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.

 

~~~

21 April 2022

Dear Jesse Norman MP

 

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.

~~~

 

 

 

 

 

Ergonvast ~ energy wasted, akin to ecocide, impacts social, ecological and climatic systems in a negative way, and adds to planetary crisis.

 

Ergon ~ Ancient Greek ἔργον (érgon). Doublet of work.

Vast ~ from Latin vastum. “Empty, desolate.” Origin of “waste”.

 

For example, light and noise pollution, uninsulated housing, wasteful advertising technology.

~~~

Chapter Severn – The Mouth 

Danger.

The Mythological.

Jumping.

 

 

Without you, I would not have known enduring love, no matter how complex, because it is complex.

Without you, we would not have the most stunning child, who takes my breath away in all she does and says.

Without you, we would not have known and loved Ben.

Without you, I would not have read Riverwalking and walked the philosophical path since. This blog was your idea, one I will always treasure because it was yours. Your name is mine, and always will be.  It’s a good strong batty name.

Without you, I would have remained parochial. I would not have read Lopez and Matthiessen. We have lived and experienced, haven’t we, all the “stuff” in the world could never ever match.

Without you, I would not have regained myself after Mum’s death; enjoyed our daughter and her absolute vibrancy; I would not have embraced the camera that you bought me and “seen” this beautiful world again alongside you, Gracie, Ben. I would not have walked the rivers again. I would not have really listened to music. Music is life, laughter, and dance. There is so much more. So much.

You have been the most thoughtful lover, father, son, brother, and man. I have missed you, miss you now, and will miss you until the day I leave this plane of existence we knew to cherish.

Without you. I am utterly and totally bereft.

I have truly lost my best friend. I will care for our daughter and take her where she needs to go on behalf of “us”. I will listen to your voice in all things. Relish the cadence on that dream bike and those biggest views. “Kudos” to you.

 

~~~

 

 

 

 

Dark rum, rumbullion, rummage, scents, essences and escents (forming adjectives expressing a flux state or action). Now is the time of falling deciduous leaves in the northern hemisphere. For a long while now, I have mulled on a word that describes the prevailing smell for me ~ a sweet, musky, peppery aroma of decaying leaves, depending on the leaf mix ~ as well as the activity of soil enrichment and kicking through them on misty mornings and cooler evenings.

Smell is a powerful provocation of emotion. Emotion may lead to good things, including the for-wiring of the cultural acceptance that we too are nature. Each of us responds to smells and the memories they stimulate with uniqueness and Autumn is an acute time for smells to accentuate in our minds in temperate zones.

Decaying leaves are broken down to soil nutrients by bacteria, fungi, and tiny invertebrates, and they give off organic compounds and sugars in an air-cocktail that is fairly unique in any given place and in our minds, though there may be commonalities at certain temperatures and times of the day.

Climate change and struggling ecologies mean such things could be afforded more names in our depauperate language, articulated and treasured in our consciousness and affirmed by the discussion of them. Let there be many names, helping to shape the way we think and evolving in time and space.

Perhaps my word here will not resonate with you. If it does, I am so glad. Why not think about a word yourself if it does not, and please do share it in the comments box below. Thank you and enjoy all the good things that Autumn will bring this year.

~~~~~~

 

“Court blocks Lafarge bid to scrap Syria crime against humanity charge” 

Ah, yes, those corporate men who pay lip service to equity and resilience. Who might abuse those surviving under the most extreme circumstances?

Please, let me point out that, according to Carbon Brief and other well-known carbon data analysis organisations, concrete (largely Portland cement) accounts for 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions

 

EIGHT PERCENT

 

not accounting for any other mineral or ecological extractions required along supply and demand chains.  Lafarge is top of the pops in the game of global concrete. And the Americans lap it up, by far the biggest importer of the stuff.

By comparison, aviation accounts for just 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions (still, not to be ignored).

Let’s be careful driving forward any “Green New Deal” infrastructure purported to protect the most vulnerable and to facilitate a new era of ecological and “zero” emissions in daily life, without looking with intense scrutiny at the land (LIFE), materials, and energy extracted and used-up in that mission. We (all life) can no longer afford to make the same mistakes in this damnation of an Anthropocene.

Should such an ethic be nobbled by those who celebrate the green dollar or pound sterling under the disguise of jobs and equity? It’s not hard to imagine, at scale. “Eco”modernists are persistently very sneaky and content to gaslight us all with their sympathies to various causes or concern for the expediency of “compromise” under time pressures. I’m rather sick of it. So will be those suffering at the frontline of extreme climate change and the ones who will suffer down the line.

What is good for LIFE comes, by nature, in flows. Concrete blocks flow, or at least it slows it down a thousandfold and more until it breaks down with the same forces that break down rock. Let’s stop with the concrete, even when it comes to rising sea levels, coastal “protection,” and river flooding. All we are doing, yet again, is knocking problems downstream in time and space. There are alternatives; ancient proven methods. They may not be so easily commodified (eg rammed earth), but they exist, bioregionally.

Concrete (French, Chinese, Green New Deals), wherever it is poured as if from an infinite tap, is an experiment that has failed and will continue to fail. Just like fossil fuels.

