The Implications of Tom Stoppard

 There was once a theatre maker friend of mine who when I suggested that Tom Stoppard was a gifted writer he instantly dismissed him as ‘being Right-Wing’.  I found this opinion, for such a knowledgably director, to be questionable.  I asked him for examples but he couldn’t provide then and there.  Tom Stoppard is on record to be ‘comfortably conservative’ but I tried to argue that his politics were different from his drama and one should not dismiss any writer on face value of their political beliefs.  In plays such as Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead I failed to pick up any political debate or message, maybe this is my failure as an audience member, but really a play like that goes beyond politics, doesn’t it?

  When Stoppard becomes more intriguing is when he writes plays like Rock ‘n’ Roll where he depicts Left-Wing characters in a sympathetic light.  This is what I would like to focus on and try to see if his politics greatly affects his work.

  Firstly I should admit a prejudice for his work.  He has all the things I love about writing: working brains, sharp wit and philosophical ideas that he juggles with craftsmanship.  He is both an entertaining and a thoughtful playwright. So, I like his work.

  Secondarily it might be useful to keep a definition of the political idea of ‘conservatism’, which is different to what it once was.  Today’s conservative is a neo-liberal and goes about business with a different attitude.  He reminds me of old-fashioned conservatives such as Roger Scruton whom I also find interesting.  I’m not so well versed in the nuances of the conservative party so I am unable at this time to give a succinct definition, but what I want to concentrate on is his portrayal of Max, the communist philosopher in Rock ‘n’ Roll.

  There is a running joke that whenever Max, who is as old as the October Revolution, says to somebody that he is a communist they will say to him “aren’t you missing something?” because it is clear to them that to believe in communism after the tragedy of early modern Russia you would have to have a lapse in reasoning.  Max says to his student, Jan that maybe communism didn’t work at that particular time but there is no reason why it couldn’t work in the present.  Jan goes to work in the Czechoslovakia at the time of state censorship and the Velvet Revolution falling away from Marxist belief.

  Max is frustrated at the state of things and though he is a deep thinker he cannot convince his students that he is right about the world or the human mind.  When Margaret Thatcher comes to power he complains that ‘the working-class vote could make this a socialist country permanently, and they voted in millions for the most reactionary Tory government of modern times.  We give them crap.  They eat crap, they read crap, they watch crap, they have two weeks in the sun, and they’re content.  Why aren’t they angry?’ 

  There is pathos in his certain belief that communism would make society a better place while all the while he watches the world make all the wrong decisions.  Despite being a philosopher he can’t explain the behaviour of the wider world.  Is Stoppard portraying someone who is misguided and deluded or is he portraying him as a noble character that only wants to do better in a world of mediocrity?

  It’s not clear-cut as though no-body else really believes in what Max has to say we don’t necessarily believe that he is entirely wrong.  He is an enduring character because of his political commitment even if he is pushing against the tide.  I don’t get the sense that Stoppard is pushing a political agenda in this play.  He doesn’t, because he is a conservative, want to dismantle Max’s belief but only to understand it.  It is an exercise in empathy and because of that I find it hard to dismiss his plays merely because he is ‘Right-Wing’.  He knows where his affiliations lie but that doesn’t stop him from sympathising with those he doesn’t agree with.  Tom Stoppard is, as well as being brainy, witty and philosophical, a robustly humane writer.

An Interpretation of the Persistance of Memory By the Right

 The existence of political parties, which is a term that should be qualified, of the BNP and Ukip is akin to Surrealism in policy making.  They are the parties of the irrational, the impulsive, the unconscious, the associative, a reflection of fear and paranoia of anything cultural and passive.  They, in short, should not be taken seriously.  Rascism is written in the manifesto of the BNP that asserts the right of the ‘indiginous people’, while Ukip call for 40% of the budget to be put into defense.  They are parties of the fortress that attack and defend for their own sake hollowing out anything else rendering existence narrowly meaningless.

  I was told that the Green Party were a party of expression but to my mind they are much more humane and rational compared to the parties on the Right that turn atuomatic-writing into policy.  It seems that their only wish is to batter and bully others listening only to their instinct that overides reason.  They turn selfishness into a public service and instutionalises it without regard to the humanity of others.  These are the parties of monstrous individualism.

  Even while this goes on the Conservitive (read Neo-Liberal) should not be left off the hook with their implicit encouragement to these parties.  It was not the BNP who sent vehicals around the country telling illegal imigrants to go home as well as putting up advertisments suggesting to Easten Europeans, who might want to come to Britain to work, not to bother.  The Conservities hides their racsim but it is racism nonetheless.  However unlike the other Right-Wing parties they are not surrealists but mad Greek warriors who are strong and destruction-fuelled slaughtering all that surrounds him.  These Ajax individuals are insane and without any conception of consequences, loving the pain of others and fighting invisible enemies.  They are repressed, inwardly angry and unable to have a mature feeling.

  For the Right culture is unesscserry unless it is able to make money and nature has no intrinstic value, which makes it ripe for exploiting.  They, George Monbiot says, cut the artiries and spill the blood that the Left has to patch up.  The President of Uruguay gives up to 90% of his salary to charities while this Government helps big companies to not pay tax.  The Lib-Dems and Labour seem to endose everything the Conservatives are doing leaving opposition to the Greens.

