The last thing I’ll say is that yes I believe we’re damaging the planet and we’re losing species and animals and plants. But I have no doubt that when nature really has had enough of this part of her, which is us and what we’re doing, we’ll go and it will regenerate in a couple of hundred thousand years. I don’t think we’re so powerful that we could wipe out nature, but I think we’re powerful enough to wipe ourselves out. 

Read more»

5 Sep 2014

How to make Transition plum & almond cake

Last night I attended the book launch, at Schumacher College, of Julian Ponsonby’s new book Gaia’s Feasts.  It contains many of the recipes used in the College’s kitchen, which, as anyone who has ever eaten there will know, produces incredible meals on a daily basis, strongly rooted in local, seasonal and organic food.  One of the recipes is called ‘Transition Plum and Almond Cake’, and I thought, as you might be about to spend the weekend harvesting plums, that you might enjoy it. Gives “Making Space for Nature” a new twist. Here is the recipe from the book.  Over to Julia …

“In 2007, Transition Town Totnes (TTT) – mother of the Transition movement – celebrated its first anniversary. Tamzin Pinkerton, author of the Transition book Local Food, asked me to make a cake for the birthday party. Clearly a cake for a movement that aims at promoting local resilience to external change – through seed-swaps, farmers’ markets, food hubs and by planting nut trees, etc., etc., would have to have a locally inspired cake . . . 

Well, the plums were dripping off the plum tree in the Old Postern garden, and Riverford Dairy’s delicious double cream was calling fatteningly from the fridge. The chickens were laying in the long grass at School Farm. And nuts – the recipe had to include nuts, even if the newly planted Totnes nut trees were still too young to produce any . . . 

1 medium round sandwich cake (serves 10)

(2 x 23cm / 9″ shallow cake tins)

175g (6oz / 1½ sticks) butter, softened

175g (6oz / 1 cup) golden granulated sugar

+ 1 tbsp extra for topping

110g (4oz / 1 scant cup) white flour

2 tbsp polenta + 1 tbsp extra for topping

85g (3oz / ¾ cup) ground almonds

3 eggs

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 good pinch salt

approx. 2 tbsp milk

approx. 3 tbsp flaked almonds

250g (9oz) fresh plums

100g (4oz / ½ cup) plum jam

250ml (9fl oz / 1 cup) whipping or double cream

(The book also includes the measurements for making this cake to feed 30 people)          

1.   Pre-heat the oven to 180°C (350°F / Gas Mark 4). Grease and line the tins with baking parchment.

2.   Cream together the softened butter and sugar, then stir in the eggs, one or two at a time.

3.   Mix together the flour, polenta, ground almonds, cinnamon, baking powder and salt. Fold this into the creamed mixture with a little milk to get a soft dropping consistency.

4.   Spread half the mixture into one tin. Then spread half the remaining mixture into the other tin – leaving a quarter of the total mixture still in the bowl for later: this means that the batter in one of the tins will be half the thickness of the other. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes.

5.   While the cake is cooking, halve the plums lengthways and remove the stones. Cutting along the dimple of the plum allows you to find the stone lying flat and easier to remove, especially if using ‘free stone’ plums.

6.   Remove the thinner cake from the oven when it is just set but scarcely browned at all (about 15-20 minutes, depending on the size). Spread the remaining cake mixture on top of this, then scatter with the flaked almonds and a little polenta before laying the halved plums on top, cut-side down. (The flaked almonds help to take the weight of the plums while the polenta absorbs juices.) Scatter meagrely with granulated sugar and return to the oven to finish baking. Your other cake may be done by now!

7.   When the cakes are ready, they should be well risen and golden-brown – a knife or skewer should come out moist but clear of any cake mix.

8.   Allow the cake with the plums on to cool in the tin. The other cake may be cooled on a wire cooling rack. Once the plummy cake is completely cool, loosen it around the edge, cover with either a clean cloth or bubble wrap (to cushion the plums) and invert it carefully on to a tray, rip off the baking parchment and then quickly turn the cake back again on to another board or cooling rack.

9.   When the cakes are completely cool, place the plain one on a plate or chopping board. Spread liberally with plum jam, followed by a generous layer of whipped cream. Carefully lift the cake with the baked-in plums, and plant it gently on top of the cream. If making the larger version, ask someone to help you lift it using spatulas inserted under each end.

10.   The plum and almond cake is now ready – though you may wish to streak a few iconoclastic jet-trails of melted chocolate over the top, as I often do – not local, but rather delicious and really puts into perspective where our cultural food journey has got to… !

You can order your copy of Gaia’s Kitchen here. 

 

Read more»

4 Sep 2014

Can supermarkets ever be sustainable?

