A poem is never really ‘finished’. The ones I post on this blog often evolve further. Having said that, the ones that I work on for longest are also often poems that I am less happy with so getting them to the point where I can park them on this blog is helpful.
This poem started with a few conversations about the other side of mental health problems.
I have to start this with a warning though. A good place to start is this article, describing just how debilitating mental illness can be, and the destruction it does to people’s long term wellbeing. Here is a quote which hits home;
In 2013 I was advised by psychiatrists to withhold my diagnosis from employers and be judicious with everyone else, as understanding of mental illness was limited in the public sphere and highly stigmatised.This was, at the time, absolutely the right advice.But in the last decade I have noticed a shift in how openly mental health is discussed; how many people are willing to claim psychiatric disorders as their own or armchair-diagnose those around them.But the sickest people I’ve ever known – myself included – have had almost no part in this opening up, as if we’re suffering from a different condition altogether.Nobody I’ve ever been locked up with in a psychiatric hospital felt accepting or “proud” of their illness.
As someone who has worked within mental health care for 30 years, this hits home harder as I am convinced that the medicalised powerlessness we enforce on people is a huge part of the problem here, and I have no desire to minimise or trivialise the pain that many people with long term mental illness experience.
And yet there is more to be said here, hence my attempt to describe this in a poem. Many of the best people I know have had devastating experiences of mental ill health.
Perhaps this should not be surprising- after all one in four of us will have these experiences, so they might be described as ‘normal’ or ‘commonplace’, but I would argue that there is something extraordinary happening here too.
Perhaps when we have experienced the depths of despair and somehow survive, our perspective shifts. We see the world in different ways. We see people in different ways. If we are not destroyed that is, if we can hold on and find our way forward, no matter how tentatively.
Perhaps too we are forced to make changes that previously we had avoided, suppressed and hidden under all sorts of coping strategies that had no longer worked.
Perhaps we finally recognise that success and failure are not opposites. Perhaps our experiences force us to get off whichever treadmill we are treading.
All I know is that wounds, even unhealed wounds, can become places of renewal. On a good day at least.
My previous post concerned itself with a letter I sent to our local paper. I was surprised and really pleased to revieve a reply in the paper the next week. I foolishly failed to copy it, but the thrust of it all was that one of the instigators of the Dunoon Project (no longer a director but still very much involved) was expressing some agreement with my comments and offering to meet to talk further. It would have been rude not to take up his offer, right?
Of course, I first did the google search in order to find out who it was that I was meeting. We had met once before actually, at one of the local consultation events for the Dunoon Project a couple of years or so ago, but I was but one of many attendees. What I was not aware of was the forestry pedigree of the man. He had spent a whoe lifetime working the woods, and is a regular writer in the Forestry Journal. One particular article spells out his feelings about the damage done and overall wastefulness of modern forestry practices.
Some of his concern appears to be the damage done to the ground by massive machines, which typically require buldozed access roads and rip the ground up in operation (incidentally, releasing huge amounts of carbon in the process above and beyond the removal of the trees themselves.)
The cable-crane operation is best suited to small, self-contained teams, be they employees or contractors. The timber-harvesting world has been taken over by the big boys to the demise of the smaller guys who were predominant in the days when I worked a winch. Small, focused teams tend to take more responsibility. In those days, a big team was one that had a winch and did the cutting, and quite often the cutters were separate to the winchmen – but it worked. Today, with harvesters costing half a million, small guys can’t get into the harvesting game and, worse than that, the competition between the big guys and the pressure from the end user contrives to keep harvesting rates at unrealistic lows, making it unattractive for new entrants. There’s little or no money for training or research and we are faced with a downward spiral of corner cutting to make ends meet.
My knowledge of forestry practice is almost non-existent, mostly gleaned from looking at the Cowal hillside then going on a deep internet dive in order to try to understand better what I was seeing. The chance to talk to someone who had actually worked these hills for decades seemed too good to pass up.
So meet we did.
Firslty, what a lovely man. He invited me to his home, where he proved to be a fantastic host, full of good stories, good humour and we shared a love of cricket. I really liked him and hope our paths will cross again.
He told me that when my letter went in the paper, some of his forestry chums had been rather disparaging, but his question to them had been ‘but what of what he is saying is wrong?’
