Fish scale in otter spraint on a fallen oak leaf between my fingers.
Otter spraint stained the smooth rock with a redness I’d not seen before. A translucent fish scale and tiny bones glowed in the shade beneath wintry stems crouching over the river’s edge. I’d been there a long while before noticing it.
My intent was not to think about treatment. Nor cancer. Nor my complicated life, in general. I just wanted to ‘fly-wheel,’ drift. Have some me-time. I didn’t even want to think.
Chemotherapy makes my skin sensitive. Finding myself alone, I braved it without a hat, the air whispering around my exposed ears. My rock-like bald head was shown to full sun and gulls cast avumbra over my vulnerability. I thought briefly of the death of poor, bald Aeschylus, by lammergeyer; hit by a tortoise dropped from talons at a great height. How sibylline for a thinker to be mistaken for a strike stone. I shuffled on my axis and continued observing the river.
So much for the fly-wheel.
On first arriving at the river, a pair of dippers had flitted to a stop on a shingle bank, and splashed beneath the ripples looking for food. Joy! I pondered what it would feel like to be a dipper submerged. Dippers exploit the physics of tiny air bubbles in protective sheens trapped around their barbuled feathers. It’s why they don’t drown, but drift back up to the surface to live and hunt again. Feathers also evolved from scales, like fish. Birds, fish, tortoises. Me. I looked at the back of my hand, and imagined bubbles shimmering there in the midday sun.
After searching for a place to sit among the flood debris, wrangled organic and human detritus, I felt distressed again. How did we ever let this happen? Eventually, I found a dry boulder to perch upon, life flows absorbing me as originally intended. This is my sanguimund; a visceral feeling of community belonging. And time lost all traction.
Me-time; so invaluable. Should we call it this? I don’t think so. It is simply living, which encompasses the passing of time and exchange within the nagorasphere. Time is not so pressing in comparison to living.
We need to think of breaths, not seconds.
(Cancer brings this kind of thought to you.)
How could we block out the possibility that, at an atomic level, merging with others might bring the biosphere into us, and us into it? More, with such coherence in a universe (or multi-universes) of unlimited complexity? There is no external environment, just as there is no definitive self. Inhale the faint breath of a dipper, absorb the odorous otter scent, feel the temperature drop when a gull casts a shadow over your bald head. They, literally, shape you.
The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, wrote that introspection does not reveal the presence of an enduring self; instead, a selection of fleeting perceptions. Our sense of self is, at best, partial. But we are reflexives among reflexives. At least Hume reintroduced the idea to Western thought of no singular self. For me, the ethos is not simply a renewed sense of a singular logos, nor a spiritual unity of mind. It is more than that ~ a constant interchanging with matter as mind/body/spirit, with other life forms at a material level (atomic, and in the nagorasphere). This exchange must be ethical to equate immanence, beauty. Everything meaningful is in the positivity of the best exchanges. All else fails, even in death. That’s why fluminism counts. It is love, at the very deepest.
I found a little fallen oak leaf and dipped it in the mustelid poo. I smelled it carefully, just to be sure. The whiff of jasmine tea made it a certainty. Otter! This was the first time I’d found signs along the lumbering River Taff through the City of Cardiff. I have observed otters playing in the River Ely just to the West, and hungrily hunting in the wilds of the Wye much further to the North. But this was just spraint. It was there; to be exchanged, melded into the symbiotic nature of nature. It brought to me another moment of self, the vision of a quick little being oscillating over the rocks at dawn. I could feel the wet on my fur, like the bubbles on my skin. She was me and I was her. Next time, she’ll sense me, perhaps, in a similar way.
Bearing witness to these wraith-like apparitions, I connected to her as I did with the dippers. Then, from somewhere other, otter spied me, took a breath and quickly melted into memory. So I put on my hat and walked home slowly, with neither introspect nor extrospect clearly defined. As it should not be! Because the experience is LIFE, immense and shared.
“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Sydney Harbour Bridge, photo by me.
Humans have been blazing trails for millennia. Our early ancestors followed the tracks of large migratory mammals who easily forged routes through the thickets of the wild. Then came the more orderly block pavias of early civilizations to resist the wear of the wooden wheel. The Romans made the roads straight and long, weapons of empire. Then, eventually, came the blacktops, McAdam’s sealed and tarred roads that we have come to expect today. Engineered to a T, with a hard surface of asphalt and aggregates mined from tar sands and quarried from glacial deposits, they are designed for the traction of rubber tyres spinning at speed. They exist for the motor car and transport lorry and perceived as a human right. They shape our streets, our broader habitations, our income, our shopping habit, family structures, schooling; the way we eat, live; the way we love.