  The Right-Wing psyche is unpleasant to think about for too long but Right feeds onto Right and makes hatred the offical line out of cruel fustration of their own emotions, corroding the surrounding culture.  They embody the darkness of the human mind and are unembrassed by that fact and this is why their members like it.  In liking it they no longer have to pretend to be cilvilised or cultivated they can go back to the vicous hunter-gather time where the world was, in their eyes, a lot more fairer.

  They provide an atmosphere of de-humanisation where people are made to defend their basic rights from health to security of job while they profit from it.  When will politics give back dignity to people and stop giving them patronising junk instead of workable solutions.  Jose Saramago spoke out about the legisaltive hatred from a belief of human decency and it is what writers should do.  When will the cruelty stop?

Traveling Companions by Augustus Egg

This painting is the painting I wake up to every morning and the painting a think about as I fall asleep.  It consists of two women on a train compartment in big grey Victorian dresses and round hats with a red feather on their laps.  One of the women is reading and the other is asleep.  I wonder about their occupation thinking that they might have been part of the Salvation Army, but Egg was painting during the early 19^th centaury and I’m not sure without checking if they even existed at that point.  They could be Governesses as depicted in the novels of the Bronte’s.  I feel that their dresses is some kind of uniform or it may reflect they lack of consumer choice in clothing.  In the background you can see the sea and a little village or town by it.  The hills or mountains remind me of the Welsh coast and so they could well be traveling into Aberystwyth, which I like.      

 

What I really like about this painting is that it reflects my attitude towards travel, best done on a train where you can either look out of the window, or rest, or read moving from one to the other depending on what is comfortable at the time.  It feels safe and looking at it you feel included in their private world.  It is a world within a world.  I also like how they have oranges in their basket, the fruit I most like to travel with due to their organic wrapper.  I also like it because it is possible parodied in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass. 

Despite the stuffiness of their dresses they seem to be at ease and relaxed, exactly how traveling should be.  It is also this continuity of train travel that connects the present age with the Victorian age and I feel that when I step on a train with a book and some oranges I am taking part in some mechanical tradition of being an experienced traveler.

Children's Books

 Children's books are fantastic.  It's where I first started to become a serious reader through amazing fiction but people who should be better known.  Here are a few that I lapped up as a younger lad and am enthusiastic about.

The Edgeworld Chronicles are a series of three trilogies and a few standalone books by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddle about a fantasy world of Edgeworld where there are sky pirates who use floating rocks as their fuel, bears who can talk and wood that has different characteristics when burnt.  The three trilogies each follow the characters of Quint, Twig and Rook who journey through the Edgeworld lands both over and under.  I started with Beyond the Deepwoods with Twig who has to leave his home after breaking a rule and tries to survive in a world he barely knows about.  The second in the Twig trilogy is Stormchaser and by far my favourite of them all.  It’s an exciting story about the sky pirates that was very pleasing.  It’s a massive world (that some may think a tad ripped off from Discworld) that has a huge range of characters and situations meaning that I was reading them for years.

The stories of Philip Ridley are wonders of fantastical realism with well-defined characters and imaginative plots.  I could talk about Scribbleboy about a graffiti artist, or the epic Mighty Fizz Chilla about the search for a mythical creature, or even Vinegar Street that at one point involves out of body projection, but the book I am going to talk about is my favourite Kasper in the Glitter.  Kasper lives with his mother in a beauty salon on a street that is apocalyptic in flavour.  His is a fairly sheltered existence until he finds a teenager in the garden who then takes him on a journey of tyranny and love on the other side of the city.  Brutal fables that intertwines beauty with cruelty but with huge dollops of heart and sensitivity.  Remarkable.

Paul Jennings has to be one of my all time favourite writers with the Un- series of short stories such as Unbearable, Unreal, Uncanny, Unmentionable and Undone, which have been made into the television program Round the Twist.  There are bizarre and weird stories that will enliven your live considerably.  Stories such as a boy who grows nails all over his body, a bug that can make you invisible, a girl who gets a harmonica stuck in her mouth and a boy who falls in love with an ice sculpture.  I devoured these stories often re-reading them with delight.  He’s not as well known now as he once was but it is a truly great way to introduce children to reading, hell it’s where I started and I read books by Thomas Mann now, I didn’t expect that.

The Wind On Fire series by William Nicholson is a fine trilogy that is sociological about fantasy societies.  The Wind Singer is the first book and it starts with the examination of a family’s young child, which is tense because the class of the family depends on their result as the whole society is divided into set classes and you can either go up or down through exam results.  This ends up in a long journey to find the sculpture’s (of which the book gets it’s title) voice.  The second book Slaves of the Mastery is about a different sort of society, one built on slaves and is about the entrapment of the people of the first book.  The final book Firesong is about the monk class of people and their ability to use their minds to control the world around them.  It’s a great series that I should re-read at some point and full of cinematic scenes that I can still clearly remember.  Wonderful.

