City Pollen

South and north

2010-05-08T17:49:00.005+01:00

We just got back from a week visiting Provence and the French Mediterranean coast, landscapes very warm and seductive:

This is the view from our hotel room, but I couldn't capture the fast swifts wheeling and screeching in that sky.

The Gorge of Verdon winds deep through the hills, the river so far below us it's hard to imagine how it ever ground away so much earth:

Green spring trees beside the bright blue water:

The French really do respect food; a Provence farm shop displayed its vegetables like artworks, colour-coordinated:

Flowered courgettes feel delicate and fleshy at once:

Back in Paris and the Jardin du Luxembourg is also in bloom, including these strange trees (I can't identify) with lilac-coloured foxglove-like flowers and some of last year's nuts still visible:

Politics of hope

2010-05-08T17:32:00.005+01:00

The fabulous Caroline Lucas thanked the voters of Brighton Pavilion for choosing 'the politics of hope' on Thursday when she became Britain's first Green MP. She will enter Parliament as the sole female leader of a British political party. Congratulations to her and to all the people who campaigned for her. Here's a video of her acceptance speech, in which we get to see her tired, emotional and very happy face at the announcement:

During the campaign, from a quite distance, I felt sceptical that the Greens would make it into Westminster. I lived near Brighton in 2005 and campaigned door to door for Keith Taylor. The feeling that year was very optimistic, and Green supporters seemed to be everywhere. On the day the Greens got over 20% of the vote, which was great, but they still came third behind the Labour and the Tories, despite the fact that on the doorstep I never heard anyone support the Conservatives. Well, I learned a little scepticism. It's cheering to see something good come out of this election, despite the Tory majority. Caroline Lucas is a great spokeswoman for ecology and environment, and I'm looking forward to watching her take on Westminster.

Waking up again

2010-04-22T10:39:00.003+01:00

This blog has been sleepy since Copenhagen, so I appreciated this video-call to recover from December's disaster. It's also a nice summary of politician-speak on climate change, a kind of antidote to the dreary General Election campaigning.

Give the orangutan a break

2010-03-27T09:42:00.005Z

Greenpeace are putting pressure on Nestle to stop using palm oil grown on land cleared of rainforest, especially in Indonesia where forest clearances are threatening the orangutan with extinction. Nestle has succeeded in banning Greenpeace's campaign video from Youtube, so the charity is asking us to spread it across the internet despite Nestle. So here it is, but first a warning - it's quite grisly and not to be watched if you're eating:

Nestle is the world's largest food and drink company so their actions have real impact. They use 320,000 tons of palm oil a year, and doubled their use of the product in the past three years. Much of it comes from plantations grown on cleared rainforests, accelerating climate change and driving extinctions. You can find a simple email to sign and send to Nestle here. In this case, I think sending an email is probably worth doing as the campaign is causing yet more bad publicity for Nestle, who could well follow the example set by Unilever and Kraft and cancel contracts with companies involved in forest clearances.

Palm oil production is driving the extinction of orangutans, one of the human species closest living relatives. Over 80% of their habitat has already been destroyed and it is estimated that the ape could go extinct in just ten years. They are particularly at risk because of their low reproductive rate; a female matures at ten to fifteen years old and can then give birth only every six to eight years. EDGE explains their vulnerability: 'Many of the remaining populations, particularly in Sumatra number fewer than 250 individuals. These small, isolated populations do not have the capacity to recover from population declines. A slight rise in female mortality rate of just 1-2% can drive a local population to extinction.'

Fontainebleau in March

2010-03-08T16:55:00.003Z

We spent a long Sunday exploring the forest of Fontainebleau. Moving between areas of bright green Scots Pines and stretches of still bare Beeches and Oaks felt a little like passing backwards and forwards between spring and winter.

Vegetation struggled to break through the thick layers of fallen leaves and needles, but the leaves in the sunlight had their own colour and warmth.

The forest's character felt quite changeable, full of hidden pleasures, like these Silver Birches complementing the green Pines.
Curiously shaped rocks attract boulderers, and we saw some working across the sandstone, or hunting between the trees for challenges, with their mattresses strapped to their backs so that they could cushion the ground beneath their climbs.

A thin city

2010-03-03T11:56:00.006Z

At noon on the first Wednesday of every month air raid sirens boom across Paris. The first time I heard this back in November the sound took me by surprise. I looked into the street to see if anything was happening, but all the Montparnassians below me walked calmly on, so I shrugged it off too. Hearing the alarm today, it already sounded familiar. The siren tells you exactly where and when you are: Paris, first Wednesday, 12 noon. But that precise present is shadowed by the city’s past, and fears for the future. The alarms are a test, to ensure that the sirens still work and can be used to warn citizens of danger in the case of future catastrophes. They also recall the dangers Paris has already survived, violence that has taken place here.

Victims of the Shoah, named at the Paris Museum of the Shoah (source)

You can barely walk down a street in this area without encountering a memorial, especially to people killed during the German occupation of 1940-44. On my way to our post office yesterday, for example, I passed a primary school with a plaque above the main door dedicated to the Jewish children taken from that school to the camps. The long unknown history of the house we live in troubles me in a way that of the Victorian house I grew up in never did. I remember that this city has endured revolutions and invasions, that it tests its sirens because of real experience.

Last year I blogged about Mircea Cantor’s Monument for the end of the world, a sculpture that tries to ‘commemorate’ a future event. I asked whether cities should build monuments not just to events in their past, but to think about lives to come. In a very dark way, the Paris sirens do this.

France is currently recovering from a natural disaster – the weekend’s storm killed over 50 people in France and swollen tides flooded towns along the Atlantic coast.

La-Faute-sur-Mer on Monday

In the capital we woke to strong winds but no damage. Today the sun is shining brightly, it’s March, spring does finally feel close, and the siren has come and gone. The alarm might be a signal of time’s continuity, its regularity, or perhaps it signals time’s rips, traumas and tears.

A place of safety

2010-02-28T16:03:00.006Z

Reading Mark Lynas’s terrifying and vivid depiction of the future on a hotter planet, Six Degrees, one of the most moving moments for me was the dedication to his wife and son ‘in the hope that most of the predictions here need not come true’. The book describes the expected food crises, extinctions and water shortages, and it culminates in an inferno of methane eruptions and stagnant, poisonous oceans. To dedicate such a narrative to your child makes sense – Lynas works to prevent such a future – but it must also have been a very painful thing to do.

I’ve been considering what children hear and think about climate change while reading Kate Thompson’s The White Horse Trick, a young adult novel set at the end of this century in Ireland crippled and dying in the ravaged climate. Dystopia has a strong presence in children’s fiction, and young readers deal with those stories in a similar way to adults: they help us to work through the terror of imagining all the logical consequences of the way we live, from the relative security of a safer present. I was impressed by Thompson’s handling of the issue. She respects her readers’ intelligence and resilience enough to confront us with the full horror of what climate change might mean. Warlords exploit and brutalise the valleys and coasts around the Burren, and the future appears so hopeless that there’s no arguing when one character declares, ‘It’s all over for the human race.’ Yet Thompson also provides a place of safety for the reader. Ireland is paralleled by Tir na n’Óg, a timeless kingdom inhabited by fairies. Just as various bedraggled human refugees cross over to this land, Tir na n’Óg also balances the reader’s experience of ecological and social collapse. The White Horse Trick is the third in a trilogy and Tir na n’Óg is well known from Irish folklore, so Thompson did not invent the land for this purpose, but she uses it deftly.

I did wonder if a refuge like this could be cheating, letting us off the hook. In particular, it allows Thompson to juxtapose human time with geological time, the millennia over which the earth’s ecosystems might recover from what we’ve done to them. This recalls arguments made by people who have run out of ways to deny climate change’s reality, so declare that the earth will survive even if humans don’t, as though the suffering in between doesn’t matter. But in Thompson’s book the suffering does matter, so the effect of her reassurance is different. I found that having access to a place of safety while reading about climate change allowed me to experience a greater range of emotions than I usually have when reading about this subject. It was a surprise. Perhaps I’d come to feel that anger, sorrow and despair are the only legitimate emotions for the subject to provoke, but in a children’s book that wouldn’t feel right. As an adult, it was oddly refreshing to face the collapse of human society from this novel’s fantastical perspective.

How Wang-Fo was saved

2010-02-23T21:00:00.002Z

An beautiful tale about art and reality, based on a story by Marguerite Yourcenar:

May they sing when they wake

2010-02-14T14:54:00.005Z

I’ve been neglecting the blog recently while finishing work on a novel, which has left me verbally exhausted. It’s nearly complete, and in the meantime here are some photos I took alongside the Seine today.

St Valentine’s day is traditionally the day the birds choose their mates.

In Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules the birds sing in praise of nature today (the song was written in France, according to Chaucer):

‘Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,

That hast this wintres weders over-shake,

And driven awey the longe nightes blake!

‘Saynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte;

Thus singen smale foules for thy sake -

Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,

That hast this wintres weders over-shake.

‘Wel han they cause for to gladen ofte,

Sith ech of hem recovered hath his make;

Ful blisful may they singen whan they wake;

Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,

That hast this wintres weders over-shake,

And driven away the longe nightes blake.’*

The summer sun has not quite shaken off winter weather here, but it was melting these icicles beneath the bridges:

The birches along the promenade bear the marks of many passing lovers:

Their bark has become hieroglyphic with names and dates:

* A sketchy translation:

Now welcome summer, with your soft sun

That has overcome this winter weather,

And driven away the long black nights!

Saint Valentine, who is upheld so high,

So sing the small birds for your sake –

Now welcome summer, with your soft sun

That has overcome this winter weather.

Well have they cause to cheer often,

Since each of them has recovered his mate;

Fully happy may they sing when they wake;

Now welcome summer with your soft sun

That has overcome this winter weather,

And driven away the long black nights.

Writing like a dying anthill

2010-01-26T17:09:00.006Z

The biologist E. O. Wilson published a fascinating story in The New Yorker this week depicting the life of an ant colony, using a literary narrative style generally reserved for human subjects. Wilson is an accomplished writer and scientist, as I’ve said before in posting about his account of ‘biophilia’, the idea that humans are instinctively attracted to life in all forms. His story, ‘Trailhead’, conjures the routines and dramas of life in the ants’ nest. It provides scientific insights without losing narrative tension, recalling Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind and Brian Clarke’s The Stream.

One of the difficulties in Wilson’s project is the question of how to imagine or talk about ants’ motivations and desires in human language. Wilson is careful to write in terms of instinctive reactions and pheromone signals. It may not be possible or desirable to write about other species without any anthropomorphism, but in ‘Trailhead’ Wilson at least tries to be as accurate as possible in his description of the ants’ sensory language. Usually he represents ants’ behaviour as simple fact, but he does not try disguise the way in which human perspective inevitably colours the tale, as in this description of ant-altruism:

‘Dying workers often left the nest completely, thereby avoiding the spread of infectious diseases. Older workers who were healthy but approaching the end of their natural life span also emigrated to the nest perimeter. From there, they often became foragers, exposing themselves to a much higher risk from enemies. When defending the nest, the elders were among the most suicidally aggressive. They were obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: humans send their young men to war; ants send their old ladies.’

[WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW]

The story centres upon the decline of the colony following the queen’s death, which is reported in the first sentence. The collapse gathers pace towards the end, culminating in a shocking scene of warfare, panic and horror.

‘Within a week, the colony began to starve. The nurse ants killed and cannibalized the last of the larvae and pupae, their own baby nest mates, and regurgitated their liquid and tissue to other adults…

In the confusion that reigned through the night, the Trailhead Colony felt—it knew—that it was in extreme difficulty. It had no conception of defeat, but the nest interior was filled with the odor of alarm and recruitment pheromones released by both sides during the attempted Streamsider break-in. The fighters were contaminated by the alien odor of the invaders. They could see the battle flags of the enemy, so to speak; they could hear the continuous shriek of alarms.’

From the beginning of the story we understand the colony is doomed, but the ants continue to pursue survival, even coronating queens whose eggs are unfertilised. Why did Wilson choose to publish a story about a tenacious, ingenious struggle to survive that never has any possibility of success? We expect to read about another species’ life, but he also shows us death.

The process of life and death in the story is entirely natural, but Wilson's choice of focus may be no surprise given his powerful account of the current mass extinction caused by human activity in The Future of Life. Interestingly, Wilson's language becomes most anthropocentric in discussing the superorganism’s collapse:

‘Lamentation and hope were mingled among the Trailhead inhabitants. The ants were a doomed people in a besieged city. Their unity of purpose was gone, their social machinery halted. No foraging, no cleaning and feeding of larvae, no queen for them to rally around. The order of the colony was dissolving. Out there, indomitable and waiting, were the hated, filthy, unformicid Streamsiders. Finally, all that the Trailheaders knew was terror, and the existence of a choice—they could fight or run from the horror.’

At the risk of reckless misreading, his thought-provoking story might not look out of place over on the Dark Mountain website.

Literary anger

2010-01-19T20:51:00.003Z

Over at Arts and Ecology, William Shaw is warming up for the arrival of Ian McEwan’s coming novel, Solar, by asking can literary fiction ever do climate change? I share the doubts about Solar but do think that there are good ‘literary’ novelists writing about climate change directly, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Hall for a start. All three women have written novels set in futures decimated by climate change. Whether their novels are literary fiction or science fiction is less important to me than the vivid, engaged storytelling.

Sarah Hall in particular writes about human relationships with nature with feeling, intelligence and fury, a great combination. In The Carhullan Army she imagines Britain wrecked by oil shortages and floods in the near future. Her narrator escapes bleak authoritarianism of town life for female commune on the Cumbrian moors, yet there’s no escape from violence.

