Seasonalight

Tag: words

  • The Real Threat

    Sometimes, the tragedy is in words. 

    Caroline Lucas’s latest series for “The Rest is Politics” podcast is a case in point: “When Nature becomes a Security Threat.”* 

    Perhaps it’s the “genius stereotype” or “brilliance bias” towards the Intelligence Community that is supposed to move people to act. Shock tactics? Why demonise Nature? If we are not moved by science, then threat to Nationhood ought to do it. How very Nationalistic.

    The Labour Government’s 13-page DEFRA-commissioned report upon which this series is based was published earlier this year, and apart from the drama of its Downing Street redactions and ultimate public release, researchers from MI5 and MI6 appear to have raised it on previous iterations of standard, modern, and extreme (Western) Anthropocentrism. Nature’s Contributions to People are central, acronym NCP applied (as you might imagine), and include ecosystem “services”, value = growth economy, and externalities to “Nation,” mainly, the Savannah-isation of the Amazon Rainforest and Inter-State competition for “resources.”

    Nature is not coming for anyone, and particularly the British. There is no intent. The real threat is human actions towards Nature, making it into the report as a small byline, and with no detailed critique of values and consequent behaviours.

    Our entrenched culture of mental separation from Nature deepens.

    References include quantitative measurements—taxa and tipping points (Natural History Museum), Natural Capital (The Dasgupta Review), IPBES “ecosystem services” inter-governmental agenda, and various scientific papers on exceeding Rockström’s 9 planetary “boundaries” (hint: they are not particularly separate)!

    Emphasis is on uncertainty and risk to the United Kingdom as a nation-state, threats largely “external” ~ food imports forcing dietary change, and, of course, “migration”. Risks generated by collective values and behaviours are absent, and a question largely left literally to “customers” who might use the document for legislative decision-making (but they do find moments to mention pro-growth AI, laboratory-grown meat, and insect proteins)!

    This highlights just how devoid of understanding our collective role within nature remains. Mentally separate, we are agents for catastrophic and rapid change of the complex system upon which all life depends, with ignorant cultural and social responses to those rapid changes on top.

    Again, serious discussion on values and ethics falls down the deep, deep chasm that still exists between science and politics.    

    Ethical framing matters; readers and interpreters should be aware that these conclusions ARE A CHOICE, and bad ones at that. They shape how the report is used, nudging along all the same-old corrupt and Earth-damaging e-motivators without a whiff of critical thought.

    I’m not going to critique the paper line by line here. Many of the risks it identifies have been predicted and observed for a very long time, and the geopolitical map of power now shifts too quickly for a fixed security reading to hold for long. As I say, my concern is instead with the report’s ethical foundation: treating ecological collapse chiefly as a “national security” problem, while leaving the deeper ethical questions of value, power, agency, and human separation from Nature largely untouched. Here, read it for yourself.

    Recognising barriers of language and value is only the beginning, because those barriers are sustained by power. They determine which harms become visible, which causes remain unnamed, and which responses feel politically possible. The harder question is who holds the power to define values, protect them, and turn them into collective behaviour.

    Critically, disproportionate power via capital has accumulated through markets, competition, and institutions that reward extraction. These systems protect values that shape planning laws, trade priorities, food systems, energy choices, land ownership, finance, and the distribution of risk. To remain uncritical is to intensify behaviours across anthropocentric society — extreme competition, expansionism, colonialism, and highly extractive industries among them — a continuity despite the exclamation! An endangering of all Nature, with the greatest harms falling on the most vulnerable lives and communities, locally and globally. The result is not a marginal side-effect but a widening spiral of cause and consequence, with many effects already unfolding and others still unknown.

    Recognising root causes means naming the actual structures of power and agency that shape value priorities and behaviours. A national-security frame may generate “flash” public interest, and the risks involved are numerous and serious, but it can also narrow attention towards state protection, territorial interest, and crisis management rather than the hierarchies, core values, and behaviours driving ecological collapse. The fact that evidence has been suppressed or redacted only underlines how central those hierarchies of control remain.

    Isn’t this just the expected politics of adversarial opposition? I’m afraid there are no sides, no “heroes”, no “saviours” or “leaders” who are going to singularly turn things around – these cultural ideas, particularly Eurocentric in origin, are also constructions by a minority, like Nationhood itself – a body, decapitated — to separate us from each other and the rest of Nature. 