Later he took me on a tour of the glen where he lives, where there has been much effort to restore the land, including a new project to bring fish back to the burn, which has involved looking at the marginal planting along the whole stream.
The glen has three main land owners – not counting Forestry Land Scotland (FLS) – and all three have their own committment to land restoration. The owner at the head of the glen seem to be trying to establish a new plantation of Caledonian pine forest, which seemed like a strange choice to me, as the great pine forests of the estern Highlands never previously grew in these parts, but alongside this there is other planting going on.
My guide showed me remnants of old growth forest, as well as newly planted mixed woodland and even a restored meadow. He is a man who clearly loves the land and regards himself as a steward. There is no doubt in my mind that he will leave a legacy in the land that will live on and on.
He is also passionate about the need to remove invasive rhododendrons and frustrated about the fact that FLS do not seem to have the same commitment to this within the glen.
Much of the woods in the lower glen are owned and managed by my guide. He explained how they had taken hundreds of tons of wood out of the still-dense spruce plantations in order to thin the trees, thereby creating greater diversity. Laudable, but the woodland is still so dense as to prevent any undergrowth. It remains the same brown desert that all plantations in these parts seem to have become. Perhaps this will change as the space created is colonised by other species. Certainly my guide had noted how birds now flew through the woods when previously they would have been excluded. There is no doubt that the glen is a place of much more diverse planting than most other parts of Cowal, with a wide variety of trees, including the elusive aspen.
I very much enjoyed our chat, which never became contentious even in areas of mild disagreement. Perhaps we were both on our best behaviour, wanting to focus more on what united us rather than what divided, but I think it was more than that. I think my guide was reflecting on a lifetime in the woods – a good life, lived out in good places – and is genuinely worried about what is happened to our once-wild places. His worries take him to a different set of questions and different solutions to what my own ill informed ponderings have taken me, but we both see the same problem; plunging biodiversity and an unfolding climate change catastrophy which at very least is already putting our woodlands in a vulnerable place.
For him I think that the solution is to do forestry better. To look at the most damaging practices and change them. This seems in part about industrial-scale machinery, poor management practices and appalling waste.
What about those areas of mild disagreement though?
I start with a warning. I don’t really know what I am talking about. All opinions I express, particularly ones that might contradict a man of the forest. Having said that, I do bring some skills to this quest for knowledge. I am a left field thinker, one used to looking at complex human designed systems and trying to understand what they are about. This was my gift (perhaps the only gift!) in the latter years of my last career, but also is what fuels my poetry, which is after all another kind of quest for truth. I am far from unbiased, but I am trying to keep my eyes wide open.
My first thought is that it does not seem sufficient to manage our way out of the denuded state of our hillsides by trying to do the same things better.
My guide may well be correct in saying that the problem has revealed itself most since the break down of the old local forestry systems – the selling off, the privatisation, the lack of public interest or investment, the advent of large machine driven solutions. For instance, he spoke about how the old chief foresters for an area had a connection to the land and to the local community that is almost entirely absent now.
They way I see it however is that this was not the golden age, it was part of the decline. The damage had already been done and what seems like best practice from back then is infact part of the problem, albeit one which we have made even worse.
The reason that our hills are planted up alien species of trees goes back to a different kind of clearances which saw small scale subsistence farming – which had already slashed and burned in to the forests and driven back the wild animals and large herbivores – were themselves cleared from the land by land owners who replace them with sheep, who munched their way to creating ‘green deserts’. Empty rolling hills, which we can see in old photos of Innellan for example, or the bare hills in Victorian photos around Loch Eck. The sheep still munch, but the national pressure, post war, was to be more self sufficient in producing our own timber needs, something that we could argue has been an abject failure, given how much we still need to import.
This was what led to much of the planting of the Cowal hills, not least those above my house here in Innellan. In other words, we replaced the green deserts (albeit with small remnants of biodiverse forest) with brown deserts – dark, dank closely planted alien species of spruce trees, underwhich almost nothing lives, nothing thrives, nothing prospers, bar the midge and the deer.
