The Source Articles

National Tree Week

08/09/2010

As the nights draw in and the weather turns the wetter side of drizzle, we often look forward to being cosy inside with a good book, some cocoa and toasting marshmallows over an open fire, that is unless you’re a tree planter!
Now we all know trees are good for us, good for the planet and totally essential – right? No?
Well how about a few facts then. England has one of the smallest amounts of woodlands in Europe, yet the rate of creating new woodlands here has halved in the new millennium.
We seem to have lost so much of the cultural reverence we once had for trees as cornerstones to societies wealth and research shows that 40% of 7-11 year olds have never visited a wood.
Often we can take trees for granted, but Ancient Woodland is home to more threatened species than any other habitat in the UK.
In isolation each mature individual tree in the UK is producing more than enough oxygen and sinking enough carbon for each individual’s respiratory requirements in the UK. However there are not enough trees for business and consumer needs, in fact the current biomass of UK forests only sink around 1% of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions.
So if you’re going to do your bit to save the planet, planting trees is an iconic statement, probably the best return on your energy, time and money! The thing is though – the planting season is in winter! When most of nature is hibernating and most people are trying to make time to do the same it seems crazy to go out and start digging in the rain?
Well you’d be surprised how many people do, particularly during National Tree Week, 27 November - 5 December 2010, in fact it’s so popular the week lasts for ten days! Go to the Tree Councils website for more details and find out what’s going on in your area.
Local tree expert Adam Griffin says” There are great opportunities for people to get out into some beautiful places this winter, and create something amazing that will last for generations to come”.
One local charity Moor Trees is leading the way with opportunities on Dartmoor and in South Devon to help restore healthy wooded habitats and create new native woodlands in partnership with local landowners. You can volunteer with them for free, or find opportunities with The British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, The Transition Network, the Forest of Avon Trust or Trees for Cities to name but a few others. If you do end up planting a few trees you’ll end up with a certain warm glow that no fireside can provide.
Adam Griffin
Adam Griffin is a independent environmental consultant specializing in woodlands and communities. www.adamgriffinconsultancy.co.uk

http://www.thetreecouncil.org.uk
http://www.moortrees.org
http://www2.btcv.org.uk/
http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
http://ww.forestofavon.org.uk/
http://www.treesforcities.org/

Tales from the Bristol Natural History Consortium

02/06/2010

Natural England

The South West of England is deservedly renowned for its spectacular natural beauty. From the upland moorlands of Dartmoor and Exmoor and the wet grasslands of the Somerset Levels, to the chalk rivers of Wiltshire, the rolling hills and valleys of the Cotswolds and the dramatic coastline of Devon, Cornwall and Dorset – the west country has nature at its very heart.

Natural England works across the region to conserve our wildlife and landscapes for the future. Our experts conduct research and provide advice on how to safeguard our environment. We work with farmers across the West Country to ensure they manage their land sensitively and protect it for future generations. We create protected areas - Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty like the Cotswolds, and National Parks like Exmoor and Dartmoor. We warn about species in danger of extinction and advise on how nature needs to adapt to climate change. And it’s not just on land, there are more than 20 coastal and marine protected sites in the region, around 8,000 marine species and we have just created England’s first Marine Conservation Zone at Lundy Island.

Our nature reserves are a gateway to the natural world and play an important part in ensuring we maintain the biodiversity we have in the South West. But they are also there for everyone to enjoy. Plan a day out this summer and visit one of Natural England’s nature reserves. Experience the magic of seeing wildlife in its natural habitat and discover the natural world on your doorstep. Many of the reserves hold events over the summer, from night time bat walks to beach combing - there’s something for everyone. Families will love the Wild Days Out on our Destination National Nature Reserves: Shapwick Heath in Somerset, East Dartmoor in Devon, The Lizard in Cornwall and Dorset Heaths.

Visit our stand at the festival to meet some of our wildlife experts and find out about the animals and plants we’re working to protect.

www.naturalengland.org.uk

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Bristol City Council

Bristol is one of the greenest cities in the country, with more green space than most others. It also supports a huge wealth of biodiversity – everything from rare plants in the gorge to foxes, skylarks and water voles.

Bristol City Council looks after around 50 sites that are important for wildlife. These are all great places to escape the hustle and bustle and get closer to nature. So if you fancy getting out and about, here are some ideas of places to visit.

In spring the woodlands are at their best so head for Blaise Castle Estate, Eastwood Farm and Badocks Woods to see bluebells and marvel at the dawn chorus.

If you fancy a summer stroll through wildflower meadows full of fantastic flowers and alive with butterflies; you don’t have to head for the countryside. The Downs, Brandon Hill and Ashton Court are all great places to see cowslips, oxeye daisies and a host of other wildflowers. At Ashton Court you’ll also be amazed by soaring skylarks that make the meadows their home.

You can even get closer to nature in the city centre – take a boat trip around the docks to see swans, cormorants and kingfishers.

To find out more about these, and other great places for wildlife, visit the city council’s website at www.bristol.gov.uk

Visit www.avongorge.org.uk for a great programme of walks, courses and family events on the Downs and Avon Gorge.

Get active for wildlife in your local park through www.bristolparksforum.org.uk

Plant a tree and help us reach our goal of 1000 trees planted in Bristol on www.treebristol.com

University of Bristol

Researchers at the University of Bristol investigate the range of life on earth - its biodiversity - as well as finding ways we can live sustainably with our changing environment. Fun, interactive and thought-provoking exhibits about our research will be displayed at the Festival of Nature, as well as at other events throughout the year.

At the Festival we will be hosting two tents: one about global change and the other about biodiversity. In the biodiversity tent there will an exhibit about 'alien invaders’, called leaf miners, which are attacking conker trees. Fortunately, there is a predator of the leaf miner and you can help researchers find out whether natural control is taking place. Come and visit us at the Festival or look at www.ourweboflife.org.uk.

In the global change tent you will be able to pedal off into the future to see what our climate will be like in 50, 100 or 1000 years’ time. This climate change computer model will be entirely bicycle-powered, showing how much energy is needed to run our every-day technology, and also how science can help us made predictions about the future. Researchers will be on hand to talk about their work and how it will help us live with environmental change.

The University has strengths in all sorts of different areas related to environmental change. We are drawing together all this expertise into one institute – the Cabot Institute – to bring together our knowledge in natural and engineering sciences with excellence in social science and law. The creation of this Institute will ensure that the University makes the best possible contribution to understanding and tackling climate change. Look out for the launch of the Cabot Institute in the Autumn.

www.bristol.ac.uk

Avon Wildlife Trust

House sparrows were probably the first wild creature to thrive through living close to humans. As soon as we started to grow crops and build houses they started to nest in our roof spaces, eat grains and even raid our crops. They have lived with people for more than 10,000 years. So it’s something of a shock to discover that 10 million house sparrows have disappeared from the UK in 25 years and their numbers are dwindling away in Bristol and the West Country.

Avon Wildlife Trust has launched its wild sparrows project to try to bring back house sparrows to the area. You can help by reporting your house sparrow sightings at www.wildsparrows.org.uk. House sparrows are easy birds to identify. You’ll normally see them in large groups and they like nothing more than a bit of communal chirping. Once you've heard them chirp and spotted the male house sparrows distinctive grey cap on his head, you'll be looking out for them everywhere. You can also help by putting up special sparrow nesting terraces in the eaves of your house.

But probably the best thing you can do to help is grow nasturtiums. This is because one of the main reasons for the crash is thought to be that adult house sparrows are not finding enough aphids, caterpillars and insect food to feed their babies, so that when they fledge they are not strong enough to survive. Nasturtiums are a favourite home for aphids and insects and so could be just the thing to save a threatened house sparrow colony.

You can pick up a free seedling at our marquee at the Bristol Festival of Nature. You can also look at our sparrow friendly garden and buy a sparrow nesting terrace too. See you there!

www.avonwildlifetrust.org.uk

Wildfowl and Wetland Trust

From a network of wetland visitor centres around the country, including the famous Slimbridge site near Gloucester, the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust is a leading conservation organisation dedicated to saving wetland for wildlife and people across the world. Visit our stand to discover more about projects in the UK and overseas, and find out how you can help with our work.

Could you adopt a crane and help us restore this emblematic bird to the Somerset Levels? The crane is a large bird that was widespread in this country before it went extinct 400 years ago due to wetland drainage and over-hunting. Although a small breeding population has re-established itself on the Norfolk Broads, it remains isolated and is not enough to ensure the breeding success and survival of this bird into the future. So we’re really excited about the opportunity to reintroduce it to the West Country this autumn at a secret site in the Somerset levels, which has been identified as the most suitable location in the UK. In preparation for this we’ve been raising chicks at the ‘Crane School’ at Slimbridge and teaching them to behave like birds so they can survive in the wild.

We think the best thing you can do for wildlife is to make a pond in your garden or school. We’re currently researching how important it is to having a wet place in our gardens, parks, allotments and schools, to encourage a whole range of animals and bird species. We’re asking for your help in our ‘Wildest Hide and Seek’ which runs from 21st to 31st May. Hide in your garden and record the wildlife that visits – you may even win a wildlife pond for your home or school. And if it’s too late to join the fun in May, come along to our stand at the festival and find out what else you can get involved in this year.

www.wwt.org.uk

Bristol Zoo Gardens

A visit to Bristol Zoo Gardens is a trip to an amazing world of animals, all within twelve acres of beautiful gardens. The Zoo is home to over 450 species of exotic and endangered animals, from impressive gorillas and fearsome lions, to giant tortoises, monkeys, meerkats and penguins. But as well as being Bristol’s most popular visitor attraction, the Zoo also works hard as a leading conservation and education charity. Conservationists at the Zoo work on twelve projects around the world that conserve and protect some of the world’s most endangered species.

This year the Zoo is supporting the International Year of Biodiversity campaign with a range of events and activities, and also by compiling a ‘top ten endangered species’ you can see there. Neil Maddison, Head of Conservation Programmes says: “By revealing the Zoo’s top ten ‘at risk’ species we hope to introduce people to some of the rare and amazing animals they may not know about, but which they can come and see on their doorstep. It is also an opportunity to remind people of the threats facing some of the more well known animals, such as western lowland gorillas, and the work we are doing to help protect these species in the wild.”

Visit the Zoo’s biodiversity tent at the Bristol Festival of Nature for a host of activities and the chance to meet some of the Zoo’s smaller creatures up-close.

www.bristolzoo.org.uk

Wildscreen

Wildscreen is a charity working to promote conservation and biodiversity through wildlife imagery. From the centre of Bristol, the global centre of wildlife filmmaking, we run several projects including The Wildscreen Festival, WildPhotos and ARKive.

ARKive is the definitive collection of films, photographs and facts on the world’s endangered species, with a rapidly growing collection of over 53,000 films and photos, freely accessible for educational use at www.arkive.org.

In 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, ARKive has set an ambitious challenge: to track down imagery for over 17,000 of the world’s most endangered species, from the Addax to the Zebra.
We know their names, we know where they live, but in many cases we don’t yet have a decent photo of them, let alone a film clip, and that’s a real problem.
We will only succeed in rescuing species from the brink of extinction if we raise public awareness of their plight. But without pictures and recordings we face an uphill struggle. We can’t expect everyone out there to know their aasvogel from their bonobo.
By revealing what these species actually look like, we hope to shine the spotlight on the many thousands of relatively obscure plants and animals threatened with extinction, thereby raising their public profile and, ultimately, helping to ensure their conservation.
We have already audio-visually profiled many charismatic and familiar species, such as lions, tigers and elephants, and are now working to put a face to the thousands of lesser known species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
These species are really hard to find, and will be best known by scientists, enthusiasts and academics. We are working with these people to unmask the mysterious life forms that hide behind names like the major black millipede, the jeweled toad and Marley’s golden mole. Hopefully, before too long, we will be able to show you the real faces of these species.
ARKive needs you!
It's an enormous challenge, and we are busy trying to track down the people that have access to the rare multimedia material we need to help us put real faces to all the names on our Most Wanted species list.
To find out how you can help visit www.arkive.org and come to see our stand at the festival.

Environment Agency

Along with pollution and changes in the way we use our land, the spread of non-native species is one of the reasons why the habitats and species of England and Wales are under threat.

In recent years our native white-clawed crayfish has disappeared from much of the country, including many former strongholds in the South West. This is mainly due to the spread of invasive crayfish which carry crayfish plague, a highly contagious disease. We aim to boost numbers by reintroducing them to a number of ‘Ark’ sites across the region, working in collaboration with people like the Avon Wildlife Trust. Come to visit us at the festival for a close-up with a crayfish and find out more about our plans.

We’ll also be looking at the non-native weeds that thrive in and around Bristol. We’ll be looking at why they are so successful, the effect they are having on local biodiversity and what we can do to stop them. There’ll be the chance to go pond-dipping to find out what lives in our ponds and rivers. Rivers, wetlands and other aquatic sites are important places to halt the invasion of non-native species, come and find out how we intend to do it.

Another part of our work is to restore habitat for wildlife to live. A good example is the Camel Estuary in Cornwall where we’ve created tidal grazing meadow from farmland that has been allowed to flood for the first time in 100 years. Wetlands are vitally important places and the species that have already benefited from this scheme include otters, kingfishers, curlews and lapwings.

To see what else the Environment Agency does to protect species and habitats around the South West see www.environment-agency.co.uk

University of the West of England

Every year we take twenty to thirty students from our Conservation Biology and Environmental Science BSc (Hons) course to the Isle of Youth in Cube to study local wildlife and collect information for scientists at the University of Havana.

Very little is known about the wildlife of the island, the largest island in Cuba, which, to the south at least, is covered in uninhabited and virtually unexploited forest and swamp. The Cuban crocodile is a resident here, as well as many species of bat and the world’s smallest bird, the bee Hummingbird.

The Isle of Youth (Isla de la Juventud) first became known to Europeans during Christopher Columbus's third voyage to the New World in 1494. Columbus named the island La Evangelista and claimed it for Spain but the island would also come to be known Isla de Cotorras (Isle of Parrots) and Isla de Tesoros (Treasure Island) at various points in its history. Both Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and Peter Pan by James Matthew Barrie are partly rooted on accounts of the island and its native and pirate inhabitants.

Come along to our stand to experience Cuba, its biodiversity and our activities there and learn how the connections between science and nature can help us live in a more sustainable way.

www.uwe.ac.uk

BBC – ‘This is how we do it’
Ever fancied yourself as a wildlife presenter or one of the crew involved in making documentaries about amazing creatures around the world? If so, come along to the Natural History Unit tent and travel to the far reaches and furthest wilds of the world with the help of green-screen, costumes and auto-cue. Crawl through the adventure tunnel and have a go with some of the gadgets you find there to make your very own wildlife adventure. Meet the presenters and BBC wildlife teams, experience the future of wildlife films in 3D and see exclusive trailers for forthcoming BBC documentaries.

www.bbc.co.uk/earthnews

Miranda Krestovnikoff

02/06/2010

Miranda Krestovnikoff has been working as a diving presenter for twelve years on shows such as Coast, The One Show and Countryfile. She’ll be speaking at the festival this year about how challenging it is to make a piece of underwater wildlife film. “When people watch it on TV they think it must be easy” she says. “But being in the water, in the right place, at the right time, with clear visibility and being able to hear my contributor and for him to hear me is something that rarely happens - normally there is at least one link of the chain that gets broken. I’ll be showing you all the people and pieces of kit that are involved - a real ‘behind the scenes’ trials and tribulations of a diving presenter”.

Miranda’s a local. She went to university in Bristol and like so many students couldn’t leave. “Bristol has a magnetic quality” she says. “It’s cosmopolitan, eclectic and there’s something for everyone. It’s big enough to have a wide range of culture and entertainment but it’s also small enough to bump into people you know on the street. It’s the major hub for wildlife with the BBC, lots of major independent wildlife film companies, the zoo and lots of wildlife charities, so when you’re working in the world of TV and wildlife it’s the centre of the universe – I couldn’t live anywhere else”.

Miranda got into this kind of work after being captivated by the work of big names such as David Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau when she was young. “To me they were really inspirational figures having incredible interactions with wildlife around the world” she says. “That’s what I wanted to do - I always had that connection with nature. As a child I used to hang out in the back garden. I was always happiest at the top of a tree amongst the wildlife”.

Her own most memorable wildlife interaction was only a couple of years ago when she got the chance to swim with basking sharks in the Isle of Man. “Basking sharks are the second biggest fish in the sea in the world and it’s amazing that they hang out around our shores. To get really close to something like that, something so large and yet completely harmless, was the most awe-inspiring moment in my life” she says. “When you are approached by wild animals you cannot engineer the situation, they are completely in control and you feel completely helpless and very small. And yet these are the most amazing, special and inspiring moments. I was in the water with the shark for twenty minutes and one of the saddest things was the moment it turned around and I watched its fin disappear into the distance”.

As well as TV presenting, Miranda is involved in various campaigns to protect our seas. “One thing I’m involved in at the moment is the Marine Conservation Society campaign ‘Your Seas Your Voice’” she says. “If you go to their website you can vote for your favourite area of coast to be protected under the new Marine Bill”. As a diver she is passionate about the South Wales and Devon and Cornwall coasts – two of the best diving locations in the country. “They are littered with shipwrecks, have an amazing diversity of wildlife and the water is fairly warm and clear” she says.

But one thing Miranda thinks we could all do is to make more space for the wildlife around us. “We seem to be concreting and decking over so much of our wild space at the moment” she says. “It seems as though our great British wildlife is being squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. People are manicuring their lawns and pulling down trees because they’re too close to the house, but when a tree is taken down and replaced by a sapling, all the life that was sustained by that tree is gone too”.

So the message is that if we want to have wildlife around us we have to make space for it. We need to keep our gardens and green places rough because that’s where the wild things are - scruffy is good. “My garden is scruffy with long grass and weeds” Miranda concludes, “and my kids are never short of somewhere to go bug hunting”.

Miranda’s website: www.mirandak.co.uk

Marine Conservation Society: www.msc.uk.org

Into the kitchen

02/06/2010

Guy Watson set up Riverford Farm in Devon in 1987 with three acres, a wheelbarrow and a dream to provide fresh affordable veg for all. Now he’s running the largest independent organic vegetable box scheme in the UK.

I’m probably a nerd but I do get excited about my vegetables. My favourite activity is to wander round the fields, normally on my back from work, and pick whatever we’re going to cook that evening. As years go by, I seem to get more and more excited about them. We grow a huge variety because the challenge is to keep the boxes interesting all year. So there’s everything from the humble swede and potato, to basil, coriander and chive, to strawberries and loads of different oriental salads.

I set up the business because I wanted to do something useful rather than make lots of money. To me, the important things were to cause minimal damage to the environment, encourage people to eat better and treat growers fairly. A few years ago I was with a farmer on the Fens who was growing lettuce for the supermarket. I bent down to taste it and he said ‘you shouldn’t do that boy’ because of course it had been sprayed. The lettuces are sprayed every week for aphids and this was a farmer who wouldn’t eat his own food. Intuitively everyone knows that’s crazy - food should be fit to eat out of the field! If you go back home with conventional farmers for a cup of tea, you often find that vegetable gardens are being done virtually organically because they know intuitively that that’s the way that good food is produced.

Organic farming is better for wildlife and I don’t think anyone would dispute that – the evidence is there. Earthworms are a good indicator of ecosystem health and there’s a ten-fold difference in numbers, maybe more, between organic and conventionally-farmed soil. I’ve been on farms when you can dig and dig and never find an earthworm. That’s the first thing I look for. People see soil as pretty boring but that’s where it all starts – you can’t be a grower without good soil. We also did a project with the University of Exeter to look at our impact on the environment – our carbon footprint mainly. That came up with some surprising and useful results. At the time we were in the process of moving to biodegradable packaging, but the work we did showed that as long as you look after it at the end of its life, plastics are probably better for the environment.

I feel tremendously lucky to have such a varied job which gives me the opportunity to put lots of ideas into action. I’m only able to do it because of the huge support we get from our customers and it’s someone saying ‘that tasted good’ that makes it all worthwhile. But in the end, the future of our business, and all veg box growers, is dependent on people’s behaviour. Everyone says they want to eat seasonal produce or food prepared from fresh but in reality it’s just not happening. The consumption of all vegetables, not just organic, has fallen across all sectors recently - everyone is eating less.

So we need to get more people in the kitchen cooking. Cooking is hugely enjoyable and we’re looking for really practical, hand-on ways to encourage them. It’s a big ask and it’s absolutely ambitious, because people’s behaviour in the kitchen is a cultural thing and changes slowly over generations. We have just been going in the wrong direction for the last fifty years. That’s why we’ve got the café on the farm and why we’ll be taking the mobile kitchen around the country this summer.

And a big thing for me at the moment is that we need to realise that greed isn’t what motivates people. I don’t think that people are motivated by greed even though we’ve set up the whole world assuming they are. We should all have the confidence to recognise what’s really important. I’m a great advocate of cooperative, employee owned businesses and it’s what I’d like to move my business to. I like to see people working together for mutual benefit. I think that’s what makes us happy.

www.riverford.co.uk

Raw Food - we try it out

02/06/2010

Raw Food? Catharine Stott tries it out

Raw food is being vaunted as the future of eating for better health and weight loss. It’s big in America, and catching on fast here. I’d always dismissed it as a fad, but if you go on youtube there are many people saying how switching to a raw food diet restored them to health and helped them lose weight, sometimes hundreds of pounds. At 45 I was feeling tired out, anxious, irritable overweight and caught every virus going, so I decided to check it out. I enlisted raw food coach Saskia Fraser’s help for a 12 week detox last November. Little did I know I’d chosen the coldest winter for decades in which to eat raw.

Each week I had 45 minutes coaching with Saskia on raw food and anything else I wanted to sort out (this included a weekly well-being plan to help busy people de-stress their lives). The sessions gave me invaluable insights into the detox process, and I found myself decluttering possessions and relationships as well as body toxins. Then she’d send me a menu plan for the week, saving me the trouble of working out what to eat.

Eating raw over such a cold winter was a challenge, but I used tricks like warming the plate, not keeping my food in the fridge and popping it in a cool oven to warm it through without cooking it. It was never dull with so many recipes to choose from: juices, smoothies, patés, curries, sweet treats, crackers, breads, salads, soups, porridges, compotes, crumbles. Most of the time I ate 70-80% raw food, supplemented with cooked brown rice. My personal favourites were alfalfa muesli, Sas’s incredible raw stir fry, and her bee pollen balls (all nuts and coconut oil).

I was all enthusiastic for the month before Christmas and then went into feasting mode until after New Year. But back on the case, I found that, despite the freeze, eating raw was easier. I even managed 100% raw food for over a week in mid January and stayed 80% raw until the end of my detox. Then I stuffed down scotch eggs, stews, cream cakes, all the things I’d fantasised about. But it was like drinking no alcohol beer - no matter how much I ate, I never got the hit. I soon found myself wolfing down salad for breakfast. Two months later, I sit still eat mostly raw food.

Is this unplanned change of diet doing me any good? My concentration is much better, I sleep like a log and I have increasingly more energy. As for my health, I failed to lose weight, but I’d only just stopped smoking and ate far too much raw chocolate and nuts. I believe raw food made it much easier to stay off the fags; the nicotine cravings just weren’t there. My eyes and skin are clearer, I haven’t had a single cold this spring, and people keep commenting on how well I look. I feel a lot clearer and quicker in my thinking, and I find myself quicker to smile and laugh. I can see I’m going to be doing this raw food thing for the rest of my life.

Saskia’s programmes include: weekend raw food retreats, Six Weeks to More Energy and Loving The Skin You’re In, her 12 week detox, and a nine month transformation programme to help you achieve your dreams in every area of your life.

For further information: www.rawfreedom.co.uk; 0117 902 9393; saskia@rawfreedom.co.uk

I reversed diabetes with raw food
Yoga teacher Rina Golan-Rothwell, 34, of Bristol, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes last year.

“The doctors told me my body could no longer produce insulin, and I’d better get used to the pain of injections because I’d be injecting insulin three times a day for the rest of my life”.

Rina, had already been reducing her insulin, but after four days on a raw food programme (green juices for a week followed by lots of raw veg, nuts and seeds, oils and spices) she came off it altogether. Five months later Rina’s still off insulin and has never had another hypoglaceamic episode.

To find out more read There is a cure for diabetes by Gabriel Cousens MD or watch his DVD Simply Raw (Diabetes Documentary).

Raw food is: Fruit, nuts, seeds, seaweed, superfoods (bee pollen, goji berries, maca), sweeteners such as raw agave syrup or raw honey, vinegars, oils, spices, herbs, dried fruits, nut milks and cheeses.

The raw kitchen contains: At the very least a good hand blender, a grater and a good knife. Keen eaters invest in a juicer that does greens (Green Star), a high-speed blender (Blend Tec), a dehydrator to make crackers and breads (Excalibur is best), a sprouter, a food processor, and a nut milk bag.

Weekly food bill: Expect to spend £60-70 if you’re shopping in a supermarket. But if you can find an organic wholesaler you can halve that bill.

Chocolate: Raw chocolate is tastier than the usual cooked we buy and the good news is it is very, very easy to make. Check out ingredient sellers online and on ebay.

Pop up forage

02/06/2010

Last summer I visited Monkey World, a picturesque Dorset home to mistreated apes and monkeys from across the globe. To my amazement I saw Capuchin monkeys picking blackberries and an Orang-Utan sifting through a lawn of mixed weeds, including noxious creeping buttercups, to pick out harmless clover.

I was amazed by this as Orang-Utans are native to Borneo and Sumatra and the Capuchin to Central or South America, yet they can pick out plants seemingly unfamiliar to them and recognize them as food. Add this to the fact that both the primates in question were in captivity for most of their lives and it begs the question, how do they know what to eat?

Coming from a species of higher ape, more commonly known as human, I have to wonder how I and my species would fare in the jungles of Borneo? Would I be able to distinguish food plants from poisonous ones?

It is tragic that we seem to have all but lost touch with this ability. At one time we would have perhaps innately known what was food and what might have us running for the nearest toilet, or worse still, the nearest hospital. I have heard rather dubious claims that people are 'drawn' to plants, yet I have known people 'drawn' to groundsel and ragwort - both highly poisonous plants!

The truth is perhaps has a lot more to do trial and error than it does with a 'magical' connection to plants. Although I would not recommend it, picking a little at a time, not so much it would poison us and waiting to see the effects would be a perfect way of finding what was edible and what definitely wasn't. We must have got it wrong at times but those who did cut themselves out of the gene pool and wouldn't have passed that information down to their offspring.

Add this passed on knowledge to the lack of outside distraction, no TV, no internet, magazines or even books and our ancestors would have been able to be much more 'in tune' with their surroundings. Subtle clues plants give us would have not been lost on them. As we fill our heads with the latest celebrity gossip or how to use our mobile phones, theirs would have been buzzing with seasonal knowledge of the plants around them (and no doubt who was sleeping with who in the next tribe).

So what can we do to regain this lost knowledge? Well the way I learned was to walk around with an expert whose Grandfather had taught him. This triggered off more study and I bought myself Richard Mabey's Food for Free and a few field guides of wild flowers, mushrooms and trees. I would cross reference my finds in as many books as possible and would use websites such Google images as a visual resource and plants for a future as a written one. Plants for a future is a fantastic website, any plant imaginable is on there, it's where I learned you could eat both Himalayan honeysuckle berries (not to be mistaken with regular honeysuckle!) and fuchsia berries.

I now teach wild food and run courses in Totnes, Devon. For me it is a fascinating subject and when I'm hanging from a tree filling a bag full of fruit I know I'm in touch with my inner monkey!

During the summer months it is easy to get in touch with our inner monkey as some of the more easily identifiable foragables begin to appear on the menu. I love this time of year as I can fill my basket and still leave enough behind for the wildlife. My top five wild foods would have to be …

1.Elderflower - if you've tried fritters last year then how about giving elderflower bhajis a go?
2.Cherries - small ones in brandy or vodka and large ones raw. Delicious
3.Plums. (Remember to leave enough to share Bristol foragers - you know who you are!)
4.Giant Puffballs – An unmistakeable mushroom. A certain pair of twins (quick clue, I may be a twin) spread the spores far and wide last year so keep a look out in the Bristol and Dorset areas for new patches coming up.
5.Blackberries – We all know them, we all pick them, we all love them. Pies, jams, juices, smoothies, wine, ice-cream and even blackberry pickle. Just leave a few for the Capuchin monkeys.

Here comes the sun

02/06/2010

If you’re confident of a barbecue summer (or scared of travel chaos), the options abound for wild, natural, green and great hols in this neck of the woods.

Camping it up
If you’re looking to get back to nature this summer but want more comfort than a tent can provide, why not try a yurt or tipi holiday? “A yurt holiday is for people who like camping but with more luxury” says Yasmine Norris who runs Blackdown Yurts in Devon. “You can have a lovely camping experience, be cosy and warm and not wake up in a freezing cold tent with the rain lashing down.”

Tucked away in a wooded valley in the heart of Devon, Blackdown Yurts (www.blackdownyurts.co.uk) offers a real eco-escape. There are badgers, deer and birds to see, footpaths, river banks and ancient woodland, plus easy access to the Jurassic Coast, Exmoor and Dartmoor. The traditional yurts sleep up to six people and are furnished with sheepskins, rugs and cushions. Beds are made from recycled timber and the bedding is organic. Each yurt has a woodburner to keep it warm and cosy, with a solar panel providing lighting. Outside, each one has its own field kitchen and compost toilet, though there are flush toilets and showers too.

