2/2/22: Trees and Time

I used to live on the edge of woodland but now I live in the middle of agricultural land, pasture for sheep, sometimes cattle, and increasingly used by pheasant shooters.  A little house not on the prairie, but a wind-blasted field.  An ideal spot for a poet, who needs solitude and spaciousness to think and write.  It is by both accident and design that the trees have disappeared: a wholesale felling in 2018, that felt like an invasion of absence, an amputation; and successive storm damage, particularly evident ever since Storm Desmond in 2015/16 and, at the end of 2021, Arwen’s devastation, which left me, like many others, without power or water for seven days. 

Fortunately, there are still trees marking the garden’s loose, uncertain perimeter – holly, yew, rowan, laburnum, cypress, birch.  I couldn’t live here without them.  They are my companions, kinfolk, fellow conspirators in the arts of living on a damaged planet.  Their assembled company softens the sense of bare exposure and the force of the wind. They also act as its instruments, roaring like the sea on more days than not, a leafy ocean, audible on the other side of my thick stone walls.  The chimney is the wind’s chanter, funnelling great breaths into the room where I sit and listen, half-listen, try not to listen.  It sounds like sobbing, the heave and fall of someone’s heart breaking.  I pretend it isn’t mine.

Who am I kidding?  Why would I rather not admit it?  This pain and loss that shakes the ground under my feet and slams doors shut, always a cold draught at the back of my neck.  It’s hard to find the words, stand upright, walk around with all that grief inside.

On this high ground where I live we have lost many trees since Arwen and Malik – conifers, hardwoods, immature and venerable.  Their limbs have been torn off, root plates up-ended, forced out of the soil by the trees’ crashing descent.  All the roadsides and hedgerows are scattered with their broken branches.  On my daily walks I bring some home for firewood, carrying them in my arms like a loved one I must prepare for consignment to the flames. 

And it’s not only single trees that have left an empty space behind them – although I’ll sorely miss the Scots pine behind my house and the two enormous oaks I’d pass by the farm gate – the whole landscape is affected: the old horizons, contours and pathways, their special character, the habitat for wildlife, the shelter they provide.  It’ll take many years before we regain a sense of lushness and canopy and can experience the benefits of the mature trees’ capacity for carbon capture, the development of their complex interspecies relationships, above and below ground. In mourning for the trees, we also mourn for the loss of everything in the trees’ ecosystem – which is our own.  Whenever we lose anything or anyone, we lose part of ourselves.

Imbolc or Candlemas is associated with the slow stirrings, still mostly beneath the ground, of Spring.  It’ll stay cold, and probably get even colder, until we reach the Equinox later in March.  Some days it requires a leap of the imagination to believe in sap rising and the earth greening.  This ancient fire festival has always been a pivot point between life and death – a tender and powerful threshold between the fierce Cailleach and sweet Brigid, mother Demeter and daughter Persephone.  

Our tears show we care, that we suffer with the world.  We water the earth with our tears and, beyond the scope of our understanding, it will do what it will in its own good time.  This Imbolc, it is raining here and the sky is heavy and full while we collect our seeds, actual and intentional, and prepare for sowing.  What will you plant?

As we give our attention to the old-growth forest and the beloved backyard shade tree, we recognise that paying attention to trees is only the beginning.  Attention generates wonder, which generates more attention and more joy.  Paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgement of pain.  Open and attentive, we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds, the old growth and the clear-cut, the mountain and the mine.  Paying attention to suffering sharpens our ability to respond.  To be responsible.  This, too, is a gift, for when we fall in love with the living world, we cannot be bystanders to its destruction.  Attention becomes intention, which coalesces itself to action.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Foreword to Old Growth (The best writing about trees from Orion magazine), 2021

Inside/Outside

Early last week I wrote an initial dispatch from Glasgow for New Writing North’s Climate Newsletter and you can read it here.  I’m trying to catch up with my impressions and experiences and will post instalments as and when I have time.  

The first three lines are a quotation from Thomas A. Clark’s work included in Dislocations:Territories, Landscapes and Other Spaces, an exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery.

places are not as

they appear, but as

they are imagined

Wiser than all the government delegates at COP26, the Eco-cab driver who took me to the station could see there’s a gap between words and deeds, promises and action.

I met a friend on the train who is working flat out to keep his business afloat – where does he find the time to protest, campaign or the money to retrofit renewable energy options in his home?  I hear this again and again – people not having the space or resources to transform their lives in a way that would radically help the planet, despite doing everything they can day-to-day to reuse, recycle and reduce.  Of course governments need to intervene with guidance and support.