~~~~~~

 

I have been walking the dried up paths by the river, thinking about emotions of the prescient and ever-increasing burden of Earth Crisis upon everyone (at least everyone who is sane).

Climate or extinction “dread” or “doom” can seem such hopeless words, yet maybe have a rightful place in the hearts of some; those in total despair. For others, life is surviving regardless, caring for others in the face of whatever comes next; no time to allow a creeping then torrential flood of negative emotions that could hamper chances.

So I offer a word that means simply a deficiency of peace (mind, body, soul, ecological, social, and even planetary), a lack of confidence – an edgy feeling on a par with eerie, of craving peaceful conditions that are amiss. There is still a purpose to the feeling, as all emotions have purpose ~ to achieve peace; a life of peace in climate, biodiversity, equity.

 

Pax ~ Latin for peace, Pacis ~ of peace

Penia ~ Latin root, suffix for deficiency in medicine.

 

Paxipenia ~ an emotional state of disquiet caused by the multitude of uncertainties and brutality of an ongoing Earth Crisis.

~~~~~~

“I don’t get depressed, I get angry,” says Johan Rockström, Breaking Boundaries, Netflix.

Me too, Johan. I am furious.

I am furious because I listened to you in hope, and imagined millions doing the same. Yet your vision of the human global reign continuing, but within your “safe operating space”, is morally defunct.

Why on Earth would I ever say such a thing? You have a vast platform; earned, I am sure of this. Your collaborative work on planetary boundaries and Earth systems is hugely valuable to modern society. But when that very modern society is THE fault-line in Earth’s discordance, you, therefore, can’t fix it. Things have to shift away from the modernism you are protecting. And I am not writing of a return to cave-life ~ but of a return to a wise way of understanding LIFE.

More.

Please don’t use your platform to dismiss ethics as if science is the “torch” to show us the way. Science gives us “light”, but not all light, and how best to live through the light. And to live through the dark. Both ancient indigenous ways of thought and emerging forms of ecologism springing up in fountains all over the world have serious contributions to make. And they may not look and sound like you.

Yours is a job of listening as well as warning.

You dismiss the moral calling; exquisite beauty is irrelevant, you say. But real beauty IS the interconnectedness, the symnexia of LIFE, and that cannot be dismissed. We are, like it or not, moral beings – the calling goes deep into our symbiotic existence, within and without; even our neural pathways, like flowers and roots in symbiosis with bacteria and viruses, are shaped in that very same pattern.

We save nature not to save us, but because it is us.

Now may be the time for some unlearning. No symling may be left behind in sacrifice for saving the human race. No symling should be enslaved “in service” or servitude to humans, but instead in Fluministic devotion to the communal cause as they were born or divided to do.

As should we all.

Please stop dismissing the moral cause, when you continually use it yourself under the guise of “science” – morality shapes even the work you do. Ask yourself again why you do what you do. What emotivates you? What ethic do you abide by? An ethic is the enactment of your own moral code.

That the biosphere should exist, therefore, evolve to prop up human civilisation is the ultimate foolishness of our young immature experiment of a species. We cannot and should not pursue this ethic of enslavement and frustropian servitude of all life to one cause.

Trees planted? Trees are perfectly evolved to grow themselves, given place. But remember they are community species, only part of something much bigger and older than themselves, an order of magnitude older, higher, broader, deeper than humans – a symbioethic. Our planting is ancillary, the gardening at the edges. LIFE is full-on love for evolutionary processes, much of which we cannot participate as ecological consumers. We must be patient. Let the trillions of symlings be Fluminists, so that we too can be Fluminists.

Food? Yes, we know what we parasitise and consume is a huge driver of ecological distress rooted in all those inter-flowing planetary systems you so rightly highlight – we are nature, so the responsibility is ours to generate LIFE in the process of its becoming, not destroy life. Shelter, clothes, waste (do we and our waste become ecological food once more), travel, we have become a “boundary” to all life – you missed humans out in your nine systems taxa – the Anthropocene puts us right in there NUMBER TEN (and equity between humans does fucking matter – you should know that better than anyone. Inequity drives the desire for more exploitation).

Back to language.

“Safe operating space” is a Westernised expression of THE language deficit ongoing right now, a continuation of the moral deflection from union with all living beings. WE ARE NOT STANDING ON A FACTORY LINE.

Instead, please use your platform to thread the nature of nature through each and every one of us, and through the symbiotic species that power this fragile, beautiful, unique biosphere – LIFE, a metabolising global kindship of community. LIFE is CLIMATE (Margulis/Lovelock/many more, including me).

That’s where “security” for ALL species lays. In them we trust.

LOVE IS FOR ALL processes that sustain life, including symbiosis. The mystery is ever-present in that love – a deep faith in processes, known and unknown. I call it Fluminism.

Dear Professor, there is not AND NEVER WILL BE a good Anthropocene. There is a falsity, an arrogance of “universal knowledge” peppered into the flesh of everything as if scientists are the masters of their aim. For all your valuable insights, what remains essential, Johan, is the recognition that our species may stand in humble rank, and that we shall not (and should not) ever fully “know.” Then, and only then, may we have a chance at aiding LIFE into very uncertain futures caused by vast human iniquity. And then… to un-belong as NUMBER TEN planetary “boundary”.

~~~