Haweswater

Hall has said that the Cumbrian floods of 2005 inspired The Carhullan Army. Her first novel, Haweswater, anticipated those floods and is for me in many ways the more interesting novel. It explores the same Cumbrian landscape, showing the stark beauty of villagers’ lives in the valley of Mardale. People, time and place are torn apart by the arrival of a representative for Manchester Waterworks who announces plans to flood the land to create a reservoir. The casual destruction of the whole valley is based on reality, vividly dramatised in the novel. The personal and the ecological intertwine through the tragedy Hall depicts. As a historical novel, Haweswater is not about climate change, but it is an impressive portrayal of human impact on landscape, and shows how fruitful this subject is for ‘literary’ writers. Most of importantly, the novel has none of McEwan's diffidence about ideas: it’s bold, roaring.

2010 is Year of Biodiversity

2010-01-17T15:29:00.015Z

The United Nations has declared 2010 to be 'Year of Biodiversity', in an effort to spread this message:

'Humans are part of nature’s rich diversity and have the power to protect or destroy it.

Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is essential to sustaining the living networks and systems that provide us all with health, wealth, food, fuel and the vital services our lives depend on.

Human activity is causing the diversity of life on Earth to be lost at a greatly accelerated rate. These losses are irreversible, impoverish us all and damage the life support systems we rely on everyday. But we can prevent them.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. Let’s reflect on our achievements to safeguard biodiversity and focus on the urgency of our challenge for the future. Now is the time to act.'

What having a 'Year of' achieves, I'm not sure, but the message is important.

A glass frog, whose heart can be seen through the skin (Photo: Paul S. Hamilton)

Beautiful pictures from Ecuador in the Guardian this week revealed some of the astonishing species we have yet to meet. They are, however, threatened by logging and climate change (see also, here).

A scaly-eyed gecko (Photo: Paul S. Hamilton)

I thought today I'd recall some already classic WWF posters dramatising the ways in which we are thrusting other species from their homes and threatening our own. They're images of things out of place, manipulated in a high contrast style that has an apocalyptic register. Some of the texts on the images struggle to match the proportion of the scene's drama (below, 'Do your bit', or elsewhere, buy a hybrid). The question 'Where is your home?' works best for me:

Vampires: an anti-nature fantasy?

2010-01-10T16:28:00.008Z

This weekend, still malingering indoors because of the Europe-wide freeze, I finally watched creepy and excellent Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In. In an effort to exorcise that film’s ugly under-the-skin nastiness I’m taking a good look at vampires today, from an ecological perspective, naturally. Vampires are absurdly popular just now, mostly because of the extraordinary success of the multi-million best-selling Twilight franchise. According to some complex alogarithms ‘vampire’ was the 5^th most popular word of 2009. And ‘climate change’ is the top phrase of the decade. Which surely raises the question, is there a link?

In their first wave of Victorian popularity vampires represented some aspects of nature that humans feared. Vampires were animalistic dwellers in darkness. They could transform into bats and dogs. Having given up their souls they were free to take survival of the fittest to new levels of selfish brutality, which Victorians worried might be a consequence of the collapse of religion (possibly). But most of the evidence suggests that vampires are anti-nature:

They are undead, not living or dead; this is quite unnatural.
They don’t breathe (no signs of various other normal bodily functions either, except for eating and sex).
They’re cold, hard and generally unmammalian despite their mammal origins.
Their natural enemies are werewolves (see Underworld and New Moon), who embody the wild, animalistic side of human nature.

Stephanie Myers’ bestseller list domination made me curious enough to find my inner teenage girl (admittedly, this is not difficult) and read Twilight, so I also know that modern vampires like fast cars, are very consumerist and have no conscience about taking long haul flights.

Twilight: Don't be fooled: this vampire is not a tree-hugger.

Why are vampires so popular now? Mostly, it’s about sex. But might their status as the anti-nature monster also have something to do with it? In the nineteenth century vampire stories spoke to cultural fears about female sexuality but also about colonialism. The vampire is a classic parasite so it was logical for Dracula to set up camp in London, heart of the British Empire, in his efforts to expand his blood-draining super-race. Today’s vampire stories might just be speaking to our fears that we are parasitically draining the world of its natural resources, transforming ourselves into an unnatural simulacrum of humanity in the process.

Let the Right One In: Also not about tree huggers

Even though vampires are decidedly unnatural beings, the current wave of novels, films and TV series like True Blood find them irresistibly attractive. Twilight and co are romances and they provoke bewildering passion in some readers. Vampires are multi-layered, and most of their appeal is in their strong appetites and freedom from social rules, but I wonder if we also see ourselves in their inversion of natural processes. Part of us does want to be better than nature, and in loving vampires we try to escape natural limitations. Let the Right One In’s deep creepiness seemed to me to come from the way it depicts human attraction to vampires. Vampires see themselves as top of the food chain, but being top of the food chain makes them parasites and a touch of sunlight makes them nothing at all (at least until Meyers started spreading all this sparkling in the sunlight nonsense).

Les Nymphéas

2010-01-02T18:14:00.006Z

(Claude Monet, Reflets verts)

About a week before Solstice, with December at its greyest, I went to visit Monet’s water lily paintings (Les Nymphéas) at The Orangerie. The paintings curve around the walls of two large oval rooms and drench the space with colour. The paintings show the water at different times of day and year. In the second room each view is framed by willows and the water’s blue runs through the trees’ trunks.

(Monet, Le Matin aux saules)

It’s difficult to convey on a screen the scale of the paintings, which are 2 metres high and up to 17 metres broad. Their great width and encircling shape immerses the viewer in the substance of the water. You cannot take it all in at once, nor distinguish surface, depths and reflected sky through his layered colours.

(Monet, Reflets d’arbres)

I was struck on this visit with the thought that Monet was painting his own garden pond to produce these images, and yet he represented the place very large. There’s a slight sense of disproportion looking at size of the leaves and walking around the space the paintings are designed to take. Nature feels bigger than usual. Monet spent the last thirty years of his life painting these scenes, completing the Orangerie Les Nymphéas in his eighties. He suffered at this time from cataracts and distorted vision, but the paintings suggest his ability to immerse himself in the substance of nature within one particular place. Perhaps he came to see that the water, the willows and lily leaves were boundless.

(Monet, Soleil couchant)

The stripped earth

2009-12-20T12:32:00.003Z

This week I’ve been to see two movies with the same question at their heart, what might humans do when the earth is stripped of all life other than ourselves? The Road and Avatar may not appear to have much in common but in both the biosphere is a major character. The Road is a harrowing depiction of a world extinct of all life apart from brutalised human wreckage surviving on cans and other remains they find left over from before the disaster. The film is faithful to the brilliantly written novel and conveys something of the horror of a world without ecosystems. There’s no suggestion that humans are responsible for the change; we can speculate about super-volcanoes and asteroids but what matters is the experience of a world without life. I admire The Road and especially Cormac McCarthy’s spare, biblically inflected prose, but for me the story is riven by ecophobia and articulates some too-familiar Western myths. McCarthy writes frontier novels, Man against Nature. The Road finds redemption in love between the Father and Son, and in the Son’s love for humanity (the weak mother is jettisoned early).

Where The Road envisions a grey-brown dead world, Avatar discovers a planet brimming with green, filled with startling bioluminescent creatures suggestive of our ocean organisms. Having stripped Earth of life, humans are recklessly mining the new world, Pandora, and murdering the native People in the process. Critics have slammed the movie for silliness and sermons. The People talk a lot about the flow of energy moving through all living things. Helpfully, they can directly experience this flow by plugging into trees, birds, horses and so on with a bunch of tentacles growing amongst their hair (what a great idea, I thought – if we could tell stories that do that…). Needless to say, the Gaian sermons did not trouble me and since I watched the movie in 3D I was happily immersed in it throughout.

Avatar is another redemption movie, and again the redemption comes from a Great White Male. The filmmakers have not sought new stories; presumably the white-man-goes-native plot is supposed to allow us to identify with the hero and not the evil planet-destroying corporate men and mercenaries. Even so, the eco-message is sound and enjoyably conveyed. The cinema audience broke into spontaneous applause at the end. I guess it’s obvious that The Road is a ‘better’ movie than Avatar with stronger dialogue and acting, but Avatar will reach more people.

This week planet-saving talks collapsed at Copenhagen and the date environmentalists have focussed on for the past two or three years has gone and achieved worse than nothing. It’s telling that both movies started from the point of giving up on Earth’s ecosystems. The pristine perfection of Pandora (the planet in Avatar) recalls all those nature documentaries with David Attenborough voice-overs. I sometimes wonder if that’s the only Nature we learn to care about. The Road angrily wipes out our messy, compromised natural world altogether for a purer form of wilderness. I’m pretty excited to see ecology at the heart of our most mainstream movies, but what I’d really like to see now are films that make us care for the natural world as it is here and now, fractured and astonishing.

Paris in snow

2009-12-17T16:10:00.010Z

Paris woke up to snow this morning.

At our nearest entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens this statue of the continents holding up the globe was lightly dusted:

The striking horse-sea-serpents that surround the base dripped with ice:

In Paris they like their parks immaculate:

I admit this sometimes makes me nostalgic for Wytham, but the place is deeply elegant and the sculptures are stunning. Here's the Luxembourg Statue of Liberty, the first bronze model made in preparation for New York's statue:

Or, Liberty Enlightening the World. I like the symmetry between her arm and the tree branching behind her.

Holding the flame

2009-12-12T20:33:00.004Z

We marked the Copenhagen march today in Paris with a candlelit vigil on the Place de la Concorde. We were a small group encircled by traffic and shoppers on their way to the Champs Elysees. It was not so much a protest as a moment to think about what's happening.

Greeting Copenhagen

2009-12-07T15:47:00.007Z

The long-awaited Copenhagen Summit has now started. Here’s the film with which they opened the conference:

I find this rather cheesy and evasive (the impacts are portrayed as a child’s nightmare), but it’s interesting to see how our world leaders see themselves. As reassurers of children?

Eran and I greeted the summit in different cities at the London and Paris demonstrations. I was only able to join the start of the London rally and march before catching the Eurostar home but the event looked vocal and well attended. About 50,000 people marched, making it the biggest climate protest in the UK so far, but the number is still short of a mass movement. Seeing everyone dressed in blue gave a sense of togetherness and lifted the gathering out of the ordinary. Thank you to Emma and others reading this who marched – it’s a beautiful thing to act at this moment. My walk back to King’s Cross took me down Oxford Street, which was closed to traffic I presume for the march route. The street was utterly packed with Christmas shoppers and outside Selfridges machines puffed polystyrene ‘snow’ over passers by. The pure strangeness of walking from a crowd of climate change protesters into hoards of consumers and being greeted by fake snow almost makes me forget how sad this is. Earlier that day in Hyde Park I watched a small boy very seriously reading his handmade sign, ‘No more toys from China’. Presumably he wrote the words but his face did not show it at that moment.

In Paris the demonstration was more modest. About a thousand met for a flash mob, clattering saucepans and other noisy objects; you can see a few in Eran’s photo. Parisians were also encouraged to wear colours, but given the choice of orange, white and black, guess what most of the crowd chose...

Cuts and Culprits

2009-11-18T20:24:00.004Z

In the run up to Copenhagen the Guardian has published this comparison of different nations’ contributions to climate change from which I’ve learnt that the per capita carbon emissions in the UK are 9.3 tonnes compared with 6.4 tonnes in France. The main reason for this difference is that France gets 80% of its energy from nuclear power, though possibly local food habits and the popularity of holidays inside the ‘Hexagon’ help marginally. The figure is heartening to me because there’s no significant difference in quality of life between the two countries. Neither lack for luxury. Francophiles and Anglophiles could argue this both ways but really the differences are trivial (the French do have very excellent bread and fresh vegetables, but personally I find this hard to weigh against the watery tea and lack of good cheddar). The statistics show that it would be possible to cut UK emissions by a third without any pain or loss at all by shifting energy generation away from fossil fuels.*

As well as useful information these national figures offer dubious entertainment – it’s very tempting to search out the bad guys. Most obviously, the USA’s 19.9 tonnes per capita annual emissions are quite shocking. But even the USA could point to worse culprits: they’re drinking oil in Bahrain (41 tonnes), Qatar (70.6 tonnes) and UAE (38.5 tonnes), and who can say what’s going on in the Virgin Islands (150 tonnes). Some of the discrepancies are caused by population size so it’s useful – and chilling – to remember that British has the 8^th highest total carbon emissions of all countries (France is 16^th).

The figures aren’t helpful if they're a temptation to evade individual responsibility by pointing to other nations or thinking in relative rather than absolute terms about emissions. We know that the earth can sustain no more than 1 tonne of annual carbon emissions from each of us.** But national statistics are helpful in giving some indication of whether a nation’s actions match their words during the rhetoric storm we can expect from Copenhagen.***

* Many environmentalists would argue that the French merely displace the problem since nuclear power creates its own dangerous pollution. There’s a very useful assessment of the UK energy situation in Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air.

** George Marshall’s Carbon Detox is still my favourite guide to reaching this target.

*** If you’re in the UK, don’t forget the march in London on Saturday December 5^th, from 12 noon to call for strong action against climate change at the UN meeting. (I have to be in the UK that week so will be there. Please do get in touch if you’d like to join me; I will have my British mobile.)

Icarus and the fox

2009-11-11T21:30:00.008Z

Outside St Sulpice today I enjoyed these sculptures, inspired by books and stories:

Icare (Icarus), by Robert Aupetit

Le Corbeau et le Reynard (The Crow and the Fox), by Florence de Ponthaud-Neyrat

(The sculpture is inspired by another cautionary tale, here.)

