Recent posts

13/12/09 – Sating the arboreal spirit in the "desert of the real world" – What has "Christ's Mass" got to do with Christmas?; an afternoon spent in the western hills beyond Sor Brook, seeking an escape from the pressures of the annual consumer frenzy within the dark of a December day

13/10/09 – "A man sits down to write a letter but instead he writes a book, the book begins 'Dear Sir'" – To understand the present ecological crisis you need to establish a set of causal relationships from the phenomena that we can observe; but what happens when you (or rather "we", the affluent members of the human species collectively) are undeniably one of those factors?

26/9/09 – "We're all planetary hospice workers now" – From local currencies to planning for life beyond the growth paradigm; moving beyond the mentality of Bretton Woods to something more meaningful

12/9/09 – 'The "green-Prometheans"; better, but still a futile gesture?' – We've got problems – and across society people are trying to advance ideas to avoid eco-catastrophe, but what many of these solutions cannot or will not address is the present structure of the human ecosystem that's creating much of the impact.

25/8/09 – The Trap — Technology, the Virtual World, and Hacking the Meanings of Society – The concepts of modern technology and their manipulation by society have become increasingly virtual; as a result does the public's indifference towards the physical world, as they rely more and more upon virtual mediation in their everyday life, hobble their ability to change society?

15/8/09 – Thoughts stirred by an afternoon on Garreg Hir... and wind turbines – An afternoon walking in the hills of mid-Wales, inspiring thoughts on the problems with the debate about energy; people are not talking about the real "energy problem".

13/8/09 – "I'm not keen on blogging, but..." – Firstly, my apologies to those wanting the everyday 'blog-o-sphere'-type brief, digested or vacuous information constructs within these pages; my medium is the word, the argument and the reference, and in these pages I'm going to push that medium as far as I can.

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This isn't a blog... blogging isn't something I aspire to. Teaching the skills of low impact living and working beyond problems of peak energy by taking people camping (click on picture), yes; sitting at a computer and writing the passage of my existence for others to share, no. For that reason this is something wholly less immediate, static, and not driven by power-hungry database servers generating bloated datastreams.

Think of this as a punctuated diary; a newsletter of thoughts, observations and ideas on the shape of the world around my own ethereal existence. A prose-aic collection of words reflecting the hyper-Kafkaesque-reality of politics, economics, the media and the environment movement; from an "age of uniformity... greetings!"

Recent posts:

