e.g. try Fluminism, Symbioethics, Nature, or Climate
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♒︎ Deus ex machina ♒︎ All feels pulled taught in the expansiveness of this place, as if the shores, the Dumbles, Sharpness, Saniger, Guscar, Mathern Oase, Northwick Oase, Portland Grounds, Goldcliff, Gordano Round, Stert Flats, Lavernock Point, are stretched in a myriad of directions by human ambition. There is
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Life on Earth is now under obvious duress from dominant human action in all living systems. Human empathy exists as part of a topography of the moral imagination. We who are wired this way feel the pain and suffering (or the comfort and exhilaration) of other living beings and symlings as well as our
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♒︎ Body Bio-Continuum ♒︎ There is a nature of beauty pushed away by all but those who live closest to the living world. It is the part of life that is the fear of danger. It is discomfort, pain, death. It is the smell of decay. From a
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♒︎ Suicidal Intertidal ♒︎ I am standing on the old ferry slipway at Beachley, just around the headland from the mouth of the Wye. Above me is a monumental hulk of steel girder and wire spanning the Severn Estuary from Beachley to Aust. This is the old Severn Suspension Bridge,
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♒︎ The Mythological ♒︎ Here, by the flow, I know I am one move away from the idea of feeling no pain. But it is a leap into mental nothingness and a physical dissolution into all the bodies of river life, not peace. There is no peace in suicide; an ecological
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♒︎ Danger ♒︎ Don’t be fooled by their seductiveness. Rivers are dangerous bodies of water. Know them less, and they’ll grab your hips and pull you down, and all the way along. They’ll fill your lungs with mud and blood clots, and turn you intertidal. Awkward, we huddled around in triage waiting
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Median mental states and habits of society, but a toxicity. Enculturation and socialization by “normative” instruments such as mass media; the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of society influenced by phenomenon that are directly and indirectly a human violence unleashed upon LIFE and Life-ism. Bruticulture English, brutal, meaning cruel or thoughtless. From latin, brutus, meaning heavy, dull, stupid,
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This is my 300th blog, and it needs my recognition. This is no small feat considering my personal story over the last seven years. From just a laptop with a wifi connection—a Twitter account, a blog— to a Masters, to my current PhD position, I’ve worked as hard as a beaver in the Johnny
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Via @KevinClimate Simon Sharpe – Deciding how to decide: potential for change in policy ap… https://t.co/TwHm8GwYXS If you can stomach it. — Ginny, Awildian (@seasonalight) May 27, 2021 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js I am grateful to Kevin Anderson for posting this online talk by Simon Sharpe, and unsurprised the organisers and participants wanted to extend viewings beyond
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I’ve been unhappy for a while now with my word “sanguimund” (Latin for Blood Earth) to describe the visceral, living human emotional connection with life on Earth. I found out about the fascist term “blood and soil” ” Blut und Boden” not long after the publication of Fluminismo. It isn’t good enough to plead “but
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“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane.…
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It has been my choice to sit by the weir, on the inside of my outstretched rain mac, each evening for a week now. No-one coerces me. And no-one calls me back in out of the rain. At first, I was captivated by the silky wave over a shallow slope of concrete. Then it was…
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“Some people say they love animals and yet harm them nonetheless; I’m glad those people don’t love me.” Marc Bekoff, The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons for Expanding Our Compassion Footprint Grey Squirrel, Ginny Battson © 2012
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“Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner — what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose
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“Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner — what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose
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“How do we live with nature?” ~~~~~~~~~~ You asked me a question when you were a little girl. When I spoke of living with nature, I didn’t really mean living with the silverfish in the bathroom, jackdaws in the chimney or cellar spiders in the cupboard. Although they are, as you know, welcome! I’ll try…
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“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien It has been an education living in a castle tower for the last eighteen months. Far from being grandiose, it’s been a small affair, a unit rented from the owners in a scheme of half a dozen, designed to equip them of income…
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Sympetrum striolatum ~ click the photo for more information…
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I hold the most archaic values on earth … the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude…. the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” ― Gary Snyder Photo: Ginny Battson © 2012