Roads allow us self-willed freedom to travel, as far as the land will take us; as long as we have the money, and we’re not stuck in traffic. We even celebrate conquests over water and wetlands by epic concrete and steel bridges and gravity-defying tunnels. Roads are so deeply entwined with our modern sense of ‘progress’, that we light many of them up at night like theatre stages. We pour millions of tons of salt on them in colder climes and spend billions on regular maintenance. Keeping the roads open, whatever the weather, has become societal anxiety.
Emergency services rely on them. Tax and insurance thrive off them. Stumbling across non-paved roads seems novel; terrifying to some. Imagined destinations are only a part of the story; the road trip is as much in our psyche as the endpoint. Families can disperse widely, then be brought together again with just a tank full of fuel. Jobs seem plentiful when the radius of potential is widened by four wheels and an internal combustion engine. Employers can rent huge car fleets at discount, whilst fuel levies raise cash to build even more roads. New roads have become a symbol of economic pride and anything less a mark of underdevelopment.
Stop. Just stop.
Given all we now need to do to reconcile our place within nature, to exit the Anthropocene and enter the Symbiocene, it’s beyond time to re-evaluate roads and their place in our modern psyche.
Roads are one of the worst forms of human chauvinism, exclusively for human purpose, and only certain groups of humans at that, even when transporting livestock. They may as well be tall border walls to wild animals. Any attempt to cross is a death wish, known or unbeknown. I want to make their profusion a thing of the past, the end of the road for roads; McCarthy’s critique of the symbolic American dream dying a death.
Cars and lorries, even buses, kill and injure people and wildlife both along and perpendicular to the route. Particulates suffocate others, causing respiratory disease and death. CO2 emissions from journeys contribute to climate chaos and all the pain and suffering that stems from that. Even the heat stored by the darkness of the tar eventually rises into the atmosphere. CO2 and other gases, metals and compounds are pumped out in construction and maintenance, concrete supports, in vehicular steel and plastics manufacturing and maintenance, in fuel refining and logistics. Plastic, metal and rubber erosion pollutes. The industry causes all kinds of mayhem. And those nightly stage lights drain huge quantities of energy from our national grid, even with newer technologies. Light pollution disrupts wildlife flows in all kinds of ways. So does noise. The disturbance is rife. Harm also comes from erosion, the chemicals and salts, the leaked oil that pollutes the run-off and poisons the adjacent land and watercourses. More, by the litter, flying out of car windows and doors, blowing into those same hammered water courses, feeding plastic to the rivers that lead to the oceans.
Roads are human chauvinism to the extreme. Catching a bus or driving an EV does nothing to prevent so many of these harms. The planners, the engineers and contractors surely can’t know fully what they do. If they do know, it is for the expedience of modernity, the discount of life for the sake of a wage. I want them to, at least, stop and think. Roads are the flesh wounds of symbiotic terrafirma. They gash the soul of soils and then smother them to lifelessness. They fragment and divide ecological communities, including rivers in spate, trapping species onto millions of mini-biological islands in a sea of human development, shrinking wild genetic pools over time and causing conflict, competitive stress and poor immunity.
Salmon, bison, grey whales, red bats, monarch butterflies and arctic terns. Just a few existent vestigial species of migration, borne of the need to move great distances. Their dynamism is also the material embodiment of flow between places, linking the essence of life in one location to another, and back again. The nagorasphere is fizzing with exchange along these routes, and ecological niches multiply across space-time. Even dung and urine enrich, and with the loss of large herbivores and predators, this is particularly on a steep decline. Such sky-land-water disturbances can mean opportunities for species laying in wait along the way. Migration routes can mean more life, not less. The act of moving in nature should be ecologically fluministic.
Humans cheat the natural rules of terra-transit, by getting from A to B not as we were born to do, but by using roads and vehicles as quickly as cheetahs with the stamina of pronghorn antelopes. * Instead of creating ecological unity between social groups and different places, as the bison and the zebra do, we destroy it, flatten everything in the path of our industrial-laden vehicles, divorcing ourselves from the natural pace of bipedal movement. Speed is a thrill, an adrenaline rush. We race each other easily, we compete on luxury. We are seduced through design and marketing to buy into those organic curves, sparkling colours, exciting sounds and plush new-leather smells. Economic and social status is tied to the success or failure of the newest car advert. They are designed to bewitch.
