Same Old Roads, Different Century

We shouldn’t be surprised by now, but occasionally the scale of the contempt for our natural heritage such as that shown by George Osborne in yesterday’s autumn review retains the capacity to stun.  Salient then among the chancellor’s decisions to eject large portions of whatever remained of his cabinet’s green credentials, backing energy intensive industries like steel and cement (to the detriment of the comparatively greater provider of jobs of the renewable sector) and threatening to do away with laws to safeguard wildlife, was the decision to plough ahead with every one of the DfT’s road schemes that were in any way eligible to be built.  Given the tenuousness of many the schemes' position with funding, it is in a way a pretty considerable acheivement.

It’s hard not to see this as anything other than a reversion to old Tory form, a rush in the tide of the times to what once was familiar ground, hoping perhaps for crumbs of comfort in what at one point were old certainties.  Never mind then that this particular model of infrastructure was outdated and out-argued a long time ago.  The beast of our current car culture had never gone away, the appetite for roads simply appeased until now by a tightening of fiscal strings, a kind of silver lining in a wave of bitter news.

All that has changed and it’s hard not to feel as if we have been transported back to the worst of the eighties: huge youth unemployment, a surge of homelessness waiting in the wings (that is in itself a timebomb not set to go off until sometime next year) even the ghost of Margaret Thatcher resurrected on our screens.  Above all a party in power there almost seems no option but to vilify; all too easy to dismiss and loathe whatever their actual nature or intent.  And the new roads over it all, like a resurrected standard from a long gone war or a mantra for an old school model of how business and people should move.

That the great seismic shift that saw Labour delivered to power, that saw countless road schemes effectively scrapped and a renewed sense that a sustainable transport policy was finally on our doorsteps has now been annulled is suddenly clearer than ever.  And was it really any wonder in a decade and a half that saw trainfares slowly or rapidly rising even amid signs that many more people would have travelled like this had they been able to afford it?  It wasn’t exactly helped by Clarkson presiding over an ever more credulous mass, driving cars up mountain sides like some kind of leaden fuelled conquistador, motoring down to the Sea of Galilee itself, proclaiming to all who were willing to listen that life behind a wheel is still a fundamental for fulfillment.  

At times like these, it’s harder than ever not to look for inspiration to a time when a mass of largely disaffected segments of society staged a huge rebellion on exactly this issue.  And with the well documented contribution of road traffic to climate change, with the knowledge that increased road capacity only leads to increased car use, there is clearly a huge need for a response of comparable scale and passion.

Without sufficient outcry and the hope of reconsideration, the schemes laid out in this autumn review look more than foreboding.  For the countless hectares of irreplaceable land that will be lost to the plough, lost to us and taken from the habitats that they form and help maintain, it is nothing short of full blown tragedy.  And it would be easy to see as dismaying that so many may feel themselves to be left no option but to protest at a time when our collective efforts would be better spent in any number of more constructive ways. 

If it seems futile to urge this government to still strive to do something other than oiling the wheels of yesterday’s industries or presenting favours to their friends in privatised big business then we have a rich history of dissent to draw on and be inspired by.  And the lessons such history lends may still hold the promise of how we might persuade Osborne and his colleagues to set a better course than this; a better course than populist postures that set us back decades and which have only ever served to carve our country into isolated pockets of what’s natural while propagating social sprawl that will become ever more out on a limb as the oil wells continue to dry. 

Taking Liberties

There are moments when life takes on a bizarreness all of it's own, as if everything else had been a long slumber and this is what waking up feels like.  Take St. Paul’s the other Sunday, where George Monbiot was leading a debate organised by Reclaim the City in their drive against the prerogative of the City of London Corporation.  They’d been joined at the last minute by Stuart Fraser, policy chairman of the corporation and over the course of the following hour the arguments went back and forth with many people from the protest making their way to the mic to make themselves heard.  But the overall feeling, despite the obvious deep convictions at play, was one of a genuine civility, where Fraser - and other like minds - were given free rein to speak and they in turn were not full of the invective you might expect from those defending an institution that was coming under such a sustained intellectual attack.

