Well, they dominate anyway in ecological terms… But there’s been a meagre addition to this wider accolade within the insignificant sphere of human culture, as the Pestival—a festival dedicated to insects in art, and the art of being an insect—won the Observer 2010 Ethical Aware for Conservation. Apparently it’s the first time a left-field festival has won this award.

I’m honoured to have helped Pestival by getting their website together, which is well worth checking out as they’ve recently taken on some guest bloggers, including resonant figures such as musician and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg, who are over there talking about such things as recordings of oscillations from within insect bodies, and the co-evolution of insects and flowers…

(Transcript here.)

When he first posted about it, someone piped up with concerns about Merrick’s tone.

The third question regards the (to me) overly aggressive attitude you took whilst you were talking about the Liberal Democrats. I was wondering how you thought it would come across to the general population of the UK? I compare this to the amiable way that Nick Clegg spoke after you.

Our culture’s gone through many cycles of upheaval, greater and lesser anger against the State and the failings of our elected representatives (and the lack of real alternative offered by their rivals). Direct action seeped into mainstream consciousness in the 1990s, mainly through environmental activism such as anti-road and anti-GM protests.

As the scientific evidence of the seriousness of our ecological blundering mounted, and the blundering continued apace, many assumed that the (supposedly) incoherent, “angry” approach to political action had failed. Corporations and the bland public reality they’ve created dominate, so the only game left is to work from within, they said. It’s the “smart” way forward; ranting from the sidelines simply engenders conflict and stand-offs, and doesn’t win over the public at large. People like “nice”, so that’s what we need to give them if we want to win them over.

There’s rarely a day goes by now that doesn’t show this attitude to be a load of shit. Of course, any intelligent person recognizes the value of tactics. However, I question the automatic association of anger with incoherence. I think this is a legacy of a culture—and I’m especially talking about my own country here, England—that seems constitutionally uncomfortable with strong human emotions. We lose coherence when angry because we’re entering alien territory, natural emotional landscapes that we’ve been alienated from.

Hatred, as Primal Scream said, will eat you whole, and has to be let go of. But all too often, in therapy, politics, and society in general, we confuse these twisted emotional brambles with the healthy shoots of anger. Our lack of emotional literacy leaves us prey to those who want us to “let go”, when actually they’re talking about repressing.

Merrick got quite a few boos at Glastonbury. The commenter on his blog took this as an indication that, if even such a left-leaning audience as Glastonbury Festival booed, the public at large would react badly to the anger expressed at the Lib Dem’s failure to offer a real alternative. Therefore, we should tone down our anger, and be more “amiable”, like Clegg. Better still, we could “let go” of our anger…

If you’re not angry—at least sometimes—at 99% of politicians today, you’re blind or numb, or both. And if you think the way forward is to publically make our emotions conform to the flattened landscape that is preferred by politics and corporations, where most of us are forced to live much of the time, you’re wrong. This public landscape, where spontaneous emotion is distrusted, and emotion and intelligence are forced apart, is the medium through which our catastrophic disconnection from nature and each other is expressed.

Anger isn’t a “solution”, and focused on to the exclusion of joy, sadness, compassion, and the rest of the spectrum (a reasonable working definition of “hate”), it can become as much of a distortion of humanity as its repression. But it’s precisely the amiable fuzziness, the tactical avoidance of anything uncomfortable or unseemly, of people like Clegg that has us continuing our trajectory towards ecological collapse.

The apocalypse is enabled with a whimper, not a bang.

Obviously, in the face of the urgent need for action on climate change, this is lunacy, on the part of E.ON and everyone supporting them. What’s more, I’m more convinced each day that the current economic crisis has to be taken as a cue to stop listening to the pro-growth voices in society—which are either almost silent, as we take the benefits of growth as gospel, or loud and rabid, in defence against the increasing awareness that growth enriches the few, impoverishes the many, and endangers the planet (to paraphrase Richard Douthwaite). Equating growth with better quality of life is a delusion that will go down in history as a far greater disaster than the belief that a guy with a beard in the sky controls everything.

What to do? Well, one current bit of online activism put forward by Merrick on Head Heritage is to Google bomb E.ON‘s website. Check out Merrick’s article for details.

This post is my contribution. All the links to E.ON here are pointing somewhere other than their website—click to find out. If you’ve got a blog or website, join in and add your little spanner to the works.