Despite well-known migrations of the wildebeest, zebra, bison, caribou and antelope, terrestrial animals are less likely to migrate large distances. It takes big energy on slow pounding feet for forward momentum through gravity. It’s tough and needs flexi-tendons, fat reserves, power and durability. Other animals, it seems, understand entropy even more than we do. Movement through air and water, despite the friction, is more efficient over distance, the locomotive aided by favourable winds and currents. Bipedal humans, with their flat plantigrade use of feet, are relatively slow at moving across distances, but we have been so clever as to replicate a four-limbed, friction-reducing, rolling method of movement – the motor vehicle. Clever is not the same as wise.
We’ve disrupted the floloca by lacerating interconnectedness and by bringing disturbances along with the linear passage; hunters to the wolf, loggers to the redwoods, gas-garchs to the prairie to frack and spew poison. And then, to transport the aggregates, the asphalt, the ore and even more cars. Roads are made to make new roads. It’s nothing less than a globalized atrocity, the antithesis of feminism.
More still ~ highway robbery. Roads have brought massive social and personal pain to many indigenous and rural people, through exposure to new markets and social pressures, land theft and forced resettlement. Any economic benefits from infrastructure projects have been iniquitous and unfairly distributed. These tarred intrusions are the long, bony fingers of plutocracies, gouging and exposing floloca to abuse, exploitation, and submission to the power. This extends, literally, to roads for extracting road tar.
Ecologists refrain from being totally frank about their destructive nature. They call them ‘linear infrastructure intrusions’, hard, human lines carved through soft ecosystems, including highways, power lines, railway lines, pipelines, firebreaks, bridges, walls and fences. I’d like to call them ‘occasiones ad mortem’, opportunities for death. Because, really, that’s all they are. Each time we go on a road trip, we are taking our chances, along with those of many other beings, human or non-human. Even our ambulances and fire engines are not immune from crashing and causing harm. That’s why they ring those ear-splitting alarms, to lessen the chances. It’s all about risk. Why do we do this?
McCarthy chose a road as a symbol, the American highway, the bastion of the Fordist dream represented as a dystopian nightmare. Cars, lorries, vans, each driven by a single person in an idealized state of self-determination, rumble along the black tops, heating the atmosphere, igniting fires and creating the ash that falls like burned snow. So where’s the utopian dream, the bringing together of human and ecological community?
Now is the time, I contend, to let the main roads rot. Let the verges spread out to re-connect community and encourage us all to really step up in transit-creativity. Gather together. Look at the maps. Decide which roads we can do without. Do it in phases. But do it. Put our heads together in collective ambition. Demand from the city planners that any new or re-development needs to be designed around public space, footpaths and cycle routes. Rural villages can become whole villages again, not commuter satellites to towns and cities. We can still have systems for emergencies, a framework of narrow electric monorails that will take us swiftly, smoothly and safely to hospitals and care facilities. Historical linear streets can be redesigned with organic walking and cycle ways, gardens and wild corridors. We can still use disability scooters. Herald an era of localism, an era of clean air for our children, for living, work, food growing and leisure time. It’s a new ethology for a kinnage dweller.
And for when we really need to travel a distance, we can build unsealed, habitat-connecting permeable routes, with hemp concrete mesh and native grasses, that aid ecology not hinder. We can ride electric bicycles on them, and use light trams, with eco-bridges for perpendicular, ecological connectivity. We can use cable cars with beautiful views, and water balanced rail with feeder lakes full of aquatic life, and other methods low on technological complexity, high in pleasure and life.
Stop the bloodletting, the pain brought to bear so severely upon life. Mend the scars. It is nothing short of mutiny. Let us be wise again like our animal kin, and arrive at the end of the road, soon.
~~~~~~~~~~
*We use large trains too, on huge tracts of land poisoned with pesticides and cleared of vegetation on purpose to keep lines clear (another blog, perhaps).
I also wish to add this tweet and link to the blog. Plastics, rubbers, metals and other chemical contaminants in road dust, particularly around traffic lights (& junctions). Children are often most vulnerable to breathing and swallowing this dust as their mouths and noses are nearer the ground. Inner city demographics means that certain minority groups are hit hardest.