'Le grand livre du temps' (The big book of time) by NISA

('Monocycle', Ilio Signore)

It seemed to me that all these sculptures have an element of the precarious in them: Icarus launching towards the dim November sun, the fox and crow sketched in driftwood, the pages in the book fragmenting, and this unicyclist wildly wheeling around. But that fragility is combined with humour, lightness, and joy of living.

My paper boat

2009-11-05T21:56:00.004Z

I came across this beautiful short video about climate change on the One Minute to Save the World competition website:

There are about a thousand eco-films on the site, where you can vote for your favourite. I love the unspoken emotion of this film by Arun Boses.

UPDATE, 19 January 2010

My Paper Boat went on to win the competition. Congratulations Arun Boses!

Home in other words

2009-11-01T13:52:00.005Z

Living in a foreign country gets me thinking about words. A few days ago I saw Marilyn Robinson’s novel Home in a bookshop, translated as Chez Nous. In French it’s customary to use this phrase, ‘at ours’ or ‘at x’s’, to mean home. You can also use the word for house, la maison, but there isn’t an exact translation for ‘home’. Hebrew also doesn’t have a word for ‘home’ in the English sense. You just use the word for ‘house’/‘building’. Robinson’s heart-breaking and perfectly written novel conveys some of the emotions, beliefs and memories with which we layer the word ‘home’. For me ‘our place’ has none of those (though perhaps it might for a native French speaker). I’m willing to call our current flat ‘ours’, but it isn’t ‘home’.

The word ‘ecology’ has its root in the Greek word for ‘home’, oikos. This means we could translate ‘ecology’ as something like home-saying, or maybe home-knowing. I love this word. It’s slightly painful to see oikos also co-opted into ‘economy’, but that’s another matter. Eco-critics and greens in general often object to the word ‘environment’ because it means something that surrounds us and prefer ‘ecology’ for suggesting connection and shared being between ourselves and the natural world. I find it tempting to describe myself as an ‘ecologist’ rather than an ‘environmentalist’ for this reason, but to do so might be a bit pretentious and deceptive, as though I were pretending to be a scientist. Here in France there’s no problem: all greens are called écologistes.

So here’s a thought from French post-modernist Jean-François Lyotard, who argues that ecology is ‘not an environment at all, but a relation with something that is inscribed at the origin in all minds… ‘ecology’ means the discourse of the secluded, of the thing that has not become public, that has not become communicational, that has not become systematic, and that can never become any of these things. This presupposes that there is a relation of language with the logos, which is not centred on optimal performance and which is not obsessed by it, but which is preoccupied, in the full sense of ‘pre-occupied’, with listening to and seeking for what is secluded, oikeion. This discourse is called ‘literature’, ‘art’, or ‘writing’ in general.’

Autumn in Paris

2009-10-25T16:06:00.013Z

I took a longer break than I anticipated mostly because settling into Paris took a while, but also because wildness is tricky to spot in this city, at least at first glance. Parisians are quite conscious of the environment to judge by the efficient recycling schemes, popular bike-hire system and the volume of adverts that promote brands as green. I’m quite hopeful that there will be lots of ecological French activity to blog: by chance, the first French-English conversation group I went to was themed ‘Going Green’, and we’ve already received a circular from the mayor of our district who has written a fistful of books on sustainability.

But as autumn is in its glory I’ve been hankering after trees. Just round the corner from our flat is an ingenious little park, the Jardin Atlantique, built across the roof of Gare Montparnasse (a major city train station).

It’s a curious place, circled by tall office blocks with Tour Montparnasse looming above them all. Train announcements and other sounds from the station platforms resonate through the ground. Like all Parisian public spaces it’s also carefully organised with lots of municipal activities: tennis courts, boules court, ping-pong tables and so on. There’s a very impressive children’s play area, including this lovely canopy walkway.

A little marsh area rustles under the tower.

On the way back today I was struck by the sunlight in these birch leaves.

While taking photos I thought I may as well take a photo of the view from another of the same roundabout’s exits.

Goodbye Oxford

2009-09-29T14:32:00.003+01:00

Eran and I are moving to Paris later this week. This blog may fall quiet for a little while until we're settled into our new flat and have set up internet access. City Pollen will resume soon with a more urban focus than of late and hopefully news of environmental arts in France as well as elsewhere. For now, this is goodbye to Oxford…

Mull and Iona

2009-09-24T18:07:00.020+01:00

From Cumbria earlier this week my parents and I visited the Scottish west coast and the islands of Mull and Iona.

Right on the edge of the ocean the land becomes fluid with the wind and the sea. Rocks and hillsides rise suddenly from the tides and lochs fill up any low place in this beautiful area. Iona’s light and colour is often praised, perhaps because the sky is so large there. Here’s a sunset over our campsite on the Ross of Mull.

Even Iona’s rocks are extravagantly coloured and organic.

Rockpools cluster with Mussels, Limpets, Anemones and seaweeds. More camera-shy were Eider Ducks, Gannets, Guillemots, Herons and the occasional Seal.

One moment we had light bright enough to turn the sea crystal, and the next moment the wind rushed in rain storms. Honestly, the seasons changed every ten minutes.

Iona is most famous for the abbey established there by St Columba who came to the island in 563 and was important in spreading Christianity from Ireland to Scotland and England. The Book of Kells is likely to have been written there, and Iona is still home to much beautiful Celtic stonework.

The modern cloisters draw upon the Celtic tradition of creating sacred art from the natural world.

No wealth but life

2009-09-18T15:15:00.009+01:00

I’m in Cumbria with family at the moment and this week visited Ruskin’s house, Brantwood, where Alexander Hamilton has responded to the place with an exhibition, Sensorium: Picture’s from Nature’s Laboratory. In a blue room he displays a series of photograms of plants, images made from laying plants on light sensitive paper which when exposed to the sun catches the plant’s shape in a vivid white against the indigo.

(from Sensorium, (c) Alexander Hamilton)

Hamilton explains, ‘I want to let the plants reveal themselves’. By the chance of his chemicals and the plants’ forms the resulting image is very beautiful, laying out the plant as though moonlit so you look again at a crocus or snowdrop because it has been made strange. I appreciated this glimpse of spirit of crocus, anemone, fern; Hamilton himself avoids naming.

(Sensorium, (c) Alexander Hamilton)

Hamilton is also experimenting with images drawn from the plants’ sap. He tries to show the inner life of the plants by making a solution of sap and water that soaks up into paper to form bubbling layers of greens and browns. From day to day the images change, perhaps responding to the moon, to the weather, or to the artist.

Hamilton worked in Ruskin’s moorland garden on the slopes above Coniston Water. Ruskin (who is quoted in today’s title) shaped grassy terraces between the trees and created small reservoirs in a stream that flows down through Brantwood’s gardens. The path zigzags up to this place away from the more managed gardens. Ruskin had a plan for the slopes patterned on Dante’s Mount Purgatory, topped by the garden of the earthly paradise.

The idea made me smile, since we visited on a grey Cumbrian day and the moorland garden stream gives out before reaching the lake, so it didn’t appear to have the cleansing force of Dante’s Lethe. But after we’d spent a quiet moment there listening to the breeze in the birch leaves and smelling the damp grass, while a last heavy bodied dragonfly danced alone at the end of summer and clattered above the ponds, I felt differently about Ruskin’s idea.

and grieved to have a soulless image on the eye

2009-09-11T18:08:00.011+01:00

My brother recently returned from a trip in the French Alps in an area we often visited as children and he reports that the glaciers have retreated remarkably over the past decade. His photos are here, and there’s an article here about climbing and climate change that really gives a sense of time running out.

It's a painful situation. One of the most powerful parts of the magnificent film Age of Stupid shows a Chamonix guide thinking about what's happening:

Alps timelapse from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Here are images from around the world:

The thought of mountains without glaciers gives the title quote, wrenched from Wordsworth's account of first seeing Mont Blanc:

. . . That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and griev'd
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurp'd upon a living thought
That never more could be. (The Prelude, Vl 452-6)

(There is good news. While Wordsworth did have some more positive experiences in the Alps later, his heart was in the Lakes. Also, there were great winter conditions in Scotland last year as the Mountainplan blog recorded. So flying isn't totally necessary. But really, there are no easy answers to this.)

Late summer in the Botanic Garden

2009-09-06T12:09:00.014+01:00

The route into the city is fruiting riotously just now, with blackberries, rosehips, conkers and all sorts of red berries, cherries and so on. At the Botanic Garden the apple trees are heavily loaded with all different varieties, in shades from apricot through lime to chestnut-red:

Hillieri

Cat's head

John Innes 1001

John Downie

Golden Hornet

Here's Magdalene Tower from behind the pond, as though rising out of the jungle:

Some jolly sunflowers:

Something spiky from Spain (Eryngium Tricuspidatum):

Cyclamen:

And finally crocuses hallucinating spring, even as we approach Autumn Equinox:

Evening at the edges

2009-08-27T20:51:00.013+01:00

Popular history likes to state that medieval Europeans were afraid of monsters at the edge of the world, such as races of men with their faces in their chests and others who had dog-heads or who lived balanced on one gigantic foot (a foot that they could hold above themselves as a shield against the sun on hot, eastern days):

(This is the thirteenth-century Psalter Map; the monstrous races can be seen on the lower right side, the coast of Africa)

The world had an edge wrapping around from Ireland to China and a centre, the walled city of Jerusalem. At the end of time Jerusalem would be renewed as the City of God, but was still imagined stiffly walled (shown here in the Gulbenkian Apocalypse).

The axiom that medieval culture walled out the forest, desert, the ocean and the wild ignores many more complex ways in which they thought about edges and centres, what did or did not belong to God. Where’s the centre in this name of Christ from the Book of Kells? Are the cats, mice and the otter eating a fish marginal to God?

Medieval experiences, ideas and art were actually far more ambivalent about whether what is feared can or should be fenced out than I’ve implied, but I was thinking about the dichotomy partially because of reading this comment by Ann Haskell: ‘In comparison with medieval people, who walled themselves in, leaving their fears and what they were afraid of outside, we in the twentieth-century, have reversed this situation: we have fenced in what was out there and put it in zoos, parks, prisons, hospitals, and nature preserves, the result being that we are now outside, living side-by-side with our fears of their escape.’

Something of this urge to contain what feels dangerous could be heard in the outrage at a dying man’s release from prison last week. Reading a poem about the New Jerusalem I recalled being there a few years ago and seeing a new Wall trapping a people inside, but also being there another time on the day of a bus bomb. We’ve performed a slow act of reversal on medieval geography so that cities feel dangerous and forests endangered. Perhaps it would help to live in a home that drifted unpredictably between inside and outside, like Sylvie in Housekeeping:

When we did come home Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was her special time of day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic. Lucille and I stepped through the door from sheer night into sheer night.

A moment for microbes

2009-08-24T22:16:00.003+01:00

All my latest posts have been lengthy, so today I’m giving a moment to microbes:

In a gram of soil there may be more than 10,000 species of bacteria.

There can be about a million microbes per cubic centimetre of sea water.

I dimly remember being told these things repeatedly before reading them again here, but something so boggling is easily forgotten: life jostling in all corners.

Water shadows

2009-08-21T20:08:00.004+01:00

I wonder if rivers are so much in our consciousness right now because we feel in need of forgiveness or forgetfulness. There are Alice Oswald’s celebrated poems, this dreary television series, this pensive review by Ian Sinclair of Peter Ackroyd’s Thames book, and of course our recent buried river walk. For months I’ve meant to blog about Samuel Turvey’s book, How we failed to save the Yantze River Dolphin. Perhaps the story’s tragedy made me resist repeating it here. The dolphin, or Baiji, was a pale, long-beaked mammal celebrated in Chinese legends and driven to exintction over the past one hundred years. Turvey took part in the comprehensive river survey of 2006 that failed to find a single Baiji: this book’s climax is in unbroken absence.

Turvey explains that over-fishing decimated the dolphin population, especially in recent years rolling hook lines set for fish but tearing the dolphins by ‘accident’ and, even more disturbing, electro-charge fishing. This tactic uses bolts of electricity sent into the water, killing everything within a 20 metre range of the charge and dragged through the water on boats by ‘fishermen’ who simply scoop the dead creatures who float to the surface. On top of this the Yangtze is a furious motorway for ships, who fill the water with their noise. In the 1980s novelist and environmentalist Douglas Adams described listening to the water through a microphone: ‘what we heard was a sustained shrieking blast of pure white noise, in which nothing could be distinguished at all.’ Since then boats have got bigger, louder and more numerous. The river dolphins navigate by echolocation. Many of the last Baiji, blinded by our noise, died on ship propellers they couldn’t locate.

The book is most powerful in its frustration with the different groups who delayed conservation attempts and prevaricated fatally. The heaviest criticism attacks international scientists and environmental organisations who Turvey claims gave up on the dolphins too soon and never acted resolutely, despite apparent willingness to use the dolphin now as the new, charismatic face of extinction.

It’s an angry, expert, open-eyed book about one of the most terrible events taking place in the world today, the anthropogenic extinction. Looking at the world’s great rivers today – the Yangtze, the Nile, the Jordan, the Ganges, the Amazon – do any still offer forgiveness?

Living rivers

2009-08-12T19:52:00.002+01:00

Today we heard that Atlantic Salmon have returned to the Seine for the first time since the First World War thanks to major efforts to clean up the river’s water. The Times compares France’s success with the failure to reintroduce Salmon to the Thames. Apparently 20,000 larvae are introduced to our river each year, but only a handful return each summer:

Unusual rain patterns are thought to be to blame. Britain’s sewers are unable to cope with intense downpours, causing them to overflow into the river. The worst culprit — London — is also closest to the river’s entrance, making the prospect for salmon even less enticing.

“The difference between the Seine and the Thames is that all the industry on the Seine is far inland, near Paris,” said Darryl Clifton-Dey, of the Environment Agency salmon restocking programme.