Well, Shed Week 2008 is now over, so it’s a little late to enter this shed into the competition. In any case, it’s not “my shed”, so I can’t claim any responsibility for its wondrous condition. But I’ve been enjoying living with it recently. Kirsty claims a preference for “the more ramshackle” sheds; I’m sure she would appreciate it, too:

It’s way beyond repair. I’m not sure how long it would take me to get around to dismantling it if I owned the property. But it wouldn’t be pure laziness holding me back; there’s a messy, downtrodden poetry to it that would be missed.

I remember seeing a documentary where one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters (or perhaps Kesey himself), showed the fabled original bus, the mobile freak machine that toured ceaselessly through America’s psychedelic meltdown. Currently it’s a rusting wreck among some trees on a farm somewhere. The guy showing it pointed out the slowly peeling paint and rusting body, and delightedly elaborated his vision of it as a slow-motion strip-tease, the decay of industrial artifice in the face of nature’s inexorable force as a kind of gradual, erotic revelation of essentials.

This shed is almost an opposite to that vision. Human construction is similarly being decomposed by the elements, but the abundance of foliage alongside this organic deconstruction, moving in to colonize the hapless wooden structure, is a kind of engulfment, an enfolding, an embrace. Erotic, but more intimate than theatrical.

Trees were felled, sliced into regular lengths, and reassembled into a shelter for human use. Now the plants are reclaiming their remnants. It makes me think of J.G. Ballard’s visions in The Unlimited Dream Company, of London overrun by tropical flora; or that recent book about how the biosphere would evolve in the next century or few if humans just vanished, leaving their artifacts behind for nature to molest and merge with.

I think it would be possible to pry the ivy-smothered door and creep in, but I don’t want to. It feels like it would be an invasion into private space, a corner of this dense city that’s been re-created as a pocket of wilderness. I hear foxes sometimes nest in there. The cat wanders in occasionally; but even she’s cautious.

Some day it’ll need to be torn down. But until then, I’ll relish being the neighbour of this mysterious icon of the wild.

As I ended up stalling halfway through series 3 of Battlestar Galactica, I skipped over Amy Kind’s discussion of Cylon identity when I heard her spoiler warning—straight to Erik Davis‘ discussion of “the Imaginal”.

This term was coined (or, at least, popularized—if even that is the right word) by the French scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, in an attempt to distinguish the realm of visionary reality that holds its own between the worlds of pure matter and pure spirit, from the “merely imaginary”.

I’ve become aware of Corbin’s work via James Hillman, but I’ve yet to dive into what I gather are the immense depths of his writings. The Imaginal is a slippery concept, and I suppose getting any kind of grasp on it involves either the arcane, discursive tactics of complex intellectual perspectives, or a form of mirroring it in allusive artistic expressions.

Characteristically, Erik manages to hold his own between these two, conducting an engagingly loquacious trip through the term’s ramifications in philosophy, rooted in psychedelic encounters and his “tactical skepticism”. It’s as thorough and sophisticated a refutation of the fundamentalist materialism of Dawkins et al. as I’ve heard of late, all the more potent for its pointed yet light embrace of doubt and disbelief. An excellent primer in the Mundus Imaginalis that can be imbibed on the way to work. Do check it out.

Another recently posted Davis fix worth checking out is his talk from last year’s Burning Man festival on ‘The Imagination and the Environment’. Vital issues, discussed by Erik & audience with aplomb.

Anyway, if you’ve not decided to be completely numb to the perils of climate change, this post by Alex Steffen is worth a read. Coming from such an avowedly positive-thinking source, this sort of news makes it crystal clear exactly how dangerously in denial politicians and the culture at large is.

Two important points. Firstly, there’s no easy way out:

There’s enormous pressure here in the U.S. on environmental groups, scientists and public officials; pressure to play ball, to support targets that are politically safe, to be moderate. But this is not a situation where such gamesmanship will help our cause. Incremental and limited gains in this situation are in fact disastrous losses.

Secondly—and this is mostly why I’ve posted this here—a call to all “cultural workers”. I’m sure I’m mostly preaching to the converted here, but it’s clear that there’s a vast responsibility on the shoulders of anyone communicating with larger, currently less engaged demographics.

We need to talk with people where they’re at on the issue, not where we wish they were. Somehow we need, in the next couple years, to guide millions of Americans through the progress of emotions—awareness, horror, despair, resignation, engagement, chosen optimism—that most of the people reading this site have gone through… and we have to do it in the next few years.