There is a problem with these statements though, in that in the febrile and overheated polarised debate about biodiversity in forests, with the foresters on one side, rightly trumpeting their carbon capture and renewable resources, and the conservationists on the other side, pointing the obvious deteriorating situation for wildlfe accross the board, and in the forested hills in particular, the actual EVIDENCE is far from clear. Here is a quote from this literature review undertaken in 2020 looking at the situation in Norway which kind of sums things up;
The controversy between the forestry sector and the nature conservation sector relies on low quality of evidence. In addition, studies on other aspects of biodiversity like habitats, landscapes and genetics are needed to strengthen the level of knowledge. We consider that the debate will benefit from a more knowledge-based approach where Sitka spruce is judged in a rational way based on both negative and positive effects. The present body of knowledge suggests a future management modification of Sitka spruce in Norway, and forest managers should consider more stand-wise mixtures of tree species, increase the proportion of early and late growth stages compared to the thicket stage but also avoid plantations on high risk “take off landscapes with respect to spread” to restrict future spread into conservation areas.
So, we think it more than likely that th eplanting of Sitka plantations is problematic, but we need to know more. A lot more. Best practice is not well understood and not actively promoted, leaving the (often very wealthy and powerful) vested interests to make it up as they go along, based on their own private profit or personal politics.
The question of WHY this research is not being done rears its head here. Why are we not asking these questions, despite being well in to the third or fourth cycle of harvesting/replanting of spruce plantations here in Scotland? This must relate, at least in part, to those vested interests mentioned above?
Partly too I think this might be because forestry is such a long term issue. Any problems develop slowly and mostly belong to future generations – perhaps with the exception of the recent Phytophthora outbreaks which have so devastated our forests of late. Perhaps these really should be the warning that we all need to heed. The canary in the coal mine perhaps? However, mostly, generations come and go and mostly the forest appears unchanging. In fact, our landscape has changed radically. Here is Loch Eck, around 1900 for example, with not a tree in sight.
The next problem is one of OWNERSHIP. This is a summary of ownership of Scottish woodlands from here. It should be noted that this data was from a survey conducted between 2012 and 2015. It seems likely that ownership has been further concentrating into the hands of companies and individuals, driven by the carbon capture industry, as made clear by the Scottish Land Commission, here.
Ownership type
Woodland area (000) ha
% of country woodland area
Public Forest Estate* [National forest and lands]
527.9**
38.4
Local Authority
7.0
0.5
Crown, Church and Educational Institution
0***
0
Other Public – not PFE or Local Authority
21.4
1.6
Charity funded by voluntary subscription
37.0
2.7
Private forestry or timber business
57.7
4.2
Private Personal
546.1
39.8
Private Business – companies, partnerships and syndicates
146.6
10.7
Private Community
13.8
1.0
Mixed
2.6
0.2
Other
13.5
1.0
Since the great free market Thatcherite revolution, it was not longer tenable to allow a nationalised industry to stand in the way of the rampant and endlessly creative free market, so the hold of the forestry commission had to be broken, but despite the best efforts of Thatcher’s government somehow the Forestry commission remained in public ownership, albeit with an ever increased push towards profitability. The forests then became devolved matters for the Scottish government. As can be seen from the above figures however, the government only has control over just over 34% of the forest in Scotland. The largest percentage is in private hands. This is perhaps not a surprise, given that we already live in a country with the most unequal land distribution in Europe, and this is probably getting worse, not better.
Ironically, it would seem that some of the most innovative and conservation-focussed forestry practices in Scotland are not happening in the public forests, but rather due to the passions and deep pockets of individuals such as Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen, who own more than 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres) across Sutherland and the Grampian mountains.
Other large scale land restoration projects in Scotland have been driven by community action, most notably the Affric Highlands initiative, or charity projects like Trees for Life’s estate at Dundreggan.
As well as the conservationist/forestry divide evident on the focus of these projects, we should also mention some other obvious differences of approach. The first and most obvious is the issue of profit. If the forest has to pay for itself as its primary purpose then all other considerations will be secondary. It will then become logical to extract as much profit as possible, giving justification to the kind of heavy machinery practices that my guide found so destructive. In a world driven by free market thinking modification of this profit imperative feels immoral. By the same token, the development of a different relationship with the land that is not driven by unmodified profit, or even sets economic production aside entirely in favour of other pressing concerns, is extremely difficult but experience has surely taught us that if our land is to flourish again, we have to free it, at least in significant part, from the chains of profit. This can not simply be left piecemeal to the whims of individuals.
