THE CLIMATE CAIRN : 

 A focus for ideas, and connections; a creative and learning process, over a series of weeks, with workshops (as well as more informal gatherings, music and movement building), to help build the consciousness and the movement for a viable living future on our planet.

It will explore the web of life which we are a part of. Starting with the breath of air which we take in,  oxygen from plants.  That air cycle, is an entry point for engaging with the larger geo-cycles of our planet.  It shows that we are part of the web of life, totally dependent on it. We need all the insects , fungi and microbes for example, for the recycling of nutrients. This symbiotic web started with bacteria that started to live together, inside each others' cells, and then in colonies, and also as multi-cellular creatures such as ourselves.

Then, the story of life will be traced in the rocks around us. People can bring stones from where they live, whether it is Cotswold limestone representing lagoons in a tropical sea in the Jurassic period,   clays formed  in deep oceans , rounded river pebbles from the ice-ages, or basalt rock from volcanic eruptions; each one tells part of the  story of earth processes, evolution, and our place in  this journey,  as the web of life, evolved through time. 

On Selsley Common, above Stroud, there is a bronze-age cairn, a burial chamber, made to celebrate the life of a chief 4,000 years ago. Those people lived in a habitable region, now known as Gloucestershire, in which moist soil, woodlands, wetlands, river and coasts supported their way of life. They could find food, forage, timber, fish and willow withies here.  But can that be said about the future of this area ? Humans have put it in jeopardy.  Can we put a cairn in the landscape here, and expect the surroundings to support  a population here in 4,000 years ? Do we have that same optimism ?   We have become used to thinking it is normal to have vast amounts of energy and materials from China, Africa and elsewhere, and normal to have food derived from the removal of tropical rainforest . There is now  evidence to show that this is destroying the very fabric of ecosystems, climate systems and of life.  

The Climate Cairn says to people in the future: "We are sorry that your climate and biodiversity is massively harmed. We are doing all that we can to ameliorate that impact . We do not accept the current paradigms that put the abstract concepts of economic growth above all else. We recognise a much more progressive definition of well-being, than that represented by GDP.  We are working for decisions, and values to be based on sustainable, living systems, not hubristic and competitive material consumption. This means devil-in-the-detail action not just vague targets and policy statements. This means international controls on habitat removal, and emissions of CO2, as well as local resilience and community building."

 We will also  symbolically bury our  past - the ways of living that have caused the exploitation of life processes. We will leave a time capsule and a message to people in the future. We will symbolically bury the fossil fuels, where they belong:  in the rocks.  We will bury carbon in the form of charcoal, wood,  tree, marsh,  bog and soil. We will learn about the processes of agro-ecology and sustainable urban design, which need to be  unrolled across our planet.

We can also mark the start of a new interaction between human and ecosystem, in which we restore instead of remove. Every action and decision we take as a society can, and should,  restore, instead of remove. That means it must be net carbon neutral or ideally negative (returning carbon to living systems or to the rocks). We must do this, or we will end up having  removed the life-processes of our planet, and we will not exist anymore.  We need all the networks of life around us**.

By building a cairn, participants will also be making a statement which is visual. It says: our community takes this problem to heart, and wishes to live in a way that does not wreck the planet's life systems for future generations. We will be challenging all existing structures that cause the destruction of our planet. We know that this means difficult decisions, and ownership of less gadgets and things perhaps (but exactly how much happiness do they bring ?) , but greater connection to nature, and community well being. Through this, there will be a need to share what we have in a more equitable, egalitarian way; with such policies as taxing land-ownership,  taxing wealth, taxing technology rather than  labour, to ensure a fairer society.

This needs to be based on an understanding and pursuance of the science that has provided data on climate change and species loss. This science needs to be funded, made better, and democratically understood.  The public understanding of Science must not dominated by a few characters (such as Brian Cox and Richard Dawkins, lovely people as they are) who  have  a rather skewed view of things. It must be rooted in a better understanding  of the processes of evidence-building, model creation, hypothesis testing.  And it must also be placed in a context of ethical decision making, which is rooted in values, ethics, law and spirituality, under which science and decisions need to sit. Technological solutions need to be placed within this context and assessed. Nature-based decisions, appropriate technology, using the best science, will be seen to be more sophisticated, and more exciting. Ecological understanding of ourselves and all life, should take predominance over technological 'labour-saving' devices. In short, understanding of the role an insect as it buzzes into a flower, will be seen to be more rewarding, exciting and empowering, than clicking on to a twitter account !

The climate cairn will  symbolise continuity in the landscape. We do not accept that Britain will just become dried out,  perhaps like Greece, and that Greece will become like the Sahara and the Sahara will become utterly uninhabitable. What were the ecologists thinking when they started to accept these paradigms, and talked about adaptation, without resistance? Going right back to the 1990's....this supine passivity has not helped. (But most blame lies with the distortion of the corporations who have corrupted government across the world.)





**, the microbes in our gut, on our skin, in our mouths and in our soil.  We need the forests to form habitable climates, soil, retain run-off, harbour insects, fruits and fungi. We need the marshes and mangroves to hold water, and protect coasts.  We won't exist without these co-habitants, these symbionts. But who is 'we' ?    !    The word 'we' should include chimp, orang and gorilla: are they not 'we' ?   And the toadstool, and sparrow are they not too , 'we'. ?



* and the carbon dioxide we breath out, which is in turn absorbed by plants, sequestered into bogs, trunks, soil and roots, formed into coal, gas and oil, and stored away in the bowels of the earth. Carbon storage, carbon release. Rain, carbonates, limestone, being a major part of this story: Basalt reacts with rain, forms into bicarbonates, taken to to the sea: this is a carbon draw-down mechanism, which operates over millenia, much slower than humans are releasing the carbon, and yet a part of the story.