Staying in a tipi also makes for an exciting eco holiday. Cornish Tipis (www.cornishtipiholidays.co.uk) is the oldest tipi campsite in the country and now has 40 tipis spread over its 20 acres, each accommodating from two to 12 people. The tipis come fully equipped, including camping stove and cool box. Roll mats are provided but for greater comfort you may want to bring your own mattress. Each tipi has a fire pit outside which campers can use to cook on or sit around in the evenings.

The site is in a secluded valley just five minutes from beautiful Cornish coastline, in a thriving habitat for wild flowers, butterflies and birds. In the centre lies a fresh water lake, where you can swim, paddle about in a canoe or catch your own dinner. “It’s a special place,” says owner Elizabeth Tom. “You can spend the day on the beach or walking the Cornish Coastal Path and come back and have a refreshing swim in the lake.” Cornish Tipis have recently been granted a wedding licence and are looking forward to hosting their first ceremonies in the newly built wood and canvas wedding pavilion.

Other yurts and tipis
Woodland Tipis (www.woodlandtipis.co.uk)
Orchard Yurt (www.orchardyurt.co.uk)
Mill Valley (www.millvalley.co.uk)
Strawberry Skys (www.strawberryskys.co.uk)
The Yurt Farm (www.theyurtfarm.co.uk)
Tremeer Farm (www.yurtscornwall.com)
Yurt Camp (www.yurtcamp.co.uk)

If you prefer the freedom of your own tent, why not visit a new site from the lovely Bell Tent people who will sort you out a few bits and pieces to make it more comfy ( … think sumptuous rugs, enamel cookware and fairy lights). “Our site is for people who like to camp soft with fresh pillows, a duvet, a self-inflating mattress and a martini” say the people who coined the phrase ‘glamping’ for the times we're moved to transfer the contents of our houses into a field.

This season’s glamping must-haves:

Glow in the dark tent pegs (£15.00)
Solar-powered non-trip pegs to guide you home

Dry Stone Wall Windbreak (£43.00)
Mark your territory with this nifty piece of camouflage

Laser Star Show Projector (£129.00)
Magical shooting stars and moving cloud formations inside your tent - how did we cope without one?

www.campingwithsoul.co.uk

On course
If you are looking for an even more hands-on outdoor experience, then why not join a buschcraft course. Based in the beautiful countryside around Dartmoor in Devon, WildWise (www.wildwise.co.uk) run a series of courses and events for adults, children and families to learn about the natural world, whether it’s foraging for food, paddling canoes at night on the River Dart or even practising storytelling skills. Amongst the most popular courses are the Dangerous Weekends: for boys (young and not so young) in June and for families in July, where the idea is to “get dirty, sleep outdoors, eat weird things and have some wicked fun”. Other courses to look out for include The Wild Ones (for 8-12 year olds) and the family camp in August.

You don’t need to be a budding Ray Mears to enjoy the courses. As WildWise founder Chris Salisbury says: “Camping with WildWise is not a military bootcamp – the aim is for people to relax and enjoy themselves in a natural setting. We make camp life relatively comfortable so that nature becomes accessible to all ages."

If you want to learn more about our beautiful and wild coastline, Coastal Survival (www.coastalsurvival.com) may have the course for you. They run bushcraft courses along the Jurassic Coast and the Llyn Peninsular in North Wales. You will learn about the coastal environment, and how to collect, catch and cook wild food, fish and shellfish along with other essential survival skills.

However, if you want food preparation skills that are a little less wild but no less fun, then you might try one of the many cookery courses in the region. At the Ashburton Cookery School in Devon (www.ashburtoncookeryschool.co.uk) you can learn all things culinary from breadmaking to Mediterranean cuisine to modern vegetarian to butchery and knife skills.

But perhaps what you’re really looking for is peace, tranquility and spiritual renewal. Joining one of the meditation retreat camps run by Buddhafield (www.buddhafield.com) at beautiful locations in the South-West may provide just that. Or you can reconnect with your sense of vitality and aliveness and open yourself up to your Qi energy by attending a summer camp run by Qi Jong SouthWest (www.qigong-southwest.co.uk).

Plan-It Earth (www.plan-itearth.org.uk) Eco adventure camps with green woodworking, blacksmithing and permaculture.
Newhouse Farm (www.newhousefarm.tv) Learn about sustainable life with the Strawbridges.
Arvon Foundation (www.arvonfoundation.org) Get your creative cap on with these residential writing courses
The Beacon Centre (www.beacon-centre.com) Yoga, bodywork and meditation
Monkton Wyld Court (www.monktonwyldcourt.co.uk) Beekeeping and biodynamic gardening in Dorset.
Low Impact Living Initiative (www.lowimpact.org) Low impact at a venue near you

Festival fever
The South West is home to many great festivals. If ‘enrolling’ in the Idler’s Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment sounds like your kind of thing then the quirky, unconventional and thoroughly laid-back Port Eliot Festival (www.porteliotfestival.com) may be the event for you. Now in its seventh year, Port Eliot started life as a literary festival but has evolved into a carnival of words, music, fashion, food and comedy. From 23-25th July you can listen to distinguished writers reading from their work, dance at the fantastic nature disco, go for a wild swim in the Lynher Estuary or be enchanted in the House of Fairy Tales. As festival director, Catherine St Germans, says: “Doing something different is at the heart of Port Eliot.”

2000trees (www.twothousandtreesfestival.co.uk) was founded three years ago by six dedicated music fans and sets out to create a relaxed, intimate and friendly festival, whilst being as environmentally friendly as possible. “What makes 2000trees so special? It's fun, friendly and affordable,” says festival organiser Andy Rea. “Just great bands and great fans in the beautiful Cotswolds"
(sounds great to us!). With an eclectic mix of almost 70 acts of new British music on three stages, plus comedy, headphone disco and campfire sing-a-longs to keep the party spirit going until dawn, 2000trees is expecting to enjoy its best year yet, playing host to 3,000 fans on the weekend of 16-17 July. Main acts include: Frank Turner, The Subways, Bombay Bicycle Club, Metronomy and 65DaysOfStatic.

Another of our region’s music festivals celebrates its 20th birthday this year. Running from 14-18 July, Larmer Tree (www.larmertreefestival.co.uk) on the Wiltshire/Dorset border, has 80 artists playing on its six stages, plus 150 free workshops and its usual, fantastic kids’ area.

Sunrise Celebration (www.sunrisecelebration.com) Even better music, performance art and invisible circus at this sustainable do, 3rd -6th June
QUEST (www.questuk.co.uk) The big celebration of mind, body and spirit in the south west, 8th-11th July
Chagstock (www.chagstock.info) The best little festival in the South, 16-17th July
Camp Bestival (www.campbestival.co.uk) Great for music and atmosphere at Dorset’s Lulworth Castle, 30th July – 1st August
Beautiful Days (www.beautifuldays.org) The Levellers annual shindig in Devon, 20th-22nd August

Eco-luxe
And when you're tired of all that camping and festival-going and want some real luxury, but on a break that still fits with your sustainable principles, why not visit the newly built Scarlet Hotel (www.scarlethotel.co.uk) in Cornwall. This beautiful 37-bedroom hotel was built to the highest eco standards, and provides sumptuous accommodation, locally sourced food and an amazing spa, all overlooking the bay at Mawgan Porth.

Its eco credentials are rock solid: solar panels to heat the indoor pool, biomass boiler running on woodchips, grey water and rainwater harvesting and a buy local policy for everything. "We created Scarlet as a perfect adult escape for a few days battery recharging, but at the same time we wanted to show that sumptuous need not mean unsustainable, and that luxury isn't necessarily a guilty pleasure," says co-owner and director, Debbie Wakefield. So, while away the hours in the luxury spa where you will find the best, bespoke ayuverdic treatments to improve your well-being, indoor and outdoor pools, a meditation room, a deep relaxation space and two outdoor, log-fired hot tubs.

If it’s luxury self-catering you’re after, check out Lower Coombe Royal (www.lowercoomberoyal.co.uk) – five star baby (and dog) friendly boltholes set within eight organic acres within spitting distance of both Salcombe and Dartmoor. “We are passionate about working with the planet rather than against it” says Susi Titchener who runs a policy of working with local people and products in addition to all the eco-furbishments. We also love self-catering in Osmington on the beautiful Dorset coast in a property owned by organic Eweleaze Farm. With access to its own private beach and farmshop, and close to Lulworth Cove and Dorchester (although you probably won’t want to leave the house) the Cartshed is one to book in advance (www.eweleaze.co.uk). For other organic self-catering options check out www.organicplacestostay.com

Up and away
If, after all that, you still need an overseas break then you can still have a sustainable time. There are plenty of eco holidays out there, many of which make sure that you do as little damage to the environment as possible and that the money you spend goes into the hands of local people.

Responsible Travel (www.responsibletravel.com) can help you find the right ethical and eco holiday in the country of your choice or you could buy the Ethical Travel Guide from Tourism Concern (www.tourismconcern.org.uk) with its listing of ethical holidays around the globe. Check out too the Green Places To Stay directory from Bristol publisher Alistair Sawday or visit his Ethical Collection (www.sawdays.co.uk/ethical_collection) where you’ll find almost 500 pretty special places to stay.

Too many of us?

02/02/2010

“I’ve spent my life looking for wilderness, but over the years wilderness has become harder to find” says David Attenborough. “It has become more apparent that the creatures giving me so much joy are under threat”. The reason for this is humans and the sheer number of us. The population of the planet is currently at 7 billion and increasingly so rapidly that it’s due to hit a whopping 9 billion by 2050. “Population density is a factor in every environmental problem” says David who is patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a charity which raises awareness of the benefits in voluntarily limiting our family size.

The problem is that for thousands of years the human population was kept in check by nature. The productive capacity of the earth has finite limits and it is these that decide the number of humans and other animals that can be supported. But according to WWF, these limits were finally exceeded in the 1980s, were 30% over in 2005, and by the 2030s, it’s predicted that the demand on the earths resources is likely to outstrip available supply by 100%. “The history of humanity has been about overcoming environmental limits” says David. So how have we finally achieved it? Because of our technology combined with a steady and cheap supply of oil.

But despite our recent innovations the strain of us living over and above the resource capacity of the planet is starting to show up in the state of our natural ecosystems, particularly as a decline in other species which need the same precious resources to survive. Not only this, our increased numbers are also damaging our own ability to survive into the future. The longer the overshoot continues, the more likely we are to get complete ecosystem collapse and scientists cannot say when the tipping point will be. “The crunch point is going to hit soon” says Exeter-based GP Pip Hayes, of the Optimum Population Trust. “As a doctor I think that the biggest health issue of all is whether we can feed ourselves and our children – so I see overpopulation as a health issue that the medical profession has got a duty to raise awareness of”.

“There is still a romantic view in this country of big families and of course we all have a right to do what we want with our own bodies” continues Pip, “but so few people are aware of the consequences. We are simply raising the profile of the overpopulation issue and encouraging people to think about stopping at two children, or having one less than they planned. The advantage of doing this is that the children they do have will stand a better chance of living on a habitable planet”. Technology enabled us to exceed the productive limits of the planet, so will the technology of contraception help us back below this limit? “We’re at a crossroads where we can chose to cooperate or carry on regardless” concludes David. “Can our own intelligence save us? – I hope so”.

www.optimumpopulation.org

Wildlife friendly shopping

02/02/2010

“Agriculture is one of the most important threats to sensitive biodiversity regions and their associated species around the world” says WWF. “Around 50% of the world’s habitable land has already been converted to farming land, and a further 120 million hectares is predicted to be converted to meet demand for food by 2050.” It seems that when agriculture is practiced with care then it can really help to preserve and restore habitats and improve soil and water quality. The problems occur when it isn’t.

Recent analysis shows that there are certain agricultural products that are contributing more than others to biodiversity threats around the world and it is these that we need to be careful about consuming. But the problem is that for many of these products there is no labeling to help us make informed decisions about which brands to buy. “Its often easier for consumers to buy products from respected shops or brands” say WWF, “those that they can trust to make the right purchasing decisions on their behalf”.

This is why WWF is busy producing things like the ‘Palm Oil Scorecard’ which gives us information on which companies are making efforts to ensure the products they use in their brands come from sustainable sources. It also gives these companies an incentive to improve. There are lots of these ‘score-card’ and certification schemes being developed to help us, but in the meantime there are some general rules we can follow when considering our impacts on global biodiversity:

 Buy local as you’re more likely to know where it’s come from
 Eat organic so less toxic chemical ends up in the ground, air, water and food supply
 Buy less blue-fin tuna, cod, non-certified hardwood products
 Buy more FSC products (wood and timber from Forest Stewardship Council certified sources), MSC products (seafood from Marine Stewardship Council certified sources), organic cotton
 Be demanding and ask your food suppliers for better labeling and sustainable sourcing

Be careful buying …

Rice
Sugarcane
Beef
Tuna
Whitefish
Farmed and wild-caught shrimp
Pulp and paper
Timber
Palm Oil
Cotton
Soy beans
Coffee
Cocoa

… as these are the top agricultural products contributing to species loss around the world

The Honey Trap

02/02/2010

The Honey Trap

It’s big news! Bee populations across the globe are in serious decline. Around one fifth of the honeybee hives in this country were lost in the winter of 2008/09, with a third the winter before, heralded by similar colony collapses in the US and Europe. Apart from the fact that honey bees have been a vital part of the biodiversity of this planet for 100 million years, bees pollinate a third of the food we eat today and contribute £200 million a year to the UK economy. We’d be in serious trouble without them, but there’s no easy answer about what’s going on and what to do about it. So far no-one can put their finger on the largest single reason why honey bee populations are in decline although it’s likely to be a combination of harmful pesticides in the environment, decline in disease, mite and enviromental resistance due to bee transportation and modern bee-keeping methods, coupled with the destruction of habitat in which bees like to live and forage. What can be done?

Natural Beekeeping

Devon-based ‘Barefoot Beekeeper’ Phil Chandler is a major proponent of a more natural, sustainable and chemical-free way of looking after bees which gradually allows them to return to natural ways of looking after themselves. “It seems to me that beekeeping - especially commercial beekeeping - is no longer sustainable in its present form” he explains. “We need to re-think our management methods from top to bottom, or face an unprecedented decline in the health and strength of the bee population and the end of honey - at least in the public perception - as a pure, healthy food”.

Man has been evolving ways of harvesting honey since his first appearance on earth. What started as honey hunting, still practiced across the developing world, has moved through to the keeping of bees in artificial conditions so that honey production can be artificially controlled in terms of quantity and content. Our practices of keeping bees, which include chemical disease control, genetic modification of local strains by importing species and movement of viruses and disease around the globe have become so detrimental for the bees themselves that it is thought to be almost impossible for bees to live in the wild without our help.

“All this might be understandable if the consistent outcome was bumper crops of honey and happy, healthy bees” continues Phil, which is clearly not the case at the moment. “We may need to re-think much of what we now take for granted, even if it means discarding protocols we have regarded as holy writ for the last 150 years. Afterall, keeping 50 or 100 or more beehives in an area that nature might furnish with only one or two colonies is very like cramming 10,000 chickens into a battery farm and has similar implications for aberrant behaviour and spread of diseases. In practical terms, sustainability may also mean accepting lower honey production per colony in return for healthier bees”.

Phil’s website and brilliant book ‘The Barefoot Beekeeper’ shows a more natural way and less intensive way of keeping bees and, if you are interested in giving it a go, he shows you how to make your own equipment using recycled materials and simple tools. There are instructions on how to build a top-bar hive, an alternative to the traditional frame hive currently used in modern bee-keeping across the world. The advantage of the top bar hive over its modern counterpart is that it’s low-tech, low maintenance so less disturbance for the bees and it allows them to build their own combs and grow to an optimum size for the surrounding environmental conditions. “Over 2500 people have joined our online Natural Beekeeping Forum” says Phil “and by freely sharing information we are developing a balanced system of beekeeping that is becoming genuinely sustainable”.

“Can the situation be reversed?” asks Phil in conclusion. “Nobody can say for sure. The real answer lies with the bees themselves. Our job is to provide them with the best possible conditions in which they can solve their own problems, as they have always done”.

www.biobees.com

Did you know? Bee colonies survive just as well in urban hives than out in the country. So if you’ve live in town but have got a garden, allotment or roof (and the neighbours don’t mind) you could be helping them out. Watch the roof of Bordeaux Quay in Bristol to see if the plan to home an urban colony comes about this year.

Keeping it simple

Bees for Development is a charity that aims to alleviate poverty across the world through sustainable bee-keeping. “We are not about teaching beekeeping or providing equipment or money” says founder Nicola Bradbear who set up the charity in 1993 having been inspired by the philosophy of ‘small is beautiful’ back in the 1970s and 80s, the birth of alternative technology. “We teach about how to step out of poverty through beekeeping and support people in moving from a subsistence level to setting up a business”.

Nicola agrees that one of the main issues in the decline of bee populations globally is that many beekeepers across the world are interested solely in the products that come out of the hive. She feels that it’s just as important to look after bees for their own sake, simply to maintain biodiversity. “We’d like everyone to understand that bees are wild animals” she says. “But like birds they need support from people – such as providing them with homes and planting things that are useful for them”.

“These days people are so phobic about bees that looking after them has become a ‘special craft’ for beekeepers alone” she continues. “So the challenge is to find better and more accessible ways for bees to live alongside humans more easily. For example, if we could develop a more gardener-friendly beehive it might be a saving grace – in the same way that the world would be a different place for blue-tits if wildlife-friendly gardeners hadn’t started using bird boxes”.

According to Nicola the key to healthy bees is simplicity. “We can learn a lot from developing countries” she says. “Beekeeping in Africa is easy because the methods and hives they use mean that the bees don’t have diseases”. This is where Bees for Development comes in – to support small-scale, simple and more sustainable beekeeping. They provide an information portal for anyone interested in simple and low-tech beekeeping globally and in the UK and run excellent courses on sustainable beekeeping.

www.beesfordevelopment.org

>
Why Don’t You …
Put a box in your garden for solitary bee species. Not only will you be providing weather shelter for these non-swarming, non-stinging insects, but you’ll be helping your flowers to bloom and your fruit and veg to produce bumper crops. The Co-Op have teamed up with www.GoneGardening.com to give 15% discount on FSC wooden boxes at £8.19. Check out vanishingbees.co.uk/plan_bee.

Cleaning Up

The Co-operative supported the film ‘Vanishing of the Bees’ that was shown across independent cinemas and National Trust Properties in 2009. It told the story of Colony Collapse Disorder which started in the US and heralded the decline of bee populations across much of the developed world. The main reason the film gave for the collapse, although stating clearly that a number of complex factors are involved, is neonicotinoid pesticides whose application coincided with the first sign of trouble for our bees.

“Without bees we don’t have produce for our stores” says Naomi Davies, Environment Adviser for The Co-operative who explains why the supermarket supported the production and distribution of the film. “We have five million members and many of them started asking us what we are doing to help. So after a lot of research and conversation with beekeeping organisations, we decided to support the film as well as focus our efforts in four keys areas”.

The first action The Co-operative has taken, and is the first supermarket to do so, is to prohibit neonicotinoid products from all their own-brand fresh produce and fund much needed research to see whether it really is these pesticides that are having an impact on bee populations. They are also taking bee-friendly action on all of their farms, planting wildflowers and encouraging farmers and allotment holders to keep hives. There are now over 500 hives on Co-operative farms!

The Co-operative is also funding research on bee health such as looking at the last remaining native bee populations which may be more resilient to the UK climate than strains that have been imported and mixed over the years by beekeepers breeding for increased honey production or disease resistance. “The main thing we are trying to do though” says Naomi, “and it’s our fourth area of activity, is to inspire people to take further personal action through Plan Bee. This is a website which provides advice on gardening in a bee-friendly way whether you have a garden or just a window box”.

www.vanishingbees.co.uk

The Soil Association is calling on UK government to immediatly ban neonicotinoid pesticides which they believe are having a huge impact on Bristish bee populations. “Honey bees live and work as a colony, not as individuals” they say “and what seems to be happening is that the cumulative impact of small doses of nenoicotinoids on thousands of bees over time is affecting individual bee's ability to work and communicate effectively as part of a colony. Because lots of bees in each colony are behaving sub-optimally, this can lead to the sudden, and devastating, outcomes that we've been witnessing in recent years”. These chemicals are already banned in France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia.

Why Don’t You … sign the petition to ban neonicotinoids at www.soilassociation.org

Why Don’t You …
Give your garden a bee-friendly make-over by:
• Planting wildflower seeds
• Allowing a patch of grass to grow long
• Providing water for bees to drink – a shallow dish with pebbles in
• Reducing the use of pesticides and chemicals
• Not leaving unwashed honey jars outside the door as overseas honey can contain harmful bacteria and spores
• Reporting honey bee swarms it to the police or local authority who will find them new homes

Bee-friendly flower seeds native to the UK
Comfrey
Common poppy
Corn marigold
Corncockle
Foxglove
Goldenrod
Lesser snapdragon
Meadow Clary
Teasel
Thistle

Moving and Shaking

02/02/2010

We’ve decided that 2010 is the year to get dancing – so we’ve talked to some of the region’s movers about why it’s such a good idea.

Ya’Acov Darling Khan is co-founder of The School of Movement Medicine in South Devon, which offers a unique form of movement that combines the traditions of ecstatic dance, shamanism and meditation. Guaranteed to get you ‘dancing at the centre of your circle without shame’ we ask him to explain what’s involved.

“Movement medicine is practical, down to earth and anyone can do it” says Ya’Acov who offers everything from taster sessions to full-on apprenticeships and professional trainings. “It’s based on a 21-step mandala which provides students with the possibility to take a journey in which they find out who they are and what they have to give. It comes out of 25 years of research, study and practice including an 18 year apprenticeship with Five Rhythms founder Gabrielle Ross and with indigenous shamans from the Amazon to the Arctic circle”. Ya’Acov knows the ropes!

But why is movement medicine so important for us now we ask him? “In troubled times it’s important to look for the overall cause rather than just treat the symptoms” he explains. “One cause for the troubles we currently face is how far we have moved away from the wisdom of our bodies, hearts and minds and especially the combined wisdom of these three working in the same direction. Movement medicine is about bringing our kinesthetic, emotional and mental intelligence together – keying us into the wisdom we were born with. It’s also very important for our relationships, with ourselves, with others and with the earth beneath our feet”.

“The problem with relationships is that we find it difficult to remain in touch with our own truth whilst being open to the truths of others” he continues, “so we spend a lot of time – in personal, business, and even nation to nation relationships – trying to convince others of our own point of view. But when we can truly embody a sense of our own unique individuality, it gives us the ground to be able to really see others and not just tolerate their differences but work with them in a dynamic and creative way. The skills we teach in Movement Medicine teach us a practical way to do just that”.

“In wider terms too, scientists and shamans around the world recognise the interconnection and interdependence of everything and see that there is a link between our own physical and mental health and the health of the planet. Therefore any practice that can bring us closer to direct experience of this inter-dependence and remind us of our connection with the community of life on earth is going to help us now. If we have a healthy relationship to ourselves as a living garden then we automatically have a much better relationship to the earth under our own feet. What we love we want to look after.

A lot of people feel very self-conscious when dancing but this sounds totally different, so how does it work? “When we dance freely” says Ya’Acov, stressing the term ‘freely’, “we access the right brain consciousness which helps us to see our own lives and existence in a much wider context. Rather than scrambling around in our daily problems, we get to soar above our lives for a while and see where we’ve come from, where we are and where we can go – not just individually but relationally and collectively. Dance is one of the places where we can let go, where we remember the magnificence of our own creative potential. If we continue to practice, it’s possible to achieve better balance between the left and right brain more permanently and achieve balance between the nitty-gritty of life and the inspiration of wider vision”.

For more on Movement Medicine check out Ya’Acov and Susannah Darling Khan’s book: Movement Medicine – How to Awaken, Embody and Dance your Dreams and their CD: Movement Medicine – the dance of life onwww.movementmedicineshop.com. And for classes and trainings see www.schoolofmovementmedicine.com.

Bernadette Ryder has been teaching Five Rhythms for thirteen years – the popular movement meditation that encourages participants to still the mind by dancing the body through rhythms of flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness in what is called a ‘wave’. “It can give you a stress-busting cardiovascular workout she says “but more importantly it encourages you to follow the body’s own impulses and allows its energies to rebalance. Usually the head overrides the body but through this movement the body’s voice becomes louder. For example, when I’m dancing regularly I find that I stop drinking alcohol and eating fatty, sugary foods. It just happens naturally”.

But it’s not only the health effects that motivates Bernadette to teach this work. Having studied environmental science and social justice – she worked as a community development worker in Africa for ten years – she believes that this kind of movement meditation can really connect us back to nature and the world around us. “Five rhythms is one of the few meditation practices working with relationships” she says “and our relationship with the earth is our primary one. Our bodies come from earth – we source and resource ourselves from it. But people often overlook the depth and intensity of this”.
Bernadette brings in many elements to her classes which run regularly in the Bristol area, including exercises from other initiatives she is involved in such as the Pachamama Alliance, Be The Change and the Transition Movement. Perhaps most exciting is the workshop she is offering this April, Dancing in Deep Ecology, which combines Five Rhythms with the very powerful ‘Work That Reconnects’ developed by American systems-thinker and Buddhist Joanna Macey. It should be excellent - we’ll see you there!

Contact Bernadette on Bernadette@dmac-uk.com; 07903 497700 or check out her Facebook page for details of classes.

From a background in contact improvisation Jamus Wood has developed a movement meditation based on different elements of dance, yoga and bodywork. He uses this to re-establish our relationship with the land and his retreats are run in natural settings, in heated dancing yurts in the middle of the Shropshire woods for example. “I work inside the studio and out on the land” he explains. “People get happy when they’re in nature. They drop the sense of urgency with life and just come to rest in themselves, finding a new rhythm”.

Jamus has first hand experience of how doing this kind of work in nature can improve our health. “I have suffered from a long-term visual impairment” he says “and in the last few years of doing this work my eyes have relaxed through working on the land and become much clearer. There is something very good for the sight in having a horizon. It causes the whole body to let go and we land on our two legs on planet earth”.

Jamus’s classes are eclectic and involve relaxation, walking, running, moving and meditating. Most are run in Bristol with retreats in the rest of the South West.

www.movementmeditation.co.uk; 07980 582791

Still moving …

If dancing is not quite your thing, why not move into 2010 with some do-it-yourself exercises from the privacy of your own home, office or favourite spot outdoors. Angus Clark, founder of the School of Living Movement in Devon has produced a DVD called Move for Your Life which one Tai Chi expert describes as: “the guide to moving your body that should be issued at birth”. It contains 21 Tai Chi and Qigong exercises for vitality and is a brilliant way to access lots of energy and feelings of well-being.

“It’ll be as helpful to the post Christmas weight worrier as it will to the surfer wanting a warm up routine, or the stressed executive wanting to promote personal health and wellbeing” says Angus who is also the author of one of the of the most definitive books on Tai Chi, the internationally acclaimed ‘Complete Illustrated Guide to Tai Chi’. It’s filmed in some gorgeous locations and has natural sounds, just in case you can’t get out there yourself, to add to stress-relief and relaxation.

Order your copy of Move for Your Life through www.livingmovement.com and while your there, check out the workshops, retreats and camps on offer locally and across the country.

The power of trust

02/02/2010

“The need of quiet, the need of air, the need of exercise and … the sight of sky and of things growing seem human needs, common to all.” – Octavia Hill

The National Trust was founded in 1895 by three philanthropists, one of whom was Octavia Hill. Concerned by the impact of uncontrolled development and industrialisation on the nation’s health and psyche, they set about forming a trust that would protect countryside, coastline and beautiful buildings for every person, rich or poor. Now, more than a century later, the inventory of land and history available to us as a result of their vision totals an impressive 612,000 acres of countryside, more than 700 miles of coastline and upwards of 200 buildings and gardens of outstanding interest and importance. These assets are held in perpetuity, so their future is as secure as possible, and the stories they tell, that link the past to the present and the future, give us a tremendous reminder of our history and place in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is these stories along with a sense of continuation and evolution that inspires the current Director General of the National Trust, Dame Fiona Reynolds.

“I feel as though I am picking up the same baton that was passed on by Octavia Hill” she says. “The values she held are remarkably similar to those we are talking about today. She wanted open air living rooms for the poor at a time when green fields were being gobbled up and beauty wasn’t on the agenda at all. She wanted green spaces for children to feel the grass under their feet. This was a time when the government was more excited about empire, wealth generation and progress, but the founders of the National Trust didn’t buy this. They knew that there were other values that were important to preserve”.

These values, which were so cherished by the founders, are still alive today if the membership of the National Trust is anything to go by. Current membership figures stand at more than 3.7 million with visitor numbers up around 20% on last year despite the economic downturn and concerns that the public may have less disposable cash.

“At one level the recession has been a crisis,” says Fiona “but at another, it has been an opportunity. It has allowed people to re-evaluate their priorities and look at what really makes them happy. For thirty or forty years the general assumption has been that happiness is about having more ‘stuff’, but the work we are doing here at the National Trust is in direct response to an insatiable public demand for the simple pleasures of life – a walk on the beach, a beautiful view – things that are priceless but not valued by a busy world.

“In the spring more people came to see the snowdrops and the daffodils than usual, and they came to walk in the bluebell woods. You don’t need lots of money to enjoy these things and people are finding that they are more rewarding than shopping. The public want to have access to these pleasures, just as our founders predicted. They want to connect with Nature again and I think there’s definitely a move towards rediscovering what’s special about our own environment which has tremendous diversity and beauty and depths of possibility”.