I hardly need to mention the amazing R.L. Stine with his Goosebumps series, particularly his stories about the living dummy, scared me silly but also opened the way for Edgar Allen Poe to me.  Got to love horror.  And I don't really need to mention Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses as I think it's well known enough but it really was a memorable book.  I always wanted to read Hexwood by Dyanne Wynne Jones but for some reason never got round to it.

So there are a few and if you have children of your own then I would highly recommend you search for these books as you will be thanked by them when they start judging the quality of Nobel Prize Winners when they eventual become part of the committee.     

Rewilding the Future: Part Three

  It was a fantastic talk and people really wanted to ask him questions.  He was asked about the badger cull.  He said on every front we are going backwards, further away from this vision but when you see the possibilities of rewilding it then changes your whole perspective of what you are trying to achieve ecologically and rather than all getting bogged down with battles of individual species you start to assail government with a complete and coherent ecosystem.  

 They’ve got rid of all the large predators, they’ve got rid of all the large herbivores and there now trying to get rid of the small predators as well, it’s just insanity.  What do you expect him to say, that badger culls are a good idea?  He goes on “the last government spent £49 million pounds on finding out if it was a good idea and they found out that it was a really bad idea, so let’s do it.  Totally, totally stupid.  We’re just going down the food chain, that’s what we’re doing with policy.  All that’s going to be left is the cockroaches and us.

  Someone else asks if there is a bigger scheme going on with the economic system as well as the ecological system, are they working with the same logic? 

George says that logic might not be the word but there is an ethos that unquestionable governs both processes where it is all about short term maximisation production and what we’re looking at is economic long term processes, and especially if you want to maintain your tropic layers, very long processes which requires a holistic understanding of the system you are looking at whereas neo-liberal whether it is in farming or conservation or whereas it is in the banking sector is to break every thing up and to flog it off.   

The horrifying thing now is with this whole market and ecosystem services and natural capital they are trying to do the same to the natural world.  One of the reports from the Natural Capital committee, which is a terrifying organisation set up by the government, talking about the secureisation of environmental assets, bio-diversity, water catchments, soil carbon and all the rest of it, these can be split into different assert classes and then traded independently.  They literally want to do what they did to the city, and didn’t that end up well? 

There are talking about derivatives.  Even calling it natural capital, we used to call it nature, is horrible neo-liberal language that destroys it and takes the value out of it.  It is exactly the same process.

  -Are there things in Britain where you see some forward motion on these issues and isn’t it about time you did a TED talk?

  The second question is easier to answer; he did one a few months back and has only just been released to the public on the Internet.

  The first question is harder.  There is stuff going on there is stuff happening.  The real wedge issue is farm subsidies.  He’s not calling for the instant rewilding of farms because he recognises that clash of values, he doesn’t want to eliminate that wonderful farming culture.  But any change in subsides would change the agenda more than anything else.  Remember that this is our money.  It’s amazing just how quiet we’ve been about the spending of our money.  You tweak the system a tiny bit and everything opens up.  What I want to do with rewilding is to unlock people’s imagination and let us think for ourselves and getting out of that neo-liberal paradigm where you are put in a box and are forced to stop thinking like that.  We’ve got to ask ourselves is what do we want, never mind what they are offering, what do we want? 

  -Is there anyone ready to take it on?

  Yes, he’s talking to a big NGO who are extremely keen on this, but it’s very big and slow so at the same time he’s in a smaller group to actually do it.  Already there are some places that do it.  Trees For Life in Scotland is by far the most impressive and interesting.  Quite a remarkable organisation and Alan Watson Featherstone decided to restore the Caledonian Forest.  He’s a man of persuasive powers and has lots of landowners on board with this through public subscription he raised the money to buy a ten thousand acre estate.  What I want to see is a lot more of it.  It’s a great model.  The current system is failing even by it’s own terms. 

 -If trophic cascade is the top layer effecting the bottom layers than does it gives justification of Thatcher’s idea of trickle down effect?

  There’s an analogy there but not an answer.  He begins to talk about fear in people toward animals.  Wolf folk tale are all about them being dangerous and swapping bodies with human beings, there’s a interesting thing happening here.  There are 60,000 wolves in North America.  The amount of people killed by wolves is 0.  The number of people killed by vending machines is 10.  Vending machines are more dangerous than wolves.  The reason why they inspire fear is because they are so much like us.  They have the same social intelligence.  They look at you as if they understand what you are thinking.  That’s what terrifying.  People have this fear of animals that they should get over.  Engaging with the natural world is a good place to start.

  Does he think if there will be a competition between renewable and rewilding?

  Some rewilders object very strongly with wind turbines but he thinks they should be used, as they are far less damaging than any non-renewable energy.  You are going to have to have some compromise.  Increasingly he would like to see them as optional but it could be quite useful.  You could declare your wind farm as a marine nature reserve with no fishing in between.  Unfortunate the burying of cables is so efficient now that you can but why not declare it?  The future is going to be offshore with wind farm.  There’s an issues with solar much less than with some places.  It’s not an easy question to answer but there are going to be clashes.

  How does he use the term Gaia?

