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”.

~~~

♒︎      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 a harshness about that and it is difficult. Folded up and inwards, down and outwards, the estuary is adulterated by human fear; often the thing that drives that ambition; to have money and to succeed, and not be poor and to have failed.

Fear has become my own greatest fear. The anxiety of those fears destroying me has sat with me for a very long time, a toxic little friend. Sometimes I feel I’d be lost without her pinchy grip on my jugular veins or kidneys. Despite the breath-crunching suffering it causes, I know that fear is also a vital emotion driving ecological processes. In predator/prey relationships, this intense emotion keeps the death tolls in check and encourages growth via avoidance. There are moments of dispersal, life and death decisions shaped by distress, such as perturbation, the anxiety of parenting, the dread of dehydration. Fear is a dynamic force, particularly as it infects an entire human culture or a Nation. The flow of it is complex and non-linear, encircling in more obvious traits crossing over with hatred, insecurity, and control—racism, homophobia, domestic violence, murder, war—but also the forms of habits and careers that can be pernicious and Earth destroying. As for a fear of death itself, we don’t know for sure whether other life forms experience it, but I’m going to hazard an easy guess—yes. Humans evolved fear largely shaped by predators and foe (we can observe it in our limbic fight or flight responses) but in modern life, where many of the predators are now wiped out, we cultivate it in order to justify our vestigial biochemical responses. Humans have substituted the predators with many things, not least a fear of not having cash, cashcards, cheques. These are the things that buy us food, clothes and shelter; the bread and butter of the banking sector, but the grand exploiters are ever-present, seizing opportunity, reaching through the media, advertising, and marketing bureaus, and dwelling at the very edges of the Law.

Deus ex machina, Latin for ‘god from the machine,’ is a term derived from ancient Greek theatre. In tragedy and sometimes in comedy, to miraculously resolve a dramatic plot corner or catastrophe, actors who played gods were carried onto the stage using some kind of machine. The machine could be either a winch, like a crane, to lower bodies from above, or some kind of lift to bring them up into vision through a trapdoor. Playwrights like Aeschylus and Euripides fashioned them as devices to wow, to draw a crowd, to evoke a feeling of awe and moral surrender to the idea of some greater power. And men still do it, with their grand openings of giant bridges and launches of ships and Space rockets, except this time the power is more honest and blunt ~ a self-aggrandisement of the human money-chain, domination of land, air, sea, and now space, the techno-brain, Western capital power labelled as “investment” and engineering prowess. There’s no masking anymore, no suspended disbelief. First, there must be the desire for something spectacular to resolve our plot corner or catastrophe – humans have been wired to find exhilaration in novelty—and these men meet that demand. They exploit for their own agendas, political expediency and money—it is usually both. Exquisitely controlled, it’s an assertion of the power that was once the domain of the gods, and we are all still buying in. But it’s a plot flaw, a device to replace the real work needed for life’s genuine resolutions, not least the peaceful and loving alignment of human life within all living systems. To do it often means overcoming many of our fears. Deus ex machina side-steps the need. It’s is an easy “out,” distracting when doom looms closer, where the long haul to resolution is seemingly short-circuited. There will always be a price to pay after the curtain call, and it’s usually borne by the vulnerable and voiceless.

Capital: what started as a headcount of steer has transcended into an extinction event. In a currency-based economy, we all need money. How do we get it? Most of our energy is now directed towards it. And quite spectacularly, one of our most common fears emerges – poverty. Poverty is almost a complete loss of control, a subservience to survival. Basic needs are unmet, and reliance on the goodwill of others is the only way to get through. I’ve been through it myself in sharp shocks, but the enduring poverty of an entire lifetime is something I can only imagine. In early human civilisations (around 10000 BC), once a few chieftains cottoned-on that commodity and later representative money can hold much power over creditors (Graeber), there unleashed a beast of finding new ways to accumulate it. Money can buy war, land, water, soils, families. It buys motorways and bridges. It destroys and pollutes fragile bodies and communities of flowing bodies. It can grow itself in the form of interest, or as collateral given in advance on bricks and mortar. It can earn an income in working for the machine of making money, and in dividends from consumptive companies and in their burning of energy.

