Monthly Archives: July 2013

Climate Change – Who Do You Believe?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in January 2013

It’s a tough call. On the one hand, there was an editorial in the Observer last Sunday that proclaimed “Now No One Can Deny that the World is Getting Warmer”

On the other hand, the Mail on Sunday, admittedly not a publication that has ever been accused of harbouring tree hugging tendencies in its newsroom, declared on the same day: “Global Warming Stopped 16 Years Ago, Met Office Report Reveals: Mail on Sunday Got it Right About Warming… So Who Are the ‘Deniers’ Now?”

That two UK newspapers published on the same day can carry such contradictory stories on the same subject of such global importance illustrates the problems faced by those who seek to communicate the facts about climate change to both political leaders and the general public and expect them to take rational decisions based on those facts.

The Observer editorial concerns the publication, in draft form at present, of the US Government’s National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee’s Climate Assessment Report.
The introduction to the report is presented in the form of a ‘Letter to the American People’ and the first sentences leave the reader in no doubt about what is to come:

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present. This report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee concludes that the evidence for a changing climate has strengthened considerably since the last National Climate Assessment report, written in 2009. Many more impacts of human-caused climate change have now been observed.”

The report extends to 1,146 pages of assessment compiled by a team of 240 scientists and will be subject to a review by the US National Academy of Sciences alongside the public consultation process before the final version is published later this year. There is no doubt that the content of the report is deeply disturbing but one thing that is really striking is the uncompromising, unequivocal way in which the report’s authors – representing some of the leading thinking in the field with access to the widest and deepest sets of data in existence – spell out their message: man-made climate change is real and it is affecting real people in the real world now. It is hard to believe that this report has originated in the same country that recently held a Presidential election in which the issues that 240 leading scientists describe as presenting “a major challenge for society” barely received a mention from either of the candidates, including the one who is now responsible for leading the world’s largest economy’s response.

On the other hand, the Mail on Sunday appears to have reverted to the belief that climate change is a leftwing conspiracy designed to undermine Western capitalist society, or at least house prices in the Home Counties. More particularly, the paper has seized on the fact that a report by the UK Met Office appears to suggest that there has been a slowdown in the rate of increase in global average temperatures. The facts, inevitably, are not so clear cut: the Met Office’s new projections, generated by a new computer model that the agency itself heavily caveats, are that temperatures over the period 2012-16 will be 0.43 degrees C above the average for the period 1971-2000 as opposed to the previous prediction of 0.54 degrees. Hardly dramatic or conclusive, especially when one considers that the confidence ranges for the new and old predictions are 0.28-0.59 and 0.36-0.72 degrees respectively. In addition to the fact that an increase in temperatures above the previously forecast level is well within these parameters, the model compares future temperatures to a 30-year average that itself shows a significant warming trend compared to previous decades.
An overwhelming majority of respected scientific thinking agrees that anthropogenic (man-made) climate change is a reality and has done for quite some time but, to read the popular press, one could be forgiven for thinking that the issue is still in doubt and that there is no need for politicians to take difficult decisions or for people to make changes to their lifestyles.
One of the coalition government’s new, and much applauded, initiatives on taking office was to establish an independent Office for Budget Responsibility to ensure that economic forecasting and the collation and publishing of data regarding key economic indicators are kept separate from policy-making. Perhaps it is time for an independent Office for Climate Responsibility.

2012: Weird Weather or Changing Climate?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in March 2013

There have been a number of sets of weather and climate-related data published in the last couple of weeks that illustrate just how extreme the weather was in the UK in 2012 and how this fits into a picture of a global climate that appears to be warming at a faster rate than was previously thought.
A report on the drought and flooding experience in the UK in 2012 by the Environment Agency and reported in The Observer on 2nd March shows that flooding was recorded on 20% of days last year and drought on 25%, often in the same parts of the country with some rivers experiencing both their lowest and highest recorded levels within the space of a few months.

Following hot on the heels of this report comes the news that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have showed the second largest annual increase on record. Data just released show that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere rose 2.67 parts per million to 395ppm.

