I’ll be heading down to Transition Heathrow from this Monday 7th May – Sunday 13th May to help them in the building of a new community longhouse from reclaimed materials. It should be great fun, a real education, and a chance to contribute to a Transition initiative that has been a real inspiration for me (see below video for a taste).

If any of you are in the area, feel free to come down and join in. All details are given here, including a request for you to email if you are planning to come, in order to help them plan. Ideally, each person would bring a tent, tape measure and hammer! Maybe see you there

My hero Enric Duran (AKA Robin Bank) has posted this new video explaining his legal situation and inviting others to join his radical action against the banks.

For those who haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend watching his inspiring 2008 video first.

What I find particularly fascinating about this new video is Duran’s statement that “I know speaking of the extension of disobedience, of the risks of detention and prison, brings up our fears and insecurities. But I also know from experience, that the experience of freedom, understood as the consistency between thought and action, generates a feeling of well-being that 1,000 bars cannot block.”

This echoes the account of another hero of mine, Tim DeChristopher, now in jail, who recently said,

“I went into this thinking, ‘It’s worth sacrificing my freedom for this’… But I feel like I did the opposite. I thought I was sacrificing my freedom, but instead I was grabbing onto my freedom and refusing to let go of it for the first time, you know? Finally accepting that I wasn’t this helpless victim of society, and couldn’t do anything to shape my own future, you know, that I didn’t have that freedom to steer the course of my life. Finally I said, ‘I have the freedom to change this situation. I’m that powerful.’ And that’s been a wonderful feeling that I’ve held onto since then.”

Perhaps these inspirational people are not simply calling on us to show the same level of bravery that they are in defending our collective future, perhaps they are actually inviting us to share in the joy and aliveness that they have discovered?

Untitled piece by Maria Elvorith
(from the cover of TheFWD)

The Future We Deserve, a collaborative book project edited by Vinay Gupta, Cat Lupton and Noah Raford, is available today. It can be read in full, downloaded or bought in hard copy here.

I contributed one of the one hundred short essays that make up the book as well as the below foreword (the same length as each essay!), which explores the unique nature of the project :

–

“Five hundred words on the theme of the title”.

A simple brief, but having just read the first proof of The Future We Deserve, that simple brief has conjured forth a wonderful mélange of foresight, insight, powerful fiction and playful speculation.

From cyber-monasteries to socialism, from taking ‘phlight’ to the importance of introspection, the contributors have taken those four titular words and run with them in myriad directions. Indeed, some even appear to have run at them. I expected an abundance of different takes on “future”, but “deserve” is challenged, “we” is questioned, and even “the” doesn’t get off scot-free!

In the face of the dauntingly poor track record of futurism, this book adopts a radically different approach, and not just in terms of the diversity of authors. Remembering the Chinese proverb that “when men speak of the future, the Gods laugh”, it perhaps seeks to humbly laugh along with them, embracing a healthy diversity of disparate and even opposed visions, ideas and plans – the useful attitude that the postmodern theorist Ewa Ziarek termed ‘dissensus’.

In grappling with an uncertain future, this exploration of many paths may be only appropriate, reflecting nature’s own evolution, which never seeks to reach consensus on the ideal life-form, but simply creates, creates, creates. Such dissensus also underlies the Transition movement, with communities exploring diverse paths towards preparedness for likely future scenarios, even where the detail of any threats may remain unclear.

Trying to agree on one grand unified story of the future is a waste of energy because whatever we may decide upon, reality surely has other plans. It may be possible (and useful) to discern trends, but the specifics will always elude us. Accordingly, resilient approaches are those which make sense across a wide range of possible futures. They are humility in action, and they keep our eyes open. So let us explore dissensus – explore our various curious projects, inspirations and stories – secure in the understanding that while some of them will thrive and others die, our task is not to foresee the future, but rather to enable it.

I wrote in The Transition Timeline that we will certainly get the future we deserve. As one contributor puts it herein, let’s work for a future worth deserving. And who can know which obscure passion, vocation or tale might turn out in retrospect to have provided a defining contribution to our collective future? The Future We Deserve is a ground-breaking collection of candidates, and while reading it I find myself always wondering whether some of them may be fated to shape our world, and whether the future collaborators may find each other through these pages.