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Sating the arboreal spirit in the "desert of the real world"
What has "Christ's Mass" got to do with Christmas?; an afternoon spent in the western hills beyond Sor Brook, seeking an escape from the pressures of the annual consumer frenzy within the dark of a December day
The Sor valley, west of Banbury, Sunday 13^th December 2009
If Christmas is a time for peace and love why do people get so stressed out by it? We are expected, and usually expect ourselves, to accomplish certain tasks and undertake certain actions in order to satisfy the self-imposed rituals of what we call "Christmas", but in turn the modern conceptualisation of "Christ's Mass" twists these celebrations into an secular fallacy of consumption. You can opt-out of Christmas because you care about the environment, or carbon emissions, or just because you can't be bothered, but for whatever reason this doesn't address the fact that the modern Christmas "doesn't do what is says on the tin"; accept that fact and you might find a route around the enforced mania of consumption that the season imposes, perhaps to find a more ecologically conscious way to mark the turning of the year.
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"A man sits down to write a letter but instead he writes a book, the book begins 'Dear Sir'"
To understand the present ecological crisis you need to establish a set of causal relationships from the phenomena that we can observe; to describe the causes you need to look at the factors creating the trends or phenomena responsible; but what happens when you (or rather "we", the affluent members of the human species collectively) are undeniably one of those factors?
The Heart of Wales Line (Llanwrda to Shrewsbury), Tuesday 13^th October 2009
So many things that need to be said but often we can't; not because we lack the terms or evidence to describe them but because such a message isn't something that "our leaders and betters", and sometimes even ourselves, wish to hear. Like the game Chinese whispers, the message of the human ecological crisis has been edited and sub-edited to the point where the commonly used terms that describe the problem, and likely solutions, have little relevance to the original diagnosis; in particular, what started as the concerns of environmentalists in the 1970s, regarding the impacts of human society on the planet, have now been reduced to mere "carbonism" – a reduction of the complexity of human ecology to an issue of carbon or climate change being our principle problem, and a belief that we can solve the global climate crisis through simple, deck-chair re-arranging measures such as "low carbon technologies". The fact is we might have the capacity to address such problems realistically, and we might conceive of alternative ways of ministering to society's needs, but the unfortunate reality is that those in charge of the public debate do not wish to contemplate what this truly means to the lifestyles of the world's richest citizens. In possessing that knowledge do you, yourself, internalise the significance of that deduction into a programme of action, irrespective of what that means for you personally; or do you skip over the problematic evidence because it might adversely affect the "Western lifestyle" that we enjoy, and therefore cannot be considered a "politically realistic" way of characterising the problem?
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"We're all planetary hospice workers now"
From local currencies to planning for life beyond the growth paradigm; moving beyond the mentality of Bretton Woods to something more meaningful
Euston Road/Marylebone Road, London, 26^th September 2009
The current economic crisis may, according to some pundits, be over but the trends that forced it into being are still operating in the background – and will return once the global economy takes off again. Amidst the pressures of our everyday life we focus primarily on the surface features of existence; we have so little time to peel away the surface of what is presented to us, and delve into its deeper meaning. If we did what terrors would that hold for a society inhered by the economic dogma that emerged from that previous great crash into the conference of Bretton Woods sixty-five years ago. The global economic framework that was developed in 1944 has delivered us into the world we inhabit today, but the assumptions upon which that system was based are no longer valid; such bad news might not be pleasant, but sometimes it is necessary to state such a truth in order to move on.
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'The "green-Prometheans"; better, but still a futile gesture?'
We've got problems – and across society people are trying to advance ideas to avoid eco-catastrophe, but what many of these solutions cannot or will not address is the present structure of the human ecosystem that's creating much of the impact.
Banbury, Saturday 12^th September 2009
An intellectual debate where a whole set of questions or positions are excluded from public examination is not a real discourse, it's a distraction to deflect criticism from the ideological viewpoints that constrain society. From the structure of building codes through to global climate negotiations, governments and lobbyists put emphasis on markets, or the marshalling of large resources – both vestiges of early industrialisation – to solve problems; but what if the true solution lay beyond this boundary? What if it's that very same structure of globalised markets and the growth paradigm that underpins their operation were to be the problem that we must solve? If the problem is the structure of modern society, and especially the global economy, how can "mainstream ideas" possibly solve the underlying trends driving the destruction of the Earth's ecosystem; more to the point, if these ideas work within this system to what extent will they perpetuate it?
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The Trap – Technology, the Virtual World, and Hacking the Meanings of Society
The concepts of modern technology and their manipulation by society have become increasingly virtual; as a result does the public's indifference towards the physical world, as they rely more and more upon virtual mediation in their everyday life, hobble their ability to change society?
Michael's Wood Services – Tuesday 25^th August 2009
The predominant view of how we radically change society is by "taking over"; revolutions – be they political, technological, intellectual, or merely the sophistry of the marketing profession – represent the succession of one dominant culture by the next, and are the means by which we take one way of viewing society can supplant it with another. But in a society where our relations are increasingly virtual, and we put our faith into mechanistic systems to handle our lives – not through conscious understanding but by attaching abstract meaning to technologically mediated interaction – is that view of changing society still valid?
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Thoughts stirred by an afternoon on Garreg Hir... and wind turbines
Does the present debate about energy, and especially climate change and wind power, mask a more troubling and pressing debate that mainstream society just doesn't want to have?
Saturday 15^th August – Garreg Hir, Clatter, mid-Wales
An afternoon walking in the hills of mid-Wales, inspiring thoughts on the problems with the debate about energy; people are not talking about the real "energy problem", and instead engage in a totemic debate that creates the pretence of action whilst ignoring the more unwelcome truths about how we consume in our "modern society".
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