I set up breakfast *in* the River Roding this week, with authors, artists and lawyers, as we discussed how art and music can drive activism for our beleaguered rivers.
It’s hard to imagine that this beautiful place is just a few hundred metres from some of the ugliest & least nature rich parts of the Roding filled with rubbish & sewage & almost buried under a motorway. It is a river of such extreme contrasts with some of the ugliest and most beautiful places of any river in London.
The fate of the Roding really does hang in the balance: will she be restored to a river of abundant life & natural beauty like this photo, as her guardians so desperately want, or will she be killed by private greed & official indifference by the government & Environment Agency?
Dummies think that caring about butterflies is for romantics & bleeding hearts. It’s not. The larvae of butterflies are one of the primary paths by which solar radiation is converted into a living food web, i.e. the ecosystem upon which all life relies. Without them, we are gone
in honor of the upcoming eclipse and the full moon here’s my favorite diagram of the phases of the Moon in Islamic manuscripts, look how gorgeous it is
Right now, @Mark_Spencer is considering letting a pesticide that's lethal to bees back onto fields - despite the Gov's own scientists saying it should stay banned. Want him to make the right decision and protect bees? Add your name: https://t.co/qbB2aQXVsH
A pilgrimage to England’s newest temple - at Bristol airport’s waiting car park.
After circumambulation (circling before entry), removing one’s hat, pouring holy water for ablution, and the gift of song (and relative silence), it felt like a holy place. The only lack was my own.
On the root issue: "The greater problem is...the obsession to increase human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal. Everything that exists ceases to be a gift for which we should be thankful + instead becomes a slave."
"To walk into one of these buildings, especially alone, is to ache with a kind of exquisite sympathy: one solitary meeting another."
An extract from Steeple Chasing – on elegiac pleasure & the work of @friendschurches – is the cover story of @ChurchTimes. https://t.co/SZLr0t43gS
Seriously underestimating danger rarely works out well in the long term.
Try this question at work after the summer hols: "where would we set the True North Star for our org. if we took the evidence of climate and nature breakdown at face value?"
The word "Anthropocene" falsely represents the predicament humanity is in. We are entering a near-explosive geological instant of high CO2, high global temperature and high sea level. That's an event boundary, not a geological era. And the cause is not anthropic, it's capitalist.