I hope to see many more books like it, for it feels like fertile ground.

Because why not?

A collection of songs from various genres, all in some way pertinent to the state of the world as we enter 2012. Here’s hoping that the apocalypse meme doesn’t encourage enough panic to fulfil itself!

(this ‘album’ is shaped by the songs contributed by Dark Optimism readers last year, and others since. Thanks all!)

Edit – January 2012: Ani DiFranco (song #9 above) turned up at OccupyLSX outside St. Paul’s the other day. See below

—

David Buckland, text Amy Balkin, ‘Going to hell on a handcart.’, Ice Art

With each day we move towards a necessary revolution. Resource depletion, mass species extinction and the risk of runaway climate change highlight the great flaws in our current worldview and the society it has built. It is in this nebulous inner realm of intuition and story that a revolution quietly gathers strength.

And it is in this realm that art has a unique power. Its intrinsic nature allows it not only to powerfully mirror ‘the now’, but to inspire and demonstrate a vision of where we can go from here.

However, if society is not engaged with these pressing issues or actively debating the absurdity of the current system, then most artists won’t be either. It has taken a painfully long time for the predominant western civilisation to begin to acknowledge the devastating consequences of its current systems. Perhaps then it is no wonder that a lot of the artwork produced in the 21st century comments on excess, commoditisation, self-immortalisation and isolation.

Artists are a part of society, and once they are aware of or involved in a debate, they will inevitably create works that communicate this understanding, whether through content, creation or presentation. But to ask an artist to respond to something that they have little or no understanding of – or interest in – invariably produces work which is contrived and short lived.

Pablo Picasso, ‘Guernica’, Oil on canvas, 1937

The greatest and most striking artworks tend to emerge instead from the expression of a tension within the artist, usually without a planned agenda. Take for example Picasso’s Guernica[1], painted almost immediately after the devastating casual bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and famous for its depiction of the horrors of war. When asked to explain the symbolical references in the painting, Picasso would often refuse.

“…this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”[2]

And herein lies our Catch-22. The urgency with which we need to respond to these issues calls for the inspiration that artists carry with them, which could help to move the debate forward into actualisation. Dr. Gerald Bast describes this well:

“The true beauty of art lies in its ability to move us intellectually, motivate us to follow new paths, shape awareness and character, demonstrate interconnectedness and teach us to employ all the things that surround us in a conscious manner. The achievement of social effectiveness can neither be the aim or the purpose of art. Nonetheless art has a social influence, either in the sense of change, or in the spirit of affirmation and conservation.”[3]

Yet unless artists themselves are genuinely intimately involved in the exploration, and can escape from the commoditisation of the arts sufficiently to find their true voice, then the need for their distinctive contribution may go unmet.

In a sense, the future we deserve is inevitable – we will reap what we sow. But if artists can be released from their bind, then their ability to unite our hearts, minds and imagination could catalyse the creation of a future we all hope for.

–
References
[1] http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp
[2] http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/a_nav/guernica_nav/gnav_level_1/5meaning_guerfrm.html
[3] U-n-f-o-l-d: A cultural response to climate change, exhibition catalogue, 2010, Springer-Verlag/Wein

A story that rings just as true in the UK as in the US.

This post was written for the Transition Network‘s Social Reporting project, and published there on Sunday 13th November.

—

Having been invited to be this week’s Social Reporting guest editor and introduce the theme of economics, the burgeoning ‘Occupy’ movement seemed the obvious place to start.

Over the last couple of months I have been fascinated as the occupations started with OccupyWallStreet on Sept 17th, followed by others joining in solidarity around the world, including OccupyLondon, which has been the London Stock Exchange’s new neighbour since Oct 15th.

I’ve not been well lately, so haven’t been able to be there as much as I’d like, but I have been following events closely online and visiting when I can. It has been interesting to note that most of those I have met at OccupyLondon hadn’t previously heard of Transition, and that got me thinking about the parallels and differences between the two movements…

So what is ‘Occupy’ all about? A lot has been made in the mainstream media about the elusive “one demand” that Adbusters referred to in the original image that sparked the movement, and the ensuing lack of a single clear demand to fulfil that call.