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The Impatiens glandulifera, Himalayan Balsam, are strong just now. Each day I wander along the river footpath they appear to glow in robust health, as if securing their non-native position here in the ecological community with a certain joie de vivre. They’ll bloom pink soon among toxic native Water Dropwort, and will nurture numerous bumblebees…
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Farms are spewing ash in green flecks under bracken bales: it is rain and this is wet which alters our man’s gait: heavy limbs clutch accountant’s files; between bank and peat grave, he’ll make a little bread. Sheep will fleece a fell and brook ~ shall strip this hill of trust, at best, sewn into…
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Guest blog by friend and author @NinaLyon. Her first book, a meditation on the Green Man, is due to be published by Faber in March 2016. Her essay Mushroom Season, was published by Random House in 2014 after chosen as runner-up in the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize. —————– It is a common error of…
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Let me be an animal of the river, where the deep flow breaks across shingle and slippery rocks entice me to stumble. Sometimes, it is everything to retreat under ancient riparian trees to rest and feel the coolness of the Wye; coolness cast by the trees’ own shadows over decades. Here, in the margin between…
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Lark is testy, hear her shriek at rootless intruders way below her camera-on-a-pole self. Plump boulder bakes a round bee, rotating way below her eye, static as a seed in a cotton sky. She plunges ~ a keen turbine on solar wing.
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January seemed a very dark month for me. Not that I remained in a perpetual state of unseeing, but that the headlines and debates about the declining state of nature, and how we respond, became critically bleak. I became depressed, which is not so unusual these days for concerned citizens of the Earth. Passion for…
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“Dear Steve, Thanks again for your reply and apologies for the delay in returning to you. I completely understand your concerns but disagree with your conclusions. I have two main questions. First, why don’t RSPB & WT (& NatCap Committee), adopt non-financial indices as a metric for gauging the state of nature instead of monetary…
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Epistemology or the Theory of Knowledge is a key thread running through Western philosophical history and inquiry, examining what is reality, how we humans sense and perceive the world, and what is or may be certain and uncertain. Discourse has been a core component to the spirit of philosophy and is ongoing. In this essay,…
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Epistemology or the Theory of Knowledge is a key thread running through Western philosophical history and inquiry, examining what is reality, how we humans sense and perceive the world, and what is or may be certain and uncertain. Discourse has been a core component to the spirit of philosophy and is ongoing. In this essay,…
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Formal response to 38 Degrees Petition and my blog post The Act of Pricing Nature “Dear Ginny Firstly I would like to thank you for your comments about the proposals for a Nature and Wellbeing Act. We are keen to receive feedback and your views get to the heart of issues. Secondly, I’d like to explain some of…
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“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
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“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
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Just to say a little something on religion, as it’s Christmas. I’m an atheist who believes in freedom to believe. I would never pinpoint religion as wrong. I study belief, hope as well as existence and truth, and lots of other interesting things as a philosopher. Yet I am more than a little jealous…
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Paco Almarcha is an anthropological researcher at the University of Alicante, Spain, specialising in people/animal relationships. A brief Twitter exchange on the notion of ‘paradise’ and I’m glad to host Paco’s latest blogpost and accompanying photos… enjoy, as I do. Every place is a historical place. We can find everywhere changing processes and episodic moments…
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“The essential first step in winning the war of the world is comprehension of it. Only system analysis can lay bare the underlying value program, but it is avoided. The sciences do not study values and specialize in domains of self-referential meaning. Journalists report facts, spectacles and impressions, but not the underlying values governing them.…
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“The essential first step in winning the war of the world is comprehension of it. Only system analysis can lay bare the underlying value program, but it is avoided. The sciences do not study values and specialize in domains of self-referential meaning. Journalists report facts, spectacles and impressions, but not the underlying values governing them.…
