I've a piece up on RTE CountryWide about Storm Darragh, powercuts, and the care of community that helped us weather the week of no water, no light, no heat
It's a lovely little three minute listen ( I reckon at least)...
www.rte.ie/radio/radio1...
It's not impossible. But. It requires letting go of winning the fight. And learning to listen, build trust, understanding, and working out how that process changes both sides to progress.
A community needs to feel an ecologist cares deeply for it before they will trust the with that change.
It;s been done. Many many times. It's been done here. Recently. In Bog Restoration Projects, The Bride Project, in work on rivers, in community driven ecology projects....
...respect comes a capacity to compromise.
Ecologists need to spend a lot more time listening in communities in order to be heard. Farmers need ecologists who have listened much more on their farms. You need to feel a community in order to understand how it can change....
...without the ecology, there will be no economics. And that end of the earth thing is closer than you think. We can only do that by staying in the room with each other and creating the understanding that allows us to achieve both. With understanding comes respect. And with...
...the communities, the people, the place, the biodiveristy things you can solve together. Ecologists need to understand that when you solve the economics, farmers will follow the ecology to the ends of the earth. Farmers need to understand that...
understanding how food actually works.
You are the greatest threat to the agricultural and economic sustainability of your own sectors.
The work for both is to find ways of staying in the room with each other until we find ways that make the ecology, the economics...
nature. Don't care about the future. You are the problem. And you are the greatest obstacle to the solutions you wish to see.
To every farmer who argues ecologists want everyone to starve. Want the destruction of rural communities, and fundamentally are incapable of...
...tool you have to culture in them, and in yourself, the change you both desperately need.
To every ecologist who talks about the greed of farmers. Invokes a fascist lurch to the right. Argues that farming must go. That farmers want people to starve. Are bent on the...
understanding to become a thing we create in concert for mutual benefit. That's lost.
Being right is never enough to create change. It can become the biggest obstacle to it. The capacity to understand the life of the person sitting across the table is the most powerful...
...When the need to be right, to win the argument is the biggest thing in the room, what's sacrificed is the opportunity to understand. The divide grows. Becomes a faultline. Then becomes battlelines drawn across a war. And that common space, where change is fed with...
. All needing change. Needing to understand the other to find the kind of change that can
take root in each and then blossom into a thing that can help reshape the place they all care so much for, in ways that build the communities, the ecology and the economics of that place...
has bridged that gap and built bridges to a better future...
...The Radical Center set out to build communties, soil, profit and biodiversity, by shoehorning people with a common love of place into a room with each other. Scientists. Environmentalists. Farmers...
When I think of that divided, across which farmers and ecologists throw names at each other while things, gradually, become divided, more difficult, more dangerous, worse. I think of The Radical Center. And how, in that most divided of cultures, The US, it's a thing that...
a kind of threat. Each desperately need the other to face into an increasingly horrifying future. But find ways to demonise each to such a degree that identity - we are the people who are right - trumps any real work on the truth - that we are the people who need to be saved.
...sacrifice the opportunity to create change. Some farmers. So afraid of the uncertain future...
...nailed to the now with terrifying economics, rather than reach out and grasp the nettle of what needs to be done, reimagine the people they need to engage and understand into...
those divides, and to find a way to speak across the ever angrier, louder fautlines and widening gaps in ecology and farming?
Hard. But. More necessary than ever too.
I watch as some environmentalists alienate those they need to enlist. In love with winning the argument they..
It's hard. Watching the faultines open up between people, conversations become conflicts. The search for solutions become the the search for someone to blame. The need to help, create change, become the need to be right.
In divided times, how to see a path to bridging...
"Along with tampons, kids’ shoes and solar panels, chemical fertilisers have a VAT rate of zero per cent"
Ella McSweeney. What the problem is. Why. What we can do about it.
This week. Fertilisers, pollution, climate targets and profit - a clover howto
There's a lovely collection of straw harnesses, creeps, collars and ropes down at the Folklore Museum in Castlebar too. There's still a few people who can make them too. Or was, last time I checked. Was planning on making a wicker hay feeder like I saw in Castlebar for the sheep on farm.
Here among the tallness of trees. The spun sugared web harp strung between the branches of beech trees. There is ease. A place to be a part of something greater, that grows the sense of youness as it dissolves among the leaves. Here I can breathe. Here I can breathe.
...Jewelled beauty of hogweed stretched between. A bridge between there and here. Snow and sky. Summer and the winter light. A crack between the frozen world through which peace can stream.
Good morning. The bright bite of frost has sucked the sound from the farm. There is the crunch of ice. The crawcous call of the ravens. There is light. Drifts of mists that catch and swallow the light, or warp the world so that the valley and the sky seem to have become one thing. And there...
me, in a field, smiling, wearing my new boilersuit
Happiness is a well fitting brand new boiler suit in winter.
Under the cobalt sky. Light ribboning through the trees.
Blackbirds and thrushes hunting the fallen leaves.
The ewe flock grazing hay on the hill.
I think I'm where I'm meant to be.
Local knowledge from people who work the sea and land, is key to the long term health of our biodiversity. Ella McSweeney at sea with Angel Sharks, and the fishers and scientists working together to try to understand and save them.
hogweed flower head, strung with dew and spiderwebs, sun going doing behind wintry trees behind
Web strung hogweed at the down of day. In the mornings, in the wildflower meadows, you can see them by the hundred. An arcoloogy of biodiversity, in the misty fields. No spray. No fertiliser. No plough. No problem.
The first of real winter. No snow. But the gardens, hedges and fields are touched with ice. So. Hay up the hill to the ewe flock, who wait impatiently by the feeders. And the goat who happily stretched through the gate to filch oats from the bucket. The air bright under a cobalt sky.