Such counselling or therapy is a mercurial prospect even on an individual level. We’ve got to do it en masse, quickly. And I’d expand on Alex’s optimism by adding that such wide-scale cultural action will be necessary even if we don’t turn this ecology-destroying economic juggernaut of ours around in time. Most things short of the miraculous aren’t going to be pretty, and we need to mitigate the ugliness with bold thinking, courage, and compassion.

First off, why no air travel? Carbon emissions, of course. Jim Bliss, my ex-engineer friend whose head for maths makes me dizzy, on moving to Dublin last year, sat down to work out how much worse it would be if he flew to London rather than taking a coach. Turns out it’s about 31 times worse.

Merrick just did some more DIY carbon calculations, and worked out that – using aviation-friendly estimates – “every minute you’re on a plane is the same as a day’s worth of your electricity”.

If we can make our way briskly past the noxious climate change denial industry (and associated amateurs), accepting that this stuff is actually happening and that our actions have consequences, we usually come to the arguments for “tech fixes”. In many arenas, this is a fair argument – at least, it’s worth engaging with, even if you disagree with it.

Not so, unfortunately, with air travel:

… every other source of global warming can be reduced or replaced [...] without a serious reduction in our freedoms. But there is no means of sustaining long-distance, high-speed travel.

The industry claims it can reduce its emissions by means of new technological developments. But as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution points out, its targets “are clearly aspirations rather than projections”. There are some basic technological constraints which make major improvements impossible to envisage.

George Monbiot

The singular nature of air travel in this respect means that we just have to travel less by air. Personal sacrifices in a matter like this, some may argue, are as nothing without widespread limits enforced for all. There’s a truth in that. Yet my general experience is that this argument is usually trotted out by people who (1) would be the last to support widespread enforced limitations, and (2) use it as a rationalization for totally disregarding personal morality.

The people I know who dedicate a great portion of their waking lives to campaigning for such limits also apply this sense of collective morality to their own actions. I think this is known as “integrity”. (Of course, no one’s perfect, and hypocrisy is the result of high ideals as well as a lack of integrity.)

What about offsetting? Surely if there’s no other way we can buy our way out of this one? Well, due to several important practical considerations, the short answer to that is, “No – deal with it”.

My trip to Malta may inevitably end up entailing air flight, if for no other reason than no ferry services seem to operate in November (I’m a good swimmer, but not exceptional). But it may be possible to include a pleasant jaunt through Italy as part of train travel most of the way, and discovering the best way to do this is made all the easier by this brilliant website:

The Man in Seat Sixty-One

The hobby site of “career railwayman” Mark Smith, it details concise and helpful information for anyone who – for whatever reason – wants to travel without flying. It’s geared towards British travellers, but does include information on travel within other countries that people originating elsewhere may find crucial. Most travel agents and other sources of information are insanely biased towards air travel, so sites like this are hugely valuable.

Mark is clearly someone who would be doing this with or without an impending climate crisis: “Many people would rather not fly, or like me, simply prefer a more civilised, comfortable, interesting, adventurous, romantic, scenic, historic, exciting and environmentally-friendly way to travel.”

Yet again, the philosophy of reduction, of intelligently scaling back some of the excesses of capitalist industrialism, is often more than it appears when forced through the growth- and speed-fixated filters of consumer economics. Frequently painted as a passé form of hippy “hair-shirt” self-mortification, reduction is often the path of choice for the true sensualist.

The fact that this philosophy’s most famed branch, the Slow Food movement, itself began in Italy as a reaction to fast food makes me even more inspired to take my time getting to Malta. See if I can find the perfect Pizza Napoletana…

I’ve just posted a review of David W. Kidner’s excellent book, Nature & Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity. Absolutely anyone who’s feeling a pull towards the ideas and feelings I’ve been trying to articulate here should grab a copy as soon as possible.

While you’re at the library, or on Amazon, or wherever, you would be doing yourself a huge favour to also look up David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. It works wonderfully as a more exuberant companion to Kidner’s brilliant analysis. It’s just as idea-filled, but it sheds some of the trappings of theoretical rigour in favour of some expressive linguistic experiments that actually try to convey the subject matter, of animistic feeling-into the living world. I stopped short of reviewing Abram’s book because it seemed a little fruitless to do anything other than point to the book and gesture urgently with my eyebrows. If you want more of a feel for it, try Jason Godesky’s review/discussion, ‘A Brief Summary of Animism‘.

Go read.