  “I’m talking about specially about the Gaia hypothesis, which conceives nature as geo-bio-physiology where basically the biosphere and the geosphere and the atmosphere control each other and regulate each other.  You can use that as a launch pad through a spiritual lens, a evolutionary lens, and an ecological lens.  What’s interesting about the Gaia hypothesis opens up the imagination.  The whole point of neo-liberalism is that you close down the imagination.  If you close down the imagination you close down the opposition.  What I like about the Gaia hypostasis, there are issues about it that I would like to see worked on, what I like about it is that it obliges us to look at the world in a different way”.

  Where does he go if he wants a bit of fun?

“Oh Alton Towers obviously” much laughter “for me it’s the sea.  Sea and salt marshes.  Salt marshes are as close to a cell in the nucleus system they are being constantly renewed and changed and the rivers are meandering and doing their own thing and they attracted a fascinating cycle of life.  And also the sea in my sea kayak and snorkeling.  You can create very large marine no take zones then you get this rapid restoration.  You get a very strong spill over into other seas.  We’ve got 0.0.1% of our territory and all the rest of it is just open takes.  It’s bad for us but it’s also the fishing industry would be better off that’s what so stupid about it.  If they had no take zones they would actually have a future.  It’s a sign of how perverse the system has got that doesn’t even look at the rational economic actors when it comes to the policy makers, even people making the best decisions in the most narrow of economic terms. It’s just macho fixation of extractive industries and everywhere has to be exploit and if you don’t then it’s a insult to your manhood.   

It’s testeria that drives this extraordinary unnecessary destruction.  It’s my interest in rewilding because it is the imaginative process that is as important as the ecological process.  First of all knowing what you want then understanding the context around what it is you want, understanding what it was and what it could be. Paleoecology is the study of past ecosystems, which is as crucial to an understanding of our own.  It’s a key to an enchanted kingdom to which we may pass, to which we may return.  To see it and to understand it, to know where we have come from and to know where we are going, that has been the task in writing this book.  That has enabled me to understand a whole lot of other stuff that was previously opaque to me and that is partly what I mean when I talk about the rewilding of us the rewilding of human beings. 

 

The is about unlocking a locked down imagination.  Unlocking as a result of a locked down diversity of experience to which we have been denied, a diversity of emotion, a diversity of intellectual development, a diversity of life, from which we have been shut out.  Contesting that we simultaneously start to contest everything that has gone wrong in the natural world.  The two process are attached to each other.  It’s by understanding that it’s not just about fighting against things, it’s not just about opposition, it’s got to be about proposition and it’s about taking responsibility for creating our own agenda, creating our own proposals, our own decisions for what we want rather than choosing from a limited list offered by politicians and by the mainstream ecologists.  

 In some ways you can’t be part of the rewilding agenda without in some respect to rewild yourself.  It almost forces us to ask us whom we are, to ask questioning the boundaries of our humanity, to start asking what it is to be a human being.  It’s a bit like the Gaia theory even if there was nothing in it would still be a worthwhile exercise, it would reinstitute the ecology of the mind.  I believe once we’ve done that we can do the dual processes to recover the psychic, which is desperately required, and physical recovery of the ecology. 

What we’ve sort to do in environment movement is this constant appeasement of politics and mainstream economy is to shut down and conpartmentalise our imagination and our own lives in order to fit in and in order to be taken seriously.  Let’s not be taken seriously, let’s stop be so damned reasonable, lets be wildly unreasonable and unreasonably wild.

 

A cheer goes up with much clapping.

The thing about the imagination got to me.  I know he’s quoted from Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised before and I ask him if he thinks there is a problem with engaging with critical thinking in this country? 

“I do, yes”

I’ve thought about it a lot and one thing keeps coming back to me is the account of Oliver Goldsmith that he told us about.

Oliver Goldsmith, the novelist, in 1776 stood on a cliff watching the herring come in which made the sea black, behind them cod, spear dog, tope, blue sharks, mako sharks, thresher sharks, great white sharks, behind them the dolphins and the porpoises, behind them the sperm whales and the fin whales.  Is it time to have that again?  I think so.

Feral is out now.

Rewilding the Future: Part Two

 

Even if subsidies continue as they are it is estimated that between 2000 and 2030, 30 million hectares on the Continent of Europe will be vacated by farmers despite the best efforts to keep them on the land because the young people do not want to stay.  Whole swathes are being reforested.  30 million hectares is about the size of Poland.  It starts to become a bit unambitious to talk of beavers, boars, wolves, lynxes, moose, bison and wolverines.  Why not consider the return of the lost megafauna?  Lions, hyenas, hippos, Asian elephants, black rhinos, why shouldn’t everyone have a Serengeti on their doorstep?  Why is conservation so unambitious, so irrational, so anally retentive and so ecologically illiterate?

  This is also about the rewilding of our own lives.  He’s not talking about giving up civilization but rather having places where there is self-willed nature that is allowed to develop under it’s own steam in which we may roam.  Places where we may escaped the ordered, regulated, buttoned down, manicured, comfortable, cushioned existence in which we are forced into for the rest of our lives and experience the wild thrill of seeing nature in raw and unmediated state both on sea and on land.  Seeing that is an experience qualifiedly different to seeing any other part of the countryside, something which is enthralling, engaging and involves us in ecstasy and it begins to reignite those buried fires.