Happy to reconnect with the Coat of Hopes – with my own little patch added.  It’s been out and about in Glasgow all week and worn by lots of different folk, including some COP delegates.  So, a circle has been stitched together.

I keep coming across another powerful sewing project embellishing the city – Collective Zurciendo – Darning the Planet – beautiful embroidered ‘Trees for Life’ initiated by a women’s artivist collective from Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Peru.  

use caution – walking directions

may not always reflect

real-world conditions

In the fish and chip shop two men pray to Allah.  Roma women are selling single red roses. You can hardly see the pavement for rubbish, plastic and polystyrene, stinking tumbleweed.  The Council are going to sow wildflower meadows across the city.  

I am offered a slice of vegan sausage roll in Sauchiehall Street and they ask if they can film me eating it.  They want to know why no one’s talking about veganism at COP26.

Everybody wants to know why they are aren’t talking about what they aren’t talking about.  The streets ring with them asking and singing and dancing and shouting.  The police – many more police than are needed – look confused but stand where they’re instructed and occasionally gather for group photos and selfies.  Some of them wear knuckleduster gloves and carry tazers which prove entirely unnecessary and therefore appear ridiculous, not to mention a waste of our taxes.

The COP26 Main Event Armadillo and Hydro (Blue Zone) and the Science Centre (Green Zone) are cordoned off by stout steel railings and heavily policed.  Despite the blue and green banners claiming that we’re doing this ‘together for our planet’, there is limited access and the message is one of exclusion, cumbersome and ugly.  Another example of more being spent on defending territory rather than sharing and regenerating it.  More than twice the amount the UK government spend on helping poorer countries in the global south deal with the consequences of climate change we in the so-called developed world have created with colonialism, extractivism and over-consumption is dedicated to keeping climate refugees from crossing our borders.

It’s as if Glasgow is populated by three tribes – those who are here to do their bit on the fringes of COP  and happy to announce it with a badge or a flag, a t-shirt or a hat with horns, and those who are going about their business with a mixture of bewilderment and pride that their city has been chosen to host this historic occasion, and then the police, drafted in from all over the country – with vanloads from the Met, Norfolk, Wales, Cornwall etc.  

Oh, yes, and the first few days of the Leaders’ Summit, those other shadowy presences at the centre of it all, invisible behind the blacked-out windows of their limousines gliding down Stobcross Road beside the River Cyde, protected from everything going on, ‘the real-world conditions’ on the streets.  And isn’t it true that democracy dies in darkness?

a dawn raid – police

arrest an inflatable

Loch Ness Debt Monster

As part of the fringe events, Tom Goldtooth from the US Indigenous Environmental Network kicks off the first Coalition Movement Assembly.  Humanity must learn its spiritual connection with the earth, he says, know that it is sacred, and then it will be clear that fossil fuels must stay in the ground.  It will be clear that the patriarchal system has caused so much damage with violence, rape and exploitation.  I saw mostly men coming and going down at the main site.  It is mostly women in this gathering.  

Cage (2015), Jade Montserrat and Webb-Ellis, Hunterian Art Gallery

What is outside?  What is inside?  How do they interpenetrate?  How come into dialogue with each other?  How can ‘we should’ and ‘we must’ realign into ‘we will’?  Where might diversity, solidarity and unity meet?  These questions recur all week and these investigations and conversations will carry on beyond November 12th when COP26 is over.  I look forward to seeing where it leads.  

the artists make hearts

with hands and earth, dolerite

quartz sand, granite, peat

THRIVING AND BALANCE

 

It’s the last day of the year.  I wake up to frost on the fields and mist in the valley, my head still thick with a Christmas cold.  First thing, I listen to yesterday’s Today programme edited by Greta Thunberg.  It’s twenty past eight when they announce the news at six o’clock: ‘The time is out of joint’.

Top news is that ‘the coming year is the last chance for us to take action against Climate Change’ (according to Natural England and the Environment Agency).  It is already too late for those affected by the wild fires in Australia.  In Victoria, some are trapped, unable now to evacuate.  The images that rise in my mind are something out of a disaster movie – unreal, at a distance.  Another consequence of our collective blindness flickering inside my brain, not knowing where to settle.

Greta herself is introduced by several clips from her past speeches and, at the sound of her voice, I find myself weeping – the passion and urgency in it, its purity of focus and simple sanity.  A great wave of emotion sweeps through me – sadness, confusion, love and gratitude all tumbled together: everything we don’t usually hear in the news – how people truly feel – what passes through our hearts and minds right from when we wake up in the morning and switch on our radios.  Especially when we hear, as I do now, so many contradictions and disjointed switches of attention.