The feeling of the surreal was not helped by an old man in some semblance of Irish traditional dress dancing round and on the spot on the stairs to the sound of an incessant tune that I knew but couldn’t quite place from a mini PA which was eventually silenced for being too loud and distracting.  But it had alot more to do with the incredibly potent forces at work; being there outside the Cathedral, the crystallisation of the movement and all that the corporation appeared to represent and mean.  The name of Wat Tyler was invoked and we were pointedly reminded that he’d died at the hands of a previous Lord Mayor. 

And more than that, the constitutional question of the rights of the corporation touched upon that other, wider theme, that Britain does not have a written constitution and suddenly it was like all the old faces and memories were there and the Magna Carta was more than some ageing roll of archaic text – the freedom that it meant and represented was heavy in the air, not least for the sense that such things must be renewed and it suddenly felt like one of those moments in time; charged and bizarre and profound.

Nearly every one of the Magna Carta’s original articles has been repealed since King John put his name to it in 1215 and it is a point of no small curiosity that one of the only three remaining in law is that which upholds the corporation’s “ancient rights and liberties.”  Quite how ancient these are no-one seems too sure of though they are said to predate the Norman Conquest so that this particular scrap of antiquated law are perhaps one of the few direct links to our old Anglo-Saxon past, where Aldermen were eldermen and the City was building itself up still from the departure of Rome.  That in itself helps explains the strange state of affairs that allows the corporation to exist at a kind of remove from the rest of British life; its existence predates the formation of the modern state, its “rights and liberties” remain undefined because they have been carried down from a time where record keeping was patchy, where it existed at all.  As such the City has never been entirely subject to the all of the laws of the rest of country as the strange ceremonies whenever the monarch enters the Square Mile serve to illustrate.

Nonetheless, the English thrive on such stuff.  It lends events like the Lord Mayor’s show a level of pageantry that almost amounts to a kind of mystique, where the past grows stranger the further back in it you go and all unbroken lines appear holy even if we do not understand them all that well.  And of course this suits an organisation like the corporation very well.  They become the benevolent upholders of tradition, their laws and quirks are placed beyond reproach and to the point where any criticism is almost seen as a kind of affront on all that is best about England itself.

But even with such charity there are things which do not seem to add up.  It seems curious for instance that hundreds of thousands of employees who do not live within the city walls take part in elections where their businesses have votes as if they were people themselves, outnumbering actual residents by two to one.  That in itself seems at best a kind of bending of the rules.  But take into account that the official role of the City’s Lord Mayor is to “expound the values of liberalization” and lend “support for innovation, proportionate (i.e. limited) taxation and regulation” and it all starts to become revealed as something far from archaic, something much more pertinent to current forces in the world.  And far from affecting finance in the UK alone, the City’s unique legal position allows it act as a hub for offshore tax havens throughout the world.

A closer look lays it all out beyond doubt: dissent against the City goes back a long way.  Reform was sought at least as far back as the nineteenth century and Tony Blair’s government were actually the first Labour party in power in the twentieth century not to seek the abolition of the corporation (they actually ‘reformed’ it in a way that only added to its powers).  As early as 1917 Herbert Morrison put it like this:  "Is it not time London faced up to the pretentious buffoonery of the City of London Cor­poration and wipe it off the municipal map? The City is now a square mile of entrenched reaction, the home of the devilry of modern finance."

Today, it seems only more pronounced that the financial heart of the City itself that beats so metallic and tall continues to hold such a serpent-like trance over the rest of the governing class of the country.  Regulation, we are told, will drive off the traders that form such a large part of our national purse and we are relayed this with such conviction, with such a sense of weary fatalism that you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d created a kind of inescapable trap where there is nothing left for us but to trust these high priests of the markets and their voodoo of faith in current currencies and hope for a day where we all see those dismal percentages and fractions of figures of growth begin to creep up and we will tug metaphorical forelocks and be grateful for what trickles down and try not to look at the widening gaps and sense of a world that is being screwed over because there does not seem to be another way.

We don’t seem to remember that the intense competition between international centers of finance has risen to its present pitch since the integration of global markets during and immediately after the ‘Big Bang’ as recently as 1986.  We seem to choose to forget that regulation was part of the mainstream political discourse at least since the Second World War and into the Seventies and even beyond.  Nobody seems to remember the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (which remained in US law until 1999) that separated banks of investment from those of deposits precisely to prevent the return of conditions that led to that Great Depression a repeat of which now seems to stalk us all.