In a currency economy, those with money strive to protect it, for the fear of losing it. Those without it, well, this shapes things. It manifests loss, ill-health, and despair. Poverty is traumatic, and an enemy of the biosphere because it calls for desperate measures. Fear of poverty is perhaps its truer enemy; power and physical structures built around the promises of its avoidance. In reality, these are structures organised by an elite are where trust and ecologies break down to dust. We can try to distribute money fairly, but the lure of the shiny heap of gold—or the digital bank account or cryptocurrencies, properties, vehicles, and infrastructures— keeps setting the planet up for a fall.

Production of objects for sale in exchange for capital means waste. It’s all discarded here, hidden in the estuary, flushed out from the land where human fears to the north, east, and south gather in suspension and dissolution, along with heavy metals, plastics, oil and anthropogenic chemicals, to travel out to sea and be buried. What lives and their lovers pay the toll? Scarce creatures who cling to ephemeral subtidal sandbanks—snails, worms, shrimps, and bivalves—violently displaced by dredging barges; the rare twaite shad, along with millions of other organisms, sucked into intake pipes of Oldbury Nuclear Power Station and spat out like rubbish, birds drowned in slicks of oil drifting out of Portberry Dock… and all those at the end of a gun barrel. There is some good from Capitalism, but for another system that might have also produced the same things. There is even creativity and innovation in widening market niches, and in breakthroughs in medical science and global communication, depending on the moralities of the leadership of the organisations. But it has also incubated a culture where the wolves of Wall Street are idols, where the richest 1% own 45% of the world’s entire wealth, and where debt, poverty and trauma are taken for granted as a human cost. Global-inequality, catastrophic biospheric change (the ultimate cost), the Capitalist extremes and the neoliberal power with a vice-like grip on governments and economies. Capitalism cannot fix what Capitalism wrought. The effects of this truly invasive alien body here in this tidal rip ~ poverty and the fear of it ~ are not so visible but they are ingrained.

Here at Beachley, at the mouth of the Wye, where the heavy tides bulge and shrink with lightning speed around the peninsula to the Severn Estuary, the second-highest tidal range on Planet Earth, you’ll also find The First Battalion The Rifles, just returned from Afghanistan. I hear them firing their practice rounds over land evicted from its community of villagers, trees and wilder paddocks over one hundred years ago and never returned, a war requisition to build a shipyard that never produced a ship. The failed National Shipyard trio included Chepstow just across the Wye, and Portberry, now one of Britain’s biggest hubs for the international trade in cars.

As a species (disparities aside just for one moment), we produce engines to run machines that do the heavy work, like we produce guns to do the worst of our bidding when we feel threatened or seek to control. What’s more, a new movement has squeezed through the gaps, one to give accent to “progress” – an industrial aesthetic validation for new materials forged from engineered combinations of the old. It began with early Modernism and still goes, perhaps heralded no less by architects Richard and Su Rogers and their ‘honest’ mechanical, inside-out building, the Pompidou Centre, Paris. Juxtaposed is to recall a false nostalgia, a falstalgia, would we so easily fall into the trap of the “picturesque,” especially in relation to rivers since Gilpin published his “Observations on the River Wye.” Those mellow tones still play widely with our ideas of what is framed and beautiful.  Smoothed by an artist’s brush or the slow shutter speed of a camera, don’t fall for this either; imprints upon our shortbread tin minds and enamelled paradise gardens. This is not what life is.

Spread over these overworked British Isles, then exported through the brutalities of Colonialism, our ancestors have enslaved ecologies to a point that they are subservient to the whole human experiment and in a plummeting order of worth. If individual wild lives were valued as a social class, they would be the third or the fourth, or perhaps even lower. There is no real levelling, apart from those who might grant them membership of the Human Club with similar Rights under the jurisdiction of the higher justice of the Courts of the land. This is the prevalence of our dominion. It really is extreme. Would valuing them with personhood belittle their identity-in-difference, their better sense of wisdom and beauty through vast interconnectedness, the spectrum of their senses, some of which we’ll never fully comprehend? Are they as themselves never enough? Or will our culture always take pride in the conquests, so there’s little choice but to label them as persons if we want to save their lives?