Visitor numbers aside, there are undoubtedly bigger and more unpredictable changes afoot than the economic recession – such as climate change – and for the National Trust, looking after so much of the nation's land and history, this is surely a huge responsibility. “The climate change debate is an interesting one for us” Fiona agrees. “I think of us as the nation’s ‘canary in the coal-mine’ because owning so much land and coastline puts us in a good position to spot trends before others do. And yes, there are certainly big changes happening such as coastal inundations, storm surges and extreme events which mean that some of the landscapes we have always thought of as enduring, will not be. But as well as raising the alarm and accepting that we can’t turn these things back, we also feel it is our job to show what can be done to minimise the risks and point us towards a sustainable future”.

The Trust currently owns the best part of forty villages, all of which will be retro-fitted for energy efficiency in a drive to cut fossil fuel dependence. There is also a huge push towards local food production, the revival of kitchen gardens, orchards and schemes for community involvement on the land.

The organisation is certainly in a good position to take a lead in the sustainability agenda, not least because many of the estates it manages were originally built to run as sustainable enterprises. The needs of the estates would have been self-generated; energy in the form of wood and charcoal, food from their farms and kitchen gardens, grain for the mills and sheep’s wool for cloth. At locations all over the country, these principles are slowly being brought back as an inspiration for how we can live today.

“A good example of this is Castle Drogo on Dartmoor, which has an old water-powered electricity generator, the original power supply” says Fiona. “Reviving that as a 21st century phenomenon is exciting. Then there’s Gibson Mill in Yorkshire which was built to be self-sufficient for power in 1701, but it fell out of use a hundred years ago. We have now fixed it to run entirely off-grid from a mix of water-generation, solar power and wood-burning fuel. These are just two examples of how we are looking at good practice in an historical context and helping people to see what they could do in their own homes. If you think that changing to a low-energy lightbulb is difficult, you should try it for some of our chandeliers!

“I also think food is completely inspiring” Fiona continues. “With the work we are doing on food, we seem to be tapping into something with enormous resonance, almost like a cri de couer from the population. We have lost touch with something that is so fundamental to our lives – the feeling of authenticity and good health that comes from eating home-grown food in season. We’ve really been encouraging ‘grow-your-own’ across our properties this summer, with free seeds, gardening demonstrations and experts on hand so that visits to National Trust properties can be times where you can really take part and learn something. We’ve also had ‘Wild Child’ where we encourage children to get their hands dirty and connect with Nature in a practical way – like days out building dens when we were children. At the end of the day, the National Trust is not an antidote any more. It’s not a place where you come to forget. It is more about being part of something – an inspiration on how to live”.

It’s an important time for the National Trust, which finds itself at the heart of what we as a nation will leave as a legacy for future generations. Will there still be green spaces for children to feel grass under their feet as Octavia Hill intended and will the buildings tell a story of how we turned back to a sustainability that was inherent in their construction? What will be the new shape of the land once we have adapted to the worst of a changing climate and will our local communities be stronger for it?

It’s a big job for Fiona at the helm, carrying the baton of Octavia Hill through different but very similar times. “So many people still see us as telling stories about the past” she concludes, “but today we are as much about telling stories of the future. We are all going through a period of readjustment and reprioritisation but I do think that people want to feel optimistic about the future, they want their children to grow up in a positive world and they want to do their bit. Whilst we live in a constant cacophany of sound, it’s important to listen to our own inner voices about the fundamentals of what really matters. Our membership numbers show that it’s the simple pleasures that really matter to a lot of people.”

www.nationaltrust.org.uk

First printed in Resurgence Magazine Nov/Dec 2009 No. 257
www.resurgence.org

Where the wild things are

01/02/2010

Where the Wild Things Are

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, when we celebrate the amazing web of life and get really inspired and involved in observing and conserving the wildlife around us. Across the country there will be exhibitions and events, including the UK’s biggest wildlife jamboree, The Festival of Nature on Bristol’s Harbourside in June. But before we get cracking, let’s take a look at why it’s so important to do our bit this time around

As humans we depend on healthy ecosystems and thriving populations of species to ensure the continued provision of ‘ecosystem services’. Our lives are intertwined with nature. We use plants and animals to produce our food, drink, clothing, building materials, fuel and medicines, and living systems provide the services we take for granted such as clean air, fresh water, fertile soil, breakdown of natural waste, plant pollination and regulation of our climate. On the basis of economics alone, a recent global survey by TEEB has shown that it will cost us a lot more in the long run if we don’t invest in maintaining our global biodiversity and ecosystem services now.

To date these natural services that the environment provides have been available to everyone pretty much free of charge. None of the products we use – from our clothes, to our food to our ways of traveling - have had the costs to the environment and to wildlife included within them. So perhaps it’s no surprise they are starting to run out. According to WWF, who produce a two-yearly report called ‘The Living Planet Index’, we are heading fast into an ecological credit crunch when the costs to the planet, to wildlife and to ourselves will be huge. Back in 2008 the Living Planet Index showed a drop in 30% from 1970, which means a big decrease in the numbers of one thousand species and more that they monitor. This is caused by land conversion, deforestation, dams, pollution and over-fishing and is likely to look even worse in this years report.

The downward trend in biodiversity is particularly disappointing because 2010 is the year when 200 governments across the world will come together to review their progress towards targets set at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. These targets, agreed by the Convention on Biological Diversity, were aimed at reducing the decline in biodiversity loss by this year and there hasn’t been that much progress for most. On the bright side there have been some success stories and new partnerships have been forged internationally and in individual countries to address the issues. But there’s always more that all of us can do to help the wildlife around us, to lobby our own governments into action or to choose more carefully the products we consume to make sure we aren’t contributing to the problems. The International Year of Biodiversity is a brilliant time for us to get involved.

TEEB – www.teebweb.org
WWF Living Planet Index – www.panda.org
International Year of Biodiversity - www.biodiversityislife.net
Festival of Nature - www.festivalofnature.org

Some Success stories

Red Kites - Hunted to near extinction by the early 1990s, reintroduction of these birds since 1989 means that the UK is home to more 1350 breeding pairs and one of the few countries in Europe with an increasing population.

Large Blue Butterflies – Having died out in 1979, reintroduction of the species and careful management of grazed grassland means we now have around 30 colonies here in the South West – the largest population in Europe.

Traditional Orchards – A collaborative project started by the National Trust and partners in 2009 to restore and protect our endangered orchard habitats means that lots of fruit trees, birds and insects have better prospects of survival.

Otters – After forty years improving riverbanks and wetlands we’ve finally got otters back in every county of England.

Ladybird spider - Thought to be extinct in 1906, a huge conservation effort has brought back this rare spider to Dorset heathland. Numbers were up to 1000 in 2009.

Make a pledge this year

Take part in an Open Air Laboratories proper scientific survey of your local habitat
www.opalexplorenature.org

Go on an ancient tree hunt and add to the Woodland Trust’s target of finding our 100,000 oldest trees by 2011
www.ancient-tree-hunt.org.uk

Plant night flowering blossoms to encourage bats into your garden – or go one step further and adopt a bat from Devon Wildlife Trust
www.devonwildlifetrust.org

Watch out for the next Bristol Bioblitz – a race against time to identify as much wildlife as possible in one green city location
www.festivalofnature.org

Ditch the lycra and sign up to a green gym for a workout that will benefit body and environment
www2.btcv.org.uk

Sign up to the Big Wildlife Garden and turn your green bits into havens for bugs, birds and beasts.
www.bwg.naturalengland.org.uk

Cows Against Climate Change

16/11/2009

The idea that eating meat is inherently disastrous for the climate is pretty much universally accepted. From Stella McCartney’s “meat free Mondays” all the way up to the likes of Lord Stern and the United Nations the same message is clear –rearing large numbers of livestock cannot be squared with the preservation of our environment.

Whilst in the process of seriously reconsidering the long term future of livestock farming there was a niggling thought at the back of my head that something about the “livestock is bad” assumption wasn’t sitting comfortably with what I was taught about ecology.

Before people started farming livestock, the world’s grasslands were positively heaving with grazing animals. When humans first got to Australia, North America and even Europe there were almost unimaginably vast herds of grazing animals. We can still see the remnants in a few small pockets of Africa but we have lost the giant grazing marsupials of Australia and the estimated 100 million American bison are now largely gone. All these animals belched and farted methane but they didn’t cause global warming. So what’s wrong with the animals, like cattle, we have replaced them with? In short, nothing. The problem lies in how we rear them.

Most of the meat and dairy we currently consume is produced by feeding animals vast quantities of maize, soya and other grains. The industrial arable farming that produces the grain is systematically emptying the world’s soils of their organic matter (which means carbon). Adding insult to injury, the unnatural grain diet is causing grass eaters like cattle to produce much higher levels of methane than normal.

To find out how to properly rear grazing animals we need to look beyond our forefathers to when the herds were managed by nature. Before human intervention, the vast herds of grazing animals were continually pushed around by pack hunting predators. This meant they tended to bunch up tight and spend very little time in the same place before moving on. This is how the grass liked it and it thrived. As it did so it locked down countless tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere in the form of soil rich in organic matter. Thanks to the bison herds, this was the kind of soil we discovered on the prairies of the United States. It was rich, fertile, metres deep and contained billions of tonnes of carbon. This is the same soil we turned to dust in the 1930s after just fifty years of growing crops.

It’s not even that our clever human system is more productive. As nature’s herdsmen, wolves, lions, hyenas, hunting dogs and the like successfully maintained considerably higher stocking densities than us whilst simultaneously increasing the fertility of the grasslands, reducing erosion, sequestering carbon, improving water supplies and reducing disease. They did this with no fossil fuels, no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides, no antibiotics, no genetic modifications, no artificial insemination and they did it for millions of years until we stopped them.

The ability of well managed livestock systems to lock down carbon is not a new discovery. Thanks to questioning pioneer farmers such as Andre Voisin and Allan Savory we have known for fifty years how to mimic this natural grazing. Time after time it has been shown, when done properly, to restore manmade deserts to lush grassland, sequestering vast volumes of carbon in the process. It is an effective strategy in almost all climates but has particular benefits in arid regions. The only side effects seem to be increased biodiversity, fewer droughts and happier, better fed local communities.

The carbon holding potential of soil is enormous, four times greater even than that of the rainforests. It has been estimated that increasing the organic content of the world’s soils by a tenth of a percent a year would sequester as much atmospheric carbon as the world produces from burning fossil fuels in one year. This rate of sequestration is distinctly possible with the help of livestock, so why aren’t we mobilizing the bovine army? Why aren’t we all talking about “Cows Against Climate Change”? Who knows? I’m sure the reasons are many and varied but I bet none of them will be based on common sense and ecology. The fact that the current grain based system makes billions in profit each year for huge powerful agricultural corporations may have something to do with it, but hay, that’s me just guessing.

Food for the Future - are we secure?

11/09/2009

In January last year the government had a good look at food from all sides and decided that ‘existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource-constrained future’. This is not news to campaigning organisations such as the Soil Association which has been working for years towards a less intensive and chemical-free system of organic food production - kinder to the environment and less wasteful of precious resources. In its own assessment of Britain’s food security last year the charity concluded self-sufficiency has declined over the past ten years as we have become more reliant on imported food. Also, worryingly, there is little information as to the resilience of UK food and farming in terms of skilled labour and infrastructure. The answer? A radical transformation of farming practices so they become sustainable, coupled with the reconstruction of regional food processing and distribution networks.

In Spring 08 we summarised a great piece of research by Simon Fairlie in The Land magazine which asked the all important question ‘Can Britain Feed Itself?’ Simon concluded that it would be possible on a plant-based diet. But if Britain was hoping to shoe-horn food production into its currently available twenty-two million hectares of non-urban land and still consume a reasonable proportion of meat and dairy products, then a radical rethink of organic farming systems is required. He suggested the closed-system loop of permaculture design, which involves mixed farms with a diversity of crops and animals and the reapplication of waste back to the land for fertility, should be applied to our entire system of food growing. These are the same earth-care principles as those guiding organic and biodynamic farming and the ever-popular global Transition Movement.

The Transition Movement has also been quick to consider our future supply with its recent report entitled ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ The conclusions are that yes it could but only if many more people lived and worked on the land (a twenty-fold increase was necessary when oil supply suddenly collapsed in Cuba). This would require a lot of re-skilling as so much of our farming expertise has been lost and the average age of today’s farmer is 60. On the other hand it would lead to a wider range of jobs at a time of economic contraction. Feeding Totnes would also depend on a very different diet. Similarly to Simon Fairlies conclusions, meat consumption would need to be significantly reduced. Demand for local food would have to grow, moving away from supermarkets and convenience food whilst finding more creative ways of getting food to local people.

The overall conclusions of all who have looked at this question are the same. It seems we need to change our attitude towards what we eat, when we eat it and where we get it from. In short we need a completely new food culture which recognises the value of good food for our health, our environment and our local economies. The time of cheap food is over. This is a challenge for all of us as consumers as the time comes for us to support our local and national food production if we wish to have security into the future. There is also a call for government to take a lead and provide a food plan for the entire country. Change has become inevitable and we need a strategy at all levels, from personal all the way to government, in order to manage it.

www.soilassociation.org
www.tlio.org.uk
www.transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork

How to feed Totnes

Fruit and Veg
Converting land within the town to community gardens and using all the south-facing gardens and allotments means enough year-round fruit and veg for everyone in Totnes. One acre for every household.

Cereals
Research needed for the best grains in our damp Devon climate but enough land around Totnes to feed everyone if cereals are for humans and grass is for cattle.

Meat and Dairy
Meat rationing required, with many more pigs and chickens. Half the dairy for all can already come from Riverford Organic Farm.

Nuts
Walnut and sweet chestnut varieties researched by the Agroforestry Research Trust replace protein lost from a decrease in meat.

Alcohol
One bottle of wine a month for everyone from the Sharpham Estate. Revival of hop and barley growing for beer.

Wood fuel
Not enough land for both food and fuel if reliant on wood for heating.

Farming for the future - does nature hold the key?

11/09/2009

The most important thing I learnt when making “A Farm for the Future” is that working with nature (rather than against it as we currently do) is the biggest key to farming in a low-energy future. For example, I think it’s important we understand our landscape. The South West used to be mainly sheep and coppice wood and then dairy farming. But now we’ve become so focused on commodities that we are growing large amounts of cereals in a region that has high rainfall and a clay soil. How did that happen? It’s important to understand what to grow on the land because if it doesn’t want to grow there, we are just making work for ourselves. I’ve spent a year observing our land and it’s amazing how much just the weeds can tell us about the quality of what’s under our feet.
Soil is a really important element for me. We can’t have healthy plants, animals and humans without healthy soil and we need to take care of it like we would our animals. But over the last 60 years we’ve worn it out and as a result we’ve lost 70% of the nutrients in our fruit, veg, meat and dairy since World War II. Just like the credit-crunch we are now realizing the scale of our soil debt and we simply can’t borrow any more. We need to go back into the black by replacing the nutrients in a sustainable natural way without relying on imported chemical fertilisers. Then we need to really understand the water table on our land and learn how to hold onto it as long as possible to ride out droughts and sequester flooding, both of which will be important in the future.
The next thing that’s important is to move away from monoculture and towards polyculture food production and for farms to become less specialised. Our farm is currently a livestock farm with beef and sheep, but twenty years ago we would have had a mixed farm. Mixed farms have more resilience for the future because you produce everything you need within a closed-loop system. You also have more products to take to market. Because of climate change we should be planting crops that need less energy and mixing trees, shrubs and perennials back into the farm system to provide a diverse habitat and enrich the soil.
A big challenge we face as farmers is the social and economic side of things. We have no idea where we’re going to be in the future with fewer resources, more expensive oil and the impacts of climate change. I’ve never thought that being a farmer was easy, but last year's fuel crisis, with oil prices continually rising, was a real wake-up call. Our costs went through the roof - animal feed, diesel for the tractors, agricultural contractor bills - and the biggest rise was in the price of fertiliser. Fortunately we use very little chemical fertiliser, but many farms were driven to bankruptcy.
It’s clear that farming needs to make a transition to the future, but if we make it too fast we will go bankrupt. If we make it too slow we’ll also go bankrupt. At the moment we are ‘beef farmers’ and we find that selling into the supermarket chain seems to be the only convenient option, particularly in a recession. But we want to move slowly away from these relationships with supermarkets to a more localised market where we can sell a wider variety of products. This requires building links with the community which is now difficult for most farmers who have become so marginalised by selling their produce as commodities to a middle-man.
I have come back to the farm, not because it’s easy but because I want to make the work my father has done sustainable into the future. I’m concerned that when pushed to improve our national food production, it is wildlife that will suffer. Yet it’s nature that holds the key to our success because time and time again scientific studies have shown that a large diversity of species in a growing system increases yields, reduces pests and disease and produces truly sustainable food. Biodiversity can have huge financial benefits for your farm. The only problem is that these systems are not profitable for big agribusinesses that currently hold the power and prefer to maintain the status quo. And if you’ll excuse the rock band references this is a status quo that can only lead to dire straights.

Local Food - a book for all seasons

11/09/2009

Published on September 17, the handbook is full of inspiring case studies of people doing it for themselves. From home to school gardens, everyone can play a part. Co-author, Tamzin Pinkerton, says: "Food is such a positive and practical way to do something now. The first place to start? Look the food on your plate: how was it made and how did it get there?"

This analysis may lead you to conclude our dominant food system is vulnerable to oil shortages yet reckless with our resources. While supermarket distribution has eroded local food chains, the book’s message is it is up to us to revive them.

The key ingredient is community. By getting together, we can learn to grow food in schools and allotments, as well as supporting our local farms. The knock-on effect? Our social networks also strengthen.

Local food also boosts the local economy. According to research, money spent on local organic food, rather than in national supermarkets, doubles its value when spent in the community.

When the oil runs out, supermarket shelves will quickly empty. Surely it is better to invest in local organic abundance and reap its solar-powered benefits now? Local food is not a lifestyle choice - it is our best bet for a sustainable future.

Local Food has many shining examples of projects in the South West. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes about Garden Shares, a Totnes project, matchmaking garden owners with would-be growers. Lou Brown: 01803 867358.

Team can effort save land from rack-and-ruin. Local people near Bath saved an orchard from being grubbed-up by sponsoring trees in return for a share of the apples. The not-for-profit group, Broadlands Community Orchard, also harvests the apples and sells them at Bath Farmers’ Market in the autumn.
Broadlands Community Orchard: 07532 472256
Shelter-design and building course: Sunday 6 September.
Earth-oven cooking course: Saturday 3 October.

Healthy food is not a middle-class obsession – it’s a human need. In the 1990s, a group came together in Hartcliffe to tackle food poverty. Set in one of Bristol’s most deprived areas, HEAEG now runs cookery classes, a community allotment and a food coop, supplying affordable local organic and whole food via bulk buying.
Hartcliffe Food Co-op; 0117 946 5285; wendy.harris@hheag.org.uk

Stroud CSA began with four people and a good idea in 2001, and now employs two administrators and two farmers. CSA stands for Community-Shared Agriculture, an arrangement between farm and local community. Stroud members support the farm’s viability by committing money - or time - in exchange for a weekly box of the farm’s fresh organic produce.
Stroud CSA: 0845 4580814; info@StroudCommunityAgriculture.org

Reader offer
Buy Local Food : how to make it happen in your community (Green Books £12.95) at the special price of £10.95 with free p&p for UK only. After publication on 17 September, phone 0845 4589910 quoting The Source reader offer.

What can you do?

Make sure your school is part of the Soil Association’s Food for Life partnership by sourcing organic and seasonal food from local farmers at www.foodforlife.org.uk

Get together with neighbours or colleagues to bulk-buy and keep down costs of local, organic and whole foods. Contact a local wholesaler or community bulk-buying scheme such as www.essential-trading.co.uk or find more about schemes near you on www.sustainweb.org/foodcoops

Support your local farmers and producers through farm shops, markets and veg box schemes. Locate and learn at www.makinglocalfoodwork.co.uk; www.FoodLoversBritain.com; and www.veg-box-recipes.co.uk.

Grow more fruit, veg, salad and herbs of your own in pots, gardens, allotments or through community schemes such as Community Supported Agriculture. Check out more on CSAs at www.soilassociation.org/csa and see examples in Exeter and St Kew Highway for how this can really work: www.exetercommunityagriculture.co.uk and www.camel-csa.org.uk. Get great growing tips on www.gardenorganic.org.uk.

Take a walk on the wild side. Our hedgerows, woods and seashores are packed with food for free at anytime of year. Find out what to look for before you set off with advice from www.wildmanwildfood.com; www.fathen.org or www.countrylovers.co.uk/wfs.

The Macrobiotic Way

11/09/2009

It’s really not long ago that people all over the World were eating this kind of diet, with one or two grains and beans, local vegetables and animal food just as a supplement. Dairy, red meat and processed foods with high levels of sugar have only become a large part of our diet in recent years. Modern science is increasingly showing the link between these foods and high levels of illness such as diabetes, heart disease and cancers and a change in diet may lead to a decrease in avoidable levels of these. Macrobiotics is suggesting that we get back to a more traditional way of eating and get away from foods that are destroying people’s health.

It also makes sense when you look at wider issues such as population. The reaction of modern science to fears of food shortages is that we need macro-scale technologies such as genetic modification. But the simplest way to feed more people is to move away from meat and dairy to a more plant-based macrobiotic diet. To grow a cow you need ten times more land than you would need to grow the same amount of plant food, and it’s much less energy efficient. At the moment 92% of the World’s soya beans are used as cattle feed and yet this is such a brilliant food for human beings. At the same time, decreasing the amount of dairy and red meat in our diet can have huge effects on our carbon footprint as so much greenhouse gas emission is produced from meat and dairy production.

Food issues are all connected - the macrobiotic food plan is not only the healthiest for us, but it also feeds the most people and leads to the least amount of environmental destruction. And changing our diets need not be a hardship. Here at the schools we teach people the fundamentals of healthy eating and how to prepare a macrobiotic diet in a really delicious way.

www.macroschool.co.uk; www.holisticcooking.co.uk; 01803 762598

Beating Flu the Macrobiotic Way

• Avoid sugar. It’s one of the most detrimental things for the immune system as it weakens mucus membranes in the nose, throat, lungs and intestine. It demineralises the body and makes the blood more acidic which is favourable to micro-organisms.
• Eat whole grains such as rice, barley and quinoa daily, in whole form rather than in bread as milling destroys the integrity of the food.
• Eat more whole plant foods, beans and fresh vegetables which help the immune system.
• Eat fruit and vegetables from the same climatic zone – local if possible. Food from the same zone has nutrients balanced for these conditions and if grown in hot conditions will have a cooling effect that can weaken the body in colder climates.
• Eat small amounts of sea vegetables as these are the foods highest in minerals and can increase mineral intake enormously
• Avoid anything that is highly processed as it will have almost always have lost its integrity.

Beyond Therapy

11/09/2009

Catharine tries PSYCH-K

About a decade ago I spent four years in therapy. I left much wiser and more forgiving but not much else changed. I still got bullied at work, fell in love with unavailable men, and thought I was rubbish. The old patterns were still there, and I didn’t seem able to shift them. But in the ten years since, new ways to change patterns that don’t involve analysing oneself and ones past have been appearing and some practitioners say that they can act more swiftly than ‘talking therapies’.

Bruce Lipton, a famous cell biologist, explains the science behind these claims. “The subconscious mind, one of the most powerful information processors known, specifically observes both the surrounding world and the body’s internal awareness, reads the environmental cues, and immediately engages previously acquired (learned) behaviours” he says, “all without the help, suggestion, or even awareness of the conscious mind.” Up to the age of six our subconscious mind is doing nearly all the work – soaking up everything around us with no power of discernment. And it’s only from age 12 onwards that we produce sustained periods of ‘active or focused consciousness’, which processes information at a much slower rate.

That’s why I’ve failed to stop smoking for any long period for the past 13 years. I witnessed my mother do it from the moment I was conceived. In moments of high stress, my subconscious mind activates the ‘smoke’ switch before my mind can say ‘you don’t need that’ and when it finally does, I don’t care, until the next day. Therapy didn’t work so I decided to try out one of the new techniques called – a method called PSYCH-K (pronounced sigh-kay). It’s a system for changing self-limiting beliefs at a subconscious level so that we may fulfill our dreams and potential.

“PSYCH-K uses kinesiology (muscle testing) to find out if we believe a particular statement, and if we don’t, it then uses a variety of different exercises to balance the right and left sides of the brain, so that the whole brain is being used while a new belief is being put in place, explains Liz Artingstall, an advanced PSYCH-K practitioner in Bristol. She is helping me to fulfill my dream of living in a community in the countryside, to stop smoking, and make better choice around men.

I hold out my arm to the side. Liz tells me to be strong and repeat a belief statement. If I keep my arm up when Liz presses on it, it shows my subconscious mind believes it, if I can’t then I don’t. There was total collapse when we tried ‘my love life is flowing and spontaneous’. Shortly after rebalancing that belief, I had a delightful fling with a guy I met at a barbecue, and several men have been paying me flattering compliments.

Liz uses kinesiology to find the most appropriate exercise to embed the new belief. One, the new direction balance, involves sitting cross-ankled and handed to unite both brain hemispheres and repeating the statement silently until the shift takes place. With me, the change signals itself with a shudder. Another technique uses guided visualization, another standing with my arms apart and feeling them move, unbidden by me, until my hands come together in a loud clap and the belief is integrated.

Rebalancing the smoking takes me deep into a host of self-limiting beliefs gathered up since I was a toddler. I’ve had a couple of bursts of not smoking and no cravings either, only to slip up when feeling vulnerable. So we’ve worked on beliefs to sort that out. I’ve been tobacco free for three weeks now, bar one slip that left me feeling awful.

Unexpected benefits include leaving a job I’ve been unhappy in for several years, and a general solid, confident grounded feeling of actually liking myself that I don’t remember experiencing ever before. As for the community idea, I’m busy trying it out. It is no longer a dream, but a reality that I’m in the process of creating.

Liz Artingstall. Tel: 07733 103879 or 01275 392241. Email: liz@buenavida.co.uk.
Websites: www.psych-kbristol.co.uk, www.psych-k.com.
Type PSYCH-K plus your local town into a search engine to find your nearest practitioner.

Elisabeth balances her brain

"The human brain has an enormous capacity for change, self-healing and self-balancing," says James Roy. He and his wife Sarah run Symphonic Mind in a retreat-like setting in West Harptree, Somerset. They reckon five days of intensive brain training with body work can bring about long-lasting changes.

"There is no need to talk about traumatic events," says Sarah. "The brain can rebalance itself without having to know what caused the problem in the first place. The best part is, it’s completely non-invasive and we can measure the changes as they happen." So I booked for my five days of neurotherapy with twin goals: more clarity and more calm. I had the best five days ever.

The brain training sessions were akin to a series of guided meditations, with a crucial difference - you are hooked up to sophisticated software that helps your brain rebalance. Sarah identified a large slodge of self-criticism in my unconscious (no surprise there), and by broadcasting a different pattern via sounds (beautiful, like chimes) my brain adapted to a more healthy pattern.

Sandwiched between the brain training sessions was body work with James. Trained with the Dalai Lama's masseur, he uses yogic breathing and postures to release tension. I unwound. To top it off, we had an organic vegetarian lunch, a nutritionally-balanced healing concoction of tempting tastes cooked by Sarah, a nutritionist.

Two months later, yes, I feel calmer. But many other things have changed in my life so is that a fair test? I needed to hear from someone who had experienced long-term effects, if any.

Francine Russell, a food consultant, went to Symphonic Mind 18 months ago with the goal of becoming stress and pain free, with better work focus. For 30 years she’d suffered constant body pain that hadn’t responded to either conventional or complementary treatment. "I was sceptical at first," she says. But like me Francine found her five days luxurious. Did the treatment work? "I found myself more efficient with less effort and or the first time I could drive on the motorway and use air travel without feeling anxious. My sleep improved vastly too. Within two months, the pain had gone and has not come back. I started running for the first time this year and have just completed a 5km run."

Strangely, Francine experienced another, unexpected, benefit. She stopped smoking. "About a month after the brain balancing treatment, I was about to have a cigarette, when I thought, "I am not buying them again. I dropped my 15-a-day habit and have not smoked since. You could say it was a coincidence but it feels like tangible stuff."

Symphonic Mind, Tilley Manor, The High Street, West Harptree, Somerset BA40 6EB. Tel: 01761 221996.

Miriam does Positive Psychology

Until the late 1990s, psychology focused very much on life’s negative aspects, seemingly having lost sight of what makes life worth living, what are our strengths and what makes us happy. Positive psychology, the science of well-being, is redressing the balance by undertaking research into what makes us happy (relationships - yes, money - no) and what helps us to be at our best (new ways of using our strengths and the 3:1 theory, more on that later)

Positive psychology is new in the UK. People are only just beginning to apply the theories in health, education and business, theories which add up to a paradigm shift in thinking. In business, most training focuses on fixing weaknesses, yet research shows the best you can expect from that is mediocrity. But if you focus on developing someone’s strengths, you create the circumstances for them to excel with ease. People playing to their strengths are more successful, productive, creative and happier. The health sector’s traditional disease model means that in mental health practitioners generally focus on what’s wrong rather than what you want to be. And as the saying goes ‘what you focus on is what you get’.