News that global efforts to reduce emissions have not only so far failed to lower the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but that these levels are actually increasing at a record rate will, or certainly should, make sobering reading for governments and policy makers around the world.
The 2007 Bali Climate Change Declaration formally set out the consensus view of the world’s leading climate scientists that, in order to avert potentially disastrous consequences, the increase in global temperatures should be limited to no more than 2 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In order to limit the rise in temperatures to 2 Degrees, the scientists’ view was that atmospheric CO2 levels should be “stabilised at a level well below 450ppm” and that, in order to achieve this, emissions would need to peak and then decline in the 10-15 years following 2007. The fact that, 6 years into this timeframe, CO2 levels are continuing to rise at an increasing rate, casts doubt on the ability of the global community to achieve the 2 Degrees cap on warming. This limit of 2 Degrees has been adopted by many of the world’s developed economies, including the European Union, and the fact that its achievement is now in doubt will come as a major blow to governments and campaigners alike.

The fact is that even a 2 Degrees rise in global temperatures is predicted by many to have dramatic consequences so the prospect of an even greater increase is a grim one indeed.

You would think that an impending global calamity of this nature would be front page news and would galvanise governments into action, spurred on by the demands of their electorates and constant media scrutiny of the progress they were making towards averting disaster. In fact, research published earlier this year by Media Matters in the United States shows that, while 2012 was the warmest year on record, this was not reflected in the coverage the issue received in the mainstream media.

With very little effective pressure from the popular press, politicians are able to continue to dismiss climate change, and environmental concerns in general, as being fringe issues that must not be allowed to thwart efforts to get the economy back on track. In the UK, the widely-reported remarks in a speech by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne that “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business, so let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe” seems to encapsulate the Government’s approach: do what we absolutely have to but be in no rush to adopt a leadership position on the issue.

Also in the papers is the news that the country’s two largest heritage organisations, English Heritage and The National Trust, have won a high court battle to stop a windfarm being built in Northamptonshire in a location that would adversely impact views of and from the Trust’s property at Lyveden New Bield, which is an Elizabethan ruin. Now I used to live very close to Lyveden and it is indeed a remarkable monument and there are many very good arguments for not building a windfarm in its vicinity, not least the fact that Northamptonshire is one of the least windy counties in England. However, I do wonder what could be achieved if the country’s largest heritage charity and a government quango could join forces to demand positive action to respond to the challenge of climate change as well as going to court to challenge misguided efforts to tackle the issues. It is right that these bodies should be vigilant in guarding our national heritage from despoliation but who is taking the same care over our national, and indeed global, future?

Are Your Staff Suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in December 2012

It’s a phrase coined by US author Richard Louv in his groundbreaking 2005 book ‘Last Child in the Woods’ and refers to the collection of physical, mental, emotional and behavioural disorders that can occur, in adults as well as children, as a consequence of a lifestyle that keeps people away from contact with the natural world.

The consequences of a childhood spent indoors, in front of computer screens and away from nature are now being recognised on this side of the Atlantic as well. The National Trust commissioned naturalist, author and TV producer Stephen Moss to gather together all the evidence surrounding the issue of the disconnection of children from nature and the result is the Natural Childhood report, published in March 2012.

The report found that the main barriers to children having access to nature included the culture of health and safety and risk aversion, including the reluctance of parents to let their children play outside. The dramatic growth in alternative, sedentary, pastimes and forms of entertainment and the lack of opportunities a crowded curriculum for schools to provide appropriate education and experiences for children were also to blame.

The consequences of this decline in outdoor activity predictably include physical health problems such as obesity and also mental and emotional health issues such as depression. There is a lot of compelling evidence around the positive impact of access to nature and green spaces on health and the ability to recover from illness – hospital patients who can see trees from their beds have been shown to get better quicker than those with only a blank wall to look at.

Of perhaps greater concern from a business perspective are the consequences of Nature Deficit Disorder for the development of important life skills such as creative visualisation and the ability to assess risks and select appropriate courses of action in complex situations. We read a lot in the media about business leaders complaining that school leavers and graduates cannot do mental arithmetic or write grammatically. Should they instead by concerned about the effect that a lack of exposure to the natural environment in childhood has had on these employees’ planning, problem solving and leadership abilities?