The Salmon are an indicator species because of their sensitivity to the water quality. In Brian Clarke’s ecological novel, The Stream (2000), a salmon’s return to its spawning ground registers the devastation industry, drought and agricultural chemicals have wrought on the river:

The great salmon had entered the Clearwater around the time the young man was arranging delivery of the new, improved fertiliser; yet for the length of his journey and for all that he had been in the Clearwater so long and had lain so long in the pool opposite the stream entrance, the taste of the water coming out of the stream held him back.

It was not until the trees on the skyline were wrestling with the wind and the leaves were being stripped away like migrating birds that the urgency of the salmon’s need overcame the reluctance that restrained him and he moved…

The pictures he had been given to help bring him there, the images of bouncing light and clean gravels and drifting nymphs and the glimpsed outlines of mayflies flickering overhead, might have faded from the salmon’s head utterly. The ache in his gut was growing and the stink of the chokeweed was putting a catch in his gills because the chokeweed was dying as it had always died when the cool weather came.

During the week when the starlings began to flock and swirl as though caught in wild currents and the Minister’s office asked if the date of the official opening could be moved from the Tuesday to the Thursday, the bed of the stream suddenly reached up and touched the salmon on his belly and seemed to waken him as though from a dream. It was as if a high fright passed through him. He suddenly turned and dashed downstream, swimming faster and faster, sending waves slopping up the banks and making the rushes shush and sway.

In this novel everything exists in relation to something else – salmon to farmer, nymph to gravel, chokeweed to starling. Clarke describes places and times for one being through reference to another, a technique that makes the Salmon’s disorientation more shocking.

All the European rivers that flow into the Atlantic once surged with Salmon. It’s heartening to imagine a reverse of the story told above as the fish surge back into the Seine.

Where are the women?

2009-07-28T17:48:00.008+01:00

Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, visited Oxford last night and answered questions in a Town Hall so packed people were standing in the aisles and peering in from doorways. Miliband’s question and answer session was preceded by a short panel discussion on climate change headed by Mark Lynas, Ian Legett, Dr MA Khalid, and Oliver Tickell. The evening underlined an aspect of climate change discussion that has been troubling me for some time: it’s overwhelming dominance by men.

While living in Oxford I’ve been to talks by George Monbiot, David MacKay, George Marshall, Mark Lynas, Chris Goodall, Mark Maslin, Colin Tudge, Oliver Tickell and Mayer Hillman. Most of these people were promoting books. Only one public event I’ve been to in this city had a woman on the panel: the literature festival discussion with Jay Griffiths, Phillip Pullman, John Ashton and Peter Gingold. Although outnumbered Griffiths was eloquent in presenting her book, which is not exactly about climate change but brings fresh outlooks crucial to the discussion.

We do have one especially prominent female climate change campaigner in Britain, Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party and MEP, but it’s clear that women are strikingly under-represented in political, scientific and technical discussion of climate change. It can’t be argued that the issue itself is not attractive to women, that we are put off by the scientific and technological debate, since audiences at events and workers in environmental organisations include women and men in fairly even numbers. At the Climate Camp women are certainly as active as men. In fiction, Margaret Atwood, Sarah Hall, Jeanette Winterson and Liz Jensen have all written climate change themed novels. Why then in discussing climate change in fiction do we usually refer to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an unremittingly masculine novel that isn’t about climate change? In poetry too women are engaging with ecological questions to an extent that has not been recognised. (I declare a special interest here, as I have an article coming out on this next month, ‘‘Shadows in their voices’: British women writing wild poetry’ in The Wolf).

The inequality is largely within public discussions where the climate change movement is being shaped and taken in new directions. I don’t think there is any simple reason for this: it is likely to be merely a reflection of wider power structures, the difficulties women have in getting their voices listened to seriously, and perhaps the difficulty we sometimes have in taking our own voices seriously. But it does matter. It is recognised that climate change will affect women disproportionately. Climate change activists often express dissatisfaction with the unfair way in which the few dominate resources in today’s global society and with the intractable way power stays with the powerful. We repeat these patterns in our own structures. Several of the men I named above I admire, and I deeply respect what all are doing, but even they must get a little weary of treading and re-treading the same circuit. We need to pay attention to where women are speaking, celebrate them and welcome more variety in our discussion of climate change.

Wytham Woods in July

2009-07-26T10:48:00.015+01:00

High summer has flooded Wytham Woods with green:

Nettles and in places Bracken have mostly taken over from flowers, but these Nettle-leaved Bellflowers were one of the exceptions breaking through the cover:

Wherever the canopy opened up a little there were also many butterflies enjoying the Nettles and the last of the Blackberry blossoms, especially Small Whites, but here’s a Brimstone on a Creeping Thistle:

(Apparently these creatures’ yellow colour gave butterflies their name.) We also saw an elegant Silver-washed Fritillary, but the superior photo is courtesy of The Independent’s butterfly guide:

There was also plenty of mammal activity in the woods - we saw a Badger poking about under a log beside one path who hurried off when we got too close. This was at about 6pm but it was still very light so a real surprise and a gift to see. According to the BBC these woods have the densest Badger population in the world, but that doesn't make it less special to see one. The Badger was fairly small and fluffy so perhaps a youngster. We also saw a female Roe Deer crossing a path and heaps of shredded pine cones showed there must have been lots of Squirrels hidden in the leaves. The Hazels have little clusters of nuts now sheltering under their leaves, and many immature nuts are already on the floor and chewed apart by Squirrels and mice:

I was entranced by the movement of leaf shadows on the trunks of the Beeches. The light changes as if through water, and you do feel as though in a different element, under a thick canopy above and crossing a seabed of dried Bluebell seedpods on yellow stalks and eager little Ash and Beech saplings:

The Dark Mountain

2009-07-19T13:14:00.003+01:00

I started writing this blog for two main reasons, firstly because I’m convinced that writers and artists have a central role to play in changing our current disastrous attitudes to ecology, and secondly because it's often difficult to recognise where they are already doing this. Many writers have sought to tell stories that would lead us into healthier relationships with our habitats and with other species, but they often aren’t widely celebrated here in the UK or that aspect of their writing is not adequately recognised. What’s more, the scale of the challenges facing us today require a much more concerted, urgent response from writers than is currently taking place. It’s hard not to scream when reading Ian McEwan describe climate change as a ‘background hum’ in his next novel. A ‘hum’? This sort of diffidence is precisely the problem – if climate change sounds like a hum, we haven’t understood what it is.

So I’m very excited that two people have launched a project for writers that fully recognises the scale of what is happening, and that we need new kinds of stories. The Dark Mountain Project launched on Friday night here in Oxford on the banks of the Thames. There was good music, a beautiful sunset and provocative ideas. Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine have written a manifesto and promise to establish a journal to follow. The Project appears to have taken its name from a Robinson Jeffers poem, but it's especially evocative since everywhere mountains really are darkening. Here are the principal points from the manifesto:

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION

‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become conﬁdent

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’

(Robinson Jeffers, ‘Carmel Point’)

1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.

4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.

6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.

7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our ﬁngernails.

8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will ﬁnd the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

From point three I’m in enthusiastic agreement. But it would be a bit disturbing to agree entirely with a manifesto, wouldn’t it? I’m sure the writers want conversation as well as praise, so I have to admit to having a problem in the second point. The writers spoke convincingly of environmentalists wasting energy in seeking to shore up the present systems, but I do think many of us are putting our energy into seeking fresh ways of living, which surely are necessary. Climate change really is a problem we should try to solve, especially if we wish to respond to non-human views, otherwise we can look forward to our rewritten lives on an almost sterile planet. The manifesto ends upbeat so I’m sure it’s a misreading to suggest that the writers think we should give up on trying to limit climate change. It does, however, draw our attention to the ways we’re doing this, in whose interests we're working and the assumptions we’re making about humanity’s role on the planet.

Autumn leaves in July

2009-07-14T21:28:00.005+01:00

The Horse Chestnut trees here are showing signs of damage from leaf miners (Cameraria ohridella) that cause brown blotches in the leaves. Here’s one in the park beside the river:

The blotches will probably spread, turning the whole leaf prematurely brown and shrivelled, as is already happening to this tree in the city centre:

In 2006 after losing their leaves prematurely some trees were observed to flush and even to flower in autumn.

About this time last year I took a bus journey across Bedfordshire into Cambridge and passed countless Horse Chestnuts with almost no green left on them – the route was unrelieved by a single healthy tree. My impression is that this process is slower this year, so perhaps our reasonably chilly winter slowed down the moths’ emergence, or else management techniques are working. (Management might explain why the tree in the park is doing better than the second one pictured.) According to the Forestry Commission the leaf miner is primarily an aesthetic problem and thankfully there’s no evidence that it damages the trees in the long term. Bleeding canker is a more serious problem for this species, but even so the leaf miner has only been in this country since 2002 so it might be a bit early to say that trees won’t be affected by dropping their leaves months early in successive years. The Horse Chestnut seems to me a particularly urban tree as so many grow in parks, school grounds and gardens. The sight of its large, soft leaves drying and curling back as though scorched is unsettling and yet it's already beginning to feel like part of summer's rhythm.

Radical Nature

2009-07-09T16:44:00.005+01:00

The Barbican is currently showing a fascinating exhibition on nature and activism, Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009. There’s a great range in feeling, from the shocking grand beauty and optimism of Agnes Denes’ wheatfield in Manhattan to Lara Almarcegui’s careful documenting of London’s patches of waste ground.

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A Confrontation, 1982 (It's being recreated in Dalston now.)

Like many of the projects displayed, these are site specific. Unable to contain them the exhibition has to document them. Others are installations – uprooted trees and other plants appear popular. Lots of thought was given to displacement of nature and the dissolution that follows.

There were also interesting displays of ecologically minded buildings, some achieved and others free-floating utopian conceptions. R&Sie(n) showed a termite-shaped building covered with plant life, blending into its forest environment which according to the blurb ‘incorporates instability, entropy and the hybridisation of the vegetal and biological’. I went to the exhibition with my brother-in-law, who is himself a talented architect, and he wondered whether this kind of design could cause problems in giving the illusion of not impacting upon the surrounding ecosystems, especially if the design isn’t as efficient as it could be. The problem here might be that buildings should make us feel part of a place and ecosystems (since even the most urban city is a habitat), without obscuring the impact of the ways we get our water, energy and generally comfortable environment. I particularly liked the exhibition’s geodesic domes, which combined spaciousness and intimacy, showed sympathy with natural shapes while clearly being designed.

Domes have mixed associations though (this is great, not sure about this).

The exhibition’s timescale was disconcerting. Hari Kunzru’s review compared the 1970s ‘global ideas and blue-sky thinking’ with today’s artist’s ‘pragmatism… less about saving the world than recovering some flotsam and jetsom from the collapse.’ I felt some alarm at the disconnection between the creativity of the artists working over the past four decades and what’s actually happened, a little as I do on reading Gary Snyder’s brilliant 1969 essay ‘Four Changes’ with its acute analyses of our pollution, population and consumption problems. Snyder’s 1995 postscript acknowledges the problems have got worse rather than better but ends with typical calm:

My teacher once said to me

- become one with the knot itself,

till it dissolves away.

- sweep the garden.

- any size.

The Lake District: nothing like a piano

2009-07-06T16:47:00.005+01:00

Many people here in the UK are planning to holiday at home this year for economic reasons, but it’s also a really positive thing to do to avoid air travel and to explore beautiful places closer to home. While we really enjoyed our trip to Dartmoor, I still think the Lake District has to be the best place in this country for outdoors holidays, which gives me a chance to show off my dad’s new book:

It's a portable guidebook with 20 circular routes for walkers of all abilities, including peaks, scrambles and more accessible routes. Each route is provided with directions, details about distance and refreshments, Ordnance Survey maps and stunning photographs. You can read more about it here, and buy it here!

(My title is a geeky Auden reference.)

London is a River City

2009-07-01T17:38:00.004+01:00

I took part recently in a walk along the route of one of London’s buried rivers as part of Amy Sharrocks’ project, London is a River City. We walked the Walbrook from its source outside London’s Highbury and Islington Tube Station through the City to its entry into the Thames, at a stony beach beside Cannon Street Station. The Walbrook was covered five hundred years ago and today it's concrete and cars all the way to the Thames. But as Sharrock’s explains, by following the route we uncover a submerged city, or at least become part of its layering. Sharrocks talks powerfully about water – how it's what we mostly are and how it runs through our imaginations and bodies:

‘stream of consciousness, flow of life, tides of feeling… We are water creatures, and our bodies are like colanders, constantly leaking fluids, thoughts and memories, yet trapped in a Sisyphean attempt to shore up against the future. If forgetting is an action that happens to you, then UN-forgetting might have to be an equally active effort.’

Thirty or so of us met all dressed in blue and walked all linked together in loops of blue elastic. Most passers-by stared or smiled, though some passed by as though there really wasn’t anything odd about it. I heard two or three recognise us unprompted: a little girl who said ‘they’re a river’, a businessman who asked, ‘are you a fountain?’

This was an event, not a guided walk, so we chatted for half of it and then fell silent for the second half to listen to the city or maybe imagine the river. Despite the odd watery street name, the city’s dryness dominated the view. As Sharrocks noted, like water, we were a little disruptive, but for the most part passed through lightly.