  He goes kayaking in Cardigan Bay and one time he went into a ten-foot swell, which was a lumpy nasty jumbled sea and there’s no safe landing and he was trying to get back in without much luck.  Behind him he hears the sound of a giant wave and braced himself for the splash but no water comes.  Under the shaft of his paddle a hooked grey fin rose out of the water all scarred and pitted.  He knows what it was but he felt fear mingled exhilaration then he turned and this blue dolphin jumped over him and as it jumped it made eye contact with him.  If anything inspired him to write Feral then that was.

  If we allow rewilding take place in nature than we can rewild ourselves.  This is something that environmentalism can finally offer, hope.  Rewilding gives us positive environmentalism that can revitalise all the other environmental campaigns.  When he tells people about rewilding they will say “well why are we putting up with this nonsense with consumption and climate change lets sort it out so we can get on with the rewilding.  We have a goal now.  An ounce of hope weighs more than ten times then that in despair.  What I hope is that our silent spring can be turned into a raucous summer.

Rewilding the Future: Part One

 How Can I Help?

 I have been a fan of George Monbiot’s since University and I like what he says but I love how he thinks.  He is such a clear critical thinker who also brings passion and scientific understanding.  It was an utter delight to see him in the living room of the Gaia House in London’s Hampstead Heath and to shake his hand once again.  He recognised me from our meeting in Coventry and we quickly got into discussion about my future, his future, and our future.  I asked him what I could do to help with the rewilding projects, where is the best place to go?

“The best thing to do a bit of volunteer work with Trees For Life.  Of all the rewilding initiatives in the country that is the most advance and the most impressive.  A bunch of us are trying to get some new initiatives going we having the first meeting in a week’s time.  Out of that we going to decide what we should do whether we should have membership organisation or whether it’s ad hoc sort of thing. 

   I’ve managed to get together about ten people who are all well place and who really want to see rewilding happening in this country.  It’s a mixture of people in NGOs, professional ecologists, landowners, which is quite useful.  The idea is that we’ll set up a group and the main aim is to simply make it happen, the advocacy work we’re hoping a major NGO I’m talking to at the moment we’ll pick it up as a big campaign and they’ll do the advocacy work, the public outreach campaigning on things like the ridiculous EU rules that force farmers to clear the land.  

That would leave us to do the practicable stuff of getting movements to rewild land my ideal is not for a big landowner to just have a land rewild, I want it to be more democratic than that.  That’s what great about Trees For Life, they’re so brilliant because they first of all raised all the money through public subscription and they bought a ten thousand acre estate through fundraising, amazing, really impressive.  They are still raising money.  Everything they do is through volunteers, they do the whole lot, and they planted a million trees”

I had to ask him to repeat that figure and he did say what I thought he said.  With ideas such as these it’s surprising that he is not more of household name yet he’s not been asked to go on Question Time while people like James Delingpole get regularly invited (“he’s insane” George says).  I wondered why that might be and while it is lovely to sit and chat with George he’s got a talk to give about rewilding, the subject of his new book Feral.  We go across the road to a small hall owned by the Gaia Foundation and I sit with my National Trust t-shirt I am ready to listen.

“How many people here have watched a hedge being laid?  Have you ever wondered how it stands against that level of punishment?  Think about what’s done to them.  You almost serve the living wood.  You take it down to just a slither with a bit of bark attached.  Then you twist and you split and you trample it down, and yet they come bounding back the next spring just as vigorous as before.  Why would tree have evolved to withstand against that degree of damage?  How do they do that?  Deer wouldn’t do that to them, the wind wouldn’t do that to them, what would make them develop in that extraordinary capacity?  Have you ever wondered why it is that so many insidious trees are able to coppice and pollard, to re-sprout from whatever point the trunk is broken.  Have you ever wondered why trees are able to withstand the loss of so much of their bark?  Perhaps most interestingly have you ever wondered why under story trees are so much tougher and harder to break than the big canopy trees even though they carry less weight and are subject to lower sheer forces of the wind?  It all seems a rather odd, but I believe that there is a single explanation for all these phenomena” he pauses as we wait and wonder what his answer is, “elephants”.

 With that he begins his talk saying that we have forgotten that our ecosystem was an elephant adapted one.  But there is no record of elephants in any book that I could find in my three day search in the Bodleian library despite looking at papers of plants and trees in Africa they show to have similar qualities to our own.  It’s not just elephants that we used to have but rhinoceros as well. Megafauna was everywhere but there were moved out by the ice sheets and replaced with other megafauna, which had more grazing habits, like the woolly mammoth.  They were driven into southern Europe before they disappeared.  The distribution with megafaunas today has almost nothing to do with climate but with human population.

  There was an interesting idea when he was a zoology student there was the question of why were large animals lived in the tropics and not in the temperate countries and all sorts of reasons were given but they were unaware that they had lived in temperate countries.  In a way they are still here.  You can see the shadows of these great beasts every time you step out of a building because every tree carries a evolutionary legacy with it’s co-evolution with those animals.  We posses a ghost ecosystem and a ghost psyche but the shadow is still there.

  The ability to forget is the defining characteristic of our relationship with the natural world.  The elephant in the forest is the elephant in the room.  Daniel Pauley says that there is something known as ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ where we think of the world of our youth as the world of normality and to use that as our baseline.   The mass of animals and insects that he grew up with has been depleted and he thinks that is what we should get back to even though those masses had already been depleted by then.  Everyone suffers from it but no one suffers from it more than conservationists.

