Seasonalight

Author: Ginny Battson

  • Risk Imagining

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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 Conservative Prime Minister via the facade of a Queen’s Speech on the banks of the Thames recently you would never have guessed. Westminster, none-the-less, will experience changes too. Just give it a while.

    Non-human life is already adapting to the first subtleties of climate change. And there are people already bearing witness, science graduates observing ecological adaptations in upland rivers, or sharply, farmers desperate to save crops on the flooded low plains of Bangladesh.

    Rich or poor, all will eventually perceive the impacts of climate change, if not all the pain.
    There is little inter-generational justice if we refrain from acting.

    Politics sees no further than the next election of course. Civic consensus is still gripped by the fear of national debt, stuck in the vagaries of last century’s stop-go consumerism. In response, they offer NOTHING new.

    Simultaneously, the climate forecasters have an angry dog of change on a shorter lead. They are predicting the changes will be rapid.

    In the next 50 years or so, there will be global consequences for this lack of NEWNESS. Water will either be short or in excess, food will be patented and there will be migrations from dry zones to wet. National borders will stretch beyond form.

    Do non-entities that will exist in future have rights now? We could argue on as to whether they do or don’t but we are no longer considering descendents with no faces. Instead, we are to consider our own children who’s faces we know intimately, each smile, tear and blink.

    And each child has a right to flourish.

    Shall our children inherit a worthwhile future? What are the consequences of no action, business as usual, deal-making with the fossil fuel lobby? Imagine. Imagine the instances of hardship which our children will face if we do nothing. Imagine their lives if we do.

    In Western culture, imagination is often associated with fiction. Fiction does not occur in the real. Fiction is a genre. We read fictional books, fictional accounts on TV, plays and film. Creative license applies, historic inaccuracies are excused. We suspend our disbelief because there will be few consequences. We may learn lines of a play, enact the parts, follow a plot to resolution yet it is (mostly) others who determine outcomes. Good fiction can connect emotionally and intellectually yet, still, we generally treat it as disposable. We return to the norm, to evidence-proven existence.
    Perhaps we have become complacent.

    In confusing imagination for disposable fiction, we may be resisting what is most important of all. Imagination can be the narrative of morality and stories can teach us to empathise, both powerful mechanisms for change. Imagination can bring us to a wealth of possibilities. Radicalism. We can re-imagine a better world where we live in harmony with each other and all other life, to flourish yet not exceed our planetary boundaries.

    To imagine and communicate those visions with creativity is to allow space and time in which ideas may flow and which may consequently become a positive reality.

    Let us not accept blindly the impotent reality of what’s put to us by the few; no action, business as usual, deal-making. If we engage with our own imagination, we can share our visions and transform them into goals. Few goals are more worthy than seeing our children flourish. Risk imagining.

  • CELEBRATING THE COMMON SPECIES ~ HERB ROBERT

    CELEBRATING THE COMMON SPECIES ~ HERB ROBERT

     

    Geranium robertianum ~ click the photo for more information…

  • Brutalitarian Stupidity

    “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 alter it, even in the smallest measure, is to us a necessary condition of any enjoyment at all” ~ Henry S. Salt, from Killing for Sport

  • Brave swallows

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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 St Helier to a particularly cloudy Weymouth. About mid-journey, mid April, as I leaned on the portside railings to brace myself from high winds, I noticed we had just passed a small sailing yacht also bearing north, bobbing in and out of a medium swell. Just above the inky water, between the two moving vessels, I glimpsed a pair of small dark birds, wing tip to wing tip, flying faster than the yacht and slower than the ferry.

    Their flight style, recorded deep in my childish memories of common land and sweet hay meadows, gave their instance away as “barn swallows”, regardless of the unfamiliar backdrop. They were perhaps a little seasonally late in their Northward ventures over crested waves.Their usual glossy feathers were dulled, I imagined, by red Saharan dust.

    Breathtaking.