Lives in Dartmoor

2009-06-28T20:33:00.017+01:00

I've been away this week, mostly camping in Dartmoor, so this post is a photo-walk across the moors and bogs, starting with some of the plants from the marshy ground (Cottongrass, Bog Pimpernel and Sundews):

Eran spotted some newts - here's one:

Impressively fibrous fructicose lichens grew from the oaks, something city-dwellers rarely get to see since these organisms are so sensitive to air pollution (I can only identify the one photographed as a kind of Usnea):

This particular oakwood grew on the bank of the Okement River:

Rocky boulders cover the ground, all wrapped in moss, and the trees grow quite low and slender. I think this may be because an oakwood loves light - they seem to reach some kind of agreement. The plants growing there are so different to under oaks around us in Oxfordshire; they look rather Alpine, such as this Stonecrop:

We walked to the head of the East Dart, inspired by Alice Oswald. After slinking past the Army (who were picking up shells from their artillery practice) and Eran's heroic tent-and-dinner-carrying labours the water was deliciously cooling. Right at the head it feels like a secret, the water's so silent it makes you back away, but further down it picks up pace and cuts out a stream, still stained with earth:

Oswald says this:

one step-width water

of linked stones

trills in the stones

glides in the trills

eels in the glides

in each eel a fingerwidth of sea

Here's where we camped that night:

At night when the meadow pippets and skylarks rested it became very silent and blue.

Counter-narratives

2009-06-19T07:43:00.003+01:00

There’s an interesting article by Paul Schrader on The Guardian this morning arguing that we all suffering from ‘narrative exhaustion’: ‘Today's viewers live in a biosphere of narrative. Twenty-four-seven, multimedia, all the time. When a storyteller competes for a viewer's attention, he not only competes with simultaneously occurring narratives, he competes with the variations of his own narrative. That's real competition. The bar of originality has been raised.’

Schrader thinks that because we’re already familiar with nearly all the plots (like serial killers, road movies, oddballs etc) we’re turning increasingly to counter-narrative, like 'reality' TV and video-gaming.

A while ago I watched this clip about new video game system that creates characters who really interact with the player:

Part of me is excited by the possibilities for participatory narrative in this, but really, it’s a pretty terrifying retreat from reality, and a bad time to be doing so.

Some more counter-narratives may be coming up in the next few days when I get back from various Respond activities in London.

The nearest kin of the moon

2009-06-17T18:29:00.008+01:00

This post is a tribute to the grey cat who comes to visit us sometimes. She lives next door but apparently likes company so when I’m working at home during the day she comes and sleeps on our bed next to my desk. She has a relaxed approach to life illustrated by this picture:

This is what she thinks of Ecology: From Individuals to Ecosystems:

We don’t feed her as she’s well cared for at home and she’s a gentle little soul so it’s quite touching that she likes to visit. Our flat is on the first floor but she gets in through the sloping roof below our window, being attuned to the wisdom of Kipling’s long-ago cat: ‘I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.’ Here’s what the ever-wonderful Martin Buber has to say about cats:

‘Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes… The beginning of this cat’s glance, lighting up under the touch of my glance, indisputably questioned me: “Is it possible that you think of me? Do you really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your sight? Do I really exist? What is it that comes from you? What is it that surrounds me? What is it that comes from me? What is it?” (“I” here is a transcription for a word, that we do not have, denoting self without the ego; and by “it” is to be imagined the streaming human glance in the total reality of its power to enter into relation.) The animal’s glance, speech of disquietude, rose in its greatness – and set at once. My own glance was certainly more lasting; but it was no longer the streaming human glance. The rotation of the world which introduced the relational event had been followed almost immediately by the other which ended it. The world of It surrounded the animal and myself, for the space of a glance the world of Thou had shone out from the depths, to be at once extinguished and put back into the world of It.

‘I relate this tiny episode, which I have experienced several times, for the sake of the speech of this almost unnoticeable sunrise and sunset of the spirit. In no other speech have I known so profoundly the fleeting nature of actuality in all its relations with being, the exalted melancholy of our fate, the change, heavy with destiny, of every isolated Thou into an It.’

Here's the cat with me - she's fed up of Buber:

Glister

2009-06-14T19:06:00.007+01:00

After frequently speculating about the supposed difficulty of writing about climate change in fiction, I recently read John Burnside’s novel Glister (published last year), which although not exactly about climate is a brilliant display of how an exciting story can encompass environmental degradation while sacrificing nothing in terms of plot or style. I previously knew of Burnside as a poet, especially good at ripping illusions of security or peacefulness away from towns and suburbs and responding to the mesmeric power of encounters with the wild. He wrote a great article on this for Poetry Review, citing Eugeiono Montale’s view that art’s traditions are continued by ‘those who have gone to the woods and stayed long enough to catch sight of the hide-behind, that old god who stands behind us always, in the green of nothingness, gifting us with music and the terrore d’ubriaco’ (I think that translates: ‘the drunkard’s terror’).

These ideas are made story in Glister, set in a Scottish peninsula town contaminated by a chemical factory that has now closed, leaving behind unemployment, sickness and a sense of entrapment that the town’s inhabitants share but that isolates them each from the other. Every year or so an adolescent boy disappears in the poisoned woods that surround the town and the truth surrounding these disappearances, that the boys are being killed in some bizarre ritual, is covered up by corrupt authorities. It wasn’t easy reading for me since brutal events are graphically described and the characters are invariably suffering. I often walk out of films during torture scenes so that crime fiction element was difficult, but I persisted with Glister because Burnside writes well, especially on the beauty of a deserted factory or the town-dweller’s unformed longing to run or go away, without knowing where to go to. He builds an interesting tension between unblinking realism and another vision, of life imbued with religious significance and strangeness.

I started thinking, if it is eco-fiction he’s subtle about it, but then he turned around at the end and delivered a ferocious attack that reminded me in its own way of the endings of American Pastoral and Kalooki Nights. Burnside has a new poetry collection coming soon called The Hunt in the Forest that sounds like it will explore a similar set of questions, ‘taking us on a journey out of the light and into the darkness, where we may just as easily lose ourselves as find what we are looking for.’ The title is drawn from this painting by Paolo Uccello, which represents a whole community adventuring towards the vanishing point, not a select and isolated poet, something that I think comes through in the novel too:

Sumatra's forests

2009-06-09T13:41:00.003+01:00

We often hear that deforestation is the low-hanging fruit in tackling climate change and species extinction. Nicholas Stern is especially keen on global agreements to prevent further devastation of rainforests, which are crucial to a healthy carbon cycle and climate. So it’s worrying to learn of plans to destroy a large area of forest in Sumatra, Bukit Tigapuluh, home to over 100 Sumatran Orangutans, and 100 of the 400 surviving Sumatran Tigers, 65 Critically Endangered Sumatran Elephants and many other threatened species (information from EDGE). The forest is to be felled for pulp and paper production. Last night we watched a documentary on iPlayer that talked about the fate of the Easter Islanders, a civilisation that died following the destruction of their forests, a shocking reminder that nature won’t keep giving forever. Nature documentaries often talk about extinction or deforestation in terms of loss and disappearance. It’s crucial to remember that these places aren’t ‘disappearing’ – we’re destroying them. Orwell would understand what’s happening to our language there.

Okay, so if you’d like to voice a protest against this destruction it’s pretty easy: there’s a petition to sign here, and lots of information here.

Signing petitions feels a little futile at times, so it’s worth thinking about what that paper and pulp will be used for. A staggering amount makes toilet paper. Isn’t that a crime? Take a look at these details (e.g. it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex), and switch to recycled.

Imperatives over, here’s a picture of a Black Pine near where I work:

Electronic pavements

2009-06-08T23:28:00.003+01:00

Continuing with the idea of cities and time I thought I’d write about an audio adventure I went on last year around the City of London guided by an eco-opera. And While London Burns tells a story imagining the streets’ past and future from the perspective of the oil-fuelled present. It is described by the makers as ‘a requiem for the warming world’ and can be downloaded here. To take part you listen to it on an MP3 player as you walk the route, receiving instructions about where to walk while listening to the story unfold. I found that the experience dissociated me from the usual thoughts I might have had in such places so that I was plunged into a whole other set of perceptions, which was at times eerie or illuminating. It’s also a little unnerving to be in a public place listening to a voice giving instructions for your next actions while not knowing what they might be (but don’t worry, nothing’s illegal or even embarrassing). I hugely recommend this experience, perhaps less for the story than for the way it gives new eyes. Some changes have been made to the buildings and street access since the piece was recorded in 2006, but I found the way my walk diverged from the speaker’s actually added another layer to the City’s palimpsest. There are artists doing similar things less polemically (such as Janet Cardiff) but this example is the most accessible and relevant to climate change that I’m aware of currently.

Some of the people who made this opera are involved in another performance piece in the City of London taking place on 17-20 June. The Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination have developed CRASH Contingency (an experiment in three acts) as part of a series of arts events called 2 degrees taking place in central London this month. There is a huge amount of environment-related cultural activity around the country this June because of the Respond project, co-ordinated by the RSA. I’ll be going to a few events later this month and blogs will follow, but meanwhile quite a lot of projects are accessible online. Here are two highlights:

Ecopoetics study packs by Mario Petrucci are available here, commissioned by the Poetry Society.

Oxford’s Climate Outreach Information Network is hosting a Climate Radio here, with a long list of interviews and events available to listen to online or as podcasts.

It’s a bit overwhelming, but a great antidote to post-EU elections blues.

The neck of the hourglass

2009-06-02T19:54:00.005+01:00

Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art has a fascinating exhibition at the moment ‘looking at how contemporary artists disrupt prevailing forms of registering and representing the world’. Two exhibits at Transmission Interrupted in particular got me thinking about the ways we see our cities, Jem Cohen’s beautiful video of New York (NYC Weights and Measures) and Mircea Cantor’s Monument for the end of the world. Cantor’s piece is a large model city, simply made from plain wood and dominated by a huge crane beneath a set of wind chimes kept in motion by a fan. The text tells us that ‘the work alludes to the anticipatory commemoration of a future event’.

I found the installation evocative if visually unsatisfying, although I do understand that Cantor wished to give a sense of unfinished vulnerability to the piece. But the concept is very significant.

Some time ago, reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities I was moved by the description of Laudomia, a city that like all cities gives space for the living and another space for the dead, the cemetery. Laudomia also includes a third city, one for the unborn. This is ‘rightly… an equally vast residence’:

‘Naturally the space is not in proportion to their number, which is presumably infinite, but since the area is empty, surrounded by an architecture all niches and bays and grooves, and since the unborn can be imagined of any size, big as mice or silkworms or ants or ants’ eggs, there is nothing against imagining them erect or crouching on every object or bracket that juts from the walls, on every capital or plinth, lined up or dispersed, intent on the concerns of their future life, and so you can contemplate in a marble vein all Laudomia of a hundred or a thousand years hence…’

Calvino describes the citizens visiting this space, this city, to think of the future. But he tells us: ‘The Laudomia of the unborn does not transmit, like the city of the dead, any sense of security to the inhabitants of the living Laudomia: only alarm.’ There are two possible paths: a future teeming with lives to come, crammed into that confined space, or else a Laudomia that will come to an end.

‘Then the Laudomia of the dead and that of the unborn are like the two bulbs of an hourglass which is not turned over; each passage between birth and death is a grain of sand that passes the neck, and there will be a last inhabitant of Laudomia born, a last grain to fall, which is now at the top of the pile, waiting.’

Oh, Calvino. His extraordinary imagination and intellectual precision leave me stricken. But at risk of bathos in following his thought, this story made me think how distorted it is that our cities build monument after monument to the dead or to commemorate past events in war and culture, and yet we make no space at all for the future. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if every city had such a space, a place where we could think about lives to come? I like Calvino’s choice of emptiness for such a city to the unborn since how else could it take shape? We tend to see ourselves as the end point of history, and this makes sense in terms of our knowledge, life spans and the necessity of repressing thoughts of death. But to acknowledge that our homes are homes of people to come could be powerful and positive. Today’s cultural short-sightedness sets us stumbling into a bleak future, but human imaginations make our cultures endlessly malleable.

Swimming Isis

2009-05-25T19:33:00.008+01:00

The hot bank holiday weekend tempted us out yesterday for a swim in the Thames, called Isis in the stretch through Oxford. Eran and I plunged in from Port Meadow, a large flood plain where the river enters the city from the west. It's a beautiful stretch of open space inside the ring-road. This photo shows some floodwater on the meadow, not the river:

The water was surprisingly pleasant, not too cold although cold enough to keep our swimming time fairly brief, and the current was very gentle. The river's name and the month brought to mind the Dylan song opening:

I married Isis on the fifth day of May,

But I could not hold on to her very long.

Wild swimming grew in popularity in this country following Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, but only boats, geese and dogs joined us yesterday, along with clouds of cotton-white willow seeds just now being released to the wind. The cycle route between our flat and the city centre crosses the Cherwell River three times because of the way it splits before joining Isis/the Thames a little downstream. Here's a photo of part of the island formed I took last winter:

The changing water has become central to the life of the city for me. Right now there are lots of tiny flotillas of goslings, ducklings and signets following their parents around and after nightfall on the bridges you can see bats dipping over the river to catch flies. If the summer’s a sunny one we’re hoping to immerse in the river a few more times before we say goodbye to Oxford and leave for Paris at the end of September.

Arboretum in May

2009-05-23T19:23:00.007+01:00

We visited the Harcourt Arboretum today in the May sunshine, where the rhododendrons were in bloom and peacocks mewing, shaking out their tales and making small children cry, but I'll leave those to your imaginations and better photographers since I still have Hughes in mind:

Here is the fern's frond, unfurling a gesture,

Like a conductor whose music will now be pause

And the one note of silence

To which the whole earth dances gravely.

('Fern')
There was another visitor from the Bodleian:
Oaks are now fully leafed, vivid green, and their flowers drying up and falling off:
The meadow crawled with life, like this lime green spider spinning between buttercups:

Finally, a visitor to our garden, just before she was chased away by the magpies nesting in the leylandiis and chattering like monkeys every morning:

Great turning times

2009-05-22T17:06:00.003+01:00

As part of a project for Transition Oxford I recently looked again at a WWF report from last spring ('Weathercocks and Signposts', here), which argues that an adequate strategy for tackling climate change demands engagement with the values underlying our decisions. The writers show that the seductive model of consumer choice can never solve so large a problem, but also that there are far more powerful possibilities available to environmental campaign groups: expressing what we actually believe.