And yet the basic point comes through loud and clear. Our economic system is profoundly unfair, and we want profound change. We live under a system in which banks receive more in subsidies than they pay in taxes, where they use their power to actually create money out of thin air, where they receive hundreds of billions in bailouts, and where the graph of global income distribution looks, well, like this:

It is easy to see why ‘the 99%’ might have something to say to ‘the 1%’ (the spike on the right should actually continue upwards over ten thousand times as far as shown here, or more than a kilometre above your computer!), and it also easy for us to let our brains boggle at numbers in the hundreds of billions of pounds. What can such numbers really mean? Yet Occupy has learned the hard way that they can become terribly real when we see some of the things that this virtually unlimited money is used for.

For example, the New York Police Department, which has been increasingly violent in its treatment of OccupyWallSt, was given a $4.6m donation by bailed-out Wall Street megabank JP Morgan Chase, and the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations apparently now actually hire individual serving policemen for $37/hr. Such riches also permit the big financial institutions to appear generous by becoming the chief sponsors of organisations like St. Paul’s Cathedral. Not to mention of course that more than 99% of us work for money, which is apparently being magicked out of thin air by others, who then use this free resource to pay the rest of us to do whatever they see fit.

It suddenly becomes crystal clear why the Oakland public were chanting “who are you protecting?” as the Oakland police force closed in to attack them for being in the streets of Oakland, threatening the use of “chemical agents” via a megaphone and throwing a flash grenade at those trying to help a wounded man:

Witnesses (AKA social reporters!) claim that one protester actually threw dollar bills at the police line while shouting “will you protect us now?” Incidentally, on the same day, on this side of the pond, Sky News were busy telling Occupy London campers that “what you’re doing is imposing your will on everybody else in a similar way (to the Nazis)”. Hm. Reasons abound for us to do our own reporting!

Now, at first glance, all this confrontation might seem a world away from working diligently to improve the resilience of our local communities, but I believe that the links are strong, and I hope to see them grow even stronger. Let me explain why.

Both Transition and Occupy are founded on a belief that the current economic system is leading us to a future that none of us desire and, although peak oil seems to be a new term to many of those at OccupyLondon, we also share a strong strand of concern over climate change.

The big question for OccupyLondon though is what next? Substantial public support has helped resist the attempts of the Church of England and Corporation of London to have them moved on, and with St. Paul’s having conceded that the camp presents no reason for the Cathedral to close its doors, Occupy London has established a site, at least for now. But what to do with it?

The mainstream media have been clamouring for a list of demands, yet I and many others find it refreshing that none has yet been forthcoming.

I fear that setting demands is tantamount to saying “give us this much and then we will go home and allow the destruction that is business as usual to continue”. For example, there is growing momentum behind calls for Occupy to demand a ‘Robin Hood tax’. Yet as banks can and do create money it seems that demanding a fraction back might amount to selling ourselves for nothing.

In the words of H.L. Mencken, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Given the mess things are in, it seems absurd to expect a simple set of demands that could put it all right. Instead, OccupyLondon has as yet adopted what seems to me a far more mature approach – setting up teach-ins and a ‘university’ in which we can educate ourselves, and then giving the resultant discussions as long as they need. It says to the guardians of the status quo “Ok, no, we don’t have all the answers, but it’s abundantly clear that you don’t either, so let’s talk it over.”

And it’s here where I fancy Transitioners might have a few things to say (as well as much to learn!) with our growing experience of building local economic networks that make a lot more sense than this globalised mess:

The first thing that I think Transitioners can usefully contribute to the discussions is an awareness of the energy limits that we are facing, and what they mean for the possibility of continued economic growth (even leaving aside the question of its desirability). If Occupy became just a mass demand for the politicians to roll back the cuts and rescue those who have been abandoned, it might be set to fail, because the era of increasing energy abundance is over, whatever politicians might say or do.

On the other hand, if Occupy recognises the inherent problem of protesting against the system your lifestyle depends upon, then the conversation goes to a much more interesting place – can we build alternative, independent systems to support us, even in a period of energy descent? This is where Transition’s five years of experience might be most helpful.

As Sharon Astyk put it,

“The reality is that the growth we’ve lived with is going away whether we like it or not – I’m hoping that this new emergent consensus that we’ve been screwed comes with a collective response to the end of growth – or the solidarity won’t last as the system pits people against one another.”