The next major difference is notable from the very language we are using to discuss this issue. Forestry is about trees, plantations, harvesting, timber. BIodiversity on the other hand is not about trees, but rather about complex interwoven relationships between species of flaura and fauna and the land/climate in which they are located. The trees are a vital component of this biodiversity, but not all trees are equal. When we talk about forest, we are not always talking about the same thing.
On the tour up his beautiful glen, my guide pointed to stands of old growth trees up the hillsides. He pointed out areas where vast amounts of invasive species had been cleared and where old drains are being left to clog in order to restore wetlands. He made a comment something like this when you are in old forest, you can feel the difference. I very much agree, but I think there is another difference in the way we might think of these precious place is as repositories for preserving what is left.
A comparison (albeit one that runs the risk of further polarising this debate) might be made with how marine protection areas are intended to work. Research has shown how these contentious interventions into the free extraction of fish and the use of the sea have real, measurable benefits. The difference is that land based ecosystems are even more denuded than marine ones, so for many species, merely protecting what is left and allowing it to flourish is not likely to be enough, which means that conservation has to be replaced by a degree of restoartive engineering in order to create the circumstances in which a protection area might have a chance.
And so we return to the Dunoon project.
Ownership matters, so if this land comes into ‘public ownership’ then this presents us with a huge opportunity.
Profit matters, in that the burden we place on this damaged and denuded land will shape its recovery entirely. Also, not all profit is equal, and certainly not all measurable in terms of money.
The conversation is vital. We have to share ideas, good practice and unfolding research in order to inform the public about the whole breadth of this complex issue. At present, this conversation is not happening in Dunoon. Those involved in the project may have all this in hand, but it is not a shared conversation either in terms of specific or general information about the state of our forests.
I am very grateful to my guide for allowing me to get deeper into this conversation.
I live in the Highlands of Scotland, one of the most beautiful places on earth. We have mountains, lochs, iconic animals like red squirrels, pine martens, white tailed eagles and osprays. A hunded yards from my house there are seals which a year or do ago were picked off by a pod of killer whales. It is a lovely place to live, but it is not wild.
We tend to think it is. We forget that the atlantic rain forest that covered these hills is all gone, and that the bare hills have been rendered green deserts by sheep, and that the forest we have is mostly spruce plantation, otherwise known as brown desert. Where there are any ancient remnant trees, they are likely to be choked by invasive rhododendrons and any new seedlings hoovered up by deer.
Meanwhile, we have an opportunity here in Cowal, because of the Dunoon Project, a which involved bringing large amounts of the hillside into public ownership in order to create outdoor tourism- a cable car, a hillside cafe, zip-wires and mountain bike trails. The project also seems to rely on income from subletting the spruce plantations to companies that will exploit them for profit.
We need economic renewal in this area badly, but faced with ecological disaster, the question is how badly?
I have been thinking for some time about how we start to tackle this issue, and decided to start with a very traditional approach- a letter to the local paper. Here it is in full.
Dunoon people, we need to talk about the forest!
David Attenborough’s magnificent ‘Wild Isles’ documentary captivated many of us, but the skill of the film makers and the beauty they recorded was wrapped around a shrill alarm call because everything we saw was under pressure. Across all of the UK (and certainly here in Cowal) there is almost nothing left that can be called ‘wild’. Whether we like it or not, or whether we seek to ignore it or not, we are a pivotal generation, measured in terms of climate change or biodiversity. There is a chance that we can finally tip the scales back towards restoration rather than destruction, but in order to do this we have to talk about the Cowal forest.
In order to do this, we have to first understand that we have a massive problem. Most of what once thrived here in Cowal has gone. All of the most precious ‘semi-natural native forest’ has gone, and there are only small patches of the next category of ‘ancient forest’ left, all of which are under massive threat from over-grazing (deer) and invasive species (mainly rhododendron, sitka and buddleia.) Replacing this ancient rain forest ecosystem, we have vast tracts of land covered in spruce plantations, which are harvested on a 35-40 year cycle using the most destructive forestry practices on the planet. The end result is entirely predictable- plummeting biodiversity, soil degradation, unstable hillsides, polluted/acidic streams. The only winners in this kind of forestry are those who own land (the value of which is going up) and those who sell timber. Environmental benefits of plantations (which are better understood as battery farms for non-native trees) in terms of carbon sequestration are increasingly being revealed to be highly questionable. We know, for example, that trees only absorb enough carbon and release enough oxygen to justify the huge destruction of clear felling and replanting if left for around one hundred years plus, not a few decades.