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Since launching my petition, leading conservationists and sustainability academics have generally either lambasted or ignored me. Rupert Read and Molly Scott Cato rightly describe the problem as the “Natural Capital Controversy”. The assertions in the Nature and Wellbeing Act Green Paper on monetary valuation ARE controversial. There is a way to bridge the gap,…
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I am told, often, that as conservationists, we must learn to speak the language of governance and commerce, and that monetary valuation of nature is the only way to communicate with politicians and business people. It’s all about the £. The way of the world. So, do we really speak ‘money’? I ask myself…
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We sign them, but perhaps do not start many. But with the support of a handful of friends, I simply want to offer the chance for people to ask the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts whether they would consider dropping Natural Capital and Payments for Ecosystem Services from the Nature and Wellbeing Act Green Paper. I…
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Sciurus carolinensis ~ Click the photo for more information…
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‘We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom’. EO Wilson The Act of Pricing Nature No, sorry, I won’t be rallying support for The Nature and Wellbeing Act, as it stands, with Chapter Four in place. Underpinning the latest Conservation NGO backed Green Paper for The Nature and Wellbeing Act is its Chapter Four,…
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The term BIODIVERSITY is used to describe variety and population of non-human life here on Planet Earth. Biodiversity includes everything from tiny microbes to blue whales. Global biodiversity is in decline. A recent WWF report, for example, shows non-human vertebrates (that’s birds, fish and non-human mammals), have declined by 50% in number since 1970. Freshwater life has been…
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“We are not outside the rest of nature and therefore cannot do with it as we please without changing ourselves … we are a part of the ecosphere just as intimately as we are a part of our own society … Paleontology reveals that the development of life on earth is an integrated process, despite…
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Sometimes, we may find light in unexpected places. These thistle flowers hung low on broken stems; a strimmer had been too busy along the verge here. But a common carder bumble bee had not given up hope of a drink of nectar and began to fly almost upside down to alight, ever so gently, on…
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Last night I sat quietly outside in the dark. I don’t know for how long but, in a way, this makes it more meaningful.The sky to the North glistened with stars and my eyes drifted across them from West to East. I dreamed of other worlds, other life. Soon the stars vanished and re-emerged as…
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For my mother. Cool springs rise to The Craft’s steep slope filtering to a twisted pipe. On warm days lambs will sip in hope before it drains beneath the yarrow. Floods benignly feed our silty depths; a pool within the fold. Rain in plenty, now. In seventy-six this well was dry and rusty.…
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I take a deep breath and turn to my family with a wry smile. I walk out until I can walk no more. Out of my depth, my feet lift from the slippery river bed and I slowly swim in circles beneath the alders. Here I am, I still exist, and despite the initial shock!…
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Today is a beautiful day and I hold a perfect Summer gem in my hand. She’s a 5-spot ladybird, Coccinella 5-punctata, flown to me as I perch by the river’s edge watching Ben, our collie-cross, playing in the shallows. Coccinella 5-punctata are a common ladybird in Europe, but endangered here in the UK. They’re usually…
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The body lies in a clearing long, tan feathers broken in a breeze quiet for a few minutes, washed up from an array of shades, the place where they gave chase. Body exhales in the sun, yellow eyes set in red shivvers, blue-green throat crushed by loners; there is no blood. The wood’s…
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‘Medusa.’ What image comes to mind at the mention of her name? I doubt very much if it is one of renewal and wisdom. The Hellenic myth of Medusa remains as metaphor for all that is wicked and vendictive in the world. Homer, the ancient Greek poet, drew her literary character as the epitome of…
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Introduction Heraclitus was borne from an early age of human enlightenment, at a time when the study of religion and poetry proved simply not enough to satiate a human hunger for knowledge and understanding of nature and existence. Homer’s epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, though linguistically direct, were not omniscient and, given the few bones…
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Brine spills across the land, sunrays bake the soils (and the souls) dry, and the rains flash across the plains with increasing ferocity. Science has clearly informed us of sea level rises, frequent drought and more energetic storms, predicted with great certainty by sophisticated mathematical models. It’s already begun. If you listened to the British…
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Geranium robertianum ~ click the photo for more information…