Could it be that the proponents of those much-derided, mud-spattered corporate “team building” activity days were right all along? Possibly not: the report suggests that unstructured experiences that require children to plan ahead and devise their own approaches to different situations are of the greatest value and that organised activities such as outdoor sports do not provide as many benefits, over and above the physical ones, as apparently aimless and unstructured play. Indeed, the author warns of the dangers of over-organising and over-packaging the countryside experience:

‘We should also be wary of the tendency to turn every encounter with nature into some kind of ‘interactive experience’. Nature reserves were once indistinguishable from the wider countryside; today they have so many signs, exhibits and organised activities that many visitors may never actually get to look at the wildlife they have come to see.’

So, whilst regular outdoor activity is certainly good for improving the physical health of your people and increases their ability to handles stress and avoid depression, if you want to ensure that your business contains innovators and problem-solvers, you should be questioning potential new recruits at interview less about their GCSE, A-level and Higher Education achievements and more about how much time they have spent bird-watching, pond-dipping and just messing about outdoors.

Climate Milestone Passes Un-noticed

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in May 2013

To be fair to the Prime Minister, he did have a lot on his mind on 10th May 2013. The Conservative party was embarking on one of its periodic spasms of self-destruction, this time following the strong showing by UKIP at the Tories’ expense in the local elections the previous week. With a Euro-Sceptic backbench rebellion to add to the ongoing unrest about “Gay Marriage” among his MPs, David Cameron could perhaps be excused for allowing the latest news from Hawaii to sink below the surface of the Downing Street In-Tray.

Except this was no ordinary run-of-the-mill bulletin from the Pacific Island paradise; not a weather report of another gloriously sunny day and not the latest breaking news of spectacular surfing exploits. This time the news from Hawaii, and in particular from the Mauna Loa Observatory, was that the levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had risen to levels not seen since the Pliocene period over 3 million years ago.

Four hundred parts per million does not seem any more momentous than when it is written in its usual, abbreviated form of 400ppm but it is an important landmark , remarkable both for its absolute magnitude and the speed at which it has come about. At the dawn of the industrial age, less than three centuries ago, the level was around 280ppm. When the Mauna Loa observatory was established in 1958, the level had climbed slowly to 315ppm. The Keeling curve that plots the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, named after scientist Dr Charles Keeling who started the Hawaiian observations, has climbed steadily upwards at an increasing rate ever since.

Analysis of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice sheets suggests that, for the 800,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, global atmospheric CO2 levels had remained between 200 and 300ppm. To jump from this long term stable average to the present 400ppm level in a mere 250 years represents a rate of increase – some 75 times faster than the pre-industrial average – that has no precedent in the geological record. What the evidence does suggest is that, the last time that the 400ppm threshold was crossed, global average temperatures were 3 or 4 degrees Centigrade warmer than today and around 8 degrees warmer at the poles. Reef corals suffered major extinction and areas around the Arctic Circle that are today a frozen wilderness were covered in lush forest growth. There is always a lag between the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing and the manifestation of its warming effects on the climate so, even if levels were to miraculously stabilise at their current magnitude tomorrow, there would still be a certain amount of warming to come. And CO2 levels show no signs of stabilising; in fact, anything but.

Even if the latest news on the global CO2 front passed the Prime Minister by, he cannot have failed to notice the report by the Government’s own Committee on Climate Change that highlighted the fact that, although domestic production of CO2 is down by 20% over the past two decades, the UK’s carbon footprint has actually increased by 10% as “embodied emissions” in imported goods have increased at a faster rate than UK-based production emissions.

This trend is cause for concern from both environmental and economic policy standpoints. If the UK is effectively “offshoring” its CO2 emissions by replacing domestic manufacturing production with imports, this is bad news for the British manufacturing sector and bad news for UK workers as jobs go to companies based overseas. It also suggests a weak base for any Green Recovery from the ongoing economic downturn. Gaining market share and decarbonising production would be significant challenges individually for the manufacturing sector to face. To ask firms to adopt low carbon technologies whilst at the same time competing to regain market share previously lost to imports is a big ask indeed.

Chancellor George Osborne has attracted a lot of criticism (not least from me) for his assertion that: “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”. The latest evidence suggests that we are currently failing to save the economy and, if governments do not start according the reduction of CO2 levels the priority it desperately requires, we are in very real danger of putting the planet out of business.

