Category Archives: Natural World

Why reducing meat consumption is a key part of tackling climate change and biodiversity loss (but we don’t all need to go vegan).

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It is now generally accepted (outside the White House) that human-induced climate change represents a clear and present danger to the survival of human civilisation as we know it. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced to net zero by 2050 to avoid the threat of runaway climate change. As a result, governments around the world have been moving at varying speeds to translate this imperative into legislative and policy changes and practical action.

The conversation about reducing emissions usually centres around three main areas: reducing emissions from electricity generation, from buildings, and from transportation. But there is a fourth area that requires addressing if we are to successfully meet the 2050 deadline and that is emissions from food and land use. In fact, the issue of food and land use sits at the intersection of the three great global challenges of our time: climate change, how we are to feed an ever growing human population that is predicted to number 10 billion souls by the end of the century, and how to halt, and preferably begin to reverse, the ongoing sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet that has seen 200 species of vertebrate animals become extinct in the last 100 years along with an unknown number of invertebrates (unknown as these creatures often go extinct before their existence is able to be catalogued by science).

 Let’s look at the issue of food supply first. 29% of the Earth’s surface is land (the other 71% being ocean): a total of 149 Million square kilometres. Of this land, 71% is classed as habitable land, as opposed to glaciers (10% or 15 Million km2, 90% of which is the land area of Antarctica), or barren land (19%: deserts, beaches, rock outcrops, etc). Of this. 50% (51 Million km2) is agricultural land and 37% (39 Million km2) is forests. A staggering 80% of this total global stock of agricultural land is used to either keep, or grow food for, livestock. What is more, the livestock that utilise all this land only account for 20% of the total calories consumed by human beings: yet another example of the 80:20 rule (the Pareto principle to economists) in action. With global population predicted to increase from 7.7 Billion in 2019 to 10 Billion by the end of the 21st century, the world’s stock of agricultural land is going to come under pressure to produce more food. Given that the 20% of this land that grows crops for human consumption and produces 80% of the calories is 16 times as efficient (4x the calories from ¼ of the land) than the 80% that produces animal products, logic would suggest that a rational world would increase food production by repurposing some of the 80% from livestock to growing crops.

However (spoiler alert), ours is not a rational world. Between 1960 and 2013, global population increased by a little over 200% but meat consumption increased by 500%. In addition to there being more people on the planet, those people have on average got richer, and rich people eat more meat than poor people. This seemingly insatiable demand for meat has led to “innovations” in livestock production that are bad news for biodiversity. Firstly, livestock production has become more intensive: in the place of extensive outdoor grazing systems have come rearing sheds and feedlots, the construction of which has led to vast areas of land being concreted over. Secondly, the production of food for these housed livestock has also intensified: the biodiverse pastures of extensive grazing systems have been replaced by rye grass monocultures that have been developed by plant breeders to respond vigorously to large amounts of inorganic fertilizer to produce the vast quantities of forage required, supplemented by cereals such as wheat, barley and maize that are grown in a similar manner. When intensification can do no more to increase production, the only way to further increase the production of livestock to meet the ever-growing global demand is to create more agricultural land by encroaching on some of the 37% of the world’s land that is covered by forests. Deforestation, especially of old growth primary forest, is disastrous for biodiversity. Tropical rainforests, which are being felled at an unsustainable rate to provide food for cattle or grow crops such as palm oil, cover around 2% of the world’s land area but are home to some 50% of the world’s plants and animals.

Livestock production accounts for around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and land use change, of which the conversion of forest to farmland is a major element, a further 12%. Worldwide, trees and forests absorb around 25% of total greenhouse gas emissions so it is not hard to see that reducing this forest area, creating more emissions in the process, in order to add to the 15% of emissions produced by livestock is a bad idea. If the loss of biodiversity and the increase in climate change-inducing emissions were not enough, the destruction of primary forest habitats has been linked to the emergence of new species-jumping diseases such as Covid-19 and yet the growth in meat consumption and the felling of forests to create new farmland to produce livestock to satisfy this demand continues unabated. Ours is not a rational world (see above).

Taking all the above into account, it is not hard to see that, if we are to stand a chance of tackling the three existential crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and global food supply, worldwide consumption of meat needs to dramatically reduce and in the interests of equity and sheer mathematics, those richer countries whose citizens consume up to 10 times as much meat as those of poorer nations, and where there is an obesity epidemic that threatens to reverse the decades-long trend of increasing life expectancy, need to lead the way.

Does this mean that all of us in the western world need to adopt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle in the interests both of our own health and that of the planet? Not necessarily. The EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet is a global reference diet for adults that is symbolically represented by half a plate of fruits, vegetables and nuts. The other half consists of primarily whole grains, plant proteins (beans, lentils, pulses), unsaturated plant oils, modest amounts of meat and dairy, and some added sugars and starchy vegetables. The diet aims to provide the level of nutrition and mix of foodstuffs that optimizes outcomes for both individual and planetary health whilst being compatible with achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Of course, what is missing in this article so far is any mention of animal welfare or the moral and ethical dimension of the decision to adopt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. This is intentional: much has been written about these considerations elsewhere and my aim has been to make the case for reducing meat consumption for quantifiable reasons to do with climate change, biodiversity loss and maintaining a global food system that can address these issues whilst being capable of feeding 10 Billion people in the not too distant future. A consequence of the extensification of livestock production will be an increase in animal welfare but that is not the motivating factor behind the scenario presented here, on the basis that people who are concerned about animal welfare are more likely to have already adopted a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle.