Thank you for your email of 10 October to the Cabinet Secretary for Education in relation to the ecoliteracy within the curriculum. I have been asked to reply on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary.
The Welsh Government is committed to supporting our young people to develop the knowledge and skills they need to become active, ethical and informed citizens of Wales and the world; which includes in the current curriculum engaging with topics delivered through Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship (ESDGC). Through ESDCG learners explore the links between society, economy and environment and our own lives and those of people throughout the world. It considers the needs and rights of both present and future generations, the relationships between power, resources and human rights, the local and global implications of everything we do and the actions that individuals and organisations can take in response to local and global issues.
ESDGC in Welsh schools is delivered through a cross curriculum approach and can be embedded in a wide range of subjects, such as Science, Geography and Personal and Social Education (PSE). This gives schools the freedom to deliver ESDGC using methods and resources that best meets the needs and interests of their learners. For example, schools may choose to make pupils responsible for attending the school vegetable garden, composting and recycling. This encourages pupils to take responsibility for their actions within the school environment and consider the sustainability of local and global food supplies and the methods used in food production.
In their most recent review on progress of ESDGC in schools, 2014, Estyn found that the majority of the schools visited had effective plans for developing and delivering ESDGC. Almost all schools taught aspects of ESDGC effectively through a variety of subjects.
We are currently developing a new curriculum in Wales, taking forward the recommendations of Successful Futures, an independent, fundamental, review of Curriculum and Assessment Arrangements by Professor Graham Donaldson. This proposes a broad and balanced curriculum from 3 – 16, delivered through six Areas of Learning and Experience (AoLE):
• Expressive Arts;
• Health and well-being;
• Humanities;
• Languages, literacy and communication;
• Mathematics and numeracy; and
• Science and technology.
The development of the new curriculum is being taken forward by teachers and practitioners
through a network of Pioneer Schools in partnership with Welsh Government, regional consortia, Estyn, Qualifications Wales, Higher Education, business and other key partners
and international experts.
One of the four key purposes at the heart of the new curriculum is to support children and young people to become ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world. This should be evident throughout each of the AoLEs.
Successful Futures has challenged us to re-think our approach to the curriculum; it makes it clear that a high degree of prescription and detail at a national level inhibits “the flow and progression in children and young people’s learning and progression”. As such, we need to ensure that the new curriculum does not provide a comprehensive list of detailed content which would quickly become complicated and overcrowded. The curriculum must also allow professionals the flexibility to choose the specific content which meets the needs of their learners in their specific context. Likewise, this flexibility should allow professionals the autonomy to consider issues such as ecoliteracy to meet the needs of their learners.
Throughout the process we are testing with practitioners to ensure the right balance between flexibility at school level and clarity at national level. The draft curriculum will be available for wider engagement in April 2019. The final publication in January 2020 will include exemplars to support teachers. The new curriculum will then be phased in from September 2022, starting with nursery through to Year 7 and will roll out
year-on-year until 2026.
“Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
So much fury is coming our way, those of us who bear the burden of understanding extreme capitalism, and the vast global inequity it perpetuates, is fuelling Earth Crisis. The more we shine the light, the more profound the insecurity of those who benefit from it. From the alt-right to the eco-modernists, we are the object of increasing anger.
I want to re-visit the proto Indo-European bher ~ to carry, to bear.
We carry a weight of understanding, wading upstream through a mud-river-torrent of climate volatility, scrambling up mountains of human debris from the hurricanes to come.
I offer bhera as the strength to deliver this specific value-shift to post-growth, post-capitalist, equitable, just, ecological civilization.
Suffix mon (PIE) and we are the becoming of the carrying of this weight, this duty. We are the bearers of this news.
The collective, Bheramon.
United, we can help each other in the face of hostility.
This week, thousands of people marched the streets of London, calling for a second referendum on the British breakup with the European Union. Simultaneously, and perhaps connected in many ways, hundreds also marched in Lancashire to protest Cuadrilian fracking. And a group called Extinction Rebellion are planning active civil disruption, beginning at the end of the month, in the face of political inaction and apathy towards the climate crisis.
On Twitter, at least, I am registering a shift in the general zeitgeist ~ notice taken, at last, by a greater crowd beyond the long converted. More retweets, more mentions, more vocal response, especially after the latest IPCC report publication, to a rapidly changing climate and relentless depauperation of wildlife (so often ignored by a lack of interdisciplinary focus). Even more intensely, there’s a rise in exchange of articles and research on steady state/de-growth economies. Campaigners seem energised by this. A good thing!