So on that note, I hand over to the social reporters to explore this week’s topic of Transition economics. From local e-currencies to the gift economy – what can we bring to the discussion that is sweeping the world?

I recently heard an interviewer ask someone who their heroes are, and was struck by the lack of names that came up when I asked myself the same question (although Dr. James Hansen now springs to mind…)

But now I think I have one, having discovered the brave story of Robin Bank (AKA Enric Duran). He is a Catalan activist who spent the two years to 2008 taking out loans totalling nearly half a million euros, and then donated all of the money to various social movements working to build alternatives to our unequal and suicidal economic-political system. His video message revealing what he had done and explaining his motives is posted above. I consider it one of the most inspiring stories of insight and resultant action that I have yet heard.

Edit – Dec 2011 – A new video has been posted in which Duran speaks about the ‘Catalan Integrated Cooperative’ project – this complements his ‘financial civil disobedience’ with the hard work of practically demonstrating his thoughts on viable alternatives.

And another new hero of mine is revealed below the cut.

…Incidentally, having reflected on my initial struggle to come up with examples of my heroes, I think that it may have been partly due to being in the very fortunate position of actually knowing and working with some of the most inspirational people I know of. I don’t think of them as my ‘heroes’, but I have some seriously awesome friends

The other hero I’ve recently discovered, and would like to introduce you to, is
'Bidder 70', Tim DeChristopher, who is facing up to ten years in jail for following his conscience and successfully protecting ‘Federally Protected’ land in the U.S.A. His story is told in the below news clip:

Edit – Jan 2012 – An honest, unguarded interview with Tim has just been published in Orion magazine. It has deeply affected me and significantly changed my thinking on how I use my time.

As regular readers will know, I am an admirer of the Dark Mountain Project – fellow adventurers in uncovering and reshaping the cultural stories that define us and guide our behaviour. Their manifesto is well worth a read.

So I have accepted this contribution from Dougald Hine, one of the co-founders, as my second ever guest post (the first remains one of my favourite moments of Dark Optimism). It was originally written for the Transition Network site, and we hope it will encourage you to join us at the Uncivilisation festival in a month’s time. I was at the first one last year, and it was a febrile, fertile space, pregnant with possibilities and realism. Hopefully I’ll see you some of you at the second instalment. Over to Dougald:

–

How do you describe a festival whose contributors range from a poet wielding a scythe, to a former banker talking about the idea of a mortgage strike, to an ex-Wikileaks hacker who’s been rigging up improvised internet services in Afghanistan?

Add in lessons in foraging and brewing, midnight theatre in the woods, a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Luddites, sessions on the future of the university and the publishing industry, as well as music from Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Chris T-T and Marmaduke Dando‚ and you have Uncivilisation 2011, the second Dark Mountain festival, which takes place 19-21 August at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire.

Ever since Paul Kingsnorth and I published Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, two years ago this month, I’ve found myself struggling to explain exactly what Dark Mountain is about. There was never a slogan or an action plan – by contrast, the Transition movement does a brilliant job of distilling important messages into simple suggestions that people can put into practice. And yet I have come to see the difficulty of summing up Dark Mountain as part of what it has to offer: an invitation to slow down, to step out of the rush of answers and actions for a while, and dwell with the puzzle of living in these strange times.

This invitation does not have to be a criticism of more directly practical projects – but given the obvious urgency of the social, economic and ecological crises we face, it can sound at first like a perverse response.

For many people, the first encounter with Dark Mountain came through our debates with George Monbiot in the pages of the Guardian. The effect of these was mixed: they opened up a rare discussion in the mainstream media of the future of industrial society; but it was a discussion whose “energy return on energy invested” was questionable, to say the least. Like much that goes on around Comment is Free, it generated more heat than light. I still meet people whose impression of Dark Mountain‚ based on those exchanges‚ is of something combative and dogmatically pessimistic. The contrast is striking with those who have met us through the Dark Mountain books or the events we’ve hosted. When they talk about Dark Mountain, as in the video from last year’s festival at Llangollen, a word which comes up repeatedly is ‘hope’.