The good news is that here in Cowal, there is loads that we can do to start to reverse this destructive trend. Firstly, we have to start a conversation about how the land we live on is being used, and become more familiar with the beauty that we have left and the damage that has already been done. Secondly, we have to demand of our politician and leaders that we invest in better, that we seek to prioritise not just the protection of remnants, but widespread landscape restoration here.
There is good work already being started, and we need to know about it. We have new rainforest alliance funded forestry posts and work is being done to restore land that once held ancient woodlands, for example on the shores of Loch Eck.
Perhaps, alongside all the good community beach cleans what we need are Rhododendron bashing parties!
Finally, we need to continue to have this conversation with our friends who are working hard on our behalf to move forward to Dunoon Project. I have written to them on several occasions on this topic but had no reply. I hope that this is because landscape restoration and working in partnership with the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest is already in hand, because anything less must be challenged.
Finally, we must consider the economics of our forestry practices. Most of us will be concerned about jobs and how a loss of commercial forestry might impact workers in this area. We do not have to look far to see how investment in our ecology and in different harvesting practices (such as selective felling) creates a different kind of work and builds community in ways that have resounding benefits to the local population. Change is not easy but what choice to we have? The alternative is not for things to stay the same but rather for things to continue to get worse.
As will be revealed later, this letter did get a response, and not the one I was expecting…
The best hope for humanity is that in a thousand years, the ancient forests will have been restored.
The point here, in case it is not obvious, is that it will take at least that long. Forest (as opposed to tree plantations) are diverse, dynamic, self-regulating ecosystems made of up many many networks of interdependence. They are lung, they are larder, they are apothecary and place of our birth and becoming.
Arguably, the human race has spent the span of our existence fighting the forest. First ridding it of fierce creatures, then slashing an burning it in an attempt to tame it, then seeing it as a resource for us to harvest for profit, until almost nothing is left. We are at a turning point where – for the sake of our very existence – we have to have a conversation about forest.
There are signs that even the most conservative of us are starting to realise that we need more trees, but in the rush to plant, often driven by desires to soak up carbon or because of green-washing carbon offset schemes, we easily forget that forest is not just about trees. The trees are merely the canvas on to which forest is painted.
Old-growth forest – or even an old single tree – has a powerful, measurable effect on our human psyche and physiology. Many others regard these as places of deep spiritual renewal. Why is this? What is it about such places that root us, connect us, open us up, hold us?
I have been involved in a number of conversations about forest in the last few weeks and months, and as ever, writing about these conversations helps me process them.
Over the next period, this is going to be my theme.
Cue all sorts of soul searching as to why I do it? Well, no. I still find it useful to write as a means to think, to externalise to ‘park’ ideas that are running through my head. Sometimes this means long posts, which I really don’t expect anyone to read. In fact, I am surprised that anyone one ever reads things I post here.
Some reflection about how social media has changed over the past fifteen years seems appropriate though. When I started, blogs were the thing. Twitter and facebook were in their infancy, yet to blot out longer form on-line discussions. Now, blogs are either dinosaurs like mine, or corporate speak written by Chat GPT (or at least someone who writes like Chat GPT.) Their purpose was mainly to convince Google that static web pages have new content – something which I am sure has been made redundant by a new algorithm or two. If we really want to know anything, we watch videos on Youtube or scan Wikipedia. (Like I said, I am a dinosaur.)
Sporadic content will continue to accumulate here.
Also, I met some lovely people through my blog – my life would be so much less without them so I am grateful still to shelter in this fragile tent…
I am not given to slinging insults on this blog, unless at myself, so forgive the title.
I was thinking about how, in the face of global emergencies, we easily get side-lined on to thinking about one small part of the whole.
Consider the tree planting thing. Trees sequester carbon, so what we need to do is… plant more trees. Any trees, anywhere, even if this creates ecological disaster. Or consider the way that we seek to manage our consumer guilt by buying expensive ‘green’ products that we don’t need.
This post follows on from some earlier posts in the wake of my withdrawal from the Labour party, in response to Kier Starmer’s apparent abandonment of principles that the party was formed uponand his subsequent purge of the left wing of the party.I found myself longing for passion and principles to be at the centre of our politics again rather than the expedient pursuit of power. I also fear that without an ideological anchor, anything goes. In these posts, I have tried to describe what this might look like, if I ruled the world. (Which would be a very bad idea.)