I was struck by this account of why consumerism is so powerful:

‘Grant McCracken argues that consumer goods serve as bridges to our hopes and ideals. He suggests that, both as communities and as individuals, we must develop strategies to cope with the discrepancy between how we find society in reality and our hope than an alternative society is possible. One such strategy, he argues, is the displacement of these ideals - allowing us to sustain hope that we might at some point, achieve the ideal social life we seek.’

The displacement may be onto a society in the future, in the past or in another place, or onto the lives of others (celebrities, for example). We need these ideals to give us hope, so we also need to be able to access them without risking close scrutiny of their meaning. The prospect of ownership of goods is a bridge between ourselves and our ideal life, so a car is sold to us as conferring freedom, sex appeal and adulation. If you buy the car and little changes, there’s always a better car, a higher level of consumption, so the ideal is deferred. It’s a familiar, wretched situation, but what I find interesting about this account is the consideration of the contradiction between our hopes and experiences, and the ways we need to bridge this. Like many people, I probably use work in a similar way (though with less environmental consequences).

Rather than displacing our ideals, the writers invite us to ask what are the values motivating us in the environmental movement, then to be clear and confident in expressing them. This is, after all, how American presidential elections are won (the situation is closely comparable: the voter knows their individual vote won’t win the election but still matters). The result can be a powerful and empowering conversation, one with hope but also recognising the scale of the issue.

This kind of campaigning would not ask us to change our lightbulbs (although that’s a good thing to do), but instead to look at what’s going on and think about what we care about. ‘It may be better to avoid focus on ‘things you can do’ at all (whether these be things small or large). Better, perhaps, to urge the audience for a particular communication to begin to think for themselves about what they can do. Prompting such reflection may facilitate integration of these external regulations into a person’s sense of self. Individuals may then be more motivated in the behaviour choices they make, and engage in these changes more persistently.’ Pragmatically, the fear is that this kind of cultural shift would just take too long, but then, perhaps it’s already underway.

Shadow to shadow

2009-05-17T23:26:00.007+01:00

The swifts have been back in Oxford for two or three weeks now, especially around the Museum of Natural History where the tower is filled with specially designed swift boxes. I often pass by on my way to visit Eran’s office and look out for the birds circling above the science departments. You can even see inside the nest boxes on this webcam. As they don’t yet appear to have laid eggs the scenes are mostly rather dull (feathers in a box) but I’ve just logged on to see two swifts snuggling up together. Here they are.

Swifts’ comfort in the air is legendary: after fledging they will not land for three years, not even to perch on wire like swallows (they don't have sufficiently developed legs), not to sleep and not even to mate. They do everything in the sky, which is their element as water is to fish. They only land to nest when they set up their homes inside roofs. So seeing the swifts resting like this makes me wonder, is it a delicious relief to settle down in the nest box and fold up their wings for the first time since fledging? Or perhaps they’re uneasy out of the air and excited to get back to it when breeding is done.

There’s an evocative chapter on the wildness of swifts in Michael McCarthy’s new book Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo and their shrieking exhilaration when flying. McCarthy points out that swifts are relatively neglected in myths and folklore, perhaps because their air-borne life is so distant from us, but they suddenly appear in twentieth-century art, especially symbolically within poetry. Hughes (in ‘Swifts’) gives us an idea about why:

… They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come –

And here they are, here they are again…

Maybe we’re drawn to them partly because of their wildness (‘Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy’), but there’s also the vulnerability, as Richard Mabey describes in Nature Cure. Swift populations fell in Britain by 41% between 1994 and 2007 – a fearsomely rapid decline.

Hughes wrote a series of creation poems called Adam and the Sacred Nine in which he described different species of birds coming to Adam with gifts showing him how to live. They are obliquely described, essentially the birds' own natures. Adam has to decide whether to accept or reject those gifts.

A few lines from ‘The Swift comes the swift’ retrospectively carry an unintended suggestion of the main threat (global warming, us rejecting the gifts), but much beside that:

Till the Swift

Who falls out of the blindness, swims up

From the molten, rejoins itself

Shadow to shadow – resumes proof, nests

Papery ashes

Of the uncontainable burning.

Birds - by the Snow

2009-05-08T18:23:00.005+01:00

There are a few main forms for writers engaging with climate change in this country: poetry, non-fiction and speculative/science-fiction. The more I read the more I feel that poets are most thoroughly at home exploring our changing relationships with nature (as seen especially here and here). While this may be because I don’t myself write poetry, it’s probably because of the rich tradition of English language nature poetry. It’s common to trace this to Wordsworth and Clare (especially since Jonathan Bate’s Song of the Earth). It won’t surprise you to hear I feel it goes all the way back. I love, for example, these lines of Old English wisdom poetry that mingle the truths about men with the truths of nature:

… Fisc sceal on waetere

cynren cennan. Cyning sceal on healle

beagas daelan. Bera sceal on haeþe

eald and egesfull. Ea of dune sceal

flodgraeg feran. Fyrd sceal aestomne

… Fish must in water

breed their kind. A king must in a hall

share out rings. A bear must be on a heath

old and terrible. Waters from the downs must

flood-grey flow. A troop must stick together

Which makes me think of Emily Dickinson:

Water – is taught by Thirst –

Land – by the Oceans passed –

Transport – by Throe –

Peace – by its Battles told –

Love – by Memorial Mold –

Birds – by the Snow.

Perhaps because of the way a poem leaves us space around the lines to make our own connections and interpretations I often feel creative reading poetry in a way that happens more rarely with prose. In this way maybe engaged poetry escapes the didacticism that plagues prose. I’m beginning to think that writing about nature needs this sense of space, of room around the edges, silences, rather than utterly exact description.

This spring we have two new collections from Alice Oswald (of which more in a later post), and there’s an evocative poetic dialogue between John Kinseller and Melanie Challenger taking place on Arts and Ecology here. I also want to share this link to the website of poet Helen Moore (thanks Kim for passing this on) who has a beautiful selection of poems online, all gracefully observant.

Mass extinction and evolution

2009-04-30T16:00:00.004+01:00

I blame Beowulf for my forgetting to post about Save the Frogs Day on Tuesday. Here, belatedly, is a link to a fascinating video about what is happening to amphibians today, ‘the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs’ as the filmmakers say. The Thin Green Line explores the different causes of frog death intelligently, including chytrid, changes in land use, climate change and pollution of watercourses. An unexpected pleasure is the opportunity to hear from scientists working around the world to protect species. I was moved by these individuals’ sensitivity and heroism.

So rather than repeating the tragic facts about this die-off I thought it might be worth exploring the issue of how man-made extinction relates to evolution. You don’t have to talk to many people about extinction before someone says, but isn’t that evolution? It emerges in the comments of this excellent site every now and then. The argument goes, the species dies because it isn’t ‘fit’ enough and it isn’t our role to interfere. I’ve been trying to shape some responses to this argument but am very curious to hear any other views on the subject. Here are mine:

1. Responsibility

The mass extinction taking place now is anthropogenic, directly caused by humans. It sounds simple to say we shouldn’t interfere with the process but it is our interference that is causing the deaths in the first place.

While we are merely animals participating in evolutionary processes we have also developed consciousness about ourselves and our actions, which means we can take responsibility for our behaviours. In this case we know we are killing other species so have to ask whether that’s something we want to do. It doesn’t make any difference that those species would eventually die in the course of evolution, just as mortality doesn’t justify murder.

2. Pace

The changes we are bringing about in land use, climate, introduction of invasive species and extraction of prey or pest species from ecosystems are happening at such a rapid pace that species cannot respond to them by evolution. Evolution is just too slow. In fact the changes in climate and land use are happening so fast that species cannot even respond by migration because of the slow rate at which plants travel (this is really well explained here).

3. Evolution

It’s obviously tempting to use the concept of evolution as if it was thoroughly understood with a brief reference to survival of the fittest and the selfish gene. It’s not really surprising that those aspects of the idea became so persuasive in colonial nineteenth-century Britain and the capitalist west. Evolution is a scientific theory of real beauty, of the sort that once you hear it it’s hard to understand why it took so long to discover, but that doesn’t mean that its processes are fully understood. We get a bit confused when using the word ‘fit’ as if it referred only to athletic über-species rather than to the ones that are most ‘fitting’. In a society less governed by cultural prejudice (or the belief in a worldwide movement towards a single type of society under the banner of progress) and by financial greed perhaps Lovelock’s Gaia theory would have been taken more seriously. He believes that climate change will prove him right, the terrible experiment to test his theory, and it may be so. At any rate, there are other and more complex models for evolution than the selfish gene, theories that consider species from an ecological or group perspective, such as Edward Wilson’s work on superorganisms.

Among the many blessings marriage to a string-theorist has brought has been the chance to learn how a theory that describes the world can be a thing of real wonder. But that doesn’t make such a theory a conceptual endgame. In fact I think an idea like evolution or the second law of thermodynamics moves my husband far more than any poem can move me (even Beowulf), partially because of those ideas’ inherent truth and elegance, but perhaps also because, just as thrilling, they suggest more thinking to be done, that there are more such ideas out there.

Old darkness

2009-04-29T23:28:00.005+01:00

As the summer term begins I’ve started teaching Beowulf, which means while the chestnut trees are towering with blossom we're meeting again the darkness in that poem, not only a world edged by monsters but one in which people, facing monsters, ask what their own lives are. It’s possible to see the poem as an archetypal story of man against nature. Hrothgar builds his glorious hall and draws the anger of the monster Grendel who comes to kill at night, ‘of more under mist-hleoþum’ (off the moors, under mist-cliffs). Of Grendel and his mother we learn

… They dwell apart

among wolves on the hills, on windswept crags

and treacherous keshes, where cold streams

pour down the mountain and disappear

under mist and moorland. (Heaney’s translation)

… Hie dygel lond

warigeaþ, wulf-hleoþu, windige naessas,

frecne fen-gelad, þaer fyrgen-stream

under naessa genipu niþer gewiteþ,

flod under foldan.

Walls can’t keep them out and trusted swords won’t kill them. When Beowulf sails across the sea to drive this darkness out of Hrothgar’s home not only does the poet repeatedly blur the identities of his hero and the monsters by using the same words to describe them, we also learn that the society he comes to save will be destroyed by human treachery and feuding. Ultimately the hall whose hinges and joints were forged in fire will be destroyed by fire. And at the end of the poem theft of cursed gold buried by the last survivor from a massacred community wakes the dragon. Again Beowulf’s sword will not kill it, and again we learn that this battle will be followed by the destruction of a kingdom tangled in a blood feud (this time it's Beowulf's kingdom). This is why the darkness Beowulf fights in the poem can’t be nature or even wildness, but something more difficult to name, at home in human society and the human mind.

In the poem's landscape people build their halls and bury their gold surrounded and driven by forces they can’t control, barely understand, but always know. For being so stark a vision the figures loom larger within it, which is why we remember Beowulf’s wise, regretful bravery going to face the dragon he understands will kill him. Tolkien described the poem as ‘a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo’, moving us, ‘until the dragon comes’.

All places are for quests

2009-04-22T19:13:00.010+01:00

Last summer I saw by chance Christopher le Brun’s haunting collection 50 Etchings at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. These etchings were densely drawn sequences of motifs: a man on horseback at a wood’s edge, discovering a tower in a forest, looking into a well or leaving a city of clustered walls and pinnacles. There are often strange effects of light, figures approaching in front of a sunrise or emerging from shadows of massed lines.

Christopher le Brun, The Given

This comment accompanied his etching of The Given: ‘Time and again, a rider, a metaphysical paladin approaches a castle. His search stands for a Northern painter’s riposte to the challenge of Picasso’s much quoted ‘I do not seek. I find.’ In the North, with its obscuring and elusive light, its hollow hills and forests, travellers of the imagination have, as their ultimate legend, by contrast, the search for the Holy Grail.’

Christopher le Brun, An Imaginary City

I often think of these images passing by this city’s domes, towers and walls.

But also last week when walking through an oak wood on a Lake District hillside.

I love the way his etchings drift between the human and the natural, suggesting narratives of shadow and illumination, filled with meaning in every place. For me they suggest how arbitrary the boundaries we build can be, between the real and fantastic, city and forest, the profound and the quotidian. I took the photo below on the cycle path across the marsh that lies between our flat and the city centre. If we're on a quest we have to be open, to seek and to come to the world.

Twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber wrote in his essay 'Dialogue':

'Each of us is encased in an armour whose task is to ward off signs. Signs happen to us without respite, living means being addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to perceive. But the risk is too dangerous for us, the soundless thunderings seem to threaten us with annihilation, and from generation to generation we perfect the defence apparatus. All our knowledge assures us, "Be calm, everything happens as it must happen, but nothing is directed at you, you are not meant; it is just 'the world', you can experience it as you like, but whatever you make of it in yourself proceeds from you alone, nothing is required of you, you are not addressed, all is quiet." ... The signs of address are not something extraordinary, something that steps out of the order of things, they are just what goes on time and again, just what goes on in any case, nothing is added by the address. The waves of the aether roar on always, but for most of the time we have turned off our receivers.'

Wytham Woods in April

2009-04-13T18:50:00.016+01:00

Our Easter weekend was very grey until today but this afternoon Wytham's hazel-woods were illuminated:

So far there are only a few bluebells:

But there are lots of other flowers blooming, including sweet violets, wood-sorrel, lesser celendine and primroses.

We also saw two hares and some signs of badgers (the paw prints leading into this set, I think).