Margaret Thatcher – Unsung Environmentalist?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in April 2013

Since the announcement of the death on Monday 8th April of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (latterly Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven), the British media has been awash with tributes to, and retrospective critiques of, her record as the longest serving United Kingdom Prime Minister of the 20th Century

Whilst most of the coverage has focussed on the legacy of her economic and industrial policies including such milestones as the privatisation of many State-owned companies such as British Telecom and the long-running and bitterly divisive strikes in the mining and printing industries, little consideration has been given to Thatcher the Environmentalist.

As a trained scientist – she studied Chemistry at Oxford University and worked as an industrial chemist before entering politics – Mrs Thatcher was probably better equipped intellectually than any subsequent Prime Minister to fully grasp the fundamental science behind climate change and other contemporary environmental issues.

Although such issues did not start to be widely discussed and debated outside academic circles until the 1990s, Margaret Thatcher delivered a speech to the Royal Society in 1988 that touched on the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, the hole in the ozone layer that had recently been discovered over the Antarctic and acid deposition from power stations and industry.

This address to a British learned society, which could possibly have been dismissed as the Prime Minister, as a Fellow of the Royal Society, seeking to demonstrate her scientific credentials to her peers, was followed in 1989 by a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that contained the lines:
“The result [of human impacts on the environment] is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.”

The fact that we may be surprised to hear such sentiments being articulated by a politician who is viewed as a champion of the Right demonstrates the extent to which the issue of climate change has become dominated by political, as opposed to scientific, considerations. Ultimately, it would seem that Thatcher could not bring herself to embrace the type of trans-national policies that are required to tackle global environmental challenges, especially when these involved challenging the hegemony of free market economics.

In her 2003 book Statecraft, Thatcher criticised the “alarmist” pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and warned that “the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes.”

A further statement appears to foreshadow the approach of the current UK Government that action on the environment must not be allowed to derail economic growth. “Whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment.” One can almost imagine current Chancellor George Osborne uttering these words in support of his assertion that “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”.

At the end of the day it seems that the concerns of Margaret Thatcher the scientist were over-ruled by Prime Minister Thatcher the free market ideologue. With all the current debate surrounding her legacy, it is salutary to speculate what it might have been had those late 1980s speeches been translated into concrete policy prescriptions. Mrs Thatcher Saves the Planet?

Climate Change and The Wheel of the Year

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This article was originally published in The Magical Times magazine in March 2013

As I sit here writing, snow is falling outside my window. It is late January and the world outside is blanketed with a covering of white that is getting thicker all the time. The newspaper headlines are filled with the usual references to ‘The Big Freeze’ and ‘Arctic Blasts’ and their inside pages are devoted to calculating how many millions of pounds the Winter weather is costing the economy. Most workplaces will experience at least one outbreak of recrimination and backbiting about the person who missed work because of the snow while someone else, who lives further away, battled in heroically.

By the time you read this, hopefully Spring will have well and truly arrived. The Snowdrops that pushed their way through the frozen ground at the beginning of February to bring their message of hope and promise of new life will have been followed in their turn by Crocuses and Daffodils. In April the hedgerows here in the Midlands will turn white once again, not with snow this time, but with the Blackthorn blossom, the effect even more striking as the flowers appear before the leaves on bare dark twigs, unlike the Hawthorn blossom in early May which puts the finishing touch to hedges and bushes already clothed in fresh vibrant green.

The period between early February and the beginning of May, between the festivals of Imbolc and Beltane, brings the most intense and dramatic transformation of any three-month period of the year. Within the space of thirteen short weeks, the countryside will change from a bleak, possibly still snow-covered, apparent wasteland of Winter to a verdant landscape that is pulsing with energy and positively bursting with life.

But is this seemingly ageless rhythm being disrupted by changes in the Earth’s climate caused by human activity?

Although not yet accepted by one hundred percent of media commentators or at the top of many people’s lists of worries, where some of us feel it should be, the vast majority of scientists now accept that the natural fluctuations of our climate between warmer and cooler periods have been significantly altered since the Industrial Revolution by the emission of large quantities of carbon dioxide as a result of burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas to power our modern economies and lifestyles. What has been more difficult to agree upon has been the rate at which this global warming is occurring and, when we experience extreme weather events such as 2012 being the wettest year on record in England despite the fact that the early Summer saw warnings of a drought and the imposition of hosepipe bans in many areas, to what extent is this a product of a shift in the climate as opposed to the famously unpredictable British weather.