That’s why what occurs with the Occupy movement – and the wider public discussion it has already inspired – is currently the best hope that we have for a better and more equitable future.  That’s why we should all look a little closer at the apparently benign paternalism of institutions like the City of London Corporation.  We should not believe that it is simply an anachronistic leftover charged with little more than the banalities of governing a piece of real estate – its actions and liberties lie at the very heart of the modern global finance whose pathological excesses society in general has had to bail out. 

We are told again and again that Britain needs London’s financial clout – apparently at any cost - but the resistance to the current global laissez-faire has now become as globally endemic as the need for governments worldwide to act together and begin to rein in financial centres’ unprecedented current power.  What’s clear is that this argument does not stop here whatever the immediate fate of the occupation outside St. Paul’s.  It will not stop until governments listen.

It is only with a renewed recognition that greater regulation - together with other reforms - is as necessary now as ever that any kind of balance can be bought to the markets that appear to govern us.  Inspiration for the kind of discourse that can inform such recognition waits for us in the records and aspirations of reformers from at least most of the twentieth century.  It is the way in which we take them up and breathe them back to life that hope remains that the heart of this city can revolve around a greater sense of equanimity than the state of semi-psychosis that modern capital has come to so closely resemble.

Zeitgeist

Last Sunday I went up to St Paul’s, compelled by curiosity as much as the urgency that has been mounting these last few weeks and months.  Part of the underground was closed for repairs so I made my way in over the Millenium Bridge, St Paul’s all soft old stone and grand in the burgeoning dusk and the bright white light of the floodlights playing on the colonnades.  The camp itself was how you might expect it: tents all huddled up like barnacles or Islamic pilgrims at prayer before the monumental pillars and stairs, the atmosphere full of the old kinetic intensity of any protest, coupled with the lively sense of mixed stress and excitement of the capital itself.

I took in the marquees and their mingling Sunday crowds and politicians or people from the press, being fielded and led around by mildly beleaguered or more sorted looking helpers, took at face value a large and scrawled instruction to first and foremost inform myself about what was taking place if I wanted to help.  Overall I was struck by the feel of the place, a sense of charge that has been with me all week and which seemed to have more to it than simply the throng of the people or the hallowed ground of St Paul’s.  It had at least as much to do with the conjunction of time and place and points in history and the hope that can hold in the face of the problems we’re faced with.

For weeks I’d watched with great interest as this camp had ridden out a sometimes tumultuous narrative of threatened evictions and actual resignations and juxtaposition of protest and the workings of the Church and this strange potential for bringing the aims and the values of both towards something like a greater harmony.  What is clear is that, whatever some in the press may have said, the camp has already achieved a great deal.  The protest has struck a chord across the country with people concerned or angered or dismayed by the homogenous domination of a financial system that has privatised profits and socialized risks and a government that seems hell bent on pursuing a policy of libertarianism that is hard not to see as all too often cold and even calculating. 

There has been a great deal of talk about the sense that the aims of the protests seem vague or at least unclearly stated.  But that seems in counterpoint to the very real list of demands released this last week.  The protestors, in a group specifically set up to deal with issues relating to the City of London Corporation (and all the fiscal weight that that body personifies), called for a full breakdown of the City cash account, for the Corporation’s activities to be subject to a Freedom of Information Act and for details to be released of all lobbying undertaken on behalf of the bank and finance industries since the 2008 crash.  Very specific demands then from what have been dismissed as a bunch of kids with a vague intent to raise the issues and do a spot of reading on the stairs.

But it’s fair to say there is a call for wider clarity as to the future of our economic system, above and beyond the vital technicalities regarding the City of London, its hitherto largely unchallenged clout and its historic and perhaps anachronistic privileges.  In the justified audacity of setting up a camp such as this there has been an expectation that the occupants should have some kind of ready-made blueprint set to be expounded from on high or simply from the street that shows a clear direction in which to move.

That in itself is nothing if not a tall order when the greatest of minds are struggling to come to terms with a world where all the old certainties are being stripped away and daily events have so far outrun the attempts of policy makers to get one step ahead of them.  But in a week where we have been warned by the IEA that we have five years to change the nature of our energy consumption if we are to retain any hope of warding off dangerous climate change, it might just be that what could be seen as fiscal hard knocks now could help see us clear of a wider climatic disaster.  That may seem something of a forlorn hope when emissions are continuing to rise despite financial crisis but it is perhaps a measure of how urgently things must be turned around that emissions would very likely be worse were the global markets in full throttle.