Aparently well-travelled waste on a Scottish island.
Our world desperately needs leaders. This is an obvious statement, but at a time when trust in the political process is rock bottom, and when we have experienced a series of ‘leaders’ who have failed to lead us towards any solution to the major problems facing our planet (climate change and it’s causal twin, rampant and widening inequality), we have to ask how we hold our leaders to account? Against which principles do we measure the policies they champion? How can we see past the distraction (deliberate or accidental) and how can we demand better if we do not know what better looks like?
The old ideologies, no matter how cherished, often feel inadequate. Can we take the best from them and make something genuinely new? There are many who are trying to do just that – with a predictable back-lash from the ‘establishment’. These voices are often forced out on to the margins by the UK political process – our two-party first-post-the-post election system, but consider this small idea from the ‘extremist’ group Extinction rebellion;
Ideas like this are only ‘radical’ if they seem disproportionate, but if we are serious about democracy, then we have to make our politics human-scale. This is not revolution, it is re-orientation, and we have never needed it more.
There is an asusmption here that decisions made by ordinary people would be better, but we have to remember that the messages and cultural cues that we live with are mostly concerned with things staying the same. We can argue over how much this hegemonic hold on our consciouness is deliberately constructed, but I would argue that for anything to change we need moral/spiritual/ethical yardsticks, alongisde working exemplars that make ideas seem more real. In these posts, I am trying to grapple with the yardsticks.
I do so not without considerable bias of course. I am left leaning, so suspicious of big-scale, non-human-level, top-down economic processes. My evolving faith background tells me that people matter, that compassion comes first and that we are here not just to exist, but to do good if we can. I was a social worker for many years, working with broken, marginalised people who were experiencing severe mental health problems and so this skews my focus to those at the margins. I make a living in a very small business, and raise veg to suppliment our small income, so I am convinced we can all live on much less. I live in a former wilderness in which everything is out of balance and diversity declining, so I am concerned about ecology and how we might preserve and restore. All of this makes me convinced that my priorities are the RIGHT ones, that my biases are in the direction of the angels and that my perpective is superior to yours.
It is not.
But then again…
Perhaps we can come to some broad agreement about what we build our future upon. If this is to be ‘owned’ rather than imposed, we have to have a conversation about it all. We might have to start by being clearer about the principles that have guided us in the recent past however, because I do not think we ever had THAT conversation before neoliberalism became so fixed and common-sense-immovable in the mind of our politicians.
We can surely agree that we want to live in a safe, prosperous country, free from oppression, protected from crime, with good education for our children and healthcare available to all who are sick. Despite some shifting of thresholds for these matters and the increasing exclusion of those on the margins, Britain is that country for most. It is still one of the best places to live on the planet. However, this comes at a terrible cost.
In terms of consumption, we use almost 100 times more energy per person than in the poorest countries, and most of this energy is still from non-renewables.
We are one of the least forested countries in Europe and our wildlife diversity is still declining alarmingly. One in seven of our native species faces extinction and more than 40% are reducing in frequency.
Our rich are becoming filthy rich, and our poor are becoming poorer. One in five of our children live in poverty.
On even these narrow parameters, something is wrong with our prosperity. Like our lifestyles, it is not sustainable.
Our politics, with it’s four year cycles and expedient short-termism, seems hellbent on ignoring this simple fact, in constantly kicking the can down the road, with a few nods at action that mostly are not worth a damn. Starmer seems to have deliberately cast himself in the same mould. Once again, there seems no escape.
But there are real alternative models of what a prosperous, fair and sustainable society might look like.
Back in 1973, E F Schumacher published his hugely precient and influential book Small is beautiful in which he described “The Problem of Production”, arguing even back then that the modern economy was unsustainable. Natural resources (like fossil fuels) were being treated as expendable income when in fact they should be treated as capital since they were – and are – very much not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further argued that nature’s resistance to pollution is limited as well. He concluded that government effort must be concentrated on sustainable development, because relatively minor improvements, for example, technology transfer to third world countries, will not solve the underlying problem of an unsustainable economy. Schumacher’s philosophy is one of “enoughness”, appreciating both human needs and limitations, and appropriate use of technology His warnings went largely unheeded, so here we are.
