Chapter Won. Introduction. Let there be peace here.

The Old General Hospital, Wye.

Boon or bane, I was born downstream from this place I stand now under unfurling beech leaves, just past the Victoria walking bridge. Down there, around the bend. See it? A red brick hospital is now apartments with annual ground rents and an alloted view. I’ve grown up with my feet in this river, with the mayfly larvae, on sunny picnic days at Bredwardine beach too, knowing— turning wet pebbles in just my toddler’s knickers and sunhat – I was part of it all. This river taught me how to listen and swim. When you are bred into quiet waters and their teresapien communal places, you’re bathed in that soft green song. It’s always jarring when being sent out by necessity into modern industrial life, each time under massive amps, like a bet, to survive the prevailing wantonomy. But this is my song, albeit still brimming with mystery. I belong to it, though mostly, still, despite everything that has happened to me, that particular melody from Builth to Hay.

As an adult, Earth sciences have revealed a small number of those mysteries in my head, connecting the flolocas of the Wye to the planetary-scale picture. More personal study of Environmental Ethics and various hard-won and generous Indigenous understandings from special places, say over the last 15 years, have led me to a broader view of the combination of processes, the most loving ones tending towards life, not against, has lead me to share Fluminism with the human world. Though the popular way of publishing has limited me to a very small corner of that world, I admit my own kind of language code—almost my entire inner world has been dominated by unfamiliar language to most who operate within a largely job-oriented mass vocabulary and education system geared to “capital”— has, more than likely, hindered me too.

I saw and heard Peter Kalmus’s emotional pleas on the Guardian website as he stood protesting in his white science lab coat. And I understand the rawness of this moment for him, especially as he has embraced the role of influencer in his writing and communication, and is devastated that the message on reducing emissions is just not reaching its intended spot.

Teresapien-centric people have been feeling this kind of pain for decades.

It’s a jagged, flesh-tearing and deep pain; breathtaking in its pervasiveness and in all aspects of one’s being. Climate change came, for us, on top. We bear witness, daily, to war crimes against those we love, and immediately feel the pain of all our peoples, of all walks, oppressed by the same structural abuses.

But it’s almost impossible to earn sympathy from those who are unknowing. When life is about political intrigue or ratings, or even putting food on the table, we are dismissed as sentimental or as having too little else to worry about, despite life, by the longest, farthest distance, not in subservience to human life but its indifferent foundation.

What should it take to make a real difference, to make the unknowing know? Shall we lay down our own lives in front of mass media cameras to protest—to rely on editors—to risk being outdone by celebrities or dismissed as more waste: shall we go to war with the employers of the unknowing, bashing those too who struggle to exist: or shall we instead radically for-form the shape of our collective morality and fluministic consciousness through mass, egalitarian education?

“I’ve tried everything else.” No, we haven’t.

I now stand still on the Old Bridge. So many people rushing to the banks in town to check-in money or cheque it out. My river, life’s river, is the Wye. The Wye asks questions of us in every ripple. Listen to those questions flowing beneath us all. All the upstream feeder tributaries reach this very point too.

This is a collective, but a collective overfed. I have watched our symling kin of the water and banks dwindle in energy transfer, shrink in territory, and wither under the strain of obesity and noise. River lives need few nutrients but for the cycling drifts from their own flolocas and the rocks the water scours. They need peace [I will write more on this in time]. As ever, the landscapes and flolocas in which we participate, knowingly or not, are burdened with the fat of all our human wastes. Human excreta— including pharma—washes in with the wastes of a meat industry too, but also from the silt from the inefficient machined numbness of commodity ag-tech, the maximalist financial schemes of the boroughcrats, the steel plough blades washed off by an ever intense rainstorm or blown off in drought; in-filling and culverting of the brooks; roads-more-roads and individualism, the poisons and shipped-in minerals from all over the globe not taken in by the living bodies of the fields we have fenced out from the rest of nature. The fishhooks. The tourists’ money.

Yes, please do test the waters with your proprietary chemistry kits and citizen projects – I’ve lost count of the times I have called on those paid to do it – and try to prove to the regulators that they need to enforce each separate unit of Law in order to punish the ignorant or entitled through the Courts (at least, the community—in its very Western way— is now trying to belong).

But if you sit and “feel” it happening for a lifetime, you also feel the atomic devastation seep into your own. There is no gap. The pain is soul-splitting, trust me. And few hear, or even wish to hear, the real meaning of those particular cries.

