What the F***  ?
By Eleanor Munro

In China and beyond, we see the rise of a new surveillance state,
supported with the argument that we need to monitor  people, by  phone, drone 
and CCTV in order to trace who might have contaminated whom with a virus, in order to contain  that virus.

It is ironic that states want to closely regulate people, but have not been regulating business, and markets for these last 30 years, since the idea of the globalised world arose (in other words an unregulated market).

The neo-liberal policies of the un-regulated market, accumulating wealth in elites who want to eat more meat,  travel around,  and consume more resources; are all about reducing any burdens (like tax) or planning regulations, to allow more and more economic growth, and more and more consumption of materials. 

It is therefore unfair, and bizarre but not surprising that the state will now control the individual but not a company.

The growing obsession with travel, and digital gadgets is promoted in state-funded media such as the BBC News channel with its ‘Travel ‘ programme, and ‘Click’ programme.
For years it has been clear that this so-called ‘interest’  in the world (called ‘travel’), is actually self-centred and has  been destroying the planet through greenhouse gas emissions and removal of habitats and species. And now we see how it also spreads  diseases.

The transference of Covid 19 into Europe is due to the mobility of people to-ing and fro-ing across continents.  The appearance of new viruses in humans is also linked to habitat destruction, and ever rising demands for meat and novelty. Factory farming in China may be a factor in pushing small holders off the land, who  then sought a livelihood in the wild-animal trade. 
And it is the wealth of the middle class, which fuels it.
The trade in bush meat in Africa led to the transference of Ebola from monkeys into humans.
Much bush meat in Africa is for the urban elite.

SINCE OUR DISEASES HAVE LARGELY COME FROM CLOSE CONTACT WITH ANIMALS,  the way to avoid such disasters as Covid-19  is to cut down, avoid and eliminate close contact with animals. It is likely  that covid 19 has come from bats or another wild animal, in a market in Wuhan, China.  SARS (South Asian Respiratory Sydrome) came from bats.

I heard a description by an eye witness  on the radio who described the appalling conditions in Chinese wild food markets.
He described cages on top of each other including wild bats who would be defecating onto the animals below, such as pangolins. These are the ideal conditions for a pathogen to transfer to another animal, and from that one into humans, as  it is butchered, chopped up and consumed. This eye witness (from a campaign group against such markets) thought it was highly likely that covid-19 is a bat virus that came to humans via pangolin meat.

It seems really bizarre that China, a very authoritarian state, that currently is committing genocide against the Uighur people, can trace exactly where everyone is, in order to track and control a virus, but it can’t regulate wild food markets, or prevent the sale of poached African elephant ivory. The reality must be that the current regime chooses  to do such things. 

From a guardian article , on Fri 24 Jan 2020, by Sarah Boseley we hear that: 

After Sars – the severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2002-3 caused by a very similar coronavirus to the one currently in China – there was a temporary ban on the wild animal markets. Chinese scientists wrote papers on the risks of allowing people to trade and eat wild meat.

But the markets are operating again and are widespread across China, Vietnam and other parts of south-east Asia, said Prof Diana Bell from the University of East Anglia’s School of Biological Sciences.

Although the coronaviruses behind both Sars and Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome) were traced eventually to bats, Bell says bats are not necessarily the source of the new virus. “It’s just that bats have been quite well studied,” she said. 

Man’s destruction of the habitat of many wild species may be partly responsible, she added. Forests and other habitats are being cleared. Species that survive are moving and mixing with different animals and with humans. 


Ebola came from monkeys, infected by bats and eaten in the African bush by people in very poor villages. But in China, wild animal meat is not cheap. “These have now become luxury items,” said Bell. “It’s a perfect storm. There is a shift from subsistence hunting to feed your family – that might make your family sick but it doesn’t go anywhere else. Now, these animals are being sold into a multibillion pound illegal trade, right up there with drugs. They cost more than livestock. 


So the problem, like so much of our impact on the natural world, is over-consumption.
Wealthy people want exotic foods, they want to ‘experience’ the world and travel around it in aircraft, in order to tick off items on their ‘bucket list’.