Here is another piece I wrote recently for the Guardian Live Better Challenge:

Can supermarkets ever be sustainable?  Walmart’s new boss is on a mission. Will his drive for renewable energy and waste reduction transform the supermarket model?

Read more»

2 Sep 2014

The Second Life of Sally Mottram: a review

It feels to me like an important moment in the evolution of Transition  – the first novel in which Transition plays a key role, published by one of the UK’s largest publishers.  It’s also a great read, and it’s oddly thrilling to think that on beaches around the world this summer people were reading this story of one woman bringing Transition to her community. 

The Second Life of Sally Mottram is written by David Nobbs, one of Britain’s best known comedy writers, who wrote for comedians such as Tommy Cooper and Les Dawson, as well as writing The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and twenty novels.  It follows the story of Sally, who, following an unexpected tragedy, decides that she wants to put her energy into reversing the decline of her fictional Yorkshire town of Potherthwaite.  The book follows her experience, and those of her friends and fellow townsfolk, as she tries to engage them in making Transition happen. 

Nobbs was inspired to write a novel featuring Transition through his stepdaughter and her husband who are involved in Transition in France.  He adds, in the book’s acknowledgements, that “I have not witnessed or taken part in any of the Transition movement’s initiatives”. Although this means that sometimes it doesn’t ring true and you may find yourself thinking “it wouldn’t actually happen like that”, there is a passion and a drive to the book and to Sally’s experience that will resonate for many.  

Sally heads to Totnes (in a chapter entitled “In which Totnes is mentioned many times”) to stay with her sister and is inspired to make it happen in Potherthwaite, a town that is dying on its feet.  Nobbs captures the essence of Transition beautifully:

“… big things come out of little things, that out of a thousand tiny acts, if they can be joined up, one might act may emerge”.  

Inspired, she invites her closest friends and people she loves for a meal at which she reveals her plan to bring the town back to life using Transition. She tells them:

“We will be able to deal at the same time with world issues and with our problems here, with our town, its decline, its ugliness, its quiet daily despair … Ridiculous? Yes, but what is happening now is ridiculous.  It’s ridiculous that we let our town die around us and do nothing about it”

I won’t tell you much more, but the story unfolds in fascinating ways.  As the book progresses: 

“…large numbers of people … were delighted to feel a connection with Brixton, Tooting, and Los Angeles, and Brasilandia, and all the other places that were working towards the salvation of the planet in a myriad of little ways”.  

Inevitably perhaps, some of the book doesn’t quite ring true.  For example, anyone doing Transition who has put the effort in to getting all the traders in a local high street behind a project might not find themselves identifying with a project to make over all the shopfronts, “all the shopkeepers having miraculously been persuaded to sign up…”. If only.  The process seems more focused around Sally’s own vision than about really engaging people in creating a shared vision.  There aren’t many public meetings, no Open Space, little in the way of working groups. More one very inspiring woman whose ideas inspire the community to help make them a reality.  

Also, I was struck that the Transition process in Potherthwaite seems, incredibly, to take place virtually without the use of IT or social media: no websites, Twitter, Facebook, I think there’s only one mention of anyone even getting an email!  Late on in the book when the town is faced with an emergency, we are told that “several of them stood with short-wave radios, ready to exchange the latest situations and make the swiftest and most accurate decisions”.  Surely they’d have been texting each other? 

What comes across in the story is also a very middle class version of Transition.  At one point, when kids from the local estate are getting involved in a particular Transition project, Nobbs writes “what a glorious thing is responsibility. Anyone who has seen children taking part in youth theatre will have noticed it”. Yet in spite of the moments when it occasionally doesn’t quite ring true, there is much about Sally’s story that I found deeply touching and resonating with my own experience.  

‘The Second Life’ captures the power of one person deciding it’s time to do something and how infectious that can be. The idea that if you don’t like things how they are then you could step up and do something about it comes through the book strongly.  What Sally starts really touches people.  It changes what people think is possible.  It changes what she thinks is possible.

It is the story of Potherthwaite’s Transition, and like Transition anywhere, it is unique to that place.  What it captures most importantly is what it feels like to have such a process happening around you, what it feels like when for the first time you feel part of something. And Sally experiences the same self-doubt, the moments of thinking it’s just never going to happen, and the same serendipitous moments when the right person turns up at the right time, that many of us have experienced.  Does it work? Does Potherthwaite end up as Sally dreams of?  I’m not saying.  You’ll have to read the book to find out.  

But The Second Life represents a fascinating moment in the cultural evolution of Transition, and its place in the wider culture. It’s not quite yet having Transition Albert Square in Eastenders, but it feels close.  For such a respected writer to put it centre stage in a book designed to appeal to a mass audience is fascinating.  I really recommend it.  I couldn’t put it down.  

Read more»