Disappearing Acts

I have stood by my window overlooking a ragged Suffolk garden and marshland for over a decade now and seen the insects disappear, the old hawthorns and ashes cut down, how the thrush and little owl no longer call from the hedge, how the green woodpecker no longer comes to forage for ants, the hedgehog to sleep in the woodpile, or the hares and lapwings appear in the fields

Discover the Joys of Keeping The Biotime Log

Biotime, or biological time, runs at a very different pace and rhythm to human time. It can be observed by recording events in the natural world. These can be as varied as the day the first spring bulb opens, the last frost before summer, or the first sighting of a species of bird or insect in a new habitat.

On Presence: Recent Lessons from the Wild

We may think like the wild, or we may think like the tamed. We humans, products, beneficiaries, and dependents of the web of life from which we were spun, can continue our collective course on this tangential path from the natural processes, limits, and communities of this planet.

Instead of Decoupling, we need Recoupling

The path to meaning – and real sustainability – is the opposite; it is through recoupling with nature. Instead of denying that we are an integral part of nature in which we swim, live, mate, laugh, cry and die, we need to embrace that fact.

Systemic Thinking: The Primary Skill That Humanity Will Need as We Prepare for A Future That Will Not Be What It Used to Be

In this article, we will take a look at systemic thinking and the dangerous unconscious childhood illusion that each of us is a unique being independent and separate from the rest of reality.

Robert Macfarlane: “The Metaphors we Use Deliver us Hope, or they Foreclose Possibility”

These debates are precisely what makes the Anthropocene so valuable as an idea.  It stops us short.  It buttonholes us.  It head-butts us.  Then it asks us really, really hard questions while we’re reeling.  I think that’s where its value lies. 

#LookUp

One of the reasons I think our imaginations are in such a poor state in 2018 is that we spend so much time looking down.  Look around you. On the bus, on the train, in the street. Our eyes are locked down to our screens, our attention elsewhere.  So I want to share with me something that I find really helps.

Our Schools are Doing too Much to Save the Planet

We may be meeting our schools’ curriculum targets, but  in many cases we are still missing the larger aims of environmental awareness, our essential inter-connectedness and inter-being with the planet we live on, and thus many teachers, and their students,  are not acting out of deep ecological understanding or deep ecological commitment. 

Psalter, For Now

We’re new to this, all of us. Whether banished from Eden or evolved from hunting and gathering is irrelevant. Either way, we’re a collective eye-blink from integration. There was a time when I wouldn’t have fussed much over sparrows or hummingbirds. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been alone, but in a band, right here, tight-knit and stitched by kinship. It’s no energy bar that would’ve sustained me, but knowledge, the same knowledge as the wolves and bears.