But I’ve got to be honest with you. I am not detecting much of the same enthusiasm in the shopping malls of Cardiff, or on a packed A48 dual carriageway at 4pm on a Friday afternoon. Importantly, neither am I seeing it echoing out from halls of power. All this takes time, when we have no time left.
I’ve been calling for ‘radical’ over these past few years but, instead, people seem to prefer the idea of being a rebel. A call to arms? Perhaps. Radicals are maybe too extreme for the British. We have a good, solid history of rebelling against monarchs (it’s Bonfire night soon), but not a culture of anything too much in the ‘extreme’. God forbid.
The problem is that rebellions may ultimately shift power structures, but I am not sure they attend to deep-seated human misadventures in values. And it’s at this earthy level – the deep roots of human values – where change in behaviour will liberate the biosphere, not apprehend it. A true radical shift still lies in the way we coach our young (and old). Slide us up the competance hierarchy from sub-man to unconscious competance in ‘living the good life’ mutually, along with all other species. A R-evolution. And soon.
Are there ways to rebel that are radical?
Here’s an idea ~ let’s adopt a system of responsibility over rights.
Legal rights are generally upheld as good. Yet time and time again, they are flouted. Governments tend to change the concept of rights to suite their agendas. Consistency is lost everytime there’s a switch in power. Rights are temporary social constructs, devised by nation states (the UN is a collective of Nation States), to impose order among the human population. They can be treatised and then rejected, voted in and out. They can be good or not so good, proclaimed as a brand of justice handed down by powerful people, who are largely in train with capitalist ideals and infrastructures. They are not necessarily liberatively just, enduring nor bioregional. And, importantly, at best, they cloak only one species from the elements ~ homo sapiens.
This is the thing; rights are quintessentially anthropocentric.
Non-human life needs liberating from human dominion, not co-opting into our systems of Law, Property and Capital.
But responsibilities are just the other side of the same coin, no?
Not if you think that all species/genera have equal responsibility to the floloca to which they relate. The basic rules of play exist in a natural order that ensures complexity, diversity and evolution. Humans are too busy simply relating to one another and not all species. We are NOT thinking ourselves of and to our symbiotic relationship with all other life. This is our immaturity.
Take land. The UN asserts through various international legal treaties the human right to secure tenure (individual or collective). Humans, therefore, are granted a right to determine what other species are allowed to cross or reside upon that land, down to the microbiome. A scrap of freedom hurled to us from on high makes us ‘feel’ empowered, right? What about the empowerment of all these other species on this shared planet? They still do not have a ‘say’, and it is ridiculous they should even need one.
Regardless, nation states bank roll their way through these seemingly basic human ‘rights’, even in the UK, where English Compulsory Purchase Orders facilitate HS2 and a political obsession with 20th century economic growth means 20km of ecological vandalism in Wales ~ M4 extension proposals.
Potentially useful legislation such as the Wales Future Generations Act are ignored, rights instead argued ‘for the greater economic good’ of a nation.
But remember, the greater good (wrong or right), is for the human population only.
Some, already embedded in the culture of legislation as the route to enlightenment, wish to enforce the Rights of Nature by legally framing wild populations, animals, nay entire mountains, rivers and mountains, as either persons or entities with single identity. These identities can then protected against other humans who want to exploit them. They are supposed to deter, but we know how this usually works. An infringement is made purposefully and then tested through the courts. This is an expensive process, and if you have enough funds, you can generally guarantee a win by appealing until you break the financial strength of the opposition. It’s a lawyer’s game, with cryptic language and a copper-bottom fee structure. Asserting rights for us or our wild communities just means a fight in court, at great expense, and against fundamentally capitalist levers channelled through 300 years of common law.
Quite frankly, I can’t see this as radical in any way. I can’t even see a funding pot as radical. Nothing fundamentally changes beyond the idea that the ‘playing field’ is somewhat levelled. But it’s still a ‘playing field’, a game, which doesn’t include the key witnesses in need. Intensely political appointments, clever lawyers smoothly cultivated from a certain educated class (the way of the neoliberal University), judge bias… there’s no real change here.
Truer meaning comes from nurturing a depth of timeless responsibility. I’m going to try to claim this back off the right-wingers.