    Here were two seemingly fragile passerines determined to cross yet another vast stretch of water, with tiny beating hearts and a heritable timing for their arrival somewhere on British terra firma to nest. I was mesmerized, so happy, but my failing eyesight tracked them for only a minute before losing them as we ploughed on towards Portland rock. I’m unsure anyone else on deck noticed them. Maybe the crew on the bridge.

    Migration of whichever species, horizontally, vertically, all around Spaceship Earth, fills me with Carson’s “sense of wonder” and beyond, with empathy and concern for our fellow time travelers . Two little birds out at sea and a massive volume of life all around the planet making tracks.

    I noticed the catamaran was throwing up sea spray, which the wind spun into webs by the ton, drifting across the swallows’ path. One of the many unexpected hazards they face. I hoped they coped.

    Hope as the plasticity of the mind, the flip side of fear, is all I have.

    Much later, by the time I reached home in the Welsh Borders, a few Southern African swallows had already completed their Spring journey; a stunning feat in all manner of ways. They swooped and dived, I do believe, in a “sense of wonder”. Brave swallows, with the hearts of lions.

    BTO Spring Migration

  • Celebrating the common species ~ Garden Snail

    Celebrating the common species ~ Garden Snail

    Helix aspersa ~ click the photo for more information…

  • Trees: do they have will?

    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 are guaranteed them. A wishful assumption.
    If we in the UK generally want something more in life, and have a will to achieve it, like a secure job or a relationship, a house and children, our neoliberal society encourages us to pursue, especially if success is financial. Eudaimonic ‘incentives’ are laid in front of us, like opportunities for qualifications (setting aside the noble idea of education for its own sake), grant aid for business start-ups, bank loans and additional training. We just have to be motivated enough to make use of them, no? Whenever we are knocked down, we’re encouraged to stand up, brush ourselves off and carry on. Again, we are rewarded by re-enforcement; gongs, grants, tax breaks. We are also at liberty to legally reward ourselves, of course, with City Breaks, the new sofa, a new car. Mostly these rewards are material things (some of them at the expense of trees), and failure is still largely perceived as a socially unacceptable outcome. By turning these opportunities down for whatever reason, and rejecting the conformity of aspiration, one might even be perceived as lazy or odd.

    Of course, there are other wants in life that aren’t financial, perhaps of higher moral worth. But I’ve emphasized material gains simply as we are living in an era of high consumption. Inter-species disturbance may well be the catalyst for biological change and diversity, but we humans, in our consumption demands, are still so dominant in the landscape that biological diversity is in decline.
    To return to trees, do they have wants and a will to succeed beyond simple needs? Given adequate life support, a lone tree can be grown from a fertilized seed in a laboratory under synthetic conditions. We can offer the tree what it needs to exist, as we can offer a brain dead patient. Whether it flourishes to a natural end is another matter. Trees reproducing and existing in nature, in landscape and sunlight, rely on symbiosis; partnerships with microorganisms to supply the nutrients for growth using different bacteria and yeast to succeed, moreover, to flourish.

    Unsurprisingly, I can’t make any assumption, not even wishful, that all trees in the UK are guaranteed even the most basic of their needs mainly because of direct and indirect consequences of human action, but recognize there are a good number of humans who do, at least, care.

    Do trees want for more, beyond survival? We can assume they do not wish for a decent annual income or an education for their children but I think, innately, all species want to ‘succeed’. In the case of trees, this may require them to create community, collectives of many life forms and species, not just to survive but to thrive, reproduce and live a long and enduring life. Incentives may not be relevant, no city breaks, but ‘good’ soils, carbon dioxide, oxygen to roots in varying degrees, unpolluted water and the unrestricted ability to photosynthesize, respire and transpire. These are commonalities required by trees to exist in a more resilient, natural state, therefore, to flourish and reproduce via pollination and seed distribution, to be self determining. Trees lock in carbon and other elements as they grow, and then release via degeneration. Trees shed limbs, needles, leaves. If humans do not remove them, these become part of the cycles of life, in decomposition, regeneration and the perpetuation of healthy, living soils and therefore resilience to biological attack.