After seeing Werner Herzog’s brilliant documentary Grizzly Man, about zealous environmentalist Timothy Treadwell and his eventual death in the jaws of the bears he became obsessed with, I could write a lot about it. I’m immersed in studying the history of our conceptions of wilderness, and how civilization has positioned itself with regard to nature, and this film is a vital meditation on the whole subject. I’ll try and just throw out some ideas that have come to me in its wake.

The film’s tagline, “nature has boundaries”, is a strong theme in a book I’m reading called Nature & Psyche by David W. Kidner (review coming soon). Kidner sees nature and culture as inextricably intertwined, and would probably add to this tagline the observation that “culture is alive”. There are distinctions to be made between the two, but it’s a destructive mistake to create a dualism out of them.

Treadwell’s fixation with trying to immerse himself in the bears’ world is plainly, as Herzog observes, a fear of civilization (not to mention a deathwish). It’s deluded and fated because he has absorbed the dualism of nature/culture so deeply that he can only run from one to the other, missing their interactions as well as their uniquenesses along the way. Treadwell romanticizes nature in ways that make rednecks and science-worshippers froth at the mouth, and intelligent environmentalists cringe; it’s all love, tear-filled rushes of sentiment and breathless wonder (until you get eaten). But then, Herzog stakes his claim at the opposite end. For him, nature is “chaos, hostility, and murder”. He’s plainly as bad an ecological thinker as Treadwell, with an equally one-dimensional view.

But then, the film is wonderfully pitched, with compassion, curiosity and admiration mixed seamlessly with hard criticism. Treadwell is painfully easy to ridicule, as a trawl through YouTube reveals. I’m fascinated by how Herzog, armed with such a blinkered view of nature on the one hand, can craft such a sophisticated portrait of such a flawed human on the other. Given his strong opposition to Treadwell’s take on the wild, his tolerance and compassionate vision are something to learn from.

The interview with Alutiiq Museum director Sven Haakanson revealed how the lack of connection to nature in our culture was the root of Treadwell’s fatal obsession with “becoming a bear”. This native Alaskan observes that, “Where I grew up, bears avoid us and we avoid them.” I don’t know the cultural specifics of Alutiiq culture; but it’s hard not to also think in this context of the widespread permeation of animal images and figures in the lore and rituals of traditional cultures—not to mention the frequent transitions between animal and human forms in shamanic visions and world mythology. In Animal Spirits, Piers Vitebsky notes:

In North American mythology the grizzly bear was believed to have once walked on two legs like a human and to have killed its prey with a club. Brown bears are uncannily like humans in their ability to stand and walk upright. Even on all fours, the bear walks like a human on the soles of its feet, instead of on its toes like a dog. To this day, the startling appearance of a standing grizzly evokes ancient beliefs of the close identity between man and bear. (p. 76)

No doubt such myths fed Treadwell’s obsession. But, unlike the native cultures, whose close engagement with both the exterior world of nature and the interior nature of the spirit feeds a sophisticated cultural understanding of connections and boundaries, Treadwell’s background in a literalist monotheistic-scientistic culture—and his unhinged stupidity—doomed him to a disrespectful, ultimately fatal transgression into the wild.

Is there a difference delineated here between animism and anthropomorphism? The former is the belief that nature is sentient and alive, and the latter is the attribution of human characteristics to non-humans. As our natural animistic tendencies have been gradually repressed, the first part of the concept to go was the idea that there is any kind of intelligence and awareness other than human intelligence and awareness. Thus denied a free play among nature, our animism came to be distorted and squeezed into simplistic anthropomorphism, popping out here and there in confused projections of humanness onto creatures that have their own intrinsic nature.

Treadwell couldn’t see that yes, bears are intelligent and aware, but they are not human-hearted. His culture failed to integrate animism, leaving this evolved response to the world to fester in the sentimentality of Disney. I don’t agree with Herzog’s cold view of the natural world, but Grizzly Man is a potent and necessary antidote to the excesses of anthropomorphism in our crass, polarized culture.

The reliably astute George Monbiot stepped up recently to clearly document the argument that Israel’s attack was far from being the expedient defensive reflex we’ve been told it was by “the news”. But his subsequent account of the motives behind it—highlighting neo-conservative American strategies for the Middle East and the domination of Israeli politics by military figures—may be just part of the story.

