I fear I cannot do this river justice. You can’t taste words or hear what they try to convey; yet as I sit on a bank of the Tweed, a few metres to the north of, and below the house we have just moved into, I feel I have a story to tell. Pity the […]
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 […]
I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock, on 4th February 2010. Alex puts heart and soul into keeping this bastion of radical environmental broadcasting operating, and is a throughly nice guy too. In the show, which can be heard by clicking on the link below, Alex was first […]
A few months ago, I struck up an online friendship with the acclaimed author and academic Carolyn Baker. It was clear that we were both writing about similar things, but I didn’t realise quite how similar until I had the fortunate opportunity to review her latest book, Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial […]
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, […]
The Earth Blog 