The salient point in all this is that constantly and exponentially growing economies are simply incompatible with an ecological framework that is explicitly finite.  This is surely the greatest issue of our times and we could do worse than see the current financial interruption as an unprecedented opportunity to reconfigure our societies’ most fundamental modus operandi.

What might such changes look like in practice?  We could do worse than follow the advice of Tim Jackson in his iconic book ‘Prosperity Without Growth’ when he suggests we implement a transition to service rather than product based economies, that we channel investment into savings rather than consumption, invest these savings in ecological assets and adjust the working week to help bring our carbon consumption under control.  For anyone serious about finding a realistic way forward, his book is well worth engaging with.

Perhaps what is clearer than ever at such a time as this is that any amount of specific policies or suggestions or advice are secondary to what we face as a global culture.  The old fluorescent dream of never ending growth in GDP is simply not tenable to continue if we are to deliver to the generations who will follow us a biosphere that remains both rich and pleasant to inhabit.  Growth of some description may not be ruled out but must be accompanied by a drop in emissions sufficient enough to make that growth tenable.  As Jackson says, that means we should be ruling out growth altogether until our emissions are under control.

What follows then does not hold easy answers.  In the short term at least it will probably not exactly make people want to sing from the rooftops in unbridled joy as all the sureties and comforts that we have grown used to are either reduced or made a little more hard-won.  But somewhere down the line, be it years or even decades, if we can navigate the times ahead, we might have cause to be more grateful, we might find a perspective to look back at the times before us as full of challenges but also holding an undiminishable promise of how a life that balances economic needs and ecological limits could be both rich and rewarding. 

There are other riches in life beyond the dictats of the bond markets and we would do well to cultivate a greater sense of inner and cultural strength and celebrate these: even – and especially – when they come without the sometimes dubious brands of officially sanctioned authenticity, if such a thing means a mainstream media that has all too often grown debased or sometimes scattered in the hunt for any fresh news.  It might just be that we can see in the times that lie ahead a greater clarity towards the things we already own and which nobody can take away: our spirit towards life and love for one another, our ability to foster and sustain a real community, the ever-present sense that strength comes from within and can be cultivated even when the times seem arduous.

The protest here and the Occupy movement worldwide has reminded us all that we have an obligation to root our spirituality in how we live our lives, in how we act in the corporeal world.  And that in itself touches on something profound, something perhaps that goes to the heart of the great environmental and financial crises with which we are faced: that it is in what is immediate and before our eyes, rather than some distant paradise or a revolution that begins next week, that holds the key to our salvation.  Our problems are urgent and need acting upon now.  Paradise, far from being something only more removed, exists in the world in its primal state, something we have imagined and then built our way out of.  In that sense it is in our imaginations that the road back must begin. 

The revolution needed then is first and foremost one of consciousness and - if you go to St. Paul’s sometime soon - you may very well feel it; the sense of transformation in the air.  The road to practical solutions then comes out of such a sense, out of the renewed belief of what is still within our hands, out of the sense of what is possible when we wake up to the potential that is with us everyday.  Materially, the limitations that we face are as real as the earth that we stand on.  But there is potentially great strength and liberation to be had within them.  Indeed it may help wake us up to the fact that much of what truly matters can never be bought or exchanged – that that which lies within us and that which we find in the people around us has never been anything other than the true measure of our wealth.

Riots and Realisations

Even watching on the box the scenes were truly staggering; anger and frustration manifesting senselessly; incendaries of rage from the excluded.  More than anything else, it's been difficult to even start to comprehend it, though all too easy now to see the warning signs in retrospect.  What has been alarming was the scale of it, the often total mindlessness, the savageness unleashed to such a brutal extent.  Seeing the images of a whole block going up in flames, there was no denying that something somewhere had gone totally tits up.  In all probability though, for many it had been going wrong for a very long time and now we were all witnessing the outcome.

So England shakes or has been shaken, and not in a way that anybody with any sense could have intended.  A whole segment of society; derided, scorned, embittered even as their actions alienate reveals itself as septic and unloved - and that in itself is the root of the problem; avoiding any platitudes about parental care, what has society shown to this generation other than mantras to buy more stuff, to seek an apparently easy and double edged fame, to count yourself as nothing if you do not have the cars and phones and everything that marks you out as a success?  Wealth for us has become irrelevant if not externalised; where are the stories in this nation of inner riches, of that which ought to bring us together and help us rise above a material condition that once was often hard but was accepted as such?

