Recently, I received a message from a group called Trees Have Rights Too. They want to create a Meme, a replicating cultural entity, from the word “ecocide”: We want to get this word out into the public consciousness so that we can call for the restoration of ecocide territories and protection of those territories at […]
Category Archives: Essays
NOTE: This essay was the inspiration for the book Underminers. Introduction It takes guts to do something that could change things forever. I’m not the obvious candidate to be a hero, that’s a fact; I have children and a wife, and an extended family that mean the world to me. Heroes, for the most part, […]
I have found an identity. Is that really such a big deal? The thing is, I didn’t realise I was missing one. There are so many things I could call myself: a human, male, a father, a husband, a writer, a thinker, a gardener, a campaigner…so many things that I feel pretty comfortable with, yet […]
I am about to make you feel uncomfortable. Sorry, but there’s no way of avoiding it if I’m going to tell this story as it should be told. You are a human being; a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, although the second “sapiens” was only put there because we like to feel we […]
If someone doesn’t want to believe something then what can you do to change their mind? Trust me, it’s more difficult than you think: it isn’t just the simple case of someone not believing something, the key word is “want” – if they don’t want to believe then there is almost nothing you can do […]
The wind is blowing hard, and the trees are bending down low, the air rushing across their branches, dragging leaves and blossom into the sky. The early summer grass, being soaked in the thick drizzle that falls in an urgent slant, ripples and chases with the gusts. A blackbird announces its territory, darting across the […]
The future is everything we will ever know, and everything we have never known. Some people deny its existence: one group of people are the Pirahã of Amazonia, who have created for themselves a temporal bubble that reflects their highly sustainable, hunter-gatherer lives – the future is irrelevant because life is what is happening now, […]
In the 1970s life became simpler. The Age of Aquarius was the stuff of satire and the hippy dream of a world full of love and peace had died; ironically killed off by a war in a country that few in the West had heard of until the body bags started coming back, and new […]
Credit crunch; economic crisis; financial meltdown…2008 became the year of monetary superlatives – and for good reason because, as far as most objective economic observers can tell, this is one event that is going to stretch well into the future, leaving no national or regional economy untouched. The Western capitalist economy is in meltdown – […]
Civilization or civilisation n. an advanced stage or system of human social development (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) Something BETTER than civilization is awaiting us. (Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization) How is that possible? One must be wrong, and it must be the second one because we know that civilization is all; we know that to be […]
The Earth Blog 