Meanwhile, the intense manicuring, agricultural maximisation, and giant road and rail stuper-structures also tap into our species-vanity, jets and rockets selling the idea of winning and losing. Fear of failure still lurks powerfully in the shape and skin of the land and water, and the causes and effects that bring about an intrusion into the flow, then several intrusions, and finally a broken ecological flow dwindling to dust or flood. It is the same human fear that builds power among the many and discards the vulnerable, oppresses old ways of knowing, and breaks the spirit leaving the biosphere in a hyper-tide of trauma.

Like a passenger plane crashed into the jungle, or a ship sunk in the ocean, the trauma is here right now in the estuary, perhaps overrun by roots and holdfasts and tendrils, a reef-like sanctuary of sorts for the animals that live in the shadows. But the wreckage is also a poison, with its paints and oils; an unwarranted picturesque artwork, bleeding its mythology into an ancient ecology. These are the sunken coal barges, the car ferries, the timber ships, The Brunswick, Ramses II, The BP Explorer, and a Victorian railway bridge demolished by deathly collisions in a place that is so turbulent and dangerous, yet full of life and those trying to love, even under a slick of oil. At the same time, this is also a place where old bones and magnificent auroch horns still dwell, trapped with split oak planks and mussel middens of long-dead ancestors. Even the footprints of Mesolithic human children still just appear at the lowest tides, real and tangible to those lives where murk is the ticket to life. Up here on the bridge, we don’t have to face any of it. We can cruise along at speed thinking about our busy lives and where we are going today, glimpsing the sparkle of the setting sun on the horizon, unaware, unconcerned, of what lies beneath. As if 14 metres of tidal rip, and all the junk and the heavy metals drained from the land—Cd, Cr, Ni, Zn and Pb—have no bearing on us and our daily lives. Enter, giant burnished silver bristle worms, filamented, glowing white heat in the sub-mud, articulating their armour in little, sudden jerks. Lead sabellaria worms the size of cranes harden to each rising tide, sucking in plastic, spitting out fire. Nickel prawns the size of men pop up from the vast trap doors to dance for bronze two-ton gobies; automaton puppets. The separation from reality—that suspended disbelief—becomes horrific, and the “jumpers”, by whatever turmoil tears through their minds, make an assumption that stepping from the bridge is the end of it. Broken bodies, broken minds, the troll of this bridge is in the myths of industrial Capitalism.

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 own species. This is not exclusively a human trait. It is a feeling that needs to be nurtured and grown in resistance to individualistic Western culture and is a pre-requisite for survival – not simply of our own species but of all life as we know it.

What it means to be alive may be expressed in kindships, mental and emotional healing being an important bi-product. Mutualism is a symbiotic reference that exists as a word to describe equality of flow between two beings, commensurable benefits to both organisms involved. Reciprocity is another keyword applied to the human-nature accord to describe the process (Wall Kimmerer). Altruism is a word to describe the actions that may come at some cost to one being for the benefit of the recipient. Each term is used, to a large degree, in human sociologies only (e.g. Mutualism and Proudhon, et al).

Fluminism as an ethic of love and ecology is mutualistic but also altruistic to all living beings. Here, I create a simple extended term that is more specifically dedicated to altruistic actions of love and care towards teresapien lives which may involve interacting with both organic and inorganic materials to that end.

Naltruism

N is for nature

Alter- latin for the “other” of the two

Ism – English for practice, system, doctrine, teaching of a thing.

Examples vary between small acts of love, care and generosity, wildlife, pet, and livestock support and rescue, children missing school to “strike for climate” relating to species extinction, dedicating human space to wildlife in housing and commercial properties, using fewer minerals so shutting down ecosystem-destroying open cast mines, using less electricity (use beyond well-being), to full locaceding of land and sea for Rewilding, refugia and migration. Some may consider it a privileged position, but I would contend those ancient cultures still living close to nature already do it on a daily basis. This is not the same as sacrifice and is a voluntary practice or responsibility.

Altruism for fellow humans under duress continues to be an important and significant force for good.

I usually and deliberately use the term “Nature” and root suffixes to include both organic and inorganic. So I am using the suffix letter “n” as I did in creating nagorasphere.

“Nal” also happens to be a suffix relating to “belonging” e.g. maternal, paternal.