If psychological health is a continuum from -10 (very unhappy) to +10 (very happy), clinical psychologists and therapists aim to get you to 0. The best the depressed can hope for is an absence of depression, which isn’t the same as the presence of happiness. Positive psychology aims to get you into the plus scale of happiness and flourishing. So if you’ve ever felt stuck in therapy chewing over the same unhappy events, a positive psychology approach could help you move into a state of well-being.

Last year I began the first ever study applying positive psychology to alcohol-misusing adolescents in Bath, with astonishing results. As the teenagers became happier, their drinking levels declined by 66%, with drug consumption also down substantially. Most of these ‘dropouts' from school are back in education now; some have new jobs. The homeless or ‘sofa surfers’ have new homes. In fact most have are no longer drunk and directionless but motivated young people with goals for the future. What fuelled this transformation is one of the most remarkable pieces of positive psychology research. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions posits that when people experience at least three positive emotions for each negative emotion, they go into upwards spirals of flourishing, possibly resulting in transformation. My prediction is that positive psychology will transform training, teaching and therapy in the next decade.

Miriam Akhtar is one of the first positive psychologists in the UK. She co-presents the self-help CD, The Happiness Training Plan.

www.miriamakhtar.co.uk
www.happinesstrainingplan.com

Biochar - the future is black

11/09/2009

“Our soils have become totally degraded after a century of careless farming with tractors and fertilisers. I was born in a farm in Nebraska and when my great-grandfather ploughed virgin prairie lands they held 40 tonnes of carbon per hectare of soil. That’s now down to 5 tonnes - the rest went up in the air as carbon dioxide. This makes agriculture responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions up to 1980. My question has always been: how can we put this carbon back into the soil and make it stay there?

Since the 1960s I have been involved in the production of organic food. I had an organic bakery in Portobello Road and then Green & Blacks Chocolate. But it was when I launched the first organic wholegrain cornflakes that I realised, thanks to a study by the Carbon Neutral Company, that the carbon footprint of this food was very low. This is because organic farmers increase the amount of carbon in their soils through the use of compost and manures every year. It means less carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere and, because they’re not using nitrate fertilisers, much less nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. I realised that farming itself could sequester carbon back into the soil and mitigate climate change rather than cause it.

But the light bulb really came on for me when I was reading a book called ‘1491’ about the Americas in the year before Columbus arrived. It’s a great book! It describes how indigenous civilisations in the Amazon were able to prosper on poor quality jungle soils. They smouldered agricultural, food and other waste to make a crude form of charcoal which they mixed into the soil to improve fertility. This ‘terra preta’ or ‘black earth’ is wonderful stuff because it has a huge surface area which holds waters, nutrients and the beneficial bacteria and fungi normally found in healthy soils. People in Brazil are still digging it up 500 to 2000 years later and selling it to farmers who need to build fertility of their land. It still makes for fertile soil.

It seemed to me that using ‘black earth’, or ‘biochar’ as we call it, is a quicker way to get carbon back into the soil than organic farming on its own. Of course organic farming is beneficial, but it’s a slower process. Biochar production is also a way of using up all the agricultural and forestry products that are currently left to rot or burnt. In Mediterranean countries for example, there are huge areas of citrus, olive or nut growing where farmers cut their trees and burn the prunings. If you add up all of these small fires, millions of tones of carbon dioxide are emitted every year. Because the photosynthesis of plant material is the only way to get carbon out of the atmosphere, it’s crazy to put it straight back by burning it. So this is why we set up Carbon Gold: to develop a simple, low cost technology that transforms the carbon in plant waste into biochar with very low greenhouse gas emissions.

At Carbon Gold we are not interested in producing biochar for fuel. We are producing it not to burn but to put back into the soil. Our technology is for small farmers across the world who can use it to improve fertility and lock carbon into their soil for hundreds of years. As well as the agricultural benefits, it gives them an opportunity for additional income from carbon credits for removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We’ve developed a drum kiln that is made from old oil drums and costs less than $100. It makes 40 kilos of biochar at a time. It’s perfect for allotments and small farmers in remote areas, so it really is a case of ‘small is beautiful’ rather than shiny machines with knobs and dials. We’re currently working on simple technology suitable for a spectrum of different situations, from subsistence farmers in Mozambique to apple producers in the UK.

I believe that biochar which is sustainably produced by small farmers and put back into the soil can make a huge contribution to mitigating climate change. That is why we are lobbying for it to be included in any future carbon reduction regime along with things like solar, wind and tidal power. I have three grandchildren and I am doing it to build a future for them. We have limited time to act, probably five years, and the thought that this technology could make a difference is what really inspires me. It’s easy to feel helpless because on an individual level there is only so that much one can do. So this is my way of taking the bull by the horns. It will take time to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases so it makes sense to me to work on taking out carbon we’ve already put in.

www.carbongold.com

Living without money - penniless and prospering

10/09/2009

Remind us why you’re doing it Mark?

After years of various types of activism – against war, environmental destruction, animal abuse, sweatshops – I realised that I was perpetually trying to fire-fight symptoms, without any thought for their root cause. When I investigated this further I found that most people have no idea that their everyday habits have such negative impacts because they have become so disconnected from what they consume. The degrees of separation between a consumer and what they consume have increased so much that people don’t see the embodied energy that goes into the stuff they buy, the waste, the environmental destruction or the suffering that happens along the way. I quickly realised that the enabler of this disconnection was money. If we had to take personal responsibility for producing the things we consume, then we would be massively less wasteful than we are today as we'd fully understand how much real energy went into making them.

Was there something that inspired you to give it a go?

Intellectualising the need to give up money, and actually living without it, are two hugely different challenges. In my last year of my economics degree in Ireland I came across the writings of Gandhi, and that changed the course of my life from one of accumulating as much wealth as I could to one trying to be of service as much as I could. You could say that his quote 'be the change you want to see in the world' inspired me to do it, as once I realised that we'll never have true sustainability until we move beyond money then I knew I had to do it myself first. I decided to attempt it for one year at the very least.

So what did you have to give up?

I had to give up everything really: pubs, cafes, flights back home to Ireland, listening to music, energy at the touch of a button, buses, trains. The only things that remained were things I could find ways of doing without money. It took a huge amount of planning - I had to break my life down to everything I consumed at the time and to then either decide that I was going to learn to do without it or else find an ecological way of doing it that involved no money.

How exactly have you done it?

I set about breaking down my life into every category imaginable, and began working out how I would meet my needs without currency. The list was huge, but on it there were a number of essentials. The first of these was obviously food.

The 'food for free table' has four legs. The first is growing your own, which I've been doing where I live. Then there is wild food foraging, my preferred option as it is nutritionally exceptional and without question the most gentle on the earth. The third leg – using waste food - is an incredible resource to draw on. Whilst I’m not comfortable with the fact that it's dependent on industrialised society to come into existence, I feel like I have an obligation to use this before using any more energy producing food. The last leg of the food table is barter, which involves using your skills or any excess food you've produced to meet any needs not met by the other methods.

With the next essential, accommodation, I got very lucky by getting a caravan from the excellent Freecycle, and parked it up on an organic farm that I volunteer on. If I am travelling I use projects such as Couch-Surfing, which is an online community of people who let you stay on their couch for free, anywhere in the world. I travel to faraway places by hitching and went from Bristol to North West Ireland for Christmas with no money. For anyone who is unsure about hitching, Liftshare is a great alternative. Anything under 150km I do either on foot or by bicycle, for which I have both a trailer and panniers to transport things around in. On top of that, I've got puncture proof tyres which means I have no more need for disposables such as tubes and puncture repair kits.

If I need something done that I cannot do myself, I use the Freeconomy Community to find willing skilled helpers, whilst getting the stuff I need to do it either from skips, tips, outside peoples houses or from Freecycle. With the Freeconomy Community, not only do I get the job done for free, I get to learn the skill I need in the process, borrow whatever tools I need to do the work and meet new like-minded friends locally!

For books and clothing, I organise book-swapping and clothes-swapping events. On top of this, there are fantastic organisations such as ReaditSwapit and Swishing online. There is so much stuff in the world and if we only learnt to share it we would only need to use a fraction of the worlds resources that we currently do.

I produce all my own energy – solar for my laptop and my incoming-calls-only mobile, a woodburner for heating and a rocket stove for cooking, which I fuel using old veg boxes and wood we coppice at the farm. When I first thought about cooking outdoors in the rain, wind and snow that inevitably comes with the British winter, I felt slightly overwhelmed. However, it quickly became one of the joys of my life; the wildlife became my TV and the birds became my ipod. Now I would rather have my time consumed cooking outdoors than kill it watching some 'reality' TV show in the 'living' room.

Whilst using my compost loo I use the discarded newspapers from the local newsagents -its not double quilted but it becomes normal surprisingly quickly! For me the compost toilet should be a symbol of this whole movement in the same way the spinning wheel became a symbol of Gandhi's India. It represents sanity and a respect for the earth and everything that lives on it.

What’s been the biggest challenge?

I think the hardest parts are the social element - it is hard to do as much stuff with friends as I used to and it can affect relationships. But also there’s the fact that everything just takes more time these days. Hand-washing my clothes in cold water, using sapindus mukkrossi (commonly known as soapnuts, native to Nepal but which I 'foraged' from a local eco-store which recently went out of business) which I boil for detergent, can take two hours instead of the normal ten minutes using the machine. Cycling 36 miles to the city and back takes a lot more time and energy than driving or catching the train, though it does provide me with a practical alternative to my old gym subscription. Finding stuff in skips – such as the steamer I cook with – takes longer than popping out to the shops. And the list goes on. The key point, however, is that I would rather have my time consumed doing things this way.

What will you do when the year is up?

I am now ten months into this experiment, and whilst it has been hugely challenging, I can no longer see myself going back to a life of credit and debt. I am much happier now than I was when I was earning a good salary, so why go back?

Do you think you’ve achieved anything on a more than personal level?

I've no idea really. Sometimes I feel small and that the problem too big. Every other person in the country uses money and its use has been such a taboo subject up to now. I often feel like the first vegan must have felt - quite alone in the world sometimes. But in some ways it’s irrelevant. As Gandhi said, "the truth is the truth regardless of whether you are a minority of one or a majority of millions." All I can do is my best to try and raise awareness of the issues as I see them, the rest is out of my hands.

What’s your advice to other people?

I would say that it’s good to think about where your food and 'stuff' comes from and of how people, animals and the environment have been treated in the process. Think about whether or not you are happy with the levels of industrialisation involved and if you feel that there are certain practices you should refrain from, and there are other habits you should start, then go for it. The main thing is to have no disparity between the head, the heart and the hands. I think that if we all resolved to live exactly the way we believed tomorrow, the world would be transformed and there would be much less destruction and suffering.

And last thoughts?

I honestly believe that until we give up money on a global scale, symptoms such as environmental destruction will inevitably exist. When people ask what I miss about my old life, I say bills, bank statements and the inevitable traffic jam on my way home from my old stressful job. Oh, and a quick pint of organic ale down the local.

Mark Boyle is the founder of The Freeconomy Community, the world’s fastest growing alternative economy – check it out at www.justfortheloveofit.org or email him at mark@justfortheloveofit.org

ReSource

www.freecycle.org

www.couchsurfing.com

www.hospitalityclub.org

www.readitswapit.co.uk

www.bookcrossing.com

www.swishing.org/

www.liftshare.com

Us and Other Animals

24/07/2009

With rising animal disease, climate change impacts and species extinctions accelerating across the globe, we speak to the people who speak up for the animals and ask them what we can do.

The Scientist

Rupert Sheldrake is well-known for his controversial theories about evolution and the nature of consciousness and much of his work over the past twenty years has focused on telepathy between animals and humans. Having caused much controversy within mainstream science, the third edition of his first book ‘A New Science of Life’ came out this year and we took the opportunity to talk to him about the human-animal relationship. Rupert believes that we should look beyond science and trust our own instincts about how similar we are to animals, and try to foster the natural affinity we have with them as children.

“Most of us have had a split relationship towards animals ever since seventeenth century science told us that animals and plants are unconscious machines and there for us to exploit through science and technology. This is the basis of industrial agriculture and factory farming on which the majority of our economy depends. On the other hand, anyone who has kept a dog or a cat knows that animals are not just machines and have emotions similar to our own. And they have intuitions that go beyond our own, for example when they show premonitions of earthquakes and other natural disasters.

But the private understanding of animals based on this personal relationship is completely incompatible with the mechanistic orthodoxy on which the modern industrialized civilization is based. Therefore those attitudes have to be kept in separate departments and there is a strong taboo about talking about pets and the understandings that one derives from them in the public domain. If this taboo is broken and people think of chickens in battery farms in the same way as animals they know and love, at the very least they are likely to become vegetarians and perhaps even animal rights activists. But the prevailing taboo is strong enough to prevent most people crossing this line.

The simplest way to break the taboo is to trust our own experience of both domestic and wild animals, then we see that they have many features in common with ourselves. We are not alone in having communication or intelligence. Experience counts far more than dogma and I don’t think we need to go to telepathy for proof of this. I don’t think we need scientific proof at all. We know it through direct experience which is the best way of knowing anything.

Most of us learn this as children because as children we have a natural affinity with animals. This is a healthy and normal part of childhood and can enrich us all our lives. Life without personal contact with plants and animals is an impoverished life and why so many people keep pets even though they have no economic need to do so, and why gardening is Britain’s biggest hobby, why the RSPB is one of our largest charities and why most people enjoy parks and the countryside. The dogma of science seems very remote from our personal experience of these things”.

Rupert’s book ‘Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home is the result of five years research into the experience of thousands of people who own and work with animals. www.sheldrake.org

For all the latest scientific research on the sensations, emotions and feelings of animals and how this impacts on our current culture and policies, see: www.animalsentience.com

The Conservationist

Bournemouth-born conservationist Jane Goodall has worked with chimpanzees in Africa for fifty years and has helped to persuade people that these animals have distinct personalities, minds and emotions. In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to advance the power of individuals to take informed and compassionate action for all living things. She has been a UN ‘Messenger of Peace’ for the last seven years, furthering the UN-set goal of ‘making the world a better place’ and her latest book, coming out at the end of this year focuses on individuals who have helped to rescue endangered species on the brink of extinction. Jane believes that we should face up to the suffering around us and use it to drive personal action such as eating less meat.

“Too many people view animals as ‘things’. If they feel pain at all, it must be somehow different from the pain we humans feel these people say. If we talk about animal emotions, we are described as being sentimental. The story of the creation which describes God giving man ‘dominion’ over the animals is responsible for much muddled thinking. In fact it is a wrong translation of the original Hebrew word which implies ‘wise stewardship’ which is very different. Dominion implies that animals are in the world simply to serve the human animal rather than as beings in their own right.

I believe that to heal this we need more and better education in schools as to the true nature of animals. I hope to involve increasing numbers of young people in the Jane Goodall Institutes ‘Roots and Shoots Programme’ that empowers members to show greater respect for animals and helps them to take action when they learn about a problem. It also helps people understand that we are animals too. We are part of the amazing animal kingdom and not separated from it.

We should also face up to the cruelty that is all around us and have the courage to admit that there is unbelievable suffering of intensively ‘farmed’ animals. If I mention the conditions in say a pig ‘farm’ or a ‘battery’ farm, people often say ‘Don’t tell me, I love animals and I’m very sensitive’. Then they go off and eat bacon and eggs. The one thing we could all do as individuals is eat only a small amount of meat and that which has come from free ranging animals. This includes poultry, which people seem to think of as vegetable, and fish too. As well as the suffering, intensive farming of animals also uses up huge areas of land, is very wasteful of water and the methane gas produced is, along with the burning of fossil fuels, the most significant contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change”.

www.janegoodall.org.uk

Is your school or college already part of Roots and Shoots – Mission Possible? If not sign up for resources and projects aimed at the people, animals and the environment around you. Certificates and awards count towards the Eco Schools Green Flag Scheme.

www.rootsnshoots.org.uk; www.eco-schools.org.uk

Endangered Animals

The Jane Goodall Institute raises funds for the Tchimpanga Chimpanzee Rehabilitaion Centre in the Congo which provides a safe haven for 140 chimps caught up in the logging, poaching and illegal pet trade. www.globalgiving.co.uk/2663.

The Environmental Investigation agency is committed to exposing environmental crime through undercover filming of illegal operations. It’s work has already saved millions of endangered animals. It’s ‘species in peril’ programme is currently focusing on tigers, elephants, cetaceans and orangutans. www.eia-international.org

Stuck for a gift? How about adopting a bottle-nosed dolphin through WWF who will use the money to campaign for protection of their UK habitat through a Marine Bill? Other adoptees include polar bears and a Bengal tiger. www.secure.wwf.org.uk/adoption

The Author

Sue Cross is the author of ‘On the Menu: Animal Welfare’ a new book out this July which examines and compares the way in which the animals we eat are bred, reared, fed and slaughtered in intensive ‘factory farms’ and small-holdings that use traditional animal husbandry techniques. Sue believes that we should steer clear of cheap animal products and go instead for meat that has been produced in a small-scale and more compassionate way.

“Isn't it strange that our pets and farm animals live in parallel universes? That while owners of domestic animals are legally bound to protect their pets from pain, fear and injury and are obliged by law to allow them the freedom to exhibit their natural behaviour, the law for farm animals merely makes it an offence to cause unnecessary suffering? Not only does this makes our human-animal relationship a contradictory one but it begs the question, when does suffering become necessary?

It is the industrial scale of animal production that causes so much suffering. As the scale increases so does the suffering. The cost of animal products can be kept down only if economies of scale are followed - if animals are reared in the smallest possible space, in an environment controlled with automated, labour-saving devices, forced to grow in the shortest possible time and treated not as sentient beings but as agricultural products. The cheaper the products the more our animal-human relationship breaks down.

The only way to improve things is to recognise that humans and animals have the same basic needs. They need a place where they can find safety and comfort, a diet that suits their digestive system and an emotionally normal life. Also we should not underestimate the capacity of animals to feel. Like us they feel pain, fear, happiness, excitement or misery. What we do have, and they do not, is a moral intelligence and that is what makes the way we treat animals on factory farms a travesty.

We also need to change our eating culture. Celebrity chefs have enormous influence and I would like to challenge them to produce dishes without animal-derived ingredients, to show that we do not have to eat meat every day. I am not a vegetarian and I am not arguing that animal produce should be banned, but I believe that the cruelty involved in producing cheap animal products, not just meat but milk, eggs and fish, is wrong because the cheaper the food the lower the standard of welfare. It is for this reason that I would love to see a McCartneys rather than a MacDonalds in every shopping precinct.

There are two extremes in farming. There is industrial production on the one hand and farming where good husbandry is paramount. As consumers we should support the latter and avoid the cheapest animal-derived products. We can campaign for labelling that makes clear that the animals we use for food have been reared according to good welfare standards and slaughtered as humanely as possible. We can avoid buying food that is produced on factory farms and support those farmers who practice good husbandry, who know their animals as individuals and who give their animals the freedom to live natural, normal and healthy lives”.

The food you choose has a direct effect on how farm animals live. Sixty billion animals are farmed for food worldwide every year – the vast majority of them reared intensively in systems that seriously impact on their welfare. The Compassionate Shopping Guide can help you with which meat, fish, eggs and dairy produce to avoid and how each supermarket scores on the welfare of farm animals.

www.ciwf.org.uk; 01483 521950

The Healer

Naomi Lewis is the educational director of Dorset-based centre for shamanic studies, The Sacred Trust. She is a shamanic teacher, healer and ceremonialist, the founder of The School of Animal Spirit Medicine and is known widely for her ability in communing with the animal kingdom. She believes that to heal the divide between human and animals and to release ourselves from the effects of trauma we need to experience our own animal natures and reconnect with the ‘primordial’ within.

“There is a great divide between humans and animals but little, if any, distance between us. This divide is a product of our anthropocentric world view and the distance is nothing more than a choice to ignore the palpable truth that we live together in a collective nation, rather than in isolated human and animal domains.

There is a pervasive amnesia at work in the human mind. We have forgotten that we are animals and instead of considering the observance of other animals’ behaviour as good council, we invest great swathes of resource in seeking to establish how like us they may or may not be. Within shamanism it has always been understood that the animals are our medicine and this simple and mystical premise has lain at the heart of shamanic practice across the world throughout time.

This knowing is also reflected in the development of contemporary therapies such as Somatic Experiencing, based on the work of Dr Peter Levine, formerly a stress consultant for NASA. This work acknowledges that wild animals are essentially ‘immune’ to trauma despite the fact that they live in a world where their safety is consistently challenged. This is because as visceral beings, animals hold an energetic blueprint that allows them to handle and process the intensity of feeling generated in life-threatening situations. In contrast, due to historical, societal and personal experience and conditioning, we as humans often repress this primitive response to threat, despite the fact that we are born with the same ability. Thus the feelings created in the experience of trauma remain locked in the body.

Having come to understand that feelings created by threat must be released in a bodily animalistic manner, those who have experienced traumatic situations can swiftly and effectively be released from the residual and often debilitating effects using Somatic Experiencing. This model of getting humans to heal based on animal behaviour, behaviour that is in truth our own natural behaviour, has been used to great effect in treating survivors of natural disasters, for example the Asian Tsunami in 2004.

If we want to heal the animal human relationship, I believe a fundamental key is the need to engage in practices which allow us to develop more of a primal response to life. In the ancient spiritual practice of shamanism we learn to dance into union with the animal powers through the total engagement of the body. This is the practice known as shape-shifting, one vein of many that recalls us to the primordial within. Somatic Experiencing helps us to understand that the resolution of trauma lies in our animal natures. Indeed any form that reminds us that the animals lie within us and are constantly calling our names in our dreams, our stories, our skin, flesh and bone, whether ancient or modern in origin, helps us to cross the divide and discover our intimacy with the animal kingdom”.

www.sacredtrust.org – Shamanic Practice and Animal Spirit Medicine

www.bevisnathan.co.uk – Bath-based ‘Somatic Experiencing’ Practitioner

www.traumahealing.com – Somatic Experiencing worldwide

The Activist

Poorva Joshipura is Head of Special Projects at PETA – ‘People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’, the largest animal rights organisation in the world. Using celebrity ads and eye-catching campaigns, PETA’s role is to educate the public on the plight of animals in food, clothing, entertainment and experimentation and promote the right of all animals to be treated with respect. She believes that it is time for people to speak out against animal abuse in the same way that historically they would have spoken out to stop human atrocities.

“There is a common link between past atrocities. Shameful chapters in world history such as the African slave trade, the massacre and displacement of civilians during war, the oppression of women and forced child labour are all examples of the abuse of power. Whether it’s for profit, ease, convenience or plain amusement, this ‘might makes right’ attitude has caused societies to tolerate, perpetuate and indignantly defend outrageously cruel acts.

Hindsight is 20/20. Most people today view slavery, child labour and the oppression of women as wrong, but changes only came about because thoughtful people demanded justice and fought against oppression. Will future generations look back at us with the same shame and horror we feel when we read about ships loaded with slaves or child labour in Lancashire’s cotton mills? Our generation operates in the same manner. The only difference is that today’s victims, used and abused because they are ‘different’ and powerless, belong to different species.

Today abuse of animals happens routinely despite our ability to choose alternatives and even though scientific evidence and common sense show that animals feel pain, love, joy, terror and other emotions. It happens because animals, whose appearance, interests and methods of communication may seem quite different from ours, are powerless to stop us. Just as it was always wrong to oppress and abuse less powerful humans, it is wrong to abuse and oppress animals and it is vital that principled people speak out for them.

Fortunately, there are many easy ways to bring about progressive change. Whether it’s by exploring humane and healthy vegetarian meals, choosing products that haven’t been tested by abuse, writing to law-makers or choosing not to wear animal skins, you have countless opportunities to choose between harming animals and helping them. There is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. When most of us think about how we should treat other human beings, we try to put ourselves in their shoes and not treat them in ways we would not want to be treated ourselves. So the single most important thing to do when thinking about how to treat animals is to ask, “If I were that animal, would I want that done to me? Would I want to be treated in that way?” The answer to what we should do for animals will then become clear”.

For ideas on how to help and for lists of companies and products that say ‘no to animal cruelty’ visit www.PETA.org.uk.

Taking Action:

Animal Aid
www.AnimalAid.org.uk
One of the largest animal rights groups in the UK, exposing and campaigning against all animal abuse.

The Vegan Society
www.vegansociety.com
Info on vegan nutrition and cooking, as well as resources for vegan advocacy.

The Vegetarian Society
www.VegSoc.org
Promoting a meat-free diet through literature and campaigns.

Viva! (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals)
www.Viva.org.uk
Bristol-based campaigning organisation helping farmed animals worldwide.

Cool Camping Cookbook

21/07/2009

How would we know where to camp without the ‘Cool Camping’ guides? Our favourite of course is ‘Cool Camping England’ because it’s got some of the best spots in the South West including Henry’s in Cornwall, Downshay Farm in Dorset and Batcombe Vale in Somerset. If you’re looking for family-friendly sites then the brand new ‘Cool Camping Kids’ has got sixty of the coolest in the country. But the one we’re really itching to try out is ‘Cool Camping Cookbook’ which has lots of simple but superb-looking recipes for camping stoves and fires. Homemade hot choc, fire-baked damper bread and barbecued Sunday roast will be first on our list – great food for the great outdoors.

www.coolcamping.co.uk
www.henryscampsite.co.uk
www.downshayfarm.co.uk
www.batcombevale.co.uk

Climate Action

21/07/2009

Big action is the name of the game as we approach the all-important Copenhagen Climate talks in December which, according to many, are our last big chance for governments all over the world to avert the worst of dangerous changes in weather. Already climate changes are affecting 300 billion people according to The Global Humanitarian Forum, a think-tank set up by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and costing us 125 billion dollars a year globally. What should we do? Here's some ideas ...

www.350.org/oct24 is asking people across the globe to stand together for a united day of action on October 24th calling for a ‘fair global climate treaty’. They are thinking bike rides, rallies, concerts, protests, and they’re hoping there will be lots of them organised by you in both famous and everyday places around the world. “It’s often said that the only thing preventing us from tacking the climate crisis quickly and equitable is a lack of political will” says US activist Bill McKibben, “Well, the only thing that can create that political will is a unified global movement – and no-one is going to build that movement for us. It’s up to regular people all over the world”. 350 is the number of parts per million that the level carbon in the air has got to get back down below (and we’re some way above it already) if we want to stabilise climate conditions, so that’s the theme for the demos. What can you do 350 times in one day on October 24th? Sign up now.

So far it’s been Drax, Heathrow and Kingsnorth power station, but this year will be a city location for the rapidly expanding movement of climate-concerned citizens from the Climate Camp. “The Camp is a place for anyone who is worried about our future and wants to do something about it” say the volunteer organisers who welcomed more than two thousand campers at the main event last year. It’s focused on sustainable solutions and direct action and this year the thrust will be on the economic system … watch out city banks.
www.climatecamp.org.uk

999 Its Time is a new UK movement calling for a big day of action, this time on the 9th September (09.09.09) – another is planned for the 10th October next year (10.10.10). Initiated by the likes of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Bruce Parry and Sam Roddick it’s calling for individual and collective displays that are designed to be a wake up call for a planet in emergency. “The message I’m trying to get out is protest without permission” says Sam Roddick who will be focusing on the street-art angle of the event, “because that is the right of our democratic system”. Register for updates on actions up to and including the big day.
www.999itstime.com

What Action?

Find out your local MP, what they stand for and how to contact them by putting your postcode into www.theyworkforyou.com.

Help to push the demand for green energy above supply and create a market for renewables by switching your energy tariff with The Big Issue on www.realpeoplepower.org.

Make a pledge to swap one car journey for cycling, walking or public transport before 4th July and join the thousands of people changing the world with cycle-based Sustrans on www.changeyourworld.org.uk.

Sign a petition run by Dorset campaigners www.edibleplaygrounds.co.uk to make it government policy that every school in the country should have an edible playground so that all children can learn where food comes from.

Enter your postcode on www.freerangereview.com to find local food producers near you and hear what other people have to say about them.

Exercise your person power by linking up with millions on www.avaaz.org for online petitions that influence global decisions on environment and human rights across the world.

Photo by Mike Russell

Random Acts of Kindness

21/07/2009

Tom Robbins from Minehead moved up to London two years ago to study fine art. Saddened by the fact that city people are often too busy to interact, he started ‘Random Acts of Kindness’, a campaign assisted by young people’s organisation ‘Battlefront’, which is turning into a high profile call for a kinder and more generous UK.Tom Robbins from Minehead moved up to London two years ago to study fine art. Saddened by the fact that city people are often too busy to interact, he started ‘Random Acts of Kindness’, a campaign assisted by young people’s organisation ‘Battlefront’, which is turning into a high profile call for a kinder and more generous UK.

I am one of twenty campaigners in Battlefront – a multi-media project set up to encourage young people to campaign about something they care about. What I care about is encouraging as many acts of kindness as possible with the aim of making the UK and London in particular a kinder place. I feel that everyone should be kinder and happier. There has been a lot of research to show that these two things are linked, that wellbeing really is linked to kindness.

When I first came to London to study art I did a lot of research into why people help each other. I wanted to make art that was inclusive and that was more beneficial to other people and not just myself. I got into performance art and did things like one day walking down the street in central London and asking as many people as I could if they needed any help. Nobody wanted any of course and it was a complete failure.