England has been slumbering for many years, or did we simply let ourselves forget, despite the signs, that all was not well on the edges?  Was society held fast by anything other than our arrogant and lazy assumptions that the social contract would always hold fast, that an overriding and implicit consideration for those around us would win out even though the wolves have been howling for years?

So this is where we must wake up.  This is where we have to stop and look at how it could have come to this.  We need a fundamental realignment of that which we truly value - and not be afraid to articulate that which we consider important.  We have to bear in mind just what it must be like to grow up in England today with little input to inform any kind of meaningful or vaguely reassuring view of the world other than what is pumped out on our screens - the caverns of the internet, the cult of fame on our TV's, the untold and almost neverending toll of adverts everywhere you look that spell out  where you stand and what you do not have.

The counterpoint is there in our consciousness for most of us, we just sometimes assume it must be all pervading for almost everyone else.  Though I've lived in one or two pretty borderline places over the years, I don't pretend to know what it's like to live on truly rough estates in England today and can only piece together painful scraps from the news reports that have for too long made too many of us shrink away from the very real problems they speak of, as if we were holding out hope that if we ignored the increasingly evident fraying of our common social bonds long enough somehow we'd wake up one day in a better world or at least one where we'd muddle through because we ourselves were not getting harassed or stabbed or left for dead or our parents imprisoned or caught in a snare of drugs or spiraling debt or were ourselves betrayed by our wider society and with no crumbs of comfort as the ladders were pulled up in this new stark austerity and apparently nothing and no one to say that there is everything to live for still and so many reasons why our fates are not yet settled if we can only reconfigure where we're at.

The fact that we are all currently facing some kind of economic contraction to the point where it might be the ideal time to reconsider if now is the time to try and imagine something like a steady state economy, something other than endless boom and bust, is one thing.  But the fact that so much of the pain of these cuts is being metered out unfairly on the poorest and most vulnerable; this is surely a thing we can no longer afford to accept on any level - we have witnessed the rude awakening of what happens when we default on our responsibilities.

That is not to say the violence and the recklessness of what happened last week is in itself justified, that the mounting asbo-oriented culture it was some kind of culmination of is anything other than deeply disturbing. But we cannot hope to instill a greater sense of responsibility in those whose actions are only too easy to revile until we look again at how each of us serves society at large outside the cosy spheres of existence we habitually inhabit and create.

However much the riots may have been criminal and often savagely so, it would be madness not to acknowledge that they were at least in part - and probably to a very large degree - the result of a mounting desperation, a boiling fury that may stand to call again if those of us who share a sense of discontent, who perceive mounting injustice do not speak up for those who have not found their voice and so express themselves so pathologically in some kind of twisted mirror image of how divided we have let this island grow.

Ancient Woodland, Modern Minds

So we live in a world where existence for so many species we happen to share this planet with is in jeopardy, or has already been denied.  And here at home our ancient woodland - supporting at least twice the amount of rare or threatened species than any other UK habitat - is being wiped out at a rate faster than that in evidence in the Amazon itself.   So here at least, in knowing this, we’re given something like a greater clarity, that if we can get beyond the myth that the world was made solely for our benefit we surely have a duty to protect those whose lives rest in our hands, in our ability and willingness to speak and act on their behalf.

So where do we start in such a monumental mission?  There are the obvious candidates of course – the HS2 line that threatens twenty one ancient woodlands for a scheme whose money would be better spent on improving and maintaining our existing railway tracks and which, if built, would scar a wider Chilterns landscape that has so far through accident or luck escaped too much encroachment by the infrastructural outrider that so often heralds more and more development.  The protests against this particular project seem set to run and run.

Then we have the sorry story down in Kent of Oaken Woods – 81.5 acres of ancient woodland due to be swept aside for a ragstone quarry, a decision which goes against not only the county council’s minerals plan but also policy of central government towards ancient woodland.  And there are no shortage of other threats – road widening programmes, pylons, new houses, even oil extraction. 