So what might this global food system look like? To start with, a dramatic reduction in meat consumption will lead to less land being required to rear and feed livestock. Given the fact that land growing crops for human consumption is able to produce calories 16 times as efficiently as land growing animals, and a global population of 10 Billion represents an increase of around 30%, it stands to reason that not all the land currently used for livestock will be required for growing crops. Following a regime like the Planetary Health Diet still requires a certain amount of livestock production but the remainder will be available for planting new forests or creating new wilderness areas: in short to give back to the non-human species with whom we share the Earth some of the habitat that humans have destroyed. How people are persuaded or coerced to reduce their meat consumption remains to be seen but it is likely that persuasion in the form of education will only go so far and that a certain amount of coercion via manipulation of the pricing mechanism for animal products is almost certainly going to be required. This could either take the form of demand side measures, such as some form of “meat tax”, or measures to restrict supply, such as production quotas and regulations banning certain intensive animal-rearing practices. The effect of both these approaches will be to raise the price of meat products, leading to a fall in demand. There are all kinds of socio-economic issues that will need to be addressed such as protecting the livelihoods of small farmers and preventing rural depopulation (other than where this would be beneficial in establishing new wilderness areas) but these will mainly require transitional measures to support the shift from a high volume/low value model of livestock production to a low volume/high value one. In addition to reducing the amount of meat in our diets, we need to urgently consider where the remaining plant-based ingredients come from. The practice of shipping and flying food around the world needs to stop, or at least be significantly reduced. We are beginning to see a return to shopping locally and eating seasonally, although work is needed to make this more than a middle-class preserve. Food poverty continues, shamefully, to be an issue even in the wealthiest societies and policy measures are needed to ensure that good nutrition, along the lines of the Planetary Health Diet, is available to everyone, regardless of income.

In conclusion, if humanity is to tackle the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss and starvation, there needs to be a significant reduction in meat consumption, starting with the world’s richest nations. Breaking the link between income levels and meat consumption would help ensure that future economic development in poorer countries is genuinely sustainable. In addition to the reduction in meat consumption and livestock production making a significant dent in the 15% of global emissions that are attributable to the sector, as growing crops for human consumption is so much more efficient in terms of calories produced per unit of land, feeding a growing global population on a predominantly plant-based diet would allow land to be made available for afforestation or wilderness creation, thus increasing both biodiversity and the capacity of forest ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, further mitigating climate change.

Don’t Succumb to the Winter Blues

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This article was first published in The Magical Times magazine in December 2013

The concept of balance is one that is central to the way in which Nature works. Day and Night, Male and Female, Summer and Winter, Life and Death: all reflect the fact that the best way to define an idea is often in relation to its opposite and that holding these opposites in equilibrium leads to balance and harmony.

It is often said that one of the major differences between our modern Western way of life and that of those indigenous societies that have not become detached from the rhythms of the Earth in quite the same way is our concept of time. The conventional way of visualising time in our culture (just try it!) is as a straight line, always progressing from past to future. Conversely, many tribal societies view time as moving in a circular fashion, living as they do in close contact with the changing of the seasons as the wheel of the year turns and with little concept of material advancement. The first concept of time reflects an obsession with the idea of progress that is absent from the second. Other thinkers have combined these two ways of viewing time into a third approach and express its passage as a spiral, which takes into account both the cyclical and progressive aspects of time passing.

No matter how we may conceptualise time on an intellectual level, there is no escaping the fact that living as we do on a group of islands that lie between 50 and 60 degrees north of the equator of a planet that is tilted some 23.5 degrees away from the vertical and is prone to wobble as it orbits the sun means that the length of the days varies very considerably between summer and winter.

This has been an undeniable fact of life in what we now call Britain since our ancestors first settled here many thousands of years ago. Having evolved in a part of the world where the length of the days hardly changes with the passing of the seasons, early humans had to make lifestyle changes to accompany the more obvious physiological adaptations to their slow migration northwards, such as the paler skins that enabled a more efficient synthesising of Vitamin D from sunlight.

Each year, once we pass the Autumn Equinox the nights begin to draw in as the days grow shorter. The first time that many people nowadays will really become aware of this is the last weekend in October when the clocks go back, accompanied every year by ritual grumbling and confusion over whether they go back or forwards and whether or not we get an extra hour in bed.

Our society has a problem with this onset of the dark part of the year. We do not like the fact that there is less light around for us to travel, work or play in and the long-running debate about the movement of the clocks reflects this. We do not like the fact that the shortening of the days is beyond our control and we want to have the long, light days of summer all through the year. As society has become more urbanised and we have become remote from the changing of the seasons then we have succeeded in almost turning night into day with streetlights, headlights and our incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes.