This is simply not possible, any more. It is causing massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. It is spreading diseases around the world. It fosters economies such as that in Thailand which are destroying their own environment and culture.

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. 

A rant about: THE BBC CLICK SHOW, TRAVEL SHOW AND FOOD WASTE

The BBC should not be modelling behaviours that destroy our planet. Let’s have some more responsible journalism that does not promote damaging  industries.

The BBC seems to think it has to promote digital technology. It has a regular programme on BBC News channel called Click which is trailered with a sequence about throwing away all your old gadgets. The trailer says: ‘’we hate old tech’’. (Do we? I don ’t. I want to keep things going for as long as possible.) Then it shows mountains of electronic waste, as though that is OK and acceptable and is just what happens because we all so much want to buy the latest i-phone or Virtual Reality set. This programme is simply enslaved to this industry and unquestioningly features every piece of useless gadgetry, entertainment, game, VR, AR, AI, robot, and utter junk (apart from medical applications). All of this ends up in the bin in a few months. It is a disgraceful industry that is destroying our planet, with junk that is not recycled. It is also producing disconnected, alienated, neurotic humans who can’t find their way around a woodland. And it is all pumping more greenhouse gases into your atmosphere, wrecking your climate.

Why does the BBC feature all this? Does it get funding from this industry ?

The second big problem on BBC News is the Travel show. It promotes addictive travel: bucket listing, which is acquisitive, self centred, and patronising to people across the planet. Why do people need to go somewhere and photograph themselves there? It is hubristic, showing off, and ultimately deeply empty and unsatisfying. One argument for tourism is that it supports economies in developing and poorer nations. I do not think it is the most dignified or long term way to build resilient local regional economies. Tourism will stop, and start. It will not be reliable. In the future it will be the first thing we drop if we have a spot of trouble at home. Never mind the communities that rely on it. Oh, and by the way, aviation is like pouring oil on a fire. Many flights emit more than 2 tonnes of CO2. That is more than your year’s ration, by the way.

Why does the BBC think it has to promote travel? Is it funded by this industry ?

Instead of the Click programme and the Travel show, why doesn’t the BBC have a Sustainability Show? It could explore: how to plant and explore local jungles. How to grow a food forest. How to build a wind turbine. How to farm without removing the top soil. How to insulate a house. How to turn plastic waste into buildings. How to make a compost toilet. How to mend things. And so on….

And lastly:

Why can’t cookery programmes compost their food waste ? It is now normal to collect all food waste, and local authorities will take it, and anaerobically digest it to make methane bio-gas, and use the sludge on the land.

The messaging, and the example that is portrayed on TV are important. They are acting like proper disposal-dinosaurs when they chuck that food into a bin with a black bin liner, and everything else in it. Please, just place it in a proper caddy or labelled food waste container.

Thank you,

RANT OVER

Willow in Swindon

A willow dome made for Millbrook Primary School, Swindon.

Feb 2013

There were about 10 post-16 year old students who were doing a Duke of Edinburgh's award. 

They were helping at the school for two weeks, with the school's garden project: a whole area is going to have habitats and raised beds, for gardening and play. It is a really good vision. The site is quite damp and water logged, so willow should help this part of it to drain, as the willow roots soak up moisture from a large area and depth around itself.

The day before we made the dome, the students had gone to Coates Water Park on the edge of swindon,and they had harvested some willow there with the ranger.

So they had seen how it grows in a wet place, and forms a tree with multiple stems. It was really good and bendy so was definitely a kind of osier willow, although I am not sure which sort it was.  Osier willows are the sort used for basketry and weaving, they are very bendy and do not snap. A goat willow however, (which has its pussy willow flowers out in early spring) does not bend well, and snaps.

We removed  the turf from the circle, and loosened the soil, to a depth of 1 foot, then we chose the longest willow lengths to form the main structure. The bases went into the ground 1 foot deep. The dome was about 8-10 feet across.

 The following day, the students and the co-ordinator, teacher Sue Thorn, madeanother willow sculpture beside the first one: this lovely bower over a carved chair. The chair is in memory of a pupil at the school who died from illness. It will be a story telling chair. It was great that they could use their skills to make this on their own.