The experience made me enormously sad that I couldn’t interact with many people. They thought I was just playing a prank or doing something negative, just like when strangers talk on the tube and people automatically think there’s something wrong with them. In London in particular, a lot of people are in a rush and they are very individualistic in their way of life which is true of society in general. It’s so entrenched in daily life that we don’t even think it’s a problem. But it isn’t the norm and I think it’s important to shift this perception.

I realised that there is a right time, a right place and right way to help people, so I set up the campaign “Random Acts of Kindness’. I got in touch with Battlefront who happened to be recruiting at the time and since then I’ve been able to organise lots of different stunts. First there was ‘Make a Difference Day’, a performance in Harringey where I organised five or six people who needed help with things like wall-paper stripping and packing boxes – all mini-things that people needed, but enough to show that just one person really can make a difference.

Then there was the ‘Do Gooder Army - Good Deed Desk’ where we offered our services to people who walked past and there was ‘Pancake day’ when we teamed up with ‘The Kindness Offensive’ to give away half a million free pancakes to the public, shelters and charities across London. A lot of people turned up to these events and we made a lot of people happy. I even had to do a cartwheel for someone at nine thirty in the morning which was a bit bizarre. But the most recent event was ‘Kindival’ – a festival of kindness which I organised back in April.

‘Kindival’ was fun and we did a lot of crazy things. There were panel discussions on the role of kindness and generosity in society today, and how business, charities and individuals can deal with these concerns. We had an exhibition space with stalls and workshops and student art, magicians, free yoga, free massage and food. The Kindness Offensive did a talk in the afternoon and gave away presents to everyone that had been donated from all the supporting business and organisations.

I hope that ‘Random Acts of Kindness’ grows bigger. I do have to catch up on my University work but at the same time I’m talking to politicians and people with similar ideas and having a think about where to take it next. I’d like to meet a lot of people in London and nationally and plant the idea of ‘Random Acts of Kindness’. There’s always a need for more kindness. When I talk to people about what I’m doing they all have a story about how someone has been horrible to them in the street. I’d like to think of a time when people have more positive stories.

I’m lucky to have come from Somerset because there is such a big contrast in terms of people’s behaviour towards each other compared with London. Coming from Minehead has had an enormous impact on me – it has given me something that I really want to change and I’m very grateful for it.

Keep an eye on the Battlefront website for news of campaigns and further more recruitment drives: www.battlefront.co.uk

Contact Tom on: thedogooderarmy@googlemail.com

Surviving the Crunch

20/07/2009

Good marketing is about investing what money you have wisely and in this climate, that means where you’ll see maximum return.

Good marketing is about investing what money you have wisely and in this climate, that means where you’ll see maximum return. But watch out for the short term blinkers. While some of us feel that it’s survival of the fittest at the moment, this recession isn’t going to last forever, and it’s important to ensure you’re well positioned to take advantage of the upswing.

Back to basics
When times are good, most companies can muddle along selling their products without any real focus. Today, for every one buyer, there are ten sellers and every purchase is subject to great deliberation. Confuse your customers and they’ll run a mile, generalise and you’ll end up meaning nothing special to anyone. Refresh yourself on who your core target audience is, play to your product’s strengths and sum that up with three golden rules: simple, relevant, memorable.

Buddy up
It’s hard enough out there on your own but there are so many complimentary services so make the most of partnering up. If you offer energy efficient PCs, buddy up with a provider of energy efficient printers, servers, paper merchants, green IT consultants. Offer incentives to each other’s customer base and set up kick backs between you.

Watch the social media hype
Yes – Linked In, Twitter, blogging are all great means of reaching a wider audience, but it’s easy to get sucked in by the hype. You can waste hours of your day ‘tweeting’ nonsense, from the comfort of your desk. Don’t forget there’s no substitute for the real deal – face to face networking. Join a networking group with the most likeminded individuals and at least three other individuals with complimentary businesses and a shared target market.

Cash in on the freebies
There are some excellent resources out there that are still free and could save you a fortune in other paid license fees. Google analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is completely free and will tell you how much traffic your website is getting, where from, what keywords are being used to get there, which pages are turning them off, which subjects keep them interested. It’s a goldmine of free information. http://www.zoho.com/ has loads of free business software. The database and CRM tools are particularly good. http://www.spyfu.com/ lets you see what your competitors’ keywords are. Use http://twitterfeed.com/ to automatically update your Twitter profile when you update your blog.

Avoid the discount downward spiral
We’ve seen the shops go from 10% off to 25, 50 and now 75% discount, but still stock isn’t shifting. Discounts are old news. There’s no incentive to buy now, because the discount will be there tomorrow. My advice is to look at alternative ways to really add value. Think differentiation – you need the customer to buy from you not your competitor.

Lucinda is the director of Marketing Clout, an advisory service for start-ups, small and medium businesses who want to get the most of their marketing.
More tips at http://www.marketingclout.co.uk/lubys-blog
www.marketingclout.co.uk

The Sound of Music

20/07/2009

“Over the past thirty years I have come to realise that it is the way one listens to music that is the critical aspect of its power” says Don. “There are physiological and emotional triggers that are set up differently in each person and we all hear different frequencies, but as we listen and focus on music it can transform our immune system, heal us of trauma and affect the way we feel pain in the body, the way we feel joy and the way we experience space and time”.

The Mozart Effect was based on the research of Dr Alfred Tomatis who found that the high frequencies of some of Mozart’s pieces helped organise the brain in adults and children suffering from head injuries and speech and communication disorders. Further research by Don and others has shown that it can indeed help with things like epilepsy, autism and a range of learning and attention difficulties as well as physical co-ordination. “Just as music changes the way the body moves” explains Don, “it is the same for the mind. Music gives us a framework in which the mind and body can move and helps us regain balance and control between them”.

Does the music have to be Mozart though, which might not be to everyone’s taste? Don himself trained as a classical musician and after training with the legendary Nadia Boulanger in Paris became an organist and choral director before deciding to dedicate himself to the transformative power of music. This decision was influenced by his travels and studies of music all over the world, from Vedic harmony in India to voodoo drumming in Haiti. “I always saw the tremendous impact music had on people’s lives” says Don, “how they were transformed by its beauty and no, it doesn’t have to be Mozart”.

“I think Mozart is the most balanced diet of music because it is not overly dynamic emotionally” he says. “Mozart doesn’t make you want to dance and it’s not in the way of your world. But you can use different music to relax the brain, to stimulate it or to allow focus. Organise your music collection by entertainment, stress reduction, exercise, background and adventure - there are sonic sedatives and sonic caffeine. The goal is to be aware of the sounds in your life, ask what your brain is trying to filter out, and rather than have music on in a lazy context, be selective and have a balanced diet throughout the day. The only harmful music is music that is too loud, no matter what the style.”

Is there a particular way in which we should be consciously listening to music to maximize its impact? “Listening is about filtering out unwanted noises” says Don, “not only from the outer world but from our own minds. It’s about being present to the information – the deep value of music itself. We teach reading and writing and we sometimes teach speech, but we never teach listening, the tool that allows us to be connected to the world around us”. Don believes that’s it particularly crucial that children should listen to music every day as this is the way that they learn language and how to coordinate themselves in terms of movement, expression and emotion. “Music teaches us how to be in the world” says Don, “it represents the progression of life”.

“In the last fifty to a hundred years, things have changed radically for the way we listen to music” Don concludes. “Music is now a private space that you can get through headphones or the car radio. But it used to be a more living experience where people would listen together or make it themselves. Having a way to make and play music now is not as easy as it was so we need to be more selective. In a noisy world, or in a world concerned with achievement, we’re forgetting the beauty of the simple songs of life: the joy with our kids, the singing of hymns together, the ways that sound can give us a less stressful, more inspired and creative life. How can people begin to sound their bodies? It’s like needing exercise and it’s something you can do on your own”.

www.mozarteffect.com

Penny Brohn Cancer Care uses music therapy as one of the complementary methods to alleviate the symptoms and stress of cancer sufferers and their carers. This includes playing and making music.

www.pennybrohncancercare.org

Green Europe

01/07/2009

Green Europe is the new guidebook from the must-remember-to-take-on-hols Sawday collection. Get your discounted copy for £6.99 (usual price £11.99) plus £2.99 p&p by visiting www.sawdays.co.uk/bookshop and using the code 'THESOURCE' when prompted. Or you can call 01275 395431 during office hours. This fabulous green offer ends 7th September 09.

The Idle Parent

01/07/2009

"It’s one that’s easy for us living on the edge of Exmoor. Idling is free and it makes sense in the credit crunch not to spend money to have fun. Why not spend a day at home and see what happens? You can lie in bed, get the cards out, watch DVDs, try some baking and it’s really good fun. You don’t have to mow the lawn or anything". Tom Hodgkinson

Check out Tom’s excellent new book 'The Idle Parent' for more ideas on what to do and what not to do with the kids this Summer.

www.idler.co.uk

Wild Swimming Coast

01/07/2009

"Hopefully there will a be bit of sand in my secret cove but also somewhere close to swim to like a rock arch, a ledge for jumping or even a sea cave. The water will be calm and very clear and I might even spot seals or dolpins offshore.

"Three things I’d always take are:

A small light quick-drying cotton sarong as a go-anywhere towel.

Sandals or reef shoes are good for protecting your feet when exploring on the rocks.

Goggles are fun for snorkelling and finding starfish!

Daniel's tip for a top wild swim

Ideally you should arrive hot and sweaty so you just want to plunge straight in. Make sure you know and understand the tides and de careful in high swell, that's when rip currents can form. (And get a good guidebook and follow the advice!).

'Wild Swimming Coast’ documents over three hundred and fifty coastal adventures to find secret coves, wild beaches, rock pool lagoons, smugglers tunnels and desert islands, all in the UK.

www.wildswimming.co.uk

Breaking the Waves

08/03/2009

We ask Merlin Hyman, the Chief Exec of RegenSW, our Sustainable Energy Agency.

“Well there is certainly a huge opportunity here in the South West” he replies. “We have the people and the skills to take advantage of the policies coming in all over the world requiring us to move towards sustainable energy and driving the demand for new technology and new green jobs. It’s a very competitive area with in other countries also hoping to take a lead – but it’s vital to our economy as well as our environment”.

So what about our geography? Surely the fact that we’re surrounded by sea is a good pointer to what opportunities we might benefit from. “Tidal and wave energy will become important in the future” Merlin confirms, “even though other technologies such as energy efficiency and wind can deliver more in short term we need to be investing now for the future. The Bristol Channel is a good example of a tidal resource we must find a way to harvest in the medium to long-term”. He is of course referring to the Severn Estuary which has been subject to years of hot renewable energy debate. With a record height of forty five metres between low and high tide this is the second largest and most powerful tidal range in the world. “We don’t have a position on what technology should be used” says Merlin carefully, “but we do believe that the environmental impacts should be considered before any scheme is selected”.

“Tidal technology is available that could be used now” Merlin continues, “but harnessing the waves is a different thing because the technologies we need for this are at a much earlier stage of development”. This is why the Wave Hub could be so important for the South West. Supported by the South West Regional Development Agency the Wave Hub is due to be installed next year on the North Cornwall coast off Hayle. It is effectively a socket into which prototype wave machines can be plugged in and tested in the real world – cutting out the need for costly infrastructure. Having this piece of kit would make the region a leading location for wave technology.

“Tide and waves aside” says Merlin, “another key technology if we are to meet our ambitious renewable energy targets for 2020 moment is offshore wind. The technologies we’ve just mentioned are a bit far down the line to be delivering much before this deadline and without substantial offshore wind farms going ahead, it’s hard to see how our targets will be met”. At the moment there are two offshore sites proposed by the Crown Estates for wind farms in the South West. A likely contender is ‘The Atlantic Array’ which, if it goes ahead, will be a site of a three hundred and fifty wind turbines stretching an area the size of the Isle of Wight, twelve miles off the Ilfracombe coast. It should be up and running by 2018.

So it’s not looking bad for the South West given the natural resources of our region. Is there anything that we should be doing to further the development and uptake of these technologies? “Well it’s something we can all get involved in” Merlin replies. “We’re all involved in workplaces and schools and we can all engage with political leaders. It’s important not to sit back and read about these things anymore – it’s time to get up and act. It doesn’t have to be something that needs a lot of kit - it could be as simple as lagging the loft. And it’s not just about doing things by yourself, it’s about doing something as a community”.

www.regensw.co.uk

To Be or Not To Be? (The Severn Barrage)

08/03/2009

What has been decided though is that a chunk of money will be set aside to look into projects such as the reef (the tidal fence is another) that are further down the line in terms of tested technology, but possibly better in terms of environmental impact.

So what do green groups think is so bad about the original barrage in the first place? Why can’t we put in twenty billion pounds worth of concrete and rock between England and Wales if it delivers a much-needed five per cent of our national electricity needs … more than any other single source in the UK! Well … it seems there are some very good reasons. Apart from concerns that the barrage would disrupt shipping, create power surges twice daily for a vulnerable national grid and be at the mercy of future events like rising tides and storm surges, there is the bad issue of habitat destruction.

The Severn Estuary is a winter home to 69,000 species of our coastal and migratory birds with mud-flats and inter-tidal areas that are currently protected under European conservation law. The destruction of this habitat by the Cardiff Weston barrage has been estimated to be as high as a big eighty per cent. This is larger by far than any others of the schemes proposed. It’s equally bad news for the many species of migratory fish and eels that would struggle to continue using this important estuary as a route to move between spawning grounds.

So what’s better about the reef? “A tidal reef, a longer dam, further down-stream, would be less costly than a Cardiff to Weston barrage and keep intact most of the estuaries, saltmarshes and mudflats” say the RSPB who have had the respected engineering firm WS Atkins have a look at the two. The reef, which is a lighter and more flexible structure, is proposed to run the fifteen miles from Minehead to Abertawe in Wales. Because the technology is less reliant on tidal drop, it has been predicted to generate just as much, if not more green energy than the barrage and at a much smoother rate. It would also allow for the safe passage of both ships and migrating fish.

The tidal reef proposal, which has been out forward by Cornish engineering firm Joseph Evans and Sons Ltd, will be scoped out over the next few months, alongside the five projects on the government’s short-list. Although the technology is not tested, veteran hydro-engineer Rupert Armstrong Evans is convinced that the reef could be constructed and ready to go in a fraction of the time taken to build a barrage. He’s even likened it to the floating dock made for the D-day landings. “It would cut Britain’s carbon emissions by about twelve million tons annually, create more than 30,000 jobs during construction and give a global led for local manufacturing companies” he concludes. The next stage is a public consultation, planned for 2010 when we will get our say.

www.rspb.org.uk; www.severntidal.com

Woods for a Future

08/03/2009

“Woods not only provide us with timber and fuel” he continues, “but there’s a whole range of other things they can give us, from food, to peace of mind, to flood and land protection – the list of values that woods and trees provide us with is endless.”

Our country used to be covered in a great forest – a constantly evolving and diverse landscape that was largely wooded but with glades, meadows, lakes and moors. Most of it was destroyed 3500 years ago, but the inheritance that was left us, which was fairly stable in the intervening period, was depleted in the second half of the twenty first century. Less than twelve per cent of our original forest now remains. “Restoring sustainable tree cover is at the centre of everything I do” says Tino. “Without that tree cover we don’t have a future. Trees have a vital role in keeping the land fertile and without them we wouldn’t be able to grow food or build trees”.

So what does sustainable tree cover mean? How much do we need for ourselves and for natural systems? “Well, we can only meet our own needs by raiding the forest resource of other countries at the moment” says Tino. “Ninety per cent of our timber is currently imported. We take one portion of the resource from these countries – the timber – but destroy the ecosystems we remove it from. In order to generate home-grown timber and fuel we do need more wood cover. The searchlight for a sustainable future is coming very quickly to trees and biomass and I think there is great danger that there is simply not the resource to sustain us. In the worst case scenario there would be so much pressure on the existing woodland that it would be in jeopardy”.

So it sounds like we need to get planting now doesn’t it? “It takes time for trees to grow” says Tino, “but the payback can be soon if it’s done with sustainable forestry”. By this he means that we should be actively engaging with trees. “People think that cutting down trees is wrong” he says, “but if you do it in a sustainable way, you are working with the tree to prolong its life and increase the biodiversity of the ecosystem it’s part of. If an ash tree has a life-span of two hundred years – you can keep it going for thousands by coppicing it. If humans interact with their environment, they can maintain a sustainable relationship that keeps it going for longer. The only reason we have woods now is because humans have engaged with them in the past. What I’m doing in Cornwall is engaging with woods for a future”.

Presumably by engaging with the forest we also have to keep wildlife in mind. “We help wildlife by having by having more land under trees and by engaging in techniques such as coppicing” he says. “But if we do it is as a monoculture – by planting all soft woods, or short-rotation coppices of willow for example, we get into the same problems as agriculture has with pests and diseases. We end up making inputs to the land, pesticide sprays and the like, that are damaging. If you emulate nature you will get a diverse and robust system. But if you do it for convenience, by planting in rows, all you will be doing is providing food source for a pest. Sustainable forests of the future should be multi-diverse with multi-species”.

Is there anything else the rest of us could be doing to make sure we have woods for the future? “Yes” replies Tino. “Take a tree seed, put your finger in the ground to make a hole and then plant the seed in it. Nothing is as profound as that simple action. Every corner of every field, every hedgerow and garden – we must put trees in because we need them. If we end up with a desert of agriculture there will be no future. We have to have both together - it simply can’t be just one or the other”.

Does he feel positive about the future, or does it all seem a bit bleak at the moment? “Yes I am positive," he assures us. “If people begin to realise that putting a seed in the ground is a good thing, and that cutting a tree down is not a bad thing, and that we do need to restore the culture of engaging with woodlands, things could be positive. Oak is a symbol of Britain afterall, and it is ingrained very deep in our cultural psyche – we need to have it. What I don’t think is possible is to carry on with business as usual. We can’t just expect to one day replace fossil fuels with biomass fuels – we have to use less fuel. And there’s a big conflict between agriculture and forestry at the moment – a drive for big production of food and forestry products. But if wise decisions are made now, a balance can be found”.

So what else could we be doing to help? “First, when building houses demand materials that are locally grown" says Tino. “It’s more important to have local timber than it is to have the FSC stamp because most of our forestry is well-maintained and managed, there’s just not enough of it. Also look out for timber that can be re-used. And in heating homes, biomass is an option but go for the simplest form. Go for logs and twigs that have the least amount of energy used in their manufacture and are easily obtained from local resources. For convenience there are pellets which are a by-product from the timber industry, or briquettes which can be used on normal wood burners. If you’re having a BBQ it’s really important to use home-produced charcoal that hasn’t been imported.”

“It’s also important to engage with the food products of trees and woodlands” he concludes. “Waitrose are experimenting with woodland-reared chicken from agro-forestry at the moment. Pigs can also be raised in woodlands and then there is all kind of delicious things like venison. There are the forest nuts and berries and fungi - although we are a bit fungi-phobic in this country - and all the herbs and medicinal plants that grow there naturally. Like I said at the beginning, there is simply a huge range of produce that we can get from our woodlands – and if we don’t have them anymore then we simply don’t have the choice”.

www.cornishwoodland.co.uk; www.cornishforestfuels.co.uk

Ancient Magic for Today

07/03/2009

Written in the 1970s, long before witchcraft and wizardry were popularised by Harry Potter et al ... it was the first modern foray into the wisdom traditions of ancient England from a factual and historical perspective. What made it so powerful was that when he wrote it, Brian was a Professor of Psychology at Sussex University.

“Well, my colleagues always knew I was an oddball” Brian admits as we settle down to find out what he’s up to now. “But what they probably didn’t know was that when I was writing the book, I was roaming around the moors at night like a wild person”. Brian spent most of the six years it took to write the book on the moon-lit moors of Sussex, crafting words he says emanated from the clouds and the earth itself. His nocturnal activity was inspired by the discovery of a very old manuscript in the British Library, a ‘Shaman’s Notebook’. And its content was so fascinating that he had no choice but to write on a subject that had so far been untouched by academia.

“I’d been living in San Fransisco for a few years” he explains, “and sampling a lot of religions like Taosim and Buddhism. But I’d always felt that there should be something in my own cultural background that would fit the place I came from”. The notebook – dating back one thousand years and written, unusually, in vernacular Anglo Saxon – contained, at first inspection, simple recipes for healing. But after some translation, Brian understood that it also contained detailed instructions for the complex shamanic initiations that would have been used by our ancestors to gain entrance to the spiritual world of this land.

“I am a psychologist” says Brian, “and I knew that writing about something like this would probably undermine my academic career. But I felt like this was a test that I’d been given, so I had to do it. At the time I knew that people in this country were interested in all sorts of spirituality, and I thought it would be great to let them know that we have our own too, from our own island. I was really excited by the thought of shamanic approaches emanating from this culture – the landscape, the stories, the heros and heroines. These are all aspects of our culture which are available for everyone who lives here now. They breathe into the air … the very spirit of England.”

Since The Way of Wyrd, which sold half a million copies world-wide, Brian has written other books, notably ‘The Real Middle Earth’ - a non-fictional account of English Shamanism. He has continued to teach a popular and regularly over-subscribed MA on Shamanic Consciousness at Sussex University and more lately has been working with tribal cultures overseas. “The tribal elders I work with say that people of Anglo-Saxon heritage have forgotten who they are” he says, “which is why they cast such a big shadow on the earth. They believe that the world-wide impact of English-heritage people learning more about their ancestry, rather than their economic and military history, is very powerful. And although it may be difficult for us to learn about this part of our ancestry because so many Anglo-Saxon documents have been lost and a great deal of imagination is required to reconstruct what we knew, what I’ve managed to uncover is just a miniscule bit of what is there”.

Luckily for us, Brian is about to embark on a public teaching programme and the south west is an early destination. His hope is that through working with others who are drawn to uncovering the roots of our indigenous ancestry we can get closer to what he calls the ‘spirit of England’. “It’s about finding ways to attune to a deeper truth” he explains. “People are moved by all kinds of different things, but its magic that helps me to get closer to that truth. To me, magic is everything. I’m interested in how we can all bring magic into our lives to empower and enchant us and to reconnect us with the spirit of our place”.

www.brianbates.co.uk; www.wayofwyrd.com.

The Way of Wyrd – past and present

By Brian Bates

What is Wyrd?

’Wyrd’ is the ancient meaning of the modern term ‘weird’. Now, when we say something is ‘weird’, we mean it to denote the unexplainable, the ‘beyond understanding’. The word meant the unexplainable in ancient England, too, except that then it had a much deeper, sacred connotation. Wyrd was the ever-present undercurrent of our lives. It was like a powerful and hidden stream underlying everything, similar to the Eastern concept of the Tao. We feel it as flowing rhythm that is just beyond our conscious awareness, but it affects us from minute to minute, day by day.

While the external trappings of life have changed enormously in the past one thousand years, most of our concerns as people are perennial. I believe that the ancient teachings of Wyrd can still empower and heal us today.

In ancient England, people believed that we each have a special destiny marked out for us. But this was a destiny, not a pre-ordained fate. Free will means that we can realize that destiny in a number of ways. But today it seems to be so helpful for people to understand what is their unique destiny, their Wyrd. For one thing it releases us from the doubts and distractions that often hold us back in life. To be on intimate terms with our own destiny is to voyage through our life empowered by a chart of that journey.

So Wyrd leads to an understanding of why we are here, and how to fulfill our unique destiny. This is deeply healing and centering at the best of times. In the turmoil of life as it is at today, it is a gift from the past whose time has come!

What elements do you think would be useful in the modern world?

In the years I have spent researching the ancient sources for rediscovering the wisdom of our ancient spirituality, I have come to believe that there were Nine Insights of Wyrd. Each one concerns practical aspects of our life. They help connect us with our roots, find our place in the natural world, rejuvenate our imaginations and thereby bring creativity into our lives. Above all, these Nine Insights contribute to our vitality. At the heart of these perennial ways of being was an English version of the Eastern ‘Chi’. It was called ‘maegen’, and we experience it as a ‘life force’. I’m probably safe in saying that we could all do with as much of that as possible! So introducing people to Wyrd includes the Nine Insights and how to build our maegen to bring us vitality, health, presence and sexual fulfillment.

How was the knowledge lost and how much is still there?

When I sat for the first time looking at the Anglo-Saxon book of magic that brings us some of this lost knowledge, I felt a thrill of recognition. Not that I had seen it before, but somehow I knew that the teachings it contained are things we already know, deep down and lost in the underworld of our cultural imagination. Rediscovering it is like reclaiming our own identity, our healing heritage for all who live on this island.

Since then I have researched academically for many years, reading and interpreting obscure sources, examining the scholarship where there is any, and carefully piecing together the evidence. But of course, this can get us only so far. I am not interested in this history for its own sake. I believe that we are living in a critical time where we all need to be re-connecting with the sources of our creativity, releasing our energies for lives full of vitality and fulfillment. It is like a hidden but rediscovered treasure. More and more is being rediscovered all the time through archaeology, history, folklore, and analysis of ancient manuscripts.

But also we need to live it to bring it back to life. The people who participate with me in bringing this knowledge into their lives are breathing vitality back into it. They have first-hand knowledge of how it enriches their lives and how we can use it today.

How is the contemporary Way of Wyrd to guide and heal us? That is what I want to teach to anyone who hears the call.

The Landscape Zodiac

07/03/2009

Landscape zodiacs are patterns of the zodiacal constellations that our ancestors recognised in the physical features of their landscape.

Spread around Britain and Ireland there are twelve that are specifically associated with a month of the year.

They comprise an old traveller’s circuit followed by gypsies right into the 1920s, a tradition called the Gypsy Switch. The most famous zodiac is around Glastonbury and corresponds with Aquarius. The others are in Lampeter (Pisces), Anglesey (Aries), Dublin (Taurus), Appleby (Gemini), Durham (Cancer), York (Leo), Lincoln (Virgo), Cambridge (Libra), Ongar (Scorpio), Kingston on Thames (Sagittarius), and Stonehenge and Avebury (Capricorn). These sites are considered very powerful places to walk on a journey through the astrological calendar of the year.

The Art of Dying

06/03/2009

“If you ask anyone who cares for the dying they will confirm it” says Peter ...

... an internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist at Southampton Hospital, author of ‘The Art of Dying’ and Chair of the Science and Medical Network. “There are common death-bed phenomena which suggest that the event of death has profound meaning beyond our current understanding”. The phenomena he refers to are more easily explained by religious or spiritual means than by current science which says that when our brains don’t function, that’s pretty much it. They include witness accounts of wisps of smoke leaving bodies at the time of death, visible lights around a dying person, and visitations reported by distant loved ones at the exact the time of death. None of these events is uncommon, yet they all defy scientific explanation.

Is that any surprise though? What you experience when you die is difficult to reproduce in a controlled lab experiment. The only accounts come from grieving relatives or from a minority of people who experience clinical death and come back to tell us what it’s like. “But people who have these ‘Near Death Experiences’ have very similar stories” says Peter who is the leading clinical authority on it in this country. They often involve an out of body experience in which patients find themselves looking down at resuscitation attempts from the ceiling – there’s a bright light, an immense feeling of love and a sense of being surrounded by deceased loved ones. It is, by many accounts, a pleasant and transformative experience regardless of whether the skeptics are right to dismiss it as an hallucination of the dying brain.

“People seem to be able to recall the specific details of their resuscitation process and that’s what makes it so interesting and special” says Peter. “This is happening at a time when they have no measurable brain function”. If the brain is effectively down, and we can still perceive and remember what’s going on – particularly if it’s from the ceiling – there’s a chance that mind and body are not as dependent on each other as we thought. If scientists can prove that it is possible for the mind to outlive the body – and thirty six hospitals are now involved in a scientific study of these phenomena – then it’s possible that our spiritual traditions, which say that there is life after death, might be right after all. Although the jury’s still out, and the skepticism is as huge as would be expected for such a large can of worms, it’s surely enough to make us think twice about what it means to die.

There are other fascinating things too. Peter is currently investigating stories suggesting that we may even know in advance the moment we are going to die. “The Dalai Lama says you know about two years before you die that you are going to” says Peter. “So I’m interested in what form these intuitions might take in our culture”. He has come across many stories in which people have received visits from dead relatives – usually a parent or a spouse – saying they will come at a specific time. “This often happens in the waking state rather than in a dream” says Peter. “It’s usually a very simple communication and people know intuitively what it means, even in circumstances when they are not ill.”

“There’s a story told to us by a son” he continues, “whose mother was visited by her dead husband saying he would collect her in a year. Although she never mentioned death the son noticed that she started putting her affairs in order. A year later, after a routine operation in which the doctor said there was no problem, she died. She said happily on her death-bed that her husband was there as promised”. According to Peter there are various possible explanations for this. “Perhaps it’s a covert function of the body to alert people to the fact they are going to die” he suggests, “or perhaps it comes out of our own knowing somehow. But the thing is, at the moment we just don’t know”. If there is anyone out there with stories of these experiences then Peter would be very interested to hear them (by email to editor@thesource-southwest.co.uk).

“What is certain from all of this is that we don’t understand the importance of death” Peter concludes. “If you ask the dying you will find that they are absolutely unequivocal that there is continuation after death irrespective of their religious beliefs. Death is seen by them as a passage towards something, a journey they are about to take”. If this is so widespread, why isn’t death recognised as more of a rite of passage in our culture? “The problem is that in our throw-way society we have lost all our rituals and our respect for it” says Peter. “Death is the forbidden subject. But this is a paradox because it will happen to all of us, and if we don’t discuss it or prepare for it in any way then it will always hit as a crisis. I think it’s time we started looking at what death really is and living our lives fully in knowledge of its presence”.