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“Why else should we “agitate,” sit in committees, write letters to newspapers, and organise public meetings to expound our principles? Certainly, not because we enjoy such occupation in itself, for a more thankless task could scarcely be imagined; but because life is at present so narrowed and saddened by brutalitarian stupidity that to try to…
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“One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.” Aristotle I’ve just returned from a short stay on the Channel Islands. We made our sea crossing in a fast catamaran ferry which departed from a distinctly sunny…
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Helix aspersa ~ click the photo for more information…
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I have been considering the self determination of trees of late, pulling on a few biocentric threads. Self determination in humans is looked upon generally as a good thing. Food, warmth, nourishment, medicines; just some of the most basic of our needs but for the sake of this exploration, I’ll assume we in the West…
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“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced…
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Vernal equinox has come and gone for the year and we tip more towards the ball of fire that is the Sun than we do away. Longer days stretch out before us. My daughter and I chat about our hopes for dreamy days by the river, fresh sandwiches and pink lemonade moments interspersed by cool,…
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“The heart is itself a structured counter-image of the cosmos of all possible things worthy of love; to this extent it is a microcosmos of the world of values” Max Scheler
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Mortimers Forest timber plantation I am really unsure that we have fully come to terms with Darwin’s analysis on common biological heritage, not only with primates, but with all life here on Earth. The theory of evolution via natural selection was a shocking revelation to Victorian society at the time and, despite evidence and consensus,…
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A few thoughts on people/nature conflict resolution, exposed to the elements, hounded by storms and, perhaps, to be scoured by a flood of anthropocentrism. “Nature OR Agriculture” “Birds OR People” “Rural OR Urban” I’m certainly hearing these demands more frequently over the airwaves. Career politicians, wrapped in the perpetual maelstrom of an adversarial system, appear…
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A few words about words. Philosophical thinking is enhanced by a fine use of words. Clarity is an honourable goal. Yet there are still some things in nature, and the spaces in between, which are yet to be granted an English name. The Welsh use a wonderful word, hiraeth, which has no direct English translation. Its…
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For the last few weeks, we’ve been enjoying the shelter of a restored Tudor Cottage. It is dominated by a large stone hearth built to withstand the winter winds from the North on this ancient river plain. It’s newly installed oil fired central heating system gives lie to our otherwise blunt exposure to the high…
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“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having…
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According to the 9th Century Anglo Saxon Chronicles, key historic manuscripts written during the reign of King Alfred the Great, January was known as ‘Wolf Manoth’. This was a more stable meteorological era, with native Eurasian wolves almost guaranteed to come out of the relative safety of the woods to approach human settlements for food…
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I often hear this, and sometimes with a dismissive tone: What relevance does environmental ethics have to me and what I do at home, work or at play? Answer: everything! The term ‘environmental ethics’ is the study, thoughts and explorations of the moral relationships, values and statuses we extend to our surroundings and non-human…
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“A river revealed in a flash of lightning is as thick and quivering as gelatin. And yet, measured against a millennium, a mountain melts down the sides of the valley and pours into the sea.” Kathleen Dean Moore I have a photo in front of me just now, I was eight or nine at the…
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There’s a footpath near here, a line first inked on a 19th Century map by an eager railway engineer. It’s the long, straight ghost of The Mid Wales line heading north and south through the village. Running for around 100 years, it was closed some six decades ago by Mr Beeching who had been appointed…
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If honest, much of my time outdoors is spent with an irreverence to wildlife photography . I sometimes carry my camera, sometimes not. I will always be keen to spot non-human life, unusual light, vistas, contrasts, oddments, but what really pulls me out from a warm hearth into a wild, wet Winter’s day is curiosity.…
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Curve balls do come at you in life. At the point when things are comfortable, settled, like a well worn pair of shoes, something happens to trip you up and turn you over. Small or great, ‘something’ provokes, challenges or downright wears you to the bone. Nobody is born with a repair manual. As we…
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“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Seasonalight 
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