The sycamores are a refreshing bright green...

and we saw these hopefuls springing up where a silver birch had fallen.

There are lots of lambs in the fields around the wood. Last week we saw a sheep giving birth there, but this one looked a bit more photogenic.

New nature poetics

2009-04-09T23:40:00.004+01:00

Following the post about literature and climate change I went back to Gary Snyder’s thoughts about wildness in ‘Unnatural Writing’ (in A Place in Space) where he argues that ‘the “art of the wild” is to see art in the context of the process of nature – nature as process rather than as product or commodity.’ He finds wildness in the mind and language, recognising that these work in similar ways to interconnected and complex ecosystems. An art of the wild ‘serves to acknowledge the autonomy and integrity of the nonhuman part of the world, an “Other” that we are barely beginning to be able to know’.

Here is his 1992 manifesto for the art of the wild:

SOME POINTS FOR A ‘NEW NATURE POETICS’

That it be literate – that is, nature literate. Know who’s who and what’s what in the ecosystem, even if this aspect is barely visible in the writing.
That it be grounded in a place – thus, place literate: informed about local specifics on both ecological-biotic and sociopolitical levels. And informed about history (social history and environmental history), even if this is not obviously in the poem.
That it use Coyote as a totem – the Trickster, always open, shape shifting, providing the eye of other beings going in and out of death, laughing from the dark side.
That it use Bear as a totem – omnivorous, fearless, without anxiety, steady, generous, contemplative, and relentlessly protective of the wild.
That it find further totems – this is the world of nature, myth, archetype, and ecosystem that we must each investigate. ‘Depth ecology.’
That it fear not science. Go beyond nature literacy into the emergent new territories in science: landscape ecology, conservation biology, charming chaos, complicated systems theory.
That it go further with science – into awareness of the problematic and contingent aspects of so-called objectivity.
That it study mind and language – language as wild system, mind as wild habitat, world as a ‘making’ (poem), poem as a creature of the wild mind.
That it be crafty and get the work done.

Writing for change

2009-04-07T22:46:00.001+01:00

Oxford’s Literary Festival included a panel on writing and climate change last week with an interesting range of speakers: non-fiction writer Jay Griffiths, diplomat and policy maker John Ashton, novelist Philip Pullman and director of Tipping Point Peter Gingold.

Of these Ashton was the most outspoken on the need for cultural discussion of climate change. He deployed the now familiar comparison between climate change and war (that this emergency needs to be approached in the same way). He warned, ‘if it doesn’t feels like a war, that’s because we’re not winning’. He said we needed ‘weapons of the imagination’ in our mobilisation, not propaganda but attention to the human condition through the dilemmas of climate change. According to Ashton we need one thing to see the enemy in this war, a mirror, and ‘art makes the mirror’.

Some members of the audience were uncomfortable with the war metaphor but he defended it in terms of the need for single-minded deployment of resources and because it clarifies that dealing with this problem involves confronting power. Ashton was highly articulate on this and other subjects discussed. It was heartening to encounter an individual like this at the heart of our government (he’s Foreign Office Special Representative for Climate Change), although also puzzling given recent priorities.

The writers were diffident about the subject. Griffiths described her artistic side as ‘disobedient’ (it will not be told what to do) while Pullman felt that artists can’t use opinions. (Not even atheism?) He claimed to see creativity as a process of solving technical problems. It’s an interesting dilemma.

My own feeling about this is that today’s artists can’t actually avoid this subject because it permeates so many aspects of the way we live now. If a novel includes a flight, any weather, a shopping trip, a description of trees then the subject is in some form present. In literary studies we’ve long been used to analysing the way writers approach gender. It doesn’t matter whether the writer studied thought they were conveying opinions about ‘feminism’ since inevitably they wrote about men and women and it’s how they did so that’s interesting. Similarly writers must represent people in their environments so their work will necessarily be relevant to climate change (becoming Ashton's mirrors).

It just so happens that right now we are experiencing a crucial moment in our relationship with nature, which is why it could be such an exciting subject in twenty-first-century culture. Gingold’s Tipping Point looks to be a forum in which this is happening by bringing together artists and scientists – as Ashton put it, an enlightenment project.

Seeing the wood and the trees

2009-04-04T13:15:00.000+01:00

I’m currently reading Richard Mabey’s Beechcombings, which explores our perceptions of trees, beech in particular. Mabey is fascinated by trees yet also critical of our tendency to sentimentalise them, especially if this involves treating them as vulnerable creatures in need of our protection rather than independent living beings. It’s a tricky balance that makes me think of two recent news stories.

One was in The Guardian last week. David Hockney has been painting a beech-wood through the seasons but having completed summer and winter when he returned to paint spring he found the wood had been felled. I hope I’m allowed to reproduce these lovely paintings and the less attractive photograph:

[All images by David Hockney]

There’s an interesting response to the story here that points out that we in Britain should take part in sustainable timber production rather than importing all our wood. The land will be replanted by 2014.

A good news story was published on the Greenpeace blog this week: after a long and difficult campaign a large area of temperate rainforest in British Columbia has been protected against any logging activity. It’s great to see how effective campaigning can work. Last summer I read a book about this area’s forests by John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce. Vaillant tells the story of Grant Hadwin, a logger turned environmentalist who in an act of protest against the destructive timber industry destroyed an ancient tree held sacred by the local Haida people. Hadwin felled the tree as a signal against tokenistic preservation of particular trees and reserves that he felt actually enabled large-scale industrial clear cuts to continue unchecked. I wonder what he would think of the protection granted to the Great Bear Forest.

These five views on trees and forestry may appear to look from our current situation in different directions but I think they have a lot in common. These writers, artists, foresters and campaigners are all trying to understand our relations with trees in focussed, attentive ways. Since all of them want us to see trees it would be a real loss if Hockney's spring and autumn paintings cannot be made so I hope he will find a way to paint them.

Beneath the concrete the forest grows

2009-04-02T19:32:00.000+01:00

This post begins with a statement about why we were campaigning in London during this G20 meeting. It’s already well known but it was the point of the protest and why we were there, so here it is (yet) again: climate change if left unchecked will during this century lead to severe water and food shortages resulting in widespread starvation, the extinction of 90% of the world’s species, the destruction of the world’s coastal cities by flood (including the land on which we were protesting), increased severe weather events and serious escalation in conflicts between nations as they fight over vanishing resources or become overwhelmed by refugees (sources here, here and here). This can still be prevented from happening, but only if we change our way of living within the next five years, which means now.

I start with this statement for lots of reasons, first of which is that I had to remind myself of it to find the courage even to go to the climate camp yesterday after the police had so hyped the threat of violence. I’d been to climate camp before but this felt different, being in the centre of London and accompanied by the anti-capitalist demonstrations nearby. Also, coverage of the demonstrations has focussed upon confrontation and police action so protestors’ messages have not clearly emerged.

The day itself started well. Taking the site happened smoothly and without any police interference. The atmosphere was very positive all along Bishopsgate – lots of discussion taking place between people, several groups playing music as well as space for workshops, a cake stall, compost loos and meditation. I once worked on this road so it felt especially good to set up tent under the huge city structures and enjoy the sun along with the slogans hung from the walls or chalked up on the street. Here are a few photos (not by me as I didn’t take a camera; images are from indymedia and the Climate Camp galleries):

I’m actually in the last one – look for a white sleeve holding onto a tent (happily they caught my most flattering angle).

Some media commentators have argued that the G20 summit was not the appropriate forum for discussion of climate change, but the policy makers urgently need to realise that we can’t fix the economy without addressing greenhouse gas emissions since it is our industries that generate the problem. It’s often repeated and always true: an economy built on infinite growth on a planet with finite resources will eventually collapse.

We were at the camp from the start until early evening when we had to leave for boring reasons. While we were there the police were very visible (along with riot vans parked alongside with their engines running) but not confrontational, and nor was anyone at the camp at all confrontational. There was also no vandalism. However, in the evening more riot police arrived (presumably freed up after the G20 Meltdown protest) and sealed the camp. I wasn’t there by this point but in this video you can see riot police surging into the southern end of the camp (where we had set up tent). (The people are chanting 'This is not a riot'. At this time people were not allowed to leave the camp from either end. Update: The Guardian has now covered the tactics.)

By midnight the camp had been aggressively cleared (using a combination of intimidation, trapping people in a shrinking space, batons and dogs). It’s important to stress that the campers were peaceful and focussed upon drawing attention to the climate emergency. The G20 Meltdown event has dominated coverage of the day’s protests, which is a shame since the Climate Camp was a very positive action and concentrated on what draws us together (basically, life on earth). There were hippies, children, people playing violins, people dressed as pandas, poets, scientists and schoolgirls (see photos), and everyone wanted to think about this:

It’s disturbing that our cities can’t make space for such an event.

[Update: Duncan Campbell has written a good article here about the police assault on the passer by who died at the G20 Meltdown. The Guardian's video footage shows a clear unprovoked attack by riot police on the man. I'm linking it because I had been unaware of how this event was covered in most of the media - The Sun thinks we were 'foaming at the mouth' and 'lurching' about in 'packs' apparently. Several times during the protests I thought how the many mobiles filming events probably helped keep police violence in check, another reason to keep an eye on the new Terror Laws that have already restricted our rights to film in public places and photograph police.]

Climate Carnivals

2009-03-31T10:57:00.000+01:00

Here are photos of the banner I've made for tomorrow's protests.

The front:

The back:

I tried to make the message positive and covered the cardboard with some used wrapping paper, hoping that the image looks attractive enough to give a good (non-aggressive) impression of protesters in general and us in particular!

The press for tomorrow's G20 climate camp has been full of hype about confrontation that is most probably being spread to deter peaceful campaigners. For me the message about climate change is too urgent to allow those who would rather we quietly accepted their ways of running things to distract us. There will be lots of activity in London and disparate interest groups. Personally, I'm not with the anarchists so there are two events of interest:

The climate camp. This is a great forum for showing serious engagement with climate issues. Previous camps were really well run, based on beautifully democratic processes and including many well informed workshops and talks.

Campaign against Climate Change will be demonstrating outside the ExCel centre. This hasn't been well publicised but should send a clear message focussed on science that indicates we face emergency now.

I'm hoping to make it back on Thursday in time for a talk here in Oxford called Writing For Change that asks: Why has the artistic and particularly the written response to climate change been so muted? Is a new self-awareness going to be motivated more by fiction than by the writing of activists or is this not the role of the writer?

Will stopping climate change create utopia?

2009-03-28T20:51:00.000Z

Earlier this week I went to a Transition Oxford workshop entitled Utopia or Apocalypse? It got me wondering about the role of these two concepts in thinking about the future and living in the present. Our workshop began by two people acting out personal visions of the future. A woman saw a world in which the few people left lived in a state of fear, monitored at all times through biochips. A man acted a scenario in which people lived in equality, shared resources and welcomed clean technologies. Curiously the two worlds could have been the same one since enforcing equality would for many produce a dystopia.

In the discussion these scenarios generated many people welcomed utopian visions as moments in which our imagination is allowed to play, to envisage alternative futures that may empower us to create those alternatives. Others were concerned that pushing stories about radical changes in the way we live would actually alienate many people who distrust change. A comment I found particularly useful suggested that instead of trying to construct a plan of what a complete successful society would look like we should try to imagine what our lives would be within a successful society and then try to live those lives.

While we do need to know what policies we’d like to see our government implement to fight climate change I’m suspicious about utopian thinking because of its potential to be oppressive and total. I would prefer us to have a clear idea of what the problem is (climate change), what causes the problems (dependency upon vanishing oil reserves etc.), and how we should solve them (contraction and convergence etc.). Happily, this message does not require me to sell anyone the ‘ideal’ of living in a yurt in Cornwall.

This is not just a pragmatic point that recognises campaigners need to compromise over ideals for the future on account of this issue’s urgency. Visions of utopia and apocalypse present an end to history. John Gray has shown how deeply embedded this idea is in religious thinking (especially in Judeo-Christian ideas about the Messianic age) and in totalitarian ideologies (Communism and Fascism). In Black Mass he argues that the concept of utopia is based upon a misconception about human nature: that we can bring history to an end because people are perfectible. This makes me wonder how deeply talking about utopia and apocalypse can galvanise us if they focus upon a finished state.

Maybe at best the appeal of dys/utopias as stories can make them a useful tool. I went to see The Age of Stupid again last night and its apocalyptic vision was just as powerful and moving the second time. But when it finished there was a question and answer session and the second question asked was ‘What can we do?’ Did the film really leave that unanswered? If so that may have been a response to the (lightly sketched) apocalyptic vision, which could feel disabling.

In fact there is no shortage of answers to the question ‘What can we do?’ Many clever people have written clever plans (examples here, here and here), and inside most of people know what they personally can do. The Age of Stupid is important because it expresses the urgency of the task faced right now and it might counter some of the apathy that easily takes hold in relation to climate change. But I felt the best thing about it is the way the documentary shows how modern lives are painfully entangled within systems destroying other people, the biosphere and ourselves. This implies that, rather than handing history over to the huge narratives (from apocalypse to economic growth), what matters is that we take possession of what’s happening now and our role within it. Slavery abolitionists, suffragettes, the Allied armies and civil rights activists did not create utopias. I increasingly suspect that focus was crucial to those successful campaigns and will be to the campaign against climate change.

Listening out for cuckoos this April?