Peter’s book ‘The Art of Dying’, written with his wife Elizabeth, takes a good look at death in terms of the inexplicable phenomena he has witnessed. There’s also a free pamphlet, produced with co-author Sue Brayne, which help relatives and their loved ones with practical decision such as medical intervention, pain relief and how to resolve family conflict (see www.braynework.com)

Peter will be speaking at the first ‘Transitus’ festival on 20th June at The Exchange, Sturminster Newton, Dorset (10.30 – 6pm). Transitus is a network of people and organisations working holistically with the transition of death. For more info contact Anne Bury: 07812 179059; anne@landcross.fsworld.co.uk.

We interviewed Peter at Schumacher College (www.schumachercollege.org.uk) on the short course: ‘Science, Matter and Consciousness’.

Woodland Renaissance

06/03/2009

How did you come to be living in Prickly Nut Wood Ben?

It was in the late eighties – a time when I was living in the village down the road from the woodland – a time when we were getting leaflets through the door saying that an area of forest the size of Belgium was being cut down every day. I went out to the Amazon to see for myself – and although I did see horrendous destruction, I also saw some really positive projects where people were living in the forest and managing the resources in a sustainable way. Sustainable forest management is something we have got to look at if we want to look after our planet and it’s something we are not really doing in this country. So I set up as a woodsman to mirror what I’d seen. I wanted to use a more holistic approach –– getting to know the butterflies and what plants they need, then supporting them to live there as well as taking a sustainable timber yield. This is very different from going into a wood and looking around for what timber needs to come out. It looks at what is actually living there and managing around that.

You have lived there for seventeen or eighteen years – what have been the main benefits for you?

I have benefited enormously. There’s a real connection with place that deepens with every year I’m here. I know things about the landscape – where I can find mushrooms, where the migratory species will be. It is that feeling of belonging to the landscape rather than being separated from it and just visiting that has been a benefit.

So for those of us who can’t live in a wood, is there another way we can achieve the same feeling?

Well the first thing I think is to try and accept where you are rather than dreaming of a better life. Look at where you are living and make a conscious effort to put down roots there. Your environment will soon start to give back to you. I think we have lost connection with where we belong. Our transient lifestyle these days can leave us feeling ungrounded after a while.

What have been the hardest things?

Well I’m struggling to find an answer to that … which must be quite good! The hardest thing is probably getting the wheels of bureaucracy to understand what I’m doing here because my lifestyle doesn’t tick the boxes that lifestyles are expected to. It’s sometimes hard to get across to people that the reason I wanted to live in the woods wasn’t because I wanted a house. It was simply that there is a different way of managing the land which means that you have to be a part of it to understand it. Driving in, cutting down a few tress and driving out wasn’t the way I wanted to do it. For me, that is not the sustainable way.

What are the top three things that you produce?

The top is round-wood buildings - the notoriety of my house has helped to bring that forward. More people want buildings of this type and there’s the possibility to use lower value timber to build the houses they need. Charcoal is something that’s an all-year-round thing – and there’s furniture, yurt poles, roofing shingles, mushroom logs – a long list really. My business and lifestyle revolves around all of these things being connected and happening at the right times of year.

What are the things you can’t live without?

We are not producing all our food – so we buy that in bulk for the moment, although that could change. And there’s fuel. I hope to move away from running a vehicle but it will be a while before I can manage the wood without it. A horse is the way forward and I’m currently looking in to that.

You say in ‘The Woodland Year’ that you feel a ‘sense of purpose’. What would you say that is?

I believe we are in a time where we need to revalue our landscapes. We need to look at what we can give to them and what we can gain. After a thousand years of growth, woodlands are coming of age again and we are unique in this country for the amount of coppice we have. Coppice is a rare system in nature where humans are an essential part – something in which we are not just the takers but also the contributors. At the same time we are seeing an increased need for renewable resources. So I think it’s time for a reawakening. We need to go back to our woodlands and realise what we’ve got. My purpose is to manage those woodlands, help to make people aware of them and make sure they go on for another thousand years. My main purpose in Prickly Nut Wood is to leave it in a better condition for the next generation.

You will not get to see the results of everything that you are planting and managing, so what are your hopes for Prickly Nut Wood and woodlands of the future?

I’d like to see reconnection of people to their local woodlands so they can wake up to the beautiful places they are. A coppiced wood in May is like a beautiful garden. I would like to see woodland management and produce becoming more localised, with woodsmen living on the edges of villages and towns, making products for the community. When people see the products coming out they can appreciate and engage in their woodland. I hope there is more use of wood for renewable energy – village-scale wood-fuel stations which make use of surplas wood. I also hope that more woodland can be planted.

What would be an average Spring day for you Ben?

The end of March, beginning of April is an interesting time of year for me. When spring comes and the buds begin to break I move away from the hard-graft season of coppicing and moving timber. I’m waiting for spring to come, partly because it’s a relief and partly because I’m picking up on that energy of moving into a different phase. In a usual day I get up in the morning and feed the chickens. Probably the rayburn has been running from the night before so I’ll put a couple of logs on the fire - I might get a charcoal kiln from the night before. I’ll pick up timber for whatever job I’m doing – weaving, fencing or making furniture – and because there will be a fresh flush of greens I’ll be looking for some salad for lunch. By the time spring comes around we will be cooking in an outdoor kitchen with a kettle on the fire. I’ll also have an apprentice by this time so we’ll carry on until the end of the afternoon when I’ll spend time with the kids, go and attend to the charcoal kiln or go for a stroll.

You make it sound as though that’s boring Ben – but it sounds fantastic to us!

Oh that’s good – it really is!

For more info on Ben’s books, woodland courses and products see www.ben-law.co.uk

The Simple Life

05/03/2009

“Simplicity. By simplicity I do not mean simplistic. Simplicity is liberating, it’s elegant and it’s not a hardship. Simplicity is not a negative quality at all. Simplicity is a positive quality because when things are simple they are less of a burden. I think it was Schumacher who said that any fool can make things complicated but it requires a genius to make things simple.

I think we need to start with simplifying our material possessions. Instead of having a big house which we have to heat, furnish and clean – all of which requires a lot of time and money – we could have a small and simple house. The beauty of a small house is that we don’t have to work as hard and we have more time for ourselves. We are liberated from the burden of the big house and we can make our small house just as elegant, beautiful and pleasant.

Simplicity requires a smaller ego and limited desires and it allows us to expand our intelligence, our imagination and our creativity. A complicated life is a hindrance to creativity and the poetic, imaginative and spiritual dimension of our being. We have expanded into material possessions at the cost of this dimension. We make life complicated and have a lot of possessions partly to impress others. So simplicity requires a focus on inner fulfillment and well-being and not outer grandiosity.

To go towards a simpler life is to undergo an inner revolution. You have to shift your consciousness to think: ‘I am going to cherish my inner well-being and happiness more than my outer appearance’. This mind-shift is the first step. Then there are all the social forces working against a simple life – schools, media, advertising – they are all pulling us toward consumerism. So we have to build a robust philosophy and conviction that we are going to resist these temptations. And we need to educate our children from the beginning in a profound way to the perils of consumerism – the damage it does behind the scenes

More people are now realising that our complicated consumerist lifestyle is causing three problems. The first is the environmental destruction in terms of resource use, climate change, and air and water pollution. That is the first consequence of a lack of simplicity. The second is that our high standard of living produces poverty in other parts of the world. Where you have mountains you have valleys and if we go on with high living standards we will never solve the problem of world poverty. The third problem is that our lives are so hectic and stressed that we have no time for our families, friends and neighbours. We have no time left for ourselves.

Because a lack of simplicity is based on the financial sector we now have a great opportunity to simplify and make our lives more resilient to crisis. Simplicity is much more sustainable and can withstand the kind of financial crisis we are seeing. But it does not mean that we have to join the ‘hair-shirt and brown-bread brigade’ (if that’s what you call it), we do not all have to live in communities. There is a middle way which means doing and making more things by hand and getting ourselves involved in more meaningful work.

At the moment the consumerist life is very easy for us. Shopping and buying and consuming are easy options, but behind the easy appearance are jobs that do not have meaning for people. Boredom is a consequence of a complicated life-style. So the challenge for our society is to develop new kinds of organisations that can provide meaningful work for people. This means good agriculture and good craftsmanship, arts, culture and service.

Meaning comes when work is done in a smaller setting, so simplicity should also have to be small. Schools, healthcare, bakeries and dairies should all be small places where people feel they are really helping others. In a smaller setting there is a more meaningful relationship between us all, as well as a relationship to the material we are producing. It is through this relationship that we find meaning. So we have to make things human scale, and human relationship must come before money, efficiency and productivity.

I also think that speed is one of the curses of our civilisation, so another thing about simplicity is that there is a great need for us to slow down. People say that everything has to be done yesterday, but you cannot produce a work of art in a hurry – everything takes its own time. It’s not a question of fast – it’s a question of rightness. Time is not running out, time is coming! I would also say that for simplicity it is important for us to do something with our hands and not simply our brains. I have found that when the hands are the head are in harmony, the heart is at last happy.

www.resurgence.org

The Converging World

08/12/2008

They have since been proved correct, with two eighty metre turbines now generating electricity ...

... in the windy Tamil Nadu region of India one of which has ‘Chew Valley’ written down the column. Over their lifetimes, these mighty machines are set to generate thousands of pounds worth of profit to be channeled into much-needed environmental and social projects for the region – and there are more turbines to come.

‘How does this benefit the folks of Chew Magna?’ we ask Ian Roderick of The Converging World, the mushrooming social-enterprise-type charity that dreams of putting up a wind turbine in India on behalf of every community in the South West of England. “The impact of our consumption in Chew Magna is felt in different parts of the world” replies Ian. “People know this and they feel that because they create the problem, they should be responsible for the solutions. They feel that it’s all very well making changes at the individual level, like changing their light bulbs, and at the community level, by producing a local food directory or installing a local renewable energy scheme, but until they address the third level relating to their global impact, the picture is not complete”.

The guiding principle of The Converging World is ‘Contraction and Convergence’. We now know that Drax power station in Yorkshire, for example, emits more carbon in a year than Kenya and Uganda … and Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia put together. For every ten tonnes of carbon a person on average emits in this country, less than one tonne is emitted by less fuel-dependent people elsewhere. So in order to produce an equitable world, where the right to emit carbon is the same for all global citizens, developed areas need to contract their carbon use, whilst allowing for developing areas to expand to meet their needs. The hope is that the two will eventually converge.

“The Converging World is a mechanism for collecting donations that support ‘contraction and convergence’” explains Ian. Donations can be channeled into community ‘contraction’ projects in this country, or they can be used to develop clean energy supplies elsewhere. For the work in India, The Converging World has found a grass-roots partner in SCAD – ‘Social Change and Development’ - that works with villages across the area to develop schools and sustainable food-growing projects. It is through them that the rewards from electricity generation and its sale back to the Indian grid, are being administered to benefit local people. “We couldn’t in any way do these things ourselves” says Ian.

What’s the plan for the future? “We are inviting other individuals, community or trade groups to set up their own Converging World Community Fund” says Ian. “They chose where their money goes – to local projects or to turbines for developing areas or both - and we handle all the mechanics for them. There is so much to learn about this – things are evolving terrifically fast and we are constantly trying hard to get things right ourselves. What we’re ultimately hoping to do is help people understand that climate change and peak oil issues are more serious than any war we’ve ever been through, and if we are just willing to sacrifice a little, like we did then, we might stand a chance to move to a more equitable and stable world”.

www.theconvergingworld.org, www.Scadindia.org

Living in Community - can we do it?

05/12/2008

“I realised that in this time of uncertainty and resource scarcity we all need to cut our carbon emissions and be able to depend on those we live close to, whether that’s an intentional community or our local neighbours.

It was John Croft of the Gaia Foundation of Western Australia who said: “we need to build community as though our lives depended on it ... because they do.

Living in a community is the natural way for human beings to live and thrive. However, cheap oil has given us consumer lifestyles and the spending power to live separately, often far from family, without the need to share resources. “We have to rediscover the art of community living”, says Dan a member of Steward Community Woodland, one of the communities I’ve visited. “We may have to break through our conditioning and competitiveness, but the joy of living together and it working are just so immense”.

My goal is to live on a sustainable, intentional, permaculture community where everyone makes their income from the land using growing systems that emulate natural ones. I want to share a similar lifestyle and common goals with people, find mutual support and friendship, and reduce the cost of living by sharing with those around me. Charlotte from Landmatters summed it up by saying: “When a community is functioning well it offers resilience in times of change, support and friendships. The benefits of the support far outweigh the disadvantages.”

So since August, I have been visiting smallholdings and communities in the south west to find out what living in a rural community really involves. Is it really idyllic or is it all hard graft? Do I have the physical strength for it and do I actually want to live like that? This article is about three of the permaculture communities I visited over this time, where members live in a way that causes minimum impact to the earth.

My first stop was Landmatters – a community of twelve adults and six children who have lived on the scenic 42-acre site of woodland and pasture near Totnes in Devon for the last three years. The community keeps sheep and runs school education days and courses. At its planning appeal in 2007, it was given three years’ temporary permission to stay, which limits the number of dwellings to the eight already built and the community vehicle pool to five.

This community spends two days a week working and eating together, but live privately in family or individual units. Most homes are ‘benders’ - temporary, dome-shaped dwellings made of a lattice-work of hazel or willow branches bent and tied together. They are insulated with blankets and covered in waterproof canvas. The bender I was lucky enough to stay in was cosy with a carpet, easy chair, double bed and wood-burner. The kitchen area included a gas cooker and sink (though not running water) - the wastewater flowed into a bucket outside that had to be emptied regularly. Collecting my water every day in five-litre containers, I became aware that I was using just under ten litres for washing and drinking, less than is used in one old-style toilet flush! The borehole is a recent addition and provides a reliable clean source of drinking water. Rain and water-butts provide water for washing and irrigation.

I enjoyed my time at Landmatters, playing with the children, sharing meals and stories around a campfire. I got to grips with serious docks, and dandelion deeply rooted in a bed of chard. I planted seeds for stubby carrot and seedlings of purslane, beetroot and chicory, to go under glass cloches in the winter. I learnt that Fuchsia bushes grow delicious tasting berries, cooked apples for crumble in the haybox, and joined in the community discussion about getting a bicycle-powered washing machine instead of driving to the laundrette in town.

My next visit was to Steward Community Woodland near Mortonhampstead, also in Devon. The nineteen members, twelve adults and seven children, live on a 32-acre woodland bought for £50,000 in 2000. Their houses, primarily built of timber and tarpaulin, are supported on stilts due to the steepness of the terrain. My favourite one wouldn’t be out of place in Swiss Family Robinson – with tomatoes and other trailing plants growing off the wooden balcony. I was glad to see that all the residents have private individual or family structures as well as communal living areas. “Tribal communities live completely communally,” says Dan, “but I don’t think, because of the societies that we come out of, that it’s an easy thing for us to do”.

Steward Wood is a physically demanding place to live though I enjoyed the hard work, laughter and the learning. Now I can identify edible wild plants including pink purslane and wood sorrel and know how to eat raw nettle without being stung. I learnt that Laurel releases arsenic and would be poisonous on an open fire, and how to swing a mawl (a large, heavy and dangerous axe). Building a shed was challenging because of my love of trees, but I realised that if you want to live in the woods in a building you’ve made from your own trees, you have to cut them down. For this we used a Second-World-War two-person saw. Although I was only at Steward Community Woodland for a couple of weeks, the community felt almost like family by the time I left.

My third adventure was at Tinker’s Bubble in Norton-Sub-Hampden near Yeovil in Somerset, the oldest and most established of the three. The fifteen adults and eight children live on a 40-acre site of steep wooded hillside, orchard and pasture bought for £55,000 fifteen years ago. The dwellings are made from their own wood and cob, with bought in straw bales and tarp. There are chickens, a cow, goats and usually a horse (although Samson died of old age recently).

At Tinker’s Bubble I picked Russets and Bramley apples for juicing and helped Charlotte cut and prepare logs for her new timber frame house. Without fossil-fuelled heating, the wood collecting missions are crucial, so I grew muscles carrying the heaviest log ever from the woods with another volunteer and had to stop at the first house to cut it into smaller pieces. I was impressed by the wood-fuelled, steam-engine powering the 1920s saw-bench that cuts the logs into timber. Whilst gardening one day, a long-term member told me that living in community means there are so many demands on your time that it’s difficult to focus on your own business. However, members do make a living from managing the land here. I enjoyed my time at Tinker’s Bubble and wish I’d stayed longer, but the frosty weather was more challenging than I’d anticipated!

I feel enriched by the experiences I’ve had at these three different communities and very inspired by the people I’ve met. I’m excited to know that it is possible to reduce your ecological footprint, live off the land and still enjoy life, even if it does take time to get there. The three communities are in different stages of development so while people at Tinker’s Bubble, the most established community, do make their living from the land, Steward Wood and Landmatters illustrate the earlier stages a sustainable community might go through. There are no opportunities for new members at any of these places otherwise I would definitely have been interested, although I have now been invited to live on another, less established community in Devon. I know my dreams are not everyone’s, but living in community can simply mean becoming friends with your neighbours. For me, the main thing that’s important is that if we work together we can create a sustainable future.”

Landmatters: 01803 712 718

Tinker’s Bubble: 01935 881975

Steward Community Woodland: 01647 440 233

Rekindling Community

05/12/2008

A professor of human ecology at Strathclyde University and a fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology in Edinburgh, Alastair has just published two new books, ‘Hell and High Water’ and ‘Rekindling Community’. He also works with urban communities in inner city Glasgow and has been described as ‘inspirational’ by Starhawk, ‘life-changing’ by the Bishop of Liverpool and ‘truly mental’ by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. We ask what ‘community’ means to him.

What do you mean by community Alastair?

I’m talking about the profound interaction we have with each other, the Earth and however we might understand the ‘divine’ that underpins it. It’s about relationship – about being inter-dependent. Intentional communities are where people set out to be a community – communities of interest or religion. But what interests me most is community of place – where geography binds us together to care for the beauty of one another and our environment.

Why is this kind of community important?

When we live a life that is competitive – in which we seek to better ourselves by ‘beggaring our neighbour’ – we become unwell and unhinged. We start to feel loneliness and then seek to fill the inner emptiness with addictions, not least of which is consumerism. Rekindling community brings us back into relationship – rekindling responsibility for each other and the earth. It’s like we’re pebbles on a beach, polished by rubbing together. It’s not always comfortable but we grow by being in contact.

How do we go about rekindling community?

I think it’s important to find a context in which there is a common task. Only a demanding common task really builds community, things like supporting a farm, setting up a wildlife project, creating an inner city drop-in centre. It’s about doing creative things together – like art or making music and even job training. In fact there are so many examples, but what matters is bringing ‘soul’ to what we are doing. We start by facing up to the deficit of soul within us and then we go about seeking and deepening it by finding what gives us life.

And what's the result of doing this?

I think that in learning how to reconnect with each other at a spiritual level there are deep patterns available to us that help us to understand our lives are bigger than our ego-selves. Obama has just been elected for this reason - because he is part of a powerful cultural story that is alive within so many of us. But as will doubtless become clear in the forthcoming months as he struggles with the challenges of office, it’s not easy work. It’s the greatest challenge that faces all of us in our lives – the challenge to express courage, the challenge of spiritual bravery.

This is the challenge that mythologist Joseph Campbell called ‘The Hero’s Journey’. The hero is every man and woman and our task is to insist on beauty against forces that would otherwise trample it underfoot. Campbell said there are three stages: the Departure, where you leave behind the familiar and launch out onto life’s journey; the Initiation where you wrestle with demons – both those thrown at you and your own; and the Return when you come back to the community to be an elder.

Community building to me is about much more than filling in grant applications and attending meetings. It is a process that requires progressively deeper connection with what it means to be a human being.

What does this mean in practice, in your work?

Well, for example, in Soil and Soul I tell how I was part of a group of people that helped to set a vision to bring the island of Eigg into community ownership. It seemed an impossible task, but in laying out a vision of what the island could become, it gave something for people to work towards. It has become an iconic part of Scotland’s land reform. In my new book, Hell and High Water, I’ve applied the same approach to climate change. Climate change is something that we may not be able to stop, but what we have to do before any serious progress can be made is to get to grips with those consumerist addictions in the human condition that caused it in the first place. These challenges of our time force us to ask the big questions: What does it mean to be a human being? Do our lives have meaning? Do we really believe that it doesn’t matter what happens to our world? Do we believe in life? These are age-old spiritual challenges and we need to look at them from more than just our own individualistic perspective. That’s what I try to tackle in ‘Rekindling Community’. The bottom line as I see it is that we’re all inter-connected and to me, community is more than just another name for society, it’s the underlying structure of reality.

www.alastairmcintosh.com

Our Sacred Landscape

05/12/2008

“It’s something in the landscape that breathes into the air” he continues ... “the repository of myth and legend and ceremony laid down by a continuation of people going back thousands of years. Here we’ve got the Avebury, Stonehenge, Glastonbury axis - there’s nowhere in the country quite like it”.

Anthony, who was a consultant psychiatrist for thirty years, has now turned his attention to sacred landscapes, of which we have many in these parts. He is interested in what sacred places meant to our ancestors and how they influence our culture today. “A lot of the culture in this country comes from the spirit of place” he explains. “If you think about our best loved poems, our passionate folk music and stories, you can see that most of them have come from the land. And once you start looking at the land you quickly start asking about ancestors.”

“A small patch in the middle of the Stonehenge bluestones was excavated earlier this year and they found organic fragments that have been carbon-dated to 7000BC. There are also four huge pine post holes in the car park that date back to 8000BC. So what was going on at the site for four thousand years before the big stones got there? The archeologists are perplexed. All we know for certain is that this place has been carrying something significant for nearly ten thousand years and today, every year at summer solstice, twenty thousand people come out to celebrate it. People have been consistent throughout – there’s a real possibility of a repeated seasonal and ceremonial presence, or some acknowledgement of the stones, for that huge period of time”.

“Sacred sites are very important for preservation of culture” says Anthony. The Gaia Foundation, which commissioned his report, is an agency which helps indigenous people across the world get legal rights over their land and protect natural biodiversity. “Indigenous people see sacred sites as ‘places of origin’ – sources of all knowledge and natural lore that governs their culture according to the ecosystem from which they emerged. They believe that all rules about how to their lives come out of these places where shamans and chieftains are initiated with the ancient wisdom of their origins. If these places are destroyed then the life blood of that culture is destroyed”.

If Stonehenge and the other sacred sites in this country are the repository of our ancestors’ wisdom of living in balance with their surroundings, then we have forgotten how to gain access because the rules were never written down. Or have we? “Ancient people may not have written their knowledge down” says Anthony, “but they have left it in the geometry of their stone circles and the geometrical alignments of sacred sites across the country. What particularly interests me, is that the land in these places seems to be speaking to our subconscious in some way. Why else do we build our nuclear power stations on these alignments without realising it and why do we get precise lines of sites that were built at very different ages throughout history? Many indigenous people would be astonished at our surprise that the land is speaking to us because it’s so obvious to them. But since we have become ‘scientific’, we can no longer countenance this kind of thing.

If there is ancient wisdom of our ancestors available to us, is it possible to somehow train our ears so that we might gain better insights on how our modern culture can live within its sustainable limits? Anthony believes we can. His way of tuning our ears is through pilgrimage and ritual journeys that retrace the steps our ancestors would have taken across their sacred landscape thousands of years ago. “Indigenous people use the power of ceremony and ritual to naturally replenish the power of their sites” he concludes. It sounds like we should be doing the same.

Anthony will be co-hosting the 2009 Alchemical Jouney in Glastonbury – a year’s journey around the zodiac bringing the elemental forces of the astrological year into your life.

www.thealchemicaljourney.com

See his website for pilgrimages, walks and other ways of honouring our sacred land, and contact him if you have any experience of the land ‘speaking’ to you.

www.earthskywalk.com

ReSource

The Gatekeeper Trust (www.gatekeepertrust.org.uk)

The Gaia Foundation (www.gaiafoundation.org)

Ancient Sacred Landscapes Network (www.warband.org/aslan)

Green Money

02/06/2008

Molly is a ‘gaian economist’ and self-confessed ‘ideas merchant’. As an author and academic she speaks regularly for the Green Party and the Transition Town Movement and has some great ideas on what should be happening with our money in a bright and sustainable future. Because we’re really confused about economics, we asked her to explain.

Why is economics so scary for most of us Molly?

The ‘professionals’ use maths and complicated language to put us off. But actually we live economics every day of our lives, every time we go to the shops and to work. We have to empower ourselves – to dismiss the myths. That’s what I did when I went back to college and study it and now I have a PhD I can say that I’m an economist and I’m doing it my way.

So what’s wrong with the economic system we’ve got?

It’s all about economic growth. The way our system works means that it has to keep growing because money is created through debt – like we’ve seen with the banks recently. To pay back the debt, economic activity has to grow. And this means using up more and more resources which puts pressure on the planet.

What do we need instead?

A stable economy! A sustainable one that is not growing. There needs to be a global renegotiation on how to achieve this which includes the countries that were not involved in economic agreements after the war. These are the ones that are now in poverty so this is also a matter of global justice. Really it’s about meeting our needs but not expanding them and not selling people what they don’t want. It’s about making things and mending them and making them last.

So what should we be doing?

The priority is to build stable economies at the local level. We can try to meet our needs locally rather than relying on the global system. I think the Transition Town stuff is great because it empowers people to think this way. Why buy everything in a shop? Why not make things yourself? It’s more fulfilling if you provide things for yourself directly – growing food, refurbishing clothes, making shoes. In fact it’s much more positive for us because it leads to more meaningful and closer relationships. Our transactions at the moment are very thin and not warm at all. We hand over the cash and we get something handed back in a bag.

What I’m really talking about is ‘Bioregional Economics’ where you borrow for your needs from the local environment. What you use has to come from the local environment and go back to it. It’s a closed system which goes back to the principles of permaculture. If your needs can’t be met locally then you go to your region, and then to your country and so on. We will still be able to get things like bananas and coffee, it’s just that their price will reflect how much it cost to get them from where they are grown to where you are.

Do you think there’s enough land for us to be meeting our needs locally?

Yes – as long as we stop driving cars as much as we do and flying – but there isn’t enough land for biofuels.

Are your views radical in the world of economists?

When I started doing this kind of stuff I was really way out – nobody had even thought of it. That was ten years ago. But now I think that economics is losing confidence in itself. If you think about it, the financial system appears to be falling apart and so is the planet and both are happening because of bad economics. Academic economists are now changing and lots of different views are holding sway. Green economics are moving closer to the mainstream

Where should we start then?

Put your energy into building the local economy – and for that you need a local currency. And you have to be a producer because you have to have something to exchange. People say they’d like to shop locally but that there’s nothing to buy. The truth is that we all need to make more things. Find your role – chose something to make.

I’m involved in Stroud Hemporium because we are going to need hemp for making our clothes. I’m also really enjoying basketmaking. It’s so much more fun than writing books and sitting behind a computer! I don’t think about it from the view of conventional economics, I just think of it as a hobby for now. But maybe some day I will need it for exchange. In fact, at the moment, because of the way the financial system works, it’s mad to do anything other than go to work and go shopping. But when the system goes down, you might really need these skills.

Don’t you get people thinking you’re mad for holding these views?

We are the same mad people who believed in climate change twenty years ago when no-one else did and we were the first ones to go out and buy organic vegetables. It’s just that we’re on the edge – we are pioneers – and it’s often an uncomfortable place to be because we often wonder if we’re off our own trollies.

The truth is that we don’t know what the future holds. We just have to go with our instincts. It’s not only people like us – it’s all the people with allotments and gardens who are growing their own food. If we turn out to be wrong then nothing has been lost. We can always keep on shopping at the Co-op.

What do you think that life will be like if this does happen?

I think it will be a lot more fun than going shopping. It will be a world of music, art and massage! If you think about your life, all the stuff you value doing most is low carbon – having a laugh with mates, watching live music. I wonder if we’ll even miss the other stuff. We will be called upon to be more creative, more ingenious and more social.

When do you think it will happen?

It’s already happening. If you are an economist you look at the world and see the crisis coming. It’s already well over $100 dollars for a barrel of oil and it will go up from there with knock-on effects on food prices. All the things we have been predicting will happen when you combine the effects of peak oil with climate change. I don’t think it’s looking good at all – but I don’t think anyone knows what it will mean. ‘Plant your potatoes now’ is my advice.

Any other advice on what we should be doing now?

I think its best not to hold on to money. Put it into mutual building societies or cooperative banks that don’t borrow money on the financial market. Alternatively put it into a credit union which is about recycling money locally. In Stroud we have something called ‘Stroud Commonwealth’ where you invest money to buy buildings and land locally for the community. These are the things that as a community we are going to need. What we are really talking about is community sufficiency rather than the self-sufficiency of the 70s. We don’t need to do everything ourselves because we’re in it together.

What are your last thoughts on it Molly?