Via Peak Energy, I came across an excellent post from The Anthropik Network that makes a clear case for these premeditated attacks being strongly motivated by Israel’s ongoing need for clean water sources. Specifically, the motive seems to be to gain access to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, which flows south through Lebanon parallel to the Syrian border, and makes a near-right-angle westward bend about 4 km from the Israeli border. Anthropik contributor Jason Godesky outlines the long history of interest in capturing this valuable ecological resource that Israel has had, together with the ongoing water supply problems Israel has had that make another Litani push very likely.

Perhaps the most revealing fact he quotes regards the vastly disproportionate distribution of water in the region:

At present, Israelis receive five times as much water per person as Palestinians. In Gaza, the disparity is even more striking, with settlers getting seven times as much water as their Palestinian neighbors. Stated differently, on average, Israelis get 92.5 gallons per person per day, while Palestinians in the West Bank get 18.5 gallons per person per day. The minimum quantity of water recommended by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization for household and urban use alone is 26.4 gallons per person per day.

Godesky seems to take a “cultural materialist” view on matters, noting that while religion is frequently cited as the source of conflict, more often it is just an excuse used to take action necessitated by more worldly concerns: usually, land and resources. I tend more towards a kind of “chicken-and-egg” approach, and find such reductionism useful to a point, but only to a point. Any reduction begs a question, and while worldly action demands that we stop asking questions, pick a side, and do something, writing is a space where we can keep asking questions. Like, why the gross disparity in allocation of water? Sure, plain old greed and perceived superior worthiness weigh in heavily. Though I do wonder about more emotional and spiritual motives, such as those embedded in the Lord’s images in the Torah:

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey…

Exodus 3:8

It’s too painful now, I suppose, to hear the Lord saying, “Sorry, maybe I forgot to mention the fact that there’s bugger all water.” Israel’s done wonderful things with the little water there is, but at the expense of its neighbours, and probably for the most part thanks to the economic subsidies it receives from the USA, and the precarious energetic subsidies it (and the rest of us) receives from fossil fuels.

In any case, it’s clear that Israel is correct in saying that it’s fighting for its existence; it’s just severely misguided, in the public arena at least, about the threat it faces.

Without the Litani, Israel’s water crisis will deepen; the very survival of Israel is at stake. Either Israel will seize the Litani, or it will perish. Historically, Hizb’allah has been primarily a nuisance to Israel, but never a genuine threat to its survival, unlike Israel’s lack of access to the Litani.

Jason Godesky

This adherence to an image from the Torah, to the concretized vision of a Promised Land abundant in actual resources, surely gives pause to anyone serious about Judaism’s injunctions against idolatry. By “serious about”, I mean serious enough to not take the injunctions wholly literally, at face value (an act of idolatry in itself, I suppose). Douglas Rushkoff is deeply serious in this sense, and critiques the literalism of Zionism in his excellent book Nothing Sacred:

Biblical warnings against the false gods of state abound. The first thing God says to Abraham in Genesis (12:1) is, “Get thee out of thy country.” The sad irony underlying the current Jewish obsession with territory is that the religion itself was founded on the disengagement from the land. As twentieth-century reformer and social activist Rabbi Abraham Heschel explains in his many books on the subject, “Judaism must be a religion which sanctifies time more than space.” For example, after escaping Egypt, the Torah’s Israelites spend forty years in the desert. They are not wandering aimlessly, but following a cloud of smoke as it moves back and forth across the flat earth. Wherever the cloud stops, the Israelites place their holy ark. This becomes the new Holy Land for a moment; then the cloud moves on. The Israelites must endure this process for four decades. Why? To learn, before they get to Canaan, that the Promised Land has nothing to do with a specific place. In stark contrast with the pagan, land-based religions from which Judaism was created to distinguish itself, for the Israelites sanctity is in the moment. (p. 166)

In a world where millennia of monotheism have severed us psychologically from natural matrix that sustains us, leaving us belatedly flailing in the ecological corner we’ve painted ourselves into, we have much to recover in re-absorbing the pagan impulse to divine deeper relationships to the biosphere. But in a world also facing severe instability, with populations shifting rapidly even before we face the surely huge upheavals implicit in climate change, we may have a lot to learn from Judaism’s rootless roots. Perhaps we can find primal common ground between pagan rootedness and the flexibility of Jewish “disengagement from the land” in the roving animism of hunter-gatherer societies. Not, of course, as another idealized model or goal; but as a source of inspiration among the many ways we have adapted, as we face the future’s essentially opaque and ever-shifting demands.