  The natural world was thought of as being organised from the bottom up, starting with the soil and working its way up to the predators.  But zoologists were studying a world were the trophic layers (the links in the food chain) have been lost.  Since then there has been the discovery of the trophic cascade, organisation from the top down starting with the predators working back down to the soil.  The best example is the wolves in Yellowstone National Park when they were introduced in 1995.  When they were introduced they killed the deer, as expected, but they did something more dramatic.  They created a landscape of fear. 

The behaviour of deer changed affecting the trees, the hillsides and the forest filled up with migratory birds and bison came and bears came, beavers, a keystone species (something that has a wider ecological impact) which then brought the otters, the muskrats, the amphibians, the ducks, the fish, the reptiles, bald eagles and ravens and hawks and weasels and foxes and badgers all re-enforcing the remarkable restoration project the wolves had begun.

  But what is most interesting was the behaviour of the river.  It changed due to the vegetation growing on its banks stabilising the water, which stopped it’s meandering.

  

 More and more evidence is suggesting that trophic cascades are the default position in the natural world.  Whales keep populations of krill and plankton up due to its fecal matter that then photosynthesis occurs when it reaches the surface then changing and dropping back down into the water to nourish the smaller fishes.  Wales even help reduce carbon emissions.  They change the atmosphere of the world.

  More and more evidence is accumulating for James Lovelock’s hypothesis the Gaia theory.  This seems to him a good argument for the re-introducing of missing animals and plants.  This is where rewilding comes in.

  He said that as soon as he saw the word ‘rewilding’ he knew it was going to change his life.  Rewilding means the mass restoration of ecosystems. To take down the fences, to block up the drainage ditches, creating large areas at sea where commercial activates are excluded, bringing back missing species and to leave it alone.  Leaving things alone is one of the hardest things for us to do as if nature would perish without us (one of his friends said “How did nature cope before we started looking after it?”)

  We really need to do very little, we need to allow nature to get on with it and that’s something we cannot contemplate. 

In the uplands a study was produced saying that within twenty years 60% of wildlife had reduced.  Some would say the problem is human population but what has more impact is the agriculture.  Sheep are very good at reducing an ecosystem to almost nothing.  Heather grows on the uplands and ecologists love it but in the tropics if heather grew as much as it does in this country they would say “isn’t this terrible?”

  The Lake District is one of the most depressing places in Europe.  It’s a bowling green with contours.  When I worked in Brazil we protect the ecosystem from the cattle ranchers, but in this country we defend the cattle ranchers from the ecosystem. 

Anywhere in the country can you find more birds in your back garden than in the countryside.  It’s all prescribed to the nearest percentage.  The countryside is meant to be kept in favorable conditions and favorable conditions means completely fucked.  Favorable condition means the condition in which you find the countryside even if it’s in a state of being trashed with the loss of its trophic layer.  In this management plan one of the main tasks is getting rid of undesirable species.  He rang them up and asked them what undesirable species are they trying to keep out?  Trees they said.  What’s the reason? he asks them.  The Countryside Council of Wales has told us to do it, they said.  So he rang the CCW up and asked them the same question.  They told him that it had nothing to do with them but that they were told to do it by a Joint Nature Conservation Committee.  The same question was asked.  They said that it was nothing to do with them but it came from the European Commission, it’s in the habitats derivative.  So he asked them why they were telling the JNCC to tell the CCW to tell the countryside managers to keep the reserves in this condition?  Nothing to do with us, they said, National Agencies tell us what they want put on the habitats derivative.  The circle is complete. 

So going back to the CCW he asked them why do they keep it in such a way.  They said that they have to keep a preserve certain species but not others.  When asked why that was they said that those species show that the habitats are in favorable conditions.  Total madness.  We, due to shifting baseline syndrome, expect the hillside to be bare.

 

If you ask someone in the tropics “Why do floods occur?” they would say “Floods happen because there aren’t any trees in the hills.” In Britain people say, “Floods happen because of the floodplain” is that were rivers start?  We’ve ignored what’s going on in the rest of the catchments.  A friend of his demonstrates, in a clear cylinder, soil from the woodlands and from the sheep farm showing what happens when water is poured through with each.  The soil from the woodlands trickles through gently while the soil from the sheep farm just sits there on top as if it was concrete.

  It’s sacrosanct to slag off hill farmers but that’s not what he’s doing.  He respects them very much but he’s pointing out a problem that people don’t want to hear about.  The standard response is “what about food production?  If people stop using the land people will starve”.  He looked into it.  He found that in Wales 76% of it is under livestock production almost all for meat.  Yet Wales imports seven times more meat than it exports.  It’s even worse than that because the sheepwrecked land causes floods on potential farmland.  Hill farming actually has an overall net loss.