2009-03-25T17:34:00.001Z

This is a quick post to link to a great article by Mike McCarthy in The Independent about the disappearance of the cuckoo and other summer migrants from our woods in spring and summer. According to surveys by the British Trust for Ornithology and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds between 1994 and 2007, 37 per cent of our cuckoos disappeared. Add to this:

41 per cent of our swifts

47 per cent of our yellow wagtails

54 per cent of our pied flycatchers

59 per cent of our spotted flycatchers

60 per cent of our nightingales

66 per cent of our turtle doves

67 per cent of our wood warblers

All these birds are summer visitors and their problems seem to be caused by two major factors: pesticide use is causing huge declines in insect numbers along their migration routes while climate change is bringing insects out earlier so the birds are not in the right places to eat them at the right times, i.e. the earth's meteorological and ecological rhythms are shifting out of balance.

McCarthy points out the cultural role these birds have played in England, something I'm often reminded of as when asked about my research area about one in three people respond to hearing I work on medieval song by saying, 'Oh, like 'Sumer is icumen in''. As is obviously well known this thirteenth-century song welcomes spring with the cuckoo's song and other natural raucousness:

Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweþ med

And springeth þe wode nu,

Sing cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,

Lhouþ after calue cu.

Bulluc sterteth, bucke uerteth,

Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;

Ne swik thu nauer nu.

Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.

Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

McCarthy concludes: 'here we have one of the world's profoundest motions, a living announcement of spring, coming to an end. We have grown used to wildlife losses, but it will be far more than the loss of a species to say goodbye to the cuckoo, and to bid farewell to its fellow summer visitors, as we are now on course to do sooner rather than later. It will be something so momentous in its implications that perhaps it is better not to think it through.'

I expect, however, he does want us to think through those implications.

Wytham Woods in March

2009-03-23T21:55:00.000Z

I went to Wytham Woods today hoping to see the hazel catkins. Some were still on the trees but I was too late – most lay on the ground and I only saw a few female flowers (tiny dark-red spines poking out from green buds). Hazels live in the semi-ancient part of the woods, once coppiced.

The way these trees grow in bundles gives the underwood a tangled appearance with a special beauty. The beech plantations are younger and more ordered. Last year’s leaves cover the ground giving it a lovely copper colour.

Today was quite windy and over in the Great Wood I filmed these sycamores swaying and clattering against each other. The trees looked especially animate (even entish) in these gusts.

Primroses flowered throughout the woods, taking their turn before the bluebells. Primroses always live in ‘guilds’ (a set of plant or animal species that share an ecological niche), especially with anemones, violets and bluebells.

In Woodlands Oliver Rackham raises a question about this ecological pattern: ‘Why do guilds exist? Why does one best-adapted species – dog’s mercury, bramble, bracken – not always out-compete the others and take over the site? … Are guilds chance groupings of plants that happen to grow in the same environment, or are they plant ‘communities’ in a real sense, with mechanisms of integration between species?’ It might be assumed that we already know the answers to a question like this but instead the deeper into woodlands you look the more questions emerge.

Save the Frogs

2009-03-20T19:57:00.000Z

The red kite conservation programme posted about below is a reminder of how well efforts to protect threatened species can work. Amphibians are currently in special need of such care and their cause is being promoted by Save the Frogs Day (April 28^th). The campaign tries to draw attention to the fact that amphibians are the most threatened group of animals on earth: nearly one-third of the world’s 6,435 amphibian species are threatened with extinction and at least 150 species have completely disappeared since 1979. This is the beginning of a mass extinction unmatched for this group in the fossil record.

Save the Frogs point out that amphibians play an important role in ecosystems, for example by cleaning waterways (as tadpoles) and eating pest species like mosquitoes that spread disease. It might help us to care more about amphibians to know that approximately 10% of Nobel prizes in physiology and medicine have resulted from investigations that used amphibians. These animals are often spoken of as important bio-indicators: their moist skins make them sensitive to environmental change and (according to Save the Frogs again) ‘their disappearance signifies the Earth’s environment is out of balance and portends potential negative consequences for humans’.

In my post about forests I questioned the rhetoric of ‘saving’ forests since they can’t actually be ‘saved’ – we can only avoid cutting them down. The same applies to ‘saving’ frogs. It is a clear slogan, sounds quite funny and is emotive at the same time. Perhaps what we’re really talking about is stopping killing frogs but this does sound rather negative and aggressive. If the campaign said ‘stop killing frogs’ this would puzzle many who would (reasonably?) feel that they don’t kill frogs. At least ‘save’ suggests that frogs are something we should cherish. Still, I’m uncomfortable with it and would be interested to hear other views on this question. Religious language is often used within the conservation movement – is that something we should embrace as powerful or reject as misleading?

Back to the campaign for now: what is killing frogs and how can we ‘save’ them? Amphibians are affected by pollution, pesticides, habitat destruction, climate change, invasive species, infectious diseases, and over-harvesting for the pet, food and bait trades’. Habitat destruction is key, as is the spread of the chytrid fungus (often spread by human activity, especially along roads and other trade routes). Climate change appears to be strengthening the virulence of this disease. Here is the campaign’s list of what we should do:

This list is a little eccentric. Don’t eat frog’s legs and drive slower? They do give a fuller list on their website with lots of reasonable explanations and suggestions. Apparently Europeans alone consumed roughly 120 million frogs per year in the 1990's. So I’m not greatly empowered by this list since I've never eaten frog, don’t drive, don’t have a pond and don’t plan to become a herpetologist (which sounds a bit unpleasant). Here are my three suggestions for stopping killing frogs:

- support campaigns to stop deforestation

- work to keep climate change below 2C

- spread the word about Save the Frogs day

Red kites

2009-03-20T12:46:00.000Z

Every few days a pair of red kites circle over our house above the gardens and the park next to us. I’ve been trying to take a photograph of them but haven’t yet been successful in catching them close enough. This photo from the internet shows the bird’s red-brown stomach and the fingery feathers at their wing-ends. During the late nineteen century and the twentieth century these birds were brought close to extinction by poisoning but a reintroduction programme began in the 1980s. By 2003 there were around 625-675 breeding pairs in Britain. They have probably come into the edges of this urban area from the nearby Chilterns. The birds have an impressively majestic flight and are an encouraging reminder of the success of recent conservation efforts.

The Age of Stupid

2009-03-16T20:31:00.000Z

I went to the Age of Stupid premier yesterday, a documentary-film about climate change that asks, why is the human race committing suicide? Pete Postlethwaite acts an archivist in the year 2055 looking back at footage from 2008 to understand why at the start of the 21^st century, when we knew what the consequences would be, we did not act to stop climate change. A series of documentaries are at the heart of the film: a young woman in Nigeria whose village has been polluted by Shell’s oil drilling, refugees from Iraq selling our discarded shoes in Jordan, an oil company geologist whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, a businessman setting up a low-cost airline in India. The stories are presented without narration (we don’t hear any interviewers) but the contradictions in the individuals’ lives are powerfully felt. The geologist calls himself an ecologist. The Iraqi children whose father was killed in the war play shoot-out games in the street.

The footage from Nigeria was perhaps the most devastating. We see a ruined building that Shell had promised to build into a health centre in a village near their oil wells, but left to collapse as the villagers die of cholera and typhus; the polluted lake that no longer feeds the population as the fish have been killed by spilled oil; and pipes continually burning off gas right beside the people’s homes. This gas is trapped with the oil and could be used to produce energy for Nigeria but the companies aren’t willing to pay for the infrastructure (they aren’t interested in paying for Africans to have electricity) so they simply burn it off. The gas flares in Nigeria burn the equivalent to 25% of UK gas consumption. Gas flaring in Nigeria contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa combined, and yet it contributes nothing to the country’s economy. Instead it damages the people’s health by spreading asthma and bronchitis.

Unfortunately the film is full of stories such as this, justifying the title. It’s powerful and humane with a vital message. It also avoids calming us with token gestures like light bulbs and recycling – the makers know we need serious action by governments and corporations, and that probably means large scale public protest is more important than lifestyle choices. One disappointment for me was that the film was promoted as drama to a significant extent through the emphasis on Postlethwaite’s role as the future archivist. His part in the film is really just a device for the documentary footage and there is in fact very little about the future and nothing of the archivist’s story. This is understandable when today’s experiences are so devastating, but it does mean the film is another documentary rather than a narrative exactly. This will affect how people react. Some will find documentary, with its truth value, more powerful but we have already seen other similar films. The Age of Stupid is the best climate change documentary so far, but there’s still a clear need for drama. Personally, I became serious about this issue after reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. It's hard to understand why today’s mainstream novelists, directors and artists are not putting everything into this subject.

Are forests doomed?

2009-03-13T16:08:00.000Z

The Guardian published an article on Wednesday about a recent study by the Hadley Centre presenting new evidence that the Amazon rainforest will be destroyed by climate change:

'It found that a 2C rise above pre-industrial levels, widely considered the best case global warming scenario and the target for ambitious international plans to curb emissions, would still see 20-40% of the Amazon die off within 100 years. A 3C rise would see 75% of the forest destroyed by drought over the following century, while a 4C rise would kill 85%.'

Models predicting these changes have been around a while but increased data has now enabled more accurate numerical predictions. There are already warning signs that the Amazon is failing. The forest generates part of its own rainfall (by recycling the water released as the trees perspire), but in 2005 the system failed, creating the most severe drought on record in Amazonian Brazil. (I read about this in Thomas Lovejoy’s chapter in State of the World 2009.)

It is vital not to leap from increased understanding about the Amazon’s future to indifference about deforestation. The destruction of biomass (principally tropical forests) accounts for about a fifth of the annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions. According to Lovejoy this is why Indonesia and Brazil are the third and fourth largest CO2 emitting nations in the world, despite low fossil fuel use. Deforestation accelerates climate change so it should be one of the first areas we tackle in trying to prevent a 2C rise in temperatures.

A doomed forest is still worth protecting. The increased temperatures our actions are bringing about will force ecosystems to change and species to migrate. Unfortunately we have extensively altered many landscapes, which will too often make this process nearly impossible. We need to address how we live within landscapes, as Lovejoy argues:

‘Natural connections urgently need to be re-established in landscapes to facilitate the dispersal of individual species as they follow the conditions they need to survive. Basically, the opposite of the current situation of patches of nature in human-dominated landscapes needs to be created, so that human needs and aspirations are embedded in a natural matrix.’

This applies everywhere, not solely in the tropics. Personally, I find this an exciting vision. The news today is dark (here, here and here) and I don’t think it’s appropriate to react simply by giving ourselves reasons to be cheerful but I hope people won’t read about the fact that climate change ‘will’ destroy the Amazon and start to feel that protecting it no longer matters.

Part of the problem is in our rhetoric. Campaign groups often talk about ‘SAVING’ the rainforest or ‘STOPPING’ climate change. Forests cannot really be saved. We can avoid destroying them while we live, but how long will they remain after that? We never know. A little bit like a surgeon who ‘saves’ a life: the operation she performs will not mean the patient lives for ever, but that scarcely matters, does it? We probably can’t 'stop' climate change, but we can take responsibility for our actions and start making better local and global ways of living.

Pollen

2009-03-13T15:00:00.000Z

A little sunlight on a grey day here in Oxford.

Biophilia

2009-03-09T10:13:00.000Z

Do we inherently value life? One way of thinking about this is to compare the appeal of a garden filled with flowers, butterflies and birdsong with one covered in paving-slabs. Children are often excited by animals and many families include a cat or dog for no obviously rational reason. Yet at the same time we appear to be content to exploit, deplete and destroy other life forms, from the massive destruction of rainforests to smaller, more local attacks.

The renowned naturalist and writer Edward Wilson suggests that humans possess an ‘innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.’ He argues that this ‘biophilia’ was essential to our evolutionary success because in order to find a meal or escape a predator our remote ancestors simply had to be alert to the presence of other animals and plants in the landscapes around them: ‘the brain appears to have kept its old capacities, its channelled quickness. We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.’

A ‘tendency to focus on life’ is not the same as valuing life, so we might object that our ‘biophilia’ has its origins in an evolutionary drive to exploit other species or to compete with them. Wilson’s argument is subtle. He proposes that we endlessly seek to balance two ideals: nature and machine. Since the industrial revolution the balance has slipped and we begin to fear we have moved too far towards the machine. He wonders whether the presence of other life forms around us will prove to be essential to the health of our civilisations because they played such a vital role in the development of our brains. Much of Biophilia shows us the powerful encounters with nature he has experienced as a biologist, from discovering the way an ant nest functions as a super-organism to using molecular biology to enrich our understanding of our own bodies.

Wilson advocates the value of ecological diversity. His more recent The Future of Life presents the desperate situation we are in today as our current actions are set to bring about the extinction of 90% of all species through habitat destruction and climate change. The problem is urgent: how can we transform our innate interest in life into an active movement to protect life?

Ancient Lichens

2009-02-28T23:48:00.001Z

Now winter is passing snowdrops and crocuses are brightening the ground beneath the trees in the parks but all year round we can see the beautiful blue-grey, golden and rust orange of lichens on trees and stones, on city walls and in woodland. These extraordinary life forms are a symbiotic union of a fungus and a partner, often an alga, that produces energy through photosynthesis.

Britain has over 1500 lichen types and many live to a great age. The oldest known in this country live on the Rollright stone circle near Oxford. We visited the circle on a frosty day and the place looked enchanted.

The lichen at Rollright, Aspicilia calcarea, is estimated to have begun its life around 1195 AD. It’s the white lichen in the middle photo (I think). See also here:

http://www-biol.paisley.ac.uk/research/ASilverside/lichens/Aspicilia_calcarea.html

City Pollen

2009-02-28T23:14:00.000Z

Welcome to City Pollen blog.

The posts will be about valuing the living Earth and its diverse plant and animal species. The blog is dedicated to discussion of climate change and how we can make the wild an essential part of our culture and personal identities.

Why City Pollen? I live in a city and most people in Europe live in towns and cities. I’m hoping that this will be a good place to think creatively about how we interact with nature even when we seem to be surrounded by concrete.

Thanks for visiting.