I think it’s a very positive world to look forward to. There will be much more community and much more relationship. There are hairy times coming but if we do it right then people will come along with it and it can really be a rosy future.

www.gaianeconomics.blogspot.com
www.gaiaineconomics.org
www.stroudcommonwealth.org.uk

The Crystal Skull

02/06/2008

Manda Scott’s Boudica books are brilliant! If you are remotely interested in the spiritual beliefs and day to day lives of our shamanic, pre-Roman ancestors then they are a big must – a gripping read that will completely change the way you look at the world. What Manda has done in these four fabulous tomes is to mix together the things we know about this country’s infamous warrior-princess with lots of skills and practices that we can still find use for today. When her latest book ‘The Crystal Skull’ was published (and also had me glued), I finally had an excuse to go and chat. ‘Why Boudica?’ was my first big question.

“Well, I was primarily interested in the spirituality of the pre-Roman Iron Age” replies Manda who is a long-time shamanic practitioner and therefore interested in the roots of this tradition in our past. “Boudica was the iconic name and character who represented the last time when shamanic practice flourished as the spiritual base on which our culture was founded”. The books themselves give a vivid and utterly convincing picture of tribal life in the British Isles as lived by warriors, dreamers and storytellers immersed in a belief system based on reverence for the natural worlds and the gods of the land. “Everyone else had written about it from the perspective of the Romans” she continues, “but even though I was told there wasn’t enough information to write it from the perspective of the indigenous peoples, that was exactly what I wanted to do”.

“I’d always wanted to write these books” says Manda, “but I was waiting until I was a good enough writer which felt like it was about three years away”. At the time she was working as a vet and writing ‘medically-based’ contemporary crime thrillers. “I was out walking one day when the dog killed a lactating hare, an animal that was sacred in this country, and I couldn’t find the young”. It was the trauma of this incident, which she later mirrored in the story of Boudica, that led to the birth of the books. “I felt that if something needed to die to show me that I was on the wrong path and needed very badly to find out what I should be doing instead,” she explains. “So I took myself on a vision quest to ask the gods ‘what do you want of me?’ and the answer came back – to write Boudica”.

Manda took the historical facts and wove them together with character and life-story details acquired through a process she refers to as ‘dreaming’. “The Boudica books are a blueprint of my understanding of dreaming” she says in explanation of the ancient art of divination, creation and living that our ancestors used to practice. “Dreaming is pretty much what every writer does but I do it in a very structured way which means lots of ceremony and intent. But most of the time I just look into the fire to see what’s on the other side. When I was writing Boudica, I would spend four or five hours in front of the fire every night. It wasn’t anything anyone else couldn’t have done, I was just lucky enough to have the freedom not to have to do anything else for six years”.

Part of Manda’s intention when writing the Boudica books was to return dreaming techniques to the modern world so that they might be used again. “We haven’t changed that much in two thousand years” she says. “Our ability to connect with the gods of the land hasn’t changed that much and it is still possible to reconnect with the world in the same ways our ancestors did – actually becoming part of it rather than just moving across the surface. I made a rule with the first book not to include any practice that I hadn’t either done or seen done – that any one of us couldn’t do now”. Due to the popular demand of her readers, Manda occasionally runs workshops on it when she’s not writing. “I see dreaming as being inseparable from living” she says. “It’s about being present in every moment, not just when we meditate. If we are not awestruck and filled with gratitude at the world around us then we are not truly present”.

Manda’s latest book, ‘The Crystal Skull’ is a modern thriller, but it does continue the theme. “I wanted to touch people with some kind of wake up call, to give them the incentive to connect with the gods of the land in the way that we talked about in Boudica” she says. The story draws on the Dresden Codex and the legend of the crystal skulls which seems to have its origins in North and Central America. The codex is a real-life Mayan text that details the astonishingly advanced mathematics behind their well-known calendar. This calendar famously predicts that the ending of a ‘great age’ that has lasted twenty six thousand years, will occur on the winter solstice of 2012. One legend associated with it says that if a set of thirteen crystal skulls, which were fashioned by the ancients specifically for this purpose, were somehow united at this time, there would be a transcendence of the difficulties undoubtedly to be faced by mankind.

‘The Crystal Skull’ is the story of one such skull discovered here in Britain and the subsequent race to discover how it can be united with the other twelve to avert apocalypse. It too is completely gripping, but what I’m really interested to know is what Manda herself thinks will happen in 2012 – does she believe the prophecy? “Well, the astronomy is very interesting” she says. “The sun moves into conjunction with the galactic centre which, in Mayan theology, opens the road to the ‘underworld’. I personally think that it will be the mid-point of an event cycle that we are already in. People are becoming more aware of climate change and the human population is out of control - I think there is bound to be an impact. I hope that it is not a point of no return but I suspect that it might be”.

‘And what of the crystal skulls?’ I wonder. “I’m not a crystal person” she says, “but the skull in the British Museum at the moment is gorgeous even if it is a fake as many people believe. If any of these skulls are real then it must be the Mitchell-Hedges” she says about another skull arriving in the British Museum later this year. “People who are very sane are saying they feel as though they are in the presence of something very ancient when they see this skull. If there is something it can do then I will be very happy” she continues, “but I’m not holding my breath. I certainly don’t think it will be as easy as flicking a switch and all our problems will be transcended”.

Manda, like many of us, is involved in the ‘Transition Town’ movement in her local area and I ask if this is her way of preparing for what might happen. “I do think we have to become more food-wise” she says, “and anything we do has to be done as part of a community rather than on our own. But more than anything I think we have to get back to a spiritual basis that connects us to the land. To do this, perhaps we need to reconsider our relationship with the Ibrahamic religions which are all about dominance over nature. Perhaps it’s time to demonstrate that there is something else to believe in that is more alive”. It seems to me that her books do exactly that – an answer to our cultural yearning for something more alive and more land-based to believe in. It has certainly given me more hope for the future and a glimpse of something very ancient and alive from the past.

Anyone who has read the Boudica books or ‘The Crystal Skull’ is hanging out for the moment they will be made into films which, fingers crossed, could really happen some time soon. But in the meantime we shall just have to look forward to the next book which will be as exciting as the last and the next step on Manda’s mission to connect us with the gods of the land. Apparently it will be based in Rome and without giving too many clues, it will feature some of our historical and long-lost friends from the past. Can’t wait!

G.R.O.F.U.N.

02/06/2008

Step up to your garden fence for the latest green-fingered revolution to be sweeping the streets of our inner cities. We are talking G.R.O.F.U.N – a grassroots community initiative that is uniting neighbours across their divides and providing fresh, local and organic food for all. It started off in Bristol – but it spreads as we speak – and the aim is to make your neglected garden spaces, patios and balconies into productive and wild-life friendly spots for the growing of fruit and veg.

“I truly believe that if a World War II scale mobilization occurred in Bristol” says GroFun-founder Nadia Hillman, “every one of the city’s inhabitants could eat at least one portion of fresh vegetables every day if all the neglected allotments, window sills, flat roofs and public gardens were utilized for food and not for lawns”. But at the moment this is not the plan. For now the ‘Grofunnies’ are simply out to enjoy themselves, build a sense of community in the areas they dig and take full advantage of the fresh and tasty food that grows there.

“A group of us go from garden to garden” explains Nadia. “preparing beds for growing and sharing labour and tools. We get owners set up and provide ongoing support, including watering crops while people are on holiday”. The food that is grown is shared out amongst the volunteers and garden-holders, and everyone gets to learn and share lots of gardening skills along the way. The whole system is run as an exchange – for every hour you put in you receive a greenie point, and once you have ten your own garden gets the makeover.

“The best thing for me is the connecting of people” says Nadia. “Seeing friendships develop between former strangers is such a buzz because our segregated urban fibre needs re-knitting urgently. We might need a neighbour for more vital things than cups of sugar in the future. At the end of the day we are all involved in this to enjoy ourselves and have a laugh whilst making a tangible difference to our neighbourhoods and health”.

If you are Bristol-based and have a little sunny sheltered spot in your garden, or indeed anywhere to put a small container in the sun, do get in touch with the folks from G.R.O.F.U.N – it will only take a few minutes a day and you could be supplying your neighbours with fresh produce. Or if you want to set up something similar in your town or city then they will be more than happy to help you. Go G.R.O.F.U.N!

www.bountifulbristolbulletin.org.uk Email Nadia : grofun@yahoo.ca

What a Beautiful Day

16/04/2008

The Levellers were huge in the eighties and nineties - their first hit album ‘Levelling the Land’ is still likely to be in your collection if you were remotely into the independent, travelling, outraged scene. They broke records for the size of their audience at Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in 1994 and have since been selling out big venues with their angry folk-punk-fiddles that never get old. Would they do anything else I wonder – should their relevance wane? “To be honest I’m unemployable” laughs Mark. “I’m not really trained for anything except music – so what’s the point of stopping? I can see us going on until someone dies”.

We hope they go on forever! – what would we do without the annual ‘Beautiful Days’ which takes place in Devon – despite the fact they’re all from Brighton. Why here? Why not organise your festival at home I ask Mark. “Well, we’ve been going to things like Glastonbury and Elephant Fayre all our lives” he says, “and now it only feels right to head west for festivals. And we’ve got lots of friends in Devon”. Mark then lets slip he may even be thinking of moving to Devon full time “We first decided to do a festival” he continues, “because six years ago there weren’t many about like there are now. We just thought ‘let’s do it properly’ – not as a corporate venture to make money but as a cultural exchange. We have local bands, local produce and local beer at Beautiful Days and it really feels like part of the community. We’re glad it’s become Devon’s festival - we even make it to the diary page of ‘Devon Life’ magazine!”

So what’s the best thing about having your own festival I ask? “Wielding ultimate power?” he suggests, “…yes, we’re headlining again! But seriously, it’s great to decide what bands to have. All the wheeling and dealing is a lot of work and very stressful but it’s also very rewarding. I get a real buzz out of it. It’s a shame it’s all over so fast – I wish it could be five days”. Why can’t it be? I ask hopefully. “Well people can get messy after five days can’t they, and we wouldn’t want anything bad to happen”.

Any early clues about who might be playing this year then? “Not even we know that until much later” Mark says. “We want people to buy tickets for the festival rather than the bands themselves. But our wish list on bands is becoming much easier to achieve as we get more established and we can pay people. It’s really important to pay people!” he says having been in the situation himself. Last years line-up included the likes of KT Tunstall, Afro- Celt Sound System, Gogol Bordello, Dreadzone and New Model Army – hard to see how it could be better.

“It’s a shame we have to play on the Sunday though” says Mark. The Levellers always headline on the last night of Beautiful Days when maybe they’d prefer to be ‘relaxing’. Do they find it hard to enjoy the festival when so many people recognise them? “No, it’s cool. I like to chat to people, and anyway people are very polite – they realise it’s our big party and they don’t hassle us at all. I like to wander around at night. That’s why we have the masked ball – so that we can disguise ourselves”. And what will his disguise be this year? He’s not telling.

So what about the bands position these days on all matters green? They have been singing songs of the land since I remember and are probably the main reason I care about it myself. “On green issues I’ve been doing it and saying it for twenty years” he replies. “If Chris Martin from Coldplay is standing up for that kind of thing now then I probably don’t need to anymore. These days I’m more gloomy about political issues … about western powers and foreign policies, about lack of learning and judgement when dealing with developing countries. There are so many problems we make that people like my daughter will have to deal with. I think we still have a chance to make things ok – but I don’t see people grabbing the nettle. I’m hoping that we might see some changes with these US elections.”

“I must say I’m also worried about young people’s lack of concern” he continues. “When I was sixteen I was really politically motivated. In fact I was completely driven by it”. Does this mean his views have changed or mellowed since then? “No they haven’t!” he insists. “If anything they’ve become more hard-core. But I really feel I’ve done my part. I spent the whole of the eighties and nineties doing it”. And does he think that the Levellers music has made a difference? “Yes, I think so” he replies whilst breaking off briefly to sort out a dog squabble. “People come up to us and say that we’ve really helped them through our music – that we’ve directed them to a more informed way of life. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way”.

And does he look back over the last twenty years and think that music was the right thing to do? “Yes, I do think the music was right given the views I’ve held in my life. I’ve got no regrets. If something exciting came along now I’d still get involved but if Chris Martin and Bono were doing it then I probably wouldn’t bother. We’re essentially an underground band - the last underground band!” This brings me to their new CD which is going to be called ‘Letters from the Underground’. What about that Mark? “Well it’s out the Monday after Beautiful Days” he says. “It’s all new stuff and it’s very very political and very very hardcore”. Crikey – we’ll be looking out for that one then!

Our walk is drawing to a close and I can hear the traffic as we approach the road home. Last question: What is Mark most looking forward to this year? “A good gig of course” is his reply, “… lots of good gigs! I’m really looking forward to the Albert Hall which is a first. It’ll be cool. It’s a big ambition and I can’t wait”. Well, I can’t wait either. I love the Levellers. I like Mark. And I’m glad he’s coming to Devon. I shout goodbye to Sidney as they disappear off the phone, I have a quick stamp around the kitchen to favourite Levellers song ‘Sell Out’ and am online within five minutes getting my tickets for Beautiful Days.

Around the World by Human Power

16/04/2008

In retrospect, what has this huge trip been about for you Jason?
I started out seeking answers to big questions we all have to face at some point in our lives: the definition of true happiness, true meaning and purpose in life. I’d always felt disenfranchised by the capitalist society that I was brought up in, and the pressure to join the ranks of worker bees to contribute to a profit-based economy. While money is certainly important, it just seemed there way too much emphasis laid on the acquisition of it. I wanted to know if there was some other currency or code that a person can incorporate into their life to make it ultimately more fulfilling and rewarding.

What are the three main things you’ve learned from the experience?
That ‘right action’ should be aimed at the art of doing something well rather than just the end result. Be it how one pedals a bicycle, makes a cup of tea or work at one’s daily job, quality of action can only come with being immersed in the eye of the moment. Only then can the action in question bring a sense of fulfillment to the doer.

That we should be aware of the larger implications of our actions on other people and the environment. Ideally our actions should benefit others and the earth rather than harm it. So charity and service should be a part of one’s daily life.

That a crocodile will never make a good pet!

What was the most challenging leg?
Probably pedaling across the mid-Pacific region of the doldrums where there was a countercurrent running in the opposite direction to where I wanted to go (Australia). I was pedaling for almost three weeks on the spot and went somewhat mad with blood poisoning and a fractured personality before finally getting out of there and into the southern ocean.

What was the scariest moment - did you ever think you were going to die?
I’ve had several hear misses over the years but I think being chased by a saltwater crocodile rates as the scariest. I was about 100 metres from making landfall in a kayak on a beach in North Eastern Australia when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Turning around I saw a 17ft saltwater croc swimming after me much faster than I could paddle. A sense of primal fear gripped me that I’d never experienced before - that of being chased by a dinosaur that should have died out thousands of years ago! I managed to get to the shore just before it reached me. The action of leaping out of my boat onto dry land frightened it away initially. Later, as I was ferrying my gear to the top of the beach, it came back and made for my kayak, which according to the experts it probably mistook for an imposter (being the same shape and length as a possible rival croc). Several seconds and a broken paddle later it returned back into the surf, giving me enough time to escape with all my gear up a cliff and onto a headland where it couldn’t get to me.

And what was the most upsetting thing you witnessed?
A dog being deliberately run over by a car on the island of Java in Indonesia. Humans can be so cruel, as well as selfish and greedy.

How did you feel as you crossed the finishing line?
Not as choked up or elated as I think people expected me to be. I’ve never seen the end of the journey being the sole purpose, rather the journey itself. So when it finally came it was like: “This is just another day on the expedition” - exciting yes, but not life-altering. The best part was seeing all these amazing people who had volunteered their time and expertise over the years in lieu of sponsorship: coming together under one roof for our completion bash, for the first and last time.

What are the biggest changes in this country?
Increased focus on money, reality TV and celebrity worship - an insidious atmosphere of narcissism that anyone can be a star. CCTV. All the establishments that had any character, like owner operated pubs and Greasy Spoons, seem to have gone by the wayside replaced by corporate branded ‘theme’ establishments. And we’re paying for the privilege! When I left a pint of beer was 87p, now it’s £2.80 odd. I know I’ve been away a long time, but not that long. There does seem to awareness of the environment now, but almost too little too late. For most it’s just another trendy thing to attach their identity to. There seem to be only a few who are prepared to make serious sacrifices to their lifestyle for the long-term picture. Perhaps they can eventually make a difference through passive example.

What are the biggest changes in you - have you found it hard to adjust?
After 101 days at sea on the Atlantic crossing I attained a two-hour state of Samadhi, or temporary non-dualistic state of awareness, in which the usual subject-object way of seeing the world as we usually do was replaced by a sense of complete oneness, or unity. It was the most important experience of my life and one that I have never been able to repeat. It was the grail that I had set out from Greenwich all those years ago to find.

Ironically the nature of the expedition, with all its logistical headaches and perpetual funding issues, has since kept me well-entrenched in the subject/object state of consciousness. Now that I have completed the task I wonder if I will be able to rediscover that state of bliss, and perhaps sustain it. But the Frankenstein monster that is the expedition is still hungry and still needs feeding: books to be written, debts to be paid off, interviews to be given and articles to write! Perhaps one day I will find the peace that I once found, but lost, on the expedition. I don’t think I’ll find it anytime soon though, especially not in this money obsessed society we live in. I’m probably destined to live the life of the Outsider, trying to live in my idea of a perfect world while remaining oblivious of the limitations of the one we actually live in.

If you could change one thing in the world what would it be?
First priority would be controlling population.

What would be your main message to people here at home?
To question everything: from whether you actually NEED to drive the car to the shops, to whether you need to run the heating, to flushing the loo, to eating another large meal, to buying more stuff … in short, the need to consume. And what would be your best advice to any would-be explorers?

Believe in yourself. You don’t have to be an expert to begin a big idea - just enough conviction to place one foot in front of the other and begin it. After all, the less you know, the more of an adventure you’re going to have.

Finally Jason, what’s next for you?
Currently writing a book. Then we’ll see: talks to make a little money, perhaps lead youth expeditions to other parts of the world and learn about how other’s live. More feeding of the Monster for the foreseeable future!

To find out more about Jason’s amazing trip see: www.expedition360.com

The Man With Wind in His Sails

16/04/2008

Do you think we can turn climate change around before it’s too late Dale?
Yes. I do think we can – but not in the way and at the rate we’re going about it. We’ve really got to get to grips and take it seriously, but at the moment the talk isn’t translating into hard policies. We have to completely change the way we live. If it’s anything less than that we haven’t got a hope.

And what role will renewable energy play?
Well, the role of renewables is nothing short of massive. In twenty years time it’s conceivable that fifty per cent of all our electricity could come from renewables. Then there’s transport - we could be using renewable energy to power electric cars. And there’s the big issue of oil on the farm. A lot of people aren’t aware of the role of oil in the way we feed ourselves. My picture of the future is of a radically different society. We’ll be driving around in cars that are plugged in at night. We’ll have organic farms with electric tractors. There’ll be decreased production and use of pesticides and fertilisers. We could have a thoroughly sustainable future if we don’t continue to fudge it.

What do you think about nuclear power?
It’s the most expensive way, pound for pound for saving carbon and it should be the last thing we resort to rather than the first. If you diverted the funds for nuclear into renewable energy you could power the whole country ten times over. And there’s not only the question of cost, the whole issue of toxic waste is just irresponsible. There are cheaper, safer and more effective ways of generating electricity.

What’s the role of Ecotricity in the renewables revolution?
We’re here to create change and also to empower people. We need to make people aware that power is in their own hands. We can all use our electricity bill to fight climate change. When we started ten years ago, people were only starting to hear about climate change – and now it’s a big deal. Climate change looks so big that we often feel it’s up to the government to do something. But its people power that’s the solution. We’re all responsible for what’s done – things wouldn’t happen if we refused to take part. But someone has to offer the choice. People can only change what they do if they are presented with an acceptable alternative.

What’s your view of the future?
Apart from electric tractors? I think there has to be a complete change. Continuous economic growth is wrong The Man with the Wind in his Sails and unsustainable – it’s materially rich and spiritually poor. Over here we live as if we’ve got three or four planets. We must look at the bigger picture and reconsider our resource use. We have forewarning that resources aren’t as endless as we thought they’d be and there’s no bottomless pit. What we are starting to see with fossil fuels will happen soon with other materials such as metals.

What’s your main mission for this year?
We’re going to get an electric car on the road that will smash the stereotype that electric cars look like something Noddy would drive. We want to show that you can be environmentally aware and still have fun. It’s going to be an electric sports car. It will do 100 miles an hour and will go from 0 – 60 mph faster than a Ferrari. We’re making this car with what’s available at this time in the world. We want to show that we don’t need decades more research in fuel-cells or a hydrogen infrastructure. We are throwing the gauntlet down to the car companies out there. If we can do it – why can’t you?

If you switch your electricity supply to Ecotricity you are supporting the development of wind energy projects and reducing the climate change gas emissions from your home and business. You can choose from two tariffs – both of which use energy from Ecotricity wind turbines, one of which comes from one hundred per cent clean green energy sources. All you have to do is call their helpline to find out more … it’s just too easy.

www.ecotricity.co.uk; 0800 0326 100

Wild Love

16/04/2008

The human animal has always journeyed into wild places, ever seeking out an intimacy and communion with nature and her inhabitants. Typically this journey is undertaken with the aspiration to feed our hunger for connection to the ‘sacred’ and to seek revelation regarding the identity of our place within the circle of life. We go to the wild to ask the perennial question: ‘Who Am I?’

The reason we can seek the answer to this core question amongst our animal kin is that they are the living embodiment of that which is uttered by spiritual elders to their students – ‘Know Thyself’’ - the admonition that leads to an inquiry of our greater, authentic identity. The stag knows that he is a stag. He knows what it is to live fully in his body – to rut with his rack of majestic antlers, to forage with his glistening nose and to run and leap on his cloven hooves. The honeybee knows who she is, in a life dedicated to the alchemy of making honey and pollinating the world’s plants. So it is with the salmon and the spider, the horse and the hound. Every species upon the Earth holds a profound knowing of who they are with one notable exception. The exception is you and I – the fragile, delicate, obstinate and peculiar bi-ped – the human being. Above all else, we long for the self-knowing that the animal kingdoms effortlessly possess as their very birthright, and by consulting them, we seek it out.

To know who we are is an essential ingredient in experiencing life to the full - not separate from nature and the cosmos, but as an integral part of the whole. But we have become divorced from the environment – split apart under the weight and force of ‘progress’ and a mindless need to plunder the Earth’s resources. As we continue along this increasingly barren path, searching blindly for the things that will stopper the holes in the human soul and psyche, we have been unwittingly destroying the only thing that has the potential to save our species – the wise and unified animal nations. Humanity evolved from the animals – we are their descendants – and they are able to remind us of our identity at a time when we can no longer rely on our culture or our education to remind us of our roots. For guidance on this path of remembering, we can look to the world’s remaining indigenous people – those who have remained untouched by modern western values. It is these people who celebrate the world through a pagan, shamanic world view, knowing well that everything is alive and everything is intimately connected. They hold an ‘acuity of seeing’ that helps them to understand that nature is not only their provider, but also their greatest teacher in self-knowing. They come to know her through close observation, through taste, touch and sound, and through ritual and ceremonial encounters that mark the sanctity of this relationship.

These people know the animals around them as vital allies and teachers – not only as a source of food but as guides to locating medicines and water and as allies within the spirit realms. They understand what it is to take a life to sustain their own, they value every part of an animal’s body, and they never forget the need to honour the animal that has died. This is a far cry from our attitude in the West. Over a short period in history we have fallen under the illusion that we are ‘all powerful’ – that we may take whatever we wish from the animal kingdom, manipulate it through intensive farming, and modify the genetics of the cow, pig, sheep and hen. We are absurdly incongruent as regards our relationship with the planet and – as a mirror - within ourselves. We love our cats, dogs and horses and yet ignore the tortuous lives of many farm animals and the brutality of their deaths. We look the other way as we simultaneously, proudly declare ourselves a nation of animal lovers.

The excuses for our behaviour have been carefully written and edited: ‘Ignorance is bliss’; ‘they are only animals, they don’t feel pain as we do’. We are influenced by societal pressure, our education, hereditary ideas and culture – much of which has roots in Christian theology. It was Thomas Aquinas the foremost classical proponent of what became known as ‘natural theology’ who in the 13th century placed animals below us in the spiritual hierarchy, enabling us to treat them as utilities rather than sacred living beings. This widely influential ‘unnatural theology’ continues to hold sway in much of modern Western culture. But many other spiritual traditions across the globe do the same. Why? Why is it that in so-called developed countries our behavior towards the animal kingdom is abhorrent? Are we perhaps fearful now to fall deeply in love with the animal kingdom? Are we fearful of the huge changes that this would mean in our lives? If we dared to feel that extraordinary love for our kith and kin it would catalyse a paradigm shift that would change the face of the world forever. What can we do to experience again the milk and honey of a green and pleasant land? We do not need to plunder the wild places further. Restoring our paradise can begin in the back garden, observing the wiles and ways of the blue tit, squirrel and fox – becoming mesmerized by their delicacy, agility and guile and applying their lessons to our lives. This wild love can be found with the zoo, should we dare to commune with animals in not-so-pleasant captive environments. If we dare to experience their pain fully, might we be moved to do things differently? And dare we research where our food comes from? If we know how an animal has lived and died we can make careful decisions about what we eat rather than brandishing the flimsy excuse of it being too painful to engage in that knowing.

It is time to look in the mirror - now before it is too late. To dare to examine our true feelings about animals beyond what we have been conditioned to believe, means there may be some hope for our species. We may once more find our place and open ourselves to the unity that is possible in animal kinship. This is our birthright. We do not need to be alone. We can chose to be part of the most colourful, wondrous and diverse animal community imaginable, and we can make a human future here on earth a possible dream.

www.sacredtrust.org

What Should We Eat

28/01/2008

The main problem we have, as Richard explained, is that our global food-producing machine is entirely dependent on oil and gas at the moment. If you think about the whole process of making food, from the artificial fertiliser to the pesticides, from the machines to the packaging to the food miles, you’ll be hard pushed to find one part of it that doesn’t use a lot of the stuff. In fact, at current estimates, each one of us in the UK is eating the equivalent of 3.5 barrels of crude oil a year – (more than we use to heat our homes) – and for every ten calories of fossil fuel energy used to get food on our forks, only one calorie goes into our mouths.

This would all be ok if the situation was sustainable, but fossil fuels were made and stored hundreds of thousands of years ago and once used up, they can’t be replaced. So, as Richard and many other experts (including those within the oil industry) are pointing out with some urgency, once the production of global oil reserves reaches a peak there will be a decline in its availability and a huge escalation in price. “Clearly the timing of the global peak is crucial” said Richard. “If it happens soon, or if in fact is has already happened, the consequences will be devastating. Oil has become the World’s foremost energy resource. There is no ready substitute, and decades will be required to wean societies from it”.

This is bad news, particularly as predictions suggest that in order to feed our everexpanding human family, we need to produce more food in the next fifty years than all the food we produced in the last 10,000 years put together. And this huge effort is already looking hampered by the spectre of an increasingly chaotic climate and now by our government’s decision to set aside food-producing land to grow crops for commercial biofuel to keep our cars on the road. So without oil, how on earth are we going to feed ourselves?

“Clearly this is a gargantuan task” warns Richard, a man who fears that technological fixes are unlikely to do the job. “In essence we need an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels”. His conclusion is that eventually we will have to resort to those organic farming practices that we were using 150 years ago, before the onset of the ‘oil age’. Food will be produced in harmony with nature rather than against it, he suggests, using methods such as permaculture and biodynamics which are already proving they can yield just as much food as intensive farming methods, but without the negative environmental impacts.

So as consumers, what should we be doing about it, short of stockpiling baked beans? Well, the message seems clear on this. We should be supporting our local food producers – particularly those who are already using organic farming methods. We should start to become more involved in the production of our own food so that one day we can hope to have local self-sufficiency and resilience. And we should be re-learning the art of cooking with seasonal ingredients and the food items around us. Down in the South West we have the soil and climate that is ideally suited to organic growing and plenty of people are already doing it. We have the best in local producers – a trend that is set to expand - and many of our towns and villages have already signed up to the Transition Towns Movement … a great community initiative which has local people drawing up plans for their life without oil.

So luckily we’ve made a great start. And it may take some time, but once we’re over the shock there’s a lot more work to be done!

The Future of Food

28/01/2008

About 15 years ago in 2015, rising oil prices, international climate change agreements, and the findings of the Royal Commission on ‘Food Security’ made the UK Government reconsider its commitment to the World Trade Organisation’s pro-globalisation, liberalised, unrestricted free-trade approach. This led to it prioritising national food security was above international trade. Local authorities across the country made local food procurement a priority, kick-starting a rapid expansion in the market for local food. Rising natural gas prices and disruptions to its supply exposed the vulnerability of UK farming’s dependence on nitrogen fertilizer (which was made from natural gas).

The building of organic matter in soils is now a priority due to their increased ability to lock up carbon, a key aspect of the Government’s ‘carbon reduction strategy’. The integration of perennial tree crops is a central feature of agriculture, both for their crop yields and for their carbon sequestering abilities. Stands of specially bred varieties of walnut, sweet chestnut and hazel have been integrated into most farms, offering protein-rich annual crops used for a variety of food uses as well as for producing oils for biodiesel for local consumption. With the changes in climate, a wider range of tree crops are now grown, as well as vines and other perennials.

Farming has learnt to compensate for its reduced oil consumption through the partial reintegration of working horses, alongside locally-produced biofuelpowered machinery and by employing more people. The average farm size is now much less than in 2008 and the countryside is much more populated.