 

He doesn’t want to get rid of the hill farmers, even if he does want to take away the sheep, but he wants to give them a choice they don’t have.  If you want your subsidy than you have to remove unwanted vegetation or wildlife habitat.  Rule twelve buried deep in the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions has caused an orgy of destruction.  So strict that even the Flag Irises in Western Scotland are disqualified, you can’t get your money if you have them.  All this is done with taxpayer’s money.  What he’s saying is take that rule away and have a cap on the subsidy and then let the farmers do what they want.  The average subsidy for a hill farmer in Wales is £53,000; the average income at the end of the year is £33,000.  You lose £20,000 by keeping sodding sheep in the hills.  He wants the hill farmers to lie on the beach rather than chasing sheep.  Then we can introduce missing animals such as beavers, boars, wolves, lynxes, moose, bison, wolverines…then we start thinking on a slightly grander scale. 

The Two Spades (A Beginning)

There was a funeral.  It was raining in a sleepy village in England.  Few people turned up to hear the last comment of the deceased.  It was a sad affair, as these things normally are, and people were numb with tears over the middle-aged lady who had a peculiar control over some certain people’s emotions.

Craig Reinen was one of these people was currently wiping a single tear from his collar.  He came on his own-too tired to be with anyone else- and he mourned privately leaving the service earlier than most.

He went back to the hotel crest-broken and spent a little time at the bar before noticing the pattern of stains his handkerchief had collected.  It was a set of circles.  Trying to decide between going to bed and having another drink he was approached by a man he hadn’t met in decades.

“So you came along too, after all these years- the intensity of our meeting was too powerful for me to ignore its passing as well”

“Charles Kingsworth, how could I not expect your presence?  Though it dawns on me obviously now”

The two decided to rest the conversation back to the hotel room while they talked with a couple of bottles brought up with them.  Charles seemed rested and remarkably tanned as he had come back from a long holiday in which he did very little other than read books.  Craig was wrecked with work.

“From what I hear it had been terrible for her for months”

“A long while”

“Just make sure you don’t follow into the same track”

Another drink is poured.

“You know looking after oneself gets very tiring-this is why people get into couples; so that there’s someone to look after you when you’re tired”

“Is that the reason she died?  Because she never coupled?”

“She was beautiful being single-she did what was best for her.  It’s still sad without doubt”

“You don’t mean that”

Rain started hitting the windows again.

“It’s so sad an occasion that even this part of the world is crying”

They both took a moment to look out from their room.

“The world hasn’t ravished you too much.  Still pretty, still young”

“She was beautiful for the both of us when we were ugly”

“Now we have our share of her beauty”

“Not that we deserve it”

“Give credit where it may be deserved”

“I’ll never listen to you again”

“You can never help yourself with it”

“You have no power over me today”

“But what about her ring- the one with the key-is it buried with her?”

“Where else would it have gone-she had no next of kin and we were wiped out of her history”

Craig drank his glass “no-where to go”

The sadness was swelling up, the room shimmering.

“She would have left provisions”

“If you want that ring you’re going to have to dig her up, which would take a good week to do”

“So I will pull her back up to former glory, seize her enchantment, put all to right like the errand knight or knightly prince that I am supposed, in her eyes, to be…”

Tears made symmetrical marking opposite the rain.  They looked at each other in sympathy.

“I was helpless before I met her- now she’s gone I am helpless again”

“Your powers don’t rely on her being- just the invited contact is good enough for it to work.  You’ll see”

“I said to her to wait and when she did you came.  I can see your young face again when we first met; you were all so clever then.  You look foolish now”

“Accidental circumstances can make brave men cowardly.  I do act out of character of at times, that’s when I feel my power slipping”

“Your standards are falling”

“You’re jealous of my skin”

They stood against each other, matching and mirroring.  A new dimension opened up between them underneath the surface of their skin.

“She’s in hell, you know that”

“You don’t know what hell is”

“I can speculate”

“That’s all your powers can do for now, lazy assumptions”

“I resent that” which he didn’t mean.  Charles loved toying, teasing.  “No really.  It takes a second order of analysis for me to come up with the things I do”

“You’re a bitch”

A crunch of bitter ice.

“I don’t follow you.  Yes she’s dead and all of our meetings go with her but still isn’t there something that had better come out from it?”

“Now I don’t follow you.  What do you expect?”

“A little gift, perhaps- from you if not from her”

“I have a spare ring that I don’t need”

“Preciesly perfect- that would be it”

Craig was hesistant.  He didn’t want to move.  Slowly he got into his luggage and brought out the bronze circle.  Taking it out was something magic.  A moment polished in marble- how he wished it could last but he knew the end was near, he wasn’t a fool.  With the ring in hand he passed it over to Charles.

“Thank you my sweet”

A dusky silence spread over the evening and between them everything came to pass.  Charles left and Criag stood over the windows with the dense sensation of loss.  It was almost a pleasure feeling this fractured quality that risen in his life.  He was not a lossful person, he never needed it but now it hounded him from behind and as much as he grit his teeth over the pain he realised that overall he needed prickly people such as Charles to give the pleasue of relife when they separate.  He didn’t need a revelation just sensation; a great pool where life ekes out into a million different nerves, interlinking and outerlocking.  That, he gives a moment to thought, is where she is. 

      

Examination

The world is too tough now.  We’re never going to be tough enough to survive complete.  Undamaged.  Nobody is saved from being scathed.  We all scratch and kick and bite in our weakness because we know, we all know, that we are weak.  This…we all know this. 