    I’d like to see the full list of the 81 rationalist “experts” who contributed, voting and consulting through various workshops and meetings, because I suspect most of them are men, and none of them is widely versed in the broad canon that is “Environmental Ethics.”  Most of them probably still consider it “religiosity.” Blah!

    Answers are deeply interconnected, and in no way final. Human food “security” is more about localism as embodied nature than any intellectualised, separate planetary boundaries, and real change far more about inclusiveness, collective knowledge sharing (causes, effects, imagining outcomes, correcting trajectories), REAL care, and responsibility for ALL life.

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  • “You are forsaken,” say the anemones.

    “I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

    ― Henry David Thoreau

    I ought not to be writing this, because academic deadlines are looming. But I’m seeing many beautiful wildflowers coming into show. I feel compelled to make a note.

    Imagine it is still early Spring. Picture a wood anemone in flower, if you will. And now a quivering constellation of them, and an overwhelming sense of wonder when gazing at these seemingly fragile starbursts just above the field layer of a temperate woodland. A light breeze blows in from a mild front and they sparkle in the morning dew. Ah, the glory.

    “You are forsaken,” say the anemones, so penned the floriographers of the Language of Flowers. But how can I associate emotional abandonment with Anemone nemorosa? They light up my world every Spring. The Victorians must have this all wrong.

    Fast forward to May. This is the time when the opportunity for pollination is done, flowers tarnish and petals shrivel to dust. The flowers are “going over,” as we say, euphemistically. Oh, the disappointment, the grief.

    But I propose there’s nothing “over” about the incredible evolution of double fertilization in angiosperms (flowering plants). Why defuse this kind of beauty with a terminal phrase like “going over”? The essence of flower, surely, includes what happens next. It may not be so sensuous to the body, but it’s certainly a wonder to the mind. The process is nothing short of a miracle.

    We photographers, artists and writers are culpable. Maybe it’s harder to convey this kind of radiance, the consciousness of life growing in the botanical ovary. Ah, the poetry of the dainty flower, the blousy show, the sexy colours and forms that attract us almost as much as the bees themselves! I’m unconvinced we are even any good at culturally admiring our own mode of pregnancy ~ there’s a lot of goo involved, for sure.

    Wood anemones lie dormant for most of the year, spreading out slowly via rhizomes just under the surface of the humous at a rate of about 6 feet per century. I know one patch in North Herefordshire around 600 by 300 feet, so on loose calculation, these plants have been resident since the last ice-age.

    Here’s the rub. Pollination fails, often, because the plant is an obligate outcrosser ~ explored not least by Charles Darwin himself, and defining the trait for pollination from spatially widespread populations in order to successfully produce genetically resilient seed. Woodland fragmentation in the UK means this process becomes less and less likely to succeed. The creeping rhizomes secure survival of the species instead. Seeds have almost been forsaken. So, it pains me to say, perhaps the Victorians were right all along.

    (returns to study)

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  • Small things that are everything


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    A few words about words. Philosophical thinking is enhanced by a fine use of words. Clarity is an honourable goal. Yet there are still some things in nature, and the spaces in between, which are yet to be granted an English name.

    The Welsh use a wonderful word, hiraeth, which has no direct English translation. Its meaning is quite profound: Homesickness and grief for a lost time, a whistful yearning, nostalgia for a homeland which is no longer the same. Hiraeth says it all.

    No English word exists for the particular shine between wet pebbles. There’s no word for our mental well-being gained from connection to nature. Look for a single word to describe small leaf bundles snagged around riparian twigs at high flood, and you will not find one.

    Language of any kind has great value to those that use it. When I’m out along the river and I see a small leaf bundle snagged around a twig, I understand what it is and I imagine how it was formed. A long tailed-tit alights upon it, a bird so delicate in its search between the leaves for insects to eat. The small leaf bundle is of great value to the bird, and to the insects that are hiding, should they succeed in avoiding the bird! When eventually the leaves degrade and fall down into the water, float on the surface for a while before sinking, they become part of the organic material which gives life to the river. The small things are everything.

    So I’m naming this small bundle of leaves, which snags on riparian twigs during floods, a tweavelet. I hope the long-tailed tit and the insects will not mind, nor the tweavelet, for they are my kin. It’s for all of us to look for the small things that have no name. And the spaces in between. Perhaps we should give them names, for often they are everything.