Both ordinated rights from on high and impulsive freedoms mirror the strict parent and a rebellious teen. The whole thing lacks maturity. This has been hijacked by the ‘Right’ in the political sphere, where regulation is seen as a bind on the ‘self,’ weaponised by the left to infringe upon the freedoms of all and particularly restricting on the financially ambitious.
But a libertarian nature of responsibility is not confined to the ultra-conservatives at all in Western political theory. As well as full-on libertarian anarchy, there is Bookchin’s Communalism; a form of social ecology, whereby smaller bioregions form smaller democratic face-to-face forums, which then co-operate under a greater administrative federation in order to maintain peace. And it is here where my own persuasions lay right now, with a little bit extra ~ the acceptance of the ethic of fluminism underpinning all decision making.
An ecoliterate population mentors its descendants in the carrying a shared load, this charge being the active proliferation of an abundant and diverse biosphere. Humans are psychologically evolved to act through innate moralities, a heady blend of rationale and emotion. They are of course shaped by culture and experience and closer attachment generally means higher moral imperative.
This is why fluminism needs to be at the heart of communalism, because as humans become more emotionally aware and physically immersed in symbiotic processes, and attached to all beings devoted to those processes, mutual love brings our ‘being’ close to the same process, the same purpose. And with it, wellbeing. The interconnections bristle.
Self respect, individually and collectively, embraces the weight of fluministic obligation, and finds the joy in devotion. To proliferate the flow of life (as a fluminist), means the rewards are great and mutualistic between all species, and in multiple directions. Block the flows at the collective’s peril. Block the flows for generations and we humans take the majority of known living systems with us into oblivion.
Legal rights generally prescribe things, not explain in depth the understanding why. It may be easy to sell to the young under a banner, “Freedom!” but it might as well read “Entitlement!” But life involves a toughness too, extending oneself beyond comfort zones, realising we are not so entitled because there is a limit to freedom when it begins to harm others. Making the effort to contribute to community (including non-human), despite all our personal issues and problems is an act beyond entitlement. It is self respect and respect of community. Love comes back in droves, whilst responsibility and truth come together ~ the reality of a functioning biosphere.
A court of law is full tricks and traps, an adversarial system designed to be fairly hostile, and Nation states do generally uphold capitalist or wealth accumulating ideals through it. Instead, via a system of responsibility and co-operation, we may go back to humble ways of living in and as part of nature. The closeness of community means that rogue behaviours are more quickly spotted and curtailed by local consensus. Morality is also about visibility. Further, we can take the strain when others are unable, an ethic of care that doesn’t necessarily require us to know all the individuals concerned intimately, but close enough knowing all are interconnected in our one biosphere.
Indigenous law generally tends towards “take only what you need and leave the rest,” as do the birds, the trees, and most other species. Produce food, clothes, tools and shelters that are crafted well the first time, and are easily prepared and repaired. Create methods of ‘harvest’ that respect each ‘world’ of being. And instead of framing nature as external ‘resource’, something separate to use, form close relationships with these ‘worlds’ as kin, organic and even the inorganic. Kinship being “we of them”, not the other way around. To make them human brethren is simply more of the same Anthropocentrism.
Therein lies responsibility to them.
In this way, the law is a living thing, a dasein-daily, which can be taught and improved down through generations and within planetary limits. And without having to pay lawyers to translate. Let us now adopt our own kind of indigenous or adopted endemism way of being. Without full cultural appropriation, we can freely adopt these basic key tenets without seeking the consent of anyone. No lawyers, no politically appointed judges, no politicians/police-itians. In doing so we are being truly radical, rebelling against the current paradigm and not simply playing the same game.
I’ll end by posting a wiki link to information about an indigenous Andean ethic called Ayni. I wish I knew about this years ago. There are other resources available on this ancient tribal way of life, and plenty of NGOs seem to be involved in protecting the people and their culture, particularly of the Q’eros community (a living form of communalism) to varying degrees of sucess. The wiki entry, none-the-less, seems to be a good introduction.
In summary, we can love, be mutualistic, learn, know and remember, work and preserve life ~ form our own bioregional forms of Ayni. We can adopt, once again, communal lands and waters, with no separation between what is human and non-human. We can reciprocate/extend mutualism, but with love, towards each other and all other life. We can look out especially for the vulnerable and sick.
And quite beautifully, as the people of Q’eros have said, we can lift each other and all life ‘up’ to equal height.