There is no doubt these woods need all our help and that campaigning in all its forms is now as necessary as ever.  But perhaps the greatest threat to our old woodlands – and everything else – is simply the mentality that lets us think that their removal is ok, that they and the species they support are somehow secondary to our own human concerns.  They are not, in our common culture, in any sense inviolable.  They are, or so the logic goes, the pretty chattels that adorn a landscape loved by sentimentalists and precious few besides.  There is simply no room for such pleasant irrelevancies if we want a modern and functioning nation.  So the roads are ushered in, high speed lines are laid out as some kind of sleek and greener future and the end justifies any means because industry and commerce must win out, because these are the wheels that keep our world turning even when such cogs drive our own end as much as the scraps of habitat that happen to be in the way.

We can fight any number of projects and - where they threaten precious ecosystems, protected by laws that are routinely deemed fit to be overidden – it is right that people should do so.  But if we are serious about preserving them for good, if we are serious about somehow grappling with the underlying assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and even that most unmodern of mindsets: the stories we tell ourselves, we have to see more clearly the ancient change in attitude - what you might even call the original sin - that let us think this world was ours to do with as we please.  Without the shift in perspective such insight would hopefully bring, we will ultimately still be simply pushing at revolving doors, or banging our heads against walls.  If we do not change the state of mind that underpins each push then even immediate success in any campaign will be rendered temporary because the beast would still live that breathes life into yet another threat and then another.

A long time ago there was no need to sweep aside the plants and animals that did not appear to matter to our immediate concerns.  The day such acts became permissible was perhaps the inception for the sorry times we face today.  The more we can all recognise that and struggle to imagine a way beyond it is perhaps the greatest and most important challenge we face.  Until then nature will remain apparently expendable as will our own lifelines that she carries, a reminder if one was still needed that there is no boundary between us and the world around us except that which we have created in our minds.  Demolishing that arbitrary and hitherto all too powerful border has never been more urgent or more vital. 

Boots, Blisters and Barrows

So this Solstice I went walking with some friends, joined the Ridgeway on the Thames past scores of women in fancy hats in Reading station, knowing that staying at home wasn’t an option even though the weather forecast did little to encourage thoughts of camping.  We missioned fifteen miles that afternoon, slept in an oversized hedge, a random late night friend of a friend turning up unexpected to me with a bottle of mead and everything looked like it had started to look up.  So past White Horse Hill the next day and an existential-conversationed stop at Wayland’s Smithy with one of us departing from bad boots and a blister the size of a cherry tomato.  Later, we trudged down an A-road and then a green lane that for the first few miles did a good impression of being anything but a green lane.  Past Liddington fort and nearing the end of the day, we finally wound up in a copse beneath the ridge in various states of pain and exhaustion and wonder.

Somehow the blisters did not come for me but for others it was like walking on nails and bubble wrap at once to the point where as we stopped just shy of the motorway crossing, a friend knelt with his head to the kerb and every bit of his body language spoke of pain and composure at once, of wanting to go on and being severely put to the test.  A few of us went up the hillfort that night, came across a gang of wannabe-gangster and moped-ed teenagers who may or may not have been responsible for the burning of the roundhouse there that I helped build five years ago now.  Two gateposts still stood, charred a bit but still with the original carvings of twin snakes.  Liddington sat between the two on the horizon, reminding me of the four-post-wide gap that had once been there that opened up the view from a darkened interior to all the hills beyond.

The area has always held some kind of almost inexplicable magic for me.  I don’t know if it was from the first time I’d walked up this way, fuelled by mini popadoms from a skip in Devizes after a trip down the canal on a boat, together with a bag of hash and no real gear besides my german army boots, a modern, summer sleeping bag and an old sports holdall which just about did a good impression of a rucksack.  Dry then the summer and me walking down the Lambourne road after a night at the Smithy, and dust on my face and a welcome from a man who’d been at Snelsmore before anyone else and kittens in the bender on the camp from the semi-feral black cat who had only just returned since the eviction.

It might have the mission a few of us made, travelling up in some last minute enterprise and camping in a copse on a track halfway up the hill itself.  It was a strange arrival, some huge looming mass in the dark as we approached; a cow we thought but then it turned out to be some kind of standing stone and when my friend began to read staccato phrases from the instant flint flash of his lighter I thought he was making it up.  But there they were, quite real the words when I looked, memorials to the Victorian naturalist Richard Jeffries and a close associate, moved from the top of the hill thanks to the kind of Swindon-induced carnage that had made the torching of the roundhouse almost inevitable.