    Of course trees need ‘place’. The size of woodland may once have been limited by climate, hydrology, altitude, coast and so on. High rates of human intervention have accelerated these factors (even altitude if you consider mountaintop mining), and imposed the development of farmland, utility forestry, transport infrastructure and urbanity. Resulting fragmentation, island bio-geography and edge effects change the very nature of living woodland community, and consequently what it is to be a tree. Mono-cultured stands are more vulnerable to pest and disease, without further human interventions like spraying pesticides and herbicides, although not exclusively. Indigenous trees in collectives may also offer some protection from windfall, fire and climatic change, and in the past with pre-industrial mammalian destruction. We see many lone trees around cities, fields and hedgerows of course, planted or selected for our utilitarian needs, at least with access to some of the most basic essential life support, whether or not they flourish. They may be less likely to reproduce naturally, however. A sociable tree may be the healthiest tree.

    Many humans, I think, are aware of at least some of the needs of individual trees. Further, if a familiar tree should die, we may grieve for a short while, but only for its passing from the landscape of our own lives, not necessarily for its own sake. Some may consider trees are not conscious, they feel no pain. They are natural architecture, landmarks in our minds, but sacrificial for our utility. Can we be absolutely sure they are nothing more than living structure?

    Everyday, scientists solve more puzzles. For instance, trees may not feel pain as we do, using a central nervous system like ours, but are able to sense vibration, oncoming rain and gravitational orientation. We didn’t know these things a hundred years ago. Many questions remain unanswered. A fertilized seed will sprout given basic prerequisites and seek to root. There are signs that trees have a will to self-heal, recover, regenerate and adapt to a changing environment. Research in hormones, i.e. jasmonates, are key to signalling morphological changes in plant cells, such as dwarfism, and through natural selection, like species spinescence, in response to environmental conditions or ‘stressors.’ A tree can generate new limbs, should others fail. New life can even spring from a fallen tree crown, phoenix generation could be the ultimate evidence of ‘will.’

    So, to me, trees do have a will to survive, reproduce, moreover to flourish. Grub out a forest, stop burning heathland, knock down a building and watch the regeneration in action. To me, primary and secondary succession are all pointers to a will for life. Aren’t there recognizable similarities here between the will of a pioneer tree and the will of a person?

    To lead a full life, to flourish and reproduce, are just a few of the basic things we humans value about life. You could say we are genetically coded and socially primed to do so. One could say the same of trees.

    I would not yet call for the rights of trees as persons. We too are nature, and have needs to survive and reproduce, moreover to flourish and this may involve killing trees before they live a long and productive life. However, just because trees cannot run away from a wielded axe, we shouldn’t treat them simply as disposable assets for excessive luxury, or woodlands as dispensable in the face of economic downturn. Trees of course are beneficial to humans as they are to many other species, and some benefits will be reciprocal. They are self determining living species. We need to remember this in our individual and collective relationship with them and in our decision making or utility of them.

    For more on habitat fragmentation, please see Trees For Life… Image

  • Seekers

    “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 in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”
    ― Peter Matthiessen

  • River Days

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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, wild swims in a seemingly perfect halcyonic existence.

    We look forward to natural abundance, to the lime green glow beneath overarching alders, and to finding our feet on slick pebbles through a cool, shallow flow.

    There will be the buzz of Dipper and Kingfisher wings. There will be Beautiful Demoiselles alighting on sedges. We’ll hug each other whilst balancing on fallen trees laying across the stream.

    Dreams based on memory feed the imagination of what is possible.
    Whether via pictorial or descriptive representation, through any or all of the senses, to imagine is as important to possibility as it is to dream.

  • The Heart

    “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

  • Thought r-evolution

    ImageMortimers 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, it’s still resisted by extreme religious quarters. Science continues to shine new light on inter-species connectivity through genetics, paleontology and so on.  But I think the general public, including many of our politicians, seem not to have yet processed the psychological and moral implications of this crucial step in eroding any notion that we are somehow separate and above all other life.