The blogger Cat Lupton is one of the forty or so writers who have contributed to the new Dark Mountain book, along with Jay Griffiths, Naomi Klein, David Abram and a whole gathering of other thoughtful voices. She has also written a series of blog posts charting her encounter with the project, which for me are as close as anyone has come to describing the heart of what Dark Mountain is about. Take this passage, from one of her posts about last year’s festival:

“The tribes, scattered clans, pair bonds and solitary pilgrims who assembled for Dark Mountain, whether or not I met them in person or even especially liked the feel of them, were simply extraordinary. The word I keep coming back to is ALIVE. Wildly, intelligently, beautifully, defiantly ALIVE. To be whirled up in the collective energy of so many of them at once was quite something. I noticed that by the end of the festival I was feeling strongly energised; had it been a two day academic conference I would normally have felt by that stage frazzled and wrung dry.”

Again and again, I find myself learning more about what Dark Mountain is (or could be) from reading other people’s attempts to express why it matters to them. To take another example, it was a post last year from Dave Pollard which clarified for me the relationship between Dark Mountain, the Transition movement, and other emerging responses to the mess we’re all in. He offered a diagram, mapping the intersections between our work:

I certainly recognise the overlap Dave describes between Dark Mountain and Transition, and the way he describes the connections:

“I’ve drawn these four movements/models as overlapping because, obviously, they are connected: The Gift Economy and Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, for example, are rooted in the New Culture Movement but focus as well on what we can do as activists, and aspects of both Gift Economy and Work That Reconnects are taught as part of Transition Movement training programs. All four movements are also essentially community-based, bottom-up, focused on the local, the land and people and ecosystems of the specific place we love.”

“What is disconcerting,” he adds, “is that there is relatively little awareness among those in the four movements of what the others are doing, and the possible synergies between the models.”

Perhaps this is a little less true on this side of the Atlantic? Certainly, my own work over the past few years has been fed by encounters with people active in Transition. Shaun Chamberlin of Dark Optimism, author of The Transition Timeline, was one of the first people to write about and engage with the manifesto. I’ve had many fruitful conversations with local groups, not least Transition Town Brixton on my own doorstep, but also as a visiting speaker to Transition groups from Lincoln to Kilkenny. And in February, I spent an inspiring weekend at the Transition Universities conference which Ben Brangwyn and others hosted in Winchester, which was a chance to go deeper into these conversations in an area I’m particularly passionate about.

So from my own experience, I’m convinced that Dark Mountain and Transition have much to learn from and share with each other, as we do our best to navigate the uncertain times around and ahead of us.

But I don’t disagree with Dave’s suggestion that we should get to know each other better. And it’s in that spirit that I’d like to invite others involved in Transition to join us in Hampshire next month at our second festival, for a weekend of stories and ideas, performances and conversations around the campfire.

–

Guests at this year’s Dark Mountain festival include Jay Griffiths (Wild), Melanie Challenger (On Extinction), Smari McCarthy (ex-Wikileaks), Ella Saitta (Dymaxion.org), Warren Draper, Rachel Horne, Dearbhaile Bailey, Simon Fairlie (The Land magazine), Maddy Harland (Permaculture magazine), Vinay Gupta (The Hexayurt Project), Fergus ‘The Forager’ Drennan, Tom Hirons, Rima Staines, Mario Petrucci, Adrienne Odasso, Alex Fradera, John Mitchinson (QI/Unbound), Andy Hamilton, Anton Shelupanov, Nick Hunt, Sharon Blackie (Two Ravens Press), Susan Richardson and many others.

Uncivilisation 2011 takes place 19-21 August at the Sustainability Centre, near Petersfield, Hampshire. Tickets are available from the festival website – http://uncivilisation.co.uk/

Last night I went to the première screening of an excellent new film called Just Do It. It’s a record of the direct action climate movement – Climate Camp, Plane Stupid et al. – made with the full cooperation of the activists, and it’s worth checking out, especially if you’ve never been directly involved yourself.

It is a story of people responding to the threat to their future with courage, determination, humour and camaraderie. It’s also a film that I remember existing only as a flyer, asking whether we would like to see a truly independent film developed outside mainstream production models and distributed for free. Hundreds of us donated, and I was keen to see the result.

After the screening, there was a Q&A session with the director, Emily James, but I found myself sitting there with a question in my head that was prompted by the film, but was refusing to form itself into anything concise and coherent. It was connected with that dreaded thought that everyone involved with any form of heartfelt climate action knows only too well – but what if it’s all too late?

