TREES 200

  The ‘Voices of the Future’ project is a hopeful project. It aims to create a space where children and young people can re-imagine the future. We are working with philosopher Johan Siebers to actively think through hope as a concept.  In our project we have been working with primary school aged children to re-design a school field. We asked children (aged 7-8) to draw images of what they would like to see in a field. Our development of ideas, with children, was a collective and hopeful action.   When we explored the children’s drawings and ‘small stories’ we could see an emergent space of practice open out that provided a more expansive vision of what treescapes could be. They were imbued with bugs, and teeming with activities, which cascaded over them like water. Planting with the children revealed a fascinating with earth and worms and the lived experience of trees in the ground. The world they inhabited was full of worms, and it presented a world to us in which i...

  One of the most hopeful sights to me is finding plants growing through, on and around human built structures. Given time and neglect, plants will reclaim the land, turning ‘order’ into ‘chaos’, or maybe ‘chaos’ onto ‘order’, but whichever way we view this, it is ultimately the stuff of life. We see evidence of the vitality of plants if we walk around the symbols of industrialisation, the railways, canals and bridges of the midlands and the north in the UK. Ivy takes a hold, covering bricks in green leaves and providing food and habitat for animals, buddleia grows out of cracks between bricks where mortar has failed. Before that, ferns and bryophytes germinate and spread on the surface of the bricks and in the spaces in between. Given a chance, plants reclaim their world. They have adapted to us, but ultimately will survive long after we have gone.   Around 300 years ago the great Mayan civilisation in central America, that had existed...

  Utopia/Dystopia by Dylan Glynn What is it to be hopeful? I believe it’s an acceptance of risk and having a vision or feeling that a better outcome is possible. I don’t believe hope is without realism. For example, one may hope to get home in time for the Olympics on tele but know that traffic and emails may impinge this. Take myself, I hope my research has impact but am aware of the daunting facts that in some fields more than 60% of publications are never cited. So, what is it to be hopeful as a researcher interested in the natural environment and desiring impact through better communication of the research value in society and to children and young people 200 years from now? I am fascinated with dystopian literature; I feel dystopia makes great novels, though at its core it is not particularly hopeful, indeed the world these books are set nears a worst-case scenario in many cases. This is not to say they are devoid of hope, often the protagonists in these novels are trapped on ...

It all went very fast in the end. It had taken roughly two centuries for carbondioxide levels in the atmosphere to peak, from the late 19th century to the second half of the 21st century. After that, it took another two centuries for emissions to return to pre-1870 levels, even if it would take much longer for the amount of carbondioxide that was already in the atmosphere to diminish. That would take thousands of years.  A curious symmetry became apparent to people living in the saddle time between the old and the new world. It had taken some five thousand years for humanity to cover the earth in cities, from Uruk, the first city ever, which had city walls in the fifth millennium BCE, to the urban conglomerations that spanned the globe in vast, drawn out and interconnected cityscapes that lay like dendrites over the continents and formed a global web in the 22nd Century, stretching out to the remotest corners of the world. It would take another five thousand years for the cities to...

This morning I woke up and saw on my phone's news feed that Thich Nhat Hanh passed away, age 95. His pacifist engagement spanned the world of social relations, the inner world of our hearts and minds as well as the world in which we exist in interdependence with the rest of nature. To practice peace not as the absence of conflict but as a generative, creative state of existing in which we are in free communication with all beings, including ourselves, in this way I have understood mindfulness, the humblest of all spiritual practices. Be like water, the Daoists say. Seek the lowly place; do not move on before you have patiently filled up the depths you find on your way; stream to nurture life without claiming credit; be aware of your destructive potential, when you allow the storms to whip you up, flood and rage in devastating and ruthless anger. "In all four corners / the voice of the water / with its eternal disasters / is feared and heard", a classic Dutch poem tells us...

 This tree is in Clifton Park in Rotherham.  It reminded me of John Ruskin saying that it is hard to feel angry when looking at a penguin.  There is something about trees that can helps us to feel connected.  I have been trying to dig up a tree stump new garden, I've been fighting with it on and off for 3 months and keep remembering this scene from Shane . The farmer refuses to hitch up the team and says 'Sometimes when wrestling with something its important to sweat and put the effort in, over-wise it would be a kind of defeat. When the stump has gone it will still be the place in the garden where there used to be a tree-stump.    I was going to write about Plenty Coups and radical hope and I was proposing to write about propositions and obliquely point towards  idea of prehension but instead I will take my axe to the tree stump in the garden as it has slipped into that time of day, with the dying of the light.