But the place has an appeal from far more than any individual associations and this was of course why we were there – walking as a pilgrimage to the central stones of the upland, heartland inner landscape of Wiltshire, as so many had surely done before, converging from all corners of the country, walking up or down the ridges that span out in every direction – South Downs, North Downs, Chilterns, Cotswolds, Mendips; fingers from Salisbury Plain’s palm.

Finally arriving and stood on a barrow, a man I’d met at Barbury pointed out the line of distant dots of vehicles stretching up the opposite hill of the Sanctuary – a gathering that seemed almost incredible as a reminder of an age no further distant than the eighties, however many echoes it held of our more seriously ancient past.  Down the avenue that stretches out from Avebury towards the southwest and the Sanctuary itself, a line of yellow bollards had been placed in an unconscious echo of the stones to either side, one to ward off travellers, the other to welcome them in.

So this perhaps was an old narrative, one mentality settled but far from sedentary, the other one more easy going but peopled by people who were living a life much like anyone else, settled like so Romanies on the estates, a few holding out in trucks and other sites but sure of one thing, that it is right to come to ancient places at these times and mark the turning of the seasons, to be there as more than mere tourists, to recognize these places were built for such a purpose, are somehow intertwined with our own fates and destinies as sure as stone is stone and that grass is still green when there’s rain.

So we partied and danced and played tunes and stayed up to see in the dawn and somehow there was something here that felt right; our being on the land again, however briefly, even in our small symbolic walking to the spot.  It was a reminder, brief but deep and pertinent, a moment like an acupuncturist’s needle that spoke of how life can be when we live it together in something approaching some kind of natural order.

I felt different leaving the stones, something that had more to it than simply the minimal food of the last few days or the sleep deprivation or the mead.  It felt like everything that must be done was somehow now more possible.  The land and the sky seemed more alive, animated and lit up by showers and sunlight and even faith in humanity had somehow been restored thanks to the excellent company.  And all these days and decades of cultural clash seemed to be somehow transparent or melting away in the knowledge that we’d made it once again, that it felt good to be here, that suddenly the world appeared to be turning on some kind of better axis. 

And that was the point of it all when all the arguments of antiquarians, all the neo-pagan highs and lows of mashedness and the utterly sublime, all the crazy face paint, all the slightly strange and well intentioned throwback cloaks; when all of this had been and gone or had been showed to matter hardly at all in the face of the spirit behind it: that was why we were here, to honour something both ancient and totally immanent, to help create a little more harmony in the world that needs as much love and devotion as we can show in large or small acts or the simple pictures of our observations, creating new memories from the experiences that life is always trying to show us, when we remember to step off the wheel of work or busy mindedness or every groove of our casual ruts and simply see how rich we all are just to be here in the first place.

Monsterdam

When it was first proposed in 1975, Brazil’s Belo Monte dam was one of several on the table, riding high on a wave of big development sponsored by the military regime that was then in power.  Over the ensuing decades of bitter contestation the other dams were dropped but plans for Belo Monte somehow remained; to be, if built, perhaps the third largest in the world.  A natural ninety foot drop in the river’s course provides a location that has so far proved all too alluring to big budget engineers.  As one of them remarked with an unswerving marriage of predestination and stark utilitarianism: "God only makes a place like Belo Monte once in a while. This place was made for a dam."

The project was given the go ahead by Brazil’s environment agency at the beginning of this month.  If building work is carried out successfully it will flood more than 150 square miles of forest, affect supplies of fresh water, displace between 20,000 to 40,000 people and seriously disrupt the lives of those downstream who depend on the river for both fish and transport.  It has been estimated that around 100,000 migrants will be attracted to the area by the project, many of whom – judging from the record of previous large infrastructural developments in the area - are likely to stay around, competing for resources with and jeopardizing the health of many of those indigenous peoples who have not been displaced by the flooding itself.  It is one of 140 dams in the Amazon region that are currently planned.