Green Space: Light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495–570 nm permeating a void. How could such a phrase be used so frequently, so poorly, to represent complex places of varied natural living process?
The universe is full of space. If life-relations are broken-dead, then all you have is space.
Such banality fails to articulate the interconnectedness of life, fails to inspire us to engage and participate in the power of interconnected living systems, anywhere.
It’s OK to be less generalist when talking about public places. Ornamental “parks” and “gardens” are where humans curate all, but when it comes to free and wild processes, be distinct, honour them with a name.
So in keeping with my work on Kinnages, I offer an alternative word, Kinnaria, to describe the koinonia or kin-gathering in the nagorasphere, where all is exchangeable in between those human harder edges. And for all people.
Kin (family) aria (originally ‘ary’ ~ contributing to, for the purpose of).
Kinnaria ~ for the purpose of kindom.
In the best of times, these too are interconnected. See them on a map, better, experienced in loops around your towns and cities; better still, weaving through and around our kinnages.
Life’s flow of the microbiome, breath, the spores, cells, fluids, chemical signals, speech, song. So many directions. Complexity. Diversity. The Nagorasphere.
These sacred, rich places are where our own species act less as stewards but community-willed participants alongside all kin in that unique locale in this universe; climate, orientation, wetness, microbes, nanobes, land swell, soils.
Here, we see nature as a community, affecting the viscera (symnexia), the deepest possible respect for natural processes (praximund), and a fundamental requisite of fluminism. Here, all life finds leverage, traction, devotion.
We realise our immanence in these places, as may all species who wish to freely be there.
My daughter also came up with something beautiful and simple.
Credit: WYLD ~ coined by Gracie-Anne Battson.
Addendum
In Burmese mythology, four of the Buddha’s past animal lives are “kinnara”. The symbol of the Karenni people is the kinnara and the kinnari, half bird half human, and symbolic of true love.
Thank you for the invite via Twitter to write to you further on egalitarian ecoliteracy.
Now the latest IPCC report has been published, still erring on the conservative side yet relentless in its call for urgent action, I hope beyond measure you will advocate providing ALL Welsh children and adult learners with the ecological systems and environmental knowledge/settings they truly require.
Equipping each and everyone for the rapid changes now, and the volatile future science predicts ahead of us, is the best gift we can bestow and a collective necessity in Wales under the WFG and Environment Acts.
And more. It’s our generational responsibility.
Here is my appeal, written for the Wildlife Trusts blog back in 2015, more urgent now than ever.
I ask you to consider setting things in motion to introduce this transformational pedagogy. We will need to mentor the mentors.
I look forward to hearing your response.
Yours very sincerely
Ginny Battson
(Previously Brecon & Radnor, now Cardiff West)
Today, I transfer my website to one powered by green energy and with no adverts. Please follow this link and you will be very welcome! Thank you so much for your continued support. With fluministic love, Ginny x
“These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.” —Anton Chekhov, A Day in the Country.
I have been watching old man heron on the Glamorgan Canal, of late. And a dainty little egret at Llandaff Weir. Their organic curves and soft feathers lull me into their lives. I long to communicate with them, if only by brief mutual gaze.
I try to imagine being Ardean; hollow-bone legs feeling the bite of cold in the shallows, and my neck long and lythe. I extend my wings and feel a sharp lift from a northerly breeze, whilst peering deep, with one eye, into a shadow I cast. If there is a silver flash in the black, I will tuck-in my wings, slowly extend my neck until my bill is stock-still for the kill.
A heron’s life may at first seem pragmatic, embracing hunting with a quiet determined grip. Lauded by old masters of our economic system founded on the protestant work ethic, pragmatism is the hard work upon only what is known, the empirical only, a practical boundary to action. That is, until, something better comes along. But from where does this ‘better’ come from? And then we have to shift. Are we ready?
Pragmatism. I hear it from many science-oriented souls. This or that goal is to be achieved only by what is known to them, rather than by what could be. Such a limiting view of what it means to be alive.
Look again at heron and little egret. They are searching, looking for something better in the deep flow of life. Today, I will overestimate heron and little egret. And here’s why.
They aim high for their catch. Always. And higher still. This is not rooted in pragmatism, but in patience as beyond-perspective.
“If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him … we promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists, in a way — because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.”