I look around at all my fellow Herefordians crossing this bridge at their speed, and wonder at their bliss when they stop to look over the thousand-year-old war bridge (to facilitate or block the trade with Wales). It must be an utter joy to find delight here (I remember the feeling as a child). But I now feel less to celebrate—though kingfisher balancing on the willow whip sprouting from the litter debris downstream does give me momentary hope. I ask these people, do you know this place? Do you really feel our belonging?

You do belong. All of you. Not to the tarmac nor the thousand-year-old bridge, nor the banks you are racing towards (that still fund wars). But to this place beneath. This kind of flower-bank laying slant into wet eddies of a living continuum. Let there be peace, just here.

~~~

 

Note: I wrote this before learning of the life given to raise ultimate awareness of this kind of pain outside the Supreme Court, Washington DC.  Rest in peace, Wynn Bruce, of Boulder, Colorado.

 

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Letter to Jesse Norman, MP – Integrity, honesty, and respect.

21 April 2022

Dear Jesse Norman MP

Integrity, honesty, and respect.

Yesterday, I listened to Boris Johnson’s performance-apology over a Fixed Penalty Notice for partying during the very lockdown he instigated by law, and I am afraid he has brought great shame to our Nation.

My father’s oldest and dearest friend, and therefore influential in my life, was Mr Hugh Rees, Conservative MP for Swansea, a lifelong Conservative member and, truly, a good man.  Although we were politically poles apart, he was–every atom–a man of great integrity, honesty and respect. He taught me much about politics and political decision making, as well as the core Conservative value of loyalty to the people. I think back to his era and lament how those core values he represented in all his political and business dealings have been utterly swept aside by Boris Johnson and the yes-men and yes-women of the current Cabinet — loyal only to themselves and their wealthy friends — supported by a backbench so without a moral compass and so far right-leaning, I’m amazed they haven’t all fallen headfirst into the Thames.

Please, at least, try to regain those core values in parliament and tell your PM to resign now.

For me, it matters less that Johnson, at best, didn’t appear to have a clue about what he was doing, nor what his staff were doing, but that he then lied and obfuscated.

Being a bit of a “character” or wanting to emulate Churchill = NUL POINTS once trust has evaporated. I neither trust nor admire this kind of “character”, and I think that the majority of decent people in Britain feel the same way. In this new era of international political and environmental threats, and after the harrowing impacts of Covid and high costs of living, people deserve better. We need someone utterly trustworthy to occupy that privileged role of Prime Minister in Government.

Meanwhile, on the subject of Offshore Detention Centres in Rwanda, I will remind you that asylum-seeking is not illegal, that you won’t solve the trafficking problem by exporting the victims, and that the whole scheme reeks of pandering to the BNP-style elements of your Party. The Australian model caused intense suffering, trauma, and even suicide as a result of similar Government activities to deflect responsibility for asylum-seeking. I call the result “Xenotrauma“. Your Government should not, for the sake of basic decency, follow their lead. We must have compassion at the centre of politics, with human dignity respected in every single individual already here and all who might try to seek sanctuary on these Isles. I have known a few refugees to have survived arduous life-threatening journeys to flee conflict and persecution. They have been subjected to sickening racism and abuse across the continent, and that’s why they have not stayed, deciding instead to press on to Britain.  Sadly, all of them over-optimistically presumed that British integrity, honesty, and respect still exist!

Once again, I ask you to demonstrate that you WILL try to regain those core values – integrity, honesty, and respect.  Tell your PM to resign now, and the entire Cabinet can follow.
Good luck!

Sincere regards,
Ginny Battson.

Various, plus Dysenergy (& Wantonomy)

Hungry for energy, the field, Westhope, 2011.

 

Another week, another bereavement. Could the grief bus just stop. I want to get off.

~~~

Meanwhile, thoughts are whirling around my head, several key projects stacked in my brain’s in-tray. I am returning to studies after a two-month bereavement break and, in all honesty, I am finding it difficult to concentrate on these longer works (though I’m trying), and much beyond my daughter’s imminent A’Levels, or bursts of 280 characters.