‘Individuals can make a difference but are not responsible for Climate Change…they can’t solve it on their own but individual action and what people choose to do in their lives is really important’.  (Steve Westlake, Researcher in Environmental Leadership at Cardiff University).  According to Steve, ‘every big helps’ – flying, car use, how we grow, buy and eat our food, how we heat our homes.  Governments and legislation have the power to reduce carbon emissions and the individual (theoretically) has the power to influence politicians.

Then, Kevin Anderson, who I heard speak so persuasively at Newcastle University in October, insists that across the globe we are still failing, ignoring the Paris agreements so that our emissions are continuing to rise to around 1%, and heading in the direction of a 3 or 4% rise by the end of the century, rather than the 1.5/2% cap we’re supposed to be aiming for.  He’s traced a lot of ‘imaginative accounting’: no one including aviation and shipping and the import of consumer items (all hidden in that little word ‘net’).  We have known the facts for 30 years and yet are still prevaricating, leaving a shameful legacy for the next generation and certainly not considering the impact on poorer parts of the world – those who consume and emit the least.  Cassandra-like, his predictions barely have room to land: this section ironically cut short because they are running out of time…

The same happens with the next item – on ladybirds and bees, particularly the recent rise in the harlequin ladybird population, who are steadily eating our native 7-, 8- and 10-spot ladybirds.  The bees don’t really get a mention before it’s ‘time for the weather…’

‘It’s 7 am on Monday 30^th December and the BBC News is read by Diana Speed.’  It’s Tuesday 31^st December and the clock on my bedside table says 9.43; the frost still white out of the window, the sun shining, while the glaciers, even in the Antarctic – previously thought relatively stable, are melting.  One, called Thwaites, like a naughty public schoolboy, alone is responsible for 4% of the rising sea level.  One of the scientists says there is no going back: ‘we can’t regrow the ice sheet.’

Meanwhile, in the UK, wildlife species have declined by two-fifths, that is, nearly halved.  A much balder picture than the clinical ‘41%’ they use on the radio – more graspable, but more devastating.  Bathed in sunlight, the whole day ahead, I am sitting listening, the whole world alive and trembling inside me.

I sit up a little straighter, heartened by economist Kate Raworth’s upbeat tone as she exposes the problems created by thinking only in terms of GDP and expecting endless growth – like having just one dial on your car’s dashboard to cover petrol, mileage, air and oil etc: it simply doesn’t work.  What she recommends instead is economies that promote ‘thriving and balance – something we understand in our own bodies’ – that meet the needs of all people while meeting the needs of the planet, taking into account health, education, housing, water, politics, reinvesting in soils, regenerating landscapes.  New metrics for the 21^st century.  Officially the new decade doesn’t actually start until 2021 but everyone seems so keen to see the back of the old one, we’re ushering it in already.  The softer side of ‘imaginative accounting’ perhaps?

The positivity continues with an interview with Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja.  The band has been working with the Tyndall Centre and Liverpool City Council on creating a carbon neutral model for an upcoming concert and plan to travel by train when they go on tour next year.  In the background, they play a track I haven’t heard for nearly twenty years that takes me back to another life and does something strange to my stomach – not unpleasant-strange, just time-travelling-strange.  Because of music’s emotional resonance and social influence, del Naja says they have something to contribute to addressing Climate Change and they are committed to changing their way of doing business.

What would it look like if we all changed our way of ‘doing business’?  Wouldn’t that be the best New Year’s Resolution?  For me, it’s something to do with Time – how we use it and how we think about it, straddling the Now of our daily choices and the invisible future of the complex, unanticipated consequences of our actions; holding both in our bodies at the same time, remembering Kate Raworth’s ‘thriving and balance’.  In the coming year I want to find out how to walk that edge.

When Greta Thunberg’s father Svante is interviewed, he talks about how all he wants is his daughter to be happy and so he and her mother ‘took time to listen’.  His wife stopped flying and he became vegan not to save the planet but to save their daughter, who had been distraught to the point of starvation and silence with the state of the environment.

In another report, Joanna Sustento from the Philippines, tells how she lost her entire family apart from her brother in the 2013 Super Typhoon Heiyan, and now dedicates her life to campaigning against fossil fuels.  It’s hard not to feel angry when the presenter Sarah Smith still insists on suggesting that there is no definitive evidence that extreme weather events were caused by Climate Change and still uses the term ‘net zero’ so carefully unpicked by both Kevin Anderson and Greta Thunberg.  Typhoon Heiyan was responsible for more than 6,300 lost lives and over 4 million displaced citizens.  The Philippines is listed as the country most affected by Climate Change in the Global Climate Risk Index 2015.