In the rain below the weir, little egret finds her own pattern in the chaos. She’s perfect. Her white chest feathers ripple to the volatile air whilst she prowls around, looking for a meal. She’s a carnivore of the shallows, of molluscs, small fry and rock-borne insect life. In the lee of this cacophany of liquid weight, she’s light on her stilt-legs across rocks and recovering foamy streamers flowing south. Heron has his skills. But she is quicker. I rapture in adaptations ~ they require imagination and foresight.
This way, that way. The flow of the water. The ruffle of a breeze. Slip-rocks, and deep pools.
She has her own beat as time whirls around her. I am captivated by her simple strategy. In order to catch fresh food, her patience is dynamic. She uses her bill to its fullest, all the senses available to her right now through to the beak-end and its alignment to potential or actual prey. It is her knowing of body to perfection. It is her niche and she lives it, dasein-daily. (Heidegger)
“From a sensory ecology perspective a bird is best characterized as “a bill guided by an eye.” (GR Martin 2017).
At the weir, there’s a dialectic underway. There’s cacophony and whisper, the smash of a river rolling over man-made edifice and then, little streams pulsing through rocks to shingle hemlines around willow islands. There are plastic sheets and childrens cars and balls and other city objects tangled in the wash-through. Tweavelets weave monofilaments of polymers as well as duff. We leave our marks in anti-fluministic ways. And yet little egret is fluministic in her devotion. Her binocular eyes are wide open, and key is alignment to a potential, the beak and beyond, like a snooker player staring down a fine-crafted cue to an imaginary, glinting ball ready for a pocket.
She is patient. Patience is a verb. It is not incapacity. It is not nothing. Neither is it death. It is keeping the opposite alive. Senses are alert to the main chance not yet happened, deep in the flows ahead. The process of patience requires imagining ~ the vision of seeing in advance the potential and most efficient main chance in space and time. Imagine all the little fishes…
In the slowness of the canal, there are potential fish in the shallows old man heron can skewer with his face-spear. But he has to remember and imagine what he is looking for. He has to find the best spot to find the right fish. He’s devoted to it. Watch him! This is his dasein-daily, a primal nature of ‘being’, simultaneously engaging with this world. After a while, it’s time to move on and he seeks to fly upstream to a better spot (with such elegance). How do better things come, were it not for this vision inside his head for a better spot, and a compulsion to fly there, freely? He imagines what he is looking for ~ all the little fishes ~ then goes to find them. It is an essential part of his act of patience in survival.
Patience is not simply the ability to wait. One has to be observant, present. It requires memory and imagination. It requires beyond-perspective. There are multiple things going on. Patience can even be endurance, a painful dasein-daily, for a richer state of being in the longer run (pati – latin, to suffer). If we are never tested, how do we know ourselves fully? Right now, heron and little egret own a deliberate sense of expansive perspective on the scale of things in life. Hunting fish is patientism- what I do now has consequences – I am fed and the fish is dead. The efforts may pay off in results, a full belly. But I am also patient in observation, presence and hunger; a virtue, but with great reward (given abundance due to me). Heron and little egret are applying themselves, in duty and with hope, within and without, to the ever dynamic flow of interconnected life.
So, no thank you. In being always pragmatic is to always compromise (in consequence and in virtue). To always compromise is to lower expectations. Sometimes, compromise is no where near enough. One needs to raise the game to beyond-perspective. Like the heron and little egret.
That patience is beyond-perspective.
That patience is not waiting idly, but putting phenomena into beyond-perspective.
That beyond-perspective becomes a state of daily-dasein.
Potential obstacles can be the instrument of action (the bill, the beak).
That heron is patient in stealth.
That little egret is patient in dynamism. She adapts to her own beat.
That humans may learn from ardean patientism.
Humans may learn from ardean patientism ~ be ready to the fullest in the river, to strike for that main chance. Look for better, fuller, abundant places to be present. Aim for a great deal more than the limitations of pragmatism. Even in the smallest of things.
Pope Gregory the Great expressed patience as the guardian of all virtues. We might consider that in our anxiety to complete goals, we forget about this valuable point of view. Ecologism, fluminism, cultivation of love in space/time means the integral beyond-perspective required in being patient. Think big.
The dialectic is there too, yes, setting out to save what we continue to destroy, because we are a society of reaction and not of considered response. We can change this too, by being patientist. Realise that accute ardean potential within us all, primed for imagining the moment of exquisite action in the flow of all life. Patientism.
You must be logged in to post a comment.