In addition, there would be a greatly increased likelihood of diseases affecting those living near the large areas of stagnant water created, as at the Tucurui Reservoir where there was a plague of Mansonia mosquitoes and malaria and where there was a rise in other waterbourne diseases such as river blindness and schistosomiasis.  Denser populations in resettlement areas can also lead to new diseases such as intestinal infections and influenza.  The Xingu river is also home to around six hundred fish species, many of them not found anywhere else on the planet.  Hundreds of species would be at risk of extinction is the project is continued.

The dam is being billed as a ‘clean’ energy alternative to fossil fuels and essential for the continued economic expansion of Brazil.  But even here serious questions have been asked: it has been estimated for instance that huge amounts of methane – 21 times more noxious a greenhouse gas than Co2 - will be released on account of the rotting submerged vegetation in the area to be flooded.  112 million metric tons of Carbon dioxide or equivalent gases are likely to be produced in the first ten years of dam’s use.  A report by Brazil’s WWF stated than increased energy efficiency could amount to savings equal to 40 Belo Monte dams.

The irony to all this is that, largely due to the methane produced, hydro-power can actually produce as much as 3.5 times more greenhouse gas emissions than would have been produced by using oil.  The Brazilian government however state that Belo Monte will save 19 million tons of carbon when compared to a plant using gas to produce the same amount of energy.

At any rate, it cannot be disputed that Brazil is a young country on the up, and growth – in the right hands - can be equated with greater prosperity and growth needs energy as surely as plants needs the sun.  Doesn’t it?  Were we to lay to one side for a moment the mammoth in the room of carbon emmissions, it might be tempting to portray this story as one of a lesser of two evils, one where the indigenous peoples' plight is bitter and unfortunate but not at the end of the day relevant to the cut and thrust that determines life for modern nations in the modern world.  But that of course is a tragic oversimplification - we all of us stand at a turning point in these times we live in and it has never been clearer that it is more urgent than ever before to reconfigure the very foundations on which we look at economic life and at patterns of development.  We are hard wired for economic growth, it has become the be-all end-all mantra of our times and so much so we barely seem to notice that if we carry on like this these days will be our last on a temperate, accommodating planet.

Consciousness has always been a funny thing, as the famous story goes of the Indians who watched the shore as Columbus’s ships stole over the horizon.  They didn’t see the ships of course, until they’d landed – such things were so removed from their experiences up until that point that they simply didn’t register at first.  Today it is imperative we all look at our cultural blind spots as it is these that hold the promise - if understood, properly clocked and somehow countered - of leading us back from the brink of a full throated stampede whereby it makes some kind of sense to forcibly evict tens of thousands of the very people who hold the key to our redemption in their hands and from a habitat whose flora helps to constitute the very air we breath, whose hundreds of unique species form perhaps our greatest treasures.

As Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund put it: "The government has an important choice – to go back to a future of wasteful publicly funded mega-projects and frontier chaos, or ahead, to the future of a sustainable and equitable green economy leader, with rule of law, good governance and a secure natural and investment environment."

The opportunity remains, if only just, for Brazil to show the imagination of demonstrating to the world that a young and rapidly changing country can still carry the hope of a pattern of growth that neither stampedes on the rights of so many of its citizens nor denigrates the rich natural heritage it ought to have a hand in safeguarding.  The opportunity remains to break free from policies that encourage the growth of industries like aluminium smelting that dams such as Belo Monte are often principally built to power, just as it does to find a way in which the Kayapo, Juruna, Enawene Nawe, Arara, Bororo, Xavante, Cinta Larga, Terena, Bakairi e Fulni-ô - and all the other ethnicities up and down the Xingu -  can help inform the picture of the way ahead, and not be shoved aside by what a few too many still apparently believe; that collosal infrastructure and industry remain the twins great gods ushered in by aspirations - that should be long gone but somehow still persist - of what a better, braver world should look like.  If such imagination cannot be found in the boardrooms of Brasilia, should we then bow down and give up dreams of what is green and good and is integral to our very future?

Antônia Melo, the coordinator of a group based in Altamira, a city that will be partly flooded if the dam is built, is clear about the way ahead: "We will not cede an inch.  Our indignation and our strength to fight only increases with every mistake and every lie of this government."

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Please consider signing the following petitions to help stop the Belo Monte Dam:

http://www.raoni.fr/signature-petition-1-EN.php

http://amazonwatch.org/take-action/stop-the-belo-monte-monster-dam?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4ded0c7157391700%2C0

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/amazon_under_threat/?r=act