The programme properly comes into flower in a Skype conversation between Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough.  Their shared openness and humility is inspiring.  When Greta says she is honoured to be talking with the man whose films she watched when she was 9 or 10, that showed her what was really happening in the natural world, David assures her he is very flattered.  But he says she has achieved in a very short time, what people like him have been trying to get across for the past twenty years.  She is ‘keeping the issue on the front line… Every day we delay changing things we are missing an opportunity.  In history no one has ever agreed but now we need some sort of consensus…some kind of electric shock to bring them to their senses.’

And then, again, the disjunction after this, with the shift to the Sports News and whatever’s happening just now between Celtic and Rangers (football, of course, more important than life or death).

Interviewed at the end of the programme, Greta Thunberg (less like ‘a brat’ than anyone I’ve ever met) admits it’s been ‘a very strange year’.  And wouldn’t we all agree with that?  She’s glad she’s being listened to but concerned that it isn’t being translated into action, seeing a huge lack of awareness in politics, finance and the media.  Pragmatic and realistic beyond her years, she knows that the campaign must continue whatever the crucial outcome of November’s UN Climate Conference 26 in Glasgow.  No single solution will solve everything but what she’s trying to do is change the conversation.  ‘Once we start to act, hope will be everywhere.’  Her phrase ripples out in the air, filling my room with the sweetness of what is possible.

She wants to go back to school and be educated like any normal teenager.  But, she says, ‘this isn’t a normal situation and we all have to step outside of our comfort zones’.  Climate Change is only going to become more urgent.  The medicine is to become active, says Dr Greta.  Inform yourself about the science, the actual situation, what is being done and what is not.  Be an active democratic citizen and make our governments change their policies.

If you do everything you can, there is no reason to be sad and depressed.  It gives you a meaning, makes you feel as if you have an impact.  It is an amazing feeling to be part of something bigger, she says: ‘I wish all people could feel like that.’

As a sort of coda to the past three out-of-joint hours, the next news bulletin leads with Mark Carney, outgoing Head of the Bank of England, talking about Climate Change as a ‘tragedy on the horizon’ and asking ‘at what speed are we going to change?’

Festina lente – make haste slowly.  Take a fortnight to cross the Atlantic and raise the tempo. If we let go of everything we think we know about Time, maybe we will have a chance to thrive.  I come downstairs to start the day, hours and minutes already falling into a new balance as the light begins its slow annual return.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Borderlands Renga

What the land says

*

Morning sun

warms crumbled earth

relief from frost heave

 

I hold it in my hands

it holds me

 

hills made overground

by velvet tunnellers

dark soil workers

 

home to the unseen

and the spectacular

 

a rusty horse-shoe, half-buried

 

O larch, cone

and whisker of you

nubs of dusted red

 

ash trees do it for me

sometimes, especially

 

fluid hardness of wood

 

leaning into, leaning on

a steady place to start

bones and barks both bend

 

hollowed, clothed

folding rock and living humus

 

the burn’s law carves a groove

divides a field

opens up earth’s skin

 

 

*

sunlit current between the banks

silent cross-currents within me

 

aching for the river’s touch

to be closer

to my open hand

 

telegraph pole floating down in the flood

 

the stream tumbling into my right ear

drifting from my left

 

glistening water

passes under the high bridge

carries thoughts downstream

 

shadow of a fish

playing with light

 

steepness

a water world

wagtail

 

too thirsty to write a verse

above the river, I drink

 

above is below, flickering

skittish dipper flashes

stone to stone

 

today’s green umbrella

sheltering last week’s rain

 

earth route, sea bound

 

the water continues

sure in its course

holding to uncertainty

 

 

 

*

around the shadow of my hat

grass glows

 

in an auditorium of green fire

burning off

winter’s residue

 

furious and ferocious me

I lie down and rest

 

bliss – a line

scorched between

need and no-need

 

sun-grown leaf, grain, fruit

 

this stone below me, slow

this light on my face

 

a constellation of solar systems

scattered over

the dandelion meadow

 

red absorbed

sleepy cushion after lunch

 

furnace of microbial life

 

flowers

photosynthetic factories

forging the sward

 

 

*

feathers in my pocket

song in the air

 

crows – two in the uplift

corks on an unseen river

your wings, my home

 

take me up, thermals

so that I may see

 

the nothingness of being

that lives by breath

 

ripple in the pool, rustle in the tree

 

tickling my cheekbones

songs of blackcap, chiff chaff, jackdaw

 

drowsy afternoon

a chance to listen to air

sifting memories

 

my mother’s bloodroot

 

a wave of tiny combustions

the wave arranged in patterns, rhythm

 

cow-breath gorse-breath

blowing the flute

of the secret valley

 