Some now produce materials needed by a building industry which now uses more local building materials, such as clay plasters, cob and hemp/lime blocks, as well as local timbers. This, in turn, has enabled the creation of small scale industries to process and produce these, often based on the farms. Others now focus on growing organic mushrooms, both for culinary and for medicinal uses. Some specialise in growing hemp for fabrics, or producing wood pellet or biofuels such as biodiesel or ethanol for the local market. For some farms, the installation of a methane digestor means that they are able to supply heat and power to the neighbouring community. This newly found diversity of enterprise, alongside food production, has led to a regenerated local economy, with much of each community’s wealth being cycled locally rather than being leached out into the national economy.

growing organic mushrooms, both for culinary and for medicinal uses. Some specialise in growing hemp for fabrics, or producing wood pellet or biofuels such as biodiesel or ethanol for the local market. For some farms, the installation of a methane digestor means that they are able to supply heat and power to the neighbouring community. This newly found diversity of enterprise, alongside food production, has led to a regenerated local economy, with much of each community’s wealth being cycled locally rather than being leached out into the national economy.

Back garden and allotment food production was already a very popular leisure activity in 2008, but in 2012 the Government legislated to make gardening a key aspect of their carbon reduction and health promotion strategies. Now local varieties of fruit and vegetables are highly treasured, and the teaching of intensive organic gardening techniques is a core part of the National Curriculum, as part of the Nation’s Food Security programme.

Over the last 25 years, food and farming in the UK has returned to being seen as central to the food security of the country. As the rising price of fuel and demand for land for the short-lived biofuels industry began to inflate the price of food around 2008, we found, for the first time in 50 years, that it was cheaper to eat local organic food. At the same time our diets, by necessity, became more seasonal and less meat-based”.

Taken from ‘The Transition Handbook’ to be published in 2008 by Green Books.

Back to Nature

28/01/2008

So what effect is this having? It’s hard to quantify in absolute terms, but a career spent working with diverse client-groups within natural settings convinces me of the significant contribution the natural world makes to a person’s health and well-being. We are told by current medical research, that hospital patients recover more quickly when listening to tapes of birdsong, and that joggers on a treadmill have lower heart rates if they are looking at a picture of a country scene. Most people can relate to the premise that we simply feel better when we step out into a garden, or into nature. Our holidays are mostly taken in areas of natural beauty, our fondest childhood memories are often the times spent out rambling about in the countryside, or messing about by a river or seaside.

From my point of view the more time you spend in an unnatural environment, the more your soul or spirit wilts. Think of a plant transplanted to less fertile soil or into a shady spot in the garden. I believe the effect is the same on the human spirit, when displaced from a natural environment. For example, in a recent magazine survey the research concluded that gardeners are generally happier people. According to research in Michigan, prisoners without a view over farmland are 24 per cent more likely to suffer illness. Richard Louv has coined the term ‘nature deficit disorder’ to sum up this ‘dis-ease’ that accounts for our separation from the natural world.

With all this in the back of our minds, we set up WildWise in 1999 to help broker the relationship between people and nature, to introduce creative and empowering ways of enjoying the countryside and to build a foundation that will hopefully last a lifetime. If we can arouse someone’s curiosity, heighten their appreciation, build their confidence and deepen their love of the natural world then we have succeeded in our aspirations. From wildwood to seashore, from meadow to moorland we host people on a wide spectrum of outdoor events from bushcraft to fieldcraft, from creative interpretation to personal development.

One of our flagship events is a four day camp for youngsters, set in our beautiful wildwood. This is a precious opportunity for children from 8-12 years old to explore the natural world and learn some new outdoor skills like firecraft and shelter building. There is even time in the programme where ‘nothing’ happens, where there are unstructured spaces within the syllabus which allows the children to make their own play, stimulated by the stream, meadow and forest. This of course is not something appreciated within our overstructured educational establishments, but nevertheless offers the child a unique, selfgenerated relationship to nature - something that parents and teachers are increasingly afraid to give them.

There is a myth that we live in a ‘litigation’ culture. The media are peddling bad news stories, and are criminally responsible for cultivating the fear and paranoia of the outdoors, putting more and more barriers up between children and nature. Within one generation, life has changed dramatically, and the same parents who took risks in their outdoor adventures and play, have been reluctant to create a similar freedom for their children, in fear of the perceived risks (some of them real such as increased traffic). I think one statistic is very revealing. In 1972, 90 per cent of us walked or cycled to school but in 2007 it is less than 10 per cent. Consider that this little everyday journey was an ongoing encounter with changing seasons, elements, flora and fauna, even for the town-dwellers. It is very symbolic of the times we live in when time outdoors has to be a structured weekend activity or a once a year holiday.

But we can still remember what it was like when we were young, and so there is time to refocus our aspirations. For example, within education in Britain there is a dramatic upsurge in ‘Forest Schools’. Where there is government support, the movement is flourishing. There are over two hundred in Worcestershire! Education for Sustainable Development is the new and urgent priority. And look at the effect that my old teacher Ray Mears has had. I firmly believe his TV programmes have kindled an interest in nature and has persuaded thousands to pursue a more outdoor life.

I think that in some ways, the most revolutionary act we might do is to step outside, to step off the beaten track, and encounter wild nature – even in our own back garden or local park. In doing this, purposefully and consciously, we move away from the corporate world that keeps us separate, and we step closer to our own true nature.

www.wildwise.co.uk; 01803 868269

Nature and Healing

28/01/2008

I believe that we are entering a new phase in the evolution of humankind. It is one that is spreading from a deep grass roots level, creating hope and healing and a clear direction to move in. The roots of this transition lie in a major shift of consciousness as we move from our old separatist way of ‘us and them’ thinking, to a new understanding of our place in the interconnected web of life.

This is not new. Our tribal ancestors understood the interconnectedness of life and the knowledge is still retained in ancient cultures around the world. Our own culture of separatist thinking was brought about by science picking everything apart, by religions which created a divided framework of earth, heaven and hell, and by suppression of the earth-based pagan religions which were naturally holistic. Industrialisation and consumerism have added further layers to our disconnection and isolation.

Now technology has given us world communication and with it the gift of ‘overview’. Through this we are finding our reconnection to our common humanity and a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things. Science has also moved on and quantum physics, string theory, and the quantum vacuum, reconnect Now technology has given us world communication and with it the gift of ‘overview’. Through this we are finding our reconnection to our common humanity and a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things. Science has also moved on and quantum physics, string theory, and the quantum vacuum, reconnect us to our common bond of unity. And we are stirred, and we are moving as individuals with an awareness of the whole.

We are learning to be part of the natural world again by finding ways to reconnect to the Earth, so that we feel ourselves to be part of creation and not somehow fragmented and separated from the whole. We are exploring ways to to connect to our feelings and our intuition, to help us to balance our inner sensitivity with our outer understanding.

Celebrating the yearly solar cycle is a means by which we can connect to the Earth’s passing seasons and acknowledge the way this resonates within ourselves as part of the natural world. In the autumn, for example, we celebrate our own personal harvest as well as the Earth’s harvest. We let go of anything that we have finished with or is not helpful to us. We then gather the seeds of our new ideas and future longings and take these into the dark of the year, letting them incubate and strengthen inside us until the time for action comes with the emergence of the outer growth cycle in the spring.

To celebrate the solar cycle is to take part in an ancient tradition which has been handed down to us since before Celtic times, from a time when the people of Europe lived close to the land and were in harmony and balance with the spirit of the land. The ancient festivals of our ancestors fell at eight points during the solar year. These included the fixed points of Winter and Summer Solstices (the longest day and the longest night), the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes (day and night of equal length) and the four seasonal peaks of Spring, Summer Autumn and Winter.

In our pre-Christian past our ancestors would have met on the land at these eight points in the year. The Druids, men and women honoured for their wisdom, would have had an awareness of the influence of the Moon and the stars. They would have had knowledge of the Earth’s energies and the places of power on the land where the energy converges and is strongest. The people would have walked the old energy routes, gathered in the stone circles or would have celebrated and lit community fires on the high places. Some would have gone into the barrows and journeyed with their ancestors to gain insight and wisdom and tap into the deepest parts of themselves.

The earth energy is still there for us to connect with. Each of the eight festivals is an opportunity for us to get out onto the land and experience its changing energy for ourselves. At these times we can extend our awareness and explore our true, personal and honest connection to the Earth and once we truly feel this connection and experience the intrinsic unity of life, a natural shift in our consciousness begins to evolve.

Each festival is a chance to feel ourselves as part of the whole, and also to connect to the moment, the here and now. From this point of being we can look back on what we have been doing, feeling and thinking; on our health, and our spiritual journey. We can also look forward with an understanding of the Earth’s (and our) inherent energy flow, to where we wish to go and how we may best use the oncoming energy for our greater good, the greater good of the Earth, and all those around us.

Each cycle of connection to the wheel of the year brings new awareness, direction and an understanding that healing ourselves and healing the Earth are the same, as all things are connected. There is no doubt in my mind that the Earth will continue with its own slow and evolving journey as it needs to. But the survival of the Earth as we know it is inextricably linked to our own survival. Our united healing depends on our ability to each take responsibility for our own ‘separation patterns’ that disconnect us from our inner wisdom, from each other and from the Earth. And at the same time we need to embrace a new and integrated perspective that will transform everything we do.

For details of Glennie’s books, prints and workshops see www.glenniekindred.co.uk

Sustainable Building: Straw Bale Building

21/11/2007

On my arrival, the reception at Dorset Rural Skills Centre (DCRS) straight away provided proof to the cynical nursery-rhyme believer just what a straw bale building can be. A beautiful timber A-frame roof sits on substantial straw walls and demonstrates that they practice what they preach here. The building acts as a wellinsulated and great-looking resource centre with excellent natural lighting and a shady veranda for slurping re-hydrating tea after building exertions

Rob Buckley was our course leader and I don’t think there’s much he doesn’t know about straw bales and their uses. The size of the class – a dozen of us – meant that Salt, his right hand man, was always there to ensure an instructor on hand. I wasn’t surprised the course was so well attended given concerns about global warming, and the fact that one ton of standard building material produces one ton of carbon, and that we have tons (probably millions!) of straw as an agricultural by-product.

As well as slides and talks, the main focus of our energies was a building we constructed in the cavernous workshop. If the Summer hadn’t been what it was (ie. wet) we would have used an outside space…. although to my surprise wet is less of a problem for a straw bale building (if you’re careful) than for the humans building it. We used sixty bales that gave a three by two metre structure with plenty of head room. Given that bales can be bought at around £2.50, a large building should not have big material costs (or much of a carbon footprint!). Everything else you need is time and a selection of basic tools, most of which you will already have. And as straw is two thirds lighter than brick a variety of foundations can be used – we used tyres, another waste product in abundance!

We filled tyres with limestone chippings. These tyres were placed on top of the trench we’d dug and filled with shingle to form the foundations. We then made a ‘ring beam’ - sections of timber and ply to provide a continuous rigid perimeter for the joists - and placed this on the tyres … using a spirit level constantly as mistakes at the bottom are magnified exponentially by the time you get to the top! The bales were then built up in lego fashion and fixed in place with hazel spikes. At the end we strapped them top to bottom with cargo straps from a lorry to another ring beam at the top. You remove the straps when the straw has compressed. We planned the doors and windows in at the outset and fixed them in carefully to ensure there was no opportunity for water ingress.

Rob talked about the range of roofs you can put on (basically anything) and we spent Sunday afternoon digesting lunch and using lime render to finish and waterproof the building. I mentioned the wet earlier….obviously straw will rot so you need to ensure that water does not gather. Provided you do not drill holes in it for pipes (they come up through the floor) and are particularly careful when fitting the windows and doors there’s no reason your building should not outlast any other. Some in the US were erected in the 1800’s and are still there.

There is more to it….slightly more than my editor will allow, but not a lot! A web search can yield detailed instructions but I would recommend DCRS as the ideal place to learn. After the two days even I, who considers building skills as having a well-thumbed yellow pages, would feel confident building a structure. And if I got out of my depth (… or forgot) I got the impression that using their phone number would lead to great advice. (DCRS also run a building company that specialises in straw!)

Amongst the other benefits of this building technique is that of the insulation which is three times better than modern building. And for those with ‘sick building syndrome’ concerns, the humidity levels and emissions of toxics of these natural buildings are much better too. Perhaps best of all, when a group of willing hands could be useful, a straw bale build is a great excuse to gather old friends and put them to task.

Dudley was a man of straw at the Dorset Rural Skills Centre near Blandford, Dorset.

www.dorsetruralskills.co.uk; 01747 811 099

DCRS also run courses on traditional skills such as blacksmithing, dry stone walling and hedge-laying. Straw-bale building courses at DCRS: 20th-21st September

There are plenty more fish in the sea. Aren't there?

21/11/2007

What then are the basic rules that we as consumers should follow? How can we buy fish in an eco-friendly way and play our part in ensuring that we do not contribute to a worsening situation? First of all we can make sure that if buying from a fishmonger we seek reassurance that the fish comes from a sustainable source (this should not be difficult as all fish sold must be accompanied by traceability information). As far as supermarkets are concerned, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose are joint first in the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) 2007 sustainable seafood supermarket league table. Although most major supermarkets are now working towards only selling fish from sustainable courses, some of them are not as far along the road as M&S and Waitrose and you should check that what you are buying carries the MSC logo in order to ensure that the fishing has been conducted in a sustainable manner with careful attention paid to the diversity of the local ecosystem.

The MSC, now an independent profit-making organisation, was co-founded by Unilever and WWF in 1996 to establish a global standard for sustainable fisheries management. Fisheries using the logo are audited annually and the number gaining accreditation is increasing year on year, particularly down here in the South West. Some restaurants also carry the MSC logo so you can check for that or ask them directly about their sustainable sourcing policy.

In 2006 the MSC produced a Pocket Good Fish Guide and I for one was very concerned to see that (excluding shellfish) only Pacific Cod, Dover Sole from the Eastern English Channel, some Herring, Alaskan Pacific Salmon and Cornish Seabass appear on the ‘Best Choices’ list. Cornish Mackerel is on their ‘Next Best’ list. The MSC also produces a Sustainable Seafood Directory which lists UK-based fish suppliers and restaurants that have made the sourcing of seafood a prime objective of their business.

It is also worrying to learn that an estimated 20 million tonnes of unwanted fish and sea-life are accidentally destroyed every year around the world – largely due to trawling practices. Whilst this figure is coming down with forthcoming EU legislation and moves within the fishing industry to redesign trawling apparatus, it is worth bearing in mind that a nice supper of trawled fish such as plaice or dover sole will have been responsible for at least it’s own weight in ‘discard’.

What are the general rules?

1. Where possible buy fish sourced from the waters of the South West of England as they tend to be less depleted than those caught elsewhere and consider trying different species rather than always choosing cod or haddock.

2. Choose line-caught fish wherever possible. Line-caught fish from small-scale fisheries do not have the ‘discard’ problems associated with trawling. Line-caught sea bass, pollack and mackerel are good options.

3. Always check that the fish you are buying carries the MSC logo. Marks & Spencer and Waitrose have excellent reputations for only selling fish from sustainable sources. In Cornwall, Tesco is now sourcing fish from local suppliers not engaged in mass-catching methods with plans to roll-out local sourcing to their other stores.

4. Don’t buy fish during their spawning season – see the MSC website for more info on this.

5. Exercise caution when buying farmed fish as they may have been fed on fishmeal and fish oil from wild caught fish.

Cod In Crisis

Stocks of cod have undergone severe declines during the last few years and scientists now believe that the species may soon be facing commercial extinction in the North Sea. “This isn’t just bad news for the ecology of the oceans, it’ll be devastating for the fishing industry” says Willie MacKenzie, Oceans Campaigner for Greenpeace. who believes that establishment of marine reserves is the only way to address the problem. www.greenpeace.org.uk

What we can do:

•Choose a different white fish
•Go for seabird-friendly line-caught cod
•Look for farmed cod
•Support the establishment of marine reserves

Sign the Wildlife Trust’s ‘Marine Reserves Petition’ online at www.wildlifetrusts.org or phone to find the nearest ‘Petition Fish’ to sign near you. 01636 677711

Write to your MP and become a marine activist with support from the Save Our Seas Campaign. www.wild-net.org

Join the Marine Conservation Society’s ‘Marine Reserves Now’ photo campaign – download a poster and take a photo of you and your friends with it. www.mcsuk.org

Tuna In Trouble

Tuna are fast disappearing according to WWF. Populations of important species such as bluefin tuna are critically depleted. Atlantic bluefin (used for high-end sushi and sashimi) is overfished and the spawning stock of Southern bluefin in the Indian Ocean is down about 90 per cent. www.wwf.org.uk

What we can do:

•Choose line or troll-caught dolphin friendly fish
•Avoid farmed tuna which takes juveniles from the wild
•Eat local fish instead

Seafood Cornwall

Fishing has always been part of the Cornish way of life, and this is hardly surprising given that there are 326 miles of coastline and 49 ports from which the fleets of Cornwall set sail. The current value of fish and shellfish from this county alone is £30 million a year but the industry itself, being best placed to know, is well aware that the sea holds a finite resource.

“Fishermen in the South West have taken their future very seriously for some time” says Nathan de Rosarieux from Seafood Cornwall. “They have been involved in a range of collaborative projects with NGOs and scientists which look towards a sustainable future”. One such project is the Trevose Box Closure – an area of 3600 square miles off Padstow which closes each season to protect the spawning of fish such as dover sole and whiting. This agreement was secured by Cornish fishermen working closely with their European counterparts.

Many of the fisheries down in Cornwall already have, or are about to get, their MSC sustainabiity accreditation. There is ongoing work down here to reduce the volume of discards from trawling boats and the fishing industry lobbies to have a positive impact on European policy. “I’ve seen a massive change in the last ten years” says Nathan, “and the industry is charting its way towards a sustainable future. I’m sure the rate of change is not as much as some people would like, but without transitional investment from the Government, there is a limit to how fast the changes can be brought about”.

So what would Nathan recommend to those eaters of Cornish fish who would like to support sustainable fishing practices in the area? “People buy their fruit and veg in season now” he says, “and the same should go for fish. That’s the best thing you can do … make sure you buy fish that is local and in season”

What is it about the drum?

21/11/2007

What is it about the drum that inspires you Pete?
I have always had a connection with rhythm as far as I can remember. I used to play on and break a lot of our glasses, so my parents had a drum sent over from my uncle in South Africa. At the age of five my true path opened. I taught myself to play, trusting my inner understanding of rhythm. Years later I travelled to Africa when I was ten years old, and again was deeply touched by the drum. It moved me in a way that nothing else had. I knew that music was more than just sounds - it was a universal language and a vehicle that touches the soul. The more I played the deeper my connection with the drum evolved, guiding my senses to a fuller understanding of rhythm. Whenever I play, I sing the songs that the drum has taught me to sing. Whether I am working as a musician or healer, I always listen.

So what do you think are the benefits of drumming?
There are many benefits of drumming! It improves the sense of personal power and confidence. It’s a great form of exercise which produces endorphins - natural anti-depressants. Drumming provides a safe way to transform emotions and express them non-verbally. It is an excellent release for stress and frustration and with proper guidance can lead you to greater self-awareness. The beauty of drumming is that, even in its simplest form, it can provide enormous benefits. I actively encourage people with Downs Syndrome, Parkinson’s disease and Autism to use the drum. Drums have been played for thousands of years, and even today we still play. Why? Because drumming works!

What exactly do you mean by ‘Shamanic Drumming’?
This is when the drum is used as a vehicle to enter a different state of consciousness rather than merely as a musical instrument. It is in this different state – named the shamanic state of consciousness – that the shamanic practitioner can receive vital information and healing for the individual or community with which he or she is working. This type of drumming – which has been used by shamans all over the world for thousands of years – is a repetitive rhythm played about 250 beats per minute (4-7 beats per second). This entrains the brain into the theta state - opening people to receive inspiration and vision. When the shaman has gathered the information they require – the drumming changes to a rapid rhythm of around 350 beats per minute, bringing them back to an ordinary state of consciousness.

Sounds better than drugs! Can we all reach this altered state of consciousness through the drums?
Yes, anyone can alter his or her state of consciousness. Our ancestors have been using drums in this way for thousands of years. However, once they were in an altered state of consciousness, they knew exactly how to skilfully navigate within that reality, whereas our culture is just re-discovering those latent talents. Shamans have always understood the importance of the drum.

What’s your best drumming advice Pete?
Drumming, whether it’s Shamanic Drumming or simply drumming for fun, is an ancient art. It has been used as a form of communication for thousands of years whether spiritually or communally. When you play, connect to your entire body and aim to play with the highest degree of accuracy. This can be attained by practice, with or without the help of a good tutor. And never forget the art of patience.

And what about learning more?
There are many courses available. Trust your intuition when looking for a teacher and remember that the best teachers will teach you how to do something, rather than show you what they can do! I teach a workshop called ‘The Rhythm of Life’ which helps people to recognise that rhythm is everywhere and provides a good understanding of how to play. My experience is that if you can walk, you can drum – and even people who can’t walk can drum!

I also teach a course called ‘The Shaman’s Drum’ which encourages people who practise basic to advanced shamanism, to become more technically proficient and deepen their connection to the drum whilst using it as a tool for healing.

Pete’s next weekend workshop of ‘The Shaman’s Drum’ will be taking place in West Dorset 2-4th November. www.peterbengry.com; peterbengry@gmail.com 01297 444690.

A Dowser's Tale

21/11/2007

Up until that time, Hamish had been a successful furniture manufacturer. “I thought I had it cracked” he admits, “I was really part of the commercial rat-race”. But now he has become one of the best-loved dowsers in the World and definitely, in my opinion, an ‘earth healer’. He lectures internationally and has authored several books including the ‘Sun and the Serpent’, ‘It’s Not Too Late’, ‘The Wee Book of Dowsing’ and ‘In Search of the Southern Serpent’. It’s usually hard for me to believe things I haven’t measured or experienced myself (probably because I’m an ex-scientist) but I have always been fascinated by Hamish’s books. It’s a huge treat to be discussing them with the man himself.

Retracing the journey that has brought him here, Hamish tells me about the moment he nearly died on the operating table. “I heard the surgeons say ‘pity we’re too late’ and saw them washing their hands over by the sink” he says. “But suddenly I realised that I was looking at them not from the operating table, but from above”. This was an out-of-body experience from which he made a choice to return and during his recovery Hamish realised that all his senses had been turned up a fraction – everything had become more vivid. I wonder if that’s what has made him such a good dowser.

“With dowsing you are looking for things that you can’t experience with your five senses” he explains, “it’s about perceiving events and objects that are normally hidden. And whilst I do feel that I can discern things, dowsing is actually a natural talent we all have – anyone can get a reaction with dowsing tools in ten minutes. I don’t know quite what causes it. Some say it’s an electrical impulse in the sweat but I don’t think so. It’s as though everything has a frequency and as a dowser you are looking for the right vibration”.

The ancient art of dowsing or divining goes back before human records began and until the advent of modern engineering it was the best way of locating water and minerals. Dowsers do lots of things now, but Hamish is best known for dowsing the vibrations of the earth – the subtle telluric currents that arise naturally from the planet’s electro-magnetic field. These currents became known to him early in his dowsing career on Trencrom Hill - a local landmark which is on a line-up of prehistoric sites known as a ley-line. “I will never forget the sense of wonder I felt when the rods first moved” he says of this first experience. “The hair on the back of my neck rose and my life changed forever. It’s a moment I can still see happening to students on my dowsing courses. You can see the breakthrough in their faces – the realisation that they’ve just been introduced to something absolutely magical. That’s how it felt for me”.

After this, Hamish took on the huge task of dowsing the St Michael ley-line which runs from St Michaels Mount in Cornwall to a point near Lowestoft on the Norfolk coast. “It was the visionary John Michell who started us on that one” he laughs. In his book ‘A View Over Atlantis’, John Michell describes the moment he stood on Glastonbury Tor and had a vision of a great line extending over the countryside between Barrowbridge Mump and the megalithic temple complex at Avebury. When he later transcribed it on to a map he was astonished to see that the line marked a country-wide alignment of ancient monuments, sacred landmarks and churches dedicated to St Michael. “While volumes have been written about the significance of these line-ups” explains Hamish, “the main interest for dowsers is the energy flows which weave around them and pulse in the sacred places”.

Ley-lines have a unique energy signature associated with them – something that allows energy dowsers such as Hamish to track them for great distances. “All energy lines are made up of bands of different frequency” he explains. “It’s like a unique chord in music”. Tracking the St Michael line took three years, but during that time Hamish made an interesting discovery. He found that many of the monuments and churches on the alignment are to be found in places where the St Michael line is crossed by separate lines with a different frequency. He concluded that these sites must have been recognised as ‘power places’ by the people who originally built there. “The ancients were undoubtedly much more aware of subtle energies that we are” he surmises. “They went to enormous lengths heaving great stones around the countryside to mark them”.

And if this is not mind-boggling enough, Hamish has also come up with a theory of what this subtle earth energy might have meant to our ancestors. He noticed that in the ‘places of power’ the energetic signature of the lines he was tracking would often inexplicably disappear into the ground. Dowsing these areas he realised that when the lines disappeared, there was a complex geometrical pattern of energy that could be marked accurately on the ground with pegs and wool. But as he continued to dowse further up the line, all the patterns he had measured on the way changed to different shapes when he returned to dowse them again. “At first I thought I was losing my marbles” he says, “or at least that my dowsing was becoming suspect. It was as though the earth itself was trying to communicate with us in the language of mathematics”.

Unlikely as it may initially sound, Hamish has concluded, after many years of dowsing this phenomenon that the subtle energies of the earth really are responding to human activity. The ‘places of power’ are found, not only at great monuments such as Avebury, but also in our own homes and gardens. Hamish believes that we are interacting and communicating with the energy of these places the whole time and that we can directly measure our impacts on the patterns they make if we learn to dowse – something we can all do.

“Sacred sites and energy lines must have been of paramount importance to the ancients” he says. They must have known about their intimate connection with the energy of the earth and been able to interact with it. “It makes their concept of being at one with the universe easier to comprehend, and while for a time we have lost the delicate art of tuning in, dowsing has re-opened a door for us to return to our evolutionary birthright”.

“Since making these discoveries” concludes Hamish, “I’ve come to view the earth as a pulsing living thing that moves and responds all the time. And I have seen the evidence for myself that the natural energy emitted by the earth seems to somehow respond to our conscious thoughts and actions. If we could just change our consciousness by one notch – to be more caring about what we do to the earth – there may be time to bring about a positive response and avert the huge shift that most of us know is coming”.

Wow! I could stay and chat to Hamish all afternoon but time sadly permits only one last question. What is it about this area of Cornwall that has made him stay so long? “Well, there’s something about the purity of the earth energy in the South West” he explains. “It’s pure and it’s honest and it suits me down to the ground. Here in Penwith it’s still relatively unspoilt and there are four hundred or more sacred sites - I don’t know even half of them”.

Hamish gives me one of his books for homework and later that night I have my first go at dowsing with a stone tied to a piece of string. I may never be confident enough to sink a well in the garden or find keys and lost animals – but one thing is for sure – I didn’t cheat and it really did work. Whether you believe it or not, the implications are huge.

To find out more about dowsing check out the British Society of Dowsers (www.britishdowsers. org) or see Hamish’s website (www.hamishmiller. co.uk).

Gardening at night

21/11/2007

“Let’s fight the filth with forks and flowers” cries Richard Reynolds, as he leads another covert battalion into war against the crisp packets and other detritus that have found homes on our kerb-sides and traffic islands. One thing these guerrillas can’t bear is an orphaned public garden becoming a rubbish dump … or a wayside verge stripped of trees and left to collect cigarette ends. Their aim is to make things more beautiful for everyone.

“Some guerrilla gardeners like me work to improve their cities” says Richard. “Some work to make the countryside that little bit more colourful. And some live off the vegetables they illicitly grow in road-side verges. It seems like common sense to me. We are running out of space and the land is finite, so it should be used rather than neglected. In some parts of the World, guerrilla gardening is the only way that people can grow food to eat”.

Guerrilla tactics became the only option for Richard when he moved from the South West to London. “I grew up in Devon” he says, “mowing people’s lawns and working on organic strawberry farms as holiday jobs. When I moved to the city I rented a flat in a tower block without thinking that it had no outside space – not even a windowsill. Yet all around the block were neglected flower beds piled high with crisp packets. I became a frustrated gardener. The tenants association had recently imploded with infighting and imbezlement so I stayed well clear and decided to go out and garden in the middle of the night. Apart from anything, I thought I might be able to cheer up the rest of the tower-block”.

“I was on my own to begin with and it was scary. But friends soon began to get interested. They would come round for dinner and we’d go out gardening afterwards - it’s the perfect way of having fun in the evening after a day in the office. But it was only when I set up the website that I realised there are hundreds of us around the World, all discretely digging at night. We do it in the dark because we’re less likely to encounter people who can’t get their heads around what we’re doing.”

“Victory for me will be when everyone feels they can go out there and do it” concludes Richard who recently won a council award for the garden outside his tower-block. (They don’t know how it got there!). “You just have to adopt a patch of neglected land and look after it in guerrilla fashion. Trying to do it through the system can end in chaos so it’s just easier to get digging”.

The guerrillas do their gardening on a tight budget, using donated plants, seeds and left-over compost. They need you! So pop a packet of seeds in your pocket and sprinkle as you go, or think about starting a local battalion. And most importantly … don’t forget to send your ‘Before and After’ pics to guerrilla HQ so we can all celebrate your success.

Green power to the people!!