Research published in the 2011 Journal of Climate suggests that Spring in western North America has been arriving around 1½ days earlier each decade since the 1950s, based on observations of the appearance of plants’ first leaves and blossom. Of these 1½ days, the authors calculate that half a day can be attributed to natural variations in weather patterns and a whole day per decade to the effects of climate change.

Assuming that something similar is happening in Britain and Europe as well, this slow but steady shift will eventually mean that the days habitually allocated in the calendar to the seasonal festivals (Major Sabbats or Cross Quarter Days) of Imbolc (2nd February), Beltane (1st May, Lugnassadh/Lammas (1st August) and Samhain (31st October) become out of sync with the seasonal changes that they traditionally mark.

I think this is a good example of the rhythms of the Earth refusing to conform to our modern human desire to regularise, categorise and allocate them to fixed dates in our diaries. The fact that modern humans are responsible for the changes in the climate that have caused this dislocation just adds a touch of irony to the situation.

The Eightfold Wheel of the Year that is used by many Pagans of today (or “Neo-pagans” if you prefer) for ritual purposes is a modern device that was devised in the 20th Century to divide the year into neat, regular portions and to provide more festivals than history shows were celebrated in any one tradition. There is evidence that all eight festivals were celebrated in one ancient culture or another but the idea of combining them all into a single, regular cycle is undoubtedly modern. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the Eightfold Wheel – modern Paganism is a young tradition and is as entitled to devise its own ritual system as any other religion. Indeed, “walking the Wheel of the Year” gives a structure and method of connection to the cycle of the seasons to many people’s spiritual practice.

We just need to remember that the Wheel is a device that originated in a time and place where such a regular division of the year happened to fit quite well with the changing seasons so, if the seasons continue to shift, we will need to bear in mind why the Wheel came about in the first place and re-design it accordingly, even if the result is not quite as neat and regular as the original. But, then again, Nature does not seem to be as neat and regular as she used to be and whose fault is that?

The State of Nature Affects Us All

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in June 2013

Published last week amid as much of a blaze of publicity that the media ever grants to environmental issues, the State of Nature report was launched by veteran documentary maker and national treasure Sir David Attenborough at the Natural History museum. The report represents a groundbreaking collaboration between 25 of the UK’s leading wildlife and conservation organisations led by big-hitters such as the Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB.

Whilst the report makes a brave attempt at striking an optimistic note by highlighting some of the conservation success stories that have occurred in recent years such as the recovery of species such as Corncrakes, Red Kites and Otters from the brink of extinction, much of the content makes grim reading: 60% of species have declined in recent decades, 31% strongly so. Some bird species that used to be a byword for the British countryside have declined alarmingly – Nightjars down by nearly 50%, 73% fewer Nightingales and a shocking 90% of Turtle Doves gone.

The existence of comprehensive baseline data against which to measure progress is patchy and varies between different species but the partnership has developed a new ‘Watchlist’ indicator, which tracks overall trends in the populations of 155 species listed as conservation priorities in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. Since 1977 the indicator has dropped by an alarming 77% and, despite strenuous conservation efforts and the higher profile of environmental issues generally in recent years, between 2000 and 2010 there was an 18% decline.

Given that over 80% of the UK population live in urban areas (Office for National Statistics figures), we can reasonably ask what difference it makes if some species, often known only to scientists specialising in a particular field, have become extinct. Many people have never heard a cuckoo call or watched a buzzard soar on a thermal, so why is important if it becomes less likely that they ever will in the future? It is even more understandable to question why the loss of less charismatic species such as invertebrates and fungi should excite public concern.

The answer depends on whether we view nature and the diversity of species it contains in purely functional, utilitarian terms or if we believe that having more species is by definition better than having fewer (greater biodiversity). This is where approaches that attempt to place an economic value on the natural world such as the State of Natural Capital report, published in April 2013 can fall short in their efforts.