    Some of us may have an explicit understanding of the current imbalances of our relationship with nature. Climate change and biodiversity decline, the twin flames of human/nature discordance, are impacting nearly all aspects of life, all places on the planet and motivating modern environmentalism. Earth’s planetary boundaries are being exceeded, and at some pace. We are in debt to nature and there will be consequences if we do not grasp the urgency of rethinking our self-centredness. There needs to be a shift away from human selfishness to selflessness in political, social and moral frameworks.

    Ecological thinking

    Ernst Haeckel first used the word ecology to define human knowledge of inter-species relationships and processes. Early studies focused on non-human life/habitats for the purpose of refining our knowledge of nature rather than for discovering increased human/nature harmony in ecosystems. Ecology itself has evolved, of course, to encompass human interactions and impacts. Rightly so, as our large and growing global population was evidently changing many of the ecosystems studied. The language of ‘ecology’ has evolved again, by philosophical thinkers like Mark J Smith, for instance, who in his book ‘Ecologism: Towards Ecological Citizenship’ (1998) urges ecological thinking as an emancipating philosophy, an act of rethinking our approach to ecosystems and our place within them.

    Anthropocentrism

    Where has this idea of humans as central come from? Have we simply won ‘the competition’, is it an inherent selfishness rooted in the survival instinct? Archeological studies suggest quite the opposite, that early human success was in some way down to collective unselfishness and a spiritual regard for the power or ‘magic’ of nature. Remnants of prehistoric and indigenous cultures are still able to show us these strands of this compassion and fortitude.

    Keith Thomas laid the origin of human-centredness, or the anthropocentric value system, on Christan Biblical teachings, developing Lynn White’s earlier emphasis on the role of Judeo-Christianity in the human/nature schism. In his fascinating book, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800, he argues that many of these religious texts assume humans as central to ‘Creation’, at the top of the hierarchical food chain, therefore giving license to an ethical foundation in which all natural things are part of a Divine plan by God to serve us. Human progress could be justified by our differences with ‘less superior’ life. However, as both he and Robin Attfield have suggested, Biblical text can also encourage a respect for nature, a nurturing rather than exploitative ethic, or stewardship. Attfield also finds this problematic, as I do. Religious stewards are answerable only to God should they fail. Thomas goes on to say, however, the perception of nature as ‘danger’ began to fall away with the rise of natural history and the sciences.

    Perhaps another relevant view was that of Rene Descartes, often referred to as the father of modern philosophy, whose rationalist approach to the establishment of knowledge led him to value natural things as mere machines, moreover animals as only having simple impulses and reflexes with no capacity for sensation, language, rational thought and suffering. Non-human life is without our moral community. Keith Thomas argues these factors are why humans justified hunting, to domesticate, experiment, consume or destroy habitat for utilitarian purposes (e.g. mining, pasture, timber). Non-human life has no sense and no feeling so is, therefore, dispensable. Science has since revealed the contrary and continues to do so. Much of life on Earth has both sense and feeling but even today many seem not to be able to shake off these historical attitudes. Why?

    ‘There is no simple or neutral act of perception, for we see things as having value and a status. When we give things a label, we also give them a standing, a position in a pecking order, an estimate of moral worth.’ M J Smith

    Utility/Property

    Human clearance of the post ice-age wildwood and prairie mosaic was well underway before industrialization but certainly accelerated with demand in timber for shipping, trade and war together with grazing pastures to feed a booming population. In our Western Civilization, we can combine this instrumental need with John Locke’s assertions on life, limb and Property as a God given natural ‘right.’ A simple equation emerges. Natural Resources (non-human nature) + human labour = Property. It is good to aspire to own property. What property we deem useless can then be thrown back into nature. Nature, plundered, becomes our dumping ground.