Let me explain. The footage in the film is from 2009 – the buildup to the Copenhagen climate conference in December of that year. It briefly reminds its audience of all the climate science that was marshalled back then to make clear that this was our last hope at curbing emissions to prevent the climate system hurtling off into unstoppable destabilisation. And then, of course, it reminds us of the abject failure this grand conference produced…

One of the most affecting moments in the film was the close-up on one inspiring activist’s face as she is asked “but does all this actually achieve anything?” She searches her mind, begins to speak, hesitates, starts again, and stops. Then her eyes seem to look into her heart and soul, and maybe even to shy away from some of the things they see there, before, as I remember, she settles upon “well, it’s better than doing nothing”.

To me, it was a sad moment, and a question that seemed unresolved, even as the film ended by reminding us that the Heathrow runway expansion has been cancelled, that the Kingsnorth coal power plant plans have been scrapped, and that projects like the exciting Transition Heathrow are growing up where only tarmac and fumes would otherwise have been.

As the deserved applause rang to the credits, I tried to figure out how to formulate this sadness into a question. Eventually, as the Q&A session moved towards its end, I gave up on producing any pithy question, but resolved nonetheless to share the journey I had personally been taken on by watching the film.

And as I spoke, I realised that there is a better answer to that question – does all this actually achieve anything? – than the one spoken in the film. It is the one that is lived by the people portrayed in it.

As my mess of a question/journey/statement tumbled out, and this realisation took form, I found myself ending with a quote from Paul Wellstone, “If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognise that we don’t really stand for them.”

This seemed to ring true, with Emily James responding that she was glad that this question had been asked, and that that quote reflected her experience – that even if we were to lose our struggle for a future, we would want to have lived our present honestly as who we are. In my imagination, it seemed as though she were saying that we sometimes have to put our bodies on the line to save our souls.

The next question from the audience was a response to this, and a simple and interesting one – “so is activism therapy then?”. The response from Emily was an enthusiastic “yes”, and an explanation of how the process has helped many people to rediscover themselves and their joy in life, and of what an exceptionally supportive community there is among activists.

But I felt that this perhaps wasn’t the most interesting thrust behind the question. To me the question hit home more as “so is activism only therapy then”? In other words, are you activists only pretending to be doing this to change the world, when really you’re just trying to make yourselves feel better about the understanding that you can’t?

And to this, as to all the best questions, the answer seems to be “er, yes and no. It’s a bit more complicated than that”!

Because of course we act in order to change the world. And change it we do. Indeed, as a friend says, we cannot not change the world, whatever any of us choose to do. And as we change it, it changes us. And as it changes us, we change it. We are all activists.

And if the story we tell with these changes is one that we are proud to be telling, to the very core of our being, then activism is certainly therapeutic. But that kind of activism is not ‘only therapeutic’, it is spiritual. It is simply an expression of what we believe life to be for.

So the thought-provoking activist in the film was right – acting in some way to reflect our beliefs in our actions is indeed better than quietly dying inside, no matter what the external consequences. Perhaps Wendell Berry said it best,

“Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success, namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

But this is different from those times when activism is based on a lie – when acting is simply easier than admitting that you don’t really believe that these actions can create the change you want to see. This kind of activism probably deserves to be challenged as ‘only therapy’, and a dangerous, deceitful kind of therapy at that.

…And of course there’s only one reason why that audience question struck a painful chord for me, and prompted this rare blog post. It’s because I’ve indulged in a bit of that in my time – ignoring the quiet inner voice that whispers the truth, telling me that the course I have chosen is futile, or counter-productive, or simply no longer a reflection of my highest truth. As Vanessa Spedding has it:

“It would be interesting if all campaigners did this: stopped, went home, and considered what we are really doing with our time and our ideas. Striving to be true to ourselves would seem to be a sensible first goal.”

This is exactly what I am trying to do at present, hence the lack of speaking, writing etc of late. I am very much in a listening phase, rather than a speaking one, and that feels very right. After last night’s interesting excursion, I have just ordered a copy of the provocative Deep Green Resistance, and will also be keeping an eye on the blog of one lady who is trying to find something more effective altogether than resistance. I will let you know how we get on.