Despite its shortcomings, this approach does represent a significant step forward in attempting to assign an economic value to elements of the natural world that deliver so-called ‘Ecosystem Services’. For example woodlands planted in river catchment areas slow down the rate at which rainwater runs off hillsides and into rivers. The value of this service is the cost of the flood defences that would otherwise have to be built to achieve the same mitigation.

In order to perform this service, and so be assigned this value, it does not much matter if the wood in question is an ancient oak wood teeming with a wide range of life and supporting a complex web of ecosystems or a plantation of non-native conifers that contains a fraction of the number of species as this has no effect on the ‘ecosystem service’ that it provides. In fact the conifer plantation, being faster growing, may well be better at mitigating flood risk than the ancient oak wood. So, in terms of the ecosystem services approach, the conifer plantation is of greater value. It also probably has a higher economic value as it will produce a higher yield of timber in a shorter time than the oak wood, although it would have to be felled in order to realise this value, which is exactly what the Valuing Natural Capital approach seeks to avoid. Ask any conservationist though, and they will tell you that the oak wood is of immeasurably greater value for wildlife than the conifer plantation and therein lies the problem: immeasurably greater value.
This overly simplistic approach to calculating the real value of nature is also the reason why the Governments proposals for ‘Biodiversity Off-setting’ have been criticised. When it comes to the natural world and its complex inter-relationships between species and their habitats, the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of the parts.

It is a management cliché much favoured by proponents of management by Key Performance Indicators that “what gets measured gets done” which leads to the inevitable problem that often what is of most importance cannot be measured and therefore does not get done. This has led to a well-documented cultural crisis in the National Health Service where things that cannot be measured – such as humanity and compassion – often did not get done as staff were so busy chasing after the things that could be measured and so had a KPI assigned to them.

So the true message of the State of Nature report is not that the decline in species is bad for economic growth, that the UK’s international competitiveness will be damaged or even that some vital ‘ecosystem service’ will not be delivered. The real underlying message is that a part of our national heritage has been lost, that some of the species with which human beings have shared these islands since the end of the last Ice Age have gone, never to return. And this loss diminishes us all.

Harvest Time

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Post originally posted in the Rockingham Forest Druid blog

I am not quite sure where July went: all of a sudden it is the middle of August and the harvest is in full swing.

The old Celtic festival of Lugnassadh was celebrated at the beginning of the month (either the 1st or the 6th, let’s not get into wranglings about the calendar again). The festival is named for the Irish god Lugh, who instigated it in memory of his mother who died of exhaustion after clearing the wild forests of Ireland so that Man could have agriculture. This certainly resonates with those of us who live in parts of the Forest where the trees long since gave way to fields.

Lugnassadh, also known by the Christianised name of Lammas (“loaf-mass”) marks the beginning of the harvest season and is one of three what might be termed “harvest festivals” in the Pagan calendar. At this time we give thanks to the Earth for continuing to nourish and sustain us and we ask for the blessing of the Goddess on the harvests that are still to come – the vegetables in the garden and the fruit in the orchards and hedgerows over the next few months until we reach Samhain and we hope that the harvest is safely gathered and stored as the cold and the dark invite us and the land to rest over the Winter months.

This is a time of reckoning as we reap the fruits, bountiful or meagre, that have been produced by the seeds that we sowed and the care with which we tended them. This is an allegory for what takes place in our own lives; the projects that we began earlier in the year may now be bearing fruit, or not, according to the effort and commitment that we put in. There is nothing that we can do now to change the nature of our harvest. We can only reap what has grown and then, as we enter the time of reflection ushered in by the darkness, decide what we will plant, in our gardens and in our lives, in the coming season and how our cultivation of the crop might be different from this year.

Wilderness or Wasteland

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This article was originally published in The Magical Times magazine in July 2013

The concept of wilderness is often defined in a negative sense by what it is not: wilderness represents an absence of orderliness and control by human beings. This failure of Nature to remain within the bounds set for it by people has been viewed as deeply disturbing and somehow indicative of some kind of moral deficiency. In the Bible (Book of Genesis), God gave Man dominion over all the plants and animals of the Earth and the taming of the wilderness and the domestication (or elimination) of wild animals has often been seen as a kind of sacred duty by agricultural societies.