    Resistance

    Crucial resistance occurred via the early protectionists; writers and artists motivated by aesthetics when witnessing a huge and rapid loss of natural environment, particularly in the US and in Britain. Individuals such as William Wordsworth and Thoreau called for a harmonious relationship with nature by humans drawing from rather than disturbing the natural order, perhaps not accounting for the fact that this ‘natural order’ had already been substantially altered by humans since the last ice-age, particularly in Britain. Aesthetics, of course, is an inherently anthropocentric view of nature, a human value which can be as misinformed and as prejudicial as any other form of extrinsic valuation. In the US, Thoreau and John Muir did challenge the values of property ownership in preserving areas from decimation as a shared commons, for the public good, but the conservationist arguments for a business-like management of natural ‘assets’ for the benefits of humans and their descendents (more anthropocentric values), championed by Gifford Pinchot in the fight over Hetch Hetchy   has prevailed in the West due it’s more comforting fit with Capitalism and private ownership of land. Preservationists were forced to give way to Conservationists as populations expanded with huge pressures forced upon land for cities and agriculture. But in the end, wasn’t Pinchot’s conservationism just a firefight against a continuing human destabilisation of the natural environment with no altered set of values which might refrain from irretrievable damage and, ultimately, self destruction?
    Other thoughtful voices were to follow of course…Leopold, Carson, and an entire academic field of study; environmental ethics, a breakaway from general moral philosophy, and I will write again on these contributions.

    Failure

    Back to today. Never more reality than now, with a continuing political preoccupation for economic growth and globalization, are we encouraged by the ones who profit to see natural things only as having value if they are of use or can be transformed into something useful. And this instrumental valuation of natural things is reenforced by Conservationists themselves now, in embracing economic valuation of Ecosystem Services (to humans) and Natural Capital as our assets.

    Quite the opposite is needed; now is the time we should be valuing natural things so that they are NOT subordinate to the consumption patterns of an economic system which, judging by the growing divide between rich and poor, is also undemocratic and unfair. Even if placed in a Common fund, which I think will be unlikely, nature as commodity would always be vulnerable to political and social abuse.

    Shift

    Enter Darwin’s discoveries to the discussion once more and we find another simple equation: All life = kin.

    To think ecologically, at the outset, lays bare the most fundamental conflicts between human beings and the rest of the natural world, moreover offering the greatest routes to resolution. Key to this will be in extending our moral community to include all life, developing a culture of ecological democracy for the benefit of all life, a new enlightenment through an educational movement. To displace ourselves as central in nature will not be an easy task but education is where it should all begin. It’s how we’ll collectively alter perceptions of nature in order to protect it, to see nature more as family once again rather than just an asset to be owned, offset and traded.

    Let’s return to Thoreau, not for his appeals based on aesthetics and spiritually, but in his call for humans to draw just enough from nature for basic needs and comforts but not to destabilize ecosystems for our luxuries in life or for what is ‘cheaper’. Recognizing the true cost/value of green technology.
    We’ll have to limit our number, not by force but by enlightenment.
    We’ll have to make concessions in our personal choices and set limits to current economic freedoms.
    We should resist commodification of nature.

    Natural Capitalists: I listen to their voices, read their justifications. They say it’s quicker, more pragmatic, to work the existing economic and political system to make nature ‘visible’ on the accounts, at least to politicians and big business. Any personal reflections on the unworthiness of anthropocentrism as a disfunctional value system are set aside by either a sense of desperation that ecological thinking is no further down the line than in 1998 when Mark Smith wrote his book or that ‘time’ is running out, entire careers are proving futile.

    Crucially however, ‘investment’ in ecological thinking, or as Mark Smith refers, ‘ecologism’, is so vital that it is absolutely beyond one person’s desperation or another’s career. To revalue nature as kin will take generations and is nothing short of revolution from contemporary neoliberal politics. Yet it’s worth the singlemindedness, beyond my lifetime, however long it takes. We can steer a course now into an ecoliterate future, across all generations and in all spheres of our culture and society.

    Who knows, change may happen sooner and the long term risks of not setting this course now are simply too high.

    For more on ecoliteracy ….