I am moving through a period of deep loss, ADHD diagnosis ~ also some kind of loss, but of my old identity ~ and medicine titration; a battle to even get anything from the NHS. I am also still in recovery from my first (and I hope, last) bout of clinical depression I had last Summer. I have no means of official therapy now. Waiting lists are months long, money is tight-to-zero, and Adam’s support money for Gracie until her 18th birthday has evaporated into probate. I try things myself to alleviate fast brain syndrome. Two delightful kittens play their part in lightening daily life, I attend weekly art therapy courses at Mind and doodle-draw in fly-wheel states, and I am volunteering now, ad hoc, for a local Help for Ukraine charity, packing boxes of donated sleeping bags and baby medicines to be sent to the insanity of bomb shelters underneath Kharkiv.

But today, I’m compelled to write this blog. It’s been a while.

~~~

Dysenergy

The Johnson government has announced its energy policy to be put in train for decades, and the major TV stations are accepting without criticism. In fact, there seems great excitement over the projected stimulus of such a gigantic infrastructure build ~ the contributions it will make to what I now call the wantonomy – the wanton economy of growth and greed.

Instead of a care-full, just, and sensitive energy transition from “fossil fools” (Antonio Gueterres, 2022) ~ mass insulation projects, new building regulations, 20-min -journey-time-planning, onshore community-owned renewables, reduced international logistics, agro-ecologies, et al, The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein) has been fully exploited for the benefit of the BIG business of corporate nuclear power, so-called blue/green hydrogen, and vast offshore wind. Russia’s abominable war crimes against the Ukrainian people, together with global inflation have given the billionaires are generous tip, and there are future billionaires – let’s call them pretenders – salivating in the wings. I will write again soon on Ukraine, and also about the ecological hit by such giant infrastructures compared to the alternatives (of course, there are alternatives)! And don’t forget these long-term projects do nothing to help people suffering today.

I’ve no doubt the Johnson energy policy is not based on logic, morality, sincerity, or a real practical response to the problems of international energy, climate, or security, but on the ideology of extreme capitalism. These are Leviathan capital projects, requiring Ziz capital investment, with the expectation of Behemoth capital gains, and, of course, the exploitation and exclusion of most people and all teresapien life.

There is a centralising core to it (against the flows of nature and symbioethical distribution) to ensure the human population of Britain is completely reliant upon the companies that supply them. The coffers are therefore guaranteed. Loyal friends of the government are financially secured and will be offered Royal patronage and other powerful positions of cultural and economic influence. Despite the Russian lesson, foreign wealth will still be embraced. Neo-colonial forces ensuring uranium supplies and other materials will, again, be set in motion. Hydrogen cells – as stored energy – are simply replacements for natural gas as a globalised commodity, the fossil fuel industry’s preferred fuel of replacement, a fuel of the loco-motive, to keep stuff moving ~ and selling ~ at even higher levels than today. These planet-sized corps can even use the same pipelines and ships. Never mind saving costs from the “public purse”, there are continuing overheads attached to such schemes paid for in the deaths of entire flolocas, symlings wrenched away from symlings, vast broken ecologies, for the sake of whitemanthropocentric business-as-usual, grid-leak inefficiency over distances (more dollar for waste). At best, these people are visionary-less to all but increasing narrow pressure to reduce emissions and, at a push, cleaner air (not clean).

More, do not ever consider that military forces around the world do not map and plan attacks, including tactical nuclear attacks, on centralised energy sources and processing plants. Someone very close to me studied and worked in this field, including tracing potential radiation pollution – at high levels of security, even if in a “defensive” capacity and unable to reveal to me any detail except with his facial expressions.

I ask myself whether I am more or less depressed by this news. I think I’ve gone into an intensive state of trauma-laced-suspended optimism. Few will want to listen – really listen – to what I am saying. Even the climate science community, now desperate for people to listen to them, seem bent on simply shouting louder, grabbing attention via protest (fair enough, it gets in the papers), but continuing to exclude from their main circles experts on human values and vital pedagogies that are PRE-REQUISITE for an egalitarian, equitable r-evolution of the masses. At least, I will have made this note for my own mental state if not for repeating incessantly on Twitter.  Though I truly love my friends, I am giving that particular dysenergy a break!

~~~

PS I am currently listening to the UN expelling Russia from the Human Rights Council. There’s no current mechanism for them to be ousted from the Security Council, but they should suspend them pending acts of aggressive war and war crimes against the Ukrainian people, including the elderly, disabled, children,  but also foreign migrants and students. If they don’t, the UN itself is at risk. Far too many people, including senior members of the Conservative Party, wish to see that whole institution burn down. We need to reform it to protect it! Its core philosophies are absolutely worth protecting. IPCC supporters, take note.

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