However, our current civilisation is such a brief few words (syllables even) in the long story of human history and evolution that our physical bodies have not yet caught up with what our progress-hungry brains want. We are hard wired to increase and decrease our levels of activity in response to the changes in the length of the days. When our ancestors could not be hunting or foraging as there was little food to be had, Nature let them conserve their energy by resting and sleeping more than in the summer months. When we attempt to live our busy lives at breakneck speed for 12 months in every year we are going against the natural rhythms of life that we have been programmed to respond to for millennia. It is no wonder that so many people succumb to SAD syndrome, the “winter blues” or suffer from one minor ailment after another all through the winter months. We need to slow down and reconnect.

As the trees and other perennial plants withdraw into themselves in order to wait out the cold time, we too feel the urge to do likewise. Many animals take this path as well and sleep through the winter in a state of hibernation that places the absolute minimum demands on their bodily systems consistent with actually staying alive. Of course, a large number of bird species opt out altogether and fly south to overwinter in gentler climes. Although we may be tempted by the prospect of either hibernation or flying south to avoid the winter chill, these are not viable options for the vast majority of us. There are pleasures to be found in wintertime – a brisk morning walk well wrapped-up on a crisp, clear morning or lighting the fire and snuggling up on the sofa on a dark evening – and we are more likely to be able to find and embrace these if we learn to accept the changing of the seasons as a natural, vital and inevitable part of Nature’s way rather than an inconvenience to be battled and overcome. Winter follows summer as surely as day is followed by night and life is followed by death.

This is very much a time of dying. But, as the wisdom of native traditions tells us, that is all part of the nature of existence. If there is no death in the autumn, there can be no rebirth in the spring and no hope for the future. The nature of existence is circular and birth and death, summer and winter, night and day are all points on the same circular path.

Death is the final frontier of human exploration and one that we approach with fear and trepidation. To know and to transcend death has been the objective of mystics and seekers throughout the ages. Whilst we may not be able to do this, to contemplate and to meditate upon death during the dark time of the year is a worthwhile spiritual exercise. To descend in our mind’s eye into the darkness, to be plunged into the cauldron of beginnings and emerge reborn with the experience of the sheer potential of the darkness enables us to fully appreciate the light of inspiration. To experience this divine light, the Awen of the Celtic tradition that is often obscured by the brightness of the summer sun, is certainly to transcend the living death to which the modern world can so easily condemn us. In the darkness, all things are real and everything is possible. It is only in the daylight that our vision is narrowed to that which our eyes can perceive.

To fully understand and appreciate the light, we need to experience the darkness and how different the world looks when viewed through a dark lens. This can be compared to walking through the forest at night: when the sun goes down our eyes, which had relied on the sunlight to see the path, struggle to provide our brains with the information we need and we stumble and trip in the twilight. We slow our pace as we struggle to discern what lies ahead. After a while, our vision adjusts to the darkness and we begin to see the world around us in a different way. The faintest glimmer of moonlight casts shadows from the trees and rocks and reflects brightly off streams and puddles. Our other senses become heightened and we hear and smell things that we would probably never notice in the full light of day. However, it is not the forest that has changed, but the way in which we perceive it, and that is an important lesson to learn if we are to endeavour to live in a way that keep these opposites in balance.

So this winter season, embrace the darkness, immerse yourself in it and learn the lessons it has to teach you. If, like most people today, you do not work on the land or in an occupation that is naturally curtailed by the shorter days, make an effort to slow your level of activity and withdraw a little into yourself. Consider the plants who have taken the energy from the summer sunshine and stored it and now lie dormant ready to burst into life again in the spring. No plant can blossom all year round: they do not have the energy reserves to do so and neither do we. For the sake of our physical and spiritual wellbeing we need to heed the pulse of the Earth as it slows for a while before quickening again as the light returns after the Winter Solstice and life begins anew.

Dear Humanity, your account appears to be overdrawn…

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Yesterday, 20th August 2013, was Earth Overshoot Day, also known as Ecological Debt Day, the approximate point in the year when humanity’s resource use for the year exceeded the Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources.

The date is an approximation but it has been moving steadily forward in the calendar since the phenomenon was first identified in the mid-1970s.

The financial analogy employed by many commentators is an apt one, particularly given the state of the gobal economy, even though world leaders are directing infinitely more time and resources at that than they are at the more pressing environmental credit crunch. Just as individuals and families were able to happily carry on increasing their consumption during the boom years, fuelled by a plentiful supply of readily available credit, so the economies of the developed world have continued to grow at an ever-inceasing rate, thanks to the ready availability of resources whose full cost we never stopped to calculate, let alone consider paying.

Eventually, however, the debt must be repaid and with interest.. The choice that we face is whether we will tighten our belts and find ways to live within our means or carry on regardless until the day that the bank, or the planet, calls in the loan.

Unfortunately, the UK’s government’s enthusiasm for technologies such as fracking to unlock the supposed shale gas boom, suggests that the lure of a short-term fix of shiny new stuff may onceagain triumph over sober restraint and delayed gratification.

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 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.