What is referred to as wilderness in Britain is often nothing of the sort but rather a manmade wasteland that has been denuded and impoverished by past forest clearance and subsequent farming practices, usually over-grazing by large flocks of sheep that eat any vegetation that grows and halt natural processes such as recolonisation by trees.

True wilderness, by contrast, is characterised by vitality and abundance as plants and animals multiply until they reach a natural equilibrium. The remaining areas of wilderness on the Earth differ from those places touched and tamed by the hands of people by having complete ecosystems and food chains: a wide variety of plant life is consumed by a range of herbivores who in their turn are preyed on by carnivores both large and small. The British Isles have seen the predators at the top of the various food chains – species such as the bear, lynx and wolf – driven to extinction by the most successful predator ever to walk the surface of the planet: the two-legged one. The ruthless hunting to extinction of our large native carnivores has left Man and his livestock physically safer but, as many people are beginning to realise, spiritually impoverished.

As our material lives have become increasingly contained within safe, neat and orderly boundaries, so our spiritual lives too have shrunk and become controlled, regimented and compartmentalised. Whatever religious or spiritual path we follow, it is easy to allow the stresses and strains of daily life, of earning a living and caring for home and family, to push our practice into a convenient box, where it can be managed like the rest of our lives with the diary and to-do list.

The practice of leaving behind the daily routine, and its associated safety and physical comforts, in search of spiritual growth has a long history in both Eastern and Western traditions. The Buddha achieved enlightenment after leaving behind a life of privilege and meditating for extended periods beneath a Bodhi tree. Many prominent figures in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, such as the Prophet Elijah, Jesus and John the Baptist all turned to the wilderness for inspiration and to hear more clearly the voice of God. Indeed, the entire nation of Israel had to spend 40 years wandering in the desert after fleeing captivity in Egypt before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land.

The Native American Vision Quest is another example of this practice, which seems to reinforce the fact that the use of wilderness to facilitate spiritual awakening and transformation is not confined to a single culture or geographical location but is part of our common human experience. In the Vision Quest the quester spends time alone in the wilderness away from the community, often depriving themselves of food, drink and sleep, in order to see a vision or encounter a spirit guide that will give purpose and direction to their life.

In the Native British tradition, the practitioner of this type of shamanic communion with the Otherworld was the Awenydd, a word which derives from the Welsh word Awen, generally translated as ‘flowing spirit’, which has been described as the inspiration of the Bard or Poet and, by the British Druid Order, as ‘the Holy Spirit of Druidry’.

So we can see that the urge to ‘get away from it all’ and ‘find ourselves’ is not merely a New Age response to 21st Century angst but rather something that has been recognised for thousands of years as a prerequisite to achieving our spiritual potential. From every tradition and every part of the world the mystical experience reported by these wanderers in the wilderness is the same: an overwhelming feeling of unity with all other beings and an insight into the inter-connection of all existence.

This inter-connectedness of the natural world and the individual works both ways and, as we shall see, this idea has a long history.

In the Celtic, and many other traditions, the King was seen to personify the life of the land. In numerous cultures, in the Middle East as well as in Ireland, the King would symbolically marry the land, as personified by one of the land’s patron goddesses. If the union was fruitful and the land provided bountiful harvests, then all was well. On the other hand, a poor harvest or famine would be viewed as a failure on the part of the King or a waning of his vital powers and the only solution was that the King should die in order to be born again in a stronger and more vibrant form, just as the vegetation that grows on the land dies in Autumn and is reborn in Spring.

This connection between the life of the King and the life of the land persisted in the Western Tradition through the Arthurian imagery of the Wasteland. Here the Fisher King has suffered a grievous wound and, while he lies stricken, the land is barren. Only the achievement of the Holy Grail by Arthur’s knights can restore both the wounded King and the land to health once again.

To put this into a contemporary context, if we replace the Fisher King with our modern, consumerist society, the link between the life of society and the life of the land becomes clear. The wounds inflicted by our exploitative, materialistic lifestyles have turned large parts of the land into a Wasteland and, until the Holy Grail of a fairer and more sustainable way of life more in tune with the natural world is achieved, there is no hope for either the King (society) or the land to be made whole again.