  In this, a morning; a small class of twleve begins work.  Their begin work on higher algerbra, higher physics (quantam and classical) and a rigourously techinal form of shorthand grammatics similar to CPU language; almost such as a spoken computer data code.  Between lessons the class enjoys logic based word games that sound like highly formilised riddles.  None of the class are older than fifteen years.

  As I am where I are I wonder, in uncharacteristc fashion, how it all came to this.  Actually it is not uncharacteristic.  Cause and effect; that’s all.  I am just looking at the links of this chain seeing how each one connects to each other from the begninning.  The first one looks like this:

  A girl, girl A, walking into the gates of a school.  The day is hot and clearly grey.  There’s intensity in the air.  A tension of sorts.  Girl A’s uniform is clean/smart and her straw hat is immaculate.  Her shoes are polished.  Her eyes are sharp.  Her head is dry.  She walks on the boiling concrete towards the large white buliding of the school.  She enters the large double doors containing her future.  Inside she looks around for the classroom she is supposed to be in.  There seems to be nobody to ask a question.  Then after a little walking a voice calls out from behind her.  She turns to confirm the voice’s presence.  The voice is confirmed to be a tall woman.  The woman recognises the girl as the new pupil and tells her to follow.  The woman is called Miss Brand.  As they walk through the corridors Miss Brand talks to A about the school, the studies, the schedule, the students, the structure of the building and of the day.  Girl A absorbs.  When asked if she has any questions she would like to ask the girl simply replies that if she does have any questions she will ask them at the end of the school day.  Miss Brand is satisfied.  They enter the classroom.

   That first day is the clearest memory I have of my time at the I.  A pinnicle of importance.  That was what I had climbed up to.  Everyday before that first day I was reaching up for that moment putting every effort into every step to move upwards and dared not to slip an inch.  I was walking on the tightrope where every step forward never prevented or secured myself from falling.  I never looked down to realise I had a fear of heights, I never worried/beileved that I was high in the air, that was how I kept on taking another carefully balanced step.  I never looked back either.

  In the classroom the pupils were working.  They were not at desks writing from a board but they were sat down on chairs that formed a square and they were debating a subject.  Though girl A had entered the room she was not noticed by any one of the pupils, or they were delibrilartly ignoring her so they could keep the flow of their arguments at full pressure.  They put forward an argument and agreed and improved it or disagreed and improvrished it, they attack the lanuage of their opponent, they critisied their development of theme, they exagerated an opposing point to turn it ridulous, they muddled and disgised their points in order to confuse the others with technicle words-sometimes even made up- they played dumb before they striked cleverly and they would be varied in their methods and ranged in their modes.  Though they argued they never shouted.  Though they disagreed they never felt their person insulted.  This was work.  It was unclear what the outcome from the debate was but the pupils all felt that it was finishead and so they all turned their attention to her and watched acutely.  The girl watched them in return.  There were eleven pupils in total.  There was one with ginger hair and one with black hair; the rest had either brown or blonde hair.  Girl A could tell almost immediately that all the pupils had similar qualities even in their differnces.  She knew she was no different.  This could not trouble her as she knew that it was these qualities that made her who she was and she did not apologise nor complained.  She knew that this place was for her.  She had found her natural habitat.  An environment she could thrive in.  Her eyes smiled.

  My lips smile but I do not beileve in them anymore.  I do not beileve there is a true smile within me.  Nothing in the methods or means or in the results or ends of this can make me smile.  There is nothing but instinct in me.  My life is levelled down to the esstential grass and ground of passing; passing each breath, passing each step, passing water and food and heat and air and energy and time all through me.  Passing each exam with impeccably flair and answers exact.  Living to pass judgment; those who cannot pass through shall pass on.  Passing…passing.

  The class were excited with the new person to enliven an old routine.  To test and try out this unknown entity, this unknown force trapped inside this girl.  She had to be good.  She was in this class; that was proof enough that was had to be good enough.  How good?, they wondered.  Further proof of her qualities was a needed nesscessity.  They were not worried though they were calculatingly cautious.  They created some small talk but she was well aware of what they were up to.  They were examining her and she let them know that she was examining them.  These children play but there are no games here.

  I've been cruel to life. 

  There was a year left to their education, on this level.  Afterwards they were to help others with their skills.  They knew that they had no choice about this, this way worked out better for the majority of them, but some of them had an inkling that they might be quicker and sharper than their teachers; and so there was always another option.  Girl A was eased into the class and she sloted in wihtout complaint.  The first month of the year was a very happy time for the pupils.  They all worked and played with equal strength of energy and enthusiam.  They enjoyed being with each other.  The winter sun burnt through their icy intellects and their characters shone out.  After that first month came about a significant change of the nature of their work, also to the tone and style of themselves.  At the end of the first month the pupils had an exam.  Nobody worried about a module exam; they could only improve from it if the results were weak.  They had no fear of failing.

  No-one expected it.  We weren't told anything, nothing was clear, we weren't told or notified:  we were unprepared for the I.  I am thinking how far it was all predicted in advance.  Could they have predicted such an end?  Have we been manipulated every day of this year?  Logic can cut through uncertainties only so far.      

           

          
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