 

 

*

where the skylark is –

even to the ten thousand galaxies

 

this pen settled in the saddle

of thumb and forefinger

widening to describe all this

 

space curves

there is a tree, a wall, a house

 

a network of human habitation

 

soft sow shape of Cheviot

stretches out asleep

over all those centuries

 

distant granite whaleback

 

in the distance

between thoughts – a space to fade to

 

sky full of bird paths

each flown invisibly

opened and closed

 

bear’s garlic, shepherd’s purse,

Persian speedwell

 

blue harvest

 

slip through

follow the fold of sky

return

 

 

 

*

the me that has no thoughts

the other quietly watching

 

a way to be back

along the boughs

a root home

 

with all the twists and turns

still there is the green

 

can we meet the tree?

sometimes I sense it

and so must she

 

tell me what I am

and through me sing

 

a group reflects

a hawthorn dances

I listen

 

preoccupied by the thinking

we forget the knowing

 

delusions like crows on a fence

 

arthritic old thorn

teaches silence

to sapling ash, oak, gean

 

ten thousand green eyes

turned skywards

 

what a day of embrace!

tree of heart’s desire

hold our grief, our trust, our uncertainty

 

alive to this place

 

tangled in and out of shadow

risk yes risk joy.

 

 

A walking renga

from Borderlands 3 at Burnlaw,

Whitfield, Northumberland,

on 23^rd April, 2017.

 

Participants:

Jo Aris, Melanie Ashby, Michael Van Beinum, Matilda Bevan, Neil Diment, John Fanshawe, Jane Field, Linda France, Kate Foster, Malcolm Green, Sharon Higginson, Geoff Jackson, Martha Jackson, Georgiana Keable, Virginia Kennedy, Linda Kent, Martin Lee Muller, Karen Melvin, Tim Rubidge, Geoff Sample, Torgeir Vassvik, Gary Villers-Stuart, Rosie Villiers-Stuart, Nigel Wild, Richard Young.

 

Borderlands 3 was a gathering of Northern Networks for Nature.  On Saturday we were mostly indoors, listening to excellent speakers, sharing thoughts (and fantastic food – thanks Martha!) and watching and listening to a ‘salmon fairytale’ from Norway.  On Sunday we went outside and walked down the valley as far as Bridge Eal, stopping along the way to consider the elements and write renga verses.  This renga is the fruit of that walk in that place on that day with those people.

 

 

Moorbank Update

The Moorbank Executive Committee has been constantly working behind the scenes to secure the future of the garden year. However, we have been significantly hampered in our efforts, and would appreciate help or advice from new sources now.

Over the last year, the committee have sought out new partners who may be interested in the Moorbank site for educational and horticultural purposes. To that end, we had pulled together a business plan with Northumberland College, for them to use Moorbank as a satellite site for their horticultural and other land based management courses. The Friends of Moorbank would have been allowed to continue volunteering, whilst also assisting with increasing the availability of the garden to members of the public. This plan was turned down by the Freemen as they do not wish to issue a lease to a third party, and would prefer to manage the garden themselves.

The committee have also been approached by The Sainsbury’s Trust, who have offered funding for three years to support Moorbank’s transition from a University department to a more public facing facility. This funding would cover all the utility and other direct costs, which would have given the garden the breathing space to build up income from visitors and other sources of funding. Despite the committee offering to put together a full application for this funding on behalf of the Freemen, we have received no reply to them about this proposal.

In addition, we have received political support from the Council, which unanimously passed a motion to support Moorbank. They have requested a meeting between the Freemen, the Council and the Executive Committee to plan the future of Moorbank. As yet, we have had no response from the Freemen about this request. We have also had support from 38 Degrees, the Northumberland and Newcastle Society, the Journal and potential financial support from individuals.

Newcastle University need to start relocating the plants soon, although a number of them are not suitable to move to another site due to their size and tangled roots, or they are not of interest. As such, a significant number of plants in the Tropical House and Desert House (not owned by the University anyway) are likely to be left in situ at the end of November. We have not received any assurances from the Freemen that heating and water will be provided to these plants after this date, so it’s looking quite dire for them.

The University lease expires on the 30th November, and we have no clear idea of the Freemen’s plans for the site after this date. The University have pledged to leave all the plants in place if we can care for them, but the Freemen have not revealed whether they will continue to heat and water the plants in the glasshouses. Time is now tight, and we need help in how to advance the situation.

If there is anything you can help with, we can send more information to you, contacts we have made and other facts if you need them. Any suggestions for how to advance this situation are welcome. Please email us at moorbankbotanicgarden@gmail.com.