More recently, Schmacher’s problem of production has been explored again through the idea of a circular economy, in which old linear inpout-output models are replaced by understanding that what we use up is gone for ever, but what we throw away is with us for ever. This idea has been applied on both a macro and a micro scale, for example in top-down planning in China and at the small company level, were waste products from one company become the raw materials for the next. Welcome as this model is, arguably it appears to be trying to redeem our current economic model whilst retaining most of the industrial processes.
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut economics has pointed us towards a different way to understand what a circular economiy might work by adding two crucial limitations – firstly, that of fair distribution of resources and secondly by adding an environmental limit on what the biosphere can sustain. It is about making our economics human scaled and nature scaled. Raworth argues that we need to be at least agnostic in relation of economic growth, which she sees as a poor measure of a functional economy, particularly when it tends to be the only measure used.
Towards circular connection
What I hope is emerging in this piece is a different way to view our economy. Smaller, more local, with an emphasis on reusing, recycling and repairing.
For example, why is it that all our domestic appliances are thrown away because they are not designed to be repairable? In a circular connected world ALL such machines would have a long life and companies would be expected to provide spare parts and repair instructions.
If we follow the logic, perhaps industrial production should be subject to scrutiny as to their sustainable practice in terms of both input and output, in terms of energy use and down the line waste implications. Taxation should be scaled to enure that less sustainable products pay more. Free market evangelists will bust a gut at the very thought, but although profit as a reasonable reward for innovation is not inconsistent with the model I am proposing, it must be mediated if we are going to stop the headlong slide into destruction we are on now.
Surely, if we have learning anything in the last decades it is that the market does NOT know best. It works always towards a concentration of wealth without responsibility;
What do I mean then by circular connection?
The ‘circular’ bit should be clear enough now. We must start seeing our activities as part of a cycle, not as linear input/output models. This principle can be applied at all levels, from individual families right through to companies to whole countries and then on to international relations.
This is the permaculture principle moved from the margins right to the centre of everything we do. Writer Emma Chapman defines it like this;
“Permaculture, originally ‘Permanent Agriculture’, is often viewed as a set of gardening techniques, but it has in fact developed into a whole design philosophy, and for some people a philosophy for life. Its central theme is the creation of human systems which provide for human needs, but using many natural elements and drawing inspiration from natural ecosystems. Its goals and priorities coincide with what many people see as the core requirements for sustainability.”
This means that when designing new societal structures/economic processes/government policies/industrial practices/gardens/transport systems etc etc, we have to learn to think like nature, even in the dark.
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But man (and woman) can not live on bread alone, we are also spirit. We need to feel things before we can fully know them. This is where the ‘connection’ comes in. I will find it much harder to describe this, so perhaps it is best just to do so by sharing this poem.
Another spring. It is the time of year that I love most for the great burst of hope and renewal it brings to the land I live and work on, but also to the human spirit. It is also the time when I travel to one of the many small uninhabited islands with a groups of friends to take what we call our ‘wilderness retreat’.
I have lost count of how many times we have done this, and even of the amount of different islands we have visited, but suffice it to say that it has been more than two decades and more than a dozen different islands, each one with different qualities. Along the way, the community of retreatants has expanded to form a body of people – mostly (but not exclusively) men – whose friendship I have come to value deeply. Quite simply, my life would be much less without them, and without the ritual of spending this time in remote places with them.
There is a generosity to these gatherings that I find hard to describe. Beneath the abusive banter, the profanity (often shockingly filthy), the preoccupation with certain bodily functions and the moans and groans from aging bodies something deep and profound happens. People care for one another. They share their food, their tots of whisky, their knowledge of wild animals and their store of stories. Neither does it ever feel like an exclusive group (I hope!) New people – friends of friends or contacts from afar – are welcomed to most of our gatherings. I try to turn no-one away.
In terms of religious allegiance (or not) we are also a fairly diverse group. Some are ministers of religion, others are atheist, or at very best agnostic. Some have firm evangelical certainty, others have travelled far to the fringe. Because of this, the practices we have evolved are never prescriptive. Mostly it is silence, then reflection. The island, the friendship and the shared hardship of rough country does the rest. Most of us can recall moments of deep trancedence, perhaps even leading to radical life change, but mostly the depth and joy is much more ordinary, much more earthy, much more…
There is a simplicity to spirituality mixed from vulnerbility, small community and wild places. Perhaps as get older, the questions that pushed me out of organised religion have rested, unanswered. It is enough to feel love and to let the sound of sea embrace me. I could give you a whole underpinning theology that might try to say why this makes sense, but I will not.
Rather, look at this;
Sometimes our group has been twenty-plus. This year there were ten of us. I missed those who could not come, but community is made with those who are there, and was no less rich for that.
This year’s venue was Inchmarnock, an island I had not visited before because I had rejected it as boring, unglamourous, farmy and flat. I was wrong. It has a different quality to many of the off-shore islands we have been to, perhaps because it feels only recently abandoned, with ruinous farm buildings still containing vestages of the lives they once contained.
Massive highland cattle still wander freely, but we gave each other a mutually beneficial wide berth. There was plenty of other wild life to excite us though- a massive seal colony, barn owls, peregrines, otters and this little feller;
Photo by Andy Prosser. Slow Worm on Inchmarnock
From the outward boat, the birders amongst us got excited at a bunch of graceful Manx Shearwaters, and we think we might have later given the ornothological world a first, because late on the first night, when it was fully dark, the air was alive with their song as they returned (we think) to breeding burrows on the island – something not otherwise known, and might represent a brand new site where these iconic mysterious birds raise their young.
Another difference from many of our previous destinations is that the island is wooded, partly scrub oak, but large parts have previously been managed coppice, presumably for fire wood or fodder for cattle. The coppiced trees have not been cut for a generation, but stand in tall, many-limbed rows, still tended as if with purpose by the roaming cattle, who have made them into glorious labyrinths, down into which the sun filters through the spring tracery of the the hazel and birch to light the floor with carpets of spring flowers. It was like no-where I had been before.
Each evening, over on our sheltered raised beach on the western side of the island, we shared the smoke and the warmth of the fireside. Paul cooked scones in a rock oven. Jokes were passed like hip flasks (which were passed too.)
This is simply the best account of the spirituality of wilderness I have ever read. It journeys from his mothers death bed, via the Californian deserts then back in time to grapple with apophatic tradition of the desert fathers of the 4th C BCE. The ‘stripping away’ that they sought as a spiritual discipline is not for the faint hearted, but Lane in his book describes too how many of us experience this in grief, in brokenness, in loss, as an inevitable part of a long life. This deeply resonated with me, after my own winter reflecting on loss and becoming lost in what was done to the exclusion of anything that might yet be.
Wilderness makes us small. The wild is indifferent to us like the stars and the sea. Before it all we are not just tiny, we are nothing. Despite this sometimes crushing reality, the desert fathers found that when we are almost eroded by harsh winds, so that it strips us of everything that we were, we find something else.
Connection? A realisation that we are part of it all? That we are held in the abyss? Perhaps all of these, but most of all, they found an indescribable love.
St John of the Cross, poet mystic, described the impact of wilderness in this way (forgive my paraphrasing) ;
It thrills us with wild beauty, but this often turns itself back to ‘the self’- we consume it, try to capture it and make it our own. Neverless, something of the divine filters in through nature.
It breaks us down, shows us as vulnerable and alone. It is hard and inifferent. It is dangerous. The divine is found at the end of our comfort, at the end of our coping.
Some places, for reasons we can not easily account for, are holy, sacred, blessed. Perhaps like those ‘thin places’ of the ancient celts, or the burning bushes. What was ordinary becomes mystically laden with the extra-ordinary. Doubt it as you will, but these experiences can be transformative.
On a short trip like ours, we can make no great claims of transformation, but feel a flavour of all three of the above.
It is good to be home, but the island, the friendship, that coppice- these I keep with me.
I don’t think I have shared these short extracts from our recent debut performance of ‘After the apocalypse‘, featuring the magnificence of Yvonne Lyon on keys/vocals along with Emily/vocals on fiddle and Will on guitar/vocals, both of Mactalla fame.
This is the line up we are hoping to take on the road as the year unfolds, but untill we had actually done a live performance, it was a total unknown quantity.
In the end, we booked the lovely Uig Hall and had a fantastic night. If I hoped for anything, it was to curate a happening, in which we collectively found depth and meaning. I think we managed this and more.
Thanks to James for all the techie stuff, and once again to Si Smith for his fantastic images.
(We are still open for venues/hosts by the way- get in touch if this is of interest.)
this fragile tent 